PP NewsBrief: 2021-02-01

We need to begin to reclaim control over the institutions which have such oversized roles in our lives. As you read this people work tirelessly to see to it that you are dumb and docile. Let's stop them.

========

"So You Just 'Raided' Your First Company" - A Letter To Non-Professional Traders

"Retail investors must understand or should be made aware of that gamma trading depends on liquidity shortages and as we saw in the market action of Gamestop and other stocks today, this market structure is dangerous to everyone. Complacency on 50% moves upwards must also be monitored and expected losses of 50% or more must also be factored in before people invest; in much the same way people must make educated investments before making investments in options, where unlimited losses may happen, or stocks on margin.

The reason I say this to you is because every mania since 1918 has led to a major market crash over the past 100 years. In every major market crash, it was retail accounts being locked out which led to crippling economic losses amid the retail public who exuberantly placed their savings into the market.

Many people today complained about their retail accounts to “Robinhood” and “Ameritrade” being locked out for various unconfirmed reasons. However, if one were to “google” this is a very loud alarm bell of a market top.

In 1929, Joe Kennedy saw, was horrified and wrote to the WSJ that manias were encouraging retail traders to form trading clubs and were investing in “Insull Trusts” and hundreds of penny trade brokerages were emerging in New York to prey on their inexperience. The Insull Trusts were overleveraged assets, often real estate and utility companies which were propped up by stock buybacks and equity speculation. When the first market crash happened, which led to the Great Depression, it was the Penny Brokers, unable to satisfy retail accounts due to the brokerages own cash crunches which led to the infamous riots and wave of iconic “jumping” suicides in the weeks after the crash. Those were not bankers who killed themselves but wiped out retail punters as documented in many economic history books about the crash."

========

Did CDC Deliberately Mislead Public on Allergic Reactions to Moderna Vaccine?

"The CDC’s choice to use VAERS data to calculate the rate of anaphylaxis associated with Moderna’s vaccine is idiosyncratic and troubling. Why?

First, VAERS is a “passive” reporting system, which results in a high degree of underreporting. In fact, a 2010 study (Lazarus et al, 2010) commissioned by the CDC, concluded that “fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries” are reported to VAERS. A 2015 study (Shimabukuro et al, 2015) similarly concluded that vaccine adverse events are underreported.

The other problem with VAERS? Reports often get filed only weeks or months after the event, which means the data is not current.

There are other reporting systems that the CDC could have used to calculate anaphylactic reactions to Moderna’s vaccine.

For example, the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) data, which the CDC used to calculate its overall rate of 1.3 events per million doses, updates in real time. So does the V-safe database, which was created specifically to assess the safety of COVID-19 vaccines. V-safe sends text message prompts to vaccine recipients on a daily basis for a week after a person is vaccinated, and occasionally thereafter. The prompts urge vaccine recipients to report any side effects directly using a cell phone app."

========

In With a Bang, Out With a Whimper

"Donald Trump spent nearly his entire campaign, and certainly his time in office under investigation by government officials, by both legal and illegal means; under attack by a uniquely and absurdly hostile press; subject to leaks, insubordination, and outright lies by faceless bureaucrats, all while representing a political party whose leaders did not want him. Given these obstacles, it is unsurprising that little of lasting impact was accomplished over the last four years.

Still, in his final days, President Trump possessed one last weapon, and the ability to do something truly epic and remarkable. He could have pardoned Julian Assange, a man who has committed no true crime and yet languishes in prison. To do so would have been an unmistakable strike back at the worst elements of our government and simultaneously a strike for freedom of speech and truth. If he really wanted to drive the point home and do some good, he could have included Edward Snowden and Ross Ulbricht among others similarly unfairly persecuted.

It is the failure to liberate Assange that is the most perplexing since his freedom would outrage all the right people—the same people in and out of government that so publicly opposed Trump.  Recall that Assange is not some criminal mastermind. Through his actions at WikiLeaks, the U.S. Government has accused him of “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.”  Notwithstanding this dubious accusation, his true offense, like Snowden, was releasing information embarrassing to the government and government officials—a job once revered and celebrated by more traditional media outlets. For a better understanding of why such actions are not and should not be criminal, one need look for no further example than the famous Pentagon Papers and the 1971 Supreme Court case of New York Times Co. v. United States.

Instead, Trump chose to cower to Mitch McConnell, apparently fearful that he would lose all support amid his second impeachment, and perhaps even face personal criminal actions. Instead of striking back, he chose to issue midnight pardons to a cadre of rappers and political grifters. Then, the following morning, the always boisterous Donald Trump meekly left town silenced, neutered, and utterly defeated."

========

Democrats’ ‘divide and conquer’ Senate show trial may jeopardize duopoly

"Much ink could be spilled about the upcoming, and second, Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump, but that would be a waste of ink – the trial has nothing to do with social justice or patriotism and everything to do with aggravating political divisions for elites’ gain.

We could say it’s just “politics as usual”, but only if: the “True Rate of Unemployment” wasn’t pushing 30%, even per Politico; 2020 didn’t witness the biggest annual rise in the US poverty rate since the 1960s; America didn’t just have its most disputed election in anyone’s memory; there weren’t armed soldiers protecting politicians nationwide, or, according to nearly 40% of the country, there weren’t armed soldiers making sure politicians are illegitimately installed in the White House. In the US right now politics are not usual, whatsoever.

In an already-catastrophic 2021 the Senate is not the place for a show trial, but Trump’s second impeachment is obviously only for show because there is no chance 67 Senators – a supermajority – will vote in favor of conviction. Many readers may believe I just made a premature prognostication, but you have been purposely misled:

It is incredibly bad journalism the way the US Mainstream Media endlessly overplays the number of Republican defectors against Trump – they get way, way too much press, and of course it’s because they don’t want to admit Trump has any grassroots support (which is not from neo-Nazis). One might have easily imagined that scores of House Republicans were about to vote in favor of Trump’s impeachment, yet only 10 out of 211 did (5%). To give one mainstream example, it was totally misleading of the Los Angeles Times to write that a “bipartisan House majority voted to charge him” after the House’s January 13 vote, and in their lede paragraph, no less, and to even mention the 10 Republicans in their headline. Trump remains the most popular Republican by leaps and bounds – there is no way 17 of 50 Republican senators will end their re-election chances just to appease a Never Trumper movement which only won the general election by a 51-47 margin. Trump’s first Senate trial was a landslide – by supermajority standards – for “not guilty”: 52-48 in favor of Trump.

Given the assurance of acquittal (again) we should ask who benefits from this second trial, and who does not benefit?

...

The only people among average Americans who insist that seeing ex-president Trump in the dock is more pressing than resolving the multiple areas of socioeconomic disaster are the most bloodthirsty and rabid of the Never Trumpers. How can one easily switch off four years of demonisation? Answer: many simply are psychologically unable to move on, and even though they got what they want – Trump is out of the White House. But while these people – generally upper- and upper-middle class persons who are not very touched by the economic crisis – are loudly obnoxious they are not in actual control of the levers of power.

It’s primarily the nation’s elite-level politicians who really want to make America’s Marianas Trench-depth cultural-political divide even deeper, but not for the reasons one may think."

========

CNA Nursing Home Whistleblower: Seniors Are “Dying Like Flies” After COVID Vaccine Injections! Speak Out!

"James (he gives his last name in the video) is a CNA (Certified Nursing Assistant), and he recorded this video as a whistleblower because he could not keep silent any longer.

James reports that in 2020 very few residents in the nursing home where he works got sick with COVID, and none of them died during the entire year of 2020.

However, shortly after administering the Pfizer experimental mRNA injections, 14 died within two weeks, and he reports that many others are near death.

The video is long (47 minutes), and it is clear that James is suffering from emotional stress, and he admits that he has nothing to gain from going public, and that he will probably lose his job for doing so.

But he makes it very clear that these were patients he knew and cared for (he is also a “lay pastor”), and that after being injected with the mRNA shot, residents who used to walk on their own can no longer walk. Residents who used to carry on an intelligent conversation with him could no longer talk.

And now they are dying. “They’re dropping like flies.”"

========

Avoid the ‘Great Reset’ in Three Easy Steps

"It has recently become popular to criticise so-called ‘fiat money’, money that is determined by government edict. The contention is that when President Richard Nixon took America off the gold standard in 1971, because the nation could not pay for the Vietnam War, it ushered in an era of government-created money whose value has been progressively degraded.

Though superficially persuasive the argument is entirely misleading. The repeated crises in the financial markets over the last four decades have not been because of too much government intrusion but the opposite: a refusal by governments to govern properly, which allowed private players to run amok.

It was a cleverly engineered scam.

...

Critics of fiat money get starry-eyed about reintroducing the gold standard or buying Bitcoin. This is because both are finite; in theory they introduce some control over the quantity of money and raise the prospect that it might once again function as a means of exchange rather than something to be debauched in an endless regress. But it is a blind alley. Neither Bitcoin nor gold can be realistically used as a means of exchange, and in any case they are both valued in fiat currency: US dollars. They are just another type of financial asset for investors to play with."

========

Pandemic False Alarm: 14 news headlines show hospitals regularly overrun during cold and flu season

"Governments, news and even hospitals are claiming that without locking down society the healthcare system would collapse.

Yet, we only need take a look at headlines of flu seasons gone by to see that hospitals have dealt with far greater surges of respiratory illnesses without collapsing.

Here are just a few samples"

========

Amnesty International: Navalny a Prisoner of Conscience. But not Manning, Assange or Mandela

"However, “prisoner of conscience” is a designation the London-based human rights organization has refused to apply to Western dissidents like Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange. A representative of the organization told journalist Joe Emersberger that it would not recognize Manning as such because they were unsure if the military whistleblower leaked the information in a sufficiently “responsible manner,” claiming to be equally uncertain that she was being punished because she revealed evidence of widespread human rights abuses.

Likewise, while Amnesty has criticized Assange’s trial (one that they have been blocked from observing), in 2019, it told the defense team of the Wikileaks cofounder that his is, “a case we’re monitoring closely but not actively working on. Amnesty International does not consider Julian Assange to be a Prisoner of Conscience.”

Going further back, it refused to grant the status to perhaps the twentieth century’s most famous political prisoner, Nelson Mandela. It justified its decision on the basis that the African National Congress leader refused to renounce armed struggle against Apartheid and advocated violence — a decision that garnered it decades of opprobrium.

Yet Navalny himself has also advocated violence. In a political video, he described the Muslim people of the Northern Caucasus as an “infestation of cockroaches.” While bugs can be killed with a slipper, in the case of human infestations, “I recommend a pistol” he said, before mimicking shooting one."

========

In Defense of Shame

"The redeeming feature of the government’s pandemic sex policy came not from the health experts, but from the public, who laughed when given the directive to wear a mask during sex, to avoid heavy breathing, or have sex through a hole. The mockery of the medical instructions regarding sexual behaviours shows us that in a functioning liberal society, the public is aware that there are some behaviours that must always fall outside of official policy and expert advice, and that in a flourishing liberal society, we need discerning rule-breakers. What a thriving liberal society needs, perhaps more than protesters who work to reform official systems of public authority, are individuals who quietly and in an ordinary, everyday way put common sense to work as a homegrown corrective to officialdom in their private spheres. Individuals, that is, who are aware that most of life will occur outside of governing structures and who act accordingly, guided by their own intelligence and competence. If we legislate all human behaviours, we will lose what is irreducibly human about them, and unintentionally end up dehumanizing the very things we want to make more humane. When it comes to sex, I think, many of us can figure out best practices on our own. Or, at least there seems to be a silent, chuckling majority that feels this way.

In many ways, pandemic policies around sex have brought modern notions of sex and shame to the surface. Shame is unhealthy. Expressions of sexual desire that contribute to self-esteem are healthy. That we can achieve this from behind a mask—literal as well as figurative—is the very soul sickness of our age being packaged as moral and sexual progress. Sexual well-being, for us, is merely another chapter in our self-obsessed culture. We certainly don’t want to be restrictive or judgemental about sex; that would make us a prudish society. But what we have done is exchange prudery for self-serving pragmatism, to our loss. At least prudery retains something sacred and reverent about sex by upholding its forbidden nature. I’d rather spend my time savouring—or even simply being tantalized by—the forbidden fruit, than participating in some kind of optimized sexual health regimen, like a reluctant kid in phys-ed. In the same way that health experts give directives which, though well-intentioned, miss the point entirely about how sex is an act that should not be reduced to an exercise program, progressive teachings around sex do much the same thing: in making sex shameless and ethical, they rob it of its significance. If sex is to remain meaningful, it must always elude our moral codes surrounding it, while at the same time acknowledging the necessity of such codes. For sex to be something other than a mechanical act, it must continue to be a source both of shame and guilt. This saves sex from vulgarity, and gives us the opportunity to rebel rejoicingly.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell writes of the sexual relationship the protagonist Winston Smith had with his wife, a relationship that was mediated through the messages of The Party. Through and through, it is a cold, professional relationship, but would have been tolerable to him had it not been for the sex they had together, sex that was merely a political act. “By careful early conditioning,” Smith narrates, “by games and cold water, by the rubbish that was dinned into them at school and in the Spies and the Youth League, by lectures, parades, songs, slogans and martial music, the natural feeling had been driven out of them.” Orwell’s description of sex education in Oceana is uncomfortably similar to the kind of sexual ethics held by contemporary students. It does indeed seem that by the time students are in upper year university classes, their sexual values have been formed through “lectures, parades, songs, slogans” that deal with sexual ethics, but very few that deal with “natural feeling.” Nor have they had any conversations about what might make sex sexy.

In a recent class discussion of Romeo and Juliet, my students were adept at pointing out any slip in equitable language and any hint of an unfair power dynamic in the lovers’ relationship. Any suggestion of gender differences in the ways the lovers addressed each other were quickly identified, and corrected by the class. Their education has trained them to be highly sensitive readers of sexual relationships, and yet not one of them found anything beautiful, romantic, or sexy about Romeo and Juliet’s tenderness, playfulness, and electric desire. Assuredly, they didn’t acknowledge that “natural feeling” may be located precisely in the shifting power dynamics of the lovers or in their natural sexual differences. When I pointed out how erotic much of Romeo and Juliet’s language is, how beautiful, they all grew quiet and stared awkwardly at their copies of the play. It was like I was exposing an indecency.

Troubled by their silence, I asked, “Has no one ever told you that love can be sexy? That differences in gender can be hot? Power dynamics desirable? Have you never in all your years reading and studying poetry been told that this is good?” The students looked back at me in confusion, until one student simply and quietly said, “No.” It was one of those rare teaching moments where the students suddenly become aware of the narrow schooling they have received in progressive public institutions. Some students bristled to acknowledge there was a chink in their moral certainty, and then doubled-down on the inequities of the play. But most students, hearteningly, laughed at themselves, and at the rote thinking they have been trained to perform. The class itself, and our subsequent discussion, became more natural for many (but more intolerable for the few). The overriding atmosphere was one of relief—like unbuttoning one’s pants after a satisfying meal. To speak of sex and romance as things that are good gave the students an opportunity to think through sex as “natural” selves, rather than as “Party” members."

========

“Western Civilization”: The Culture of Slavery vs. the Culture of Resistance

"The general problem of culture today is its ability to facilitate and support negative aspects of society through encouraging escapism, diversion and ignorance regarding many important issues of contemporary life, such as economic crises, repressive legislation, poverty, and climate chaos. Or worse still, the use of culture to promote elite views of society regarding power and money, as well as imperialist agendas through negative depictions of a targeted ethnic group or country.

In this, some would call a neo-feudalist age, we see echoes of an earlier feudalism with its abuse of power and wealth that the philosophers of the Enlightenment tried to deal with and rectify. The Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries.

It was led by philosophers such as Cesare Beccaria, Denis Diderot, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, John Locke, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Hugo Grotius, Baruch Spinoza, and Voltaire. Their concerns about injustice, intolerance and autocracy led to the introduction of democratic values and institutions, and the creation of modern, liberal democracies.

However, a new movement in the arts and literature arose in the late 18th century, Romanticism, which emphasized inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual. Romanticism was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, aristocratic society and politics, and the scientific rationalization of nature. Romanticism became the basis of many subsequent cultural movements whose common feature has been anti-science and individualistic.

The Romanticist influence can be seen in ‘mainstream’ mass culture and high culture in terms of its emphasis on formal experimentation or emotions over sociopolitical content. Romanticist reaction stressed “sensibility” or feeling, and tended towards looking inwards. It was a movement whose ideas have come to dominate much of culture today."

========

User Agreement, Congress Protect Robinhood, Reddit From Lawsuits

"Robinhood's users were at the center of this week's wild rally in a handful of stocks that had been heavily shorted by hedge funds and championed by individual investors in online chatrooms including Reddit's WallStreetBets.

The lawsuits, brought in federal court, allege the Menlo Park, California-based company breached its contractual obligation as a regulated broker to execute orders promptly and effectively.

However, Robinhood is not legally bound to carry out every trade and the lawsuits will not succeed without evidence the company restricted trading for an improper reason, such as to favor certain investors, according to several legal experts.

The user agreement on Robinhood's website says it "may at any time, in its sole discretion and without prior notice to Me, prohibit or restrict My ability to trade securities."

Adam Pritchard, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, said the lawsuits are very unlikely to gain traction.

"The contract says they can do it," Pritchard said of the company's decision to restrict trading. "That seems to be a big stumbling block to the breach of contract claim.""