Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has condemned possible new US sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline as “deliberate termination of the transatlantic partnership.”
A draft law currently under discussion in the US Congress is “a widespread, unjustified attack on the European economy and an unacceptable interference with EU sovereignty and the energy security of Western Europe,” Schröder writes in his statement for a public hearing of the Economic Committee scheduled for Wednesday in the Bundestag.
The article closes:
Schröder sees the relations with the USA as “heavily burdened” by “escalating tariffs and going it alone” policy by the Americans.
Schröder writes: “Economic fines against a NATO ally during the current economic recession are nothing other than a deliberate termination of the transatlantic partnership.”
This is as if Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama were to say that EU policymakers had a trade policy toward the U.S. that is so hostile and uncooperative that in order to comply with it, the U.S. would have to subordinate itself to the EU and lose some of its own sovereignty, and as if he were to tell the U.S. Congress that for them to okay the EU’s demands in this matter would be “nothing other than a termination of the transatlantic partnership.”
Both of Germany’s main political Parties (Schröder being SPD) support strongly the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, which will be considerably more economical for supplying natural gas to the EU than would be the U.S. Government’s demand that American shipped fracked liquified natural gas be used, instead of Russian pipelined natural gas, in Europe. Though this U.S. legislative initiative is called “Protecting Europe’s Energy Security,” its overwhelming support in the U.S. Congress is instead actually for protecting U.S. fracking corporations.
The bill’s title is only for ‘patriotic’ propaganda purposes (which is the typical way that legislation is named in the United States — as a sales-device, so as to sound acceptable not only to the billionaires who fund the Parties but also to the voters on election day).
Both of America’s political Parties are significantly funded by America’s domestic producers of fracked gas. One of the few proud achievements of U.S. President Obama that has been proudly continued by President Trump has been their boosting U.S. energy production, largely fracked gas, so as to reduce America’s foreign-trade deficit.
However, if this control over the U.S. Government by frackers continues, then there now exists a strong possibility, or even a likelihood, that the transatlantic alliance will end, as a result.
France Suspends Role In NATO Naval Mission, Outraged Over “Turkish Aggression” Tyler Durden
Thu, 07/02/2020 – 02:45
France has notified NATO command that its military is suspending involvement in an ongoing Mediterranean operation called Sea Guardian in protest of a June 10 incident wherein Turkish warships off Libya’s coast “engaged” a French frigate via radar. This means the Turkish ship essentially had missile lock on the NATO allied ship.
The AP detailed in the days after the hostile encounter between two NATO members that “the frigate Courbet was ‘lit up’ three times by Turkish naval targeting radar when it tried to approach a Turkish civilian ship suspected of involvement in arms trafficking.” The Turkish military ships were allegedly escorting the smaller civilian ship, suspected by the French of illegal gun-running.
French frigate FS Courbet, image via US Navy.
The French vessel was then forced to back off as it tracked a civilian Turkish vessel suspected of smuggling arms into Tripoli amid a blanket UN arms embargo. The two sides have since blamed the other for the act of “aggression”.
Paris had declared it a “hostile act” – something which Ankara has rejected. The French Foreign Ministry further accused the Turkish ships of “extremely aggressive” intervention against a NATO ally.
Ironically, Operation Sea Guardian is meant to enforce the arms embargo on Libya — but Turkey allegedly intervened against the French ship to thwart inspecting and seizing weapons in transit. Needless to say the incident highlights severe cracks in the NATO alliance.
The incident came also amid worsening relations between Turkey and France over Turkey’s increased “adventurism” of late in defending Tripoli against Haftar forces, which has involved drones, aircraft, and even sending Turkish national troops to the region along with mercenaries from Syria.
France has also over the past years criticized Turkish intervention in northern Syria against the Kurds, via The National.
On Wednesday France reportedly sent a formal letter to NATO command in Brussels informing the alliance that it is effectively suspending support for the Mediterranean operation until necessary “clarifications” are made as a result on the NATO investigation into the incident.
Specifically, the letter addressed to NATO’s Secretary-General makes“four demands to clarify the role of the Sea Guardian operation, including its cooperation with an EU mission that is enforcing a UN arms embargo to Libya.”
Though an arms embargo has been in effect on Libya since last year, the multiple players supporting opposing sides in the proxy war have essentially treated in as a joke. Since the UN declaration, more arms than ever have poured into the conflict, as well as mercenaries.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2BlslOb Tyler Durden
The ban would remain in effect until the U.S. infection rate falls to a level comparable to or lower than the European rate and the number of new cases nationwide starts trending downward.
Although the guidance approved by the European Council is non-binding on EU member states, the economic repercussions of the action could be severe on both sides of the Atlantic.
Prior to the pandemic, Europe was earning fully 10% of its revenue from tourism, with much of that from the U.S. Further, a new IMF report concludes it’s the advanced nations of the world that will take the biggest hit from coronavirus fallout, so there are powerful economic incentives for the EU and the U.S. to mutually relax travel restrictions.
While Europe’s ban on travel from countries with high infection rates appears sound on the surface, the data underlying its exclusion of U.S. travelers is misleading to the point of being false.
At a glance, the rate of U.S. infections (or “cases,” whether or not infections result in COVID-19 symptoms) is vastly higher than that of any European country except tiny ones like the Vatican City and Andorra. And who wants visitors from a plague hotbed?
And yet, the U.S. infection “case rate” obscures something crucially important that is being missed — or ignored — by the media on both sides of the pond: Despite the high U.S. rate, six major European countries have a higher per-capita death rate than the U.S., and a couple of others are on about the same level. (Maybe U.S. healthcare for COVID-19 patients is better, but that much better?)
What really explains the higher U.S. infection is twofold.
First, U.S. testing per capita has soared far above that of the major European countries. As with any other disease, whether infectious or not — heart disease, cancer, etc. — the more you test, the more you find. So, in banning travel from the U.S. while ignoring the causal link between increased testing and increased infections rates, the EU is in effect punishing the rapid expansion of testing in the U.S.
Second, as The Atlantic reported last month in article entitled “How Could the CDC Make That Mistake?” the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), under its controversial director Robert Redfield, is conflating antibody tests that indicate past infection with antigen (viral) tests showing current infection. That superficially scary U.S. infection rate thus includes antibody-positives, who actually make the most desirable foreign visitors because they won’t get sick on your soil and won’t be infecting your people. The commingling of the two kinds of tests, moreover, is made to order for double-counting, since a person who tests positive for the actual virus will later probably test positive for the antibody also.
So those articles you’ve been reading about U.S. case rates going back up (while deaths suspiciously stay flat or decline)? The best explanation may not be the easing of lockdown restrictions, as has been implied by innumerable scare headlines in the media. It may instead be the U.S. testing surge, plus case numbers misleadingly inflated by double-counting.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ashish Jha, the K. T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard and the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said to The Atlantic when told what the CDC was doing.
“This is a mess,” he said.
Whether it’s somehow a “mistake” as both he and article state is debatable, but either way, the U.S. government has effectively invited exaggerated COVID-19 numbers in multiple ways, including:
The CDC has conflated “death with” the virus and “death from” to the extent that the number of fatalities attributed to COVID-19 may be highly inflated.
If it’s hard to conceive why European governments would forfeit badly needed American tourist dollars simply because of surging U.S. testing combined with a counting methodology that overstates case numbers, perhaps it’s because the EU has an additional, unacknowledged motive beyond public health, namely retaliation: Remember, President Trump blocked travel to the U.S. from all 26 member nations of the European Schengen Area in mid-March, before Europe blocked the U.S.
The U.S. stands to take a big economic hit of its own by keeping its doors closed to Europeans. In March, Tourism Economics estimated the U.S. travel and tourism industry could lose at least $24 billion in foreign spending this year because of COVID-19 travel restrictions.
With summer travel season in full swing and the worst of the pandemic now behind both Europe and the U.S., time is running out for both sides to open their doors and start helping each other back to economic health.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2BVnfrG Tyler Durden
This week marks the 219th birthday of the great 19th-century French economist Frederic Bastiat. It’s the perfect time to talk about his famous essay, “That Which is Seen, and that Which is Not Seen,” published in his book, The Law. This timeless work remains an essential guide to thinking about policymaking.
In that essay, Bastiat writes: “In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause—it is seen. The others unfold in succession—they are not seen: it is well for us if they are foreseen. Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference—the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen and also of those which it is necessary to foresee.”
Oh, how I wish we would have remembered to earnestly account for the unseen effects of policies put into place during this pandemic that will pop up in its aftermath.
Take, for example, the massive amount of additional debt the federal government has imposed on future generations of Americans during the COVID-19 crisis. That which is seen is the money flowing from the federal government to the unemployed, to those taking leave due to rescue money given to businesses during the pandemic. While we might be aware in the abstract that there is an accompanying rise in U.S. government indebtedness, that which is not seen is the increase in taxes that must be paid by future generations. Nor do we see the slower economic growth that will be caused by the need to pay off this debt.
Even less obvious are the unseen effects of making permanent the supposedly temporary creation of federal paid-leave entitlements. While it’s easy to point to all the advantages of such a move for the 35 percent of women who didn’t have any such benefits pre-COVID-19, it’s more difficult to see the lower wages and employment that will result. Also hidden from our vision is the increase in employment discrimination fueled by this policy: When governments arbitrarily increase employers’ costs to hire certain groups, fewer members of those groups get hired. The academic literature is clear that such legislation inflicts very real negative effects on women.
Also harder to spot are the unseen effects of rent-control legislation. Such regulations exist in states and cities nationwide, though it wouldn’t be surprising to see more such policies implemented in this crisis’s wake. The benefits are easy to see. The rules promise to make housing in high-value rent markets more affordable for middle- and lower-class families. But once such legislation is implemented, reality kicks in.
We see rents going up more slowly than they likely would have otherwise. When paired with eviction protections, this policy gives an illusion of control to tenants who were already in rental homes when the regulation was adopted. What is unseen, however, is significant. Rent-control statutes reduce the incentives for property owners to supply their facilities as residential housing, and they make it less attractive for developers to build rental housing. Rent control even diminishes landlords’ willingness to maintain the quality of their units. The final result is less and lower-quality housing for ordinary people.
There are also seen and unseen effects from the lockdown put in place to control COVID-19’s spread. The seen effects of the policy are millions of people limiting their interactions with others as a protection from a virus that has killed many. The unseen effects of this policy are, among other things, the rise of depression, drug overdoses, and suicides; a decrease in diagnostics for other lethal diseases (which will lead to more deaths); the educational impact on children cut out from school; and the long-term economic devastation.
Peering past the obvious in order to get a more complete picture is what adults do when running their lives and managing households or business affairs. It’s what good economists do when analyzing public policies. And it’s what Frederic Bastiat did with unmatched skill and style more than two centuries ago. Unfortunately, it’s not what most politicians tend to do today.
This week marks the 219th birthday of the great 19th-century French economist Frederic Bastiat. It’s the perfect time to talk about his famous essay, “That Which is Seen, and that Which is Not Seen,” published in his book, The Law. This timeless work remains an essential guide to thinking about policymaking.
In that essay, Bastiat writes: “In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause—it is seen. The others unfold in succession—they are not seen: it is well for us if they are foreseen. Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference—the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen and also of those which it is necessary to foresee.”
Oh, how I wish we would have remembered to earnestly account for the unseen effects of policies put into place during this pandemic that will pop up in its aftermath.
Take, for example, the massive amount of additional debt the federal government has imposed on future generations of Americans during the COVID-19 crisis. That which is seen is the money flowing from the federal government to the unemployed, to those taking leave due to rescue money given to businesses during the pandemic. While we might be aware in the abstract that there is an accompanying rise in U.S. government indebtedness, that which is not seen is the increase in taxes that must be paid by future generations. Nor do we see the slower economic growth that will be caused by the need to pay off this debt.
Even less obvious are the unseen effects of making permanent the supposedly temporary creation of federal paid-leave entitlements. While it’s easy to point to all the advantages of such a move for the 35 percent of women who didn’t have any such benefits pre-COVID-19, it’s more difficult to see the lower wages and employment that will result. Also hidden from our vision is the increase in employment discrimination fueled by this policy: When governments arbitrarily increase employers’ costs to hire certain groups, fewer members of those groups get hired. The academic literature is clear that such legislation inflicts very real negative effects on women.
Also harder to spot are the unseen effects of rent-control legislation. Such regulations exist in states and cities nationwide, though it wouldn’t be surprising to see more such policies implemented in this crisis’s wake. The benefits are easy to see. The rules promise to make housing in high-value rent markets more affordable for middle- and lower-class families. But once such legislation is implemented, reality kicks in.
We see rents going up more slowly than they likely would have otherwise. When paired with eviction protections, this policy gives an illusion of control to tenants who were already in rental homes when the regulation was adopted. What is unseen, however, is significant. Rent-control statutes reduce the incentives for property owners to supply their facilities as residential housing, and they make it less attractive for developers to build rental housing. Rent control even diminishes landlords’ willingness to maintain the quality of their units. The final result is less and lower-quality housing for ordinary people.
There are also seen and unseen effects from the lockdown put in place to control COVID-19’s spread. The seen effects of the policy are millions of people limiting their interactions with others as a protection from a virus that has killed many. The unseen effects of this policy are, among other things, the rise of depression, drug overdoses, and suicides; a decrease in diagnostics for other lethal diseases (which will lead to more deaths); the educational impact on children cut out from school; and the long-term economic devastation.
Peering past the obvious in order to get a more complete picture is what adults do when running their lives and managing households or business affairs. It’s what good economists do when analyzing public policies. And it’s what Frederic Bastiat did with unmatched skill and style more than two centuries ago. Unfortunately, it’s not what most politicians tend to do today.
On a December 2010 episode of Fox News’ Freedom Watch, John Bolton and the show’s host Andrew Napolitano were debating about recent WikiLeaks publications, and naturally the subject of government secrecy came up.
“Now I want to make the case for secrecy in government when it comes to the conduct of national security affairs, and possibly for deception where that’s appropriate,” Bolton said.
“You know Winston Churchill said during World War Two that in wartime truth is so important it should be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies.”
“Do you really believe that?” asked an incredulous Napolitano.
“Absolutely,” Bolton replied.
“You would lie in order to preserve the truth?” asked Napolitano.
“If I had to say something I knew was false to protect American national security, I would do it,” Bolton answered.
“Why do people in the government think that the laws of society or the rules don’t apply to them?” Napolitano asked.
“Because they are not dealing in the civil society we live in under the Constitution,” Bolton replied. “They are dealing in the anarchic environment internationally where different rules apply.”
“But you took an oath to uphold the Constitution, and the Constitution mandates certain openness and certain fairness,” Napolitano protested.
“You’re willing to do away with that in order to attain a temporary military goal?”
“I think as Justice Jackson said in a famous decision, the Constitution is not a suicide pact,” Bolton said.
“And I think defending the United States from foreign threats does require actions that in a normal business environment in the United States we would find unprofessional. I don’t make any apology for it.”
I am going to type a sequence of words that I have never typed before, and don’t expect to ever type again: John Bolton is right.
Bolton is of course not right in his pathetic spin job on the use of lies to promote military agendas, which just looks like a feeble attempt to justify the psychopathic measures he himself took to deceive the world into consenting to the unforgivably evil invasion of Iraq. What he is right about is that conflicts between nations take place in an “anarchic environment internationally where different rules apply.”
Individual nations have governments with laws that are enforced by those governments. Since we do not have a single unified government for our planet (at least not yet), the interactions between those governments is largely anarchic, and not in a good way.
“International law”, in reality, only meaningfully exists to the extent that the international community is collectively willing to enforce it. In practice what this means is that only nations which have no influence over the dominant narratives in the international community are subject to “international law”.
This is why you will see leaders in African nations sentenced to prison by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes, but the USA can get away with actually sanctioning ICC personnel if they so much as talk about investigating American war crimes and suffer no consequences for it whatsoever. It is also why Noam Chomsky famously said that if the Nuremberg laws had continued to be applied with fairness and consistency, then every post-war US president would have been hanged.
And this is also why so much effort gets poured into controlling the dominant international narrative about nations like Russia which have resisted being absorbed into the US power alliance. If you have the influence and leverage to control what narratives the international community accepts as true about the behavior of a given targeted nation, then you can do things like manufacture international collaboration with aggressive economic sanctions of the sort Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is currently calling for in response to the the completely unsubstantiated narrative that Russia paid Taliban fighters bounties to kill occupying forces in Afghanistan.
Sen. Schumer: “We need in this coming defense bill… tough sanctions against Russia.” pic.twitter.com/L3M9hZg0Xm
In its ongoing slow-motion third world war against nations which refuse to be absorbed into the blob of the US power alliance, this tight empire-like cluster of allies stands everything to gain by doing whatever it takes to undermine and sabotage Russia in an attempt to shove it off the world stage and eliminate the role it plays in opposing that war. Advancing as many narratives as possible about Russia doing nefarious things on the world stage manufactures consent for international collaboration toward that end in the form of economic warfare, proxy conflicts, NATO expansionism and other measures, as well as facilitating a new arms race by killing the last of the US-Russia nuclear treaties and ensuring a continued imperial military presence in Afghanistan.
We haven’t been shown any hard evidence for Russians paying bounties in Afghanistan, and we almost certainly never will be. This doesn’t matter as far as the imperial propagandists are concerned; they know they don’t need actual facts to get this story believed, they just need narrative control. All the propagandists need to do is say over and over again that Russia paid bounties to kill the troops in Afghanistan in an increasingly assertive and authoritative tone, and after awhile people will start assuming it’s true, just because the propagandists have been doing this.
They’ll add new pieces of data to the narrative, none of which will constitute hard proof of their claims, but after enough “bombshell” stories reported in an assertive and ominous tone of voice, people will start assuming it’s a proven fact that Russia paid those bounties. Narrative managers will be able to simply wave their hands at a disparate, unverified cloud of information and proclaim that it is a mountain of evidence and that anyone doubting all this proof must be a kook. (This by the way is a textbook Gish gallop fallacy, where a bunch of individually weak arguments are presented to give the illusion of a single strong case.)
This is all because “international law” only exists in practical terms to the extent that governments around the world agree to pretend it exists. As long as US-centralized empire is able to control the prevailing narrative about what Russia is doing, that empire will be able to continue to use the pretext of “international law” as a bludgeon against its enemies. That’s all we’re really seeing here.
Israeli Leaders Say West Bank Annexation Must Wait Due To COVID-19 Tyler Durden
Wed, 07/01/2020 – 23:25
What was surely supposed be the most controversial and provocative move in all recent Israeli-Palestine conflict history was supposed to be initiated yesterday, July 1st, according to prior target date statements of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to annex up to one-third of West Bank territory, including the Jordan Valley.
Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials claimed to have a ‘green light’ from the Trump administration, but at this point it’s anything but certain. “We are in discreet talks with US officials here,” Netanyahu told a Likud party meeting on Monday. “We are doing it discreetly. The matter is not up to Blue and White, they are not a factor either way,” he said in reference to the power sharing coalition with ‘Alternate Prime Minister’ and Defense Minister Benny Gantz.
Gantz told his party at the start of this week thatannexation “will have to wait” due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic in the country.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition partner, Defense Minister Benny Gantz, via AFP.
“Anything unrelated to the battle against the coronavirus will wait,” Gantz said.
This as the country’s health ministry is urging authorities to impose a second locking down of cities while cases soar again both inside Israel and the Palestinian territories.
In reality citing the coronavirus crisis also appears a well-timed excuse to temporarily delay a plan that will surely set the region on fire, given the unforeseen consequences for both Palestinians and Israel. Both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have said such a move would be a declaration of war. Hamas has openly stated it will attack Israeli towns and settlements if Palestinian territory is seized.
Israel is looking to seize up to 30% of West Bank territory, bringing it under permanent Israeli control, as part of Trump’s ‘deal of the century’ Mideast peace plan. Theoretically according to the plan the remainder of the territory will be used to establish an autonomous Palestinian state.
MeanwhileThe Jerusalem Post has confirmed that annexation will not happen this week, largely because Washington has not yet fully approved the plan.
For now, Israeli politicians will blame coronavirus while still claiming a US green light, despite US and Israeli officials still in high level meetings to hash things out, and contingency plans for what could unleash a next Palestinian intifada.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YNGVGS Tyler Durden
A new super PAC formed by hundreds of former campaign, administration, and political staffers from George W. Bush’s administration will work to get former Vice President Joe Biden elected, saying they are “dismayed and disappointed” by the Trump presidency.
The new group, 43 Alumni for Biden, announced their formation on Wednesday, saying their purpose is to “unite and mobilize a community of historically Republican voters who are dismayed and disappointed by the damage done to our nation.”
“For four years, we have watched with grave concern as the party we loved has morphed into a cult of personality that little resembles the Party of Lincoln and Reagan,” said 43 Alumni for Biden PAC Director Karen Kirksey in a press release.
“We endorse Joe Biden not necessarily in full support of his political agenda but rather in full agreement with the urgent need to restore the soul of this nation.”
The group began outreach last month, according to The Hill. More prominent and high-profile Bush alums in the group are expected to be made public in the coming weeks.
Committee member Jennifer Millikin told The Hillmany in the group don’t agree with Biden’s policies but agree his temperament and demeanor are what they’re interested in.
Millikin severed in the General Services Administration under Bush and the Small Business Administration in the Trump administration.
“We as a group have policy differences with him. We’re just looking to have someone in the office who will stand up and act like a leader,” she said.
“We can debate the differences in the way we think about policies, we can have a robust debate, that’s what America’s for. But that’s not happening now, and we feel it will definitely happen with Joe Biden in office.”
43 Alumni for Joe Biden will focus on swing state voters and is planning to release testimonials of Republican officials supporting the former Vice President.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/31xMStr Tyler Durden
Florida Sheriff To Deputize Gun Owners If Cops Can’t Handle Protesters Tyler Durden
Wed, 07/01/2020 – 22:45
A Florida sheriff says he’ll deputize lawful gun owners in the event BLM protesters overwhelm local police forces, according to WTSP.
Clay County Sheriff Darryl Daniels announced in a Tuesday video that he will “make special deputies out of every lawful gun owner” in the county if he has to.
In the three-minute video, the northwest Florida sheriff calls out “the mainstream media” and protesters as godless dissidents. He tells people to not “fall victim to this conversation that law enforcement is bad, that law enforcement is the enemy of the citizens that we’re sworn to protect and serve.”
Daniels then talks about law enforcement taking an oath “to support, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and the government…And we end that with, ‘So help me God.’“
“But God is absent from the media’s message or Black Lives Matter or any other group that’s making themselves a spectacle disrupting what we know to be our quality of life in this country,” Daniels says. –WTS
Daniels then warns protesters to stay out of Clay County.
“If we can’t handle you, I’ll exercise the power and authority as the sheriff, and I’ll make special deputies of every lawful gun owner in this county and I’ll deputize them for this one purpose to stand in the gap between lawlessness and civility,” adding “You’ve been warned.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2NPnuYa Tyler Durden
When traffickers in intellectual gobbledegook have free reign, the Truth Irrelevancy Project’s work is done.
Truth is always the enemy of power. Exposure of power’s motivations, depredations, and corruption never serves power’s ends. Truth is often suppressed and those who disclose it persecuted. Any illegitimate government (currently, all of them) that fails to do so risks its own termination.
What if, instead of suppressing the truth, a regime could render it irrelevant and not have to worry about it? That prospect is the Holy Grail for those who rule or seek to rule.
By now most people recognize war is being waged. “Make the Truth Irrelevant” was published before Covid-19 or the George Floyd protests and riots, but it offers the perspective necessary to understand who is waging war against whom, and what’s at stake.
Science is one way humanity searches for truth. The Covid-19 panic and response are a direct assault on what remains of science. All of the hysteria and the political reaction to it are driven by models and projections, which are nothing more than hypotheses.
It is said that models are only as good as the underlying data and assumptions they incorporate, but that’s misleading. They may use the best available data and assumptions and still be wildly off the mark. For any model of a complex phenomenon—the weather, the climate, financial markets, or the progression of a disease—substitute “our best guess” for the word “model” and you have a better understanding of what the model actually is.
“Our best guess” also depends on who’s doing the guessing. The Covid-19 models that have been accepted and heavily publicized are the ones with the most dire projections for cases and deaths. The projections have generated the fear and panic necessary to support unprecedented restrictions on freedom and individual rights—lockdowns, business closures, involuntary unemployment, social distancing, and face masks—and a concomitant expansion of governments’ power, essentially rule by decree.
The truth and logic were made irrelevant in many ways. Any opposition to the substitution of “our best guess” for actual science was roundly denounced as anti-science! The effectiveness of the totalitarian measures had never been established and still has not. There are in fact ample indications that they have made the outbreak worse. The use of hydroxychloriquine with antibiotics and zinc compounds, and other alternatives, as a treatment for Covid-19, based on doctors and other researchers’ observations, hypotheses, and experimentation—the scientific method—that too was anti-scientific. When non-science (sounds a lot like nonsense, doesn’t it?) becomes science and real science is scorned and discarded, the Holy Grail is within grasp.
Even after the models upon which the totalitarian measures were based proved dramatically wrong, questions and dissent were suppressed and the measures kept in place. Nobody was to question the motives or the political philosophies of the officially approved best-guessers or their sponsors, even after the best guesses were wildly errant. Nobody was to question the good faith of the government officials who imposed the totalitarian measures even as the dire consequences mounted. When the official story cannot be questioned and alternative stories are suppressed, what does it say about the official story?
Social media companies openly proclaim their fealty to the party line and remove anyone who has the temerity to challenge it. After a slow start most of the alternative media has woken up. Only a remnant cling to the official narrative, hoping any new uptick in cases anywhere heralds the kind of pandemic they predicted but never came, or at least a second wave of the one that did. Disappointingly for them, death rates keep going down and increases in cases are mostly driven by the increases in testing the coronavirus commissars have mandated.
Corrupting science is the penultimate step to making the truth irrelevant. The last step is obliterating thought. The chaos in the streets that erupted after George Floyd’s death is a flyspeck compared to the mental chaos it reflects, which finds the ostensibly opposing sides on the same side, waging full-on war against reason and logic. A small and lonely brigade does battle against huge armies marching under banners of intellectual gobbledegook.
Violence or its threat precludes discussion, which means you don’t have to rhetorically disarm and win a debate with someone who’s pointing a gun at you before you physically disarm, injure, or kill him in self-defense. Anyone who inflicts violence on people or property must be confronted by law enforcement with whatever force is necessary to stop the violence and subdue the perpetrator. Peaceful, law abiding citizens have the right to call upon what is, in a rational society, their agent the government to do it’s duty and arrest, try, and, once the violent criminal is convicted, incarcerate, regardless of the criminal’s beliefs and purported justifications.
George Floyd’s death raises a variety of disturbing questions and issues. The facts surrounding his death are not altogether clear, but will presumably be clearer after further investigation and the trials of the four police. Some have taken his death as an indictment of, among other things, police tactics, police in general, public laws, government, and the status of racial groups within the US. They have the right to peaceably protest. However, their questions, accusations, and condemnations, well-founded or not, afford no justification for violence and the destruction of property.
A society in which violence is initiated against people and property and is excused in the name of a cause is a society well down the road to its own destruction.People’s safety and freedom cannot be subject to the random and arbitrary terrors of political and ideological zealotry. To claim otherwise is to excuse the inexcusable.
The rioters are using the alleged murder of George Floyd and the alleged violation of his rights as a suspected criminal to justify the wholesale violation of rights of people who had nothing to do with the situation. You cannot protest a violation of yours or someone else’s rights while claiming the right to violate other people’s rights. It’s a double standard, which is the same thing as no standard – more gobbledegook.
If a white person is racist by virtue of being born white, but those using that pejorative and rationale are not racist for doing so, the words racist and racism have lost all meaning. Definitions of those words contingent on who’s using them and to whom it’s being applied render them meaningless. The guilt and apologies from some whites for racism and acceptance of their accusers’ claim that it is congenital is akin to guilt and apologies for attributes they actually are born with—blue eyes, curly hair, etc. An accusation that has no meaning or force is an accusation that must be ignored.
Similarly, “medical science” that warns of the dangers of anti-lockdown and Trump rallies but blesses George Floyd protests destroys the meaning of that term. A double standard is no standard and consideration of either the warning or the blessing is precluded by their self-contradictory idiocy. It is yet another indication of the corruption of medical science, already glaringly evident since the onset of the coronavirus outbreak.
The premise essential to the argument against racism is that individuals as a matter of logic must be judged as individuals, on their individual merits and flaws, not on their race. The concepts of racial guilt and racial pride are equally fatuous, a cover for people who want to either artificially inflate or deflate their own or someone else’s worth based on the accomplishments or transgressions of people to which they have no connection other than race and who often lived before they were even born. While the motivations of such people vary, it’s a plausible speculation that they stem from feelings of personal inadequacy.
Any racial generalization—commendatory, pejorative, or benign—is disproven by at least one individual member of the race who does not conform to it. Other than the characteristics which define a race, it is virtually impossible to make any true and universal generalizations (including generalizations about privilege or its lack) about any particular race. That’s on the questionable assumption that race can be even a definable concept in societies where races intermarry. What race is a child with a white and black parent? What is the race of the grandchildren if that child procreates with an Asian or Hispanic?
To paraphrase Ayn Rand, don’t bother analyzing nonsense, instead ask what it accomplishes. The premise of individuality and the impossibility of generalization cannot be acknowledged because this “war” is actually just another skirmish in the endless battle between the individual and collectivism, which at root is violence against the mind.
The rioters, looters, and vandals, and their political and rhetorical enablers have been forthright about their desire to destroy, stop, or cancel any form of individual expression that does not conform to their ever-shifting whims and dictates. They are more honest than the Covid-19 totalitarians, who want the same things but are hiding behind the spurious rationale of protecting public health. Both groups claim the collective good as they define it transcends individual rights, meaning it transcends the individual mind.
Undoubtedly there are people behind the scenes who are pulling the strings of the coronavirus commissars, peaceful protestors, and rioters. Many believe the string-pullers’ long-term goal is to install their version of order from the chaos they are fomenting. However, order out of chaos is a historical and intellectual canard, still more gobbledegook.
What will come out of chaos is what has always come when that crowd gains control: suppression, submission, stagnation, decay, tyranny, totalitarianism, and mass murder. Coronavirus totalitarianism and the open embrace of Marxism by many of the rioters tell you all need to know. One question undercuts Marxism: why will the people of ability continue to produce for the people of need? It’s a question whose only correct answer is that they won’t, not for long, and it should have relegated Marxism and its collectivist fellow travelers to intellectual dustbins from the moment they were promulgated. Instead, those ideologies drove the murder of at least 100 million people in the twentieth century.
Misery and death will always be Marxism and its collectivist way stations’ end product. Collectivism, whether the product of an uprising from below or some grand plan from above, inevitably degenerates to the “order” of the prison, the concentration camp, the Antebellum plantation, the gas chamber, or the graveyard. It’s also the order of the pressure cooker, as such measures always generate intense counter-pressure from the irrepressible human mind and spirit.
“Order” imposed and enforced by arbitrary violence is not order, it’s violence, destruction and death, a different and often more pernicious version of the same chaos it ostensibly replaces. To say that the communists replaced the chaos of Tsar Nicholas II’s regime with order is to equate the infliction of incalculable misery and despair and the death of tens of millions at the hands of their violent dictatorship with a scientific laboratory, a factory, a library, or any other endeavor dedicated to the peaceful pursuit of knowledge, production, and human advancement. That equalization stretches the definition of “order” beyond the breaking point.
Order is a human value, produced by rational human minds, not intellectual gobbledegook and chaotic violence. Order is a consequence of freedom and the protection of individual rights. There is nothing spontaneous about such order, it doesn’t happen by chance. It happens because people have discovered its necessary conditions and requirements, instituted corresponding social, political, legal, and economic arrangements, and find it in their self-interest to support and defend such arrangements (it’s not easy). The order that emerges results from voluntary choices, not violent control, which ultimately leads to chaos.
Sense and nonsense cannot peacefully coexist, either intellectually or in real life. Sense will be the first to realize that. Nonsense cannot recognize it—sense provides its sustenance. The desirability of separation is seeping into the alternative media. Terms like “secession” and “divorce” are used more frequently, especially among people who espouse freedom and liberty as their ultimate goal. They understand the totalitarian designs of the globalists, coronavirus commissars, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and the politicians, celebrities, and businesspeople kowtowing to them, and know full well who has the ability and who has the need.
The first requirement of collectivism is victims. Its proponents can’t let their victims (sustenance) walk away, so there won’t be an amicable divorce. It will come down to history’s perpetual victims—the capable, competent, and honorable who ask of government only that it protect their rights—confidently asserting their own value, refusing to be victims, establishing one or more enclaves, defending their right to their own lives and free and peaceful order, and ignoring the collectivists’ screams as they consume themselves.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2BZd7xY Tyler Durden
