Category Archives: The State

Unmasking Statist Illogic About Face Masks

Argument, Critique, Healthcare, Propaganda, Regulation, The State

Some clear thinking to counter incessant, statist propaganda against respirators is needed.

The State and its agents, in our highly centralized healthcare system, categorically doesn’t want the citizen to purchase “face masks,” the surgeon general’s term, not mine.

Hence the incessant, neurotic, total discrediting of N95 filtering facepiece respirators, which, by the CDC’s own account, can be protective.

Logic says the respirator is better than nothing and may indeed be protective. Here’s why:

While the virus is indeed minuscule, COVID-19 is delivered in a larger medium of bodily fluids or spray. In other words, some barrier to the medium in which the Corona Virus is delivered is better than none.

The CDC asks and answers the following question:

What makes N95 respirators different from facemasks (sometimes called a surgical mask)?

Understanding the difference between surgical masks and N95 respirators:
N95 respirators reduce the wearer’s exposure to airborne particles, from small particle aerosols to large droplets. N95 respirators are tight-fitting respirators that filter out at least 95% of particles in the air, including large and small particles. … These respirators filter out at least 95% of very small (0.3 micron) particles. N95 filtering facepiece respirators are capable of filtering out all types of particles, including bacteria and viruses.

In the service of honesty, state apparatchiks (CDC, included) might make an honest appeal to consumers on the grounds of dire shortages.

But on the grounds that no protection is better than some protection? You gotta be stupid to fail to dissect that bit of disinformation, repeated ad nauseam by the healthcare automatons.

* Image of a N95 Respirator courtesy CDC

Of interest:
“Surgical Masks vs. Respirators”

The Economist: “Diagnosis: opaque: Donald Trump wants hospitals to be more upfront about prices“

NEW COLUMN: No Pardons For Neocon War Crimes (Part 2)

Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Iraq, Just War, Morality, Neoconservatism, The State, War

NEW COLUMN, “No Pardons For Neocon War Crimes” (Part 2), is on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

An excerpt:

“HOW does America change if our intelligence agencies were more accurate in their assessment of Saddam Hussein’s chemical and nuclear weapons programs?”

The question was posed, just the other day, in “Make America Competent Again,” by David French, at the Dispatch, a neoconservative website. The tract is an agony aunt’s meander that calls on shoring-up competency in state and civil society.

But first: Dissecting, deconstructing and exposing the neoconservative mindset and machinations matters. The reason is this:

Thanks to President Trump, neoconservatives are not exactly having a moment—they’re down in the doldrums. But they’ll be back. For neoconservatives and liberal interventionists make up the Permanent State. The ideology the likes of David French, formerly of National Review, and his ilk promote—foreign-policy bellicosity, endless immigration, mindless consumerism, racial shaming, “canceling” of deviationists and conformity to an American identity that’s been melted away in vats of multiculturalism—is in our country’s bone marrow, by now.

Therefore, the fighting words in response to French’s framing of the invasion of Iraq as a mere glitch in intelligence are these:

Oh no you don’t, you so-and-so!!

No creedal neoconservative should be able to get away with the claim that a problem of criminality is really just a problem of competency.

You’d think that a military man like Mr. French would know that fixing problems rests on defining them with precision. Recasting state corruption and war crimes as incompetence cures neither state crimes nor incompetence.

America’s war on Iraq was a war crime, plain and simple. It was a reflexive collaboration between elements in a vast, by now familiar, intelligence bureaucracy, comprised of neoconservative and liberal interventionists, whose aim was to help The Powers that Be pulverize a country, Iraq, for the purpose of making it over in the image of America.

Contra Mr. French, the war on Iraq cannot be reduced to systemic incompetence. Anyone who doggedly tracked and documented the ramp up to war, as this column did, can attest that the United States bullied its way to war, monomaniacally. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “No Pardons For Neocon War Crimes” (Part 2), is on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

The Faces Of Justice Democrats, Who Herald ‘The Death of The Old America …’

Democrats, Justice, Multiculturalism, Politics, The State

Waleed Shahid, pictured, is a Justice Democrat spokesman. In a pinned tweet, he heralds the coming “death of the old America, and the birth of a new America.”

Among their policy objectives, Justice Democrats count  penal abolition, and universal everything, including the right of the universe to live in the USA, to enjoy a federally guaranteed job, universal healthcare and education. (Some of the aims of Justice Democrats, like a cessation to recreational wars and drug decriminalization, comport with libertarianism.)

To hasten that goal, Shahid targets voters in districts that are “majority non-white and economically diverse.” Justice Democrats like him hope “to mobilise infrequent voters in the less-white and less-rich parts of the district to vote,” so as to, presumably, bring about the desired change. The JD has the “experience, the infrastructure, the people and the coaching” to achieve transformative results.

Jamaal Bowman: Green New Deal, Medicare for All.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is another familiar Justice,  “death of the old America, and the birth of a new America” Democrat.

Ayanna Pressley among the SQUAD, all Justice Democrats:

Morgan Harper:

The Economist contends, however, that mainstream Democrats are still in control, do not seek to challenge Democratic incumbents, and that “the freshmen representatives who gave the House its Democratic majority were mostly moderates from swing districts.”

Impeachment Uninteresting To A Certain Kind Of Libertarian

Constitution, Democrats, Law, libertarianism, Republicans, The State

As a libertarian, I’m not in the least interested in the impeachment proceedings and process.

Democrat or Republican initiated, impeachment as we’ve come to know it intimately, showcases the might of the American Administrative State in all its muscular display of extra-constitutional powers. There is nothing constitutional, and very little that is naturally licit, in this process, despite all the “solemn” references to the poor, unused document.

That the participants wrap themselves in the toga of constitutionality makes the process all the more  farcical.

To quote from my “Moral Of The Mueller Inquisition, Part 2″:

“As a scrupulously honest broadcaster, Tucker Carlson recently confessed to ‘looking back in shame’ for having originally supported Kenneth Starr’s independent counsel investigation of President Clinton. (Good libertarians have always opposed the very existence of the OSC. This writer certainly has.)”

Another comment, relating to the above and to the imperative to, at the very least, denounce the last two impeachment productions undertaken by the extra-constitutional Office of Special Counsel (OSC):

I like Jonathan Turley a lot. But I am shocked that he supported the impeachment of Bill Clinton. I am beginning to suspect that Turely, despite repeated denials, is a Republican through-and-through. Why not say so, sir?

Here is Jonathan Turley, in 1998.

In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a lawbreaker; it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. The allegations against President Clinton go to the very heart of the legitimacy of his office and the integrity of the political system. As an individual, a president may seek spiritual redemption in the company of friends and family. Constitutional redemption, however, is found only in the company of representatives of all three branches in the well of the Senate. It is there that legitimacy, once recklessly lost, can be regained by a president.