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For The New York Times, which started this whole fiasco dating from Feb. 27, 2020, with a podcast designed to drum up disease panic, it’s been a drip, drip, drip of truthiness ever since.

A fortnight ago, the paper finally decided to report on vaccine injury from shots that vast majorities never needed and that stop neither infection nor transmission. And now, as of June 3, we have as decisive an article as one can imagine that shows that “a laboratory accident is the most parsimonious explanation of how the pandemic began.”

“Whether the pandemic started on a lab bench or in a market stall, it is undeniable that U.S. federal funding helped to build an unprecedented collection of SARS-like viruses at the Wuhan institute, as well as contributing to research that enhanced them,” the article reads. “Advocates and funders of the institute’s research, including Dr. Fauci, should cooperate with the investigation to help identify and close the loopholes that allowed such dangerous work to occur. The world must not continue to bear the intolerable risks of research with the potential to cause pandemics.”

The author is scientist Alina Chan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For purposes of documentation, let’s go through the points she makes.

1. The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, Hubei Province, the Chinese city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located.

2. The year before the outbreak, the Wuhan Institute, working with U.S. partners, had proposed creating viruses with SARS‑CoV‑2’s defining feature.

3. The Wuhan lab pursued this type of work under low biosafety conditions that could not have contained an airborne virus as infectious as SARS‑CoV‑2.

4. The hypothesis that COVID-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is not supported by strong evidence.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What Really Happened: Lockdown Until Vaccination

May 24, 2024

What Really Happened: Lockdown Until Vaccination

“…in April of 2020, I got a call from Rajeev Venkayya…he told me on the phone to stop writing about lockdowns…”

Four years later, many people are investigating how our lives were completely upended by a pandemic response. Over my time on the case, I’ve heard countless theories. It was Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Finance, the Green New Deal, the CCP, Depopulation, Get Trump, Mail-In Ballots, and so on.

There is evidence to back them all.

The problem with having so many pieces of evidence and so many theories is that people can too easily get thrown off track, going on wild goose chases. It’s too much to follow through consistently, and this allows the perpetrators to hide their deeds.

For such situations, we can take recourse to Occam’s razor: the best explanation is the simplest one that explains the maximum number of facts. This is what I offer here.

Those in the know will be shocked by nothing herein. Those not in the know will be amazed at the audaciousness of the entire scheme. If it is true, there are surely documents and people who can confirm this. At least this model of thinking will assist in guiding thinking and research.

There are three parts to understanding what took place.

First, in late 2019 and perhaps as early as October, higher-ups in the biodefense industry and perhaps people like Anthony Fauci and Jeremy Farrar of the UK became aware of a lab leak at a US-funded bioweapons lab in Wuhan. This is a place that does gain-of-function research to produce both the pathogen and the antidote, just like in the movies. It’s gone on for decades in possibly hundreds of labs but this leak looked pretty bad, one with a fast-transmitting virus believed to be of high lethality.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Trouble With World Government

May 17, 2024

The Trouble With World Government

Well, at least that’s one setback for world government.

A court in Australia has told the government’s own eSafety Commission that Elon Musk is correct: One country cannot impose censorship on the world. The company X, formerly known as Twitter, must obey national law but not global law.

Mr. Musk seems to have won a very similar fight in Brazil, where a judge demanded not just a national but global takedown. X refused and won. For now.

This really does raise a serious issue: How big of a threat are these global government institutions?

Dreamy, dopey, and often scary intellectuals have dreamed of global government for centuries. If you are rich enough and smart enough, the idea seems to be the perennial temptation. The list of advocates includes people who otherwise have made notable contributions: Albert Einstein, Isaac Asimov, Walter Cronkite, Buckminster Fuller, and many others.

Often the dream comes alive following huge upheavals such as war and depression. Or a pandemic period such as the one we’ve just gone through. The use of “disinformation” as a cross-border test case of global government power is designed to deploy a new strategy of governance in general, one that disregards national control in favor of global control.

That has always been the dream. In history, for example, following the Great War, we saw the creation of the League of Nations, which was a forerunner to the United Nations, at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson. Both were seen by the intellectual class as necessary building blocks for what they really wanted, which was a binding world state.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s what they said and what they wanted.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Proof of Censorship is…Censored

May 10, 2024

The Proof of Censorship is…Censored

It’s not been a good week for the Censorship Industrial Complex.

The machine has been built and put into action over nearly a decade but largely in secret. Its way of doing business has been via surreptitious contacts with media and tech companies, intelligence carve-outs in “fact-checking” organizations, payoffs, and various other clever strategies, all directed toward boosting some sources of information and suppressing others. The goal has always been to advance regime narratives and curate the public mind.

And yet, based on its operations and insofar as we can tell, it had every intention of remaining secret. This is for a reason. A systematic effort by government to bully private sector companies into a particular narrative while suppressing dissent contradicts American law and tradition. It also violates human rights as understood since the Enlightenment. It was a consensus, until very recently, that free speech was essential to the functioning of the good society.

Four years ago, many of us suspected censorship was going on, that the throttling and banning was not merely a mistake or the result of zealous employees stepping out of line. Three years ago, the proof started to arrive. Two years ago, it became a flood. With the Twitter files from a year ago, we had all the proof we needed that the censorship was systematic, directed, and highly effective. But even then, we only knew a fraction of it.

Thanks to discovery from court cases, FOIA requests, whistleblowers, Congressional inquiries thanks to the very narrow Republican control, and some industrial upheavals such as what happened at Twitter, we are overwhelmed with tens of thousands of pages all pointing to the same reality.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Money Is a Monopoly Government Will Never Surrender

May 5, 2024

Money Is a Monopoly Government Will Never Surrender

A major intellectual revelation from my youth came from reading Murray Rothbard’s “What Has Government Done to Our Money?” (1963). He includes a passing opinion that private markets are perfectly capable of producing money with no help from government. Under a sweeping monetary reform, private mints could compete in offering this good with full associated services. There is no need for any government intervention here.

It was the kind of claim that, at some point in one’s life, causes the jaw to hit the floor. Investigating this assertion more, I came to see that there was a large literature on the topic. Historically, money originated in the market economy itself, a naturally evolving institution that met the needs of trade. Whatever good was generally valued by everyone, and was as capable of being divided into consistent units with a stable value, could be deployed as money, with no need for government to do anything but watch.

But of course history has not panned out that way. Every government has a strong incentive to monopolize the good called money because this is how they can tax their citizens, reward the most compliant industries, cultivate close relationships with bankers, and inflate the currency at will through a variety of methods depending on the technology of the time.

We can of course imagine primitive tribes or pre-colonial native populations using rocks and shells, but is there a modern case where private coinage became normalized? In a major but often overlooked work of historical scholarship, economist George Selgin has written the most extensive treatment of the private coinage industry in the UK at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Did Lockdowns Set a Global Revolt in Motion?

April 14, 2024

Did Lockdowns Set a Global Revolt in Motion?

“The intellectual parlor game is over. This is a real-life struggle for freedom itself. It’s resist and rebuild or doom.”

My first article on the coming backlash – admittedly wildly optimistic – went to print April 24, 2020. After 6 weeks of lockdown, I confidently predicted a political revolt, a movement against masks, a population-wide revulsion against the elites, a demand to reject “social distancing” and streaming-only life, plus widespread disgust at everything and everyone involved.

I was off by four years. I wrongly assumed back then that society was still functioning and that our elites would be responsive to the obvious flop of the whole lockdown scheme. I assumed that people were smarter than they proved to be. I also did not anticipate just how devastating the effects of lockdown would be: in terms of learning loss, economic chaos, cultural shock, and the population-wide demoralization and loss of trust.

The forces that set in motion those grim days were far more deep than I knew at the time. They involved a willing complicity from tech, media, pharma, and the administrative state at all levels of society.

There is every evidence that it was planned to be exactly what it became; not just a foolish deployment of public health powers but a “great reset” of our lives. The newfound powers of the ruling class were not given up so easily, and it took far longer for people to shake off the trauma than I had anticipated.

Is that backlash finally here? If so, it’s about time.

New literature is emerging to document it all.

The new book White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy is a viciously partisan, histrionic, and gravely inaccurate account that gets nearly everything wrong but one: vast swaths of the public are fed up, not with democracy but its opposite of ruling class hegemony…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Censorship Began Earlier and Went Further Than We Thought

November 30, 2023

The Censorship Began Earlier and Went Further Than We Thought

There was some sense in the air in the spring of 2020 that many things were not quite normal. Here we had most governments in the world locking down their populations with extreme policies, wrecking economies and long-settled traditions of rights and liberties, while fake scientists took over the airwaves and blasted us daily and hourly with crazy messages of compliance.

It was a lonely time to be incredulous. Most of the people I would have thought would cry foul simply stopped talking. Most of what I saw on social media seemed all about conformity with the insanity. When someone would pop up to raise questions here and there, the account was shouted down brutally and socially punished for deviating from the narrative. This further discouraged people from objecting.

So on it went for months, and then got worse with the nutty masking practices and the vaccine. Suddenly every major voice from pop culture and the movies became a voice for the practice of medicine. These are people who would never recommend pharmaceuticals to people they don’t know. They are not professionals and are in no position to do so. But when the time came, they were all cocksure that getting the shot was the way to go for absolutely everyone.

One possible explanation of the unfolding frenzy was simply that society had gone mad. There is surely truth in that. History is replete with examples of such things, and I had studied them for years. We always believe that in our own times, we are too enlightened and informed for such things but apparently not. The same mad passions that led to the witch burnings, the red scares, and even the bonfire of the vanities are still with us, ready to be unleashed under the right conditions.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The Psychological Pain of Inflation

November 14, 2023

The Psychological Pain of Inflation

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) tomorrow morning will report its Consumer Price data from October. The Producer Price Index (PPI) appears the following day.

There will likely be no real surprise here: inflation will still be running hot around 3.7 percent, confirming what I and many have suspected. Inflation is overall accelerating over the declines earlier this year. That’s bad economic news because it further confirms lower living standards and continues to vex average people juggling multiple jobs, high interest payments on debt, and increased unaffordability of just about everything.

(Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker)

“Inflation has given us a few head fakes,” Fed chair Jerome Powell said at an International Monetary Conference over the weekend. He further swore that he would continue to use the power of the Fed to beat back this monster. But notice that he took no responsibility for inflation at all, despite the factual record showing that he enabled some $5 trillion in debt purchases from a spending-mad Congress, and soared the money stock in ways we’ve never seen.

This is the first time that I can recall the Fed chair having anthropomorphized inflation, as if it has a will of its own, has a head on its body, while using clever tricks to get around the defense front line, which of course is the Fed.

The line about “head fakes” pertains not to inanimate inflation but to the very human and oddly devious Fed itself. To understand Powell’s remark here fully requires a refresher lesson from Freud in what it means to project one’s failings on something else. It’s really childish—the young child blaming the monsters under the bed for the mess in his room—but it works due to the economic ignorance of the public.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

‘Gaslighting’ Is the Word of the Year for Good Reason

November 29, 2022

Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in “Gaslight” (1944). (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.)

‘Gaslighting’ Is the Word of the Year for Good Reason

Every year, Merriam-Webster picks a word to capture the culture of a moment in time. The choice is based on the frequency and quantity of searches as well as the departure from the norm. This year, the choice seems perfect: gaslighting. It’s drawn from the 1944 film noir starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman.

The term means to be subjected to extended psychological trickery to cause the victim to question his or her own reality. In the film, Boyer plays a handsome stranger who meets the beautiful heiress Bergman on a foreign journey and they fall in love. He convinces her to marry and move back together to London to her family home, whereby he embarks upon a subtle campaign to convince her she is bonkers while he secretly searches the home for legacy jewels he intends to steal.

It’s painful to watch, but the experience connects with our own as we watch mainstream media, see respectable scientists canceled for supposedly spreading disinformation, or when we watch a White House press conference. They try to convince us that they are normal and we are the crazy ones, probably guilty of wrongthink or not aware of the full facts. The more they insist on their version of truth, the more we are invited to see ourselves as nuts for failing to give them all the benefit of our doubts.

The film has this crucial moment when Bergman flips from believing that she is a broken spirit and confused person suddenly to realizing that she is the victim of an elaborate hoax. Once she realizes this, and all the pieces fall into place, she calls him out as a fraud and a thief…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Name the State

April 8, 2019

Name the State

The number one problem of all public debate about politics and economics is the failure to name the state. If this would change, so would public opinion.

There is no shortage of examples. People talk about health care for all, solving climate change, providing security in old age, universal educational access, boosting wages, ending discrimination, and you can add to the list without end.

That’s one side.

The other speaks of national identity, protecting jobs, making us more moral, forming cultural cohesion, providing security against the foreign enemy, and so on.

Obfuscation

All of this, no matter how fancy the language, is obfuscation. What all of this really means is: put the state in charge. What’s strange is the unwillingness to say it outright. This is for a reason. The plans the politicians have for our lives would come across as far less compelling if they admitted the following brutal truth.

There really are only two ways to allocate goods and services in society: the markets (which rely on individual choice) and the state (which runs on compulsion). No one has ever found a third way. You can mix the two — some markets and some state-run operations — but there always is and always will be a toggling between the two. If you replace markets, the result will be more force via the state, which means bureaucratic administration and rule by force. If you reduce the role of the state, you rely more on markets. This is the logic of political choice, and there is no escaping it.

Diversity in Markets

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Your Recycling Might Be Poisoning Poor Communities

March 7, 2019

Your Recycling Might Be Poisoning Poor Communities

You know the routine, which has become a required liturgical rubric of the American civic religion. You separate your trash: plastics here, glass here, cans here, papers here. Doing so is our little way of showing we care about the environment. Not doing so – let’s just say it would be better not to be spotted in noncompliance by anyone with an elevated civic consciousness.

What happened to all the recyclable material then? Most people hadn’t had a clue. The mostly unknown fact is that it has been mostly sent to China, which has thus far had an insatiable need for cheap raw materials for manufactured products to feed its astonishing rise over the last twenty years into the leading industrial power in the world.

The system worked beautifully. Americans got to feel good about themselves by recycling as much as possible. China obtained the lowest possible prices for essential materials. The system worked, until suddenly it stopped working.

The End of Recycling

In the last year, everything changed with a new law that China passed at the onset of America’s trade war. The law, which came into effect in February 2018, is called the “National Sword” and its aim is to stop China from being used as the dumping ground for refuse from all over the world. It bans imports of 24 types of waste material. And it sets a regulatory standard for contamination that US recyclables cannot meet – with enforcement of that standard imposed by X-rays of shipping containers and much deeper inspections.

Basically, China no longer wants your leftover pizza box. Nor your empty 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fed Official Decries Bitcoin as “Not Backed”

December 2, 2017

Fed Official Decries Bitcoin as “Not Backed”

Bitcoin is backed by the use value of the distributed ledger in the underlying technology of the Blockchain.

Randal K. Quarles, a Trump administration appointee to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and Vice Chair for bank supervision, has given a lengthy speech (“Thoughts on Prudent Innovation in the Payment System”) that directly targets Bitcoin as a danger to the monetary and financial system.

To reiterate, an official speaking for the nation’s central bank that manages the global reserve currency – the institution that has long bragged about its power to bail out the entire world with the magic powers of the alchemist – has put down Bitcoin for being untrustworthy, unbacked, and unsound.

Discrediting Crypto

The timing here seems about right. Nine years ago, Bitcoin was born, but only a small group of developers were really paying attention. Today, there are lines forming at Bitcoin ATMs around the country as people scramble to convert cash to digital money even at absurdly high premiums.

With one unit of Bitcoin now worth 10,000 times the US dollar, it makes sense that the Fed would begin to feel a bit defensive. Indeed, the speech comes to the defense of the central bank, the existing money, and payment system networks, and calls for the pace of innovation to be controlled by regulators in the interest of “prudence.”

His summary criticism of Bitcoin is that:

The “currency” or asset at the center of some of these systems is not backed by other secure assets, has no intrinsic value, is not the liability of a regulated banking institution, and in leading cases, is not the liability of any institution at all. Indeed, how to treat and define this new asset is complicated.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Goodbye Net Neutrality; Hello Competition

November 25, 2017

Goodbye Net Neutrality; Hello Competition

We should take our deregulation where we can get it.

At long last, with the end of “net neutrality,” competition could soon come to the industry that delivers Internet services to you. You might be able to pick among a range of packages, some minimalist and some maximalist, depending on how you use the service. Or you could choose a package that charges based only on what you consume, rather than sharing fees with everyone else.

Internet socialism is dead; long live market forces.

With market-based pricing finally permitted, we could see new entrants to the industry because it might make economic sense for the first time to innovate. The growing competition will lead, over the long run, to innovation and falling prices. Consumers will find themselves in the driver’s seat rather than crawling and begging for service and paying whatever the provider demands.

Ajit Pai, chairman of the FCC, is exactly right. “Under my proposal, the federal government will stop micromanaging the internet. Instead, the F.C.C. would simply require internet service providers to be transparent about their practices so that consumers can buy the service plan that’s best for them.”

A Fed for Communication

The old rules pushed by the Obama administration had locked down the industry with regulation that only helped incumbent service providers and major content delivery services. They called it a triumph of “free expression and democratic principles.” It was anything but. It was actually a power grab. It created an Internet communication cartel not unlike the way the banking system works under the Federal Reserve.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why We Love Farmers Markets

November 20, 2017

Why We Love Farmers Markets

They are relatively free of federal regulation, and that’s what makes them great.

Almost every small and medium-sized town has what are called farmers markets. We love them. Some are seasonal. Some open only on weekends. People shops under tents and pay vendors cash. It’s all very charming, a nice alternative to superstores.

I just returned from one. I came home with a 4-pound Red Snapper, oversized Brussels Sprouts, beautiful red potatoes, fresh cheese made in the Mexican style, and tubs of spices – all for less than half what I would pay at a regular grocery store. Plus I enjoyed looking at foods and ingredients from all over the world. So delightful, and so smart financially.

You simply would not believe the fish counter. You would think it was Greece or Turkey.

However, there were no tents and no farmers taking cash. This was a permanent building with regular hours of operation, unified checkout lines, and all the necessary technology to take credit cards. Enough of the products there were direct-to-consumer to justify the name ‘farmers market’ but it’s also a big business.You simply would not believe the fish counter. You would think it was Greece or Turkey. Fresh fish (yes, with heads and tails) were everywhere, on ice, all selling for half the price of the frozen stuff at the local store. It was dazzling. And the action! People from all over the world were grabbing tickets (you had to get in line), shouting demands, and piling their carts high.

It was just beautiful, if you like this sort of thing, which I do.

Better Groceries

Still, there is something puzzling about these markets. I have friends who visit or move from foreign countries. I’ve always been proud of American food markets, but these typically denounce what they find in stores. They think our food is terrible: processed, fake, tasteless, boring, expensive.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Great Deficit Ruse

November 4, 2017

The Great Deficit Ruse

Your intuition is right: tax cuts are good and tax increases are bad.

If your profligate friend blew his budget on liquor, you might feel bad for him. But it’s unlikely that you would be willing to fork over money to cover his mistake. He needs to figure it out. And maybe, then, he will learn a lesson for the future.

This is exactly how I feel about all this whining about the federal deficit. I didn’t cause it. It’s not my problem. I should not be forced to pay for it. I don’t work every day in order to earn money to pay for other people’s problems.

It’s bad citizenship always to be willing to pay the government’s debts.

Admit that you agree. You don’t really care about the deficit. Not really. It’s an abstraction to you. More crucially, the deficit is not your fault. You are not responsible for paying for one dime of the federal debt. No portion of your justly made income should be taken to cover the fiscal irresponsibility of anyone except perhaps your children.Actually, it’s very bad parenting always to be ready to pay the kids’ debts. It’s similarly bad citizenship always to be willing to pay the government’s debts.

All this media talk–and it is incessant and ubiquitous–about how the deficit is way more important than your property rights completely disregards the realities of politics. Namely: politicians and bureaucrats desperately need an excuse to take your money. Making you pay for their past mistakes is as good an excuse as any.

Your intuition is right: tax cuts are good and tax increases are bad.

But hold on: doesn’t that just shove the burden of debt onto the next generation? My answer: not if the next generation is similarly unwilling to cough up taxes to pay for the dumb things government does.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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