RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2020/12/23/why-do-we-continue-to-follow-nonsensical-covid-rules-n1227670

The only demonstrable result of government-imposed COVID-19 lockdowns has been the destruction of national economies, the crippling of domestic and cultural life, the suffering and death of multitudes due to untreated prior medical conditions, and the drastic rise in suicide rates. The lockdowns themselves have seemed to do little to prevent the onset of the disease, hence one lockdown after another has led to no discernible effect—apart from the fact that the virus appears to strike primarily a designated older cohort of the population already suffering from comorbidities. A recent graph charting the effects of repeated lockdowns in the province of Ontario would appear to indicate that the lockdowns themselves are super-spreaders. Texas Tech professor Gilbert Berdine sums up: “After taking the unprecedented economic depression into account, history will likely judge these lockdowns to be the greatest policy error of this generation.”

The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to the mask mandate, somewhat less destructive but equally absurd. After touting home-made, cloth, and sundry other masks for six months, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam have discovered that Canadians should be wearing three-layer masks—a tacit admission that the single- and double-ply masks we have been wearing for all this time are patently inadequate. Apparently, no-ply also works, given that our Minister of Health Patty Hajdu was spotted at Toronto’s Pearson Airport unabashedly maskless and happily smiling, like her American counterparts Anthony Fauci at a baseball game and Governor Newsom of California at his favorite restaurant.

In fact, masks do not screen out (or keep in) viral microns averaging 100 nanometers in size; the weave of all masks, with the partial exception of the medical N-95, is far too large to repel the coronavirus particle, which varies between 60nm and 140nm. Further, masks may cause hypoxia and consequent immune deficiency through the ingestion of one’s own CO2. It gets worse. A 50-state-wide controlled study showed that there is no correlation between mask mandates and fewer cases. On the contrary, there is a reverse correlation: non-masking states and counties did better than their masking counterparts. There is no weeding around the graphic evidence. One wonders if CO2 -forced immunity depletion had something to do with this.

As for home isolation and travel restrictions, they are not taken seriously by our authorities. According to the Associated Press, Denver’s mayor flew to Mississippi to spend Thanksgiving with his family, after urging others to stay home. A Pennsylvania mayor banned indoor dining, then patronized a restaurant in Maryland. The governor of Rhode Island was photographed at a wine tasting. The mayor of Austin, Texas, flew to Cabo San Lucas on a private jet after hosting a wedding for 20. It’s common knowledge that Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker & family have blatantly violated his own travel ban. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s husband was caught attempting to sidestep her shutdown.

https://asiatimes.com/2020/12/the-tech-war-that-isnt/

Washington last week added China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) to the “entity” list that requires US companies to get special permits to trade with it, rattling the Chinese chipmaker’s stock price. But China hawks in the US Senate complain that the wording of the new rules makes them easy to circumvent, and allege that the Commerce Department bowed to the “parochial commercial interest” of US companies trading with China.

The trouble is that China’s market for semiconductor technology is growing so fast that American firms fear for their long-term viability if they are not involved. The Trump Administration imposed controls on the export of key semiconductor technology six months ago, but American chip design companies’ China sales are booming. Cadence Design Systems, one of America’s top two makers of design software, reports a near-doubling of China sales during the third quarter – after the controls went into effect. Meanwhile, America’s top design firms are investing in the Chinese startups that are hiring away some of their best talent, in order to keep a foot in the door of the Chinese market if they are prevented from selling directly.

Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) complained Dec. 22 that the new controls announced on SMIC, China’s largest chip fabricator, have a big loophole: The new rules apply only to equipment that is “uniquely” required to produce the most advanced logic chips, with a transistor gate width of 10 nanometers or below. But there’s no clear definition of what “unique” means, so “the Department of Commerce seems to be allowing SMIC access to nearly all semiconductor manufacturing equipment – undercutting the effectiveness of its nominal intent.”

The two Republicans added, “In effect, SMIC will not face serious restrictions, because very few tools are “uniquely capable” of producing a certain chip size. Indeed, SMIC publicly stated that its designation has no material adverse effect on the company’s short-term operations.”

They’re right, but they miss the big picture. SMIC is a minor factor in the world semiconductor market and in China itself, while a myriad of other firms – including telecom giant Huawei – are building chip fabrication lines without restricted US equipment. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/12/destination_socialism.html

In a recent article, I stated that the U.S. lacks an influential right-wing party, and our two major parties — Democrats and Republicans — are left and center-left, respectively.  That is, the perceived rightness of the GOP makes sense only relative to the Democratic party.  It is refuted if one considers the actual policy carried out by Republicans for the last one hundred years.

First of all, it is necessary to clarify what we understand by the left-right political spectrum.  A political spectrum is a system of qualitative comparisons of different political philosophies.  There are plenty of approaches in compiling the political spectrum based on various factors, dimensions, axes, and cardinal points.  Most often, political spectrograms differ significantly from each other, and it seems that each of them describes an entirely different reality.

Recent developments in the analysis of political philosophies, based on a multi-disciplinary approach utilizing set theory and mathematical logic in a framework of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), started to remove the ambiguity in understanding a political spectrum.  The study identifies three main factors that influence the political spectrum polarization: attitude to private property, degree of individual freedom, and the scale of wealth redistribution.

The political doctrine is left-wing if it assaults private property rights OR subjugates the individual to the collective OR imposes compulsory and scaled-wealth redistribution.  The “OR” operand means that these factors can be employed individually or in concert and can be considered unique paths to socialism.  Thus, Bolsheviks utilized all three ways to build communism, and Italian Fascists and German Nazis used coercive collectivization of consciousness and generous wealth redistribution as the main paths to socialism.  In contrast, evolutionary socialists funnel the effort to implement a massive wealth redistribution along with the gradual indoctrination of the population.