Authored by James Rickards via Daily Reckoning,

On Friday Joe Biden signed an executive order directing every federal agency to work toward “environmental justice for all.”

The executive order even establishes a new Office of Environmental Justice within the White House.

If that sounds kind of Orwellian, there’s a reason for that — it is.

“It’s only about the future of our planet,” Biden said.

If “the future of our planet” is on the line, then you can justify whatever extreme measure you want to enact.

After all, you don’t ask questions during an emergency. You act. And what bigger emergency is there than the planet’s very future?

It frames the issue in such a way that’s designed to nullify any criticism or serious analysis. You’re either with the planet or against it.

Beneath a large component of this campaign is the so-called climate emergency.

There’s only one problem — there is no climate emergency. It’s a myth whipped up by radicals to terrify people into supporting extreme policies no one would otherwise embrace.

Some climate activists have even conceded that they’ve had to exaggerate the threat in order to frighten people into taking action.

In other words, they admit that they’ve been engaging in propaganda. Unfortunately, it’s worked to a frightening degree.

They’ve Got It Backward

Here are the facts: There was a slight warming trend from 1985 to around 2005, although there’s nothing unusual about that. Since 2005, there has been a slight cooling trend but, again, that’s not unusual.

These warming and cooling trends are caused by solar cycles, ocean currents and volcanic activity. These large and complex forces can create induction zones where warm saltier water moves under colder less saline water to change surface temperatures, which in turn affect temperatures at lower latitudes as cold Arctic water moves further south.

None of this has anything to do with CO2 levels, which have never been shown to have any measurable impact on climate. In fact, the evidence strongly indicates that periods of high CO2 concentrations followed warming periods. In other words, higher CO2 concentrations were not the cause of warm periods, but the result of them.

So the CO2 alarmists have it all backward.

Again, all of these changes I described above are normal. In fact, much more extreme changes such as the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warming Period have been proved to have occurred centuries before any industrial or manmade output of CO2 or methane.

The bottom line is CO2 is a trace gas with little or no provable effect on climate. But that doesn’t matter to the climate change cult. And that’s really what it is — a cult.

Do you think I’m exaggerating? Well, Time magazine just published an article called “The Case for Making Earth Day a Religious Holiday.” So there you go.

These people are either incredibly stupid, incredibly deluded or incredibly naive. Most are probably a combination of all three.

Does This Make Sense?

These green cultists claim that wind turbines, solar modules and electric vehicles (EVs) will provide a non-carbon-based sustainable alternative to oil and gas. But that’s demonstrably proveable nonsense.

If you have an EV, the vast majority of its electric charge comes from oil, gas and coal-burning plants. So there’s no reduction in carbon emissions. All you’re doing is shifting the emissions from the engine to the electricity plant, but the emissions are the same.

(Never mind the waiting time at charging stations, which can be hours even for 30-minute charges because there’s a line of cars ahead of you.)

That’s just a fact. And if everyone were driving electric cars like the cultists want, it would overwhelm the energy grid, leaving everyone in the dark without power. For some of these cultists at least, that’s probably a feature, not a bug.

Meanwhile, the chemicals needed for batteries include lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel and more. The energy and water needed to mine those chemicals are greater than the electricity saved by the finished product.

Not to mention the poisonous byproducts and the fact that all of the lithium in the world won’t be enough to manufacture more than a small portion of the batteries needed to power the cars envisioned with batteries.

The list of non-feasible, non-economic and highly polluting aspects of the “green” revolution in power sources goes on. The whole thing is a scam driven by greed — think of those corporate solar panel and windmill producers — ideology and a hidden agenda of transferring wealth from rich to poor countries without any input from voters and citizens.

The Green Cult’s True Legacy

What has it actually produced, besides things like blighting land- and seascapes with huge stretches of ugly wind turbines? Here’s the answer:

Actual environmental destruction. These wind turbines have killed massive numbers of whales, porpoises and birds. This is from a New York Post article following Earth Day:

“As the Biden administration is literally permitting the offshore wind industry to kill endangered whales under the guise of ‘saving the planet,’ Earth Day has gone 180 degrees from where it started and has become truly Orwellian,” [Steve Milloy, a senior fellow at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute] said…

“It’s gone from ‘Save the Whales’ to ‘Kill the Whales.’ And the green groups that have promoted Earth Day for 53 years are totally OK with this agenda”…

Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow president Craig Rucker said the push to build the wind farms comes “despite growing evidence that whales are being impacted by the preliminary sonar blasting being conducted to site windmills, as well as scores of the marine mammals washing up dead on beaches.”

“’Damn the whales, full speed ahead’ seems to be the official policy of the Biden administration when it comes to the construction of offshore wind,” Rucker said in a statement. “The White House seems to remain unfazed and fixated on implementing its reckless ‘net zero’ energy agenda”…

The noise produced from building the farms, especially pile-driving the turbines into the ocean floor, has been shown to affect aquatic life, according to federal regulators, who implemented a “soft start” approach before construction to drive away species.

The ProPublica report states that in the next 10 years, more than 3,000 turbines will be built and nearly 10,000 miles of cable will be laid on 2.4 million acres of the ocean managed by the federal government.

The construction would involve scores of ships traveling at high speeds and crisscrossing known whale habitats, increasing the chances of marine mammals being fatally struck…

“This alarming number of deaths is unprecedented in the last half-century, the only unique factor from previous years, is the excessive scope, scale, and magnitude of offshore wind powerplant activity in the region,” the environmental conservation group said in a statement.

Yet the green cult claims to be environmentalists. What a joke. They’re cultists whose true legacy is scores of dead whales and other creatures. Can it be stopped? Maybe — there is hope.

The Green Cult’s “Jumped the Shark”

The lies and fake science coming from the climate cult is non-stop. Each report has more dubious assumptions and flawed models than the one before. It would be nice to think we could stop fighting the climate cult because they are making such fools of themselves that the Green New Scam will fall of its own weight.

Now, after decades of bad science, the climate cult has finally “jumped the shark,” as the saying goes. They’ve gone too far.

A new report claims that there is a definite causal relationship between global warming and the number of home runs hit in Major League Baseball. That’s right.

Never mind that the correlation does not hold in AAA ball, NCAA ball, or the Japanese major leagues. Never mind that home run seasons often come in streaks and there may just be more home run hitters around. What about the fact that annual home run production since 2016 is 5,800 with a huge standard deviation of 500 home runs?

The truth is, this “scientific” paper is junk science as is the entire phony climate change hysteria. It took a while but the climate cult crowd may have finally jumped the shark.

The Green New Scam will fail sooner than later. In the meantime, we’ll just have to put up with the latest elite fantasies.

Let’s just hope we can limit the damage they do to the rest of us. We know whose side the whales are on.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell reiterated on Friday that Europe should have its own policy on China which is separate from the US. “I think that yes, we, Europeans, we have to have our own way of facing China. On the EU-US-China triangle, we are closer to Washington, certainly, but we have to have our own way and we are working on that,” he said at an event hosted European University Institute in Florence.

The fresh comments echo controversial statements of French President Emmanuel Macron issued in April wherein he told the press after a state visit to Beijing to meet with President Xi Jinping that Europe must have “strategic autonomy” and not merely become ‘America’s followers’. 

Borrell on Friday was also cited as saying, “I think we should not be against the rise of China. China will become a great power, like it or not. The important thing is how China will manage its power.”

He further took the opportunity to weigh on China’s “12-point peace plan”, first published and circulated in February. He called it “not a peace plan” but said it expresses “wishful thinking.”

On this, he reflected the Western and Washington consensus: 

“The Chinese peace plan, well, it’s not a peace plan. It’s a set of wishful considerations, wishful thinking, but it’s not a peace plan,” Borrell said. “If you want peace, push Russia to withdraw.”

The West has been firmly in Zelensky’s corner on the prospect of entering negotiations. The Ukrainian leader’s unwavering position has been that all Russian forces must first withdraw from Ukrainian territory: 

Reiterating that the support for Ukraine should increase, he said that if Kyiv surrenders, Russian troops would be “on the Polish border” and Ukraine would become a “second Belarus.”

He noted that without Western support, this would happen “in a matter of days.”

Each of the member states have their own unique relations with #Beijing and to reach a common approach towards #China, the #EU will have to balance the national interests of its member states, writes @ankitadutta5 https://t.co/akIsDOTN0a

— ORF (@orfonline) May 5, 2023

When Xi went to Moscow in March, the Chinese peace initiative fell flat, given there was no movement on it and Putin seemed to greet it with ambivalence or else apathy. 

Authored by John Cody via Remix News,

The West is facing a “nation-destroying virus” unleashed by progressive idealists that will destroy civilization unless conservatives fight to contain it, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has warned.

Speaking at CPAC Hungary in Budapest on Thursday, the Hungarian prime minister, seen as perhaps the preeminent leader of the Western conservative movement, issued his warning to hundreds of politicians, national leaders, and conservative activists who gathered in Budapest from around the world.

“A virus attack has been launched against us. This virus was developed in the progressive liberal laboratories,” said Orbán.

“This virus is attacking the most vulnerable point in the Western world, and that is the nation. It is a nation-destroying virus that will atomize and pulverize our nations.”

The Hungarian leader said his country is seen as an incubator of conservative thought, and one of the primary strongholds left working against globalism. He noted that conservatives arrived in Budapest from countries ranging from the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Israel and Japan.

Not bad company, but how did Hungarians get into such a distinguished club? We’re not huge, we’re not formidable, we’re not rich, we don’t have a big army, we don’t have a huge GDP, and we’re not particularly populous. Who cares about us? Yet, here we all are today.

I think there is only one reason why we are in this elite club. There is one thing that makes our country an important place. It is the fact that Hungary is actually an incubator where the conservative politics of the future are being experimented with. Hungary is the place where we have not only talked about defeating progressive liberals and making a conservative Christian political turn, we have done it.

The Hungarian prime minister said that the attack facing Europe is not economic, but actually goes deeper into the very values and culture that had defined Europe for generations.

I report to you that we are all under attack, in Europe as well as in America. I must also report to you that the attack is not economic. We are dealing with a biological weapon,” said Orbán. “The nation is the great invention of the West. It is the heart of the free world, but it is also the Achilles heel of the Western world. If the nations evaporate, disintegrate, rust away, the possibility of free life will be lost and the West will fall. People without a homeland can never be free, they can only be landless pawns of the global elite.

Although it may seem self-evident for many conservatives today, Hungary was not always a bastion of conservatism. Orbán and Hungary truly rose into the international headlines once his country took a strong stance against immigration in 2015-2016. However, in a surprise move at the CPAC conference, Orbán said he had to thank billionaire oligarch George Soros for this political gift, which helped put Hungary on the political map and defined Hungary as a country dedicated to protecting Europe’s borders and cultural heritage.

But there is nothing to be done. Man plans, God does. In fact, the Hungarian experiment owes its worldwide fame to George Soros. In vain, God works in mysterious ways. If George Soros had not attacked Hungary, if he had not announced his program to resettle millions of illegal immigrants in Europe with the help of his mercenary NGOs, we would never have made the headlines. But Uncle George did announce his resettlement program, deployed his NGO army and set about implementing his grand plan. They flooded the Balkans with illegal migrants and set up a people-smuggling route into the heart of Europe, and then they bumped into Hungary. We called a halt, we took up the gauntlet, we defended ourselves, we built a fence, and we defended our country.

Orbán said that it was amidst the battle over migration with Soros, NGOs and Brussels, that he realized how the battle must be fought.

After a while, I also realized that it is not enough to defend our borders, it is not enough to fight physically in self-defense; we can only defend our country if we also engage in intellectual and ideological battles. We found ourselves in the middle of an intellectual ideological battlefield because migration is an important part of the liberal progressive philosophy. We had no choice but to call to account the ideology of the open society and with it the entire empire of George Soros.

Orbán stated that Hungary was not a country that attacked, but instead, focused on defense.

We Hungarians do not attack. We do not want to tell other countries what to think about migration, gender theory or the European superstate. And we certainly don’t want to tell the Americans what to think. Every nation has the right to live according to its own will and quality. Yes, we do not attack, we defend. We are defending because the globalist progressive elite wants to impose its will on us, wants to tell us what to think and how to live.

The Hungarian leader reemphasized the importance of the nation-state, but warned the existence of national sovereignty is under threat.

My friends, the idea of the nation is our particular Western heritage. That is why the Hungarians recognized it, that is why they made a blood pact, that is why they organized themselves into a nation, that is why we joined the Western world, and that is why we did not disappear into the mists of history, as happened to the other Asian peoples who came to the West. As nation-based political organization spread in the West, we rose up, we overtook our Western counterparts, in the race of civilizations. It proved that the nation is the best framework. It is the best framework for unleashing the dormant forces in the citizens of a country and for serving the interests of the whole community. If one knows, accepts and embraces a common language, history and culture, one is a full member of the nation and therefore free. This was the great advantage of Western civilization. That is why we were centuries ahead of the other continents. It is this competitive advantage of civilization, my dear friends, that is under attack today. And I am sorry to say that the attack is successful.

He warned that other civilizations across the world have not just caught up with Europe economically but have “simply outgrown us,” and lamented the fact that the Western world now only accounts for around 40 percent of the world’s economic output compared with more than 60 percent before the turn of the century.

Furthermore, the West is losing the race in terms of population growth with rapidly declining demographics “masked” by mass immigration. With its economic, cultural, and demographic decline, the only thing the West still has is its military strength, Orbán said.

So we are not doing well, the West is not doing well in the competition of civilizations and the worst thing is that we have only ourselves to blame. We have no competitor who could have wreaked such havoc. When the left unleashed the virus on the world, many well-meaning conservatives said that this anti-national virus was just a laboratory pest. The left doesn’t want to unleash its radicals on the world, they will contain them themselves, they said. But that’s not what happened. Let us not be naive. Today, we see that this virus has not escaped, it has been bred, it is being bred and it is spreading all over the world. Migration, gender, wokism — these are all just variants, variants of the same virus.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the essence of illegal migration is the destruction of the national community. It is to break down the cultural basis necessary for the functioning of the nation-state and to create in its place marginalized, atomized, coexisting but hostile groups who will never form a community and who will eventually never form a state.

Orbán then turned his attention to the cultural debate enveloping both Europe and the U.S. in recent years, taking aim at the woke ideology and gender propaganda being used by the left to promote their progressive agenda.

The woke movement and gender ideology are exactly what communism and Marxism used to be. They artificially divide the nation into minorities in order to foment discord between groups. This is their power base. The Hungarian conservative experiment is successful because we know the Marxists from many miles away, and even by smell, unseen. They have been sitting on us for 50 years. Gender and woke also divide the nation into classes and proclaim that class is more important than nation and precedes belonging to the nation and precedes national identity. My friends, I lived 26 years under Marxist oppression.

Wherever class warfare rears its head, countries based on peaceful cooperation will be the scene of unrest. There will be no more mutual respect and acceptance of each other, and only unquestioning hostility will remain. Ladies and Gentlemen, the third variant of the virus that threatens Western nations today is progressive foreign policy.

The Hungarian leader then raised the issue of the West’s foreign policy and claimed that progressive administrations intent on labeling people and countries as either “good” or “bad” was a deeply dangerous policy in the modern political climate.

Progressive foreign policy always leads us to war. It subverts countries in the name of exporting democracy, and then either leaves or drifts, gets stuck in the mess it has created. I have seen many such color revolutions. It started with the slogan of freedom, and it continued with liberal, progressive re-education, human betterment. It ended in chaos, confusion and the shame of abandoned countries.

I am sure that if Trump were president, no war would be hitting Ukraine and Europe today, so come back Mr. President and make America great again and bring us peace.

Ladies and gentlemen, in recent years progressives have once again divided the world into good, bad, Nazis, non-Nazis, democracies and autocracies. Progressives always pursue an imperialist policy. What they are doing is an imperialist textbook example. First, they put diplomatic pressure on nations. They expect them to show their colors. Whether they support migration, whether they support gender propaganda, the relativization of families, the sexualization of children. Those who refuse to do so are the enemy and the liberal fatwa is pronounced on them. If you say that gender and LMBTQ movements mean the sexualization of children, you will be accused of betraying Western values. If you say that universities should not be about woke ideology but about seeking the truth, you are attacking academic freedom. If you say that war is not in the interests of the Western world, then you are being branded as pushing Putin’s wagon. We are getting a bit tired of it here in Budapest, but we cannot take it lightly. The latest imperial foreign policy goal of the progressives is to take away the right of EU member states to have their own foreign policy. They must be stopped, and this will be the biggest battle in Brussels in the months ahead.

“I’m sure if Donald Trump was president today, there would be no war in Ukraine, or in Europe. Mr. President, come back, make America great again and bring peace back to Europe.” – Viktor Orban Prime Minister . pic.twitter.com/FnA3dNlJNp

— Spriter (@Spriter99880) May 4, 2023

Thankfully, according to Orbán, the virus unleashed by progressives on the Western world is beginning to not just be contained but countered in some European nations. The Hungarian prime minister praised Giorgia Meloni’s electoral victory in Italy last fall, as well as Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election in Israel.

We are rooting for Mrs. Meloni so that the Italian brothers and sisters show inspiring results as soon as possible. And in Jerusalem, the conservative forces have also won.

I can see that the progressive left there does not accept the facts either, but I have good news for Prime Minister Netanyahu, the louder the liberals are, the faster they lose popularity. I say this from experience. And here they are ahead of us.

We have the promising Spanish elections ahead of us and the stars are looking good for our Polish friends. And then the European Parliament elections, when we can finally capture the conservative elite and drain the swamp in Brussels.

Orbán added that those afraid of the virus need to look no further than Hungary for the cure, where his government remains stoic in its promotion of conservative values and defiant in the face of liberal opposition from Brussels.

We have stopped migration at our borders, we have banned the sexualization of children and gender propaganda in schools, and we are also working uncompromisingly for peace. It works. We have won four in a row. People feel that they are being played. They support the political force that protects and represents the interests of the whole nation. Yes, popular will, or democracy itself, is the main weakness of the progressive forces. Is this where they can be caught?

Ladies and gentlemen, there are two ways to take a city, as they knew in ancient Rome. Either you take the walls of the city, or you take the sanctuaries of the city. My advice is that we start with the sanctuaries, then we take the walls. We have taken great European sanctuaries in recent years. Budapest, Warsaw, Rome, Jerusalem, Vienna are not hopeless, but the truth is that the two main sanctuaries of modern democracy, Washington and Brussels, are still in the hands of the liberals. Let us make sure that this is not the case.

I wish you all God’s support and perseverance in doing so. And if we are to meet on May 4, may the Force be with you.

Authored by Matt Taibbi via Racket News,

Last December, Michael Shellenberger reported in a #TwitterFiles thread that the Aspen Institute hosted a “Hack-and-Dump Working Group” exercise in the summer of 2020 titled, “Burisma Leak,” which predicted with uncanny accuracy an upcoming derogatory story in the New York Post about Hunter Biden’s lost laptop.

The documents Shellenberger published showed how at least five media figures, including David Sanger and David McCraw of the New York Times, Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post, then-Daily Beast and future Rolling Stone editor Noah Schactman, and Rick Baker of CNN worked alongside Twitter and Facebook’s chief moderation officers, Yoel Roth and Nathaniel Gleicher, to plan a response to a hypothetical damaging exposé about Joe Biden’s son.

The “Burisma Leak” exercise predicted many elements of the real response to the New York Post’s coming Hunter Biden story, including complaints from influential Democratic congressman Adam Schiff about its “source and veracity,” and public statements from “former senior intelligence officials” falsely raising the specter of a “Russian operation.”

Newly uncovered documents show the war-gamed, choreographed response to the New York Post piece in October, 2020 — which included temporary suppression by those tech platforms Twitter and Facebook — may have been part of a broader plan to re-think basic journalistic standards in general, beyond just the one incident. This included junking what experts involved with the tabletop exercise referred to as the “Pentagon Papers Principle,” under which journalists since Daniel Ellsberg’s 1971 leak had “operated under a single rule: Once information is authenticated, if it is newsworthy, publish it.”

The “break” from the age-old standard was endorsed by multiple current and former figures from the Washington Post and New York Times, the two papers most associated with the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Neither of the press offices of the two papers would comment, nor did individual figures named in the #TwitterFiles leaks.

The genesis of this idea appeared to come from a paper co-authored by two Aspen tabletop attendees, both from Stanford: longtime journalist Janine Zacharia and former Obama and Trump Cybersecurity Policy Director Andrew James Grotto. Their “How to Report Responsibly on Hacks and Disinformation: 10 Guidelines and a Template for Every Newsroom” included the idea of ditching the “Pentagon Papers Principle,” insisting, “authentication alone is not enough to run with something.”

The concept seemed to provide the intellectual foundation for shelving the Post story, which otherwise presented a real conundrum for would-be censors, being neither fake news nor a Russian plant. The elaborate carve-out for dealing with such material is laid out in another newly discovered document, called “Partnership for a Healthy Digital Public Sphere: Opportunities & Challenges in Content Moderation.”

This summary was sent by Aspen Digital’s Executive Director and former NPR CEO Vivian Schiller to two other Aspen figures on September 15, 2020. Echoing the Stanford paper, it summarized the lessons Aspen Digital learned from examining the hack-and-dump problem, explaining the need to put “provenance front and center”:

The concept theoretically represented a major shift, asking reporters to move from focusing on the what of news to why? and who from?

Subscribers to Racket News can read the rest here…

Authored by Daniel Y. Teng via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

As reports of vaccine injuries gain traction globally, an Australian doctor is leading a new class action against the federal government and key medical figures.

Queensland GP Dr. Melissa McCann has filed the action in the Federal Court of Australia on behalf of 500 complainants.

The action targets the federal government, Dr. Brendan Murphy, the Chief Medical Officer, and Prof. John Skerritt, the public face of the Therapeutic Goods Administration—the country’s drug regulatory body.

“The action will argue that the Therapeutic Goods Administration [TGA] did not fulfil their duty to properly regulate the COVID-19 vaccines, resulting in considerable harm and damage to Australians,” said Natalie Strijland from NR Barbi Solicitor said in a statement.

The main thrust of the claim is that the government’s actions in promoting the use of COVID-19 vaccines were “negligent or wrongful” and resulted in personal injury, medical expenses, and economic loss for the claimants.

“The claim now proceeds upon the basis that the government, in fact, acted negligently in approving the vaccines and also by failing to withdraw them after approval based upon the known evidence,” Strijland said.

“Australians who have experienced a serious adverse event following COVID-19 vaccination are invited to step forward and register for this class action.”

Liberal Sen. Gerard Rennick—a vocal critic of vaccine mandates—welcomed the action.

“Thank you to Dr. Melissa McCann and the solicitors that have taken up the fight to help those affected and still suffering,” he wrote in an online statement.

“It is disappointing, to say the least, that people are not being compensated or receiving the healthcare they now need due to these experimental jabs which were, as we now know, never designed to be safe or effective.”

Vaccine Injury Payouts Ongoing

The Australian government operates a vaccine injury compensation scheme that has, thus far, paid out over $7.3 million (US$4.87 million) to 137 claimants. It has received 3,501 applications and is progressing with 2,263, according to figures obtained by news.com.au.

The Department of Social Services has previously estimated the government could be liable for a payout of $77 million (US$49.35 million).

Lawyers assisting patients have noted the challenges with navigating the scheme.

“We’ve had just under 350 inquiries about adverse outcomes, and they have been extremely varied, but most of them have a condition that has some ongoing impact. Not many seem to fit within the criteria of the six categories,” personal injury lawyer Clare Eves told The Epoch Times previously.

Meanwhile, in response to the class action, the Australian Department of Health said, “The department is aware of a proceeding commenced today in the Federal Court of Australia by applicants represented by NR Barbi Solicitor Pty Ltd. As the matter is before the court, it is inappropriate to comment further.”

Vaccine Injuries No Longer A Taboo Topic

Since late last year, vaccine injuries have gained increasing recognition.

Previously, health authorities censured medical professionals who questioned the efficacy of the jab—part of a wider effort to encourage vaccine takeup.

In December 2022, former MP Dr. Kerryn Phelps and her partner revealed they suffered serious injuries from a COVID-19 vaccine and suggested that the actual number of adverse events linked to the jab was far higher than what official data showed.

“In my case, the injury resulted in dysautonomia with intermittent fevers and cardiovascular implications including breathlessness, inappropriate sinus tachycardia and blood pressure fluctuations,” she wrote in a submission to Parliament.

Some medical practitioners continue to fight to be reinstated into their profession after being ousted for speaking out against the vaccine or mandates.

In August 2022, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency suspended the registration of North Brisbane GP William Bay after he interrupted a national Australian Medical Association conference in late July and told attendees to stop forcing vaccines on people.

Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

There was something deeply demoralizing about the recent Mayoral election in Chicago, once among America’s greatest cities. The good news is that the catastrophic reign of a deeply corrupt and crazed mayor, who piled egregiously racist policies on top of one of the worst COVID responses in the country, came to an end. The bad news is that a guy who is arguably worse took her place.

As Allysia Finley put it in the Wall Street Journal, “Brandon Johnson’s victory in last week’s Chicago mayoral race is a reminder that no matter how bad things get, they can always get worse.”

The city itself is facing bankruptcy but that economic reality is changing nothing about city policies. Crime is out of control. Poverty and despair are on the rise. And the residents who can leave are fleeing. Businesses are closing up shop and 175,000 people have left the city in the last two years, leaving the place at the mercy of people who only vote for more handouts and union controls.

The people who leave feel a sense of guilt, but the decision is entirely rational. One person’s vote makes no difference and no one has the obligation to stick around and become a sacrificial victim of pillaging politicians and dangerous criminals.

It’s all deeply tragic. The first time I went to Chicago many years ago, I was just thrilled to discover a city which seemed to combine the best of New York City but without the chaos, confusion, and muck. But sadly, those days have come to an end.

At some point in the last three years, many people just decided the situation was hopeless and left for greener pastures. Sadly, this put the city into a deep spiral of political disaster to the point that hopes for change and renewal seem to have been permanently dashed. Maybe it will come back to life at some point but maybe not in any of our lifetimes.

Incredibly, however, this same spiral of exodus plus the entrenchment of crime and corruption seems to be affecting other great cities too. People living in New York City today are grateful for an end to the utter madness and desolation of the lockdown years and the city is certainly revived today as compared to what it was in 2020 and 2021. However, by any standard, the experience of the city is massively deprecated compared with what it was only a few years ago.

For my part, I avoid the city as much as possible, simply because I cannot bear the Gotham-like feel of the place, with the inescapable stench of trash, sewage, and weed, plus the ever-present threat of crime. To be sure, there are some beautiful neighborhoods but getting there requires that you interact with the rest of the city through its main transportation portals.

And the bureaucracy of the state in general is absolutely overwhelming. If you own a business with an employee in New York State, you know this. Navigating the endless bureaucracies just to get a basic payroll in place is maddening beyond belief. One agency doesn’t talk to another and has no idea what they are doing. Compliance alone is too complicated even for online payroll platforms like Gusto. I know of companies that refuse even to hire anyone who lives there just to avoid this mess.

There are two other cities on the deathwatch list: San Francisco and Seattle. You know of the deep tragedy of San Francisco if you have visited lately. The place is an appalling mess and deeply dangerous too. Murder has nearly become normalized as something that just happens. Robert Lee, founder of CashApp and one of the most brilliant young entrepreneurs in the country, was brutally stabbed in broad daylight last week. The appalling event came to be shrugged off by major media as something that just happens, when reported at all.

I wasn’t entirely aware of the turn Seattle had taken until I visited last month, and found the same thing, with residents fleeing as fast as they could if they had the resources to do so. This trend leaves the cities in the hands of hoodlums public and private and dooms the place to go a long time without reform.

This is a reversal of the past when big cities would go through cycles of bust and boom once city fathers saw the errors of their ways. That is no longer a dynamic that seems plausible now. In other words, this time could be permanent.

The city as an institution is one of the great achievements in the history of modern civilization. They first began to emerge in the late Middle Ages with the end of feudal estates and the rise of the money-based exchange economy that allowed people to move and travel without grave danger. The city drew people out of their tribal hovels and created new centers of prosperity and the exchange of ideas. It was here and in spots all over the world that germinated the creative ideas that led to revolutions in art, literature, science, medicine, and industry.

Cities also created the basis for growing amounts of tolerance, peace, and human rights, as diverse people from all lands and languages came together to their mutual advantage. The experience led to a greater appreciation for the universality of the human experience and incentivized the entrenchment of a new ethos of togetherness. Arguably, it was the city that ended the religious wars, for example, and eventually slavery too.

The American cities were newer than those in the Old World but especially prosperous in ways that no one could even imagine. American freedoms in the second half of the 19th century led to the miracles of San Francisco, Atlanta, New Orleans, Chicago, and Hartford. But once the technology of steel and its commercial viability arrived by the turn of the 20th century, New York City overtook them all and eventually gave us wonders of the world like the Empire State Building. Meanwhile, Los Angeles, Dallas, St. Louis, Miami, and others rose up to greatness too.

The 21st century fall of so many American cities poses dangers not just to the city but also to the host state, simply because of the direct election of senators. The original Constitution assured that cities could not dominate state politics because the Senate representation was not subject to direct election. The 17th Amendment of 1913 changed that. Now the fate of the city has a profound effect on the whole state and then the whole nation. It was not supposed to be this way but the disastrous decision to change the Constitution assured that it would be so.

There is another factor to consider. People like Anthony Fauci and the plutocrats at the World Economic Forum somehow turned against cities in the last decade, deciding that they really did nothing but promote material excess, disease, and waste. They were suddenly put on the chopping block in the name of “radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces.”

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Australia has done very little over past years in practical terms when it comes to protecting the rights of its imprisoned citizen Julian Assange, who is still locked up in London’s Belmarsh Prison as his extradition case is slowly processing through the courts. 

This is why it’s somewhat surprising and refreshing to very belatedly hear Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese while visiting England complain about the WikiLeaks founder’s ongoing detention, though not for the first time of his administration. He also expressed concerns over his health and well-being during all these years of harsh confinement, previously holed up inside the Ecuadorian embassy as well.

On Friday Albanese said he is “frustrated” for not having found a diplomatic fix to Assange’s plight. “I know it’s frustrating, I share the frustration,” Albanese told ABC television from London.

“I can’t do more than make very clear what my position is and the U.S. administration is certainly very aware of what the Australian government’s position is. There is nothing to be served by his ongoing incarceration.”

“Enough is enough, this needs to be brought to a conclusion, it needs to be worked through,” said Albanese, and also highlighted a glaring contradiction:

Albanese said Australians were failing to understand the reasons for freeing the source who leaked the documents to Assange while he still remained in prison, referring to the release of former U.S. soldier and WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning.

WikiLeaks and Assange’s legal team and family will certainly welcome the Australian leaders’ protestations, and there’s hope that Albanese will continue pressing the issue with President Joe Biden.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese expressed his most aggressive “frustration” (anger) to date over the fact that Joe Biden continues to keep Australian citizen Julian Assange imprisoned.

“Enough is enough,” he said. Indeed.https://t.co/4Kt0WEyCM6

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 5, 2023

Assange supporters, however, are arguing that Albanese is in a position to do much more, but has so far stopped short:

The prime minister apparently is not willing to use his leverage with the U.S. regarding Assange when it comes to Australia’s reckless assistance to Washington’s preparations for war with China. As many people have pointed out, the U.S. needs Australia a lot more than Australia needs the U.S. in this regard.  

And the point Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong made about Australia not interfering in the ongoing legal processes of another country has been rubbished by the fact that Australia has done just that in two cases to free their citizens from foreign jails. 

Assange is sitting in Belmarsh prison just miles from where Albanese is staying in London. The prime minister can go see his jailed citizen, as suggested by Consortium News reader Randal Marin.

Assange’s plight has largely dropped out of mainstream media coverage, and so indeed any potential efforts of Albanese to visit him in prison would be hugely symbolic and a boost to WikiLeaks.

White House Press Secretary refuses to answer question about Julian Assange when asked about criticism of double standards in calling for the release of Evan Gershkovich, while pursuing prosecution of Assange #WorldPressFreedomDay #FreeAssangeNOW pic.twitter.com/at7lcbYUwP

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 3, 2023

But it remains that Australia is a member of the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence-sharing allies, and thus is always likely to default on the side of Washington’s security interests in cases like this, centered on a famous dissident journalist.

Authored by Paul Gottfried via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Daniel Henninger, writing in the Wall Street Journal on April 26, properly describes Joe Biden as “the perfect Democratic president.”

According to Henninger, Biden’s “non-compos” condition should give the “left wing of his party free rein” during his second presidential term, which is exactly what his party wants. A cognitively impaired, not particularly principled figurehead fits the needs of his handlers; and Biden obviously has no interest in doing anything to upset them. He will dutifully get behind his party’s latest woke project and ritualistically attack its Republican opponents as white nationalists, sexists, and homophobes.

Equally significant, Biden is the perfect front figure for an administrative state in which the chief executive provides little more than an ornament: “A beside-the-point president is the best thing that has ever happened to the progressive centralization project. That is why Washington’s Democrats would embrace a Kamala Harris succession.”

What I discern in Henninger’s compelling description of a second Biden term is the outline of my thesis in “After Liberalism” (Princeton, 1999), which is subtitled “Mass Democracy in the Administrative State.” In this work I argue that modern Western regimes are not really about “democracy,” that is, meaningful self-rule, of the kind that existed historically in Swiss cantons or in Thomas Jefferson’s concept of popular government. The modern version of democracy is about public administration, in which citizens are called on periodically to give their rulers a stamp of approval through elections (which are now conducted in much of this country without voters having to identify themselves or even appearing in person at a voting precinct).

“Liberal democracies” have also ceased to be “liberal” in any real sense since that term now refers to the actions and policies of governments run by public administrators and their media backers. It’s now considered “liberal” for the state to approve of the sexual mutilation of children, even without parental permission, or to close down opposition speech, if our administrators decide that’s the “liberal” course of action.

There’s also a secular state religion that reigns in most Western countries, and that too dispenses “liberal” teachings. When I wrote “After Liberalism,” that state religion featured a more modest form of diversity than the one that’s now in place. In its more recent form, as taught by the media and academic priesthood, postliberal liberalism has turned woke and now urges discrimination against white people, particularly against heterosexual white males. It also discriminates against devout Christians of all races, in the name of transgendered identity, which represents the newest distillation of liberal orthodoxy.

Political labels are therefore in freefall, and often mean no more than what those who control our lives and consciousness want those terms to signify. Values and rights are also part of the common moral vocabulary, which is shaped through an exercise of will on the part of our “liberal democratic” leaders. Henninger may be actually understating this situation when he observes about policy wonks and social engineers running the Deep State that “their control of the bureaucratic levers today is unprecedented.” Even more ominously, we may now be at a loss trying to figure out how we can reverse this situation. With “passive presidents” like Biden technically at the helm and fronting for woke administrative elites, there’s no real chance of this ever happening. The bureaucratic control that Henninger bewails, unless upended, will likely reach further unprecedented levels.    

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The protest movement that’s rocked Israeli politics over the past months on Thursday shifted its fire to a new target: special treatments given to the country’s rapidly-growing ultra-Orthodox population. The growing discontent threatens to widen a critical fault line spanning Israeli economics and politics.  

Declaring a “Day of Disruption to Demand Equality,” tens of thousands of marchers in several cities asked for an end to a variety of special perks given to Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are called “Haredim.” As they did in their successful quest to force a pause in Prime Minster Netanyahu’s supreme court reform scheme, protesters blocked roads and demonstrated outside cabinet officers’ houses — although their numbers lagged earlier demonstrations. 

One of those special treatments is exemptions from Israel’s military draft. Haredim who are enrolled in religious study get to skip compulsory military service, a central aspect of Israeli society and an essential ingredient in the country’s militarism. 

As long as they keep studying the Torah, the exemption keeps going too. Worse, Haredi men receive public subsidies all the way to the standard retirement age of 67. That’s an economic double-whammy: These men aren’t productive, and are taking money collected from others. (Thanks to America’s lavish foreign aid to Israel, and the fact that money is fungible, some of those on the wrong end of this redistribution scheme are US taxpayers.) 

In another exception to policy, Haredi children are exempt from Israel’s educational standards. Haredim children don’t have to study core topics like math, science and English, which means they offer lesser skills to would-be employers. 

According to the Bank of Israel, 75% of Haredi women work, but just 50% of men. Two thirds of those working men only work part-time, and mostly in menial jobs commensurate with their lack of Earthly education. The average Haredi family pays only a third of the income tax paid by non-Haredim.

Within Israel, the dynamic has sparked growing resentment among non-Haredi Jews. “This is taxpayer money, almost exclusively funded by families whose children serve in the IDF,” wrote Yaakov Katz in a Jerusalem Post opinion essay. “Having IDF-serving families fund non-serving families is an insult to these soldiers.

Similar sentiments were expressed on Thursday. “[The Haredim] are not carrying with us, they are not part of society,” 58-year-old Dafna Goldenberg told the Washington Post. “I’m deeply worried that it will all collapse.” 

She said when she debated Haredim in front of a yeshiva school, they assured her, “God will protect us and we will protect you by studying Torah.” 

The economics of the situation are growing grimmer each day, thanks to the fact that the Haredim are the fast-growing segment of Israel’s population, with a birth rate that’s triple that of non-Haredi Jews. 

The politics are intense too. Netanyahu’s grip on power rests in part on Haredi political parties, whose demands for expedited passage of new laws cementing military exemptions for Yeshiva students are accompanied by threats of withdrawing from the ruling coalition. 

“Coalition agreements signed between Netanyahu and the ultra-Orthodox parties also reportedly promise to funnel billions to ultra-Orthodox institutions, housing developments, and health-care and child-care services, proposals that have further infuriated the anti-governmental protests” — Washington Post 

Since he values power above all else, look for Netanyahu to walk a tightrope, with a bias toward advancing the Haredim agenda at the price of undermining Israel’s long-term economic, cultural and political stability.