Throughout July, USAAPAY.com will celebrate white people - including their history, their accomplishments and future.

Western man towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost inexpressible. It’s Western exploration, science, and conquest that have revealed the world to itself.

Ted Cruz says his pronoun is "kiss my ass"

Cruz made the comment during last Friday's Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in Tampa, Florida

During a speech given at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit, which kicked off on Friday night in Tampa, Florida, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told attendees that his pronoun is "kiss my ass."

The summit, which has the intended purpose of offering leadership training and championing student activism; groups students together with political leaders such as Cruz, former President Donald Trump, Trump Jr., Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham, Rick Scott, Gov. Ron DeSantis, congressman Matt Gaetz, Sen. Josh Hawley and several other notable "right wingers," as described by Creative Loafing Tampa.

In Creative Loafing's preview coverage of the summit they mention that a protest organized by Women's Voices of Southwest Florida, Florida For Change and Tampa Bay Community Action Committee is planned to take place during Saturday's events, which feature a speech from Marjorie Taylor Greene. The groups are asking people to gather at the Downtown Convention Center in Tampa, where the event is being held, to voice their collected views that the TPUSA is "fascist."

Cruz took to the stage during Friday's event kick-off and began his speech with a lively roar, positioned in the middle of a ring of smoke machines. 

"I'm told that there's a dangerous bunch of radicals gathered in Florida seeking to peacefully overthrow a Communist government run by imbeciles and nincompoops, and so God bless each of you" he said in his opening. 

"We are gathered at a time of extraordinary challenge," Cruz continued. "I wanna say two things to you today in a word of encouragement. I'm here today to encourage you, to bring a word of hope. The first thing I wanna say is America is in crisis. This is not normal. We have a president who shakes hands with the empty air. We have a president who talks to the Easter Bunny . . . This is nuts."

 The second of the two words of encouragement from Cruz was that "revival is coming." 

"All over this country people's eyes are opening up and they realize, this is a mess," Cruz said. 

After spending a fair portion of his speech poking fun of COVID-19 safety measures, calling them "garbage," Cruz launched into a segment on abortion issues and the phrasing, "people with the capacity for pregnancy," which he seemed to find amusing. 

"Trigger warning, women exist," Cruz said. 

After touching upon abortion, Cruz explained to the audience what the proper definition of a woman is, and then went into the topic of gender identity.

"I talked to a student recently at one of our woke college campuses who said she's required in every class to introduce herself and to give her pronouns. Well I'm Ted Cruz and my pronoun is kiss my ass." (read more)

Secretary Yellen Reminds Good Citizens Their “Household Finances are Strong”, We are Experiencing Abundance and Not Being Happy is Disinformation

Comrades, Secretary Janet Yellen reminds everyone how important it is to smile and support the policies of Dear Leader as they manage our overwhelming happiness through this period of exceptionally wonderful abundance.

The secretary reminds us that our “household finances are strong” and we have good employment to keep ourselves industrious and valuable on behalf of the state.  WATCH.

The cabbage, beet and potato harvest will provide soup for everyone, but only if we continue to do our best.  All of the best comrade citizens are cheerful and happy. (read more)

Why Globalism Cannot Survive

Vladimir Putin correctly points out that globalism is inherently doomed to failure due to the same sort of structural incoherencies that afflict communism, feminism, and imperialism.

A new epoch of world history is approaching and only “truly sovereign” states will be able to succeed in the changed environment, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday.

Speaking at a business forum, Putin claimed that “truly revolutionary,” “enormous” changes would lead to the creation of a new, “harmonious, fairer and more community-focused and safe” world order. In this new epoch, “only truly sovereign states can ensure high growth dynamics,” he said.

By the term ‘sovereignty’ the Russian president means “freedom of national development, and thus of each person individually,” as well as “technological, cultural, intellectual, educational viability of the state” and a “responsible, active and nationally minded, nationally oriented civil society.”

Such a state, the president said, will serve as an example for others when it comes to “the standards and quality of people’s life, the protection of traditional values and high humanistic ideals.”

This kind of world is in sharp contrast to the Western-dominated unipolar world order, which, in Putin’s opinion, is “becoming a brake on the development of our civilization.”

He accused the West of being “racist and neo-colonial,” saying that its ideology “is becoming increasingly more like totalitarianism.”

The president argued that despite attempts by Western elites to preserve the existing world order, the changes are “irreversible.”

Globalism is simply another form of imperialism that involves a self-selected, self-serving elite ruling over a diverse collection of different peoples with different beliefs, capabilities, and interests. It utilizes the influence of money rather than the force of military might, but both the effects and the consequences are the same.

However, globalism is even less tenable than standard imperialism because the money it is built upon is an illusion created by the manufacture of debt through finance capitalism. This means that once the debt structure becomes overloaded and begins to collapse, the influence upon which the entire governing system rests begins to vanish as well.

Furthermore, the satanic element that elevates incompetents and degenerates to positions of power relies in part upon rewards that can no longer be provided once the system begins to break down. In the absence of the carrot, this leaves only the systemic stick, the pervasive blackmail, to hold the elite together and there are far too many people who are either immune to it or unconcerned by it, thus permitting the rise of a rebellious rival elite who have no loyalty to the globalist elite or the system.

This is why globalism has no choice but to become totalitarian and abandon all of its purported Enlightenment ideals, which were never more than propagandistic lies in the first place. And this is why nationalist leaders such as Putin can be so confident that the changes to the world order are irreversible, because the existing neo-liberal one is already collapsing under the weight of its debt and structural incoherencies. (read more)

People Are Becoming Ungovernable

Resisting the ‘Food Transition’: Genetic Engineering and Dependency

This is an abridged version of the second chapter of the author’s short e-book Food, Dispossession and Dependency. Resisting the New World Order (2022), which can be read for free here.

The ‘food transition’ is integral to the ‘great reset’. This transition is couched in the language of climate emergency and sustainability and warnings about the imminent need to address the Malthusian threat of too many people and not enough food to feed nine billion by 2050.

This transition envisages a particular future for farming. It is not organic and relatively few farmers have a place in it. It involves drones, driverless machines and largely farmerless farms. Cloud-based ‘precision’ agriculture as the norm – meaning GMOs and new gene-editing techniques and amalgamated farmlands growing monocultures.

GM crops are required to feed the world is a well-worn industry slogan trotted out at every available opportunity. Just like the claim of GM crops being a tremendous success, this too is based on a myth.

There is no global shortage of food. Even under any plausible future population scenario, there will be no shortage as evidenced by scientist Dr Jonathan Latham in his paper “The Myth of a Food Crisis” (2020).

However, new gene drive and gene editing techniques have now been developed and the industry is seeking the unregulated commercial release of products that are based on these methods.

These new techniques can cause a range of unwanted genetic modifications that can result in the production of novel toxins or allergens or in the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes. Even intended modifications can result in traits which could raise food safety, environmental or animal welfare concerns.

The European Court of Justice ruled in 2018 that organisms obtained with new genetic modification techniques must be regulated under the EU’s existing GMO laws. However, there has been intense lobbying from the agriculture biotech industry to weaken the legislation, aided financially by the Gates Foundation.

Various scientific publications show that new GM techniques allow developers to make significant genetic changes, which can be very different from those that happen in nature. These new GMOs pose similar or greater risks than older-style GMOs.

In addition to these concerns, a paper from Chinese scientists, ‘Herbicide Resistance: Another Hot Agronomic Trait for Plant Genome Editing’, says that, in spite of claims from GMO promoters that gene editing will be climate-friendly and reduce pesticide use, what we can expect is just more of the same – GM herbicide-tolerant crops and increased herbicide use.

By dodging regulation as well as avoiding economic, social, environmental and health impact assessments, it is clear that the industry is first and foremost motivated by value capture and contempt for democratic accountability.

Bt cotton in India 

This is patently clear if we look at the rollout of Bt cotton in India (the only officially approved GM crop in that country) which served the bottom line of Monsanto but brought dependency, distress and no durable agronomic benefits for many of India’s small and marginal farmers. Prof A P Gutierrez argues that Bt cotton has effectively placed these farmers in a corporate noose.

Monsanto sucked hundreds of millions of dollars in profit from these cotton farmers, while industry-funded scientists are always keen to push the mantra that rolling out Bt cotton in India uplifted their conditions.

On 24 August 2020, a webinar on Bt cotton in India took place involving Andrew Paul Gutierrez, senior professor at the College of Natural Resources at the University of California at Berkeley, Keshav Kranthi, former director of Central Institute for Cotton Research in India, Peter Kenmore, former FAO representative in India, and Hans Herren, World Food Prize Laureate.

Herren said that “the failure of Bt cotton” is a classic representation of what an unsound science of plant protection and faulty direction of agricultural development can lead to.

He argued that a transformation of agriculture and the food system is required; one that entails a shift to agroecology, which includes regenerative, organic, biodynamic, permaculture and natural farming practices.

Kenmore said that Bt cotton is an aging pest control technology:

It follows the same path worn down by generations of insecticide molecules from arsenic to DDT to BHC to endosulfan to monocrotophos to carbaryl to imidacloprid. In-house research aims for each molecule to be packaged biochemically, legally and commercially before it is released and promoted. Corporate and public policy actors then claim yield increases but deliver no more than temporary pest suppression, secondary pest release and pest resistance.”

Recurrent cycles of crises have sparked public action and ecological field research which creates locally adapted agroecological strategies.

He added that this agroecology:

…now gathers global support from citizens’ groups, governments and UN FAO. Their robust local solutions in Indian cotton do not require any new molecules, including endo-toxins like in Bt cotton”

Gutierrez presented the ecological reasons as to why hybrid Bt cotton failed in India: long season Bt cotton introduced in India was incorporated into hybrids that trapped farmers into biotech and insecticide treadmills that benefited GMO seed manufacturers.

He noted:

The cultivation of long-season hybrid Bt cotton in rainfed areas is unique to India. It is a value capture mechanism that does not contribute to yield, is a major contributor to low yield stagnation and contributes to increasing production costs.”

Gutierrez asserted that increases in cotton farmer suicides are related to the resulting economic distress.

Presenting data on yields, insecticide usage, irrigation, fertiliser usage and pest incidence and resistance, Kranthi said an analysis of official statistics (eands.dacnet.nic.in and cotcorp.gov.in) shows that Bt hybrid technology has not been providing any tangible benefits in India either in yield or insecticide usage.

Cotton yields are the lowest in the world in Maharashtra, despite being saturated with Bt hybrids and the highest use of fertilisers. Yields in Maharashtra are less than in rainfed Africa where there is hardly any usage of technologies such as Bt hybrids, fertilisers, pesticides or irrigation.

It is revealing that Indian cotton yields rank 36th in the world and have been stagnant in the past 15 years and insecticide usage has been constantly increasing after 2005, despite an increase in area under Bt cotton.

Kranthi argued that research also shows that the Bt hybrid technology has failed the test of sustainability with resistance in pink bollworm to Bt cotton, increasing sucking pest infestation, increasing trends in insecticide and fertiliser usage, increasing costs and negative net returns in 2014 and 2015.

Herren said that GMOs exemplify the case of a technology searching for an application:

We need to push aside the vested interests blocking the transformation with the baseless arguments of ‘the world needs more food’ and design and implement policies that are forward-looking… We have all the needed scientific and practical evidence that the agroecological approaches to food and nutrition security work successfully.”

Those who continue to spin Bt cotton in India as a resounding success remain wilfully ignorant of the challenges (documented in the 2019 book by Andrew Flachs – Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India) farmers face in terms of financial distress, increasing pest resistance, dependency on unregulated seed markets, the eradication of environmental learning,  the loss of control over their productive means and the biotech-chemical treadmill they are trapped on (this last point is precisely what the industry intended).

In general, across the world the performance of GM crops to date has been questionable, but the pro-GMO lobby has wasted no time in wrenching the issues of hunger and poverty from their political contexts to use notions of ‘helping farmers’ and ‘feeding the world’ as lynchpins of its promotional strategy.

The performance of GM crops has been a hotly contested issue and, as highlighted in a 2018 piece by PC Kesavan and MS Swaminathan in the journal Current Science, there is already sufficient evidence to question their efficacy, especially that of herbicide-tolerant crops (which by 2007 already accounted for approximately 80% of biotech-derived crops grown globally) and the devastating impacts on the environment, human health and food security, not least in places like Latin America.

In their paper, Kesavan and Swaminathan argue that GM technology is supplementary and must be need based. In more than 99% of cases, they say that time-honoured conventional breeding is sufficient. In this respect, conventional options and innovations that outperform GM must not be overlooked or side-lined in a rush by powerful interests like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to facilitate the introduction of GM crops into global agriculture; crops which are highly financially lucrative for the corporations behind them.

In Europe, robust regulatory mechanisms are in place for GMOs because it is recognised that GM food/crops are not substantially equivalent to their non-GM counterparts. Numerous studies have highlighted the flawed premise of ‘substantial equivalence’.

Both the Cartagena Protocol and Codex share a precautionary approach to GM crops and foods, in that they agree that GM differs from conventional breeding and that safety assessments should be required before GMOs are used in food or released into the environment. There is sufficient reason to hold back on commercialising GM crops and to subject each GMO to independent, transparent environmental, social, economic and health impact evaluations.

Regardless, global food insecurity and malnutrition are not the results of a lack of productivity. As long as food injustice remains an inbuilt feature of the global food regime, the rhetoric of GM being necessary for feeding the world will be seen for what it is: bombast.

Take India, for instance. Although it fares poorly in world hunger assessments, the country has achieved self-sufficiency in food grains and has ensured there is enough food (in terms of calories) available to feed its entire population.

It is the world’s largest producer of milk, pulses and millets and the second-largest producer of rice, wheat, sugarcane, groundnuts, vegetables, fruit and cotton.

But large sections of India’s population do not have enough food available to remain healthy nor do they have sufficiently diverse diets that provide adequate levels of micronutrients.

People are not hungry in India because its farmers do not produce enough food. Hunger and malnutrition result from various factors, including inadequate food distribution, (gender) inequality and poverty; in fact, the country continues to export food while millions remain hungry. It’s a case of ‘scarcity’ amid abundance.

Where farmers’ livelihoods are concerned, the pro-GMO lobby says GM will boost productivity and help secure cultivators a better income. Again, this is misleading: it ignores crucial political and economic contexts. Even with bumper harvests, Indian farmers still find themselves in financial distress.

India’s farmers are not experiencing hardship due to low productivity. They are reeling from the effects of neoliberal policies, years of neglect and a deliberate strategy to displace smallholder agriculture at the behest of the World Bank and predatory global agri-food corporations. Little wonder then that the calorie and essential nutrient intake of the rural poor has drastically fallen. No number of GMOs will put any of this right.

Nevertheless, the pro-GMO lobby, both outside of India and within, has twisted the situation for its own ends to mount intensive PR campaigns to sway public opinion and policy makers.

Golden Rice 

The industry has for many years been promoting Golden Rice. It has long been argued that genetically engineered Golden Rice is a practical way to provide poor farmers in remote areas with a subsistence crop capable of adding much-needed vitamin A to local diets. Vitamin A deficiency is a problem in many poor countries in the Global South and leaves millions at high risk for infection, diseases and other maladies, such as blindness.

Some scientists believe that Golden Rice, which has been developed with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, could help save the lives of around 670,000 children who die each year from Vitamin A deficiency and another 350,000 who go blind.

Meanwhile, critics say there are serious issues with Golden Rice and that alternative approaches to tackling vitamin A deficiency should be implemented. Greenpeace and other environmental groups say the claims being made by the pro-Golden Rice lobby are misleading and are oversimplifying the actual problems in combating vitamin A deficiency.

Many critics regard Golden Rice as an over-hyped Trojan horse that biotechnology corporations and their allies hope will pave the way for the global approval of other more profitable GM crops. The Rockefeller Foundation might be regarded as a ‘philanthropic’ entity but its track record indicates it has been very much part of an agenda which facilitates commercial and geopolitical interests to the detriment of indigenous agriculture and local and national economies.

As Britain’s Environment Secretary in 2013, the now disgraced Owen Paterson claimed that opponents of GM were “casting a dark shadow over attempts to feed the world”. He called for the rapid roll-out of vitamin A-enhanced rice to help prevent the cause of up to a third of the world’s child deaths. He claimed:

It’s just disgusting that little children are allowed to go blind and die because of a hang-up by a small number of people about this technology. I feel really strongly about it. I think what they do is absolutely wicked.”

Despite the smears and emotional blackmail employed by supporters of Golden Rice, in a 2016 article in the journal Agriculture & Human Values Glenn Stone and Dominic Glover found little evidence that anti-GM activists are to blame for Golden Rice’s unfulfilled promises. Golden rice was still years away from field introduction and even when ready may fall far short of lofty health benefits claimed by its supporters.

Stone stated that:

Golden Rice is still not ready for the market, but we find little support for the common claim that environmental activists are responsible for stalling its introduction. GMO opponents have not been the problem.”

The rice simply has not been successful in test plots of the rice breeding institutes in the Philippines, where the leading research is being done. While activists did destroy one Golden Rice test plot in a 2013 protest, Stone says it is unlikely that this action had any significant impact on the approval of Golden Rice.

Stone said:

“Destroying test plots is a dubious way to express opposition, but this was only one small plot out of many plots in multiple locations over many years. Moreover, they have been calling Golden Rice critics ‘murderers’ for over a decade.”

Believing that Golden Rice was originally a promising idea backed by good intentions, Stone argued:

“But if we are actually interested in the welfare of poor children – instead of just fighting over GMOs – then we have to make unbiased assessments of possible solutions. The simple fact is that after 24 years of research and breeding, Golden Rice is still years away from being ready for release.”

Researchers still had problems developing beta carotene-enriched strains that yield as well as non-GM strains already being grown by farmers. It is still unknown if the beta carotene in Golden Rice can even be converted to vitamin A in the bodies of badly undernourished children. There also has been little research on how well the beta carotene in Golden Rice will hold up when stored for long periods between harvest seasons or when cooked using traditional methods common in remote rural locations.

Claire Robinson, an editor at GMWatch, has argued that the rapid degradation of beta-carotene in the rice during storage and cooking means it is not a solution to vitamin A deficiency in the developing world. There are also various other problems, including absorption in the gut and the low and varying levels of beta-carotene that may be delivered by Golden Rice in the first place.

In the meantime, as the development of Golden Rice creeps along, the Philippines has managed to slash the incidence of Vitamin A deficiency by non-GM methods.

The evidence presented here might lead us to question why supporters of Golden Rice continue to smear critics and engage in abuse and emotional blackmail when activists are not to blame for the failure of Golden Rice to reach the commercial market. Whose interests are they really serving in pushing so hard for this technology?

In 2011, Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, a senior scientist with a background in insect ecology and pest management asked a similar question:

Who oversees this ambitious project, which its advocates claim will end the suffering of millions?”

She answered her question by stating:

An elite, so-called Humanitarian Board where Syngenta sits – along with the inventors of Golden Rice, Rockefeller Foundation, USAID and public relations and marketing experts, among a handful of others. Not a single farmer, indigenous person or even an ecologist or sociologist to assess the huge political, social and ecological implications of this massive experiment. And the leader of IRRI’s Golden Rice project is none other than Gerald Barry, previously Director of Research at Monsanto.”

Sarojeni V. Rengam, executive director of Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific, called on the donors and scientists involved to wake up and do the right thing:

Golden Rice is really a ‘Trojan horse’; a public relations stunt pulled by the agribusiness corporations to garner acceptance of GE crops and food. The whole idea of GE seeds is to make money… we want to send out a strong message to all those supporting the promotion of Golden Rice, especially donor organisations, that their money and efforts would be better spent on restoring natural and agricultural biodiversity rather than destroying it by promoting monoculture plantations and genetically engineered (GE) food crops.”

And she makes a valid point. To tackle disease, malnutrition and poverty, you have to first understand the underlying causes – or indeed want to understand them.

A complex of policies that pushed the Philippines into an economic quagmire over the past 30 years is due to ‘structural adjustment’, involving prioritising debt repayment, conservative macroeconomic management, huge cutbacks in government spending, trade and financial liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation, the restructuring of agriculture and export-oriented production.

And that restructuring of the agrarian economy is something touched on by Claire Robinson who notes that leafy green vegetables used to be grown in backyards as well as in rice (paddy) fields on the banks between the flooded ditches in which the rice grew.

Ditches also contained fish, which ate pests. People thus had access to rice, green leafy veg and fish – a balanced diet that gave them a healthy mix of nutrients, including plenty of beta-carotene.

But indigenous crops and farming systems have been replaced by monocultures dependent on chemical inputs. Green leafy veg were killed off with pesticides, artificial fertilisers were introduced and the fish could not live in the resulting chemically contaminated water. Moreover, decreased access to land meant that many people no longer had backyards containing leafy green veg. People only had access to an impoverished diet of rice alone, laying the foundation for the supposed Golden Rice ‘solution’.

The effects of IMF/World Bank ‘structural adjustments’ have devastated agrarian economies and made them dependent on Western agribusiness, manipulated markets and unfair trade rules. And GM is now offered as the ‘solution’. The very corporations which gained from restructuring agrarian economies now want to profit from the havoc caused.

The poor are suffering from broader malnourishment than just vitamin A deficiency; the best solution is to use supplementation and fortification as emergency sticking-plasters and then for implementing measures which tackle the broader issues of poverty and malnutrition.

Part of this entails breeding crops high in nutrients; for instance, the creation of sweet potatoes that grow in tropical conditions, cross-bred with vitamin A rich orange sweet potatoes, which grow in the USA. There are successful campaigns providing these potatoes, a staggering five times higher in vitamin A than Golden Rice, to farmers in Uganda and Mozambique.

Blindness in developing countries could have been eradicated years ago if only the money, research and publicity put into Golden Rice over the last 20 years had gone into proven ways of addressing Vitamin A deficiency.

Value capture

Traditional production systems rely on the knowledge and expertise of farmers in contrast to imported ‘solutions’. Yet, if we take cotton cultivation in India as an example, farmers continue to be nudged away from traditional methods of farming and are being pushed towards (illegal) GM herbicide-tolerant cotton seeds.

Researchers Glenn Stone and Andrew Flachs note the results of this shift from traditional practices to date does not appear to have benefited farmers. This is not about giving farmers ‘choice’ where GM seeds and associated chemicals are concerned (another much-promoted industry talking point). It is more about GM seed companies and weedicide manufactures seeking to leverage a highly lucrative market.

The objective involves opening India to GM seeds with herbicide tolerance traits, the biotechnology industry’s biggest money maker by far (86% of the world’s GM crop acres in 2015 contained plants resistant to glyphosate or glufosinate and there is a new generation of crops resistant to 2,4-D coming through).

The aim is to break farmers’ traditional pathways and move them onto corporate biotech/chemical treadmills for the benefit of industry.

Calls for agroecology and highlighting the benefits of traditional, small-scale agriculture are not based on a romantic yearning for the past or ‘the peasantry’. Available evidence suggests that smallholder farming using low-input methods is more productive in overall output than large-scale industrial farms and can be more profitable and resilient to climate change.

Despite the pressures, including the fact that globally industrial agriculture grabs 80% of subsidies and 90% of research funds, smallholder agriculture plays a major role in feeding the world.

At the same time, agri-food oligopolies externalise the massive health, social and environmental costs of their operations.

But policymakers tend to accept that profit-driven transnational corporations have a legitimate claim to be owners and custodians of natural assets (the ‘commons’). These corporations, their lobbyists and their political representatives have succeeded in cementing a ‘thick legitimacy’ among policymakers for their vision of agriculture.

Common ownership and management of these assets embodies the notion of people working together for the public good. However, these resources have been appropriated by national states or private entities.

Those who capture essential common resources seek to commodify them – whether trees for timber, land for real estate or agricultural seeds – create artificial scarcity and force everyone else to pay for access. The process involves eradicating self-sufficiency.

International bodies have enshrined the interests of corporations that seek to monopolise seeds, land, water, biodiversity and other natural assets that belong to us all.

Technocratic meddling has already destroyed or undermined agrarian ecosystems that draw on centuries of traditional knowledge and are increasingly recognised as valid approaches to secure food security.

Under the guise of ‘climate emergency’, we are currently seeing a push for the Global South to embrace the Gates’ vision for a one-world agriculture (’Ag One’) dominated by global agribusiness and the tech giants. But it is the so-called developed nations and the rich elites that have plundered the environment and degraded the natural world.

To say that one model of agriculture must now be accepted by all countries is a continuation of a colonialist mindset. (read more)

Real Dissidents Grow Gardens & Raise Chickens

They’re coming for your backyard chickens …

Since the “bird flu outbreak” first hit the headlines OffG has been predicting how the inevitable agenda would unfold.

The first impact was as obvious as it was predictable – the price of chicken and eggs went up, this was just another front in the war on food.

The second planned impact was less immediate, but just as predictable if you know how to read the media, and potentially far more harmful in the longterm – clamping down on alternative chicken farming. This includes both organic farms and individuals keeping their own chickens in their garden.

It didn’t take long for the media to prove us right. In fact the Guardian has done it twice in the last ten days.

Firstly, last Thursday, the Guardian ran this article: “Spread of ‘free-range’ farming may raise risk of animal-borne pandemics – study”

Sponsored by the NGO Open Philanthropy, this piece reports that organic and free-range farming could increase the risk of a zoonotic disease outbreak, and quotes the authors of this new study:

If we can’t dramatically cut meat consumption then intensive ‘factory farming’ may be comparatively less risky

…yes. they’re actually arguing that the corporate mega-farms are better at preventing pandemics than free-range or organic farms because they have “tighter biosecurity controls” (meaning their animals never go outside or interact with nature in anyway whatsoever).

Then, in this piece from June 19th, The Guardian asked…

Bird flu is on the rise in the UK. Are chickens in the back garden to blame?

Which quotes the head of virology at the government’s Animal and Plant Health Agency (Apha):

The more humans are in contact with birds in an uncontrolled way, the greater is the theoretical risk that people can get infected,”

“Uncontrolled” is very much the key word there.

This scare campaign is not new. Three weeks ago an outbreak of salmonella in the US was blamed on people keeping their own chickens.

Back in January, when there were barely any bird flu cases to report, The Conversation was already hosting articles claiming…

Bird flu: domestic chicken keepers could be putting themselves – and others – at risk

And calling for a new policy on backyard chickens:

This is why it will be important in the future for Defra and APHA to provide specific policy for backyard chicken keeping.

It’s pretty easy to see where this is going, isn’t it?

But why take aim at ordinary people keeping a handful of chickens in their back garden?

Well, partly because they simply want to cut the amount of natural food people eat – most especially meat, but also eggs and other dairy produce. They want people entirely reliant on mega-corporations for their processed cubes of “food”.

But they also want people entirely reliant on the state for permission to do…almost everything. And in, some ways, the Covid pandemic narrative was counterproductive in that cause.

One of the unintentional effects of Covid in general and lockdown specifically was re-awakening in people an urge to go their own way. The powers-that-be are keen to reverse that trend.

As the above Guardian article points out [emphasis added]:

This may be due to the growing number of people keeping chickens or ducks, Brown said. Many of these keepers do not have to register with any authority because of the small numbers of birds involved.

During lockdown there was a spike in people keeping their own chickens.

Under UK law, it is illegal to keep a flock of fifty or more chickens without obtaining a license from the Poultry Register (yes, that’s a real thing) – but the vast majority of private flocks are much less than fifty birds, and therefore totally unregistered.

This scare-mongering on “spreading disease” is preparing the ground for “regulation” of these small private flocks.

Will that mean an outright ban? Maybe. But at the very least, I would expect the minimum number requiring a license to begin dropping from 50, and the cost of obtaining a license to rise.

We have already seen an example of this process with homeschooling.

Nations all over the world saw huge spikes in homeschooling through 2020-2021, this surge continued even after schools re-opened.

Tens of thousands more people are homeschooling in the UK than were before the lockdown started. The government response has been to re-open their years-old war on homeschooling by creating a national register of homeschooled children, and threatening parents with fines or unspecified “sanctions” for refusing to sign-up for it.

The same exact process will likely be seen with backyard poultry.

That’s the specific and practical part of it.

More poetically put, the state resents them because they are free.

Keeping a few chickens in your garden may be a small, fragile, kind of freedom…but it is freedom nonetheless, and power structures are easily petty enough to destroy even that modicum of independence.

At its heart, self-reliance of any kind is the antithesis of everything driving us toward the “new normal”.

No freedom. No independence. No living outside the carefully controlled machinery of the state. That’s their aim.

As we phase out of “Covid time” and careen towards “world war 3 times” or “climate change times” or whatever the next stage of the grand narrative is, the gears of the state are intent on grinding up those pockets of resistance their relentless overreach has accidentally cultivated.

The good news here is that their ever-more tyrannical efforts to control people will only end up driving more and more people away.

To quote the philosopher Lucas, the more they tighten their grip, the more people will slip through their fingers.

(read more)

From Bill Gates to the Great Refusal – Farmers on the Frontline

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most humans were engaged in agriculture. Our relationship with nature was immediate. Within just a few generations, however, for many people across the world, their link with the land has been severed.

Food now arrives pre-packaged (often precooked), preserved with chemicals and contains harmful pesticides, micro-plastics, hormones and/or various other contaminants. We are also being served a narrower menu of high-calorie food with lower nutrient content.

It is clear that there is something fundamentally wrong with how modern food is produced.

Although, there are various stages between farm and fork, not least modern food processing practices, which is a story in itself, a key part of the problem lies with agriculture.

Today, many farmers are trapped on chemical and biotech treadmills. They have been encouraged and coerced into using a range of costly off-farm inputs, from synthetic fertilisers and corporate-manufactured seeds to a wide array of weedicides and pesticides.

With the industrialisation of agriculture, many poor, smallholder farmers have been deskilled and placed into vulnerable positions. Traditional knowledge has been undermined, overwhelmed or has survived only in fragments.

Writing in the Journal of South Asian Studies in 2017, Marika Vicziany and Jagjit Plahein state that farmers have for millennia taken measures to manage drought, grow cereals with long stalks that can be used as fodder, engage in cropping practices that promote biodiversity, ethno-engineer soil and water conservation and make use of collective sharing systems.

Farmers knew their micro-environment, so they could plant crops that mature at different times, thereby facilitating more rapid crop rotation without exhausting the soil.

Experimentation and innovation were key. Two terms modern agritech/agribusiness corporations lay claim to, but something farmers have been doing for generations.

Many farmers also used ‘insect equilibrium’ and their knowledge of which insects kill crop-predator pests. Food and policy analyst Devinder Sharma says he has met women in India who can identify 110 non-vegetarian and 60 vegetarian insects.

Complex, highly beneficial traditional knowledge systems and on-farm ecological practices are being eroded as farmers lose control over their productive means and become dependent on proprietary products, including commodified corporate knowledge.

Farmers in places like the Netherlands are now being blamed for harming the environment due to carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions. Although Dutch farmers are taking flak, what we are also seeing is an attack on large feed and meat producers. There are not many small farms left in the Netherlands and most animal farms are concentrated feeding operations.

The Netherlands’ farming sector is highly livestock intensive and there seems to be a policy to reduce the size of the meat industry in that country. Farmers have been told to get out of farming or shift to growing crops.

Instead of the authorities facilitating a gradual shift towards organic, agroecological agriculture and attract a new generation to the sector, farmers are in danger of being displaced.

But Dutch farmers are not the only ones in the firing line. Farmers in other European nations are also protesting because various policies make it increasingly difficult for them to make a living.

There seems to be a concerted effort to make farming financially non-viable for many farmers and remove them from their land. The farmer protests in Europe follow in the wake of massive resistance by Indian farmers against corporate-backed legislation that would have seen an accelerated drive to push many already financially distressed farmers out of farming.

Farmer Bill 

The biggest owner of private farmland in the US – Bill Gates – has a vision for farming: a chemical-dependent, corporate-dependent, one-world agriculture (Ag One initiative) to facilitate the global supply chains of conglomerates. This initiative is side-lining indigenous knowledge and practices in favour of corporate knowledge and a further colonisation of global agriculture.

Gates’s corporatisation of smallholder agriculture is packaged in philanthropic terms – ‘helping’ farmers in places like Africa and India. It has not worked out well so far if we turn to the Gates-backed Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), established in 2006.

The first major evaluation of AGRA’s efforts to expand high-input agriculture in Africa found that – after 15 years – it had failed. With concerns being voiced over the use of hazardous pesticides, less than impressive yields, the privatisation of seeds, corporate dependency and farmer indebtedness, among other things, we can expect more of the same under the Ag One initiative.

But the ultimate high-tech vision for farming is farmerless farms largely overseen by driverless vehicles and AI-driven sensors and drones linked to cloud-based infrastructure. The likes of Microsoft will harvest field data on seeds, soil quality, historical crop yields, water management, weather patterns, land ownership, agronomic practices and the like.

Tech giants will control multi-billion-dollar data management markets that facilitate the needs of institutional land investors, agribusiness and monopolistic e-commerce platforms. Under the guise of ‘data-driven agriculture’, private corporations will be better placed to exploit farmers’ situations for their own ends.

With lab-based synthetic meat being promoted and attracting huge interest from investors, Gates and the agritech sector also envisage a largely ‘climate-friendly’ animal-free agriculture, which they claim will result in freeing up vast tracts of farmland (we can only speculate for what).

It remains to be seen just how energy-efficient, environment-friendly and health-friendly synthetic meat labs are once scaled up to industrial levels.

At the same time, industrial agriculture will use new technologies – minus farmers – and will still rely on and boost the use of fossil-fuel-dependent agrochemicals (with all the associated health and environmental problems) and remain focused on long-line supply chains, unnecessarily shipping food around the world.

A high-energy system reliant on the oil and gas that has fuelled the colonisation of the food system (‘globalisation’) by agribusiness conglomerates. Moreover, the new human-less on-farm technologies will be energy-intensive to run and will rely on environment-destroying extraction for finite resources like lithium, cobalt and other rare-earth elements to produce.

Low-energy agroecological approaches based on the principles and practices of localisation, local markets, authentic regenerative agriculture and proper soil management (which ensures effective and ecologically sound nitrogen and carbon storage) are key to ensuring genuine long-term sustainability in food production.

Many who belong to the agribusiness lobby have been drawing attention to Sri Lanka in an attempt to show organic farming can only lead to disaster. A transition to organics has to be gradual, not least because regenerating soil cannot occur overnight.

Regardless, the article ‘Sri Lanka Faces Food Crisis – No, It’s Not Due to Organic Farming’ that recently appeared on The Quint website reveals why that country really headed into crisis.

Great refusal 

The neoliberal programme that took root in the 1980s has now reached a debt-bloated, inflationary impasse. In response, capitalism has embarked on a ‘great reset’ with transformative technology very much to the fore in the guise of a ‘4^th Industrial Revolution’, promising a brave new tomorrow for all.

However, there are deep-seated concerns about how this technology could be used to monitor and control entire populations, especially as we are witnessing a brutal economic restructuring and increasing clampdowns on personal liberties. If neoliberalism promoted individualism, the ‘new normal’ demands strict compliance – individual freedom is said to pose a threat to ‘national security’, ‘public health’ or ‘safety’.

There is also concern about economic collapse, war and the exposure of a food system to energy price shocks, supply chain breakdowns and commodity market speculation.

In Mali in 2015, Nyeleni – the international movement for food sovereignty – released The Declaration of the International Forum for Agroecology.

The Declaration Stated:

Essential natural resources have been commodified, and rising production costs are driving us off the land. Farmers’ seeds are being stolen and sold back to us at exorbitant prices, bred as varieties that depend on costly, contaminating agrochemicals.”

It added:

Agroecology is political; it requires us to challenge and transform structures of power in society. We need to put the control of seeds, biodiversity, land and territories, waters, knowledge, culture and the commons in the hands of the peoples who feed the world.”

The Declaration made it clear that the prevailing capitalist food system had to be challenged and overcome.

In analysing the potential for challenging the capitalist order, Herbert Marcuse stated the following in his famous 1964 book One-Dimensional Man:

“A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress.”

Today, we might say – an uncomfortable, unsmooth, unreasonable, undemocratic unfreedom prevails, a token of an emerging techno-dystopia.

Marcuse felt post-war mass culture had made people repressed and uncritical. They were a reflection of a one-dimensional system based on the consumption of commodities and the effects of modern culture and technology that served to dampen dissent.

The controlling nature of technology pervades all aspects of life today. But whether it involves farmers protests in Europe and India, the advancement of a political agroecology, truckers taking to the streets in Canada or ordinary people protesting against a rapidly advancing authoritarianism in Western societies, many people across the world know something is seriously amiss.

To borrow from Marcuse, we are seeing a ‘great refusal’ – people saying ‘no’ to multiple forms of repression and domination – tentacles of an economic system in crisis. (read more)

JUST SAY NO

The great refusal starts at the most basic levels, think for yourself, scrutinize everything do something positive: create an organic garden with like minded people growing food that can support you and your family while diminishing dependence on Frankenfoods.

We are living in an era of mass commodification, monopolization and privatization, all to benefit a psychopathic few who see themselves destined to be the overlords and betters of those of us they allow to remain alive. Eugenics is part of their agenda. Food and water control are the fundamental keys to that.

The mass culling will continue. Notice how they are pushing Monkeypox and a shot for that despite ample evidence the COVID shots are maiming and killing millions! It’s all part of their program.

LET THE GREAT REFUSAL GROW.

— Junious Ricardo Stanton, July 28, 2022 6:57 PM

I pledge allegiance to the flag
Of the Unconscious States of Awareness.
And to the Banana Republic
For which it stands.
One plantation
Under Jewish gold.
Indifferent to individuals,
With tyranny and injustice for most.

(source of original version)

By their fake fruits ye shall know them.

Superficial America

If we were to try to identify one point in US history where superficiality took root in America, it might well be a speech by an American salesman named Elmer Wheeler who in 1937 coined the now-famous maxim of, “Don’t sell the steak – sell the sizzle!”. For those who don’t know, the sizzle is the sound made by a steak when it is first tossed onto a hot barbeque. His idea had merit. Looking at a photo of a steak or listening to a radio commercial about steaks would be unlikely to generate much immediate purchasing response, but hearing that sound might well recall fond memories and persuade shoppers to head for the supermarket. His theory was that it isn’t the simple product that generates a purchase but rather our emotional response to some element of that product.

Of course, it was American Jews who more or less created [modern] marketing, and Bernays’ advertising wizards were not slow to adapt Wheeler’s advice to virtually every product in existence. But, as with most things American, they didn’t know when to quit, and carried the process far past the end. It soon occurred to American businessmen that if people were buying the sizzle there was no need to provide the steak. It may come as a surprise to many people, especially Americans, but it was American companies, not Chinese, that created fake products and flooded the nation and the world with them. Since customers wanted the ‘sizzle’ of leather in their cars and on their sofas, anything vaguely resembling leather would suffice. It was Americans who created fake leather, wood, metal, glass, fake wool and linen, fake virgin olive oil and, eventually, fake people. The list is almost endless. Any natural product that could possibly be counterfeited – but nevertheless sold as the real thing – was produced and sold.

And it was primarily the conflux of sizzle and credit that led companies and marketers to create the propaganda of the American Dream; not the dream where you succeed, but the dream where you have the appearance of success. After all, borrowing money to purchase a fake leather sofa to show off to your neighbors is almost as good as actually having the money in the bank to purchase the real thing. And this is what the marketers marketed. The focus on providing consumers with increasingly less steak and more sizzle, along with the fake materials purchased on credit, eventually resulted in what we call superficiality, a term that describes Americans as perfectly as any other.

It is interesting to watch the continuing development of this process today. It shouldn’t be necessary to point out that Starbucks offers some of the worst coffee on the planet, which is natural since it was designed to suit American tastes. But you may be surprised to learn that Starbucks is no longer selling coffee; they are now selling “experiences”. The marketers and advertisers, aided and abetted by the propagandists and their Freudian background, have concluded that there is an even better way to loot bank accounts than offering fake goods on credit. In their view, shops once sold commodities (coffee beans), then became ‘service firms’ (coffee shops) where the commodity was standardised and the distinguishing consumer attraction was the quality of service. Inherent in that shift was the degrading of the commodity – which was expensive – and replacing it with ‘service’ which cost nothing but an artificial smile. They have now moved to a new level where we sacrifice both the commodity and the service, and replace both with “an experience”.

The propagandists and marketers, the offspring of Lippman and Bernays, are spending enormous sums of money on psychologists and psychiatrists to fathom precisely what it is about going to a Starbucks or a Wal-Mart that can create a positive emotional response. Yes, I know. I almost choked writing that sentence, but these people are serious. They want to identify the stimulus and to then fabricate the circumstances in an attempt to provoke that response. If successful, the fake commodity and fake service can disappear to be replaced by a fake emotional experience that you will treasure and one day excitedly relate to your grandchildren. It is all a false reality created with contrived experiences that are not real, but Americans are already on international speaking tours proselytising the new marketing approach. And it’s all fake, in the same way that most of America is fake. In the US, marketing is built on lies just as is virtually all else in the nation. It is interesting to watch Americans promoting this new view; they are unable to recognise that any part of their new bible contrasts with reality, and react with offense when Europeans tell them “You Americans are all about image instead of reality. Everything about you is fake and superficial. You people are living in a cliché.”

It is true that sitting in a coffee shop in Vienna or at a sidewalk cafe in Rome can be a treasured experience, a result generated by dozens or perhaps even hundreds of charming small details that combine to create a genuine appreciation of one of life’s little pleasures. But these wonderful small experiences cannot be fabricated and still generate a pleasure of life, except perhaps for Americans who appear to have lost entirely the ability to distinguish the sizzle from the steak and to whom the only genuine reality is superficial. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting one’s customers to have a good experience, but the American attitude toward creating these is not genuine or sincere; it is cheap, fake, and artificial, a psycho-induced emotional response to a fake reality. Instead of trying to understand how to give customers a real, genuine, pleasant experience as they would receive in Vienna or Rome, the Americans are spending millions trying to understand how to fabricate in their customers the artificial “feelings” of an experience without actually giving them anything. One needs to wonder what the hell Americans think about, what goes on in those minds. And again, if anybody needs an “experience” so badly they have to go to a Starbucks or a Wal-Mart to find it, what they really need is a life.

One of the most obvious sources of evidence of the ingrained superficiality that pervades America today is [large-scale] fruit and vegetable production. There are almost no fruits and few vegetables [mass] produced in the US today that have any taste, and there are almost no Americans who know what good fruit tastes like[, except those who buy from farmers or farmer's markets]. The reason explains much about the American mentality. US growers wanted to eliminate the natural blemishes that occur on most fruits, so these were cross-bred through many generations to produce a cosmetically-perfect appearance. Next, sporadic and uneven ripening was inconvenient and expensive since pickers would have to return for many days over a month or more to pick all the fruit, so growers cross-bred the fruit to ripen as nearly as possible on the same day. Next, tenderness and delicacy were a problem because fruits are often damaged during packing and transportation, so the growers cross-bred the fruits for toughness and hardiness. It’s no secret they succeeded. You can take an apple in an American supermarket and throw it against a concrete wall, with the only damage being to the wall. Then, they wanted to standardise the sizes, so they cross-bred for size consistency, after which shelf life was a problem. Natural fruits will last at best only a few days before they begin to spoil, so growers cross-bred fruits that could be picked green and would last for months. Finally, they cross-bred for artificial color.

In all of this, the Americans were so interested in cosmetics and profit that they sacrificed the only important quality which was taste. The result is apples that taste like cardboard if they have any taste at all, and most don’t. We can buy American Granny Smith apples in supermarkets in Shanghai, with a taste somewhere between clay and tissue paper. Eating an American peach is like chewing on a piece of soft wood. American oranges from Florida are just a bitter, tasteless pulp, as are most strawberries. One American grower claimed that the entire fruit industry was about “decorating stores”, instead of providing delicious food. It’s all about appearance, marketing and corporate profit, an underlying philosophy that perfectly mirrors the superficial American attitude to most things, from automobiles to education. The American version of a peach is a pretty colored ball of dry cellulose that can be picked green and hard, thrown off rail cars and thrown onto trucks, transported for weeks and stored for months, then ripened artificially by exposure to [ethylene] gas. It’s the perfect American fruit; hard as a rock, indestructible, has a shelf life of 75 years (more or less), and with its lack of taste perfectly reflected in its customers. If you see an American apple in a Chinese supermarket in May or June, that apple has been sitting somewhere for almost a year, and the fact that it hasn’t rotted does not mean it’s edible. All American fruit should be avoided, not only for tastelessness but for the chemicals and GM dangers. (read more)

Leaving a Sinking Ship?

The Inflation Reduction Act Of 2022
(Its Name Is Orwellian.)

Joint Statement From Leader Schumer And Senator Manchin Announcing Agreement To Add The Inflation Reduction Act Of 2022 To The FY2022 Budget Reconciliation Bill And Vote In Senate Next Week
July 27, 2022

Washington, D.C. – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) issued the following joint statement today announcing an agreement to add the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 to the FY2022 Budget Reconciliation bill and vote in the Senate next week:

“Today, we are pleased to announce an agreement to add the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 to the FY2022 Budget Reconciliation bill. After many months of negotiations, we have finalized legislative text that will invest approximately $300 billion in Deficit Reduction and $369.75 billion in Energy Security and Climate Change programs over the next ten years. The investments will be fully paid for by closing tax loopholes on wealthy individuals and corporations. In addition, the expanded Affordable Care Act program will be extended for three years, through 2025. The revised legislative text will be submitted to the Parliamentarian for review this evening and the full Senate will consider it next week.

“The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 will make a historic down payment on deficit reduction to fight inflation, invest in domestic energy production and manufacturing, and reduce carbon emissions by roughly 40 percent by 2030. The bill will finally allow Medicare to negotiate for prescription drugs and lower health care costs for millions of Americans. Additionally, we have reached agreement with President Biden and Speaker Pelosi to pass comprehensive permitting reform legislation before the end of this fiscal year. We urge every member of the U.S. Senate to support this important legislation.”

Are those real tears or onion tears?

Comrades, prior to the Joe Biden economy the average American worker was earning 29 onions per hour.  After, the Biden economic policies were put into place, the average American worker is now earning 11 onions per hour. (source)

Fed Chair Announces Additional 0.75% Increase in Interest Rates and There will be More, After They Assess How Much Damage This Creates

While admitting that consumer spending had dropped; and while admitting that production of goods and services had “slowed significantly”; and while admitting that consumers have “lower real disposable incomes and tighter financial conditions; and while stating that “activity in the housing sector had weakened”, housing purchases have fallen; and while accepting that “business fixed investment seems to have declined in the second quarter,” Fed Chairman Powell announces his intention to continue targeting excessive demand.

If we accept that monetary policy can only impact the demand side of the economy (regulatory policy impacting the supply side); and if we accept all off the currently existing realities of a declining demand side, as outlined by Powell; then you might wonder what excessive demand is it that he’s targeting?   The answer to that question is the secret sauce.  They want less energy demand.   WATCH (2 mins).

The federal reserve, just like all the central banks around the collective western alliance, is trying to reduce the economy in order to reduce energy use.   This is the monetary policy side supporting the Build Back Better, Climate Change, regulatory policy side. {Go Deep}

They cannot admit openly what they are doing, but the bankers are trying to help the globalist politicians by shrinking their economy.  Raising interest rates into preexisting economic contraction is against their legislative mandate, because it only leads to unemployment and a smaller economy.

Powell is using the pretense of demand side inflation as a justification to raise interest rates.  It’s not demand driving inflation, it’s the energy policy.

Powell is managing the monetary side of the transition to a New Green Deal economy.

Powell is managing the economy into a recession to support the “energy transition.”.

This is all being done on purpose.

[…] Mr. Powell said in his news conference following the Fed’s decision to raise rates by by 75 basis points that future rate decisions will be made on a meeting-by-meeting basis now that the federal funds rate target range is between 2.25% and 2.5%, which he deemed roughly neutral in terms of its impact on economic activity.

Mr. Powell said the 75-basis-point moves in June and July were unusually large and something similar at the September FOMC “could be appropriate.” But he said that the Fed can no longer provide “clear guidance” and will let the data determine what happens next. He said he still believes monetary policy will need to move to a restrictive stance and will likely be between 3% and 3.5% by year end. (LINK)

(read more)

Trolley Car Problem – The Fed’s Predicament

[...] Jerome Powell can tackle inflation but risk a recession and lower stock prices. Or he can try to avoid a recession and risk persistently high inflation.

(read more)

JEWESS DENIES REALITY OF RECESSION

The New Definition:
“A recession is two consecutive quarters with negative
growth in GDP while a Republican is President.”

Peter Schiff and Laura Ingraham: The White House Recession Denial

The economic data indicate that the US economy is already in a recession. The [illegitimate] Biden administration wants you to think otherwise, and the White House has come up with an interesting way to deny the recession reality. Just change the definition of a recession.

Peter Schiff appeared on the Ingraham Angle with Lauren Ingraham to talk about this White House spin.

The common definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. In the first quarter of 2022, GDP came in at -1.6 percent. The Atlanta Fed projects another -1.6% decline in Q2. That would mean we’re in a recession now, and we have been all year. But White House spokespeople and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen are quick to remind us that this is not the “technical” definition of a recession.

Technicalities notwithstanding, Ingraham points out that the last 10 times the economy experienced two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth were technically defined as recessions. She called the Biden administration’s wordplay “a perfect distillation of modern leftism.”

When you’re losing, just change the rules of the game, then declare victory.

Peter pointed out that the government already changed the definition of inflation from “an expansion of the money supply” to “prices going up.”

So, they may as well change the definition of recession. Because for my entire career, recession has been described by two quarters of negative GDP growth. And we’ve got that.”

During her interview on Meet the Press, Yellen said a recession wasn’t two quarters of negative GDP. She said it was a broad-based economic slowdown. Peter said that’s exactly what we’ve got.

The auto industry is in recession. The housing industry is in recession. Retail is in recession. Advertising is in recession. So many unrelated segments of the economy are in recession — how you can’t say this is a broad-based slowdown — it doesn’t make any sense. And in fact, it’s going to get a lot worse in the third quarter and then probably the fourth quarter as well.”

Ingraham noted that the White House and others denying a recession hang their hats on the tight labor market. But even that is looking shaky. As Peter said, we’ve seen three straight weeks of increasing first-time jobless claims, and they’re at the highest level since October last year.

Meanwhile, if you look at that last job report, even though we added about 400,000 jobs in the establishment survey, the household survey lost about that many jobs. But if you actually look at the jobs, almost all of these new jobs were for people who already had jobs. These were people taking second and third jobs because they’re struggling to pay the bills. And you have a lot of retirees who are being forced back into the workforce because inflation has eviscerated their incomes, and now they have no choice but to go to work. So, these are not jobs that people want. These are jobs that people are forced to take because the economy is so weak.”

Peter also pointed out that employment is a lagging indicator.

I think we’re going to see mass layoffs in the third and fourth quarters of this year as employers start to react to the reality of recession by laying off workers.”

As Ingraham said, next the White House will have to redefine the word layoffs. (read more)

IS WHITE HOUSE REGRETTING HIRING LOW IQ,
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, BLACK LESBIAN
PRESS SECRETARY?

Peter Doocy Humiliates Karine Jean-Pierre by Reading Biden Econ Advisor Brian Deese’s 2008 Definition of a Recession (VIDEO)

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Wednesday confidently asserted that two back-to-back quarters of negative GDP growth is not the technical definition of a recession.

Even though it is.

The [illegitimate] Biden Regime is actually redefining the term recession.

Fox News reporter Peter Doocy pointed to Biden econ advisor Brian Deese’s 2008 statement on the definition of a recession: “Economists have a technical definition of recession, which is two consecutive quarters of negative growth.”

The same people who accurately defined a recession years ago are now denying the true definition of a recession… because Joe Biden is in the White House.

“If things are going so great, then why is it that WH officials are trying to redefine recession?” Peter Doocy asked KJP.

“No, we’re not redefining recession,” KJP retorted.

Doocy shot back: “If we all understand a recession to be two consecutive quarters of negative GPD growth in a row and you have the White House officials come up here to say no, no, no that’s not what a recession is…how is that not redefining recession?

“Because that’s not the definition,” KJP said.

Okay, then!

WATCH:

Doocy: If things are going so great, then why is it that WH officials are trying to redefine recession?

KJP: No, we’re not redefining [it].

Doocy: “If we all understand [it] to be 2 consecutive quarters…& you have WH…say…that’s not…how is that not redefining [it]? pic.twitter.com/FrQXLQIoJg

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 27, 2022

Peter Doocy humiliated Karine Jean-Pierre when he read Biden’s econ advisor Brian Deese’s definition of a recession from 2008.

“What changed?” Peter Doocy queried.

A humiliated Karine Jean-Pierre repeatedly interrupted Peter Doocy: “It is not! It is not!”

“What’s the difference other than who’s president?” Doocy said.

VIDEO:

Doocy: Deese said in 2008…’economists have a definition…of a recession, which is two consecutive quarters of negative growth’ & yesterday he said, two negative quarters…is not the technical definition of a recession.

KJP: It is not.

Doocy: What changed?

KJP: It is not. pic.twitter.com/ZMndyheHT1

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 27, 2022

(read more)

It's Obvious Kamala Advanced the Old-Fashioned Way:
on her back, with legs spread.

Is she qualified to define a woman?

Deliberate Destruction of America

If you know a man with several of these traits, throughout this monkeypox outbreak, wear a Hazmat suit if you have to shake his hand:

1. Zero interest in sports.
2. Low interest in talking about women.
3. Few to zero anecdotes about sex with women.
4. Avoids activities where there are single women.
5. Spends a lot of time on image.
6. High interest in cleanliness.
7. Zero interest in jokes or comments about female sexuality.
8. Claims to be too busy with work to go out or find dates.

GAMBLING WITH GLOBAL HEALTH

God Smote Him Yet He Is Not Chastened
Soros Sodomite describes consequences of his promiscuous depravity.

‘I literally screamed out loud in pain’: my two weeks of monkeypox hell

A New Yorker describes his harrowing ordeal to receive care through a system underequipped to handle another pandemic

I got monkeypox and it’s been a total nightmare.

When New York Pride festivities kicked off on 24 June, I was aware that monkeypox was an emerging issue – especially for gay men – but I was also under the impression that the number of cases in the city was relatively small. What I didn’t understand was how absolutely dismal testing capacity was: at that point, the city only had capacity to process ten tests a day.

I had sex with several guys over the weekend. Then a week later, on 1 July, I started feeling very fatigued. I had a high fever with chills and muscle aches, and my lymph nodes were so swollen they were protruding two inches out of my throat.

First, I took a Covid self-test: negative. Then I started suspecting monkeypox. I texted a friend: I’m just sitting here waiting for the rash to start.

I’m a 39-year-old man from Sweden, living in Brooklyn and working in philanthropy. For the past decade, my work has primarily focused on sexual and reproductive health and rights, so I followed the outbreak from the very beginning. I had even tried to get vaccinated when New York City launched an initial vaccination drive on 23 June. But like the vast majority of other New Yorkers who tried to get an appointment, I had no luck.

Two days after my symptoms began, the rash started as anorectal lesions – painful sores on my anus and rectum. Initially it was a stinging, itchy feeling. I wasn’t scared at this point. I was told that it would be mild, and I was a completely healthy individual with no underlying conditions. But I had no idea how bad it was going to get.

I had a tele-health visit with my primary-care physician (PCP) and she agreed that I should get tested. So I went to urgent care. I had all the symptoms of monkeypox and thankfully nobody questioned whether or not I should receive a test. I also asked for a full STI panel.

I wanted the antiviral drug that is being used to treat monkeypox, TPOXX, but you need a positive test result first. So they sent me home with Tylenol. (European regulators have approved TPOXX as an effective monkeypox treatment, but the FDA has only approved it to treat smallpox. The CDC maintains a stockpile of TPOXX and allows for its “compassionate use” during monkeypox outbreaks.)

After I went home, the rash started spreading, and I began to feel anxious. I developed lesions literally everywhere; they started out looking like mosquito bites before developing into pimply blisters that would eventually pop, then finally scab before leaving a scar. I had them on my skull, on my face, my arms, my legs, my feet, my hands, my torso, my back, and five just on my right elbow. At the peak, I had over 50 lesions, a fever of 103F and intense pain, prompting a panic attack. Ironically, the only place I didn’t have lesions was my penis.

The next day I got my STI results: positive for gonorrhoea. But no word yet on monkeypox. That’s when I developed hives everywhere on my body from my neck down, as well as a headache, arthritis pain in my fingers and shoulders and a strange pain in my shin bone that got so painful that I couldn’t stand up. At night, I would wake up going crazy with both pain and itching from the lesions and hives, just sitting up in bed and scratching myself. I was isolated, lonely and frustrated with how unfair the situation was. I was clearly very sick, yet had to cobble together a care plan on my own.

My anorectal lesions, which were already very painful, turned into open wounds. It felt like I had three fissures right next to each other, and it was absolutely excruciating. I would literally scream out loud when I went to the bathroom. Even keeping the area clean, like washing myself, was extremely painful. It was a two hour process each time.

Four days after my test – I got a call from urgent care that I had tested positive for monkeypox. But they gave me no information beyond that. So I started calling around to see how I could get access to the antivirals. I knew the CDC had put out guidance around who should be considered for treatment, and that included people who had anorectal lesions, lesions in the throat and dermatological conditions, which I did.

But I was just referred in circles. I would call urgent care, who told me to contact the department of health. The department of health would say, “Oh no, your PCP has to request treatment for you.” Then I would contact my PCP, and they were like, “We can bring the case to the department of health, but just so you know, they deny most of our requests, so don’t get your hopes up.”

Then my throat started swelling up. My tonsils were covered in white pus. I did a video with someone in my PCP’s office and they said, “I think you should go to the ER.” The ER determined it was bacterial tonsillitis, and they gave me a round of antibiotics. But when I asked them for antivirals, they said they wouldn’t give them to me because they only gave it to people who were severely immunocompromised. I told them, “That’s not the CDC treatment guidelines.” They wouldn’t have it, and they discharged me at 2 am. I was incredibly demoralized.

The next evening, I finally got a call from a clinic at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center. They said DoH had asked them to take on my case. So that was apparently how I was one of the lucky few to be invited for treatment. Because the drug hasn’t been extensively tested in humans, there’s quite a significant informed consent and intake process. I spent about an hour at the clinic and walked out with a two week supply of TPOXX. I was so relieved.

You have to take three pills every 12 hours, with a high fat diet. I’m eating a lot of bacon and whipped cream, which is the second best thing about this treatment. The lesions started drying out very quickly and I’m now down to just three tiny little scabs left. Only in the last couple of days have I been able to go to the bathroom without pain.

I’m still in isolation. I can’t tell you how sick of my apartment I am right now. I’m a pretty privileged person in that I have the resources necessary to order food and medicine and get it delivered to my door. I have laundry in my apartment, so I can wash my bedsheets and clothes. I know other people who are really struggling with isolation because they don’t have the situation I have.

The day after I started the treatment, 13 July, I finally got a call from a contact tracer from the department of health, who said I may have been exposed to monkeypox on 26 June. I told her I already have monkeypox, and she asked me about my symptoms. The call lasted about half an hour and she was obviously reading off a script. Then she was like, “Okay, thanks for your time, get well,” and hung up. She didn’t even ask me what contacts I’d had.

This whole thing just feels like a huge failure that should not have been allowed to happen, especially not two and half months into the outbreak. If someone like me, who has worked in sexual health for a long time, had such a hard time navigating care, I can’t imagine other people doing it. I know several people who are just sitting at home in agonizing pain because they’re not getting the support that they need.

I’m pretty worried that we’re close to the point that this is going to be another endemic disease, especially among gay men, if we haven’t passed that point already. I’m worried we’ll be stuck with it forever. (read more)

Delete the K in Monkeypox

In a move that is sure to trigger widespread discussion concerning the independence, objectivity and wisdom of granting authority to the WHO to manage global infectious diseases responses, the monkeypox outbreak has been declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) by the World Health Organization.

The declaration was made unilaterally, in direct contradiction of independent review panel advice, by WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Tedros made the declaration despite a lack of consensus among members of the WHO’s emergency committee on the monkeypox outbreak, and in so doing overruled his own review panel, who had voted 9 against, 6 for declaring the PHEIC. Tedros asserted that this committee of experts (who met on Thursday) was unable to reach a consensus, so it fell on him to decide whether to trigger the highest alert possible.

Any objective outside observer would conclude that the committee failed to endorse moving to a PHEIC. When a similar meeting was previously held on June 23, 2022, the committee resolved by consensus to advise the WHO Director-General that at this stage the outbreak should be determined to not constitute a PHEIC. An official United Nations article summarizing this can be found here.

When the group met in June, the breakdown was 11 against and three for. It is not clear what has changed in the intervening four weeks to justify the change in Tedros’ position, although comments from internet pundits raise concerns that the unilateral action was taken in response to pressure from special interest advocacy groups.

There has also been a sudden burst of coordinated social media postings raising concerns regarding Monkeypox risks to children, which raises the question “If Monkeypox is a sexually transmitted disease, why are kids getting it?”

On Friday, the U.S. confirmed the first two cases of monkeypox in children, Centers for Disease Control Prevention and Control (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky said Friday. The CDC has said children, especially those under 8 years old, are among those at “especially increased risk” for severe monkeypox disease.

At a virtual event with the Washington Post on Friday focused on new coronavirus variants, Walensky stated that:

“Both of those children are traced back to individuals who come from the men-who-have-sex-with-men community, the gay men’s community,”

Clearly, the WHO committee did not reach the desired decision to declare a PHEIC, and so for some extraordinary reason Tedros stepped in.

Though the committee does not formally vote, a survey of the members revealed that nine thought a PHEIC should not be declared and six supported a declaration. “Nine and six is very, very close,” Tedros said in a news conference called to announce the decision. “Since the role of the committee is to advise, I then had to act as a tie-breaker.”

Tedros made the declaration despite a lack of consensus among members of the WHO’s emergency committee on the monkeypox outbreak. It’s the first time a leader of a UN health agency has made such a decision unilaterally. 

In the event of a deadly disease outbreak, a group of World Health Organization (WHO) experts can declare a “public health emergency of international concern,” or PHEIC, to trigger global action. Since the procedures to declare a PHEIC were implemented in 2005, the WHO has only done so six times. The last time the WHO declared an international emergency was in early 2020, for Covid-19.

The designation of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern is the WHO’s highest alert level. It is based on international health regulations established in 2005, to define countries’ rights and obligations in handling cross-border public health occurrences. 

The WHO defines a PHEIC as “an extraordinary event which is determined to constitute a public health risk to other States through the international spread of disease and to potentially require a coordinated international response.”

The WHO further explains how this definition implies a situation that is serious, sudden, unusual or unexpected; carries implications for public health beyond an affected country’s border and may require immediate international action.

Tedros’ statements clearly demonstrate that he unilaterally substituted his own opinions for those of the convened panel, raising questions of his objectivity, commitment to process and protocol, and whether he has been unduly influenced by external agents:

I have decided that the global monkeypox outbreak represents a public health emergency of international concern”

“WHO’s assessment is that the risk of monkeypox is moderate globally and in all regions, except in the European region where we assess the risk as high”

“We have an outbreak that has spread around the world rapidly through new modes of transmission about which we understand too little and which meets the criteria in the international health regulations,” Tedros said.

“I know this has not been an easy or straightforward process and that there are divergent views among the members” of the committee,” he added.

“Although I am declaring a public health emergency of international concern, for the moment this is an outbreak that is concentrated among men who have sex with men, especially those with multiple sexual partners,” Tedros went on. “That means that this is an outbreak that can be stopped with the right strategies in the right groups.”  

As the outbreak continues to grow, epidemiologists are split as to whether the WHO’s decision was correct. The meeting was the second time the emergency committee convened, after a meeting on June 23 when it decided the outbreak had not met that threshold.

Dr. Jimmy Whitworth, a professor of international public health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine:

“It is a tricky decision for the committee, in some senses, it meets the definition — it is an unprecedented outbreak widespread in many countries and would benefit from increased international coordination.

On the other hand, it seems to be an infection for which we have the necessary tools for control; most cases are mild and the mortality rate is extremely low”

The PHEIC designation comes from the International Health Regulations (IHR) created in 2005, and it represents an international “agreement” to help the prevent and respond to public health risks that have the potential to spread around the globe.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (US CDC) describes the IHR regulations as “a legally binding agreement of 196 countries to build the capability to detect and report potential public health emergencies worldwide. IHR require that all countries have the ability to detect, assess, report, and respond to public health events.” 

These are the same IHR which the Biden administration sought to further strengthen, but the attempt to implement proposed modifications were placed on hold after an international, multi-country outcry concerning loss of national autonomy. The unilateral actions of Tedros in this current situation clearly demonstrate that these concerns were warranted.

Despite the statement by the US CDC, the WHO IHR are not a treaty which has been endorsed by the US Senate, and the assertion that these are legally binding has been challenged.

In an article supportive of the declaration, Vox news provided a summary of the potential financial beneficiaries of this declaration; that being vaccine manufacturers and the holding companies who have invested in them.

The emergency ought to get countries to share vaccines. But it’s not guaranteed.

Vaccination plays a key role in controlling monkeypox transmission during an outbreak, and crucially, these vaccines already exist.

The Covid-19 pandemic taught the world some painful lessons about the importance of global coordination to ensuring fast and equitable vaccine distribution. The PHEIC alarm bell hopefully will spur action so the same mistakes are not repeated.

A major reason global health experts have been anxious over the timeliness of a WHO emergency declaration for monkeypox is the declaration’s potential to get vaccines to the most vulnerable groups quickly.

Vaccines do exist to prevent monkeypox, and while many countries have a quantity of these vaccines on hand as part of their national stockpiles, US demand has greatly outpaced supply, and the global supply of vaccines is relativelysmall.Countries have been scrambling to order more vaccines, and while the producer of the most popular monkeypox vaccine has not disclosed which countries have put down orders, the nations that have announced vaccine purchases have generally been higher-income ones, like Germany, Britain, and Canada.

That portends a pattern of vaccine inequity that unfolded to tragic effect during the Covid-19 vaccine rollout, with poorer countries struggling to acquire vaccines and cut off from vaccine production efforts. In his announcement of the WHO’s Emergency Committee’s plan to convene in June, WHO Europe director Hans Kluge said following a more equitable blueprint for monkeypox vaccine distribution would be a key step in controlling the outbreak.

“A ‘me first’ approach could lead to damaging consequences down the road if we do not employ a genuinely collaborative and far-thinking approach,” Kluge said. “I beseech governments to tackle monkeypox without repeating the mistakes of the pandemic — and keeping equity at the heart of all we do.”

When the WHO declares an emergency, it also makes recommendations to affected countries, which often relate to vaccination strategies. This spurs countries to coordinate vaccine strategies to increase vaccine supply in less wealthy countries. It can also spur donors to fund vaccination efforts that prioritize equitable access to vaccines. However, the WHO’s recommendations in the face of an emergency are ultimately just recommendations.

The ACT Accelerator, a collaboration to raise funds to distribute Covid-19 tests, therapies, and vaccines to low-resource countries, was an attempt at an equitable solution in the pandemic. However, in the eyes of many, it did not succeed. Public health experts are hopeful earlier action on monkeypox could avoid some of the ACT Accelerator’s pitfalls.

In its announcement today, WHO representatives said it was encouraging countries with large vaccine stockpiles to share and donate vaccines to other countries who do not currently have access to vaccines.

“There’s no way to enforce that globally,” Heymann said.

Please see previous coverage of this issue, which clearly demonstrate the concerted effort to weaponize fear by a variety of stakeholders including corporate media and Bill and Melinda Gates affiliated organizations.  (read more)

Monkeypox: The New AIDS

You have to admit, the word “monkeypox” is fun to say: monkeypox, monkeypox, monkeypox.

On the other hand, this less lethal relative of smallpox, which is now up to 2,000 confirmed cases in its first two months in the United States, sounds extremely painful and disgusting.

In Nigeria, where it is endemic in wildlife, it kills an estimated 1 to 3 percent of humans who get infected, a fatality rate worse than Covid.

Fortunately, in the current global outbreak only three people outside Africa have died so far, none in the U.S. Hopefully, there’s something different between African monkeypox and Western gay monkeypox.

Of course, monkeypox in America and Europe is overwhelmingly being spread by gay men to gay men.

For example, in New York City, none of its 336 victims so far have been women, in comparison to seven who are listed as “TGNCNB,” an acronym new to me that stands for “Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Non-Binary.” Similarly, in Washington, D.C., which has the highest per-capita infection rate in the country, not one of the 122 patients is a woman.

While monkeypox is centered in virtually the exact same urban and resort gay neighborhoods, such as West Hollywood and Fire Island, from which AIDS dispersed four decades ago, it has already been found in 43 states.

One reason is because many gay men, despite their depiction in the Narrative as oppressed and marginalized, tend to spend a lot of money to travel to vast circuit parties to have sex with numerous male strangers. Numerous municipalities encourage local entrepreneurs to host big gay parties to lure in tourists, despite the role gay sex tourism plays in spreading infectious diseases, such as last summer’s Provincetown Bear Week superspreader event for the Covid Delta variant. And the success of heavily advertised anti-HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis drugs like Truvada has brought back 1970s attitudes toward industrial-scale gay promiscuity.

It’s unclear if this version of monkeypox spreads sexually or through more general skin-on-skin contact, or, most likely, both. It might also transmit through the air, but, at the moment, it appears to usually take a gay bacchanal to strew it far and wide.

Then again, who knows what monkeypox might evolve to next? The more people it infects, the more opportunities it has to evolve to be even more infectious.

The 2022 wave appears to track to homosexual parties in Spain and Belgium, and has since been amped up by the usual Pride Month orgies in June.

The world had plenty of warning to call off Pride Month due to monkeypox, but of course, the Centers for Disease Control and the prestige press did not call upon gay men to tone down their decadence because that would be stigmatizing. In contrast to canceling weddings and funerals over Covid, it’s unthinkable to publicly ask gay circuit parties to cancel their 2022 saturnalias because in modern America there is nothing more hateful than causing gays to feel shame over their depravities. (Businessman Ric Sena did cancel last Saturday’s circuit party in New York due to “growing concerns about the monkeypox outbreak.” He deserves credit.)

The CDC, for instance, issued a document on July 12 entitled “Reducing Stigma in Communications and Community Engagement” instructing the press to replay the AIDS strategy of misleading the general public:

Partners can help by providing monkeypox information to different communities and various channels.

I.e., tell different stories to different audiences.

Be careful to avoid marginalizing groups who may be at increased risk for monkeypox. Keep messages fact-based to help prevent stigmatizing populations most affected.

For Messages to General Audiences:

…Emphasize that anyone can get monkeypox and promote it as a public health concern for all.

That’s not exactly “fact-based.”

Focusing on cases among gay and bisexual men may inadvertently stigmatize this population and create a false sense of safety among those who are not gay and bisexual men.

Among gays, however, the CDC wants to raise monkeypox awareness, but without the health authorities suggesting anything so unthinkable as that gays, say, knock it off with the group sex with strangers until we can figure out what’s going on with this monkeypox thing.

For instance, the CDC put together a template letter for gay men attending circuit parties, massage parlors, spas, saunas, and sex clubs. Did it tell them that they should cut out the orgies until further notice, the way school, church, and sports were canceled over Covid? Of course not. That would be homophobic. Instead, the CDC declared:

We want you to have fun while you are at [insert event/venue].

A CNN article presents the CDC’s comically non-peremptory health advice for gays:

“In line with our harm reduction guidance, thinking about reducing your number of partners, potentially trying to avoid anonymous contacts ends up being smart from the perspective of decreasing the risk of exposure,” Daskalakis said. The CDC says people might want to reduce skin contact as much as possible by having sex with clothes on or after covering areas where the rash is present.

These government formulations tend to be written by gay men with advanced degrees who imagine that other gays can figure out what they are vaguely hinting at. But they forget that half of gay men have IQs below average and just won’t get it unless you explain it to them directly enough for non-gays to grasp it as well.

This week, however, as monkeypox spreads largely out of control, the winds in the media are starting to finally change. Joseph Goldstein, The New York Times’ hard-nosed municipal beat reporter, sympathetically presented the calls by dissident scientists within the NYC Health Department to finally ask gay men to temporarily restrain their self-indulgence:

Dr. [Don] Weiss said that asking people to change their sexual behavior—even if just for a month or so—was the most potent weapon available right now for reducing monkeypox transmission…. Dr. Weiss said his recommendations have been largely ignored by the department’s senior leadership, who seem “paralyzed by fear of stigmatizing this disease,” he wrote in an email to colleagues this June…. “If we had an outbreak associated with bowling, would we not warn people to stop bowling?” he wrote.

Bowling alone for a while sounds better than monkeypox, but what does Dr. Weiss, the director of surveillance in the bureau of communicable diseases, know?

If America actually had a homophobic culture, the government and media conspiring like this (in the open) to bamboozle the public into thinking that this gay-spread disease is a major threat to themselves might lead to a negative reaction to the actions of male homosexuals. If gays were truly unpopular in American society, it would instead be good for them for the government to reassure the majority that gays spreading monkeypox through their debauchery doesn’t much threaten anybody else.

In reality, though, gays are high-status and powerful, so the government is much more concerned instead that being frank with the general citizenry would open some naive eyes about gay male behavior, which could lower gay status, which is unthinkable.

If you are old enough to remember the 1980s, you may recall much the same Establishment tactics. At first, media coverage of AIDS was factual and informative because no party line had yet emerged. By 1983, people in the know talked about the Four H Club of AIDS demographics: homosexuals, heroin needle junkies, Haitians (a major U.S. gay sex tourism destination), and hemophiliacs.

(By the way, the world’s worst outbreak turned out to be in Southeastern Africa due to a regional heterosexual fetish for “dry sex.”)

But by the mid-1980s, a huge push was organized among the respectable to fearmonger the general public into believing that heterosexuals were as much at risk of AIDS as male homosexuals.

This generated much needless fear among straights, but it served to distract the public from noticing that the bulk of the American AIDS disaster was obviously the outcome of Gay Liberation from 1969 onward. Instead, official disinformation helped inculcate in confused heterosexual minds a sense of guilt that homophobia was, somehow, the cause.

In reality, of course, HIV spread outward not from rural backwaters but from where Gay Liberation had triumphed most overwhelmingly in the 1970s: Castro Street, Christopher Street, and Santa Monica Boulevard. Similarly, AIDS killed off large numbers of New York choreographers and fashion designers while leaving almost untouched less gay-friendly professions such as baseball players and golfers.

Rather than stigmatization causing AIDS, its primary driver in the U.S. was the destigmatization of homosexuality.

But an ironic truth like that is too sophisticated for us to acknowledge anymore. Instead, the straight media now blame AIDS on Ronald Reagan and the gay media on Nancy Reagan.

Why? Americans are increasingly unable to remember events that can’t be fitted into the Narrative. We now tend to reason about historical events in the following childish manner:

(a) Gays are good.
(b) AIDS was bad.

Ergo, homophobes caused AIDS.

I would hope monkeypox remains just a comic version of AIDS Lite. But if something worse comes along, we’re ever less able to function intelligently due to our culture’s worship of its sacred cows.

(read more)

The Impersonator: Eric Feigl-Ding, COVID-19, and an implicit far-left agenda

How a nutritionist turned politician became a "COVID-19 expert."

If you’re on social media and you follow news related to the coronavirus pandemic, chances are you’ve stumbled upon some panicked pandemic posts coming from a man named Eric Feigl-Ding, a nutritionist and longtime democrat political operative who has succeeded in impersonating a medical professional, and is generating a cult following in the process.

With one hysterical tweet after another, Feigl-Ding went from having a small social media following to accumulating a massive army of influence. Feigl-Ding’s consistent elevation of fear and panic, doom and gloom, and his relentless themes of chaos and destruction related to a virus with a 99.8% recovery rate has brought his accounts millions of clicks and views, and hundreds of thousands of new followers.

And he did it all without having a clue what he’s talking about.

The ‘Charlatan’

At the beginning of 2020, Feigl-Ding was an unpaid, visiting scientist in Harvard’s nutrition department. His academic research centered entirely around nutrition, diet, and exercise. If Eric Feigl-Ding was interested in pandemics and the study of viruses, his research and academic credentials did not reflect that.

When the coronavirus pandemic began to make waves in the media, everything changed. Feigl-Ding, an aspiring politician, appeared to see an opening to influence the masses and build up his brand.

Feigl-Ding’s rise to coronavirus stardom began with this since-deleted tweet falsely describing the coronavirus as “the most virulent virus epidemic the world has ever seen.”

But not everyone associated with Feigl-Ding was thrilled with the early panic promotion act. Feigl-Ding’s frequent use of Harvard-associated credentials to elevate his baseless COVID-19 proclamations greatly upset some of his colleagues (despite many of them advocating for the same draconian measures proposed by Feigl-Ding to “combat” the virus), and landed him in hot water with the academic institution.

Twitter, for reasons unknown, decided to credential him as a “COVID-19 health expert,” which further elevates his supposed legitimacy as an “expert” on the pandemic. (read more)

In a just world, Deborah Birx would be hanged
in public and her body fed to ravenous dogs.

Dr. Birx Praises Herself While Revealing Ignorance, Treachery, and Deceit

The December 2020 resignation of Dr. Deborah Birx, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator under Trump, revealed predictable hypocrisy. Like so many other government officials around the world, she was caught violating her own stay-at-home order. Therefore she finally left her post following nine months of causing unfathomable amounts of damage to life, liberty, property, and the very idea of hope for the future.

Even if Anthony Fauci had been the front man for the media, it was Birx who was the main influence in the White House behind the nationwide lockdowns that did not stop or control the pathogen but have caused immense suffering and continue to roil and wreck the world. So it was significant that she would not and could not comply with her own dictates, even as her fellow citizens were being hunted down for the same infractions against “public health.”

In the days before Thanksgiving 2020, she had warned Americans to “assume you’re infected” and to restrict gatherings to “your immediate household.” Then she packed her bags and headed to Fenwick Island in Delaware where she met with four generations for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, as if she were free to make normal choices and live a normal life while everyone else had to shelter in place. 

The Associated Press was first out with the report on December 20, 2020. 

Birx acknowledged in a statement that she went to her Delaware property. She declined to be interviewed.

She insisted the purpose of the roughly 50-hour visit was to deal with the winterization of the property before a potential sale — something she says she previously hadn’t had time to do because of her busy schedule. 

“I did not go to Delaware for the purpose of celebrating Thanksgiving,” Birx said in her statement, adding that her family shared a meal together while in Delaware. 

Birx said that everyone on her Delaware trip belongs to her “immediate household,” even as she acknowledged they live in two different homes. She initially called the Potomac home a “3 generation household (formerly 4 generations).” White House officials later said it continues to be a four-generation household, a distinction that would include Birx as part of the home.

So it was all a sleight-of-hand: she was staying home; it’s just that she has several homes! This is how the power elite comply, one supposes. 

The BBC then quoted her defense, which echo the pain experienced by hundreds of millions: 

“My daughter hasn’t left that house in 10 months, my parents have been isolated for 10 months. They’ve become deeply depressed as I’m sure many elderly have as they’ve not been able to see their sons, their granddaughters. My parents have not been able to see their surviving son for over a year. These are all very difficult things.”

Indeed. However, she was the major voice for the better part of 2020 for requiring exactly that. No one should blame her for wanting to get together with family; that she worked so hard for so long to prevent others from doing so is what is at issue. 

Sin of omission

The press piled on and she announced that she would be leaving her post and not seeking a position at the Biden White House. Trump tweeted that she will be missed. It was the final discrediting – or should have been – of a person that many in the White House and many around the country had come to see as an obvious fanatic and fake, a person whose influence wrecked the liberties and health of an entire country. 

It was a fitting end to a catastrophic career. So it would make sense that people might pick up her new book to find out what it was like to go through that kind of media storm, the real reasons for her visit, what it was like to know for sure that she must violate her own rules in order to bring comfort to her family, and the difficult decision she made to throw in the towel knowing that she has compromised the integrity of her entire program. 

One slogs through her entire book only to find this incredible fact: she never mentions this. The incident is missing entirely from her book. 

Instead at the moment in the narrative at which she would be expected to recount the affair she says almost in passing that “When former vice president Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, I’d set a goal for myself—to hand over responsibility for the pandemic response, with all its many elements, in the best possible place.”

At that point, the book skips immediately to the new year. Done. It’s like Orwell, the story, even though it was reported for days in the world press and became a defining moment in her career, is just wiped out from the history book of her own authorship. 

Somehow it makes sense that she would neglect to mention this. Reading her book is a very painful experience (all credit to Michael Senger’s review) simply because it seems to be weaving fables on page after page, strewn with bromides, completely lacking in self awareness, punctuated by revealing comments that make the opposite point of what she is seeking. Reading it is truly a surreal experience, astonishing especially because she is able to maintain her delusionary pose for 525 pages. 

Chief lockdown architect

Recall that it was she who was tasked – by Anthony Fauci – with doing the really crucial thing of talking Donald Trump into green-lighting the lockdowns that began on March 12, 2020, and continued to their final hard-core deployment on March 16. This was the “15 Days to Flatten the Curve” that turned into two years in many parts of the country. 

Her book admits that it was a two-level lie from the beginning. 

“We had to make these palatable to the administration by avoiding the obvious appearance of a full Italian lockdown,” she writes. “At the same time, we needed the measures to be effective at slowing the spread, which meant matching as closely as possible what Italy had done—a tall order. We were playing a game of chess in which the success of each move was predicated on the one before it.”

Further: 

“At this point, I wasn’t about to use the words lockdown or shutdown. If I had uttered either of those in early March, after being at the White House only one week, the political, nonmedical members of the task force would have dismissed me as too alarmist, too doom-and-gloom, too reliant on feelings and not facts. They would have campaigned to lock me down and shut me up.”

In other words, she wanted to go full CCP just like Italy but didn’t want to say that. Crucially, she knew for sure that two weeks was not the real plan. “I left the rest unstated: that this was just a starting point.”

“No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it,” she admits. 

“Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them. However hard it had been to get the fifteen-day shutdown approved, getting another one would be more difficult by many orders of magnitude. In the meantime, I waited for the blowback, for someone from the economic team to call me to the principal’s office or confront me at a task force meeting. None of this happened.”

It was a solution in search of evidence she did not have. She told Trump that the evidence was there anyway. She actually tricked him into believing that locking down a whole population of people was somehow magically going to make a virus to which everyone would inevitably be exposed somehow vanish as a threat. 

Meanwhile, the economy was wrecked domestically and then all over the world, as most governments in the world followed what the US did. 

Where did she come up with the idea of lockdowns? By her own report, her only real experience with infectious disease came from her work on AIDS, a very different disease from a respiratory virus that everyone would eventually get but which would only be fatal or even severe for a small cohort, a fact that was known since late January. Still, her experience counted for more than science. 

“In any health crisis, it is crucial to work at the personal behavior level,” she says with the presumption that avoidance at all costs was the only goal. “With HIV/AIDS, this meant convincing asymptomatic people to get tested, to seek treatment if they were HIV-positive, and to take preventative measures, including wearing condoms; or to employ other pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) if they were negative.”

She immediately hops to the analogy with Covid. “I knew the government agencies would need to do the same thing to have a similar effect on the spread of this novel coronavirus. The most obvious parallel with the HIV/AIDS example was the message of wearing masks.” 

Masks = condoms. Remarkable. This “obvious parallel” remark sums the whole depth of her thinking. Behavior is all that matters. Just stay apart. Cover your mouth. Don’t gather. Don’t travel. Close the schools. Close everything. Whatever happens, don’t get it. Nothing else matters. Keep your immune system as unexposed as possible. 

I wish I could say her thought is more complex than that but it is not. This was the basis for lockdowns. For how long? In her mind, it seems like it would be forever. Nowhere in the book does she reveal an exit strategy. Not even vaccines qualify. 

Myopic focus

From the very beginning, she revealed her epidemiological views. On March 16, 2020 at her press conference with Trump, she summarized her position: “We really want people to be separated at this time.” People? All people? Everywhere? Not one reporter raised a question about this obviously ridiculous and outrageous statement that would essentially destroy life on earth. 

But she was serious – seriously deluded not only about how society functions but also about infectious disease of this sort. Only one thing mattered as a metric to her: reducing infections through any means possible, as if she on her own could cobble together a new kind of society in which exposure to airborne pathogens was made illegal. 

Here is an example. There was a controversy about how many people should be allowed to gather in one space, as in home, church, store, stadium, or community center. She addresses how she came up with the rules: 

The real problem with this fifty-versus-ten distinction, for me, was that it revealed that the CDC simply didn’t believe to the degree that I did that SARS-CoV-2 was being spread through the air silently and undetected from symptomless individuals. The numbers really did matter. As the years since have confirmed, in times of active viral community spread, as many as fifty people gathered together indoors (unmasked at this point, of course) was way too high a number. It increased the chances of someone among that number being infected exponentially. I had settled on ten knowing that even that was too many, but I figured that ten would at least be palatable for most Americans—high enough to allow for most gatherings of immediate family but not enough for large dinner parties and, critically, large weddings, birthday parties, and other mass social events.

She puts a fine point on it: “if I pushed for zero (which was actually what I wanted and what was required), this would have been interpreted as a ‘lockdown’—the perception we were all working so hard to avoid.”

What does it mean for zero people to gather? A suicide cult?

In any case, just like that, from her own thinking and straight to enforcement, birthday parties, sports, weddings, and funerals came to be forbidden. 

Here we gain insight into the sheer insanity of her vision. It is nothing short of a marvel that she somehow managed to gain the amount of influence she did. 

Notice her above mention of her dogma that asymptomatic spread was the whole key to understanding pandemic. In other words, on her own and without any scientific support, she presumed that Covid was both extremely fatal and had a long latency period. To her way of thinking, this is why the usual tradeoff between severity and prevalence did not matter. 

She was somehow certain that the longest estimates of latency were correct: 14 days. This is the reason for the “wait two weeks” obsession. She held onto this dogma throughout, almost like the fictional movie “Contagion” had been her only guide to understanding. 

Later in the book, she writes that symptoms mean next to nothing because people can always carry around the virus in their nose without being sick. After all, this is what PCR tests have shown. Instead of seeing that as a failure of PCR, she saw this as a confirmation that everyone is a carrier no matter what and therefore everyone has to lock down because otherwise we’ll deal with a black plague.

Somehow, despite her astonishing lack of scientific curiosity and experience in this area, she gained all influence over the initial Trump administration response. Briefly, she was godlike. 

But Trump was not and is not a fool. He must have had some sleepless nights wondering how and why he had approved the destruction of that which he had seen as his greatest achievement. The virus was long here (probably from October 2019), it presented a specific danger to a narrow cohort, but otherwise behaved like a textbook flu. Maybe, he must have wondered, his initial instincts from January and February 2020 were correct all along. 

Still, he very reluctantly approved a 30-day extension of lockdowns, entirely on Birx’s urging and with a few other fools standing around. Having given in a second time – still, no one thought to drop an email or make a phone call for a second opinion! – this seemed to be the turning point. Birx reports that by April 1, 2020, Trump had lost confidence in her. He might have intuited that he had been tricked. He stopped speaking to her. 

It would still take another month before he would fully rethink everything that he had approved at her behest. 

It made no difference. The bulk of her book is a brag fest about how she kept subverting the White House’s push to open up the economy – that is, allow people to exercise their rights and freedoms. Once Trump turned against her, and eventually found other people to provide good advice like the tremendously brave Scott Atlas – five months later he arrived in an attempt to save the country from disaster – Birx turned to rallying around her inner circle (Anthony Fauci, Robert Redfield, Matthew Pottinger, and a few others) plus assembling a realm of protection outside of her that included CNN reporter Sanjay Gupta and, very likely, the virus team at the New York Times (which gives her book a glowing review).

Recall that for the remainder of the year, the White House was urging normalcy while many states kept locking down. It was an incredible confusion. The CDC was all over the map. I gained the distinct impression of two separate regimes in charge: Trump’s vs. the administrative state he could not control. Trump would say one thing on the campaign trail but the regulations and disease panic kept pouring out of his own agencies. 

Birx admits that she was a major part of the reason, due to her sneaky alternation of weekly reports to the states. 

After the heavily edited documents were returned to me, I’d reinsert what they had objected to, but place it in those different locations. I’d also reorder and restructure the bullet points so the most salient—the points the administration objected to most—no longer fell at the start of the bullet points. I shared these strategies with the three members of the data team also writing these reports. Our Saturday and Sunday report-writing routine soon became: write, submit, revise, hide, resubmit. 

Fortunately, this strategic sleight-of-hand worked. That they never seemed to catch this subterfuge left me to conclude that, either they read the finished reports too quickly or they neglected to do the word search that would have revealed the language to which they objected. In slipping these changes past the gatekeepers and continuing to inform the governors of the need for the big-three mitigations—masks, sentinel testing, and limits on indoor social gatherings—I felt confident I was giving the states permission to escalate public health mitigation with the fall and winter coming.

As another example, once Scott Atlas came to the rescue in August to introduce some good sense into this wacky world, he worked with others to dial back the CDC’s fanatical attachment to universal and constant testing. Atlas knew that “track, trace, and isolate” was both a fantasy and a massive invasion of people’s liberties that would yield no positive public-health outcome. He put together a new recommendation that was only for those who were sick to test – just as one might expect in normal life. 

After a week-long media frenzy, the regulations flipped in the other direction. 

Birx reveals that it was her doing:

This wasn’t the only bit of subterfuge I had to engage in. Immediately after the Atlas-influenced revised CDC testing guidance went up in late August, I contacted Bob Redfield…. Less than a week later, Bob [Redfield] and I had finished our rewrite of the guidance and surreptitiously posted it. We had restored the emphasis on testing to detect areas where silent spread was occurring. It was a risky move, and we hoped everyone in the White House would be too busy campaigning to realize what Bob and I had done. We weren’t being transparent with the powers that be in the White House…

One might ask how the heck she got away with this. She explains:

[T]he guidance gambit was only the tip of the iceberg of my transgressions in my effort to subvert Scott Atlas’s dangerous positions. Ever since Vice President Pence told me to do what I needed to do, I’d engaged in very blunt conversations with the governors. I spoke the truth that some White House senior advisors weren’t willing to acknowledge. Censoring my reports and putting up guidance that negated the known solutions was only going to perpetuate Covid-19’s vicious circle. What I couldn’t sneak past the gatekeepers in my reports, I said in person.

Missing: self-reflection

Most of the book consists of her explaining how she headed a kind of shadow White House dedicated to keeping the country in some form of lockdown for as long as possible. In her telling, she was the center of everything, the only person truly correct about all things, given cover by the VP and assisted by a handful of co-conspirators.. 

Largely missing from the narrative is any discussion of the science gathering outside the bubble she so carefully cultivated. Whereas anyone could have noted the studies pouring out from February onward that threw cold water on her entire paradigm – not to mention 15 years, or make that 50 years, or perhaps 100 years of warnings against such a reaction – from scientists all over the world with vastly more experience and knowledge than she. She cared nothing about it, and evidently still does not. 

It’s very clear that Birx had almost no contact with any serious scientist who disputed the draconian response, not even John Iaonnidis who explained as early as March 17, 2020, that this approach was madness. But she didn’t care: she was convinced that she was in the right, or, at least, was acting on behalf of people and interests who would keep her safe from persecution or prosecution. 

For those interested, Chapter 8 provides a weird look into her first real scientific challenge: the seroprevalence study by Jayanta Bhattacharya published April 22, 2020. It demonstrated that the infection fatality rate – because infections and recovery was far more prevalent than Birx and Fauci were saying – was more in line with what one might expect from a severe flu but with a much more focused demographic impact. Bhattacharya’s paper revealed that the pathogen eluded all controls and would likely become endemic as every respiratory virus before. She took one look and concluded that the study had unnamed “fundamental flaws in logic and methodology” and “damaged the cause of public health at this crucial moment in the pandemic.” 

And that’s it: that’s Birx grappling with science. Meanwhile, the article was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology and has over 700 citations. She saw all differences of opinion as an opportunity to go on the attack in order to intensify her cherished commitment to the lockdown paradigm. 

Even now, with scientists the world over in outrage, with citizens furious at their governments, with governments falling, with regimes toppling and anger reaching a fevered pitch, while studies pour out by the day showing that lockdowns made no difference and that open societies at least protected their educational systems and economies, she is unmoved. It’s not even clear she is aware.

Birx dismisses all contrary cases such as Sweden: Americans could not take that route because we are too unhealthy. South Dakota: rural and backwater (Birx is still mad that the brave Governor Kristi Noem refused to meet with her). Florida: oddly and without evidence she dismisses that case as a killing field, even though its results were better than California while the population influx to the state sets new records. 

Nor is she shaken by the reality that there is not one single country or territory anywhere on the planet earth that benefitted from her approach, not even her beloved China which still pursues a zero-Covid approach. As for New Zealand and Australia: she (probably wisely) doesn’t mention them at all, even though they followed the Birx approach exactly.

The story of the lockdowns is a tale of Biblical proportions, at once evil and desperately sad and tragic, a story of power, scientific failure, intellectual insularity and insanity, outrageous arrogance, feudalistic impulses, mass delusion, plus political treachery and conspiracy. It is real-life horror for the ages, a tale of how the land of the free became a despotic hellscape so quickly and unexpectedly. Birx was at the center of it, confirming all of your worst fears right here in a book anyone can buy. She is so proud of her role that she dares to take all credit, fully convinced that the Trump-hating media will love and protect her perfidies from exposure and condemnation.

There is no getting around Trump’s own culpability here. He never should have let her have her way. Never. It was a case of fallibility matched by ego (he has still not admitted error), but it is a case of enormous betrayal that played off presidential character flaws (like many in his income class, Trump had always been a germaphobe) that ended up wrecking hope and prosperity for billions of people for many years to come. 

I’ve tried for two years to put myself in that scene at the White House that day. It’s a hothouse with only trusted souls in small rooms, and the people there in a crisis have the sense that they are running the world. Trump might have drawn on his experience running a casino in Atlantic City. The weather forecasters come to say a hurricane is on the way, so he needs to shut it down. He doesn’t want to but agrees in order to do the right thing. 

Was this his thinking? Perhaps. Perhaps too someone told him that China’s President Xi Jinping managed to crush the virus with lockdowns so he can too, just as the WHO said in its February 26 report. It’s also difficult in that environment to avoid the rush of omnipotence, temporarily oblivious to the reality that your decision would affect life from Maine to Florida to California. It was a catastrophic and lawless decision based on pretense and folly. 

What followed seems inevitable in retrospect. The economic crisis, inflation, the broken lives, the desperation, the lost rights and lost hopes, and now the growing hunger and demoralization and educational losses and cultural destruction, all of it came in the wake of these fateful days. Every day in this country, even two and a half years later, judges are struggling to regain control and revitalize the Constitution after this disaster. 

The plotters usually admit it in the end, taking credit, like criminals who cannot resist returning to the scene of the crime. This is what Dr. Birx has done in her book. But there are clearly limits to her transparency. She never explains the real reason for her resignation – even though it is known the world over – pretending like the entire Thanksgiving fiasco never happened and thus attempting to write it out of the history book that she wrote. 

There is so much more to say and I hope this is one review of many because the book is absolutely packed with shocking passages. And yet her 525-page book, now selling at a 50% discount, does not contain a single citation to a single scientific study, paper, monograph, article, or book. It has zero footnotes. It offers no go-to authorities and displays not even a hint of humility that would normally be part of any actual scientific account. 

And it nowhere offers an honest reckoning for what her influence over the White House and the states foisted on this country and on the world. As the country masks up yet again for a new variant, and is gradually being groomed for another round of disease panic, she can collect whatever royalties come from sales of her book while working at her new gig, a consultant to a company that makes air purifiers (ActivePure). In this latter role, she makes a greater contribution to public health than anything she did while she held the reins of power. (read more)

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