Does Privacy Need Enumeration in a Constitutional Amendment?

The US Constitution does not use the phrase "right to privacy." It does say, however, that all rights not specifically assigned to the federal government are reserved to the State governments or to the individual citizens. 

The Supreme Court ruling in the Roe v. Wade case recognized privacy as one of those "unenumerated rights." Some people still think the fuss about Roe v. Wade is or was about protecting fetuses from being killed in the abortion process. But no. For the informed members of our governing class, Roe v. Wade was about whether or not government is still willing to recognize individuals' right to privacy. The Left wanted to strike down the Supreme Court's historic decision in order to suppress that right from consideration. And the voters let them--many feeling good about the idea that reversing Roe v. Wade was protecting fetuses. But what really made the control freaks in Big Government and Big Business want to erode women's medical privacy, to make abortion a decision for the State government to make as opposed to one for the individual woman to make, was a different kind of invasion of privacy. 

Without ever taking a vote on the constitutionality of government agencies directly "monitoring" our electronic communication, during the War on Terror W Bush signed legislation requiring private corporations to spy on our electronic communication...and authorizing them to finance all that "monitoring" by allowing private businesses to peek at our electronic communication, too. And now Trump's allowing Thiel's Palantir corporation to put together electronic dossiers on all of us.

 After all, don't you want all those ads they shove in front of you to be "relevant" enough that you want to click right over to the sponsors' sites and buy things? Oh, you didn't? You think it's obnoxious when people presume to know that (based on your age and gender, not because you're stupid enough to take polls about your medical profile) you might be at risk for a disease that people of your age and sex get, but sort of entertaining, in a sick way, when they try to sell you patent remedies for a disease you're absolutely certain never to have? Well you're an outlier. A nasty, secretive outlier. You wouldn't be cackling, "I love being sterile and, if I didn't, Viagra would be the last thing I'd try!" if you were a the kind of person the corporations approve of. 

 And maybe the service you get when you stay in a hotel, or in a hospital, is being influenced by the corporations' disapproval of your protecting your privacy. The fact that you're secure enough in your marriage, or lack of one, to be willing to grow older without any "male performance enhancement products" may be creating prejudice against you. A regular fellow would be insecure enough to pay whatever the ads tell him is a good price for Viagra. 

And matters of religion or politics? Well, as far as the former is concerned, the corporations have determined that you shouldn't have one. Despite the existence of CEOs who want to testify to their faith, the general consensus of those who want to rule the world through manipulation is that religious faith makes people more resistant to manipulation and is, therefore, a bad thing. Politics is different. You should have politics if they're the globalist kind of politics that make it easier for huge multinational corporations to eradicate smaller local competitors. You may be subject to punishment for having a religion or a more realistic type of politics. 

Consider the wreck that used to be Twitter. The same people who urged W to mandate that Twitter be "monitored" then pressed Jack Dorsey to impose censorship on it. Preferably through "shadowbanning" in a way that people couldn't say for sure was happening to them, that could be used, most noticeably, to mute even the blandest members of the other political party during an election season--and it was--but, most importantly, to protect Bayer, Lilly, Merck, and some other corporations from having to deal with tweets about the fact that their most profitable products were killing people. 

Don't be deluded about this (the corporations want you to be). When you've seen vigorous opposition to a harmful product, and you continue to see that product on the market, you are not looking at proof that the problem with the product has been solved. You're probably looking at proof that the complaints have been censored. 

 If chronic diseases that involve internal bleeding are being discussed, and glyphosate is not being mentioned, what you are reading has been censored. Glyphosate is still causing chronic diseases that involve internal bleeding. Some manufacturers are now replacing glyphosate with glufosinate. Glufosinate is likely to cause more dramatic and dangerous internal bleeding. 

If homicide-suicides are being discussed, and serotonin-boosting "antidepressants" are not being mentioned, what you are reading has been censored. Serotonin boosters are still producing a very specific psychotic syndrome involving pain, pseudomemories of past abuse that may never even have been possible but is congruent with the pain the patient feels, and a resolution either to kill innocent people to spare them from what the patient thinks s/he survived or to kill people the patient blames for what s/he thinks s/he survived, then kill oneself. Most psychologists are being successfully pressured not to recognize this disorder and give it a proper name. 

If vaccines are being discussed, and the risk of contaminated vaccines doing more damage than the diseases they're meant to prevent is not mentioned, what you are reading has been censored. For a long time the focus of discussion of vaccine contamination used to be Merck's measles vax. Then the urge to get a vaccine for COVID "Out There," even if it had to be a new untested type of vaccine with new unknown risks, produced much more dramatic statistics of bad results with the COVID vaccine. The majority of people who've had one or more COVID jabs have shown no ill effects, at least, though they've also shown no very good ones--most people received vaccines formulated against an irrelevant strain of the coronavirus and were not actually immunized at all. If you think people who remind us of these unpleasant truths are just "vaccine-phobic," you have been successfully deceived by censorship. 

Elon Musk wanted to show Dorsey that Twitter could be made profitable. Simple! Just turn what still had the look of a free social media site into another outlet for corporate-sponsored commercial messages. Anybody could post anything on X, Musk proclaimed, but "freedom of speech does not equal freedom of reach"--tweets from free accounts would no longer reach even the non-paying Twits' followers, and even tweets from paying "subscribers" might not be allowed to reach anyone but the paying Twits' followers if they were unsupportive of sponsors' products. Wasn't that clever...for a few months, anyway. Every time I look at anything on X I see less activity by real people, more by corporate accounts and bots. People are paying to say what they want to say, then finding no real people listening any more. 

I became a leader of Glyphosate Awareness by adopting an abandoned Twitter hashtag, hosting a series of chats, and compiling a series of newsletters. I happen to be unattached to the idea of "being the leader." I wish more people were. Being a Christian first and an activist only later, I'm comfortable with the idea that we're all supposed to be following one Leader, that this is not done by worrying too much about who else may or may not be following whom. I want to be as close as possible to the Truth. If other people believe that I'm following the Truth more closely than other people are, all to the good. I don't want to lose sight of the Truth by letting my focus shift to concerns about who's following me. 

So I welcome updates, of course, and I think it might be a good thing if people fought to keep a Glyphosate Awareness web site active on the Internet, but I really think we've done what can be done in cyberspace, before censorship. People who use the Internet, who mostly don't feel like a global elite class but we are one, already know how toxic glyphosate is. Fresh news fills in gaps and supplies details, but we're preaching to the choir. We have to keep spreading the word out to the technologically illiterate. We have to keep spreading it out to the same ones, in some cases, because some of these people have minds like sieves. And yes, I still think that's where the action is in our movement. We need to be making sure the workers on the highway--especially!--and the ninety-year-old volunteer groundskeeper for the church and the panhandler on the corner know how dangerous glyphosate, and glufosinate and similar things, are for them too. 

But here I stand to testify that we do not need any young people to be publicly identified as leaders in Glyphosate Awareness, at this stage. "Young," in this case, meaning under age 50. We need young people in the movement but we need them to maintain a low profile. Because the leaders in Glyphosate Awareness are in real physical danger. Ask Karen Kingston. Ask Anna Lappe. This is one of the very few, not even top-downward so much as front-backward, statements I ever intend to make as a "leader" in Glyphosate Awareness. 

I say, if you have children at home, or if parenthood is still ahead of you, you need to be a leader of your children's education now and be a leader in Glyphosate Awareness--if it still needs to exist--later on. Be aware! Teach your friends and your children what we've learned about glyphosate and these other chemicals. Send a postcard to an official and sign a petition now and then. Plant butterfly gardens. If you live in a city where US PIRG sends students from house to house on hot days, bring them inside, give them water, sign their petition sheets, donate money if you can spare any, even give them a Save The Butterflies water bottle. But don't call attention to yourselves as being more aware of these things than everybody in your generation is. 

It may be the best strategy, in any case, to let the evil corporations get a nice healthy scary sense of the rising generation all being forearmed with Glyphosate Awareness, and COVID vax awareness, and awareness of dioxin as the carcinogen in cigarettes, and all the other kinds. Let them feel like, "It's no good even trying to advertise our profitable toxic product to the young any more. They're all onto us. We can't sell them anything." As distinct from "If we can make this or that activist look stupid, other young people will trust us and buy our profitable toxic product."

 One difference between Glyphosate Awareness and the US Army is that a nineteen-year-old can say "I flunked out of college. I don't care if I live or die. I want to join the Army," and the Army will test him and probably enlist him. Glyphosate Awareness will not. We're all about young people having complete adult lives. And we know that that's not a priority for the chemical corporations, at all. 

Why am I such a privacy fanatic? Why can't you write to me at a street address instead of a post office box? Why don't I use anybody's real-world name? Well, for one thing, anyone who knows my home town knows who I am, if they've ever wanted to know. And guess what some people could and would do with that information. Guess what's been sprayed on the property of The Celiactivist. Repeatedly. What has this to do with privacy? Need you ask? I've suffered enough from one glyphosate goon knowing where I live. I want the Internet to be regulated in such a way that no other glyphosate goon is going to find out where I live, or where Carey Gillam or Michael Balter or Ralph Nader live. Corporate goons can get very nasty when there's a chance of even a small reduction in profits. 

The Internet with privacy creates the possibility that people can blow the whistle whenever a corporation's most profitable product happens to be toxic, can get dangers recognized before a harmful product becomes enmeshed in our culture the way Prozac and glyphosate have become. The Internet without privacy creates the possibility that corporate goons can kill the public-spirited person who is warning others about the toxic product. 

Lack of Internet privacy creates a lot of other ugly possibilities, of course. In Babylon Rising, Tim LaHaye imagined a professional assassin cutting off someone's fingers to be able to use person's fingerprints to foil biometric security devices. It could happen. It's not happening now, at least not often, because for people who grew up with computers (as LaHaye did not) it's so much easier to use computer code to foil those security devices. But the more elaborate and biometric we want to make ways for computers to recognize individuals, the nastier the possible abuses can be. Even easier than fooling a computer security "app" into thinking you connected to it from my phone, you know, the one the computer is eager to imagine that I have, is for the good side to recognize that things posted on their web site should not be identifiable with individuals. 

Instead of trying to make sure that nobody else uses my laptop to read an e-book, why not just accept that lots of people should be able to share a computer.  Don't try to tie my Kindle account to me personally; it's for anyone I allow to use my laptop. Amazon needs to strip the account of any personal information. Instead of trying to find ways to sell our contact information to sales pests while keeping that information "secure" from evildoers, web sites need to get comfortable with the fact that they don't know whom they're trading with. Should not be a problem--matters affecting national security have no business on the Internet. 

Anybody has a right to order a T-shirt online. It might be better to use a prepaid, printed, postal money order, to order that T-shirt, rather than put any bank or credit card information online. All e-commerce sites need to be required by law to accept (and mail out!) postal money orders. 

Instead of trying to verify that independent contractors who do writing, coding, or graphic design online are citizens of the US (or anywhere else), the sites that handle those transactions need to let the appropriate tax office verify that...by mail, not online. After earning enough money at an online job site to be required to report the income on your taxes, you should inform the tax authorities. But you should send them a photocopy of your tax information, rather than putting that information online where hackers can get at it. No web site should be allowed to ask you to transmit your tax information online. 

Don't use any electronic device that has a flat screen. Don't touch screens--period. For one thing nobody else wants to try to read the screen through your fingerprints. For another thing, digital images of law-abiding North Americans' fingerprints have resale value.

The push to eliminate online privacy is coming from people who want to reduce private citizens' freedom by setting up "social credit systems," as in China. Americans should not allow this idea to get off the ground. For a start we can all agree: "I have NO 'social credit' and I don't want to work or trade with anyone who has. Anyone who has failed to oppose 'social credit systems' publicly, in real life and on the Internet, is not welcome here." And then we can demand that electronic devices be built with touch controls that are solid and opaque, that don't allow hackers to gank images of our fingerprints. 

Don't use devices that allow hackers to gank images of your face, either. Don't use "apps" that do. We don't like to waste plastic or rare minerals so it's nice to know that manufacturers can easily fit opaque covers over laptops with slick camera-friendly covers through which "apps could use your camera" to see what's in your house. 

How many times did your laptop show that obnoxious message about "Lower your finger if you don't want to have to choose from lots of different fonts"? Nobody has to choose from different fonts; the option of using the default font is always there. How long did it take you to figure out the correct answer, for those who want to keep their fonts or who just don't like that kind of slimy message? The correct answer was to hold up both middle fingers and tap the button to start the computer with your knuckles. How long did it take Microsoft to stop showing you the question? Right. 

When anybody, whether they're in the federal government, the police, Microsoft, or anywhere else, can sneak a peek at you or your house through a computer screen, that's a search without a warrant. That's unconstitutional. It's a crime even if the person trying to peek into your house is not a burglar. We need laws requiring any programs or "apps" that enable that kind of spying to be disabled, and any further use of such things to be prosecuted as a felony. People who use computers in private homes have a right to work in their underwear. If they wear underwear. The computer should not be able to tell. 

The work people do at job sites, the content they post at forum or "social" sites, should tell people which accounts belong to one real person, a group of people, or a bot. That is all anyone in cyberspace needs to know about anyone else. People choose whether to identify with one screen name, as I've come to do, so that the main difference between what "Priscilla King" writes and what the writer known as Priscilla King says to her friends and family is that "Priscilla King" doesn't mention other people's names, or to have a dozen different screen names and even give them different personalities and relationships with each other. Nobody else needs to know. 

Nobody should be able to identify a real person with things you post online... Unless, of course, the person is a Least Competent Criminal who insists on posting content about the crimes he intends to commit, which should alert local law enforcement. Then they can take out a warrant, trace the location of the computer, and knock on the criminal's door while he's still typing a blackmail letter. We've already seen the uncensored Internet help fight crime. The Internet is designed to make it easy to trace evidence of real criminal activity, sufficient to obtain a warrant for a criminal's arrest. The rest of us need more safeguards to prevent the criminals using the Internet to track us, to search our homes (for valuables) and monitor our interests (for scamming). The easiest way to do that is to ban any storage of information that identifies a person "in the cloud." 

Don't encourage the "we can keep your information safe" scam. The way you keep people from stealing your friends' keys from you is not to carry your friends' keys. If you've not already seen firsthand how this works in cyberspace, trust me: We need to stop letting banks, stores, schools, and other legitimate businesses that are managed by fallible humans put the information that is "key" to our accounts on the Internet where criminals can steal it. 

The Internet can help--any requests for a home address, a credit card number, use of your camera app, etc., could easily be made to cause the offending business computer's screen to flash red and display a message like "This information can be accessed only with a warrant obtained from a local magistrate." 

Amending the Constitution is expensive and tedious and a long hard slog. That's as it was meant to be, and as it should be. Still, I see many benefits and no real risks in making privacy an enumerated right in the Constitution. (Abortion might be said to violate a fetus's privacy, so abortion should just be left out of this discussion). The Internet, in any case, needs to be regulated in a way that respects privacy.

It will happen if we demand it, Gentle Readers. 

Morgan Griffith on Chevron Doctrine

 From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith, R-VA-9:

:

NOTE: last week’s column should have clarified that while some coronaviruses have a furin cleavage site, none have previously been seen to occur naturally in bat coronaviruses or SARS-like viruses.

Please forgive our oversight.

Chevron Doctrine

The U.S. Supreme Court has decided some notable cases in 2024.

Donald J. Trump v. Anderson was a unanimous decision by the justices to allow President Trump on this year’s ballot, despite efforts from states like Colorado and Maine to remove him.

National Rifle Association v. Vullo arises from a New York state official accused of coercing banks and insurers into cutting ties with the NRA by threatening regulatory action.

The justices voted 9-0 to protect the NRA’s right to free speech and allow the NRA to move forward with their lawsuit against the New York official for First Amendment violations.

Among Supreme Court cases set for decision this summer are Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce.

Loper and Relentless, Inc. represent commercial fishing groups whose operations encompass the Atlantic herring fishery. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) requires the fishermen to abide by a litany of regulations.

Amongst these regulations are ones requiring the commercial fishermen to alert regulators before they set out to fish. The fishermen’s locations are tracked. Sometimes, the fishermen have to allow a government-mandated federal observer to be present on the boat to collect data and information about their catch!

But wait, there’s more!

NOAA’s budget from Congress did not provide funding for NOAA to do on-the-boat observation of the fishermen’s activities.

So what did NOAA do?

They forced the fishermen to hire third-party monitors and made the fishermen pay the third-party monitors’ salaries!

USA Today states this rule costs the fishermen up to $700 a day. If they do not pay, they are further penalized.

NOAA Fisheries justifies these actions as “necessary and appropriate” for the “conservation and management” of fisheries.

Even though Congress never specifically authorized these actions to be a part of “conservation and management”, the fishermen bear these burdensome requirements because they were upheld under the “Chevron Doctrine” at the appellate level.

This rule comes from Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, 467 U.S. at 842–43.

The “Chevron Doctrine” states if an agency asserts that it has jurisdiction to take action in order to fulfill its overall purpose, that deference would go to the agency unless a claimant could prove that the action was not a “permissible construction.” This is true if Congressional language is in any way ambiguous.

Apparently a “permissible construction” allows NOAA to force commercial fishermen to pay to have NOAA third-party agents aboard their ships.

The “Chevron Doctrine” at one time even saw the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) try to claim that trailers for a tractor-trailer were self-propelled motor vehicles, notwithstanding there is no motor. The EPA backed down, but it shows just how far some activists inside agencies will push the boundaries of the “Chevron Doctrine.”

I have long advocated for the 1984 Chevron ruling to be overturned or legislatively eliminated. The original 1984 ruling was an improper shift of authority from Congress to administrative agencies.

When Congress delegates regulatory authority to agencies, it should be clear and authoritative. When the authority is unclear or not specifically granted to an agency, the Courts should rule against the agency. Congress will then either let the Court decision stand or take action to grant the agency specific authority. 

In 2016, I was an original cosponsor of H.R. 4768, the Separation of Powers Restoration Act, a bill to restore the balance of power between all three branches of government and codify measures to rein in the executive branch, including a reversal of the Chevron rule. It passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 2016 but no action was taken in the U.S. Senate.

This Congress, I voted for similar legislation, H.R. 288, the Separation of Powers Restoration Act. The legislation passed in the U.S. House of Representatives last year. The U.S. Senate should take up this bill and send it to President Biden’s desk.

Because of Chevron, activist bureaucrats can interpret statutes according to their political agenda, expanding their bureaucracy’s powers without Congressional approval.

The outcome of Loper will have tremendous implications for the American people and our government.

Duke Law Journal estimates that the Supreme Court has cited Chevron 238 times and invoked the rule in over one hundred decisions.

Litigation cases generally cost a small fortune and take years to decide. Even if the Court overturns an agency action, many times companies have already complied with expensive and egregious regulations. These regulations cost consumers.

We will see if the 239^th instance where the Court cites Chevron restores balance of power between our branches of government.

If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office.  You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405 or my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671.  To reach my office via email, please visit my website at https://morgangriffith.house.gov.

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Vaccine Mandate Null, Void, & of No Effect

Splendid news from Mary Holland at the Children's Health Defense office...This actually came in on Friday, and I retweeted it then, but it belongs here too.

"

In a groundbreaking decision filed today, NY State (NYS) Supreme Court Judge Gerard Neri held that the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for healthcare workers is now “null, void, and of no effect.” The court held that the NYS Dept. of Health lacked the authority to impose such a mandate as this power is reserved to the state legislature. Furthermore, the court found that the mandate was “arbitrary and capricious” as COVID-19 vaccines do not stop transmission, vitiating any rational basis for a mandate.

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) financed this lawsuit on behalf of Medical Professionals for Informed Consent and several individual healthcare workers. Sujata Gibson, lead attorney, said, “This is a huge win for New York healthcare workers, who have been deprived of their livelihoods for more than a year. This is also a huge win for all New Yorkers, who are facing dangerous and unprecedented healthcare worker shortages throughout New York State.”

CHD President Mary Holland stated, “We are thrilled by this critical win against a COVID vaccine mandate, correctly finding that any such mandate at this stage, given current knowledge is arbitrary. We hope that this decision will continue the trend towards lifting these dangerous and unwarranted vaccine mandates throughout the country.”

We are off to a great start in 2023.

###

About Children’s Health Defense:

Children’s Health Defense is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Our mission is to end childhood health epidemics by working aggressively to eliminate harmful exposures, hold those responsible accountable and establish safeguards to prevent future harm. For more information or to donate to CHD, visit ChildrensHealthDefense.org.

" 

Book Review: Letter to Liberals

Title: A Letter to Liberals 

Author: Robert F. Kennedy (Jr.)

Date: 2022

Publisher: Children's Health Defense

ISBN: none

Length: 57 pages

Quote: "It is my hope that this short book will remind all Americans that blind faith in authority is a feature of religion and autocracy, but not of science nor democracy." 

With so many People of the Burro spouting pure Stalinist insanity these days it's easy for Elephant People to question whether Reason itself has left the Democratic party. Here Robert Kennedy stands to prove that there are still people who identify as Ds for reasons other than dependency on government handouts or on government jobs...and they're righteously ticked off with the rest of their party. 

As an Independent who tries to practice good will toward the people who make up both parties, I say: Ds need to read this e-book. They should take it as spinach--natural, unsprayed spinach--bitter, but cleansing and ultimately soothing to the body. 

They should of course remember that it's a lawyer's book. While Kennedy presents over 300 documents for his statements of fact, at some points he is accusing, not merely reporting. Check the references to be sure which is which before quoting this book.

So what is he saying? His argument won't surprise anyone who reads The Defender, though some of his documented evidence may. Government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and especially Anthony Fauci exploited the coronavirus panic for their own gain, both of wealth and of power. Poor people and ethnic minorities were disproportionately harmed. Certain symptom-blocking medications, which doctors don't like to recommend because they already know these chemicals have risks, seemed to work for some people with bad cases of COVID-19 and may have been more effective than the vaccines were.

I don't want to start a stampede here. I want to remind people that if you took a personal health class at a college or university in the 1980s, when this stuff was breaking news, you saw it coming and it didn't surprise you and you should feel no urge to start screaming about evil conspiracies blah blah. If you are currently in your forties, fifties, or sixties, you should have been reminding panic-prone friends of some things all along...

* Coronavirus, the "chest cold" or "cough" or "bird flu" virus, has some peculiar qualities. One of them is that healthy humans barely notice having it at all, feel able to work through it and usually are (though COVID-19 did bring a few people down with remarkable speed). Another is that when people do feel it as a disease, they lack normal resistance to it and may have it several times, or it may become chronic, as in "Long COVID." Another is that nearly all people who are seriously ill, or die, from coronavirus were already very ill and not expected to have normal lives again. 

* Resistance to infections is an individual thing. People inherit specific patterns of immune system strength and weakness, and our health alters those patterns. If your resistance to an infection is high you may feel energized rather than drained by your immune system's mopping it up. If other people's resistance is much lower you may still reasonably be asked to observe quarantine for those other people's sake. 

* Virus mutate quickly, so any new vaccine for a virus infection is always going to be a hit-or-miss experimental treatment that may do more harm than good, and nobody even knows just why the vax that do work for some people may have worked against others. If you try a new vaccine for a virus, you are volunteering to be a medical experiment. There's reason to believe that the new vaccine won't actually kill you, but, for reasons unknown and unforeseen, it might. If you had the disease and would rather have it again, quarantine and all, than go to the clinic and have the shot, you should probably let people more vulnerable to the disease have your share of the vaccine.

* No government should ever make any vaccine mandatory, although schools or employers could reasonably make vaccines conditions of admission to their buildings, especially when you have other alternatives like distance learning or working from home.

Kennedy seems to take this knowledge base for granted. That's reasonable when talking to people our age, not so reasonable when talking to people who are older, and not necessairly reasonable when talking to people who are younger.

He goes on to elaborate the case against the COVID vaccine. I didn't know, for example, that there was actually a federal law forbidding the government to mandate vaccines for diseaes against which effective symptom-blockers are known. How effective the symptom-blockers for COVID were is still a matter for debate. In fact many people who were harmed by the vaccines were not at any personal risk for injury from COVID-19. They were young, active, healthy, with robust immune systems; they'd probably already had the virus and not noticed. 

(For me one of the most annoying things about this whole episode in history is that several people who were harmed by COVID vaccines had those vaccines for someone else's sake. My Significant Other's ability to bounce back from things that would have killed most people is already legendary, so there was some question about how much it would reassure other people if he didn't react badly to the COVID vaccine. He went first, anyway, because he's been the "I'll go first and find out whether it's safe for you" sort of person. His perkiness encouraged other people to have the vaccine in 2021, and I've yet to hear his voice in 2022. He's been very ill, because of his overconfident public spirit. I suspect part of what's making this bout so hard to recover from is a feeling that he led people the wrong way.)

Then there's the case against the U.S. government's response, specifically, as an "Assault on the Bill of Rights." For "conservative" readers, this will be preaching to the choir. Kennedy is not a "conservative" and it's his "Fellow Liberals" who need this message. That's why the book is addressed to them. 

There are probably "conservatives" who will want this book just to gloat over. See! A brave, honest, and intelligent D must admit that...Well, actually, President Trump did not stand firm against the pressure from those who wanted to build and exploit the panic for power-grabbing (and smokescreening) purposes. I doubt the R response to the coronavirus panic cost Trump many informed votes in 2020, but among those who vote against an incumbent President or former Vice-President whenever they think the state of the Union has gone down it must have been a great boost to the Biden campaign. Kennedy is in agreement with some libertarian Tea Party types, both left and right, and in disagreement with poll-conscious "moderate," "mainstream," and "liberal: types in both parties. 

There are surprises in this part of the book, too, even for people who've been following the story. Glyphosate Awareness is certainly aware of censorship--youall realize I went into this cause as an officially recognized Twitter "influencer"? And I've been shadowbanned to the point that long-term e-friends don't know I've kept the same Twitter account?--but I didn't realize how deep the rot had penetrated. Kennedy documents that several news sources I've trusted actually formed something they called a "Trusted News" pact to censor information about coronavirus. Reuters? Yes, Reuters, and also the BBC. Read the book for details about this.

What's not to like? Assuming you're not working for an organization whose role in the COVID story is indicted here, what you won't like is the formatting. Multiple-column formatting is a bad idea for e-books. To get the whole page to display on any given computer screen you may have to change the size to a point where the type is hard to read. I have been known to copy text out of a PDF document into a Word document and reformat it for readability, but this book contains enough graphs that much meaning would be lost that way. Readers have no remedy but to print out the e-book as they find it, which always works better with some computers and printers than with others. 

But you can download this e-book free from ChildrensHealthDefense.org, and you should. Even if you have to pay $11.40 for printing (in my town it'd be $6.84) this material is worth its price.

Remedial English 001: Dependent Clauses

There is a persistent, pernicious, wilful misinterpretation of the U.S. Constitution floating around among those who want to wish away the Right to Bear Arms.

This explication came from a troll on Disqus whose name is being withheld just in case he's sobered up by now:

"

A sentence has a subject clause for a reason – it is the subject of the sentence. That means that it is the part of the sentence that is being discussed; with an objective clause referring back to the subject clause.

‘’A well regulated militia, (comma)….’’ IS the subject clause of the sentence. All other clauses refer back to this clause….
‘’… being the best security of a free state, (comma)’’ refers to the ‘militia’…..
‘’…, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, (comma)’’ refers back to those in the militia.
‘’,… shall not be infringed.’’ Refers to the ‘right of the people’ IN THE ‘MILITIA’
Yes, we have a right to bear arms IF you are in ‘’A well regulated militia,…”

Our founders were the most educated people in our nation at that time –
Learn their English and you will understand their intent as it was meant to be understood

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In their English a sentence may consist of two kinds of clauses, dependent and independent. Many eighteenth century sentences contain multiple clauses of both kinds. The Second Amendment contains only one of each.

A dependent clause is one that does not form a complete, grammatical sentence all by itself. It consists of a subject (noun phrase), a predicate (verb phrase), and modifiers (adjective, adverb, or prepositional phrase(s)). It can be introduced by a word like "when" or "after" or "because," or its verb can be a participle form that would need an auxiliary verb to form a complete grammatical sentence.

We don't say or write sentences like

*The term papers written.

*He having washed the dishes.

*She being the eldest.

We do say or write sentences like

"The term papers written, they began cramming for the final exams."

"He having washed the dishes, she began cleaning the kitchen."

"She, being the eldest, inherited the house."

(We don't usually write "she" twice in sentences like "She, being the eldest, inherited the house," but many people say "She being the eldest, she inherited the house.")

The second half of each sentence can stand on its own:

"They began cramming for the final exams."

"She began cleaning the kitchen."

"She inherited the house." 

Thus the first clause in each sentence is dependent, while the second clause is independent. Despite coming first, the dependent clause is regarded as modifying the independent clause, which is considered the important part of the sentence.

"Being" is a word that indicates a dependent clause. In some dialects of English it's more common than in others to use "being" as one of those words that announce a dependent clause: 

"Being that it was a holiday, the bank was closed." 

"Being a good scholar, she spelled it." 

"I wouldn't call Fred a friend, him being a boy." 

The second example comes from a song that's been traced back even further than the eighteenth century, showing that "being" was commonly understood to be part of a dependent clause at this period. (The framers of the Constitution were educated gentlemen and didn't have to limit themselves to phrasing that was commonly used, but on the whole they did.)

So we have the Second Amendment as it stands: 

"A well regulated militia being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." 

"Being" is the verb in the dependent clause. "Shall not be" is an independent verb phrase and identifies the independent clause. The first half of this sentence modifies the second half.

A moment's consideration of U.S. history shows why this historic sentence was written the way it is. In the 1770s many of the revolutionary colonists lived in towns that did have well regulated militias that drilled and practiced fighting in formations, as in old England, and wore uniforms that made it easy to see who was where. Many more were "frontiersmen" living on what was then the almost lawless borderland later known as the western parts of the Eastern States--not even Ohio and Kentucky, yet, so much as wilderness areas like Roanoke, Bennington, and Hagerstown, where people were still hunting bears and fighting Native raiding parties. Those people never went out without their firearms. When the men mustered to the call to fend off "disciplinary" attacks by the British army, they came in their shrunk-to-fit leather and fur "woods" clothes and fought in their bear-hunting style, stalking their quarry, hiding behind trees, blending into the landscape. Their rifles were regarded as light arms compared with muskets and cannon. And it's well documented that these unregulated warriors, fighting as individuals and small groups, won the war. The British expected to beat the local armies by force of numbers, and they did. The "Yankee Doodles" and "frontiersmen" then beat the British, though outnumbered and out-armed, by strategy. They did to the British what they did to bears, and soon had the British throwing down their weapons in surrender.

Here's a living historian's rendition of the Revolutionary pop song, "Riflemen of Bennington": 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIUf7-tDBNY

These people had a right to keep and bear arms that never had been infringed and, despite feeling themselves superior as more sophisticated and better educated, our Founding Fathers paid tribute to them in writing the Bill of Rights. "Frontier" Americans would continue to bear arms whether or not their communities grew big enough to form "well regulated militia." 

By now, of course, the "frontier settlements" (like Bray and Estilville, Virginia) have either become towns, like Estilville, now known as Gate City, or faded into obscurity, like Bray, which is an hour or two's walk from Gate City. The well regulated militia that organized itself for local defense only was known as the National Guard, which has since been taken over by the Army and deployed to fight overseas. Those who want to organize and drill to defend only their community are usually distrusted as not being well enough regulated by the Left, though most of them seem to consist of law-abiding and well-behaved citizens. 

Personally, I like the idea of an all-volunteer local militia, especially for people whose age or medical condition keeps them out of the Army but who benefit from the social aspects of learning military, first aid, and survival skills in a group with a leader who knows what he's talking about. They may or may not ever be needed to fight in a battle, but they can serve the community in other ways such as preparing to defend against natural disasters. Militia groups can, among other things, help recognize when a member of the group may be reacting badly to PTSD medication. And they can find uses for people with, e.g., astigmatism, who should not be depended on for shooting or driving, but may be excellent lookouts, medics, or messengers. 

But the Constitution could not have presupposed, nor was it construed to presuppose, that all armed citizens would have the opportunity to join militia groups. Many did not. And our country gained its independence because they did not have the opportunity and could only fight like hunters, which happened to be the style of fighting our Revolutionary War needed.

Our Constitution salutes the historical reality that, without individual free-range hunters and shooters who added value to the militia groups they temporarily joined, we would not have been a nation capable of having a Constitution. Let us always remember this.

Morgan Griffith Gets Back to the ABC

It's the first thing we learn in American history: First the United States, and then the other American nations in turn, defined our national government by rejecting systems based on monarchy. 

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith (not "Sir Morgan, Baron of the Point"), R-VA-9:

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Presidents Are Not Kings

Americans have long been skeptical of monarchs. We still celebrate July 4 each year, marking the adoption of the Declaration of Independence which catalogued our grievances against Britain’s King George III. We celebrate George Washington precisely because he chose to be a president who retired after two terms rather than a king. Presidents throughout our history who were seen as overstepping the bounds of office have been compared to kings, and not in a positive way.

This national trait of ours is a healthy one. As Ronald Reagan said of freedom, “It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.”

Our republican form of government requires the engagement of its citizens. Further, it separates powers between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches and expects each to guard those powers from the others.

Nevertheless, the presidency has clearly accumulated great power of which the kings and queens of old could scarcely dream.

In a spirit not of partisanship but of concern for our form of government, I offer some examples where recent presidencies surpassed their authority. Even if you or I agree with the goal, we should beware executive overreach.

Let’s start with the Biden Administration. Under President Biden, the Department of Homeland Security has ruled that large swathes of the illegal immigrant population should not be eligible for removal from our country. Of course, we have seen the immediate consequences of this legally unsupportable position: much more illegal immigration.

But it also damages the rule of law in the long term. Congress writes immigration laws. Several presidents have sought bills to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants, but they have not passed Congress. President Biden’s decision amounts to amnesty, but it is a decision he is not free to make.

His recent order canceling student loan debt at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars will likely be challenged in the courts. Its foundation in emergency authority is constitutionally dubious.

During President Trump’s Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) unilaterally issued a nationwide moratorium on evictions in September 2020. Congress had previously passed a set of protections from eviction during the coronavirus pandemic in the CARES Act. The eviction limits expired, so the CDC cited a vague law allowing its director to take “measures to prevent such spread of the diseases as he/she deems reasonably necessary” to issue its own moratorium.

The CDC continued to extend the moratorium under President Biden until the Supreme Court eventually blocked its enforcement.

President Obama’s time in office was characterized by aggressive efforts to push the envelope of his legal authority. He entered the Paris climate agreement without seeking Senate approval as a treaty. His Administration issued guidance documents that sought to evade the steps for rulemaking required by law. Just this year, the Supreme Court found in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that the Obama EPA tried to usurp authority that did not belong to it in the regulation of greenhouse gases.

President George W. Bush’s time in office was consumed by the response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but national security does not justify acting outside the law. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) set rules for reviewing requests by intelligence agencies to keep track of suspects. I believe the Bush Administration went beyond the rules to allow the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on suspects, including Americans, without a warrant.

Preventing presidents from overreaching their authority can be difficult. One may sympathize with the president’s goals or not want to side with the president’s opponents. Nevertheless, keeping our republic requires vigilance against presidents of any party acting outside their legal and constitutional limits.

As a Member of Congress, I have sought to keep presidents within the law. Under Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden, I have called for the review and repeal of the authorization of use of military force in Iraq to prevent it from being used for unrelated purposes. I have been an outspoken critic of the FISA court process.

Further, I have spoken out against regulations that do not follow the proper rulemaking process, and have supported legislation to keep the president, whoever he or she is, within the limits of their office.

A president is not a king, no matter how well-meaning he is. All citizens should seek to keep it that way.

If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office. You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405, my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671, or my Washington office at 202-225-3861. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov.

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