Zero Hedge with an article on Houston’s hospital doctors and administrators downplaying all the recent propaganda asserting that Texas’s hospitals are overwhelmed with COVID patients.
How Ignorant Are the Rioters, Statue-Topplers, and Race-Based Censors?
Charles Burris with a post on marauders and vandals going after the Tadeusz Kościuszko monument in Washington DC. He quotes the article he links to about Tadeusz Kościuszko:
Kościuszko also fought for the rights of national and racial minorities. In his will, he donated a portion of his estate to free black slaves belonging to Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of the United States. However, Jefferson did not fulfil Kościuszko’s testament.
Kościuszko also bequeathed sums for the education of freed Afro-American slaves to enable them to function normally in society. According to many historians, he was ahead of his time with this will.
And supposedly “Uncle Ben’s” rice will change its name and logo, because of “racial stereotypes,” even though the guy “Uncle Ben” was a prominent black farmer in Texas, not a manual laborer but the owner of his business selling great rice to millers. The makers of “Uncle Ben’s” are caving to ignorance and irrationality by changing the product’s name for no good reason.
So much for education in Amerika.
More Mask Fascism Commentary
Becky Akers has another post on the ongoing mask fascism in Amerika.
…Plus, the body doesn’t instantly recover upon removing the mask: it takes hours for the oxygen and carbon dioxide to return to correct levels and for cognitive abilities to revive.
Mr. F particularly worries about lower-level employees whose bosses—and Rulers—compel them to suffocate:
I talked to a cash register clerk in Publix supermarket today, and then subsequently a register clerk in Walgreens. They both told me the same horror story; to wit:
1) Every employee in the store was sick from the masks, suffering from brutal headaches, dizziness and exhaustion
2) None of the workers felt they could take much more “mask abuse.”
Therefore, they are all suffering from symptoms of hypercapnia (excess CO2) in their blood. We know that excess CO2 causes acidosis of the blood. When the blood becomes acidic, the immune system becomes depressed. …
What a fascinating process! Force everybody to wear masks. Make them sick from the masks. Drive them into hospitals and doctors’ offices. Claim that COVID numbers are escalating. Just about everybody will have COVID in their blood with no adverse effects. So the CASE numbers will go up as more testing is done. The death numbers however are not there.
That’s exactly right. But that is not what most people are hearing from the morons of mainstream news media. Do any of the “news” “journalists” from MSNBC, Fox News, CBS, ABC, New York Slimes, or CNN Fake News even actually investigate the safety of the goddamn masks?
Anti-Capitalist Corporate Amerika
Robert Wenzel with a post on corporations aiming to boycott Fakebook, but not for the right reasons, no, for very wrong reasons. It’s because Fakebook is not censoring “hate speech” enough. Of course, one person’s “hate speech” is another person’s “normal speech.” The anti-“hate speechers” tend to be those who think that “hate speech” means speech that criticizes the gubmint, or that criticizes or makes fun of stupid, silly people, like Hillary Rotten Clinton, or Ronald McDonald Trump, or entities such as Fakebook.
In my view, there is no need for censorship of so-called “hate speech.” This is why those platforms have something called “comments” sections, so that if you do disagree with the post, you can write something on there yourself and explain your disagreement. But the censorship/book-burning Nazis don’t agree with me there. They just want to ban speech that isn’t what they have been trained by their elders or teachers to be acceptable and tolerable.
Wenzel writes: “More than 150 companies have decided to stop advertising spending on Facebook for the month, including Verizon, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Honda, Lending Club, Ben and Jerry’s and The North Face.” Humph. I have a great jacket by North Face that I got at TJ Maxx. Oh, well.
Wenzel also mentions that the anti-capitalist movement is also going after Target for calling cops on black shoplifters. Does this mean they don’t call the cops on white shoplifters? I find that very hard to believe. If I had a store, I’d call the cops on anyone who is stealing from me. Couldn’t care less what your skin color is. What matters is what you do. Shame on shoplifters.
Corporate Amerika should take its nose out of social activism, and stick with attempting to provide the best products and services so that our standard of living can go back up following the current decline that was caused by brainwashed social activists.
A Decline in Readership in Last Few Months
I’ve had this blog for over 11 years now. And I’ve contributed maybe about 150 or so articles to several other websites. There have been times that I get a lot of views for one post or article, but in recent months my “stats” have not been good. This is especially the case since my web host service was purchased by a different one, and my blog/website was moved over to a new server in January. I guess this blog was offline for a day, and maybe some people assumed that it was down permanently?
You can see the graph of the stats crash suddenly on the day of that server change on January 9th. And it doesn’t seem to have recovered.
The views/visitors increased a little by March, but since March it’s been way low, so I’m not sure if I want to keep doing this if there aren’t that many readers.
I did recently add the HTTPS for supposedly “enhanced security” for what it’s worth.
I know that I haven’t written or posted something every day like I should. I need more time in one day, and I also spend a lot of time going over my writing and proofreading.
Another explanation is that I had done a lot of writing on the COVID scamdemic in recent months, and maybe some people had been hearing about COVID over and over and over on their local news media, on social media, and they are sick of it. Perhaps they don’t want to read about it here, I don’t know.
Another issue is that many people “trust” and believe their local mainstream news on TV and radio. When they see a blog post that talks about governors ordering businesses closed as “fascism,” and immoral/criminal, that is not what they’ve been hearing on a daily basis, hour after hour, minute by minute. They have been hearing, “Order businesses must be closed, people must stay in, for our own good, to save lives, prevent spreading,” because a lot of people believe the propaganda. But when someone who is sensible and goes over the actual facts of the situation that is contrary to what people have been hearing from their mainstream news, some just don’t want to hear that!
So, another problem might be that. And there is also the issue of my lack of “wokeness,” and my criticism of political correctness, censorship, etc. So things that I write in those areas also go against the brainwashing propaganda that many especially younger people are getting now, in the terrible government schools, social media, pop culture.
So, I’ll try to write more, but with the mass censorship of truth, the erasing of history and book-burning we are seeing now, like in Nazi Germany, just those trends in Amerika are quite discouraging. I think people should stop watching TV, at the very least.
Turley on the Mob Cultural Revolution Hysteria
Law professor Jonathan Turley has a terrific article on the cultural revolution taking place right now, with brainwashed activists tearing down statues and defacing historical artifacts and getting college professors fired for saying something that their apparent betters of the millennial generation disapprove of, as well as getting people in business fired, and bloggers and website owners “deplatformed.” it is a revolution of hysteria, intolerance and criminal harassment of innocent people. (I’m not familiar with “Gab,” an apparent new alternative for Twitter and Fakebook, but I hope Gab’s CEO Andrew Torba is able to sue Visa for what that company is doing, if true.)
“Second Wave” Still the First Wave, the Scamdemic Continues
No, it is not a “second wave” of COVID-19, it is still the first wave. Even Dr. Fauci has said that (along with his panic-incitement rhetoric, of course). The states that are having a “spike” are experiencing their higher numbers for the first time, like Florida, Texas and Arizona. The news media are extremely dishonest and/or ignorant and they are either unwittingly or intentionally fear-mongering to incite more panic and hysteria like they were doing in March through May.
This new panic, by the way, started shortly after Donald Trump had his big rally in Tulsa. (But there has been no panic and fear regarding gatherings involving Marxist Lives Matter in Minneapolis, New York and Washington state. Hmm.
The increase in positive “cases” of COVID-19 is because of a large increase in testing in general. But there hasn’t been a spike in deaths. The case fatality rate is even lower now than the .1% that is more realistically told by non-hysterical media.
Target Liberty has a good post on all this. Wenzel shows three charts showing the increase in testing. He also shows some tweets and quotes from others who make good points, including former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, who tweets: “Remember yesterday, when I published an email asking about possible double-counting of cases in Arizona? And then the state said no, it wasn’t double-counting. Must just be coincidence that the number of #Covid hospitalizations fell 300 and ventilator use plunged 25% overnight.” And Daniil Gorbatenko: “‘Health officials in Texas are logging every single COVID-19-positive hospital patient in the state as a COVID-19 hospitalization, even if the patients themselves are admitted seeking treatment for something other than the coronavirus.’,” who retweets a tweet by Keith: “So apparently our hospitals in Texas aren’t in nearly the doom and gloom position we are being told. Who knew?” who links to an article on Just the News: Texas hospital CEO: COVID inpatient count ‘misinterpreted,’ level of alarm ‘unwarranted’.
Why is Texas Gov. Abbott going backwards to the alarmist and fascist orders of businesses or gatherings to do this or that detailed behavior when it is and has always been unnecessary? And the same thing with Florida Gov. Ron Duh Santis, who is doing the same unnecessary fascist things.
Scamdemic much?
More News and Commentary
Jim Davies: Bigotry and prejudice.
Jacob Hornberger: The nonsense of “national security.”
James Bovard: The Korean War atrocities no one wants to talk about.
Chuck Baldwin: Pastors and Physicians: from protectors to predators.
Becky Akers has more on masks, unfortunately.
Laurence Vance on the masks and the fascist mayor of Orange County, Florida, and mask fascism at McDonald’s.
Doug Casey on anarchy and voluntaryism.
Karen De Coster: Fauci: 23 million people could die.
The Daily Sheeple: ‘The squad’ opposed to law barring sexual predators and terrorists from being hired at TSA.
Richard Ebeling: Fifty years of statist policies and economic fallacies.
Fox News: Strzok notes show Obama, Biden weighed in on Flynn case even as Comey downplayed it: lawyers, and Nunes says Strzok notes link Obama, Biden to Flynn prosecution: ‘They kept this investigation going’
Dr. Joseph Mercola: Why social distancing should not be the new normal.
And Joel Pollack: NYC Mayor De Blasio offers South Africa-style “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” for NYC.
The COVID Hysteria Continues (Until November 4th, of Course)
Just some follow-up on my posts from yesterday. You know, there are some people who might think that I’m a bit too sarcastic, and that I shouldn’t be calling people “psychopaths” or “brainwashed.” But, if someone is a psychopath then I will calls it like I sees it.
And there are people who think I’m just writing about “conspiracy theories,” or making stuff up, because they have not heard any of the things I keep referring to. They don’t click on links to articles I provide. (For example, just read the great points that Ron Paul made recently on the concern over a COVID “second wave.” Is it a hoax?)
Too many people rely only on mainstream news sources, or their social media (which rely on mainstream news media for news). But the news media today are mostly very lazy, and mainly just repeat what government bureaucrats tell them. The media are stenographers, mostly. They themselves believe their own narratives, such as “America is a racist country” (in which the majority of white voters elected Barack Obama President twice?), and “Covid-19 is WAY more serious and deadly than the flu” (despite contrary evidence), etc.
So, you can stick with CBS, NBC, New York Times, Fox News, and CNN Fake News if you want to. They are not telling you the truth.
For example, rarely do we hear local bureaucrats distinguishing between different kinds of COVID “cases,” and we get newscasters and reporters just repeating the bureaucrats’ references to “spike in cases” and that’s it (as they continue with their omissions to elicit more hysteria and panic among the sheeple). The ages of those testing positive for the virus are getting younger now. (But could that be because the “public health” (sic) authorities are testing more younger people than usual?) Just like with higher proportions of black people and other minorities testing positive — Is that because they are testing more minorities? And if so, is it because the authorities are trying to prove how racist COVID is, attacking minorities more?
But the Lieutenant Governor of Florida, Jeanette Núñez, actually distinguished between the number of asymptomatic cases versus cases among those who are actually sick. And she said the number of cases who are sick is way low. But bureaucrats and their media groupies are not doing that. they just refer to a spike in the number of “cases,” and that’s it. Unfortunately, Núñez went on to repeat the exaggeration of asymptomatic “carriers” easily spreading the virus to others.
I have already referred to a recent study and the quote by the World Health Organization who used actual data to show that if people do not have symptoms, even if they have the virus it is not easily spreadable. The WHO has a “number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing. They’re following asymptomatic cases. They’re following contacts. And they’re not finding secondary transmission onward. It’s very rare,” according to an epidemiologist of the WHO’s “emerging diseases and zoonosis unit.”
After that came out, the extremely corrupt and dishonest propagandist Dr. Fauci frantically tried to walk that back, claiming the WHO had “no evidence” to support that. Which is a lie given what the WHO epidemiologist had just stated.
Another political hack, Gov. Charlie Half-Baker of Massachusetts said he didn’t believe it (because it goes against the official narrative that healthy people better self-imprison for 14 days, wear an oxygen-depriving face mask and practice anti-social distancing for no good reason).
And now Dr. Fauci is going with the “spike in cases” narrative, saying that it is a “disturbing surge,” and gave a renewed panic-driven testimony in CONgress. He stated that the COVID virus “is not going to disappear.” Duh, Fauci. Has the flu disappeared?
And this only weeks after Fasci said that a “second wave” is “not inevitable.”
Now, add to all that that the “public health” (sic) authorities have been lying about the number of COVID deaths, based on the CDC’s own guidelines which promote categorizing non-COVID deaths such as gunshot deaths and deaths by heart failure or kidney disease, as “COVID deaths,” merely because the deceased happened to have tested positive for the virus, whether or not the deceased even had any actual COVID-related symptoms. So, the purpose of all that is to drive up the “COVID death” numbers as high as possible. That is just how dishonest and corrupt our rulers and their media press spokesmen are. So you will not get the truth about all that from CBS, the Washington Pest, CNN Fake News, et al.
And then there are all the false positives in the testing which is thoroughly unreliable. So none of the numbers we have been getting are reliable.
And then there is the fact that governors have been ordering nursing homes to admit COVID patients, particularly in New York. What is it, like 80% of the actual COVID deaths are from nursing homes, and 99% of those involved patients who were already dying of some serious illness. (Great post today on the nursing homes, by the way, from Jon Rappoport.)
In other words, it’s the same as the flu. Seasonal influenza kills tens of thousands of people each year in the U.S. The 2017-2018 flu season killed 80,000. The hospitals were crowded, people had to be treated in waiting rooms, etc. And the “public health” (sic) bureaucrats at those propaganda press conferences know all that.
Have you heard any references to these things in the mainstream news media? In my view, as a “public service,” news outlets should be telling people the actual facts of what’s going on, as a means of reducing PANIC and HYSTERIA that we have seen for 4 months now. But no, they are intentionally suppressing facts, science and data to push their narrative, that narrative being “COVID is going to kill anyone and everyone who gets it!!” Even though the case fatality rate is less than .1 percent. That’s one-tenth of one percent.
And telling people to stay indoors has also been bad for people, mentally and medically as well. Officials postponed the April 2020 Boston Marathon for September 14, but even though things were looking better in Massachusetts the moron mayor of Boston cancelled the Marathon completely.
But being outdoors is good for people. The problem with bureaucrats is they love to take things away from people, not just the people’s money and property, but their FUN!
Sadists and psychopaths love taking pleasure away from people!
The Latest Eye-Opening Articles
Daisy Luther: We live in a time when our “opinions qualify as crimes.”
Becky Akers: AP: All Propaganda, even to the orthography.
Zero Hedge: NPR busted for making up “right-wing extremists.”
Just the News: Video appears to expose Facebook bias: ‘If someone is wearing a MAGA Hat, I am going to delete them’
Jon Rappoport: Let’s fact-check Reuters: they say DNA vaccines don’t change your genetic makeup—true or false?
Jacob Hornberger: The “Greatest” Generation’s refusal to fight the “good war.”
Scott Sumner: Fewer laws, less police brutality.
James Bovard: Repealing useless and abusive laws better than defunding the police.
Wendy McElroy: Women: reject victimhood, embrace your individualism.
Laurence Vance: Government standards.
Greg Mitchell: New film explores U.S. suppression of key footage from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Walter Block: Try libertarians’ souls.
Matt Agorist: Cops Ordered to Turn Off Body Cams, Illegally Raid Journalist Who Embarrassed Them, And They Obeyed.
Dr. Joseph Mercola: Warp speed COVID-19 vaccine makes Big Pharma crooks rich.
And F. William Engdahl: America’s own color revolution.
COVID Fascists Aiding and Abetting Marxist Lives Matter Against Civilized Culture
Now that I’m seeing more info on the classical music venues continuing to be canceled and for no good reason, it is becoming more clear to me how the “Black Lives Matter”/antifa vs. civilized life is closely linked to the COVID situation and associated fascism.
The fascists ordering businesses closed down and ruining the economy and causing unemployment and unproductivity are no different and no better than the communists and Marxists burning down businesses or looting from the ones still in existence.
The official organization “Black Lives Matter” itself and its little robot followers do not care about all black lives. Why don’t they scream about the black lives being murdered by other black people especially in the cities, such as Chicago? (Brainwashed loony-tunes call it “racist” to point that out, because they are not rational. But don’t tell them I said that.)
And then if someone says, “All lives matter,” they are also called “racists,” and in some cases fired from a job. That is how irrational and hypocritical these social movements are.
They do not believe in “inclusion,” that’s for sure.
If it’s about “police brutality,” then they should look into de-monopolizing community policing away from government control. Not the kind of criminal racket that thugs have set up in Seattle, but an unorganized system of freedom in which whoever wants to patrol neighborhoods can do so. Nobody is above the law. But when government has a monopoly on community policing and security, those government “officials” are above the law, because they ARE the law. Only obedient sheeple would promote that government monopoly system in an otherwise free society.
But this would mean that because everyone has a right to defend oneself from the wanton aggression and violence of others like rioters and looters and arsonists, the free society would not infringe on the right of the good people to keep and bear arms.
And it’s not even about “racism,” this hypocritical, irrational movement. It is not about “black lives.” It’s about power and control. The Marxist youngins are being brainwashed to believe that they are entitled to other people’s wealth and earnings, and that they have a “right” to take stuff from others. For whatever reason, whatever made-up reason.
Just listen to the brainwashed True Believers.
The brainwashed youngins believe that they are justified in committing acts of violence, looting, and burning down businesses. They believe they have a “right” to steal away the livelihoods of entrepreneurs who spent a lifetime building such livelihoods.
I guess you would have to be brainwashed to really believe that you have a “right” to steal from (i.e. enslave) some guy or gal who never harmed anyone, and in fact someone who employs young black people.
The rioters, marauders, looters, thugs, arsonists and barbarians in Minneapolis and other cities remind me of the criminal psychopaths of the U.S. military invading and bombing and destroying Iraq in the early 1990s, a good 10 years prior to 9/11. They are brainwashed, too, but with a slightly different ideology. The militarist sheeple psychos of the U.S. military are brainwashed to believe that the U.S. government rules the rest of the world and has a “right” to criminally invade and bomb other countries with impunity, steal their wealth and natural resources and murder millions of foreigners.
In 1991 the crazed criminals of the U.S. military intentionally bombed Iraqi civilian water and sewage treatment centers and caused the Iraqi people to have to use untreated water which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents. Psychopath President George H.W. Bush started that war of aggression and imposed those sanctions and no-fly zones for no good reason.
The entitled American political class and all its obedient underlings and followers having the power to enslave the rest of the world, and enslave the workers and producers of their own society, is an ideology shared by both the U.S. militarists and America Firsters, and the communist-Marxist thug psychopaths who are burning down whole cities.
And regarding those communist-Marxist thug psychopaths, the cultural stuff goes with all this. Tearing down statues and burning down historic buildings is just as ISIS would do.
Centuries ago, much of the world was barbaric. The “Enlightenment” period developed.
The concepts of individual freedom, individual rights and individual dignity were becoming prominent. Those concepts included freedom of voluntary association, voluntary contracts and voluntary trade, the recognition of property rights, including the property right of the individual in one’s person and labor. The freedom of self-ownership.
While chattel slavery was ending peacefully all over the world, many people still really believe that the “Civil War” “ended slavery.” Well, “slavery” actually did continue 50 years later with the imposition of the income tax in Amerika. The government is the slave master, in which the obedient sheeple must do a certain amount of labor, involuntarily, to serve the master in Washington, state capitols and City Halls. And that’s basically what we have now.
The Marxist movement we have now, “Steal from the honest working folk, steal from the productive, i.e. enslave the productive,” is not that different from the political class all across Amerika. The Heritage Foundation, National Review, The New York Times, The DNC and the RNC are no different. Do those influential organizations ever call for the elimination of the income tax-theft and the IRS? Do they ever call for the most evil organized crime racket ever, the U.S. government, to be decentralized? Of course not. They thrive on tax-redistributionism just as the Soviet rulers thrived on living off the labor of the workers and producers.
In the ongoing scamdemic, the brain-dead government bureaucrat rulers such as governors and mayors have ordered businesses shut down to try to put a stop to whatever economic progress was happening (that Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation contributed to). Unemployment was way down including and especially among black people and other minorities and women. The Marxists and communists (a.k.a. “socialists”) would have none of that.
First, seeing that many more black people being employed and more able to provide for themselves went against the “Whitey is keeping black people locked out of the economy” narrative.
And second, the economy showing just how most of the population benefits from a more freed market was refuting the Marxists’ brainwashed beliefs in the “centrally-planned Almighty Government being the caretaker of the people” crapola. (Even though they can just look at Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, and worse, the U.K., to see that communism “socialism” doesn’t actually work in practice, but brainwashed morons choose not to do that.)
I think the Marxism ideology that the modern “revolutionaries” seem to want to implement is not to do with State worship, because we already have State worship in Amerika. It’s to do with people wanting to have a system in place that allows them to get away with wanton aggression and violence against others. A criminal, violent society, in other words.
And the cultural artifacts being torn down now. With the COVID scamdemic we have music cancellations, especially classical music, which unfortunately is very “historical” and represents the human progress that was made especially since the “Enlightenment,” as well as being great music. Maybe that’s why the government schools have been dropping classical music references from their music programs, and might be another explanation why the symphony orchestras don’t seem to have that many black musicians. It’s not because the musical organizations are “exclusionary,” or racist. The schools prefer to encourage cRAP music along with rock music which isn’t nearly as inventive, intellectual, or emotionally wide-ranging as classical music.
Yes, “cRAP” music. It is crap, quite frankly. Nothing racist about that. The “Rap culture” (if I may call it that) includes a lot of utterances of the “N word,” which is encouraged by this nasty, thuggish, culture that promotes violence against innocents (like the Bushes and Clintons and their fellow psychopaths Obama and Trump, and all points between and their wars overseas and war on drugs, etc.). Yet, when a college professor reads Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail out loud in class, that includes the “N word” (that King wrote in the letter himself, HE is saying it, not the professor), that professor gets investigated by the university! This kind of irrational, hypocritical crap is going on ALL the time now!
But with the “Black Lives Matter”/antifa criminality, hypocrisy, Marxism and brainwashed loony-tunes taking down historical artifacts, the COVID fascists are causing various classical artistic organizations to be cancelling whole seasons. And whatever the venues can attempt to save, they are trying to implement “social distancing” measures, which in some venues is impossible. So, some of them or many of them will go bankrupt. And this might very well be on purpose. Without the New York Philharmonic and the Met, how will New York residents expose their children to great music that goes back centuries? And in every other city?
And with the COVID scamdemic as the excuse, those of us who are not bamboozled by the mainstream media, know that all this COVID fascism CRAP is for no good reason. The masks which are harmful to your health, the “social distancing” lunacy, hand sanitizer to ruin your skin, the restaurants having to seat people 18 yards apart. It’s for NO GOOD REASON! And the “stay-in” orders by fascist governors and mayors have been causing more harm than good.
The best thing for our society is decentraliztion, getting rid of Washington, D.C. completely, at the very least. (And restoring the right of the people to keep and bear arms, of course.)
The Latest on the Ongoing Scamdemic
As I have already written here, the face masks have big problems, such as causing oxygen deprivation in your brain and hurting your immune system, so governors or mayors who are making the masks mandatory should be charged with endangerment. And if someone suffers some sort of seizure or accident because of being forced to cover one’s nose and mouth for no good reason, those bureaucrats and their “public health” officials should be sued financially for all medical costs and charged criminally.
And we know they don’t care about preventing COVID spreading. it is now known that asymptomatic “carriers” of COVID have little to no infectivity of others. There is no point to quarantining healthy people, there is no point to “social distancing,” there is no point to masks or imposing ANY of the restrictions on anyone and continuing them, on individuals telling them to stay home for no good reason, or on businesses, restaurants, sporting and concert venues, and all the rest.
And further, when the “public health” (sic) “experts” (sic) criticize lockdown protesters for not “social distancing” or wearing masks yet encourage “Black Lives Matter” protesters and look the other way regarding no social distancing or not wearing masks, then we know the fascists are full of sh*t.
Here are some more important recent articles on the scamdemic being forced on us by our criminal government rulers:
Patrick Wood: The miserable pseudo-science behind face masks, social distancing and contact tracing.
Just the News: Stanford prof: Median infection fatality rate of coronavirus for those under 70 is just 0.04%
Gateway Pundit: Coronavirus study continues to confirm overall mortality not much different than a bad seasonal flu.
Robert Wenzel: COVID roulette at an Apple store.
KDKA: Hot temperatures complicate face mask safety.
WKRG: Dangers of wearing masks in the heat and humidity.
Laurence Vance: Masks in a free society.
John Vibes: Study finds some governments already using contact tracing apps for mass surveillance.
Dr. Joseph Mercola asks, Is there really strong evidence for wearing masks?
And Jack Hellner: Another day, another bogus report from CDC seeking to entice the public to continue wearing masks.
End Government-Imposed Restrictions and Central Planning in Immigration
The U.S. Supreme Court blocked Donald Trump from dismantling the “DACA” program, or “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals”, which exempts immigrant children from some immigration restrictions. It is not a legislative act, but an unconstitutional executive “memorandum” imposed by Premier Obama. So, it can’t be repealed via legislation, although the legal restrictions being waived could be, I supposed. Premier Trump wants to have another try at dismantling the program.
My view on all this, if you don’t already know, is to repeal every immigration restriction legislatively or by executive order, or just not enforce them, and dismantle ICE and the IRS (and DHS, TSA, FBI, ATF, and all the rest of those fascist agencies that are unbecoming of a free and civilized society).
One of my main points on the immigration issue is regarding this false belief or assumption that many people seem to have that there is some kind of common ownership of the territory as a whole. That is just a myth, an “old wives’ tale,” and not backed by any legal or constitutional basis. It is based on emotion and collectivist ideology, not morality or rationality.
So, there is no such common ownership of the territory because in our society we have something called private property.
In April of 2019 I posted a compilation of excerpts from my past posts dealing with the immigration issue, and I will repost most of that post now because the immigration problem will never be resolved in the U.S. as long as the control over such matters continues to be seized by the idiot moron central planners in Washington.
Here is that earlier post:
In the post, Freedom Matters, I wrote:
…
In the article, titled “Culture Matters,” the writer Jim Cox compares the U.S. territory and its public or collective ownership to a condominium made up of several buildings with commonly owned areas, in which the condo owners “own the land between the 27 buildings and the pavement in common and own only our individual units separately.”
And he continues: “This is a very analogous situation to US citizens owning private property as well as public property via government. The condominium association has rules about people coming onto the common property.”
In Cox’s example, each condo owner buys one’s own unit with the rules of the condo association in mind.
Already Cox confuses private and public property. The entire territory of a country is not a commonly owned parcel of private property and can’t be compared to that.
Outside of each individually-owned unit, the property of the condo buildings and real estate is commonly owned by the condo owners. But it is still all private property.
In contrast, “public property” is supposedly publicly owned. Actually, as Jim Davies pointed out, public property is unowned. Either no one has actually legitimately homesteaded or honestly acquired it, or it was owned but the bureaucrats of the State have seized and occupy it.
Many individuals, groups and business owners own individual parcels of private property. But it’s more difficult to define who the actual owners of public property are. An intruder onto the condo property is trespassing onto private property. But if the “public” supposedly owns non-privately-owned public property, just which part of the public can be considered an owner or an “intruder”? “Citizens” or non-citizens? Taxpayers or non-taxpayers?
As I asked in this critique of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, what about non-taxpaying citizens, such as those who work but don’t earn enough to be required to pay income taxes? Are they less owners of the “public” property? Are they “intruders”? What about working, taxpaying non-citizens?
And what exactly is a “citizen”? As Carl Watner notes, a “citizen” is a “member of the State.” Other sources define citizen as someone who is legally recognized by the government. But who is the government to “recognize” or authorize someone as legitimate?
Sadly, statists look to the ruling government bureaucrats for validation. But just who exactly are the ruling bureaucrats, and what exactly is the State?
As Murray Rothbard has pointed out (.pdf) in his Anatomy of the State,
The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively “peaceful” the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society. Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. The State has never been created by a “social contract”; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation.
And, in his great treatise The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard asserts,
Thus, the State is a coercive criminal organization that subsists by a regularized large-scale system of taxation-theft, and which gets away with it by engineering the support of the majority (not, again, of everyone) through securing an alliance with a group of opinion-moulding intellectuals whom it rewards with a share in its power and pelf.
But there is another vital aspect of the State that needs to be considered. There is one critical argument for the State that now comes into view: namely, the implicit argument that the State apparatus really and properly owns the territorial area over which it claims jurisdiction. The State, in short, arrogates to itself a monopoly of force, of ultimate decision-making power, over a given territorial area — larger or smaller depending on historical conditions, and on how much it has been able to wrest from other States.
If the State may be said to properly own its territory, then it is proper for it to make rules for anyone who presumes to live in that area. It can legitimately seize or control private property because there is no private property in its area, because it really owns the entire land surface. So long as the State permits its subjects to leave its territory, then, it can be said to act as does any other owner who sets down rules for people living on his property.
So what we have from Cox is the collectivist notion of a common ownership of a territory. He writes: “Until we can shift to a Private Property Society we are stuck with a government handling immigration.”
Unfortunately, “government handling immigration” is the police state that we have now. Bureaucrats empowering border control agents to violate due process rights, arrest innocent people who have not harmed anyone, arresting employers for not getting government permission to hire a worker, arresting workers who are peacefully making a living, an out-of-control “ICE” working to take citizenship away from naturalized citizens, storm troopers ripping whole families apart. All this because the people have gullibly empowered a centralized government to decide who is and who isn’t on the premises legitimately.
And Cox lists “negative cultural traits” of possible immigrants that people wouldn’t want to invite in. He neglects to mention, however, that it’s the government planners (that we are “stuck with”) who are responsible for bringing in the violent criminals he mentions.
But the collectivist-minded writer is putting ALL immigrants into one big group, the “undesirables,” the riffraff and the actual violent criminals, all lumped together with the peaceful people, the hard-working laborers, the honest folks.
Whatever happened to the individualism and free markets that used to be associated with libertarianism? Whatever happened to presumption of innocence? If you don’t suspect an individual of something, leave him alone.
And why would libertarians want bureaucrats to control markets, labor and employment? “We’re all socialists, now”?
Regarding the crime problem, the rapes and assaults, murders, etc., why are the anti-immigration crowd so bent on being dependent on centralized bureaucrats and government police for their protection from criminals? Why don’t they ever bring up the right of the people to keep and bear arms? They only seem to bring that up when the gun control debate is in the news.
When criminals know ahead of time that their prospective victims are armed there would be far fewer rapes, assaults and murders, and attempted rapes, assaults and murders. That would be the same with violent foreigners entering the territory, no?
Is the “culture” stuff actually more important to these immigration critics than their security? So instead of promoting the right of people to keep and bear arms and use the arms to protect themselves from actual criminals, the anti-immigration crowd are more concerned with promoting government-controlled social engineering.
And to say that someone not violating the person or property of another, who is peacefully exercising one’s freedom of movement to find a better life for himself and one’s family, is a “criminal,” is to not understand the libertarian non-aggression principle.
***
In the post, Walter Williams on Immigration: Very Collectivist-Minded, I wrote:
Walter Williams has been considered very “libertarian” in his thinking and his writing, although a conservative libertarian. He has been great in his essays raking the political correctness crowd and the college hystericals over the coals, and his books Up from the Projects and Race and Economics should be read by everyone, especially the youngins in college if they want to get a dose of reality in life.
However, when it comes to nationalism and immigration it seems he is less libertarian and, unfortunately, extremely collectivist, and his latest article on that subject is no exception. So, I feel I must fisk Dr. Williams on this one, because clarification of the issues, ideas and principles is necessary here.
First, Williams asks,
How many Norwegians have illegally entered our nation, committed crimes and burdened our prison and welfare systems? I might ask the same question about Finnish, Swedish, Welsh, Icelanders, Greenlanders and New Zealanders.
How many U.S. citizens who are here legally commit crimes against others? And who has committed more crimes against the American people, immigrants or the government in Washington (and the bureaucrats of the state and city governments)? (Answer: It’s governments, no contest.)
Williams continues:
The bulk of our immigration problem is with people who enter our country criminally from Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East. It’s illegal immigrants from those countries who have committed crimes and burdened our criminal justice and welfare systems.
No, the bulk of our immigration problem is that immigrants from those “undesirable” countries are brought in under the control of government bureaucrats in Washington. The bureaucrats have no incentive to strive for better outcomes in their policies because government bureaucrats are not accountable. They have a monopoly in their control over immigration, and monopolists are not accountable.
In the debate about illegal immigration, there are questions that are not explicitly asked but can be answered with a straight “yes” or “no”: Does everyone in the world have a right to live in the U.S.? Do Americans have a right to decide who and under what conditions a person may enter our country? Should we permit foreigners landing at our airports to ignore U.S. border control laws just as some ignore our laws at our southern border?
“Does everyone in the world have a right to live in the U.S.?” This is not a “yes” or “no” question. Everyone has a right to live wherever one finds it to be a better place for oneself and one’s family, as long as one doesn’t violate the persons or property of others. I know, some people have the mistaken belief that the U.S. territory is “our” property, and outsiders entering the territory sans authorization are “trespassing.” Nope. The territory contains many, many parcels of private property. The owners of the private property have the ultimate right to decide who enters and who does not enter their private property, not the community, and not the government. This applies to people’s homes, their businesses, churches, and so on.
“Do Americans have a right to decide who and under what conditions a person may enter our country?” Again, not a “yes” or “no” question. Many people believe that Americans as a group, by majority rule, have a right to decide those things, and that the government has the authority (constitutional or moral) to implement those decisions, regardless of a private property owner or employer’s decision to invite someone. If the collectivists’ vision were the case (as it currently is now), then we don’t really have private property rights, and the majority of the territory’s population and the government really are the ultimate decision makers of who may enter private property.
“Should we permit foreigners landing at our airports to ignore U.S. border control laws just as some ignore our laws at our southern border?” Why is there “U.S. border control”? That’s referring to U.S. government border control, which is a police state now. A “100-mile Constitution-free zone”!
And then Williams gets into the cultural aspects of the problems of today:
People who came here in the 19th century and most of the 20th century came here to learn our language, learn our customs and become Americans. Years ago, there was a guarantee that immigrants came here to work, because there was no welfare system; they worked, begged or starved. Today, there is no such assurance. Because of our welfare state, immigrants can come here and live off taxpaying Americans.
Then get rid of the welfare state! THAT’s the answer to that problem. It’s the welfare state that FDR and LBJ (and Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama, et al., ad nauseam) have forced on us. Dr. Williams has many times written in his articles that it is immoral to take earnings from one person to give to another, by force. Why doesn’t he say outright here that involuntary contracts and theft (i.e. taxation), Social Security, Medicare and all their spin-offs should be abolished?
There is another difference between today and yesteryear. Today, Americans are taught multiculturalism throughout their primary, secondary and college education. They are taught that one culture is no better or worse than another. To believe otherwise is criticized at best as Eurocentrism and at worst as racism.
Well, that’s because governments in the U.S., federal, state and local government, control education in America! Get the government out of education, completely! And THAT’s the answer to that problem, this “multiculturalism” crapola. You think that an all-private schools system, without any government handouts and without the imposition of monopolistic government bureaucrats’ sick, irrational, kooky claptrap would survive in an educational free market?
Very unfortunate for our nation is that we have political groups that seek to use illegal immigration for their own benefit. They’ve created sanctuary cities and states that openly harbor criminals — people who have broken our laws.
That’s because “sanctuary cities” are run by city governments — THAT’s the problem! Bureaucrats should not be empowered to get involved in bringing in foreigners, unless those actual bureaucrats invite the foreign visitors or workers to live in their homes, the bureaucrats‘ own homes, and they pay for their visitors, not the taxpayers. Sadly, government bureaucrats mainly just want to have as much welfare parasites (and voters) brought in, because getting reelected and expanding their tax-funded racket is what bureaucrats really care about.
And also, it’s not really about “legal” vs. “illegal” with many of today’s anti-immigration conservatives, unfortunately. A lot of this anti-immigration stuff is just coming from a collectivist, nationalist anti-foreigner mentality. “We are all one ‘family,’ and we don’t want ‘them’ invading ‘our’ home,” and all that. I’m hearing that on a constant, daily basis from the conservative talk radio personalities and their dittohead followers calling in.
This immigration stuff is mainly to do with a collectivist nationalism, which is not what “America” is all about. America was all about individualism and private property, NOT collectivism and collective ownership of a territory that overrules the will of the private property owner.
And “America” is also not about central planning as well. Most of the early Americans who founded the country would not have agreed to empowering central planning bureaucrats to have authority over controlling immigration matters. Leave those matters up to Americans themselves, not the government.
***
And finally, in Immigration and Private vs. Public Property, I critiqued a speech by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, in which I wrote, among other things:
…
Unfortunately Hoppe gets into some confusion between private property and “public property,” and some of his “rights to exclusion” seem quite collectivist, in my view. He seems to advocate a public, collective right to exclusion, whereas the only legitimate right to exclusion is the private property owner’s right to exclusion, and the individual self-owner’s right to exclusion, and the right to inclusion as well.
For instance, Hoppe states: “In a fully privatized libertarian order there exists no such thing as a right to free immigration. Private property implies borders and the owner’s right to exclude at will.”
But he goes on to say that “’public property’ has borders as well.” Wait a minute, the “public property” borders he’s talking about are government-drawn borders, therefore they are not legitimate.
Hoppe states that public property “is not unowned. It is the property of domestic tax-payers and most definitely not the property of foreigners.”
I have some questions here, using the U.S. as an example. Just how did the taxpayers come to own such “public property”? Did they inherit the property? Was it by way of a voluntary contract? Or was such ownership imposed on them involuntarily along with the tax-thefts that were imposed on them involuntarily?
My answer is that, if there is any ownership at all of so-called public property, and he suggests the owners are the taxpayers, then of course such ownership is involuntary just as are the tax-thefts imposed on them. Therefore, such ownership is lacking in any moral justification.
Some further questions: Millions of undocumented workers’ presence and labor in the U.S. have not received proper bureaucrat-parasite authorization, but they have paid billions of dollars in federal taxes. And while some of their legitimate, honest earnings are withheld by employers to pay the feds the demanded booty, they are nevertheless ineligible for Social Security from those earnings. But they are “taxpayers.” Do they thus share in ownership of U.S. “public property”?
And also, do you divide ranks in “public property” ownership”? For instance, do very wealthy people have a higher percentage of ownership than lower-class workers, and thus have more ownership rights of control than the others? What if many wealthy progressive thinkers have a larger percentage of ownership/control, and want to have marijuana dispensaries, abortion clinics, etc. on “public property,” but a minority of the tax-payers disagree with that scheme? Is that legitimate?
When Hoppe says that public property is the “property of domestic tax-payers and most definitely not the property of foreigners,” what about domestic non-taxpayers? What about “citizens” (non-foreigners) who do work for a living, but don’t make enough to be required to have to pay income taxes? Are they denied rights of exclusion or inclusion because of this? So in other words, those who don’t pay the feds anything in tax-thefts should have the same denied rights of access to public property as the foreigners/non-“citizens”?
And also, it seems here in Hoppe’s justification of taxpayers’ involuntary ownership of public property he apparently, at least for this topic, accepts the State’s existence. Although he does admit that “the State is a criminal organization,” but its inaction regarding border control “will lead to even more and much graver injustices, in particular to the domestic citizenry.” Does Hoppe here seem to abandon his description of so-called “fake libertarians” at the very beginning of the speech, in which he says a “fake libertarian” is one who “affirms or advocates” “the necessity of a State” or “of public or State property”?
…
Now back to Hoppe’s recent speech (as shown at the top), he states that “immigration must be by invitation only,” and that “immigrants must be productive people and hence, be barred from all domestic welfare payments.” But he gets into a lengthy discussion of his proposed rules that seem very central planning-like, in my view.
For instance, immigrants “or their inviting party must place a bond with the community in which they are to settle, and which is to be forfeited and lead to the immigrant’s deportation should he ever become a public burden.”
And with whom in the community will such a bond be placed? Who is to be in charge of that? What if a foreigner peacefully travels to the community and doesn’t give anyone a bond?
So are you saying that the immigrant is morally obligated to pay some third party some payment, without any voluntary, mutually-agreeable contract? What if he finds a room to rent or buys a home, who is it that owns the property? Does the individual landlord or property seller own the property, or does the community share in ownership of those properties? Is the entire community collectively owned by its inhabitants (regardless of separate private property parcels)?
It seems to me that Hoppe is suggesting that the community shares in ownership of property within the community. Not good.
In the just society, each property owner has full, 100% sovereignty over one’s property and its property title that he and only he may decide to whom to transfer, and he and only he may decide to whom to rent, and for whatever reason.
Hoppe continues: “As well, every immigrant, inviting party or employer should not only pay for the immigrant’s upkeep or salary, but must also pay the residential community for the additional wear and tear of its public facilities associated with the immigrant’s presence, so as to avoid the socialization of any and all costs incurred with his settlement.”
Who is going to decide how much “wear and tear” one immigrant has caused or might cause in the future? Who has the authority to charge the employer such a fee and decide how much to charge? Sounds very central-planning, if you ask me.
This all sounds very communal or “private club”-like to me, and seems to abandon the principles of private property and freedom of association. My neighbor doesn’t own my property and has no authority to dictate to me whom to let on my property, quite frankly.
And Hoppe continues: “Moreover, even before his admission, every potential immigrant invitee must be carefully screened and tested not only for his productivity but also for cultural affinity (or ‘good neighborliness’)…”
“Carefully screened”? By whom? The employer? Landlord? Prospective home seller? The community? Who will be in charge of this? Who owns the lives of the immigrants? Do they lose their self-ownership when moving to a new territory, even though they are peaceful and there’s no reason to think they might be a burden on the public? What if some family from a different area just moves into a home they’ve bought or rented and they don’t submit to screening, and there’s no reason to suspect them of not having “good neighborliness”? How about just letting property owners, businessmen and home sellers make those decisions, not by some some preset rules but by random events that take into account multiple, spontaneous factors? Whatever happened to Hoppe’s promotion of “Natural Order”?
So Hoppe’s “right of exclusion” seems to mean that the collective public may decide who gets in and who stays out. But how? By some sort of democratic vote? How else could a large group, such as U.S. taxpayers who supposedly own the public property, be able to come to a decision regarding who gets in and who stays out?
The true free market way is when an individual anywhere in the world who wants to make a better life for himself and his family travels to wherever he sees an opportunity, as long as he doesn’t violate the persons or property of another. He can rent a home or purchase one from a willing landlord or seller. And the property owner who rents out or sells a home is the owner, not his neighbors or the community.
I don’t see any moral obligation to pay the community some advance tribute, as the aforementioned family never entered into any contract with the “community,” only the employer, landlord or home seller, etc.
…
The end.
Current Civil War-Era Hysteria Reminds Me of Interview of Tom Woods by a Zombie
With all the hysteria now over historic artifacts such as from the Confederacy or statues or military bases named after “Confederate generals,” I was reminded of Tom Woods’s “Interview with a Zombie,” in which the “Zombie” represents the typical brainwashed “Social Justice Warrior” who has been told without any evidence that “America is a racist country,” that keeping historic artifacts or statues in place is “racist,” and especially that advocating “Nullification” (The title of Tom Woods’s book that was published at that time) is “racist.” This Interview with a Zombie was 10 years ago this month, apparently, and as we see today nothing has changed. The Zombie could very well be anyone from CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc. So, I thought I would repost this video now.
After Closing the Foreign U.S. Military Bases, Close the Domestic Ones, Too
Jacob Hornberger addresses the issue of people wanting to rename anything with a Confederate or racial reference, including U.S. military bases. He says, instead of renaming them, close them down instead.
Scott Lazarowitz's Blog 