12 Marvelous Quotes on the Bill of Rights

From FEE.org (Dec. 15, 2021):

Americans over the age of 60 will likely remember the hilarious TV game show that ran for 25 years (1965-1980) called Hollywood Squares. On the show, host Peter Marshall (still living at age 95) once directed this question to comedian Paul Lynde: “Pride, anger, covetousness, lust, gluttony, envy and sloth are collectively known as what?”

Sustained laughter ensued when Lynde replied, “The Bill of Rights.” (The correct answer, of course, is the Seven Deadly Sins.)

It was on this very day in 1791—December 15—that a young United States of America formally adopted the first ten amendments to its Constitution that we call the Bill of Rights. Those amendments were fundamental and foundational, as bedrock as it gets, without which adoption of the Constitution itself might not have occurred. In fewer than 500 words, many of our most cherished liberties are expressed as rights to be protected. It’s a roster of instructions to government to keep out of where it doesn’t belong.

Not long ago, the late and famous trial attorney F. Lee Bailey (1933-2021) posed a poignant question to which he provided a disturbing answer: “Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn’t even get out of committee!”

Bailey was likely right, which makes it even more urgent that Americans renew a learned passion for the Bill of Rights. Toward that end, I offer here a sample of thoughts in its defense:

_____

1. The concept that the Bill of Rights and other constitutional protections against arbitrary government are inoperative when they become inconvenient or when expediency dictates otherwise is a very dangerous doctrine and if allowed to flourish would destroy the benefit of a written Constitution and undermine the basis of our government. - Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black
2. Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty? - Patrick Henry
3. The Bill of Rights wasn’t enacted to give us any rights. It was enacted so the Government could not take away from us any rights that we already had. - Kenneth G. Eade, author
4. The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities, and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections. - Robert H. Jackson, Supreme Court Justice
5. Education on the value of free speech and the other freedoms reserved by the Bill of Rights, about what happens when you don't have them, and about how to exercise and protect them, should be an essential prerequisite for being an American citizen — or indeed a citizen of any nation, the more so to the degree that such rights remain unprotected. If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us…In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness." - Carl Sagan, astronomer
6. "There are two ways to choke off free expression. We've already discussed one of them: clamp down on free speech and declare some topics off-limits. That strategy is straightforward enough. The other, more insidious way to limit free expression is to try to change the very language people use" - Dennis Prager, author
7. "Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States." - Noah Webster
8. "The constitutions of most of our States assert, that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves, … or they may act by representatives, freely and equally chosen; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed; that they are entitled to freedom of person, freedom of religion, freedom of property, and freedom of the press." -Thomas Jefferson
9. "In 1942, there were 110,000 Japanese American citizens in good standing, law-abiding people who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. That's all they did wrong. They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their peers no right to due process of any kind. The only right they had: "Right this way" into the internment camps! Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most, their government took them away! And rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re just privileges." - George Carlin
10. "The first article of the Bill of Rights provides that Congress shall make no law respecting freedom of worship or abridging freedom of opinion. There are some among us who seem to feel that this provision goes too far, even for the purpose of preventing tyranny over the mind of man. Of course, there are dangers in religious freedom and freedom of opinion. But to deny these rights is worse than dangerous, it is absolutely fatal to liberty. The external threat to liberty should not drive us into suppressing liberty at home. Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination." - Harry Truman
11. "In respect to political rights, we hold woman to be justly entitled to all we claim for man. We go farther and express our conviction that all political rights which it is expedient for man to exercise, it is equally so for women. All that distinguishes man as an intelligent and accountable being, is equally true of woman; and if that government is only just which governs by the free consent of the governed, there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the exercise of the elective franchise, or a hand in making and administering the laws of the land. Our doctrine is, that “Right is of no sex." - Frederick Douglass
12. "The Bill of Rights is the United States. The United States is the Bill of Rights. Compromise the Bill of Rights and you dissolve the very foundation upon which the Union stands… Nowhere in the Bill of Rights are the words ‘unless inconvenient’ to be found." - A. E. Samaan, historian

[source]

The Woke Plans to Rebuild Notre Dame

From Breakpoint.org (Jan. 5):

The 2019 fire in Notre Dame reminded the world of the importance, the history, and the beauty of this magnificent structure. As we mourned the damage, many hoped the building would be repaired to remind the world of its original purpose. Recently, the cathedral’s reconstruction plans were announced and, unfortunately, the news isn’t good.

Notre Dame is rightly considered one of the most fantastic examples of French Gothic architecture. It took nearly 100 years to build, from 1153 to 1260, and incorporated several architectural innovations. For example, rib vaults and flying buttresses enabled the walls to be opened up for stained glass windows, including three beautiful, enormous rose windows.

The only way to fully understand Gothic architecture is by experiencing it. Despite its dark-sounding name, Gothic cathedrals were built for light. This was to symbolize divine illumination. Vertical lines and soaring ceilings were intended to point thoughts and imaginations upward to God. In fact, as Dr. Glenn Sunshine has pointed out, nearly every aspect of Gothic cathedrals symbolically point to the truths of the Christian faith. And, in the case of Notre Dame, the result is simply jaw-dropping.

For over 500 years, until the French Revolution, Notre Dame stood at the center of French Catholicism. The revolutionaries desecrated the church and destroyed much of the religious art. They beheaded the statues of biblical kings in the mistaken belief that they represented the kings of France. After a brief period in which Notre Dame was reconsecrated as the Temple of Reason, it was used as a storehouse for grain.

Napoleon Bonaparte had the cathedral rededicated and redecorated in the then-popular Neo-Classical style as part of his efforts to restore the Church in France.  After the Napoleonic Wars, the cathedral fell into such a state of disrepair, the French considered demolishing it. It was Victor Hugo’s book Notre Dame de Paris (better known by its English title, The Hunchback of Notre Dame), which, more than anything else, spurred the French to renovate and restore it.

Sculptors, glassmakers, and other craftsmen worked to reconstruct the cathedral using illustrations of it from before the Revolution. Whenever critical information was missing, the work was completed after the spirit and style of the thirteenth century. A taller and more ornate spire replaced the original, which had been removed in 1786.

Historically, the French have demonstrated a commitment to preserve and, when necessary, restore the cathedral in its original spirit and style, with the desecration of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s neo-classical decorative style as the most notable exceptions. (There was also the incident when, after being damaged by gunfire during World War II, some of the medieval glass was replaced by abstract art in the colors of the French flag.)

The spire, the roof, and a considerable part of the interior were destroyed by the fire of 2019. Even before the structure had been stabilized, proposals for restoring the cathedral began pouring in, with many of them offering a modernist vision utterly incompatible with the medieval building. Many breathed a sigh of relief when it was announced that the roof and spire would be rebuilt as they had been.

More recently, however, plans for the interior were released to the public. One Paris architect referred to what was planned as “a politically correct Disneyland.” Mood lighting at head level would obscure the impact of the stained glass. Added light and sound effects would create “emotional spaces,” and “themed chapels” as part of a “discovery trail” that would feature Africa and Asia and end in a chapel entitled “reconciled creation.” An environmental focus, merged with Bible verses in various languages, would be projected on the walls. Modern art murals would be added, the confessionals would be removed, and the altars rearranged so that visitors could more easily experience the newly imagined cathedral.

To say this is a travesty is an understatement. After all, nothing goes out of date faster than the latest taste and fashion. The previously timeless beauty of the cathedral would soon go the way of parachute pants and brutalist architecture. Even worse, the new design would undermine the message of the cathedral itself, which has long proclaimed an integrated set of eternal truths in a way that demonstrated how “the faith given once and for all” remains true and vibrant.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether or not a culture like ours could make much progress in fully restoring a structure like that, given how different the dominant worldviews of the eras are.  It would be a real shame if the eternal truths long attested to by and in this 13th-century cathedral were obliterated, especially if replaced by modern tastes and political correctness. Even more than a real shame, it would be a real loss. [source]

Fears grow that cyber chaos will spark wars as hack attacks become more aggressive

From Washington Times.com (Jan 1):

The nightmare of America under cyberattack is happening now and it is not going to stop anytime soon. Foreign adversaries and criminal gangsters alike are hammering all aspects of society from hospitals to schools to government offices.

In December alone, a ransomware attack on human resources software disrupted operations for some hospitals operated by Ascension Healthcare, the timekeeping system of New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, and the government of Prince George’s County in Maryland, among others.

That ransomware attack was far from December’s worst events, however, as private cybersecurity companies said they saw hackers backed by China, Iran and other countries exploiting a widely used piece of software, the open-source logging platform Apache Log4j.

People have warned of a Pearl Harbor- and 9/11-style cyberattack for decades, but the U.S. has thus far avoided suffering a major surprise attack that costs lives and spread to other realms of society. But considering what happens if a cyberattack causes a war to break out is something professionals in business and government have prepared for.

“I hate to say it, I do think about it, it’s a pretty scary thing, [and] I hope that we never experience a cyberattack that’s considered a declaration of war,” said Charles Carmakal, senior vice president at cybersecurity firm Mandiant. “And I don’t know that we have in the United States, I don’t know that I’ve seen anything that I would say should have been declared as an act of war, but there have been some situations in general, in other parts of the world that have been declared acts of war.”

Mr. Carmakal pointed to a 2017 cyberattack, NotPetya, by Russia against Ukraine as the sort of thing that would be considered an act of war in the U.S. The NotPetya attack leveraged accounting software to infect computers in Ukraine and wreck networks that ultimately did $10 billion of damage globally, according to the Brookings Institution.

The rules for war in cyberspace are less clearly established than in other domains.

National Cyber Director John C. Inglis told the House Oversight and Reform Committee in November that a cyberattack is typically considered an act of war when it achieves the same amount of damage as a kinetic weapon, including things like the “loss of health safety, national security of a significant nature.”

Some cyberattacks have come dangerously close to Mr. Inglis’ generic definition of cyberwarfare.

The Biden administration said in November it had evidence of Iran-backed hackers exploiting vulnerabilities at hospitals. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency alert on the hacks, however, said CISA, the FBI and their partners in the U.K. and Australia determined the hackers were focused on exploiting known vulnerabilities over picking specific targets in the health care and transportation industries.

The Biden administration also has accused Iranians of attempting to interfere in the 2020 elections, particularly aimed at Republican lawmakers, Democratic voters and news outlets. Last month, the Justice Department charged two Iranians with computer fraud and voter intimidation while the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on six Iranian people and one Iranian entity.

Such cyber operations are nothing new for the Iranians, but wading into politics, particularly efforts to influence voters through intimidation beforehand and sowing distrust afterward, is a new tactic for Iran, said Jonathan Couch, senior vice president at risk intelligence company ThreatQuotient.

“I think they’ve learned from the Russians. It’s one of those things where, despite a lot of the rhetoric that goes on, actually hacking elections at scale is an incredibly difficult thing to do just because of how we run our elections and how those things go about,” said Mr. Couch, who formerly served in the Air Force. “One of the things the Russians successfully exploited back in 2016 and now the Iranians are getting involved with it, it’s more what I’ll call ‘influence operations’ to where if I can’t go in and change the votes themselves, let me try to influence the voters to change their vote.”

America has narrowly missed suffering major catastrophes caused by cyber problems in the last year. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas recently told USA Today’s editorial board that a February hack on a water treatment plant in Oldsmar, Florida, “should have gripped our entire country.”

A hacker who sought to change the drinking water’s level of sodium hydroxide, the liquid drain ingredient lye, was prevented from doing so by a plant operator in the town near Tampa.

According to Mr. Mayorkas, the hacker did not have a financial motivation and just wanted to do harm.

The crush of cyberattacks on America has made predictions for the future look grim and caused lawmakers to consider an unusual solution resembling vigilante justice — empowering private companies to legally hack back against attackers.

Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse, Rhode Island Democrat, and Steve Daines, Montana Republican, proposed a hack-back bill directing the Department of Homeland Security to study the benefits and risks of allowing private groups the authority to take offensive action.

“The status quo has failed to protect the American people from cyberattacks. That’s why I’m challenging federal officials to think outside the box and put all options on the table,” Mr. Daines said in a statement to The Washington Times.

Giving private groups the authority to legally fight back is a proposal that may find fans in the private sector and among victims. Mr. Carmakal said he was not familiar with the senators’ proposal but he believed there was an opportunity for the government to entrust a few commercial entities with the ability to take aggressive action against attackers.

He stressed that not anyone should have the legal ability to strike back because not everyone has the knowledge necessary to do so and it could cause a conflict to escalate. [source]

Chinese posed as local Texans online to target rare earth producer

From Washington Times.com (June 29):

China conducted a sophisticated disinformation campaign against a company building a rare earth minerals facility in Texas for the Pentagon, according to the Pentagon and a cybersecurity firm.

The cybersecurity company, Mandiant, disclosed the campaign on Tuesday. It said Chinese actors used social media in a bid to discredit Lynas Rare Earths Ltd., an Australian company, and other rare earth mining firms to undermine the critical supply chain for the elements. The Pentagon has signed an agreement with Lynas, the world’s largest rare earth mining and processing company, to build a Texas plant.

China has aggressively moved to dominate the global market for “rare earth” minerals, which are indispensable to many cutting-edge technological products, including smartphones, flat-screen TVs, medical equipment and water treatment systems. The U.S. and its allies have pressed in recent years to develop alternative sources of supply and production.

Mandiant investigators identified what they said were Chinese agents posing online as concerned local Texans who opposed Lynas’ planned construction of a rare earth processing plant there.

Fake Twitter accounts claimed the Texas plant would cause irreversible environmental damage, Mandiant stated in a blog post report. The fake accounts also stated that the plant would expose residents to radioactive contamination and health risks, including cancer, genetic mutations and deformities in newborns.

The campaign was also conducted on Facebook and used more sophisticated pitches seen in past Chinese online influence operations, Mandiant said.

“We observed accounts post primarily in English, with an additional lesser amount of content in Chinese,” the report said. “Additionally, we observed extremely limited messaging in Malay, and Dragonbridge accounts promoted photos of demonstrations against Lynas that took place in Malaysia sometime between 2012 and 2019, due to controversy surrounding the disposal of radioactive waste produced by its rare earths processing facility in the city of Kuantan.”

“Dragonbridge” is the code name Mandiant gave to those conducting the Chinese disinformation operation.

Chinese Embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu said he had not seen the Mandiant report but suggested it was based on “forces in the world” that seek to fabricate rumors to slander and discredit China.

“China is one of the biggest victims of disinformation,” he said in an email. “China always opposes the creation and dissemination of disinformation. There are some people and forces in the world who are keen to fabricate rumors, slander and discredit China.”

The campaign involved a network of thousands of inauthentic accounts on social media platforms, websites and forums that “promoted various narratives in support of the political interests of the People’s Republic of China (PRC),” Mandiant stated in a report.

The Pentagon confirmed the disinformation operation in a statement Tuesday. It praised the work of Reston, Virginia-based Mandiant in helping to expose the disinformation attempt.

Lynas Rare Earths is working to set up production in the United States, and the Defense Department “has engaged the relevant interagency stakeholders and partner nations to assist in reviewing the matter,” the statement said.

The disinformation operation made false claims about the company’s environmental record and tried to spark protests against the facility, according to Mandiant. The Chinese used similar tactics in opposing a Canadian rare earth mining company called Appia Rare Earths & Uranium Corp. and the American rare earths manufacturing company USA Rare Earth.

The targeting included “negative messaging in response to potential or planned rare earths production activities involving those companies,” the report said.

The Chinese also targeted the Biden administration’s March decision to invoke the Defense Production Act to speed up domestic production of critical minerals and end reliance on Chinese sources for the minerals. [read more]

Just think the Biden regime is worried about domestic and Russian disinformation. When it comes to the ChiComs the regime looks the other way.

Coach Kennedy Shows What Religious Liberty Is

From John Stonestreet on Break Point.org (June 29):

This term of the U.S. Supreme Court has been consequential, to say the least. In addition to the landmark decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the court has now issued a second ruling that protects religious freedom. The first, issued about a week ago, protects religious institutions from being singled out and discriminated against by state-run entities and programs. The 6–3 decision was consistent with previous rulings in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer and Espinoza v. Montana Dept. of Revenue that state programs available to non-religious entities cannot be withheld from religious entities simply because they are religious. Instead, the state bears the burden of proof to demonstrate a compelling state interest in discriminating against religious institutions. It remains to be seen whether state officials have finally gotten the message.

This week, the court handed down their decision on Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, or what’s become known as the “Coach Kennedy Case.” High school football coach Joe Kennedy was fired for praying on the football field after games by school officials who kept (pun intended) “moving the goal posts” about what religious expressions were allowed.

Contrary to various news reports, Kennedy never forced student athletes, coaches, or anyone else to join him. After school officials raised concerns, he even agreed to pray silently by himself. However, he was told that if he insisted on closing his eyes in silent prayer, he must do it somewhere out of sight. Coach Kennedy rightly recognized their demands as a violation of his right to free religious expression and took his case to the Supreme Court with the aid of First Liberty Institute.

On Monday, the court ruled overwhelmingly for Coach Kennedy, on both free speech and free exercise grounds. As Justice Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion:

By its own admission, the District sought to restrict Mr. Kennedy’s actions at least in part because of their religious character. Prohibiting a religious practice was thus the District’s unquestioned “object.” The District explained that it could not allow an on duty employee to engage in religious conduct even though it allowed other on-duty employees to engage in personal secular conduct.

This behavior, Gorsuch concluded, was unacceptable. 

Here, a government entity sought to punish an individual for engaging in a personal religious observance, based on a mistaken view that it has a duty to suppress religious observances even as it allows comparable secular speech. The Constitution neither mandates nor tolerates that kind of discrimination.

Often, religious liberty violations are more symptoms of bureaucratic inertia or ignorance, than of animus. The first few letters sent by school officials to Coach Kennedy asking him to stop praying are not rantings of radical atheists. Officials acknowledged Coach Kennedy was “well-intentioned” and never forced students to participate in his religious observances. Still, they asked him to stop out of fear they would be sued for a First Amendment violation. In the end, they failed to understand the First Amendment and violated it themselves.

This is what happens when ignorance of the law mixes with stubbornness, or, even worse, animus toward religious conviction. When religion is seen as non-essential, religious freedom is limited to “religious” activities like private prayer, church attendance, and personal piety. At the same time, “secular” is wrongfully thought of as “neutral” or “unbiased.” Faith is reduced to a hobby, and a highly idiosyncratic one at that. Spiritually inspired convictions must be kept safely within church, synagogue, and mosque walls, and out of the government and schools.

This, however, is not religious liberty. It is merely “freedom of worship,” what some of the worst tyrannies and their successors falsely claim to be freedom. Thankfully, the court has seen through this muddled thinking and brought clarity to the freedom all Americans have to speak and exercise their religious convictions.

Christians, and those of other faiths, absolutely can stand on a football field and close our eyes in prayer, even if others can see us. Christian educators can cite the Bible as a historical record or a masterclass in philosophy. Christian school kids can host Bible studies after school. Christian workers do have the freedom to not take part in the latest ideological fad that business leaders have latched onto.

I am grateful for our friends at First Liberty, ADF, and elsewhere that defend conscience rights, and for organizations like Gateways to Better Education who help Christian educators know what those rights, in fact, are. I am grateful that the court has stated, again, that being religious is not a crime, and that the state is required to respect the religious freedom of individuals and institutions.

A final lesson for Christians is that we must not become like those who seek to silence us. If the truth is on our side, we’ve no reason to fear. [source]

The reality of One World government

From American Thinker.com (Dec. 18, 2021):

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. . . and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned. . .
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

—William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming," 1919

The rough beast whose hour has come round at last is the replacement of America's constitutional republic with global governance.  A critical mass of the country's public servants, corporate heads and boards, academics, think tanks, religious leaders, and financial influencers has intellectually accepted and promoted the loss of America as a sovereign nation.  From one of America's best-known families:

"Some even believe we [Rockefeller family] are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure — One World, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it. "

—David Rockefeller, Memoirs, 2002.

"We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the work is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a World Government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."

—David Rockefeller to the Trilateral Commission, 1991.

So David Rockefeller pleads guilty.  The world should be governed by Man (the intellectual elite) and specifically by Man in the role of world banker (the enforcement mechanism — debt that can never be repaid).  America's debt is $31.4 trillion, as just agreed to by the United States Congress.  Service on this debt is astronomical and virtually unsustainable if interest rates rise.

The alternative to the elite is God-centered governance, not Man-centered, in line with Judeo-Christian Moral Law.  This is the model that the American Constitutional Republic represents.

Elite international banking has partially operated, since WWII, through the auspices of many organizations and agencies of the United Nations.  The U.N. also includes international courts and bureaucracies that would replace our own.

The intellectual elite has devised a seemingly impenetrable web of structures with such elaborate interconnections, including tax-exempt foundations and secret societies, that no one can unravel the whole scheme.  The Bank for International Settlements (the "bank of banks"), the World Bank, the World Conservation Bank, the World Wilderness Land Inventory Trust, the International Monetary Fund, the U.N. Man and Biosphere Programme (into which we have placed our most precious national parks and landmarks), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (think minimum global tax), are operating as quasi-world government whether Americans are prepared to concede the point or not.

Should there be any doubt that Global Governance has arrived, notice the new statue in front of the visitor's center at the United Nations headquarters in New York City called "The Guardian for International Peace and Security."  A gaze pitiless as the sun.

America's answer to David Rockefeller is simple: the best for most Americans is embodied in the structure of our national rule of law — Positive Law that includes state constitutions, our federal Constitution, and statutes passed by legislative bodies as representatives of the American people; Natural Law that includes unalienable rights from God; Unwritten Law that represents our culture and courtesies; and Moral Law, the highest law of our land, that tells us what is "right" and what is "wrong" as a reflection of divine tenets.

Our constitutional system needs to be preserved, protected, and defended, lest it disappear into the "abyss of the regretted" that has plagued mankind forever.  All American public servants take an oath to this effect.

The positive news is that it is not too late.  Yeats was anguished that the same lesson was not learned before WWI.  The central banks of that era funded both sides of a hideous bloodbath to make money.  It was so horrific that faith was lost.  We have another chance, now, if faith can be retrieved.  Yeats is hoping we are paying attention.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

[source]

I hope it is not too late. Then again the Bible says otherwise.

Other articles on the New World Order:

• Why the "New World Order" Is Impossible to Implement without Creating Mass Chaos
• The Oligarchy: Our Brave New World
• Op-ed: A new world order is emerging — and the world is not ready for it
• The consequences of a 'New World Order' could be HUGE

High court allows football coach’s prayer as private religious expression

From Washington Times.com (June 27):

The Supreme Court ruled Monday in favor of a public high school football coach who was fired after he prayed at the 50-yard line immediately after games, saying the government can’t punish someone for what a majority of justices held was personal, private religious expression.

The 6-3 ruling may put the final nail in the “Lemon” test, a decades-old precedent that offered a strict, albeit confusing, interpretation of the First Amendment’s balance between free exercise of faith and government entanglement with religion.

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said Joseph Kennedy, who coached at a school in Bremerton, Washington, proved his postgame prayer was private and no students were compelled to join him — indeed, on the three occasions that led to his firing, none did.

The school district still ousted him. It said Mr. Kennedy’s role as an employee and the public setting drifted too far into state sponsorship of religion, making some students and parents uncomfortable.

Justice Gorsuch said that wasn’t a good enough reason to trump Mr. Kennedy’s First Amendment rights.

“The Constitution and the best of our traditions counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views alike,” he wrote for the majority.

Justice Gorsuch was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Clarence Thomas, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing in a dissent joined by fellow liberal Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Justice Elena Kagan, argued that the coach invited players to pray with him, that many of his prayers right after the game attracted significant crowds and that his conduct was neither personal nor silent, but rather an “official-led prayer.”

She said the coach was fired after a back-and-forth with the school district over Mr. Kennedy’s behavior, which initially involved inviting student-athletes to join him, and the school was justified in seeing the coach’s actions as a “severe disruption” at events.

“This decision does a disservice to schools and the young citizens they serve, as well as to our nation’s longstanding commitment to the separation of church and state,” Justice Sotomayor wrote.

She argued that the court’s decision effectively overrules Lemon v. Kurtzman, a 1971 case that set out a complicated test to determine whether and when the government was unlawfully endorsing or

encouraging a particular faith or religion. The Lemon test, as it became known, said a government’s action must have a nonreligious purpose and its effect must not promote or inhibit religion, nor constitute “excessive government engagement with religion.”

Justice Gorsuch, in the majority opinion, said the high court “long ago abandoned Lemon and its endorsement test offshoot” because of confusion and inconsistency.

“The court has explained that these tests ‘invited chaos’ in lower courts, led to ‘differing results’ in materially identical cases, and created a ‘minefield’ for legislators,” he wrote.  [read more]

Good.

WTH? Biden Regime Signs $137 Million Deal with GERMAN Company to Make COVID Test Strips — Will Start Producing in Late 2024 at the Earliest

From The Gateway Pundit.com (Dec. 31, 2021):

The Biden regime struck a deal with a German Company to build a factory in Wisconsin to produce COVID test strips. The plant will not be up and running until 2024 at the earliest.

The regime is obviously planning on pushing the COVID panic porn well into 2024 and beyond.
It’s a great way to control the rubes.

The Daily Mail reported:

The Biden administration struck a $137 million deal to build a new factory in the U.S. to ramp up production of COVID-19 testing kits – but the new facility won’t be completed until late 2024 at the earliest.

MilliporeSigma, a brand formed by Germany’s Merck KGaA, will build a new factory in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the Defense Department announced as the U.S. hit a high record of 489,267 COVID cases on Wednesday

While the contract gives the company three years to complete the facility, it is not immediately clear when it will ramp up to full production, which is expected to pump out 83.3 million tests per month.

‘Construction is expected to begin the second half of 2022 and initial planning and preparatory work is already underway,’ a MilliporeSigma spokesperson told DailyMail.com. ‘We estimate that the facility will be capable of providing lateral flow membranes in the latter part of 2024.’

The individual said that the production of lateral flow membrane is ‘critical for rapid diagnostic tests’ that will not only help with COVID-19 detection, but also with ‘any future public health emergencies.’

The deal has fueled speculation that the administration is predicting high rates of testing capabilities for coronavirus detection will still be needed several years down the line.

[source]

Couldn’t find an American company to make the strips? Hmmm. Well, I guess it is better than a Chinese government owned company.

SELLIN EXCLUSIVE: Anthony Fauci Directly Funds Research by Chinese Military Scientists

From The Gateway Pundit.com (Dec. 13, 2021):

Research grant number R01AI098775 “RBD recombinant protein-based SARS vaccine for biodefense” amounting to over $1 million per year was awarded by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to Professor Peter Hotez of Baylor College of Medicine as the Project Leader.

One of the two other Principal Investigators on the project is Shibo Jiang, who lists two affiliations related to grant R01AI098775:

• Laboratory of Viral Immunology, Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute, New York Blood Center, New York, NY, USA
• Key Laboratory of Medical Molecular Virology of Ministries of Education and Health, Shanghai Medical College and Institute of Medical Microbiology, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

Shibo Jiang’s connections with China’s People’s Liberation Army have been exhaustively detailed in Gateway Pundit articles, here, here and here.

Briefly, Shibo Jiang obtained his MS and MD degrees from the People’s Liberation Army’s First Military Medical University and the Fourth Military Medical University, respectively.

During his over 20 years working in the United States, Shibo Jiang developed an extensive network of collaborative research with other U.S. virus research laboratories and received more than $17 million in U.S. research grants, the vast majority coming from Fauci’s NIAID.

During that entire period, Shibo Jiang actively collaborated with People’s Liberation Army laboratories, while simultaneously inviting into his U.S. laboratory and training scientists linked to the Chinese military.

Yusen Zhou, from the People’s Liberation Army’s State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity in Beijing, was Shibo Jiang’s long-time research collaborator and Shibo Jiang’s key link to the People’s Liberation Army’s research on coronaviruses.

With Shibo Jiang as the conduit, Fauci’s R01AI098775 grant funneled U.S. taxpayer money to support the research of multiple Chinese scientists with connections to the People’s Liberation Army.

Two of the publications arising from grant number R01AI098775 are worth noting, both dealing with coronaviruses and, strangely, in neither of which the Project Leader Peter Hotez participated.

That is, both studies were entirely designed and conducted by Chinese scientists.

1. Wanbo Tai, Guangyu Zhao, Shihun Sun, Yan Guo, Yufei Wang, Xinrong Tao, Chien-Te K Tseng, Fang Li, Shibo Jiang, Lanying Du, Yusen Zhou. A recombinant receptor-binding domain of MERS-CoV in trimeric form protects human dipeptidyl peptidase 4 (hDPP4) transgenic mice from MERS-CoV infection. Virology. 2016 Dec; 499:375-382.
2. Lei-Ping Zeng, Xing-Yi Ge, Cheng Peng, Wanbo Tai, Shibo Jiang, Lanying Du, Zheng-Li Shi. Cross-neutralization of SARS coronavirus-specific antibodies against bat SARS-like coronaviruses. Sci China Life Sci. 2017 Dec; 60(12):1399-1402.

In article #1, seven of the eleven authors (Wanbo Tai, Guangyu Zhao, Shihun Sun, Yan Guo, Yufei Wang, Lanying Du, Yusen Zhou) have connections to the Academy of Military Medical Sciences in Beijing. Lanying Du, the wife of Yusen Zhou, was recruited by and worked with Shibo Jiang at the Lindsley F. Kimball Research Institute in New York.

In article #2, Wanbo Tai hides his affiliation with the Academy of Military Medical Sciences in Beijing. The last author is Zheng-Li Shi, the “Bat Woman” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology offering a link between the authors and the origin of COVID-19. [source]

Glad he’s retiring. The sooner the better.

More articles on him and his NIAID organization:

• Fauci’s NIAID Spent Nearly $500,000 ‘to Turn Monkeys Transgender’
• “Potential Extinction”: 48 Top Global Scientists Sign Declaration – Demand Ban on Fauci’s “Gain of Function” Research

Forced Labor: The Dark Side of Feel-Good Electric Vehicles

From Liberty Nation.com (June 27):

The far left’s push for green energy regardless of the financial or humanitarian cost has long been a topic deemed unworthy of mention to those with “higher goals” to be achieved. A sustainable planet that delivers climate solutions and environmental justice is at the world’s fingertips, and all you need to do to fight $5-a-gallon gasoline is to buy a $50,000 electric vehicle (EV). Unfortunately, it turns out the typical electric car is not great for the environment – or humanity.

Blood Batteries

The New York Times recently published a bombshell report that found Chinese producers of raw materials for EV batteries are using forced labor. In one instance, mining juggernaut Xinjiang Nonferrous Metal Industry employs hundreds of Uyghurs as part of a work transfer initiative. The company manufactures metals and minerals, including copper, lithium, and nickel, that have been exported to the US, UK, Germany, Japan, and India. These are crucial components for EV batteries that have exploded in value over the last couple of years.

Prior to starting employment, internment camp detainees were forced to listen to lectures on “eradicating religious extremism” and turn into obedient workers who “embraced their Chinese nationhood.” The newspaper reported:

“Inductees for one company unit underwent six months of training, including military-style drills and ideological training. They were encouraged to speak out against religious extremism, oppose ‘two-faced individuals’ — a term for those who privately oppose Chinese government policies — and write a letter to their hometown elders expressing gratitude to the Communist Party and the company, according to the company’s social media account. Trainees faced strict assessments, with ‘morality’ and rule compliance accounting for half of their score. Those who scored well earned better pay, while students and teachers who violated rules were punished or fined.”

China currently creates three-quarters of the planet’s lithium-ion batteries, and nearly all the metals required to produce them are processed in the world’s second-largest economy. Because a considerable amount of the material is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Argentina, the central government has relied on its own western province’s mineral inventories to boost domestic stocks.

Multiple industries, including apparel, food, and renewable energy, have supply chain links to Xinjiang. The newspaper noted that thousands of companies worldwide might have some type of connection to Xinjiang in their supply chains. This could prove to be challenging as the US government is set to implement the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a piece of legislation that prohibits goods produced with forced labor in the Chinese province from entering the country unless businesses can prove their products were not created in this manner.

Beijing has reportedly confirmed that the government is maintaining a program that transfers Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities from the southern region of the province to the north to work in industrial positions. Millions of the Muslim minority residing in the Xinjiang province are presently confined to mass re-education camps, where there have been reports of sexual abuse and torture. However, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) insists that it doesn’t enslave or imprison Uyghurs, calling it “the lie of the century” and a “huge lie made up by anti-China forces to denigrate China.”

This is not the first time the EV sector has had tragic connections to nations with human rights abuses. The Democratic Republic of Congo maintains the world’s largest cobalt deposit that is mined through industrial and artisanal practices. The latter does not include any safety protocols or labor laws for the roughly 200,000 miners, including 40,000 children. The workers often dig with their hands and are not provided masks or gloves. Beijing imports tons of cobalt from the Congo in exchange for billions of dollars in investment in local infrastructure and schools, although corrupt government officials make it unclear if the funds achieve the desired result.

US officials have expressed concern over these reports in recent years. “People are being enslaved in part of the world in order to get the resources that we seem to want to be out of sight, out of mind, and we just say, ‘Well, we have an electric vehicle,'” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) told the National Press Club last year.

Rep. Thomas Suozzi (D-NY) was more forthright in an interview with The Times, sending the message that “it’s too damn bad” if prices go up by banning products from Xinjiang. “We can’t continue to do business with people that are violating basic human rights,” he said.

In April, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) urged automaker Volkswagen to provide more information on its decision to seek partnerships with two Chinese companies that have records of environmental destruction and alleged human rights violations, including human trafficking and forced labor. “As you may know, Huayou has been credibly implicated in the forced labor and human trafficking of child laborers in its cobalt mines in Democratic Republic of Congo,” Rubio wrote in his letter to the European company. “Meanwhile, Tsingshan operates lithium and nickel mines in Indonesia, which require the destruction of the rainforest ecosystem, and is considered a major risk to biodiversity.”

Considering the increased number of entrants in the EV realm and raw material costs for electric vehicles doubling since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, experts doubt anything will change.

The Economics of Forced Labor

The White House is stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, it wishes to accelerate green energy production and adoption. On the other, the swelling costs of the domestic output and non-Chinese imports can make solar panels and electric cars more expensive and, therefore, less prevalent. It has become a trade-off between China’s low-cost parts and blatant humanitarian violations. For now, it is a juggling act between Democrats who want to expand renewable energy prevalence and Republicans who advocate for the free market.

With the growing number of transgressions and challenges in China, multi-national corporations might continue to reconsider their presence in the country. Over the last few years, Beijing has erected multiple hurdles for foreign companies, aside from market liberalization: COVID Zero, human rights abuses, trade strife, the possibility of invading Taiwan, and intensifying state power. Where is the incentive to do business in China, especially with the yuan appreciating in value and rising wage rates? Plus, Corporate America was quick to abandon Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, so it seems inevitable that companies will need to choose to emulate this strategy with China in the future.

In the end, US corporations, from apparel to solar, will need to make one of three decisions: repatriate capital and investment, shift supply chains to other Asian markets (Vietnam, the Philippines, and Thailand), or maintain the status quo in China and turn a blind eye to the degradation of mankind. [source]

More stories on electric cars:

• Electric Car Castrates Man on Biden’s Watch
• Electric Cars Are Not “Zero-Emission Vehicles”
• Millions of Electric Car Batteries Retiring by 2030, Are We Ready To Deal With What Could Be Ticking Time Bombs?

The Decline and Fall of Gorbachev and the Soviet State

From Yuri N. Maltsev on Mises.org (Aug. 30):

Lenin's slogan, "Marxism is Almighty Because It Is True," was displayed practically everywhere in the former Soviet Union. My first encounter with Karl Marx came in the first grade of elementary school in the city of Kazan on the banks of the great Volga River. His picture was printed on the first page of the first textbook I opened. "Dedushka Marx" (Grandfather Marx), said the teacher pointing to the picture. I was thrilled, for both of my grandfathers died in Stalin's purges in the 1930s. I ran home to my grandma to tell her she was wrong. "I have a grandpa," I said, and with his huge beard and smiling eyes, "he looks like Father Frost" (the Soviet/atheist version of Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of Russia).

Growing up in the Soviet Union, such early confusions are soon cleared up, for studies in Marxism were an unavoidable experience for everyone irrespective of age, class, social position, or nationality. Even the convicts in prison, including those on death row, studied the "Shining Heights" of the "great liberating teacher." The works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin were published in the USSR in 173 languages with a total output of 480 million copies. Many of them were exported. I once met an Indian translator hired by the Political Publishing House to translate 50 volumes of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels into Malayalam. He complained the project was stalled because the Soviet propaganda officers could not find another Malayalam translator to cross check his work.

In the Soviet Union, Marxism was not thought to be just an economic theory. It pretended to be the universal explanation of nature, life, and society.1 It was also a deadly weapon to be wielded against personal enemies. As in the case of Nikolai Vavilov who was starved to death for violating Marxism because he adhered to the science of genetics, "a false science invented by the Catholic monk, Mendel." In the name of Marxism, the death toll reached 100 million; the rivers of blood flowed from Russia to Kampuchea, from China to Czechoslovakia.

Hatred was the chief motivator of the socialist revolutionaries and their followers. Lenin regarded politics as a branch of pest control; the aim of his operations was the extermination of cockroaches and bloodsucking spiders, the myriad persons who stood in the way of his political ambitions. Yet Western hagiographers have glossed over this atrocious ruthlessness of Marxists, as historian Richard Pipes has documented.

One of the common denominators between Leninists and government interventionists in the West is the belief that the problems of monopoly are the problems of ownership: only private monopolies acting out of greed are harmful. These institutions are suppressing scientific and technical progress, polluting the environment, and engaging in other conspiracies against public well-being. Government monopolies, however, were believed to be ethical and upright; they substituted the "greed" of the profit motive with a "societal interest." Yet group bureaucrats who manage and operate the public sector are no less self-interested than those who manage and operate private business. One important difference exists, though: unlike private entrepreneurs, they are not financially responsible for their actions and they operate without institutional constraints of cost control that private property and competition induces. The enlightened minds of planners and technocrats cannot overcome the problem of economic calculation without market signals.

The failure of socialism in Russia, and the enormous suffering and hardship of people in all socialist countries, is a powerful warning against socialism, statism, and interventionism in the West. "We should all be thankful to the Soviets," says Paul Craig Roberts, "because they have proved conclusively that socialism doesn't work. No one can say they didn't have enough power or enough bureaucracy or enough planners or they didn't go far enough."

In contrast to the West, where Marxist tenets were doctrines of a counterreligion, few in the Soviet Union truly believed in the official ideology: not the state managers, not the professors, not the journalists.3 It was not necessary that they do so, for Marxism was a means of political rent seeking and of coercive control, not a body of ideas held to by honest men.

The Soviet Union is now gone, as are the huge statues of Marx and Lenin that littered the East, and the good reputation of their systems of thought. This collection of articles is the Requiem for Marx and the social and economic systems created in his name. As with any funeral service, we look back on the life of Marxian ideas. But unlike the ordinary funeral, we are not looking back fondly, for Marxism is as good an example of the maxim that "ideas have consequences" as can be found. It does not speak well of the intellectual class that no body of ideas attracted a greater following in this century.

It is beyond the capacity of economic analysis to calculate the opportunity costs of the socialist experiment in Russia. But the human death toll from Stalin's collectivization, purges, and Gulags is estimated by Russian historian Roy Medvedev at forty-one million people. A popular Russian aphorism says: "The only lesson of history is that it does not teach us anything."

"Despite the recent collapse of socialism and communism in Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe, socialism is alive and growing," Gary Becker has said. It presents a mortal danger to economic freedom and the quality of life, and will for generations to come.

The scholars contributing to this volume write in the economic and historical tradition of the Austrian school, founded by Carl Menger with his book Principles of Economics (1875). The tradition emphasizes a deductive method, the role of choice and uncertainty in economic affairs, the power of market prices to coordinate economic activity, and the essentiality of private property for forming the basis of rational calculation. The Austrian school is also the historical bête noire of the Marxian school. Long before any other school came around to understanding the deep flaws in the Marxian approach, the Austrians had devoted an enormous amount of intellectual power to exposing its fallacies and dangers. Carl Menger refuted the labor theory of value, his student Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk demolished Marx's views of capital, F.A. Hayek showed the incompatibility between socialism and political freedom, and Ludwig von Mises attacked the core of socialist economic theory.

It was Mises's criticism that has proven to be the most prescient. In his 1920 essay "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth," he argued that the socialist economy couldn't properly be called an "economy" at all, since the system provides no means for rationally allocating resources. It abolishes private property in capital goods, thereby eliminating the markets that produce prices with which to calculate profit and loss. The absence of rational economic calculation, and the institutional structures that undergird it, prevents any realistic assessment of the proper uses and opportunity costs and resource allocation options. "As soon as one gives up the conception of a freely established monetary price for goods of a higher order," Mises wrote, "rational production becomes completely impossible." The central planners of an industrial economy will find themselves in a perpetual state of confusion and ignorance, "groping in the dark."

"One may anticipate the nature of the future socialist society," he said seventy years before the rest of the world was to become convinced. "There will be hundreds and thousands of factories in operation. Very few of these will be producing wares ready for use; in the majority of cases what will be manufactured will be unfinished goods and production goods… Every good will go through a whole series of stages before it is ready for use. In the ceaseless toil and moil of this process, however, the administration will be without any means of testing their bearings."

From my life and study in Moscow, I can attest to the truth of this prediction. In an economy, nearly every consumption good requires several stages of production. The more natural resources used and the more complex the technology involved, the more stages of production are required. Yet lacking an ability to see a production process through to ends that consumers desire, Soviet socialism produced only military hardware, useless goods, goods to make other goods, while consumers were deprived of bare essentials.

In the late 1980s, when glasnost at last permitted Soviet economists to speak out, they confirmed the death sentence that Mises had pronounced. As Martin Malia put it, "through the voices of Nikolay Shmelev, Gavriil Popov, Vasiliy Selyunin, Grigory Khanin, Larisa Piyasheva, Mikhail Berger, and subsequently Grigoriy Yavlinksy and Yegor Gaidar, they offered us a portrait of the Soviet that was in full accord with the evaluations of … Ludwig von Mises, whose book contains hardly a single figure and not a word about GNP." This powerful confirmation, Malia points out, led to "methodological smuta" ("Time of Troubles" in Russian) in Western economics.

A common mistake Western observers made was to think the Soviet Union's fundamental problem was a lack of democracy. They completely overlooked that the institutional structure of the political system cannot overcome the problem inherent in an economic system with no means of rational calculation. The Soviet Union had a number of leaders who promised political reform, but none was able to put bread on the table. In fact, the primary problem in the Soviet Union was socialism, and it is still far from being dismantled in the nations that once made up that evil empire.

The present "capitalist revolution" in Russia was best described by Russian publicist Viktor Kopin: it is a "quasi-democratic society with a quasi-market of quasi-legality and quasi-morality. The predominant conclusion out of this is that freedom leads to the destruction of spirituality, crime, pauperization of the masses, and the emergence of a class of fat cats."

The decades-long effort to eliminate markets destroyed the work ethic, the mass misallocation of resources through centralized investment, the demolition of the base for private capital accumulation, distorted means of economic calculation, and technology so obsolete that the capital value of industrial enterprises is zero or negative. Most heavy industries were built during Stalin's Industrialization Program in the 1930s and have not been updated since. A huge part of Russian industrial stock is as productive as an industrial-history museum.

The crisis in socialist agriculture goes back to the 1920s and '30s, when millions of the most productive peasant households were branded as "kulaks," and exiled to Siberia. Most of them could not survive the hardships and purges and perished there. Agriculture still has not recovered from this collectivization and blanket nationalization of property that turned owners into prison laborers. At the beginning of the century, Russia exported wheat, rye, barley, and oats to the world market. Today Russia is the world's largest importer of grain.

Russia's consumer prices index registered the inflation rate to be 1,240 percent in 1992, instead of the promised 100 percent. Even as the chairman of the Russian central bank blamed the government for not pumping enough liquidity into the system, Russia's printing presses have not been able to keep up with demand. Credit markets remain centrally controlled, and serious monetary reform is nowhere in sight.

Larisa Piyasheva — the only visible economist close to the Austrian school in present-day Russia — believes that total privatization alone will not solve all the problems, but without it, there is no hope. She was fired by Yeltsin's government due to ''budget cuts."

If the present looks bleak, the recent history of the Soviet Union remains widely misunderstood. No one figure represents the confusion better than Mikhail Gorbachev. In the West, he was and is considered the great reformer — witness the title of Princeton Professor Stephen Cohen's New York Times op-ed, "Gorbachev the Great." If Gorbachev was a reformer, he was hardly the first Soviet politician to use so-called reforms to maintain power. Lenin was a reformer too, and he resorted to extraordinary means to save communism. As a result of Lenin's efforts to impose real utopian socialism — not the bureaucratized model that existed until recently — the entire population was dying out. Had he continued on that course, he would not have had any subjects to rule. Then he initiated the New Economic Policy, which allowed markets and private property. [read more]

I never had a Gorbasism.

IRS wants its cut from looters and other thieves

From American Thinker.com (Dec. 31, 2021):

The Internal Revenue Service realizes the rampant crime wave in Democrat-run cities is an opportunity for the tax man.  And Fifth Amendment protection from self-incrimination apparently doesn't apply to filing income tax returns, the IRS seems to believe.

Patrick Reilly of the New York Post reports:

Steal any property or deal any drugs this year? Well, the IRS wants it reported as taxable income. (snip)

"If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless you return it to its rightful owner in the same year," the IRS told sticky-fingered Americans.

The agency also reminded those who've pocketed any by cash selling narcotics —  or through any number of unspecified "illegal activities" — to report their earnings.

"Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Schedule 1 (Form 1040), line 8z, or on Schedule C (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity," the bureau said.

Reilly quips:

The IRS did not say whether career thieves could deduct work expenses such as ski masks, crowbars and getaway vans on their tax forms. [source]

I guess income is income even if it’s from immoral means.

Other IRS news:

• EXCLUSIVE: IRS Is Targeting Christians, Prominent Pastor Tells Starnes
• IRS still paying pandemic benefits to dead people: Audit
• IRS unmasked: Away from politics, America's tax agency has lots of warts, and ammunition
  
• IG announces audit of IRS employees to find tax cheats within workforce
  

Biden's War against Fossil Fuels Is a War against Ordinary People

Commentary From Mark Hendrickson on  Mises.org (Dec. 27, 2021):

A few months ago, I wrote about President Biden’s anti–fossil fuel policies. Among other steps designed to restrict domestic production of oil and natural gas, the president canceled completion of the Keystone XL pipeline, banned drilling for oil in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, and greatly curtailed the issuance of leases for companies to develop fossil fuel resources underneath public lands and waters.

Since then, the prices of gasoline, oil, and natural gas have risen smartly. As noted by one source, the last time natural gas prices were this high, “One-third of American households already had difficulty … adequately heating and cooling their homes—and one-fifth of households had to reduce or forego food, medicine and other necessities to pay energy bills.” Bank of America is predicting that the price of a barrel of oil may rise to $120 this winter, inflicting additional hardships on the poorest Americans.

Globally, many countries are already in the midst of a full-blown energy crisis. There are critical shortages of fossil fuels at a time when energy from so-called renewable sources (more accurately, “intermittent” energy sources) have fallen far short of expectations. In Brazil, China, India, Europe, and other countries, energy shortages have led to factories cutting production, blackouts in which traffic lights are inoperative, nonfunctioning elevators in high-rise apartment buildings, vital ventilation systems not working in hospitals, etc. Britain is facing the possibility of more than ten thousand deaths this winter due to cold weather in homes where families can’t pay the elevated energy prices that would provide adequate heat.

Surely, with so many people at home and around the world needing more energy so badly, the Biden administration would ease off its aggressive restrictions on fossil fuel production here in the United States, wouldn’t it? Alas, no. Instead, Team Biden has doubled down on its antienergy policies.

Examples:

Team Biden left the recent United Nations climate gathering in Glasgow pleased that a plan has been put into place for the world’s major banks to restrict investment in companies that produce fossil fuels. The president also designated 1.7 million acres of federal land in Utah as a “national monument,” thereby putting that acreage off-limits to oil and gas exploration. The administration also is reportedly considering the possible shutdown of another major pipeline, the Enbridge 5, which moves a half million barrels of oil per day through Canada and Michigan. Biden’s recent nominee to be the country’s next comptroller of the currency, Saule Omarova, is on record as stating, “[W]e want [America’s small oil and gas companies] to go bankrupt.”

Perhaps most egregious of all, when asked by a Bloomberg interviewer what her plan was “to increase oil production in America,” Biden’s energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, responded with a belly laugh. She then evaded the question by saying that she didn’t have a magic wand to make the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries increase production. (Of course, she doesn’t. She is the secretary of energy for the United States, not for foreign countries.) In other words, Granholm has no intention to undo the Biden-imposed impediments to domestic oil production.

Cynically, the president called for the Federal Trade Commission to investigate oil companies that have raised prices. Well, of course oil companies have raised prices. That is what happens in a market when supply doesn’t meet demand. And what is a major reason why supply isn’t meeting demand? The president’s own antiproduction policies.

Even more cynically, the only action the president has taken to try to lower domestic gasoline prices has been to dip into our national Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That stockpile was created to be available in the case of a national emergency. A “national emergency” would be something like war or weather or terror-related ruptures of vital fuel pipelines. The “emergency” that the president has today is his own plummeting popularity polls.

President Biden’s insistence on squelching fossil fuel production before intermittent sources are sufficient to fill the gap is unconscionable. If the coming winter is harsh, the resulting hardships suffered by Americans and others around the world will be a humanitarian crisis that could have been avoided by a rational and compassionate energy policy. [source]

Biden and his regime doesn’t care about the ordinary people. The Left elites know what’s best for the masses even it hurts the masses.

Other articles about the Demented One’s war against fossil fuel:

• Why the Utes Opposed Biden's Plans to Limit Oil Drilling
• Top US oil exec warns Biden's energy policies are really 'Green New Deal lite'
• Can We Really Divest from Fossil Fuels without Hurting the Economy?

Ghislaine Maxwell Touted Her Connection to Bill Clinton, How She Helped Launch His Global Initiative

From Resist the Mainstream.org (June 20):

Ghislaine Maxwell cited her relationship with former President Bill Clinton as a reason to lessen her sentence for trafficking underage girls for her former partner Jeffrey Epstein.

Maxwell referenced her work with Clinton’s philanthropic efforts, specifically her efforts in launching the Clinton Global Initiative, as proof that she has a “desire to do good in the world,” and therefore she should only be sentenced to four years in jail.

Epstein’s former partner was found guilty of trafficking and sexually abusing underage girls last December and will be sentenced on Monday.

Maxwell not only claimed that she had received death threats in prison, but had also been told by her guards that “there was concern she could be shot by a sniper,” the alleged explanation for why she was being held in such high security conditions.

Her 77-page filing claims that prosecutors made her a scapegoat for Epstein, who hung himself in 2019 while awaiting trial. It also references “history of philanthropy, charitable work, and helping others, namely her work with the Clinton Global Initiative.”

“Ms. Maxwell has always worked hard,” the filing says. “Her many educational, occupational, and avocational accomplishments include becoming an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), a helicopter pilot, a submersible pilot, a banker; partnering with the Cleveland Clinic to establish a telemedicine platform to enable people in remote areas to obtain quality medical treatment; helping develop the Clinton Global Initiative; and supporting a variety non-profit and charitable organizations.”

It also claims that she is not an “heiress, villain, or vapid socialite,” saying instead that “she has energy, drive, commitment, a strong work ethic, and desire to do good in the world.”

“She has supported friends and family through tough times and personal crisis and currently is assisting women in her unit at the MDC. She has endeavored to contribute to society….(by) helping launch the Clinton Global Initiative.”

The new information puts scrutiny on the relationship between Maxwell, Clinton and Epstein. Photographs taken in 2002 show Clinton and Maxwell on the stairs of the “Lolita Express,” Epstein’s private plane. The relationship between Clinton, Maxwell and Epstein can be traced back to 1990 at a minimum when the three were photographed at the White House together.

Clinton has denied any wrongdoing and claimed that he never visited Epstein’s Caribbean island. [source]

I wonder what dirty laundry she has on Clinton.

More articles on Maxwell:

• Ghislaine Maxwell abruptly put on suicide watch without psychological evaluation, attorney says
• The Strange Case of Ghislaine Maxwell

EXCLUSIVE: MTG Authors Bill to Designate Radical Abortion Groups as Domestic Terrorists, Citing a Long List of Recent Attacks.

From The National Pulse.com (June 23):

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has authored a bill which would designate radical anti-life, pro-mass abortion groups Jane’s Revenge and Ruth Sent Us as domestic terror factions, following a spate of vicious attacks on pro-life groups as well as the recent attempted murder of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The bill follows a letter obtained by the Daily Wire which revealed growing support for the move amongst Republicans in the United States Congress.

Seen first by The National Pulse, the bill is believed to count Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) and Andy Harris (R-MD) as cosponsors, and states: “This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Protecting Mothers and Babies from Terrorism Act.”

A spokesman for the Congresswoman told The National Pulse: “The Democrats’ war on women is real and it is now being waged with firebombs. I am proud to introduce this legislation to hold these groups accountable for their crimes.”

The substance of the bill alleges a litany of attacks from individuals connected with the groups. Twenty-one such cases feature in the Georgia Congresswoman’s bill, including:

1. On May 8, 2022, the headquarters of Wisconsin Family Action, a pregnancy center in Madison, Wisconsin, was set on fire and left with graffiti saying, ‘‘If abortions aren’t safe then you aren’t either’’, with ‘‘Jane’s Revenge’’ claiming responsibility for the attack and for several other similar attacks across the country;
2. On May 25, 2022, Next Step Pregnancy Center in Lynnwood, Washington, was vandalized and graffitied;
3. On May 22, 2022, St. Michael’s Parish in Olympia, Washington, was vandalized with the words ‘‘Abort the church’’ spray-painted on the wall, with ‘‘Jane’s Revenge’’ claiming responsibility;
4. In May 2022, graffiti saying, ‘‘Not a Clinic’’ and ‘‘From Jane’’ was found at Dove Medical Clinic in Eugene, Oregon;
5. In May 2022, the offices of Oregon Right to Life in Keizer, Oregon, were set on fire;
6. In May 2022, the windows of Southeast Portland Pregnancy Resource Center in Portland, Oregon, were smashed and a hateful message was spray-painted on the wall;
7. On June 10, 2022, a fire was set to Gresham Pregnancy Resource Center in Gresham, Oregon;
8. In June 2022, graffiti saying, ‘‘Jane’s Revenge’’ was found on the walls of Options360 Women’s Clinic in Vancouver, Washington;
9. On June 2, 2022, vandalism occurred at Community Pregnancy Center in Anchorage, Alaska;
10. On May 3, 2022, Sacred Heart of Mary Parish in Boulder, Colorado, was attacked with graffiti and windows were smashed;
11. On May 7, 2022, St. John XXIII Parish in Fort Collins, Colorado, was attacked with graffiti and windows were smashed;
12. On the weekend of May 7, 2022, Woman to Woman Resource Center and Loreto House in Denton, Texas, were vandalized and graffitied;
13. On May 3, 2022, Trotter House, a pregnancy center in Austin, Texas, was attacked and vandalized;
14. In May 2022, Holy Rosary Catholic Church in Houston, Texas, was graffitied;
15. In May 2022, South Broward Pregnancy Center in Hollywood, Florida, was sprayed with graffiti including, ‘‘Janes revenge’’ with an anarchist symbol;
16. In June 2022, Mountain Area Pregnancy Services in Asheville, North Carolina, had its windows smashed in with graffiti spray-painted on the walls;
17. In June 2022, CompassCare, a pregnancy center in Amherst, New York, sustained major fire damage, broken windows, and graffiti saying, ‘‘Jane was here’’;
18. On June 11, 2022, Hope Pregnancy Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, sustained smashed glass doors and windows and vandalism;
19. On June 3, 2022, Capitol Hill Pregnancy Center in Washington, D.C., was vandalized with graffiti saying, ‘‘Jane says revenge’’;
20. In May 2022, a far-left extremist damaged and urinated on the office of Concerned Women for America in Alexandria, Virginia.
21. On May 7, 2022, First Care Women’s Health in Manassas, Virginia, was vandalized with spray paint.

The bill concludes: “The conduct of members of the groups ‘‘Jane’s Revenge’’ and ‘‘Ruth Sent Us’’ described in section 2 is deemed to be domestic terrorism (as such term is defined in section 2331 of title 18, United States Code).” [source]

Good for her.

Why Socialism Does Not Work

From American Thinker.com (Dec. 16, 2021):

The resurgence of socialist ideology is curious given the unpleasant history of that doctrine.  The historical evidence is that socialism does not work as claimed.  Moreover, when socialism has been tried, it has all too frequently been accompanied by catastrophe and atrocity.  It is not unfair to say that history has not been kind to socialism and vice versa.  It is not hyperbole to note that the results of socialist government have been evil.  It is also reasonable to conclude that many of the failures of socialism were due to inherent weaknesses in its doctrines and philosophies.  Stated simply, the history of socialism as a large-scale governing principle is one of misery and failure.

Some of the appeal of socialism is due to its proponents’ selectively disavowing past socialist failures while also adopting successes that are not socialist.  It is common to hear that the mass deaths that accompanied the socialist enterprises of the 20th century and the ongoing economic catastrophe that is Venezuela were not socialist per se but rather artifacts of circumstance.  It is also claimed that public financing of roads, schools, and public services are species of socialism when they are, in fact, methods of allocating the benefits of private enterprise to public purposes.  Much of the appeal of socialism is a semantic artifice.  The socialism that is promised in current politics will always work in the imagination and fail in reality.  There are very simple reasons for why this is so.

Socialism, as an economic and political doctrine, is not social safety nets or paying taxes to fund public services.  It is government control of capital.  All economic systems, whether in the United States, or North Korea, or Zimbabwe, require capital. The difference lies in who controls the capital, and consequently, who profits from it.  The fundamental flaw of socialism is that it contains no optimizing mechanism for selecting those who will manage capital most efficiently.  Capitalist systems rely on the optimizing mechanism of competition.  Fair competition selects those who make the most effective use of capital and who are most suited to contend with risk.  Socialists do not deny this fact, rather they substitute the irrelevant argument that competition produces "unfair" outcomes, and that efficiency ignores empathy.  The appeal of socialism is almost entirely emotional.  It implicitly disparages efficiency but in fact all progress, all improvements in human life, are the result in improvements in efficiency of one sort or another.  

Socialism lacks objective processes of optimization and improving efficiency.  Instead, it seeks to determine relative merit and improve processes by planning and resort to "experts." This creates an endless regression of shortcomings in that there is no optimizing mechanism for planning or choosing experts.  More particularly, there is no optimizing mechanism for choosing who should be given control of the process, and those who attain such positions often do so because of abilities largely irrelevant to the claims of the socialist ideal. Capitalist systems, through competition, tend to select managers of capital who have competence in using it.  Socialist systems, lacking any other type of optimizing mechanism, tend to select on the basis of political skills, which may be entirely unrelated to economic competence, or even interest in economic progress.  It is no accident that many of the socialist experiments of the 20th century resulted in authoritarianism and the predictable calamities to which authoritarianism is prone.  

It should not escape notice that many of the socialist regimes that were associated with mass death and economic calamity had leaders whose terms were limited only by their deaths or removal by force.  This reveals another flaw in socialist theory.  Once a leader ascends to a position of power, he becomes interested in maintaining power and is decidedly hostile to any mechanism that may identify a more capable leader.  Socialism thus tends to discourage finding those most capable of using capital, with the result being North Korea, Venezuela, and other economic invalids. [read more]

Other articles on socialism:

• Socialists Claim Their System Is Morally Superior. They're Wrong.
• Socialism Sucks, If You Need Proof, Here It Is
• Our Corporate Oligarchy and the Road to National Socialism
• Covid-19 and the Socialist Calculation Problem