CV NEWS FEED // The Supreme Court on Friday repealed pro-abortion legal precedents Roe vs. Wade and Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, returning the matter of abortion to elected officials in each state.
The 5-4 ruling in the case of Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health has long been anticipated by both sides of the political aisle.
Democrats and abortion industry leaders have worked for months devising ways to thwart the ruling, including by enshrining the so-called “right to abortion” in blue state constitutions. Republican lawmakers in at least 18 states, meanwhile, have enacted “trigger” laws to protect unborn life immediately in the event of Roe’s repeal.
“Held: The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito in the Supreme Court majority opinion released Friday:
Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.
CatholicVote President Brian Burch hailed the decision and called on pro-life Americans to immediately act in the interests of cementing the Supreme Court victory at the state and local levels throughout the country.
“Catholics and pro-life advocates across the country celebrate today’s landmark Supreme Court decision as the ‘dawning of a new day in America’ – a long-awaited first step toward the full protection of American women and children,” said Burch:
The Court finally righted the notorious decision in Roe vs. Wade after nearly 50 years of heroic efforts by millions of Americans in pursuit of justice. Nowhere in our Constitution do we find a right to take innocent human life. Further, the humanity of children in the womb has become plain and undeniable thanks to the decades of technological advances since Roe was decided. Millions of women have been coerced, threatened, or forced into a decision they regret. They too are worthy of protection. A dark chapter in our nation’s history has finally been closed.
Burch exhorted the pro-life movement to “resolve to work ever more diligently toward building a culture of life that respects the dignity of both mother and child.”
The Court today has merely allowed state legislators to begin the important task of supporting women in need, and protecting their vulnerable children from the grisly practices of the abortion industry,” he said:
We urge state legislatures along with our federal representatives to move quickly to enact broad protections for women and children, and support for pregnancy centers, maternity homes, and programs that offer real choices for women to keep and love their children.”
CatholicVote Communications Director Joshua Mercer added that he saw a great significance in the date of the ruling, from a Catholic perspective. “Not only was this realized on the day we celebrate the Sacred Heart, but every other year it will fall on the Nativity of John the Baptist — who recognized the humanity of Christ in the womb,” he said.
Continuing Coverage
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced in response to the Supreme Court ruling that abortion is now fully illegal in the Lone Star State. In addition, June 24 is now a state holiday.
ISRAEL SHOWCASED is a project of The United West featuring the accomplishments and global contributions of Israel, to the world.
FROM THE HOLOCAUST TO SURFSIDE – A short documentary by The United West about an elite team from Israel’s National Rescue Unit, in the search and recovery efforts at the Surfside, Florida building collapse. The United West team, with Suzi Gold as Host, showcases the turbulent history of the Jews and their continued resilience to overcomes all obstacles and share their experience and talents with all mankind.
Please watch and share this story which features first-time interviews inter-cut with the actual 911 call, in real time! The Surfside unspeakable tragedy, ironically, will uplift you as you watch this story and listen to the survivors and rescue team members.
BACKGROUND ON THE SURFSIDE, FL. BUILDING COLLASPE:
On Thursday, June 24, 2021, at approximately 1:25 a.m. EDT, Champlain Towers South, a 12-story beachfront condominium in the Miami suburb of Surfside, Florida, United States, partially collapsed. Ninety-eight people died. Four people were rescued from the rubble, but one died of injuries shortly after arriving at the hospital. Eleven others were injured. Approximately 35 were rescued the same day from the un-collapsed portion of the building, which was demolished 10 days later. The main contributing factor under investigation is long-term degradation of reinforced concrete structural support in the ground-level parking garage under the housing units, due to water penetration and corrosion of the reinforcing steel. The problems had been reported in 2018 and noted as “much worse” in April 2021. A $15 million program of remedial works had been approved before the collapse, although no main structural work had been undertaken. Other possible factors include land subsidence, insufficient reinforcing steel, and corruption during construction.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-24 07:51:282022-06-24 07:51:28FROM THE HOLOCAUST TO SURFSIDE — The amazing story of the Champlain condo collapse in Surfside, FL.
The Democrat USG is out of control – destroying our economy, our freedoms, our every way of life.
In the wake of Democrat-induced hyper inflation amid massive government spending, the Biden regime has gone on the attack against ……. business.
In this case, Chevron has responded, which is mighty brave. Speaking truth to power makes you an an enemy of the Biden regime — a suicidal act.
The irony is Chevron and other oil companies have been trying to appease the radical greens for years by running away from defending their core oil business and promoting biomass and other green fantasies. https://t.co/3Vgq9YVXrn
Biden last week blamed oil companies for contributing to high prices — arguing they aren’t refining enough oil after previously claiming they aren’t drilling enough on existing federal leases and slamming companies such as ExxonMobil and Chevron for reaping massive profits as global prices rise.
Wirth pushed back on Biden’s portrayal of the companies as responsible for soaring gas prices, which last week hit an all-time average of more than $5 per gallon.
Chevron’s CEO pointed out to @adsteel that the U.S. hasn’t constructed a new refinery since the 1970’s and he doesn’t believe a new facility will ever be constructed. https://t.co/u2iHzxg6td
The CEO of Chevron sent an open letter to President Joe Biden after Biden sent a letter suggesting that oil companies could face consequences and accusing them of not doing enough to increase refining capacity.
Mike Wirth, in the letter, called on the White House to end its hostilities toward the oil industry, saying there needs to be a change in its approach and policies before gas prices can drop.
“Addressing this situation requires thoughtful action and a willingness to work together, not political rhetoric,” Wirth said, adding, “Your Administration has largely sought to criticize, and at times vilify, our industry.”
More than a week ago, Biden attacked oil companies and claimed they’re making record profits before urging them to increase oil production to alleviate record-high gas prices. Targeting ExxonMobil specifically, Biden accused them of making “more money than God” and not drilling enough during comments he made in May.
Soaring Gas Prices
In recent months, Biden has taken criticism as regular gas prices have eclipsed the $5 per gallon mark. AAA data shows that prices fell for several days before rising again this week to $4.96 per gallon.
Since Biden took office, gas prices have been steadily increasing as the president issued a number of energy-related executive orders, including suspending new oil drilling leases and ending the Keystone XL pipeline.
“The U.S. energy sector needs cooperation and support from your Administration for our country to return to a path toward greater energy security, economic prosperity, and environmental protection,” Wirth said in the letter, adding that Chevron has increased production in recent years.
Oil companies “need clarity and consistency on policy matters ranging from leases and permits on federal lands, to the ability to permit and build critical infrastructure, to the proper role of regulation that considers both costs and benefits,” Wirth added.
“Most importantly, we need an honest dialogue on how to best balance energy, economic, and environmental objectives–one that recognizes our industry is a vital sector of the U.S. economy and is essential to our national security,” he said. “We can only meet these challenges by working together.”
When asked about the letter, Biden didn’t appear to try and tone down the tensions.
“I didn’t know they’d get their feelings hurt that quickly. We need more refining capacity. This idea that they don’t have more oil to bring up and refine is simply not true,” he told reporters.
Last week, ExxonMobil responded to Biden’s letter and said it had invested $118 billion in new oil and gas supplies compared to a net income of $55 billion.
“We kept investing even during the pandemic, when we lost more than $20 billion and had to borrow more than $30 billion to maintain investment to increase capacity to be ready for post-pandemic demand,” the company stated.
U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is slated to meet with oil industry executives on Thursday to discuss ways to reduce energy prices.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-23 19:52:322022-06-23 19:52:32Chevron CEO Fires Back at Biden, Slams His Attacks And ‘Political Rhetoric’ in New Letter
Public school spending has become a costly failure.
While I have great fondness for some of the visuals I’ve created over the years (especially “two wagons” and “apple harvesting“), I confess that none of my creations have ever been as clear and convincing as the iconic graph on education spending and education outcomes created by the late Andrew Coulson.
I can’t imagine anyone looking at his chart and not immediately realizing that you don’t get better results by pouring more money into the government’s education monopoly.
But the edu-crat lobby acts as if evidence doesn’t matter. At the national level, the state level, and the local level, the drumbeat is the same: Give us more money if you care about kids.
So let’s build on Coulson’s chart to show why teachers’ unions and other special interests are wrong.
Gerard Robinson of the American Enterprise Institute and Professor Benjamin Scafidi from Kennesaw State University take a close look at this issue.
…education is important to the economic and social well-being of our nation, which is why it is the No. 1 line item in 41 state budgets. …Schools need extra money to help struggling students, or so goes the long-standing thinking of traditional education reformers who believe a lack of resources – teachers, counselors, social workers, technology, books, school supplies – is the problem. …a look back at the progress we’ve made under reformers’ traditional response to fixing low-performing schools – simply showering them with more money – makes it clear that this approach has been a costly failure.
And when the authors say it’s been a “costly failure,” they’re not exaggerating.
Since World War II, inflation-adjusted spending per student in American public schools has increased by 663 percent. Where did all of that money go? One place it went was to hire more personnel. Between 1950 and 2009, American public schools experienced a 96 percent increase in student population. During that time, public schools increased their staff by 386 percent – four times the increase in students. The number of teachers increased by 252 percent, over 2.5 times the increase in students. The number of administrators and other staff increased by over seven times the increase in students. …This staffing surge still exists today. From 1992 to 2014 – the most recent year of available data – American public schools saw a 19 percent increase in their student population and a staffing increase of 36 percent. This decades-long staffing surge in American public schools has been tremendously expensive for taxpayers, yet it has not led to significant changes in student achievement. For example, public school national math scores have been flat (and national reading scores declined slightly) for 17-year-olds since 1992.
By the way, the failure of government schools doesn’t affect everyone equally.
Parents with economic resources (such as high-profile politicians) can either send their kids to private schools or move to communities where government schools still maintain some standards.
But for lower-income households, their options are very limited.
Minorities disproportionately suffer, as explained by Juan Williams in the Wall Street Journal.
While 40% of white Americans age 25-29 held bachelor’s degrees in 2013, that distinction belonged to only 15% of Hispanics, and 20% of blacks. …The root of this problem: Millions of black and Hispanic students in U.S. schools simply aren’t taught to read well enough to flourish academically. …according to a March report by Child Trends, based on 2015 data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 21% of Hispanic fourth-grade students were deemed “proficient” in reading. This is bad news. A fourth-grader’s reading level is a key indicator of whether he or she will graduate from high school. The situation is worse for African-Americans: A mere 18% were considered “proficient” in reading by fourth grade.
But Juan points out that the problems aren’t confined to minority communities. The United States has a national education problem.
The problem isn’t limited to minority students. Only 46% of white fourth-graders—and 35% of fourth-graders of all races—were judged “proficient” in reading in 2015. In general, American students are outperformed by students abroad. According to the most recent Program for International Student Assessment, a series of math, science and reading tests given to 15-year-olds around the world, the U.S. placed 17th among the 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries in reading.
This is very grim news, especially when you consider that the United States spends more on education – on a per-pupil basis – than any other country.
Here’s a table confirming Juan’s argument. It lacks the simple clarity of Andrew Coulson’s graph, but if you look at these numbers, it’s difficult to reach any conclusion other than we spend a lot in America and get very mediocre results.
Juan concludes his column with a plea for diversity, innovation, and competition.
For black and Hispanic students falling behind at an early age, their best hope is for every state, no matter its minority-student poverty rate, to take full responsibility for all students who aren’t making the grade—and get those students help now. That means adopting an attitude of urgency when it comes to saving a child’s education. Specifically, it requires cities and states to push past any union rules that protect underperforming schools and bad teachers. Urgency also means increasing options for parents, from magnet to charter schools. Embracing competition among schools is essential to heading off complacency based on a few positive signs. American K-12 education is in trouble, especially for minority children, and its continuing neglect is a scandal.
P.P.P.S. Shifting to a different topic, another great visual (which also happens to be the most popular item I’ve ever shared on International Liberty) is the simple image properly defining the enemies of liberty and progress.
Daniel J. Mitchell is a Washington-based economist who specializes in fiscal policy, particularly tax reform, international tax competition, and the economic burden of government spending. He also serves on the editorial board of the Cayman Financial Review.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-22 16:51:172022-06-22 16:51:17The Failure of Public Schooling in One Chart
President Biden isn’t entirely to blame, but his anti-market policies have contributed to the problem.
Average gas prices recently passed $5 per gallon nationwide, setting a new record. This is bad news for workers’ budgets, and since it’s happening under President Joe Biden’s watch, it’s bad news for the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects.
The White House has tried to deflect blame for the insane surge in gas prices onto Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. And, to be fair, gas prices are definitely not completely within any president’s control. They absolutely are influenced by global factors, and the disruption in the global energy market caused by Putin’s invasion certainly has contributed to higher prices.
But Biden isn’t off the hook. Gas prices started rising long before the invasion, and the president still has direct responsibility for how his policies have contributed to this problem.
Here are three specific things Biden has done that have led to increased gas prices.
1. Canceling Drilling Leases and Limiting Domestic Production
Since taking office, Biden has taken too many steps to count to limit domestic production. These include halting federal permits for oil and gas drilling and leasing shortly after taking office and blocking drilling in a major oil-rich Alaskan region.
To be clear, these decisions will mostly affect future production. But that does still significantly affect gas prices because companies factor in their expectations about the future into the decisions they make today.
“Some say that new leases … would have taken time and would not yet be online, but even so, there is evidence that expectations of increased future supply has a beneficial impact on current prices and expectations of future supply drying up has a negative impact on current prices,” the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ben Lieberman said.
“At a day-to-day level, I am hearing from drillers that they are having a very hard time getting all the approvals they need from [the Environmental Protection Agency] and other agencies in order to produce on existing wells, and of course, new federal leasing has come to a halt,” Lieberman added.
It’s just basic economics that when the government throttles future supply in an industry, that will lead to higher prices both now and in the future. Biden was warned by many critics at the time that this would happen, but he proceeded anyway.
2. Choking Regulations that Impose Big Costs and Lead to Higher Prices
Speaking of basic economics, it’s well established that when businesses’ costs rise, that puts upward pressure on the prices they charge consumers. The oil and gas industry is no exception.
And unfortunately, the Biden administration has both proposed and implemented a wide array of regulations on the energy sector, inflicting billions in direct financial costs and incalculable indirect compliance costs — plus further harming expectations for the future.
“The regulatory chokehold imposed by the Biden administration on oil production in place of a Green New Deal has drastically raised gasoline prices, thereby hurting lower-income people the most,” said conservative economist Vance Ginn, who served in the Trump administration.
“This is yet another example of the high cost of big-government environmentalism when the better approach is to remove government barriers so that free markets can better let people adapt to changes in the environment at a much lower cost,” Ginn concluded.
3. Anti-Energy Rhetoric that Discourages Investment
Rhetoric matters. While words don’t literally do anything to change gas prices, the signals coming from policymakers absolutely do affect the long-term investment decisions businesses make.
And even as a presidential candidate, Biden sent very negative messages about what his leadership would mean for the gas industry.
In just one example, as Americans for Tax Reform pointed out, Biden said during a campaign stop: “We are going to get rid of fossil fuels. … We’re going to phase out fossil fuels.” Then, upon taking office, the president followed these words with actions such as canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, blocking leases, restricting imports, and pursuing regulations.
In general, Biden’s open hostility toward the oil and gas industry has almost certainly curbed investment into production that otherwise would’ve occurred.
“Such extinction rhetoric, coming from the now-president, has an unprecedented chilling effect on investment,” Lieberman said. To put it simply, less investment means less supply — which means higher prices.
It’s absolutely true that our high gas prices aren’t entirely Biden’s fault. But the president is not the helpless bystander his defenders would have you believe.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-22 16:51:162022-06-22 16:51:163 Things Biden Has Done That Increased Gas Prices
“Our Founding Fathers didn’t give us the Second Amendment for duck hunting or simply for self-protection in a country that at the time had a vast and yet unknown frontier. They bestowed it upon us so that we could protect our precious nation from devolving into tyranny as so many others have done.”
“All political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The Communist Party must command all the guns; that way, no guns can ever be used to command the party.”
The quote was from Mao Zedong, founder of Communist China. Mao’s first act after gaining complete control of China in 1949 was to take away all guns from the population. It was a policy he began in 1935 as he took over each rural province. Anyone found with a gun post-confiscation was executed.
An estimated 65 million Chinese died as a result of Mao’s repeated, merciless attempts to create a new “socialist” China. Anyone who got in his way was done away with—by execution, imprisonment, or forced famine.
Mao killed more people than either Stalin or Hitler during World War II. And it all began after he took away the guns.
Dictators throughout much of history have disarmed their populations before they began their mass killings. Examples abound beyond Mao: Hitler took guns from the Jews in November of 1938, and Kristallnacht and the Holocaust followed; and then there was Fidel Castro in Cuba and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, to name but a few.
Cuba and Gun Control
Everybody ought to have a gun, Castro maintained—until he took over Cuba in 1959. At a rally in Havana before he assumed power, he explained: “This is how democracy works: It gives rifles to farmers, to students, to women, to Negroes, to the poor, and to every citizen who is ready to defend a just cause.”
Weapons ranging from Czech submachine guns to Belgian FN automatic rifles were handed out to 50,000 soldiers, 400,000 militiamen, 100,000 members of the factory-guarding popular defense force, and to many men, women, and children in Cuba’s 1 million-strong “neighborhood vigilance committees.”
Immediately after assuming power in 1959, Castro changed his position, following Mao’s rule that guns should not be in the hands of the people.
For three weeks after the Castro government was formed, Radio Havana warned, “All citizens must turn in their combat weapons. Civilians must take arms to police stations, soldiers to military headquarters.”
Radio Havana’s explanation was somewhat contradictory: The guns were in bad shape anyway and the “struggle against our enemies requires a rigorous control of all combat weapons.”
There was an urgency about the new policy that suggested serious concern. Failure to turn in military weapons by Sept. 1, 1959, warned Radio Havana, would be punished not by criminal courts but by the dreaded Revolutionary Tribunals—those kangaroo courts that sentenced thousands of Cubans to death after Castro took over.
Venezuela and Gun Control
Venezuela is now paying the price for allowing Chavez to implement the Mao rule when he came to power in 2012.
The shocking nature of an economic collapse that led Venezuela from being one of the richest countries in Latin America to one of the poorest has been well documented.
One aspect of the Venezuelan crisis that does not receive much coverage is the country’s gun control regime. All guns were outlawed when Chavez came to power, and harsh penalties were imposed on violators. The Venezuelan Armed Forces have exclusive power to control, register, and potentially confiscate firearms.
Many citizens now regret the repressive gun control legislation the Venezuelan government implemented in 2012. Naturally, this regret is warranted. The Venezuelan government is among the most tyrannical in the world, with a proven track record of violating basic civil liberties such as free speech, debasing its national currency, confiscating private property, and creating economic controls that destroy the country’s productivity.
Elections have proven to be useless, as they’ve been mired with corruption and charges of government tampering. For many, taking up arms is the only option left for the country to shake off its tyrannical government. But the Venezuelan government has prevented such an uprising with its draconian gun control.
These life-and-death lessons of history are lost on too many Americans. Our Founding Fathers didn’t give us the Second Amendment for duck hunting or simply for self-protection in a country that at the time had a vast and yet unknown frontier. They bestowed it upon us so that we could protect our precious nation from devolving into tyranny as so many others have done.
Politicians who respect the American ideal don’t try to diminish the Second Amendment or blame it for other ills of society that they have failed to solve, but rather embrace it as part of the legacy of rights that helps keep America free.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-21 16:51:262022-06-21 16:51:26VIDEO: After the Guns Were Confiscated, the Killing Fields Began
Government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem.
We continue to see a push for legislation to cure America’s ills. Red flag laws for guns, on demand abortion available in the name of women’s rights, prosecution of “insurrectionists”, all of these are being touted as a solution or cure. But the reality still remains, that evil will always be present in this world. Evil acts are a physical manifestation of Satan and the control that he has over our flesh. You cannot pass legislation to end evil. You can take action to minimize evil and incentivize moral behavior, but you cannot stop the Prince of Darkness with a bill that comes out of congress.
There are nuances that come with these “feel good” proposals in congress, and there are unintended consequences that result from those nuances. Sometimes the proposed government solution can be abused and manipulated in order to expose loopholes in the law. The worst legislation to ever come out of the halls of congress, has been a result of a knee jerk reaction to an event or crisis. It is the “do something” mentality that has destroyed liberty in America. The definition of tyranny is said to be, “The deliberate removal of nuance.”The USA Patriot Act is a prime example of the government abuse that is tolerated by the people when there is fear among the citizenry. If you acknowledge that the government has the authority to suspend portions of the constitution in a time of crisis, then the government, in its quest for power and authority, will create a crisis to exploit. Use the Reichstag fire in pre Nazi Germany as a point of reference. There is too much trust in government. People have a tendency to believe the government narrative, even when it doesn’t make sense, because they believe that our government has credibility. Jim Garrison once said, “Is the government worth preserving when it lies to the people? Doesn’t it become a dangerous country when you cannot trust anyone anymore, when you cannot tell the truth?’ Garrison then sternly asserted this familiar maxim, “Let justice be done though the heavens fall”. He was of course referring to his case against New Orleans business man Clay Shaw, regarding the alleged conspiracy in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Do we seek justice anymore, or have we decided to forego justice and replace it with political expediency? Garrison’s words are still very relevant today.
Do you not think that the government creates crises to push agendas? Try running “Operation Northwoods” through an internet search and read the declassified documents. Or maybe dig into the Gulf of Tonkin incident that was used to justify going to war in Vietnam. Our government does not deserve our trust or respect, if they continue to lie to us, take advantage of us and waste our hard earned tax dollars on other countries and promotion of sexual deviancy. All of this while our so called representatives, enrich themselves and become multi-millionaires after only a few terms.
Why is knee jerk legislation dangerous even when it sounds good on paper? The answer is nuance and unintended consequences. These two forgotten components are never part of the legislation being proposed and there is little thought into how these things may affect implementation of said law after it goes into effect. We’ll start with Red flag laws and the very concept of imposing such law on the masses, opening Pandora’s Box when it comes to abuse and manipulation. Hypothetical scenario, a couple is getting a divorce and the woman wants to get under the skin of her soon to be ex so she makes an accusation that leads to a man having his guns confiscated in the absence of due process, because a bitter ex-wife or husband to be fair wanted to get back at their former partner. What about a leftist progressive that lives in a neighborhood where they find out their next door neighbor possesses firearms? An accusation is made about the gun owner to trigger confiscation of a law abiding citizen’s weapons. These are just unintended consequences that make things worse. This is on top of the fact that due process is being scrapped here totally. Even if the allegations are legitimate, the accused still has a right to due process. Suggesting anything less is putting forth a “minority report” enforcement mentality. These loopholes and the total disregard for due process and the 5th and 6th amendment, are not highlighted in the legislation, and there is no acknowledgment of these pitfalls as congress scurries to appease the activist mob.
Let’s move onto abortion laws, and the potential abuses that may exist in drafting state legislation if the SCOTUS sends regulation on the issue back to the states. Once again, a hypothetical but realistic scenario; a woman gets pregnant and does not want to have the baby, and she lives in a state that has strict abortion restrictions but makes exceptions for rape and incest. In order to justify her abortion, she accuses the partner that she had of rape, which leaves the accused no alibi, because he was with her. Even though it was consensual from the perspective of both parties, the woman screams rape because she wants an abortion. I believe that if a state passes abortion restrictions with an exception for rape, that state would see rape accusations skyrocket. So on abortion, we must not attempt to appease the moderates. Life is life, period.
Now onto the so called “insurrection”, and the screams from the left to prosecute any and all involved. BLM and ANTIFA are generally given a pass, and released soon after arrest, but because they subscribe to a leftist ideology, they are handled with kid gloves. They are certainly not subjected to the same scrutiny. This is my warning to both sides of the aisle, and to all ideologies across the spectrum of the electorate. Be careful what you wish for, because there will be a day when there is someone in the White House, in control of the DOJ, that wants to target political opposition, and they are at the opposite end of the political spectrum from where you are. Be careful when you demand peoples’ heads on a silver platter. German born Martin Niemöller, son of a Pastor, wrote a poem that I think is relevant to this subject.
“First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak out for me.”
Martin Niemöller
We have to stand up for the rights that we have as individuals as dictated by God, not government. We must be consistent in our defense of these rights, not selective, based on political ideology. If we don’t take this seriously, the law is dead, and all that is left is tribalism and warring factions. I hear many people cite the 14th amendment when it comes to equal protection under the law. However, I have to submit, that if we are all given equal protection, we must all be held accountable under the same law. Translation: government officials from either side of the aisle, should not be immune to prosecution when corruption/wrongdoing are present.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-21 14:53:122022-06-21 14:53:12Proposed Government Solutions Ignore the Presence of Nuance, and Perpetuates Unintended Consequences
Immigrants who have fled socialist countries are travelling to schools across the U.S. for free under a new program to teach students about the dangers of socialism.
The Dissident Project launched Monday with speakers set to “travel to high schools across the U.S. to speak to students about authoritarian socialism” at no cost to the schools, Dissident Project founder and Venezuelan-born economist Daniel Di Martino told the Daily Caller.
The speakers include activists from Venezuela, Cuba, Hong Kong and North Korea who have immigrated to the U.S. and are dedicated to speaking about how socialism has destroyed their countries.
Grace Jo, a speaker from North Korea, came to the U.S. after almost starving “to death as a child” under the country’s socialist regime. Two of her brothers and her father died from starvation, according to the Dissident Project’s website.
“All of us Dissident Project speakers came to America for freedom, and it is our duty to preserve that love for freedom among the youngest generation. That’s why we’re stepping up and doing our part so Americans never forget that this is an exceptional nation, that free enterprise and the rule of law made it great and that socialism can destroy it all like it did in our native countries,” Di Martino said.
The project was inspired by Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ legislation recognizing a statewide “Victims of Communism Day” annually on Nov. 7 and requiring Florida schools to teach students about “the evils of communism.”
“Honoring the people that have fallen victim to communist regimes and teaching our students about those atrocities is the best way to ensure that history does not repeat itself,” DeSantis said in a statement about the bill in May.
Starting in the 2023-2024 school year, students in Florida will be mandated to receive at least 45 minutes of instruction in their required U.S. Government class about the evils of communism. Potential topics to cover include “Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution, Joseph Stalin and the Soviet System, Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, Vladimir Lenin and the Russian Revolution, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and Nicolás Maduro and the Chavismo movement,” according to the bill.
Di Martino began the Dissident Project “after learning about Florida’s new curriculum.”
“I thought we needed a unified platform where schools could find immigrants from socialist countries to speak there at no cost to them so we could reach every single American,” he said.
The Dissident Project will focus its efforts in speaking to school districts in Florida, given DeSantis’ legislation, but will also advertise the opportunity to teachers across the country, Di Martino concluded. Teachers who wish to host a speaker can do so for free by filling out a form.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-06 23:51:152022-06-06 23:51:15EXCLUSIVE: Immigrants Travel To Schools With Warning: Socialism Is Deadly
In a famous lecture, economist Ludwig von Mises showed how government intervention begets more intervention.
Over the last month, president Biden invoked the Defense Production Act in an attempt to fix the formula shortage. In a statement, the White House highlighted that,
“The President is requiring suppliers to direct needed resources to infant formula manufacturers before any other customer who may have ordered that good. Directing firms to prioritize and allocate the production of key infant formula inputs will help increase production and speed up in supply chains.”
In other words, the government is now engaging in what economist Don Lavoie referred to as non-comprehensive economic planning. It’s imposing rules requiring businesses to operate in a way that bureaucrats believe will quickly resolve this crisis. But the planning seems to have failed. Since Biden invoked the DPA, the number of stores out of stock has increase to 70% according to ABC news.
While some may be surprised that the US government can so quickly command industry, it should be no surprise at all. In fact, some basic understanding of government intervention shows that this sort of result is seemingly inevitable.
A Web of Intervention
There have been several good articles explaining the source of this infant formula shortage. FEE’s own Jon Miltimore produced a great story on the topic. But, to keep it short, Abbott, one of the country’s largest formula producers, had a plant shut down by the FDA due to safety concerns.
But how could shutting down one plant in the whole country cause this? Well, formula production is one of the most tightly regulated industries in the US. Because of this, it’s very difficult to enter the market, so there are a few firms that dominate the industry. So, when one has problems, the national supply is severely impacted.
One of the most harmful regulations are related to WIC and SNAP programs aimed at providing taxpayer subsidized formula to low-income consumers.
As reported in Time, Congress, in a supposed attempt to limit the cost of this program, made each state select one company to have formula which can be bought with WIC and SNAP in 1989. Since up to two thirds of formula is purchased with WIC and SNAP, the winners of these bids are able to crush competition.
Furthermore, until recently, the FDA banned importation of formula that listed ingredients in an order not prescribed by US bureaucrats. This limit on imports further restricts competition on a basis unrelated to health.
Meanwhile Fortune highlights research that shows despite European brands meeting safety regulations by and large, the FDA still restricts these imports due to the instructions being confusing.
Economist Alex Tabarrok highlights how price controls may be playing a role in the shortage as well.
Policy analyst Gabriella Beaumont-Smith examines the trade restrictions on baby formula, which includes tariffs of up to 17.5 percent.
In short, the industry is tangled in a web of intervention which is killing competition.
It’s this abundance of regulation that makes Biden’s use of the Defense Production Act so unsurprising.
In 1950, economist Ludwig von Mises gave a lecture titled “The middle of the road policy leads to socialism.” In this lecture, Mises expounded upon a theory now known by many as “the dynamics of interventionism.”
Mises uses an example of the dairy industry to show how intervention unfolds dynamically. Imagine the government decides that the price of milk is too high for poor people to afford it. In order to remedy the problem, the government passes a price control. For example, “milk cannot cost more than $2/gallon.”
But another problem arises. At this lower price, dairy farmers can no longer sell their milk at a high enough price to make a profit. Instead, they would be better off exiting the industry. But if dairy farmers exit, there will be less milk to buy. If the government wants to continue to make milk affordable and accessible, they’ll have to bail out the dairy industry. One way they could do this is by setting a price control on feed for cows.
But then producers of cattle feed will make losses. So, the interventions must occur again.
Intervention begets intervention.
This dynamic is exactly what is occurring in the formula industry. FDA regulations have made it impossible in the current industry for sufficient competition to arise.
This lack of competition combined with FDA shutdowns exacerbates the possibility of shortages like this. The shortages lead to the executive branch using the Defense Production Act to control the industries which provide imports to the formula industry.
Again, intervention begets intervention.
Market Solutions
Some may accept the argument but argue that now that we have a crisis, we need to use things like the Defense Production Act to end it.
I disagree.
Government bureaucrats have insufficient knowledge and incentives to craft regulations which actually help. The Defense Production Act won’t help, because the government does not effectively plan the economy.
Need proof? The Abbot formula plant was shut down in February. The politicians and bureaucrats in Washington had from February to May to create and carry out a plan which would prevent this crisis. They failed.
Rather than solve the problem by using the same means that created it, central planners would be wise to lay down their Excel spreadsheets and let the market solve problems.
Allowing consumers to give their money and provide profits to companies which best solve their needs is how babies get fed.
Peter Jacobsen is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Ottawa University and the Gwartney Professor of Economic Education and Research at the Gwartney Institute. He received his PhD in economics from George Mason University, and obtained his BS from Southeast Missouri State University. His research interest is at the intersection of political economy, development economics, and population economics. His website can be found here.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-05 22:51:292022-06-05 22:51:29The Economic Theory That Explains Biden’s Response to the Baby Formula Shortage
I grew up watching shows about cowboys like Roy Rogers, The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, Rawhide and Have Gun – Will Travel. In these television series there was the good guy versus the bad guy. The good guy always won and usually got the girl.
Fast forward to 2022 and we now have a new series of cowboy television shows called Yellowstone, The Ranch and Outer Range. I have watched all three series and was shocked as producers and filmmakers worked to destroyed our uniquely American and iconic cowboys and ranchers.
Each series has these things in common:
Cowboys are now the bad guys.
The families of cowboys and ranchers are dysfunctional.
Cowboys are heavy drinkers.
Cowboys are murderers.
Cowboys and ranchers are violent.
Cowboys and ranchers are oppressors of minorities, like the native American Indian, i.e. Yellowstone.
Cowboys and ranchers are greedy.
Cowboys and ranchers use guns.
Cowboys and ranchers are uneducated, inept and prone to violence.
Cowboys have serious challenges which they are not equipped to deal with.
Finally, cowboys and ranchers are portrayed as vigilantes and above the law.
In other words the American cowboy and ranchers are portrayed today as evil.
Cowboys and Guns
By portraying our cowboys and ranchers in a negative light it impacts the actual families and children of cowboys and ranchers.
This is part and parcel of the anti-gun, cultural and social justice war being waged against Americans in general, and in the case of these three popular streaming television series, cowboys and ranchers in particular.
QUESTION: But why?
ANSWER: Ranchers and cowboys represent fly over America.
Ranchers and cowboys feed Americans and work their land for the common good. Also, they carry guns.
Yellowstone, The Ranch and Outer Range each has a anti-gun agenda. This anti-gun agenda is particularly noticeable in Yellowstone. For example, the Marlin Model 336 is a rifle seen and used throughout the Yellowstone series. But so to are AR-15 style rifles like the Daniel Defense MK18 AR, a rifle similar to the DDM4, made by Daniel Defense that was used by 18-year-old Salvador Rolando Ramos during the Uvalde Massacre on May 24, 2022.
“I respect the culture and the tradition and the concerns of lawful gun owners. At the same time, the Second Amendment,like all other rights, is not absolute.”
Cowboys have a tradition and culture of the use of guns to protect themselves, their families and their ranches and livestock. Yellowstone, The Ranch and Outer Range are designed not only to denigrate our iconic cowboys and ranchers but also to attack guns.
You see these cowboys and ranchers are much like today’s law enforcement officers. In Yellowstone the ranchers have their own police force called “Livestock Agents.”
“When your culture makes George Floyd the hero, real heroes stand down. Cultural rot has consequences.”
After watching Yellowstone, The Ranch and Outer Range we sadly say,
When your culture makes cowboys and ranchers the bad guys, real heroes stand down. Cultural rot has consequences.
Today we have people who celebrate criminals while attacking our Constitutional right to keep and bear arms. This is all designed to disarm us. As Keven Downey, Jr. wrote,
The 2nd Amendment isn’t about shooting deer… It’s about defending the Constitution against enemies foreign and DOMESTIC. It’s for when our elected leaders go rogue. It’s for when an entire political party of the United States goes full commtard and won’t stop shredding the Constitution until it’s dead, floating facedown in the Potomac, enveloped in adipocere. Defending our Constitution is way easier to do with magazines that hold 30 rounds of commie-stoppers.
The Bottom Line
Here is an FBI chart showing the types of weapons used for murders between 2015-2019. As you can see, over three times as many people were beaten to death as were killed by all rifle styles combined, and nearly five times as many were killed by knives.
5) May 2022 18 illegal aliens arrested for 42 child rape/child sexual assault charges in NC here
4) April 2022 19 illegal aliens arrested for 72 child rape/child sexual assault charges in NC here
3) March 2022 30 illegal aliens arrested for 110 child rape/child sexual assault charges in NC here
2) February 2022 27 illegal aliens arrested for 84 child rape/child sexual assault charges in NC here
1) January 2022 18 illegal aliens arrested for 96 child rape/child sexual assault charges in NC here
But these facts don’t matter to Biden, Democrats and their social justice warrior allies. What matters to the likes of Biden and his administration is taking away our God given freedoms and gaining more and more power.
If you want more crime, anti-social behavior and civil disorder then simply demonize the police, cowboys and ranchers and idolize criminals like George Floyd.
I spent 23 years in the U.S. Army. I used guns of all types and calibers. I defended our nation using guns to stop our Communist enemies in Vietnam and during the Cold War with the former Soviet Union.
I grew up watching cowboys and ranchers doing these same things when it came to their families, ranches and communities. Guns save lives, protect families and secure our homes.
To kill the iconic cowboy is to kill our American culture.
It is no different than tearing down statues of Confederate generals, defacing statues of General George Washington or cancelling our culture using theories like Critical Race in public schools.
These times are dangerous times. Everywhere you look our institutions, icons and heroes are being torn down and replaced with symbols and icons of pure evil.
REMEMBER:Without law and order there is no law and order.
Gird your loins. Tyranny is coming to America in the name of social justice for some but not for all.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-05 10:51:292022-06-05 10:51:29Destroying Our Iconic and Uniquely American Cowboys via Yellowstone, The Ranch and Outer Range
Bonner R. Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with CFACT, where he focuses on natural resources, energy, property rights, and geopolitical developments. Articles by Dr. Cohen have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Investor’s Business Daily, The New York Post, The Washington Examiner, The Washington Times, The Hill, The Epoch Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Miami Herald, and dozens of other newspapers around the country. He has been interviewed on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, NBC News, NPR, BBC, BBC Worldwide Television, N24 (German-language news network), and scores of radio stations in the U.S. and Canada. He has testified before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, and the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee. Dr. Cohen has addressed conferences in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Bangladesh. He has a B.A. from the University of Georgia and a Ph. D. – summa cum laude – from the University of Munich.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-04 21:52:212022-06-04 21:52:21Biden’s Rollback of NEPA Reforms May Haunt Green Energy Projects
After the horrific mass murders in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York, Senate Democrats took an opportunity to try and ram through new biased counterterrorism legislation which treats law enforcement and the military as infiltrated by “extremists” and seeks to limit counterterrorism training. The legislation was blocked after Republican senators held firm with Republican Senator Rand Paul calling the bill an “insult” to law enforcement.
“It would be the Democrat plan to name our police as white supremacists and neo-Nazis. I met policemen throughout Kentucky and I’ve not met one policeman motivated or consumed with any kind of racial rage,” Paul said, according to The Hill.
The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, sponsored by Senator Dick Durbin (D-Il), is the latest iteration of legislation which has been on the Democrats’ wish list since early 2020. The bill would create a joint “Domestic Terrorism Executive Committee” and would create special Domestic Terrorism offices within DHS and DOJ and the FBI.
The legislation goes further, putting its thumb on the scales and directing these new offices to focus their attentions only on “white supremacist” terrorism by mandating extensive reporting requirements exclusively focused on that threat. This reporting would then be used to justify focusing domestic terrorism and law enforcement counterterrorism training solely on “white supremacist extremism.” Democrats previously shot down attempts by Republicans to include a broader range of potential terror threats within the language of the legislation.
Efforts by politicians to direct law enforcement to investigate only certain types of terror threats can have a severely deleterious effect on intelligence gathering and terrorism prevention. In 2019, the FBI faced substantial pressure from congressional Democrats to eliminate the use of the analytical category “Black Identity Extremism.” The same year the FBI reportedly investigated but cleared Frank James, who went on to conduct the NYC subway mass shooting that injured 10 people. James’ social media was replete with references to black identity extremist ideology.
Two decades after 9/11, it is readily apparent that a top-heavy, politicized federal bureaucracy approach to counterterrorism isn’t working.
Bureaucrats in Washington D.C. shouldn’t presume to tell police scattered around the country what the greatest terrorism threat is for their specific area of operations. Rather they should listen seriously to local law enforcement’s local knowledge and follow their lead.
A federal office of domestic terrorism should not tell local law enforcement officers what kinds of training they can receive, or which threats are most relevant to investigate. Federal agencies cannot continue to demand maximum cooperation from local agencies, hoovering up hard-earned information, only to be ever more secretive and unwilling to share information with those same departments, whom they are being told by politicians to treat as “infiltrated” by extremists.
A survivor of the 2018 massacre on Valentine’s Day at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and now enrolled at Harvard, student gun control activist David Hogg has become a sought-after speaker at colleges and universities, and the odds are off the chart that he’ll be given a prime-time slot at the Democratic National Convention in August. While I fully support his right to protest things he thinks are wrong, I respectfully disagree with his belief that school carnage will end if semi-automatic rifles are banned.
When I was in high school in the early 1960s, there were no mass school shootings. The only times I remember seeing a police officer at school was once a year to give a talk about obeying the law. Only occasionally were policemen summoned to schools to deal with violent students. After the profound cultural changes our society has undergone since the 1960s, threatening behavior by troubled students is commonplace — Nikolas Cruz, who used an AR-15 to murder seventeen people at Stoneman Douglas High, was threatening teachers and other students with violence long before he did the unthinkable.
The dramatic increase in violent behavior by students is why most schools in America now have at least one full-time police officer. Some schools have more, many more. Like its counterparts in other large cities, the public school system in Detroit has its own police department, which employees hundreds of administrators, investigators, campus police officers, security personnel and a K-9 unit. Why is it necessary for so many school districts to have their own police department? The answer is a national tragedy: schools in our largest cities and counties have become dangerous places where lawless behavior by students is so prevalent that police must be close at hand. Prior to the anything goes ‘sex, drugs and rock & roll’ cultural decay that generally began in 1968, school systems that had their own police department were virtually non-existent.
If, as I believe, banning semiautomatic rifles will not put a dent in school shootings, what will? Here’s my answer. Most school shootings are carried out by severely disturbed young white males whose thought processes went haywire due to acute mental illness (bad genes, drugs) or a dysfunctional childhood (bad parenting) — or both, as was the case with Nikolas Cruz. Another reason for school shootings can be laid squarely at the feet of the corrosive cultural decline of the society in which these deranged mass murderers developed their upside down sense of right and wrong.
The anything-goes progressive culture that permeates virtually every facet our society teaches these young madmen the politically correct concept of moral relativism, the idea that moral judgments are values that can vary, depending on the viewpoints of differing cultural norms. In other words, there is no clear-cut right and wrong. If some people believe it’s O.K. to throw gay men from rooftops — an approved practice in some Muslim countries — who’s to say that’s wrong? It’s what their native culture believes. In contemporary America, troubled young minds receive mixed messages about what’s permissible and, far more important, what’s totally off limits.
When I was David’s age, kids had ready access to guns, but not to violent imagery. Young people of today are bombarded with gratuitously violent movies and video games that make the act of pumping bullets into human beings seem almost hip. Some studies show little connection between such viewing and mass shootings, but how can a constant stream of bloody visual carnage not have a profoundly negative impact on troubled young minds? The simulated violence that blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality is knowingly mainlined into the consciousness of today’s youth by the entertainment industry and its anything-goes progressive values.
Progressive curriculums in our schools and colleges teach budding white male mass murderers to be ashamed not only of their country, but their skin color, as well. Their already-confused minds are methodically indoctrinated with the concept of white privilege, a political narrative designed to create racial guilt and self-loathing among white people. Militant feminism further erodes the self-worth of young white males by stereotyping them with the invented malady known as toxic masculinity. Message: They’re not only white and male, God forbid, they’re also wildly cruel to women. The constant assault on their gender and skin color turns some of them into emotionally damaged young men who withdraw into isolation and anger.
Our society’s progressive-dominated culture teaches mentally troubled young white males to loathe themselves, that right and wrong are malleable concepts, and that viewing simulated images of gory violence is a cool way to have fun. No wonder some of them become mass murderers. Through its relentless indoctrination in political correctness, multiculturalism, racial politics and feminist victimization, progressivism further screws up the already screwed-up minds of future school shooters. The dramatic cultural upheaval since I was in school coincides almost perfectly with the sharp increase in self-inflicted deaths by young people: the Journal of the American Medical Association reports that in 2017 the suicide rate among young people reached its highest point since the government began collecting such statistics in 1960.
Would David also ban knives and automobiles?
I read that four times more people are stabbed to death than are killed by rifles, including semi-automatics, such as AR-15s. I’m not sure if that ratio is entirely accurate, because the FBI’s crime statistics breakdown of the specific kind of gun used to commit murder is somewhat ambiguous. In any event, a lot of people are killed by knives each year. I’m sure David would agree that those deaths are just as tragic as the ones taken by Nikolas Cruz, yet no sane person would call for banning knives.
Left at rest, a loaded gun is incapable of spontaneously discharging. The only way a gun can kill is if a human picks it up and fires it. Making guns the scapegoat for school shootings and other mass killings is no different than blaming DUI manslaughters on cars and trucks. I have never been arrested and have no history of mental illness. Other than to home invaders and anarchists, my AR-15 poses a threat to no one. Taking such weapons away from responsible people like me wouldn’t stop a single school shooting. The battle we face is not against inanimate objects used by deranged people to kill. The battle is against the mental illnesses, drug addictions and cultural depravity that cause disturbed people to do horrible things.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-03 10:51:192022-06-03 10:51:19Gun Control Activist David Hogg Targets Semi-Automatic Rifles
ANSWER: Because Biden and the Democrats simply don’t care!
Now we are learning that if Biden and his administration do not do a 180° turn around we will be facing massive brown and black outs across our nation.
A brownout is:
An intentional or unintentional drop in voltage in an electrical power supply system.
A blackout is:
A power outage is the loss of the electrical power network supply to an end user.
Much of the US and Canada faces a higher than normal risk of blackouts this year. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation warns that above-average temperatures (which drive up demand for electricity) and an ongoing drought (which decreases supply of hydroelectric power) could cause problems for chunks of the grid from June to September 2022. When supply and demand aren’t in balance, blackouts can occur.
[ … ]
The potential for blackouts isn’t evenly spread, NERC reported. In a May report, the nonprofit identified two risk levels for blackouts — elevated and high — for the regional organizations responsible for operating the grid. An elevated risk means there’s a chance that demand could exceed supply during periods of higher-than-normal demand. NERC identified an elevated risk of blackouts for the western North America, from Washington south to northern Baja California, east to Texas and north to include most of North and South Dakota. Saskatchewan has an elevated risk, too.
The tough news keeps coming for Americans struggling with high energy prices. Not only have gas prices broken records for the past several weeks, now a good portion of the country is being told they should expect rolling blackouts, as we enter the hot summer months. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) officially released its summer report last week and almost two-thirds of the country should prepare for a possible blackout.
The report from NERC includes a harrowing map that shows most of the nation should stand ready for possible blackouts this summer.
The reason for these coming blackouts is clear: a mandated transition to clean energy. The Wall Street Journal editorial board writes:
“Welcome to the “green energy transition.” We’ve been warning for years that climate policies would make the grid more vulnerable to vacillations in supply and demand. And here we are. Some of the mainstream press are belatedly catching on that blackouts are coming, but they still don’t grasp the real problem: The forced transition to green energy is distorting energy markets and destabilizing the grid.”
One of the chief proponents of forcing a transition to clean energy has been Richard Glick, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). In February, he and the other Democrat commissioners at FERC tried to force through a policy that would have made building new natural gas pipelines and infrastructure almost impossible. Thankfully, the leadership of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee blasted the move. Senators Joe Manchin and John Barrasso made clear they wouldn’t stand for it. FERC pulled back the rule, for now.
Glick has been renominated as the chair of FERC. The Journal editorial board continues: “His renomination is a clear and present danger to the U.S. electricity supply. The war in Ukraine and surging energy prices haven’t deterred Democrats from their anti-fossil fuels campaign. Will widespread power outages?”
The Biden administration’s policies are resulting in a hot, dark summer for millions of Americans. With the summer heat just getting started, there is no relief in sight.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-03 09:51:192022-06-03 09:51:19Two-Thirds of the Country Face the Prospect of Blackouts this Summer
I joined Kara McKinney on OAN’s Tipping Point to discuss FBI involvement in any number of terror attacks in the United States.
The massive evidence of corruption in the FBI that has come to light since 2015 only confirms that the organization is desperately corrupt, working against the American people, and in immense need of serious reform. If that reform is not forthcoming, it should be disbanded. In 2015, ISIS targeted me and other American civilians in an attack on U.S. soil for exercising our constitutional rights. All the evidence points to the fact that instead of protecting us, the FBI agent involved was egging on the attackers. Did Obama’s FBI want to make an example of those who supposedly insulted the prophet of Islam after Obama had said “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam”? The FBI could have dispelled these suspicions immediately, but instead completely stonewalled our requests for information. The archives on this and other cases must be opened – and the whole place fumigated.
In 2015, a free speech symposium I organized, was the target of the the first Islamic State (ISIS) attack on U.S. soil. A “60 Minutes” special on CBS subsequently revealed that an undercover FBI agent accompanied the terrorists in a separate car as they approached the Center. Many questions remain unanswered regarding his role in the attack and the FBI’s responsibility to forewarn in such cases. (Editor’s note: ISIS is also known as Islamic State, ISIL, and Daesh.)
The undercover agent, alias ‘Steven Jane’, had been communicating with jihadists Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi through encrypted messages for some time. According to “60 Minutes,” a few weeks before the attack he urged them to “Tear up Texas.” Simpson responded, “bro, you don’t have to say that … you know what happened in Paris … so that goes without saying. No need to be direct.”
The mastermind behind the Garland attack, Erick Jamal Hendricks, was also communicating with the FBI as well as with Ibrahim Simpson, who along with Nadir Soofi opened fire on the event.
Hendricks made it clear that he was an ISIS supporter and spoke of using acres of land to train recruits, the agent said.
“My work is for Allah. It is my full-time job,” said Erick Jamal Hendricks, making it clear once again what jihad violence is all about. It’s ironic that he said it to an FBI agent, with the FBI committed to the claim that Islam is a religion of peace that has nothing to do with terrorism. Did the agent try to convince Hendricks that he was misunderstanding Islam?
Obama’s FBI knew about impending attack and did nothing. They wanted us dead.
While I do believe that undercover FBI agents have to play along with the jihadis they’re dealing with, because in order to be in an informant you have to have credibility, it’s a whole other thing if you’re encouraging and cheering on the proposed murder of Americans who are standing in defense of the freedom of speech, and then not doing anything about it. Why did the FBI only have one agent there? And not a team waiting for them to shoot back?
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-02 08:51:202022-06-02 08:51:20VIDEO: Massive Corruption in the FBI
Yesterday, Joe Biden stupidly said a 9mm bullet is a high-caliber weapon that “blows the lungs out of the body.” He’s an ignorant fool. 9mm rounds are typically used in handguns, not high-powered rifles. He called for more gun control after Uvalde, but Democrats always do after a tragedy, because their motto is ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’.
Biden and his fellow Democrats would rather be authoritarian and talk about how the Second Amendment is “not absolute” than do something that might actually solve the problem. They’d rather take guns away from law-abiding citizens and pass more gun control laws that haven’t worked in places like Chicago. Red flag laws didn’t stop the grocery store shootings in Boulder or Buffalo. Gun control is a complete failure, but Democrats keep pushing it at every turn. You have to ask yourself why, when they can’t point to any success. I would wager it has something to do with where the Democrats’ bread is buttered. When’s the last time you heard of a billionaire like Michael Bloomberg giving away millions of dollars to promote armed guards in schools? It doesn’t happen. But Bloomberg and others like him give away millions to Democrats and left-wing activist groups to push gun control. So Democrats get to indulge their authoritarian fantasies and get paid for doing it. Life is good, if you’re in the gun control racket.
Back in the real world, a whole menu of common-sense solutions have been put forth and ignored in recent days on the subject of school shootings, so let’s take a look at some of them:
A father who lost his daughter in the Parkland shooting recommends a single point of entry that is locked down, armed guards, and teacher training. It’s not likely anyone dressed in black carrying a rifle would be allowed in. That would go a long way toward solving the problem, wouldn’t it? That’s just the beginning of what’s possible.
Comb social media and develop algorithms to identify troubled students in advance to get them the help they need – profiling. Recruit volunteer armed guards from retired military and law enforcement personnel. Arm the teachers like they do in Israel and conduct active shooter drills until they become as routine as fire drills. When’s the last time you heard of a school shooting in Israel – maybe 1956 and 2002? Missouri allows teachers and school staff to be armed, and two school districts in St. Louis are moving ahead with teacher firearms training and annual retraining.
Israel uses a multi-layered approach: profiling, armed guards, outside patrols, cameras, metal detectors, and a single point of entry. Visitors must have a reason for being at the school and must sign the visitor log.
Take immunity away from social workers and counselors, and hold them liable for letting disturbed people slip through the cracks. They should be specifically trained to profile students most likely to erupt. Evacuation and safety plans should be drawn up locally and reviewed on a regular basis. This is what security professionals advise and have seen make a difference in emergency situations.
The Democrats won’t even consider ideas from the Right side of the ledger. They’re too busy lining their own pockets with big bucks from the gun control lobby. They have a financial conflict of interest on this issue and their demands for gun control should just be ignored. If they won’t let the adults in the room solve the problem, then, the next time there’s a story about murdered school kids being laid to rest in tiny coffins, blame the Democrats.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-01 06:52:052022-06-01 06:52:05Gun Control Pays Too Well
If you’ve ever been stuck behind a transport truck on a highway, you know how annoying it can be. The worst part is when trucks are trying to pass each other. A line of cars builds up behind them as they drive side-by-side for what seems like an eternity.
That problem may be about to get a whole lot worse in the coming years. On April 27, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) issued a Notice of Intent stating they are planning to pursue new rules that would require the use of speed limiters for trucks. The limiters would be set up on a truck’s internal computer and would make it impossible for the driver to exceed a certain maximum speed.
“The National Roadway Safety Strategy identified speed as a significant factor in fatal crashes and speed management as a primary tool to reduce serious injuries and fatalities,” the FMCSA said in the Notice. “FMCSA is moving forward with this rulemaking because of concerns about the number of CMV [Carrier Motor Vehicle] crashes and fatalities traveling at high speeds…The rule will help reduce crashes and save lives on our nation’s roadways.”
The Notice of Intent does not propose what the maximum speed should be. It’s still early in the process, and at this point the FMCSA is mostly looking for public comments on the idea.
There is one hint about what it might be, however. April’s Notice of Intent is a follow-up on a similar proposal made back in 2016, and that proposal sought comments on maximum speeds of 60, 65, and 68 miles per hour, so it’s likely the FMCSA is thinking of something in that ballpark.
The reaction to the Notice has been mixed. Some industry groups are applauding the agency for taking action, but others are raising concerns.
“Studies and research have already proven what we were all taught long ago in driver’s ed classes, that traffic is safest when vehicles all travel at the same relative speed,” said Todd Spencer, president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA). “Limiting trucks to speeds below the flow of traffic increases interactions between vehicles which can lead to more crashes.”
Spencer also noted that traffic congestion caused by slow trucks could become a much bigger problem under the new rule.
There are also other concerns with the proposed rule beyond safety and congestion. As trucker Jaxon Allen explains in an Instagram video, mandated speed limiters would likely have a negative impact on supply chains, because trucks would take longer to reach their destination. Of course, having to go a few miles per hour slower doesn’t sound like much, but the extra time for trips would add up. Truckers’ wages may also take a hit, since they wouldn’t be able to cover as many miles.
So, are speed limiters a good idea? Is 60 or 65 or 68 mph the right limit? It’s tempting to take a side on these questions, but there’s a more fundamental question here that needs to be asked first. Namely, who should get to decide?
The current decision mechanism, where the bureaucrats at the FMCSA make the call, has a serious problem. Since bureaucrats look good when roads are safer and get blamed when there are more accidents, they have an incentive to be cautious (we’ll assume, for the sake of argument, that imposing speed limiters would in fact make roads safer). The problem is, they have no counterbalancing incentive to consider opposing concerns like efficiency or congestion. They lose nothing if traffic congestion becomes intolerable or if supply chains get strained, but they stand to lose a lot in terms of reputation if traffic accidents increase. As a result, they have an incentive to be overcautious, making rules far more stringent than what’s appropriate for the circumstances (this parallels the incentive problem with the FDA).
So, how can we create a better incentive structure? One way would be to privatize roads, and let each individual road owner make the rules for their road.
Unlike government bureaucrats, private road owners have an incentive to make rules that strike the best balance between safety and other factors, as determined by their customers, drivers. Rules that are too loose would lead to more accidents, which would tarnish the reputation of the road, causing fewer people to drive on it and leading to lower profits for the owner. On the flip side, rules that are too stringent would also turn away drivers, perhaps because there’s too much congestion.
Thus, with private roads, the rules that are created would gravitate toward the rules that drivers think are best. Road owners would have a strong financial incentive to avoid rules that are too dangerous and rules that are too safe. In other words, while bureaucrats are constantly veering into the ditch of being too cautious, private roads would keep their rules in the middle, away from the ditch of extreme caution on the one side and the ditch of extreme danger on the other side.
Contrary to popular belief, libertarianism is not about having no rules on the road. Rather, it’s about reimagining the way that these rules are formed. By privatizing roads, we can create an incentive structure that rewards the best rules and weeds out the ones that don’t make sense. Since road owners have to be responsive to drivers to make profits, the rules that emerge will reflect the values and concerns of drivers, rather than the values and concerns of bureaucrats.
In fact, for all we know, roads may actually get safer under private management, because entrepreneurs will be experimenting with various rules and design features to this end. It’s counterintuitive, but moving away from safety regulations might just be the best way to save lives.
Perhaps it’s at least worth an experiment?
This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.
Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-05-26 12:51:152022-05-26 12:51:15Truckers Speak Out over Proposed Rule That Could Impose Speed Limits as Low as 60 MPH on Rigs
Elon Musk tore into the Democratic Party in a Wednesday tweet calling them the party of “division and hate.”
“In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party,” Musk said. “But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold.”
In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party.
But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.
Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold … 🍿
The multibillionaire said he will vote Republican for likely the first time in his life in the 2022 midterm election after overwhelmingly voting Democrat in the past. He said the Democratic Party is controlled by unions and trial lawyers.
“I might never have voted for a Republican, just to be clear,” Musk said during a Tuesday “All-In” podcast. “Now this election, I will.”
“It definitely feels like this is not right,” Musk added. “The issue here is that the Democratic Party is overly controlled by the unions and by trial lawyers, particularly class-action lawyers. … In the case of Biden, he is simply too much captured by the unions, which was not the case with Obama.”
Liberal media pundits and Democratic lawmakers have warned of the supposed dangers of Musk’s vow to foster free speech on Twitter in the midst of his $44.3 billion takeover. MSNBC host Joy Reid previously accused the Tesla CEO in a April 26 segment of “The ReidOut” of wanting the “old South Africa of the ’80s” back, in reference to the Apartheid.
“There was a time when people had the double hashtags around their names because they were Jewish and right-wingers were saying ‘get in the oven’ anytime you made any benign comment on Twitter,” Reid said. “They attacked women, the misogyny was crazy on Twitter for a while. Elon Musk, I guess he misses the old South Africa in the ’80s, he wants that back.”
Musk trolled Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after claiming she has to “collectively stress” about an increase in hate crimes due to his takeover. Musk responded, “stop hitting on me, I’m really shy.”
Liberals have not taken kindly to Musk vowing to allow former President Donald Trump return to the platform when he officially takes over the social media company. Then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the administration is determined to prevent platforms from spreading disinformation at a May 10 briefing.
Musk has been highly critical of the left, recently stating “the far left hates everyone, themselves included,” noting that he does not support the far-right either.
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich said Musk’s Twitter takeover will lead him to seek “freedom from accountability” in an April 24 tweet.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-05-19 18:52:272022-05-19 18:52:27Elon Musk Calls Democrats ‘The Party Of Division And Hate’
The globalist takeover is coming at us from every possible angle. Whether we’re talking about biosecurity, finance, housing, health care, energy, transportation or food, all the changes we’re now seeing have one goal, and that is to force compliance with a totalitarian slave system
The global food system, and protein sources in particular, are currently under coordinated and intentional attacks to manufacture food shortages and famine
The globalist elite intend to eliminate traditional farming and livestock and replace it with indoor-grown produce and lab-created protein alternatives that they own and control
While the presence of hundreds of food brands gives the appearance of market competition, the reality is that the food industry is monopolized by fewer than a dozen companies, and all of them, in turn, are largely owned by BlackRock and Vanguard
Eventually, your ability to buy food will be tied to your digital identity and social credit score
The globalist takeover agenda is nothing if not comprehensive. They’re coming at us from every possible angle, and whether we’re talking about biosecurity, finance, housing,1 health care, energy, transportation or food, all the changes we’re now seeing have one goal, and that is to force compliance with a totalitarian slave system.
In an April 27, 2022, blog post,2 investigative journalist Corey Lynn takes a deep dive into the new food system being put into place, and how it is geared to control you.
“‘Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world.’ This famous quote by Henry Kissinger is ringing more and more true by the week,” Lynn writes.3
“The globalists already control the majority of the money, are moving ever so swiftly to convert the energy system over into systems they are all invested in, and have been taking drastic measures to control the food industry while running much of it under the radar. If they control the seeds they control the food, and if they control the food they can use the digital ID to control consumer access to the food.
While a rash of fires suddenly destroy food processing, meat, and fertilizer plants, during a time where farmers are hurting and supply chain issues are kicking in, an entire traceable food infrastructure system has already been built in multiple cities and is making its way across the globe …
The USDA and FDA have already approved lab grown meat, genetically modified cattle, and are funding the globalists to research and develop cellular agriculture as well as indoor growers and genetics companies …
Union Pacific is mandating railroad shipping reductions by 20% impacting CF Industries Holdings, the world’s largest fertilizer company. Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street happen to be the top shareholders of Union Pacific, and BlackRock and Vanguard are in the top three shareholders of CF Industries Holdings.
By mapping some of the largest vertical farms, it reveals the crops, grocery stores involved, locations and billions pouring in by globalist investors and shareholders. It quickly becomes evident that this is the global plan to control all produce — ingredients that go into all food products.”
The Secret Monopoly
As noted by Lynn, this monopoly has been locked into place over the course of many years. Slowly but surely, the monopoly has grown, under the radar of public consciousness, which in turn has resulted in food getting simultaneously more expensive and less accessible.4
Now, as the final pieces are being put into place, many are waking up to the realization that we’ve been massively fooled and are now at the mercy of a figurative “handful” of unelected people whose megalomania is unsurpassed in human history.
While the presence of hundreds of food brands gives the appearance of market competition, the reality is that the food industry is monopolized by fewer than a dozen companies,5 and all of them, in turn, are largely owned by BlackRock and Vanguard. The growing fake meat market is similarly dominated by a very small number of large food giants6 which, again, are owned by BlackRock and Vanguard.
BlackRock alone holds $10 trillion in assets,7 up from $6 trillion in 2017.8 Combined, the three largest investment firms in the world, BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, have ownership in nearly 90% of all S&P 500 firms.9
Through their investment holdings they secretly wield monopoly control over ALL industries, so the idea that there is competition anywhere in the marketplace is really just an illusion. You never learned about their ever-expanding monopoly because they also own the centralized media.
It’s hard to tell which of the two is more influential. Vanguard owns a large share of Blackrock. Owners and stockholders of Vanguard include Rothschild Investment Corp,10 Edmond De Rothschild Holding,11 the Italian Orsini family, the American Bush family, the British Royal family, the du Pont family, and the Morgan, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller families.12,13
Blackrock, meanwhile, has been called the “fourth branch of government,” as they are the only private firm that has financial agreements to lend money to the central banking system.14
Food Security Is Undermined by Patentable Food
In 2014, the U.S. Congress established the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research Act (FFAR) through the Farm Bill. After siphoning off $200 million in taxpayer funds to get the foundation started, FFAR became a nongovernmental not-for-profit organization. Bill Gates is one of its funders, and its first board of directors included deputy director Dr. Robert Horsch of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.15
The mission of FFAR is to “connect funders, researchers and farmers through public-private partnerships to support audacious research addressing the biggest food and agriculture challenges.”16 In reality, it’s been used to undermine food security by increasing reliance on gene-edited and patentable foods.
In April 2019, FFAR launched the Precision Indoor Plants (PIP) Consortium, a public-private partnership of indoor growers, breeders and genetics companies with the shared goal of advancing speed-breeding and altering plant chemicals responsible for flavor, nutrition and medicinal value. Five key crops being worked on are lettuce, tomatoes, strawberries, cilantro and blueberries.
In August 2020, Monsanto/Bayer helped found a startup called Unfold, which develops new vegetable seed varieties specifically geared for vertical farms. According to Lynn, “GMOs already account for 75 to 80% of food Americans consume,”17 and once fresh produce is under patent, that percentage will inch closer to 100%.
The University of California is also working on plant-based mRNA vaccines. The idea there is to disseminate vaccines through the conventional food supply,18 which puts a whole new spin on the old adage to “Let thy food be thy medicine.”
“Bill Gates insists that droughts and climate change is destroying our ability to farm and that the future will consist of populations moving into metropolitan cities where indoor vertical farming is necessary to feed people.
If this is the case, why has he acquired 242,000 acres of farmland over the past decade while simultaneously investing in indoor vertical farming? Who gets to sit at the table with healthy produce served up by Gates while the rest of the population eats gene-edited produce from locked-down facilities, delivered to their local grocery store, and accessed only through a digital ID?” Lynn asks.19
“Meanwhile, the Consultative Group of International Agriculture Research (CGIAR) holds the world’s largest private seed banks consisting of 10% of the worldwide germplasm across the globe, which is controlled by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and World Bank, managing 768,576 accessions of hijacked farmers seeds …
[W]hat’s going to happen to the farmers when these astronomically enormous indoor vertical farm facilities have taken over every major city, locked in contracts with all major grocery store chains, and are funded by some of the same billionaire globalists who are seeking to control human beings through every industry for their fourth industrial revolution?
It’s a legitimate concern. Add ‘gene-editing,’ ‘smart,’ ‘traceable,’ and ‘net zero’ to the production of these facilities, and the fact that they are still moving full speed ahead on digital IDs and currency, and it becomes even more concerning …
Whereas this provides a lot of explanation on the absolute intentional demolition to all of our farmers on the seed, vegetable, and produce front, people should also be aware of what’s been taking place with cattle ranchers and the globalists’ plan to take over the meat industry as well.”
Controlled Demolition of the Protein Supply Is Underway
As I explained in yesterday’s weaponized bird flu article, alleged outbreaks of bird flu and COVID-19 in food animals, along with drought and fertilizer shortages, have led to the mass culling of flocks20 and cattle herds21 around the world. So much so, we’re now told to expect egg,22 poultry and meat shortages.23
Add to that a global fertilizer shortage that is limiting the amount of animal feed that can be produced this year, and the curious decision to limit U.S. fertilizer shipments on trains, which restricts distribution and raises the cost of what little remains. Experts predict it may take up to three years to replenish global grain stocks,24 and in the meantime, farmers won’t have a readily available supply to feed their livestock.
Canada-based Nutrien Ltd., the world’s largest fertilizer company, recently warned the shortage is likely to extend into 2023. The price of fertilizer has also “skyrocketed to absurd heights that have never been seen before,” The Economic Collapse Blog reports.25
The U.S. and U.K. are also paying farmers to not farm all their available land, California is paying farmers to grow less, ostensibly to save water, and the U.K. is encouraging farmers to retire by offering them a lump sum of £100,000 — all while publicly predicting looming food shortages.26 On top of that, the two largest water reservoirs in California have also fallen to “critically low levels” and wildfires are devastating agricultural land across the western half of the U.S.27
Food production is being blatantly attacked and irrationally restricted on so many fronts, it’s clearly an intentional demolition of primary protein sources28 — meat, egg and dairy.
“February 1, 2016 the Good Food Institute was launched … with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Open Philanthropy Project, and Y Combinator, with the goal to ‘reimagine meat production,’” Lynn writes.29
“In October 2021, the Good Food Institute celebrated the USDA’s $10 million grant for the creation of the first-ever National Institute for Cellular Agriculture at Tufts University so they can back researchers in manufactured meat.
To be certain all of these goals are locked into place and the UN 2030 agenda is achieved, disrupting the fertilizer industry, food supply chain, and a rash of coincidental fires to food processing plants sure would help to seal the deal, wouldn’t it?”
The Emperor Has No Clothes
In a blatantly self-serving gesture, Gates has publicly called for the West to quit eating beef and transition to lab-grown meats, ostensibly to address climate change. He’s also railed against legislative attempts to make sure fake meats are properly labeled, since labeling would slow down public acceptance.30
Not surprisingly, Gates is financially invested in several faux meat companies.31,32,33 As luck or godlike foresight would have it, he’s also invested in genetically engineered fertilizer alternatives.34 Lynn writes:35
“Bill Gates explained his love for fertilizer in 2018 while in Tanzania.36 Coincidentally, Gates-led and Rockefeller-funded Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) has been an epic fail, with a first ever evaluation report37 that came out on February 28, 2022 after a 15-year effort with bold claims to rescue Africa’s small farmers.
Their false promise to ‘double yields and incomes for 30 million farming households by 2020’ was removed from their website in June 2020 after an assessment by Tufts University revealed little evidence of progress, and in fact showed a 31% increase in hunger.
Evaluators stated there were many deficiencies and AGRA’s reporting and monitoring data was weak. Even the German government is considering pulling funding from AGRA over their pesticide use, which is ironic because Gates claims we need to remove pesticides in the U.S. and move to indoor vertical farming …
One of AGRA’s biggest achievements was their participation in 72 agricultural policy reforms in 11 African countries, pertaining to seed, fertilizer and market access. Laws were created to protect intellectual property rights for ‘certified’ seeds, as penalties were created for open-source seed sharing.
Imagine being a farmer, homesteader or gardener and having to share and trade seeds on the black market so you don’t get penalized. Anyone who believes they won’t try this in the U.S. is kidding themselves, especially since the globalists hold the largest private seeds banks, and invest in the largest commercial seed companies …
On March 17, 2022, a notice was published38to the U.S. Federal Register seeking comments by May 16, 2022 on Competition and Intellectual Property System: Seeds and Other Agricultural Inputs. Remember to read through the proper lens when reviewing this notice that derived from an executive order signed by Biden in July, 2021 on promoting competition in the American economy.
Their ultimate goal — every human being, every piece of food, resource, and product on this planet will be tracked and traced via blockchain. This isn’t a theory — it is their goal. In July, 2021, the FDA released their ‘New Era of Smarter Food Safety’ which consists of using tech-enabled traceability for a digital, traceable food system, from farm to plate using blockchain.
A digital identity to grant access to establishments, control financial spending, and trace everyone’s moves has been rolling out on multiple fronts, including the vaccine ID passport. Eventually they will try to move toward a chip, as it will be easier with biometrics being installed everywhere …
There is no way to sugarcoat this system they are implementing. Whereas vertical farming is brilliant in many ways, and could be beneficial on a smaller scale in communities, the fact that this is the global agenda to remove farms and control all produce by the globalists themselves, makes is incredibly concerning …
We must work together to find a way forward and continue to say no to the digital ID they are creating to control our access and spending, while building self sufficiency and security together.”
For solutions to this rapidly approaching dystopian future, review my previous article, “Why Food Prices Are Expected to Skyrocket,” and Lynn’s article “Finding Sources of Fresh Food.”39
Part of the answer is to grow your own food, to the best of your ability. Another part is to support local growers by buying their produce, or else they’ll get pushed out. Starting local co-ops and community gardens can also go a long way toward creating food security in the long term.
At the same time, we also have to reject globalist solutions like fake meat, gene-edited beef, GMO foods and all the rest of it. It’s time to recognize that none of their solutions are for our benefit. They’re for our detriment. The World Economic Forum has declared that by 2030, you will own nothing. They mean it. They will take everything from us, including the right to grow our own food, if we let them.
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President Joe Biden’s administration is planning to roll back current Title IX regulations, which experts argue will revoke protections for both the accuser and the accused in sexual assault cases and threaten freedom of speech at federally funded schools.
“It ultimately returns Title IX back to a guilty until proven innocent standard,” Sarah Perry, a senior legal fellow for the Heritage Foundation said.
“Any changes could put students’ free speech rights at risk and will only exacerbate the problem of self-censorship that has been plaguing our campuses,” Speech First executive director Cherise Trump said.
President Joe Biden’s Department of Education (DOE) is planning to roll back Title IX due process regulations implemented by former President Donald Trump’s administration, which experts argue will revoke protections for both the accuser and the accused in sexual assault cases and threaten freedom of speech.
The Office of Civil Rights (OCR) is planning to rewrite the rules outlined in Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments that set sexual harassment standards at federally funded schools. The Biden administration’s changes would reverse 2020 due process protections that require federal K-12 and higher education schools to investigate Title IX violations in a fair and unbiased manner, which includes the right to be represented by counsel, the presumption of innocence, the ability to cross examine and to introduce witnesses, experts told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Proponents of the current standards argue they fixed problems created by former President Barack Obama’s Education Department; before the 2020 changes, instances of sexual assault and harassment were only recognized as instances of unlawful sex discrimination through regulations that were not legally binding. However, under the current standards, school districts, colleges and universities have a legal obligation to respond to such cases in a fair and unbiased manner.
Under the Trump administration’s standards, instances of sexual assault at federal schools are handled more like “quasi-judicial proceedings,” Sarah Perry, a senior legal fellow for the Heritage Foundation, told TheDCNF.
“It ultimately returns Title IX back to a guilty until proven innocent standard … as opposed to leaving it to one Title IX investigator to determine who was right and who was wrong, in a ‘he said, she said’ proceeding,” Perry said.
Speech First executive director Cherise Trump told TheDCNF that the rules changes will likely be weaponized against constitutionally protected speech, which could make students subject to “harassment” for their personal or political stances.
The current Title IX regulations that were implemented in 2020 are consistent with a Supreme Court precedent known as the Davis Standard, which concluded that “student-on-student harassment must be so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it can be said to deprive its victims of access to a school’s educational programs or activities,” Trump explained.
“This is a pretty high threshold that protects students from being accused of harassment for simply voicing their opinions and possibly offending someone with their ideas,” Trump said. In response, universities frequently manipulate Title IX language to fit a more “broad-sweeping definition” such as “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive…” to “severe, pervasive, or objectively offensive,” she explained.
The small change in wording allows school administrators to restrict and punish speech they believe is “offensive,” “unwanted” or “problematic,” but would not be considered harassment under current Title IX rules, she said.
“Previously, the process for adjudicating serious harassment allegations on campus had been plagued by bias, vagueness, and overreach,” Trump added. “Any changes could put students’ free speech rights at risk and will only exacerbate the problem of self-censorship that has been plaguing our campuses.”
A Republican coalition of 15 state attorneys general have expressed legal concern about the DOE’s plans to roll back the “historic” move that codified sexual harassment regulations under Title IX into law, arguing the previous standards were unworkable and unfair.
“Hundreds of successful lawsuits against schools for denying basic due process and widespread criticism from across the ideological spectrum arose from the Obama-era rules“ the statement said. “The rules also resulted in a disproportionate number of expulsions and scholarship losses for Black male students.”
The Department of Education did not respond to The DCNF’s request for comment.
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