Better Government

‘PC’, ‘Woke’ Orwellian censorship – 1984, official lies, media lies, ‘socialism’, modern ‘democracy’ and modern ‘capitalism’

Many from the ‘Left’, progressives, Cultural Marxists and activists keep trying to stymie democracy with their shrill, often illogical, Orwellian and ideological views and variations of mind control. The following articles provide evidence.

Links to more articles follow the five below

America’s Future Is Liberal Fascism

America’s Future Is Liberal Fascism  By Robert Bridge, The Strategic Culture Foundation, via Zerohedge 2 Dec 2020

America’s Future Is Liberal Fascism Sporting A Smiley Shirt And Armed With A Syringe

The globalists responsible for engineering a medical tyranny across much of the Western world have something valuable to teach right-wing nationalists and would-be fascists, and that is you don’t sell your damaged product out of the barrel of a machine gun, but rather dripping from the end of a syringe that promises to end all pain and misery.

 

Patrick Henry, one of America’s more outspoken Founding Fathers, famously remarked “give me liberty or give me death” when the life of his nation was on the line.

Today, America’s famous battle cry has been replaced by a masked and muffled gasp that advises, without hope of a second opinion, “give me lockdowns and keep me safe.”

So terrified is the American public of catching a virus that comes with a 99 percent survival rate that they are willing to forego Thanksgiving, the great national holiday commemorating – with no loss of irony – their Pilgrim ancestors’ collective courage to overcome the wild, hostile conditions of their new land.

It must be said that no fascist party has ever been so adept when it came to sealing the collective fate of their people to a common enemy. That’s because the threat facing mankind today, or so we are told, is not some nefarious ideology, like communism, or even a terrorist organization that the masses can be rallied to fight. Rather, the threat is a microscopic contagion that is capable of invading every nook and cranny of our lives. Already the age of manly handshakes is over, replaced by an emasculated majority, while an entire generation of youth now looks at their fellow human beings as infernal germ factories.

And unlike a traditional enemy that can be seen, attacked and eventually defeated, the coronavirus – we have been oddly forewarned – will make landfall again and again, while regularly morphing with comic book abilities into an increasingly deadlier villain. In this landless battle, only the medical authorities are decorated as heroes, while the people, lacking the professional credentials, are forced to be passive and helpless onlookers, their freedom of movement severely constrained. More importantly, the forces of nationalism have become irrelevant; only a globalist, one-world-order response can defeat this pandemic.

There is very good reason to suspect, however, that either the science on all of this is half-baked, or we the people are being intentionally duped on a grand scale. In fact, it’s probably a little bit of both. First, relying on nothing more than empirical evidence, it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that there is no existential emergency confronting mankind. If there were, we would expect to see decomposing bodies piling up in the streets, like in the medieval times during the Black Plague. This would be especially the case among the homeless population, which is certainly not practicing social distancing etiquette as they pass around open containers on street corners.

Nor does there seem to be any massive queuing up at hospitals for emergency treatment. In fact, as early as April, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told President Trump that the Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort deployed to New York City by the federal government to help fight the coronavirus outbreak was “no longer needed”. Cuomo said the need for the support vessel “didn’t reach the levels that had been projected.” And I am certainly not the only one who has noticed that Covid cases seem to fluctuate curiously with the political climate.

Let’s not forget that the overwhelming majority of Covid ‘victims’ recover nicely at home, according to no less of an authority than Anthony Fauci. At the same time, many people who acquire the disease are asymptomatic and never even knew they were infected. Children, meanwhile, seem amazingly impervious to the virus. That is not to say that there has been no sign of a virus this winter season. Of course there has been, just like every year. But while Covid cases may be on the rise in some places, and invisible in others, the death rate from this illness remains low and tumbling, predominantly hitting elderly people already suffering from comorbidities.

There are other reasons to be suspicious that what we are dealing with is not a first-class medical emergency, but rather something much more sinister. Like maybe an excuse for rolling out a Western-made vaccine that carries a microchip implant with tracking technology? Such a claim will sound less fantastic when it is realized that it has already been developed.

It is no secret that just one month before Covid-19 made its dramatic landfall in the United States, purportedly from Wuhan, China, MIT researchers announced a new method for recording a patient’s vaccination history: storing the smartphone-readable data under the skin at the same time a vaccine is administered.

“By selectively loading microparticles into microneedles, the patches deliver a pattern in the skin that is invisible to the naked eye but can be scanned with a smartphone that has the infrared filter removed,” MIT News reported.

“The patch can be customized to imprint different patterns that correspond to the type of vaccine delivered.”

Would it surprise anyone to know that the research was funded largely by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the same family venture that now provides the bulk of funding to the World Health Organization?

Then, in September 2019, ID2020, a San Francisco-based biometric company that counts Microsoft as one of its founding members, announced a new project that involves the “exploration of multiple biometric identification technologies for infants” that is based on “infant immunization.”

We could continue here with a long list of other disturbing technologies that would effectively turn people into walking antennae for the rest of their lives, but the point is hopefully clear: although many people might be willing to accept a vaccine against Covid-19, they probably do not want the extra technological add-ons that people like Bill Gates, a man with zero medical qualifications, seem extremely anxious to include.

Bottom of Form

So what can Americans expect next? How about ‘Freedom Passes’ that Britons may need before they are able to return to some semblance of normalcy?

According to the Daily Mail, “Britons are set to be given Covid ‘freedom passes’ as long as they test negative for the virus twice in a week, it has been suggested…To earn the freedom pass, people will need to be tested regularly and, provided the results come back negative, they will then be given a letter, card or document they can show to people as they move around.”

And this is what they call a “return to normalcy.”

Personally, I call those plans the approach of fascism. And for those who doubt that it could not happen in America should heed the words of the late sagacious comedian George Carlin, who once quipped that “when fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jackboots. It will be Nike sneakers and smiley shirts.” Had Carlin been alive today to see the tremendous mess we’ve inherited, he would most likely have included a syringe in the neo-fascist’s toolkit.

=====================

A Biden counterrevolution would be a disaster for democracy, solidarity and freedom

A Biden counterrevolution would be a disaster for democracy, solidarity and freedom  By Brendan O’Neill, Editor, Spiked Online, 7 November 2020

A victory for Joe Biden would embolden the regressive woke elites across the Western world.

Make America Boring Again. Remarkably, this has become the rallying cry of many in the Joe Biden camp. ‘Vote Biden and make the presidency boring again’, instructs the New York Daily News. ‘The delightful boringness of Joe Biden’, as Vox puts it. ‘Joe Biden is a boring candidate. That’s why he is doing well’, says a writer for the Guardian. After the fire and the fury and the lies and the bluster of the first Trump term, what America needs right now is a big ol’ ‘dose of monotony’, says one observer.

This all captures what is motoring the extraordinarily uniform pro-Biden outlook across the old political establishment, the media class and the celebrity set. Every now and then these people will use words like ‘renewal’ to describe a Biden presidency. They even occasionally claim he is riding on a similar wave of ‘HOPE’ to the one that swept Obama to power in 2008.

But in truth, at root, what the cultural elites love about Biden is that he would render politics dull again. He would help to restore calm and normalcy and, most importantly, order. More specifically, he will restore the order, the old order, the pre-Trump order in which politics was a fundamentally boring, technical, managerial affair, the business of educated elites rather than of loudmouth populists and the swarms of excitable people who come to hear them and cheer them. Make no mistake: the celebration of Biden’s tedium speaks to an elitist longing to drain the popular democratic spark from political life and return politics to the aloof, bureaucratic clerisy who had been running things before Trump came along.

The most important thing about Joe Biden is not the man himself – it is what has been invested in him by the establishment. This is why those who go on about Biden’s age and his bouts of mental confusion and the stark possibility that he wouldn’t survive a four-year presidency are kind of missing the point. Biden, for the purposes of this election, this election that the elites tell us is the most important of everyone’s lifetime, is not a politician; he’s a mascot. He’s a flag. He’s a largely symbolic figure, primarily symbolising Not Trump and Not Populism, whose presence in the White House will, the old establishment hopes, help to embolden their efforts to rebalance politics away from the frankness and populism of the last four years and return it to what a writer for the Los Angeles Times refers to as the ‘expertise’ of the pre-Trump era, which is apparently preferable to ‘the authenticity’ of a political figure like Trump.

So what will happen today is not really a normal election. Rather, it is an attempted restoration. A restoration not of monarchy but of technocracy; not of a king but of the status quo ante and its conduct of politics in a removed, disconnected way. Not only in the US but across Europe and elsewhere in the world, the political and moral clerisy see the restoration of their preferred order in the US as an essential first step in their longed-for rollback of the populist rebellions of the past few years. This is why spiked thinks a victory for Joe Biden will be a disaster for the world – because it would further embolden the most regressive, anti-democratic, woke strains in Western political life. If Biden wins, we all lose.

One of the most revealing justifications for voting for Biden is that he would relieve people of the burden of thinking about politics. As one writer says, the main horror of the Trump era is that it made ‘politics and government’ into ‘the omnipresent centre of gravity in our daily lives’. With a monster like Trump in the White House, many people, apparently, could think about little else other than politics and what a shitshow it had become courtesy of the ‘deplorables’ who elevated Trump to power. And the great thing about Biden’s rule is that it ‘promises to return the outsized stature of politics to its rightfully diminutive place’ (my italics). Diminutive: extremely or unusually small. That is the presence politics should have in most people’s lives, apparently: an infinitesimally small one. Don’t think about politics – just let other people get on with it. And that is what Biden promises – ‘a government you simply don’t have to think about all that often’.

This has become a common cry in the vast pro-Biden lobby. It is a central component of the Make Politics Boring Again worldview. They want a world where most people – ordinary people – don’t have to worry themselves about issues of governance. They can just leave that stuff, the business of the national destiny, to the competent classes (‘competence’, alongside ‘boring’, is another buzzword of the Biden lobby). As the Los Angeles Times says, this election is really a reckoning between ‘experts’ and the ‘authentics’. The experts are the likes of Hillary Clinton and, latterly, Joe Biden (eight years in the Obama administration ‘boosted his expert credentials’, says the LA Times), and the ‘authentics’ are people like Trump. And what we need to restore is ‘the expertise’ and ‘reliance on science’ of that pre-Trump class, against ‘the feral frankness’ of the Trump era, the LA Times says.

So the wave of pro-Biden sentiment among vast swathes of the establishment is not merely about changing policy in the White House, as most elections are. (Indeed, it is striking how much of the pro-Biden commentary says Biden’s policies don’t actually matter. ‘It’s not the policies that count’, as the Guardian says.) Rather, it is about negating the ‘feral’ populism of recent years and restoring the rightful rule of the smart set, of those who can be trusted to govern while the rest of us just get on with our lives and never think about politics. A Biden presidency is a ‘protest against protest’, in the words of the Guardian. That is, it would be a protest against the protest votes cast by vast numbers of ordinary people in 2016 for a different, more democratic way of doing politics. There’s a word for ‘protest against protest’, of course: counter-protest, or counterrevolution. That is what the elite Biden wave represents: a counterrevolution against the populist cries and democratic demands of the 2016 era.

‘Feral’ means having escaped from domestication and become wild. That is how much of the cultural and media elites view the masses in the post-2016 era: we disobediently broke free of the domesticating force of managerial politics and became beast-like, ignorantly voting for Trump or Brexit. The Biden reaction, the Biden counterrevolution, is fundamentally a project of redomestication, of returning the masses to the tamed state in which they do not concern themselves with politics and instead leave it to ‘America’s system of checks and balances’, as The Economist says in its pro-Biden leader.

If successful, this ‘protest against protest’, this elitist reaction against the feral demands of the people for change, would be bad not only for America but for other parts of the world, too. It would be particularly bad for the Brexit spirit. We know that Biden is hostile to Brexit, viewing it as a Trump-like phenomenon. We know that he is keen to reward the European Union for its steadfastness in the face of the Brexit revolt and of the various challenges to its authority from the East, especially from Poland and Hungary. The masses’ democratic impulse would suffer both in the US and in Europe if the self-consciously domesticating force of technocracy is restored to power in Washington, DC.

The desire to make politics diminutive again, to return decision-making to ‘the experts’, speaks to the overarching aim of the technocratic impulse – to insulate political life from the pressure of the masses. The elite meltdown of the past four years, in both the US and the UK, has been motored by a great fear that the votes for Trump and Brexit tore away the insulation of politics from popular pressure. This project of insulation had been taking shape for decades, in the form of the European Union, of the increased juridification of political decision-making, of quangos and checks and balances. In questioning the authority of the EU and the expertise of the Clinton-style establishment, British and American voters started to pull apart this insulation and make the case for more direct forms of democracy and decision-making. The ‘delightful boringness’ of Biden, his promise to make politics ‘diminutive’ again, his implicit invitation to ‘the experts’ to take authority back from ‘the authentics’, is fundamentally a project of restoring the insulation between politics and the masses. This will be a deeply concerning backward step for democracy.

The restoration of the pre-2016 order would not only insulate public life from people’s feral political demands but also from our cultural and moral values. It would redomesticate the masses morally as well as politically. A Biden victory would embolden the woke mobs of the new elite and their tyranny of cancel culture. Under the imperfect instrument of Trump’s often crude, narcissistic presidency, ordinary people have had a mechanism through which they could express their disdain for the eccentric, divisive, identitarian crusades of the new elites, on everything from transgenderism to the nonsense of ‘white privilege’. The defeat of Trump, the removal of one of the few anti-woke leaders in the West, would green-light the intensification of those crusades. We should expect to see an even keener assault on the apparently outdated family values and community concerns of the ‘deplorable’ sections of society by a newly emboldened elite.

Trump’s victory fundamentally represented a rude intrusion by ordinary people into the democratic life of America. It was an assertion of their democratic, moral concerns against an establishment that wasn’t only not listening to them but which was treating them with open contempt and hostility. The elite Biden wave is about reversing this rude intrusion and returning the people to their apparently natural state: one in which their role is merely to be governed, not to think about government. You might not want Trump to win, and that’s fine. But you should want Biden to lose. A Biden counterrevolution would be a disaster for democracy, solidarity and freedom.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy

=============================

“Capitalism” Is No Longer Attractive To Capitalists

 

Capitalism Is No Longer Attractive To Capitalists  By Charles Hugh Smith, vai OfTwoMinds blog, Zerohedge, 31 October 2020

This “capitalism” is only attractive to parasites, predators, kleptocrats, legalized looters, embezzlers, fraudsters and all those insiders whose palms get greased along the way.

Back of the envelope definition of classical capitalism:

  1. Transparency in markets, including pricing, information on quality and reliability of products, sellers and buyers, and of rules of conduct and rights governing all participants;
  2. Risk is tightly bound to reward, i.e. everyone has skin in the game, those who lose are forced to absorb the entire loss.
  3. Open competition, i.e. no monopolies or cartels limiting supply or setting prices;
  4. Free flow of capital and labor;
  5. Everyone pays the same rates of taxes, duties and fees on every transaction.

Needless to say, what is presented as “capitalism” in America today is not actually capitalism; it is monopoly-state-socialism for the wealthy, a kleptocracy incompetently cloaked by a rigged simulacrum market in which risk and losses are transferred to the debt-serfs and tax donkeys and the “socialism for the rich and powerful” is enforced by a pay-to-play simulacrum democracy and kleptocratic, totalitarian central bank, the Federal Reserve.

In this winner take most, anything goes if you’re rich casino, the weaker players are ruthlessly stripmined and exploited and those enterprises without political protection are cannibalized by rapacious, predatory monopolies and cartels.

Parasitic elites take a skim from every table: student loans over here, state junk fees over there; everyone gets clipped by self-serving insiders and entrenched interests.

Transparency is an illusion. Complexity thickets protect monopolies and cartels, and the fine print… try getting a set price for healthcare services. (You must be joking.) Sign the form for the $30 oil change and come back to an $800 bill for “work you authorized.” (You didn’t read the fine print? Too bad.)

Quality has gone downhill across the board but there’s no recourse or competition. All the items regardless of brand come from the same factory in China. So what if your new oven turns on by itself randomly (true story, happened to me); the once-proud American brand’s warranty is only one year, so tough luck, bucko, the repair bill for the defective $5 sensor will cost you as much as a new range.

In American “capitalism,” the name of the game is scale up with cheap debt supplied by the Federal Reserve, use the “Fed free money” to buy up any potential competitors and then start buying back your own shares, jacking your share price even as sales and profits stagnate. (Charts of Apple below).

Once you’re too big to fail or jail, then you can gamble to your heart’s content because all the winnings will be yours to keep and if you lose big, the Fed or the Treasury will step in and transfer the losses to the debt-serfs and tax donkeys.

In America, as Warren Buffett jacks up the price of Sees candy, etc. to maximize his profits and add more billions to his net worth, and Amazon uses its quasi-monopoly power to relentlessly jack up the price of Prime membership, nobody asks Warren or Jeff “don’t you have enough already?”

The answer is “no”. It’s never enough, because as long as the Fed and federal government enforce, enable or allow your monopoly, quasi-monopoly or cartel to kill transparency and competition, and offer you limitless “Fed free money” while students pay 8% on their loans, then why not add another $10 billion to your personal wealth?

Go ahead and lie, cheat, embezzle, rig markets, commit fraud, collude–everything is allowed if you’re a powerful corporation because all your execs have get out of jail free cards from the Department of Justice. Nobody in Corporate America ever goes to prison no matter how egregious the fraud or theft. And you get to keep all the loot, other than a wrist-slap fine if you’re caught. But that’s just a modest cost of doing business in American “capitalism.”

If this “capitalism” was actually attractive to capitalists, why would everyone pile into the same six Big Tech monopolies? Is that really the only opportunity left to “create shareholder value,” to pour hundreds of billions of dollars in “Fed free money” into a handful of Big Tech monopolies?

Paraphrasing the late Immanuel Wallerstein, “Capitalism” is no longer attractive to capitalists. This “capitalism” is only attractive to parasites, predators, kleptocrats, legalized looters, embezzlers, fraudsters and all those insiders whose palms get greased along the way.

If you think this “capitalism” is sustainable, the future holds a big surprise.

=======================

Previous articles

    • pauling-hansons-first-speech-in-the-senate-14-september-2016
    • cairns-post-editorial-201016  Laws of diminishing returns as the ‘nanny state’ takes over control of our freedom, By Julian Tomlinson, Cairns Post, 20 October 2016