Muda69

I just sent you an invite to the OOB 2.0 club.

You are more than welcome to start a Tokyo Olympics topic in the OOB 2.0 forum. Or I can start the topic if you wish.

A Club which contains a Forum.

The Biden Administration Continues to Exaggerate the Risk Posed by COVID-19 Breakthrough Infections While Slamming the Press for Doing the Same Thing https://reason.com/2021/08/01/the-biden-administration-continues-to-exaggerate-the-risk-posed-by-covid-19-breakthrough-infections-while-slamming-the-press-for-doing-the-same-thing/ This "information" is just a huge *hitshow. No wonder a significant number of the U.S. populace doesn't trust it.

This fits you to a T, my socialist friend:

There is that, along with the covid restrictions of no spectators. Make the competition seem kind of dead.

FBI Seized $900,000 From Safe Deposit Box on 'Pure Conjecture,' Federal Judge Says https://reason.com/2021/07/29/fbi-seized-900000-from-safe-deposit-box-on-pure-conjecture-federal-judge-says/ Good to see the side of personal freedom prevail against the feds.

Keeping The Sport But Losing The Team: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/keeping-the-sport-but-losing-the-team/

Haven't watched any of the 2021 Summer Olympic games so far. Not interested this year.

Kroger, The Wokest Supermarket: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/kroger-the-wokest-supermarket/ As you will see, that’s what Kroger is doing here. It’s perfectly fine for a company to expect its employees not to bring their political, religious, or cultural proselytizing to the workplace. But that is exactly what Kroger is doing with LGBT! Employees who don’t agree with the ideology behind “allyship” had better go into the closet at work. Kroger says it wants to focus “on behaviors and not beliefs,” but if that were true, they would not be indoctrinating employees by the woke LGBT catechism. They would simply insist on courtesy and respect, not push gender ideology onto unwilling employees. Look: What does any of this have to do with being a supermarket cashier or stock person? Nothing! Do you have to affirm these contestable categories and definitions in order to treat your LGBT co-worker with respect? No, you don’t. Kroger wishes to indoctrinate its workers, and by so doing make it a less friendly place for people with dissenting moral or religious values to work. Again, what possible relationship does this ideology have to the ability of a Kroger employee to be a competent and dependable supermarket worker? Since when does corporate management involve itself in propagandizing for left-wing theories that until five minutes ago were confined to the Gender Studies faculty? Since the American elites lost their minds. Look at this stupidity. Imagine how hard it is for the people at the Kroger in Southern states, with our courtesy codes, to get with this idiotic language policing: We are re-working ordinary English to accommodate a thin-skinned fringe and their corporate elite allies, and turning the workplace into a massive eggshells-walk. Speaking of walking on eggshells: “Oppressive”! Gosh. So now some poor young man who got his GED, and is now working as a trainee at the meat market at the Kroger in Opelika, Alabama, might forget to say “xe” or “hir” or some other weird-ass Klingon pronoun to a co-worker or customer, and thus find himself denounced as an oppressor, and fired. Great, just great. Don’t work for Kroger if you want to retain your sanity and self-respect. Behold, the High Holy Days: Here’s the most outrageous thing in the whole set: Kroger tells its employees to get politically active to support a particular (and particularly controversial) law, then tells them to join the LGBT activist group HRC. What an outrageous overstepping of workplace boundaries in a supermarket. In this presentation, Kroger went from being nice to LGBTs to instructing its employees to take specific political stands. And it tells employees to join these activist organizations: Unbelievable. A person just wants to be a cashier at the local Kroger, but she has to endure this culture-war harangue by her employer. Imagine what ordinary people who work at Kroger must think as they have this stuff forced on them. They don’t dare object, or even question it publicly, out of fear they will be called a bigot, and fired. But see, that’s okay, because Kroger doesn’t want bigots working for it! If working-class bigots mopping the aisles at Kroger are terrified for their jobs in case someone discovers their bigotry, well, good: that means the system is working. As someone — Robespierre, or maybe Ibram X. Kendi — said, “Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.” Plainly Kroger, the largest supermarket chain in America, is a bad place to work for the non-woke. If you are one of the deplorably non-woke, don’t shop there. Don’t participate in this propaganda and indoctrination foisted on working-class people. Look at these charts from Indeed.com to see what people at Kroger are paid: Unsurprisingly: Kroger fired a couple of workers in Arkansas over this stuff, and are now facing an EEOC suit: Here is a key principle behind Woke Capitalism: You can pay your employees badly and bully them, making them afraid that they’re going to slip up, or that somebody’s going to find out that they are conservative, or go to church … but as long as you say the right pronouns, and get the seal of approval from the leading woke activist groups, hey, you’re golden. All the elites at the country club praise your executives for their social progressivism, and you never run into the grubby Bible-beaters and other grocery-store deplorables anyway, so who cares what they think? Right? I'm glad that I don't shop at Kroger.

High school children's football. Serious Business.

Should Taxpayers Be on the Hook for All Rental Debt Accrued During the Pandemic? https://reason.com/2021/07/29/should-taxpayers-be-on-the-hook-for-all-rental-debt-accrued-during-the-pandemic/ A knee-jerk government reaction may cost U.S. taxpayers billions. Again.

R.I.P. Ron Popeil, TV pitchman and inventor https://www.avclub.com/r-i-p-ron-popeil-tv-pitchman-and-inventor-1847382554 Truly an American Icon. He will be missed.

https://reason.com/2021/07/28/australia-is-the-canary-in-the-coal-mine-of-eroding-liberty/ Freedom-loving Americans should take the likes of Australia as a warning cry.

Goodbye, America We no longer have a Constitution. https://spectator.org/goodbye-america-and-free-speech/ <insert deity here> help us indeed.

Again, just a game. Played by children.

https://mises.org/wire/shrinkflation-inflations-sneaky-cousin-rise Yep, mostly caused by out of control government spending. This is the future we are leaving for our children and grandchildren.

Let's deny masks work, then mandate masks, then never differentiate between medical grade n95 masks & pieces of cloth, then mask only children for a bit, then reimpose universal mask mandates on vaccinated people and then ask why trust in institutions is crumbling. — Zach Weissmueller (@TheAbridgedZach) July 23, 2021

Why Progressives Will Never Accept Market-Based Medical Care https://mises.org/wire/why-progressives-will-never-accept-market-based-medical-care What this Oklahoma City clinic has done should be catching on everywhere and it should be celebrated in our body politic. Instead, as Dr. Smith points out, the medical establishment has done everything possible to shut it down and, if those in charge of other clinics and hospitals had their way, the Surgery Center of Oklahoma would meet the same fate as Tom Smith’s “Incredible Bread Machine.” Some of the rejection certainly falls into the “capture theory” category of regulatory economics. Other medical entities don’t like the competition and they use the apparatus of government to hamstring competing firms—all while using the “we’re protecting the consumer” rhetoric, which is textbook theory. Likewise, we also can see the “Baptists and bootleggers” theory of regulation at work. (Both Baptists and bootleggers want the liquor stores closed, but for very different reasons. The Baptists provide the high-sounding, “public interest” rhetoric, while the bootleggers don’t want the competition from legal entities.) No matter what theory we use to describe the opposition to free market medical care, we easily can characterize it by the following statement: medical care should not be inexpensive; it should be free. Anything less than “free” is morally and politically unacceptable. Whether one reads statements by Paul Krugman, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or anyone else in the current pantheon of American progressivism, “free” medical care is at the heart of all their demands. I point out that no one—not even Krugman—believes that medical care is a “free” or nonscarce service. To state otherwise would be claiming that every single factor of production that goes into the development and delivery of medical care also would have to be nonscarce, from labor to every single component of every medical device used. Even people that claim that medical care is ”different” from other goods and services and does not adhere to standard laws of economics are not going to claim that every input that goes into medical care also should be free. Since progressives believe that “free” medical care actually is not free in the economic sense, we are left with their central doctrine: all medical care should be administered free of charge to recipients and all payments that go to providers of medical care and producers of goods used in medical services should come from sources other than the direct recipients of medical services. This is not so much an economic statement as it is a religious one. If there is one central religious belief that all progressives share it is the belief that no one who receives medical services should have to pay directly for them. The amount of the fee is irrelevant; anything more than zero is prima facie immoral. This doctrine is so central to American progressive beliefs that progressives will go to extraordinary lengths to defend any political regime that offers free medical care. All one needs to do is to find progressive support for every single Communist regime from the twentieth century—and that includes the madly genocidal regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia in the mid-1970s—because they have free healthcare. Even after the collapse of most Communist regimes thirty years ago, the lone holdouts like Cuba and North Korea have their amen corners. Nikole Hannah-Jones, before she came to the New York Times, wrote this for readers of her former employer, the Portland Oregonian, after a visit to Cuba in 2008: She continues: I recall reading the same worshipful language directed at Mao’s regime in China even during the disastrous Cultural Revolution and praise directed to the former USSR and its Eastern European satellites for their alleged “free” medical care for all. No matter how violent, how murderous, and how genocidal a political regime might be, if it offers “free” and universal medical care then nothing else matters. “Free” and universal medical care legitimizes all other excesses. The left-leaning Guardian provides a recent example of this principle. Given that progressives are willing to excuse political mass murder if the regime in question claims to offer “free” medical care to everyone, then they hardly will be convinced that a medical model like that of the Surgery Center of Oklahoma (SCO) is morally legitimate even when it provides quality services at a fraction of the cost of medical care under third-party payments. For example, even after acknowledging the success of the SCO, a self-described “libertarian” recently challenged its legitimacy, employing Kenneth Arrow’s famous 1963 paper in American Economic Review that claimed medical care was “different” than other goods and services and needed to be removed from the market system. For all of the praise heaped upon the paper, and for all of its positive acceptance by the elites of academic economics, the Arrow paper is a poster child for the informal fallacy of “begging the question.” Arrow begins with a conclusion and then “proves” his point—without proving anything at all. Likewise, progressives begin with the declaration that the only morally legitimate system of medical care is one in which no recipient of medical services pays directly, so even if the SCO were able to bring their prices down to a nickel per procedure, progressives still would object. Briefly put, the Arrow theme is that because there is much uncertainty in the field of medical care, markets in that field cannot be competitive, which means that by definition they are not optimal. He writes: “[W]hen the market fails to reach an optimal state, society will, to some extent at least, recognize the gap and nonmarket social institutions will rise attempting to bridge it.” There is much to criticize here and not enough space to do it, but suffice it to say that Arrow’s analysis, as faulty as it may be, provides the fig leaf for economists like Krugman to make his antimarket claims: The fact that the SCO can profitably perform surgeries at less than a tenth of what nearby hospitals would charge insurers is irrelevant to economists like Krugman, who forcefully dismiss such information on its face. Not only clinics like the SCO but also outfits like Epiphany Health Direct Primary Care in North Port, Florida, are able to provide quality healthcare at affordable prices, but mainstream economists simply can deny their existence—and get away with it. In fact, there are more than fourteen hundred such cash-only practices across the country, giving lie to Krugman’s claim that free markets make healthcare more expensive and less available. (Remember, in Krugman’s world, only the wealthy have access to medical care in a free market system. That most patients taking part in the medical version of free markets are not wealthy people does not change Krugman’s narrative.) In his 1963 paper, Arrow spoke for progressives when he conducted a flawed analysis meant to reach conclusions “proving” that the free market and healthcare were incompatible. He wrote: “It is the general consensus, clearly, that the laissez-faire solution for medicine is intolerable.” However, there is plenty of evidence today that laissez-faire medical care is not intolerable and that most medical procedures performed in a free market setting are well within the financial means of most people in this country. Medical care that truly is affordable certainly is not given a fair and honest hearing in this country. For politicians, the media, such a situation is anathema. They would rather see a contrived, high-cost system that wastes trillions of dollars in misallocated resources but is subsidized on the back end to give the appearance of being “affordable” and, more important, “equitable.” High-cost “free” medical care is morally superior to low-cost free market medical care, because, well, because it is. When such ground rules for debate exist, it is hard to be able to make a public argument. Economists like Krugman, who are able to martial media resources to shout down opposing arguments, will appear to carry the day, at least where the supposed debate is concerned, as will his allies in academe and in Congress and the legislatures. But economics is not based upon rhetoric but rather the real world of resources, production, and consumption. Just because Paul Krugman claims that by definition free market medical clinics cannot exist does not mean that thousands of people are not receiving the kind of care that Krugman, Arrow, and most of the economics profession claim to be impossible. Free market care does exist, and it provides, frankly, a moral choice against the lies the established elites are telling us.

https://www.cato.org/commentary/should-we-reform-supreme-court I agree with Mr. Shapiro. Reduce the size, scope, and power of the federal government by 25% across the board, and the impact of the SCOTUS will be reduced proportionally.

Elizabeth Warren Says People Are Struggling and Jeff Bezos Hasn't Pitched In Enough https://reason.com/2021/07/26/elizabeth-warren-says-people-are-struggling-and-jeff-bezos-hasnt-pitched-in-enough/ From the Warren vantage point, it's easy to capitalize on this moment to make the case for a wealth tax, an idea she's been fixated on for years. But taxing billionaires' fortunes will almost certainly fail. A tax on households with high net worths (over $50 million in assets, in Warren's template plan, with more for households of $1 billion or higher) would present a huge incentive for people to engage in capital flight, fleeing for greener pastures on far-away shores; taxing the same pot of money over and over will result in less money to tax over time; some assets that rich people store their wealth in are very difficult to assess; and, all these other matters aside, much of this wealth isn't actually liquid. I suppose Warren could look to France to see how they pulled it off—except they didn't. When France implemented a wealth tax, more than 40,000 millionaires fled the country over a 12-year period. The country ultimately dropped its wealth tax; Germany and Sweden did the same to theirs. Inequality arguments aside, Bezos should not be scapegoated for high costs of living that compel people to take on student debt and saddle them with high child care costs. Though politicians often address poverty via income-based approaches, they could take a cost-based approach instead. For example, they could try to eliminate the government-created muddled incentives that have encouraged so many colleges to jack up tuition while letting unqualified Americans take out tons of cheap loans to earn degrees that do not make them very much money. This is something that's within Warren's power to attempt to solve, not Bezos'. Warren seems to view wealth in America as a fixed pie. But companies like Amazon that deliver cheap goods to people who want them aren't responsible for people's malaise. In fact, Bezos' creation may be easing that malaise by delivering inexpensive products to people who are otherwise struggling to get by. Agreed.

U.S. Billionaire Wealth Would Fund Government For Just 6 Months: https://reason.com/video/2021/07/23/u-s-billionaire-wealth-would-fund-government-for-just-6-months/ Truth, yet socialists like Dante insists taxing ourselves out of debt is the answer.

The reelection of Mr. Biden or election of Ms. Harris in 2024.

Cleveland unveils new team name, logos: Cleveland Guardians https://www.coveringthecorner.com/2021/7/23/22590233/cleveland-unveils-new-team-name-logos-cleveland-guardians Ughh.

Why Is The CDC Quietly Abandoning The PCR Test For COVID? https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/why-cdc-quietly-abandoning-pcr-test-covid So, in summary, with regard to our current "casedemic", positive tests as they are counted today do not indicate a “case” of anything. They indicate that viral RNA was found in a nasal swab. It may be enough to make you sick, but according to the New York Times and their experts, probably won’t. And certainly not sufficient replication of the virus to make anyone else sick. But you will be sent home for ten days anyway, even if you never have a sniffle. And this is the number the media breathlessly reports... and is used to fearmonger mask mandates and lockdowns nationwide... In October we first exposed how PCR Tests have misled officials worldwide into insanely authoritative reactions. As PJMedia's Stacey Lennox wrote, the “casedemic" is the elevated number of cases we see nationwide because of a flaw in the PCR test. The number of times the sample is amplified, also called the cycle threshold (Ct), is too high. A month later, Dr. Pascal Sacré, explained in great detail how all current propaganda on the COVID-19 pandemic is based on an assumption that is considered obvious, true and no longer questioned: Positive RT-PCR test means being sick with COVID. This assumption is misleading. Very few people, including doctors, understand how a PCR test works. In mid-November, none other than he who should not be questioned - Dr. Anthony Fauci - admitted that the PCR Test's high Ct is misleading: So, if anyone raises this discussion as a "conspiracy", refer them to Dr.Fauci. In response to this and the actual "science", Florida's Department of Health (and signed off on by Florida's Republican Governor Ron deSantis), decided that for the first time in the history of the pandemic, a state will require that all labs in the state report the critical “cycle threshold” level of every COVID-19 test they perform. Then, in January, as Biden takes office, The FDA publicly admits it... First Fauci, then WHO, and then FDA all admit there is malarkey in the PCR Tests, but have - until now, done nothing about it... allowing the daily fearmongering of soaring "cases" to enable their most twisted 1984-esque controls. All of which brings us to today's announcement from The FDA, that it will be abandoning the PCR Test for COVID at the end of the year. The question one is forced to ask is simple - as with everything else that happens in the Healthcare-Industrial-Complex - cui bono? Is another provider of testing about to be enrichened? Or is it even more sinister than standard crony capitalism? Given the traditional winter spike in 'flu' cases and the PCR-Test-driven "casedemic" we experienced into the election and through the start of the Biden administration, one could be forgiven for suggesting that the last thing an already weakened Democratic Party, desperate to cling to control in DC, would be a dramatic re-emergence of the "deadly" virus (driven by the numerous false positives of the PCR Test as described in detail above) ahead of the Midterms? Killing off the PCR Test would go a long way to "solving" the "casedemic" and offer Biden and his pals a positive talking point for voters. Bingo. All politics.