Month: August 2021

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

The policy response to the covid panic of 2020 in the United States was one of the most widespread direct attacks on fundamental human rights in decades. Overnight—and without any deliberation, debate, or checks and balances—millions of Americans were denied their basic rights to seek employment, to freely assemble, and to engage in religious practices.

Business and churches were closed, and countless Americans were ordered to stay in their homes and abandon their sources of income.

This was all done with no legal process other than the issuance of edicts from a tiny handful of politicians, usually executives such as state governors and city mayors.

Those who pressed for lockdowns and the effective confiscation of property—for that’s what a forced business closure actually is—denied that any sort of due process or “checks and balances” were necessary.

Rather, the lockdown advocates insisted that the public instead embrace unreservedly the “recommendations” of experts in government offices, who insisted that coerced lockdowns and business closures were the only reasonable response to the assumed threat of covid-19. Were one to suggest in mixed company that businesses ought to be afforded a hearing before being forcibly closed—or that an individual ought to receive some sort of due process before being deemed a “nonessential” worker—this was likely to elicit scoffing and contempt.

There’s no room for due process anymore, the official narrative tells us.

This new turn toward obedience to expert-fueled executive power didn’t appear from nowhere. Rather it is, in part, a manifestation of a long ideological process that has gradually replaced respect for legal checks and balances and due process with a deference to scientific experts. These experts, it is alleged, must not be subject to the slow and inefficient process of legal constraints on state power.

This process is explained in a 1963 essay by French political scientist Bertrand de Jouvenel titled “The Political Consequences of the Rise of Science.”1

De Jouvenel’s basic premise is this: with the rise of liberalism in the West—what some call classical liberalism—greater care was taken to erect legal obstacles that slowed or prevented state action against individuals. This was done to ensure due process was afforded to ordinary people. This position became especially widespread and respected in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as many gained a greater mistrust of government institutions and their agents. The idea was that political institutions could not seize life, liberty, or property from a person unless the state was first subjected to a reliable and stable legal process. 

But this due process was slow, and was backward looking in the sense that it had been built up on legal foundations of avoiding past abuses by regimes. In a certain sense, it is conservative by nature.

De Jouvenel writes:

Precedent is the most ancient basis of law, and the safest….

Judicial procedure is the sole remnant of the old idea of “the right way,” and therefore an islet of stable procedure in a sea of shifting processes.

The most revered experts under this way of thinking were the legal experts or—to use de Jouvenel’s preferred term—the jurists, who ensured that legal process was respected so as to ensure the maintenance of legal rights.

But by the twentieth century, this respect for the jurists had begun to be replaced by deference to other experts, especially to scientific experts and policy experts, who promised to be able to manage and direct society toward specific outcomes. Moreover, the public’s growing faith in technology as a means of fine-tuning society began to challenge the now seemingly old-fashioned ideas of due process and stable procedure.

Consequently, de Jouvenel writes,

Now the judgment has been reversed: those who operate traditionally [i.e., the jurists who demanded respect for the old legal processes] are a drag upon progress.

Outcomes, rather than the legal process, become the driving motivation for policy. The model for society at this point shifts from a courtroom or parliament to a laboratory. Progress comes to be defined as the adoption of lightning-fast scientific efficiency:

Social organization [under the new experts] becomes a matter for systems engineering, and specific decisions become problems of operations research….

Unwittingly and indirectly, the scientist undermines the juristic order…. Our expectation of and enthusiasm for progress are in contradiction with fidelity to “the ways of our fathers.” But the “ways of our father,” so dear to ancient moralists, have always served as a significant basis for jurists.

So let’s look at how this has played out during the covid crisis.

That “science” was more important than due process in the minds of a great many Americans became immediately obvious for anyone who tried to stick up for “due process” during the spring of 2020.

Rather, policy became guided by the idea that experts will tell us the proper goals of government policy, and then governments were expected to impose the coercive measures necessary to achieve those goals. This process was seemingly efficient and progressive: the experts wanted X and Y, so it was expected that the state would use its police powers to force everyone to do X and Y. The end.

Political debate, legislative process, and adherence to legal processes, on the other hand, became mere impediments to accomplishing these important “scientific” goals.

The means through which this was to be accomplished was also explained by de Jouvenel, who noted that in the old liberal ideal of legal process, the legislature was to take the lead, with the executive acting merely to carry out the legislators’ wishes. This was the old Lockean model. But it failed to last. 

Rather, in a regime that defers to scientific expertise, executive power has the upper hand, and the old Lockean model is turned on its head:

Science is a contributory influence to the dissolution of a juristic order. In the political realm, it is blatantly clear now that ”the executive” is nothing like what Locke imagined: he saw it as a power subordinate to the legislative, and as “seeing to” the execution of the laws. This implied that a decision of the executive should look back to the laws in force, whereas we are well aware that that such decisions in fact look forward to the results to be hoped from them.

In this new model, only the executive is well suited to conform to the demands of the new model of expertise. The executive can act fast, with minimal deliberation, and with attention paid more to outcome than to process. Growing executive power is a natural fit for a society geared toward deference for technocratic experts. By this way of thinking, it’s best to just move forward and let the legislatures and courts catch up later.

And this what we have seen over the past eighteen months. Experts and executives take the political lead with a variety of orders and edicts, and it’s up to the courts and the legislatures to follow the lead of “decisive” action taken in the name of science.

Thus, only many months after the fact can those who oppose the executive’s preferred policies hope to regain some semblance of legal rights and due process through the courts or legislative action. By then, of course, grave damage might have already been done to human rights and economic institutions. And experience suggests that legal rights, once abolished, are exceptionally difficult to regain months or years later.

The public is likely to tolerate this, however, because the new model of scientific expertise has been so successful among so much of the public. In this new way of thinking, it is important to “do something” and to “trust the experts” and to disregard legal limits on executive power. To demand otherwise is to be “against science.”

As schools across the country force masks and Critical Race Theory (CRT) on America’s youth, a massive backlash from angry parents has proven to be too much for some school board members to handle.

According to the Associated Press, “a growing number are resigning or questioning their willingness to serve as meetings have devolved into shouting contests between deeply political constituencies over how racial issues are taught, masks in schools, and COVID-19 vaccines and testing requirements.“

A Nevada school board member said he had thoughts of suicide before stepping down amid threats and harassment. In Virginia, a board member resigned over what she saw as politics driving decisions on masks. The vitriol at board meetings in Wisconsin had one member fearing he would find his tires slashed.

…

In his letter of resignation from Wisconsin’s Oconomowoc Area School Board, Rick Grothaus said its work had become “toxic and impossible to do.” -AP

“When I got on, I knew it would be difficult,” Grothaus – who resigned Aug. 15, told AP. “But I wasn’t ready or prepared for the vitriolic response that would occur, especially now that the pandemic seemed to just bring everything out in a very, very harsh way. It made it impossible to really do any kind of meaningful work.”

2/2 Williamson County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. : “I am begging ya’ll to be peaceful” -hundreds of protesters earlier-School board voted to require masks for elementary schools until 9/21/21. FPD also on site. #williamsoncountyschools #franklintn @WilliamsonHmPg pic.twitter.com/Mic8zfXFZC

— Matt Masters (@formvscontent) August 11, 2021

This is Courtney Ann Taylor, a mother in Georgia. She’s one of the many parents who’ve HAD IT with mask mandates, especially for young kids in school.

Share this video! pic.twitter.com/pyG3fYmgVI

— Errol Webber (@ErrolWebber) April 22, 2021

According to National School Boards Association interim executive director, Chip Slaven, the charged political climate ‘has made a difficult job even more challenging, if not impossible.’

It’s not just pissed off parents, either. Earlier this month, a Virginia teacher quit her job at a school board meeting, saying that she refused to “be a cog in a machine” that forces her to transmit their “highly politicized agendas” to children.

“Within the last year, I was told, in one of my so-called equity trainings, that white, Christian, able-bodied females currently have the power in our schools and that ‘this has to change,’” said the elementary school teacher Laura Morris during the public comment portion of the board meeting.

“School board, I quit,” she said.

“I quit your policies, I quit your training, and I quit being a cog in a machine that tells me to push highly politicized agendas on our most vulnerable constituents—the children,” Morris added.

At one Veil, Arizona school board meeting, angry parents alternated between blasting officials over masks, vaccines, and CRT – while the board has no intention of addressing and acting on any of those topics.

After the board attempted to shut down the debate, more angry parents stepped up to drag their noses back on topic.

“There is starting to be an inherent distrust for school boards, that there’s some notion that we are out to indoctrinate children or to undermine parents or things like that, when we are on the same team,” said Vail, AZ board member Allison Pratt, who’s been on the board for six years.

Pratt said she strives to view issues from the perspective of even the most extreme members of the community, and she has no plans to resign. But she has stepped up security at her home.

Police have been called to intervene in places including Vail, where parents protesting a mask mandate pushed their way into a board room in April, and in Mesa County, Colorado, where Doug Levinson was among school board members escorted to their cars by officers who had been unable to de-escalate a raucous Aug. 17 meeting. “Why am I doing this?” Levinson asked himself.

Kurt Thigpen wrote in leaving the Washoe County, Nevada, school board that he considered suicide amid relentless bullying and threats led by people who didn’t live in the county, let alone have children in the schools. “I was constantly looking over my shoulder,” he wrote in July.

In several states, board members who won’t resign are facing recall efforts. According to Ballotpedia, 147 school board members are up for recall across 59 campaigns in 2021. Among them, Vail board president Jon Aitken – whose critics say the mental and physical health of students in his district has declined amid pandemic restrictions.

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

Sunday’s news reports that the Biden Administration mistakenly killed nine members of one Afghan family, including six children, in “retaliation” for last week’s suicide attack which killed 13 US servicemembers, is a sad and sick epitaph on the 20 year Afghanistan war.

Promising to “get tough” on ISIS, which suddenly re-emerged to take responsibility for the suicide attack, the most expensive military and intelligence apparatus on earth appears to have gotten it wrong. Again.

Interventionists love to pretend they care about girls and women in Afghanistan, but it is in reality a desperate attempt to continue the 20-year US occupation. If we leave, they say, girls and women will be discriminated against by the Taliban.

It’s hard to imagine a discrimination worse than being incinerated by a drone strike, but these “collateral damage” attacks over the past 20 years have killed scores of civilians. Just like on Sunday.

That’s the worst part of this whole terrible war: day-after-day for twenty years civilians were killed because of the “noble” effort to re-make Afghanistan in the image of the United States. But the media and the warmongers who call the shots in government – and the “private” military-industrial sector – could not have cared less. Who recalls a single report on how many civilians were just “collateral damage” in the futile US war?

Sadly these children killed on Sunday, two of them reportedly just two years old, have been the ones forced to pay the price for a failed and bloody US foreign policy.

Yes, the whole exit from Afghanistan has been a debacle. Biden, but especially his military planners and incompetent advisors, deserves much of what has been piled onto him this past week or so about this incompetence.

Maybe if Biden’s Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs’ Chairman had spent a bit more time planning the Afghan exit and a lot less time obsessing on how to turn the US military into a laboratory for cultural Marxism, we might have actually had a workable plan.

We know that actual experts like Col. Douglas Macgregor did have a plan to get out that would have spared innocent lives. But because this decorated US Army veteran was “tainted” by his service in the previous administration – service that was solely focused on how to get out of Afghanistan safely – he would not be consulted by the Pentagon’s “woke” top military brass.

Trump also should share some of the blame currently being showered on Biden. He wanted to get out years ago, but never had the courage to stand up to the also incompetent generals and “experts” he foolishly hired to advise him.

Similarly, many conservatives (especially neoconservatives) are desperate to attack Biden not for how he got out of Afghanistan, but for the fact that he is getting us out of Afghanistan.

That tells you all you need to know about how profitable war is to the warmongers.

I’ve always said, “we just marched in, we can just march out,” and I stand by that view. Yes, you can “just march out” of these idiotic interventions…but you do need a map!

Over the years, we’ve noted that some reckless drone operators have collided with aircraft or had near misses. But the latest incident involves a police-operated drone that crashed into a small plane.

According to the local newspaper CityNews Toronto, a Cessna 172 operated by Canadians were on their final approach for Toronto Buttonville Municipal Airport in Ontario when a York Regional Police DJI Matrice 210 drone collided with the small aircraft. 

CityNews’ Ken Townsend tweeted images of the Cessna’s damage that appears significant. He said, “I spoke with the owner of this small plane, he says if York Region Police drone had collided with his aircraft’s windscreen instead of cowling, it could have resulted in loss of life. Says he is frustrated at lack of safety and following laws.”

The Transportation Safety Board is investigating the incident and attempting to understand why a police drone was flying in unauthorized controlled airspace. 

Damage to the Cessna goes far beyond the engine bonnet. The aircraft suffered a propeller strike in the collision and a badly damaged airbox. The costly part will be when the engine is torn down to see if there is internal damage and or if the airframe is cracked. 

Hitting a drone at over 100 mph can be extremely dangerous. 

The University of Dayton Research Institute ran simulation tests of a commercial aircraft flying at 238 mph. They found the impact from a drone could be devastating for the aircraft. 

Dario Matrundola, the owner of the plane and a flight school called Canadian Flyers, said if the drone struck the windshield, both pilot and passenger would’ve been killed. 

“It would have been a tragedy, it would’ve been loss of life or injuries for sure. The pilots are very lucky they were able to land the plane and avoid injuries,” said Matrundola.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

There is growing controversy in San Diego after the county board of supervisors introduced a proposal to declare “health misinformation a public health crisis” and enact measures to try to “combat” views deemed untrue or misleading. As a free speech advocate, I do not share some of the objections made to the proposals.

However, one item is deeply concerning.

On its face, the proposal calls for government agencies to combat bad information with better information on Covid. I have no problem with such informational programs. Even if people disagree with the government’s view of vaccines or mandates, they are free to voice their opposing views in the exercise of free speech.  For example, while I opposed the Big Gulp laws and laws barring certain foods or advertising, I have always recognized the legitimate (and often positive) role of the government in highlighting what it views as good science or good practices.

What concerns me is this item:

“e). Partner with federal, state, territorial, tribal, private, nonprofit, research, and other local entities to identify best practices to stop the spread of health misinformation and develop and implement coordinated recommendations.”

There is a difference between countering and stopping misinformation. The latter has been a focus of Democratic members in Congress in seeking to censor opposing views on subjects from election fraud to climate change to Covid.  Direct censorship from “federal, state, territorial” offices would be subject to First Amendment challenges. However, the proposal also makes specific reference to private and other entities which would be enlisted to combat misinformation.

As previously discussed, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey appeared at a key hearing in which he followed up his apology for censoring the Hunter Biden story by pledging more censorship. One of the most chilling moments came from Delaware Senator Chris Coons who demonstrated the very essence of the “slippery slope” danger.

Dorsey: Well, misleading information, as you are aware, is a large problem. It’s hard to define it completely and cohesively. We wanted to scope our approach to start to focus on the highest severity of harm. We focused on three areas, manipulated media, which you mentioned, civic integrity around the election, specifically in public health, specifically around COVID. We wanted to make sure that our resources that we  have the greatest impact on where we believe the greatest severity of harm is going to be. Our policies are living documents. They will evolve. We will add to them, but we thought it important that we focus our energies and prioritize the work as much as we could.

Coons: Well, Mr. Dorsey, I’ll close with this. I cannot think of a greater harm than climate change, which is transforming literally our planet and causing harm to our entire world. I think we’re experiencing significant harm as we speak. I recognize the pandemic and misinformation about COVID-19, manipulated media also cause harm, but I’d urge you to reconsider that because helping to disseminate climate denialism, in my view, further facilitates and accelerates one of the greatest existential threats to our world. So thank you to both of our witnesses.

Notably, Dorsey starts with the same argument made by free speech advocates: “Well, misleading information, as you are aware, is a large problem. It’s hard to define it completely and cohesively.” However, instead of then raising concerns over censoring views and comments on the basis for such an amorphous category, Coons pressed for an expansion of the categories of censored material to prevent people from sharing any views that he considers “climate denialism”

There is, of course, a wide array of views that different people or different groups would declare “harmful.” Indeed, Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal seemed to take the opposite meaning from Twitter admitting that it was wrong to censor the Biden story. Blumenthal said that he was “concerned that both of your companies are, in fact, backsliding or retrenching, that you are failing to take action against dangerous disinformation.” Accordingly, he demanded an answer to this question:

“Will you commit to the same kind of robust content modification playbook in this coming election, including fact checking, labeling, reducing the spread of misinformation, and other steps, even for politicians in the runoff elections ahead?”

“Robust content modification” is the new Orwellian term for censorship.

The focus of the government needs to be combating what it views as bad speech with better speech, not trying to prevent or silence those deemed to be misleading others.

Here is the proposal: Board Letter

The U.S. officially ended its military presence in Afghanistan on Tuesday with the final flight out of Kabul, concluding two decades of American involvement touched off by the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

“I’m here to announce the completion of our withdrawal from Afghanistan,” General Kenneth McKenzie, the head of U.S. Central Command, said Monday afternoon in the U.S.

The last of the military planes has left the Kabul Airport.

“final plane is wheels up. War is over.”

America’s longest war ended with a rushed withdrawal of more than 100,000 people since Aug. 14. That followed the Taliban advance to Kabul, and the killing of 13 U.S. service members in a suicide bombing outside the capital city’s airport last week.

Last U.S. military plane carrying troops with call sign MOOSE94, its all over. Hamid Karzai Airport now under #Taliban control pic.twitter.com/wvKl9p4sig

— M Zafar (@ice_koool) August 30, 2021

The FAA has issued warnings:

Developing…