PP NewsBrief: 2021-04-02
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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Second Amendment in the Firing Line
"Gun control was already a Biden Administration priority before the recent shootings in Georgia, Colorado, and Virginia. In fact, the House of Representatives passed two gun-control bills weeks before the shootings.
One of the House-passed bills expands background checks to include private sales, including those made at gun shows. Under this bill, someone who is not a licensed federal firearms dealer cannot sell a firearm without first relinquishing it to a federally-licensed dealer. The dealer must then conduct a background check on the prospective purchaser.
The second bill allows the federal government to indefinitely delay a background check, thus indefinitely delaying a gun purchase. Other legislation introduced in Congress would create a national firearms registry, which would only facilitate gun confiscation.
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The bill requires Americans to obtain a federal license before getting a firearm, but individuals cannot receive a license unless they undergo a psychological evaluation. The psychological evaluation mandate could lead to individuals losing their Second Amendment rights because they once suffered from depression. It could also cause people to lose their Second Amendment rights because someone told the police they may become violent.
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There is also legislation to reinstate the assault-weapons ban. Like the original ban, which was in effect from 1994-2004, the new legislation bans an arbitrary list of firearms and will do little to reduce gun violence.
Criminals and psychotics are not going to be deterred by background checks and licensing requirements from obtaining a firearm. There will be a black market to service those who cannot obtain firearms by legal means.
By discouraging law-abiding Americans from owning firearms, these laws leave millions of Americans defenseless against gun violence...."
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Atlanta-based news outlet retracts false claims about new Ga. elections law
"Left-wing news outlet Atlanta Journal-Constitution issued a retraction after it falsely claimed the new Georgia elections law would limit voting times. On Wednesday, the correction was made after it was discovered the law would not end voting hours early. The paper even went as far as to clarify: “Experts say the net effect was to expand the opportunities to vote for most Georgians.”
However, the paper was not the only one pushing false claims. Joe Biden also alleged the law would limit voting hours. Though, unlike the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the White House has doubled down on its criticism of the Georgia’s new election law."
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The Bullshit Economy: Homebuying “Help”
"There’s a gamut of structural issues preventing those living responsibly with full-time jobs from owning starter homes: lecherous student loans, stagnant wages, a paucity of savings, and poor credit. But since this is America, these policy issues are actually market opportunities.
As such, a slew of startups have found ways to lower the bar for entry into the housing market. Companies like Divvy, Flyhomes, and ZeroDown are attempting to encroach on the space traditionally held by mortgage lenders. Although each is slightly different, they have a shared goal: helping those, who by lack of funds or credit are excluded from the traditional home ownership model, own a home.
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Intuitively, if the people meant to be helped by these companies could get access to a mortgage, they would. They can’t get a mortgage because they don’t have the requisite wealth, income, credit profiles, or some combo therein.
From a lending perspective, this cohort is higher risk, which means high interest. Is it possible these startups are forgoing similar revenue to their mortgage providing forebears in pursuit of nobility? If payday lending, check cashing companies, and banks with overdraft fees and minimum deposits have taught us anything, it’s that it’s expensive to be poor. The answer is no: based on my bitter, qualitative math, whatever these companies end up charging their customers will be more expensive than a traditional mortgage."
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Cancel the ‘Cancel Culture’ Defense of Terrible Republicans
"South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem claims she’s a victim of “conservative cancel culture.” After vetoing a popular bill to defend women’s sports from the transgender lobby, Noem insists she did no such thing. She claims she only rejected the bill because legendary (but unnamed) conservative legal scholars told her she would lose a fight with the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
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The governor’s damage control is not likely to work as conservatives continue to mock her for capitulating to corporate interests. Her first brush with criticism from conservative media doesn’t augur well for her presidential hopes. She demonstrated she will surrender rather than fight on the controversial issues. How can we expect her to stand up for Middle Americans in the Oval Office? Amazon and the NCAA matter more to her than her own voters do.
What really distinguishes her as suspect is her use of the “cancel culture” defense. It’s expected for politicians to face tough criticism for their decisions. It’s a part of the job. The worst Republicans have decided, however, the usual criticism from the Right is something unprecedented. In reality, it’s cancel culture to excoriate elected representatives when they vote the wrong way.
This asinine argument is used to deflect from blame and shame ordinary Americans for daring to criticize Republicans. The only way to avoid cancel culture is to say nothing when your elected representatives do something stupid.
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Consider the number of conservatives who were kicked out of school or their jobs for not bowing before Black Lives Matter. That’s the real cancel culture. Noem and Cheney’s tribulations are just a normal part of politics.
The people have the right to disfavor their representatives if they fail at their job. To many conservatives, Noem and Cheney have done a terrible job. If the two are bothered by this, maybe they should change their behavior.
It would be terrible, absolutely horrible, to see these two suffer the ultimate cancellation at the ballot box."
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TK Finance Dictionary: "SPAC"
"SPAC (n) acronym for Special Purpose Acquisition Company: a way to pay millions today, for the exciting investment idea someone promises to have tomorrow.
After the dot-com bubble exploded, Americans were forced to take a master class in the initial public offering, or IPO. When Enron blew up, we sifted through Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) found in the wreckage. With the 2008 crash, the job was finding ways to explain Collateralized Debt Obligations, Credit Default Swaps, and other acronymic nightmares, under cover of which a fair portion of the world’s wealth vanished.
In the Fed-fueled Covid-19 economy, there’s one acronym worth knowing now, in case of bust later: the SPAC, or Special Purpose Acquisition Company.
The SPAC is an IPO-for-IPOs. In essence, it’s a shell company, put together for the express purpose of raising money to acquire private companies that will eventually be taken public. Pick any absurd empty-package metaphor, and it’ll probably fit: investing in the plate one picks up on the way to a salad bar, in the tortilla you’ve been told will eventually contain the world’s best burrito, in the plain white paper and finger-paints you hope to dump in the crib of the next Rembrandt, etc."
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Democrats Cannot Erase The History Or Hypocrisy Of The Filibuster
"President Biden has come out this week against the Senate filibuster as a “relic” of the Jim Crow era. In these times, it is a virtual mantra on Capitol Hill that the filibuster is synonymous with racism and people supporting it are presumptively racist. That very point was noted by cable news host Al Sharpton, who threatened to denounce members as racist if they support the rule. The only thing more dramatic than such historical revisionism is the political revisionism underlying this new national campaign.
The filibuster is more a “relic” of the Julius Caesar era than the Jim Crow era. In ancient Rome, the filibuster was used to force the Senate to hear dissenting voices, including an opposition of Cato the Younger to Julius Caesar returning to Rome. The foundation for the filibuster today can be traced to an argument by former Vice President Aaron Burr that led to a change in the early 1800s. The minority has used versions of the rule to block or force consensus on controversial legislation, ranging from war actions to oil mandates. It was not created in the Jim Crow era.
But Biden is correct that some of the most abusive uses of the filibuster was by segregationists in the 1950s, as embodied in Strom Thurmond, a South Carolina Democrat, who set the record with filibustering the Civil Rights Act for over 24 hours.
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A few years back, Democrats cried foul over the notion of eliminating the filibuster. They did not argue the rule was the embodiment of racism but rather the heart of the Senate. Biden spoke in the Senate in 2005 against ending the filibuster. So did Charles Schumer, who said it put the Senate “on the precipice” of a constitutional crisis, as “the checks and balances which have been at the core of this republic are about to be evaporated by the nuclear option.” Now as Senate majority leader, Schumer decries the same filibuster as the racist rule forged by segregationists.
Other leading Democrats also denounced prior moves to end the rule as destroying any hopes for political consensus. Barack Obama denounced the rule as a racist device back when he was a member in the Senate and condemned its elimination as an obvious effort to establish party control by shifting “the rules in the middle of the game so that they can make all the decisions while the other party is told to sit down and keep quiet.” He added, “If the majority chooses to end the filibuster and if they choose to change the rules and put an end to democratic debate, then the fighting and the bitterness and the gridlock will only become worse.”"
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The World’s Richest People: Excessive Wealth Disorder Is Destroying Our Societies
"...Excessive wealth is a symptom of an economic system that drains wealth from everybody else, because the biggest companies have enough power to exploit employees, suppliers, customers, governments and the environment. These people have not ‘earned’ their wealth. They became rich because they understand how the system is rigged.
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The value of land for building expensive homes means that other activities that cannot generate high revenues are no longer viable. Councils sell city hospitals so that the land can be used by property developers.(8) The hospitals are relocated out-of-town on cheaper land, which is much less convenient for many patients, but profitable for the council, and very profitable for the property developers.
Higher land values tend to increase business rents. This is fine for big international companies, such as McDonalds, but smaller or local businesses are unable to afford the rents, so more towns become clones with the same big chains. The general pattern is for small or local businesses to be priced out of the area. It becomes difficult for new, small businesses to get started. High business rents generally get passed on to customers in higher prices. This creates a general increase in the cost of living. Businesses selling high-priced coffee are of more relevance to the middle class than to the poor, who cannot afford it. In developing countries, large swathes of major cities contain only businesses that serve wealthier people. Many of the dominant businesses are international, so profits go overseas, leaving less to circulate locally.
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...In 2005, a report by Citigroup explained that there were going to be big profits to be made from servicing the needs of individuals with excessive wealth.(10) This has led to the creation of another layer of very well-paid jobs, such as wealth managers, tax specialists, offshore account experts, private bankers, and personal lawyers, whose main role is to serve the rich. Britain has actively changed its policies to attract excessively wealthy people. It has become the tax-dodging capital of the world, as hundreds of accountants, often from the Inland Revenue, are recruited to manipulate the tax system.
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The existing economic system is built around the poorest people receiving less income, and having to pay more for everything, including basic necessities. In other words, the system that creates excessive wealth is a direct cause of poverty. Some readers might be shocked by this idea, as the mainstream media, and mainstream economists, never link the wealth of billionaires with the causes of poverty. But if you want to understand poverty, you have to study the role played by the rich in structuring the economy to benefit themselves."
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Why Is Everyone in Texas Not Dying?
"I’m sitting at a bar in Texas, surrounded by maskless people, looking at folks on the streets walking around like life is normal, talking with nice and friendly faces, feeling like things in the world are more-or-less normal. Cases and deaths attributed to Covid are, like everywhere else, falling dramatically.
If you pay attention only to the media fear campaigns, you would find this confusing. More than two weeks ago, the governor of Texas completely reversed his devastating lockdown policies and repealed all his emergency powers, along with the egregious attacks on rights and liberties.
There was something very un-Texan about those lockdowns. My hotel room is festooned with pictures of cowboys on horses waving guns in the air, along with other depictions of rugged individualism facing down the elements. It’s a caricature but Texans embrace it. Then a new virus came along – as if that had never happened before in Texas – and the new Zoom class took the opposite path, not freedom but imposition and control.
After nearly a year of nonsense, on March 2, 2021, the governor finally said enough is enough and repealed it all. Towns and cities can still engage in Covid-related mischief but at least they are no longer getting cover from the governor’s office.
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The US has many examples of open states that have generally had better performance in managing the disease than those states that are closed. Georgia already opened on April 24, 2020. South Dakota never shut down. South Carolina opened in May. Florida ended all restrictions in September. In every case, the press howled about the coming slaughter that did not happen. Yes, each open state experienced a seasonality wave in winter but so did the lockdown states.
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...lockdowns have had no statistically observable effect on the virus trajectory and resulting severe outcomes. The open states have generally performed better, perhaps not because they are open but simply for reasons of demographics and seasonality. The closed states seem not to have achieved anything in terms of mitigation.
On the other hand, the lockdowns destroyed industries, schools, churches, liberties and lives, demoralizing the population and robbing people of essential rights. All in the name of safety from a virus that did its work in any case.
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What’s striking about all the above predictions of infections and deaths is not just that they were all wrong. It’s the arrogance and confidence behind each of them. After a full year and directly observing the inability of “nonpharmaceutical interventions” to manage the pathogen, the experts are still wedded to their beloved lockdowns, unable or unwilling to look at the data and learn anything from them."
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Rep. Greene Offers Bills to Dock Fauci Salary, Ban Vaccine Passports
"Greene’s "Fire Fauci Act" would cut the salary to zero for the government’s leading infectious disease expert and an adviser to President Joe Biden.
"Americans deserve better than a self-promoting career bureaucrat like Fauci, who spent the last year getting it wrong almost all of the time," Greene said, the Washington Examiner, which first revealed the measures, reported.
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Fauci is the top paid federal worker at $434,312, according to the Washington Examiner.
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The "We Will Not Comply Act" would "ban" vaccine passports — documents that show that Americans have been vaccinated — by prohibiting businesses engaged in interstate commerce from using them to allow patrons to access their services.
According to Greene, vaccinations can be discriminatory against those who choose not to receive them, including those who cite religious objections. It would also bar the State Department from requiring a vaccination to receive a diplomatic travel passport, the Washington Examiner reported."
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Sweden axes Bill Gates-funded Harvard experiment aiming to DIM THE SUN to fight climate change amid outcry from activists
"Sweden’s space agency has called off a geoengineering experiment to determine whether blotting out the sun with aerosols could reverse global warming. Funded by Bill Gates, the project stoked fierce opposition from eco groups.
Proposed by researchers at Harvard University, the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment, or SCoPEx, ultimately planned to release a cloud of calcium carbonate – more commonly known as chalk dust – into the atmosphere from a high-altitude balloon to study its effects on sunlight reaching Earth. The project proved too controversial, however, and on Wednesday the Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) said that a test flight set for June would not move forward.
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Asked at a 2010 TED talk about what “emergency measures” mankind could implement to fight climate change should all else fail, Gates suggested solar geoengineering could be an “insurance policy.”
“There is a line of research on what's called geoengineering, which are various techniques that would delay the heating to buy us 20 or 30 years to get our act together. Now that's just an insurance policy, you hope that you don't need to do that,” he said, adding that the idea might be “kept in the back pocket.”
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The experiment could find traction in the States, as a report published last week by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine called on the government to devote between $100 million and $200 million to solar geoengineering projects, including technology to dim out the Sun, over the next five years."
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Rita Hart withdraws contest against 2020 Iowa congress election results
"In part, it says “After many conversations with people I trust about the future of this contest, I have made the decision to withdraw my contest before the House Committee on Administration. Since Election Day, and throughout this entire process, my mission has been about ensuring the voices of Iowans who followed the law are not silenced. I am saddened that some Iowans’ votes will not count through no fault of their own. The work of ensuring it does not happen again will continue beyond this campaign.”
Hart’s statement blames “political disinformation” for sabotaging the review process. What she’s indirectly referencing is today’s visit to Iowa made by Republican Leader Kevin KcCarthy and Rep. Miller-Meeks."
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The Brand-Spanking-New Space Race
"The brand-new space race is upon us.
It moves into two directions – who will reach Mars first, who will colonize the Moon, as it is nearby. Resources need to be extracted, and the US wants them to be available to it and its corporations.
The second aspect of the race comes down to who will be able to establish the most military and reconnaissance infrastructure in space to have the upper hand in harvesting resources.
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Other countries such as India, Israel and others also wish to partake in the space race, but they are still far behind in terms of their capability.
While spreading the loudest claims of its adversaries militarizing space, the United States is attempting to do specifically that. Even if the US statements regarding numerous Russian attack satellites in orbit were true, and every nation’s space infrastructure is under threat, how can it even be considered that Washington is not moving in the same direction?
The United states actively attempts to take control and impose its “democratic will” across the globe, in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan. How unlikely is it that it attempts to do the same in space?"
A new space race benefits the elite. Don't be fooled by claims that benefits will trickle down to the masses. The consequences will far outweigh any meager benefits. Our home is this planet, We The People do not benefit by leaving it.
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We Are Living Through a Time of Fear – Not Just of the Virus, but of Each Other
"We are now firmly in a time of fear – not only of the virus, but of each other. Fear destroys solidarity. Fear forces us to turn inwards to protect ourselves and our loved ones. Fear refuses to understand or identify with the concerns of others.
In fear societies, basic rights become a luxury. They are viewed as a threat, as recklessness, as a distraction that cannot be afforded in this moment of crisis.
Once fear takes hold, populations risk agreeing to hand back rights, won over decades or centuries, that were the sole, meagre limit on the power of elites to ransack the common wealth. In calculations based on fear, freedoms must make way for other priorities: being responsible, keeping safe, averting danger.
Worse, rights are surrendered with our consent because we are persuaded that the rights themselves are a threat to social solidarity, to security, to our health.
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From the outbreak of the virus, there were those who warned that the pandemic would soon serve as a pretext to take away basic rights and make our societies less free. Those warnings soon got submerged in, or drowned out by, much wilder claims, such as that the virus was a hoax or that it was similar to flu, or by the libertarian clamour against lockdowns and mask-wearing.
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What was notable was the readiness of the political and media establishments to intentionally conflate and confuse reasonable and unreasonable arguments to discredit all dissent and lay the groundwork for legislation of this kind.
The purpose has been to force on us unwelcome binary choices. We are either in favour of all lockdowns or indifferent to the virus’ unchecked spread. We are either supporters of enforced vaccinations or insensitive to the threat the virus poses to the vulnerable. We are either responsible citizens upholding the rules without question or selfish oafs who are putting everyone else at risk.
A central fracture line has opened up – in part a generational one – between those who are most afraid of the virus and those who are most afraid of losing their jobs, of isolation and loneliness, of the damage being done to their children’s development, of the end of a way of life they valued, or of the erasure of rights they hold inviolable.
The establishment has been sticking its crowbar into that split, trying to prise it open and turn us against each other.
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If free speech ensures we have some agency over our own minds, protest allows us to mobilise collectively once we have been persuaded of the need and urgency to act. Protest is the chance we have to alert others to the strength of our feelings and arguments, to challenge a consensus that may exist only because it has been manufactured by political and media elites, and to bring attention to neglected or intentionally obscured issues.
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...The establishment has been using fear to keep us divided and weak since time immemorial. The source of our fear can be endlessly manipulated: black men, feminists, Jews, hippies, travellers, loony lefties, libertarians. The only limitation is that the object of our fear must be identifiable and distinguishable from those who think of themselves as responsible, upstanding citizens.
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...when politics and science are merged, as is happening now, dissent can be easily reformulated as either derangement or criminal intent. On this view, to be against lockdown or to be opposed to taking a vaccine is not just wrong but as insane as denying the laws of gravity. It is proof of one’s irrationality, of the menace one poses to the collective.
But medicine – the grey area between the science and art of human health – is not governed by laws in the way gravity is....
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The right to protest must be championed even through a health crisis –most especially during a health crisis, when our rights are most vulnerable to erasure. The right to protest needs to be supported even by those who back lockdowns, even by those who fear that protests during Covid are a threat to public health. And for reasons that again should not need stating.
Politicians and the police must not be the ones to define what protests are justified, what protests are safe, what protests are responsible.
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What the UK’s Police and Crime Bill does, like similar legislation in the US and Europe, is to declare some protests as legitimate and others as not. It leaves it to our leaders to decide, as they are trying to do now through the pandemic, which protests constitute a “nuisance” and which do not.
The political logic of the Bill is being contested by a minority – the hippies, the leftists, the libertarians. They are standing up for the right to protest, as the majority complacently assumes that they will have no need of protest.
That is pure foolishness. We are all damaged when the right to protest is lost."
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The Bullshit Economy Part 2: Payday Loans 2.0, aka Early Paycheck Apps
"Money doesn’t buy you love, and a love of Doritos doesn’t buy you Doritos. To walk out of the store with them, you need to exchange money for the chips in real time—this is how most day-to-day purchases are made.
Wages, the grease that lubricates these purchases, are built different. You exchange something of value in real-time, labor, and with some exceptions, that labor is compensated just twice a month. A person works for two weeks without pay, then receives income on the final day of the two-week pay period for the previous two weeks of work: employees provide an advance on their labor at 0% financing to their employer.
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People eat, go places, buy stuff, and tend to their bodies constantly. This extension of credit for employers puts people in an adverse position to pay their operating costs. Going back to our Doritos-craver, there’s no way for that same person to get gas at 0% down, 0% for the first month. Conoco wants the money now.
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Payday loans’ prevalence declined the past couple of decades due to regulation and pressure from consumer advocates. Why regulation and pressure? The loans are obscene: a study by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau revealed that most borrowers paid more in fees than the loan itself. Meaning, if you borrow $200 for medicine, you may owe more than $400 by the time you’re through fulfilling your loan obligation in much less than a year’s time.
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Notwithstanding their decline, the ethos of payday loans lives on in applications that allow people to access their paychecks in advance of payday: charge exorbitant amounts to those who can least afford it so that they may access their own wages in a timeframe that’s more reflective of reality. Apps such as Earnin, Dave, DailyPay, and many others give users access to their paychecks early. Each early-access app has its nuances around how paychecks are accessed and how each makes money; however, the effective interest rates charged by each mirror their payday loan forebears quite closely. Equally obscene APRs, repackaged in brightly-hued homescreen apps.
Earnin users, for instance, are prompted to pay a default 10% ‘tip’ on the amount of money they access. If they opt not to tip, they’re limited in the amount they’re able to withdraw. If a user tips $5 on a $100 advance, that comes out to a 130% APR. Earnin has received $190 million in VC funding. The ethos lives on."
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The ‘Pathetic’ Genesis of a Fake News Story
"In a headline clearly designed to prompt outrage, CNN recently claimed that “Sidney Powell argues in new court filing that no reasonable people would believe her election fraud claims.” Similarly, CBS News asserted that “Sidney Powell tells court ‘no reasonable person’ would take her voter fraud claims as fact.” The implication is that Powell, one of the most prominent critics of the 2020 presidential election, who has been outspoken in her claims that Joe Biden’s victory was secured through outright fraud involving, in particular, illegal and malicious manipulation of the vote-counting machines, has now repudiated those claims.
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...it is accurate that the filing by Powell’s attorneys in the defamation lawsuit did assert that when Powell made her charges of election fraud involving the Dominion voting systems, she made clear that she was asserting opinion rather than fact, as her charges remained to be proved, and the evidence on which she relied for her assertions (which was spelled out in detail by Powell at the time) still had not been authenticated in a judicial setting.
The explanation for this seeming anomaly (that Powell believed and still believes that fraud took place and her lawyers’ assertion that she was only asserting opinion) is that for Dominion to succeed in its libel case against Powell it would have to prove that she knew what she was asserting was false, and that, indeed that falsity was a matter of fact she consciously or recklessly malevolently presented as something it was not.
Her lawyers, in other words, were simply making a highly technical legal argument that at the time Powell made the statements in question they could only be matters of opinion, and the statement of an opinion is not a statement of fact and therefore could not be grounds for a defamation action. This is not the easiest point to grasp, but any reading of the whole pleading by anyone with legal training should have made it evident."
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SEC sues decentralized content platform LBRY over sales of its cryptocurrency, puts the entire industry at risk
"The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed a complaint against LBRY Inc, the company behind the open-source, decentralized, blockchain-based LBRY network and the growing video-sharing platform Odysee, which alleges that LBRY’s sale of the LBRY Credits (LBC) cryptocurrency constitutes an unregistered security offering under the Securities Act of 1933.
LBC is used to perform various functions on the LBRY network such as sending tips, publishing and boosting posts, and buying and selling digital content. It can also be bought and sold on several cryptocurrency exchanges.
The complaint won’t impact LBRY channels, LBRY content, or LBC token holdings, according to LBRY. LBRY adds that LBC will remain usable, regardless of the outcome of this complaint.
However, LBRY warned that if the complaint is successful, it would advance an “aggressive and disastrous new standard that would make almost all blockchain tokens securities.”
The complaint invokes the Howey Test (four criteria that were established by the Supreme Court in 1946 in SEC v. W.J. Howey to determine whether a transaction qualifies as an “investment contract” and is considered a security under US securities law) to allege that LBRY offered and sold investment contracts when it offered and sold LBC.
Under the Howey Test, transactions are deemed to be an investment contract when there’s an “investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others.”
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“The implications of this case are extremely dire for the blockchain and technology industry in the United States,” LBRY wrote in response to the SEC’s complaint. “The SEC is alleging that any entity that transfers a blockchain token while simultaneously working or funding work on it is performing a security offering. Under that standard, every blockchain technology that is actively developed faces existential threat, so long as that development is either funded by a token holder, even if indirectly, or if the developers themselves hold the token.”"
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Only those with Covid vaccine passport will be able to return to their ‘daily lives’, South Korean PM says
"Seoul has announced it will issue digital certificates verifying a person’s Covid-19 vaccination status, becoming the latest nation to adopt the controversial measure as a means to reopen cross-border travel.
South Korea will roll out a smartphone application this month that will be able to show whether someone has been administered the jab, Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun said on Thursday. The system will use blockchain technology to guard against potential identity theft.
“The introduction of a vaccine passport or ‘Green Pass’ will only allow those who have been vaccinated to experience the recovery to their daily lives,” the prime minister noted while unveiling the new identification. He added that South Korea was following the lead of other nations that claim to have developed systems capable of verifying vaccination status without storing other private information."
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Why Can’t the IRS Just Send Americans a Refund – or a Bill?
"In 1985, President Ronald Reagan promised a “return-free” tax system in which half of all Americans would never fill out a tax return again. Under the framework, taxpayers with simple returns would automatically receive a refund or a letter detailing any tax owed. Taxpayers with more complicated returns would use the system in place today.
In 2006, President Barack Obama’s chief economist, Austan Goolsbee, premiered the “simple return,” where taxpayers would receive already completed tax forms for their review or correction. Goolsbee estimated his system would save taxpayers more than US$2 billion a year in tax preparation fees.
Though never implemented, the two proposals illustrate what we all know: No one enjoys filling out tax forms.
So why do we have to?
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Almost 20 years ago, Congress directed the IRS to provide low-income taxpayers with free tax preparation. The agency responded in 2002 with “Free File,” a public-private partnership between the government and the tax preparation industry. As part of the deal, the IRS agreed to not compete with the private sector in the free tax preparation market.
In 2007, the House of Representatives rejected legislation to provide free, government tax preparation. And in 2019, Congress tried to legally bar the IRS from ever providing free online tax preparation services.
Only a public outcry turned the tide.
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...there is the anti-tax argument for onerous tax preparation: Keep tax preparation unpleasant to fuel anti-tax sentiment.
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Unfortunately, the anti-tax contingent’s desire to force Americans to spend time and money on tax preparation dovetails with the tax preparation industry’s desire to collect billions of dollars in fees.
Tax preparation companies lobby Congress to keep tax preparation costly and complicated.
Indeed, Intuit, maker of TurboTax, the tax preparation software, lists government tax preparation as a threat to its business model."
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Kansas Senate Passes Bill Banning Transgender Athletes from Competing on Female Sports Teams
"In a 24-10 vote, the Republican controlled state Senate approved the “Fairness in Women Sports Act” that would require public schools and state colleges to categorize sports teams based on an athlete’s gender at birth.
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Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, labelled the bill “regressive” and Senate Democratic Leader Dinah Sykes said the vote was “hateful,” “rooted in bigotry,” and a failure in “compassionate government and leadership.” She said it shows “how little…elected representatives value [trans] lives and contributions to our state,” WIBW reported.
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Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves just signed a bill banning trans girls on girls’ sports teams last week."
The governor acts like they just legalizing the lynching of trans teens.
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Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down mask mandate
"The Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down Governor Tony Evers' mask mandate on Wednesday in a 4-3 ruling, deciding that the mandate exceeded his authority.
The decision, which came from the conservative-controlled court, comes after the state's Legislature voted to repeal the mask mandate in February. Gov. Evers then reinstated the mandate.
The court has ruled that Evers was only able to issue public health emergencies for just 60 days, to which any decisions would need legislative approval."
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The “Corona Crisis” and the War of “The Super-Rich” against the Earth’s Citizens
"The tools they use to pursue this war against the citizens of the Earth are technology, propaganda and disinformation campaigns, threats against individuals who display leadership skills and massive bribes for the leaders who are allowed to be covered in the media to represent the conservative and the progressive causes.
They also employ as part of this strategy an intimate knowledge of certain key weaknesses in the brain, and the potential for exploiting the human inclination to determine truth based on a vague sense of the mood of the herd, rather than logic. That is to say they are investing billions in hidden money to systematically create social pressure that makes citizens conform with pointless mandates for masks or vaccines that are launched from diverse platforms as a means of inducing the population to police itself.
Without such a strategy, the super-rich could not possibly seize control of the entire Earth.
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The super-rich has also invested wisely in the establishment of a panoply of sham activists, or toothless, “feel good, do nothing” NGOs.
These “movements” are allowed to appear in the corporate-controlled media, and they pretend to respond to corporate power, but they purposely discourage citizens from organizing themselves (they ask only for donations, or attendance at protests, but they pointedly do not empower people to form their own groups or achieve financial and ideological independence).
Such NGOs are silent about the mass manipulation of the media and of politics by global finance—even though that is the primary cause of the political problems we face.
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The push for mandatory COVID-19 “vaccines” in the face of the overwhelming scientific evidence against them is not a matter of mistaken science or bad policy. It is rather a process of preparing government officials, doctors, reporters, and other media figures to follow orders from above that have no rational basis.
After this “softening-up process,” which is carefully calibrated on the basis of secret CIA torture programs designed to test the weaknesses of the human psyche, a rougher and more brutal form of the rule can be implemented.
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The super-rich relies on two approaches to psychological manipulation that go back to the 1930s and before but have been perfected by recent research.
The first technique is the use of traumatic events that are reported on in a sensationalist and unscientific manner in the media so as to induce a deep sense of shock, disorientation and confusion in the population as a whole. The mental trauma of such events, whether the 9.11 incident, or the hyped-up COVID-19 crisis, or the “armed insurrection” at the Capitol, is used to induce passivity and receptivity to profound institutional shifts that would otherwise be impossible.
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The second strategy is to induce a hypnotic state in the brain of the individual, and the population as a whole, through the constant repetition of certain themes and images through advertisements, commercials, images, and themes articulated in movies, TV shows, reporting, and even the packaging of products.
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When we awake from this slumber, if we ever do, we will discover that every aspect of our lives is controlled by unaccountable powers which we cannot understand, which we have no way to challenge and which will increase slowly and systematically the means by which we are made slaves, and, if necessary, destroyed."
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The “Unvaccinated” Question
"So, the New Normals are discussing the Unvaccinated Question. What is to be done with us? No, not those who haven’t been “vaccinated” yet. Us. The “Covidiots.” The “Covid deniers.” The “science deniers.” The “reality deniers.” Those who refuse to get “vaccinated,” ever.
There is no place for us in New Normal society. The New Normals know this and so do we. To them, we are a suspicious, alien tribe of people. We do not share their ideological beliefs. We do not perform their loyalty rituals, or we do so only grudgingly, because they force us to do so.
We traffic in arcane “conspiracy theories,” like “pre-March-2020 science,” “natural herd immunity,” “population-adjusted death rates,” “Sweden,” “Florida,” and other heresies.
They do not trust us. We are strangers among them. They suspect we feel superior to them. They believe we are conspiring against them, that we want to deceive them, confuse them, cheat them, pervert their culture, abuse their children, contaminate their precious bodily fluids, and perpetrate God knows what other horrors.
So they are discussing the need to segregate us, how to segregate us, when to segregate us, in order to protect society from us. In their eyes, we are no more than criminals, or, worse, a plague, an infestation.
In the words of someone (I can’t quite recall who), “getting rid of the Unvaccinated is not a question of ideology. It is a question of cleanliness,” or something like that. (I’ll have to hunt down and fact-check that quote. I might have taken it out of context.)
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Now, don’t get all excited, my “conspiracy theorist” friends. I haven’t gone full QAnon just yet. Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab are not sitting around together, sipping adrenochrome on George Soros’ yacht, dreaming up ways to rape people’s noses. This stuff is built into the structure of the system. It is a standard feature of totalitarian societies, cults, churches, self-help groups, and…well, human society, generally.
Being forced to repeat a physical action which only makes sense within a specific ideology reifies that ideology within us. There is nothing inherently diabolical about this. It is a basic socialization technology. It is how we socialize our children. It is why we conduct weddings, baptisms, and bar mitzvahs. It is how we turn young men and women into soldiers. It is how actors learn their blocking and their lines. It is why the Nazis held all those rallies. It is why our “democracies” hold elections.
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...for most of us denizens of the global capitalist empire, it looks like the New Normal is here to stay. So, unless we are prepared to become New Normals, we are going to have to stand and fight. It is going to get rather ugly, and personal, but there isn’t any way to avoid that.
Given that many New Normals are our friends and colleagues, or even members of our families, it is tempting to believe that they will “come to their senses,” that “this is all just a hysterical overreaction,” and that “everything will go back to normal soon.”
This would be a monumental error on our parts…very possibly a fatal error.
Totalitarian movements, when they reach this stage, do not simply stop on their own. They continue to advance toward their full expressions, ultimately transforming entire societies into monstrous mirror-images of themselves, unless they are opposed by serious resistance. There is a window at the beginning when such resistance has a chance. That window is still open, but it is closing, fast.
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Today, the New Normals are presenting us with a “choice,” (a) conform to their New Normal ideology or (b) social segregation. What do you imagine they have planned for us tomorrow?"