PP NewsBrief: 2021-03-10

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.

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Govt-Linked CSIS Urges DC To Partner with Social Media Firms To “Promote Protests Movements”

"A new report from Washington D.C.-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) concludes that the U.S. government should work closely with social media companies to ensure that protest movements around the world result in an outcome more conducive to American interests. Along with intern Riley McCabe, the organization’s senior fellow, Samuel Brannen, argued that the White House, State Department, and intelligence community must explore deeper coordination with major tech companies that provide global media platforms:

   The U.S. government should think creatively about public-private partnerships that can expand its toolkit to defend the legitimate rights of political protestors globally, including preserving the digital rights of peaceful democratic activists while muting harmful mis- and disinformation from violent state and nonstate actors seeking to tip the balance in various countries.”

While the language used couches the potential move as defending democracy, the rest of the article makes clear that the fight of the future lies between the democratic U.S. and other “like-minded governments” versus “authoritarian states — especially China and Russia.”

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The U.S. has been intimately involved in protest movements against its enemies. In 2014, then-vice-president Joe Biden traveled to Ukraine to gin up the protagonists of the anti-Moscow Maidan Revolution, with senior U.S. official Victoria Nuland even photographed handing out cookies to protestors. Washington was also a major actor in the Hong Kong protests, funding and training many of its leaders, and spending at least $29 million on “pro-democracy” projects in the region.

More Americans were arrested after barely a week of protests following the killing of George Floyd than in over one year of demonstrations in Hong Kong, and protest organizers and journalists alike are still facing lengthy sentences for their roles in them. Yet, the CSIS presents the U.S. response to internal strife as exemplary, stating that “the United States is uniquely positioned to make its own handling of political dissent and protest a centerpiece of U.S. outreach to the world,” claiming that it can “lead not only by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.”

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It is a standard response of authoritarian governments the world over to claim that protests against them are illegitimate, and spurred on by outside enemies intent on seeing them destroyed. This even happens in the U.S., where senior politicians have suggested that political strife of all sorts, from Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling to the George Floyd protests, to the storming of the Capitol Building on January 6, had been amplified by Russia. This latest CSIS offering will only add weight to those governments who see an American hand behind domestic dissent."

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‘I will not self-suffocate!’ WATCH Idaho demonstrators BURN MASKS at state Capitol

"Dozens of demonstrators, including families with small children, held a “burn the mask” demonstration outside Idaho's state Capitol building in Boise, demanding that face covering mandates amid the Covid-19 pandemic be rescinded.

Video footage on social media shows demonstrators dropping masks into a burn barrel on Saturday as people cheered and a man in the background said, “Smell the freedom, baby.”

Journalist Heath Druzin said Idaho Lt. Governor Janice McGeachin and at least three state legislators attended the protest. He posted photos of a crowd of maskless demonstrators listening to a speech and people talking and hugging on a stairway. One woman at the event carried a sign saying, “I will not self-suffocate,” while another sign said, “No masks, no mandates. Free your face and your mind.”

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Social media users mocked the rally. Alex Gutierrez, associate director of career development at Boise State University, quipped, “Was this before or after the book burning?” Others denounced the stunt as an example of terrible parenting."

There's been metaphorical book burnings lately and it hasn't been done by the people who are likely to be anti-mask. All Alex knows is that book burnings are bad and these are bad people so lets call them book burners. It's not really an action they're condemning but an emotion they're attempting to conjure in the reader.

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Our Children Are Crying. “The Covid Stranglehold”

"...the dark forces of the Global Cabal, the Deep State, has plunged humanity – all 193 UN member states at once, into a global catastrophe of epic proportions. To break that globalist spell and to get out of the disaster still unfolding, the world needs thinking people, courageous people, informed and awakened people; people who are not afraid to swim against the stream, to stem the ever-increasing flow of misinformation and government and media lies. It takes educated people. It takes people who dare to resist.

We are experiencing today just the contrary. The minute global elite that has taken a covid-stranglehold on the world’s 7.8 billion people, is doing everything to keep our children, the generations that are supposed to lead the world and humanity into a bright future, uneducated, scared, socially unfit to communicate, to take initiatives, to lead. Today’s youth is depressed by this constant fear propaganda, by the authorities (sic) rules of confinement, not being able to see their friends, to play with them, communicate with them, to do the healthiest social activities there are – exchanging ideas with peers, acquaintances and friends.

One might think, there is a purpose behind it all. Could it be, that this minute diabolical Globalist Cabal, those who are behind “The Great Reset”, co-authored by the WEF’s founder and CEO since the NGO’s creation in 1971, Klaus Schwab – could it be that these people have a plan, namely to leave the world to a generation of uneducated, fear-indoctrinated people, who are used to and have been trained to follow orders, obey authorities and believe their very leaders’ (sic) lies and fall for their manipulations?

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They are being flooded by autocratic measures they do not understand, like being forced to cover their faces by wearing masks in school, it’s like a forced-hiding of their identity from their friends and peers; being obliged to follow strict rules of social distancing – don’t get close to your friend, for the protection of your health, you need a distance to your friend, you can no longer freely communicate, and even if you could, due to the covered face, you could not read your friends facial expressions – which is key to any useful conversation, between kids as well as adults.

Our kids in the west are being fear-induced and permanently indoctrinated, by radio, TV-broadcasts, by permanently having to listen to “case” figures, infections, hospitalizations and death rates. Never mind, that most of these figures are false or distorted, made even more meaningless by absurdly obsessive testing-testing-testing.

To crown it all off – newspapers and magazines depict pictures of coffins, not one or two, but hundreds, mass graves – they are utterly disturbing for adults, let alone for children – fear is being weaponized and replaced by more fear – followed by depression, the perspective of no future — and often and ever more frequently ending in suicide, children’s, adolescents’ suicides are skyrocketing.

Children who are the least vulnerable to the covid disease, are forced into mass-testing, entire communities, by order of the mayor or the governor – all the way to kindergarten. Testing with hurtful nasal swaps, as often as once or twice a month, and if positive – high percentages of these PCR tests – so far, the only covid test method available in the west – are false positives.

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For many kids – this continuous repression makes them aggressive, frustrated and eventually so depressed, that many see no way out – as they see no future in their lives. They are crying from despair, crying from fear, crying from isolation – crying for not being able to congregate with their friends, classmates and peers – and crying for seeing no way out.

What is being done to our children is inhuman. The unilateral, viciously applied repressive measures of confinement, not being able to physically go to school and mix and exchange with friends is destructive. It may leave a deep dent in the social and psychological fabric and subsequent behavior of this future post-covid generation."

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Smith College Under Fire For Treatment Of Employees After Disproven Bias Incident

"Even after the intensive investigation found that there was no racial bias incident, McCartney and others refused to apologize and most of the media did not report on the fact that the original allegation was disproven. McCartney simply declared “I suspect many of you will conclude, as did I, it is impossible to rule out the potential role of implicit racial bias.”

The ACLU was even more dismissive of the abusive treatment of these workers who earned less in salaries than the annual tuition at the school. Keep in mind that the report exonerated these employees who spent years being called racists and left the school. Rahsaan Hall, racial justice director for the A.C.L.U. of Massachusetts and Ms. Kanoute’s lawyer, simply said “It’s troubling that people are more offended by being called racist than by the actual racism in our society. Allegations of being racist, even getting direct mailers in their mailbox, is not on par with the consequences of actual racism.”

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None of this was necessary. Smith College had a video of the incident. It could have declared that the matter would be thoroughly investigated but reaffirm that both the student and these workers are entitled to an opportunity to be heard on the matter. It could have held sessions to discuss claims of systemic racism and privilege at the college for anyone to attend. Likewise, the media could have done a modicum of investigation and even presented both sides of this story as a contested account of racism. The costs of those failures were placed on these workers. Indeed, most media (and certainly McCartney) did not admit to the failures or the unfair treatment of these workers.  Even after the investigation disproving the Kanoute allegation, it is simply too risky for many to be seen as critical of the original narrative."

Collateral damage is totally acceptable in the Social Justice Wars apparently.

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Whistleblower: Biden’s FAA Forcing Air Traffic Controllers to Wear Masks While Speaking to Pilots, Causing Serious Read-Back Errors

"Investigative journalist Alex Berenson reported on Twitter that he received an “urgent warning” from an air traffic controller who works at a major Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The whistleblower told Berenson that the FAA issued a guidance about a month ago requiring controllers to “wear masks at all times” while at work and in position, and warned that the directive could have devastating consequences for airline passengers and pilots.

Prior to this, he said, most controllers took off masks while speaking directly with pilots.

The whistleblower noted that posters have gone up where he works that say “mask up for the mission,” and his supervisors are now insisting that they keep the masks on while speaking with pilots.

“For context, our headsets use a boom microphone that adjusts to fit somewhere an inch or two away from our face. It has created an issue where we get a lot more read-back errors from pilots on instructions because they can’t hear us clearly over the radio,” he explained.

“A bad readback or failure to even copy can cause a lot of problems when we’re busy because we use up more time to correct them,” he continued. “Worst case scenario is a pilot thinks we say something, reads it back wrong, and it results in disaster because we can’t correct them before we lose them on radios.”

The whistleblower noted that communication issues have always been a concern, but the mask mandate has made the problem much worse. He said that he has taken his mask off at times so he could communicate clearly to a pilot, only to be told by a supervisor to put it back on.

“The FAA cares as much, or more about us wearing masks as they do about the safety of passengers and pilots on the aircraft we a re working,” he told Berenson."

Virtue signalling can have deadly consequences...

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Choose Your Ground

"The U.S. military uses a concept called “defense-in-depth” as its primary defensive strategy. Defense-in-depth is a layered, multi-domain approach that uses numerous defensive elements designed to delay and diffuse the advance of an attacker. Rather than relying on a single, strong defensive line, the defender wears down the enemy, causing casualties while deliberately yielding space. Once the enemy has lost momentum and is under stress, the defender mounts a decisive counterattack to destroy the enemy or drive them back to their original lines.

This strategy also works in the political world and is relevant to our current situation. An effective political defense-in-depth strategy should include all mechanisms of political action to wear down the attack on our republic, its culture, and the Constitution. The term political action isn’t just limited to casting a vote or sending money to a political party. Effective political actions include protests, general strikes, walk-outs, sick-outs, civil disobedience, lawfare, and nullification.

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Where does the Second Amendment fit into the concept of a political defense-in-depth? Traditional Americans largely have aligned themselves with Jeffersonian non-aggression principles. These principles define a moral obligation to use non-violent means to achieve political and cultural change, and to use aggression/violence only in defense when other options are unavailable, ineffective, or imprudent.

Consider the colonists in their struggle against the Crown. The colonists built a political movement that unsuccessfully petitioned the crown for a redress of grievances before they took up arms against the British. Colonists used political actions of civil disobedience, such as the famous Boston Tea Party, to make their voices heard. They did not deploy arms before they had the intent to use them. Armed resistance came later, as a collective political activity deliberately applied at designated times to achieve a defined objective. In this struggle, armed resistance was not a single screaming Yankee flinging himself at the nearest redcoat.

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The Second Amendment represents the natural right of Americans to defend themselves, their property, and their way of life through the use of arms. It is not the rifle that the authoritarian fears, but the organized people who might wield it. The Second Amendment, as a deterrent against tyranny and authoritarian government, is a weapon of mutually assured destruction. Its use will necessarily set in motion draconian retaliatory actions by the government and the citizenry. Its employment is costly and is not a move to be taken lightly. The ruling elite understands this. They know that if Americans can’t muster the strength of will to organize, rise up, and use the political measures that are short of armed rebellion, then they most assuredly do not possess the strength of will and courage to cross the line to armed rebellion.

At this point, the Second Amendment stops being a deterrent against tyranny and an authoritarian government and becomes simply a thorn in the side of the ruling elite—to be removed by whatever means they wish and at the time of their choosing.

In asymmetric political warfare [you are here], the weaker party wins by not losing. Its greatest strength is its ability to endure. The goal is to wear down the stronger party and use its own inefficiencies and weaknesses against it. The weaker party chooses the ground to fight on and avoids being drawn into a fixed battle. That means avoiding armed conflict unless the conditions for victory are ensured. This is the same strategy our enemies effectively used against us in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

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The Biden regime is not a sustainable political entity. It cannot continue to exist in its present state because it will collapse under the weight of its own spectacle. As a result, it needs a catalyst to move its increasingly unpopular agenda forward. The catalyst they are trying to create is a defined internal enemy. A bogeyman they can use to justify tyrannical “emergency” actions, which mask the truth of the regime’s activities and enable it to eliminate any credible political opposition.

Since the national security apparatus is the primary regime backer within the permanent bureaucracy, you can expect it to use the provocation-reaction-counteraction template that is the favorite of organizations like the FBI. They provoke and harass the target until it punches back—at which point the target is labeled a threat and a counteraction is justified.

Traditional Americans need to recognize this tactic because they are the antagonist in this regime’s Greek tragedy. If the regime’s enforcers can get traditional Americans to look like they are about to commit violence, then they can justify the passage of the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act and can implement draconian gun control policies. Once they’ve attained the legal authorities to neuter their political opposition, they can move to further isolate them under the guise of national security."

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Teachers fear losing their jobs after trans activists scan their social media to see what posts they ‘liked’

"Lecturers are increasingly facing “transphobia” probes for sharing or even liking posts that counter or critique transgender ideology on social media. These investigations are happening despite many universities having policies that supposedly protect free speech.

Political correctness in colleges, particularly surrounding transgender individuals, is having a chilling effect on free speech. The majority are said to be self-censoring to keep their jobs and secure promotions.

Three weeks ago, two academics in the UK created an anonymous testimonials website to document the prevalence of censorship surrounding the trans debates in British universities. The site has received many submissions, with most reporting how they are self-censoring to avoid backlash."

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Have You Tried Not Being White?

"We find ourselves in a curious situation. The most public, brazen racial hatred is put out into the world every single day by the Left, but it is never acknowledged. It must never be acknowledged for what it is.

Hatred must be disguised and repackaged as something else, something benign. The target is conscripted against his will in a movement for “justice” in which he is the enemy. That he himself is the enemy of justice is never far from the center of this new consciousness, in fact it is the entire reason he must be reeducated in the first place. But he is denied the right to protest his classification as enemy. His “programming” is for his own good.  

He is, in this way, forced to pretend that he is not being attacked and becomes a participant in his own abasement. This strips him of all dignity and renders him totally defenseless. Defensiveness is considered a count against him, a sign of his “fragility.” If he is denied the right to acknowledge attacks on his honor, though, it can only be because he has been, in some way, reduced to something less than human.

Confronted with the most unmistakable hostility, it is his job to “listen” and “understand.” Sympathy for the tormentors is part of the torture.

The hatred directed his way is mystified and couched in a pretentious, fashionable language—a maze of nonsensical concepts with no fixed meaning, but which form their own dialect—a lingo that he must adopt to prove that he is human, in “good standing” with his rulers.

In this way, he is “enlightened” to understand the “proper” meaning of words and forced to participate in a lie.

While they may appear to use “white” as a slur, he is made to understand that this refers not to him personally, nor to any race, but rather to an abstraction: a social conspiracy of “whiteness” which must be “dismantled,” but which can never be precisely defined or identified.

Neither should he go asking for an explanation. He is not granted this privilege. His ignorance, rather, is another count against him. It shows that he is insensitive, that he has not been schooled properly, that he is not a true ally. Apropos of evidence, he is supposed to know what is meant by such nebulous terms as “white supremacy” and “systemic racism,” to acknowledge that they are real and encoded in the most mundane social interactions.

The problem is always conveniently a target that moves whenever they need it to. The case is different when their mood changes and the “construct” talk gives way to ethnic schadenfreude."

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“Fact-checkers” want more power

"The fact-checking industry is trying to impose itself as a de-facto participant in discussions in various countries, as governments consider introducing new regulations that are supposed to suppress “misinformation.”

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As has been the case of late, the charge towards relevance by “fact-checkers,” who apparently want to be accepted as civil society groups, is led by the Poynter Institute – who own the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN).

A post on the organization’s website reporting from an IFCN panel cites Peter Bodkin from AAP FactCheck in Australia as saying that “fact-checkers” need to be as vocal and possible, and assert themselves to governments and the public. The latter, Bodkin believes, must be “educated” in order to stop believing that “fact-checkers” are some of the forces behind internet censorship."

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Investigation Links Fauci to Controversial Experiments that May Have Led to Pandemic

"Fox News investigation says there’s “reasonable grounds to suspect” that SARS-CoV-2, which may have leaked accidentally from a lab in Wuhan, China, was the product of taxpayer-funded gain-of-function experiments commissioned by the U.S. government and overseen by Fauci.

At the outset of the COVID-19 outbreak, anyone who dared question the mainstream government and media narrative that SARS-CoV-2 evolved in the wild did so at the risk of being labeled a conspiracy theorist.

But as months passed, organizations like Children’s Health Defense (CHD), U.S. Right to Know and others began asking questions and calling for investigations.

The Washington Post eventually went out on a limb to print an op-ed suggesting that the virus might have leaked from a lab. And more recently, the Wall Street Journal waded into the controversy with its article, “China’s Reckless Labs Put the World at Risk.”

On Feb. 28, Fox News tackled the COVID origins story, not to point blame, reporter Steve Hilton said, but to make sure “we learn lessons, to prevent the next pandemic.”"

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The New Normal (Phase 2)

"So, we’re almost a year into the “New Normal” (a/k/a “pathologized totalitarianism”) and things are still looking … well, pretty totalitarian.

Most of Western Europe is still in “lockdown,” or “under curfew,” or in some other state of “health emergency.” Police are fining and arresting people for “being outdoors without a valid reason.”

Protest is still banned. Dissent is still censored.

The official propaganda is relentless. Governments are ruling by edict, subjecting people to an ever-changing series of increasingly absurd restrictions of the most fundamental aspects of everyday life.

And now, the campaign to “vaccinate” the entirety of humanity against a virus that causes mild to moderate flu-like symptoms or, more commonly, no symptoms at all, in over 95% of those infected, and that over 99% of the infected survive (and that has no real effect on age-adjusted death rates, and the mortality profile of which is more or less identical to the normal mortality profile) is being waged with literally religious fervor.

“Vaccine passports” (which are definitely creepy, but which bear no resemblance to Aryan Ancestry Certificates, or any other fascistic apartheid-type documents, so don’t even think about making such a comparison!) are in the pipeline in a number of countries. They have already been rolled out in Israel.

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Phase 1 was pretty much classic “shock and awe.” An “apocalyptic virus” was “discovered.” A global “state of emergency” was declared. Constitutional rights were cancelled. Soldiers, police, surveillance cameras, military drones, and robot dogs were deployed to implement the worldwide police state.

The masses were bombarded with official propaganda, photos of people dropping dead in the street, unconscious patients dying in agony, bodies being stuffed into makeshift morgue trucks, hospital ships, ICU horror stories, projections of hundreds of millions of deaths, terror-inducing Orwellian slogans, sentimental “war effort” billboards, and so on.

The full force of the most formidable Goebbelsian propaganda machine in history was unleashed on the public all at once. (See, e.g., CNN, NPR, CNBC, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Forbes, and other “authoritative” sources like the IMF and the World Bank Group, the WEF, UN, WHO, CDC.)

But the “shock and awe” phase can’t go on forever, nor is it ever intended to. Its purpose is (a) to terrorize the targeted masses into a state of submission, (b) to irreversibly destabilize their society, so that it can be radically “restructured,” and (c) to convincingly demonstrate an overwhelming superiority of force, so that resistance is rendered inconceivable.

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The shape of Phase 2 is not entirely clear yet, but one can make a few logical assumptions. Typically, this is the phase in which the conquering force (in this case, GloboCap) restores “normality” (i.e., a “new normality”) to the society it has just destabilized and terrorized. It installs a new occupation-friendly government, restarts the economy, and otherwise begins the gradual transition from martial law to something resembling “normal” everyday life. It hands out candy bars to kids, financial aid to businesses, power to generals and police, and “freedom” to the shell-shocked public.

This appears to be where we are at the moment. As you’ve probably noticed, the corporate media, government leaders, and medical experts have been making noise about “the end of the pandemic,” or at least “the end of the emergency phase” of it. Suddenly, “some level of Covid is tolerable,” “Zero Covid is unlikely,” et cetera. This is happening pretty much right on cue.

Now that the vaccination push is underway, they are trying to temper the mass paranoia and hatred that they have fomented for over a year with some hope and a vision of a post-crisis future.

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The “New Normal” isn’t just about a virus. The “New Normal” was never just about a virus. You don’t need a new “normal” because of a virus. You need a new “normal” when your current “normal” has outlived its usefulness to those in power, which, in our case, are the global capitalist ruling classes.

I’ve been writing about this for … well, most of my life, and publishing these columns for the last five years, so I’m not going to summarize all that here, but, basically, we’re living through one of those historic transformations of the structure of political power that we usually don’t recognize until after it has occurred … not just a “changing of the guard,” a transformation of the nature of power, how it is exercised, the beliefs it is based on, and the “reality” conjured into being by those beliefs.

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A globally-hegemonic system (e.g., global capitalism) has no external enemies, as there is no territory ‘outside’ the system. Its only enemies are within the system, and thus, by definition, are insurgents, also known as ‘terrorists’ and ‘extremists.’

These terms are utterly meaningless, obviously. They are purely strategic, deployed against anyone who deviates from GloboCap’s official ideology … which, in case you were wondering, is called ‘normality’ (or, in our case, currently, ‘New Normality’) … [t]he new breed of ‘terrorists’ do not just hate us for our freedom … they hate us because they hate ‘reality.’

They are no longer our political or ideological opponents … they are suffering from a psychiatric disorder. They no longer need to be argued with or listened to … they need to be ‘treated,’ ‘reeducated,’ and ‘deprogrammed,’ until they accept ‘Reality.’

As we shift from Phase 1 to Phase 2 of the “New Normal,” the pathologization of political dissent will continue, and intensify, both overtly and subtlely. GloboCap and the corporate media will continue to warn of imminent “attacks on democracy” by imaginary “domestic terrorists,” as well as the old “non-domestic terrorists.” They will also continue to warn of imminent threats posed by exotic viruses, and “variants” of exotic viruses, and permanent “conditions” caused by viruses, and other threats to our bodily fluids.

Above all, they will continue to warn of the danger of ingesting “misinformation,” “conspiracy theories,” or any other type of unverified, unauthorized, un-fact-checked content. They will thoroughly diagnose the sources of such content, and exhaustively explain the pathological conditions these sources will clearly be suffering from. They will explore a variety of treatments and cures, and recommend prophylactic measures against potential exposure to these sources."

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People can’t get vaccinated at Walgreens and CVS without giving up their data

"These companies claim that collecting consumer data is important as it helps with record-keeping and ensuring only qualified people get the shots.

Walgreens, for example, requires people interested in the vaccine to register a Walgreens account in order to search for available appointments. By signing up for a Walgreens account, you automatically start receiving marketing emails, which you can opt-out of. However, you also allow the company to “automatically collect information about you and your use of the Services, including without limitation, your real-time location, MAC address, and IP address.”

A spokesperson for Walgreens told the Wall Street Journal that the data “helps us better understand our customers, meet changing needs and continue to enhance and deliver the tailored solutions that we have been known for throughout the pandemic.”

Jonathan Roberts, the COO of CVS, said, “Every one of these customers is coming through our digital front end, so we have their email, we have their text message, and we have the ability to communicate with them regularly.”

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For other retail pharmacies such as Hartig Drug Stores, a chain pharmacy in the Midwest, the vaccination program is an opportunity to bring in more business. The company is encouraging staff to suggest products people might need after receiving the shot, such as ice packs and pain killers."

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Will 2021 be Public Banking’s Watershed Moment? Resolving the Devastation of the Lockdowns

"Just over two months into the new year, 2021 has already seen a flurry of public banking activity. Sixteen new bills to form publicly-owned banks or facilitate their formation were introduced in eight U.S. states in January and February. Two bills for a state-owned bank were introduced in New Mexico, two in Massachusetts, two in New York, one each in Oregon and Hawaii, and Washington State’s Public Bank Bill was re-introduced as a “Substitution.” Bills for city-owned banks were introduced in Philadelphia and San Francisco, and bills facilitating the formation of public banks or for a feasibility study were introduced in New York, Oregon (three bills), and Hawaii.

In addition, California is expected to introduce a bill for a state-owned bank later this year, and New Jersey is moving forward with a strong commitment from its governor to implement one. At the federal level, three bills for public banking were also introduced last year: the National Infrastructure Bank Bill (HR 6422), a new Postal Banking Act (S 4614), and the Public Banking Act (HR 8721).

As Oscar Abello wrote on NextCity.org in February, “2021 could be public banking’s watershed moment.… Legislators are starting to see public banks as a powerful potential tool to ensure a recovery that is more equitable than the last time.”

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Half the cost of infrastructure generally consists of financing, doubling its cost to municipal governments. Local governments are extremely good credit risks; yet private, bank-affiliated rating agencies give them a lower credit score (raising their rates) than private corporations, which are 63 times more likely to default. States are not allowed to go bankrupt, and that is also true for cities in about half the states. State and local governments have a tax base to pay their debts and are not going anywhere, unlike bankrupt corporations, which simply disappear and leave their creditors holding the bag.

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Banks do not have the funding problems of local governments. In March 2020, the Federal Reserve reduced the interest rate at its discount window, encouraging all banks in good standing to borrow there at 0.25%. No stigma or strings were attached to this virtually free liquidity – no need to retain employees or to cut dividends, bonuses, or the interest rates charged to borrowers. Wall Street banks can borrow at a mere one-quarter of one percent while continuing to charge customers 15% or more on their credit cards.

Local governments extend credit to their communities through loan funds, but these “revolving funds” can lend only the capital they have. Depository banks, on the other hand, can leverage their capital, generating up to ten times their capital base in loans. For a local government with its own depository bank, that would mean up to ten times the credit to inject into the local economy, and ten times the profit to be funneled back into community needs. A public depository bank could also borrow at 0.25% from the Fed’s discount window.

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What a state can achieve by forming its own bank has been demonstrated in North Dakota. There  the nation’s only state-owned bank was formed in 1919 when North Dakota farmers were losing their farms to big out-of-state banks. Unlike the Wall Street megabanks mandated to make as much money as possible for their shareholders, the Bank of North Dakota (BND) is mandated to serve the public interest. Yet it has had a stellar return on investment, outperforming even J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. In its 2019 Annual Report, the BND reported its sixteenth consecutive year of record profits, with $169 million in income, just over $7 billion in assets, and a hefty return on investment of 18.6%."

Public banks are key. Why should your state or local government pay Wall St. for the privilege of putting our monetary resources to use?

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Founder resigns after backlash over post about hiring for talent, not color, sexuality, or religion

"The founder and chairman of one of UK’s largest digital marketing and advertising companies, Gordon Beattie, was forced to resign over a badly-worded LinkedIn post.

“At Beattie Communications, we don’t hire blacks, gays or Catholics,” the post reads. “We sign talented people and we don’t care about the colour or their skin, sexual orientation or religion,” the post continued. “That’s the way it should be with every company – only hire people for their talent, experience, knowledge, and wisdom.”"

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South Dakota passes bill banning biological males from participating in female sports to mark Women’s Day

" South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem vowed to sign the legislation that will ban biological males from competing in female sports, following other Republican-controlled states in sending a message on gender politics.

“We're celebrating International Women's Day by defending women's sports,” Noem said Monday on Twitter, minutes after the South Dakota Senate passed the state's Women's Fairness in Sports legislation. “I'm excited to sign this bill very soon.”

South Dakota's bill was passed after Mississippi lawmakers approved similar legislation last week. Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves said on Thursday that he would sign the bill, making it law. Idaho last year became the first US state to enact a law barring transgender females from competing in girls' and women's sports, but a federal court ruling has held up implementation."

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Vaccine Diabolus and the Impending Wave of Rare Neurodegenerative Disorders

"Do you realize that the mRNA vaccine is a purely synthetic PEG-coated lipid nanoparticle that spreads throughout the body and brain creating conditions for debilitating ailments 3 or 4 years down the road? (More on this below)

Do you realize that these dubious vaccines have not been thoroughly tested, did not undergo critical animal trials, did not complete Phase 3 trials, and were waved through the regulatory process under the “Emergency Use Authorization (EUA)” provision?

What does it mean when we say: “The vaccines were waved through under the Emergency Use Authorization provision?”

It means that the vaccines were not required to meet the same rigorous standards or follow the same protocols as previous vaccines. It means that, by definition, these vaccines are not safe. It means that normal precautionary regulations were suspended in order to put these vaccines into service as fast as possible. Isn’t that worth mulling over before rolling up your sleeve?

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The truth is, we don’t need a vaccine. The case numbers and fatalities are already dropping precipitously around the world. The virus is on its way out. Here’s how Pfizer’s former Vice President and Chief Scientist for Allergy & Respiratory Disease, Dr. Michael Yeadon, summed it up some months ago:

   “There is absolutely no need for vaccines to extinguish the pandemic… You do not vaccinate people who aren’t at risk from a disease. You also don’t set about planning to vaccinate millions of fit and healthy people with a vaccine that hasn’t been extensively tested on human subjects.”

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Let’s summarize:

The new messenger RNA vaccines could make recipients more susceptible to serious illness or death. (The vaccine could pave the way for autoimmune disease or ADE Antibody-dependent Enhancement.)

Spike proteins can “trigger an immune reaction” that will “result in infertility.”

The new vaccines contain polyethylene glycol (PEG) which can be “potentially fatal.”

The trials were not long enough to determine whether the vaccines are safe or not. FDA approval does not mean “safe”. Quite the contrary. The FDA is “captured” in the same way the FAA is captured.

Naturally, the analysis of Yeadon and Wodarg has appeared nowhere in the MSM. (Also, Yeadon was recently removed by Twitter.) Experts in their field of learning are no longer allowed to candidly discuss their concerns in a public forum if their conclusions do not jibe with the official narrative. The push to censor opposing points of view is greater now than any time in our 245-year history. The people who now insist that you get vaccinated, are the very same people who are doing everything in the power to prevent you from knowing the truth about their vaccines.

And what is the truth?

The truth is that ‘universal vaccination’ factors quite large in the elitist restructuring agenda that has nothing to do with global pandemic and everything to do with social control. At its heart, Covid is a political phenomenon more than it is a public health emergency. One is merely a fig leaf for the other.

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...The new regime of mRNA vaccines fails on a great many levels which we will discuss in future articles. These “gene editing” vaccines are not medicine, they are strange and menacing hybrid cocktail that was created to achieve an elusive political objective of which we still know very little. If there was ever a time to stand back from the crowd, resist groupthink, and employ one’s own critical thinking skills to decide whether the risks of vaccination far outweigh the benefits; this is it. The choice is yours to make."

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FBI Director Wray uses January 6th Capitol riot to call for backdoors to private messaging apps

"Like many others, the FBI is trying to seize an opportunity to use the January 6 protests in Washington as an excuse to sneak in some dangerous and unrelated policies that happen to suit their particular agendas.

For FBI Director Chris Wray, it’s law enforcement’s now multi-decade obsession with encryption. The US is not the only place where the fallacy persists that police and various spy agencies don’t already have enough tools and powers to prevent anything from actual terrorist attacks to unrest like that seen on Capitol Hill.

It’s a convenient way to deflect from any of law enforcement’s own internal and operational shortcomings that make them incapable of fully utilizing what they already have at their disposal to protect the public and institutions. Instead, like Wray demonstrated during his recent testimony before the US Senate, they play the blame game and time and again, encryption – the backbone of a secure and safe internet – comes up as “the enemy.”"

Without the protection of encryption many individuals who are currently engaging in simple speech will be forced to evaluate whether it is time to act. Strong encryption, just like strong free speech protections, supports peaceful resolutions.

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The Prophet Of The Trump Era

"In the introduction to The Revolt of the Public, Arnold Kling speaks of a different “Gurri moment”: when Dan Rather’s 2004 expose about George W. Bush’s military service was blown up by an amateur blogging under the name “Bucklehead.” In the past, a media titan like CBS could only be second-guessed by another major institutional power. In “Rathergate,” both the network and one of its most iconic celebrities were humiliated by a single individual, a preview of the coming disorientation.

The thesis of The Revolt of the Public is that traditional centralized powers are losing — have lost — authority, in large part because of the demystifying effect of the Internet. The information explosion undermined the elite monopoly on truth, exposing long-concealed flaws. Many analysts had noted the disruptive power of the Internet, but what made Gurri unique is that he also predicted with depressingly humorous accuracy how traditional hierarchies would respond to this challenge: in a delusional, ham-fisted, authoritarian manner that would only confirm the worst suspicions of the public, accelerating the inevitable throw-the-bums-out campaigns. This assessment of the motive for rising public intransigence was not exactly welcomed, but either way, as Kling wrote, “Martin Gurri saw it coming.”

Gurri also noted that public revolts would likely arrive unattached to coherent plans, pushing society into interminable cycles of zero-sum clashes between myopic authorities and their increasingly furious subjects. He called this a “paralysis of distrust,” where outsiders can “neutralize but not replace the center” and “networks can protest and overthrow, but never govern.” With a nod to Yeats, Gurri summed up: “The center cannot hold, and the border has no clue what to do about it.”

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Published in 2014, The Revolt of the Public may be alone among the countless books about the Trump years to correctly peg its core destabilizing problem. While conventional pundits blame everyone from Russians to white nationalists to “fake news” for all that currently ails us, Gurri focused on the inherent problem of authority in the digital age. If you follow his thinking, the specific forms that recent revolts have taken — Brexit, Trump, etc. — have been far less important than what he describes as the “nihilist impulse” behind them, “the wish to smash down whatever stands.” In America, this impulse found Trump, not the other way around. It also could have (and has, in other countries) come from the left instead of the right. The relentless focus on Trump as the center of all evil on earth has mostly served to deflect from a broader narrative about distrust of institutional authority that far pre-dates Trump.

Through a series of case studies ranging from Egypt to Tunisia to Italy to the campaign of Barack Obama, Gurri lays out how snowballing disgust with the blundering arrogance of ruling parties was everywhere leading to upheavals....

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Gurri predicted throughout that entrenched authorities would be unable to distinguish between legitimate criticism and illegitimate rebellion. Once they lost control “over the story told about their performance,” they’d denounce clearly factual evidence of public discontent as lies. Gurri would later talk about centralized authority being “institutionally unable to grasp that it has lost its monopoly over political reality.” This in turn would stimulate even more “distrust and loss of legitimacy.”

This is exactly what happened with Trump. His dominance in primary polls was simply disbelieved by politicians and elite press outlets, who were all — not some, but all — certain that he could never win, not even the nomination."

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Twitter introduces new speech strikes system, will ban accounts that repeatedly post “misinformation”

"Some of the specific examples of the topics that Twitter will label or remove under this policy include “false or misleading” tweets about:

• Adverse impacts or effects of receiving vaccinations, where these claims have been widely debunked
• Personal protective equipment (PPE) such as claims about the efficacy and safety of face masks to reduce viral spread
• Preventative measures such as hand-washing, proper hygiene or sanitation methods, or social distancing
• Local or national advisories or mandates pertaining to curfews, lockdowns, travel restrictions, quarantine protocols, inoculations, including exemptions from such advisories or mandates
• How vaccines are developed, tested, and approved by official health agencies as well as information about government recommendations
• The prevalence of the virus or the disease, such as information pertaining to test results, hospitalizations, or mortality rates
• Research findings (such as misrepresentations of or unsubstantiated conclusions about statistical data) used to advance a specific narrative that diminishes the significance of the disease

Twitter added that high-severity violations of the policy include tweets that contain “misleading information” about “the nature or treatment of the COVID-19 virus” or misleading information about the “pandemic or COVID-19 vaccines that invoke a deliberate conspiracy by malicious and/or powerful forces.”"

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How Wokeness Captured Big Business

"...What explains the greening of Wall Street and corporate CEOs becoming woke and dissing the system that made them rich? In part, it is a cheap way of buying protection—especially when shareholders are paying, as is the case with Marc Benioff, multi-billionaire CEO of Salesforce. “Capitalism, as we know it, is dead,” Benioff declared in the New York Times. Described as “one of the modern-day robber barons,” Benioff earned his billions from a series of acquisitions of profitless software companies and constant stock sales. Benioff’s schtick is “a confidence game in the true sense of the term,” says market analyst Ben Hunt.

Wokeness is not a system of morality with universal applicability. “With every breath we take,” Apple CEO Tim Cook declared in the wake of George Floyd’s death, “we must commit to being that change, and to creating a better, more just world for everyone.” Well, not for everyone—not for the tens of thousands of Chinese workers at Apple’s Foxconn iPhone factory at Longhua. In 2010, a spate of suicides led Foxconn to install nets outside many buildings to catch falling bodies.

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Soukup also documents Disney CEO Bob Iger’s bullying of states like Georgia and North Carolina for passing laws that he dislikes—even as Iger disappeared minority actors from publicity for the Chinese market of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” There is indeed something nauseating about people claiming to be virtuous when they’re not, but to accuse Apple and Disney of hypocrisy would be to miss the point. Wokeness is directed at transforming America, using Wall Street and corporate America to help bring it about.

The Dictatorship of Woke Capital provides the best account so far of how finance capital ended up on the woke side of the culture wars. The book’s great strength is tracing the lineages of woke back to their sources. Soukup identifies two principal streams. The first, an all-American affair associated with progressives such as Richard Ely, Woodrow Wilson, and John Dewey, gave rise to the administrative state and the creation of a class of professional administrators unaccountable to voters and “trained in the ‘science’ of administration to manage society more rationally and carefully than the masses would, if left to their own devices.”

The second has its origins in Europe, with an assortment of Marxists and post-Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci, György Lukacs, and the Frankfurt School. It then proceeded, in the words of the German 1968-er Rudi Dutschke, on “the long march through the institutions,” the New Left successfully colonizing virtually the entire American system of higher education."