Uvalde Footage Underscores the Myth of Police Protection: ‘Just Call 9-1-1’ thumbnail

Uvalde Footage Underscores the Myth of Police Protection: ‘Just Call 9-1-1’

By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

The gunman walked into Robb Elementary School almost casually.

Minutes earlier he had crashed a vehicle near the school, spraying three bullets at a pair of men who approached the scene to see if he was okay. After walking into the school, AR-15 in hand, the gunman takes a right turn down a hallway. From a different hallway, a child sees the gunman. The child pauses, watches, and then jumps at a roar of gunfire. He darts away.

Less than three minutes later, police officers begin to fill the corridor, weapons drawn.

The scene described comes from new video footage obtained by The Statesman and KVUE News on the May 24 mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which left 22 people dead and 18 injured. (Editor’s note: the footage, which is embedded below, does NOT show anyone being shot.)

NEW

The @statesman and @KVUE have obtained body cam footage and security camera footage from the shooting at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary.

Pay close attention to the time stamp in the upper left hand corner.

You don’t see anyone get shot in this video. https://t.co/HsytsOa0tR pic.twitter.com/L9JSse9SeD

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) July 12, 2022

The 77-minute video shows that police were on the scene minutes after the shooter entered the school, but they quickly retreated after receiving a burst of gunfire. As KVUE notes, over the next hour little is done, even as more and more police arrive.

In the video, 13 rifles can be seen arriving in the hallway in the first 30 minutes of the incident. The first shield arrives in under 20 minutes. Dozens of law enforcement officers can be seen in the hallway, along with equipment. No officers make entry into the classroom for more than 70 minutes.

The tragic events in Uvalde have naturally sparked both outcry and discussion. On good and evil. On mental health. On courage and cowardice.

A Uvalde mother was PLACED IN HANDCUFFS by Federal Marshalls on scene for attempting to enter the school to get her child. Another man was tased for trying to get his kid off a bus. All while Salvador Ramos was alive inside killing kids https://t.co/LqqhuIMGlP pic.twitter.com/CNIUZ2GYhk

— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) May 26, 2022

Above all else, however, Uvalde has reignited the debate over gun control.

Following the shooting, and heated demands for new gun control laws, lawmakers in DC passed federal gun legislation for the first time in nearly 30 years, imposing tougher background checks on younger buyers and encouraging states to impose “red flag” laws.

This is peculiar, because the events at Robb Elementary School actually undermined one of the key arguments used to argue for gun control.

As Richard W. Stevens pointed out in a FEE article more than two decades ago, a common—and false—belief underpins gun control ideology.

“Private citizens don’t need firearms because the police will protect them from crime,” wrote Stevens, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., and author of Dial 911 and Die.

This belief, Stevens noted, is false for two reasons. The first reason is the most obvious one, which was on full display in Uvalde. Police can’t protect everyone from crime, and rarely do. The primary purpose of police is to respond to crimes after they occur, and data suggests even this they do not do very well.

“In reality, about 11% of all serious crimes result in an arrest, and about 2% end in a conviction,” writes Shima Baughman, professor of criminal law at the University of Utah, in The Conversation.

Second, Stevens notes, the government generally and the police specifically have no legal obligation to protect people from criminal attacks in most localities. In fact, they don’t even have to show up, Stevens explains.

It’s not just that the police cannot protect you. They don’t even have to come when you call. In most states the government and police owe no legal duty to protect individual citizens from criminal attack. The District of Columbia’s highest court spelled out plainly the ‘fundamental principle that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen.’

The “no duty” rule was established in a particularly gruesome landmark case.

Just before dawn on March 16, 1975, two men broke down the back door of a three-story home in Washington, D.C., shared by three women and a child. On the second floor one woman was sexually attacked. Her housemates on the third floor heard her screams and called the police. The women’s first call to D.C. police got assigned a low priority, so the responding officers arrived at the house, got no answer to their knocks on the door, did a quick check around, and left. When the women frantically called the police a second time, the dispatcher promised help would come—but no officers were even dispatched. The attackers kidnapped, robbed, raped, and beat all three women over 14 hours.

The horrifying events were made more horrifying in the legal aftermath. The victims sued the city and the police department for negligence to protect them (or even respond to the second call).

“The court held that government had no duty to respond to their call or to protect them,” Stevens writes. “Case dismissed.”

The court’s response was not unique. Most states have similar laws, Stevens notes, and some are quite explicit. A statute in Kansas precludes citizens from suing the government for negligence in police protection, while a California law states “neither a public entity nor a public employee is liable for failure to establish a police department or otherwise provide police protection service.”

While police may not be obligated to help people in need, it’s fair to assume that most want to help people. Unfortunately, by its very nature, bureaucracy tends to frustrate the ability of police departments to effectively do so.

An example of this can also be seen in Uvalde. A New York Times description of Uvalde Police Chief Pedro Arredondo’s decision making process reveals how bureaucratic processes and red tape appear to have cost lives.

[Arredondo] ordered the assembled officers to hold off on storming the two adjoining classrooms where the gunman had already fired more than 100 rounds at the walls, the door and the terrified fourth-graders locked inside with him, the state police said. (…)

Officers were told, under Chief Arredondo’s direction, that the situation had evolved from one with an active shooter — which would call for immediately attacking the gunman, even before rescuing other children — to one with a barricaded subject, which would call for a slower approach, officials said.

That appeared to be an incorrect assessment, according to the state police director, Steven McCraw: Gunfire could sporadically be heard inside the rooms, including on continuing 911 calls by the children.”

Police officers standing around debating protocols while a gunman in a nearby room executes children is both horrifying and mind-boggling to most people, but it perfectly illustrates the very real problems inherent in bureaucracies noted by economist Ludwig von Mises, who wrote about the inherent “slowness and slackness” pervasive in bureaucratic institutions.

On Tuesday, the Uvalde City Council accepted the resignation of Uvalde school district police chief Pedro Arredondo, who rightly stepped away from his position under pressure. But make no mistake: the lack of response by the Uvalde Police Department is a characteristic of bureaucracy itself, a problem that goes far beyond Arredondo’s leadership shortcomings.

Uvalde school district police chief Pedro Arredondo finally resigned from the City Council yesterday:

49 days after the massacre, when he was guilty of the most egregious dereliction of duty imaginable.

That’s how insulated government bureaucrats are from accountability.

— Dan Sanchez (@DanSanchezV) July 13, 2022

The bottom line is that police usually have no obligation to protect individuals from crimes, and even if they do they lack the ability to effectively do so. The idea that Americans can protect themselves just by calling 9-1-1 is simply not true, and the tragic events in Uvalde and countless other examples show this.

When they say you don’t need a firearm because the police will protect you, don’t believe it.

AUTHOR

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Was the Uvalde Massacre a Drug Cartel Warning to Border Agents to Back Off?

The Key to the Uvalde Massacre is: The Critical Importance of One Brave Good Guy with a Gun

PODCAST: What the Uvalde Cops Were Probably Thinking

How Bureaucracy May Have Cost Lives in Uvalde

The Devil Went Down to Texas: The Utter Evil of the Uvalde Massacre

For 77 Minutes, Cops Never Even Tried to Enter Classroom, Police Could Have Stopped Uvalde Shooter ‘3 Minutes’ After Entering School

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Republicans Demand DOJ Release J6 Surveillance And Police Body Cam Footage thumbnail

Republicans Demand DOJ Release J6 Surveillance And Police Body Cam Footage

By The Daily Caller

House Republicans are demanding the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) release body and surveillance camera footage as well any other footage in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Wisconsin Rep. Glenn Grothman, Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert and South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman first requested the information from the DOJ in October 2021. Now, they are re-upping their inquiry, asking Attorney General Merrick Garland to release the information since their constituents have a “growing concern” with the DOJ’s “apparent failure” to do so.

“Many Americans question why their government, and the Department in particular, has been so selective in its release of footage,” the lawmakers said in their letter. “We believe all Americans, including Members of Congress, the media, and the public at-large, should be able to view footage from January 6th that the Department has in its possession.”

The committee investigating Jan. 6 has publicized some degree of unaired footage during its ongoing hearings. The Republicans want to know “what percentage of body camera, surveillance camera, and any other footage related to the events surrounding January 6th” in the DOJ’s possession has actually been made public.

Most of the 14,000 hours of surveillance footage from Jan. 6 has not been made public, Buzzfeed News reported in August 2021. It is unclear how things have changed roughly one year later.

“From every camera on the Capitol grounds – including body and fixed surveillance cameras – every second of footage from January 6, 2021 ought to be in the public domain by now,” Norman told the DCNF. “It is baffling to me why the Attorney General has failed to make the entirety of footage available, especially while the Select Committee is cherry-picking clips to suit its narrative.”

While lawyers and defendants charged in the Capitol riot have gained access to watch related surveillance footage, the footage is given under protective orders, which does not allow the parties to release it, Buzzfeed News reported. The Capitol Police’s chief lawyer said in a March 2021 affidavit that members of Congress can watch Jan. 6 footage on a case-by-base basis under the supervision of a police employee.

“The disclosure of any footage from these cameras is strictly limited and subject to a policy that regulates the release of footage,” said the lawyer.

The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the Capitol Police.

“It continues to be our hope that all Americans have faith in our systems of government, including our criminal justice and judicial system,” wrote the Republicans in their letter, setting an August 4 deadline. “For this reason, it is imperative that the Department adequately respond to our requests in timely manner.”

READ:

07-14-22_Follow Up Letter t… by Gabe Kaminsky

AUTHOR

GABE KAMINSKY

Investigative reporter.

RELATED ARTICLE: EXCLUSIVE: Rep. Rodney Davis Demands Answers From Legislative Branch Agencies On Their Work For Jan. 6 Committee

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Delta Paid Passengers $10,000 to Give Up Their Flight Seats. How One Economist Made It Possible thumbnail

Delta Paid Passengers $10,000 to Give Up Their Flight Seats. How One Economist Made It Possible

By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Julian Simon understood that inherent in market systems are the upsides of mutually beneficial exchange.

Delta Air Lines made headlines this month for offering passengers $10,000 to leave their flight. Several customers heading to Minnesota reported being offered $10,000 (in dollars, not flight credits) to voluntarily deboard an overbooked flight.

“On Delta flight from GRR to MSP and they just offered $10,000 for people to give up their seats,” tweeted Inc. tech columnist Jason Aten. “Ten. Thousand. Dollars.”

A different passenger on the flight, Todd McCrumb, told Fortune magazine it was no joke.

“It’s a true story,” McCrumb tweeted. “I was on that flight!”

When flights are overbooked, it means airlines have more passengers with tickets for a flight than there are seats. And, as I previously reported, complaints about oversold flights have increased relative to pre-pandemic times.

And while you might think airlines offering to pay customers for overbooked flights represents a bug in the airline industry, it’s actually the opposite. Airline overbooking payments are an intentional strategy by companies, and they are a great case study on the power of markets.

To see why, let’s look at the history of airline overbooking.

Prior to 1978, the airline industry dealt with a consistent bug: oversold flights. Oversold flights occurred as a means for airlines to deal with the fact that passengers frequently skip flights. This would lead to several empty seats on flights that could have otherwise been sold to other willing fliers.

While one or two empty seats in a flight may not seem like a big deal, this adds up when you consider the thousands of flights airlines offer every year. Each empty seat represents a lost opportunity to fly passengers at a lower cost.

So airlines solved this problem by selling more tickets than there were seats. Oversold flights were in a gray area for federal regulations, but this didn’t stop companies. They simply claimed this was sometimes done unintentionally. The American Airlines handbook for 1974-1975 stated:

American Airlines never deliberately causes a passenger to be oversold. We tolerate only a limited number of oversold and inconvenienced passengers only because we must allow some margin of error in our operation.

Despite this claim, it was an open secret in the industry that airlines overbooked to increase sales.

And before 1978, there was no good solution to an overbooked flight. The previously mentioned handbook gave crews some guidance for these situations such as:

Reservations will select for removal, the most recently sold locally boarding passenger, whenever good judgment dictates that this passenger will be less inconvenienced than some other passenger, except when undue hardship will be incurred.

In extreme cases the handbook said, “it may be necessary to cancel the flight until all passengers have deplaned.”

Lastly, the handbook is clear that employees should “[n]ever give an oversold passenger anything in writing which admits an error on the part of American Airlines.”

So volunteers were solicited, and, if none could be found, employees arbitrarily selected passengers according to ambiguous perceptions of inconvenience.

So, airlines oversold their flights to the detriment of involuntarily bumped passengers.

All of this changed after economist Julian Simon proposed a solution. In 1968, Simon, a professor of business administration at the University of Maryland, published an article cheekily titled “An Almost Practical Solution to Airline Overbooking.” His solution was simple—introduce a market.

Specifically, Simon proposed a reverse auction system. In this system, passengers would write down the minimum amount they would need to be paid to give up their seat. The person with the lowest amount would win the auction and receive money to give up the right to a seat.

It took nearly a decade for regulators and the industry to implement Simon’s solution in 1978— but it had many perks.

This market, like all markets, introduced a win-win scenario. Passengers who win the auction get an amount of money they value more than the seat. Other passengers don’t have to fear losing their seats. Airlines retain the ability to overbook flights. Everyone wins.

If you’re skeptical that airlines are made better off here, consider the data below.

VIEW CHART: TOTAL OVERSALES PER 10,000 BOARDINGS

As you can see from the graph, airlines massively increased overbooking when the reverse auction system was implemented in 1978. This suggests the system was profitable for airlines. If it wasn’t, airlines simply could have suspended overbooking.

The total oversales per 10,000 passengers continued to be higher than 1978 until in 2017, when the infamous United Express Flight 3411 incident occurred which led to major decreases in airlines utilizing overbooking.

The Flight 3411 incident infamously involved Dr. David Dao who was involuntarily selected to deboard his flight. After refusing, an officer forced Dao off the plane leading to a broken nose and concussion. Before the incident, United tried to offer vouchers to incentivize volunteers, but they refused to offer more than $800.

After the incident, United and several airlines began to severely cut oversales, but post pandemic those numbers seem to be rising again.

This sort of situation, where a change leads to all parties being better off, is known by economists as a Pareto improvement.

The market had other advantages as well. Unlike the prior system, the passenger who gives up a seat is not chosen arbitrarily. Instead, the person who loses the seat is someone who doesn’t value it very much anyways. This is another advantage of markets. Resources tend to be allocated to the people who value them most.

These valuable features should come as no surprise. Simon’s solution was for airlines to create markets, and inherent in market systems are the upsides of mutually beneficial exchange and resources being allocated to highest valued uses.

So a $10,000 offer to incentivize someone to deboard a plane isn’t a failure of markets—it’s the beauty of markets in action. I can only hope to someday be on a flight that offers me $10,000 to make new plans.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Two and 3-Year-Old Vaxxed Kids With Seizures Is ‘The New Normal’ thumbnail

Two and 3-Year-Old Vaxxed Kids With Seizures Is ‘The New Normal’

By The Geller Report

ONLY vaxxed kids. The only thing these kids have in common is that they were given the COVID vaccine just days earlier (two to five days earlier).

This is the new normal. Like the new ‘Sudden Adult Death Syndrome.’

Two and 3-year-old kids with seizures is “the new normal”

I’m getting multiple reports from my nurse friends about kids 2 and 3 years old having seizures. It is ONLY happening on vaccinated kids, and symptoms start 2 to 5 days after the COVID vaccine.

By: Steve Kirsch, July 5, 2022:

Doctors are mystified by a rash of seizures, rashes, etc. happening to 2 and 3-year-old kids.

The only thing these kids have in common is that they were given the COVID vaccine just days earlier (two to five days earlier).

The doctors cannot figure out what is causing the seizures (since it couldn’t be the vaccine since those are safe and effective). The medical staff is not permitted to talk about the cases to the press or on social media or they will be fired.

One nurse posted something to the effect of “how is this legal????” I had to paraphrase to protect the poster.

This is why you are hearing these reports from me. They can’t fire me.

There is nothing on the mainstream media about this since the nurses and doctors aren’t allowed to talk about it.

This will all come out some day, but for now, everyone is keeping quiet about it and the doctors are instructed to convince the parents that it isn’t vaccine related and that they are the only ones having the problem.

Because that’s how science works.

Keep reading…..

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED TWEET:

Cruise ships full of only the vaccinated are experiencing large outbreaks of Covid.

What does that tell you?

— Brigitte Gabriel (@ACTBrigitte) July 14, 2022

RELATED ARTICLES:

Data Proves ‘Sudden Adult Death Syndrome’ Fiction Is Death by Covid Vaccination

Vaxxed Young Adults are 92% More Likely to Die than Unvaccinated

Are We Now in the Era of the ‘COVID Matrix’ with the Mandated Vaxxed Passports?

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The End of Private Car Ownership thumbnail

The End of Private Car Ownership

By Jihad Watch

You will drive nothing and you will be happy.


The term “pedestrian” has a derogatory meaning because peasants walked while nobles were “equestrians” and rode horses. The industrial revolution eliminated this class difference, as it did so many others, by making car ownership available to the masses until eventually Herbert Hoover was able to boast that “Republican prosperity has reduced and increased earning capacity” to “put the proverbial ‘chicken in every pot’ and a car in every backyard to boot.”

Democrats have spent two generations trying to get those cars out of every backyard.

Biden is trying to bring back Obama’s mileage standards that were estimated to raise car prices by 20%.The goal is to “nudge 40% of U.S. drivers into electric vehicles by decade’s end.”

Will 40% of Americans be able to afford electric cars that cost an average of $54,000 by 2030?

Not likely. Nor are they meant to. Biden’s radical ‘green’ government, which includes Tracy Stone-Manning, the former spokeswoman for an ecoterrorist group as the head of the Bureau of Land Management, isn’t looking to nudge drivers into another type of cars, but out of cars.

Gas prices are a way to price Americans out of car ownership under the guise of pushing EVs.

Biden’s Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm responded to American concerns about high gas prices by urging them to buy electric cars. Granholm, who had promoted a green energy tycoon who spent years in prison for fraud, who had served on the board of directors of an electric battery company, and made millions divesting stock in an electric vehicle manufacturer, is a fan.

“Most electric vehicles are now cheaper to own than gas-powered cars from the day you drive them off the lot,” Granholm tweeted.

That isn’t actually true, but actual cars have become more expensive to own, largely because of efforts by the Biden administration, and by various states, including California. That hasn’t however made electric cars any more affordable for ordinary Americans.

The average price of an electric car shot up to $54,000 in May. Car prices in general have risen in the Biden economy, but electric cars are naturally expensive. The raw material costs for an average electric car are up to over $8,000. That’s compared to $3,600 for an actual car.

When your raw material costs are that high, electric cars will be inherently unaffordable.

The Obama administration pumped billions in taxpayer money into battery and electric car manufacturing, the majority of which failed, on the theory that enough government subsidies would lower battery costs. Not only was much of that money lost, but currently electric battery costs hover around the $160 kilowatt-hour mark. Green boosters cheer that’s far down from over $1,000 per kWh a decade ago, but that still adds up to the reality that an electric car capable of traveling for even short distances needs a battery that alone costs thousands.

The Nissan Leaf, which approaches $30,000 once the reality of MSRP in the current sales market is taken into account, is one of the cheapest electric cars around, and has a range of only 149 miles. Replacing its battery can set back car owners $6,500 to $7,500. And that’s even when you can manage to find one or someone willing to replace it. In less than 3 years, Leafs lose 20 miles of range. By the fifth year, they have lost 30 miles. And it’s all downhill from there.

The Nissan Leaf was initially a hit, but car manufacturers quickly realized that anyone willing to overpay that much for substandard performance had money to burn. The electric car market is now thoroughly dominated by luxury vehicles subsidized by taxpayers. And the Leaf went from 90% market share to less than 10%. The EV market is now a taxpayer-funded status symbol.

The dirty truth about the “clean” car market is that it consists of traditional car companies and Tesla frantically trying to unload a limited share of luxury electric cars on wealthy customers to cash in on the emissions credits mandated by states like California. Tesla makes more money reselling these regulatory credits to actual car companies than it does selling cars. Taxpayers and working class car-owners pick up the bill for the entire luxury electric vehicle market.

A market that they are shut out from by design.

The “green” vision is not a world in which everyone has their own electric car. It’s one of collective transport, of buses, light rail, and car-pooling through shared rides and roving self-driving cars. The only vehicle the average consumer is supposed to own is a bicycle.

While the Biden administration is still pretending that it’s out to “encourage” electric car ownership by making actual cars too expensive for much of the country to afford, others are saying the quiet part out loud.

“Car-lovers will doubtless mourn the passing of machines that, in the 20th century, became icons of personal freedom. But this freedom is illusory,” an Economist article predicted.

“There will be fewer cars on the road—perhaps just 30% of the cars we have today,” the head of Google’s self-driving car project predicted.

“The days of the single occupancy car are numbered,” Brook Porter at G2 Venture Partners, a green energy investment firm, thundered in an article titled, The End of Cars in Cities.

Dan Ammann, the former president of GM, claimed that “the human-driven, gasoline-powered, single-passenger car” is the “fundamental problem” in a post titled, “We Need to Move Beyond the Car”. He has since gone to work for Exxon-Mobil.

Predictions are cheap, but car bans are expensive and all too real. The European Union voted to back a ban on the sale of non-electric cars by 2035. California is also pushing for a similar 2035 ban on the sale of new actual cars in the state. Officials noted that the ban would push more than half of mechanics out of work and leave much of the state unable to afford cars.

Canada has its own 2035 car ban. Last year, Governor Newsom and Governor Cuomo, along with 10 other governors, urged Biden to impose a 2035 car ban on all Americans.

Electric cars aren’t actually “cleaner”. The mining processes that produce “green” technologies are as dirty, if not dirtier, and trade dependence on oil for dependence on rare earth metals, and dependence on the Middle East for dependence on Communist China. The one thing that they decisively accomplish is to make it impossible for ordinary Americans to own cars.

And that is what environmentalists really want. But not just them.

The vision of a nation in which private car ownership is a luxury good, in which cars have been priced out of the reach of most people through environmental measures that concentrated on gas-powered vehicles, and then added more taxes and fines for the waste” and “inefficiency” of an individual owning a vehicle is not very far away.

The technocratic sales pitch is that ride-sharing and self-driving cars will make car ownership unnecessary. Why own a big clunky machine when you can own nothing and be happy?

The reality is that car ownership offers mobility and independence. That is exactly what the leftist radicals making social policy want to eliminate. Gas prices are not Putin’s price hike, they’re the green dream. And that dream isn’t to put you in a Nissan Leaf. It’s the Pol Pot dream of dismantling civilization and rolling back the industrial revolution.

Once the dark age norms of their dark enlightenment are restored, peasants will go back to being pedestrians and only the progressive philosopher kings will ride.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

RELATED ARTICLES:

FABRICATING REALITY: Climate Change, Atmospheric Transgenderism and Mental Masturbation

FACT: All Electric Vehicles (EVs) Are Powered by Coal, Uranium, Natural Gas or Diesel-Powered Energy

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Marx and the Banning of Elements in the Periodic Table thumbnail

Marx and the Banning of Elements in the Periodic Table

By Vlad Tepes Blog

Examining the problem, reaction, solution/thesis, counter thesis, solution, or the dialectic scam of the left.

There certainly seems to be more than one understanding of this phrase. Here is our shot at it. Of course, there are scholars of Hegel/Marx who read this site, and we welcome any corrections or other interpretations of this well known phrase.

Picking Global Warming as an example, we have a completely invented problem which of course can be manipulated in any way needed to end up at the point you want to land on. Primarily, the destruction of the West with its notions of free market economy and individual rights. Since the problem is fake, and created and enforced by “consensus” (See video below) all the reactions from people calling it out as fake must be dealt with using the dialectic attack of hate speech. This was fabricated by a second generation Frankfurt School acolyte, a certain Habermas, in the form of “Discourse Theory”.

For the past many decades, various leftist controlled governments and leftist think tanks, have attempted to use the element of Carbon as a means to control industry and humanity in a highly selective manner. Like slavery as an issue, we must only examine the ‘problem’ of CO2 production in Western and free market nations, more accurately perhaps, in cultures with the concept of individual rights as being sacrosanct. We must not look at slavery in Africa or Islam ever but must focus on the past actions in The USA pretty much exclusively in terms of passing moral judgment. And we must not look at really dirty industrial activity, let alone CO2 production in China or India but must pretend that CO2 produced by any and all means connected to humans in the West as an existential threat to the entire planet.

There should be no need to try and disprove the idea that CO2 is a problem on this site. I do have a dedicated page to the science of it here on Vlad but I don’t maintain it very well as to engage in a debate based on a lie is to lose that debate since only one side seeks to know the truth and the power of the lie is much greater in the short run. At least where the goal is destruction.

One fact though, is that where CO2 is produced, more life happens. Plants grow etc. Plants, and life, are made of carbon. Even on the side of highways, plants tend to thrive from a truly poisonous form of carbon, CO1 or Carbon monoxide. CO2 is actually pumped into greenhouses to help plants hit their optimal growth rate.

But let’s pretend that CO2 production was a problem. Then why are those who wrap themselves in a false flag of environmentalism, so opposed to nuclear power? Its the obvious solution to those who claim that carbon dioxide is an existential threat to the planet. Whatever the issues with nuclear power, it cannot be as bad as that.

And then there is this:

Geothermal

A very worthy deeper dive:

So we have a solution now for food production that is safe, energy efficient and absorbs far more carbon than it produces.

Global Warming is a consensus based thing though. Meaning communists agreed on creating it and presenting it as an existential problem in order to get to the solution they want, which is communism. No real world approach to solving even the non-problem of “global-warming” will be entertained and any attempt to expose it as the fraud it is will be met with charges akin to hate speech. “Climate-denier” for example, makes moral equivalence with a Holocaust denier to one who would deny the ‘existential threat of global warming’. A fairly palpable use of the Hate-Speech tactic.

More recently, in order to destroy farming in the Netherlands and replace these farms with what will almost certainly be beehive brutalist housing for illegal mostly Muslim and African migrants forced on the local population since before 2015, a new element and compound had to be demonized as an existential threat. Nitrogen, which makes up damn near 80% of the total atmosphere, and ammonia.

I won’t even bother to deal with the issue of nitrogen. To think that the tiny amount of nitrogen released on a few dutch farms justify the actions against farmers we see in the Netherlands is even worthy of rebuttal on that basis, means a lack of understanding of the tactic at play. Much like when one knows that nearly all human beings are born either a man or a woman (with the exception of extremely few genetic mutations which end with those individuals as they tend to be sterile) and to pretend these are fungible is, well risible.

So let’s look at the new threat of ammonia.

How could we somehow solve the issue of ammonia in a way that would satisfy those who claim its a problem while maybe at the same time, solving other problems many are concerned about:

The bottom line is:

The problems we are bombarded with, from Covid to vaccine hesitancy. From global warming to cow flatulence. From Nitrogen to ammonia, are all fake problems which, even by engaging about it, causes us to lose. These are not problems at all, and some, to the extent they might be, are selectively enforced against the Western nations and peoples with zero effort to deal with these non-problems in places like China, North Korea, India and other places where the raw production of these gasses and so on are orders of magnitude higher than in the West.

We need to understand that so much of what we engage with on a day to day basis is we, the intellectual descendants of Socrates, being constantly basted with pseudo-reality and false cosmologies in order to destroy Western civilization where it actually lives.

In our own minds.

Eeyore for VladTepesBlog.

EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Man Charged With Rape In Connection To 10-Year-Old Who Traveled For Abortion thumbnail

Man Charged With Rape In Connection To 10-Year-Old Who Traveled For Abortion

By The Daily Caller

A man was arrested Tuesday and charged with the felony rape of a 10-year-old girl who later travelled to Indiana for an abortion, The Columbus Dispatch reported.

Police said 27-year-old Gershon Fuentes confessed to raping the child on at least two occasions, according to the Dispatch. The child reportedly obtained an abortion in Indianapolis June 30.

Franklin County Children Services referred the case to the police June 22, and the suspect is being tested for paternity.

Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, shared the story with the press July 1 and said the child had gone to Indiana for the abortion because it was illegal in her home state of Ohio, a fact that has been contested by the state’s attorney general. She has since been disciplined for a HIPAA violation for publicizing the patient’s details, Fox News reported.

“A Columbus man has been charged with impregnating a 10-year-old Ohio girl, whose travel to Indiana to seek an abortion led to international attention  following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade and activation of Ohio’s abortion law.”https://t.co/EMWfJyq3V2

— Jerry Dunleavy (@JerryDunleavy) July 13, 2022

Fuentes is being held on a $2 million bond, which the judge said was especially high in order to protect the child’s safety.

Bernard did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

LAUREL DUGGAN

Social issues and culture reporter.

RELATED TWEET:

BREAKING: The suspected rapist accused of impregnating the 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio was arrested Tuesday and booked into Franklin County Jail.

Columbus Dispatch says bond was set at $2 million and that Gershon Fuentes, 27, is believed to be an “undocumented” immigrant. pic.twitter.com/x3GJ36Y5iY

— Mia Cathell (@MiaCathell) July 13, 2022

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden Considers Declaring Public Health Emergency To Help Secure Abortion Access

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

PODCAST: What the Uvalde Cops Were Probably Thinking thumbnail

PODCAST: What the Uvalde Cops Were Probably Thinking

By Center For Security Policy

This is Frank Gaffney with the Secure Freedom Minute.

Heartbreaking video from inside Uvalde elementary school documenting the protracted failure of police to stop the slaughter underway there is prompting afresh disbelief and fury at the officers involved. What on earth were they thinking?

After weeks of conflicting official descriptions of what went down, this video further undermines public confidence in law enforcement. And those most critical of its conduct, especially towards minorities, are emboldened to renew and generalize their condemnations and efforts to demean and, if possible, defund the police.

Given all that, it seems likely what the Uvalde cops were thinking was: If they took unauthorized initiative to stop the shooter, their risk-averse chain of command would throw them to the wolves.

It’s not an excuse, just a possible explanation. And one that surely is operating elsewhere at a time when we need robust policing more than ever.

This is Frank Gaffney.

AUTHOR

Frank Gaffney, Jr.

Founder and Executive Chairman

EDITORS NOTE: This Center for Security Policy podcast is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Inflation Hits Yet Another Record High As Americans Feel The Squeeze thumbnail

Inflation Hits Yet Another Record High As Americans Feel The Squeeze

By The Daily Caller

Inflation climbed 9.1% over the past 12 months, the highest year-over-year percentage increase since December 1981, the Department of Labor (DOL) announced Wednesday.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased 1.3% between May and June, according to the DOL report released Wednesday. Economists had predicted that CPI would increase by 1.1% last month and 8.8% over the 12-month period ending in June.

“The energy index rose 7.5 percent over the month and contributed nearly half of the all items increase, with the gasoline index rising 11.2 percent and the other major component indexes also rising,” the DOL said in their report. “The food index rose 1.0 percent in June, as did the food at home index.”

The White House preemptively downplayed the inflation data, saying the metric was already outdated as prices have begun to supposedly decrease.

“June CPI data is already out of date because energy prices have come down substantially this month and are expected to fall further,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Tuesday.

BREAKING: Inflation just hit 9.1% in the United States.

Unreal.

— Pomp 🌪 (@APompliano) July 13, 2022

“I don’t think that number peaks until September and I think at that point it will be in double digits,” E.J. Antoni, research fellow for Regional Economics at The Heritage Foundation told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Wednesday’s report follows a steady stream of negative polling for President Joe Biden, including one New York Times survey that found a majority of Democrats would prefer the 79-year-old not run in 2024. Voters have cited the economy and inflation as major issues ahead of the midterms.

The gasoline index rose 11.2%, while the food at home index increased 10.4%,  year over year, BLS reported. Almost all aspects of American purchases increased in June, including shelter, airline fares, new and used cars and trucks, medical care, household furnishings and operations, recreation and clothing, according to BLS.

CPI surpassed the Federal Reserve’s 2% target in May 2021 and has continuously climbed higher and higher since, according to federal data.

AUTHOR

MAX KEATING

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: The DeSantis Boom: Florida Economy Soars As State Records Highest Budget Surplus Ever

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Racist Jill Biden Calls Latinos ‘Tacos’ thumbnail

Racist Jill Biden Calls Latinos ‘Tacos’

By The Geller Report

Now imagine the backlash from the mainstream media if Melania Trump said this. These double standards are really disgusting.

At a “Latinx IncluXion” conference, Jill Biden says the Hispanic community is as “unique” as tacos.pic.twitter.com/Vb5wJyYGWB

— RNC Latinos (@RNCLatinos) July 11, 2022

Jill Biden fails at Spanish again, calling bodegas “bo-ga-duhs” and saying Hispanics are as unique as tacos. Cringe.

pic.twitter.com/WENC5KZQxH

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) July 12, 2022

Right rips Jill Biden for saying Hispanic community as unique as ‘breakfast tacos’

By The Hill, July 11, 2022

First lady Jill Biden is receiving flak from the right for comments in which she said the Hispanic community was as “unique” as the “breakfast tacos” in San Antonio.

Biden was speaking at the 2022 UnidosUS Annual Conference titled “Siempre Adelante: Our Quest for Equity” in San Antonio on Monday.

AUTHOR

Geller Report Staff

RELATED ARTICLES:

‘SIT DOWN’: Biden Shouts Down Father Of Murdered Parkland Shooting Victim To Listen After Gun Control Speech Interruption

FBI Confidential Human Source INFILTRATED Proud Boys, Ran FBI Operation on J-6, Reported They Were INNOCENT

‘Liz Cheney Epitomizes Never Trumpers’ Betrayal Of Our Nation’

Elon Musk Laughs Off Twitter Lawsuit Threat

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

Buttigieg Defends Harassing Conservative Justices Over Abortion thumbnail

Buttigieg Defends Harassing Conservative Justices Over Abortion

By Jihad Watch

It’s never an insurrection when your side is the one doing it. Just ask good ol’ Mayor Pete.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Sunday defended protesters against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh who gathered earlier this week outside Morton’s steakhouse, where he was eating dinner.

Buttigieg’s boyfriend, Chasten, tweeted in response to the news: “Sounds like he just wanted some privacy to make his own dining decisions,” a shot toward Kavanaugh’s vote to overturn Roe v. Wade last month, ending a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.

During an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” moderator Mike Emanuel asked Buttigieg if his Chasten’s tweet about the incident was “appropriate.”

“Look, when public officials go into public life, we should expect two things. One, that you should always be free from violence, harassment, and intimidation,” Buttigieg replied. “And two, you’re never going to be free from criticism or peaceful protest, people exercising their First Amendment rights.”

Speaking out is a First Amendment right. Harassing people in their private life isn’t. There’s a huge difference between protesting outside the Supreme Court, and outside the homes and private gatherings of individuals.

Buttigieg isn’t very bright, despite trying to make that into his brand, but he knows the difference quite well and is being disingenuous when he pretends that he doesn’t.

“So, yes, people are upset,” Buttigieg concluded. “They’re going to exercise their First Amendment rights.”

If they were exercising “their First Amendment rights” outside Sotomayor’s cafe, the conversation would be quite different.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

RELATED ARTICLES:

Leftist Group Offers Venmo Payments to Harass Supreme Court Justices

France: Afghan Muslim migrant guilty of rape, says ‘In my country, it is normal to have sex with young boys’

Germany: Teacher tries to stop forced marriages, is told by the victims ‘That’s the way things are in Islam’

Biden thanks CIA for warning of Putin’s plans to invade Ukraine, Russian TV mocks: ‘Biden is of course our agent’

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Why We Should Take the ‘Socialism’ Part of Democratic Socialism Seriously thumbnail

Why We Should Take the ‘Socialism’ Part of Democratic Socialism Seriously

By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

Democratic socialism isn’t the same as autocratic communism, but there are problems with socialism that democracy can’t solve.


In the wake of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent primary victory, many writers have made the cases for and against democratic socialism. Both its defenders and its critics have tried to insist, quite rightly, that those who support democratic socialism are serious about the “democratic” part.

And it is important that critics take this point seriously: arguing that someone like Ocasio-Cortez is just a Stalinist wannabe is not an effective counter-argument. Those making the case for democratic socialism really do wish to avoid the totalitarianism of the 20th-century history of socialism. Whether they can avoid that outcome, despite their good intentions, is an issue I will return to in what follows.

Critics and supporters should also take the “socialism” part of democratic socialism seriously.

The website of the Democratic Socialists of America is clear about their desire to eliminate the profit motive, or the very least to subordinate it to “the public interest” in a large number of sectors of the economy. A good number of democratic socialists would expand public ownership and control into many of those same sectors. And all of them seem to agree that democratic control is needed for major decisions about “social investment” as well as trade, monetary, and fiscal policy.

The question is whether—even if we assume that the process is as democratic as the democratic socialists desire—they can actually create a world of peace and prosperity given the degree to which they wish to abolish markets and profits. I will argue that the answer is no.

As is often the case with these sorts of proposals, the details of how more democratic control over economic decision-making would work are left vague, but if they are serious about the “democratic” part, it will necessarily involve the participation of as many people as possible, presumably through some sort of voting mechanism. If instead, such decisions were left in the hands of a small group, even if they were elected by people in general, it would risk reproducing the same alienation and exploitation of the masses supposedly committed by capitalists and their bought-off politicians today.

In a recent piece for The AtlanticConor Friedersdorf raised the important critical point that leaving economic decision-making to majority voting imperils the ability of those with minority tastes to acquire the things they desire. For example, if we let Americans vote on whether resources should be devoted to the medical needs of transgender people, would it happen? Would residents of Utah vote to make sure that those who wished to consume alcohol and caffeine could do so?

That we aren’t sure that the answers to both questions are “yes” is a matter of much concern about the democratic-socialist vision. How a democratic and participatory process would ensure that the needs of minority consumers were met without over-riding the will of the people is not clear.

As important as Friedersdorf’s point is, there is an even deeper problem at the heart of the socialist part of the democratic socialist vision. If public ownership is expanded and the profit motive removed, this implies the elimination of markets as the way in which resources in those industries are allocated. It certainly eliminates markets for ownership of capital resources by eliminating private and tradeable ownership claims to firms.

The question facing democratic socialists is this: how, in the absence of market prices, profit and loss signals, and private ownership of the means of production will even the most purely motivated actors in a deeply democratic process know what their fellow citizens want and need and, what’s more important, how best to produce those goods and services?

Even if “the people” want to ensure that minority tastes and needs are accommodated, how will they know what those are? In a market economy, the exchange of private property generates prices that work to signal producers about what is wanted and how urgently. The ability of owners of private resources to risk those resources on their best guesses about what is wanted, and to have the feedback of profits and losses to inform them whether they judged correctly, is what enables us to figure out what people want.  And that’s true whether it’s the masses or more specialized tastes. Markets are processes of discovery by which we learn things we otherwise would not, and could not, know.

Those same prices and profits of the market help us figure out how best to make the things that people want. This part of what markets do is often overlooked by socialists of all stripes. They might be able to offer mechanisms by which consumers could communicate their desires so that “the people” could know what needs to be produced. Even then, however, socialists over-estimate how much of what we know can be effectively communicated in words and statistics.

A good deal of human knowledge, including the knowledge relevant to economic decision-making, is tacit. There are things we know yet are unable to articulate. Think about how you keep your balance on a bicycle. You know how to do it, but you cannot explain to someone else exactly how it’s done.

Acts of buying and selling in the market enable us to make tacit knowledge usable by others in the form of prices and profits. This is the sense in which prices are knowledge surrogates that enable our fields of economic vision to overlap such that we can coordinate our actions and use resources wisely. Market exchange is a process of communication that enables us to go beyond the articulate knowledge of words and numbers.

Given this role of prices, what socialists don’t have an answer to is how democratically controlled industries—in which there are no market prices, profits, or private property in the means of production—will know which inputs to use to make the outputs they believe people want. If you want to socialize health care, how do you know how many nurses, NPs, doctors, and lab techs you will need in each state, city, or hospital?  You want people to get medical care without paying a monetary price for it?  How will you decide who should provide that care?  And with what machines?  Made out of what materials?

We completely take for granted the way in which markets smoothly enable producers to make these decisions using the signals of prices and profits.  Prices and profit calculations enable resources-owners to determine what combination of inputs appears to be the least wasteful in order to make what people want before they start producing, thereby not wasting valuable resources. Prices work as knowledge surrogates to help producers know how valuable people think those resources are so that producers make decisions that are the least wasteful possible.

Prices are the ways we make our private assessments of value publicly available for others to use to make their decisions before they produce. Profits and losses tell entrepreneurs after the fact just how well they decided. Those profits or losses inform the next round of decisions by entrepreneurs, all the time helping them figure out how to best provide what we want using the least valuable resources possible. Without prices or profits, what will perform this task under socialism, even the most widely democratic socialism one can imagine? How will this dispersed, contextual, and tacit knowledge be mobilized and made available for others to use?

Notice that this is not a matter of people’s motivation or psychology. Socialists sometimes like to invoke a version of “New Socialist Man” to escape these problems. They argue that people will just be different under socialism and that they will be motivated to serve the public interest. But motivation isn’t the problem here—knowledge is. How even New Socialist Man will acquire knowledge from others that they cannot express in words or numbers is a question most socialists have never faced.

Furthermore, consider what happens to firms in markets when they consistently fail in this task. Firms whose profits are negative period after period must either change their behavior or find themselves out of business. Firms with publicly traded private ownership shares will find the value of those shares (their stock) falling, reducing the firm’s value and making it more likely that other people might buy up those shares and take over the firm.

The opportunity to purchase the means of production and use them more wisely than the current owners is a key advantage of markets. In the absence of private ownership of the means of production, what will be the comparable corrective process? The long history of wasted resources and unwillingness to change that describes so many government programs would be spread to additional sectors of the economy. There is a reason that the stock market is the very heart of a market economy: it is where those who think they can do things better are free to take their shot. Even the most democratic version of socialism lacks that feature.

If what one supports, however, is something like worker-owned or worker-managed firms who still compete with each other in a genuine market, the argument above does not apply nearly as strongly. Such a system might well be immune to the problems associated with eliminating prices, profits, and private property. Whether such firms would face significant collective action problems associated with worker ownership or management is a separate issue for another time.

Without prices, profits, and a market for the means of production, the areas that democratic socialism would socialize would fail consumers and waste resources, impoverishing societies that adopted such policies. Those failures would force democratic socialists into an unresolvable dilemma.

Critics might argue that specialized experts were needed to run these industries better than the people at large, undermining the democratic part of democratic socialism. Other critics might argue that it was necessary to re-introduce prices and profits, undermining the socialism part. Either way, the democratic socialist vision collapses. Down the first path lies the very totalitarianism they wanted to avoid, and down the second lies the market economy they are committed to rejecting.

This process also demonstrates how even the best-intentioned democratic socialism can end up with 20th-century style totalitarian socialism. As the socialism part of democratic socialism fails to reduce poverty and ensure that people get the goods and services they want and need, and as it becomes clearer that public ownership cannot provide anything close to responsible use of resources, the democratic planning process will become increasingly dominated by those with a comparative advantage in using the levers of power it has created.

As Friedersdorf points out, putting economic control in the hands of the people actually centralizes control over resources in comparison to the decentralized ownership we see in the market. Such centralized control, even in the hands of “the people,” requires institutions of power and domination. Democratic socialists might be confident in their belief that “the people” would handle such power responsibly, but because they overlook the inevitable failure of an economic system lacking prices, profits, and private ownership, they have not thoroughly considered what might happen when the socialism half fails. When public ownership fails at allocating resources in any rational fashion, it is ripe to be taken over by those who care much less about meeting the needs of humans and much more about exercising power over them.

Marx never intended Stalin, but the latter is an unintended consequence of the Bolsheviks trying to put Marxism into practice in the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Democratic socialists can emphasize the adjective as much as they want, but the realities of socialism’s flaws will ultimately undermine both its democracy and its socialism.

Until socialists of all stripes come to grips with the role that prices, profits, and private ownership play in helping us to figure out both what people want and how best to produce it, they will continue to be mystified by socialism’s continued failure. Increased democratic control will not solve the structural problems that arise whenever people attempt to abolish the institutions of the market. In the end, the problem with democratic socialism is that it’s socialist.

Reprinted from Libertarianism.org

AUTHOR

Steven Horwitz

Steven Horwitz is the Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise in the Department of Economics at Ball State University, where he also is Director of the Institute for the Study of Political Economy. He is the author of Austrian Economics: An Introduction.

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

GOP Set To Win Massive Majority In House, Analysis Finds thumbnail

GOP Set To Win Massive Majority In House, Analysis Finds

By The Daily Caller

Republicans are expected to take control of the House of Representatives with a potentially massive majority, according to the Fox News Power Rankings.

The GOP is predicted to win between 225 and 255 seats in the November midterm elections, according to the Fox News Power Rankings, which uses data such as historical trends, fundraising and other polling to create projections for elections. Currently, there are 33 seats that the GOP will likely win, with another 30 seats considered as “toss-ups” come this November, according to the analysis.

One such seat is New York’s 18th Congressional District, which has a 65% chance of flipping red, according to FiveThirtyEight. The district was once a Democratic stronghold, but with redistricting Republican New York Assemblyman Colin Schmitt appears poised to win the seat.  

“The issues at hand are economic and crime-related,” Schmitt told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Crime is affecting our community, and the economic issues are crushing us in the Hudson Valley.”

Roughly 56% of voters said that the economic state of the nation was the most essential issue to them this election cycle, according to polling from Republican State Leadership Committee.

🚨🇺🇸🚨🇺🇸 Fox News Power Rankings shift our race to Lean Republican this morning!!!

Momentum keeps building toward victory!

We will take back #NY18 for our Hudson Valley values and restore checks and balances to the failed Biden agenda. Help us win —> https://t.co/7RSEELBIr9 pic.twitter.com/61U8EdwKmm

— Colin Schmitt (@colinschmitt) July 11, 2022

The nation has seen a slight rightward shift with states such as Florida and minorities groups like Hispanics becoming more right-leaning, exemplified by the election of Texas Republican Rep. Mayra Flores in a special election

Oregon’s 5th Congressional District could see its first Republican member of Congress ever, according to FiveThirtyEight. Republican Lori Chavez Ramirez is projected to cruise to victory against her leftist challenger.

Other outlets such as Real Clear Politics and FiveThirtyEight also predicted the GOP would win the House handily.

“Joe Biden’s failed agenda has led to record-high prices at the gas pump and grocery store, and put every vulnerable Democrats’ reelection efforts in jeopardy,” National Republican Congressional Committee Communications Director Michael McAdams told the DCNF.

The predictions by Fox News come at a time when President Biden’s approval numbers hover around 33% and Democrats are losing faith in his ability to win an election, according to a poll by The New York Times.

AUTHOR

CARL DEMARCO

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Republicans Are Turning A Massive Swing State Solidly Red

POLL: More Americans Want Trump To Run In 2024 Than Biden

New NYT Poll Shows ‘Staggering’ Amount Of Americans Believe US Heading In Wrong Direction

Jean-Pierre Responds To Poll Finding Majority Of Democrats Prefer Different Presidential Candidate In 2024

National Hispanic Org To Jill Biden: ‘We Are Not Tacos’

GOP Eyes Garland Impeachment for Ignoring Abortion Terrorism

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

VIDEO: Ten Minute Lesson on the Nature of Money thumbnail

VIDEO: Ten Minute Lesson on the Nature of Money

By Vlad Tepes Blog

I was sent this by a gentleman who has a financial magazine read by some of the top people in finance. This is not my field and am uncomfortable even thinking about it in some ways. But I am reliably informed by a few people now, that there is truth in this world view, and profundity. In fact, this is not the usual video about how things work or what to invest in, so much is its an attempt to explain an entire world view about how money is created and destroyed, what wealth is, and so on. I plan to watch it a few more times and hopefully develop an understanding that gives me some predictive ability.

To the extent that I get it now, it doesn’t necessarily change much. It still appears that we are moving from a more or less credit driven free market system into what might be a more controlled feudal system. I dunno. Hopefully this offers insight. Looking forward to the comments on this.

EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog column by  Eeyore is republished with permission.

Studies Show The Electric Vehicles Democrats Insist You Buy Are Worse For The Environment And Lower Quality thumbnail

Studies Show The Electric Vehicles Democrats Insist You Buy Are Worse For The Environment And Lower Quality

By The Geller Report

It was never about the climate. It was always about destroying our way of life, our standing in the world and transferring our wealth to left-wing elites with nonsensical, failed ‘businesses’.

Studies Show The Electric Vehicles Democrats Insist You Buy Are Worse For The Environment And Lower Quality

By: Helen Raleigh, The Federalist, July 11, 2022:

Two recent studies have shown that electric vehicles have more quality issues than gas-powered ones and are not better for the environment.

Many people believe electric vehicles are higher quality than gas-powered vehicles and are emissions-free, which makes them much better for the environment. But two recent studies have shown that electric cars have more quality issues than gas-powered ones and are not better for the environment.

J.D. Power has produced the annual U.S. Initial Quality Study for 36 years, which measures the quality of new vehicles based on feedback from owners. The most recent study, which included Tesla in its industry calculation for the first time, found that battery-electric vehicles (EVs) and plug-in hybrid vehicles have more quality issues than gas-powered ones.

According to J.D. Power, owners of electric or hybrid vehicles cite more problems than do owners of gas-powered vehicles. The latter vehicles average 175 problems per 100 vehicles (PP100), hybrids average 239 PP100, and battery-powered cars — excluding Tesla models — average 240 PP100. Tesla models average 226 PP100. Given the average cost of an electric car is roughly $60,000, about $20,000 more than the cost of a gas-powered car, it seems owners of EVs didn’t get the value they deserve.

Some blamed the supply-chain disruptions caused by pandemic-related lockdowns as the main reason for EVs’ quality issues. EV makers have sought alternative (sometimes less optimal) solutions to manufacture new vehicles. But the same supply-chain disruption affected makers of gas-powered vehicles. Yet the three highest-ranking brands, measured by overall initial quality, are all makers of gas-powered vehicles: Buick (139 PP100), Dodge (143 PP100), and Chevrolet (147 PP100).

Some pointed to the design as a main contributing factor to EVs’ quality issues. According to David Amodeo, global director of automotive at J.D. Power, automakers view EVs as “the vehicle that will transform us into the era of the smart cars,” so they have loaded up EVs with technologies such as touch screens, Bluetooth, and voice recognition. EV makers also prefer to use manufacturer-designed apps to “control certain functions of the car, from locking and unlocking the doors remotely to monitoring battery charge.” Increasing technical complexity also increases the likelihood of problems. Not surprisingly, EV owners reported more infotainment and connectivity issues in their vehicles than owners of gas-powered vehicles. Amodeo acknowledged that “there’s a lot of room for improvement” for EVs.

Electric Vehicles Are Worse for the Environment

Besides quality issues, a new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that electric vehicles are worse for the environment than gas-powered ones. By quantifying the externalities (both greenhouse gases and local air pollution) generated by driving these vehicles, the government subsidies on the purchase of EVs, and taxes on electric and/or gasoline miles, researchers found that “electric vehicles generate a negative environmental benefit of about -0.5 cents per mile relative to comparable gasoline vehicles (-1.5 cents per mile for vehicles driven outside metropolitan areas).”

Keep reading.…..

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLE: FACT: All Electric Vehicles (EVs) Are Powered by Coal, Uranium, Natural Gas or Diesel-Powered Energy

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

NY DA Bragg Charges VICTIM of Bodega Attack by Violent Ex-Con thumbnail

NY DA Bragg Charges VICTIM of Bodega Attack by Violent Ex-Con

By Discover The Networks

In an op-ed Friday at Fox News Channel, retired FBI agent James Gagliano blasted Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s “shameless body of work,” highlighting his charging of a 61-year-old bodega clerk, Jose Alba, with Murder in the Second Degree in the self-defense stabbing death of a violent ex-con who threatened and assaulted him in the shop.

The entire incident in Upper Manhattan last week was caught on the store’s surveillance video. “Alba was charged with murder and subjected to a ridiculously high quarter-million-dollar bail package (half of what the DA’s Office requested, but later reduced to $50,000.00 in the self-defense case) and transported to Rikers Island to be housed with real criminals,” Gagliano wrote. “Welcome to the dystopian hellscape that Alvin Bragg’s prosecutorial discretion has wrought on New York. Is it any wonder city dwellers consider fleeing in droves?”

Gagliano went on to note that the thug Alba stabbed was a career criminal, while Alba has no criminal record. “What kind of message does Alba’s arrest for defending himself send?”

“Bragg’s refusal to serve as the people’s prosecutor, while coddling criminals and charging those who act in clear defense of self, make him unfit for duty,” Gagliano correctly noted.

“Decades of Democratic stranglehold on the Office have seen moderate D’s accede ground to progressives like Bragg. The leftward lurch isn’t working — it is harming a once great city,” Gagliano concluded.


Alvin Bragg

6 Known Connections

On January 8, 2022 in New York City, Bragg appeared at a National Action Network rally alongside activist Al Sharpton to discuss his (Bragg’s) criminal-justice agenda. “We know that our first civil right is the right to walk safely to our corner store,” said Bragg. “But we also know that safety has got to be based in our community and fairness. It cannot be driven solely by incarceration.” In defense of his tepid approach to punishing criminals, the new D.A. said: “This is going to make us safer. It’s intuitive. It’s common sense. I don’t understand the pushback.”

When asked during a January 2022 interview with Fox News if his policies would “give criminals a green light,” Bragg answered: “No, I mean, it at least depends upon your definition of a criminal. And for all too long we’ve kind of dealt with this othering of anyone we put in jail is a criminal. Well, you know what, we’re putting in jail homeless people who, literally, in one example, used one counterfeit bill to buy food and toothpaste, got a sentence of [several] years. So, if that’s your definition of a criminal, I suggest we need to really reorder ourselves…”

To learn more about Alvin Bragg, click here.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Buttigieg Defends Harassment of Kavanaugh at Restaurant

CNN’s Bell Wears T-Shirt Vowing to ‘Aid and Abet Abortion’

EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Great Reset is Communism’s Final Solution thumbnail

The Great Reset is Communism’s Final Solution

By Kelleigh Nelson

“We will see how contact tracing has an unequalled capacity and a quasi-essential place in the armory needed to combat COVID-19, while at the same time being positioned to become an enabler of mass surveillance.” ― Klaus Schwab,  Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum

“The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.” — Karl Marx

“I consider that the Communist Party of the United States is one of the few Communist Parties to which history has given decisive tasks from the point of view of revolutionary movement.  You must forge real revolutionary cadres and leaders of the proletariat, who will be capable of leading millions of American workers toward the revolutionary class wars.” —  Joseph Stalin in his speech to the American Communist delegation in Moscow, May 6, 1929


The 19th Century Victorian scholar of freedom, Lord Acton, made it plain to the people when he said, “Socialism is slavery.”  It is also starvation and death.

Terror By Starvation” is Charles Scaliger’s latest article in the June 13th issue of the New American Magazine.  He states, “The practice of deliberate starvation as a tool of war and oppression was fine-tuned by communists in the 20th Century.”

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by the pseudonym Lenin, died on the 21st of January 1924, having killed an estimated 3 million of his people and that’s beyond the six million who died in the civil war with the Marxists gaining power. He had built a totalitarian horror, and it fell to a monster after his death.

The communist state took the place of God. Under the rhetoric of liberation, Lenin’s Red Terror plundered the rural middle class, known as Kulaks, and when they resisted, it slaughtered.  The confiscation and redistribution of grains from Kulaks in Ukraine and Russia led to starvation on an epic scale.  The urban middle classes in general, and free-thinkers in particular, suffered a similar fate.

Other mass murderers followed Lenin.  Stalin, who through mass starvation murdered at least 20 million, and Chairman Mao, most prominent among them, who starved at least 45 million Chinese.  Scaliger writes, “Mao Tse-tung’s Great Leap Forward, which resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese, primarily by starvation, was a deliberate imitation of Stalin’s Great Turn.”

Millions upon millions died of starvation when communism’s collectivism took over farms, production and ultimately property. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed the engineered famines and sweeping purges of Lenin and Stalin had murdered from 40 to 60 million, probably even more.

Remember the truckers of Canada and now the farmers of the Netherlands.  We’re seeing the beginning “tools of oppression” ultimately leading once again to mass starvation.  It was the key in the 20th Century and it’s now the 21st Century plan for the entire world and it started long, long ago.

Communists Emigrate to America

In previous articles, I’ve mentioned the 48ers, European communists who emigrated to America in 1848.  The 48ers left Europe after a series of revolutions, including Germany where Marx and his colleagues worked and fought.  Bourgeois liberals and communists fled their countries and emigrated to various countries across the world, including the United States.  The 48ers played a large roll in American leftist movements in the middle and late 1800s.

But they weren’t the first communists to come to the US.  There is a tradition of socialism and communism in the United States tracing back almost to the very origins of the movements and much further back than many of the things we consider “American” today.  Matthew Britt, author of The First Communists in the United States writes, “Only a selective reading of American history will tell you that socialism and communism don’t have a place in America’s history or society today.”

Not long after America’s founding, members of the first Marxist organization known as the Communist League moved to the states to avoid political persecution in Europe.  Robert Owen, a socialist from Wales, emigrated to America in 1824.

Owen created the Utopian Socialist Society of New Harmony, Indiana in 1825.  He tested some of his writings and speeches in both Scotland and Indiana and his experiments were very influential on Marx, Engels, and other socialists and communists at the time and later on. This led to Owen being mentioned in the Communist Manifesto and would lead to the creation of other utopian societies around the country.

Robert Owen’s influence reached key members of society.  In February and March of 1825, Owen gave two speeches to Congress when figures such as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and others were present.  Wouldn’t you love to know what our early presidents and founders thought of Owen’s speeches!

One of Owen’s sons later became a member of Congress from Indiana. Robert Dale Owen was a Democrat steeped in his father’s utopian socialism.  Later in life, he was into spiritualism as were President Lincoln and his wife, Mary.

Many of the early American communists were figures in history and have been mentioned in numerous books and articles.  Let’s take a look at just a few of the many.

Edward Bellamy, born in 1850 in Massachusetts, was another latter 19th century utopian socialist.  His claim to fame was his best-selling book, Looking Backward.  His book, still popular today, is nothing more than a socialist polemic promoting a communist society for America.  Charles Beard and John Dewey (the famous Dewey of progressive/leftist education, no relation to the John Dewey of the decimal system) considered Bellamy’s book to be the second most important book of the 19th century.  The book cited by Beard and Dewey as the most influential book of the 19th century was Marx and Engels’ Das Capital.

On page 16 of Crimes of the Educators by Samuel Blumenfeld and Alex Newman, the authors state, “Even after the rise of Hitler’s National Socialism in Germany and the Marxist-Leninist communism in Russia, Dewey still clung to Bellamy’s vision of socialist America.”  On page 17 of Crimes of the Educators, the authors write, “Dewey, who spent his professional life trying to transform Bellamy’s fantasy into American reality, is responsible for the dysfunctional public education we have today—a minimal interest in the development of intellectual, scientific, and literacy skills, and a maximal effort to produce socialized, politically correct individuals who can barely read.”

Education was a massive target of the early communists.

Francis Bellamy was the socialist minister cousin of Edward Bellamy and the original author of the Pledge of Allegiance.  Francis believed the Civil War was the defining event in American history and desired a pledge that would reinforce the meaning of the North’s victory over the south, (and the centralized federal government).  On page 292 of Lincoln’s Marxists, the author Al Benson Jr. and Walter Donald Kennedy write, “His pledge was designed to incorporate into the mind-set of all Americans the views of Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Webster, and the radical abolitionists, who he believed held the correct view of what America should be.” (One nation, indivisible.)

Joseph Weydemeyer was one of the first major figures to arrive as a forty-eighter.  He was part of the League of Communists and headed its Frankfurt chapter before moving to the US.  Prior to emigrating, Weydemeyer participated in the 1848 revolution and was a close friend of Marx and Engels.  In 1852, Weydemeyer founded the first Marxist organization in the US called the American Workers League.

In 1860, he became involved in the campaign to elect Abraham Lincoln.  Weydemeyer joined the army soon after Lincoln was elected, and during the Civil War, he led volunteer units from Missouri. With his socialist faith in strong central government, he was an avid supporter of the Union cause.

Marx even wrote a letter to Lincoln on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association congratulating him on his second electoral victory, which you can read here.

Weydemeyer stayed politically active, which continued after the end of the war, even handing out copies of Marx’s Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association to troops under his command. In his post-war career, he was elected as a county auditor in Missouri.

August Willich was a Brigadier General in the Union Army and was often referred to as “the Reddest of the Red 48ers.”  He fought in the 1848 Revolution in Germany and Friedrich Engels was his aide-de-camp, which is basically the highest-level personal aide.  Marx called Willich a “communist with a heart,” even though Willich had publicly insulted him and called him too conservative. Willich was actually more “radical” than Marx, and was part of the opposition group against Marx when the Communist League split. He wasn’t fond of Lincoln’s close ties with big-business interests, but he still supported the Republican Party and the Union’s war efforts against the South.

William Tecumseh Sherman – On page 296 of Al Benson Jr. and Walter Donald Kennedy’s book, Lincoln’s Marxists, is the following:

While doing research for this book, the author came across Sherman’s name in a list of “approved” socialists/communists in America.  The press of the Communist Party of the United States published the book from which this name, as well as the names of other leading socialists/communists, was taken.  The editor of this communist book noted that Sherman was an “outstanding” general of the Union Army.  It should be noted that the co-founder of modern-day communism, Fredrick Engels, also held this opinion.  Both Gen. William Sherman and Sen. John Sherman, his brother, believed in a strong, indivisible, central government.

General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union “Army of the West” marched from Atlanta, Ga., to the seaport of Savannah. Enroute, Sherman’s forces intentionally devastated a 60-mile-wide swath of countryside.  Sherman’s March to the Sea was a hideous five-week destruction of “total war.” Sherman’s engineers and foraging “bummers” — were scorched-earth devils, burning Atlanta and then plundering the countryside.

Sherman’s order was clear: Thoroughly destroy every building and every piece of equipment that might be militarily valuable.  Lincoln’s army, especially those under the command of Sherman, left a swath of destruction.  Congressman Zachariah Chandler said this about the rights of Southerners, “A rebel has sacrificed all his rights.  He has no right to life, liberty, property, or the pursuit of happiness.  Everything you give him, even life itself, is a boon which he has forfeited.” (Congressional Globe, 37th Congress, 1st sess.)

Horrors were visited on the civilian population of the South, even upon women and children; mass starvation, pillaging of homes and churches, rapes of both white and black, yes, raped and murdered, thousands of citizens, both white and black, left homeless and forced to forage for whatever morsel of food they could find in the rubble left desolate after the slaughter.  Destruction of all means of production, even of medicines and medical supplies, cemeteries were looted, colleges and libraries were obliterated, a massive blight on the land and her people.

Sherman, upon hearing in 1864 that continued attacks on his army were being conducted by Southern partisans, said this, “There is a class of people (Southerners) men, women and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.”  Sherman wasn’t the only one, Grant was in on the murder of non-combatants.  Grant stated, “It is our duty to weaken the enemy by destroying their means of subsistence, withdrawing their means of cultivating their fields, and every other way possible.”  And it was an order from on high, Lincoln did not dissuade his Union Army from these atrocities on Southern Americans.

With the blessing of President Abraham Lincoln, General Sherman and his 62,000

battle-hardened Union troops fulfilled his promise, raping, pillaging and burning their way through South Carolina and Georgia.

General Henry Halleck, Army Chief of Staff wrote to General Grant the order to annihilate the south, “…make all the valley south of the Baltimore and Ohio road a desert.”

Sherman obliterated the ability for men, women and children, and the elderly and infirm to sustain life.  One need only search, “The War Crimes of William T. Sherman.”

Sherman didn’t retire after the war.  He took his “scorched earth” tactics to the American Indians and wiped out their food supply.  In the late 1860s and early 1870s, nearly every Buffalo herd of the plains was slaughtered by Sherman and his men.  In an 1867 letter to Grant, Sherman referred to his policy against the native Americans as “the final solution to the Indian problem,” the same sentence Hitler said some 70 years later.

Nationwide Infiltration

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy tried to warn the American people that communists had infiltrated every branch and department of government, and society.

Hollywood romanticized communism by promoting “world peace” in the 1933 movie, Gabriel Over the White House.  The movie was a promotion for the 1945 United Nations Charter and was funded by William Randolph Hearst.

The pulpits of America were slowly infiltrated with black churches being the first targets for subversion.

But the real quarry was education.

As Lenin stated so long ago, “Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.”

John Dewey’s plan to dumb down America was launched in 1898 and today it is alive, well, and flourishing with communist propaganda. Academic education is gone, a collective utopia runs in the veins of every public school and most private and religious schools. Dewey has destroyed the literacy of millions upon millions of American children, most of whom have attained only a third-grade level of reading.  Phonics is long gone, English literature is a thing of the past, simple math has become a nightmare.

Dr. Theodore Brameld, an avowed communist, was professor of education at New York University and right-hand man of Dean Ernest 0. Melby. Dean Melby was perhaps the most conspicuous champion of progressive education, and also was most vocal in his criticism of any investigation of subversion in education.

The Turning of the Tides by Paul W. Shafer and John Howland Snow was first published in 1953.  It is an expose of the destruction of academic education in America by the communists.  On Page 47, the authors expose Dr. Brameld’s device for circumventing opposition via slyness and outright deception.

In 1935, Brameld said, “Teachers favorable to the collectivist philosophy and program must influence their students, subtly, if necessary, frankly, if possible, toward acceptance of the same position.”   

It is the method referred to in the May 1937 issue of The Communist: Only when teachers have really mastered Marxism-Leninism will they be able skillfully to inject it into their teaching at the least risk of exposure, and at the same time to conduct struggles around the schools in a truly Bolshevik manner.

They trained the teachers.  And we willingly gave them our children!

Homeschool your babies and grandbabies!

Conclusion

The tentacles of socialism/communism are deeply ensconced in our culture, but the Great Reset is nothing new.  It has been around from the beginning of time, the desire of man to eliminate opposition and subjugate survivors into slavery.  It’s the same serpent from the Garden and his fallen minions.  The Great Reset may be communism’s final solution, but an all-powerful Creator is still in control.

We’ve recently seen breathtaking answers to prayer.  We must keep working in our local communities, keep praying, and as my friend Roger Anghis says, “God has everything in control.  It’s time to get the popcorn.”

©Kelleigh Nelson. All rights reserved.

Court Blocks Pennsylvania’s Carbon Pricing Scheme thumbnail

Court Blocks Pennsylvania’s Carbon Pricing Scheme

By Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

“Don’t let activists who believe that putting Pennsylvanians out of work will help ‘save the planet.’ It’s time to confront the wannabe planet savers here in this room and this state and tell them not only NO, but HELL NO.”

That’s what CFACT’s Marc Morano declared before the Pennsylvania House of Representatives when Governor Tom Wolf tried to push The Keystone State into “The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative” (aka RGGI) scheme without authorization by law.

A state court agreed and blocked Wolf’s power grab as an attempt to establish an “unlawful tax.” The court said plaintiffs “raised a substantial legal question” since taxing is a power that is supposed to be wielded by the Pennsylvania General Assembly rather than the Executive.

As reported by the AP, “The Power Pa Jobs Alliance, a coalition of industry and labor groups, said that power plant operators would have started paying what it called the ‘carbon tax’ on Friday had the court not issued its injunction. It contends the carbon policy will impose higher electricity costs on consumers. The group called Friday’s ruling a ‘significant win for working families.’”

Winning court decisions are important and cause for celebration. But we must remind ourselves that oftentimes they’re only isolated “battles” and don’t necessarily determine the larger outcome.

Take, for example, how the Biden Administration is brazenly moving forward on its climate agenda despite the fact the Supreme Court handed them a stinging defeat on regulating carbon dioxide emissions in West Virginia v. EPA.

No sooner did the court wallop them, than Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg rolled out plans to regulate CO2 emissions from motor vehicles and boost his power over the states in ways Congress never intended.

As CFACT senior policy analyst Bonner Cohen reported at CFACT.org:

“One week after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency could not regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants because the agency lacks congressional authorization to do so, the Biden Department of Transportation (DOT) proposed a rule targeting CO2 emissions from highway vehicles, for which DOT also has no legal authority.”

“In a rare moment of regulatory candor, the administration acknowledges in the docket supporting DOT’s proposed rule that DOT’s scheme will ultimately encourage Americans to switch from gasoline-powered cars to EVs.”

For those on the Left, court decisions are a useful tool if they propel their agenda forward — but if they suffer a setback then they proceed on as though it’s just business as usual. They need to lose again and again to force compliance.

Let’s hope the courts continue to teach Governor Wolf, Secretary Buttigieg and their armies of bureaucrats a sorely needed lesson in constitutional checks and balances.

RELATED VIDEO: COVID lockdowns morphing into climate lockdowns

RELATED ARTICLES:

Biden’s Transportation Department targets CO2 emissions of cars on highways to push EVs

No excuse for Texas energy debacle

Electric vehicles a tool ripe for abuse

Government benefits more from fuel sales than oil companies!

EDITORS NOTE: This CFACT column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The FDA Is Considering a Change That Would Have Huge Implications for Birth Control thumbnail

The FDA Is Considering a Change That Would Have Huge Implications for Birth Control

By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

The downsides of government mandates requiring a prescription are significant.


With the Supreme Court’s recent abortion decision, unplanned pregnancies are top-of-mind for many Americans. So, whatever one believes about abortion, the timing of a new debate on birth control policy within the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) couldn’t be more important.

The FDA just received a request from a contraceptive company seeking authorization to sell its birth control pills over-the-counter—without a prescription, as is required nationwide under current laws. This has prompted renewed calls for the FDA to approve this change. And, according to the New York Times, it’s seriously considering it this time.

The FDA received its first application for the sale of a nonprescription birth control pill. The Paris-based company that asked for the over-the-counter authorization said the timing, weeks after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, was a coincidence. https://t.co/bHvsZra2zL

— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 11, 2022

Why? Well, the downsides of government mandates requiring a prescription are significant.

For one thing, it makes birth control harder to access for people without health insurance or the time/resources to obtain professional medical care. It also adds significantly to the cost of birth control by introducing middlemen and additional steps.

The current restrictive regime is defended in the name of safety. After all, hormonal birth control pills can have serious side effects and some women shouldn’t take them if they have certain medical factors that conflict with the medication.

Still, while the medication is indeed serious, it should still be made available over the counter. Right now, the government is needlessly standing in the way between the medical community and countless women who could benefit from care but can’t necessarily obtain a prescription.

You don’t have to take my word for it. The American Medical Association (AMA) has firmly endorsed making birth control available over-the-counter and called on the FDA to approve the change.

“Providing patients with [over-the-counter] access to the birth control pill is an easy call from a public health perspective,” AMA Board Member David H. Aizuss, M.D. said. “Access is one of the most cited reasons why patients do not use oral contraceptives, use them inconsistently, or discontinue use. Expanding [over-the-counter] access would make it easier for patients to properly use oral contraceptives, leading to fewer unplanned pregnancies.”

Studies have shown that, in absence of a required doctor consultation, women are able to self-screen and determine if they meet any of the conditions where one shouldn’t take hormonal birth control. (You know, like people do all the time with various medications). They can also always consult the pharmacists, which doesn’t typically require insurance or even an appointment.

Other expert groups like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists also support making the medication available without a prescription.

It would hardly be an unprecedented move.

Dozens of other countries don’t require a prescription for birth control, including Mexico, Portugal, India, Greece, and Brazil. It’s mostly western Europe, the US, Canada, and other advanced nations—with big, bloated bureaucratic governments—that have barriers in place. But in the countries where it is available, it seems to work out just fine.

More fundamentally, it’s a matter of who gets to decide. Can women weigh the risks and benefits of a medication and decide for themselves? Or should that decision be made for them by supposedly benevolent bureaucrats and the nanny state?

For those who believe in individual liberty, the answer is clear.

“Freedom over one’s physical person is the most basic freedom of all, and people in a free society should be sovereign over their own bodies,” former Congressman Ron Paul, himself a medical doctor, once said. “When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we in essence accept that the state owns our bodies.”

The FDA shouldn’t own women’s bodies. They should.

As one long-time advocate of making birth control available over-the-counter, (my friend) the Washington Examiner writer Tiana Lowe, put it, “[The FDA] could do something that not only is broadly supported by people of all political stripes but also has a marked ability to prevent unplanned pregnancies from occurring in the first place.”

All it has to do is get out of the way.

AUTHOR

Brad Polumbo

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and Policy Correspondent at the Foundation for Economic Education.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Shroud of Turin Defies its Sceptics thumbnail

The Shroud of Turin Defies its Sceptics

By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

Even though it failed a carbon-dating test 40 years ago, new findings suggest that the scientists were wrong.


In April 2022 new tests on the Shroud of Turin — believed by many to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ — dated it to the first century. This dating contradicted a 1980s carbon dating that suggested the Shroud was from the Middle Ages. Some people would have been surprised, but not anyone who had been following the build-up of evidence indicating the Shroud is authentic.

A total of four tests have now dated the Shroud to the first century. In addition, an immense body of other evidence suggests the cloth, which appears to carry an image of Jesus’s crucified body, is genuine.

Experiment

Debate about the Shroud has been going on for centuries, provoking heated exchanges, revealing a tortuous trail of evidence full of unexpected twists and turns, and prompting more unanswerable questions than any other artefact in history.

Only days before the new dating results were announced, one of the main players in the drama, British filmmaker David Rolfe, issued a million-dollar challenge to the British Museum to replicate the Shroud.

The Museum oversaw the carbon tests on the Shroud and Rolfe explained: “They said it was knocked up by a medieval conman, and I say: ‘Well, if he could do it, you must be able to do it as well. And if you can, there’s a one-million-dollar donation for your funds.’”

Rolfe’s challenge might have seemed like a stunt, but it was serious. He said if the museum accepted the challenge, he would place a million dollars in a legal holding account pending the outcome.

You would think if anyone could copy the Shroud, the British Museum could. It certainly has the resources: around a thousand employees, including research scientists, links to major universities — and I’m sure the museum would not refuse outside help.

So, was Rolfe’s bet risky?

Those familiar with the evidence would say no. Given all we now know about the Shroud of Turin, and the fact that no one has ever been able to copy it or even explain how it was made, Rolfe’s million dollars appears safe. The reason he and so many others are convinced the burial cloth is genuine is that there is a mountain of evidence supporting that conclusion.

One reason most people don’t share this view is that they seem to know as little about the Shroud as they do about carbon dating. They are not aware that, contrary to the popular idea that the Shroud is a fake, it has become, in the words of a number of researchers, “the single most studied artefact in human history”.

Solid science

The most recent verification of its authenticity came in April this year. A member of Italy’s National Research Council, Dr Liberato de Caro, used a new X-ray technique designed specifically for dating linen.

He used a method known as wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS), which he says is more reliable than carbon dating. He said this was because carbon dating can be dramatically wrong due to contamination of the thing being dated.

If you are one of those who know little about the Shroud, here are some basic details: It is a long strip of linen, covered in blood and carrying a faint image of the front and back of a dead man, apparently beaten and scourged, bleeding copiously from the scalp, and showing all the signs of Jesus’s crucifixion, including a lance wound to the heart. It first appeared publicly in western Europe in 1355 when it was put on display in France. The owners refused to say where they got it — understandable, given that it was probably stolen.

The Shroud’s sudden appearance set off the fiery debate that continues to this day. You may know that many books and articles have already been written. Over the years, I have read many of them, but none offered what I was looking for — an up-to-date introduction to the subject that was accessible to non-academics.

I couldn’t find one, so I decided to write it myself.

Overwhelming data

Soon, I felt like this was a mistake. They say the worst thing you can do to journalists is to provide them with too much information, and the information on the Shroud is very close to being too much. To get an idea of how much information is involved, search for “Shroud of Turin” on Google Scholar. You will get around 12,000 links.

Even a search on academia.edu turns up about 4,000 academic papers begging to be read. The oldest Shroud website, shroud.com, has among its extensive resources, one comforting list of a mere 400 “essential” scientific papers and articles. But even this is a lot if you are already struggling to get through books, videos and papers from academic conferences, podcasts and documentaries going back decades.

Most people, including myself (until recently), closed their minds to the Shroud when the 1988 carbon dating results were released. Those tests suggested the relatively high levels of carbon 14 on the cloth meant it came from around 1325 — give or take 65 years.

That sounds precise, but what most of us weren’t told was that carbon dating had been wrong many times, sometimes by as much as a thousand or more years, due to contamination of the article being dated. In the case of the Shroud, there is a long list of reasons it could be contaminated, including the fact that it has been handled by countless people, exposed to fire, water, repairs, and other materials capable of causing contamination.

Most interesting of all, as indicated by a growing body of evidence, its carbon levels could have been raised by the radiation that appears to be the most likely cause of the image it carries.

So, even though many people still assume the carbon date was the end of the story, it may be just the beginning. If, like me, you take the time to review the evidence, it wears you down. These days, if anyone asks me if I really think “that Shroud thing” could be Jesus’ burial cloth with his image on it, all I can say is: given the evidence, I can’t think what else it could be. I am open to being talked out of this view, but so far nobody has managed to do it.

Whatever your own view, following the trail of evidence is possibly the most fascinating and rewarding journey you will ever undertake. This is partly because the case for the Shroud does not hinge on a single fact — certainly not on the radiocarbon date. It involves many interlocking facts — a big picture painted by intriguing details. My experience is that the Shroud asks more unanswerable questions than anything on the planet.

Excerpted from Riddles of the Shroud with permission.

AUTHOR

William West

William West is a Sydney journalist. More by William West

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.