And still they aggressively promoted this poison. It is, in fact, one of the greatest medical crimes in history.
According to Dr. Naomi Wolf, who runs a crowdsourced project to analyze 300,000 Pfizer documents released via a FOIA request, 44 percent of pregnant women who participated in the drug maker’s COVID-19 vaccine trial lost their babies. pic.twitter.com/48fGypwSlw
More than 40 percent of pregnant women who participated in Pfizer’s mRNA COVID vaccine trial suffered miscarriages, according internal Pfizer documents, recently released under court order. Despite this, Pfizer, and the Biden administration insisted that the vaccines were safe for pregnant women. Out of 50 pregnant women, 22 of them lost their babies, according to an analysis of the documents… The FDA and CDC could conceivably claim they were unaware of high rate of miscarriages in the trial because Pfizer attempted to obscure the data.
According to Dr. Naomi Wolf, who runs a crowdsourced project to analyze 300,000 Pfizer documents released via a FOIA request, 44 percent of pregnant women who participated in the drug maker’s COVID-19 vaccine trial lost their babies (Twitter).
On its website, the CDC still recommends that pregnant women get vaccinated: “COVID-19 vaccination is recommended for all people 6 months and older. This includes people who are pregnant, breastfeeding, trying to get pregnant now, or might become pregnant in the future”.
EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. All rights reserved.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-08-21 07:52:352022-08-21 07:52:35DOCUMENTS: 44 Percent of Pregnant Women Miscarried After Receiving Pfizer Vaccine
Another 199,976 economic migrants arrived at the southern border in July, ensuring President Joe Biden’s 2022 migration exceeds the total 2021 numbers, even though August and September numbers have yet to be added.
The government tracks the migrant arrival and inflow data by its “Fiscal Year” calendar, which starts October 1 and ends September 30. The total 2022 number will be known once the August and September numbers are counted.
In all 12 months of fiscal 2021, officials counted 1,734,686 migrants at the border and allowed 671,160 into the United States via various border-law loopholes.
But in the first 10 months of fiscal 2022, border officials have counted 1,946,780 migrants at the border and allowed 1,012,378 economic migrants to seek homes and jobs throughout the United States.
This July, Biden’s deputies admitted 125,403 of the 199,976 arriving migrants. The 2022 admission numbers show a 50 percent jump over 2021, with two months to go.
The numbers are flawed. For example, the numbers counted at the border are inflated when rejected migrants repeatedly try to sneak across the border.
But the bigger problem is that the government numbers hide the huge inflow of “got-aways” — people who sneak past the few patrol agents and the incomplete border wall along the border. Insiders within the border agencies say the agencies count roughly 40,000 got-aways each month or roughly 500,000 per year….
The documentary above, “Uninformed Consent,”1,2,3 takes a deep dive into the COVID-19 narrative — who’s controlling it and how fear was (and continues to be) used to push novel, unproven gene transfer technology onto, and into, people of all ages, and the simultaneous theft of private wealth and the destruction of small businesses, across the globe.
The film is written and directed by Todd Michael Harris (Matador Films). Odessa Orlewicz, a pro-freedom activist in British Columbia and founder of the Canadian social media platform Librti, and Ted Kuntz, retired psychotherapist and president of Vaccine Choice Canada, co-produced the film.
Weaving in and out of the heart-wrenching story of one man’s loss, interviews with doctors and scientists explores the loss of human rights in the name of biosecurity, and how the “elite class” profit from it all.
Interspersed are compilations of media lies and the bewilderingly contradictory dictates of government officials, as well as footage from protests and examples of people collapsing on live television after getting the jab.
The COVID jabs are a crime against humanity, and it’s a crime in progress. For many who are aware of what’s going on, everyday reality is like watching an intentional, slow-motion train wreck.
Divide and Conquer
As noted by B.C. physician Dr. Stephen Malthouse, who is interviewed in the film, “divide and conquer” is an age-old war strategy. During Hitler’s reign, anti-Semitism was normalized through propaganda in which Jews were likened to “lice,” and were accused of carrying typhus. The same exact strategy was used during the COVID pandemic.
Irrational hatred against anti-maskers, “anti-lockdowners” and “anti-vaxxers” was relentlessly fueled and “normalized” by government officials, health authorities and media, right from the start.
Those who dutifully wore their face masks and got the jab were hailed as good and moral citizens, while the rest were labeled as murderous, disease-carrying, amoral egotists, who’d by their selfishness forfeited their right to life.
Family members were pitted against family members. Friends against friends. Coworkers against coworkers. Employers against employees. Most of us who opted out of this grand genetic experiment have been shunned and berated by people we love.
Adding insult to injury, we all paid for this abuse. Billions of taxpayer dollars were spent on propaganda, anti-vax harassment and pro-vax advertising. The pain of this intentional divide and conquer strategy was too great to bear for many.
Bullied to Death
The personal story that Harris returns to again and again throughout the film is that of a grieving husband whose wife committed suicide. She suffered relentless bullying and harassment from coworkers and superiors for refusing the jab, and when she was finally placed on unpaid leave, she took her own life.
How many suicides are the pandemic puppet masters and their brainwashed minions responsible for? Nobody knows, but it’s likely quite a few. And make no mistake: The hateful rhetoric fed into everyone’s brains and acted out by the weak-minded was intended to cause harm.
It was intended to cause distress, and many now carry the cross of having bullied someone to death, whether they’re aware of it or not. Sadly, many have not yet learned their lesson, and efforts to demonize certain groups continues. Now, the targeted opposition are those who ask questions that Big Pharma and government refuse to answer, or point out blatant contradictions in the narrative.
Most ‘Conspiracy Theories’ Are Conspiracy Facts
Terms like “conspiracy theorist” and “conspiracy theory” are applied to everything and everyone who questions the official and clearly ridiculous narrative. And, the demonization continues even as so-called “conspiracies” are repeatedly shown to be true.
For example, the suspicion that we’d be forced to take these gene therapy shots multiple times a year, for years on end, was labeled a “conspiracy theory,” yet it didn’t take long before boosters were rolled out, and now they’re coming out with shots for newer variants as well, which will result in another round of shots.
Similarly, “conspiracy theorists” warned that people who got the jab would have to continue getting boosters or lose their precious “fully vaccinated” status, and that’s exactly what happened.
In fact, the concept of vaccine passports being used to shut people out of everyday society was initially dismissed as a paranoid conspiracy theory, yet it didn’t take long before governments were doing exactly that.
“Conspiracy theorists” also warned that the COVID jab didn’t prevent infection or spread, and that too is now an indisputable fact. As of early February 2022, Israel reported that 80% of serious COVID cases were among the fully vaccinated.4
“Conspiracy theorists” warned that giving the experimental shot to teens and young children would be unconscionably dangerous, as they have a negligible risk for COVID complications, and now even mainstream media from time to time admit that teens and young adults are suffering above normal rates of heart inflammation.
Between January 2021 and August 2022 (a period of 19 months), at least 1,249 athletes have suffered cardiac arrest or collapse, and 847 have died after COVID injection, worldwide.5 Historically, the annual average of sudden death in athletes was between 296 and 69.7
Pandemic Responses Scrutinized
“Uninformed Consent” scrutinizes many of the elements of the pandemic response, such as the irrational idea that early treatment for COVID-19 is nonexistent and/or futile, and the equally irrational idea that the only solution is to inject everyone on the planet with an experimental product, without regard for individual levels of risk.
In interviews with doctors and scientists — such as Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Peter McCullough, B.C. family physicians Dr. Stephen Malthouse and Dr. Charles Hoffe, Dr. Tess Laurie and government drug policy researcher Alan Cassels — Harris shines a bright light on the medical establishment’s sudden wholesale abandonment of the Hippocratic Oath.
He also looks at the lawless culture of the drug industry and its capture of regulatory agencies and media — a development that has effectively eliminated any protection the public would have had, and should have, from predatory behavior and dangerous products. Harris also reviews:
The history of informed consent and why coercion and mandates violate this most basic and essential public health principle.
Injuries from the COVID jab and other childhood vaccines, and the history of vaccine-injury denialism.
The corrupted individuals, organizations and networks behind the pandemic measures, including the central roles of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates in the suppression of science and life-saving treatments.
The massive conflicts of interest between Big Pharma, the agencies that regulate them and politicians who create our laws.
The collusion between private entities and governments to bring forth global totalitarianism under the banner of biosecurity.
I hope you’ll take the time to watch “Uninformed Consent,” and share it with others. Harris specifically tried, he says, to create a film that would help open the eyes and minds of those who still cannot see what’s happening, or don’t fully believe what they’re seeing.
Resources for Those Injured by the COVID Jabs
To close things out with something that is not covered in this film, if you for whatever reason got one or more jabs and suffered an injury, know there are good doctors and scientists working on solutions.
First and foremost, never ever take another COVID booster, another mRNA gene therapy shot or regular vaccine. You need to end the assault on your system. The same goes for anyone who has taken one or more COVID jabs and had the good fortune of not experiencing debilitating side effects.
Your health may still be impacted long-term, so don’t take any more shots. When it comes to treatment, there still aren’t many doctors who know what to do, although I suspect we’ll see more doctors specializing in COVID jab injuries in the future.
Doctors who have started tackling the treatment of COVID jab injuries in earnest include Dr. Michelle Perro (DrMichellePerro.com), whom I’ve interviewed on this topic. Perro is a pediatrician who over the past couple of years has also started treating adults injured by the jab. Another is Dr. Pierre Kory (DrPierreKory.com).
Both agree that eliminating the spike protein your body is now continuously producing is a primary task. Perro’s preferred remedy for this is hydroxychloroquine, while Kory typically uses ivermectin. Both of these drugs bind and thereby facilitate the removal of spike protein.
Kory also believes there may be ways to boost the immune system to allow it to degrade and eventually remove the spike from your cells naturally, over time. One of the strategies he recommends for this is TRE (time restricted eating), which stimulates autophagy, a natural cleaning process that eliminates damaged, misfolded and toxic proteins. Another strategy that can do the same thing would be sauna therapy.
As a member of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), Kory helped develop the FLCCC’s post-vaccine treatment protocol called I-RECOVER. Since the protocol is continuously updated as more data becomes available, your best bet is to download the latest version straight from the FLCCC website at covid19criticalcare.com8 (hyperlink to the correct page provided above).
Other Helpful Treatments and Remedies
In previous articles, I’ve also covered a number of treatments and remedies that can be helpful for COVID jab injuries, such as:
Pharmaceutical grade methylene blue, which improves mitochondrial respiration and aid in mitochondrial repair. At 15 to 20 milligrams a day, it could potentially go a long way toward resolving some of the fatigue many suffer post-jab.
It may also be helpful in acute strokes. The primary contraindication is if you have a G6PD deficiency (a hereditary genetic condition), in which case you should not use methylene blue at all. To learn more, see “The Surprising Health Benefits of Methylene Blue.”
Near-infrared light, as it triggers production of melatonin in your mitochondria9 where you need it most. By mopping up reactive oxygen species, it too helps improve mitochondrial function and repair. Natural sunlight is 54.3% infrared radiation,10 so this treatment is available for free. For more information, see “What You Need to Know About Melatonin.”
Self-improvement is the answer to interventionism.
The world is beset by meddlers run amok. Government officials around the globe have been on an interventionist decree spree, placing whole populations under house arrest, shutting down entire industries, mandating medical procedures for millions, and so much more.
What can anti-interventionists do about such a metastasis of mass-meddling?
The Office Swap Solution
The solution that gets the most attention is direct political change: remove the mass-meddlers from power and replace them with leaders who respect liberty. Leonard E. Read, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), discussed this proposed fix in his book Elements of Libertarian Leadership.
“The interventionists, it is observed, have ‘leaders’ galore in the political arena. Why, inquire many anti-interventionists, should we tarry any longer?” Read wrote. “Why not find ourselves some political leaders who will represent our points of view?”
This solution, he noted, misunderstands the problem.
“The reason,” Read continued, “that the interventionists have so many ‘leaders’ is only because there is throughout our land a very substantial body of influential, interventionist opinion. The ones out front and who are popularly appraised as leaders are, in fact, not the real leaders. They are but echoes of the underlying opinion, and an echo implies an antecedent sound.”
As Read’s colleague Ludwig von Mises explained, thought-leaders (“influential opinion”) sway popular support, and popular support sets the parameters for political success. The reason anti-interventionist policies have not prevailed is that the ideological groundwork for them has not been laid. Read warned of “the futility of attempting to build on a foundation that does not exist. One might as well look for an abundance of flowers where there has been a scarcity of seeds…”
“The out-front folks in political parties,” Read explained, “are but thermometers—indicators of the political temperature. Change the temperature and there will be a change in what’s out front—naturally and spontaneously. The only purpose in keeping an eye on the thermometer is to know what the temperature is. If the underlying influential opinion—the temperature—is interventionist, we’ll have interventionists in public office regardless of the party labels they may choose for their adornment and public appeal.”
In other words, we will be stuck with interventionist overlords so long as the masses are under the sway of interventionist thought-leaders. Until that changes, deposing one set of tyrants will only make room for another. The only way to rid ourselves of mass-meddlers is to reorient the meddlesome masses. “Politics,” as Andrew Breitbart said, “is downstream from culture.”
Ideas Reign Supreme
And both politics and culture are downstream from ideas.
The political culture of a people is shaped by the moral, social, economic, and political philosophy of its thought-leaders.
“It’s the influential opinion,” as Read clarified (or “ideological might” as Mises called it) “that counts, and nothing else. This is to be distinguished from ‘public opinion,’ there being no such thing. Every significant movement in history—good or bad—has resulted from influential ideas held by comparatively few persons.”
“For the masses of men,” as Murray Rothbard explained,” do not create their own ideas, or indeed think through these ideas independently; they follow passively the ideas adopted and disseminated by the body of intellectuals. The intellectuals are, therefore, the ‘opinion-molders’ in society.”
It is important to note that the ranks of influential intellectuals are not exclusive to university academics and corporate journalists—which is a relief, since those establishment professions have become so compromised by interventionist governments. Especially in the age of the internet, entrepreneurial intellectuals (like podcasters and Substack writers) and amateur intellectuals (like you or anyone else with the interest and intellect it takes to read an essay like this) can rise and come to the fore.
Influence does not come from the government-aligned establishment vesting someone with a PhD or a press pass. True influence, Read taught, comes from within.
“Here, then,” he wrote, “is the key question: What constitutes an influential opinion? In the context of moral, social, economic, and political philosophy, influential opinion stems from or rests upon (1) depth of understanding, (2) strength of conviction, and (3) the power of attractive exposition. These are the ingredients of self-perfection as relating to a set of ideas. Persons who thus improve their understanding, dedication, and exposition are the leaders of men; the rest of us are followers, including the out-front political personalities.”
To realize liberty, we must first cultivate “an influential libertarian opinion.” To rid ourselves of mass-meddlers, we must first persuasively advocate an anti-interventionist, pro-liberty philosophy. And before we can effectively do that, we must understand and uphold that philosophy ourselves, which, as Read cautioned, is harder than many libertarians suppose.
Meddling Defined
With that in mind, what exactly is interventionism, as distinct from liberty? What constitutes meddling, as opposed to minding one’s own proper business? To rid ourselves of something, we must first be able to identify it.
The most fundamental distinction between proper and improper conduct is between the proper and the improper use of force. As John Locke discussed and America’s founders (for the most part) agreed, force is only proper in the defense of individual rights. Any use of force outside of that, whether by government agents or private criminals, is therefore the worst kind of intervention: meddling with someone else’s person or property. When government agents infringe on the rights of individuals, they transgress the most fundamental bounds of propriety.
And by meddling in other people’s business, government officials also stray beyond their domain of competence. As F.A. Hayek explained in his work on “the knowledge problem,” central planners are incapable of “social engineering” the affairs of others without making a massive mess of things. Tyrannical order can only yield “planned chaos,” as Mises called it.
Interventionism is morally wrong and socially destructive, whereas liberty yields justice, harmony, and flourishing. If more intelligent and upstanding men and women had understood these truths well enough to consistently abide by them and persuasively explain them, their influence would have prevented the interventionist blitzkrieg that has made such a mess of the world over the past two years.
Clean Your Room
But advancing a pro-liberty and anti-meddling social, economic, and political philosophy is only half the solution. As Mises explained in “The Psychological Roots of Antiliberalism” (a section of his book Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition), many people have moral failings and psychological issues that make their support for interventionist and socialist doctrines immune from rational counter-argument.
Some people embrace interventionism and socialism as a coping mechanism: they respond to disappointment over their own lives by shifting most of the blame away from themselves and onto outside factors: like “greedy capitalists” or capitalism itself. Through political activism, they meddle in the affairs of others as a way of evading responsibility for their own lives.
As Read put it, “Those who refuse to rule themselves are usually bent on ruling others. Those who can rule themselves usually have no interest in ruling others.”
With people for whom meddling is less an intellectual error and more of an emotional hangup, a different approach may be needed. You may need to help them understand that a life philosophy of resentment is debilitating and self-destructive, while a life philosophy of responsibility is fulfilling, ennobling, and can be downright life-saving.
Frédéric Bastiat said to the mass-meddlers of 19th century France: “You who wish to reform everything! Why don’t you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough.”
Psychologist Jordan B. Peterson echoed this injunction when on Joe Rogan’s podcast he said, “don’t be fixing up the economy, 18-year-olds. You don’t know anything about the economy. It’s a massive complex machine beyond anyone’s understanding and you mess with it at your peril. So can you even clean up your own room?”
Before you get caught up in restructuring society, Peterson advised, sort out your own life first, starting with your room, because then “you’re not exceeding your domain of competence.”
“My sense,” he said, “is that if you want to change the world, you start from yourself and work outward, because you build your competence that way.”
As you improve yourself, you may become an inspiration and good influence for your family, then your circle of friends, then your colleagues at work, then maybe even wider communities.
You change the world for the better by acting as a role model, not a mass-meddler. True leadership is modeling, not meddling.
That is how you can become a force for good instead of a do-gooder. It’s the difference between meaningful virtue and vain virtue-signaling. And attaining the former is vastly more satisfying than indulging in the latter. You can sometimes fool others, but you can’t fool your own conscience. And the human conscience knows the difference between actually doing good and fraudulently looking good.
Peterson’s message of personal responsibility and self-improvement has resonated powerfully with young audiences and inoculated them against the gospel of resentment and intellectual arrogance preached by interventionists and socialists.
Leonard Read would have been delighted to see Peterson’s impact and not the least bit surprised. “Right method,” he wrote, “…consists of self-improvement. If everyone were devoted to the perfection of self, there could be no meddlers amongst us, and without meddlers there could be no socialism.”
A message of self-improvement and personal responsibility can succeed where socio-economic arguments fail, because it’s less of an intellectual exercise and more of a practical dilemma. A person can still cling to their coping mechanism and deny the truth of the message, but only to their own great personal detriment.
The Paradox of Changing the World
We free ourselves from mass-meddling by educating ourselves and others about the dangers of meddling: both on a societal and a personal level.
But in so doing, we must be wary of fighting fire with fire: of meddling with the meddlers.
For example, we must never use government intervention for cheap “wins” against interventionists, for then we become what we hate.
And as Read stressed, we should even avoid “imposing” our explanations on those who have no interest in them. Sharing wisdom where it’s not welcome is its own kind of meddling. Rather than “casting pearls” at those incapable of appreciating them, we should address those who are open to learning.
Above all, Read stressed improving one’s own understanding, dedication to, and ability to explain the freedom philosophy, because the more you do that, the more you will attract students who are not only open to your teaching, but actively seek it.
As Lawrence Reed, President Emeritus of FEE, has stressed in his book Are We Good Enough for Liberty?, improving one’s character in general is also essential, because it greatly increases your influence with those who admire you.
Of course that shouldn’t be the main reason you pursue character development. Self-improvement becomes self-defeating when it becomes primarily about garnering influence, winning praise, and other forms of moral vanity.
The paradox of changing the world is that the best way to improve others is not to try to improve others. Instead seek self-improvement for its own sake, and you will inspire others to improve themselves as a natural and blessed byproduct.
As Leonard Read taught, the most powerful way to minister to the meddlers in our midst is to exorcize the meddlers within ourselves and devote our hearts to self-improvement, thereby leading the way to liberty by our example.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-08-19 18:52:012022-08-19 18:52:01When Government Meddlers Run Amok
Amid a full-blown border crisis that threatens national security and public health — for which the Biden administration is wholly responsible — a bipartisan group of lawmakers has decided this might be a good time to fast-track citizenship for around 76,000 Afghan nationals who were lucky enough to force their way onto the last planes out of Kabul a year ago.
Republicans have been unanimous in their criticism of President Biden’s handing of the border and immigration enforcement overall, correctly noting the reckless nature of the administration in turning loose a million or so illegal border-crossers, whom we know little or nothing about. Yet, Republican Sens. Roy Blunt, Lisa Murkowski and Lindsey Graham are joining with their Democratic colleagues in sponsoring the Afghan Adjustment Act, a bill that would eventually make citizens of 76,000 people from a country now controlled by an antagonist terrorist theocracy. The proposal also seeks to expand additional pathways for Afghans to enter the country.
Most of the Afghans who were airlifted out of Kabul when the Biden administration bugged out with its tail between its legs are probably decent folks who, understandably, would rather not live under the Taliban. Given the nature of the regime, it is also possible, if not likely, that some of those who made it onto the tarmac at the Kabul airport last summer were intentionally placed there by the Taliban or al Qaeda. In fact, a Department of Defense whistleblower recently reported that 324 of the individuals the Biden administration evacuated have appeared on the Pentagon’s watch list, including known and suspected terrorists. Others may have been heinous criminals — but these are things we’ll never know until it’s too late.
Additionally, turning 76,000 random Afghans into U.S. citizens would serve as a further acknowledgment by our government that the Taliban is, and will remain, the unchallenged government of that country. The unmistakable signal will be that the United States holds out no hope that Afghans will be able to reclaim control of their country from the Taliban, further dispiriting those who might be brave enough to challenge the medieval theocracy from within.
Acceptance is one step short of the normalization of a regime that not only brutalizes its own people but serves as a haven and an incubator for global terrorism. If these members of Congress need any reminder of that, it is worth noting that Kabul was the last known address of Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Maintaining the status quo for the 76,000 Afghan nationals in question does not put them in harm’s way. On the other hand, rushing to turn them into citizens potentially puts everyone else in harm’s way. We have neither eyes, ears nor feet on the ground in Afghanistan. Not only can we not rely on the Taliban to provide us with background information about the people we are trying to vet (if those records even exist), we can safely assume that the regime will do all in its power to prevent us from identifying people who might pose a danger. Moreover, merely seeking that information could endanger family members who remain in Afghanistan. At the very least, maintaining people as parolees allows us to easily remove them when we uncover, through other means, that they pose some sort of threat.
Context is also important. And the context in which this legislation is being offered is a full-blown border crisis that is being deliberately perpetrated by the Biden administration. The last thing the country needs at this point is a bill that would divert the attention of the resource-starved and dispirited agencies attempting to cope with the Biden border crisis toward rubber-stamping the citizenship applications of people they know nothing about.
The wrong proposal at the wrong time — that’s the Afghan Adjustment Act in a nutshell.
AUTHOR
Dan Stein
Dan Stein is president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-08-19 18:51:592022-08-19 18:51:59Why Are Lawmakers Trying to Fast-Track Citizenship for Afghans We Can’t Properly Vet?
A recent scenario at the Ford Motor Company is the perfect way to explain what Democrats are doing to this country when they pass bills for our “benefit.” On August 9, Senate Democrats passed a bill they praised, which included a $7,500 federal electric vehicle tax credit.
Shortly after, Ford raised the price of its electric car. By how much? $7,000. What a coincidence. “The base model of the 2023 F-150 Lightning pickup will now cost $47,000, up from it’s original price of $40,000, according to CNN.”
Daily Caller News Foundation reports ”More expensive models, such as the XLT High/Extended Range and the Lariat Extended Range have increased in price by $8,500, while other F-150 Lightning designs vary between $6,000 to $7,000 in price increases, according to the Detroit Free Press.”
The price change was attributed to “significant material cost increases and other factors,” CNN noted. Despite the changes, the increase will not impact those currently waiting for delivery of their vehicles, but impacts those who have reserved but not yet ordered the truck, CNBC reported.
But don’t just blame Ford for being forced to dance with the Democrats. General Motors also just announced it will increase the price of its electric model of the GMC Hummer. The cost will go up by $6,250, CNN reported.
A recent scenario at the Ford Motor Company is the perfect way to explain what Democrats are doing to this country when they pass bills for our “benefit.” On August 9, Senate Democrats passed a bill they praised, which included a $7,500 federal electric vehicle tax credit.
Shortly after, Ford raised the price of its electric car. By how much? $7,000. What a coincidence. “The base model of the 2023 F-150 Lightning pickup will now cost $47,000, up from it’s original price of $40,000, according to CNN.”
Daily Caller News Foundation reports ”More expensive models, such as the XLT High/Extended Range and the Lariat Extended Range have increased in price by $8,500, while other F-150 Lightning designs vary between $6,000 to $7,000 in price increases, according to the Detroit Free Press.”
The price change was attributed to “significant material cost increases and other factors,” CNN noted. Despite the changes, the increase will not impact those currently waiting for delivery of their vehicles, but impacts those who have reserved but not yet ordered the truck, CNBC reported.
But don’t just blame Ford for being forced to dance with the Democrats. General Motors also just announced it will increase the price of its electric model of the GMC Hummer. The cost will go up by $6,250, CNN reported.
The Daily Caller adds:
With eligibility and tax credit rules preparing to change under new legislation, including the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, certain modules of the vehicle may qualify for the credit this year, according to Consumer Reports. It is unclear if the truck will be eligible in the future, according to CNN.
The electric trucks only have a range of 230 to 320 miles depending on the model, a moderate increase of 10 miles to the company’s standard battery, CNBC continued.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-08-19 17:51:412022-08-19 17:51:41Democrats Passed $7,500 Electric Vehicle Tax Credit, Then EV Prices Were Immediately Raised $7,500
The U.S. Congress is composed of 100 members of the US Senate and 435 members of the US House of Representatives, called ‘The People’s House’ (seriously, when was the last time “the people” actually had any voice in THAT House?). For the remainder of this article, and for the sake of clarity, all the members of the Senate and the House will be called “the 535”
When people in positions of trust and authority try to cover their own bad behavior and deliberately ignore the bad behavior of their colleagues, and worse, try to cover them up, you must be aware there is a problem. We have witnessed this in the U.S. Congress for many decades and privately wondered why this is allowed to happen, yet it continues to happen from year to year without being addressed in any way. It is a complete impossibility for those who use their eyes and ears, with their brains hopefully engaged, to deny this is a serious problem in the US.
Based on the constitutional description of their duties, have the 535 now made the entire U.S. Congress irrelevant? You decide.
These 535 people who sit in their padded chairs, who have bloated salaries and budgets and huge numbers of staff to “assist” them (doing what?), who are provided “armed security” (from what?), who fly from coast to coast, indeed around the world on OUR dime, have totally lost touch with, not only their constituents (remember them?), but with reality itself and have separated themselves from the American people in so many ways it’s nearly impossible to enumerate them. But let me give it a shot.
Separation from Constituents (remember them?)
They are paid $174,000 per year, compared to approximately $54,000 which is the average salary of a working class American, including their constituents (remember them?) in 2022.
They are provided (I should say they voted themselves) much better ‘benefits’ than the average American, including their constituents (remember them?), both in pensions and insurance, once again from the public treasury.
They are given exemptions from many of the ‘mandates’ that average Americans are required to accept.
They are (seemingly) not required to justify, to anyone, why they voted a certain way on any issue in their day to day work as “representatives” of their constituents (once again, remember them?), compared to the average American who must continually explain his actions to his employer when the expectations of his or her job are not met and the end result is usually termination of employment.
Unlike a majority of their constituents (remember them?), they are not required to go through a yearly “job review” in order to continue with employment, which would almost certainly result in THEIR termination based on poor job performance.
They introduce bills that may result in additional laws being written and signed into law requiring their constituents (remember them?) to obey these laws, while the 535 seem to be exempt from them most of the time. In addition, their constituents (remember them?) are almost never allowed any input into the bill-introduction process.
They are privy to “insider information” that allows them to make stock purchases and sales that brings them huge returns on investment, and indeed will render them millionaires during their time as “representatives of their constituents’ (remember them?), while their constituents must rely on the sometimes fake information given to the public and hope and pray they will not lose their life savings to a crooked and corrupt stock market.
Separation From Reality
The 535 placed their hands on The Holy Bible (remember it?) and swore an oath before Almighty God, to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God (Oh, remember him?).
It now appears that their oaths should be amended to say they swear to “support and defend their party agenda”, regardless of whether said agenda violates the Constitution, and will “bear true faith and allegiance to their party agenda”, and that they will discharge the “duties of their office”, which duties seem to have no connection to the Constitution but rather to the enrichment of themselves and their party, along with further consolidating their power over the people.
The 535 now seem to believe that their constituents (remember them?) exist only to pay the taxes levied by the Congress so that the 535 can continue in their lavish lifestyles, eating super-expensive ‘gourmet’ ice cream and jetting around the world, increasing their personal wealth from covert, and likely illegal, deals made with officials from foreign governments and corporations. While the eating and jetting are commencing, their constituents (remember them?) are trying to come up with additional ways, up to and including taking on extra jobs, to keep themselves and their children fed and clothed.
The Bloated US Debt
Setting the spending of the US government, and making sure that the financial security of the United States government is intact, is the duty of the members of the US House of ‘Representatives’ (do we truly still have those?).
It has been said that debt is bondage, and a majority of Americans experience that bondage daily, and while the AVERAGE American and the constituents (remember them?) of the 535 are living week to week, sometimes day to day, and maxing out credit cards to survive, the 535 seem to spend an inordinate amount of THEIR time, funded by the American taxpayers and their constituents (remember them?), eagerly searching for additional ways to borrow and spend even more money on ridiculous and worthless ideas, adding trillions of dollars to our current debt (and, by the way, millions of dollars to their personal wealth).
While most Americans try to live by a balanced budget (an increasingly impossible task), balancing their incomes with their expenditures, the 535 have not submitted to, or received from, a POTUS, a balanced budget since 2001 (seriously?) and the last time the federal government budget displayed a surplus was in the 1920s (again, seriously?).
If true that the last balanced budget was in 2001, could that have necessitated the instigation of a costly (in excess of $2 trillion) and questionable war, lasting more than twenty years, in order to ignore, or better yet, get rid of that pesky ‘budget-balancing’ idea? After all, wars are critical to the sustenance and proliferation of our “American democracy” (what happened to the republic?) and they sometimes demand that reality be ‘suspended’ so that the war can be fought and won……but wait, we didn’t win THAT war, did we? No, in shame, we left the battlefield to the enemy, along with $85 billion of the latest and greatest US military hardware, paid for by the constituents (remember them) of the 535.
Could this be an indication that, while everyday American citizens wish they had enough income to simply match their necessary expenditures, reality has fled from the 535 who agree to send hundreds of billions of OUR dollars overseas, ostensibly to ‘rebuild’ the very countries they spent hundreds of billions of OUR dollars to ‘destroy’?
Has reality fled from the 535 when they think it is their “duty” to require the lives of thousands of their constituents (remember them?) who have been sent to, and shed their blood in, places that their constituents have no interest in and likely could not locate on a world globe?
Has reality fled from the 535 who daily entertain an army of lobbyists who job it is to present new spending projects to the 535 and get them approved, by any means necessary? Could it be that these lobbyists, who have extremely large amounts of money to use for wining and dining the intended recipients, offering the contents of their bulging pockets, actually enrich the 535 in order to get their pet projects approved?
If so, would that not be an unethical, immoral and likely illegal action of the 535 in receiving such funds?
Even though the 535 (sometimes) make contact with their constituents (remember them?) when their campaigns for reelection are beginning and they feel the need to get their faces in front of them so the voters will be able to place that face with a name on the ballot, those constituents would prefer that the 535 ASK them what they would like to see happen in OUR Congress, while they are being required to pay their bloated salaries, but the 535 mostly seem to be way too busy to spare any time to actually get to know them, and get a feeling for what their concerns are. And that is a real shame because they would get quite an education that, if they were honest enough to admit it, would likely change, at least some of THEIR actions in OUR Congress. (Hint: They are NOT that honest).
Could it be that the 535 don’t really WANT to know the thoughts and needs of their constituents?
BINGO!
The Real Reality, An Eventual Accounting
Has reality fled from the 535 when they believe there will not be an eventual accounting required of them for their unethical, immoral and likely illegal actions?
These 535 might want to take a closer look at those oaths they spoke. They swore, not so much to their constituents (remember them?), but to an eternal and all-powerful God who is also JUST in all His ways. But, they might say, “I really do not believe in God,so I’m not really worried about retribution from any God for violating the oath”. And based on their actions, this would likely be the one time they’re actually speaking the truth),
All well and good, no one is forcing them to believe in God, but their constituents (remember them?) are likely people who DO believe in God and take all oaths sworn before Him much more seriously than the privileged 535. They are also likely to be true patriotic Americans who understand the importance of OUR Constitution and want to see it supported and defended, especially by those 535 for whom they voted.
Conclusion
If any of this makes sense to you, it MUST be considered that the US Congress has indeed become irrelevant. Usually, when important events are occurring, anything deemed to be irrelevant is simply ignored, not considered during discussions or even thought about. But when an entity such as the US Congress, has become irrelevant, yet is responsible for raping the American taxpayers, their constituents (remember them?), an accounting must happen, whether at the hands of their constituents (remember them?) or an angry and powerful God.
The writer of the Book of Hebrews said. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Hebrews 10:31 KJV).
The current sentiment of the average American voter, with polling recently showing that the approval rating for Congress is under 20%, when considering whether the US Congress is still relevant, the question could be asked whether it might be a more fearful thing to be required to answer, completely and HONESTLY, to their American CONSTITUENTS, either through the ballot box or the jury box.
As for the ballot box, it has been said that votes and voters do NOT decide elections, MONEY decides elections.
I personally believe that the current political system is SO corrupt and so beyond repair, that the ballot box will not suffice to correct any problems with the US Congress. The powers that be, the ones who truly make the decisions that are ‘mouthed’ by Congress, have enough money to buy any person or party and any number of votes.
The demonic persons just mentioned seem to be very ‘relevant’, but beyond the reach of the average person, leaving the 535 alone to be held responsible, via the jury box, for their actions that affect 330 million Americans.
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David Carlin:Catholics must face unpleasant facts: we are surrounded by enemies of our religion; and they are not moderate enemies like the Protestants of old.
During the 19th century, Catholics found themselves settled and growing in numbers in the United States, a great Protestant country that was relatively tolerant and hospitable toward Catholics. This, even though the American people generally felt that the Roman religion adhered to by these Catholics was a false and corrupt version of Christianity.
The leaders of the Catholic Church in America – its bishops, priests, and religious sisters – were well aware of the great danger that Catholics, an island surrounded by a vast sea of Protestantism, might fall away from the true faith and either: (a) embrace the Protestant heresy; or (b) become mere infidels, having no religious belief at all.
And so the leaders of the Church, aided and abetted by myriads of devoted laypersons, developed a vast network of religious institutions designed to keep Catholics and their children and grandchildren within the faith.
The most important of these institutions were dioceses, parishes, schools, colleges, seminaries, and hospitals. But they also included Catholic newspapers, magazines, and book publishers; the Knights of Columbus and the CYO; and dozens of other things. Above all, they included strong barriers to intermarriage between Catholics and outsiders. Catholics built a quasi-ghetto for themselves, a kind of imperium in imperio.
And for a long time it worked. Although there were defections from the faith, they were relatively few and far between, especially when we consider the many opportunities available in a country that was growing steadily more tolerant of Catholics and their religion.
All this collapsed beginning in the 1960s. The walls of the “ghetto” fell down like the walls of Jericho, cracked and undermined by the loudly blaring trumpets of post-modernity. This was partly due to Vatican II; it was much more due to “the spirit of Vatican II.”
Most of all, however, it was due to the fact that Catholics were entering fully into the mainstream of American life at precisely the moment – the fatal moment – when the United States was ceasing to be a Protestant country and was becoming instead a country dominated by the culture of secular humanism.
In the first half of the 20th century the traditional Protestant mind of America had been replaced by a liberal Protestant mind, and, in the second half, the liberal Protestant mind was being replaced by an agnostic mind.
As long as the walls of the ghetto were standing, Catholics were not strongly tempted to abandon Catholic convictions and embrace Protestant convictions. For instance, no matter how poor an opinion Protestants had of the Catholic “worship” of the Virgin Mary, Catholics kept up their Marian devotions. If anything, they intensified these devotions, as if to say, “Take that, you Mary-phobic Protestants!”
Another instance: the practice of divorce and remarriage. Although this had always been approved of (at least in certain circumstances) among Protestants, and although it was becoming more and more common in America, and although Hollywood celebrities often carried it to ridiculous extremes, Catholics generally speaking continued to adhere to the old teaching that marriage is indissoluble.
As long as the walls of the ghetto remained standing, the Catholic bishops of America could say to the outside world, “You Protestants can do whatever you like, but you won’t draw our Catholic men and women into the error of your ways. Our bet is that they will remain steadfastly Catholic, a bet we feel confident that we’ll win.”
Once the ghetto walls collapsed in the ‘60s and ‘70s, however, all bets were off. Catholics, above all Catholics of the younger generations, began swimming with the current of popular opinion.
But this time the current was not a Protestant current; the demand was no longer that we stop “worshipping” the Virgin or that we remarry after our first marriage falls apart. No, the current was now a highly secularized current, even an anti-Christian current, and it demanded:
that we fornicate, preferably with multiple partners;
that we have abortions, or at least express our support for those who do;
that we give in to our homosexual temptations (if we happen to have any) and, after we have done so, boast of being “true” to ourselves;
that we deplore or ridicule those who decline to swim with the current;
that we not waste our valuable time attending Mass on a weekly basis; and that, if we do choose to waste our time in that manner, we at least reject the old superstition that Jesus Christ is really and truly present in the Eucharist.
In America, I cannot help but conclude, the Catholic religion without the protection of ghetto walls is a thing that won’t work. It’s a lost cause, a religion that will slowly but surely fade away.
What then? Am I suggesting that we rebuild the old ghetto? No, that’s impossible. It’s gone forever. The clock of history never runs backwards.
History suggests that the Catholic religion can flourish in two circumstances only: (a) When it is the virtually universal religion of a society – as it was for many centuries in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and certain other places; and (b) When it is a ghetto religion surrounded and more or less persecuted by hostile forces – as it was under British rule in Ireland, or Communist rule in Poland, or pagan rule in ancient Rome.
American Catholics must face unpleasant facts: that we are surrounded by enemies of our religion; that these are not moderate enemies, like the old Protestants. No, they are red-hot enemies, atheistic or quasi-atheistic in mind and morals; that they dominate, or are rapidly coming to dominate, the command posts of American culture – colleges and universities, public schools, the entertainment industry, the journalistic mass media, and the Democratic Party.
If we’d like our religion to survive in the America, we have no choice, I submit, but to create a new ghetto, however difficult that may be to imagine at present. I don’t mean the Protestantism-resistant ghetto of old. I mean the creation of a new kind of ghetto, an atheism-resistant ghetto.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-08-19 05:51:282022-08-19 05:51:28A New Ghetto for American Catholicism
As the mid-term elections near the Biden regime is completing another one of their agenda items, the permanent weaponization of the U.S. Postal Service.
According to FTR, , the USPS is reporting it delivered more than 135 million ballots in 2020, and has already delivered another 40 million so far this year during the primaries.
The USPS should be relegated to the dustbin of history, it is an ancient relic of a bygone, pre-technological era. Instead the Biden regime is revolutionizing it into the illegal election arm of the party of treason.
Further, the democrats just passed an almost trillion dollar spending bill at the height of a recession and 9% inflation.
‘The new spending bill will force middle-class Americans to pay $20 billion more in taxes. The bill will create 87,000 new IRS agents to harass Americans and target their political enemies.
And Democrats did all of this less than three months before an election.
Democrats just passed a $700 spending bill — during a recession — with record 8.6% inflation.
The new spending bill will force middle class Americans to pay $20 billion more in taxes. The bill will create 87,000 new IRS agents to harass Americans and target their political enemies.
And Democrats did all of this less than three months before an election.
A major part of their election scheme is the work done by the US postal service with mail-in ballots.
Democrats NEED mail-in ballots and Democrats NEED the assistance of the US postal service.
Chuck DeVore published this warning to the nation on the Democrat’s mail-in voting scheme at The Federalist.
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) announced on July 28 that it was creating the Election and Government Mail Services division. Adrienne E. Marshall, a USPS veteran, was named as the division’s first director, with Marc Elias, the Democrat’s foremost lawfare professional and longtime proponent of elections by mail, tweeting out his approval.
The rationale for this new division is that the growing use of mail-in ballots requires extra attention to ensure the greater volume of mailed ballots can be handled by an increasingly overburdened USPS.
The USPS reported it delivered more than 135 million ballots in 2020, with 40 million delivered so far this year during the primaries.
Elections conducted by mail have been a longtime goal of Elias and others since long before public health fears over in-person voting during the Covid-19 pandemic. It is instructive to note that most European nations found mail-in ballots to be susceptible to fraud and limited their use.
Among other problems, mail-in ballots can be cast by someone other than the voter, voter ID measures are harder to ensure absent in-person voting with a government-issued ID, and the secret ballot is more easily compromised by professional ballot traffickers who “help” the voter fill in their ballot. Thus, mail-in ballots will be an increasingly important part of the Democratic election playbook.
And once again, the GOP, a subsidiary of the DNC is completely silent.
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Document lists perceptions of “government overreach” and “election fraud” as red flags.
“The threats we have observed, to date, underscore that DVEs [Domestic Violent Extremists] may view the 2022 midterm election as an additional flashpoint around which to escalate threats against perceived ideological opponents, including federal law enforcement personnel.”
“Information contained in this intelligence bulletin is for official use only. No portion of this bulletin should be released to the media, the general public, or over nonsecure Internet servers. Release of this material could adversely affect or jeopardize investigative activities.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Project Veritas released a leaked document today from within the Department of Homeland Security which shows how federal agencies are reacting to the recent raid of President Trump’s Florida home.
In the document, the DHS warns of a heightened security risk for federal agents, specifically FBI agents, because of the Mar-a-Lago raid.
In addition to listing potential warning signs for Domestic Violent Extremists [DVEs], the DHS predicts that violent threats may continue to escalate this year.
“The threats we have observed, to date, underscore that DVEs [Domestic Violent Extremists] may view the 2022 midterm election as an additional flashpoint around which to escalate threats against perceived ideological opponents, including federal law enforcement personnel,” the document reads.
The document also appears to state that DVE ideology tends to be aligned with the ideas that “government overreach” and “election fraud” are a threat to the country.
“In recent years, DVEs adhering to different violent extremist ideologies have coalesced around perceptions of government overreach and election fraud to threaten and conduct violence. As a result of recent activities, we assess that potential targets of DVE violence moving forward could include law enforcement, judicial officials, individuals implicated in conspiracy theories, and perceived ideological opponents who challenge their worldview.”
The leaked material concludes with a warning to agents that the public should not know this information.
“Information contained in this intelligence bulletin is for official use only. No portion of this bulletin should be released to the media, the general public, or over nonsecure Internet servers. Release of this material could adversely affect or jeopardize investigative activities.”
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-08-17 17:51:362022-08-17 17:51:36DHS Whistleblower Leaks New Joint Intelligence Bulletin on ‘Domestic Violent Extremists’ Sent in Wake of Mar-A-Lago Raid
Below matches what our great candidates for school boards across Florida like Jill Sessions, Rick Nolte, Terry Clark and Justin Sharpless on Polk County have been emphasizing along with Parent’s Rights.
The current Polk County School Board and Superintendent Heid just doesn’t get it as illustrated by their decision to support an OPT-OUT rather than an OPT-IN policy when it comes to age inappropriate and, in some cases, pornographic books in the PCPS media centers; gay pride month proclamations and refusal to put out a written policy that software available to teachers and students called Nearpod would not contain any access to Critical Race Theory.
It is a myth that some Politically Correct teachers are not referring to gender identity pronouns or CRT.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has issued a tweet listing the types of subjects schools should, and should not, be teaching — the governor declared that Sunshine State schools will educate, rather than indoctrinate, students.
“As students head back to their classrooms this fall, I’m happy to clear up any ‘confusion’ the media may have about appropriate curriculum,” DeSantis tweeted, listing “Math, Reading, Writing” as approved subjects, but critical race theory, “Sexualized Content,” and “Transgender Ideology” as disapproved topics. “Florida schools will educate children, not indoctrinate them,” he added.
The tweet earned plaudits from many on social media.
Responding to the governor’s post, Parents Defending Education founder and president Nicki Neily tweeted that “this is EXACTLY what parents want.”
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It’s been a bad stretch for the phony climate change narrative, lately.
A new report shows 96 percent of NOAA’s temperature stations don’t meet the agency’s own placement standards. They are deliberately placed near urban areas in order to overstate average temperatures, leading to the now-routine bogus claims we’re having the ‘hottest year on record’.
Someone pointed out the inconvenient truth that NASA has recognized over the years that the biggest factor affecting temperature and climate is the sun, specifically, variations in the earth’s solar orbit. Fly too close to the sun, and things get a little warmer, whodathunkit.
Those disappearing coral reefs in Australia? Well, guess what – they’ve rebounded to record levels. Environmentalists routinely tell you the sky is falling and the coral reefs are disappearing, but neither is true.
The climatistas prattle on about extreme weather events, but the fact of the matter is that the number of climate-related deaths has dropped by 99 percent since 1920 and is now approaching zero – except for storm chasers, of course. Oh, by the way, the number of tropical cyclones has dropped 13 percent since pre-industrial times, a new study found. Sorry to rain on your anti-growth parade.
The climate change crowd is deceiving you when it claims extreme weather is increasing and climate change is to blame. It turns out that the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – IPCC – recently changed its methods, producing an increase in extreme weather events on paper but not in the real world. “(T)he latest IPCC report has introduced novel ‘attribution’ statistics and now insists that things are getting worse. It’s yet another case of scientists trying to scare the public into compliance,” a recent paper said.
So-called experts say sea levels are rising, but photos show they’re not, and the satellite data underlying the sea level rise claim has not been vetted for satellite altitude which makes all the difference in the method used.
Greenies hyperventilate about the water level at Lake Powell being down 94 feet since 2000 and blame evaporation from hotter temperatures, but it is government policies that produced the drop. The original plan was to hold back water in wet years to make up for dry years, but the government now releases more water than originally planned in wet years, leaving no cushion. You can’t blame that on climate change – or maybe you can, if you’re dishonest.
Similarly, it is government policies that are producing the increasing wildfire problem in the West. Litigation under environmental laws and environmental reviews have delayed thinning and controlled burns. Some controlled burns are being done, stupidly, in windy conditions. So look to forest management, not climate change, if you’re sincerely interested in finding the culprit instead of just demagoguing the issue.
California and Germany are finding out that alternative energy isn’t all sunshine and lollipops. Faced with electricity shortages from pursuing green energy policies, both are moving toward increasing reliance on their fossil fuel and nuclear power plants.
If you’re pinning your hopes the planet won’t burn up on the new climate bill Joe Biden is signing today, you might want to reconsider. If you use U.N. climate models and everything in the bill goes swimmingly, the average temperature of the earth in the year 2100 will be 61.972 degrees instead of 62.0 degrees, best case. I’m so relieved, and I’m so glad we’re spending $739 billion dollars to achieve a drop of 0.028 degrees. Lollipop, anyone?
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Imagine if this system were to be extrapolated to other fields.
The present system for pharmaceutical drugs requires a doctor’s prescription as a precondition for their sale to members of the public.
At first glance this seems like a reasonable plan. After all, most people simply lack the necessary information to determine whether they need or can benefit from drugs such as Penicillin, Vicodin, Albuterol, Lisinopril, Levothyroxine, Gabapentin, Metformin, Lipitor, Amlodipine, Tamsulosin, Finasteride, Digoxin, Metoprolol, Celecoxib to name but a tiny sample of those drugs covered by this rule. Moreover, even if people had that knowledge, which the average person most certainly does not, they would be totally lost as far as proper dosage is concerned.
However, all is not well under present institutional arrangements. For here we are not talking about advice and counsel from a physician to a patient. That is all well and good. Rather, the problem is that the horse is placed before the cart: the client must seek the permission of a person who is for all intents and purposes an employee of his, not an employer.
That should be the proper relationship between the two, and in the free society that is exactly what would occur. Instead, nowadays, the patient is not seeking, nor obtaining, information, knowledge, advice. Instead, he must appear on bended knee to beg for permission from his physician.
Imagine if this system were to be extrapolated to other fields of endeavor. Then, instead of the motorist telling the mechanic which of his services he requires, matters would be inverted: the former would have to gain the approval of the latter regarding the proper procedures to be followed. Instead of the customer telling the cab driver where to go, the former would have to seek approval from the latter regarding the destination deemed by him to be the most appropriate.
Similarly, the diner would have to ask the permission of the waiter as to what kind of meal to order; if the latter deemed the former’s choice to be in any way problematic, he would simply reject his request. Travelers would propose destinations to air carriers; the latter would say yea or nay. After all, doctors nowadays sometimes refuse to write prescriptions for patients if they deem those prescriptions harmful; they make the final determination to the request, not the order, of the patient.
Yes, yes, there are disanalogies here. Pharmaceuticals have life and death implications, certainly those for good health. Some, but not all of these examples are fully apropos. But this is a dramatic and accurate way of depicting exactly what is going on in the prescription system.
How should matters work, ideally? Architects give advice to builders. Mechanics give advice to automobile owners. That is exactly the relationship that should prevail between a doctor and a patient. The former should advise the latter as to proper medication. But the patient should be free to ignore what the physician says, to seek a second opinion, and to have access to whatever (legal) drug there is out there. (All drugs should be legal, but that is entirely a different matter.)
Lawyers know more than us about law; the same thing follows; they are our employees, not employers. Physicists, chemists, mathematicians, economists, musicians, plumbers, and electricians are also more knowledgeable about their own specialties than we laymen; still, this gives them not a shred of justification to boss us around.
Yes, doctors, too, know more than us, specifically about medicine. But that shouldn’t make them our bosses. Their brief should not be to permit, or to withhold permission. We, their clients, are not children. We should not be treated as such.
Walter Edward Block is an American economist and anarcho-capitalist theorist who holds the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair in Economics at the J. A. Butt School of Business at Loyola University New Orleans. He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network.
EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.
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Free and fair elections isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. Our once free country will not survive.
By: Victoria Marshall, The Federalist, August 11, 2022:
Left-wing operatives are working overtime to accomplish their partisan goals and drive Democratic voter turnout.
A prominent voter-roll management system used by 31 states and the District of Columbia has politically compromised ties, according to a new report by independent research group Verity Vote.
The Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, was sold to states as a quick and easy way to update their voter rolls. Started in 2012 by far-left activist David Becker and the left-leaning Pew Charitable Trusts, the program is ostensibly run by the member states themselves. But as public records show, Democratic operatives are working overtime under the cover of ERIC to accomplish their partisan goals and drive Democratic voter turnout. David Becker, Far-Left Activist
Becker’s left-wing ties have long concerned Republican state officials participating in ERIC. Before he started ERIC, Becker worked as a lobbyist for People for the American Way, a George Soros-funded advocacy group best known for the Right Wing Watch project, a website that catalogs and attacks conservative politicians and movements.
Before that, though, he was a Justice Department attorney whom colleagues remember as a “hard-core leftist” who “couldn’t stand Conservatives.”
While at the DOJ, Becker became the subject of an ethics complaint after he contacted Boston and offered his help in defeating a lawsuit made against the city by his employer for voting infractions. According to Hans von Spakovsky, former counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the time, Becker “was supposed to be nonpartisan, but his emails uncovered in the Boston investigation revealed nasty, disparaging remarks about Republicans. Very unethical and unprofessional.”
After his stint at the DOJ and People for the American Way, Becker became the director of election initiatives at Pew Charitable Trusts, where he organized the creation of ERIC in 2012. Though Becker officially left ERIC in 2016, public records show he has continued to play a strong role in the organization, coordinating with state officials on ERIC-related activities and even running ERIC meetings. Documentation of that role is provided in Verity’s report. This is in violation of ERIC’s bylaws as Becker is a “non-voting board member” of ERIC and should not have the power to direct projects.
While Becker is a shrewd activist, ERIC member secretaries of state describe him as charming and brilliant. Becker is known to host swanky, all-access-paid election integrity conferences for state election officials and their spouses. Even during the pandemic, Becker courted ERIC members with Zoom catch-up calls. “Shane Hamlin and I have discussed doing another virtual get-together with the folks in the states (we did a small one last Friday) to catch up and hang out. No particular agenda, not about ERIC, just a good way to kick off the Memorial Day weekend (what’s a weekend?). I hope many of you can make it,” a May 15, 2020, email to ERIC members said. ERIC, CEIR, and ‘Zuck Bucks‘
But now ERIC is undergoing scrutiny for its involvement with another Becker project, the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR). That group was one of two leftist groups used to funnel Mark Zuckerberg’s $419 million that funded the private takeover of government election offices in 2020. This funding targeted the blue areas of swing states, allowing left-wing operatives to run Democrat “get out the vote” operations from inside the election apparatus.
ERIC shares voter roll data — including records of unregistered voters — it receives from the states with CEIR, according to public information requests detailed in the report. CEIR then develops targeted mailing lists and sends them back to the states to use for voter registration outreach. As part of their agreement with ERIC, states are not allowed to disclose any data they send to nor receive from ERIC, however, ERIC is not under the same constraints and is able to work with CEIR.
Participants also express concern that ERIC does more to inflate voter lists without scrutiny than to scrub those lists of people who have died, moved, or otherwise become ineligible to vote in a given jurisdiction. Per ERIC’s own statistics, in 2020, it identified 17 million new voters compared to identifying only about 3 million inaccurate voters on the rolls.
Some member states are beginning to worry the organization is being mismanaged. Earlier this year, Louisiana announced its withdrawal from ERIC due to “questionable funding sources and that possibly partisan actors may have access to ERIC network data for political purposes.”
Even more troubling is that some of the information shared — including the email addresses and cell phone numbers of voters — is now being used for a “disinformation” voter contact drive, according to reports.
ERIC’S Failure to Clean Voter Rolls
How does ERIC work? According to its membership agreement, every 60 days states are required to send “all active and inactive voter files,” “all licensing or identification records contained in the motor vehicles database,” and any state agency records that perform “voter registration functions” to ERIC, which matches those against data from all other member states and Social Security death data. From there it creates voter maintenance lists — lists of voters who have moved, died, or have duplicate registrations — and lists of non-registered voters called “eligible but unregistered.” States are then required to contact every person on the latter list and tell them how to register.
Week before last, I told you about a lawsuit brought by the state Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden administration for colluding with Big Tech to censor free speech on COVID, the 2020 election, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and mail-in voting, among other things. The case is getting interesting because the judge is allowing the plaintiffs to proceed with discovery and because people who were censored – the Gateway Pundit and scientists and doctors who criticized the COVID lockdowns – have joined the suit.
So keep your eye on that one, but understand the move to silence the political Right in this country is not confined to the Biden administration. Every corner of the Left is jumping in.
A professional Gay Gestapo group called for more censorship of information from the Right on social media and said the platform companies should become pronoun police.
A trans mafia group got a theater in Minneapolis to cancel a show by comedian Dave Chappelle whose jokes they didn’t like. Twitter supports the trans mafia, suspending Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, and a dozen others for poking holes in the phony transgender narrative. Heck, Twitter even canceled me for posting Tea Party information a few years ago.
A Democrat Senate candidate in Iowa demanded a town mayor take down a ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ flag outside somebody’s house. This guy is a real authoritarian because, when he was a Vice Admiral in the Navy, he banned Fox News at meal time, and wouldn’t let his sailors watch it.
A medical board threatened to decertify doctors for telling the truth about abortion; for example, how abortion is linked to breast cancer and infertility. Congressional Democrats and the New York Attorney General asked Google to hide information about pro-life pregnancy centers in its search results.
The Fairfax County school board in Virginia – professional left-wing activists all, and not a single parent among them – voted for mandatory speech guidelines and will now suspend any student as young as ten who misgenders another student or calls them by the name they had before they transitioned.
College administrators are using ‘bias reporting systems’ to punish the free speech rights of conservative students on campus. Under these systems, students are asked to inform on each other and report supposed incidents of bias regarding race, sexual orientation, and even ‘smoker status’ and ‘intellectual perspective’. The threat to free speech is obvious even before you get to ‘intellectual perspective’. Informing on your neighbor for saying ‘I don’t like the Democrats’ – are you kidding? Inform – that’s what they do in communist countries.
California Democrats introduced a bill to strip nonprofit groups on the Right – but not the Left – of their tax-exempt status if a claim can be made the groups endorse ‘insurrection’ or engage in ‘conspiracies’. Sounds like a roadmap for political persecution to me. I think they should throw in “conspiracy to undermine national integrity” while they’re at it. That’s the phony charge the Sandinista regime just used to put an opposition figure in prison for 10 years.
NPR formed a ‘disinformation team’ which is rich because NPR covered up the Hunter Biden laptop story and claimed there was no evidence Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self-defense, among other fits of disinformation of its own. In a recent speech, Barack Obama called on social media to “detoxify our discourse, particularly the scourge of ‘disinformation’.” You can dress that up any way you want, but it’s still censorship and thought control.
Controlling the information environment is a cult technique. Preventing information from coming in from the outside and telling members only to rely on what the cult leaders tell you is a cult technique. You don’t want people to think you belong to a cult, do you?
Maybe you like belonging to a cult, but I’ll tell you this: you’ll never shut me up until you pry this microphone out of my cold, dead fingers. And there are many more just like me and we’re organized. Seventy-five of us grassroots writers and media hosts with sizeable platforms of our own have formed a group and you’ll never succeed in silencing us all. If you start with me, I will sue you into oblivion and I have the trial experience to do it.
The following is adapted from a talk delivered on July 20, 2022, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C. campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.
Complaints by veteran soldiers about younger generations who lack discipline and traditional values are as old as war itself. Grizzled veterans in the Greek phalanx, Roman legions, and Napoleon’s elite corps all believed that the failings of the young would be the ruin of their armies. This is not the chief worry of grizzled American veterans today. The largest threat they see by far to our current military is the weakening of its fabric by radical progressive (or “woke”) policies being imposed, not by a rising generation of slackers, but by the very leaders charged with ensuring their readiness.
Wokeness in the military is being imposed by elected and appointed leaders in the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon who have little understanding of the purpose, character, traditions, and requirements of the institution they are trying to change. The push for it didn’t begin in the last two years under the Biden administration—nor will it automatically end if a non-woke administration is elected in 2024. Wokeness in the military has become ingrained. And unless the policies that flow from it are illegal or directly jeopardize readiness, senior military leaders have little alternative but to comply.
Woke ideology undermines military readiness in various ways. It undermines cohesiveness by emphasizing differences based on race, ethnicity, and sex. It undermines leadership authority by introducing questions about whether promotion is based on merit or quota requirements. It leads to military personnel serving in specialties and areas for which they are not qualified or ready. And it takes time and resources away from training activities and weapons development that contribute to readiness.
Wokeness in the military also affects relations between the military and society at large. It acts as a disincentive for many young Americans in terms of enlistment. And it undermines wholehearted support for the military by a significant portion of the American public at a time when it is needed the most.
Let me give some examples of what I mean by wokeness.
In 2015, then Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus rejected out-of-hand a Marine Corps study concluding that gender-integrated combat formations did not move as quickly or shoot as accurately, and that women were twice as likely as men to suffer combat injuries. He rejected it because it did not comport with the Obama administration’s political agenda.
That same year the Department of Defense opened all combat jobs in the U.S. military to women, and Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter committed to “gender-neutral standards” to ensure that female servicemembers could meet the demanding rigors involved in qualifying for combat. Since then, the Army has been working for a decade to put in place the gender-neutral test promised by Carter. But after finding that women were not scoring as highly as men, and under fierce pressure from advocacy groups, the Army threw out the test. Now there is no test to determine whether any soldier can meet the fitness requirements for combat specialties.
In 2015, near the end of his second term, President Obama initiated a change to the Pentagon’s longstanding policy on transgender individuals in the military. Before that change could take effect, the incoming Trump administration put it on hold awaiting future study. Subsequent evidence presented to Secretary of Defense James Mattis—including the fact that transgender individuals suffering from gender dysphoria attempt suicide and experience severe anxiety at nine times the rate of the general population—raised legitimate concerns about their fitness for military service.
This led the Trump administration to impose reasonable restrictions on military service by those suffering gender dysphoria. But only hours after his inauguration in January 2021, President Biden signed an executive order that did away with these restrictions and opened military service to all transgender individuals. Since then, the Biden administration has decreed that active members of the military can take time off from their duties to obtain sex-change surgeries and all related hormones and drugs at taxpayer expense.
Along similar lines, the Biden administration has recently ended support for a longstanding policy prohibiting individuals infected with HIV from serving in combat zones. The policy had been based on sound science tied to the need for HIV medications and the danger of cross-infection through shared blood.
Physical fitness has long been a hallmark of the U.S. military. But in recent years, fitness standards have been progressively watered down in pursuit of the woke goal of “leveling the playing field.” The Army, for instance, recently lowered its minimum passing standards for pushups to an unimpressive total of ten and increased its minimum two-mile run time from 19 to 23 minutes. The new Space Force is considering doing away with periodic fitness testing altogether.
Back in 2016, Navy Secretary Mabus decreed that Navy sailors would no longer be known by traditional job titles such as “corpsman,” adopting instead new gender-neutral titles such as “medical technician.” The resulting blowback was so severe from enlisted sailors who cherished those historic titles that the Navy was forced to reverse the changes. But wokeness has a way of coming back, and last year the Navy released a training video to help sailors understand the proper way of using personal pronouns—a skill Americans have traditionally mastered in grade school. The video instructs servicemembers that they need to create a “safe space for everybody” by using “inclusive language”—for instance, saying “hey everybody” instead of “hey guys.” Can the return of gender-neutral job titles be far behind?
Much of the emphasis of wokeness today is on promoting the idea that America is fatally flawed by systemic racism and white privilege. Our fighting men and women are required to sit through indoctrination programs, often with roots in the Marxist tenets of critical race theory, either by Pentagon diktat or through carelessness by senior leaders who delegate their command responsibilities to private Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion instructors.
These indoctrination programs differentiate servicemembers along racial and gender lines, which runs completely counter to the military imperative to build cohesiveness based on common loyalties, training, and standards. Traditional training and education programs used to combat racial and sex discrimination have been supplanted by programs that promote discrimination by replacing the American ideal of equality with the progressive ideal of equity—which in practice means unequal treatment based on group identity.
The Biden administration’s Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Michael Gilday, decided last year to add Ibram X. Kendi’s book, How to Be an Antiracist—one of the leading sourcebooks on critical race theory—to his list of recommended readings. To give an idea of how radical Kendi’s book is, one of its famous (or infamous) arguments is that “Capitalism is essentially racist,” and that “to truly be antiracist, you also have to be truly anticapitalist.”
Last year, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told the House Armed Services Committee, “We do not teach critical race theory, we don’t embrace critical race theory, and I think that’s a spurious conversation.” Despite repeated denials by Austin and others in the Pentagon that critical race theory is being taught in the military, there is no shortage of evidence to the contrary.
Indeed, last year a senior officer in the U.S. Space Force, Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier, was removed from command for publicly describing the role of critical race theory in indoctrinating servicemembers at his installation. And just this summer, multiple media outlets reported on training materials on the problems of “whiteness” obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. One training slide read: “In order to understand racial inequality and slavery, it is first necessary to address whiteness.”
Congressmen have obtained curricular materials from West Point showing lectures titled “Understanding Whiteness and White Rage” and classroom slides labeled “White Power at West Point.” When challenged about this, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley became defensive: “I wanna understand white rage, and I’m white,” he said. “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist.”
The rationale for reading communist writings in the service academies in the past has been that by doing so, we learned about our Soviet enemies at the time and how they thought. How is that analogous to reading Leftist tracts accusing white people (including servicemembers)—just by virtue of their being white—of racism?
Last year, Secretary Austin alarmingly called for a one-day military-wide stand-down to address the so-called problem of “extremism” in the ranks, despite the fact that there has been no evidence presented—including in testimony by senior officials—that there is a problem of extremism in the military. Commanding officers were required to discuss the topic using a PowerPoint presentation that included Ted Talks asking the question, “What is up with us white people?”
Since 2008, the Air Force has created at least eight “Barrier Analysis Working Groups” to “create an inclusive culture regardless of race, ethnicity, sex, orientation, religion, or disabilities.” These groups include the “Indigenous Nations Equality Team” and the “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, or Questioning Initiatives Team.” President Biden signed an executive order in 2021 requiring all organizations in the military—as well as in the rest of the federal government—to create Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices, to produce strategic DEI plans, and to create bureaucratic structures to report on progress towards DEI goals. The overall goal, Biden said, was “advancing equity for all”—again using the Left’s euphemism for achieving desired outcomes through discriminatory policies.
Wokeness also comes in the form of conflating the mission of the military with environmental ideology. A year ago, President Biden told a group of overseas Air Force airmen that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had determined that the greatest threat facing America was global warming—a claim the Joint Chiefs had to walk back. In the same vein, Biden signed an executive order imposing a massive regime of environmental goals and requirements for the Department of Defense. These goals included transitioning to all electric non-tactical vehicles by 2035, carbon-free electricity for military installations by that same year, and net zero emissions from those installations by 2050. As a result, the Pentagon recently announced it will devote over $3 billion of its already stretched-thin military budget to climate-related initiatives in 2023 alone.
Although direct “cause and effect” studies on the impact of woke policies such as these do not exist, common sense suggests that the consequences for military readiness are dramatic. Spending billions on woke programs while the Chinese are outpacing us on hypersonic weapons, quantum computing, and other important military technologies is one piece of evidence. Recent reports showing the military’s dismal failure to gain new recruits in adequate numbers is another. Is anyone surprised that potential recruits—many of whom come from rural or poor areas of the country—don’t want to spend their time being lectured about white privilege?
These ideological policies move the military in a divergent direction from the American mainstream. In a recent poll of voters, for instance, 69 percent oppose the teaching of critical race theory in schools. Relatedly, Americans are increasingly losing confidence in the military. Between 2021 and 2022, the percentage of Americans who report a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the military decreased five percentage points, from 69 to 64. In 2012, this confidence level stood at 75 percent.
The bottom line is that precious time and money are being poured into woke programs and projects that would be better applied towards making the military more capable. The billions of dollars that will be spent on Pentagon climate change programs, the time and money spent in creating DEI structures and hiring DEI commissars, and the time spent indoctrinating servicemembers in critical race theory and addressing an imaginary crisis of extremism in the ranks—all this detracts from the purpose of our military: preserving the security and freedom of the American people and nation.
These costs come at a time when the current administration is not even proposing to fund the Department of Defense to keep up with the rate of inflation—and a time when serious threats from China and other adversaries have never been greater.
Last month, Ramstein Air Base in Germany scheduled a drag queen story hour at its base library, where drag queen Stacey Teed was scheduled to read to children. When lawmakers back home got wind of the event and wrote to the Secretary of the Air Force, the event was cancelled. This suggests that pushback can be effective against the tide of wokeness plaguing our military. But there needs to be a lot more pushback.
Legislation introduced this year in Congress would stop the teaching of critical race theory in the military, the creation of the multitudes of diversity offices and officials, and the rolling back of physical fitness requirements. While the ultimate success of these proposals in the legislative process is uncertain, they are a start at least.
The American military remains a faithful and loyal servant of the republic. Most Americans are still proud and trusting of our military. But this trust and support cannot be taken for granted. If Americans perceive that the military is being exploited for political purposes or being used for experiments in woke social policies, that support will evaporate, and the consequences will be dire.
My hope and my prayer are that we figure this out before it is too late.
Thomas Spoehr is director of the Center for National Defense at the Heritage Foundation. He served previously for over 36 years in the U.S. Army, attaining the rank of Lieutenant General. He earned a B.A. from William and Mary, an M.A. from Webster University, and an M.A. from the U.S. Army War College. While in the Army, he served in numerous leadership roles, including senior positions in the Pentagon and Commandant of the Army’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear School. His operational experiences include service with the 82nd Airborne Division and the 1st Armored Division. He participated in the 1983 invasion of Grenada, and in 2011 he served as Deputy Commanding General, U.S. Forces Iraq.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-08-06 12:51:392022-08-06 12:51:39The Rise of Wokeness in the U.S. Military — Let me give some examples of what I mean by wokeness.
The government drive to force auto manufacturers to produce uneconomical and unreliable as well as totally inefficient electronic cars is a scam. It’s not an error, however, it is their intent.
The analyses in the column are spot on, but the author refuses to look the issue square in the actual intent.
The public at large will be denied any “right” to private transportation.
A public at large and free to roam the country is anathema to the Bolshevik ideal. The public is to be wired into high density dwellings (not privately owned individual homes) and will either bike to work or take public transportation. Privately owned vehicles will be a thing of the past, and electric vehicles will be doled out on a parity basis for members of the party in good standing, and the models according to position. Gasoline vehicles will exist at the party’s permission to do essential work for farms, factories, aircraft, and train locomotives.
George Orwell knew whereof he wrote.
The book 1984 was supposed to be a warning (like Mein Kampf) but the people read it and said, that’s preposterous, never happen to a modern, civilized people.
And yet, here we are.
Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris | Mar 15, 2022
The utility companies have thus far had little to say about the alarming cost projections to operate electric vehicles (EVs) or the increased rates that they will be required to charge their customers. It is not just the total amount of electricity required, but the transmission lines and fast charging capacity that must be built at existing filling stations. Neither wind nor solar can support any of it. Electric vehicles will never become the mainstream of transportation!
The problems with electric vehicles (EVs), we showed that they were too expensive, too unreliable, rely on materials mined in China and other unfriendly countries, and require more electricity than the nation can afford. In this second part, we address other factors that will make any sensible reader avoid EVs like the plague.
EV Charging Insanity
In order to match the 2,000 cars that a typical filling station can service in a busy 12 hours, an EV charging station would require 600, 50-watt chargers at an estimated cost of $24 million and a supply of 30 megawatts of power from the grid. That is enough to power 20,000 homes. No one likely thinks about the fact that it can take 30 minutes to 8 hours to recharge a vehicle between empty or just topping off. What are the drivers doing during that time? ICSC-Canada board member New Zealand-based consulting engineer Bryan Leyland describes why installing electric car charging stations in a city is impractical:
“If you’ve got cars coming into a petrol station, they would stay for an average of five minutes. If you’ve got cars coming into an electric charging station, they would be at least 30 minutes, possibly an hour, but let’s say its 30 minutes. So that’s six times the surface area to park the cars while they’re being charged. So, multiply every petrol station in a city by six. Where are you going to find the place to put them?”
The government of the United Kingdom is already starting to plan for power shortages caused by the charging of thousands of EVs. Starting in June 2022, the government will restrict the time of day you can charge your EV battery. To do this, they will employ smart meters that are programmed to automatically switch off EV charging in peak times to avoid potential blackouts.
In particular, the latest UK chargers will be pre-set to not function during 9-hours of peak loads, from 8 am to 11 am (3-hours), and 4 pm to 10 pm (6-hours). Unbelievably, the UK technology decides when and if an EV can be charged, and even allows EV batteries to be drained into the UK grid if required. Imagine charging your car all night only to discover in the morning that your battery is flat since the state took the power back. Better keep your gas-powered car as a reliable and immediately available backup! While EV charging will be an attractive source of revenue generation for the government, American citizens will be up in arms.
Used Car Market
The average used EV will need a new battery before an owner can sell it, pricing them well above used internal combustion cars. The average age of an American car on the road is 12 years. A 12-year-old EV will be on its third battery. A Tesla battery typically costs $10,000 so there will not be many 12-year-old EVs on the road. Good luck trying to sell your used green fairy tale electric car!
Tuomas Katainen, an enterprising Finish Tesla owner, had an imaginative solution to the battery replacement problem—he blew up his car! New York City-based Insider magazine reported (December 27, 2021 ):
“The shop told him the faulty battery needed to be replaced, at a cost of about $22,000. In addition to the hefty fee, the work would need to be authorized by Tesla…Rather than shell out half the cost of a new Tesla to fix an old one, Katainen decided to do something different… The demolition experts from the YouTube channel Pommijätkät (Bomb Dudes) strapped 66 pounds of high explosives to the car and surrounded the area with slow-motion cameras…the 14 hotdog-shaped charges erupt into a blinding ball of fire, sending a massive shock wave rippling out from the car…The videos of the explosion have a combined 5 million views.”
We understand that the standard Tesla warranty does not cover “damage resulting from intentional actions,” like blowing the car up for a YouTube video.
EVs Per Block In Your Neighborhood
A home charging system for a Tesla requires a 75-amp service. The average house is equipped with 100-amp service. On most suburban streets the electrical infrastructure would be unable to carry more than three houses with a single Tesla. For half the homes on your block to have electric vehicles, the system would be wildly overloaded. Batteries.
Although the modern lithium-ion battery is four times better than the old lead-acid battery, gasoline holds 80 times the energy density. The great lithium battery in your cell phone weighs less than an ounce while the Tesla battery weighs 1,000 pounds. And what do we get for this huge cost and weight? We get a car that is far less convenient and less useful than cars powered by internal combustion engines.
Bryan Leyland explained why: “When the Model T came out, it was a dramatic improvement on the horse and cart. The electric car is a step backward into the equivalence of an ordinary car with a tiny petrol tank that takes half an hour to fill It offers nothing in the way of convenience or extra facilities.”
Our Conclusion
The electric automobile will always be around in a niche market likely never exceeding 10% of the cars on the road. All automobile manufacturers are investing in their output and all will be disappointed in their sales. Perhaps they know this and will manufacture just what they know they can sell. This is certainly not what President Biden or California Governor Newsom are planning for. However, for as long as the present government is in power, they will be pushing the electric car as another means to run our lives.
Dr. Jay Lehr is a Senior Policy Analyst with the International Climate Science Coalition and former Science Director of The Heartland Institute. He is an internationally renowned scientist, author, and speaker.
Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition, and a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute.
You do not need to have an advanced degree in mathematics to understand the term “Overload”! The average person, no matter where you live, can quickly identify the political feel-good sensation that is being attempted by those short-sighted individuals who are promoting the EV revolution….Vehicle manufacturers, Charging station builders, Transmission Line contractors, Battery producers….etc. i.e. Everyone that has their hands out for a government subsidy (i.e. your tax money).
“It’s Magic”….and you are saving the planet by creating less pollution as you get rid of your gas burning vehicle and take out a five-year loan to pay for the shiny new $60,000 electric car. No more fill-ups at the service station and the global warming is solved. You can now sit back and imagine the new polar ice formations that are providing a safe environment for the Polar Bears, Seals, Penguins that we all adore. We have done our part saving humanity…..and you can see the smile on little Greta Thunberg’s face!
BUT WAIT….why are we losing power at our house?
Well the short answer is….We failed to understand that our electrical grid reached max capacity and was overloaded when all of the EV’s were plugged in tonight at the same time. The next short answer is…..where do you think the energy came from to supply the grid in the first place? It sure was not from Wind or Solar….nor from any other alternate energy source we use which, when all combined, only provides 7% of today’s use demand. It was from the traditional combustible resource called Hydrocarbons!
Until we discover a non-hydrocarbon energy source that is efficient and safe, GET OVER IT …. Like it or not, we are committed to Oil & Gas!
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-08-05 12:51:172022-08-05 12:51:17All Electric Car Scam
To help passengers, airline regulations should be scrapped, not increased.
If you’ve been anywhere near an airport in the last two years, you’ve probably gathered that things in the airline industry have changed. Delays and cancelations are causing more headaches than ever, baggage mishandling is up, unruly passenger cases are up…it’s really a mess. Unsurprisingly, flight complaints remain significantly higher than pre-pandemic levels.
The most common complaint category is refunds. Many passengers feel that airlines have been bad about issuing refunds for missed flights, and some have been calling on the government to do something about this problem.
On Wednesday, the Department of Transportation responded to these calls with new proposed regulations that would create stricter rules for airlines regarding refunds.
According to current regulations, airlines are required to give refunds if a flight is canceled, or if a flight experiences a “significant delay” or change and the passenger chooses not to travel. However, under the current rules, the airline gets to decide what constitutes a “significant delay.” Unsurprisingly, passengers don’t always agree with the decisions airlines make.
“In practice, the circumstances in which airlines are required to make refunds have often been subject to interpretation,” writes Alison Sider in the Wall Street Journal. “The government doesn’t define significant change or delay in current rules, leaving it up to airlines to determine that.”
The new rules being proposed by the DOT are designed to eliminate the ambiguity in the current rules. Under the proposed rules, refunds would be mandatory for passengers who choose not to fly if the departure or arrival time changes by more than 3 hours for a domestic flight or 6 hours for an international flight. The new rules would also require refunds for missed flights if there is a change in the departure or arrival airport, an added connection, or a change of aircraft that constitutes a “significant downgrade” in the traveler’s experience.
Aside from clarifying (and, in practice, expanding) when refunds are mandatory, the proposed rules would also require airlines to issue non-expiring vouchers for passengers who don’t want to fly because of public health concerns or who can’t fly due to public health regulations such as stay-at-home orders or border closures.
“When Americans buy an airline ticket, they should get to their destination safely, reliably and affordably,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a press release. “This new proposed rule would protect the rights of travelers and help ensure they get the timely refunds they deserve from the airlines.”
There’s No Such Thing as a Free Refund
At first glance, it’s easy to think that these regulations would be a pure win for consumers. After all, doesn’t it help to have more refunds and vouchers?
Yes, on the surface. But everything comes with a cost, and airline regulations are no exception. In a world of scarcity, you can’t get something for nothing. There’s no such thing as a free refund.
So where is the cost? Here, as in many cases, the cost is hidden, and it requires some digging in order to find it.
A good place to start is to look at this policy from the airline’s perspective. Now, this isn’t to say that airlines and their profit margins are the only thing that matters. Far from it. What I’m saying is, in order to help consumers, it’s important to understand how airlines make decisions and what incentives they face.
When an airline gets hit with a regulation, whether it be about safety or staffing or refund policies, the airline is essentially forced to take on additional costs. When they have to pay out more for refunds, for instance, their average cost per flight goes up. The result is a leftward shift in the supply curve and a higher price.
Now, some airlines may choose to offset the price increase by cutting back on other perks and services (meals etc.), but consumers ultimately pay somehow for the privilege of having their guaranteed refunds.
To give an analogy, say the DOT decided that, in the name of consumer welfare, every flight needed to have at least 20 flight attendants. Undoubtedly, consumers would have a better experience, but clearly that flight is going to be more expensive than a flight with fewer attendants.
The point is, there’s always a tradeoff between perks and price. Generous refund policies are nice to have, but just like generous staffing and generous safety standards, they come at a premium.
The Goldilocks Zone and Spontaneous Order
So far we’ve established that, all else equal, the more-consumer-friendly refund policies being proposed by the government will lead to higher prices because they impose higher costs on airlines. The benefit is that more people get refunds. The cost is more-expensive airfare.
So, is this a good tradeoff? Is the benefit to consumers worth the cost? To answer this question, we need to understand how markets deal with tradeoffs. Let’s begin by considering two hypothetical extremes.
Luxury Air is an airline that cares deeply about customer satisfaction. To show this, they have a very generous refund policy, even more generous than what the government requires. They will give anyone a refund for any reason at any time. Naturally, they have to charge a lot more than anyone else to stay in business with that kind of policy, so that’s what they do. Lots of perks. High prices.
Frugal Air is an airline that cares deeply about affordability. To show this, they have the lowest prices in town. They will always match their competitors. Naturally, they can’t afford to be very generous with their refund policies, so they don’t give any refunds for any reason. It’s a bit of a risk, but hey, you get what you pay for.
Now, back to the real world. In the free market, airlines begin by offering a combination of prices and perks somewhere along the spectrum from Frugal Air to Luxury Air. Then, consumers patronize the airlines that best satisfy their wishes. If consumers don’t think it’s worth it to pay for Luxury-Air-style refund policies, the businesses offering those flights will go under. Likewise, if consumers are turned off by “no refunds for any reason,” those kinds of policies will also be weeded out.
What we’re left with is the airlines that offer the optimal tradeoff between perks and price as judged by consumers. Thus, through a process akin to natural selection, consumers “choose” the refund policies and corresponding prices that best suit their wishes. The policies that the market “selects for” are the ones that consumers prefer the most. In other words, the market naturally gravitates toward a sort of goldilocks zone.
Now, consider what happens when a regulator comes in. Essentially, they mandate a specific spot on the Frugal-to-Luxury spectrum and force airlines to be “no less luxurious” than that. A mandate to provide refunds in certain circumstances is a mandate to provide extra perks, which invariably leads to higher prices. But—and this is the key—the “degree of luxury” they mandate is arbitrary, and the fact that they have to force the market up to it indicates that it is not in the goldilocks zone where consumers are happiest.
If consumers really believed those better refund policies were worth the extra expense, they would have favored airlines that offered that tradeoff, and the industry as a whole would have gone in that direction to maximize profits (that is, the goldilocks zone would be at a higher degree of luxury). The fact that the airlines aren’t offering them for the most part is all the evidence we need to conclude that consumers don’t think the benefit of more refunds is worth the cost. Thus, imposing a policy like this is most likely a net harm to consumers.
Again, the analogy to flight attendants is a bit easier to conceptualize. If the market is selecting for 3 attendants per flight and $100 tickets, a government mandate of 5 attendants per flight (which makes for, say, $120 tickets) pushes consumers away from their preferred perk/price combination. Hence, the regulation designed to help consumers ultimately ends up hurting them, because even though they got an extra benefit, it wasn’t worth the extra cost.
Consumers are perfectly capable of regulating airlines through their purchasing decisions—they do it every day. The DOT might think they’re helping, but they’re really not. Airline passengers are far better off when they, not bureaucrats, decide how airlines are run.
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.
George Soros should be banned from the U.S.. We must pass a “Stop Soros” bill like Hungary did. Soros presents a grave dangerous to the democratic process.
A proposed constitutional amendment in Michigan by a Soros-funded group would prevent both strict voter ID requirement and a ban on private donations to election officials from being enacted.
While federal agencies under the Biden administration are seeking to increase voter registration and turnout, a group linked to left-wing megadonor George Soros is pushing for a constitutional amendment in the battleground state of Michigan that would allow Zuckerbucks to be used in election administration.
Biden issued an executive order to all federal agencies in March 2021, instructing them to send him “a strategic plan outlining the ways identified under this review that the agency can promote voter registration and voter participation.”
The order gave agency heads 200 days to determine how their public services could be used as voter registration agencies, and directed them to notify the states in which their agencies provide such services that they “would agree to designation as a voter registration agency.”
Earlier this year, departments such as Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, and Labor turned their assisted housing centers, public health centers, and American Job Centers, respectively, into voter registration agencies.
Federal agencies participating in voter turnout efforts “is wrong” because they will target who they want to turn out to vote, “and government can’t be engaged in that process” because it’s “partisan politics,” Phill Kline, director of The Amistad Project, told Just the News.
Meanwhile, with midterm elections approaching in November, a left-leaning organization called Promote the Vote submitted nearly 670,000 voter signatures — more than the roughly 425,000 required — for a new Michigan constitutional amendment to be placed on the ballot in the November election.
The amendment would “require state-funded postage for absentee applications and ballots”; “require state-funded absentee-ballot drop boxes”; allow voters to be sent an absentee ballot for every election by requesting it on an absentee ballot application; and “require 9 days of early in-person voting.”
It would also prevent enactment of both strict voter ID requirements and a ban on private donations to election officials, following approval of such safeguards by the Michigan Legislature before the legislation was vetoed by the governor.
Michigan currently doesn’t allow early voting, but requires election officials to accept, in at least one location, absentee ballots during business hours and for at least eight hours on the Saturday and/or Sunday prior to an election, the Detroit Free Press reported.
The signatures submitted by Promote the Vote must be reviewed by the Board of State Canvassers to determine the petition’s validity before certifying the petition and placing the amendment on the ballot, with the deadline to do so being two months prior to the November election.
Soros gave nearly $10 million in 2019 to the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which gave $250,000 to Promote the Vote in 2018.
The left has “become very supportive and open to billionaires” influencing U.S. elections, Kline said Tuesday. He argued this is dangerous to the democratic process, as candidates receiving funding from Soros would be beholden to him, and that “unless action is taken, we’ll reach a crisis where Americans no longer have faith in elections.”
The left, he added, is “trying to enshrine in law all the problems in the 2020 election” because its focus is not on “running the government objectively, but obtaining power.”
In the Fortune article below Shawn Tully interviews Ed Pinto and cites AEI Housing Center data on HPA to discuss the cooling housing market. He also writes about the geography of these changes, as western metros face the most drastic downturns in HPA.
It’s finally happening. After soaring 40% from pre-pandemic levels in the greatest boom in decades, home prices peaked in June, and started falling in July. That’s the stunning, sudden shift revealed in a new set of data just introduced by the American Enterprise Institute’s Housing Center, one of the top sources for in-depth, city-by-city numbers on all things housing, from appreciation to inventories and mortgage originations. “The market just reached a turning point,” says Ed Pinto, the AEI Housing Center’s director. “Prices will keep falling on a national basis for August through December. It’s likely that we’ll see declines in around four out of five metros in some of the months ahead.”
Until now, the AEI had measured prices primarily on a year over year format. And by that yardstick, housing still looked strong in June. That month, the AEI found that the value of the average home had grown by 15% from June of 2021. But its data also showed over the 12-month span, “home price appreciation,” or HPA, was slowing fast, down substantially from a summit of 17.5% in April. The question that pullback posed for America’s homeowners: What’s happening right now, week by week or month by month? Is it possible that in my city, in Atlanta or Phoenix or Raleigh, prices are actually starting to decline?
The AEI’s new data answers that query. The measure displays price changes from one month to the next. Hence, the numbers provide an up-close view of precisely when the patterns turn, by how much, and what the moves foreshadow. They’re a guide to reading the market’s pulse. The AEI’s figures are based on actual closings for the month, as reported in the public records. Pinto deploys a methodology that compares sales of similar quality homes, eliminating distortions from shifts in the sales “mix”––for example, a deceptive boost to average prices as a higher share of pricey homes sell in June than in May.
An astounding number of markets are already posting declines
The AEI calculated the figures for the nation’s 50 most active housing markets. The AEI’s below, “Home Price Appreciation (Month over Month),” shows the changes from one month to the next from the start of 2019 through June of this year. Let’s begin with the national data. The overall market has been on such a relentless rampage, for so long, that only twice in that period have prices retreated, and each time by just 0.1%. As recently as January, America’s monthly HPA was 2.6%, sliding in May to a still robust 1.1%. But in June, appreciation hit a virtual freefall, shrinking to just 0.2%.
Behind that national downshift are astounding reversals in sundry cities that were thriving just months ago. In June of 2021, only four metros showed a fall in prices from May and last year, the only May-to-June loser was Louisville at a tiny -0.1%. In April, not a single one of the fifty metros endured a decline from March. But this June, no fewer than 21 locales suffered drops from their May prices, some of them big. In general, the steepest falls came in the expensive west coast markets, as well as western metros that gained legions of buyers from the exodus from California. Eleven of the hardest-hit addresses fit this category. The biggest loser was San Francisco at -3.8%, followed by San Jose (-3.2%). Among the other western cities logging large declines are Seattle (-1.8%), Los Angeles (-1.5%), Portland (-1.3%), Denver (-0.9%) and Phoenix (-0.6%). Almost all of these metros were rocking as recently as February, with San Francisco up 2.8% over January, San Jose ahead 3.9%, and Seattle gaining 3.5%.
“The clearest trend is the pullback in these west coast cities, and those influenced by the California craziness,” says Pinto. In these places, the giant price increases in the last two years, from already expensive levels, has so diminished affordability that the fast-shrinking ranks of buyers are hammering values in spite of historically low volumes of homes for sale. From the fourth quarter of 2019 to Q1 of this year, prices jumped from $1.2 to $1.6 million in San Jose, $575,000 to $819,000 in Seattle, from $466 to $623,000 in Denver, and from $340,000 to $516,000 in Phoenix. The only out West markets that still showed strength were Las Vegas, a venue that’s cooling but still managed a 0.2% increase over May, and Boise, where prices waxed 1.8%, maintaining a record of consistent, month over month advances. Boise keeps thriving as a favorite destination for work-at-home refugees from California who can sell a home in, say, San Jose, get a much bigger abode at half the cost in their adopted city, and still bank hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In recent months, the hottest markets have clustered in the sunshine state. Cape Coral, which was scoring year over year increases in the mid-30% range, is backpedaling fast (you can read my recent feature on Cape Coral’s market here). Its gain of 2.8% from April to May flip-flopped to a negative 1.0% in June. Tampa, North Port, Orlando, Jacksonville and Miami are all way down from February increases, but still advanced between 0.2% and 1.1%.
By contrast, a number of older metros that didn’t experience big price gains demonstrated remarkable resilience, for a simple reason: Many remain relatively cheap. St. Louis, Nashville, Boston, Providence, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Columbus and New York all ranked in the top ten for May to June gains. Tied for first place with Boise the Big Apple, which garnered a month over month increase of 1.8% and is one of few stalwarts that appear on a rising trajectory.
The downdraft in June radically transforms the outlook for this year and 2023
Pinto also gets a good look at where prices are headed by studying “rate lock” data from Optimal Blue. Those numbers reflect contract prices for sales that will close in around 90 days. For Pinto, the rate lock trend points to falling prices, at the national level, for July through December of 2022. “We expect the national month over month HPA to go negative in July for the first time in years,” he says. “From there, prices should fall 3% to 5% from June levels by year end. Those total increases will accumulate gradually over the seven months from June to December.” By year end, Pinto expects that home prices will still be 4% to 6% above December of 2021, but probably remain on a downward path.
Pinto forecasts that if overall prices slide by around 4% from here to year end, a far larger number of metros than the 21 that were negative in June will be soon posting falling prices from month to month. “I wouldn’t be surprised if some months, we see 40 cities showing declines,” he says.
So where does Pinto see values heading in 2023? It would seem that if prices are falling in December, they’d keep tumbling through most of 2023. But that’s not necessarily the most likely scenario, says Pinto. “We’ve seen a decline in mortgage rates in recent weeks from 6% to around 5.5%,” says Pinto. “If rates rates continue to recede, that would give a boost to appreciation.” He points out that although inventories are growing, stocks remain extremely slim. “We’re still at around one month of supply at the current level of demand,” he says. “To get declining prices, we’d need to see seven ‘months of supply, and that could be a long way off.” For Pinto, it’s highly possible that a combination of stable or falling rates, and limited volumes of homes for sale, could sustain gains of 4% to 6% next year.
Still, Pinto says it’s never been more difficult to predict housing ‘s future. “There are so many factors pushing and pulling in different directions,” he says. “My crystal ball is getting foggier.” The AEI’s new monthly numbers enable homeowners to watch the market’s course, not just over long spans, but as it evolves. Folks are super-anxious about what today’s tumultuous times mean for the future of their biggest asset. They want to see whether the value of their ranch of colonial waxed or waned in the last 30 days. Now they can. The AEI numbers don’t hand homeowners a crystal ball. But following the AEI’s fresh data will keep your thumb flush on the market’s pulse of the market that, for most Americans, counts more than any other by far.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-08-03 21:52:362022-08-03 21:52:36New housing market data reveals a stunning shift as these 21 of the top 50 metro areas show price declines for June
