Tag: nanny state

The Church of State: Taxonomy of a New Religion

Darkness descends over civilization and freedom. It flows not from any external threat but from within the human heart. We are beings capable of happiness and flourishing, but sometimes we push our fears and anxieties into the shadows. There they fester. And from those deep psychological bowers, fear and anxiety reemerge transformed. 

To live right now, then, is to live in paradox. Despite conditions of relative peace and abundance, a psychosocial pathology has taken hold. It manifests itself as something like a replacement religion. Where people once turned to their temples and communities for reassurance, more turn now to political authority. Merchants of fear magnify the significance of certain human problems, which obscures complicated truths and feeds the dogmas of this new faith. Adherents believe they are on the side of the angels, but their faith threatens to bring about a new Dark Age. Why? Because more and more people in the grip of this religion are willing to use illiberal means.

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How Many Zombie Agencies Does Government Need?

How many federal agencies do we pay for?  I bet you think, as I once did, that a quick internet search would tell.  But researching for an essay a couple of years ago, I found numbers varying from 78 to 158, and websites saying the exact number was impossible to determine. 

Looking at the USA.gov website recently, I discovered a tab for Federal Agencies A to Z (actually there are none past W).  Scrolling around the list for two days, subtracting duplicate listings, like Useless Policy, Office of and Office of Useless Policy, I counted 456 (and a few more as I checked some links while drafting this essay). 

The large number of agencies was my first, but not my only surprise.  Each agency’s listing had a field for government branch, mostly filled with Executive, some Legislative, some Judicial.  But sometimes that field contained: Independent, Quasi, or None.  How can we have parts of government that are not part of a branch of our government?

It amused me that some agency names made it easy to guess when they were created.  Delinquency was a focus in the 1930s; nuclear threats, 1950s; civil rights, 1960s; cyberterrorism, after 2001.

This just started with to know how many federal agencies we have.  But discovering there are agencies decades past their freshness date, begs to be explored. This essay is a just cursory view.

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If The Left Ends Parent Rights, You Might Need A License To Raise Your Own Child

Parents are now more aware than ever that their right to raise their own children is in danger. Recent election results in Virginia and elsewhere testify to that awakening. A lot of the news focused on the public school curriculum of critical race theory, which pits children against one another based on their race. Parents never signed on to that.

But they’re also waking up to a host of other disturbing trends in public education. An extremist sex education curriculum includes pornography and pushes transgenderism. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) instruction tells kids exactly how they should feel and relate to others while using invasive data-mining to collect psycho-social information on them.

COVID-19 mask and vaccine mandates are another point of contention. All of these directives hijack the role of parents as the emotional and moral guides of their children.

Parents ought to be asking: What next? If those trends are left unchecked, I think the answer could be the state licensing of parents.

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Infrastructure Bill to Require ‘Breathalyzer’-Style Systems in All Cars by 2026

Automakers will be required to install ‘breathalyzer’-style systems in all new cars starting in 2026 as part of the trillion-dollar infrastructure bill.

The Transportation Department will be tasked with developing the new technology automakers will be forced to install on vehicles.

The system must “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired,” according to the broadly-written legislation.

It may not entail blowing into a tube, but the system could involve something even more Orwellian: infrared cameras that track and monitor driver behavior.

“That technology is already being installed by automakers such as General Motors, BMW, and Nissan to track driver attentiveness while using partially automated driver-assist systems,” according to the AP. “The cameras make sure a driver is watching the road, and they look for signs of drowsiness, loss of consciousness, or impairment.”

Ostensibly, the “driver behavior” monitoring system could expanded later on for “carbon tax” enforcement, such as charging drivers who drive too fast, for example.

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Dr. Fauci: A tyrant from out of The Twilight Zone

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector. —Plato

Observing Doctor Fauci’s behavior since the start of this COVID-19 pandemic, I am reminded of an episode of the original Twilight Zone series written by Rod Serling: “On Thursday We Leave for Home.”  According to The Twilight Zone Companion, by Marc Scott Zicree, Serling considered it the best episode of the fourth season.  It is an excellent example of tyrants — how they are made and how they behave.  It’s also consistent with Plato’s succinct definition.

James Whitmore plays William Benteen, the leader of a colony of Earth people who have been living on a colony planet.  They left Earth because of the conditions there and went in search of their own paradise.  The colony planet was anything but a paradise.  In order to keep up their spirits, Benteen tells the people stories of how wonderful Earth was when he lived there.  Many of the people are too young to remember or were born on the colony planet.

Benteen learns that a rescue ship is coming to take everyone home on Thursday.  When the people learn of this rescue mission, Benteen changes his stories about Earth.  When they remind Benteen of the fact that he told them stories of how wonderful Earth was, his response is, “I lied to you to make you feel better.  Now I’m telling you the truth for your own good.”

This is consistent with the flip-flops that Doctor Fauci has given us from the beginning.  He said masks don’t protect you.  In fact, years earlier, he said that very thing.  At the time, he called them a paranoid tool.  Then he changed his tune and said everyone should wear a mask.  Next, he suggested a mask mandate.  When he was confronted with his own words, he echoed Benteen’s response: I lied to you so there wouldn’t be a rush on masks.  Now I’m telling you the truth for your own good.

It’s troubling that he didn’t concern himself with the hoarding and shortages of toilet paper, paper towels, hand sanitizer, or food.  That’s exactly what happened when he called for a home quarantine for fourteen days to “flatten the curve.”

Benteen begins to respond in such a way that it becomes apparent that he is afraid of losing his power over the colony’s people.  He changes from the great protector to the authoritarian.  He insists that if they return home, the colonists must remain isolated from the rest of Earth for their own good.  Doctor Fauci refers to this same mandate as “social distancing,” which he said may be necessary until 2022.  He has stated that he wasn’t sure if we should cancel Christmas this year again, like his Grinch-like mandate of 2020.

Think back to how Doctor Fauci was portrayed by the media at the beginning of this pandemic versus now.  In the beginning, he was the great protector, just as Plato describes in his definition.  A baker in my hometown made a Doctor Fauci donut to honor the great doctor.  There was other fawning over him, including a disastrous first pitch at a baseball game.  The accuracy of that pitch parallels his medical advice.

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Universities Deputize Students As Mask Police To Snitch On Peers For Money

How much would you have to be paid to commit social suicide? What if a paycheck wasn’t the only perk, but it also entitled you to a sickening sense of self-righteousness and an air of superiority? 

This appears to be the tradeoff many college students have made this semester as universities’ “Student Health Ambassadors,” paid adult hall monitors whose job is to patrol their campuses and enforce mask policies and distancing regulations. Several different institutions have opened this position, each one slightly different but all giving students authority over their peers in the name of public health. 

One of the most egregious examples comes from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where student Covid commissars have been given the authority to “break up social gatherings” and to check students’ “clearance certificates.” Students who violate COVID policies can face suspension and expulsion. The enforcers, who are paid $15 an hour, even don vests and T-shirts emblazoned with the health ambassador logo. 

Other universities have taken similar approaches. The school that I attend, Pepperdine University, has launched a program to “train and deploy” students to “monitor” their peers for “COVID-19 policy compliance,” a gig that conveniently comes with a high visibility bright blue T-shirt. Pepperdine has also decided to use the carrot instead of just the stick, now giving out raffle tickets to those who are wearing masks. 

Similar “health ambassador” positions have opened up at various universities, including at the University of Rochester, the University of California at Davis, New York University, Penn State, and the Washington University in St. Louis, where the student workers wear yellow shirts bearing the phrase “If you can read this, you’re too close” and an elite division has been dispatched to be “cubby monitors” who monitor private study rooms.

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Tyrants of the Nanny State: When the Government Thinks It Knows Best

“Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers’ enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.”—Simone Weil, French philosopher and political activist

We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, carried out in the so-called name of the national good by an elite class of governmental and corporate officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.

We, the middling classes, are not so fortunate.

We find ourselves badgered, bullied and browbeaten into bearing the brunt of their arrogance, paying the price for their greed, suffering the backlash for their militarism, agonizing as a result of their inaction, feigning ignorance about their backroom dealings, overlooking their incompetence, turning a blind eye to their misdeeds, cowering from their heavy-handed tactics, and blindly hoping for change that never comes.

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Schools gave laptops to kids during pandemic — then they spied on the students for their own good

Schools across the United States reportedly handed out laptops to pupils for distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic — and then spied on them with the very same electronic device, according to a Monday report from The Guardian.

What are the details?

According to recently released research from the Center for Democracy and Technology, 86% of teachers polled said their schools provided electronic learning devices — such as tablets, laptops, and Chromebooks — for students to use at home at nearly double the rate when compared year over year.

Many of those devices, however, were reportedly being used to monitor students — even going as far as to “[comb] through private chats, emails, and documents” — in order to protect them from harassment and suicidal ideations.

The research noted that more than 80% of teachers surveyed admitted that their schools used such surveillance software on those student devices.

One anonymous administrator told the Center for Democracy and Technology that many teachers believe that spying on kids for the greater good will have only positive impacts on the students being surveilled.

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