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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Wednesday, November 30, 2022

P&D Today


De Omnibus Dubitandum

By Rich Kozlovich 

I particularly like this Quote of the Day:

 “The Left is atheist, and, simply because it is atheist, its religious fanaticism is worse than any of the other fanaticisms of history. For the romantic of the past has sometimes, if all too rarely, been restrained by the memory that God is Truth. But the atheist fanatic has no reason for such restraint.”  Christopher Hollis from Foreigners Aren’t Fools,

 

As this year is ending society as a whole is now seeing what many have been seeing that which has been unfolding for decades, and they were ignored. There's a penalty for that, and interest on the penalty is coming due.  Voter fraud is totally out of control.  The Deep State, especially the intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and even the military, have been thoroughly corrupted.  People are voting away their Constitutional rights for free lunches, and the nation is heading into bankruptcy, especially involving entitlement programs.  And what's the answer from the nation's "leaders"?  More taxes, more regulations, more spending, more borrowing, and absolute censorship of any voices that stand against any of that.   America is in Crisis

Academia

January 6th

Pandemic: Lies, Mandates and Vaccinations

Voter Integrity, Fraud and the Deep State

  Free North Star Clipart, Download Free North Star Clipart ... 
 Constant as the North Star


 

Quote of the Day

“The Left is atheist, and, simply because it is atheist, its religious fanaticism is worse than any of the other fanaticisms of history. For the romantic of the past has sometimes, if all too rarely, been restrained by the memory that God is Truth. But the atheist fanatic has no reason for such restraint.”  Christopher Hollis from Foreigners Aren’t Fools,

You'll never guess what (or who) is responsible for incidents of vaccine side effects

Jazz Shaw November 26, 2022 

By this point, you’ve probably seen some of the many stories making the rounds about increased awareness of potentially damaging (or in some cases fatal) side effects from the mRNA COVID vaccines. Even the CDC has been admitting for a while now that both myocarditis and pericarditis can result, particularly in younger adult males, though they seem to play down the numbers. Blood clots are also reported in a disturbing number of patients (mostly after getting the Johnson & Johnson shot), though it’s still a tiny portion of the population, thankfully. Enough concerns have been raised that multiple European countries have stopped offering these vaccines to all but the most elderly and at risk.

So if I were to ask you what the root cause of these side effects is likely to be, you might be tempted to say that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are causing them, right? Aha! As it turns out, you would be wrong, at least according to the author of a study published in an Indian medical journal. The author of that paper claims that the vaccines aren’t to blame. You are! That’s right. “Misinformation” about vaccine side effects is probably making some people so nervous about getting the shots that their stress levels are causing all of these side effects. Don’t you feel ashamed? (The Blaze)..........To Read More....

Vaccine Mandates 20 Years Ago Versus Today. Is History Repeating Itself?

By Mingjia Jacky Guan

This year, thousands of military members from the navy, air and space force, and coast guard filed class action lawsuits against the government’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate issued by the Department of Defence. Many soldiers have requested an exemption from COVID-19 vaccination on religious grounds, yet very few were accommodated and some were disciplined or forced into premature discharge or retirement. This could, however, be history repeating itself—something strikingly similar happened two decades ago. Anthrax and Vaccine Mandates in the Military........To Read More....

A Look Inside the “Vaccines” and the Blood of the Jabbed

Are unlisted ingredients in these vaccines proprietary secrets or unintentional contaminants?

More than 12.7 billion doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered since the treatment became available nearly two years ago. Some have received one or two doses, while others have had multiple doses. Yet many don’t know what these shots actually contain.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) website provides ingredient lists for curious consumers to consider. For example, vials from Moderna and BioNTech/Pfizer famously contain messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA). This is a genetic sequence designed to program your cells to manufacture a spike protein, thereby training the immune system to guard against the signature spike of the COVID-19 virus in the wild.

Less well-known ingredients include a different mix of lipids (fats). Pfizer’s shot, for example, contains 4-hydroxybutyl, and Moderna’s contains SM-102. These shots also include polyethylene glycol, cholesterol, a few salts (such as potassium chloride and sodium chloride), and sucrose (sugar)........To Read More....

My Take - This issue isn't about what's in these chemical compounds as what do those compounds do, and that's the problem, no one knows because these false "vaccines" haven't been properly tested.  They came on the market with less than two years testing when it normally takes ten to twelve years.  

They've changed the definition of what constitutes a vaccine in order to declare these are "vaccines", they are not.  They do not prevent transmission, nor do they prevent infections, which was the foundational criteria for a compound to be defined as a vaccine, ergo, these are experimental chemical compounds that, one, don't work, two, don't prevent transmission, and are having a massively negative impact on the health of untold millions all over the world.  

This is our thalidomide era, which caused national outrage, and that drug only effected thousands.  These compounds are effecting millions, and will continue to impact millions for decades to come.  Especially the children governments are forcing to be "vaccinated" with these dangerous compounds. And that's the view of someone who has been a big supporter of vaccines for decades. Me!

Tragic: 14-Year Old Vaccine Myocarditis Victim - By Rav Arora On May 12th of last year -  Vaccine myocarditis is not trivial, mild, or “rare.” In young men, it’s a far greater risk than Covid hospitalization and death. On May 12th of last year, school teacher Emily Jo took her 14-year-old son Aiden to get his first Pfizer vaccine dose. The public health authorities and her son’s pediatrician unanimously recommended vaccination, prompting her decision. She knew that mRNA shots caused some number of adverse events, like all vaccines, but was re-assured by the CDC and White House’s public recommendation. “The talk amongst the mainstream medical community was that vaccine myocarditis was mild and that this was very rare,” she told me..................

In the case of COVID-19 vaccines causing myocarditis, we aren’t dealing with trivial ratios of one in a million or even one in ten thousand. Among the most robust data we have—according to Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg (Florida Health department) and Dr. Marty Makary (Johns Hopkins University)—is from Dr. Katie Sharff (who had her young son vaccinated) and colleagues, who analyzed a wide database from Kaiser Permanente...............


12 Ways The New Congress Should Hold Big Pharma Accountable For Covid Evils

 

Yes, it's been reported that the CENSUS BUREAU COMMITTED FRAUD. They knew they errored and refuse to correct.

Census numbers forecasted that Minnesota was scheduled to lose a congressional seat, right up until “blue state” numbers miraculously shot up in contrast to the usually reliable December estimates.  The Bureau has admitted it “over counted” Minnesota, which helps explains why DFL Chair Ken Martin giddily touted “the state with both the highest census response rate in the nation at 75.1% and the highest voter turnout in the nation.”

Imagine that.............To Read More...




Why the Midterms Didn't Surprise Me

November 28, 2022 By Robert Merz 

The red wave ebbed into a pink splash.  The Democrats are crowing and claiming victory while Republicans look for scapegoats.  But what can you expect when it isn't a level playing field, and the non-socialist team is fragmented?    

During the 2022 campaign, I chuckled while seeing ads where the same Democrats who voted for all of Biden's destructive programs tried to sound reasonable while calling all the Republicans "extremists" for opposing programs that were destroying the economy, the police, and the military.  Well funded Democrat ads ran all day, far outpacing Republican ads.  At the same time, most news programs and TV shows had a relentless Democrat slant.  Social media (socialist media?) stories were even worse.    

The two sides weren't equally matched and operated differently.  In addition to seeing some of the same voting and ballot irregularities that were present in 2020, we saw many of the same problems with Republicans that we've seen for years.  These included:  

  • Republicans still don't stay on track with simple, consistent messages.  
  • Republicans don't fight as a team.   
  • Republicans still play nice and often don't fight back.  

On the other side:  

  • Democrats have simple messages that are repeated ad nauseam.  
  • Democrats continually attack by pairing themes with recent news stories.
  • Democrats (and their surrogates) use every opportunity to push their talking points and bash opponents.
  • And as my dad always said — the Bolsheviks never break ranks.  

The real problem for Republicans is that they still don't understand what they are up against.  They are still fighting the Democrats with a 1950 mentality, where political campaigns began a month or two before the elections and people were expected to be gentlemen.  Republicans don't understand the totalitarian-style long game the Democrats have been playing for decades (and its effects are cumulative)..............Why the Midterms Didn't Surprise Me

Dreaming of America's Future

After the indecisive midterm election, it is time for everyone to be doing thumbsucker pieces. Former President Trump had a couple of thinkers over to Mar-a-Lago -- Ye West and Nick Fuentes -- for a chat. Nick Fuentes? But he's a faaar-right conspiracy theorist last seen at Charlottesville! OMG! You should see the outrage on lefty Twitter. Roger Kimball is more worried about "Highways to Utopia" such as the destructive dynamism of the Marxists and Wokists, the possibilities of technological Armageddon, and the ever-present threat of genetic engineering.  Yep, with all that stuff, there's no doubt it's the end of the world -- particularly when a far-right conspiracy theorist gets into range of Trump.

But my imagination sees three things that are going to affect traffic in the near to middle-distant future...............To Read More..


Don't Be So Sure That The Climate Extremists Have "Won"

November 29, 2022 @ Manhattan Contrarian

Undoubtedly, the question right now at the top of everyone’s mind is, When is the Manhattan Contrarian’s Energy Storage Report coming out? After all, he previously promised it for September, and then October, and here we are almost in December and we still haven’t seen it.

It’s a fair question. Being a blogger, I don’t have much appreciation for the formalities of the publication process. In blogging, you finish the post, do a quick proofread, press “Publish,” and there it is. With this, it has been rounds of peer review, editing, typesetting, proofreading, and so forth. However, I’m now told that the official issue date will be Thursday, December 1.

After the publication, I’ll have several posts expounding on parts of the Report, particularly those portions that cover topics I have not already beaten to death here on the blog. But for now I want to focus on the most important aspect of this, which is: Don’t get discouraged in thinking that the climate extremists have “won.” They have not.

It does not really matter that the climate extremists at the moment control all of the commanding heights of our culture — the media, academia, most big corporations, and the Executive Branch of the government. What matters is that the cultists are proposing a new utopian energy system that will not work and cannot work. It’s only a question of when and how it fails — and of how big the political blowback will be when that happens. The main Achilles heel of the proposals is the problem of energy storage.

As an example of a discouraged voice out there, I refer you to an interview of environmentalist-turned-climate-skeptic Michael Schellenberger, that appeared today on the website Spiked. After a long career in environmentalism, Schellenberger more recently came to realize that the climate alarm movement is a scam. In 2020 he published the book “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.” But despite getting his own views out there in a book, in the Spiked interview he remarks that essentially all voices of reason on the subject of climate, including his own, are getting completely drowned out in the public square:

[T]he climate movement is bizarre. . . . [I]t’s taken control of all these elite institutions. The movement’s ideology is the official religion of the British government, including the British Conservative Party. It’s the official religion of the United Nations. It’s the official religion of the World Economic Forum. Climate activists have made the great reset, which is fundamentally about a transition to renewables for climate change, the dominant ideology of the global elites. . .

[T]he whole mainstream news media and the global elites are basically part of this cult. The idea that the world is coming to an end is mainstream among journalists.

As the voices of climate extremism have become more dominant in the public square, Schellenberger notes that their demands have become ever more and more unhinged:

We’re seeing much more extremist rhetoric and a lot of people engaging in extremely disruptive civil disobedience. That’s what’s new about Just Stop Oil. Its accusation is, why are people upset about attacking works of art, rather than being upset about the planet? . . . There’s definitely a cult aspect. You see it in everything they’re demanding.

Schellenberger’s conclusion: the climate extremists “have won”:

[T]he climate extremists have won. Their demands and their discourse are so mainstream. . . .

My response to Schellenberger is, don’t be so sure. The extremists may seem to have the upper hand at the moment, but the missing piece is that they have no idea how our energy system works, and they are demanding a replacement that has zero chance of success. It’s only a question of when and how it will fail, and how damaging the consequences of the failure will be.

Consider as a counterpoint to Schellenberger a post today from a British guy named Paul Homewood at his website Not A Lot Of People Know That, with the title “Why Solar Power Is Useless In Winter.” Homewood has gone and gotten the hourly data on UK electricity generation from its solar panels from this website. For context, the typical electricity usage in the UK at this time of year is given by Homewood as 840 GWh, which would be 35 GWh for each hour of the day. The capacity of the solar generation facilities in the UK is given as 14 GW. That would mean, if the solar facilities produced at full capacity for the 24 hours, they would have produced some 336 GWh, or a full 40% of the UK’s usage for the day. But hey, it’s late November. The days are short, and the UK has lots of clouds. So how much did the solar facilities actually produce today? Here is the chart:

At around noon, the solar panels reached their peak of generation for the day at 1.33 GW — less than 4% of average usage. For the whole day, production from the solar panels was all of 5.46 GWh, or 0.65% of usage. The times of peak electricity demand are the early morning and evening. At those times the UK’s solar panels produced absolutely nothing. In fact, they produced nothing from midnight to 8 AM, and then from 4 PM on.

So how is the UK (or anywhere else) ever going to obtain a meaningful amount of its electricity in winter from solar panels? Well, considering just today, they could have built some 154 times as many solar panels as they currently have. With that, they could have obtained the exact amount of electricity that they actually consumed today. However, it still would have come mostly at mid-day when it was not needed, and nothing during the peak 6-8 AM and 5-8 PM windows. To cover those, you would need some kind of energy storage. Hundreds of gigawatt hours worth, just for today. Or you could try saving the energy up from the summer time when there is more sun. But for that, to cover the whole winter, you would need, for just the UK, some tens of thousands of gigawatt hours of storage, of a form that could store the energy for six or more months and then discharge over the course of months. Such a thing has not yet been invented, and it is not clear that it can ever be invented.

The current cult of the academic, journalistic and governmental elites suffers from the eternal problem of all central planners. They think they are brilliant — and in some ways they might be (high scores on SATs?) — but they have no idea at all how to engineer an energy system that will work. We all eagerly await for their planned utopia to crash and burn.

 

The Daily Chart: Latest SAT Scores by Race

by Steven Hayward in The Daily Chart 
 
From Mark Perry, the latest SAT scores by race. No wonder elite colleges are racing to get rid of the SAT, LSAT, and other aptitude tests (which the higher education establishment initially invented), and are turning on the idea of meritocracy itself.

 

How Deep Is the Corruption?

Jeffrey A. Tucker  Jeffrey A. Tucker November 28, 2022

The collapse of FTX is not just another crypto scam gone bust due to changed market prices. In its brief life of three years, stretching from 2019 to 2022, it became the 2nd biggest crypto exchange on the planet with billions in venture funding and a million customers.

It also had enormous influence over the direction of American public life, backing and subsidizing the worst policy decisions of public health on record. They included lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and compliance passports that contradict every core principle of freedom.

You could say that all of this is coincidental. Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was just a geek with too much success too fast, and his philanthropy was entirely heartfelt. There is nothing strange going on here! And it’s true that one can be too conspiratorial.

On the other hand, we should not be naïve.

At some point, it is entirely possible that FTX became a money-laundering operation for pro-lockdown psyops. In fact, we cannot rule out that this was part of the raison d’être of the operation from the beginning. Perhaps it was intended to have a short shelf life, transferring billions and manipulating public opinion during the Great Reset, and then shutting down.

For these years, it’s been a mystery to me and to many millions of others why there wasn’t more opposition from intellectuals, public health officials, political figures, and nonprofit organizations, even those ostensibly dedicated to civil liberties and freedom. We locked down and there was this seeming silence. Those of us who wrote to object were isolated and disconnected. We were the extreme minority.

The elites, on the other hand, pretended that all of this was completely normal. Why are we objecting as churches and schools were closed? Why were we spreading disinformation that scrapping the Bill of Rights overnight is a bad idea? Why were we so obsessed with the idea of freedom that we fail to realize that these are all just common-sense health measures?

It took those of us among the dissidents months and even years to find each other. Our legacy communities failed to speak out and we were forced to wander alone and look for new allies. Meanwhile, the lockdowners and mandaters seemed to have it all together, with Big Media, Big Tech, and the whole of government on their side.

FTX might have played a central role in this, similar to the Gates Foundation except with fake money made through the crypto racket, even while its founder chose the disguise of working toward a more regulated industry.

The company and the founder/CEO Sam Bankman-Fried gave tens of millions to Democrat Party candidates and backed all associated causes from climate change to pandemic planning. They funded media outlets like ProPublica, Vox, Intercept, and Semafor, all of whom backed lockdowns and mandates. Even now, the New York Times is hosting SBF for an interview this week and charging $2,400 to attend.

Meanwhile, the corporate structure of the company had ballooned beyond belief, with some 300 different divisions and side companies, and it was the same in the philanthropic arm, a network of astonishing complexity. It’s extremely difficult to follow it all, exactly as one might expect from a money-laundering operation.

I’ve spent hours trying to trace it all out based on public records, which are thin but also breadcrumbs from podcasts, blogs, tweets, and listings of staff, scholars, and board members of various nonprofits that seem to come and go and enjoy mysterious funding sources. One gains a picture of a remarkable web of quid pro quo and dark scammery. It would take some serious and deep forensic accounting to figure it all out more clearly, which is something expensive and difficult.

One keeps seeing these strange overlaps of mutual connections between SBF, his brother’s nonprofit Guarding Against Pandemics, Protect Our Future, Center for Innovation in Global Health, Center for Health Security, Emergent Ventures/Fast Grants, Future Fund, Institute for Progress, and many other institutions that seem to share funding and priorities. Their podcasts with each other promote and protect, and their tweets tag each other and name specific accounts along the way as interested parties.

It’s all a huge thicket.

Meanwhile, the people associated with all these causes and institutions are all saying that they didn’t know and are as shocked as you and I. Oh, sure.

Another key to understanding influence is to realize that it is not just the money that is given but also that which is promised. On Feb. 28, 2022, FTX announced: “a philanthropic fund making grants and investments to ambitious projects in order to improve humanity’s long-term prospects. We plan to distribute at least $100M this year, and potentially a lot more, depending on how many outstanding opportunities we find. In principle, we’d be able to deploy up to $1B this year.”

These kinds of numbers make people in academia, media, and the nonprofit world lose their minds. They realize that they can be on the list for funding provided that they don’t screw up and start protesting the public health response, doubting the brilliance of Fauci, or advocating for the unvaccinated. The point is to play your cards right and get on the list.

In this way, the announcement of possible funding can be as effective a means of control as the funding itself. In light of this, I cannot shake the strong impression I have that FTX and its funding networks account for the massive distortion of the public conversation surrounding COVID controls. One of the major economic blogs touted FTX’s funding scam even while pushing for more lockdowns and smearing critics of lockdowns. It was hardly alone. Essentially, all these venues tended toward a China-style of pandemic control rather than a traditional public health response.

FTX and its networks are the very definition of dark money. Surely many recipients knew this or at least suspected that there might be something funny going on if millions of dollars suddenly arrives from a source that traces to a magic bean factory in the Bahamas as run by a 30-year old geek whose parents are law professors at Stanford. There is something implausible about the whole deal but when cash like that is waved around, it is easy to let go of one’s incredulity.

How deep does the corruption go? I do not know the answer but I’m willing to guess that the answer is: much deeper. Consider FTX’s connections to Ukraine. Of all exchanges in the world, why did the money managers of Ukraine pick FTX? We are told that Ukraine did not deposit money with FTX but rather only used them to exchange their crypto for dollars. But where exactly did Ukraine get all this crypto? Are we really supposed to believe that this was just philanthropy at work as millions of generous donors the world over were giving to the cause from the goodness of their own hearts?

The timing of the unraveling here also shakes me. Founded in 2019 just soon enough to enter into the public realm on the topic of pandemic controls and then it disappeared just following the midterm elections in 2022 over which its funding arm had huge influence especially in races that were in deep need.

One looks at all of this unfolding with a sense of amazement. We are being told it was all on the up and up, no real funny business, just a bright student having gotten carried away. Meanwhile, Bernie Madoff was arrested within hours after the revelations of his Ponzi scheme and Elizabeth Holmes is going to jail. It seems like FTX managed its payoffs pretty well because even as I type, Sam is refashioning himself as a public pundit.

Keep in mind, too, that FTX might only be the tip of the iceberg. During the pandemic years, governments of the world found the excuse to distribute billions and trillions from taxpayers to well-connected elites, and doing it all through the public treasury. Much of it was lost and stolen. Much of it ended up in the hands of people who were up to no good. FTX is thus a window into a world of scammery that is beyond what the worst cynic of 2019 would have thought possible.

A final note: the bandits absolutely do not want to be found out. The cover-ups have already begun. There simply are not enough investigators on this case. We need answers. Getting them is going to take years.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Academic economic theories are damaging in the real world

Recently, the Columbus Dispatch published an op-ed by Musbah Shaheen, a Ph.D. candidate in educational studies from Ohio State. Shaheen classifies as “brainwashing” Ohio’s recent legislative initiative to mandate financial literacy classes that teach free market principles. Shaheen’s op-ed, though, is useful only insofar as it exposes the anti-economic nonsense coming from academia—a type of nonsense that has bled into federal policies with disastrous effects for the American economy.

The Ohio law against which Shaheen inveighs is simply: Public education should instruct students in free market capitalism. Shaheen’s problem is that his opposition is replete with errors and strawmen.

An obvious strawman is Shaheen’s insistence that teaching economic reality means “No talking about race or slavery or gender or sexuality. No talking about what socialism—or even communism—mean [sic].” The contrary is true: Those of us that went to Ohio public schools did learn about slavery, segregation, the Civil Rights movement, and other racial issues. The difference then was that educators did not try to inflict guilt on certain students because of their racial background and associated privileges.....................To Read More 

 

Don’t Shut Down the January 6 Committee – Supercharge It!

By Brian C. Joondeph November 28, 2022

Now that the US House of Representatives will be under Republican control, assuming Santa Claus doesn’t deliver Democrat ballots to a few key swing districts as an early Christmas present for the Democrat party, the new House GOP leadership will determine the fate of the January 6 committee.

Will GOP leaders shut down the committee? Far-left Mother Jones believes it, “Will be coming to an end.” They also think that the GOP will want to, “Exact revenge on the panel by attacking its work—and its members.” Revenge against the two RINO Republican committee members is done as neither will be returning to the next Congress.

The January 6 committee is a hyper-partisan gaggle of Trump-hating members of Congress, consisting of a Democrat chairman, 6 Democrat committee members including Reps Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin, and two token Republicans, who loathe Donald Trump even more than their Democrat colleagues, Reps Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger...........To Read More....

  • Everybody Hates Liz Cheney By November 28, 2022 - Pimped by Democrats, used by the news media, abandoned by Republicans, and disliked by the public, Cheney, like her father, might have managed to tick off almost everyone on her way out the door............


The Bureaucracy’s Democrat Majority Made America a One-Party Government

November 28, 2022 @ Sultan Knish Blog

When former President Trump, Gov. DeSantis, and Senator Ted Cruz, among others, endorsed rolling back the power of bureaucrats and their administrative state, Democrats panicked.

Senator Dianne Feinstein and Hillary's former running mate, Senator Tim Kaine, introduced a countermeasure which they called, "Preventing a Patronage System Act" according to Kaine, to "protect the merit-based hiring system for our federal workforce".

Media editorialists claimed that making it easier to get rid of federal employees would bring back patronage or the spoils system. The problem is that patronage never left.

We have spent generations living under a permanent patronage system. The spoils system, as bad as it was, kept one party from permanently packing its supporters into the government. Removing it just meant that the Democrats have permanently packed the federal bureaucracy.

That’s how America became a one-party government at the federal level in Washington D.C. Politicians of both parties come and go, but it’s the Democrat bureaucrats who call the shots.

The same media outlets now fussing about “patronage” were gleefully reporting how a “resistance” was operating within the federal bureaucracy to undermine President Trump. That same “resistance”, without the public posturing, has quietly sabotaged every Republican administration and any conservative piece of legislation that gets through the process.

Before the 2016 election, one in four federal employees claimed that they would leave if Trump won. Six out of ten federal employees supported Biden. Only 28% backed Trump.

In the 2022 cycle, the American Federation of Government Employees has doled out over a million dollars. 94% of that money has gone to Democrats.

Not only does the federal workforce tilt leftward, but the number of Republicans fell from a third to a quarter over the last generation. The federal machine that controls the lives of most Americans has limited representation for one of the country’s two major political factions.

But even that's misleading.

The men and women who actually run things are mostly Democrats. 63% of the senior executives, the highest officials within the bureaucracy, are Democrats, while the number of Republicans drops into the low 20s. A National Bureau of Economic Research paper notes that the "the overrepresentation of Democrats increases as we move up the hierarchy".

“Among employees in grades 1-12 of the GS, we find about 50% of Democrats (30% of Republicans and 20% of independents), which rises to approximately 56% at the top of the GS (grades 13-15), and to 63% among career SES,” the research showed.

This is what a slow-motion coup looks like.

Apologists for the bureaucracy might claim that this reflects a lack of qualifications by Republicans, but the share of independents similarly drops. Only the share of Democrats steadily rises. If we were looking at a similar breakdown of racial groups in which the share of every racial group declined as it moved up the ranks, except one, it would be evidence of bias.

And a political coup is far more corrosive and dangerous to a government than racial bias.

Democrats want us to believe that the consolidation of the civil service by one political faction is somehow a natural occurrence which does not reflect a calculated strategy or patronage.

In between political tests like diversity and equity, the insistence on concentrating federal leadership in Democrat areas, and providing special entryways and promotions to members of identity politics groups more likely to vote for their party, Democrats claim that it’s all “merit”.

After fighting to eliminate merit in college admissions, the military, and federal contracts, they want us to believe that they not only believe in merit, but want to protect it in the civil service.

Democrats created an independent bureaucracy that provides its own patronage. That corrupt system has led to everything from massive theft to IRS investigations of political opponents. And the result is much worse than the rotten spoils system ever was because it’s immune to change.

The modern civil service owes its existence to a crooked bargain between President Grover Cleveland, the first post-Civil War Democrat to occupy the White House, and one of the most personally and politically corrupt men to hold that office in the century, and the Mugwumps, the Never Trumpers of the era. The federal workforce massively exploded from 5,837 before the Civil War to 15,344 after the Civil War to millions over the next century. The civil service “reforms” were a key ingredient in what became a permanent patronage system built to benefit the Democrats and the liberal Republicans who were instrumental in imposing it on Americans.

Where before individuals had traded on their political support and campaign activities to win a few hundred offices during the spoils system, urban political machines packed the civil service with tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands of their supporters in the next century.

The liberal promises of Wilson, FDR and JFK required a symbiotic growth in government. The government programs never delivered a better life, except by providing government jobs for Democrats. The spoils system was corrupt, but permanent patronage has not only rewarded members of one party with jobs, especially senior roles, to the tune of billions, but it also shifted power away from the voters and elected officials, and to partisan bureaucrats.

The solution to patronage isn’t professionalism, it’s smaller government. Government is not a meritocracy and there’s no point in keeping up the pretense that any part of it is merit based. The most fundamental virtue of our constitutional government is that the public has supreme power over the government. The civil service system has effectively eliminated that power.

Firing federal employees is a long difficult process. The Merit Systems Protection Board has repeatedly intervened to protect even the worst abuses by workers including outright criminal behavior. Americans can lose their jobs, but they can’t do anything about the bureaucrats who control their lives. Politicians come and go, but the Democrat administrative state abides.

A smaller government begins with a much smaller bureaucracy. President Trump’s commitment to wielding Schedule F is important, as are other ideas by conservative politicians. Schedule F would be crucial in rolling back the power of key policy-making bureaucrats, but it’s only the beginning. The Founding Fathers understood that government is innately oppressive. And government, like any parasitic infection, naturally grows unless it’s shrunk or it kills the host.

Apologists for the bureaucracy claim that eliminating the permanent patronage of the civil service would erode "public trust in our government" and "undermine the role of civil servants as stewards of the public good".

The public has no trust in the government. The one thing most of the country, across political and racial lines, can agree on is not trusting the government. Currently only about 29% of Democrats and 9% of Republicans trust the government. How much more trust is there to lose?

Civil servants are not “stewards of the public good”. The American people are. Monarchies and tyrannies have stewards of the public good. The only true constitutional and democratic virtue of a civil service is that it is easy to fire. A bureaucracy that can’t be gotten rid of isn’t serving the people, it’s mastering them, and that is what the administrative state has long since become.

The only reason Democrats are panicking over permanent patronage reform is because the ranks and especially the senior management of the federal bureaucracy are full of their people. There’s nothing democratic or merit-based about letting a corrupt partisan faction control the administrative state and the lives of hundreds of millions of people with no recourse.

The next president who isn’t beholden to the administrative state should provide that recourse.

Is this the Supreme Court case that will drain the swamp?

"The Question: How can you support, and defend, the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic?  Answer: You investigate.  If there are claims that there is a threat, even if you don't believe there is a threat, you investigate.  How else can you determine if there is a threat unless you investigate?  You can't.  Were there claims of a threat to the Constitution?  Yes.  Where did these serious claims come from?  100 members of Congress.  What was the threat?  That there were enemies of the Constitution who successfully rigged the 2020 election.  Is this lawsuit about a rigged election?  No, it's about the members of Congress who voted AGAINST the investigation thereby thwarting the investigation.  Was this a clear violation of their oath?  YES."  

—Question of Law in the Supreme Court case known as Brunson v. Alma S. Adams; et al. (Biden, Harris, Pence & 385 Members of Congress)

They Broke Their Oaths

Loy, Raland, Deron, and Gaynor Brunson all witnessed what they believed to be the theft of the 2020 election and decided to file suit.  However, the interesting approach that they have taken is not to make a formal complaint that the election was stolen; instead, they have chosen to sue members of the U.S. Congress who voted not to investigate whether any election irregularities may have occurred that could have affected the outcome.  In other words, the Brunson Brothers were motivated to sue because these elected officials broke their oaths to protect the Constitution of the United States.............Might the Supreme Court grant relief, not only to the Brunson Brothers, but to millions who are weary of being characterized as "election deniers" simply for wanting investigations to take place?  Is it possible that some, or all, of those named in the lawsuit might be removed from office?  Keep an eye on this one...........To Read More.....


 

Citizenship and Intervening in Elections

With the ongoing invasion over the last two years by millions of foreigners at our southern border, America has a much bigger election integrity problem than before Joe Biden became president. So, just how did California, Arizona, New Mexico and other states with large enclaves of illegal aliens ensure that the recent invaders (as well as the millions of previous invaders from decades past) didn’t vote in the November 8 federal elections?..............

Clause 1, Section 4, of Article I of the Constitution gives the authority to enact laws that govern electing members of Congress (i.e. the federal legislature) to the legislatures of the States. This provision was trampled on in the 2020 election, when the courts in Pennsylvania saw fit to rewrite election law. (That the judges are still at large is disappointing.) But there’s more, so here’s Clause 1 in its entirety (italics added):

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing [i.e. choosing] Senators.

It would seem, then, that Congress has the power to impose upon the several States its own laws concerning elections of members of Congress. Not only that, but Section 5 of Article I stipulates that (italics added): “Each House [of Congress] shall be the Judge of the Elections… of its own Members.”  So, Congress can reject States’ elections of federal officials, and refuse to seat their electees.............

Here’s a very simple requirement of the States that would make it possible to get much closer to the truth about who are the victors in our federal elections. And that is for Congress to require that each State put an additional datum on ballots that is not currently required -- the SSN...........To Read More.....


Here’s How They Did it: Real-time Election Fraud

By Jay Valentine

Database latency -- a geeky term, but that’s how they did it! A policeman pulls over a speeder.  The police computer reports that three hours ago a similar vehicle and person held up a liquor store -- so the police are on alert. 

No database latency.

County election managers change the zip code of 31,000 voters on September 3. Ballots go out that week.  Those 31,000 are undeliverable.  Someone collects those valid ballots.  On September 15th, those addresses are quietly changed back.  National Change of Address Database (NCOA) will not pick up those address changes.  They didn’t happen because there is no history. The 31,000 citizens were getting their mail just fine -- except for ballots.  Ballot addresses were driven by the county mail-in ballot database -- the one that was changed, then changed back. Many states send ballots to everyone; the recipient is none the wiser that they never received a mail-in ballot.  They may vote in person.  Oops!  “You already voted!”  Ever heard that?

Welcome to database latency. ...............

Here’s the fraud equation taking place across the country: 

  • Count the in-person votes on election day. 
  • Count the early, in-person votes. 
  • Shut down the system (Atlanta water leak, Maricopa County everything). 
  • Bring in undeliverable ballots gathered when you changed voters’ names, addresses, or zip codes, then changed them back.
  • Determine the votes you need to win.  Press the “WIN” button.
  • Wait for the Republicans to file a lawsuit months later.

Floating ballots are the lifeblood Democrats need to win -- and win they do........In a real-life example, this month, we found a county that changed 31,500 zip codes, yet the voter remained at the same address.  Curious?  That means the voter did not change their address, continued to receive all their mail, except one item -- a ballot sent from a voter commission.  Our teams in Wisconsin and Florida are discovering this scam by the truckload -- do not email me that it is not real!  And NCOA and Melissa?  They are totally blind to this -- because the addresses are changed back!..............To Read More....

 

Cry for Argentina

November 17, 2022 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

When I write about Argentina, I normally have bad things to say.

 http://freedomandprosperity.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Aug-16-19-JPM-Bar-Chart.jpg

Today, for only the second time, I’m going to say something positive about Argentina. At least in a back-handed way.

I’m currently in Buenos Aires for a conference. And because Argentinian monetary policy is even worse than U.S. monetary policy, the dollar is very strong and I’m able to enjoy great steak dinners for about $15.

Unfortunately, my gain is Argentina’s loss.

In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Dave Seminara discusses that nation’s long-run decline.


Argentina was one of the world’s seven richest countries at the turn of the last century thanks to its agricultural abundance. “People used to say someone is as rich as an Argentine.” …But bad governance has taken a heavy toll. More than a third of Argentines live in poverty and tens of thousands of small businesses closed during the pandemic. …nearly every young person…is plotting an escape to Europe or North America.

…Argentina ranks 126th in the World Bank’s ease of doing business index and 96th on Transparency International’s corruption perception index, behind developing countries like Ethiopia, Tanzania and Kosovo. A bloated public sector weighs down Latin America’s third-largest economy. Roughly half the country either works for the government or depends on it for social welfare benefits. …

The left’s mistakes in Argentina…profligate social spending, high taxes, and too many restrictions on commerce—are eerily similar to the priorities of the American left.

The most important passage in the above excerpts is that “Roughly half the country either works for the government or depends on it for social welfare benefits.”

How can you save a country when such a high percentage of the population has a direct incentive to vote for more government?

But it’s possible the outlook is even worse if you compared private sector workers to government bureaucrats.

Writing for National Review, Antonella Marty is very dismayed by Argentina’s trajectory.


Argentina’s annual inflation rate now exceeds 70 percent — a 30-year high. Its monthly inflation (just under 8 percent) is comparable to the U.S.’s annual inflation… Argentina is starting to resemble Venezuela — and no country wants to resemble Venezuela.

How did things get this bad? The answer is actually quite simple: a big government that loves printing money. For decades, government intervention in Argentina’s economy has ballooned to such an extent that the state basically dictates the overwhelming majority of private-sector activity either directly or indirectly.

The public sector’s meddling is notorious, crowding out the entrepreneurship, innovation, and job creation that keeps markets free and healthy. While Argentina’s population exceeds 45 million people, only about six million Argentines are employed in the private sector, while 55 percent of the country’s registered workers are employed by the government.

I don’t know which factoid is more depressing. Is it that “only about six million Argentines are employed in the private sector” or is it that “55 percent of the country’s registered workers are employed by the government”?

For what it’s worth, I assume “registered workers” does not include people in the underground economy. And because taxes and red tape are such a nightmare in Argentina, a lot of economic activity has been forced into the shadows.

But that does not change the fact that the country has a far-too-heavy burden of government. Politicians have turned a rich country into a basket case. And the situation seems to get worse every year, even when supposedly right-leaning governments occasionally get elected.

P.S. There’s an interesting debate whether Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt was the worst president in U.S. history. In Argentina, there’s no ambiguity.

 Editor's Note:  Please take some time and review My Argentina File, which goes back to 2012.  RK