REPUBLIC REBORN

“It has to be this way, or else.”

-Johnny Rotten

Activist Post: “Landmark” victory for First Amendment as court strikes down Texas anti-BDS law

BRITTANY HUNTER: No one is coming to rescue you, especially not a presidential candidate

Techdirt: Study: The ‘War on Cops’ is pure BS

FEE: Electric cars aren’t nearly as green as people think

JEFFREY SINGER: Scapegoating opioid manufacturers lets true offenders get away

The Outline: Thanks to Trump, psychedelic drugs have received more medical research and consumer market approval than ever

Forbes: The fossil that inspired ‘Alien’

The Hill: Report: More Afghan civilians killed by U.S. and Afghan forces than killed by the Taliban

Detroit Free Press: Student slated to attend Western Michigan University beheaded in Saudi Arabia

“Saudi killing spree” of its own civilians

Activist Post: NBC and CNN caught faking measles pics

Reason: The New York Times built a functioning private facial recognition system

The Intercept: Coalition airstrikes in Raqqa killed 1,600 civilians, more than 10 times U.S. estimate, according to Amnesty International report

FEE: The ADHD overdiagnosis epidemic is a schooling problem, not a child one

KOAM: Medical marijuana patients in Oklahoma to be allowed to own, purchase firearms

Reason: The government is treating Julian Assange like a hacker to punish his journalism

Activist Post: “It should be illegal”: Use of facial recognition software at airport draws anger

Techdirt: State investigator granted immunity for hours-long detention of doctor at gunpoint during search for medical records

Business Insider: Trump’s washing machine tariffs stung consumers while lifting corporate profits

New York Daily News: Hundreds of Pakistani children hospitalized with nausea and vomiting following polio vaccine

Going back to meat after eating vegan made Anne Hathaway feel “like a computer rebooting”

This Scientific American article from 2016 is a fairly eye-opening report on the tactic that most government, scientific, and corporate agencies use to control coverage of them by the media. It describes the tactic of giving a select group of privileged reporters early access to breaking news, in exchange for relinquishing journalistic independence. That tactic is known as a close-hold embargo. Basically, the reporters would be instructed on how to report the story in order to have the scoop. As one might expect, the slimiest, most amoral, opportunistic reporters jump at this Faustian bargain, since they have no soul to sell anyway. But the effect on the profession of journalism at large is devastating: the most high-profile media outlets become nothing more than stenographers, willingly publishing whatever they are told. In exchange, they get the exclusive.

Think that garbage you watch on TV is “news”? It is a series of polished turds, propaganda in pure-heroin form, manufactured in scientific fashion by the very industry or government agency being covered, designed to elicit a particular response from the person ingesting it. And they are getting that response.

Town Hall: The Assange exception to the First Amendment

RYAN MCMAKEN: Yes, Julian Assange is a journalist. But that shouldn’t matter.

Activist Post: More than 50,000 marijuana convictions to be wiped clean in Los Angeles

PCmag: Microsoft rejects police request for its facial recognition tech

Reason: The Feds make a killing by overcharging for electronic court records

Futurism: Denver is voting on whether to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms

CNBC: Investors are starting to bet big on psychedelic medicine

With the exponential growth in autism cases since the epidemic took off in the early 90’s, it was inevitable that one case would occur that would represent a perfect storm for the federal government, vaccine manufacturers, and the parents of children who developed autism shortly after receiving a barrage of vaccines in one doctor’s visit. In 2000, 19-month old Hannah Poling deteriorated into autism immediately after receiving 5 vaccinations in one visit. Her case was unique in the fact that her father was a neurologist, her mother an attorney, and brought a sustained and devastating campaign, both in the media and at “vaccine court”, where it was ruled that, due to an underlying mitochondrial disease, the multiple vaccines tipped her into autism. Despite the unique advantage in having parents who were professionals in law and neurology, it still took 7 years of fighting the Justice Department for a ruling in her favor, while obtaining an admission that vaccines did contribute substantially to her resulting autism diagnosis.

Here is an interesting 2008 interview with Hannah’s father:

Recently, Meghan McCain, whose only claim to fame is being the daughter of the Senate’s premier warmonger, the late John McCain, unleashed a vile attack on “anti-vaxxers”, an ignorant slur for people who’ve looked at the facts surrounding vaccines, and have understandably become hesitant to inject themselves or their children. Over at Twitter, prime real estate for such ignorant bile, McCain tweeted, “Dear anti-vaxers, your stupidity and arrogance are putting the lives of children in danger! It is nothing short of abominable.”  To paraphrase the great Malcolm Reynolds, I’d say that McCain isn’t burdened with an overabundance of brains. It’s hard to learn, to retain facts, and to think critically. Much easier to just let whoever happens to be in authority fill your mind with the preferred propaganda, and let one’s own emotions do the talking, and tweeting. Which is what appears to be the case with McCain. If even a minuscule amount of research were possible for her, she’d discover that vaccine manufacturers are exempt from liability, that the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program exists and has paid out $4 billion to the families of the vaccine-injured or vaccine-killed, that the FDA regularly manipulates the media in favor of Big Pharma, that vaccine manufacturers have a sordid history of committing fraud by manipulating research for a new product. The few vaccinated versus unvaccinated studies that exist show that there may be something catastrophically wrong with U.S. vaccine policy. Peter Aaby’s 2017 comprehensive study of health outcomes of children in Guinea-Bissau found that children vaccinated with DTP had a mortality rate far higher than unvaccinated children.

Invincibly and comfortably ignorant, Meghan McCain won’t even begin to develop thoughts or ideas of her own. Thinking is hard, and can cause much discomfort, much easier to settle into an easy mental torpidity, and launch attacks at people who prefer to use their minds.

The almost exclusive attention given to ‘RussiaGate’ has been a pathetic display, magnified not only by the fact that it turned out to be untrue, but also by the fact that many of Trump’s actual crimes have been completely overlooked in the pursuit of phony Russian “collusion”. Case in point: Trump just vetoed a congressional resolution to end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s slaughter of thousands of Yemen’s poorest civilians with the help of U.S.-made weapons and U.S. military strategy.

The U.S., being the world’s largest weapons dealer, and Saudi Arabia the world’s top buyer of First World weapons, creates massively lopsided wars, with one side almost exclusively bearing the brunt of the casualties.

It’s just one of many examples of barbarians from the Third World equipping themselves with weapons purchased from barbarians of the First, and unleashing a campaign of mass murder against the civilian population of their enemy.

Trump, in defiance of Congress, supports this. And the media ignores it.

Liberty On Tap OKC, a wonderful pro-liberty meeting of minds that holds their monthly gathering at Pelican’s restaurant in Oklahoma City, held it’s most recent meeting last night on the topic of vaccines. Organizer Craig Dawkins set the stage for the meeting by reading alternating views on the topic by two fairly prominent libertarian writers, confirming that this debate is alive and well within the pro-liberty community as well.

Speaker Carlos Ledesma, certified hematologist and program director for a medical lab technology and phlebotomy program at Rose State College, presented the pro-vaccine side of the argument, but in a very reasonable manner. While he advocated vaccines as necessary for the overall health of society, he did acknowledge that their were risks involved. Additionally, growing up in the Philippines gave him first-hand experience in the dangers of vaccines, specifically the Dengvaxia scandal that erupted in his home country two years ago. French pharmaceutical company Sanofi Pasteur manufactured the vaccine, designed as an inoculation against Dengue fever, and struck a deal with the government for a mass vaccination program. The vaccine ended up being given to over 700,000 Philippine students, many without parental consent. The vaccine ended up actually inducing a severe form of Dengue infection in children who received the vaccine but had had no prior Dengue infection, and causing an unknown number of deaths.

Ledesma’s presentation was very reasonable, and he didn’t appear to advocate mandatory vaccination at all. I couldn’t help but wonder, though, how his arguments would be handled by mainstream press, who seem to automatically catalogue anyone with any questions about vaccines at all into the “antivaxx” camp. The “vaccines are safe and effective” mantra probably wouldn’t have gone over so well in his home country after the Dengvaxia affair.

After Ledesma finished speaking, the conversation among attendees shifted to the more philosophical aspects of the vaccine debate, specifically whether its a violation of another’s right to expose them to disease.

I believe that most people involved in this debate are less concerned with the philosophical aspects than they are with the corruption of the pharmaceutical industry, the blanket legal immunity those entities enjoy, the almost invisible epidemic of autoimmune disease and chronic illness in children, an epidemic that appeared seemingly out of nowhere sometime around 1990, the $4 billion in vaccine injury payouts given to families by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, the ballooning vaccine schedule, as well as the many scandals that have erupted surrounding vaccines, including Dengvaxia.

What sets off alarms bells for some, particularly those critical of the ‘War on Terror’ era propaganda campaign, is how much the current push for mandatory vaccination mirrors that effort, with mandatory vax bills essentially the Big Pharma equivalent of the Patriot Act. The “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” attitude pushed by the major media outlets, with any view even mildly critical of vaccines enough to incite an ad hominem avalanche, and the effort to censor vaccine critics online has been highly disturbing to people who do have serious questions regarding the “safe and effective” mantra.

My own two cents: Aside from the question of whether vaccines are “safe and effective” or not, or from the question of whether many of these previously-normal childhood illnesses might actually be beneficial to our immune system over the long term, advocates of liberty should approach disease prevention in the same way that it does every other societal issue that it confronts. To understand the libertarian solution, you must first understand what libertarians are for. What we support is a system where voluntary interaction is expanded as far and wide as possible. We are for a system of rules that enforce voluntary interaction, and prohibit coercion as much as possible. This system is ends-independent, we libertarians have no idea of the direction society will evolve, but we support any direction that is arrived at via voluntary means. We support this system of rules because we trust that, even though we can’t know how or in what direction society will change, we do know that the outcomes will be far better for everyone involved than if top-down planning attempted to force an outcome.

Allowing people to plan their own lives and make their own decisions, shielding them only from coercion, produces a market order that provides thousands of benefits that no program of top-down coercion could ever hope to produce. Allowing people to plan their own lives has resulted in massive increases in standards of living, quality of life, and large leaps in health and sanitation.

So the solution to the vaccine question should be simply to remove monopoly power from vaccine manufacturers, restore liability, and either modify or abolish altogether the various public agencies(CDC, FDA, etc.) that have shown to be highly susceptible to influence by the industries they ostensibly regulate. The power of choice, highly underestimated, will force industry to also evolve, and create a better product.