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State Power and Covid Crimes

The three major controversies over pandemic management for the past three years have been lockdown measures, universal masking recommendations and mandates, and Covid vaccines. 

The last was a pharmaceutical intervention using revolutionary new technology. The first two were radical departures from the existing scientific and policy consensus as encapsulated in official documents from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and in several national pandemic preparedness plans. They established the willingness of the state to dictate every aspect of people’s lives, down to the most ridiculous and absurd details. 

For example, people were told when they could shop, the hours during which they could shop, what they could purchase, how close they could get to others and which direction they could move in by following arrows on the floor. Governments also stepped into nations’ bedrooms at home to dictate with whom people could and could not be intimate: a ukase that notoriously turned Professor Neil ‘Lockdown’ Ferguson himself into Professor Pantsdown.

Lockdowns thus proved the extent to which people would comply with state directives without deploying independent critical thinking and, like frogs in boiling water, their almost total lack of concern about the gradually increasing degree of infringements of civil liberties and personal freedoms. 

Compliance with often idiotic rules was ratcheted up to another level still with mask recommendations-cum-mandates, with one additional notable feature. Governments were able to mobilise members of the public to exert peer pressure and societal coercion to enforce compliance, backed by often brutal police coercion against pockets of resistance and protest. 

In retrospect, it’s doubtful if the degree of state and social coercion deployed to increase vaccine uptake would have been possible without the ground having first been prepared with lockdowns and masks.

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10 Scandals To Keep Your Eye On In 2023

The new year is upon us and with it a fresh start for more corruption. But 2023 also offers the opportunity to bring closure to some long-running scandals. Here are 10 to track in the upcoming year.

1. Government’s Puppeteering of Big Tech and Media

The ongoing release of the “Twitter Files” closed 2022 with a new scandal, as the internal communications of the tech giant exposed extensive coordination between the government and Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other big players controlling the flow of information. While conservatives have known — and complained — for years of Big Tech’s censorship and shadowbanning, by purchasing Twitter and giving independent journalists access to corporate emails, Elon Musk provided indisputable confirmation that Twitter both censored and blacklisted conservatives.

The censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story and the silencing of scientific criticism of the government’s heavy-handed Covid regime, both at the prompting of federal agents, proved the most appalling. 

As Musk continues to provide access to internal communications, a watchful eye is warranted in 2023.

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Guns for Me but Not for Thee

It’s 2023, and two of America’s deep-blue governors are still having conniptions over the June 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association vs. Bruen that threw out the need for a justifiable reason to receive a permit to carry a concealed weapon (CCW). While bound to follow the Bruen decision, both are doing everything they can to sidestep the ruling through legislative and executive fiat.

New Jersey, New York, and California are America’s triumvirate of extremely gun unfriendly states.  They are led by Democrat governors and legislatures that march to a progressive drumbeat, promote economic and social policies onerous to businesses large and small, and force their overtaxed, working residents to subsidize sanctuary policies that have turned their states into strongholds for illegal immigrants and vagrants.

All three governors have retained their emergency powers into the post-pandemic era, reviving them as needed to invoke programs and policies that regulate many aspects of their constituents’ lives.  Above all, they harbor an intense hatred for a citizenry under arms, in keeping with their dim view of the Founding Fathers who understood in framing the Second Amendment that to “disarm the people was the best and most effectual way to enslave them.”

One month after the Bruen decision, New York acting Governor Kathy Hochul thumbed her nose at the Court by signing a gun law that designated when and where you could carry a concealed weapon.  The new rules created a list of “sensitive locations,” prohibiting weapons at government facilities, parks, churches, schools, public transportation, and entertainment venues.  Intruding on private property rights, Hochul banned weapons in all establishments serving alcohol and ordered that commercial businesses of all shapes and sizes must post signage in plain view giving explicit approval to carry weapons on the premises, going so far as to provide a downloadable sign for posting on a government website.  Absence of a storefront notice would be taken as a presumptive gun prohibition lacking the proprietor’s express consent.  In the stroke of a pen, all of New York City had become a gun-free zone, as well as anywhere else in the Empire State where constituents go about their social and professional lives.  Legal challenges immediately followed, as the law is patently unconstitutional in its scope and severity, but a federal judge refused an injunctive stay pending an appeal.

New Jersey governor Phil Murphy is a garden-variety progressive Democrat of privilege who has freely admitted to his ignorance of the Bill of Rights and has often adopted the disastrous policies of his New York counterparts rather than think through the consequences to his own state; for example, the COVID nursing-home scandal, emptying jails, and free money and welfare programs for illegal immigrants. In December, Murphy latched on to Hochul’s post-Bruen CCW restrictions, enacting the same list of barred locations that add on to an already existing regulatory burden of multiple background investigations and approvals, mandatory training, ammunition limits, waiting periods, and storage requirements for home and transport that puts locked and unloaded weapons out of an owner’s reach during a critical need for self-defense.  Permit fees are now skyrocketing in the Garden State, and new liability insurance requirements will have a disparate impact upon low-income residents, creating for them an economic deprivation of their Second Amendment rights in populated areas and urban settings where self-defense against violent crime sees its most acute need.

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Attacks on US churches tripled since 2018, often politically motivated, report says

Attacks on churches in the United States have nearly tripled in the last four years, and many have political motivations, according to a new study.

Evangelical activist group and think tank The Family Research Council (FRC) argues that criminal acts of vandalism against a church, among other forms of attacks, are “symptomatic of a collapse in societal reverence and respect for houses of worship and religion.” With an emphasis on Christianity, FRC researched the trend of criminal acts against churches over the last four years.

FRC utilized FBI data for its report, which groups Catholics, Protestants, Eastern Orthodox and “other Christians” under Christianity.

The report released earlier this month found a significant upward trend in attacks or “acts of hostility.”

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America’s Forgotten Reign of Terror

Exactly a hundred years ago this morning—on January 3, 1920—Americans woke up to discover just how little their own government regarded the cherished Bill of Rights. During the night, some 4,000 of their fellow citizens were rounded up and jailed for what amounted, in most cases, to no good reason at all and no due process, either.

Welcome to the story of the Palmer Raids, named for their instigator, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Though largely forgotten today, they shouldn’t be. They constituted a horrific, shameful episode in American history, one of the lowest moments for liberty since King George III quartered troops in private homes.

The terror during the night of January 2-3, 1920, shocked and frightened many citizens. In her 1971 book, America’s Reign of Terror: World War I, the Red Scare, and the Palmer Raids, Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht wrote:

[T]error is not just a body count. Terror exists when a person can be sentenced to years in prison for an idle remark; when people are pulled out of their beds and arrested; when 4,000 persons are seized in a single night; and when arrests and searches are made without warrants. Moreover, for each person sent to prison for his views, many others were silenced. The author amply documents the government’s insensitivity to civil liberties during this period, its frequent brutality and callousness, and the personal grief that ensued.

The targets of the Palmer raids were radicals and leftists deemed by the Wilson administration to be hostile to “American values.” Ironically, none of those arrested had done anywhere near as much harm to those values as the man living in the White House—Woodrow Wilson, arguably the worst of the country’s 45 presidents. More on that and the Palmer Raids after some background.

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Ukraine Arms Trafficking: The Waltz of Bloody Clowns

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Through an unprecedented outpouring of solidarity (especially with regard to the management of the health crisis), Europe has sent massive arms to Ukraine. Weapons that will undoubtedly end up killing Pierre, Jacques, Anne, even you or me.

This is the boomerang effect already seen through the ridiculous imposition of “sanctions trains”: before releasing 100 million euros to equip the Ukrainian armed forces, it is hard to believe that French President Emmanuel Macron did not understand the risk that its weapons will be used to equip entities that do not care about France’s interests in protecting its own population. (1)

Since last March, the NATO and G7 countries have been massively feeding President Zelensky and his clique with weapons of all kinds. (2)

The hunger of Kiev’s bloody clown is never satisfied, however.

In doing so, many of these weapons also end up in the hands of various terrorist groups around the world, including in Africa, fueling political instability there. (3)

The director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Samantha Power, indicated that Ukraine spends “the staggering amount of six billion dollars each month” on the war, this sum being provided to Zelensky by his Western ‘partners.’ (4)

These are hundreds of thousands of pistols, assault rifles, submachine guns and grenades, and hundreds of millions of cartridges of various calibers exported to Ukraine over the past eight months. Even NATO-supported Kosovo Albanians have not benefited from such largess.

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Cops Killed More People in 2022 than Any Year on Record — Here’s How to Stop It from Happening Again

As 2023 begins, American police polish off another deadly year, ending 1,176 lives in 2022. This number is a new record for police killings in America and yet still, it is set to increase by one, on average, every 8 hours.

Since 2018, cops in America have killed 5,668 citizens. And most people are not saying anything about it.

While it may be easy for some to write off police killings as a problem of American gun culture, this is not major factor. According to a report by the Institute for Criminal Justice Training Reform (ICJTR), Finland has one the highest gun-ownership rates in Europe, with around 32 civilian firearms per 100 people – but incidents of police shooting civilians are extremely rare. We could only find 9 examples of police killings in Finland in the last two decades, one of which was an accidental shooting of a prison guard.

What’s more, as TFTP reported in 2021, the majority of police killings involve calls in which there was no crime or the suspect is only suspected of a non-violent offense.

“Most killings began with police responding to suspected non-violent offenses or cases where no crime was reported,” according to a report from PoliceViolenceReport.org

It gets worse.

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Babies put at risk, even killed, in ‘reputable’ studies over the years

Public health officials and other medical professionals have helped untold millions over the years. But the hard truth is that some have hurt many.

This was a difficult lesson I learned many times when I was assigned to investigate FDA, CDC, NIH and pharmaceutical industry scandals at CBS News.

One of the most heartbreaking early stories I investigated in 2000 was the death of a baby who was given an experimental heartburn drug called Propulsid as part of a study. His death had been ruled a mysterious SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) death.

Little Gage Stevens’ parents didn’t know that the drug he took, Propulsid, had been linked to dozens of deaths, including at least one other baby, before Gage even got his first dose. Shortly after Gage died, Propulsid was pulled from the market — linked to more than 300 deaths.

Read the death certificate on Gage.

My investigation revealed that the study consent form falsely stated Propulsid, made by Johnson and Johnson, was “approved by the FDA” for children. In fact, the Food and Drug Administration had repeatedly rejected it for pediatric use.

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Drone advances in Ukraine could bring dawn of killer robots

Drone advances in Ukraine have accelerated a long-anticipated technology trend that could soon bring the world’s first fully autonomous fighting robots to the battlefield, inaugurating a new age of warfare.

The longer the war lasts, the more likely it becomes that drones will be used to identify, select and attack targets without help from humans, according to military analysts, combatants and artificial intelligence researchers.

That would mark a revolution in military technology as profound as the introduction of the machine gun. Ukraine already has semi-autonomous attack drones and counter-drone weapons endowed with AI. Russia also claims to possess AI weaponry, though the claims are unproven. But there are no confirmed instances of a nation putting into combat robots that have killed entirely on their own.

Experts say it may be only a matter of time before either Russia or Ukraine, or both, deploy them.

“Many states are developing this technology,” said Zachary Kallenborn, a George Mason University weapons innovation analyst. ”Clearly, it’s not all that difficult.”

The sense of inevitability extends to activists, who have tried for years to ban killer drones but now believe they must settle for trying to restrict the weapons’ offensive use.

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Bankman-Fried Asks Judge To Hide Identities Of Bail Guarantors

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has asked a judge to conceal the identities of two people who will help secure his bail in addition to his parents’ house in Palo Alto, California, Bloomberg reports.

“If the two remaining sureties are publicly identified, they will likely be subjected to probing media scrutiny, and potentially targeted for harassment, despite having no substantive connection to the case,” wrote SBF’s lawyers in a letter filed on Tuesday seeking redactions of the names of the two individuals who intend to sign as sureties to his bail.

“Consequently, the privacy and safety of the sureties are “countervailing factors” that significantly outweigh the presumption of public access to the very limited information at issue,” the letter continues.

Bankman-Fried’s $250 million bail package – granted in his first appearance on US soil since his arrest in the Bahamas, was secured by his parents’ Palo Alto home, which is worth nowhere near that amount. The judge in the case also required that two people of “considerable means,” at least one of whom cannot be a relative, also sign the bond.

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