What could we count on after lockdowns descended? Mainstream churches shuttered doors while the local AA meeting near my house met at a park in the winter. Another 12-step meeting met under a tree in the yard of the church in warm months and under a porch awning when it rained. Church bureaucracies ordered doors closed. What had happened to us? Yet, Amazon never stopped.
The prevailing attitude in public life is just to forget the whole thing. And yet we live now in a country very different from the one we inhabited five years ago. Our media is captured. Social media is widely censored in violation of the First Amendment, a problem being taken up by the Supreme Court this month with no certainty of the outcome. The administrative state that seized control has not given up power. Crime has been normalized. Art and music institutions are on the rocks. Public trust in all official institutions is at rock bottom. We don’t even know if we can trust the elections anymore.
Four Years Ago This Week, Freedom Was Torched Continue Reading
We recoil because we know that the appeal to self is corrosive to unit cohesion. We also know that promoting individual identity and self-actualization—focusing on what is different among us—fosters division. And yet we are repeatedly told that it’s precisely such “diversity”—not of thought, but of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, and sexual orientation—that makes our nation prosperous and our military strong.
Much of the current debate surrounding health care – putting aside momentarily the catastrophic failure of the public health system during the pandemic – is whether or not it is a “right” or a “privilege.”
Our models represent, largely, a collaborative social universe, where people play by rules, say what they mean, and act with honesty and integrity — and where, in general, we do not deal with calculating minds trained in the arts of war and espionage. Their models, on the other hand, encompass a reality that exists completely off this game board, which is not beholden to it, and whose players often take each other’s movements into account and plot reactions several steps in advance.
The Playmobil Society vs. The Game of Nations Continue Reading
With the world turning full circle, post-World War Two concepts of human rights, equality, and local agency are exiting the international stage. The veiled colonialism currently dressed up as vaccine equity looks like a bunch of colonial bureaucrats forcing their sponsors’ wares on those with less power, whilst building policies to ensure this imbalance remains. Malnutrition, infectious disease, child marriage, and generational poverty are side issues to the East India Pharma and Software Company’s bottom lines. This will stop when those being colonized once again unite and refuse to comply. In the meantime, the enablers could open their eyes and understand who they are working for.
With media shying away from publishing views critical of the WHO and its pharma sponsors, our politicians remain naively blind to the web of ulterior, vested motivations driving the restructuring of global public health. But with one set of actors coming to the table with clean hands — no undisclosed financial incentives nor purse strings pulled by profit-driven corporations — and the other with hands stained by pharmaceutical profits and dancing to the tune of undisclosed funders, who would the public trust were they only to be fed the facts?
We’ve become, through a series of coercions and inducements forced on us by the government since 2001, and made banal through cult-like invocations and rituals, a nation of first-class “skimmers” there for the taking by anyone who feels like tossing us out into the encroaching waves of the deep blue sea.
The institutions we once expected to be our allies have revealed themselves to be derelict or submissive. In their place, new groups have emerged to speak truth to power. Now is the time if there ever was one.
A Close Look at the Amici Briefs in Murthy v. Missouri Continue Reading
For many years now, Ireland has been subject to a particularly intense cultural offensive. Why this should be so is an open question. It may be that Ireland is – or was, at least – more than usually culturally robust, an opportunity for the technocrats to really cut their teeth.
In sum, while the poisonous aspect of the media pharmakon has not nearly exhausted its toxic potency, the curative side has incrementally been gaining strength and therapeutic effectiveness, as reflected in the anxiety of the ‘Davos elites,’ detectable in their worry, that they no longer ‘own the news.’ They thought they had it all under control, but were caught unawares by the unexpected power of the alternative media – those ever-expanding digital spaces of the machine inhabited by the resistance.
Health insurance needs a new pricing structure that is not based on a one-size-fits-all model that it is now. Health and therefore healthcare expense is highly tuned to individual choice. We need more information about the best choices, and that information can only come to us once the specialists who know the data are allowed to impact pricing structures in ways they currently cannot.
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