The week’s news that wasn’t

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Rehumanizing, unNazifying, dusting off and unlocking the most repugnant, Hitleresque, oldest and most constrained fakeries in fake news.

Wiping out Down syndrome

Each year in American about 6,000 babies are born with Down syndrome. Caused when an individual has a full or partial extra copy of chromosome 21, Down syndrome’s common traits include low muscle tone, small stature, an upward slant to the eyes and cognitive delays ranging from mild to severe.

In 1910, children born with Down syndrome had a lifespan of about 9 years. Today, with corrective surgeries (particularly heart surgeries) and clinical treatments, about 80 percent those with Down syndrome live to be 60 years old, and some much longer. And they are increasingly being integrated into the general population; living on their own, holding jobs and contributing much to society.

Parents of Down syndrome children speak unabashedly about how precious and special their children are and how enriched their lives have become through raising their Down syndrome child.

We badly want all children to be born perfect – and most Down syndrome parents believe their child is perfect – so eliminating birth defects is a laudable though likely unattainable goal.

But CBS News tells us that Iceland is on the way to attaining a country free of babies with birth defects. The story’s headline: ‘”What kind of society do you want to live in?”: Inside the country where Down syndrome is disappearing.”

We learn that only two or three children with Down syndrome are born in Iceland each year. So, has Iceland achieved a breakthrough in medical technology? Have they found the cause of Down syndrome and eradicated it? From CBS:

Geneticist Kari Stefansson is the founder of deCODE Genetics, a company that has studied nearly the entire Icelandic population’s genomes. He has a unique perspective on the advancement of medical technology. He told CBS, “My understanding is that we have basically eradicated, almost, Down syndrome from our society — that there is hardly ever a child with Down syndrome in Iceland anymore.”

Sadly, no, Iceland has not “basically eradicated, almost, Down syndrome.” It’s just engaged in the abhorrently despicable practice of eradicating babies with Down syndrome before they’re born.

At Iceland’s Landspitali University Hospital, Helga Sol Olafsdottir counsels women who have a pregnancy with a baby experiencing a chromosome abnormality.

“We don’t look at abortion as a murder,” she told CBS. “We look at it as a thing that we ended. We ended a possible life that may have had a huge complication… preventing suffering for the child and for the family. And I think that is more right than seeing it as a murder — that’s so black and white. Life isn’t black and white. Life is grey.” (emphasis mine)

This is more than just murder. It’s eugenics. It’s an evil philosophy rooted in the notion that some people are more equal than others; that some people have rights and others don’t; that moral worth and natural rights are rooted in genetic fitness or one person’s or group’s definition of ethnic purity; that someone who is designated by the state or the elite as “unfit” or “impure” can be tossed away as so much garbage.

It had its heyday in Nazi Germany and resulted in sterilization, segregation, institutionalization, euthanasia, mass murder and a world war. And now it’s apparently coming back as public policy. Bob Livingston has warned us in the past what “public policy” actually means.

And medical ethicists – a contradiction in terms – are increasingly proposing that not only do the soon-to-be-born not have any natural rights, neither do the newly born, because they lack the capability of attributing their own existence to some basic value. Therefore, “afterbirth” abortions should be permissible in all cases where an abortion is, including if the child is not born with a disability.

And speaking of Nazism…

No matter how many times the MSM (and Wikipedia) says it and the dumbed down American public school victims repeat it, Nazism is not a “right wing” ideology.

The term “Nazi” stems from Adolph Hitler’s National Socialist German Worker’s Party. It was big government, state-worshipping authoritarianism that embraced leftist eugenics policies and social welfare programs, opposed communism and parliamentary democracy and redistributed wealth.

As Hitler himself said:

Each activity and each need of the individual will thereby be regulated by the party as the representative of the general good. There will be no license, no free space, in which the individual belongs to himself. This is socialism — not such trifles as the private possession of the means of production. Of what importance is that if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them then own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the party, is supreme over them, regardless whether they are owners or workers. All that, you see, is unessential. Our socialism goes far deeper.

In a May 1, 1927 speech, Hitler said:

 We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic
economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak,  with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a  human being according to wealth and property instead of  responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy  this system under all conditions.

And as Hitler readied his forces for Operation Barbarossa on June 16, 1941, Josef Goebbels wrote that he looked forward to the new order the Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back, he wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars. Rather, in the place of debased, Jewish Bolshevism, the Wehrmacht would deliver “der echte Sozialismus”: real socialism.

Hitler preached class warfare, agitating the working class to resist “exploitation” by capitalists — particularly Jewish capitalists, of course. His program called for the nationalization of education, health care, transportation, and other major industries. He instituted and vigorously enforced a strict gun control regimen. He encouraged pornography, illegitimacy, and abortion, and denounced Christians as right-wing fanatics.

Each of those policies is decidedly left wing.

A correction 103 years in the making

The Financial Times has been the voice of the globalist banksters for more than a century. Its words are taken as gospel for the global financial community.

But last week the FT came clean and admitted it had colluded with the government of England and printed fake news. It issued a clarification more than 100 years after the fact.

Seems the Times was less than truthful when it claimed the British government’s war loan in 1914 was “oversubscribed” and had more investors than needed to cover it. In fact, the government had to turn to the central bank after the loan brought in less than a third of the £350 million it sought.

The “discrepancy” was found by Bank of England employees scouring the bank’s old ledgers.

Owing to the government’s concerns that a failed bond sale would have been “disasterous” to the general public, FT provided the cover and the central bank purchased the unbought securities in the name of its chief cashier, listing them on the balance sheet as “other securities.”

The original headline looked like this:

Here’s the clarification:

On 23 November 1914, a piece published in the Financial Times claimed the UK government’s War Loan was “oversubscribed”, with applications “pouring in”. The item described this as an “amazing result” that “proves how strong is the financial position of the British nation”. We are now happy to make clear that none of the above was true.

So The Financial Times knowingly published state propaganda which made an unsuccessful bond sale appear successful  and attempted to sucker others into the scheme by offering “further particulars of this magnificent investment… upon request.”

As the Economic Policy Journal asks: “Could this be the only time FT has colluded with the government?”

Nah!

Former gatekeeper asks how he can reclose the gate

MSNBC’s Morning Joe rivals CNN in its broadcasting of fake news, so turning there in search of it feels almost like cheating. But sometimes we need a break from hard work and a good laugh at the same time. In that regard, Morning Joe never disappoints.

Monday’s guest was self-described “liberal atheist” Kurt Andersen, a novelist, sometime contributor to The New York times, and host of Public Radio International’s Studio360 radio program. While promoting his new book about the fantasyland in which he resides, Andersen “bemoaned the extremely polarized state of contemporary American politics and its supposed detachment from reality, which he blames in part on the mainstream media’s losing their ability to peddle a single narrative.”

The establishment media, he claimed, once kept the “worst hogwash out of the stream,” but that ability was “stolen” or “mooted” by the internet. He longed, he said, for the time where the three networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), The New York Times, Time magazine and Newsweek – as he described them, the “descent, reasonable establishment” – served as gatekeepers to all information. He said he wanted a return to “objective” journalism.

Americans love to think – and have been propagandized – that the media’s job is to present the news fairly and objectively. But all the way back to before the American Revolution, American media have picked sides and advocated for a position in all conflicts. The myth that the press was objective gained status through the 20th century as national media coverage became co-opted by the three television networks, The Times, Time magazine and Newsweek.

That there has ever been “objective journalism” in America is one of the biggest lies ever told. National media — even in Walter Cronkite days — have always been partisan, and throughout the last half of the last century it seldom, if ever, presented any “side” other than government’s side.

In doing so it’s glossed over a host of instances of government atrocities and has promoted wars and actively worked to divide Americans along the areas of race and class. And even though the truth is now trickling out through means of alternative media, the traditional gatekeepers are joined by the cable news networks, social media platforms and search engines in continuing to try and reclose the gate.

As a reminder, six megacorporations control more than 90 percent of all you see, read and hear.

Personal Liberty

Jay Baker

has been editorial director of Personal Liberty® and The Bob Livingston Letter™ since 2008. He previously worked as a reporter and editor for several newspapers — including Alabama’s largest daily, The Birmingham News — and as editor of a business magazine. Jay also served stints as marketing and public relations director in the healthcare, banking and construction industries. This experience makes him especially adept at digging through the lies, doublespeak and folderol emanating from places of power.