Jts5665

Former president says rising energy costs are 'a price we should be willing to pay.'

KEY POINT:

If you supported global policies which drove up the price of petroleum (that is, Russia's key foreign-exchange producing export), your policies empowered Putin and the Russian military.

Did you get good value for your money?

— Seth Barrett Tillman (@SethBTillman) February 24, 2022

ELSEWHERE IN WORLD WAR III COVERAGE: Taiwan reports nine Chinese aircraft in defense zone.

THE EVER-EXPANDING PARAMETERS OF MODERN WARFARE: Twitter admits it mistakenly removed Ukraine open source intelligence accounts. “The people behind the suspended accounts said they believed they had been the target of an attack by Russian bots—computers that mimic the activity of human users—that had mass-reported their content as being suspicious. This led their content to be removed automatically by Twitter’s moderation technology.“

WHEN ALL YOU HAVE IS A HAMMER, EVERYTHING LOOKS LIKE GLOBAL WARMING: Not a parody: John Kerry warns of the carbon footprint of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The post Google Ads Flags Article Blaming Inflation on Government Spending as “Dangerous” and “Derogatory” appeared first on The Bongino Report.

COMPLETELY, OBVIOUSLY TRUE:

Because fuel exports are the basis of the Russian economy, Putin’s war-making capability depends critically on energy prices being high, as they are now. The most effective step countries like the U.S. can take in response does not require sanctions, let alone military action. It’s simply to remove artificial constraints on energy production, especially on relatively clean natural gas. That means removing roadblocks to fracking, pipelines and LNG export facilities that could supply Europe.

It also means reversing our decades-long suppression of nuclear power.

So why aren’t we doing it? Let’s just say there’s more reason to think that environmentalists and other energy-deniers are on the Russian payroll than there ever was for Trump.

KNOW YOUR PLACE, PEASANTS! Schools in Rochester, Minnesota, monitor parents’ social media posts and have twice contacted critics’ employers.

The superintendent of Rochester Community Schools monitored the social media of parents who criticized the district and he and a deputy reported posts to at least two employers and one police department, the superintendent acknowledged in a deposition.

One of those parents was fired shortly after the district contacted her employer about a posting.

Superintendent Robert Shaner testified during a Feb. 3 deposition that he called one parent’s employer, the Detroit Police Department, because he was “scared” by a social media post that called for protests outside private homes in March 2021. It was not clear to whose homes the post referred.

Shaner also acknowledged, under oath, that he called the police on a parent based on his belief that the woman had submitted a written threat to the district, although he admitted he never spoke with the woman.

The deposition was taken as part of a lawsuit filed in May and amended on Feb. 15 that accused Rochester school officials and staff of widespread monitoring and documenting of social media activity of parents the administration labeled as “protesters” because they demanded the reopening of schools.

Rochester Community Schools parent Elena Dinverno sued in May in U.S. District Court alleging she lost her job at Blake’s Hard Cider in December 2020 after Board of Education President Kristin Bull called her employer to falsely claim Dinverno was participating in a group launching threats against the school district.

Make them pay.

GLENN GREENWALD: The Neoliberal War on Dissent in the West: Those who most flamboyantly proclaim that they are fighting fascists continue to embrace and wield the defining weapons of despotism.

When it comes to distant and adversarial countries, we are taught to recognize tyranny through the use of telltale tactics of repression. Dissent from orthodoxies is censored. Protests against the state are outlawed. Dissenters are harshly punished with no due process. Long prison terms are doled out for political transgressions rather than crimes of violence. Journalists are treated as criminals and spies. Opposition to the policies of political leaders are recast as crimes against the state.

When a government that is adverse to the West engages in such conduct, it is not just easy but obligatory to malign it as despotic. Thus can one find, on a virtually daily basis, articles in the Western press citing the government’s use of those tactics in Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and whatever other countries the West has an interest in disparaging (articles about identical tactics from regimes supported by the West — from Riyadh to Cairo — are much rarer). That the use of these repressive tactics render these countries and their populations subject to autocratic regimes is considered undebatable.

But when these weapons are wielded by Western governments, the precise opposite framework is imposed: describing them as despotic is no longer obligatory but virtually prohibited. That tyranny exists only in Western adversaries but never in the West itself is treated as a permanent axiom of international affairs, as if Western democracies are divinely shielded from the temptations of genuine repression. Indeed, to suggest that a Western democracy has descended to the same level of authoritarian repression as the West’s official enemies is to assert a proposition deemed intrinsically absurd or even vaguely treasonous.

Yes, disagreeing with the ruling class now constitutes treason and will be punished as such to the extent they can get away with it.

 

Trudeau faced immense criticism, including a lawsuit from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, over his tyrannical behavior.

The post Trudeau Revokes the Emergencies Act, Financial Institutions Can Unlock Accounts first appeared on Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion.

CDC WITHHOLDING COVID DATA FROM PUBLIC:

The CDC has been withholding large portions of COVID-19 data from the public.

The New York Times reports that the CDC has published only “a small sample of the data” because it fears the public would not properly understand the data, that the public is too dumb.

“The agency has been reluctant to make those figures public, the official said, because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective,” the Times reports.

In other words, if there’s proof that the vaccines against COVID are less effective than promised — as each triple-vaxxed COVID positive individual proves — you don’t deserve to know about it. So don’t ask.

Among the hidden data points are the hospitalization rates broken down by age and vaccination status, in addition to the effectiveness of booster shots. Just the important stuff.

The CDC is simply trying to help the Times in its self-stated goal to “come out with the best version of the truth.”

WHO YOU GONNA BELIEVE?

John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, 1859: “Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.”

The FBI, on Twitter, 2022:

For those who might say “oh, this is only about foreigners,” that doesn’t matter — if the “foreigners” are right about the electoral system being compromised, they’re doing us a favor by telling us so, even if it’s for their own selfish reasons.

 

 

EAT RED MEAT: Study: Red and processed meats don’t raise risk for death, recurrence in colon cancer.

The following is the letter I sent to my local high school community council today. Here I have redacted all the names, and I don’t normally talk about my location online, but I did leave the school’s name because I want the locals to know what’s going on, and they know who everyone involved is. (to prevent confusion there are two Honors English teachers, the long time one who nobody has any complaints about, my older kids had her and loved her, and this newer one)

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My son is in (redacted) Honors English class at Morgan High School (Utah). Recently her teaching methods have caused some controversy. As a professional writer I would like to address her curriculum—which appears to be far more about leftist indoctrination than English skills—and as a parent, the principal’s lackluster response to our voiced concerns.   

I became aware of this issue when I was approached by some other parents. They told me that the school’s response had been to “blow them off” as if they were too ignorant to understand what constituted effective English education. They asked if I would attend the parent’s meeting to add the perspective of someone who makes his living writing.

By way of introduction, I am a New York Times bestselling author of twenty-five novels, and three collections worth of short fiction. I’ve edited three anthologies. I’m published in multiple foreign languages, with several million copies in print, eBook, and audio. I have taught creative writing classes for dozens of events and for Weber State Continuing Education. I have been nominated for several prestigious literary awards and won a few of them.

That brief resume is to establish my credibility on this subject, but basically it boils down to the fact I’ve spent the better part of the last two decades learning how to write effectively, and more importantly, how readers process information. So I can say with absolute certainty that the methods Ms. (redacted) are using on our kids are awful. She isn’t just failing to teach them how to write, she’s teaching the antithesis of effective communication.

After I was approached by these parents, I asked my son about this class. To give you an idea how bad it is, (my son) told me that “it sucks”, he had learned absolutely nothing, but he was getting an A because he’s good at “telling the teacher whatever she wants to hear.” My son wasn’t learning any English skills at all, but rather how to play a political game.

I was appalled to hear that they would be spending the entire trimester on a single book, The Great Gatsby. Three months? I have nothing against The Great Gatsby, but to put this in perspective, it is only 47,000 words. My copy is 210 pages. The audio book is only 4 hours long. By novel standards it is extremely short. My smallest novel is more than double that, and my average is triple. Basically I’ve written longer books in less time than this class is being forced to analyze what’s basically a turgid novella.

It doesn’t matter how good a book is though, because tortuously analyzing any book for three months would make it awful.

You might be wondering, how in the world does an honors English class stretch out a tiny book for that long? Easy. You just talk about a bunch of contemporary political issues—which aren’t actually in the book—day after day, all from a biased leftist perspective.

You might think I am exaggerating for political effect. I’m not. My son was happy to show me some of his homework, and the assignments are simply absurd. Here’s an example.  

This is actually even more nefarious than it looks, because once you delve into each of those links, even the innocuous sounding ones are pushing a hard left perspective. Most of them are about how society is terrible somehow and you should feel bad for benefiting from it. None of these “lense” help the kids get better at writing or communicating. They are designed to squash dissent and force rigid conformity through public shaming.

What do I mean by that? It isn’t my story to tell, but one of the moms at the last parent’s meeting talked about how her daughter comes home in furious tears because she fails to live up to this teacher’s imposed ideal of feminism.

These “literary approaches” do not promote greater understanding of books. On the contrary they try to shoehorn in a bunch of political nonsense which isn’t in the actual work, and they fabricate messages the authors never intended. The kids aren’t learning to write. They are learning to “deconstruct” writing, which is totally backwards.

The number of readers in America is plummeting. People don’t read for fun like they used to, and why should that surprise us? Classes like this teach kids that reading should be a horrible, dreary slog, where you can’t just enjoy a work, you have to deconstruct it and look for all the secret symbolic meanings which are usually just a figment of some professors’ wishful thinking. Sometimes the curtains are just blue.

To demonstrate how nefarious this leftist propaganda masquerading as English education is, one of my son’s friends, (redacted), asked me to take a look at one of his homework assignments that (redacted) gave a zero. He believed his grade was politically motivated. After taking a look, I believe he’s absolutely correct.

The assignment was another of these deconstructionist nonsense things, where the student was expected to force a work into a proper leftist bucket based upon their feelings. They used a short Hemingway story, and (the student) looked at it through feminist lenses to explain why he felt the protagonist was a terrible person.

Professionally speaking, his sentence structure was clunky, and he couldn’t decide if he was going for colloquial voice or not, but it certainly wasn’t a zero. By the directions on the homework assignment, (the student) not only did it correctly, he also used one of the other encouraged lenses as well, by pointing out she was a vapid consumer with a pointless life, he accidentally used a Marxist deconstruction of the bourgeoise class. That’s nonsense, I know, but this whole thing is nonsense. The fact is this particular kid got zinged for not parroting the correct nonsense.

Meanwhile, my son just made up some crap about how the rain represented sadness and got an A. That’s great that he’s learning how to placate leftists, but I’d kind of like him to learn English in an English class.

None of this enables kids to write better. On the contrary, it creates mushy, indoctrinated, check box writing. Where rather than communicate ideas effectively and evocatively, they walk on eggshells, too afraid of violating some leftist shibboleth to actually come out and say what they mean. We see this in the real world every day, where any ideas which go against the prevailing cultural narrative are met with performative outrage.

That’s all I will say about the ineffectual nature of this politicized curriculum. The other parents have plenty of other examples to share, including male students being treated like garbage for being male, or kids getting up and walking out as they grew tired of the teacher’s tiresome use of “bitches”, or homework assignments being assigned late at night and expected to be turned in the next day (I believe the dismissive explanation for that last behavior was the unnecessary stress was supposed to prepare them for college, which is frankly asinine to anybody who has got a degree).

As for the school’s response, I’m unimpressed. I have now been to two meetings, one for parents, one community council, both of which are held at difficult times for anybody who works a normal job to attend, but even then there was a good-sized group at each.  I believe the first one had thirteen parents, and the one at 6:30 AM(!) today I saw many of the same faces.

Both meetings consisted of parents rattling off story after story about this one particular teacher, most of which hit the same consistent themes, and some fun new ones, like how she told the kids not to talk about her lessons with their parents. Gee whiz. I wonder why?

In the first meeting Principal (redacted) listened, and then tried to placate us by talking about the process of picking books and how some books are controversial. Here’s the thing. We don’t care about the intricacies of your bureaucracy or which novel you use. We care that the teacher then spends three months cramming social justice down their throats instead of learning about that novel. The book choice is almost irrelevant in that case. I bet (redacted) could vampire all the fun out of anything I wrote too!

However, that meeting did at least end with him promising to investigate.

Except then the written response to one parent’s officially filed complaint was dismissive and concentrated on the parents’ concerns which were brought up the least. There were a bunch of platitudes and academic speak that basically reads as, we just don’t see the big deal, sorry you parents are so worked up, but you don’t understand our brilliant procedures.

Fantastic. At this point I can see what the moms who first contacted me meant by “blown off”.

Then this morning’s community council meeting was interesting. Once again, parents voiced their concerns about this specific class, but were each allotted only two minutes to speak. Then the Principal spoke, and it was preposterous. He opened by reading us the dictionary definition of “discrimination” and then launched into a whole bunch of platitudes and circular logic, which was basically a thought terminating cliché about how the parents might be the real problem here, because by wanting English taught in our English classes instead of social justice, maybe we are enabling hate and genocide.

Yeah. He actually went there.

One of the moms is emailing me a recording of this so I can relisten to it, because it was so mushy it was hard to follow, but my initial reaction was anger. Nobody complained about “diversity”. There was no bigotry. In fact both meetings I’d been to the parents specifically said they had no issue with other points of view being respected, their issue was the biased, ham fisted, unfairness.

It is infuriating to see people do something horrible, and then hide behind the magic shield of “diversity” that excuses all failings. Even though this is a bunch of white folks in one of the whitest towns in America, lecturing the Azorean by way of North Africa, who grew up in one of the most impoverished and diverse places in the country, that because I want my kid to get educated rather than indoctrinated, I’m enabling genocide? I’ll be sure to tell my grandma the Polish Jew. How many rabbis do I need to get to tell you that excuse doesn’t make a lick of sense?

As far as I could parse, the excuse this morning was that she’s teaching “empathy” and everybody knows empathy is nice. Except that’s a big fat lie. First, it’s an English class, not an Empathy class. Second, why is empathy a one-way street, where only leftist approved views are the ones requiring all this understanding? And third, and most importantly, this nonsense doesn’t create empathy. It creates division and enmity. This stuff portrays a simplistic cartoon version of other human realities, filtered through the lens of liberal angst. Nobody appointed you guys Speaker For (insert minority group here).

This whole empathy schtick is tiresome. Oh no. The same political philosophy which runs most of publishing, Hollywood, the news media, academia, Big Tech, social media, the White House, and Congress, isn’t pervasive enough. Heaven forbid we don’t teach that exact same message our kids are force fed everywhere else in society in English class too.

He repeatedly brought up how teachers must be able to respond when students ask these hard questions about difficult topics. Great. Except I’ve yet to see any evidence the kids are the ones bringing this stuff up. Instead we are hearing our kids complain that she brings this stuff up constantly and beats them over the head with it. It certainly isn’t the kid’s questions that are writing up those homework assignments.

The really particularly galling part about all this is that in the name of “empathy” and “diversity” in order to stop genocide, they need to teach Marxist deconstruction… Marxism? The all-time reigning world champion of genocide? I know this is Social Justice English rather than Social Justice History but give me a break. In order to prevent genocide and truly understand The Great Gatsby it needs to be studied through the lens of the philosophy that gave us the Holodomor and the Killing Fields? Gulags and gas chambers?

Sure, as a writer I look through that sort of lens… When I’m writing the villains.

This kind of nefarious woke corruption of our academic institutions is nothing new. Most of us saw it when we went to college, but it has crept downstream since. What was 300-400 level university English deconstruction nonsense now gets crammed down their throats in high school. Which is why many kids going into college now no longer possess the basic composition skills we used to take for granted, because their high school classes were too busy searching for genderqueer Marxism instead. They can’t write coherently, but by golly they know Sam and Frodo were secret gay communists.

The best thing to come out of the last couple of years is that parents nationwide got to see just how horrid their schools had gotten. It was a wakeup call. Disgust at Critical Race Theory flipped the government of Virginia. The school board got recalled in San Francisco—the bluest big city in America—over this kind of thing. I keep seeing people thinking Utah is fine. Surely we don’t have that here. All is well in Zion!

It’s time for people to quit beating around the bush and be honest. Utah is “nice” in that as a culture we try to avoid contention, but in doing so we abdicate our responsibilities. Our tendency toward conflict avoidance might make us feel good about ourselves, but it is our kids who lose because of it. So I will spread the word about this to every MHS parent I can. If we need to escalate this through official channels and up the chain, great.

Because if we are forced to choose between our kids and your job security, the kids are going to win.

Sincerely,

Larry Correia

POLICING FOR PROFIT: My colleague Penny White and I have a piece over at the Wall Street Journal based on our forthcoming law review artice on this subject.

Excerpt:

Everyone knows the speed trap: a sudden speed-limit drop, often poorly marked, with police waiting to pounce and local courts ready to assess fines for the local treasury. This has now gone mainstream, as communities large and small across the U.S. adopt policies that make citizens targets to be squeezed, not constituents to be protected.

This destructive exploitation is due in part to state and federal laws that allow jurisdictions—and sometimes law-enforcement agencies themselves—to keep the proceeds from fines, forfeitures and court costs. Fortunately, there is a simple fix.

In some places, police prey on citizens. In Brookside, Ala., as Birmingham News columnist John Archibald recently reported, from 2018 to 2020 “revenues from fines and forfeitures soared more than 640 percent and now make up half the city’s total income.”

So many tickets are issued that police have to direct traffic around the courthouse. Forfeitures—in which property is seized by police on suspicion of a crime, requiring the owner to prove his innocence in court to regain his property—are out of control. In 2020, taking advantage of its 1½ miles of Interstate 22, the town of about 1,250 residents had more misdemeanor arrests than residents. That year it collected $487 in traffic fine and forfeiture revenue for each resident, quite an achievement for a town with no traffic lights. Total town income more than doubled on proceeds from fines and forfeitures. Brookside’s police chief recently resigned under pressure from state lawmakers and the public. . . .

It is easy to see the appeal for government officials. Voters may punish politicians at the polls when taxes are raised to fund government, but when those same expenditures are funded by fines, forfeitures and court costs paid by those who “violate” the law, politicians face less risk. Some targets may be out-of-towners, but too often those targeted are poor and minority citizens who may be less likely to vote.

What is at risk, however, is the legitimacy of law enforcement. Policing for profit produces a predatory relationship between officers and citizens. Policing is no longer about protecting people, but about extracting money from them. This also promotes hostile interactions between police and citizens, which increases the likelihood of violence. The entire system winds up being corrupted. Can an accused person expect fair treatment when everyone in the system knows that its well-being depends on revenue from convictions?

The U.S. Supreme Court held in Tumey v. Ohio (1927) that when judicial officials profit directly from fines, defendants are denied due process. It also held, in Ward v. Village of Monroeville (1972), that if those administering the fines benefit indirectly from boosting municipal budgets, then due process is violated.

Two 2019 decisions from the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Cain v. White and Caliste v. Cantrell, applied the due-process requirement that judges be entirely disinterested in the outcome. Noting that money from fines and fees went into a slush fund that covered judicial personnel and travel, the court held that judges’ knowledge that their day-to-day comfort depended on revenue from convictions was enough to bias them unacceptably, denying defendants the neutral decision makers to which they were entitled.

We agree. As municipalities’ and law enforcement’s reliance on revenue from fines, fees and forfeitures grows, the chance that defendants will get a fair shake falls. Judges are supposed to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, and relying on people targeted by law enforcement as a revenue source makes the entire process appear improper.

What to do? One would hope for greater judicial scrutiny, but the judiciary is part of the problem. Appellate courts and the U.S. Supreme Court should provide more supervision. So should state legislatures and Congress.

The solution is to send the money from fines, fees and forfeitures elsewhere. If that money went to a state’s general fund, municipalities would have no incentive to target people for extra revenue and could focus simply on public safety. Even if the state returned the money to municipalities based on a neutral formula, the incentive to engage in financially motivated law enforcement would vanish.

Instead of “defunding the police,” which is such a dumb idea even the Democrats are now pretending they never favored it, it’s more helpful to look at how the police are funded. Incentives matter.

PUSHBACK: Evangeline Lilly Urges Justin Trudeau to Sit Down With Canadians Protesting Vaccine Mandates.

Plus: Freedom Convoy: Piers Morgan flames Justin Trudeau for ‘behaving like a fascist.’

Related: Jewish Journal: The Decline of Free Societies is Rooted in These Two Words from Justin Trudeau: When he responded to truckers protesting vaccine mandates by saying they had “unacceptable views,” he was undermining the fundamental right to dissent.

UPDATE: Fight the Power:

The whole world is watching.

Related:

Ottawa, brutality of Justin Trudeau's police toward a woman who wanted to have coffee. pic.twitter.com/LaDeLxiHaf

— RadioGenova (@RadioGenova) February 20, 2022

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ouch.

MORE:

 

The post Ottawa Mayor Says He’ll Sell Confiscated Freedom Convoy Trucks appeared first on The Bongino Report.

  CDC has withheld vast swaths of the information it holds about the impact of COVID-19, leading to anger from the scientific community and speculation the agency is not releasing the data because it weakens the case for booster shots in certain demographics.   Two weeks ago, the CDC published the first significant data on […]

AND IT WILL HAPPEN AS SOON AS OUR POLITICAL CLASS CAN MAKE IT HAPPEN: When Fascism Comes To America, It Will Look Like Justin Trudeau’s Canada.

Related:

TRUST THE SCIENCE! ALSO, YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE THE SCIENCE, BECAUSE SCIENCE. The C.D.C. Isn’t Publishing Large Portions of the Covid Data It Collects: The agency has withheld critical data on boosters, hospitalizations and, until recently, wastewater analyses.

For more than a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collected data on hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the United States and broken it down by age, race and vaccination status. But it has not made most of the information public.

When the C.D.C. published the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65 two weeks ago, it left out the numbers for a huge portion of that population: 18- to 49-year-olds, the group least likely to benefit from extra shots, because the first two doses already left them well-protected.

The agency recently debuted a dashboard of wastewater data on its website that will be updated daily and might provide early signals of an oncoming surge of Covid cases. Some states and localities had been sharing wastewater information with the agency since the start of the pandemic, but it had never before released those findings.

Two full years into the pandemic, the agency leading the country’s response to the public health emergency has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected, several people familiar with the data said. . . . The performance of vaccines and boosters, particularly in younger adults, is among the most glaring omissions in data the C.D.C. has made public.

Plus: “Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted, Ms. Nordlund said. . . . Concern about the misinterpretation of hospitalization data broken down by vaccination status is not unique to the C.D.C. On Thursday, public health officials in Scotland said they would stop releasing data on Covid hospitalizations and deaths by vaccination status because of similar fears that the figures would be misrepresented by anti-vaccine groups.”

BLUE CITY BLUES: Denver’s Worst-in-the-Nation Car-Theft Problem and Where Stats Are Highest.

Arrests and frozen bank accounts – that is the price you pay for protesting for your freedom in Canada.

Last summer, I warned readers of Common Sense that financial deplatforming would be the next wave of online censorship. Big Tech companies like PayPal were already working with left-wing groups like the ADL and SPLC to define lists of individuals and groups who should be denied service. As more and more similarly minded tech companies followed suit (as happened with social media censorship), these deplorables would be deplatformed, debanked, and eventually denied access to the modern economy altogether, as punishment for their unacceptable views. 

That prediction has become reality.

What I could not have anticipated is that it would occur first in our mild-mannered neighbor to the north, with the Canadian government itself directing the reprisals. It remains to be seen whether Canada will be a bellwether for the U.S. But anyone who cares about the future of America as a place where citizens are free to protest their government needs to understand what has just occurred and work to stop it from taking root here.

For the past three weeks, thousands of truckers have gathered in Ottawa and along the Canada-America border in protest of Covid restrictions and mandates. Rather than engage with them or listen to their concerns, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau first denounced them as having “unacceptable views.” Then he demonized them as white supremacists, racists, and “swastika wavers.” 

On Monday, the rhetoric turned to action when Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act. This heretofore-unused 1988 law gives the government virtually unlimited power for 30 days to deal with a crisis. Invoking the law under the present circumstance would require the threat or use of “serious violence,” yet the vast majority of protesters have been entirely peaceful—playing “We Are the World” and waving Maple Leaf flags. Indeed, the government has made little attempt to justify the need for emergency powers beyond Trudeau’s frequent bemoaning of the truckers’ alleged “hateful rhetoric.” His public safety minister Marco Mendocino stated that such extraordinary measures were necessary due to “intimidation, harassment, and expressions of hate.” Perhaps he doesn’t realize that none of these are listed in the law as valid reasons to invoke it. 

Trudeau escalated things further on Tuesday night, when he issued a new directive called the Emergency Economic Measures Order. Invoking a War on Terror law called the Proceeds of Crime and Terrorist Financing Act, the order requires financial institutions—including banks, credit unions, co-ops, loan companies, trusts, and even cryptocurrency wallets—to stop “providing any financial or related services” to anyone associated with the protests (a “designated person”). This has resulted, according to the CBC, in “frozen accounts, stranded money and canceled credit cards.”

Banks, according to this new order, have a “duty to determine” if one of their customers is a “designated person.” A “designated person” can refer to anyone who “directly or indirectly” participates in the protest, including donors who “provide property to facilitate” the protests through crowdfunding sites. In other words, a designated person can just as easily be a grandmother who donated $25 to support the truckers as one of the organizers of the convoy. 

Because the donor data to the crowdfunding site GiveSendGo was hacked—and the leaked data shows that Canadians donated most of the $8 million raised—many thousands of law-abiding Canadians now face the prospect of financial retaliation and ruin merely for supporting an anti-government protest.

Already, a low-level government official in Ontario was fired after her $100 donation came to light. A gelato shop was forced to close when it received threats after its owner was revealed to have donated to the protest. On Wednesday, Justice Minister David Lametti went on Canadian television to say the quiet part aloud, namely that anyone contributing to “a pro-Trump movement” should be “worried” about their bank accounts and other financial assets being frozen. 

When these protestors or those that supported them end up in financial hardship because they lose their job, business, or bank account, what will happen to those who try to help them? Will Canadian financial institutions be forced to play Six Degrees of Deplorables? The fear of being ensnared in the dragnet will surely have a chilling effect on the commercial prospects of those suspected of “unacceptable views,” creating a caste of untouchables whom no one will dare to transact with or help. 

B.J. Dichter, one of the protest organizers who has had all of his bank accounts and credit cards frozen, expressed the sense of desperation: “It feels like being banished from the medieval village left to die.”

How did things get to this point? For years, ideologues have used accusations of bigotry to hound people from their jobs, kick them off social media, and rescind their right to participate in the online economy. However, many observers shrugged off these cases as outliers—fringe examples that could be ignored because they affected unsympathetic individuals. But now we have a wide-ranging group of working-class people and their supporters who are being financially deplatformed for civil disobedience.

The Canadian truckers have been so thoroughly defamed as racists and bigots by the media on both sides of the border that few are thinking about the nightmarish implications for ordinary citizens. For the most part, the CBC, CNN, MSNBC, and the major newspapers in both countries have cheered and egged Trudeau on as he descends into authoritarianism—even as various Canadian provinces rescind the vaccine mandates that originally inspired the protests. 

Perhaps no one has been more enthusiastic than CNN contributor Juliette Kayyem. She took to Twitter to encourage Trudeau’s government to first “slash the tires, empty gas tanks, arrest the drivers” and later to “cancel their insurance, suspend their driver’s licenses, prohibit any future regulatory verification for truckers,” and other ideas that seemed extreme until Trudeau adopted several of them. “Trust me,” declared Kayyem, “I will not run out of ways to make this hurt.” One suspects Trudeau won’t either, even as the coming end of the pandemic renders this entire dispute irrelevant. Funny, it’s almost as if “the cruelty is the point.” 

The self-conception of these pundits and politicians could not be more at odds with reality. They pose as defenders of democracy while invoking emergency powers without legislative or public debate, or without an emergency for that matter. They claim that diversity and tolerance are their highest values while insisting that only one political point of view is acceptable and censoring the alternatives. Above all, progressive elites see themselves as the champions of the disadvantaged while demonizing working-class men and women whose economic livelihoods have been devastated by their draconian Covid policies.

These elites will soon move on to the next Twitter outrage, but the people of Canada will be living with the consequences of Trudeau’s actions long after every last truck has been towed and the last of the protesters has been cleared by tear gas, stun grenades, and mounted police on horseback. Indeed, over the weekend, the Ottawa police chief told reporters that they will be pursuing protestors for weeks and months to come: “If you are involved in this protest, we will actively look to identify you and follow up with financial sanctions and criminal charges. Absolutely.”

While the emergency order only authorizes the freezing of assets for 30 days, banks and financial institutions will be wary of resuming business relationships with any “designated person”—or anyone they think could be one in the future. Confident that these private businesses will do their dirty work for them, the government will likely back off, but the chilling effect on political dissent will remain. It’s a Western version of China’s social credit system that does not altogether prohibit political dissent but makes it so costly that it becomes impractical to the ordinary citizen. 

How do we stop this dystopian policy from taking root here in the United States? Some of my friends in the tech world say that decentralized blockchain and cryptocurrency offer an answer—and that might be true for pseudonymous computer programmers who can do gig work from anywhere in the world. But it won’t help truck drivers who operate in the real world under the supervision of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The real answer lies in politics and the law. Policy makers need to build safeguards into our laws that protect citizens’ financial rights against some future emergency that would be used as the excuse to take them away. Just as University of Chicago professor Richard Epstein proposed that the largest social media companies should be treated as common carriers to prohibit them from restricting speech, we may need to prohibit the largest financial institutions from denying citizens access to the financial system because they dislike their politics. In order to prevent discrimination on the basis of creed, political beliefs may need to become a protected class.

We must also stop the definition creep around “terrorism,” a term whose use has become so elastic that it now even includes angry moms fighting school boards. Just this month, the Department of Homeland Security made a little-noticed change in its definition of domestic terrorism, citing “widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19” as a key driver of what it deemed a heightened domestic terror threat environment. As we have seen for over 20 years, “terrorism” is the magic word by which any curtailment of rights and expansion of government power can be justified.

American citizens must never be labeled terrorists simply for exercising their constitutional rights to speak freely, to worship freely, or to assemble peaceably in protest. Of course, an act of violence committed in service to a radical cause is terrorism, whether committed in Baghdad or Brooklyn, but constitutionally protected speech alone is not. Contrary to the safetyism practiced by university administrators and HR departments, speech is not violence. A citizen posting on social media, even if she is questioning vaccines or railing against mask mandates, is not fomenting terrorism.

Those of us in the free world have been asked to suspend many of our freedoms for the sake of our collective health during this pandemic. But asking us to compromise our right to peaceful protest, or to have our finances seized without due process of law in the name of a fake emergency, can never be made normal. In the words of Justice Gorsuch, “Even if the Constitution has taken a holiday during this pandemic, it cannot become a sabbatical.”

If you missed David’s last prescient essay for us, Get Ready for the ‘No-Buy’ List, read it here.

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It has been obvious since early 2020 that there has been an organized cult outreach that has permeated the world as a whole. It’s possible that this formed out of a gigantic error, rooted in a sudden ignorance of cell biology and long experience of public health. It is also possible that a seasonal respiratory virus was deployed by some people as an opportunity to seize power for some other purpose. 

Follow the money and influence trails and the latter conclusion is hard to dismiss. 

The clues were there early. Even before the WHO declared a pandemic in March 2020 (at least several months behind the actual fact of a pandemic) and before any lockdowns, there were media blitzes talking about the “New Normal” and talk of the “Great Reset” (which was rebranded as “Build Back Better”). 

Pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, and Astra-Zeneca were actively lobbying governments to buy their vaccines as early as February 2020, supposedly less than a month after the genetic sequence (or partial sequence) was made available by China. 

As a person who spent his whole professional career in pharmaceutical and vaccine development, I found the whole concept of going from scratch to a ready-to-use vaccine in a few months simply preposterous. 

Something did not add up.

I knew of the names with which everyone has become familiar. Bill Gates, Neil Ferguson, Jeremy Farrar, Anthony Fauci, and others had either been lobbying for or pursuing the lockdown strategies for many years. But still, the scope of the actions seemed too large to even be explained by those names alone.

So, the fundamental questions that I have been asking myself have been why and who? The “Why” seems to always come back to issues besides public health. Of course the “Who” had the obvious players such as the WHO, China, CDC, NIH/NIAID, and various governments but there seemed to be more behind it than that. These players have been connected to the “public health” aspect but that seemed to be only scratching the surface. 

I am not an investigative journalist and I would never claim that role, but even I can do some simple internet searches and start to see patterns evolve. The searches that I have done have yielded some very interesting “coincidences.”

If I give you the names of the following people – Biden, Trudeau, Ardern, Merkel, Macron, Draghi, Morrison, Xi Jinping – what do you think that they have in common? Yes, they are all pampered and stumble over themselves, but that is also not the connection.

One can see very quickly that these names certainly connect to lockdown countries and individuals who have ignored their own laws and/or tried in some way to usurp them. But, there is more to it than that and I will give a hint by providing a link with each name.

• Joseph Biden, President, United States 
• Boris Johnson, PM of United Kingdom
• Jacinda Ardern, PM of New Zealand 
• Angela Merkel, Former PM of Germany
• Emmanuel Macron, President of France 
• Justin Trudeau, PM of Canada 
• Xi Jinping, CCP Leader, China
• Mario Draghi, PM of Italy 
• Scott Morrison, PM of Australia 

They are all associated with the World Economic Forum (WEF), a “nonprofit” private organization started (in 1971) and headed by Klaus “You will own nothing and be happy” Schwab and his family. This is a private organization that has no official bearing with any world governance body, despite the implication of the name. It could just as well have been called the “Church of Schwabies.” The WEF was the origin of the “Great Reset” and I would guess that it was the origin of “Build Back Better” (since most of the above names have used that term recently).

If you think that the WEF membership ends with just leaders of countries, here are a few more names:

• Gavin Newsom, Governor of California 
• Jay Inslee, Governor of Washington State 
• Anthony Fauci, Director NIAID 
• Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House 

Allow me to introduce more of the WEF by giving a list of names for the Board of Trustees. 

• Al Gore, Former WP of the US
• Mark Carney, UN Special Envoy for Climate Action
• T. Shanmugaratnam, Seminar Minister Singapore
• Christine Lagarde, President, European Central Bank
• Ngozi Okonja-Iweala, Director General, WTO
• Kristalian Georggieva, Managing Director, IMF
• Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Minister of Canada
• Laurence Fink, CEO, BlackRock 

You can see a cross section of political and economic leaders on the board. The leader of the organization, that is the leader of the Board, is still Klaus Schwab. He has built an impressive array of followers.

If you want to really see the extent of influence, go to the website and pick out the corporate name of your choice; there are many to choose from: Abbott Laboratories, Astra-Zeneca, Biogen, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer, Serum Institute of India, BASF, Mayo Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, Blackrock, CISCO, Dell, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Zoom, Yahoo, Amazon, Airbus, Boeing, Honda, Rakuten, Walmart, UPS, Coca-Cola, UBER, Bank of China. Bank of America. Deutsche Bank, State Bank of India, Royal Bank of Canada, Lloyds Banking, JP Morgan-Chase, Equifax, Goldman-Sachs, Hong Kong Exchanges, Bloomberg, VISA, New York Times, Ontario (Canada) Teacher’s Pension Plan

The extent of reach is huge even beyond the worldwide leader network. For example, we all know what Bill Gates has been doing with his wealth via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). But, the Wellcome Trust is equal to the task. Who is the Director of the Wellcome Trust? One named Jeremy Farrar, of the United Kingdom SAGE and lockdown fame – arguably the architect of the US-UK lockdowns in 2020 – is closely associated with WEF. 

Concerning the reach that can occur, let me give some examples from the BMGF alone, and it comes from the time that I spent in 2020 reading their extensive funding list.

A few years ago, the BMGF awarded the Institute for Health Metric Evaluation (IHME) a ten-year, almost $280 million award. IHME (associated with the University of Washington in Seattle) was at the forefront of the computer modeling that was driving the lockdowns and the nonpharmaceutical Interventions during 2020. People have seen their name often in print or on MSNBC or CNN. 

In 2019, IHME awarded the Editor of the Lancet (Dr. Richard Horton) a $100,000 award and described him as an “activist editor.” The Lancet, once considered one of the best medical journals, has been at the forefront of censoring opposing scientific viewpoints since 2020 and publishing “papers” that were not fit to be published. I never could understand what it meant to be an “activist” editor in a respected scientific/medical journal because, stupid me, I always thought that the first job of the editor was to be impartial. I guess I learned in 2020 how wrong I was.

Of course, the Lancet is also heavily funded from pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer (also a member of the WEF). 

But, the BMGF reach goes far beyond just IHME and these connections have been quite recognizable. Here are some examples of the organizations and moneys received during 2020 alone broken down by areas.

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Grants 2020

Organization Name	Amount USD
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health	20+ million
World Health Organization (WHO)	100+ million
Oregon Health Sciences Univ.	15+ million
CDC Foundation	3.5+ million
Imperial College of London	7+ million
Chinese CDC	2+ million
Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health	5+ million
Institute of Health Metric Evaluation (IHME)	28 million (part of a 10 yr/279 million USD grant)
Nigeria CDC	1.1 million
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Z. (Gmbh)	5+ million
Novartis	7+ million
Lumira Dx UK LTD	37+ million
Serum Institute of India	4+ million
Icosavac	10 million
Novavax	15 million
BBC	2 million
CNN	4 million
Guardian	3+ million
NPR	4 million
Financial Times LTD	0.5 million
National Newspaper Publishers Assoc.	0.75 million

Bill Gates has also invested heavily in Moderna and his investments have paid out nicely for him. The BMGF has also given close to $100 million to the Clinton Health Access Initiative.

The questions now have to be asked: 

• Is this some beginning of a controlled authoritarian society intertwined via the WEF? 
• Has the Covid panic been staged to set the stage? Please note, I am not a “Covid Denier” since the virus is real. But, has a normal seasonal respiratory virus been used as an excuse to activate the web?

The next questions, for those of us who at least pretend to live in “Democratic” societies, have to be:

• Is this what you expected and/or want from the people you elect?  
• How many people knew of the “Associations” of the people that they voted for? (I certainly did not know of the associations until I did the searches but maybe I am just out of touch)

Can we anticipate their next moves? There may be some hints.

The Next Move 

Jeremy Farrar of The Wellcome Trust recently wrote an article for the WEF with the CEO of Novo Nordisk Foundation, Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen. It is a summary of a larger piece written for and published by the Boston Consulting Group. 

In this article, they propose that the way to “fix” the problem of antibiotic resistant bacteria is via a subscription service. That is, you pay a fee and when you need an antibiotic, presumably an effective one will be available for you. 

My guess is that they have the same philosophy for vaccines and that certainly seems to be the approach with Coronavirus. Keep paying for and taking boosters. 

In view of this philosophy, the vaccine mandates make sense. Get society “addicted” to an intervention, effective or not, and then keep feeding them. This becomes especially effective if you can keep the fear going.

This approach is so shortsighted, from a scientific viewpoint, it astounds me. But, like much of recent history, I think science has little to do with it. The goal is not scientifically founded but control founded. 

After the discovery of penicillin almost one century ago, there were scientists who warned that antibiotic usage should be considered very carefully in practice because evolutionary pressures would lead to antibiotic resistant species of bacteria. At that time, they were considered to be rogue scientists; after all, didn’t we suddenly have a miracle cure for many deadly problems?

From the time of discovery, it took over a decade before fermentation methods were developed to produce sufficient quantities of antibiotics to be practical. These methods allowed for the use of penicillin on the battlefield towards the end of WWII and undoubtedly saved many lives then and later in subsequent wars (Korea and Vietnam) by preventing serious infections resulting from wounds sustained during battle. 

However, it did not take long before the medical establishment was handing out antibiotics like candy. I experienced this myself when I was a child in the 1960s. It seemed like every time we went to the doctor, no matter what the problem, I was given a series (not just one) of injections of penicillin. There were never any attempts to determine if I had a virus, bacteria, or even an allergy. The answer was: in with the needle. I cannot count how many times I was “jabbed” as a child.

It didn’t take long before resistance species started to appear. The result was that more and more money was pumped into R&D for antibiotics. When I was in graduate school during the 1980s, one sure way to get some NIH funding was to tie the research into the “antibiotic” search. Antibiotics became big business. 

We now have several classes of antibiotics that are used for specific cases. We have Aminoglycosides (Streptomycin, Neomycin, etc.), Beta-Lactams Cephalosporins (four generations including Cefadroxil-G1, Cefaclor-G2, Cefotaxime-G3, Cefepime-G4 , Beta-Lactams Penicillins (including Ampicillin, Amoxicillin, and Penicillin), Other Beta-Lactams (Meropenem), Fluoroquinolones (Levofloxacin, Gemifloxicin, etc.), Macrolides (Azithromycin, Clarithromycin, etc.), Sulfonamides (Sulfisoxazole, etc.), Tetracyclines, and others such as Clindamycin and Vancomycin (typically reserved for resistant bacteria). All in all, physicians have over 50 different choices for antibiotics.

The most common place to encounter antibiotic resistant bacteria is in a hospital. Most people who get some sort of infection in the normal routine of life, like a sinus infection or skin infection, will not likely encounter an antibiotic resistant species. 

Except there has been another source of the problem and that has been in the food supply. Antibiotics have become very popular with large scale meat production facilities of all types including beef, poultry, swine, and even fish. These include actual farms where the animals are raised as well as in the processing of the meat. The overuse of antibiotics in these industries has also produced resistant forms of bacteria.

For example, in attempts to limit the bacteria e. coli, common to mammalians, antibiotics have been used and this has resulted in some antibiotic resistant forms of e. coli. An infection via e. coli (antibiotic resistant or not) can be avoided by proper cooking and handling of meats. However, sometimes that does not happen and there are e. coli outbreaks (also from improperly washed vegetables that may use contaminated irrigation water). 

For most healthy people, experiencing e. coli (either resistant or not) is only a passing discomfort that includes intestinal cramps, diarrhea, and other GI complaints. Depending on the amount of contamination, a person may suffer for a day or two or for several days. 

But, with some people, it can be serious or deadly (such as in elderly people in poor health and young children). If that occurs, then the presence of an antibiotic resistant form can be a serious matter. Presence of a non-resistant form can be treated more readily.

A few years ago I had pneumonia; a relatively mild case. I was given a choice of in-patient treatment or out-patient and it was a no-brainer. If I wanted to make sure that my pneumonia could be handled by the normal course of antibiotics (I was given a quinolone), staying at home and away from the hospital was important. I knew that hospital-acquired pneumonia could be a much more serious situation. So, I stayed at home and easily recovered. That did not mean I was guaranteed getting a more serious resistant form in the hospital but I understood that the risk was much greater. 

Producing more antibiotics and giving them on subscription to the users is not the answer. That will only lead to more resistant forms and there will be this continuing loop of antibiotic use. But, if the actual goal is societal addiction to antibiotics out of fear, just like addiction to universal Covid vaccines out of fear, then it makes sense. 

Finding a few universal antibiotics that deal with the resistant forms is important and it is also important to use those sparingly and only as a last resort. In addition, better management of antibiotic use in our society would go a long way to attenuating the problem. 

There is nothing particularly controversial about that observation. It was accepted by nearly every responsible health professional only two years ago. But we live now in different times of extreme experimentation, such as the deployment of world-wide lockdowns for a virus that had a highly focused impact, with catastrophic results for the world. 

It was the WEF on March 21, 2020 that assured us “lockdowns can halt the spread of Covid-19.” Today that article, never pulled much less repudiated, stands as probably the most ridiculous and destructive suggestion and prediction of the 21st century. And yet, the WEF is still at it, suggesting that same year that at least lockdowns reduced carbon emissions. 

We can easily predict that the WEF’s call for a universal and mandated subscription plan for antibiotics – pushed with the overt intention of shoring up financial capitalization of major drug manufacturers – will meet the same fate: poor health outcomes, more power to entrenched elites, and ever less liberty for the people. 

I’VE SEEN THE LOCKDOWNS AND THE DAMAGE DONE:

Related: CDC: Children’s ER visits for eating disorders, self-harm spike during pandemic.

“Never in my life would I have believed anyone if they told me that our own P.M. would refuse dialogue and choose violence against peaceful protesters instead.”

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