PP NewsBrief: 2021-02-24

We need to begin to reclaim control over the institutions which have such oversized roles in our lives. As you read this people work tirelessly to see to it that you are dumb and docile. Let's stop them.

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Biden Launches Campaign to Silence Critics of Killer Vaccine

"In a free country, it is the vaccine manufacturers that should be scrutinized, lambasted and taken to task for the shortcomings or lethality of their product, but not in America. In America, it is the vaccine critics that are being condemned and targeted by the state. According to an article in the New York Post, the Biden Administration is joining forces with Big Tech to actively seek out and eliminate those people who challenge the official narrative and who reject the idea of inoculating the entire population with a dodgy experimental vaccine that poses a clear threat to one’s safety and well-being. Here’s an excerpt from the article in the Post:

The White House is asking social media companies to clamp down on chatter that deviates from officially distributed COVID-19 information as part of President Biden’s “wartime effort” to vanquish the coronavirus.

A senior administration official tells Reuters that the Biden administration is asking Facebook, Twitter and Google to help prevent anti-vaccine fears from going viral, as distrust of the inoculations emerges as a major barrier in the fight against the deadly virus.

“Disinformation that causes vaccine hesitancy is going to be a huge obstacle to getting everyone vaccinated and there are no larger players in that than the social media platforms,” the White House source told the news agency.

The news out of Washington is the first sign that officials are directly engaged with Silicon Valley in censoring social media users; Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain previously said the administration would try to work with major media companies on the issue….

Social media leaders have vowed to squash anti-vaccine “disinformation” on their platforms, but the spreading of such content has persisted....

A Twitter spokesman said the company is “in regular communication with the White House on a number of critical issues including COVID-19 misinformation.”

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And what does this tell us about the way the Biden administration plans to conduct business in the future?

It tells us that Joe Biden is essentially the corporate meat-puppet that he’s been for the last 5 decades and, that now, he intends to cancel vast swaths of the Bill of Rights to accommodate his deep-pocket managers. No one should be surprised by this. Biden has always been the Establishment’s best friend."

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Congress Escalates Pressure on Tech Giants to Censor More, Threatening the First Amendment

"For the third time in less than five months, the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms. On March 25, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will interrogate Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebooks’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai at a hearing which the Committee announced will focus “on misinformation and disinformation plaguing online platforms.”

The Committee’s Chair, Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and the two Chairs of the Subcommittees holding the hearings, Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), said in a joint statement that the impetus was “falsehoods about the COVID-19 vaccine” and “debunked claims of election fraud.” They argued that “these online platforms have allowed misinformation to spread, intensifying national crises with real-life, grim consequences for public health and safety,” adding: “This hearing will continue the Committee’s work of holding online platforms accountable for the growing rise of misinformation and disinformation.”

House Democrats have made no secret of their ultimate goal with this hearing: to exert control over the content on these online platforms. “Industry self-regulation has failed,” they said, and therefore “we must begin the work of changing incentives driving social media companies to allow and even promote misinformation and disinformation.” In other words, they intend to use state power to influence and coerce these companies to change which content they do and do not allow to be published.

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...the key point raised by these last threats from House Democrats is an often-overlooked one: while the First Amendment does not apply to voluntary choices made by a private company about what speech to allow or prohibit, it does bar the U.S. Government from coercing or threatening such companies to censor. In other words, Congress violates the First Amendment when it attempts to require private companies to impose viewpoint-based speech restrictions which the government itself would be constitutionally barred from imposing.

It may not be easy to draw where the precise line is — to know exactly when Congress has crossed from merely expressing concerns into unconstitutional regulation of speech through its influence over private companies — but there is no question that the First Amendment does not permit indirect censorship through regulatory and legal threats.

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When it comes to censorship of politically adverse content, sometimes explicit censorship demands are unnecessary. Where a climate of censorship prevails, companies anticipate what those in power want them to do by anticipatorily self-censoring to avoid official retaliation. Speech is chilled without direct censorship orders being required.

That is clearly what happened after Democrats spent four years petulantly insisting that they lost the 2016 election not because they chose a deeply disliked nominee or because their neoliberal ideology wrought so much misery and destruction, but instead, they said, because Facebook and Twitter allowed the unfettered circulation of incriminating documents hacked by Russia. Anticipating that Democrats were highly likely to win in 2020, the two tech companies decided in the weeks before the election — in what I regard as the single most menacing act of censorship of the last decade — to suppress or outright ban reporting by The New York Post on documents from Hunter Biden’s laptop that raised serious questions about the ethics of the Democratic front-runner for president. That is a classic case of self-censorship to please state officials who wield power over you."

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Hart to Bypass Iowa Election Law to Have Pelosi-Led-House Be Judge

"There is a widely uncovered situation developing in the House of Representatives that has the potential to send huge shockwaves through Congress and throughout Washington, if the most radical left-wing faction of the House Democrats are allowed to have their way.

In Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District, GOP candidate Mariannette Miller-Meeks was declared the winner by a mere 6 votes in a contest that included almost 400,000 votes cast.  The final certified result was 196,964 to 196,958.

Miller-Meeks victory was certified by Iowa state officials after a recount. On January 4, House Speaker Pelosi allowed Miller-Meeks to be seated in the new Congress and take the oath of office.

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As noted in the Des Moines Register editorial, the recount process itself was not “neat and tidy.” Each county in the district selected a Recount Board consisting of one representative from each party and a third Board member agreed upon by those two. The Boards in each county then engaged in the recount process of all votes cast in that county — but with no statewide standard on how that was to be accomplished. Some Boards agreed to a machine recount, while others engaged in hand recounts of each ballot. When the recounts were complete; Miller-Meeks was declared the winner by 6 votes.

There is a process for appealing an election outcome through the Iowa state courts. Hart chose not to file any such appeal. Under Iowa law, any such court proceeding would need to be completed by December 8, and Hart claimed that an election contest involving 400,000 votes cast, with a margin of only six votes, could not be investigated and litigated in the time period authorized by Iowa law. By opting to bypass the Iowa courts, Hart chose to not engage in a process that would have had neutral arbitrators examine the fairness of the procedures employed by the County Election Boards — with Iowans resolving issues involving Iowa law.

Instead, Hart filed a petition with the House of Representatives pursuant to the Federal Contested Elections Act of 1969. The effort is being spearheaded by Democrat party election law specialist Mark Elias.

That statute, 2 U.S.C. Sec. 381 provides that a losing candidate can file a challenge of the qualifications of a House member — in this case, Miller-Meeks — which is then assigned to the Committee on House Administration to investigate. Last week the Administration Committee took its first action on the Petition when it finalized the process it will use to proceed on Hart’s claim.

Miller-Meeks has filed a motion to dismiss the petition, which the Committee has not yet acted upon. Denying the motion would signal that the Committee is going to begin an investigation into Hart’s claims. Under the statute, the Committee conducts an investigation. It can hear from witnesses, accept documentary evidence, conduct interviews in Iowa, and even conduct a recount of all the ballots on its own to come up with its own final vote tally.

This is where the pernicious aspect of the process comes into play. In conducting their own count of the ballots, the House Democrats who have majority control of the committee can fashion their own standards as to what constitutes a valid vote, and in the process, ignore the standards established by Iowa law and court precedent. Ultimately, it is not a vote of the Committee, but a vote of the entire House that determines the outcome of the Petition."

The double standards are really getting ridiculous at this point. These are plot lines chucked into the wastebin of the writer's room of the absolute worst political drama you can possibly imagine. Yet they are your actual lived reality...

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International Alert Message about COVID-19. United Health Professionals

"First, let’s start with the conclusions of the 2010 report of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on the management of the H1N1 epidemic :

"The Parliamentary Assembly is alarmed about the way in which the H1N1 influenza pandemic has been handled, ot only by the World Health Organization (WHO) but also by the competent health authorities at the level of the European Union and at national level. It is particularly troubled by some of the consequences of decisions taken and advice given leading to distortion of priorities of public health services across Europe, waste of large sums of public money and also unjustified scares and fears about health risks…grave shortcomings have been identified regarding the transparency of decision-making processes relating to the pandemic which have generated concerns about the possible influence of the pharmaceutical industry on some of the major decisions….unregulated or secret lobbying may be a danger and can undermine democratic principles and good governance".

Know that the same mistakes made in the H1N1 epidemic are being repeated today in the COVID epidemic. You are the victims of the biggest health scam of the 21st century regarding the real danger of the virus, the measures to be taken, the figures, the tests and the treatments, and this was done with the same techniques of manipulation used during the epidemic of H1N1 or the Iraq war. Experts, professors of medicine as well as scientific and medical collectives began to alert others of this as early as March 2020.

The countries of the world (except rare cases like : Sweden, Belarus or Tanzania), without thinking, have only imitated and blindly followed others.

This epidemic is amplified, dramatized and instrumentalised by criminals who take advantage of it to achieve economic, political and ideological goals and agendas that are harmful to humanity and we will prove this to you. You must stop this global scam quickly (because it is a serious danger to your people and your country in terms of : health, economy, education, ecology and human rights)...

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In this epidemic, the danger is not the coronavirus but the people who instrumentalise it and who are the real virus to fight.

The virus is completely innocent of what is happening (impoverishment, job losses, suicides, deaths, economic recession, unemployment, etc.) and the real culprits are those who have pushed the world to use these measures and the governments that continue to implement these measures despite alerts and warnings."

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What dreams may come: Scientists develop method for two-way communication while people are in deep sleep

"Throughout a total of 57 sleep experiments, at least one correct response was given in 47 percent of sessions during which the participant dreamt lucidly.

Upon giving a correct response to a given question, participants were quickly woken up and asked to report on their dreams.

"We found that individuals in REM sleep can interact with an experimenter and engage in real-time communication," says psychologist Ken Paller from Northwestern University.

"We also showed that dreamers are capable of comprehending questions, engaging in working-memory operations, and producing answers.”"

If this isn't just science PR nonsense then expect to see this used in "deradicalization" programs in the future. They WILL change your mind...one way or another.

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Cold Truth: The Texas Freeze is a Catastrophe of the Free Market

"Under New Deal-style regulations, electric utilities got a rate-of-return on their investment, governed by a utility commission that set and stabilized prices. It was (in principle) enough to cover construction and maintenance and a fair profit, not so much as to amount to monopoly profits; utilities were a stable but dull business, municipal socialism. Economists complained: there was an incentive, they said, for such utilities to over-invest. The bigger their operations, the higher their total costs, the more they could extract from the rate-setters.

What to do? Economists proposed a free market: let generating companies compete to deliver power to the consumer through the common electrical grid. Freely chosen contracts would govern the terms and the price. Competition would assure bare-bones, lean-and-mean efficiency, and low, low prices most of the time, reflecting the cost of fuel plus the smallest possible profit margin. The role of the state would be minimal – just to manage the common grid, through which power flows from the producer to the consumer. In times of shortage, prices might rise, but then the market would decide; those who did not wish to pay could always flip their switches off.

It was a perfect textbook setup, with supply on one side, demand on the other, and a neutral manager in between. True, there were a few loose ends. One is that demand for electricity is what economists call inelastic: it doesn’t respond much to price, but it does respond to changes in the weather, and at such times, of heat or cold, the demand becomes even more inelastic.

Another detail was that in an ordinary market, there can be some play in the relationship between supply and demand. If even a fishmonger does not sell his catch, he can, at the end of the day, cut his price – or even freeze the haddock for the following day. Electricity isn’t like that. Supply has to exactly equal demand every single minute of every single day. If it doesn’t, the entire system can fail.

This system, therefore, had three vulnerabilities. First, it created an incentive for cut-throat competition, to provide power in the cheapest possible way, which meant with machinery, wells, meters, pipes, and also windmills that were not insulated against extreme cold – a rarity but not unknown, even in Texas. Second, it left prices free to fluctuate. Third, it assured that when prices rose the most, that would be at exactly those moments when the demand for power was the greatest."

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DeSantis to Introduce New Election Integrity Agenda, Ban Mass Mail-In Ballots, Target Ballot Harvesting

"Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced a number of election integrity reforms to target ballot harvesting, ballot drop boxes and mail-in voting in the Sunshine State following the mishaps of the 2020 election.

The legislation he will pursue in March, prior to the 2022 midterms, would ban “mass mailing of vote-by-mail ballots,” require voters to request mail-in-ballots each year, and require the signature found on a ballot to match the most recent one on file.

Candidates and political party members would also be allowed to observe signatures being matched at vote counting facilities.

Additionally, counties will be prohibited from receiving grants from third-party entities who are conducting “get out the vote” efforts,” BizPacReview reports."

Desantis is attempting to make himself look like a strong leader on this but he is taking the coward's path. There's no good argument for mail-in ballots at all. In-person voting (with a pen & paper) is the most secure form of voting. Security matters more than convenience in this instance.

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The fall of Western liberal utopia

"Completely detached from their own nations, imbued with a global liberal ideology and driven by the desire to accumulate wealth regardless of the consequences, Western elites have become antagonistic to their own citizens whose physical existence and spiritual heritage is unreservedly sacrificed for narrow economic interests and ideological views. The reaction of the other side is expectedly negative, but slow, given that social engineering within Western countries has been conducted since the end of World War II.

Among the best indicators of the growing divide between the nation’s masses and elites are the growing popularity of previously excommunicated right-wing parties, in a simplistic black and white manner of Hollywood immediately identified with Nazi groups by leftists, and the loss of trust in democratic institutions by the average voter, who more and more turn towards more authoritative forms of social organization.

This process is noticeable throughout Europe and within most members of the European Union. Besides support for the right-wing parties, there has been a marked increase in the attractiveness of strong leaders, unfettered by restrictions imposed through political correctness, who act primarily for the benefit of their own nation and state.

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Representatives of the left are increasingly moving away from their own electorate and persistently refusing to see what seems obvious to others. Contemporary populations of Western Europe look to the future with much less enthusiasm and live within societies where fear has become an integral part of everyday life, fear of terrorist attacks, fear of persecution by social networks mobs, fear of losing ones life achievements or fear of losing a job if one makes an erroneous remark about “vulnerable and minority groups” whether they are women, homosexuals or Muslims.

This fear is only exacerbated by a number of situations where state institutions are clearly biased against the interests of the average citizen. Efforts of the German and Swedish authorities to hide the migrant origin of the sexual assault perpetrators[54] is a clear example indicating unwillingness of the state leadership to face the reality. This behavior, for decades accompanied by restricting the rights of the majority for the sake of the minority’s comfort, has transformed fear into distrust of the already established social norms and institutions on which the states of the collective West rest upon.

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The principle of tolerance, within one society, cannot coexist with the reality of completely different cultures which in some respects are even hostile to one another. Multiculturalism is used as an excuse to reject integration, but without integration and partial assimilation, the wholeness of one society and state cannot be preserved.

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The incessant attacks of liberal demagogues, directed towards the traditional family, classical moral principles derived from Christian teaching, natural inclinations of women and men and the life decisions that result from them, eventually led to the situation where children, in their thousands, fall victim to sadists while the remaining society, with special emphasis on state structures, either denies reality or refuses to face problems resolutely. The case of abused children in Britain is just the most obvious example of distorted behaviors that are becoming a new pattern of reality within communities deeply affected by liberal ideology. Inevitably, the society in which liberal order acquires the status of dogma, ceasing to be subject of consideration and contemplation, will be betrayed, leading to the tyranny of the minority over the majority.

The ideological emphasis on individuality and rights of the individual, to the detriment of the responsibility towards the community and its right, corrodes the networks of mutual support characterized by their collective nature, bringing the individual into a state of isolation that is defined and promoted as desirable. Only a cursory insight into the nature of human interaction is sufficient to reveal a high degree, necessary by nature, of sociability. Man, by his nature, is not an isolated island."

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Texas Demonstrates the Failure of Both Party Establishments

"The partisan brawl amid massive blackouts that plunged Texas into days of darkness illuminated one thing, at least: the need for a new social philosophy on the Right.

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Many Republicans and Democrats appear more interested in scoring points against each other and casting oeillades at pet projects than in solving the immediate problem or working to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), for example, is using the crisis to argue that all of this could have been avoided had Americans simply embraced the Green New Deal.

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On the other hand, Tim Boyd, the recently retired mayor of Colorado City, Texas, exemplifies everything wrong with the conservative ideology that informs GOP thinking.  

In a long, error-ridden screed on social media, Boyd denounced his constituents as freeloaders for expecting the government to which they pay taxes to keep the lights on. “If you have no water you . . . think outside of the box to survive and supply water to your family,” he wrote. “If you were sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because your lazy [sic] is direct [sic] result of your raising!”

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Our lawmakers and leaders occupy fantasy worlds where the solutions to all of life’s problems are as simple as regulating more or less—and that is when they are not merely paying cynical lip service to ideals to mask ulterior motives. In either case, neither is willing or able to see beyond their own anti-social delusions and lies. Public affairs becomes theater, a vehicle for self-aggrandizement and special interests. For this to change, our social philosophy of politics must change."

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Towards Practical Empowerment

"In a (since deleted) 2020 tweet, Nikole Hannah-Jones, curator of the “1619 Project” for the New York Times, declared that there is a difference between being black and being politically black. She failed to provide an adequate definition for this latter term, but the distinction appears to permit blacks to be expelled from the Community of the Good if they do not meet Hannah-Jones’s ideological requirements for membership of their own racial group.

I just want an anti-racism that does not require a feeling of victimization or, at times, infantilization and learned helplessness in people of color. I want an empowering anti-racism that provides and maintains racial dignity while encouraging deliberative engagement with the social and material realities of American society. Unfortunately, most contemporary anti-racism suffers from a primacy of identity that consists of four parts: a narcissistic embrace of lived experience as its primary ethos and epistemology, a tendency to essentialize people based on race, a demonization of critical inquiry (let alone blunt disagreement), and a neglect of fundamental aspects of rhetoric like context and audience consideration.

The primacy of identity tends to produce what is known as “prefigurative politics”—a politics in which people try to perform the world they are trying to bring about. Prefigurative politics is not a problem when coupled with clear strategy and concrete planning. Unfortunately, the real-world strategies needed to create that world are often neglected by those willing to settle for the comfort of make-believe. The prefigurative bubble can be a conference, an institution, a department, or a club in which modes of behavior indicate a societal structure unreflective of social and material realities. It is therefore unsuited to the demanding task of actually bringing about meaningful change.

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Prefiguration crafts a make-believe world of heroes and villains at the expense of the real world in which people are nuanced, multi-dimensional, and often on board with the ostensible goals of progressive social justice movements: the eradication of racism and inequality."

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Cartoon Network Urges Kids To View Each Other By Skin Color

"The ad consists of three characters—one white, one black and a purple alien named Amethyst.

The video starts off with a song featuring the lyrics, “colorblindness is our game because everyone’s the same. Everybody join our circle, doesn’t matter if you’re white, or black, or purple.”

“Hold up a minute here, who wrote this?” Amethyst interrupts, as the PSA turns meta. “I think it kind of does matter that I’m purple. I mean, I’m purple because I’m literally an alien.”

“Well I’m not an alien, but it definitely matters to me that I’m black,” the black character shares.

“See Color” was developed with psychologist Dr. Deborah J. Johnson, “who specializes in racial and cultural development,” according to Variety."

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“Protective Measures” against a Supposed Corona Pandemic: “Compassion for All Creatures Is What Makes Human Beings Truly Human”

"Foolish as we are, we continue to lull ourselves into security while the dark clouds of this crime against humanity gather ominously over our heads. While we are half aware that we live on the edge of a volcano, we give in to the deceptive hope that there will be no eruption. We prefer the comforting self-delusion to the thought of danger. We want to forget unwillingness and prefer to wish for pleasure. The pleasure principle, however, is incapable of protecting human life, because reality needs to be recognised and understood: anyone who contradicts it will either be harmed or destroyed.

Thousands of injustices happen not only in faraway countries, but also in our immediate vicinity. But we do not outrage, we do not defend the weak and we do not help the helpless. The plight of the millions affected does not touch our hearts. By not fighting against the obvious tyranny of those in power, we condone it. We have the deceptive hope that it will spare us. But the moment it takes a stranglehold on us, it is usually too late to contain it. The disease that we have failed to cure in the other takes us away ourselves."