Daily Archives: January 27, 2023

Futuristic tech flagship smartphone the HUAWEI Mate50 Pro with ultimate Ultra Aperture XMAGE camera launches in SA – Mail and Guardian

Posted: January 27, 2023 at 7:58 pm

Futuristic tech flagship smartphone the HUAWEI Mate50 Pro with ultimate Ultra Aperture XMAGE camera launches in SA  Mail and Guardian

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Interpretation: The Second Amendment | Constitution Center

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The right to keep and bear arms is a lot like the right to freedom of speech. In each case, the Constitution expressly protects a liberty that needs to be insulated from the ordinary political process. Neither right, however, is absolute. The First Amendment, for example, has never protected perjury, fraud, or countless other crimes that are committed through the use of speech. Similarly, no reasonable person could believe that violent criminals should have unrestricted access to guns, or that any individual should possess a nuclear weapon.

Inevitably, courts must draw lines, allowing government to carry out its duty to preserve an orderly society, without unduly infringing the legitimate interests of individuals in expressing their thoughts and protecting themselves from criminal violence. This is not a precise science or one that will ever be free from controversy.

One judicial approach, however, should be unequivocally rejected. During the nineteenth century, courts routinely refused to invalidate restrictions on free speech that struck the judges as reasonable. This meant that speech got virtually no judicial protection. Government suppression of speech can usually be thought to serve some reasonable purpose, such as reducing social discord or promoting healthy morals. Similarly, most gun control laws can be viewed as efforts to save lives and prevent crime, which are perfectly reasonable goals. If thats enough to justify infringements on individual liberty, neither constitutional guarantee means much of anything.

During the twentieth century, the Supreme Court finally started taking the First Amendment seriously. Today, individual freedom is generally protected unless the government can make a strong case that it has a real need to suppress speech or expressive conduct, and that its regulations are tailored to that need. The legal doctrines have become quite complex, and there is room for disagreement about many of the Courts specific decisions. Taken as a whole, however, this body of case law shows what the Court can do when it appreciates the value of an individual right enshrined in the Constitution.

The Second Amendment also raises issues about which reasonable people can disagree. But if the Supreme Court takes this provision of the Constitution as seriously as it now takes the First Amendment, which it should do, there will be some easy issues as well.

District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) is one example. The right of the people protected by the Second Amendment is an individual right, just like the right[s] of the people protected by the First and Fourth Amendments. The Constitution does not say that the Second Amendment protects a right of the states or a right of the militia, and nobody offered such an interpretation during the Founding era. Abundant historical evidence indicates that the Second Amendment was meant to leave citizens with the ability to defend themselves against unlawful violence. Such threats might come from usurpers of governmental power, but they might also come from criminals whom the government is unwilling or unable to control.

McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) was also an easy case under the Courts precedents. Most other provisions of the Bill of Rights had already been applied to the states because they are deeply rooted in this Nations history and tradition. The right to keep and bear arms clearly meets this test.

The text of the Constitution expressly guarantees the right to bear arms, not just the right to keep them. The courts should invalidate regulations that prevent law-abiding citizens from carrying weapons in public, where the vast majority of violent crimes occur. First Amendment rights are not confined to the home, and neither are those protected by the Second Amendment.

Nor should the government be allowed to create burdensome bureaucratic obstacles designed to frustrate the exercise of Second Amendment rights. The courts are vigilant in preventing government from evading the First Amendment through regulations that indirectly abridge free speech rights by making them difficult to exercise. Courts should exercise the same vigilance in protecting Second Amendment rights.

Some other regulations that may appear innocuous should be struck down because they are little more than political stunts. Popular bans on so-called assault rifles, for example, define this class of guns in terms of cosmetic features, leaving functionally identical semi-automatic rifles to circulate freely. This is unconstitutional for the same reason that it would violate the First Amendment to ban words that have a French etymology, or to require that French fries be called freedom fries.

In most American states, including many with large urban population centers, responsible adults have easy access to ordinary firearms, and they are permitted to carry them in public. Experience has shown that these policies do not lead to increased levels of violence. Criminals pay no more attention to gun control regulations than they do to laws against murder, rape, and robbery. Armed citizens, however, prevent countless crimes and have saved many lives. Whats more, the most vulnerable peopleincluding women, the elderly, and those who live in high crime neighborhoodsare among the greatest beneficiaries of the Second Amendment. If the courts require the remaining jurisdictions to stop infringing on the constitutional right to keep and bear arms, their citizens will be more free and probably safer as well.

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Interpretation: The Second Amendment | Constitution Center

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Priyanka Chopra Jonas’ idea of financial independence is inspirational and how! – Zoom TV

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Priyanka Chopra Jonas' idea of financial independence is inspirational and how!  Zoom TV

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Independence Realty Trust, Inc.’s (NYSE:IRT) Stock Has Seen Strong Momentum: Does That Call For Deeper Study Of Its Financial Prospects? – Simply Wall…

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Independence Realty Trust, Inc.'s (NYSE:IRT) Stock Has Seen Strong Momentum: Does That Call For Deeper Study Of Its Financial Prospects?  Simply Wall St

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Feds investigating eczema cream after two Oregon babies found with high levels of lead in blood – OregonLive

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Feds investigating eczema cream after two Oregon babies found with high levels of lead in blood  OregonLive

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Heres how to treat eczema and other skin conditions for cold weather – The Hindu

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Heres how to treat eczema and other skin conditions for cold weather  The Hindu

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Rev Father Kelvin Ugwu knocks women wishing to be Ned Nwokos next wife after condemning polygamy – WITHIN NIGERIA GIST

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Rev Father Kelvin Ugwu knocks women wishing to be Ned Nwokos next wife after condemning polygamy  WITHIN NIGERIA GIST

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The Great Nonsense of The Great Reset – LewRockwell

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The Great Reset is the latest deceptive euphemism for totalitarian socialism that is being promoted by yet another group of wealthy corporate elitists who think they can centrally plan the entire world economy. They are essentially the ideological heirs of Frederick Engels and his intellectual puppet Karl Marx. The Great Reset follows in the rhetorical footsteps of such euphemisms for socialism as economic democracy, social justice, liberation theology, progressivism, market socialism (an oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp or military intelligence), environmentalism, fighting climate change, sustainable development, and green new deal, to mention just a few.

The main figure of this movement is wealthy German engineer Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, who champions what he calls transhumanism, the integration of nanotechnology into the human body so that humans can be controlled remotely by the state.[1] As Ron Paul has noted, Included in Schwabs proposal for surveillance [of every citizen] is his idea to use brain scans and nanotechnology to predict, and if necessary, prevent, individuals future behavior . This means that anyone whose brain is scanned could have his . . . [constitutional] rights violated because a government bureaucrat determines the individual is going to commit a crime.[2]

The Fourth Industrial ...Schwab, KlausBest Price: $9.95Buy New $10.69(as of 05:40 UTC - Details)Placed in the hands of politicians, this would create a level of totalitarianism the Soviets could only have dreamed of. In other words, Schwab is reminiscent of that famous twentieth-century German who also fantasized about creating a master race and ruling the world.

This is nothing new, Antony Mueller points out, as eugenics, which was all the rage among so many ruling class elitists of the early twentieth century is now called transhumanism.[3] Among the most prominent late nineteenth-and twentieth-century eugenicists were H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Charles Darwins son Leonard, John Maynard Keynes, Irving Fisher, Winston Churchill, and Bill Gates, Sr. Bill Gates, Jr. is an enthusiastic funding source for transhumanism research and, like his father, is fond of eugenics.

During a recent Ted talk Gates, Jr. complained that The world today has 6.8 billion people . .. thats headed up to about 9 billion. Have no fear, he said, because if we do a really great job on vaccines [with anti-fertility drugs? Poisons?] health care, reproductive health services [including abortion?], we could lower that by perhaps 10 to 15 percent.[4] That in turn will lower carbon dioxide levels on the planet and address climate change as well, said Gates.

Keynes was treasurer of the Cambridge University Eugenics Society and director of the Eugenics Society of London. He called eugenics the most important and significant branch of sociology [Eugenics Archive]. Irving Fisher, icon of the Chicago School of Economics, literally wrote the book on the subject, entitled Eugenics.

When he was the British Home Secretary (1910-1911) Winston Churchill advocated the confinement, segregation, and sterilization of a class of persons contemporarily described as the feeble minded [International Churchill Society]. His stated goal was the improvement of the British breed. Accordingly, he supported compulsory detention of the mentally inadequate; the sterilization of the unfit; and proper labor colonies for tramps and wastrels.

World Government, Anyone?

How the West Grew Rich...Birdzell Jr., LEBest Price: $4.42Buy New $18.66(as of 11:22 UTC - Details)Antony Mueller also wrote of how the first attempt to create some kind of global governing institution to centrally plan the world was the League of Nations (1920), followed by the United Nations in 1945 under the leadership of Stalin, FDR, and Churchill.[5] Although Churchill was fond of citing F.A. Hayek, especially The Road to Serfdom, FDR was essentially a fascist whose domestic policies differed very little from fascist Italy and Germany, and of course Stalin was a mass-murdering communist.

Churchill was voted out of office and replaced by the socialist Labor Partys Clement Atlee in 1945. The three allied powers of World War II were then led by two socialists and the political heir to FDRs economic fascism, Harry Truman.

The U.N. immediately created UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and the World Health Organization (WHO), whose stated goal was to manipulate human development. Eugenicist Julian Huxley was the first director of UNESCO who lamented that Marxisms attempt to create a new type of human (socialist man) had already failed because it lacked a biological component.

Neo-Malthusianism and the Birth of Environmentalism

[S[ocialism . . . is . . . the society that must emerge if humanity is to cope with . . . the ecological burden that economic growth is placing on the environment . . . . [C]apitalism must be monitored, regulated, and contained to such a degree that it would be difficult to call the final social order capitalism.

Robert Heilbroner, After Capitalism, The New Yorker, Sept. 10, 1990

The above quotation by socialist economist, the late Robert Heilbroner, was written in the context of an article that lamented and mourned the worldwide collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. The great debate between capitalism and socialism was over, he said, and Ludwig von Mises was right about socialism all along, said a man who had spent the past half century promoting socialism in his teaching, speaking, and writing. But do not despair, he told his fellow socialists, for there is one more trick up our sleeves, namely, the Trojan Horse of achieving socialism under the guise of environmentalism.

On the Origins of MoneyMenger, Carl MengerBest Price: $12.31Buy New $16.36(as of 11:22 UTC - Details)The basic strategy was then, as it is now, to constantly frighten the gullible public with predictions of The End of the World from environmental catastrophe unless we abandon capitalism and adopt socialist central planning. This has always been the one constant theme of the environmentalist movement (not to be confused with the conservation movement which is actually interested in the health of the planet and the humans who occupy it) since the 1960s. It ignores the fact that the twentieth-century socialist countries like the Soviet Union and China had by far the worse environmental problems on the planet, orders of magnitude worse than in the capitalist countries.

In 2019 the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) published Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions by Myron Ebell and Steven Milloy.[6] The study is a compilation of reprints of newspaper and magazine articles that illustrate the seemingly never-ending false scare stories spread by the environmentalistS and their media puppets. The real founder of the modern environmental movement was entomologist Paul Ehrlich, not Rachel Carson, author of the widely-cited novel, Silent Spring. Ehrlich was supported by a group of wealthy socialists known as The Club of Rome. His book, The Population Bomb, was incredibly successful, selling millions in just a couple of years, warning that the entire world will soon be destroyed by capitalism unless it is ended NOW and severe regulatory measures are taken.

The first article displayed by CEI was from the November 17, 1967 Salt Lake Tribune announcing that Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford said the time of famines is upon us and will be disastrous by 1975 because of over-population. Such talk was a resurrection of the hoary, thoroughly-discredited Malthusianism of the nineteenth century, cloaked in the words of modern science. Birth control may have to be made involuntary, said Ehrlich, and accompanied by putting sterilization agents into staple foods and drinking water. The Catholic church needs to be pressured by government to support his, said Ehrlich, who became one of the most celebrated, rich, and famous academics of the twentieth century.

The New York Times quoted Ehrlich on August 10, 1969, as predicting that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam n 20 years.

Ice Age Hysteria of the 70s

Socialism: An Economic...Von Mises, LudwigBest Price: $7.57Buy New $12.95(as of 07:00 UTC - Details)Global cooling that would create a new ice age was the next scare tactic. An April 18, 1970 Boston Globe article quoted pollution expert James P. Lodge, Jr. as saying air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century.

Ehrlich chimed in, naturally. An October 6, 1970 Redlands, CA Daily Facts article quoted him as predicting that the oceans will be . . . dead . . . in less than a decade because of pollution caused by capitalism. And they will be frozen over. A July 9, 1971 Washington Post article quoted a Dr. S.I. Rasool of NASA and Columbia University who said that pollution will cause an average temperature drop of as much as ten degrees that could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!

On December 3, 1972 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sent a letter to President Nixon predicting a global deterioration of climate never before seen by civilized mankind that would lead to a new ice age.

A January 29, 1974 article in The Guardian was headlined, Space Satellites Show New Ice Age Coming Fast. This was followed by a June 24, 1974 Time magazine article warning that telltale signs are everywhere that we were already in a new ice age. Global cooling hysteria was still alive and well in 1978. A January 5, 1978 New York Times article was headlined, International Team of Specialists Finds No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend in Northern Hemisphere.

Pivoting on a Dime: Global Warming Hysteria

By 1988, after more than a decade of warnings of a new ice age unless capitalism is destroyed failed to produce the desired result, many of these same scientists and bureaucrats all of a sudden began warning of an earthly apocalypse caused by global warming. The greenhouse effect of pollution was discovered/invented, with nationwide warnings like one in the June 24 Miami News declaring that 88 On Way to be Hottest Ever as World Temperatures Up Sharply. James Hansen of NASA warned in the Lansing State Journal on December 12, 1988 that Washington, D.C. would go from its current 35 days a year over 90 degrees to 85 days a year and the level of the ocean will rise by as much as six feet. Rising seas could obliterate nations, a U.N. official informed the Associated Press on June 30, 1989. In reality, as CEI points out, is that the number of 90+ degree days in Washington, D.C. peaked in 1911 and continues to decline.Friedrich A. Von Hayek...Check Amazon for Pricing.

By 2000 the mantra of the global warming hysterics included predictions that snowfalls are now just a thing of the past, and children just arent going to know what snow is, The Independent announced on September 12, 2015, quoting another environmentalist expert from the University of East Anglia.

By 2013 the Arctic will be free of sea ice predicted James Hansen in 2008, as reported by The Argus Free Press of Owosso, Michigan. In the same year Al Gore informed us that the North polar ice cap would be gone, as reported by the Associated Press on June 24, 2008. For such predictions Massachusetts Senator ed Markey designated Hansen as a climate prophet.

The renowned atmospheric scientist Prince Charles told The Independent on July 9, 2009 that the price of capitalism and consumerism is just too high. The planet will be destroyed by 2017 if capitalism is not essentially destroyed immediately, said the mega-wealthy prince whose preferred method of travel is by gas-guzzling Rolls Royce and private jet.

Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown outdid the prince by informing The Independent on October 20, 2009 that we have fewer than fifty days to save our planet from catastrophe. When New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez publicly announced in 2019 with perfect certainty that the world will end in in twelve years, she was referring to a 2018 United Nations study of climate change that said the same thing.[7] The world will likely end in twelve years, said the U.N. bureaucrats, unless the U.N. is given vast new governing powers over all countries of the world, and vast sums of additional tax revenue.

NONE of these widely-touted and celebrated predictions came true. Birds did not even disappear from the planet as predicted in Silent Spring. capitalism was not replaced by worldwide socialist central planning; so the environmental scientists pivoted on a dime once again and adopted the language of climate change. It now does not matter whether the climates temperature is increasing or decreasing; either will cause a catastrophe that can only be avoided by replacing whats left of capitalism with some kind of worldwide socialist central planning, they inform us.

A quarter of a century of climate change hysteria has still not led to the desired result. The next step in this more-than-a-century-old political crusade for worldwide socialism, therefore, is The Great Reset.Fascism versus CapitalismLlewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.Best Price: $3.39Buy New $7.45(as of 05:45 UTC - Details)

The Great Nonsense of The Great Reset

Klaus Schwab holds doctorates in engineering and economics, although he seems ignorant of the most elementary economic concepts when he contends that the entire world economy can somehow be stopped by a god-like hand, pushbutton style, and reset and built back better, one of his favorite slogans. He is the founder of the World Economic Forum, touted as an organization that promotes Public-Private Cooperation. As Ayn Rand once said, however, whenever the private sector partners with government, government is always the senior and controlling partner.

Schwab seems totally unaware of how the institutions of capitalism have evolved over the centuries by ingenuity and efforts of millions and were not magically set or reset by any single man or government committee.[8] Money evolved on the free market and did not originate from governmental edits.[9] Even language evolved, and was not invented by any government bureaucracy. There is no recognition at all in any of Schwabs books that he understands (or cares) anything about the spontaneous order of markets, the importance of private property and free-market prices, the economy-smothering effects of government bureaucracy, or the economic reasons for the inevitable failures of socialism. Like all other socialist ideologues, he does not even bother to address the critics of socialism as he blindly makes his case for world socialism. It can work, he insists, if only he and his corporate elitist comrades could be in charge.

The logic of The Great Reset can be stated in a syllogism: 1. Socialism has failed disastrously everywhere it has been implemented; 2) Everyone knows this; 3; Therefore, what the world needs is more socialism on the biggest scale ever.

Schwab is an engineer and believes that world society can be socially engineered by corporate elitists like himself. The Soviets would label this kind of thinking scientific socialism.

Destructionism

Like all socialist ideologues, Schwabs starting point is what Ludwig von Mises called destructionism. All socialists, Mises said, advocated the destruction of the existing institutions of society, especially capitalism, the family, and religion, all of which form a barrier between the individual and the controlling dictates of the state. Only then can society be reset to create a socialist utopia. For Socialism is . . . the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It doesnt build; it destroys. For destructionism is the essence of it . . . each step leading towards socialism must exhaust itself in the destruction of what already exists.[10]

This is why Schwab, Gates, Biden, and other proponents of the great reset so enthusiastically celebrate the lockdowns that occurred during the so-called pandemic of 2020 and declare that it is time to build back better. Destroy what exists, they tell us, and then trust them to build back the entire planet better. In fact, they were caught on video at their annual World Economic Forum meeting in early 2021 cheering a video of empty city streets and closed-down businesses caused by the government-mandated lockdowns that plunged literally millions into poverty worldwide. The lockdowns are improving cities around the world, said Schwab.[11] They may even moderate climate change, he triumphantly chortled. The unemployed and impoverished residents of those devasted cities would obviously disagree with this rosy scenario.

A team of researchers at the University of East Anglia, an institution that is notorious for its studies of global warming/cooling/climate change hysteria, has also chimed in to advocate a global lockdown every two years to supposedly reduce carbon dioxide emissions as required by the Paris Climate Accord.[12] These lockdowns would not be related to any virus but would simply be designed to intentionally destroy much of the world economy, leaving millions in abject poverty, causing untold illness and death, for the sake of fighting climate change and of course, to achieve their real objective of destroying capitalism and adopting a version of worldwide socialist central planning.

Abolition of Private Property

The Word Economic Forum (WEF) socialists reveal themselves as classic Marxists in the sense that many of them call for the abolition of private property which, coincidentally, was the first plank of the ten planks of The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. Former Danish Minister of the Environment Ida Auken was given a platform at a WEF event to explain her definition of a good life that entailed the abolition of private property:

Welcome to the year 2030 . . . . I dont own anything, I dont own a car. I dont own a house. I dont own any appliances or any clothes . . . someone else is using our [house] whenever we do not need it . . . . I have no real privacy . . . everything I do . . . is recorded [by the state]. All in all, it is a good life.[13]

Auken here is obviously dreaming of a good life where governments own all property and rent or lease everything to their subjects. Of course, that means that politicians will decide for you what you need. There would be no such thing as consumer sovereignty any more than there was in the Soviet Union (apart from the black markets). And as Hayek famously said, in such a system the only power worth having would be political power. Bribery, corruption, and rent seeking run amok would be pervasive in any such society.

They want to spy on your every move, using the latest nanotechnology which probably means implanting devices into your body. There will no privacy, and thats all good with Ida Auken and her WEF colleagues.

Auken speaks fondly of how, if she wasnt using a room of her house, it would be perfectly fine for strangers to occupy it in her absence. Government-approved strangers, of course. This is eerily reminiscent of how the Soviets socialized housing and forced strangers to live in extremely cramped spaces in communal housing. It is easy to imagine an Auken army doing the same in the name of sustainability.

After receiving criticism of this outrageous view, Auken attempted to soft pedal and disguise her true beliefs by saying that such a world was not actually her utopia but only what she believes is the inevitable. This is another old socialist gimmick to argue that socialism is inevitable, and it is therefore futile to oppose it. Her argument that she was just explaining an inevitable future is not believable.

In fact, the inevitability gimmick is the main theme of all of Schwabs books on the subject. They tend to go into excruciating detail about the digitalization of life, nanotechnology, etc., portray it all as inevitable, and then make a pitch for why this supposedly means that centralized political control of all societies is necessary .

Exactly the opposite is true, however. As Hayek pointed out in almost all of his lifes work. The more complex society becomes, the greater is the need to rely on voluntarism, private property, and free markets, the only known means of achieving an effective use of knowledge in society. Complexity requires the use of many minds (and bodies) to make effective use of increasingly complex knowledge in order to advance. Not only many minds, but many minds in a regime of economic freedom is necessary again the polar opposite of the great reset ideology.

The Soviet Union had many brilliant people but they were largely forbidden to apply their talents in a way that would improve the lives of their fellow citizens. They were viewed by the state instead as tools to aggrandize the state, not to serve the citizenry. To deny this is to engage in what Hayek called a fatal conceit.[14]

The Stakeholder Subterfuge

The WEF elitists also employ another subterfuge as a means of essentially abolishing private property. They do this by advocating the replacement of corporate shareholders with stakeholders, which includes just about every type of group of individuals in any community which are said to have a right to affect corporate decision making on a day-to-day basis.[15] Such groups usually involve various left-wing political pressure groups such as labor unions, environmentalists, the civil rights/affirmative action lobbyists, ad infinitum. Libertarians and free-market economists never seem to appear on the lists of stakeholders that are espoused by leftist stakeholder theorists.

Public choice economics teaches us, however, that such large groups tend to be disorganized because of their size, diversity, and consequently high decision-making costs and are therefore rarely effective. It would also subject corporate decision making to profit-destroying bureaucracy and indecision, effectively turning corporations into versions of say, the Department of Motor Vehicles or the U.S. Postal Service in terms of efficiency.

The stakeholder advocates surely understand this, which is why they propose that people such as themselves serve as unelected spokesmen for all the various stakeholders. This will require the heavy hand of government to empower them to order corporations to do as they say, not as their customers and shareholder owners say. It is de facto nationalization, in other words, an effective abolition of private property in corporations.

In addition to offering no clue that he understands elementary economic principles, Schwab also seems completely clueless about the long history of classical liberal ideas such as private property, free markets, limited constitutional government, decentralized government, the rule of law, and much else. Or, he simply doesnt care because he is a megalomaniacal tyrant. He is no different, in other words, than all the other twentieth century socialists who were either ignorant of these things or openly attacked them as barriers to their totalitarian intentions.

Moreover, Aukens utopian daydream is reminiscent of the late nineteenth century book, Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy. This was another utopian socialist daydream in the form of a novel whereby one Julian West falls asleep in 1887 and awakens 113 years later in the U.S. in the year 2000 when the country had been turned into a socialist utopia. Auken apparently believes it would only take a single decade to achieve her (and Schwabs) socialist utopia, however.

The Great Reset as Super Fascism

The World Economic Forum claims to exist in order to promote an integration of private enterprise and the state. This is a perfect definition of economic fascism.[16] Economic fascism in Mussolinis Italy and Nazi Germany allowed ostensibly private enterprises to exist (unlike the Russian socialists), but only if it was subjected to a totalitarian regulatory regime that forced all production to serve the common good as defined by the political ruling class, not the ruled. Consumer sovereignty was not at all a concern. Schwab uses this same language of the common good to describe his great reset agenda.

It is basically a plea to turn the entire world economy into a version of Chinese fascism. In the past several decades the Chinese communist government allowed more and more private enterprises to exist, but they are all still very heavily regulated, regimented, and controlled by the state. Of course, the same can be said of the U.S. economy; its all a matter of degree. As Robert Higgs has said, the American economic system is a system of participatory fascism, by which he meant a combination of economic fascism and democracy instead of dictatorship.

After claiming that the Fourth Industrial Revolution in the form of the digitalization of just about everything is inevitable, and arguing that that means there is a need for the most centralized government the world has ever known, Klaus and his associates drag out the same tired, old socialist platitudes that Leftists have been promoting for generations as the alleged answers to all of societys problems. They advocate shutting down more and more of the world economy with more lockdowns (destructionism); a huge expansion of the catastrophically-failed welfare state with the unlimited printing of money by central banks in order to hand out universal basic income to everyone; the eventual abolition of beef in order to fight climate change allegedly caused by cow flatulence; the abolition of virtually all other kinds of meat, replacing it with grass and insects as part of the average diet (presumably not their diet, however); the abolition of the energy industries and their replacement with windmills and solar panels; communal housing, Soviet style; the leveling of wage differences by regulating labor markets essentially null and void, which would create communistic chaos; and the effective nationalization of whatever is left of private society with a 400% increase in taxation (for starters).

There is supposed to be no opposition to this recipe for totalitarian utopia because it is all being done in the name of equity and inclusion (the mating call of Leftists everywhere), sustainability, and the common good. To oppose this latest proposal for a totalitarian world order is, therefore, to be an enemy of society. The common good before individual good, by the way, was also the explicitly-stated theme of the 1920 Nazi Party Platform.[17] According to the World Economic Forum crowd this is the new ideology that is supposed to lead us all through the twenty-first centurys Fourth Industrial Revolution.

[1] Klaus Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (New York: Currency, 2016); Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset (Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2020).

[2] Ron Paul, The Great Reset is about Expanding Government Power and Suppressing Liberty (https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/01/ron-paul-the-great-reset-is-about-expanding-government-power-and-suppresing-libety/).

[3] Antony Mueller, The United Nations and the Origins of The Great Reset (https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/11/antony-mueller-/the-united-nations-and-the-origins-of-the-great-reset/).

[4] Gary D. Barnett, Eugenics is Alive and Well, and the COVID-19 Scam is the Engine for Accomplishing Depopulation (https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/02/gary-d-barnett/eugenics-is-alive-and-well-and-the-covid-19-scam-is-the-engine-for-accomplishing-depopulation/).

[5] Antony Mueller, The United Nations and the Origins of The Great Reset.

[6] Myron Ebell and Steven Milloy, Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-Pocalyptic Predictions, (https://www.cei.org/wong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-population-predictions/).

[7] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, The World is Going to End in Twelve Years if We Dont Address Climate Change (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2019/01/22/ocasio-cortez-climate-change-alarm/264281002/).

[8] Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell, Jr., How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World (New York: Basic Books, 1987).

[9] Carl Menger, On the Origins of Money (https://mises.org/library/origins-money-0).

[10] Ludwig von Mises, Socialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951), p. 457.

[11] Jim Holt, World Economic Forum Deletes Latest Video After Cheering Global Lockdowns that Pushed 100 Million Humans into Extreme Poverty (https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/02/world-economic-forum-deletes-latest-video-after-cheering-global-lockdowns-that-pushed-100-millio-humans-into-extreme-poverty/).

[12] Helen Buyniski, Global Lockdown Every Two Years Needed to Meet Paris CO2 Goals (https://www.rt.com/news/517146-climate-lockdowns-every-two-years/).

[13] Ida Auken, Welcome to 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy and Life Has Never Been Better (https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/shopping-i-cant-really-remember-what-that-is-or-how-differetly-we-live-in-2030/?sh=3d95793e1735).

[14] F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

[15] See George Reisman, Shareholders Not Stakeholders (https://misesorg/wire/shareholders-not-stakeholders); and Gary Galles, Why Shareholders are Better Than Corporate Stakeholders(https://mises.org/library/why-shareholders-are-better-corporte-stakeholders).(https://mises.org/library/why-shareholders-are-better-corporte-stakeholders).

[16] Lew Rockwell, Fascism versus Capitalism (Auburn, Alabama: Mises Institute, 2013).

[17] https://historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/25points.htm.

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The Great Nonsense of The Great Reset - LewRockwell

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The US Government and Its Military Have Declared War on … – LewRockwell

Posted: at 7:39 pm

Although tyrannymay successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.

~ Hannah Arendt

In order for tyrants to claim and retain total power, the people must become ignorant of their own history and roots, and must through propaganda and fear be so terrified as to abandon all logic and responsibility in order to seek a false safety. In this country today, history and tradition are being destroyed, while the ruling class and government have stoked immense fear based on a propaganda campaign that was used to create a make-believe threat called Covid-19. Every element is now in place to transfer all power to the state, and in order for that coup to be successful for the tyrants, all dissent and disobedience to totalitarian mandates must be squelched. The key element to accomplish this lies in the ability for the government to instill division and distrust among the people themselves; so much so, that the masses turn on each other to assure compliance to order to have a false sense of security. This leads to voluntary servitude, which is vital to the evil governing system, because once force is the only option for the state, chaos, revolution, or violent civil unrest will replace tyranny.

The Origins of Totalit...Hannah ArendtBest Price: $8.49Buy New $12.90(as of 06:35 UTC - Details)With this in mind, the plot to achieve an economic and technological reset is being pursued through lies and propaganda at every level, including the use of the military within the boundaries of the United States. This is happening globally as well, and in fact is far advanced in some areas of the world. This should be of extreme importance to Americans, because what is happening in other parts of the world will soon be on our doorstep, as the areas around the globe experiencing more extreme control measures are being used as tests to gauge when to let loose similar policies here. It is only a matter of time.

Next door in Canada, the military is openly using propaganda methods as training in order to understand how that population can be maneuvered into a position of total compliance. In Australia, where extreme gun control efforts in the past disarmed the entire citizenry, brutal controls are now in place to capture and contain the people so that any resistance can be eliminated. Harsh measures and mandates are also being ramped up again in the U.K. Compulsory vaccination legislation is also going forward in Australia, with possible long jail time and high fines for refusal to comply. Gun control and a state monopoly of arms and force is always a prerequisite to totalitarian rule. Most Americans still have the legal ability to possess weapons, but that could change with any new legislation, or emergency executive orders due to a contrived and purposely structured threat. If the people give up their arms, they would stand defenseless in the face of a heavily armed state and military. That cannot be allowed to happen.

The Human Condition: S...Allen, DanielleBest Price: $15.00Buy New $15.99(as of 02:44 UTC - Details)One of the major plots to gain control over the masses rests in the development and distribution of vaccines. Trump said recently that Pfizer Pharmaceuticals had developed and successfully tested a Covid vaccine. This was an outright lie meant to gain political favor in this time of a contentious election battle. In addition, Trump had made an announcement earlier that he had deployed the military to stand ready to distribute these poisonous vaccines across the nation. This borders on insanity, and is an attempt to frighten the herd so greatly by claiming this vaccine delivery should be a military operation. But as it stands now, this government and its military, as well as all police and security forces, are at war against the people of the United States. In other words, the new enemy of America according to the self-claimed ruling elites and their pawns in government are all of us lowly citizens.

While we are in the midst of the most corrupt and criminal election fraud in our history, and this includes many players from both sides, but especially on the left this time around, and the entirety of the mainstream media, the masses are ignoring what is continuing to go on concerning the takeover of this country and the world. Covid-19 seems to be on the back burner for the moment, and playing second fiddle to the election circus, but that is not the case. All the nefarious agendas concerning this fraudulent virus pandemic are not only still in place, but advancing without pause. More lockdowns are occurring in this country and globally, and vaccine plans are in place. Pfizer has openly stated that they already have a stockpile of vaccines awaiting the go ahead from the FDA, even though no serious testing whatsoever has occurred. I have stated many times that this Covid vaccine has been available for a long time, waiting for the right moment to be released on the public. Depending on the outcome of this selection by the ruling class, the entire country could be shut down almost overnight. Plans are set to increase the tyranny, and blame it on this fake virus, and regardless of who is chosen to be the next president; there will be substantial trouble ahead.The Politics of Obedie...Etienne de la BoetieBest Price: $7.00Buy New $7.00(as of 05:45 UTC - Details)

The U.S. governments primary enemies today are the American people, all of us, especially any that question and disobey state mandates. What is planned and what is possible in the near future is staggering. New lockdowns seem imminent at this point, and could be handed down at the national level, which would vastly increase the risk of federal and military policing and martial law. Isolation from friends and family will increase, and job loss will escalate as more lockdowns occur, causing an economic catastrophe, which will lead to a digital monetary restructuring. Travel will become even more impossible, and even local borders could close or be heavily restricted. Those that refuse the forthcoming deadly vaccination will find themselves in a virtual prison, as without a vaccine or health pass, normal life and sustaining any normal life will disappear. Surveillance that is already expansive will become so invasive as to eliminate all privacy, inside or outside the home. Contact tracing will likely become a federal system, with tens or hundreds of thousands of new government workers with one mission; to spy on and report any not acquiescing to government rules. Food shortages that are already evident in many areas would dramatically worsen, causing hunger, poverty, and sickness. Parents brave enough to protect their children by refusing toxic vaccines or quarantine could have their children removed from the home. All this could easily bring about unrest, rioting, looting, and violence as well, whether purposely designed or not, and this could in turn lead to internal warlike scenarios, especially in the cities.The Demon in Democracy...Legutko, RyszardBest Price: $11.33Buy New $11.87(as of 05:06 UTC - Details)

This is no time to be complacent, and no time to ignore these risks. Worse times are coming regardless of this political nonsense, and increased control will be prevalent no matter the final outcome of this state selection process. Wake up people, as our lives are losing all meaning, and all the joy, emotion, and love of life are being systematically destroyed in favor of technocratic transhumanism, which can only lead to a robotic existence devoid of wonder and feeling.

Extreme evil is coming, and hell is coming with it, so cowardice in the face of this evil; refusing to take risks to remain free, guarantees a deserved slavery.

Sources: Here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

How to Opt-Out of the ...Broze, DerrickBest Price: $12.50Buy New $12.00(as of 04:52 UTC - Details)The Conscious Resistan...Broze, DerrickBest Price: $8.25Buy New $12.00(as of 04:52 UTC - Details)

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The US Government and Its Military Have Declared War on ... - LewRockwell

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Tech for Me, but Not for Thee: Psalm 8 Meets Transhumanism

Posted: at 7:39 pm

I wrote to the late, great Becky Akers about a year before her too-early passing early in 2022. I wanted to share with her my horror upon learning that an academic had just published a book suggesting that all of humanity should be eliminated in the cause of saving the environment. Eliminated. I was familiar enough with Beckys own work to know that she would drop her jaw (as I did) upon finding yet another ostensibly educated person pronouncing her way out of our scientific world right back into the realm of (supposedly discredited) metaphysical decisions. The professor in question I wont here give her name or the title of her book so as to avoid granting her one scintilla of publicity decided it was her place to pontificate regarding humanity-ending decisions. The kinds of decisions that belonged, during sane eras, to God Almighty. Bring to an end all of mankind? Hey why not? She has a PhD, right?

Returning to sanity, for a moment. About man and his role in life, death, and the environment, one of my favorite Psalms says this:

You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;You have put all things under his feet,All sheep and oxenEven the beasts of the field,The birds of the air,And the fish of the seaThat pass through the paths of the seas.

Its certainly true that in our era, just like the academic about whom Becky and I marveled, there are now teeming millions of our fellow human beings currently bowing to elements of nature (or, the earth, or to Gaia, or the environment pick the name of your idol). These folks willingly worship and revere that which is neither eternal nor divine.

So its almost confusing to read straightforward words, from God, no less, about man exercising dominion. Really? Were to prevail upon nature, upon the environment, that false god so widely revered, venerated, and even downright worshipped in our day? Needless to say, unlike our unnamed academic, the Psalm says not one word suggesting collective suicide in behalf of the environment, in some sort of macabre twisting of Gods mandate to assert dominion. (As an aside, Ill note that those turning nature and the environment into false gods do so apparently ignorant of the most basic teachings provided by any decent Sunday School: Bad things come to idolaters. Really bad things.)

Sure, there might be room for a tad bit of confusion as to who, exactly, exercises dominion over nature, given that the Psalmist uses metonymy to define his subject: What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You visit him? For You have made him a little lower than the angels, and You have crowned him with glory and honor.

Quibblers could (and probably do) ask, what exactly does the Psalmist mean here by, man? One thing is perfectly clear, though: The eighth Psalm makes no mention about governments, nations, or corporations exerting said dominion. Nor does the Psalmist suggest that God grants this globe-spanning dominion over nature to only select groups, such as Yuval Hararis most intelligent among us, nor the cyborg-ish post-humans found in the dreams of Lee Silver, Ray Kurzweil, Gregory Stock, and a growing number of transhumanists in our midst.

Just as fascinating to me, being a post-Nietzschean, is the eighth Psalms lack of mention of an Ubermensch. Which is to say: Nothing in the Psalmists wording seems to exclude any old regular Joe from exerting dominion over even the arcane aspects of Gods green earth. Granted, I, being a regular Joe if there ever was one, dont spend much time where the fish of the sea pass through. But the Psalms wording suggests that even those nuances of nature normally hidden from view (i.e., the paths of the seas) are ripe for the taming. I.e., for taming by us the contented members of regular-Joe tribes.

Tech for Me, but not for Thee

But today theres even more confusion about man and his relationship to nature than any we might encounter when reading the eighth Psalm. Think about it: Is there not something grotesquely odd about todays leaders funding research into the most nature-intrusive experimental technology anyone has ever imagined, while simultaneously egging on the masses to hate and abandon life-sustaining, reliable, and simple technologies like firewood and food fertilizer? How much cognitive dissonance are we to accept? Were now learning about multiple labs around the world looking into altering the DNA of viruses so that they can better infiltrate and influence the bodies of human beings. I speak here of the newly infamous gain of function research. Yet, at the same time, were being told that collecting firewood (or, Gaia forbid coal!) to heat hearth and home is an act of selfishness at best. Nothing funny about the logic of the elites there, eh?

So clearly one issue at question here is limits. And more specifically, the issues at hand involve determining who applies limits to technology? And these limits are applied for what purpose? When and where do we apply these limits, and perhaps the most intriguing question we impose these limits for the benefit or protection of whom?

During the many centuries in which stirrups and leather saddles, a coal-fired smithy, or a tall-masted wooden ship were somewhere near the apex of technology, maybe it made little sense to concern ourselves about placing limits upon mans manipulation of nature. Those hot-coal fires of yesteryear, after all, pounded out merely one life-threatening knife or sword at a time. And thankfully those swords neither procreated nor morphed into oddly named variants chasing through our cloth masks. (Kraken swords, anyone?)

To be more blunt: Whereas for the ancient Greeks, Prometheus may have deserved the wrath of Zeus, his revelations to men about fire did not generate anything nearly as deadly as Faucis gain-of-function research. Fauci and Prometheus now theres an odd but rightly-paired couple for you.

But heres the rub: Today, while financial and technological elites are toying with ideas far more deadly than even nuclear technology, with some of them bragging openly about creating entirely new species of post-humans, millions of citizens all over Europe and North America are self destructing by way of clamoring for states to outlaw simple technologies that form the very backbone of our continued physical existence.

Theres some small degree of resolution to this dissonance if we acknowledge that straightforward elitism explains the current tech for me, but not for thee approach: Largely the same financial elites funding and encouraging death labs own or control much of the media and communication technology stirring up the wrath of Zeus in the common man the common man being the newly angry regular Joes guys very much like me. Which is another way of highlighting the sad fact that a Prince Philip could enjoy the life of royal luxury, jet-setting about the globe, while simultaneously writing in the preface to a childrens book that in the future hed like to return to earth as a deadly virus so that he could help kill people. (One presumes this future-Philip-virus would be engineered to bypass fellow royalty and elites? Maybe well have a high-tech new version of the Passover?)

Destructive Dialectic, Anyone?

The Psalmist neither called us to pagan mindsets that attribute sentience to various flavors of nature-idols, nor did he imply that our dominion over nature should reflect any version of abusive control or monstrous domination. With apologies to PETA, his wording suggests a warm welcome to farmers and fishermen. Heck, as a one-time aviator, I even like to imagine the reference to dominion over the birds of the air may have foreshadowed aviation. (Yes, I realize thats a stretch.)

But the enemy of our souls wants a lack of balance, both in us as individual children of God and within our communities and societies. Old Scratch encourages a complete disdain for harmony and moderation. There may even be yet another wicked dialectic at work here:

Theres an irony of sorts at work here. Lust of chaos a twisted desire for the kind of bedlam that ensues when we fail to address our lack of respect for the natural order as given by God Himself has a mirror sin in lust of control. The writer of the eighth Psalm suggests what for millennia has been an accepted norm: That men, in their love of God and in their appropriate respect for His creation, shepherd all His creatures. Then along comes a wanna-be Prometheus with laboratories full of new fire. And as that fire evolves it becomes clear that soul-crushing (not to mention body-destroying) control of not just animals, fish, and birds is possible, but that this new tech can harness yet another of todays idols: Human evolution itself.

Yes, its true. Read the works of todays purveyors of transhumanism, and youll see that their Holy Grail is an admixture of biology, nanotech, and genetic engineering, operating in an infrastructure of technocracy, and put in motion to literally re-engineer humanity. Survival of the fittest changes its stripes the moment you put both the definition of fittest and the timeline and conditions of survival into the purview of well-funded lab coats. Transhumanists blush not at all when altering the definition of either (or both) of these words.

In my aging God-given skin, and even with my increasingly creaky DNA, given the choice between the new fire of transhumanism or the Psalmists (implied) endorsement of a life of fishing and farming, Ill take the hoe and a fishing net. While Im out and about, casting and digging, please get the firewood stacked and ready.

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Tech for Me, but Not for Thee: Psalm 8 Meets Transhumanism

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