No to liberty, yes to libertinism 88

Yesterday we discussed the Left’s excitement over the prospect of controlling us all by using the internet and a multitude of other surveillance techniques. (See the post immediately below: The end of liberty? April 28, 2020)

Now we note an exception. There is one activity the would-be controllers, or at least an avant-garde among them, do not want to control. Do not want anyone to control. Would not allow anyone to control.

Even – or especially – self-control is to be discouraged. No, forbidden.

The name of this exception?

Sexual intercourse. 

In this vision of lust set free, there are no moral restrictions. No one will be let off because of feelings of shame or modesty. Every body must be ungrudgingly available to every other body.

But has such a vision been actually added to an avant-garde progressive agenda? Is this concupiscent dream being openly expressed?

Well yes – incipiently. There is a slow viscous movement, likely to flow strongly soon, towards normalizing polygamy, polyamory, “non-monogamism”.

Monogamy is above all things hated by its proponents. But they are not just against marriage and the “nuclear family”. They are for

John Murawski, writing at The Daily Signal, explains what they are for:

Activists are moving to dismantle the legal and social barriers to polyamory, and say their goals are beginning to take shape….

Polyamorists are at present scorned, but the arc of lechery bends towards libertinism:

Not too long ago … marginalized groups [such as homosexuals] were also viewed as unnatural, depraved, or inferior, until negative judgments became socially unacceptable and often illegal.

The aspirations of non-monogamists don’t sound like such a moonshot in an increasingly tolerant society where a transgender man can menstruate and experience childbirth, and Pete Buttigieg, a gay man married to another man, can make a serious run for U.S. president.

As the topic breaks into the mainstream, some churches are beginning to grapple with the issue, and polyamorous students are forming university clubs and organizing events.

“There is plenty of evidence that consensual non-monogamy is an emerging civil rights movement,” said Heath Schechinger, a counseling psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-chair of the Consensual Non-Monogamy Task Force, recently created within the American Psychological Association. “I’ve heard from a number of people advocating for relationship structure diversity over the past 20 years who are elated about this issue finally gaining traction.”

What? Is this a satire, you ask? Not at all. The issue is serious and important.

Activists are already working with elected officials in more than a dozen local governments, especially in California, to expand local anti-discrimination ordinances to include a new protected class, “relationship structure,” said Berkeley psychologist and poly activist Dave Doleshal.

Most efforts are at the informal stage but the city of Berkeley did consider a formal proposal to extend protections in housing, employment, business practices, city facilities, or education to swingers, polyamorists, and other non-monogamists.

The proposal stalled last year amid concerns that it would have required employers to provide health insurance to numerous sexual and romantic partners outside of marriage.

Undaunted by that setback, advocates continue to generate a body of ideas and theories that normalize non-monogamy as a form of positive sexuality—and possibly an identity—following a script followed by other marginalized groups.

Their efforts have led to reassessments of non-monogamy in the psychological and legal fields, contending the relationships are emotionally healthy and ethical, and thus forging a social movement with a shared identity, shared vocabulary, shared history, and a shared desire for full recognition.

And, yes, there is already a polyamory pride flag.

 

Over the past two decades, nearly 600 academic papers have been written on the subject of non-monogamy, according to one count, including an assessment of the benefits to children in polyamorous families.

Such research creates a body of scholarship to counteract ingrained social attitudes that poly advocates call prejudices and misconceptions.

At the same time, the field has spawned more than 50 books, mostly written by women, said Kenneth Haslam, 85, a retired anesthesiologist and polyamorist in Durham, North Carolina, who helped create the polyamory history archive at the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana.

Brian Watson, author of Annals of Pornographie [sic]: How Porn Became “Bad” (2016), is co-authoring a book on non-monogamy throughout history. He said it will feature 50 to 100 prominent figures, such as Victor Hugo and Virginia Woolf, and is deliberately modeled on earlier works about famous gay people.

Just as women’s rights grew from feminist legal theory and LGBTQ rights from queer theory, non-monogamy is also developing its own historiography, scholarship, and theoretical frameworks.

Still, it’s not easy to pinpoint a polyamorist profile. They are less likely to identify as heterosexual or to conform to gender norms, but academic studies and anecdotal evidence don’t tell a single story.

While some non-monogamists consider themselves neo-pagans, anarchists, or socialists, others are libertarians or outwardly conventional suburbanites.

Some studies say the lifestyle attracts more men, others say more women. Some say it appeals to affluent whites, others say a polyamorist’s average annual income is under $40,000.

(That last sentence does not improve on re-reading.)

In the legal arena, sympathetic scholars are arguing for the extension of legal reforms adopted in family law in recent decades in response to the continued erosion of the nuclear family, which is no longer America’s dominant family structure.

At least a dozen states now recognize or allow for the possibility of a child having more than two parents, an accommodation for surrogate parents, grandparents, stepparents, and other nontraditional families, according to a February legal article by Edward Stein, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York.

These expansions of the legal concept of family are potential pathways for non-monogamous families to win legal rights of their own, Stein said.

Another potential legal opening could be the existing precedents in domestic partnerships and civil unions that were set up locally for gays and lesbians before same-sex marriage was legalized nationwide in 2015.

In both cases, legal victories for one group could be extended to another group, a common way that legal developments happen, he said.

The first steps would likely have to be decriminalizing of adultery in the 38 states that don’t distinguish between consensual and non-consensual non-monogamy.

The prohibition of adultery is comparable to anti-sodomy laws whose repeal by the Supreme Court in 2003 cleared an obstacle for recognizing gay marriage, Stein said.

The world of polyamory overlaps with the subculture of kink and BDSM, which refers to the erotic practices of bondage, domination, submission, and sadomasochism. …

Conservatives had long warned that redefining marriage to allow same-sex unions would throw open the door to allowing any kind of marriage, from polygamy to incest.

Incest?

Well, clearly polyamorous non-monogamous persons are less likely to know who their own children are than married heterosexual couples. So isn’t there a danger … ?

We anticipate an answer from the Consensual Non-Monogamy Task Force or the University of California, Berkeley:

Are your consensual polyamorous copulations to be postponed because of a possibility that the object of your desire may be your own child or sibling? Are you to wait each time for the results of a DNA test? Ridiculous. The time has come to stop viewing incest as depraved or unnatural and make it socially acceptable and legal.

Because moral progress is unstoppable.

Posted under Anarchy, Leftism, liberty, tyranny, United States by Jillian Becker on Wednesday, April 29, 2020

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The end of liberty? 88

“You are all, every one of you human beings living on this earth, threatened by an overwhelming disaster. It is coming for sure. It will mean the end of most of you, a painful end, and acutely difficult conditions for any survivors.”

“Oh, how dreadful! Can nothing be done to prevent it? Can it be mitigated? Can it be postponed? Does anyone have an answer?”

“Well, there are experts who understand this Thing. And yes, they do say that it can be mitigated. But it will take concerted effort. All of you, every single one of you, must join together and agree to take the action that the experts say is essential if you are to stand a chance of surviving and ever finding life tolerable again. Obey the experts implicitly, do what Those Who Know say you must do, tolerate no dissenters, backsliders, rebels, drop-outs, deniers, and there is a chance that the worst effects of this horror can be averted.

“We are the experts. Put yourselves totally in our hands. Do what we say without question. Do that, or suffer and perish.”

“But what is this horror? What is its nature? What is it called?” 

“It is called Global Warming. The earth is heating up and will become so intolerably hot that billions of you will die because YOU have damaged it with your so-called ‘civilized’ way of life, your industrial development, your reckless consumption of resources, your cars and aircraft, your begetting too many children so you have over-populated the planet –  in sum, with your selfish self-indulgence that you like to praise as the freedom to say and do just as you like.

“From now on, put yourselves in our hands, let us rule you, obey us in all things, and we will save you.”

That has been the message from Those Who Know – aka the collectivist Left – for some time now. But it hasn’t worked.

“We don’t believe the earth is burning up. We like our civilization. We still want the freedom to say and do just as we like.” 

But Those Who Know have not finished with their mission to put a stop to that. They speak again:

“We were not telling you everything. There is something worse than Global Warming. There is a Sickness so terrible that it will infect 80% of the world’s population and kill millions. Each and every one of you is threatened by it. You might save yourselves if you all obey us. Now close your businesses. Do not gather together. Keep well apart from each other. If you are sick with any but The Sickness do not seek medical help. If you see any of your neighbors doing anything to defy our rules, inform the police. The police are instructed to arrest the disobedient. Get used to doing what we tell you to do …”

And this time it nearly worked.

We obeyed. We regret that we did. Many among us are the poorer for it, some to the point of despair – and it turns out that The Sickness would not infect 80% of the world’s population. Or even 1%?

So what will be the outcome of this extraordinary historical episode? 

Some of us in America trust President Trump to restore our prosperity.

Some of us in America feel that we have had a taste of totalitarianism, of a police state, of socialism. And it has been horrible. We never again want the heavy hand of tyrannical government holding us down. From now on we want more liberty not less. 

Then there are those – on the Left, of course – who want to build on the success of the Great Obedience. Those Who Know are raising their voices louder than ever.  Only world government will save us, they say. Only socialist world government. A borderless world. The end of the nation-state. The end of the “nuclear family”. The end of private ownership. No great industries. Little travel, only by or with the permission of Those Who Know. The whole Green New Deal. And the end of liberty.

But hasn’t it been shown that not enough can be known for central planning to work?

“Ah,” say Those Who Know, “that used to be the case. Now we can know everything about every one of you. Because we have the Internet.”

Here are extracts are from an article in The Atlantic written by two professors of Law: Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School and a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution [!] who was also an assistant attorney general in the George W. Bush administration; and Andrew Keane Woods, a professor at the University of Arizona College of Law.

The trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.

In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong.

Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.

Who decides what they are?  Those Who Know, of course – who will be the government.

Ten years ago, speech on the American Internet was a free-for-all. There was relatively little monitoring and censorship—public or private—of what people posted, said, or did on Facebook, YouTube, and other sites. In part, this was due to the legal immunity that platforms enjoyed under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. And in part it was because the socially disruptive effects of digital networks—various forms of weaponized speech and misinformation—had not yet emerged. As the networks became filled with bullying, harassment, child sexual exploitation, revenge porn, disinformation campaigns, digitally manipulated videos, and other forms of harmful content, private platforms faced growing pressure from governments and users to fix the problems.

Actually, there was no crisis of free speech. There can be no such thing as a crisis of free speech.

The result a decade later is that most of our online speech now occurs in closely monitored playpens where many tens of thousands of human censors review flagged content to ensure compliance with ever-lengthier and more detailed “community standards” (or some equivalent). More and more, this human monitoring and censorship is supported—or replaced—by sophisticated [?] computer algorithms. The firms use these tools to define acceptable forms of speech and other content on their platforms, which in turn sets the effective boundaries for a great deal of speech in the U.S. public forum.

After the 2016 election debacle [the alleged interference by Russia], for example, the tech platforms took aggressive but still imperfect steps to fend off foreign adversaries. YouTube has an aggressive policy of removing what it deems to be deceptive practices and foreign-influence operations related to elections. It also makes judgments about and gives priority to what it calls “authoritative voices”. Facebook has deployed a multipronged strategy that includes removing fake accounts and eliminating or demoting “inauthentic behavior”. Twitter has a similar censorship policy aimed at “platform manipulation originating from bad-faith actors located in countries outside of the US”.  These platforms have engaged in “strategic collaboration” with the federal government, including by sharing information, to fight foreign electoral interference. …

Facebook, for example, also takes down hate speech

A “crime” invented by the Left and applying only to speech antagonistic to itself …

… terrorist propaganda, “cruel and insensitive” speech, and bullying speech, which are harder to identify objectively and more controversial to regulate or remove.

Yes. But objective judgment is not wanted by Those Who Know.

All these developments have taken place under pressure from Washington and Brussels.

From Washington? From the Trump administration? Or from the Deep State?

In hearings over the past few years, Congress has criticized the companies—not always in consistent ways—for allowing harmful speech. In 2018, Congress amended the previously untouchable Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to subject the platforms to the same liability that nondigital outlets face for enabling illegal sex trafficking. Additional amendments to Section 230 are now in the offing, as are various other threats to regulate digital speech. …

Against this background, the tech firms’ downgrading and outright censorship of speech related to COVID-19 are not large steps.  ..

 As in other contexts, Facebook relies on fact-checking organizations and “authorities” (from the World Health Organization to the governments of U.S. states) to ascertain which content to downgrade or remove.

The iniquitous, corrupt, lying WHO – obedient to the Communist Party of China – relied on as a trustworthy fact-checker!

What is different about speech regulation related to COVID-19 is the context: The problem is huge and the stakes are very high. But when the crisis is gone, there is no unregulated “normal” to return to.

We live—and for several years, we have been living—in a world of serious and growing harms resulting from digital speech. Governments will not stop worrying about these harms.

Which governments?

And private platforms will continue to expand their definition of offensive content …

“Offensive” according to the prejudices of the owners …

… and will use algorithms to regulate it ever more closely. The general trend toward more speech control will not abate.

And in addition to the Internet, “we have many other mechanisms for watching you”.

Over the past decade, network surveillance has grown in roughly the same proportion as speech control. Indeed, on many platforms, ubiquitous surveillance is a prerequisite to speech control.

The public has been told over and over that the hundreds of computers we interact with daily—smartphones, laptops, desktops, automobiles, cameras, audio recorders, payment mechanisms, and more—collect, emit, and analyze data about us that are, in turn, packaged and exploited in various ways to influence and control our lives. We have also learned a lot—but surely not the whole picture—about the extent to which governments exploit this gargantuan pool of data.

Police use subpoenas to tap into huge warehouses of personal data collected by private companies. They have used these tools to gain access to doorbell cameras that now line city blocks, microphones in the Alexa devices in millions of homes, privately owned license-plate readers that track every car, and the data in DNA databases that people voluntarily pay to enter. They also get access to information collected on smart-home devices and home-surveillance cameras—a growing share of which are capable of facial recognition—to solve crimes. And they pay to access private tow trucks equipped with cameras tracking the movements of cars throughout a city. …

The harms from digital speech will also continue to grow, as will speech controls on these networks. And invariably, government involvement will grow. At the moment, the private sector is making most of the important decisions, though often under government pressure. But … the firms may not be able to regulate speech legitimately without heavier government guidance and involvement. It is also unclear whether, for example, the companies can adequately contain foreign misinformation and prevent digital tampering with voting mechanisms without more government surveillance.

The First and Fourth Amendments as currently interpreted, and the American aversion to excessive government-private-sector collaboration, have stood as barriers to greater government involvement. Americans’ understanding of these laws, and the cultural norms they spawned, will be tested as the social costs of a relatively open internet multiply.

COVID-19 is a window into these future struggles. …

And a door into world socialist totalitarian government?

Which will force a reversion to primitivism? A highly sophisticated, technological primitivism. Primitivism-plus-the-internet. The simple life, highly regimented, constantly surveilled by Those Who Know.

The loss of civilization.

The end of liberty.

How to keep safe in a pandemic 115

What we must do to keep ourselves safe from the coronavirus:

Posted under government, Health by Jillian Becker on Monday, April 27, 2020

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The UN must be destroyed 130

From its inception, the United Nations Organization has been the tool of America’s enemies: Communist regimes and their sympathizers, later joined by the Islamic states – tyrannies all.

Yet the Organization has been chiefly sustained by America! To this day the US gives it nearly a quarter – about 22% – of its funding. In this the US resembles a dhimmi paying a tax to his Muslim  oppressors for the favor of being slapped.

The UN has done no good, but it never stops doing evil; and every one of its sub-agencies has done evil; often by letting it be done.

President Trump sees this and does not like it.

Lloyd Billingsley writes at Front Page:

President Trump is cutting off funding for the World Health Organization, headed by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus … the first director-general in the WHO’s 72-year history not to be a medical doctor but a favorite of China with a radical leftist past. This is not the first time a Communist regime installed their mouthpiece and deployed an international body for their own purposes.

The WHO is part of the United Nations, which dates from the waning days of World War II. Stalin’s foreign minister Andrei Gromyko suggested U.S. State Department official Alger Hiss, a Stalinist spy, as the first Secretary General, the first and only time a Soviet leader suggested an American for an international post. Hiss was duly appointed acting Secretary General, so the Communists got the man they wanted.

U.S. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, who had been under the wing of Hiss and [possible Soviet agent] Harry Hopkins, delivered a speech to the opening UN conference in San Francisco in May-June of 1945. The speech had been written by Stalinist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, brought to the conference by Alger Hiss. Stettinius was so pleased with Trumbo’s speech that he requested an autographed picture of the screenwriter, but Stettinius later denied he ever knew Trumbo.

Stettinius became U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, first headed by Norwegian Trygve Lie. The newfound UN did nothing to liberate eastern Europe from Soviet control. When Hungarians rebelled in 1956 the UN, then under Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, stood by as the Soviet Communists crushed the rebellion, as they did the “Prague Spring” of 1968.

The Soviet Union retained control of eastern Europe and from 1972 to 1981, made gains in southeast Asia, Africa and Central America. UN Secretary General at the time was Kurt Waldheim … a former Nazi in a sturmtruppen unit that executed thousands of Yugoslav partisans and civilians and deported thousands of Greek Jews to death camps from 1942 to 1944.

The Khmer Rouge [in power in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979] murdered nearly two million people, approximately one-fourth of the population. The Khmer Rouge murdered thousands of babies by smashing their heads against a tree and forced prisoners to dig their own graves before killing them with clubs to save bullets. The UN dithered until 1988 before condemning the Khmer Rouge and utterly failed to establish any kind of tribunal for genocide.

From 1974 to 1987 the head of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was Amabou-Mahtar M’Bow of Senegal, a Muslim … On M’Bow’s watch, UNESCO funded the PLO and violent Marxist movements around the world. UNESCO served as cover for a dozen of the 47 KGB spies expelled by France in 1983.

UNESCO promoted the “New World Information and Communication Order,” a Soviet-style offensive to quash free expression and repress journalists. When the French L’Express described M’Bow as a “megalomaniac despot,” the UNESCO boss sued the publication. All told, M’Bow’s excesses prompted U.S. President Ronald Reagan to pull the United States out of UNESCO in 1984.

The United Nations did nothing about the murderous repressions of China’s Communist government under the genocidal Mao Zedong, a contender with Stalin for worst mass murderer in history.

Communist China has occupied Tibet since the 1950s and the UN looks the other way.

The UN’s favorite targets are Israel and the United States, the UN’s largest funder.

The United States is also the largest funder of the World Health Organization, now headed by “Dr. Tedros”, the non-doctor who appointed Zimbabwe’s dictator Robert Mugabe as a WHO “goodwill ambassador”. So no surprise that Tedros serves as the dummy for Communist China’s ventriloquism.

President Trump has pulled the plug on US funding for the WHO, based on its failures during the current pandemic. The president should now turn his attention to the United Nations, a boon for Communist dictatorships, a bust for democratic nations, and like the WHO a bad deal for the United States.

The UN must be destroyed!

Cold war with China 8

Yes.

Cold war with China needs no question mark. It is not a question – should there be, or should there not be …?

It is a fact. It is a war even longer than the one in Afghanistan.

Colonel Richard Kemp (who commanded British forces in Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Balkans) writes at Gatestone:

Commentators and politicians today worry that the current situation might trigger a new cold war with China. They fail to understand that, in a similar but much more far-reaching pattern to the jihadist conflict, China has been fighting a cold war against the West for decades, while we have refused to recognize what is going on….

Few in the West fully recognize the threat to our own economies, security and liberty. Many who do refuse to speak out for four reasons: 

First, fear of coming into China’s crosshairs, provoking economic harm or character assassination.

Second, fear of accusations of racism, a concern readily exploited by the Chinese state whose own egregious racism is only too obvious.

Third, belief that our liberal values can change those that oppose us. The hope that Chinese exposure to free trade, including entry into the WTO in 2001, would have this effect has proven woefully misguided and served only to strengthen Beijing’s oppressive regime.

Fourth, many political leaders, businessmen, academics and journalists have been bought and paid for by Beijing whether by financial incentive or blackmail.

How can the West fight back? Although still militarily and economically inferior to the US, China is a formidable and growing economic power, interwoven with Western economies to an unprecedented degree. We must begin to divest from and sanction China, repatriate and use alternative sources of manufacturing and technology, restrict capital investment there and curb Chinese investment here, especially in our infrastructure.

We must re-invigorate and develop our own technology, much long abandoned to the Chinese juggernaut. We must enforce the norms of international trade and act vigorously to prevent and penalize China’s orgy of industrial theft that has gone largely unchallenged for decades. We must push back globally against Beijing’s imperialism and propaganda wherever it occurs.

But what if cold war with China leads to hot war with China?

We must also prepare for military conflict, with an emphasis on deterring Chinese aggression.

America will have to lead the fightback as it did previously in the cold war [with Soviet Russia], but success will require Europe and our allies around the world to stand with them for the long term. This is not a party political issue, but must become a fundamental element of enduring Western grand strategies. This is the task of decades and will be high-risk and costly. The alternative is to remain on the hook and in hock to the Chinese communist state and let future generations suffer the incalculable consequences of our continued purblind inaction.

Tom Basile, writing at American Greatness, thinks cold war with China is yet to begin in ernest on our side, but certainly will, and should be unhesitatingly engaged.

Our struggle will not be against China alone, but also against Russia and Iran.

 We shouldn’t be afraid of a new Cold War. …

Economic alliances that have made the Western democracies weaker, less focused, and often playing into the hands of authoritarian competitors seeking to expand their power.

We believed that opening China would produce a stronger level of trust, cooperation, and liberalization. …

It has not done so.

We genuinely wanted the Russian experiment in democracy to succeed. It hasn’t and we need to accept that. …

We may have wanted it to succeed, but not all of us expected that it would.

For decades we failed to make Iran pay for financing global Islamic terrorist networks that have taken countless innocent lives and destabilized countries around the world. The Obama Administration’s capitulation to the mullahs was perhaps the lowest point in American foreign policy of the last half-century.

Agreed.

The troika of China, Russia, and Iran represent a significant and present threat to the safety and security of the free world.

That requires an aggressive response.

Agreed again.

The Chinese, through their Belt and Road Initiative, have set about conquering Africa.

The three are also making inroads in the Western Hemisphere as well, including information manipulation that reaches the eyes and ears of Americans every day.

China, Russia, and Iran will act with insidious intent to damage the United States. Having an economic, military, and diplomatic counter-posture is absolutely critical.

America should not fight the “troika” alone, but with Western allies:

From 1960-1975, the United States threatened or imposed economic sanctions more than 25 times, not counting U.S. support for U.N. sanctions against South Africa and other nations. We invested in the developing world to provide an incentive for those nations to align with the West. The Cold War promoted enterprise-based, free-market capitalism that strengthened our democratic allies. The military effort led to significant technological advancements.

Redrawing the lines of engagement now would mean igniting the ability of the United States and Western economies again to consolidate economic power. The economic opportunity for American and European countries for freezing out Huawei is enormous.

But the opportunity is not being seized by America’s closest European ally. Britain is obstinately sticking to its contract with Huawei to build its G5 network, careless of the risk that doing so further empowers the Communist Chinese enemy.

A new Cold War means creating new trading blocs and incentives to dissuade free nations from supporting authoritarian competitors. It means governments making the tough decision to economically marginalize these regimes. Such a move may increase consumer prices but can lead to a restoration of millions of American jobs, economic growth in the developing world, and protecting superior Western innovation from piracy.

During the Cold War [with Soviet Russia], a vast majority of Americans understood that it was important for the United States and its allies to counter Communism. We cannot allow the moral relativism of the Left in America today to make us timid in the face of real threats to our security and individual liberty, not to mention the sovereignty of other nations.

Sure, there was debate and protest over disarmament and détente. Of course, there were those who were opposed our strong anti-Communist stance and Ronald Reagan’s “We win, they lose” posture, and many who railed against the so-called military-industrial complex.

Today, empowered by the media and digital platforms, those forces clearly have a strong voice.

Nonetheless, America’s destiny is—as it has always been—to be a beacon of freedom and prevent the human race from being dominated by authoritarianism that saps the soul of the individual, devalues life, and prevents human advancement for the sake of ruling elites.

Prevent the whole of the human race from falling under oppressive government? That is a very large assignment. Is it really America’s mission? And if so, is it possible?

Those who today fancy themselves experts in the media will say we can’t shift our posture in such a fashion. …

We would do well to remember our history. In the past century, hundreds of thousands of Americans died fighting the Germans, only to see Germany become one of our staunchest allies. We used the atomic bomb to obliterate two Japanese cities, yet today Japan is one of our closest trading partners.

A new Cold War-style approach to China, Russia, and Iran is a call for America reconstituting the strong allied bloc it once led and rejecting the free-for-all globalist movement that turns a blind eye to enemies allegedly for the sake of cheap products.

America first needs to mean America leads again.

[The pandemic of] COVID-19 can indeed reset the world order placing us in the familiar position of making bold moves to protect freedom. What remains to be seen is whether we have the courage to lead again.

Using economic and if necessary military power to fight China, preferably with the co-operation of Western allies, is one thing – necessary and possible.

But America resetting the world order?

That requires a question mark.

Posted under Africa, China, Iran, Russia, Soviet Union, United States, War by Jillian Becker on Wednesday, April 22, 2020

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Doctoring WHO 200

“ANYTHING to oppose Trump” is the motto self-scorched into the anger-fired skulls of the Kings and Queens of the Universe – so crowned by the New York Times, with the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Guardian, and the ghost of Che Guevara in perpetual attendance.

This time, for that great cause, Global Royalty is trying to resuscitate the COVID-19 patient, the World Health Organization, an institution born of the iniquitous UN, run at vast expense by a puppet of China, for the pleasure of the world’s Gasbags.

President Trump, knowing the patient was always a wasteful useless parasite who recently did great harm to the whole world by helping to cause a pandemic, rightly decided to let it fade away. By defunding it.

So – it follows as the night the day – Global Royalty rushes to save it. By raising funds for it.

Lee Cary writes at Canada Free Press*:

The Event: A Star-studded fund raiser for the World Health Organization (WHO)

Contributors, filmed in their homes, included Elton John, Jennifer Lopez, Stevie Wonder, British soccer star David Beckham, former U.S. first ladies Michelle Obama and Laura Bush, Andrea Bocelli, Celine Dion, Billie Eilish, Bill Gates, Taylor Swift, Jennifer Lopez, Andrea Bocelli, Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Beyonce, Oprah Winfrey, Stevie Wonder, Lady Gaga – the usual cast of celebrities who show up to promote global causes.

The event kicked off with a one-minute video from WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus—a “superstar” according to Ms. Gaga.

Tedros said [in a speech compiled from the UN Book of Utter-Ready Phrases – ed]:

Today, we come together as one to express our common humanity. To mourn those we have lost. To salute the health workers who save lives. And to say, with one voice, we shall not be defeated. Covid-19 has taken so much from us. But it has often given unique opportunity to put aside our differences, to break down barriers, to see and seek the best in each other. And to lift our voices for health for all. And to insure this never happens again. Never again. The World Health Organization is proud to be part of this historic show of solidarity. I want to thank Lady Gaga, the many artists and many (inaudible), global citizens, my friend Hugh Evans, and the United Nations, for bringing us together as one world together at home.” 

In an article in The Dispatch titled Suspending WHO Funding Should Be Just the Beginning: let’s talk about what the organization does—and what it doesn’t do, the author  Lyman Stone writes*:

[The WHO] is a body for research, conferences, and grant-writing, not frontline disease-fighting.

The WHO’s current head, Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is not a doctor of medicine. 

[The WHO] spends from $200 to $600 million on travel expenses each year.

High-ranking WHO official and Canadian scientist Bruce Aylward racked up $400,000 in travel expenses helicoptering around West Africa during the Ebola epidemic, even as many African countries could not afford basic medical supplies or body bags.

The WHO pays for the travel costs of experts they invite to conferences. A huge part of the WHO’s budget is simply buying plane tickets and booking swanky hotel rooms for prestigious experts to give speeches and present papers they’ve already published online. 

Dr. Tedros made Robert Mugabe [dictator of Zimbabwe, a mass murderer – ed] a “goodwill ambassador” for the WHO in Africa.

And under his watch, the WHO has begun to include “traditional Chinese medicine” remedies in its international diagnostic manuals. What’s particularly galling about this is that the ingredients for traditional Chinese medicine often include the very wild animals that are over-hunted and endangered around Africa, and from which so many novel zoonotic diseases originate. For the WHO to endorse these practices is absurd and dangerous.

The WHO has done everything it can to support the propaganda of authoritarian regimes and cover up [not cure – ed] embarrassing epidemics.

Dr. Tedros spent his major speeches urging the world not to blame China, and claiming that “stigmatization” [of China] was as big a problem as COVID-19. 

As a result of the WHO’s delay, many countries delayed their responses by weeks, making a crucial difference that epidemiologists say may have doubled the total death toll.

The WHO has been dominated by shills for the Chinese Communist Party for nearly a decade and a half, and in that time it has systematically suppressed information about numerous epidemic outbreaks and actively advanced propaganda for authoritarian regimes at great cost to public health.

Any appropriate responsibility for the U.S. being unprepared for a pandemic such as COVID-19 falls heaviest on the eight years of the George W. Bush presidency, followed by the eight years of the Barack H. Obama administration.

So it’s no surprise that Laura Bush and Michelle Obama are among the Global Royals eager to fatten up WHO and get it organizing those luxury conferences again.

 

The UN must be destroyed!

 

*We have shortened some of the quoted passages.

*

Later:

About Tedros Adhonom Ghebrevesus

From our Facebook page, quoting from Discover the Networks:

The US paid most of the costs of keeping the World Health Organization in existence, and yet successive US governments allowed this to happen:

Tedros Adhonom Ghebrevesus is a corrupt, dishonest, communist, terrorist-loving thug. From 2005-2016 he was a member of the corrupt government of Ethiopia. In 2017, when he ran for the post of Director-General of the WHO, he stood accused of complicity in the commission of “crimes against humanity” in Ethiopia. That charge was related not only to three cholera coverups, but also to allegations surrounding Tedros’s longstanding political affiliation with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), an organization that grew out of the Marxist-Leninist League of Tigray and was responsible for horrific atrocities — particularly targeting the Amhara ethnic group in the country’s northwest region. The TPLF became Ethiopia’s principal ruling party. In the 1990s, the U.S. government listed TPLF as a terrorist group. The Global Terror Database continues to list it as such, given the organization’s ongoing commission of armed attacks in rural areas. Tedros remains a high-ranking member of TPLF’s Central Committee, or politburo. TPLF provided millions of dollars for Tedros’s campaign to become the leader of the WHO. Those funds – along with vital support from China – propelled Tedros to victory when, at the Seventieth World Health Assembly in May 2017, the WHO Member States elected him to a five-year term as their Director-General, making him the first person to hold that position without a medical degree. Notably, the wife of Chinese President Xi Jinping was the WHO’s longtime goodwill ambassador – a post that enabled her to effectively promote Chinese interests under the umbrella of the UN.

Adam Schiff: a man of Soros 3

Is there a nastier person in America than Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif)?

He’s a lackey of George Soros, the world’s top enemy of civilization.

He supports jihadi organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic relations (CAIR).

He pursues Donald Trump with all the ardor of a Captain Ahab pursuing Moby Dick.

His low, mean, petty malice can be matched, perhaps, but it is difficult to imagine it being surpassed.

Well yes, he can be matched in those qualities. Just a few names off the top of the head: Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Jerry Nadler, James Comey, James Clapper, John Brennan, Christina Blasey Ford are all candidates for equal repugnance and contempt. But Schiff is surely the first among his equals.

Charles Hurt writes at Breitbart:

Adam Schiff … for more than three years now has lied to gullible reporters about his spectacular fantasies of Mr. Trump in a Moscow hotel room with hookers.

This is the same ridiculous nutjob who for years now has been lying to American voters about how he has secret evidence that he cannot share proving that Mr. Trump “colluded” with Russian President Vladimir Putin to “steal” the 2016 election.

Secret “evidence”, it turned out, that all came from the Kremlin.

This is the same desperate, dishonest charlatan who — after his Russian fantasy went up in smoke — turned his imagination to Ukraine and began spinning new fantasies about Mr. Trump conspiring with the president of Ukraine to make Joe Biden look bad — as if Joe Biden needs any help looking bad.

And, yes, this is the same Adam Schiff who colluded with phone callers he believed to be actual Ukrainians in order to obtain naked pictures of Mr. Trump. (Sickos like this you really cannot make up.)

Now Mr. Schiff and his fellow Democrats have seized on something that at least did actually happen. The Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.

This virus is as deadly real as these people are ridiculously unserious.

Mr. Schiff and his band of twittering impeachment fairies have decided to turn the awesome powers of the legislative branch of the federal government into yet another weapon against Mr. Trump. This time, they want to use all their constitutional powers to accuse the president of somehow playing dumb to allow the coronavirus to spread as far and wide as possible so as to infect and kill as many Americans as possible.

Again, to what end? To help Russia? To prop up his only personal financial interests in the wild-bat trade?

Anyway, this latest fever dream is downright comical, given the fact that it was Mr. Schiff and his twittering impeachment fairies who were fully engaged with impeaching Mr. Trump while the pandemic was brewing and first jumped from China to America.

Mr. Trump can point to actual decisions he made at that time to combat the pandemic while Mr. Schiff and his dollhouse friends can point to nothing other than their failed impeachment charade in Congress — as the pandemic marched across the globe.

That’s not to say that Mr. Schiff’s latest delusions are not terrifying. They are. Because we now know the dark depths of depravity Mr. Schiff and the anti-Trump crusaders in Washington will resort to in pursuit of Mr. Trump. They will stop at nothing and there is no apparatus of the federal government they won’t try to use in their zealous pursuit.

Who voted for Schiff? What sort of person? There are people, quite a lot of them, who thought – or felt  – that this useless being full of spite would represent them well in Congress, and voted him into the House of Representatives no fewer than 10 times! That’s a strange thing to contemplate. Hard to explain.

Posted under Commentary, Subversion, United States by Jillian Becker on Friday, April 17, 2020

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Atheist conservative aphorisms 12

To start a lively discussion, we posted these statements on our Facebook page today.

The lively discussion followed. Maybe it will follow here too.

Gods did not create Man; Man created gods.

Religion not only teaches untruth, it excludes the search for truth.

There is no Mind presiding over this universe.

Mind came into existence at this end of evolution, not before evolution began.

Existence has no purpose.

You cannot measure the value of human life because human life is the only measure of value.

Whether or not we have free will, we must live as if we have it, so to all intents and purposes we have it.

Many a belief survives persecution but not critical examination.

Justice is elusive, but judgment is inescapable.

 

(The last two are among our Articles of Reason listed under Pages in our margin.)

Posted under Miscellaneous by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, April 14, 2020

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The source 121

A documentary that reveals how COVID-19 came out of a Chinese laboratory (28 minutes forward) and not a food market.

And that the cause of this sickness that is afflicting the whole world, killing many, impoverishing nations, is China’s Communism.

 

Posted under China, communism, Health, Videos by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, April 14, 2020

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What cause of death, what price the treatment? 125

From Canada Free Press:

Why are more deaths being attributed to COVID-19 than actually occur? Who benefits?

Are more people being put on ventilators – which can kill – than need them? Who benefits?

Here is where everything Scott Jensen is saying can turn very grim—-

New York ER doctor, Cameron Kyle-Sidell, has made public statements about the misuse of ventilators with supposed COVID-19 patients. He’s stated that some of these patients actually have functioning lungs. Their immediate and dire life-threatening situation is straight oxygen deficit, as if they have high-altitude sickness. But pressure on the lungs, applied by the use of ventilators via standard rigid protocols, he says, can cause damage, and even death.

Imagine what would happen if another way—NOT ventilators—was found to usefully and safely deliver oxygen to these patients.

The hospitals wouldn’t get their huge $39,000 payout for each Medicare patient put on a ventilator.

What do you think a hospital would say…what decision would the hospital make…would the hospital allow a better and safer and necessary delivery system for oxygen? For every labeled “COVID-19 patient” whose desperate emergency is a straight deficit of oxygen?

Would the hospital forego all those huge Medicare coverage payouts?

Posted under Health by Jillian Becker on Monday, April 13, 2020

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