"America needs a militant democracy" -- Adolf Hitler, 1939.
Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt advised pushing a "militant democracy" to ensure an "authoritarian figure" like former President Trump never rises to power again.
In an op-ed for the New York Times, Levitsky and Ziblatt describe how they spent the last year "researching how democracies can protect themselves from authoritarian threats from within," lamenting how close Trump remains to getting a second term.
"How could such an openly authoritarian figure have a coin flip’s chance of returning to the presidency? Why have so many of our democracy’s defenses seemingly broken down, and which, if any, remain?" they wrote.
We're not a Democracy; America is a Constitutional Republic.
No matter the majority there are things you can't do; that's the difference. One of the things you can't do, which both these "professors" and Hitler did, is outlaw speech -- whether you're offended by said speech or not.
Harvard and its professors, of course, have freedom of speech too -- even speech that wildly offends like theirs does here.
However, I will note that since The First Amendment applies to all but true and unconditional threats, and in fact it is lawful to note what the retributive act will be if our Constitution is abrogated wholesale because under said Constitution such an act is unconditionally unconstitutional and thus impermissible and as such that note is NOT a legally-punishable threat, that should said Professors manage to convince the public to overthrow the Constitution and its protections, an act of unspeakable evil and an act of Civil War against the American people, that their families, their property and their persons will go first in what follows.
Don't do it Professors.
I don't want it and I assure you don't want it either but by God I will act in whatever degree is necessary to prevent any funny Austrian painters from taking hold in America. We know where that leads, and no, Donald Trump is not Hitler despite your rhetorical bullshit.
It is especially telling that these "Professors" believe that they would somehow be magically shielded from the consequences of such act were they to succeed in provoking it.
That, standing alone, makes them unfit to profess anything and that Harvard allows such as a serious discussion and proposal for America, not a mere academic exercise, is enough for me to call for each and every graduate and student, along with THEIR families, to be shunned in all respects and thus destroyed, entirely within the boundaries of the law as is every person's right under said First Amendment to not associate with those who seek to ruin this nation and kill both them and their families.
I'm specifically speaking of the utter scam run on people when it comes to environmental issues.
Its not really their fault, but on the other hand it is: They simply don't have the experience of what was, as they weren't born yet (or in some cases were born but not yet sentient -- the age at which that occurs does vary some but nobody can argue they were at birth, for example.)
Further, and probably more-seriously, the decline of written material means that those who seek to lie can trivially erase things they don't want to admit for the purpose of deliberately misleading you. That's hard to do with a physical book except by burning it, which leaves plenty of evidence since the book used to exist and no longer does. In the world of electronic media you can change "history" and unless someone made a copy beforehand nobody's the wiser. Witness the change in the dictionary definition of the word "vaccine" (yeah, go look it up -- you'll be shocked.)
Of course the physical presence of a book cannot compel you to read it. Witness those who have never read both The Federalist and The Anti-Federalist. If you're among them you have no concept of what the Founders envisioned and why the Constitution was constructed as it is, nor why the 10 original Amendments were required in order to ratify it. Those two written works are literally the debate between the Founders of this nation and present two quite-different aspects to that debate and process. You cannot claim to understand that process and thus are not qualified to enter into a debate as to what is and isn't appropriate to change unless you've read both and thus understand how the original decisions were reached.
Politicians and others who seek to influence society often pander to the part of the population who never had the background information to make informed choices. One of the key points in the modern era is usually "environmentalism"; the goal itself is good but the incremental improvement available in America now is tiny and the cost astronomical. That's right -- we already did it and those who lived through that time period know it and we don't have to read about it -- we directly experienced it.
There is a basic principle that essentially-always applies: The first 80% of any problem is trivially solved at reasonable cost. The last 20% is exponentially harder as one approaches 100%, and further the resource expenditure in doing so, whether in time, month or both, goes vertical.
People claim we must "save Gaia" (the planet), for example.
Reality: The planet, in the context of America, is in better condition today than at any time in the last 150 years.
You think not?
Let's count just a few examples out of literal thousands:
- The predominant heating fuel until fairly recently was wood or raw coal in either an open fire or crude stove. Combustion of same was woefully incomplete emitting a huge amount of tar and similar into the air. While wood is still used in some areas for efficiency reasons most stoves are now of either a "rocket" or catalytic design and thus emit much less.
- Even in the 1970s the water was wildly polluted as was the air in the United States. I distinctly remember both including watering eyes whenever driving past a chemical plant (of which there was one near my home), river water you could not safely swim in nor eat the fish from and similar. Today there are no chemical plant fumes there and the water in the same place is clean -- and you can eat the fish. This is true literally all over America; Love Canal anyone? Not one person younger than about 50 remembers any of this but it is fact.
- Until 1975 there were no catalytic converters on cars. Every single vehicle stank -- badly -- from the moment it was started until it was shut off. The early catalysts, however, were not particularly efficient and because those engines still had no closed-loop control they were hot enough to start fires if you parked over dry material -- and sometimes did. Modern closed-loop systems showed up in the early 1990s; the reduction of pollutant emissions by modern vehicles compared with engines prior to that time exceeds 99%. At the same time fuel economy dramatically improved because closed-loop operation allows the engine to run at almost-exactly stochiometric mixtures and therefore the engine does not deliberately waste fuel to avoid damage from lean combustion. Indeed the CO reduction in modern automobiles is so extreme that it is actually fairly difficult to kill yourself deliberately via CO poisoning using a modern car engine where with older, pre-catalyst engines you could literally do so in minutes. Simply put unless you're older than 40 in the US you never lived in a world where air quality was this good. All the bellyaching about vehicle emissions and thus the claimed "need "for electric cars in the modern world, in short, is flat-out bullshit.
- Older coal-fired things, whether power plants or steel mills, were hideously nasty emitters of pollutants. Modern coal-fired power plants (which the EPA is now trying to kill with impossible to meet regulations) are 90-95% cleaner in both Sulfur Dioxide and Nitrogen Oxide emissions compared with the same plant in the 1950s yet nobody ever considers that for the exact same amount of electricity produced they now emit 1/20th of the pollution they did just 50 years ago and will keep the lights on as long as they have fuel. Nonetheless they're not as efficient as natural gas since the combustion temperature is lower and they cannot run combined-cycle, which natural gas plants can -- and thus on a per-unit-of-energy cost basis, depending on the price of both fuels, natural gas is frequently cheaper.
The Laws of Thermodynamics are not suggestions; no law passed by man can change them. All transformations of energy involve loss; this is guaranteed by thermodynamics. Thus the most efficient way to do a given thing is always to use whatever form of energy is available that can be used directly without transformations and is of lowest all-in cost.
In addition intermittent sources of electricity (e.g. solar and wind), for example, will never win compared with either atomic energy or combustion fuels and all of them require seriously-toxic chemical processes to construct, have limited lifetimes and present serious disposal costs and environmental mitigation on the back end that everyone always ignores. Windmill blades are made out of fiberglass, which in turn is made from oil, and they are not recyclable. In addition they kill birds by the millions because while it looks like the blades are turning slowly at the tip the rate of movement is in fact nearly supersonic and a bird cannot see it. Solar cells require nasty chemicals and rare earth metals to produce which in return requires digging up huge amounts of land to acquire them and when either damaged or they wear out they too present serious environmental risk. If destroyed by bad weather such as hailstorms the damage to the environment from the release of those materials (onto the ground under them) is severe and immediate. In addition both are unreliable and this efficiency problem cannot be overcome because while solar and wind are great when the sun is shining or wind blowing (1) collecting that energy covers vast amounts of land compared with all the other alternatives and (2) you have to have available another form of generation all the time, and pay for it to be available, otherwise you have no electricity when they're not available. Since covering that potential lack of capacity is equally expensive as just buying and staffing the nuclear or carbon-fueled plant in the first place you're basically choosing to double your power bill and may I remind you that every single thing we do in our economy -- and thus its price -- has energy in it. Your grocery store, for example, needs both lights and the power to run the refrigerators or you have no meat, dairy and similar -- and that power has to work 100% of the time.
Further while heat pumps for heating use win in some circumstances against a natural gas furnace they lose a good part of the time, and not by a little either, especially when it gets materially cold outside. The exact cross-over point is easy to compute given the price of both power and gas along with the efficiency of the heat pump at a given temperature (its just simple math) but in every case where electricity has been moved off carbon-based fuels to renewables it is a near-certainty that natural gas will win on cost -- and not by a little and in addition the maximum demand for heating is of course in the winter at night -- when there is never any solar energy available. I've written a column on this; heat pumps only win in moderate temperatures if electricity is cheap or if you're forced to use Propane because there is no piped gas; otherwise you are way ahead to simply burn the gas directly in your furnace.
This same cost issue applies to all commerce! If you wish to force businesses, for example, to use heat pump or other electric heating fuels you will radically increase their costs and guess who gets to pay that in the price paid in the store?
Further natural gas is a nearly-pollutant-free energy resource. Yes, it produces CO2 when burned (and water vapor); neither is a pollutant. CO2 is plant food. Since you either eat the plants yourself or you eat what eats the plants increasing the growth rate of plants is a public good rather than a menace. You would like lower cost food rather than higher -- or worse, not enough food at all -- yes? And may I remind you that one of the key components of fertilizer for crops is in fact made from..... natural gas!
It is true that the climate changes. It always has and always will. What is not true is that we are evil SOBs who are out to destroy the climate or the Earth generally by polluting it; on the contrary; the data is that has been no change at all in, for example, the total energy in tropical cyclones since we began to be able to accurately compute that (e.g. since the satellite era began and thus we can "see" all the hurricanes where before satellites many were undetected since unless the storm hit land -- and many do not -- only the poor SOB who ran into it at sea by accident knew about it.)
Indeed some of the things we've done to clean up the planet have actually allowed more solar energy to reach the surface. Specifically we have insisted on far lower-sulfur fuels for ocean-going ships which reduces sulfur dioxide emissions and that makes the air more-clear thus more solar energy reaches the surface. The same thing is true for coal-fired power plants over the last 50 years; that is, we have in fact increased the amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet by a small amount because we made the air cleaner. This of course is the exact opposite of what you're told and sold by those screaming about "climate change."
There are lots of people who wish to lie to you about both history and where we are now for the purpose of making money. Never forget that in any regulated line of business -- that is, where there's a monopoly of any sort whether "natural" or otherwise, since profit margins are capped the only way to make more money is to force the total amount of spending to go up.
Power companies are natural monopolies; there is only one set of power lines to your house or business. You have a personal incentive to, for example, improve the seal around your windows because it reduces your heating and air conditioning costs. The power company cannot cause you to consume more power by breaking your windows or removing your weather stripping and their profit margin is capped by the rate-setting process so the only way for them to make more money is to "agree" that if you are forced to use electricity instead of gas the climate will be irrevocably ruined and thus you will be compelled to spend more money to heat your house or buy and operate a vehicle even though that claim of "permanent ruination" is a lie.
Likewise the car companies are all in on the government mandating all these new "nannies" (e.g. lane-keeping, blind spot monitoring and similar.) Why is it that the crash rate has not gone down if these things actually work? Obviously they do not work otherwise the crash rate would drop like a stone and it hasn't. But what has happened is that the cost of cars and insurance has risen dramatically with a large part of the cost increase being in the mandated "nannies" and the expense when one of them gets broken; instead of a $200 windshield now its $1,000 because the camera and other sensors has to be realigned at the dealer. The insurance company has its profit margin capped so the only way for them to make more money is to force up the cost of vehicles and collision repairs so they therefore can charge more for the insurance! You are told this improves safety but the data says it has not; all it has done is drive up the price which you are forced to pay even if you don't buy a new car because you might be at fault in an accident and the other guy did buy the new car with all the fancy mandated gadgets on it.
If you're young you might fall for the "imminent ruination" of the environment and planet generally because you've never seen it so much worse than it is now. You see, in 1970 you weren't alive -- but I was, and I remember it. You've never seen America look like this because you were never alive when it did.
I was.
It no longer is.
The air is no longer poisoned. The factories and chemical plants no longer belch eye-watering fumes and poison the water to the point you cannot swim in it or eat the fish. The tailpipe of your car no longer belches fumes that can kill you in minutes and being caught in traffic does not cause you to choke on the unburned hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide. Earth has quite-literally never been healthier; no longer do you get polio from your drinking water as that disease is fecal/oral in transmission. No, it was not the vaccine that stopped it; it was in fact the improvement in public sanitation as the case rate was dropping like a stone before the vaccine was introduced.
So-called "Green Energy" is a scam; it is neither green nor are we destroying the planet by exploiting carbon. On the contrary; we have wildly cleaned up the planet from our previous actions, it is in better condition today than any time in the last 150 years and all of that has happened while we have built more vehicles and consumed more carbon-based energy than ever. Indeed the cleaning of the air has led to more solar radiation reaching the surface of the Earth because we cleaned up the air, not the other way around, and this is a good thing since I presume you'd prefer not to choke on dirty air.
Don't fall for the scam: It is nothing more than yet another grift designed to make your poor for the benefit of a few monopolists and their cronies in government. Tell them to cut that crap out and if they don't you will cut them out rather than be impoverished by their deliberate, malicious lies.
... for people like me who refused the jabs.
You really ought to read that entire thing.
If you remember me saying that I had to double my "you're hosed" (seriously injured on a permanent basis or dead) percentage from being centered around 3% to about 5-6%. I've seen nothing in the data to change my mind on that. But the bad part is that on the data the negative outcomes are not slowing down materially but uptake of more boosters has basically gone to zero statistically, so those who getting nailed with cancers and neurological problems now are almost-always from the original insanity from 2021 to early 2023.
The problem is that plenty of people will try to sell you some sort of fix. Let me be clear: There isn't one.
All you have is the body's natural capacity to unscrew itself -- which is quite significant but not unlimited. That capacity is why my "you're hosed" percentage is 5-6% instead of 90%. But if you did it there's nothing you can do about it other than pray that you're in the 94-95% bracket and not the 5-6% one.
Where this leads to serious problems is when we start talking about more than ourselves -- specifically, if you're either in a "mixed jab" relationship or not in one but would like to be in one.
Many people at this point know damn well that these things were dangerous because they've seen their friends get screwed. Getting involved with someone always comes with risk especially over the long term but now we have another dimension to it and one that can't be un-done if there is divergence between two members of a couple. This is especially a big deal if kids (under 18) are involved or worse, if they're being contemplated by the couple.
Worse this means people will lie. They have every reason to do exactly that, especially if being truthful means you have to accept being exposed to the personal (always) and potentially the financial anguish if they get fucked or much worse if you make children with that person and the kids get screwed.
This won't sort itself out any time soon folks, but if you disregard these issues you're a fool. Its one thing to date for fun and not care, but if you're thinking about being serious with someone and letting them into your heart (say much less everything else) then its a whole different game.
The people who did this, and particularly those who were in the middle of pushing it on others in the medical system must be held accountable for it. The destruction they're laid upon everyone is not a singular event, it is not over and it will impact family formation, creation and more for the next two decades or more. I remind you that the SV40 polio disaster took decades to peak and recede and this is likely as bad or worse, as while that was horrid it didn't nail anywhere near the percentage of people in the first couple of years this has -- the largest impact didn't start to show up for a decade.
I know, "that's in the past" and "let it go."
No.
I will not.
Those who foolishly made their own decision as a single adult, with no dependents and nobody else who gets burned if it goes bad on them I can respect. They made a decision and they have to live with it. That's fine.
Nobody else, especially those who profited from it or pushed this shit on others, gets off free, I will never trust any part of that structure in our economy and government again and if any or all of it is utterly destroyed by any means, fair or foul, I'll cheer. Every single person involved in that, from physicians to hospital administrators to "influencers" and politicians deserves whatever they get.
The title pretty-much describes the functional reality of most of what's wrong in America today.
America is presumably a capitalist nation. Capitalism is an economic system where buyers and sellers enter bids and offers for various goods and services and the laws of supply and demand tend to dictate where price, production, expansion and contraction fall.
Its not a perfect system; among other things its reactionary by nature, in that until demand shows up supply will not, and thus it is always "behind" if you will. However, it has over time proved to be superior to any sort of central control.
There is a fly in the ointment: Humans are not necessarily good -- either all the time or even most humans some of the time. In fact most humans will pick up a $20 bill that is sitting on the sidewalk and put it in their pocket after taking a quick look around to see if anyone will actually see them do it. This, even if they have reason to believe it fell out of the guy's pocket 20' in front of them and for the majority even if they saw it fall out.
Now just because you took advantage of a situation doesn't make you a bad person. If you in no way influenced the other person's bad decision or the outcome from it then to feast on it is perfectly fine both ethically and morally. You owe that individual nothing and in fact it is precisely this that powers productivity and capitalism forward!
That is, if I can take advantage of some unrelated person's idiocy such that I can rent their office space for a tiny fraction of what they were paying because the owner has to fill it, the original lessee has no money and thus can't fulfil their contract and I have both money and need for the space there's nothing wrong with that. I had no part of creating either party's unfortunate circumstance.
But now let's take a different scenario.
I'm a dude with political power. I also own a bunch of rental properties. This puts me in a position to influence policy in a manner that causes a supply/demand imbalance in the rental housing market. Let's say that, for example, I arrange with the Federal government to "welcome" a few thousand "migrants" into my town, all of whom come with serious federal subsidies amounting to a couple of thousand dollars a month plus they have work permits.
Think about what happens here. The local employer base can pay these people less because they have a $24,000 annual tax free subsidy that the Federal government "gives" them. In truth they didn't give anyone anything -- they stole it from US Citizens since the government can't make money -- it can only transfer it from one person to another. In addition the local residents do not qualify for that same $24,000 annual subsidy and thus the price of rent now increases dramatically because the supply of housing does not change much on a rapid basis but the demand does and the people that are presenting the new demand are obtaining, by force, the $24,000 from the rest of the US population.
As the landlord I'm happier than a pig in shit. I can (and do) double or even triple the rent. When the American citizens can't pay and the "migrants" can, guess who gets the apartment? While my costs might go up a bit (more people, more wear, etc.) my profits skyrocket.
The problem is that I didn't honestly earn the money. I deliberately put in motion a scheme where I indirectly stole tens of thousands of dollars per person, per year for each apartment through the tenants and ultimately from every US Citizen. The harm to anyone citizen is diffuse but just as someone who skims ten cents each from 10 million account holders in a bank I still stole a million bucks.
Worse, the harm is not entirely diffuse. The townsfolk who are displaced get the immediate negative impact of having their place to live ripped out from under them. Given the further-depressed wage base in the local area which I created whether on purpose or simply as a reasonably foreseeable consequence of the policy I screwed them twice -- first by ripping their place to live out from under them by soliciting the subsidy and then again by destroying wages in the local area so they can't replace either their job or their apartment.
This isn't a "natural" capitalist circumstance and there is no creative destruction of someone who made a poor decision and as a result someone else who happens along gets to feast on the back of the voluntarily poor decision of the schlub who made it.
To some people these situations may look similar -- but they're not.
How about the medical field. We now know that "big sugar" bribed medical researchers; they paid for work to target their desired results and there was no disclosure that they funded that work. Now that would be bad enough but in fact it gets worse because if you can manage to convince people of something like this and it screws you then the business interests who make money because you're screwed love it -- so long as you don't blame them.
In other words in a capitalist system your incentive is to spend the least you can on medical care to obtain an acceptable result. Your physician's and the local hospital's incentive is to get you to spend every available dollar to obtain an acceptable result, and if you run out of dollars then advocating for shifting some of that price onto other people by force (since they'd never do it voluntarily) is next. There is no incentive in the medical system to promote anything that leads you to spend less or even better, nothing even if the result would be objectively superior!
The tension between buyer and seller is normal in a capitalist system however as soon as others are forced to pay the bill then your incentives are destroyed and the provider is enriched at the cost, forcibly extracted, of others.
The nuances of this are complicated but it all comes down to one thing: Capitalism isn't forcing others to pay someone else's bill; that's theft and since theft always involves involuntary taking no matter the actor involved it is supposed to be a crime. Further, when such theft distorts the market then the people who are priced out of whatever it was by said theft are immediately and irreparably harmed.
How do we redress this? Well, there are plenty of laws on the books (8 USC 1324 and 15 USC Ch 1) dealing with most of these practices but nobody has been criminally prosecuted and sent to prison for either of these offenses in decades despite there literally being too many instances of these acts on a daily basis to list. They continue because nobody goes to jail; the richer you are (that is, the more you exploit people and rob them on an individual or collective basis) the more prison sucks compared to your daily lifestyle. It thus is the ultimate progressive punishment; the homeless man doesn't think of prison as all that bad compared to the alternative while Jeff Bezos, a Mayor or Governor would find it an extraordinarily bad thing.
That's how it should be.
But financial punishment is not enough when the harm is irreparable. Money damages do not bring back dead people or restore a destroyed life. Time can never be recovered and thus there are crimes for which the only reasonable punishment is execution. This set of offenses, in size, is of that kind and character and incidentally this behavior by American government and business interests is, when you boil it all down, in fact identical in form and fashion to slavery which we allegedly banned by Constitutional Amendment.