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2020-


2020-07-15 f
The Overton Window Went from Porthole to Keyhole

The Illiberal Liberal Media

As Bari Weiss’s departure confirms, the New York Times has narrowed its spectrum of allowable opinion.

What New York Times contributing editor and writer Bari Weiss recently called the “civil war” within the Times has just claimed another victim: Bari Weiss.

In a scathing open letter to publisher A. G. Sulzberger that instantly went viral on Twitter and other social media, Weiss asserted that she was resigning to protest the paper’s failure to defend her against internal and external bullying; senior editors’ abandonment of the paper’s ostensible commitment to publishing news and opinion that stray from an ideological orthodoxy; and the capitulation of many Times reporters and senior editors to the prevailing intolerance of far-Left mobs on Twitter, which she called the paper’s “ultimate editor.”

Weiss was apparently stripped of her role as editor, and not immediately offered another position; the implication that she was no longer welcome was clear. “The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people,” she wrote. “Nowadays, standing up for principle at the paper does not win plaudits. It puts a target on your back.”

Weiss did not respond to a request for comment. But friends and supporters said Tuesday that her decision was prompted in part by events surrounding the forced resignation last month of opinion editor James Bennet, to whom she reported during her three years at the Times. Bennet left the paper, and his deputy James Dao was demoted, after Times staffers revolted against their decision to publish an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton arguing for deploying the military into U.S. cities to quell riots, if local law enforcement was unable to restore order. Many staffers protested the paper’s decision to give Cotton the powerful platform of the Times opinion page.

Some reporters argued that the conservative senator’s claims were contradicted by the paper’s own coverage, and that publishing the essay had endangered blacks, including minority reporters at the paper. Other Times staffers criticized Weiss’s characterization of the debate over Bennet’s publication of the Cotton op-ed as a “civil war” inside the Times between “the (mostly young) wokes” and “(mostly 40+) liberals,” reflecting a broader culture war throughout the country. Several staffers attacked her for having betrayed the paper by publicly describing its internal feuds.

In the aftermath of the Cotton episode, Weiss and many others quietly opposed the paper’s new “red flag” system, which effectively enables even junior editors to “stop or delay the publication of an article containing a controversial view or position,” as one senior editor characterized it.

Weiss has been a lightning rod ever since arriving from the Wall Street Journal, along with her friend, former colleague, and fellow columnist Bret Stephens, who declined to comment today on her resignation. Soon after joining the Times, she wrote a piece about a figure skater of Asian-American descent who was the first American woman to land a triple axel at the Olympics. She was attacked on Twitter after posting a story on the achievement, tweeting the line from the Hamilton musical “Immigrants get the job done”—but the skater was not an immigrant herself, merely the child of immigrants. Twitter exploded, accusing Weiss of “othering” an Asian-American woman.

At the Times, Weiss described herself as a centrist liberal concerned that far-Left critiques stifled free speech. She frequently wrote about anti-Semitism and the Women’s March and warned of the dangers of overly zealous proponents of #MeToo culture in a controversial column about comic Aziz Ansari, which inspired a skit on Saturday Night Live. One friend said that many of Weiss’s Times colleagues resented her because they envied her success. “She was a mid-level editor who made a splash and whose essays became the basis of Saturday Night Live skits,” the friend and former colleague said, asking not to be named.

In her letter, Weiss wrote that she had joined the paper to help publish “voices that would not otherwise appear in the paper of record, such as first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of the Times as their home.” She had been hired, she wrote, after the paper failed to anticipate Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory because it “didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers.” But after three years at the paper, she wrote in her open letter, Weiss had concluded, “with sadness,” that she could no longer perform this mission at the nation’s ostensible paper of record, given the bullying that she had experienced within the newsroom and the almost daily attacks on her, often from Times colleagues, on social media. She deplored the paper’s unwillingness to defend her or act to stop the online intimidation. “They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again,’” she wrote.

Her criticism of Sulzberger rang true to several Times veterans, who note that he has been accused before of yielding to disgruntled liberal staff members. A publisher said to have intervened often in the paper’s news decisions, Sulzberger initially defended James Bennet and the decision to publish the Cotton op-ed, for instance. But faced with a staff revolt, he criticized the essay and the paper’s publication of it, saying that the editorial process had been too “rushed” and that the essay “did not meet our standards.” (read more)

2020-07-15 e
Viral-Mediated Euthanasia of the Frail Elderly

Nursing Homes: The Center of the Pandemic

Steven Malanga and Chris Pope join Brian Anderson to discuss how long-term-care facilities have borne the brunt of the Covid-19 pandemic, innovative approaches to nursing-home staffing and training, and what we can learn from the experience to be better prepared next time. (read more and hear audio)

Audio Transcript

Brian Anderson: Welcome to the Manhattan Institute's Eventcast. And thanks very much for joining us. I'm Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal and today we'll talk about how long term care facilities bore the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic and what we can learn from that fact. We'll draw upon recent writings on this important issue by City Journal and Manhattan Institute experts. Throughout the program please submit your questions as we go along and I'll try to include them into our discussion. Let me introduce our two panelists first, Steve Malanga. He's the senior editor of City Journal and the George M Yeager fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Writing for City Journal, Steve has pointed to the inadequacies in American nursing homes. Even before the pandemic as Steve notes, the US fell short of protecting the elderly in longterm care facilities from infectious diseases.

Our other guests today is Chris Pope. He's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Chris's research focuses on healthcare, market regulation, hospitals, entitlement design, insurance market reform. In City Journal, Chris has highlighted successful innovative approaches to staffing during the pandemic that can be a model perhaps for other facilities. So we'll talk a bit about that.

So let me start with you, Steve. The pandemic has proved devastating for nursing homes nationwide. According to some estimates, as much as 40% of the overall count of people who've died in America during the pandemic were nursing home residents. But as you pointed out in a City Journal piece back in April, though this is a horrible and tragic situation, it's also not all that surprising. So what went wrong?

Steve Malanga: Well, first of all, let's talk specifically about the extent of it and where it went wrong. At this point, the best counts are that about 55,000 people may have died in longterm care facilities out of nearly 300,000. It's almost a 20% death rate which is really shocking although again, this is our most vulnerable population probably. To talk about where it's happened, New Jersey is actually led the way. The States with the most deaths in nursing homes are New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Illinois, California, Connecticut, Michigan.

The States with the highest percentage of deaths in nursing homes, some smaller States, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. We can talk a little bit about some of those States later on. However, here's then the real shocker in 23 States more than half of all deaths have been in longterm term care facilities. Now, the thing is, this was not completely unanticipated by some of us who were writing about early for this reason. Early on, I wrote a piece called the Virus and the Economy, which really attempted to look at what were the health implications of shutting down the economy because I wanted people to try to balance, understand there were health implications to shutting down the economy.

And I wanted them to balance that with the predictions about deaths from COVID, because that's a very easy number to understand. One thing that impressed me while I was doing this, is that a number of health experts, especially epidemiologists were talking early on about those trade offs and they were afraid that a panic was emerging in America. Remember this was mid March I did this. They were afraid there was a panic that was emerging, that was going to make us miss the target. And one prominent researcher said something that stuck with me. He said, "Our focus needs to be on the most vulnerable." He said, "Nursing homes not schools." Immediately after hearing that, I went and started looking at what the record was if you would of nursing homes in terms of infectious diseases. Now, the thing about COVID-19 is it's new, it's unique, but it is basically a respiratory infectious disease and every flu season, we have similar problems with pneumonia and the flu. And I looked at the record in nursing homes. There's a lot of academic research on this and it's pretty startling.

In particular outbreaks are very common. The notion of States mandating protections is very erratic. Only about half of States even require nursing home workers to get a vaccine. We have vaccines for the flu and we're talking so much about how the vaccine is going to save us from COVID but only about half of States require vaccines from nursing home workers. And if you look at it, not even nowhere near 80 to 90% of nursing home residents themselves get vaccinated. You would think that in this vulnerable population that we would be focusing on that and that nursing homes themselves are bringing doctors and make sure this is done or nurse practitioners.

The other thing is there's a lot of criticism of the record on nursing homes in terms of infection controls. In some surveys, 40% of homes during flu season have essentially failed their inspection protocols for infection control. So all of this was very, very troubling. And what then occurred quickly after this, more than anything justified the concerns that we were starting to hear from some of these people like this expert who said again, nursing homes not schools. And yet at the same time, we'll talk about this a little bit more later, what I was hearing from some of the governors was that essentially this COVID was a nobody left behind. (read more and hear audio)

2020
-07-15 d
More to read about the COVIDIOTS and Mask-Morons

Round-Up

And on to the round-up of all the stories I’ve noticed, or which have been been brought to my attention, in the last 24 hours:
2020-07-15 c
Mainstream Media Lies About Everything

Texas Coronavirus Numbers Show COVID-19 Less Lethal than Last Two Flu Seasons

This is really STUNNING information!
The Texas Department of Health released numbers recently comparing the coronavirus to the last two seasonal flu viruses.

The coronavirus was actually less lethal than the flu in the state!
The flu had a mortality rate of 0.03% and 0.04%.
The coronavirus has a mortality rate of 0.01% in Texas.

This won’t make any headlines. (read more and view chart)

2020-07-15 b
The CDC's Numbers Can't Be Trusted

Trump administration strips CDC of control of coronavirus data

The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass CDC and send all COVID-19 patient information to a central database in Washington beginning on Wednesday.

The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass CDC and send all COVID-19 patient information to a central database in Washington beginning on Wednesday. In its new guidance, HHS said that going forward, hospitals should report detailed information on a daily basis directly to the new centralized system, which is managed by TeleTracking, a health data firm with headquarters in Pittsburgh. However, if hospitals were already reporting such information to their states, they could continue to do so if they received a written release saying the state would handle reporting. Officials say the change will streamline data gathering and assist the White House coronavirus task force in allocating scarce supplies like remdesivir, the first drug shown to be effective against the virus. Both the CDC network and the TeleTracking system set up by HHS rely on so-called push data, meaning hospital employees must manually enter data, rather than the government tapping into an electronic system to obtain the information. Public health experts have long expressed concerns that the Trump administration is politicizing science and undermining its health experts. (read more)

2020-07-15 a

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
Frederic Bastiat

2020-07-13 b
Steele Dossier, Crossfire Hurricane, Entrapment of Gen. Flynn, Russia-Gate, Mueller-Gate, Ukraine-Gate, Impeachment, COVID-19, race riots, toppling of statues, the Surge or Spike, impeding food shortages, COVID Second Wave, and massive election shenanigans. - All brought to you by the Deep State, Democrats, and Neocon Never-Trumpers doing the bidding of their Globalist masters.

Fauci Is a Deep State Fraud

The pandemic’s guru, unfortunately, behaves as an ordinary creature of the Washington swamp.

I knew for sure that Anthony Fauci is a fraud after listening to him for about 10 seconds—as anyone who listens carefully would have known as well. President Trump had been charging the Chinese government with obscurancy and deception in its handling of the novel coronavirus outbreak. Fauci had dealt intimately with the Chinese on that matter. His National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Centers for Disease Control had partially financed the notorious Wuhan laboratory where Chinese scientists were researching the virus. Fauci knew a lot.

A reporter asked Fauci if he agreed with Trump that the Chinese have not been fully forthcoming about the scope of the pandemic. Fauci answered that although the Chinese had lacked candor in previous years, this time they had turned over “the sequence of the virus.” Spoken like a wily swamp reptile!

His words were factually correct. The Chinese had turned over all they knew about the virus’s “sequence”—namely, its genetic structure. But the reporter and the audience neither knew nor cared about that. They were interested in the Chinese government’s misrepresentations of the virus’s contagion, fatality rate, and so forth. That is what they had dissembled and lied about.

Fauci’s answer artfully deceived the audience into believing the opposite of the truth. Thus did Fauci help plant a dagger between Trump’s shoulder blades and help his party—the Democrats and the deep state—extort the American people’s compliance to their agendas.

Deep State Doctor

Donald Trump’s decision to accredit Dr. Anthony Fauci as the COVID-19 pandemic’s guru is largely responsible for the extent of the panic that gripped America in the spring and now summer. Fauci is a bona fide graduate of medical school. Many attest to his earlier epidemiological brilliance. But none of the words by which he has helped inflict chaos on America have reflected either medical or epidemiological facts. Fauci has acted as, and has been, a politicized, partisan bureaucrat while pretending to be the disinterested authority of physicians and scientists.

The pretense that COVID-19 is something like, and hence is to be treated like, the plague is the essence of the scam that the deep state and the Democratic Party are perpetrating on America. Anthony Fauci’s pseudo-medical, pseudo-scientific pretense is the foremost pillar of that lie.

Sowing and maintaining confusion about the severity of cases of  COVID-19 infections—indeed, about the very meaning of the word “case”—has been the heart of that lie.

Understanding the truth begins with comparing the infection/fatality rate (IFR) of ordinary seasonal flu, 0.01 percent, with that of the bubonic plague or smallpox—around 30 percent—and then realizing that COVID-19’s IFR is roughly that of the flu.

Although Fauci was not the sole author of the confusion, he surely was most influential in spreading it. And it was a lie, because by January Fauci knew that, despite the Chinese government’s indications and media management to the contrary, COVID-19 was what we in the West have since learned from experience: deadly to the very old and otherwise compromised, but milder than most flu strains for just about everyone else.

That knowledge notwithstanding, Fauci concurred with the mathematical modelers’ dire forecasts of frightful across-the-board mortality rates. He substantiated their (baseless) assumptions of an IFR around 5 percent for everyone by citing as a “case” any sick person who tested positive for the virus or who had a fever, cough, and other respiratory symptoms like those caused by the virus. He then agreed that all such persons who died should have their deaths attributed to the virus.

In late March, Fauci convinced President Trump that a wave of such deadly “cases” would overwhelm America’s healthcare system unless Americans huddled at home. Trump agreed. (Remember, “15 Days to Slow the Spread”?) Thereafter, the lockdowns took on a momentum of their own.

Mindless Momentum

So mindless of reality was this momentum that it shoved aside the only medical fact that made any difference, namely, the vulnerability of old, fragile people. Hence, Fauci’s CDC, all keen to free up hospital space, advised state and local health systems to transfer all manner of patients into nursing homes and long-term care facilities.

Thus did Fauci’s CDC become the efficient cause of the holocaust that killed perhaps 60,000 practically captive old folks.

By mid-April however, as the great wave simply was not happening, any number of independent studies were establishing COVID-19’s true, low IFR. Fauci retreated, no longer linking “cases” to deaths, he used the panic he had helped foment and the credit that Trump had naively given him, to finagle Trump into agreeing to a staged plan to end the lockdowns which, upon closer look, was really a plan for perpetuating them regardless of what happened.

The essence of this fraud is the pretense that all COVID-19 infections are “cases” requiring sequestration and quarantine, even if they involve persons to whom the virus poses no danger—i.e., nearly all Americans. To keep down the number of “cases” Fauci now preaches, Americans must be willing to accept any number of arbitrary restrictions, not least of which is superintendence by “contact tracers” empowered to allow or disallow anyone from ordinary employment and human contact. (read more)

2020-07-13 a

“The only difference between ‘propaganda’ and ‘education,’ really, is in the point of view. The advocacy of what we believe in is education. The advocacy of what we don’t believe in is propaganda.”
Edward Bernays, 1923

2020
-07-12 a
And the Truth Will Set You Free

ROGER STONE FIRES BACK AT ROBERT MUELLER AND NANCY PELOSI

I am pleased and gratified to accept the grant of clemency in the form of the full commutation of my sentence by President Donald Trump. As I have said for some weeks I have been praying to God for this result and if anyone doubts the power of prayer or that God will always defend and protect His people, President’s Trumps actions today should remove any doubt

Above all I want to thank not only the President but the over 600,000 Americans who signed petitions to the President urging Clemency and the 65,000 people who contributed to my legal defense fund as well as the millions of Americans who are praying for me.

The reaction to the President’s act of clemency by bitter Democrats and the Dirtiest of Dirty Cops was predictable. They recycle the same debunked lies.

Now mentally feeble and thoroughly discredited former Special Counsel Robert Mueller in an op-ed ghost written for him by Andrew Weissmann attempts to recycle the same old falsehood. His claim that my innocent and innocuous exchange with the persona of Guccifer 2.0 which I released publicly, was proof of collusion between the GRU and the Trump campaign is disproved by the timing and content of the exchange which took place after the release of DNC documents by Wikileaks . The exchange itself proves no collaboration or collusion. Mueller’s assertion that I claimed advance knowledge of the Wikileaks release of data is meaningless; Julian Assange had already announced that he had more material on Hillary Clinton and would release it.

In fact, Mueller justified my case being tried before Judge Amy Berman Jackson because he said evidence from the Russian hacking case would be introduced at my trial. No such evidence was introduced. Using forensic evidence and expert testimony I could have proved that was no on-line hack of the DNC servers by the Russians or anybody else but Judge Amy Berman Jackson prohibited it. Nor can Mueller prove that Guccifer 2.0 is a Russian Intelligence asset. Just because John Brennan says something does not make it true. If Mueller had any evidence that I was involved in working with the Russians to steal data and disseminate it (I wasn’t) why wasn’t I charged with it?

I must address the other faux line of attack of the Democrats, and their handmaidens in the corporate media. Those like Speaker Pelosi who make the baseless claim that my refusal to testify against the President means I covered up some act of wrong-doing by the President in return for commutation are purposely twisting what I have said repeatedly on the record. I refused to bear false witness against the President. I refused to let prosecutors compose false testimony regarding the content of multiple phone conversations with candidate Trump in 2016. I refused to lie despite intense legal and financial pressure to do so.

Because of a ruling by Judge Jackson that I be incarcerated in a correctional facility with documented cases of COVID-19 contrary to all current legal precedents, the current policy of the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons and despite my age and medical condition (strangely upheld by the DC Circuit of Appeals) the President’s action is certainly defensible on humanitarian grounds as an act of mercy as well as  basing it on the lynching I received in a DC Court Room which features a biased Judge, a corrupted jury and a politically motivated and corrupt prosecutors.

I was targeted for political prosecution in an investigation that we now know had no legal or legitimate reason to be opened. In fact, the investigation into my activities were not authorized until October 26,2017, three months after Robert Mueller had established that there was no collusion between the Russian state and the Trump Campaign.

Because I did not receive a fair trial I have filed an appeal of my conviction on numerous constitutional grounds as well as appealing the decision by Judge Amy Berman Jackson for a new trial based on juror misconduct that is so egregious, blatant, and illegal that only Judge Jackson could not see it. This commutation of sentence will allow those appeals to go forward. I still maintain my innocence. It’s amazing how many ‘journalists” omit this information from their coverage.

I will also file formal complaints of misconduct with the Office of Professional Conduct at the Department of Justice against at least three of the prosecutors in my case. I was unconstitutionally prohibited from raising this misconduct at trial.

With this decision by the President I am fully aware that “many” of the reporters in the mainstream media are on “suicide watch”” The lies and distortion which did – and still do – dominate the coverage of my indictment, case, and trial; and continue to misinform the American people and propagate a false narrative that was discredited long ago.

Hypocritical Democrats ranting about the rule of law should address the biggest abuse of power in which President Obama and Vice President Biden used the authority of the United States Government and the capability of our intelligence agencies to use fabricated evidence to defraud the FISA Court to spy on the Republican candidate for President and launch an illegitimate attempt to remove the President from office. When they finish with that they can address the effort by the FBI and the DOJ to fix Hillary Clinton’s illegal email server and missing e-mail case.

Beyond working on my personal appeal, I intend to expose the injustice perpetrated on General Michael Flynn and to work overtime to inform the American people why it is crucial to re-elect President Donald J. Trump in November, 2020.

Please donate to Roger Stone’s Legal Fund Here.

2020
-07-11 f
Sordid Sex Secrets

Ex-Jewel Thief Claims Epstein And Ghislaine Maxwell 'Forced Him To Watch Pedo Videos Involving US Politicians'

An alleged former Jewel thief who says he had group sex with Ghislaine Maxwell but 'drew the line at under-age girls' claims he was forced to watch pedo videos involving 'two high-profile US politicians' and 'two high society figures having a threesome with an under-age girl.'

Whether one believes an anonymous ex-jewel thief's exclusive interview with The Sun is up to the reader. That said, Epstein accuser Maria Farmer claimed there was a 'secret media room' in the dead pedophile's New York mansion which was full of recording equipment.

What's more, former Israeli spy Ari Ben-Menashe - alleged "handler" of Ghislaine's father, Robert Maxwell, told the authors of Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales, that the Epstein was operating a "complex intelligence operation" at the behest of Mossad, and 'filmed US politicians and power players having sex with underage girls to blackmail them.'

Jumping into the salacious claims by the jewel thief, who goes by the name William Steel, the story begins in the mid-1990s when Steel claims he met Epstein in the "upstairs room at a very high-end diamond dealer, the kind of place where only a few people are allowed in at a time."
...
SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE:

Steel claims that he saw a parade of underage girls 'coming and going' from Epstein's Palm Beach oceanfront mansion, but that he never participated in pedophilic sex acts.

"I only ever had sex with Maxwell and threesomes with her and other adult females," he said. "I suspected what they were doing with the under-age girls, I knew their routine, so when they tried to get me involved, I said, ‘No, I’m not into that — you’re not getting me on video doing any of that’."

Steel also says Ghislaine is a "nymphomaniac" who would try "everything and anything in bed." (read more)

2020-07-11 e
The Globalist Planners are not done killing our economy.

The Delusion Of A Seamless Reopening Is Being Obliterated

During the first wave of pandemic lockdowns, America became a rather surreal place. The initial shock that I witnessed in average people in my area was disturbing. Half the businesses in the region closed and a third of the grocery store shelves were empty. The look in people’s faces was one of bewilderment and fear; their eyes were like saucers, no one was staring into their cell phones as they usually do, and people huddled over their shopping carts like wild dogs protecting a carcass.

Luckily, this tension has subsided, but only because the majority of Americans have been assuming for the past couple months that the pandemic was going to fade away in the summer and that the “reopening” was permanent. Sadly, this is a delusion that is going to bite people in the ass in the next month or two.
...
As I have argued for the past few months, the REAL public crisis will strike when the secondary lockdowns are enforced, either by state governments or the federal government. Make no mistake, these orders are coming. We can already see restriction in some states being implemented, though they refuse yet to call the situation a “lockdown”. (read more)

2020-07-11 d
The Pentagon wants to continue protecting:
   A. Its budget.
   B. The Afghan opium trade.
   C. Pashtun pedophiles.
   D. All of the above.

How The Pentagon Failed To Sell 'Bountygate' Hoax To US Intelligence

The New York Times dropped another Russiagate bombshell on June 26 with a sensational front-page story headlined, “Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says.”  A predictable media and political frenzy followed, reviving the anti-Russian hysteria that has excited the Beltway establishment for the past four years.

But a closer look at the reporting by the Times and other mainstream outlets vying to confirm its coverage reveals another scandal not unlike Russiagate itself: the core elements of the story appear to have been fabricated by Afghan government intelligence to derail a potential US troop withdrawal from the country. And they were leaked to the Times and other outlets by US national security state officials who shared an agenda with their Afghan allies.

In the days following the story’s publication, the maneuvers of the Afghan regime and US national security bureaucracy encountered an unexpected political obstacle: US intelligence agencies began offering a series of low confidence assessments in the Afghan government’s self-interested intelligence claims, judging them to be highly suspect at best, and altogether bogus at worst.

In light of this dramatic development, the Times’ initial report appears to have been the product of a sensationalistic disinformation dump aimed at prolonging the failed Afghan war in the face of President Donald Trump’s plans to withdraw US troops from it. (read more)

2020-07-11 c
Do you belong to the Safety Cult?

Safety First Is A Bad Ideology

When you walk out of your house, or enter the public street, you are on shared ground, a community space. During the pandemic of 2020, community spaces that are private venues, like Disney, have closed down just as often as community spaces that are public venues, like schools and playgrounds.

Public and private distinctions do not make a difference. Risk is the key factor to understanding why common spaces are closed and likely to remain so, at least in the way we were used to. In what is called the asymmetric loss function, a decision maker’s cost of a mistake in one direction is many times greater than the cost of error in the other direction.

Individuals with asymmetric loss functions are extremely risk averse when it comes to potential losses. Individuals often employ asymmetric loss functions in everyday life. For most people being 30 minutes early for a flight, for example, is much less costly than being 30 minutes late.

But, because people are different, individuals decide for themselves how late they can arrive and risk missing a flight. Things get trickier when decisions regarding risk tolerance are made for common spaces and groups, because one size doesn’t always fit all.

Weighing downside risks too heavily can be socially costly, because some valuable private activities are prohibited.

Historically and across cultures, individual risk-taking is associated with growth and prosperity while minimizing risk and emphasizing potential social losses is not. In the last several decades, public tolerance of risk has shifted towards lower socially acceptable levels of risk-taking and in the long run, these changes may leave us all worse off. (read more)

2020-07-11 b
When is a politician lying? Whenever her lips are moving.

Phoenix Mayor Lied About Morgues Bringing In 'Refrigerator Trucks' To Store Overflow COVID Bodies

As the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients in Maricopa County climbed to new highs late this week, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego appeared on MSNBC Friday morning for an interview with Chuck Todd and Katy Tur to discuss the situation in the state, which has moved to close bars, and rollback other reopening measures to combat the outbreak.

During the interview, Gallego claimed that the county's public health agency had just put in an order for refrigerated trucks because they were running out of space in the morgue.

"Maricopa County, which is our county public health agency, just announced that they're going to be getting refrigerated trucks because the Abrazo health care system has run out of morgue beds," Gallego said.

Hours later, as the mayor's comments started proliferating through the media, representatives for the hospital system called and complained that the mayor's comment wasn't true, despite the fact that she made the claim - seemingly with a high degree of certainty - on a popular cable new show.

Spokesman Keith Jones told azcentral.com that Abrazo hospitals have "adequate morgue space." (read more)

2020-07-11 a

“The public relations counsel, therefore, is a creator of news for whatever medium he chooses to transmit ideas. It is his duty to create news no matter what the medium which broadcasts this news.”
Edward Bernays, 1923

2020
-07-10 e
Will He Gain More Brown Voters Than He Will Lose from His Base?

EXCLUSIVE: @realDonaldTrump to sign a “merit-based”
immigration executive order that would include a path to citizenship
for
#DACA recipients.https://t.co/7Sx2Fm9fLm

— Noticias Telemundo (@TelemundoNews) July 10, 2020


2020-07-10 d
Dark Times for the Melanin Minorities

Gun violence is surging in cities, and hitting communities of color hardest

Communities of color have endured the weight of COVID-19, the recession and social unrest. They’re also bearing the brunt of a surge in gun violence.

For many major U.S. cities, this year has been marked by bullets and bloodshed.

Over 1,500 people have been shot in Chicago, almost 900 in Philadelphia, and more than 500 in New York City so far in 2020 — all up significantly from the same time last year (1,018 in Chicago, 701 in Philadelphia and 355 in New York).

The surge in shootings has been particularly painful for communities of color, which have disproportionately endured the weight of the COVID-19 crisis, the economic recession and social unrest following the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis in May.

In New York City, after the number of shooting victims more than doubled from June 2019 to this June, every person who has been shot this July, nearly 100 in total, has been a member of the minority community, according to the police department. And in June, 97 percent of the shooting victims were minorities, the department said.

In Chicago, where minority communities have long struggled with deadly gun violence, shootings have increased 76 percent from the same time last year, with nearly all the bloodshed concentrated in the city’s predominantly Black and brown communities on the South and West Sides.
...
“The Black community lives in a state of trauma when you look at all the maladies that adversely impact them,” he said. “These communities are the most vulnerable in our society, so a lot of these social and societal ills are going to manifest there earlier and more prominently.”

Atlanta had a 20 percent spike in shootings from the same time in 2019, with one of the youngest victims being an 8-year-old girl, Secoriea Turner, who was shot while riding in a car with her mother over Fourth of July weekend. …

“If they don’t kill us,” she told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “we’re going to kill one another. It’s sad.” (read more)

2020-07-10 c
Another Blog Is Self-Destructed

Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media

How a controversial rationalist blogger became a mascot and martyr in a struggle against the New York Times.

On June 22nd, visitors to Slate Star Codex, a long-standing blog of considerable influence, discovered that the site’s cerulean banner and graying WordPress design scheme had been superseded by a barren white layout. In the place of its usual catalogue of several million words of fiction, book reviews, essays, and miscellanea, as well as at least as voluminous an archive of reader commentary, was a single post of atypical brevity. “So,” it began, “I kind of deleted the blog. Sorry. Here’s my explanation.” The farewell post was attributed, like virtually all of the blog’s entries since its inception, in 2013, to Scott Alexander, the pseudonym of a Bay Area psychiatrist—the title “Slate Star Codex” is an imperfect anagram of the alias—and it put forth a rationale for this online self-immolation.

“Last week I talked to a New York Times technology reporter who was planning to write a story on Slate Star Codex,” the post continued. “He told me it would be a mostly positive piece about how we were an interesting gathering place for people in tech, and how we were ahead of the curve on some aspects of the coronavirus situation.” …

The final post went on, “It probably would have been a very nice article. Unfortunately, he told me he had discovered my real name and would reveal it in the article, ie doxx me.” Alexander explained that he has a variety of reasons to prefer that his real name, which can be ascertained with minimal investigation, be left out of the paper of record. As a psychiatrist, he suspects that his relationships with his patients could be compromised if they were made aware of his “personal” blog, which gets six hundred thousand monthly page views. (read more)

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sic semper tyrannis

French bus driver dies following attack by passengers who refused to wear masks
 
Philippe Monguillot, 59, died in hospital on Friday after doctors previously declared him brain dead

A French bus driver declared brain dead after an attack by passengers who refused to wear face masks has died, according to his family.

Philippe Monguillot, 59, died in hospital on Friday, his daughter Marie told AFP. “We decided to let him go. The doctors were in favour and we were as well,” she said.

Monguillot was attacked in the south-western town of Bayonne on Sunday after he asked three passengers to wear masks – in line with coronavirus rules across France – and tried to check another man’s ticket.

Two men have been charged with attempted murder, two others with non-assistance to a person in danger and another with attempting to hide a suspect, the local prosecutor’s office said.

The two charged with attempted murder are aged 22 and 23. They were previously known to the police. (read more)

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“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence; it is force, and like fire, makes a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”
George Washington

2020-07-09 f
The Revolution Devours Its Own

Remember The Red Guards Before You Cheer The Woke Mobs

Today statues, tomorrow mass firings... or even worse. There's a history here.

I'm ambivalent about statues and J.K. Rowling being torn down, but terrified of the thought process behind the destruction. Decisions should never be made by mobs.

Is America on the edge of a cultural revolution?

The historical namesake and obvious parallel is the Cultural Revolution in China, which lasted from 1966 to 1976. Its stated goal was to purge capitalist and traditional elements from society, and to substitute a new way of thinking based on Mao’s own beliefs. The epic struggle for control and power waged war against anybody on the wrong side of an idea.

To set the mobs on somebody, one needed only to tie him to an official blacklist like the Four Olds (old customs, culture, habits, and ideas). China’s young people and urban workers formed Red Guard units to go after whomever was outed. Violence? Yes, please. When Mao launched the movement in May 1966, he told his mobs to “bombard the headquarters” and made clear that “to rebel is justified.” He said “revisionists should be removed through violent class struggle.” The old thinkers were everywhere and were systematically trying to preserve their power and subjugate the people.

Whetted, the mobs took the task to heart: Red Guards destroyed historical relics, statues, and artifacts, and ransacked cultural and religious sites. Libraries were burned. Religion was considered a tool of capitalists and so churches were destroyed—even the Temple of Confucius was wrecked. Eventually the Red Guards moved on to openly killing people who did not think as they did. Where were the police? The cops were told not to intervene in Red Guard activities, and if they did, the national police chief pardoned the Guards for any crimes.

Education was singled out, as it was the way the old values were preserved and transmitted. Teachers, particularly those at universities, were considered the “Stinking Old Ninth” and were widely persecuted. The lucky ones just suffered the public humiliation of shaved heads, while others were tortured. Many were slaughtered or harassed into suicide. Schools and universities eventually closed down and over 10 million former students were sent to the countryside to labor under the Down to the Countryside Movement. A lost generation was abandoned to fester, uneducated. Red Guard pogroms eventually came to include the cannibalization of revisionists. After all, as Mao said, a revolution is not a dinner party.

The Cultural Revolution destroyed China’s economy and traditional culture, leaving behind a possible death toll ranging from one to 20 million. Nobody really knows. It was a war on the way people think. And it failed. One immediate consequence of the Revolution’s failure was the rise in power of the military after regular people decided they’d had enough and wanted order restored. China then became even more of a capitalist society than it had ever imagined in pre-Revolution days. Oh well.

I spoke with an elderly Chinese academic who had been forced from her classroom and made to sleep outside with the animals during the Revolution. She recalled forced self-criticism sessions that required her to guess at her crimes, as she’d done nothing more than teach literature, a kind of systematic revisionism in that it espoused beliefs her tormentors thought contributed to the rotten society. She also had to write out long apologies for being who she was. She was personally held responsible for 4,000 years of oppression of the masses. Our meeting was last year, before white guilt became a whole category on Netflix, but I wonder if she’d see now how similar it all is.

That’s probably a longer version of events than a column like this would usually feature. A tragedy on the scale of the Holocaust in terms of human lives, an attempt to destroy culture on a level that would embarrass the Taliban—this topic is not widely taught in American colleges, never mind in China.

It should be taught, because history rhymes. Chinese students are again outing teachers, sometimes via cellphone videos, for “improper speech,” teaching hurtful things from the past using the wrong vocabulary. Other Chinese intellectuals are harassed online for holding outlier positions, or lose their jobs for teaching novels with the wrong values. Once abhorred as anti-free speech, most UC Berkeley students would likely now agree that such steps are proper. In Minnesota, To Kill A Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn are banned because fictional characters use a racial slur.

There are no statues to the Cultural Revolution here or in China. Nobody builds monuments to chaos. But it’s never really about the statues anyway. In America, we moved quickly from demands to tear down the statues of Robert E. Lee to Thomas Jefferson to basically any Caucasian, including “White Jesus.“

Of course, it was never going to stop with Confederate generals because it was not really about racism any more than the Cultural Revolution was really about capitalism. This is about rewriting history for political ends, both short-term power grabs (Not Trump 2020!) and longer term societal changes that one critic calls the “successor ideology,” the melange of academic radicalism now seeking hegemony throughout American institutions. Douglas Murray is more succinct. The purpose “is to embed a new metaphysics into our societies: a new religion.” The ideas—centered on there being only one accepted way of thought—are a tool of control.

It remains to be seen where America goes next in its own nascent cultural revolution. Like slow dancing in eighth grade, maybe nothing will come of it. These early stages, where the victims are Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, someone losing her temper while walking a dog in Central Park, and canceled celebrities, are a far cry from the millions murdered for the same goals in China. Much of what appears revolutionary is just Internet pranking and common looting amplified by an agendaized media. One writer sees “cancel culture as a game, the point of which is to impose unemployment on people as a form of recreation.” B-list celebs and Karens in the parking lot are easy enough targets. Ask the Red Guards: it’s fun to break things.

Still, the intellectual roots of our revolution and China’s seem similar: the hate of the old, the need for unacceptable ideas to be disappeared in the name of social progress, intolerance toward dissent, violence to enforce conformity. (read more)

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The Covid-Caper As Social Control Theater

Doug Casey On COVID Brainwashing: "Look, Hysteria Is The Problem; Not The Flu Itself"

Recently, gold bug and investor Doug Casey sat down with Kenneth Ameduri of Crush the Street. Casey jumped right in saying the breakdown of the United States under the boot of tyranny is “actually predictable.”

Casey says Western civilization peaked around World War 1, just after the Federal Reserve took over the monetary supply. Yet at the same time, technology improved. So in some ways, things have gotten better, but in the ways that matter, things have gotten worse. Now, people are easily programmed to believe what the TV tells them to, thanks to technological advancement. Yet, both global warming and COVID are “phony” as far as Casey is concerned.

Casey then discusses more in detail the COVID hoax.  When Ameduri asks about the cases going up, but fatalities going down, Casey says the case numbers are meaningless. He says we should focus on the deaths, which are being “greatly overreported.”

In fact, we showed documents from the government back in April that prove they need the death toll to be as high as possible to exact tyranny on people through fear.

Casey says this whole situation was done as a form of “people control.” The government, who will issue your immunity passport, will decide what you can and cannot do based on whether or not you’ve gotten the mandatory vaccine. He says it’s possible to experience even more tyranny as the vaccine is rolled out. (read more)

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The "Woke" Are Thumb-Sucking Tantrum-Tots - Part III

The Assault on Civilization

“Liberalism,” wrote James Burnham in his 1964 classic Suicide of the West, “is the ideology of Western suicide.” Western civilization and the police that guard that civilization are under assault by the forces of radicalism. The civil unrest created by neo-Marxist, far-Left radicals in American cities (and in some European cities, as well) applauded by liberal intellectuals and activists, and countenanced by liberal governors, mayors and district attorneys, is causing much immediate harm. Businesses are being looted, trashed, and burned, innocent people and police officers have been wantonly threatened, assaulted and killed, and incompetent and ideologically-disarmed political and societal leaders are doing nothing to stop it. 

It has all happened before. Far-Left radicals in the 1960s and 1970s — the Black Panthers, Weather Underground and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in America, the IRA in the United Kingdom, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction in West Germany, the ETA Basque terrorists in Spain, Action Directe in France — incited riots, attacked police forces, damaged property, and killed police and innocent citizens. Student radicals took over universities, and some university administrators and faculty sided with the radicals. Those groups all had grievances — racial, political, economic — against the existing orders in each country.
 
Then, the radicals were more open about their methods and goals. In May 1967, the SDS National Secretary described his group as “post-communist revolutionaries” who are “working to build a guerilla force in an urban environment” and are “actively organizing sedition.” Columbia University’s SDS leader in June 1968 touted the group’s “ability to manipulate people through violence and mass media.” The Black Panther Manual on Urban Warfare explained that the group’s “sole purpose is to turn the System upside down . . .”

The Weather Underground’s Communique No. 8 in March 1971 described the group’s tactics as “armed underground attacks, propaganda, demonstrations in the cities and campuses, actions by local collectives . . . [and] political warfare.” In Europe, the neo-Maoist terrorist groups used violence, propaganda, and intimidation in an effort to undermine the public’s confidence in the existing order.

New Left radicalism has roots in French Revolution
 
Eugene Methvin in his long-forgotten book The Rise of Radicalism: The Social Psychology of Messianic Extremism (1973), traced the roots of New Left radicalism in America to the utopian dreamers of the French Revolution through Marx, Lenin, and Mao. In the book’s first chapter, Methvin quotes the character Mourlan in Martin du Gard’s novel Les Thibaults: “Everything has got to be smashed to start with. Our whole damned civilization has got to go, before we can bring any decency into the world.” Methvin elsewhere quotes Karl Popper from The Open Society and Its Enemies: “ . . . our greatest troubles spring from something that is as admirable as it is dangerous — from our impatience to better the lot of our fellows.”

Methvin noted that in the late 1960s, America suffered more than 100 riots, insurrections, and civil disorders. Thousands of buildings were burned. More than 130 people were killed and more than 3,000 injured. Following Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder in 1968, Black Panthers killed more than 10 policemen in ambushes and encounters during the next two years. A lawyer for the Black Panthers falsely asserted that police had murdered 28 Panthers, and this assertion was printed as fact in major newspapers and news magazines. Meanwhile, according to the Washington Post, liberal U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark refused to prosecute black militants and anti-war leaders for inciting riots.

Methvin described the 1960s' radicals as “those who believe they can get to the root of things and change them only through . . . violence applied in one form or another . . . and afterword through the terror and coercion of a ‘revolutionary dictatorship . . .’” The radicals’ idealism, Methvin noted, turned into raging hate because all people did not conform to their ideals. In a recent interview, one of the leaders of today’s radicals mimicked his 1960s’ predecessors: “If this country doesn’t give us what we want then we will burn down this system and replace it.”

Current radicals turning legitimate protests into assaults

Today’s radicals have covertly hijacked, infiltrated, and utilized legitimate protests to wage an all-out assault on the police — the forces of order in society — and Western civilization. Attorney General William Barr recently explained that the radicals have “hijacked protest to engage in lawlessness.” He decried the “violent rioting, arson, looting of businesses and public property.” He condemned the “assaults on law enforcement officers and innocent people.”

“Such senseless acts of anarchy,” he explained, “are not exercises of First Amendment rights. They are crimes designed to terrify fellow citizens and intimidate communities.”

The totalitarian nature of the assault on Western civilization, and the ineffectual liberal response, are on display for all to see. Radicals demand that statues and murals of historical figures they deem intolerable be taken down or erased. Protestors hold signs with the words “white silence is white violence,” meaning that if you do not speak out as they want you to, you are committing an act of “violence” and presumably should be prosecuted and punished. Protestors demand the censorship of thought that they disagree with on social media, and the social media barons comply. An editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer was forced to resign for printing a headline that said public and private property should be protected against looters. An editor at the New York Times was forced to resign when he agreed to publish an op-ed piece by a conservative U.S. Senator that advocated using the military to quell the riots in our cities.

Liberal district attorneys announce that they will not prosecute “low level” crimes committed by protestors. Liberal bail laws set violent looters free soon after their arrests. In Seattle, Washington, left-wing revolutionaries took over a police precinct and surrounding city blocks and issued “demands” to abolish the police and empty the prisons. Seattle’s liberal mayor called the radicals “patriots,” while Washington’s liberal governor appeared oblivious to it all. Most ominously, radicals are waging war against law enforcement, and liberals in power pledge to disarm, defund, or disband the police.

We're living a totalitarian nightmare

In London, in a symbolic act, protestors defaced the statue of Winston Churchill — the Western leader who did more than anyone to save Western civilization when it was under assault by Nazis and Communists (remember, in May 1940, Hitler and Stalin were allies). Almost daily, we are witnessing similar symbolic acts here in the United States — radicals deface and topple statues of Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. New York’s mayor has announced that a city museum will take down a statue of Theodore Roosevelt. A mob in San Francisco toppled a statue of Ulysses S. Grant. A mob in Washington tried to topple the statue of Andrew Jackson.

The great religions of Western civilization have also been targeted. In Washington, D.C., radicals damaged and vandalized the historic St John’s Episcopal Church near the White House. Catholic churches have been damaged, vandalized or defaced in California, Texas, Minnesota, New York, Kentucky, and Colorado. Synagogues in Los Angeles and Virginia have been attacked. The radicals are even targeting images of Jesus Christ. It was inevitable that Christianity and Judaism, which are at the very heart of Western civilization, would become targets. If your goal is to overturn Western civilization, Judeo-Christian symbols and traditions must go. The response to all of this by liberal religious hierarchies, with few exceptions, has been silence mixed with public confessions of past sins.

Like their predecessors during the French Revolution, today’s radicals seek to erase the imperfect vestiges of the old order — including traditional religions — and replace them with their vision of the good society — when, in Marx’s words, each will give according to his abilities and each will receive according to his needs. Like their predecessors in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, today’s radicals demand strict conformity to their “acceptable” opinion and insist on public confessions of past sins. Totalitarian reeducation is beginning and liberalism is ill equipped to confront it.

History is being erased. George Orwell foresaw this totalitarian nightmare: (read more)

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The "Woke" Are Thumb-Sucking Tantrum-Tots - Part II

Why Do So Many White Women Hate Themselves?
 
Amid societal unrest, woke white women are proving to be a brainwashed force to be reckoned with.

Some might find it odd that so many seemingly middle-class, young, white women are taking up street theater with a vengeance. We’ve seen the woke white woman spitting harangues into the faces of police officers, including black officers, trying to lecture and shame them into obedience.

We saw many of them acting up in the “autonomous zone” of CHAZ or CHOP in Seattle, condescendingly guarding a “blacks only” area. We’ve also seen these women physically attacking those they deem the enemy, including a Democrat state legislator in Wisconsin. A 29-year-old white woman was arrested for setting fire to the Wendy’s restaurant in Atlanta after the police altercation and shooting there last month. Another was filmed setting fire to police cars. The list goes on.

Some observers see all of this as a contradiction. Since the “woke white woman” tends to be college-educated, many think she must be smart. Since she comes from a middle- or even upper-class suburban background, people assume she must be emotionally stable. Because she is socially aware, she must be interested in trying to understand people as individual human beings. How is it that such a woman can so easily become an arsonist, a terrorist, a mobster, and a taunter of black police officers?

She shows none of the positive traits expected of her. Her commitment to identity politics demands she reject people as unique human beings. Since she insists racism is “systemic,” she is forever guilty and therefore cannot be emotionally stable. In her obedience to the coercive thought reform of the education establishment, she has surrendered the right to think independently.

Other observers don’t see contradictions, but a catty and spoiled girl whose main pursuit is the collection of status points — of which the latest method is to pose as an ally of the Marxist Black Lives Matter movement. She could be the one giving you the finger as she cuts you off in her Mercedes, and her natural habitat is the public middle school where she is forever stuck scanning the landscape for winners and losers. (read more)

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The "Woke" Are Thumb-Sucking Tantrum-Tots - Part I

The Fragility Of The Woke

A TikTok video that recently went viral on social media showed a recent Harvard graduate threatening to stab anyone who said "all lives matter." In her melodrama, she tried to sound intimidating with her histrionics.

She won a huge audience as she intended. But her video also came to the attention of the company that was going to give her an internship later this summer, Deloitte, which decided it didn't want to add an intern who threatened to kill strangers who said something she didn't like.

This wouldn't have been much of a story. But then the narcissistic Harvard alum posted a very different video -- one that showed her weeping in a near-fetal position.

She fought back tears while complaining how unfair the world had been to her. Her initial TikTok post had earned cruel pushback from the social media jungle she had courted. Deloitte, she sobbed, was mean and hurtful. And she wanted the world to share her pain.
...
The Harvard grad instantly became an unwitting poster girl for the current protest movement and the violence that has accompanied it. What turns off millions of Americans about the statue toppling, the looting, the threats and the screaming in the faces of police is the schizophrenic behavior of so many of the would-be revolutionaries.

On one hand, those toppling statues or canceling their own careers on the internet pose as vicious Maoists -- the hard-core shock troops of the revolution. Their brand is vile profanity, taunts to police, firebombs and spray paint.

In homage to Italy's blackshirts of the past, they wear black hoodies, don makeshift helmets and strap on ad hoc protective padding -- part lacrosse attire, part cinematic Road Warrior costume.

The televised stereotype of the antifa activist is a physically unimpressive but violent-talking revolutionary. He seems to strut in laid-back, blue-city Minneapolis but wisely avoids the suburbs and small towns of the nation's red states. He spits at police when standing beside fellow agitators but would never do that when alone confronting an autoworker or welder.

When police march against the antifa crowd and their appendages in order to clear the streets, they often scream like preteens, objecting to mean officers who dare to cross them.

When arrested, the trash talkers are usually terrified of being jailed or of having an arrest on their records.

Federal authorities are currently searching thousands of videos to ferret out looters, arsonists and assailants. Perpetrators who are caught are shocked that the evidence that they once posted online in triumphant braggadocio is now being used to charge them with felonies. (read more)

2020-07-09 a

“All government is authoritarian; and the more democratic a government is the more authoritative it is; for with the people behind it, it can push authority further than any Tsar or foreign despot dare do.”
George Bernard Shaw

2020
-07-08 d
Join The Resistance

Why Freedom Is Ending

First, the force that is ending freedom will be identified and described; and, then, the force that they fear and hate the most (and are trying to destroy) will be identified and described.

THE FORCE THAT IS ENDING FREEDOM

The force that is ending freedom is empire.

Every empire is a dictatorship. No nation can be a democracy that’s either heading an empire, or a vassal-state of one. Obviously, in order to be a vassal-state within an empire, that nation is dictated-to by the nation of which it is a colony. However, even the domestic inhabitants of the colonizing nation cannot be free and living in a democracy, because their services are needed abroad in order to impose the occupying force upon the colony or vassal-nation. This is an important burden upon the ‘citizens’ or actually the subjects of the imperial nation. Furthermore, they need to finance, via their taxes, this occupying force abroad, to a sufficient extent so as to subdue any resistance by the residents in any colony.

Every empire is imposed, none is really voluntary. Conquest creates an empire, and the constant application of force maintains it. Every empire is a dictatorship, not only upon its foreign populations (which goes without saying, because otherwise there can’t be any empire), but upon its domestic ones too, upon its own subjects.

Any empire needs weapons-makers, who sell to the government and whose only markets are the imperial government and its vassal-nations or ‘allies’. By contrast, ‘enemy’ nations are ones that the imperial power has placed onto its priority-list of nations that are yet to become conquered.

There are two main reasons to conquer a nation:

One is in order to be enabled to extract, from the colony, oil, or gold, or some other valuable commodity.

The other is in order to control it so as to be enabled to use that land as a passageway for exporting, from a vassal-nation, to other nations, that vassal-nation’s products.

International trade is the basis for any empire, and the billionaires who own controlling blocs of stock in a nation’s international corporations are the actual rulers of it, the beneficiaries of empire, the recipients of the wealth that is being extracted from the colonies and from the domestic subjects.

The idea of an empire is that the imperial nation’s rulers, its aristocracy, extract from the colonies their products, and they impose upon their domestic subjects the financial and military burdens of imposing their international dictatorship upon the foreign subjects.

Some authors say that there is a “Deep State” and that it consists of (some undefined elements within) the intelligence services, and of the military, and of the diplomatic corps, of any given dictatorship; but, actually, those employees of the State are merely employees, not the actual governing power, over that dictatorship.

The actual Deep State are always the aristocrats, themselves, the people who run the revolving door between ‘the private sector’ (the aristocracy’s corporations) and the government.
...
In order to maintain this system, of international dictatorship or empire, the most essential tool is deceit, of the electorate, by the aristocracy.

The method of control is: the bought agents of the Deep State (including the major ‘news’-media, etc.) lie to the public about what their polices will be if they win, in order to be able to win power; and, then, once they have won power, they do the opposite, which is what they have always been paid by the Deep State (the aristocracy) to do. Thereby, elections aren’t “democratic” but instead ‘democratic’: they are mere formalities of democracy, without the substance of democracy, because there can be no democracy where truth is suppressed and lies are spread instead. All of the well-financed candidates for the top offices are actually the Deep State’s representatives, and virtually none are the representatives of the public, because the voters have been deceived, and were given (by the DNC and RNC) choices between two or more candidates, none of whom will represent the public, if and when elected. Individuals who want to represent the public instead of the aristocracy get drowned by the aristocracy’s campaign-money. (read more)

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I hope she gave Wikileaks copies of Epstein's sex tapes.

Ghislaine has thumb drives. “She knows where all the bodies are buried” (Video)
...
A former warden at the jail holding Ghislaine Maxwell says the accused Jeffrey Epstein accomplice should be on suicide watch – as her case is ‘too explosive to risk her killing herself behind bars,’ reports the New York Post.

She allegedly knows a great deal of information about a multitude of potential co-defendants in the actions against Jeffrey Epstein,” said Cameron Lindsay, who served as the warden of the Metropolitan Detention Center for three years, adding that he wouldn’t risk the possibility of her suicide.

“This is just such a sensitive case, it’s absolutely imperative that the government get it right,” added Lindsay. “Why take any chances? Just put her on suicide watch and keep her there until she’s out the door. I would just not risk it.”
...
Maxwell’s death would also be incredibly convenient for a host of high-profile individuals suspected of participating in Epstein’s underage sex trafficking ring. She was charged with four counts of sex trafficking and two counts of perjury, and will be held at the Metropolitan Detention Center at least until her bail hearing, tentatively scheduled for the 14th of July.

After his arrest on charges of sex-trafficking dozens of teenage girls, Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his cell last August at New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in lower Manhattan. While ruled a suicide, many have speculated that the combination of broken security cameras and ‘sleepy guards’ at the exact moment he allegedly hanged himself suggests he was ‘suicided’ before he could spill the beans on his high-profile friends and clients. (read more)

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-07-08 b
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo Is The Grim Reaper

The Nursing-Home Catastrophe

Governor Andrew Cuomo’s fateful decision to return Covid-19 patients to care facilities ought to haunt him—and us.

As more details emerge of the early days of the Covid-19 outbreak in the United States, perhaps the most disturbing chapter is the tragedy that befell nursing homes. According to the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy, only 1 percent of Americans reside in nursing homes or long-term-care facilities (LTCFs), but this group accounts for 40 percent of all Covid-19 deaths. This high mortality rate can be explained, in part, by the reality that such populations are significantly more prone to the cardiac, respiratory, and renal comorbidities that predispose individuals to bad health outcomes. Tragically, however, a great deal of the nursing-home mortality rate is also due to a misguided—and arguably negligent—policy of discharging Covid-19 patients directly to these facilities.

The March 25 order by New York governor Andrew Cuomo and state health chief Howard Zucker mandated that nursing homes and LTCFs accept patients discharged from hospitals, even if they received only emergency care and were still infectious; it is now reported that 6,300 Covid patients were sent to nursing homes throughout the state. The motivation behind the order was understandable: in late March, public concern was high that Covid-19 cases would overwhelm New York’s hospital capacity. Yet, despite an impressive deployment of surge capacity from the federal government (much of which went unused), Cuomo’s order remained in place for almost two months, not being rescinded until May 10.

By then, New York had lost 6 percent of its residents in nursing homes to the virus. Michigan would lose 5 percent, and New Jersey a harrowing 12 percent. Florida, which never implemented such a treat-and-return policy, suffered a mere 1.6 percent mortality among nursing-home residents, while California, which changed course in time, managed to keep nursing-home casualties at 2 percent. While the media were preoccupied with Floridians enjoying walks on the beach, Covid-19 raged unchecked through nursing homes and LTCFs throughout America, with little attention paid to the plight of their residents.

The humanitarian disaster in nursing homes—which, even with outstanding research by ProPublica, remains little more than a footnote to the popular narrative about the Covid-19 outbreak—is particularly tragic because it was entirely avoidable. Governor Cuomo asserts that New York followed federal guidance on nursing homes. It’s true that Washington’s instructions permitted the return of patients to nursing homes and LTCFs if the facilities had adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) and sufficient isolation capabilities, but it was left unclear who would make these determinations. At one point, Cuomo said that it was “not our job” (meaning the state government’s) to provide supplies to privately run nursing homes. The federal guidance was written with the assumption that readmission would be preceded by testing—but Cuomo’s March order didn’t make that a condition. The result: a badly informed, poorly executed policy that allowed a deadly pathogen to ravage nursing-home facilities, burning through elderly and at-risk residents like “fire through dry grass.”

Remarkable men and women reside in America’s nursing homes and LTCFs. Many survived the turmoil of the Great Depression, shed their blood on battlefields, fought for civil rights, and helped shape the American century. Their sacrifices paved the way for an age of unprecedented wealth in America, and we remain in their debt—a debt that should include supporting and protecting them in their sunset years. As is often said, the character of a society can be glimpsed in how it treats its most vulnerable. On the count of failing in this duty, many state leaders come out guilty as charged. (read the original)

2020-07-08 a

“The less government we have, the better—the fewer laws, and the less confided power.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

2020
-07-07 e
Marxist Muslim from Minnesota Hates Capitalism

Radical Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar Calls For “Dismantling” of US “Economy and Political Systems” (VIDEO)

Radical Muslima Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) on Tuesday called for the dismantling of the US economy and political systems.

The crazed Marxist lawmaker called for capitalism to be destroyed in the name of social justice.

“As long as our economy and political systems prioritize profit without considering who is profiting, who is being shut out, we will perpetuate this inequality so we cannot stop at the criminal justice system,” Ilhan Omar said. “We must begin the work of dismantling the whole system of oppression wherever we find it.”
...
According documents and sources previously reported by investigative journalist David Steinberg, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar married her own brother in order to defraud US immigration.

In fact, evidence is mounting that Ilhan Omar isn’t even her real name.

Ilhan Omar refuses to answer questions about her fraudulent marriage to her own brother and accuses anyone asking questions of bigotry and Islamophobia.

In February a Somali community leader came forward and confirmed Ilhan Omar married her own brother to get him ‘papers’ to keep him in the US.

Ilhan Omar came to the US illegally and now she’s calling for the overthrow of the current system. (read more)

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I Ignore the Fear-Mongers

Stanford Doctor Confirms What We’ve Been Saying for Months – For People Under Age 45 the COVID-19 Mortality Rate is Almost 0%

The China coronavirus is real but the facts about it have been hidden or contaminated.  For example, a doctor at Stanford reported a couple days ago that the China coronavirus mortality rate for those under the age of 45 is almost 0%. (read more)

2020-07-07 c
Deep State Judge Should Be Impeached

Corrupt Judge Emmet Sullivan in General Flynn Case Hired Attorney Beth Wilkinson Days after She Represented Hillary Aide Cheryl Mills in Sullivan Related Deposition

What the hell is going on?  Attorney Beth Wilkinson represented Judge Emmet Sullivan in his attempted takeover of the General Flynn case in front of a DC Circuit Court.  This occurred only days after Wilkinson represented Cheryl Mills in a deposition related to a Sullivan court ruling.

After the US government reviewed the information related to the case the government had against General Michael Flynn, the government made the decision not to proceed with the case.  General Flynn’s attorneys agreed and they all went to the court to have the case dismissed.

The problem is the judge overseeing the case is Judge Emmet Sullivan.  He not only decided not to end the case (which was unheard of) but decided to bring other opinions into the case.  This all happened after an audio of Barack Obama was released urging for the resistance.

Flynn’s attorneys reached out to the Circuit Court in DC to review the actions of the corrupt Judge Sullivan overseeing the case.  Three judges heard the arguments and ruled days later that Judge Sullivan must end the case.  No one wanted to move forward with the case, clearly the Obama holdovers in the government set General Flynn up, harassed him, indicted him under false charges, did not share information with him that they were required to share proving his innocence and put him under a gag order. (read more)

2020-07-07 b
This story from MarketWatch has been re-written by our “
truth squad.”

Racist San Francisco lawmaker proposes ‘CAREN Act,’ targeting racist 911 calls

Black Supervisor Shamann Walton proposes law against reporting ‘racially exploitative non-emergencies’

Calling 911 to report a fabricated, racially-biased emergency would be illegal in San Francisco under a new thought-crime proposal called, appropriately enough, the CAREN Act.

“Racist 911 calls are unacceptable that’s why I’m introducing the CAREN Act at today’s SF Board of Supervisors meeting,” Black San Francisco Supervisor Shamann Walton tweeted Tuesday. “This is the CAREN we need. Caution Against Racially Exploitative Non-Emergencies.”

“Karen,” of course, has become a racist, pop-culture catch-all name for people (in many notable cases, white women) who, out of a well-founded fear or concern, call the police on minorities for allegedly trivial matters, supposedly exaggerating a situation or falsely claiming the member of a Melanin Minority is breaking a law. Recent incidents include a New York woman who called the police on a Black bird-watcher in Central Park; an Alameda, Calif., Black man who was arrested after a woman reported him for dancing in the street; and a San Francisco woman who called the police on a Filipino neighbor for writing “Black Lives Matter” in chalk in front of his house.

The proposed San Francisco legislation would hold people liable for calling 911 to report something they know is false or exaggerated, and based on a bureaucrat deciding racial bias was involved.

Fellow San Francisco Supervisor Matt Haney co-authored the bill, and noted in a tweet: “Racist false reports put people in danger and waste resources. Our police are not here to protect White Women who are afraid of Black Men.”

In a statement, Walton said he aims to join a statewide effort by California State Assembly member Rob Bonta of Oakland, who has introduced similar thought-crime legislation statewide.

While it is already illegal to file a false police report, that legislation would add a hate-crime designation to reports based on racial bias if a bureaucrat decides such was involved. Though it is unclear how that determination can be made accurately.

The thought-crime bill “will impose serious consequences on those who make 911 calls that we decide are motivated by hate and bigotry; actions that inherently cause harm and pain to others,” Bonta-the-Omniscient said in a statement.

Bonta stressed that his proposal does not seek to discourage people from calling 911 to report real emergencies. Though that indeed is his intent.

However, “racist and discriminatory 911 calls are dangerous, demeaning and demoralizing to the person falsely accused. They further deteriorate community-police relations and contribute to the inaccurate and harmful over-criminalization of black and brown males who actually to commit a disproportionate number of crimes,” Bonta said in a statement. “If you are afraid of a black family barbecuing in the community park, a man dancing and doing his normal exercise routine in the bike lane, or someone who asks you to comply with dog leash laws in a park, and your immediate response is to call the police, the real problem is with your own personal prejudice, in my humble opinion.”

2020-07-07 a

“The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.”
John Adams

2020
-07-06 c
Links from https://lockdownsceptics.org/ that the COVIDIOTS and Masked Morons Don't Want You to Read:
2020-07-06 b
I Doubt the Count

Double-Counting

A reader in Toronto has been in touch to flag up a possible explanation for the rising case numbers in southern and southwestern US states.

Your recent post about double counting of Pillar 2 tests in Leicestershire got me thinking whether that could be a factor in the recent spike in cases in the U.S.

So here’s a link to, for example, Johns Hopkins data for Arizona.

Among other things, the percentage of positive tests has been growing steadily and now stands at 25%. On the face of it, this is very alarming. It also doesn’t seem to pass the sniff test, as hospitals should theoretically be overwhelmed.

So here’s an interesting disclaimer on the same page: “When states report the number of COVID-19 tests performed, this should include the number of viral tests performed and the number of patients for which these tests were performed. Currently, states may not be distinguishing overall tests administered from the number of individuals who have been tested. This is an important limitation to the data that is available to track testing in the U.S., and states should work to address it.”

So they’re as much as saying there’s double counting going on. And if people who test positive get retested until they’re negative, that would have the effect of artificially increasing both the number of “cases” and the “percent positive”.

The same page also has an admonition for states not to include antibody tests in their reporting. So if some states are doing that, that could also help to explain the rise in “cases” and “positive tests”.

Arizona is a more extreme example, but Texas and Florida are also showing strong increases in “percent positive” to 14% and 18% respectively.

Another problem with the data, in addition to double counting, is that not all of it is up-to-date. This story in azcentral has a rather bed-wetting headline, but contains this gem towards the end:

Arizonans have reported delays in getting tested and waits of as long as three weeks to get results. The daily cases reported are not all from the previous day’s results — they could have been tests conducted weeks ago

2020-07-06 a

“An elective despotism was not the government we fought for.”
Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia, 1782

2020
-07-05 d
Lock Him Up!

IT’S A START: Portland Rioter Arrested With Pipe Bomb Materials, Will Face Federal Charges

This merits federal prosecution.

Acting Deputy Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli revealed that a rioter in Portland, Oregon was arrested with materials used to create a pipe bomb on Saturday night.

Cuccinelli shared an image of the rioter’s terrorist paraphernalia on his Twitter Sunday, announcing that the rioter would face federal criminal charges for his possession of the destructive device.

Customs and Border Patrol official Mark Morgan confirmed that the thus-unnamed rioter had been arrested on Sunday morning not only with pipe bomb paraphernalia, but a machete and a knife. (read more)

2020-07-05 c
Black Lives Re-Gather
 
STALKERS: Black Lives Matter Returns to Home of St. Louis Couple After Armed Confrontation

It’s harassment at this point.

Protestors of the Black Lives Matter movement returned to the premises of the home of Mark and Patricia McCloskey on Saturday, a Saint Louis couple who confronted rioters of the movement who trespassed near their property last week. The McCloskeys had been peacefully armed on their own property, but nonetheless became the targets of a left-wing hate campaign for refusing to bow in submission to the threatening rioters.

The crowd of ‘protestors’ appeared to refrain from trespassing during Saturday’s harassment of the couple, instead chanting taunts in the direction the McCloskey home from behind a wall gating off the private community in which they live.

A protestor of the mob recounted his grievances with the couple, castigating them for insufficient support of the previous trespassing rioters.

italics   “They love black lives for what, but they got a gate? They installed a new gate… But they’re supporters of Black Lives Matter? They thought we was an angry mob, but they support BLM? They said we was gone go into his house, kill him, enslave [unintelligible] and his dog…”

A new fence appears to have been installed around the McCloskey home after the confrontation, and the house is being protected by a team of private security agents. (read more)

2020-07-05 b
Has Farrakhan Gone Too Far?

Farrakhan Accuses Fauci And Bill Gates Of Plotting To ‘Depopulate The Earth’ With Coronavirus Vaccine

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan trended on Twitter on Saturday after he accused Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates of trying to “depopulate the Earth” through the development of vaccines aimed at ending the coronavirus pandemic.

Speaking at Nation of Islam headquarters in Chicago, Farrakhan urged African leaders and his followers to avoid accepting vaccines and medications developed by Western scientists.

“I say to my brothers and sisters in Africa, if they come up with a vaccine, be careful. Don’t let them vaccinate you with their history of treachery through vaccines, through medication,” Farrakhan said during the speech, which he gives annually on the Fourth of July.

“Do not take their medication,” the 87-year-old firebrand continued.

This year’s speech drew particular attention after Fox Soul, a division of 21st Century Fox, came under fire for planning to stream the event online. Farrakhan has a history of making anti-Semitic remarks.

Farrakhan proposed convening a team of virologists and epidemiologists to inspect whatever vaccines are developed to deal with the coronavirus.

He then pushed a popular but unfounded conspiracy theory that Fauci and Gates are working on a vaccine for the purposes of population control.

“They’re making money now, plotting to give seven billion, five-hundred million people a vaccination.
 Dr. Fauci, Bill Gates and Melinda — you want to depopulate the Earth. What the hell gave you that right? Who are you to sit down with your billion to talk about who can live, and who should die?” Farrakhan said. (read more)

2020-07-05 a

“It does not take a majority to prevail … but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.”
Samuel Adams

2020
-07-04 f
Denouncing the Left-Wing Agenda

Trump Gives History Lesson, Slams 'Left-Wing Cultural Revolution' In Mount Rushmore Address

President Trump kicked off Independence Day weekend on Friday by delivering a fiery address in front of Mount Rushmore - a site undoubtedly chosen as left-wing protesters shift focus from removing confederate statues to destroying monuments of US presidents.

"Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities," said Trump - who added "There is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. Not gonna happen to us."

"Make no mistake, this left wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American revolution," Trump told the crowd of more than 7,000. "Our children are taught in school to hate their own country."

Trump then announced that under an Executive Order signed last week, "people who damage or deface federal statues or monuments will get a minimum of 10 years in prison."

Trump then vowed that Mount Rushmore will "never be defaced." (read more)

2020-07-04 e
Old Joe Is Turning into an Old Joke

The Strategies Of Dementia Politics

Stoke chaos, obstruct economic recovery, and hide Biden in the basement till Election Day.

Joe Biden is tragically suffering a mental eclipse and sliding away at a geometric rate. Understandably, his handlers have kept him out of sight. He stays off the campaign trail on the pretext of the virus and his age-related susceptibility to COVID-19 morbidity.

I say “pretext” without apology. Quarantine should not have otherwise stopped Biden over the past three months from doing daily interviews, speeches, and meetings. But each occasion, however scripted, rehearsed, and canned, would only have offered further daily proof that Biden is cognitively unable to be president or indeed to hold any office.

Often Biden cannot finish a sentence. Names are vague eddies in his mind’s river of forgetfulness. He is in a far more dire mental state than a physically failing FDR was in his 1944 campaign for a fourth term.

The earlier career of a healthy Biden illustrates that he was not especially sharp even when in control of most of his faculties. We recall the former sane/nutty Biden of Neal Kinnock plagiarism, his “put y’all in chains” demagoguery, the studied racism of Biden’s riffs about a “clean” and well-spoken Obama, and the sane/insane Corn Pop stories. All are the trademark of a once fool Joe Biden, who was at least alert when compared with his current catalepsy. If Donald Trump can be ungrammatical, Biden is agrammatical — he simply streams together half-thoughts without syntax and then abandons the sentence entirely.

If Trump repeats vocabulary, Biden increasingly searches for words, any noun, whatever its irrelevance to the point he is making. Biden seems to suffer dyscognitive seizures, in which for moments he has no idea what he is doing or saying or where he is — a tragic, nearly epileptic condition. In scary episodes, the pale, scaly, and frozen visage of Biden appears almost reptilian, like a lizard freezing and remaining stationary as it struggles to process signals of perceived danger.

Inserting memorized answers into rehearsed questions, as if the entire con was spontaneous, only reveals how his once episodic dementia has become chronic as he loses his prompt and place. It was understandable that his handlers saw opportunity in secluding Biden during Trump’s tweeting, alongside the contagion, the lockdown, the recession, and the rioting that in voters’ minds had equated fear of chaos with the culpability of the current commander in chief.

But there were always problems with placing Biden in suspended animation in his basement, even as he seemingly surged ahead of Trump in the early-summer polls.

One, seclusion, quiet, and the absence of intellectual stimuli often only enhance dementia, while travel, conversation, and new imagery and experiences tend to unclog for a bit the congested neuron pathways. The more Biden “rests up,” the more he seems to be non compos mentis in his rare staged interviews. His brain is like a flabby muscle, and restful disuse does not make it firmer.

Two, in theory there should be a shelf life to a virtual presidential candidate. True, Biden has climbed in the polls, as the public never sees or hears him — in the manner that an unpopular lame-duck Obama disappeared to the golf courses and retreats in 2016 and yielded the media spotlight to the dog and cat fighting between Trump and Clinton. Obama then discovered that the more he retreated from the public eye, the more the public liked the old idea, rather than the current reality, of him.

So too the ghost model was supposed to work for Biden.

He is a cardboard candidate, but at least he’s not on the front lines of commentary on statue toppling and the contagion, and so he can be blamed for neither. (read more)

2020-07-04 d
Subcomandante Fauci Failed America

Dr. Fauci Is No Nostradamus: How COVID-19 Ran Amok Under His Watch

Michel de Nostradamus was born in Saint-Remy, South of France, in 1503. Beyond the gifts he would one day explore in astrology, he pursued an education to become a physician. After his first year at the University of Avignon, an outbreak of the plague swept through France, forcing the University to close.

Undaunted, Nostradamus opened an apothecary before attending the University of Montpellier in pursuit of a doctorate. But a second plague struck disrupting his plan; the plague also killed his first wife and two children. During the outbreak, he joined city doctors to fight against and contain the plague. They succeeded.

Nostradamus remarried, engendered six children, and wrote an almanac. Well received, he developed his ability as a seer, with a mix of astrology and biblical end-times visions, to become the world’s most famous prognosticator of the last one thousand years. He captured his dark revelations in The Prophecies, writing a collection of 942 quatrains.

Knowing more about his life, pursuits, interests, and experiences—a survivor of two plagues, fighting on the frontline of one outbreak—many will now see Nostradamus in a new light. It’s no wonder that his visions leaned toward doom and gloom.

By contrast, Dr. Anthony Fauci, born on Christmas Eve in 1940 in Brooklyn, New York, has lived a vastly different life. Yet, there are parallels between the two men. Both pursued a career as a physician. Both experienced two plagues during their lifetimes. In Fauci’s case, he was thrust into the epicenter of the 1980s AIDS/HIV epidemic when he became director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease (NIAID). In spring 2020, he roamed center stage of the COVID19 pandemic, featured as one of the “experts” on the White House Task Force.

The big delta between Dr. Fauci and Nostradamus boils down to the ability to predict the future. Beyond Nostradamus’ uncanny ability to predict the first two World Wars, two of the three “antichrists” in Napoleon and Hitler, the assassinations of U.S. presidents, and the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers centuries before the events happened, Fauci predicted a pandemic in 2017, a measly three years before it took place.

Dr. Fauci shared his foresight with medical peers at a Georgetown forum when he stated, “There will be a surprise outbreak during Trump’s first term.”

Fauci’s prediction wasn’t conjured from the alignment of the stars and planets, or a passage lifted out of the Bible. No. He didn’t develop any such gift. Instead, he arrived at his foresight by steering the financing of zoonotic viruses “gain-of-function” research. In 2018, he joined the World Health Organization’s (WHO) new unit, Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) to be hands-on with pandemic planning, a full year after his “prophecy.” He likely advised or took part in the development of the World Bank’s first-ever “pandemic bond” the same year. Moreover, Fauci also helped the GPMB write its first annual report that pronounced the drills, simulation, and release of at least one “lethal respiratory pathogen.”

Stacking the Deck on Coronavirus Prediction

Unlike Nostradamus, it appears Fauci helped initiate the release of the novel coronavirus, unleashing pandemic paranoia and now, fanning new fears about the coming “second wave,” while insisting that only a COVID vaccine will allow society to “return to normal.” He did everything he could to kick the inexpensive hydroxychloroquine to the curb while promoting the ultra-expensive Remdesivir as a temporary fix until a vaccine becomes available. Fauci further spent a lot of political capital contradicting President Trump—and himself—nearly every day over several weeks.

And the NIAID director still presents himself as the lone go-to source for trusted information on the virus. Right.

Dr. Fauci’s recent Congressional testimony on the coronavirus was a master class in how to provide politicians and mainstream media with fodder they wanted to hear. He deftly avoided giving any firm answers on titers, how long they might last, “neutralizing antibodies,” and other sleights of the tongue. (read more)

2020-07-04 c
Known Unknowns and the Pretense of Knowledge

Rand Paul Is Right About Experts

The Internet is having a bit of fun with Rand Paul’s claim during a Tuesday Senate committee hearing that “We shouldn’t presume that a group of experts somehow knows what’s best” (here’s Tommy Beer with more). After all, they’re the experts. Shouldn’t we get out of the way and do as the experts tell us?

No. Rand Paul is right.

Friedrich Hayek was famously skeptical of experts because they have a tendency to stretch beyond their expertise and make claims, recommendations, or policies that are beyond the narrow confines of their expertise. They also tend to collapse social problems into frameworks and models that seem easy to manipulate but that leave out a lot of important on-the-ground knowledge that, Hayek argued, is of a kind that is inaccessible to an outside observer. In short, it is easy to mistake a model for the actual underlying reality. It is just as easy to identify important considerations and act as if they are the only

In a 2014 book, William Easterly highlighted and criticized The Tyranny of Experts (I reviewed it for Regulation here). His subtitle is revealing and relevant to the present moment: “Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor.” Experts can identify facts and make recommendations, certainly, but they’re not well-positioned to know the specific trade-offs and decisions people should make in light of what they know.

Probably the best illustration of this that I’ve seen is not a dense academic treatise but the February 6, 2013 installment of the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. A gentleman in a coat and tie stands in front of a tank of fluid in which someone is floating like Luke Skywalker in the bacta tank in The Empire Strikes Back. He says “We’ve encased everyone in a vat of gelatin, with nutrition fed directly into their mouths. Once a day, the gelatin is electrically excited so as to stimulate their bodies to aerobic exercise! They all live to at least 150.”

The cartoon’s caption says “fortunately, public health advocates have no legislative power.”

That’s the important point relevant to Rand Paul’s statement on Tuesday. In the cartoon, the experts have created and are enthusiastic about a technology that will lead to long lives. However, I think most of us would agree that floating in a tank of gelatin—even if you’re hooked up to Robert Nozick’s experience machine—isn’t really living.

Paul makes the important point that a bit of humility is in order. An expert is very well-positioned to say “if you do these things, then you can expect the following effects with the following probabilities.” Only in the most extraordinary of circumstances—and even then, I’m still extremely skeptical—should they presume to tell others exactly which choices they should make. (read more)

2020-07-04 b
The "Surge" in the South Plains Fails Mainly on Its Claims

Orange Man Bad!

As the Impeachment Farce neared its pathetic denouement, an optimist might have expected that the virulent Trump Derangement Syndrome infecting the MSM, the Dems and the Washington ruling class would finally die out.

Not at all. It’s back with a vengeance, lurking in the subtext and sotto voce of virtually every headline and utterance from the above precincts with respect to the Covid-19.

Indeed, the entire Covid narrative is so hideously distorted, exaggerated, mendacious and risible as to finally confirm what’s actually been at bottom of the successive waves of RussiaGate, UkraineGate, the Impeachment Farce, the Covid-Hysteria and now the Summer of Race Huckstering, too.

Namely: Orange Man Bad!

It’s as simple and primitive as that. In the present instance, only the filter of Orange Man Bad can possibly explain each new twist and turn of the MSM’s Covid narrative, which has essentially degenerated into a running show trial-like prosecution.

But finally they have gotten so desperate and hysterical that they are just flat-out fabricating, censoring and falsifying the evidence with respect to the so-called second wave allegedly hitting the Sun Belt states.

Their true purpose however, is nakedly evident. They are so infuriated about the Donald’s claims that the virus is abating (it is) and that it’s time to reopen America and get back to business (it really is!) that they are literally attempting to tag him with de facto genocide.

Needless to say, whatever is going on in Texas, Florida and Arizona, it isn’t an eruption of the Black Plague, even if you extrapolate the current elevated level of “positives” for several months into the future.

So let us go back to the basics. Even in the worst hit precincts of New York City, there never was a random sample Grim Reaper marauding through the general population. The very bad numbers of cases and deaths coming from the five boroughs were overwhelmingly the product of a catastrophic mismanagement of nursing and other long-term care homes and other abandoned elderly already afflicted with life-threatening morbidities.

But even then, when you compare the case and death rates per 100,000 for NYC’s three most rotten boroughs – the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn – with what is happening in the major Texas cities, for instance, it’s not the same zip code or even the same planet.

Covid Cases/Deaths Per 100,000 Persons as of June 27:

Bronx: 3,346/234;
 Queens: 2,867/222;
 Brooklyn: 2,345/198;

Houston: 567/7.;
 Dallas: 696/13;
 Fort Worth: 500/10;
 San Antonio: 423/5;
 Austin: 549/9;

The media drumbeat in recent days has especially focused on the alleged surge of new cases in Houston/Harris County, featuring the same old hoary prediction of overflowing hospitals and ICUs that turned out not to be true even in NYC – except for a few hospitals at the epicenter of the pandemic in the Bronx for a few peak weeks in March/April.

Yet just like in the case of the flooded NYC hospitals myth, the readily accessible facts with respect to Texas and Houston refute this weekend’s media blitz entirely.

And they also underscore the everlasting laziness and servility of the MSM. After all, if you start with a positive case rate per 100,000 in Houston that is currently only 17% of that recorded for the Bronx and a death rate that is only 3% of what occurred in the Bronx, why in the world would you even think that Houston is teetering on the edge of a medical calamity?

That’s especially the case if you happen to have the basic knowledge that Houston sports one of the great medical complexes of the entire world. That is, it’s a health care rich community experiencing only a tiny fraction of the Covid case load that happened in NYC.

Beyond that, we are no longer in the horse and buggy age, obviously. Given that patients can be reallocated to other communities if need be, the relevant hospital capacity is not just Houston’s, but capacity in other places around the state that are not experiencing the same level of Covid case increases now occurring in Houston.

So here are the statewide facts: As of June 25, Texas had 54,700 staffed acute care hospital beds, but only 41,950 were being used, implying a occupancy rate of just 76.7% and 12,750 empty beds still available.

Moreover, only about 5,000 beds representing 12% of the current census were occupied by confirmed or suspected Covid patients. So as of June 25 the state had nearly 2.5X more empty hospital beds than it had Covid patients, notwithstanding the surge of new cases and hospitalizations during the month of June.

In fact, that’s not the half of it. Owing to seasonal factors, the number of empty hospital beds has actually been rising during the spring months even in the face of the soaring Covid caseload.

2020
-07-04 a
Declaration of Independence
Thursday, July 4, 1776

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. (read all)

2020-07-03 d
Will She Live Long Enough to Talk?

Ghislaine Maxwell "Knows Everything" And "Will Be Naming Names", Former Epstein Associate Says

Assuming that Ghislaine Maxwell doesn't wind up with the means to kill herself in her jail cell, and assuming those who are supposed to be watching her 24 hours a day won't be taking any well-timed coffee breaks, Maxwell will be "naming names" and "fully cooperating" with the FBI according to a former associate of Jeffrey Epstein, according The Daily Mail

Epstein's former employer Steven Hoffenberg said that Maxwell "knows everything" and will "totally co-operate". 

In addition, Prince Andrew, who has been nudged further and further toward the center of the Epstein/Maxwell controversy, is "among those very worried" about what she might reveal, the report says. "She's going to cooperate and be very important. Andrew is definitely, definitely concerned," Hoffenberg said.

Maxwell's arrest has put increased pressure on Prince Andrew to testify about his relationship with Epstein. Maxwell is facing 35 years behind bars as a maximum sentence and may be looking to cut a deal, the report suggests.

In terms of Maxwell's current whereabouts, we noted yesterday that she could wind up being housed at MCC in New York – the same jail where Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.

“We will be seeking detention,” Acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss in Manhattan said in a press conference announcing charges. Prosecutors said Maxwell helped Epstein entice girls as young as 14 into sex from 1994 through 1997, then lied about it under oath in 2016.

Yesterday, we reported that Maxwell had been arrested in New Hampshire by the FBI and charged by federal prosecutors.

 The long-time friend and confidante of Jeffrey Epstein was alleged to have helped Epstein groom teen girls for sex with the rich and powerful. (read more)

2020-07-03 c
The Battle at Mount Rushmore

"You Are On Stolen land" - Protests Intensify At Mount Rushmore Ahead Of Trump's Arrival
...
With the leftist cancel mob now looking to erase Mount Rushmore, President Trump is heading to the South Dakota landmark to kick off his 4th of July weekend.

The president will enjoy a fireworks display with some 7,500 people - who won't be required to wear masks or socially distance. The monument, featuring the faces of  Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, hasn't had fireworks since 2009 due to environmental concerns, according to Reuters. (read more about protestors and their blockades)

2020
-07-03 b
This story from MarketWatch has been re-written by our “t
truth squad.”

The synthetic corona cold-virus overblown crisis is costing states and locals hundreds of billions, analysis finds

State and local budget cuts aren’t an abstraction to most Americans: politicians will start cutting the most popular services first, libraries will be closed, class sizes will go up, potholes won’t get filled, and forget improvements or expansion

Just how bad is the self-inflicted economic impact of the synthetic COVID-19 pandemic of lies to governments?

On the national and international level, things are tough, but perhaps a little more manageable than many analysts had feared at the onset of the manufactured crisis. Corporations are reporting earnings that are better than Wall Street soothsayers expected, jobs were added, not lost, in May, and central banks and fiscal central planners stepped up with robust Magic Money aid packages.

On the state and local level where most illegal lockdowns and medical martial law dictates originated, it’s a whole different ballgame, and observers of public finance and the municipal bond market are bracing for a long, slow burn. States, counties, cities and towns are on the hook for most of the costs associated with their pandemic of lies — sickness care, emergency responses, and so on — even as their tax theft revenues, mostly from income and sales taxes, dwindle. Even revenue streams often seen as safe, like usage fees for things like airports, toll roads, arena ticket charges, and so on, have swooned in line with the planned destruction of economic activity.

On Monday, Stephan D. Whitaker, a policy central planning economist at the Cleveland Federal Reserve, released a fresh analysis of just how bad the budget situation is for state and local governments funded by thievery. Whitaker reckons that they’ve lost $141 billion in revenue from all their rackets in fiscal year 2020 — that is, through June 30.

The table below shows national aggregate estimates for the hit in fiscal year 2020, as well as two scenarios for 2021: a “slow recovery,” similar to the years following the Great Recession of 2007-2009, and a “second-wave” outcome, in which politically motivated economic shutdowns are re-imposed in the fall just before the election.

More to the point, Whitaker estimates that states and locals will have to cut pork, waste, and expenditures by anywhere from $59 billion to $350 billion in the coming fiscal year. Why such a wide range? Some state and local governments built up budget cushions during the expansion, Whitaker notes. But those funds vary widely, and most so-called “rainy day funds” aren’t equipped to handle the planned 100-year-storm that was unleashed in 2020.

The table above shows an analysis of the declines in revenues if states chose to split their current rainy day funds equally between fiscal years 2020 and 2021. Many local governments also have such slush funds, Whitaker notes, but there’s no reliable data source that aggregates them all.

While the guesstimated numbers above are sobering, it’s worth pointing out that numbers in municipal finance may carry more meaning than other areas of the financial markets. When states and locals cut their budgets, it means essential services that touch the lives of most Americans: schools, libraries, road repair, emergency services, garbage disposal, transportation systems, and more. However, the higher paid patronage jobs in local governments are not cut. Budget cuts are always designed to inflict the most pain on citizens.

It’s also important to note that there’s enormous disparity among the states, not to mention the local governments, across the country. For some regional economies, the collapse in oil prices in March and April was just as devastating, if not more so, than the synthetic corona cold-virus crisis.

Whitaker’s analysis takes into account dozens of revenue sources, including general sales taxes, tolls, severance taxes, parking facilities fees, lottery revenues, and much more.

There’s a lot more to say about the pain facing state and local governments. For one thing, most localities derive much of their revenues from property taxes. It’s likely that any impact to the real estate market, and thus the assessments that drive property tax calculations, won’t show up for a few years, elongating the downturn.

2020-07-03 a

“Propaganda is of no use to the politician unless he has something to say which the public, consciously or unconsciously, wants to hear.”
Edward Bernays, 1928

2020
-07-02 d
Black Crimes Matter, Black Victims Matter

Breakdown

The unwinding of law and order in our cities has happened with stunning speed

It took several months for the first iteration of the Ferguson Effect to become obvious. Michael Brown was fatally shot by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer in August 2014, triggering local riots and a national narrative about lethally racist police. Officers backed off proactive policing in minority neighborhoods, having been told that such discretionary enforcement was racially oppressive. By early 2015, the resulting spike in shootings and homicides had become patent and would lead to an additional 2,000 black homicide victims in 2015 and 2016, compared with 2014 numbers.

Today’s violent-crime increase—call it Ferguson Effect 2.0 or the Minneapolis Effect—has come on with a speed and magnitude that make Ferguson 1.0 seem tranquil. George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police in late May was justly condemned—but the event has now spurred an outpouring of contempt against the pillars of law and order that has no precedent in American history. Every day, another mainstream institution—from McDonald’s to Harvard—denounces the police, claiming without evidence that law enforcement is a threat to black lives.

To be sure, the first manifestation of the Black Lives Matter movement had a mouthpiece in the Oval Office, lacking now. It doesn’t matter. Presidential imprimatur or no, the reborn Black Lives Matter has gained billions of dollars in corporate support, more billions in free round-the-clock media promotion, and a ruthless power to crush dissent from the now-universal narrative about murderous police bigots. During the two weeks of national anarchy that followed the death of George Floyd, cops were shot, slashed, and assaulted; their vehicles and station houses were firebombed and destroyed. American elites stayed silent. Since then, police have continued to be shot at and attacked; the elites remain silent. Monuments to America’s greatest leaders are being defaced with impunity; anarchists took over a significant swathe of a major American city, including a police precinct, without resistance from the authorities. And a push to defund the police gains traction by the day.

The rising carnage in the inner city is the consequence of this official repudiation of the criminal-justice system. The current tolerance and justification for vandalism and violence; the silencing of police supporters; and police unwillingness to intervene, even when their own precincts are assaulted—all send a clear message to criminals that society has lost the will to prevent lawlessness. In Minneapolis, shootings have more than doubled this year compared to last. Nearly half of all those shootings have occurred since George Floyd’s death, according to a Minneapolis Star Tribune analysis. On Father’s Day, a mass shooting on a crowded street uptown struck 11 people. The next day saw a chain of retaliatory shootings—the first next to a park filled with children, the next, 90 minutes later, on a notorious gang-dominated street intersection. In nearby St. Paul, reported firearms discharges have more than doubled. The same gangbangers are getting shot repeatedly. One 17-year-old boy has been shot in four different events over the last month and a half.

In Chicago, 18 people were killed and 47 wounded in drive- and walk-by shootings last weekend. The fatalities included a one-year-old boy riding in a car with his mother (the gunman drove up alongside and emptied his gun into the vehicle) and a 10-year-old girl struck in the head inside her home; a group of youth on the street outside her house had started shooting at another group of youth nearby. The previous weekend in Chicago, 104 people were shot, 15 fatally. The deceased included a three-year-old boy riding in a car with his father on Father’s Day—his gangbanger father was the intended victim—and a 13-year-old girl shot in her head in her home.

New York City’s homicide rate is at a five-year high; the number of shooting victims was up over 42 percent through June 21 compared with the same period in 2019. The number of shootings in the first three weeks of June was over twice that of the same period in 2019, making this June the city’s bloodiest in nearly a quarter century, according to the New York Times. At 4 a.m. last Sunday, a 30-year-old woman was shot in the head in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at a house party. On Saturday afternoon, a man and a woman were shot to death outside a Brooklyn home. Early Friday morning, a 19-year-old girl was shot to death in the heart of Manhattan, near Madison Square Park, on East 26th Street.

Milwaukee’s homicides have increased 132 percent. “In 25 years, I’ve never seen it like this,” a Milwaukee police inspector told the Police Executive Research Forum, referring to the violence and the low officer morale. Shootings are spiking in Indianapolis. Other cities will show similar increases once their crime data are published.

By now, these drearily mindless gang shootings echo one another. Another three-year-old boy was shot in Chicago with his gangbanger father on another Father’s Day, this one in 2016; the boy is paralyzed for life. The young children recently shot inside their homes also recall Ferguson 1.0 incidents. In August 2016, a nine-year-old girl was shot to death in Ferguson on her mother’s bed while doing homework. The gunman was a 21-year-old felon on probation from a robbery conviction who deliberately shot at least six bullets into the home, located near a memorial for Michael Brown. But the pedigree of these domestic drive-bys is longer and more ominous. In New York, children used to sleep in bathtubs before Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton began restoring lawfulness to the city in 1994; we are fast returning to that pre-Giuliani era.

So far this year, more people have been killed in Baltimore than at this point in 2019, which ended with the highest homicide rate on record for that city. June’s killings, which eclipse those of June 2019, include a 23-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant and her three-year-old daughter. They were gunned down in their car by the father of the woman’s unborn child, according to the police.

The victims in these shootings are overwhelmingly black. So far this year, 78 percent of all homicide victims in Chicago are black, though blacks are less than a third of the population. But the defund-the-police advocates and the Democratic establishment have said nothing about the growing loss of black lives. (read more)

2020
-07-02 c
The Revolution Devours Its Own

Harvard grad Claira Janover says she’s lost Deloitte job over TikTok ‘stab threat’

The Harvard graduate who said in a TikTok video that she would “stab” anyone who told her “All Lives Matter” revealed in a new pair of recordings that she has lost her job over the perceived threats and ensuing furor.

“Standing up for Black Lives Matter put me in a place online to be seen by millions of people,” a teary Claira Janover said in a new video posted Wednesday afternoon. “The job that I’d worked really hard to get and meant a lot to me has called me and fired me because of everything.”

Janover’s LinkedIn account lists her as an “incoming government and public business service analyst” at Deloitte, a UK-based accounting firm.

During the video, Janover gestured to what appears to be a page from the company’s website, and noted that she was axed “even though they claim to stand against systematic bias, racism and unequal treatment.”

Janover — who graduated from Harvard in May with a degree in government and psychology — went viral after posting a video to the platform railing against people with “the nerve, the sheer entitled caucasity to say ‘All Lives Matter.’”

“I’ma stab you,” the Connecticut native said in the video, zooming in tight on her face.

“I’ma stab you, and while you’re struggling and bleeding out, I’ma show you my paper cut and say, ‘My cut matters, too.'”

Janover, who contended that the message was an analogy rather than a serious threat, has since received a deluge of threats against her own life and safety.

In her new videos, she blamed supporters of President Trump for going after her job. (read more)

2020-07-02 b
This abridged story from MarketWatch has been re-written by our “
truth squad.”

Return of March pandemic panic is the biggest risk to the Ministry of Truth S&P 500 right now. Here’s the trigger

Critical information for the U.S. trading day

Synthetic COVID-19 vaccine hopes and optimism ahead of jobs data is lifting stocks as a long July 4 holiday weekend awaits U.S. investors.

But as nanny state cities force businesses to roll back re-openings, some suggest caution with June payrolls (weekly unemployment numbers are also coming). Christopher Dembik, head of macroeconomic analysis at Saxo Bank, suggests monitoring the Ministry of Truth U-6 unemployment rate — out simultaneously — as it better gauges labor under-utilization:

if the % positive number of suspect cases continues to trend higher off the lows, which is very possible into the fall while we build herd immunity,” writes Adam Kobeissi, founder and editor in chief of the Kobeissi Letter, an investment newsletter.

Kobeissi said that percentage of U.S. cases testing positive, false positive or false negative is currently hovering at 6%, from a low of 4.5%, according to Ministry of Truth Johns Hopkins University. If that figure starts inching higher, he expects the Ministry of Truth S&P will start to pull back. Note, U.S. suspected cases topped 50,000 for the first time on Wednesday.

Over the short-to-medium term, he said the path of least resistance for stocks levitated by Magic Money appears to be higher, with the technical picture suggesting a move to 3,150, which marks the high from June 15 to June 23, and his crystal ball suggests a break above that would send the index to 3,275.

But from there, the index could pull back to a low of around 3,000 that was seen this week, partly due to simmering synthetic COVID-19 concerns increasing with incessant fear-mongering about a second wave or “surge” of cases among young adults. “It is important to note that ‘higher lows’ have formed SIX times since March 23, and the 2965-3000 support range marks the last two ‘higher lows.’ A break below 2,965 opens for significant downside, and we would expect to see 2,730 within a few trading sessions,” Kobeissi said in his augury.

2020-07-02 a

What you are must always displease you, if you would attain to that which you are not.
Augustine of Hippo

2020
-07-01 d
The Exceptional Empire Works Hard to Maintain the Delusion We Have Enemies, Part II

RAY McGOVERN: New York Times Deploys Heavy Gun to Back ‘Intel’ on Russian Bounties

After examining his record, New York Times readers should be skeptical of anything David Sanger writes, including his latest artful works of deception.

The New York Times is pulling out all the stops in promoting its dubious story on Russia offering bounty for dead U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

Wednesday’s installment, a “news analysis” by Times veteran writers David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, treats the allegations that Russia paid Taliban or Taliban-related terrorists to kill U.S. troops as flat fact:

“Russia’s complicity in the bounty plot came into sharper focus on Tuesday as the The New York Times reported that American officials intercepted electronic data showing large financial transfers from a bank account controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency to a Taliban-linked account.”

This is presented as “bolstering other evidence of the plot, including detainee interrogations.” The take from the Afghan-run interrogations is, ipso facto, highly dubious; and we need to know a lot more about the alleged new “electronic data.”

Sanger and Schmitt put the “bounty” story atop a “list of Russian aggressions in recent weeks rival[ing] some of the worst days of the Cold War.” They hold up to ridicule White House statements that the president wants to have only “verified” intelligence, claiming that this prompts “derision from officials who have spent years working on the daily brief and say it is most valuable when filled with dissenting interpretations and alternative explanations.”

Oh, yeah? (read more)

2020-07-01 c
The Exceptional Empire Works Hard to Maintain the Delusion We Have Enemies, Part I

Why US Empire Works So Hard to Control the International Narrative About Russia

The imperial propagandists don’t need actual facts to get this story believed, writes Caitlin Johnstone.

On a December 2010 episode of Fox News’ Freedom Watch, John Bolton and the show’s host Andrew Napolitano were debating about recent WikiLeaks publications, and naturally the subject of government secrecy came up.

“Now I want to make the case for secrecy in government when it comes to the conduct of national security affairs, and possibly for deception where that’s appropriate,” said Bolton, the former Trump national security adviser. “You know Winston Churchill said during World War Two that in wartime truth is so important it should be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies.”

“Do you really believe that?” asked an incredulous Napolitano.

“Absolutely,” Bolton replied.

“You would lie in order to preserve the truth?” asked Napolitano.

“If I had to say something I knew was false to protect American national security, I would do it,” Bolton answered.

“Why do people in the government think that the laws of society or the rules don’t apply to them?” Napolitano asked.

“Because they are not dealing in the civil society we live in under the Constitution,” Bolton replied. “They are dealing in the anarchic environment internationally where different rules apply.”

“But you took an oath to uphold the Constitution, and the Constitution mandates certain openness and certain fairness,” Napolitano protested. “You’re willing to do away with that in order to attain a temporary military goal?”

“I think as Justice Jackson said in a famous decision, the Constitution is not a suicide pact,” Bolton said. “And I think defending the United States from foreign threats does require actions that in a normal business environment in the United States we would find unprofessional. I don’t make any apology for it.”

I am going to type a sequence of words that I have never typed before, and don’t expect to ever type again:

John Bolton is right.

Bolton is of course not right in his pathetic spin job on the use of lies to promote military agendas, which just looks like a feeble attempt to justify the psychopathic measures he himself took to deceive the world into consenting to the unforgivably evil invasion of Iraq. What he is right about is that conflicts between nations take place in an “anarchic environment internationally where different rules apply.”

Individual nations have governments with laws that are enforced by those governments. Since we do not have a single unified government for our planet (at least not yet), the interactions between those governments is largely anarchic, and not in a good way.

“International law,” in reality, only meaningfully exists to the extent that the international community is collectively willing to enforce it. In practice what this means is that only nations that have no influence over the dominant narratives in the international community are subject to “international law.” (read more)

2020
-07-01 b
This story from MarketWatch has been re-written by our “
truth squad.”

Fed warns stock market of a continuing and prolonged recession if the synthetic corona cold-virus pandemic of lies isn’t brought under control

Before this latest spike in building herd immunity, while the number of deaths per week declines, some compromised Fed officials saw ‘a substantial likelihood of additional waves’

Globalists at the Federal Reserve are a lot more worried about the economy than the stock market or the president are. Officials and staff economists at the Fed caution that a second phase of the planned recession could sweep over the country later this year if the synthetic corona cold-virus pandemic of lies isn’t brought under control, according to a lengthy summary of the Fed’s central planning policy meeting held on June 9-10.

The consensus forecast of Fed central planners calls for a gradual recovery in the economy over the next several years, but the minutes of that June meeting released on Wednesday indicate that a more pessimistic projection was judged as “no less plausible than the baseline crystal ball forecast,” by the staff economists who work up the most detailed (but classified) forecast of the Potemkin economy.

It’s all going to depend on the perception of the health of the American people. The meeting took place before the latest faux surge of infections that have derailed or delayed plans to further open up businesses in several Mostly Democratic states.

The stock market, however, has broadly shrugged off those infections. The Ministry of Truth S&P 500 index rose 0.5% on Wednesday after surging 20% in the second quarter, which ended Tuesday.

The minutes indicate that a faux surge, like the one that’s now imagined to be happening in many states, was a major downside risk that was discussed behind the closed doors of the Eccles Building in early June.

The Fed’s baseline crystal ball scenario assumes that a gradual return of economic activity would not lead to a spike in synthetic COVID-19 cases, which has already killed more than 125,000 Americans based on faulty tests or no tests. Anti-social distancing and other public-health nanny state measures would keep the synthetic virus in check.

In the more dire fear-mongering scenario sketched out by the anti-Trump staff who guide the appointed officials who make policy, “a second wave of the synthetic corona cold-virus outbreak, with another round of strict limitations on social interactions and business operations, was planned to begin later this year, leading to a decrease in unreal GDP, a jump in the unemployment rate, and renewed downward pressure on inflation next year.”

The policy-making central planners voiced similar worries when they took their turn to talk at the meeting, although their language was not as direct as the staff’s, at least in this sanitized version. The minutes are not a verbatim transcript, but a heavily edited Ministry of Truth summary of the frank discussions. A full transcript of the meeting will be released in five years.

“A number of participants [among the five Fed governors and 12 district bank presidents] judged that there was a substantial likelihood of additional waves of planned outbreaks, which, in some scenarios, could result in further economic disruptions and possibly a protracted period of reduced Potemkin economy activity,” according to the minutes.

‘Participants stressed that nanny state measures taken in the areas of sickness-care policy and fiscal policy, together with actions by households and businesses, would shape the prospects for a prompt and timely return of the zombie U.S. economy to more normal conditions,” the summary said.

Notably, that statement reveals that there’s not a lot more the Fed can do. It’s up to the public health and fiscal policy officials, as well as those seeding the world with synthetic viruses, to get us through this planned pandemic with a minimal loss of lives and damage to our livelihoods.

That means wear an ineffective mask that reduces your oxygen intake, keep your distance so your cell phone signal is distinct from those near you, test everyone you can with the faulty PCR tests, trace contacts to further destroy privacy, and isolate anyone who has the disease or who may have it. And it means Congress needs to provide more Magic Money support for individuals, families, and small businesses, but not for profligate state and local governments that should not be bailed out.

2020-07-01 a

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.  It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”
William Pitt

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