PP NewsBrief: 2021-03-19

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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Moving Mountains and Making Men: King Randall and “The X For Boys”

"Crediting his mom, stepdad, reading, and ultimately God for his determined spirit, Randall faced numerous obstacles in early 2019 when attempting to develop community solutions for the troubled young boys he wanted to help. Albany, GA has one of the highest crime and poverty rates in the nation, with white supremacy believed to be one of the most significant obstacles throughout the community. Not everyone at the town meetings was on board with how he wanted to help and mentor the boys, so Randall decided to go about it all on his own, telling UncoverDC of the ideology, “if we do believe it (white supremacy) is the biggest issue, we need to simply stop begging and asking white people for everything and do something for ourselves.”

In the early days, Randall gathered troubled boys from around town and took them on various field trips. He asked their parents to send twenty bucks if possible to cover things like gas and tickets to different museums. He also started putting together auto-repair workshops for the boys, teaching them how to change oil, brakes, work on alternators, starters, and other useful car repair skills.

After auto-repair, Randall moved on to home-improvement-type skills. In the summer of 2019, he held a summer-camp workshop in his home with 20 boys. Randall proudly stated that “every day, parents trusted me enough to drop their kids off from 8-5 at my house.” He taught them how to create and grow food in a community garden, how to change ceiling fans and toilets, you name it. Randall said that his stepfather, a “big handyman country boy,” taught him these skills growing up, and he believes they are ones that “our boys need to know.”

Randall also started reading with the boys in summer-camp and soon realized that the majority of them couldn’t read. Frustrated, he commented, “they’re in the 6th, 7th, and 8th grades and can’t read—that is ridiculous. Who is passing them through school?” Randall immediately started a book club and held one-on-one reading sessions with the boys to catch them up. As summer came to a close, Randall continued to take the boys on field trips through the fall and winter. He started a bowling team to expose them to different sports.

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Besides teaching the boys to work with their hands and grow their minds, Randall helps them find ways to work through uncomfortable traumatic issues, like past emotional and physical abuse, including incest. He also started a YouTube channel that covers topics such as: “Have you ever done drugs? Do you feel safe in the community?”, “What is a role model? Are you a virgin?”, “Why is anger management so important for our young men?” and “Does age determine wisdom?

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Recently, after a couple of other building options didn’t pan out, Randall decided to call Albany’s school superintendent, Kenneth Dyer, to inquire if the district had any school facilities that weren’t being used. He discovered that three buildings were scheduled to be demolished. He toured one of the empty schools located on an impoverished side of town in an area that would benefit profoundly from a school like his. It almost seemed too good to be true.

According to Randall, the school, minus a little TLC, is in great condition, and to this day, he has no idea why it was scheduled to be torn down. After some negotiations, they made a deal. The Life Preparatory School for Boys is becoming a reality. In fact, on the day of our interview, Randall had just purchased a school bus.

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Randall remarked that learning at The Life Preparatory School for Boys will not begin and end with the boys. He emphasized the importance of having positive support at home. For a child to attend, his parents must participate in mandatory classes at least once a month designed to teach them life skills they may not possess, like how to manage a bank account."

You want to fight the elite? This is what it looks like.

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Wall Street Journal Forbids Writers From Using the Phrase ‘Illegal Immigrant’

"The ostensibly right-leaning Wall Street Journal further curtailed its own writers’ freedom of speech, dictating that none of its staff are to use the phrase “illegal immigrant,” as reported by Breitbart.

The change was announced in the Journal’s newly-updated style guide, where it specifies that, although writers are still allowed to refer to the process itself as “illegal immigration,” the words “illegal” and “illegal immigrant” are no longer allowed to be used in any of its articles, as they claimed that this amounts to “labeling people.”

The guide tells writers that “when describing a broad category of immigrants, use alternatives such as ‘immigrants who entered the country illegally’” or “‘people living in the U.S. unlawfully or without the legal right.’” The guide further went on to claim that “illegal immigration is a highly charged issue that must be covered with precision and sensitivity, without taking sides or resorting to perjorative labels or euphemisms.”"

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Monetary Progression and the Bitcoiner’s History of Money

"In the world of cryptocurrencies there’s a hype for a certain kind of monetary history that inevitably leads to bitcoin, thereby informing its users and zealots about the immense value of their endeavor. Don’t get me wrong – I laud most of what they do, and I’m much looking forward to see where it’s all going. But their (mis)use of monetary history is quite appalling for somebody who studies these things, especially since this particular story is so crucial and fundamental to what bitcoiners see themselves advancing.

Let me sketch out some problems. Their history of money...goes something like this:

• In the beginning, there was self-sufficiency and the little trade that occurred place took place through barter.
• In a Mengerian process of increased saleability (Menger’s word is generally translated as ‘saleableness’, rather than ‘saleability’), some objects became better and more convenient for trade than others, and those objects emerged as early primative money. Normally cherry-pick some of the most salient examples here, like hide, cowrie shells, wampum or Rai stones.
• Throughout time, precious metals won out as the best objects to use as money, initially silver and gradually, as economies grew richer, large-scale payments using gold overtook silver.
• In the early twentieth century, evil governments monopolized the production of money and through increasingly global schemes eventually cut the ties to hard money and put the world on a paper money fiat standard, ensuring steady (and sometimes not-so-steady) inflation.
• Rising up against this modern Goliath are the technologically savvy bitcoiners, thwarting the evil money producing empires and launching their own revolutionary and unstoppable money; the only thing that stands in its way to worldwide success are crooked bankers backed by their evil governments and propaganda as to how useless and inapt bitcoin is.

This progressively upward story is pretty compelling: better money overtake worse money until one major player unfairly took over gold – the then-best money – replacing it with something inferior that the Davids of the crypto world now intents to reverse. I’m sure it’ll make a good movie one day. Too bad that it’s not true.

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...governments have almost always defined – or at least seriously impacted – decisions over what money individuals have chosen to use....

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...Most bills of exchange were denominated in the major unit of account of the dominant financial centre at the time (from the 15th to the 20th century progressively Bruges, Antwerp, Amsterdam and London), quite often using a ghost money, in reference to the purchasing power of a centuries-old coins or social convention.

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...monetary history is, contrary to what bitcoiners might believe, not a steady upward race towards harder and harder money."

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On The Psychology Of The Conspiracy Denier

"Why is it that otherwise perfectly intelligent, thoughtful and rationally minded people baulk at the suggestion that sociopaths are conspiring to manipulate and deceive them? And why will they defend this ill-founded position with such vehemence?

History catalogues the machinations of liars, thieves, bullies and narcissists and their devastating effects. In modern times too, evidence of corruption and extraordinary deceptions abound.

We know, without question, that politicians lie and hide their connections and that corporations routinely display utter contempt for moral norms – that corruption surrounds us.

We know that revolving doors between the corporate and political spheres, the lobbying system, corrupt regulators, the media and judiciary mean that wrongdoing is practically never brought to any semblance of genuine justice.

We know that the press makes noise about these matters occasionally but never pursues them with true vigour.

We know that in the intelligence services and law enforcement wrongdoing on a breathtaking scale is commonplace and that, again, justice is never forthcoming.

We know that governments repeatedly ignore or trample on the rights of the people, and actively abuse and mistreat the people. None of this is controversial.

So exactly what is it that conspiracy deniers refuse to acknowledge with such fervour, righteousness and condescension? Why, against all the evidence, do they sneeringly and contemptuously defend the crumbling illusion that ‘the great and good’ are up there somewhere, have everything in hand, have only our best interests at heart, and are scrupulous, wise and sincere? That the press serves the people and truth rather than the crooks? That injustice after injustice result from mistakes and oversights, and never from that dread word: conspiracy?

What reasonable person would continue to inhabit such a fantasy world?

The point of disagreement here is only on the matter of scale. Someone who is genuinely curious about the plans of powerful sociopaths won’t limit the scope of their curiosity to, for example, one corporation, or one nation. Why would they? Such a person assumes that the same patterns on display locally are likely to be found all the way up the power food chain. But the conspiracy denier insists this is preposterous.

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Sociopaths do not choose their worldview consciously, and are simply unable to comprehend why normal people would put themselves at such an incredible disadvantage by limiting themselves with conscientiousness and empathy, which are as beyond the understanding of the sociopath as a world without them are to the humane being.

All the sociopath need do to win in the game is lie publicly whilst conspiring privately. What could be simpler? In 2021, to continue to imagine that the world we inhabit is not largely driven by this dynamic amounts to reckless naiveté bordering on insanity. Where does such an inadvertently destructive impulse originate?

The infant child places an innate trust in those it finds itself with – a trust which is, for the most part, essentially justified. The infant could not survive otherwise.

In a sane and healthy society, this deep instinct would evolve as the psyche developed. As self-awareness, the cognitive and reasoning abilities and scepticism evolved in the individual, this innate trust impulse would continue to be understood as a central need of the psyche. Shared belief systems would exist to consciously evolve and develop this childish impulse in order to place this faith somewhere consciously – in values and beliefs of lasting meaning and worth to the society, the individual, or, ideally, both.

Reverence and respect for tradition, natural forces, ancestors, for reason, truth, beauty, liberty, the innate value of life, or the initiating spirit of all things, might all be considered valid resting places in which to consciously place our trust and faith – as well as those derived from more formalised belief systems.

Regardless of the path taken to evolve and develop a personal faith, it is the bringing of one’s own consciousness and cognition to this innate impulse that is relevant here. I believe this is a profound responsibility – to develop and cultivate a mature faith – which many are, understandably, unaware of.

What occurs when there is a childish need within us which has never evolved beyond its original survival function of trusting those in our environment who are, simply, the most powerful; the most present and active? When we have never truly explored our own psyches, and deeply interrogated what we truly believe and why? When our motivation for trusting anything or anyone goes unchallenged? When philosophy is left to the philosophers?

I suggest the answer is simple, and that the evidence of this phenomenon and the havoc it is wreaking is all around us: the innate impulse to trust the mother never evolves, never encounters and engages with its counterbalance of reason (or mature faith), and remains forever on its ‘default’ infant setting.

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In my view, this is how conspiracy deniers are able to cling to and aggressively defend the utterly illogical fantasy that somehow – above a certain undefined level of the societal hierarchy – corruption, deceit, malevolence and narcissism mysteriously evaporate. That, contrary to the maxim, the more power a person has, the more integrity they will inevitably exhibit. These poor deluded souls essentially believe that where personal experience and prior knowledge cannot fill in the gaps in their worldview – in short, where there is a barred door – mummy and daddy are behind it, working out how best to ensure that their little precious will be comfortable, happy and safe forever.

This is the core, comforting illusion at the root of the conspiracy denier’s mindset, the decrepit foundation upon which they build a towering castle of justification from which to pompously jeer at and mock those who see otherwise.

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The tediously common refrain from the conspiracy denier is, ‘there couldn’t be a conspiracy that big’.

The simple retort to such a self-professed expert on conspiracies is obvious: how big?

The biggest ‘medical’ corporations in the world can go for decades treating the settling of court cases as mere business expenses, for crimes ranging from the suppressing of adverse test events to multiple murders resulting from undeclared testing to colossal environmental crimes.

Governments perform the vilest and most unthinkable ‘experiments’ (crimes) on their own people without consequence.

Politicians habitually lie to our faces, without consequence.

And on and on. At what point, exactly, does a conspiracy become so big that ‘they’ just couldn’t get away with it, and why? I suggest it’s at the point where the cognitive ability of the conspiracy denier falters, and their unconscious survival instinct kicks in. The point at which the intellect becomes overwhelmed with the scope of events and the instinct is to settle back into the familiar comforting faith known and cultivated since the first moment one’s lips found the nipple. The faith that someone else is dealing with it – that where the world becomes unknown to us, a powerful and benevolent human authority exists in which we have only to place our faith unconditionally in order to guarantee eternal emotional security.

This dangerous delusion may be the central factor placing humanity’s physical security and future in the hands of sociopaths.

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Power corrupts. And, in the world today, misplaced and unfounded trust could well be one of the greatest sources of power there is.

Massive criminal conspiracies exist. The evidence is overwhelming. The scope of those currently underway is unknown, but there is no reason to imagine, in the new global age, that the sociopathic quest for power or the possession of the resources required to move towards it is diminishing. Certainly not while dissent is mocked and censored into silence by gatekeepers, ‘useful idiots’, and conspiracy deniers, who are, in fact, directly colluding with the sociopathic agenda through their unrelenting attack on those who would shine a light on wrongdoing.

It is every humane being’s urgent responsibility to expose sociopathic agendas wherever they exist – never to attack those who seek to do so.

Now, more than ever, it is time to put away childish things, and childish impulses, and to stand up as adults to protect the future of the actual children who have no choice but to trust us with their lives."

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Digital Trails: How the FBI Identifies, Tracks and Rounds Up Dissidents

"Databit by databit, we are building our own electronic concentration camps. With every new smart piece of smart technology we acquire, every new app we download, every new photo or post we share online, we are making it that much easier for the government and its corporate partners to identify, track and eventually round us up.

Saint or sinner, it doesn’t matter because we’re all being swept up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.

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Relying on selfies, social media posts, location data, geotagged photos, facial recognition, surveillance cameras and crowdsourcing, government agents are compiling a massive data trove on anyone and everyone who may have been anywhere in the vicinity of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The amount of digital information is staggering: 15,000 hours of surveillance and body-worn camera footage; 1,600 electronic devices; 270,000 digital media tips; at least 140,000 photos and videos; and about 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones.

And that’s just what we know.

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For instance, you didn’t even have to be involved in the Capitol riots to qualify for a visit from the FBI: investigators have reportedly been tracking—and questioning—anyone whose cell phones connected to wi-fi or pinged cell phone towers near the Capitol. One man, who had gone out for a walk with his daughters only to end up stranded near the Capitol crowds, actually had FBI agents show up at his door days later. Using Google Maps, agents were able to pinpoint exactly where they were standing and for how long.

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It’s not just the FBI on the hunt, however.

They’ve enlisted the help of volunteer posses of private citizens, such as Deep State Dogs, to collaborate on the grunt work. As Dinah Voyles Pulver reports, once Deep State Dogs locates a person and confirms their identity, they put a package together with the person’s name, address, phone number and several images and send it to the FBI.

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Chances are, as the Washington Post reports, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.

In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.

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As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.

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It’s a sure bet that anything the government welcomes (and funds) too enthusiastically is bound to be a Trojan horse full of nasty, invasive surprises.

Case in point: police body cameras. Hailed as the easy fix solution to police abuses, these body cameras—made possible by funding from the Department of Justice—turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras. Of course, if you try to request access to that footage, you’ll find yourself being led a merry and costly chase through miles of red tape, bureaucratic footmen and unhelpful courts."

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Father jailed after referring to biological female child as his daughter

"There is a man in Canada who can only be alluded to as He Who Shall Not Be Named: Robert Hoogland. For the sake of natural justice, it is important to speak this man's name. He is now the Canadian state's prisoner of conscience.

The warrant was issued by a judge for the arrest of a father after calling his biological female child his "daughter," and referring to her with the pronouns "she" and "her." Hoogland was found to be in contempt of court.

Hoogland is a father to a gender non-conforming biological female 14-year-old who identifies as transgender and prefers the use of male pronouns. Hoogland has repeatedly called this person his daughter, though the court has forbade it.

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Hoogland opposes his child's undergoing "gender affirmative" medical procedures, and has stated this opposition again and again, in the hope of saving his child from irreversible harm. The Canadian medical system, the legal system, and the child's mother press ahead with social and medical transition of the child.

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Hoogland told his story. The child had complex problems, but the court blamed them all on gender dysphoria. His marriage to the child's mother had broken up. He said that, in grades 5 and 6, his daughter was "getting into trouble and hanging out with boys," so they arranged for her to see the school counsellor. In grade 7, he noticed she cut off her long hair and started wearing a toupé. He said that she developed intense crushes on two male teachers, and made a suicide attempt.

Hoogland discovered that the school had been showing his daughter SOGI 123, the going sexual and gender identity education materials in British Columbia which amounts to transgender ideology "propaganda videos." In the grade 7 yearbook, the child was referred to by a different name. The school counsellor changed the child's name without telling her parents. The school "socially transitioned" the biologically female child on its own initiative, with the input of a gender ideologue psychologist, Dr. Wallace Wong.

When Hoogland accompanied his child to a consultation with Wong, the psychologist advised the pubescent child to take testosterone. Wong referred the child to the endocrinology unit at the local hospital. Meanwhile, Hoogland was looking for mental health solutions to help the child without drugs.

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A gender identity activist lawyer, Barbara Findley, represented the child in court. Justice Boden decided that the child's best interests lay in destroying her long-term health to make her body appear more like that of a male.

Hoogland, in contrast, thinks his daughter's best interests lie in preserving his child's health, in case his child ends up among the estimated 85 percent of children who desist in their belief that they are the opposite sex once puberty ends.

He said, "Here I am, sitting there as a parent, watching a perfectly healthy child be destroyed, and there's nothing I can do but sit on the sideline according to Justice Boden at the time. I can only affirm, or get thrown in jail."

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"What kind of father would I be if, in ten years time she's detransitioning, and she asks me 'why didn't you do anything to stop this? None of your stuck your neck out for me back then.'" He said.

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The Canadian state has taken a drastically wrong turning by institutionalizing transsexual medical procedures for children, then imposing draconian constraints on free expression to conceal the full horror of what it is doing to a generation of children. It seems unwilling to consider the implications of the decision in Keira Bell v Tavistock in the UK.

In December, the high court handed down the decision in Keira Bell's judicial review of the state's gender identity clinic, the Tavistock. It held that children of 16 and under were incapable of giving informed consent to puberty blockers.

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...with a four-in-five chance of desisting, and incontrovertible evidence that "gender-affirming" medical experiments harm the body and fail to help mental wellbeing, what reasonable adult could now argue that she should stay on that path?

We watch the Hoogland case develop with interest, and hope that his arrest and imprisonment may precipitate a watershed moment in drawing national attention to the atrocity of pediatric transitioning."

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COVID-19, Trust, and Wellcome: How Charity’s Pharma Investments Overlap with Its Research Efforts

"An increasingly clear feature of the covid-19 pandemic is that the public health response is being driven not only by governments and multilateral institutions, such as the World Health Organisation, but also by a welter of public-private partnerships involving drug companies and private foundations.

One leading voice to emerge is the Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s top funders of health research, whose sprawling charitable activities in the pandemic include co-leading a WHO programme to support new covid-19 therapeutics. The Access to Covid-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator project hopes to raise billions of dollars and deliver hundreds of millions of treatment courses in the year ahead, including dexamethasone and a number of monoclonal antibodies.1

At the same time, The BMJ finds, Wellcome itself holds investments in companies producing these same treatments. Financial disclosures from late 2020 show that Wellcome has a £275m (€318m; $389m) stake in Novartis, which manufactures dexamethasone and is investigating additional therapeutics. And Roche, in which Wellcome holds a £252m stake,2 is helping to manufacture monoclonal antibodies with Regeneron. Both Roche and Novartis report having had conversations with WHO’s ACT Accelerator about their therapeutic drugs.3

Wellcome’s financial interests have been published on the trust’s website and through financial regulatory filings but do not seem to have been disclosed as financial conflicts of interest in the context of Wellcome’s work on covid-19, even as they show that the trust is positioned to potentially gain from the pandemic financially.

Revelations of the Wellcome Trust’s financial conflicts of interest follow news reports that another charity, the Gates Foundation, is also positioned to potentially benefit financially from its leading role in the pandemic response. An investigation by the Nation revealed that Gates had more than $250m (£179m; €206m) invested in companies working on covid-19 and cited civil society groups expressing alarm with the outsize influence the billionaire charity wields in the pandemic response, which they see as elevating the role of the drug industry.4

Yet charities such as Gates and Wellcome—and even drug companies—have generally been praised in the news media during the pandemic for their efforts to solve the public health crisis, with relatively little attention paid to their financial interests and with few checks and balances put on their work.

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The Wellcome Trust disputes that its investments compromise—or conflict with—its independence. “We are not aware of any situation in our relations with . . . the ACT Accelerator in which a conflict has arisen as a result of our investment portfolio, or in which it would have been necessary for Wellcome representatives to recuse themselves,” a spokesperson said, declining to comment on its investments in Novartis or Roche. “We would never make decisions or advise others about the pandemic response for a reason other than public health.”"

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The 2020 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d’État and the “Great Reset”

"This E-book consists of a Preface and Ten Chapters.

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Each of the ten chapters provides factual information as well as analysis on the following topics: What Is Covid-19, what is SARS-CoV-2, how Is it identified, how is it estimated? The timeline and historical evolution of the Corona Crisis, the devastating economic and financial impacts, the enrichment of a social minority of billionaires, how the lockdown policies trigger unemployment and mass poverty Worldwide, the devastating impacts on mental health.

The E-book also includes analysis of curative and preventive drugs as well as a review of Big Pharma’s Covid-19 vaccine initiative.

Also analyzed are issues pertaining to the derogation of fundamental human rights, censorship of medical doctors, freedom of expression and the protest movement. The last chapter focusses on the unfolding global debt crisis, the destabilization of national governments, the threats to democracy including “global governance” and the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” proposal.

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We are at the crossroads of one of the most serious crises in World history. We are living history, yet our understanding of the sequence of events since January 2020 has been blurred.

Worldwide, people have been misled both by their governments and the media as to the causes and devastating consequences of the Covid-19 “pandemic”.

The unspoken truth is that the novel coronavirus provides a pretext and a justification to powerful financial interests and corrupt politicians to precipitate the entire World into a spiral of mass unemployment, bankruptcy, extreme poverty and despair.

More than 7 billion people Worldwide are directly or indirectly affected by the corona crisis.

The COVID-19 public health “emergency” under WHO auspices was presented to public opinion as a means (“solution”) to containing the “killer virus”.

If the public had been informed and reassured that Covid is  (according to the WHO definition) “Similar to Seasonal Influenza”, the fear campaign would have fallen flat. The lockdown and closure of the national economy would have been rejected outright.

The first stage of this crisis (outside China) was launched by the WHO on January 30th 2020 at a time when there were 5  cases in the US, 3 in Canada, 4 in France, 4 in Germany.

Do these numbers justify the declaration of a Worldwide public health emergency?

The fear campaign was sustained by political statements and media disinformation.

People are frightened. They are encouraged to do the PCR test, which is flawed. A positive PCR test does not mean that you are infected and/or that you can transmit the virus.

The RT-PCR Test is known to produce a high percentage of false positives. Moreover, it does not identify the virus.

From the outset in January 2020, there was no “scientific basis” to justify the launching of a Worldwide public health emergency.

In February, the covid crisis was accompanied by a major crash of financial markets. There is evidence of financial fraud.

And on March 11, 2020: the WHO officially declared a Worldwide pandemic at a time when there were  44,279 cases and 1440 deaths outside China out of a population of 6.4 billion (Estimates of confirmed cases based on the PCR test)..

Immediately following the March 11, 2020 WHO announcement, confinement and lockdown instructions were transmitted to 193 member states of the United Nations.

Unprecedented in history, applied almost simultaneously in a large of number countries, entire sectors of the World economy have been destabilized. Small and medium sized enterprises have been driven into bankruptcy. Unemployment and poverty are rampant.

The social impacts of these measures are not only devastating, they are ongoing under what is described as “A Second Wave”.  There is no evidence of a “Second Wave”. Amply documented the PCR estimates are flawed.

The health impacts (mortality, morbidity) resulting from the closing down of national economies far surpass those attributed to Covid-19.

Famines have erupted in at least 25 developing countries according to UN sources.

The mental health of millions of people Worldwide has been affected as a result of the lockdown, social distancing, job losses, bankruptcies, mass poverty and despair. The frequency of suicides and drug addiction has increased Worldwide.

“V the Virus” is said to be responsible for the wave of bankruptcies and unemployment. That’s a lie. There is no causal relationship between the (microscopic) SARS-2 virus and economic variables.

It’s the powerful financiers and billionaires who are behind this project which has contributed to the destabilization (Worldwide) of the real economy. And there is ample evidence that the decision to close down a national economy (resulting in poverty and unemployment) will inevitably have an impact on patterns of morbidity and mortality.

Since early February 2020, the Super Rich have cashed in on billions of dollars.

Amply documented it’s the largest redistribution of global wealth in World history, accompanied by a process of Worldwide impoverishment."

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These ‘Inactive’ Ingredients in COVID Vaccines Could Trigger Allergic Reactions

"COVID vaccine makers have not only introduced new primary ingredients to the U.S. vaccine stage, but they’ve bundled these new ingredients with “inactive” ingredients in unprecedented ways that raise the risk for dangerous allergic reactions.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) claims that vaccines “use only the ingredients they need to be as safe and effective as possible.”  The star of the show in any vaccine is the “active” ingredient, which is the one designed to create an antibody response.

But the other, supposedly “inactive” ingredients — known as excipients — also play significant, and in many cases risky, co-starring roles.

Studies of licensed vaccines have identified many problems with these secondary ingredients — adjuvants like aluminum, preservatives like thimerosal and stabilizers like gelatin — not to mention highlighting the presence in vaccines of residual DNA from cell lines used in the manufacturing process as well as disclosed and undisclosed contaminants.

With the advent of three experimental COVID injections approved for emergency use in the U.S., manufacturers have introduced new primary ingredients to the U.S. vaccine stage — messenger RNA (mRNA) in the Pfizer and Moderna injections and an adenovirus vector in the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) injection.

Not only that, but vaccine makers have bundled these new primary ingredients with  “inactive” excipients in unprecedented ways — polyethylene glycol (PEG) in the case of the mRNA vaccines and polysorbate 80 in the J&J shot.

PEGs and polysorbates are structurally similar and are also sometimes combined in a PEG-polysorbate 80 mixture that is “substantially the same as that of … pure PEG.” Pre-COVID, both compounds had already been flagged for their ability to cross-react and produce immediate hypersensitivity reactions, a type of “exaggerated or inappropriate” immune response that can include anaphylaxis.

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Allergic sensitization is a complicated affair that even allergists do not fully comprehend, and there are ongoing questions about the mechanism of sensitization to PEGs (and, by implication, to polysorbates).

In their 2019 paper, Phillips and co-authors describe two case studies involving recurrent exposures to medical products relying on PEG excipients (colonoscopy preparations and corticosteroids), also describing occupational exposure from glycol-containing hydraulic fluids. In both instances, these exposures resulted in cross-reactivity to polysorbates.

In his final exposure to PEG, the first patient lost consciousness, “knocking a hole in the drywall with his head,” and after experiencing plummeting blood pressure of 60/20 spent a night in the emergency room. Subsequent skin testing showed positivity to polysorbate-80-containing products ranging from a corticosteroid (triamcinolone acetonide) and eye drops to a pneumococcal vaccine.

The scenario was similar for the second patient, who became dangerously hypotensive following PEG exposure, ended up in the emergency room and had a positive allergy skin test to the same polysorbate-containing corticosteroid.

Both case studies hint at one of the central problems with PEGs and polysorbates: They are everywhere, potentially offering numerous opportunities for sensitization. For example, PEGs are used in drugs, cosmetics, personal care items such as toothpaste and shampoo, bowel preparations for colonoscopy and as a food additive.

As a result of industry’s pervasive reliance on PEGs, approximately 72% of contemporary samples of human blood analyzed in 2016 revealed detectable and sometimes high levels of anti-PEG antibodies — with 8% displaying extremely elevated levels strongly associated with anaphylaxis."

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Moderna begins testing COVID-19 vaccine on infants and children

"Moderna has started testing its COVID-19 vaccine on infants and children.

According to reports Tuesday, the pharmaceutical company is seeking to expand approval for its vaccine for those between the ages of six months and 12-years-old. The study will consist of nearly 7,000 children in both the U.S. and Canada.

“There will be two parts to this study, the first parts is where we will find the appropriate dose of the vaccine for children,” explained Jacqueline Miller, Moderna’s therapeutic area head for infectious diseases. “Children often need lower doses of vaccines than adults, so we want to make sure we find the best dose that increases their immunity.”"

This is crazy. Why would you sign up your kid for a medical experiment when they're the least likely to die of COVID19?

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The Media and The Mayhem: The Chauvin Trial Coverage Follows A Dangerous Pattern

"Trials, however, are based on the evidence and elements of crimes. They are designed to separate the material from the mythological. A good example is the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, which provoked days of rioting. The shooting was widely called murder by national figures and commentators. To this day, because of wildly inaccurate media coverage, pundits and protesters still refer to Brown holding up his hands and pleading, “Don’t shoot!” However, the officers involved were never charged despite long, repeated federal and state investigations that found no criminal culpability. Indeed, the Obama Justice Department and other investigations refuted the hands up, don’t shoot claim.

Chauvin’s trial has some of the same problematic elements of incomplete or distorted coverage and commentary. It clearly is much stronger than the Michael Brown case — and one can not overestimate the impact of the videotape of Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for almost 10 minutes as Floyd pleads “I can’t breathe.” The video is seared into the minds of many, provoking anger and disgust. Admittedly, I view cases from the perspective of a longtime defense attorney, but this one has defense points that are rarely reported but could prove decisive in this trial.

...

The biggest defense point will come from official autopsy and toxicology reports. The autopsy did not cite restraint as the cause of the death, instead citing “cardiopulmonary arrest while being restrained by law enforcement officer(s).” (The family’s autopsy disagrees, citing death by asphyxiation). The preliminary finding of the autopsy “revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation. Mr. Floyd had underlying health conditions including coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease.”

The autopsy states that Floyd had fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system. The level of fentanyl was extremely high, and documents from the autopsy attribute the following statement to Andrew Baker, Hennepin County’s chief medical examiner: “Fentanyl at 11 ng/ml — this is higher than (a) chronic pain patient. If he were found dead at home alone & no other apparent cause, this could be acceptable to call an OD [overdose]. Deaths have been certified w/levels of 3.”

The toxicology report on Floyd’s blood amplifies that point, stating: “In fatalities from fentanyl, blood concentrations are variable and have been reported as low as 3 ng/ml.” Floyd’s blood showed almost four times that level. There is palpable fear that even discussing such countervailing defense issues will lead to accusations of being a racist or an apologist for police brutality. As a result, most of these details are routinely omitted from coverage, or only obliquely referenced.

...

If Chauvin is acquitted of murder, many are likely to be unsatisfied by a second-degree manslaughter conviction carrying a presumptive sentence of 41 months to 57 months, rather than a sentence of up to 15 years. The anger is likely to be greater if they were never told of the defense arguments and evidence. Chauvin’s trial shows the same profile as past cases with a mix of heightened charges and heightened expectations in what is a difficult prosecution case. Chauvin could very well be convicted of murder but, if not, the incomplete commentary and coverage will only add to the ensuing unrest."

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How Government Squelches the Human Need to Feel Important

"Among the many psycho-social crises afflicting Americans is a crisis of importance. Fewer Americans feel important than did Americans in the past.

Why? What has happened?

What has happened is a steep decline in the number of institutions that gave people a feeling of importance.

Given that work is generally regarded as one of the most ubiquitous providers of purpose, and that, prior to the COVID-19 lockdown, more Americans were working than ever before, one would think that more Americans than ever before felt important.

It has not turned out that way. For many, work has not provided the sense of importance people expected it to, let alone fulfilled the other great need: for meaning....

...

Moreover, throughout history, work was rarely seen as a primary provider of importance or meaning—for either sex. Work was little more than a necessity, and the vast majority of people would have happily abandoned their often back-breaking, drudgery-inducing work if they could afford to.

For the most part, people sought—and found—importance and meaning outside of work. This was especially true in America, where “associations” provided both importance and meaning.

Nongovernmental associations, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his brilliant analysis of American life in the early 19th century, was the key to Americans’ success and happiness. These included, first and foremost, religious associations and religion in general. Most religious people feel important—to God, to their community, to their family. My father was the president of our synagogue, and my mother was active in the synagogue’s “sisterhood.” Though both worked full time, those roles provided them with immense meaning and sense of importance.

Add to that: Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions clubs; book clubs; the Masons; bowling leagues; coaching Little League; volunteer charitable work; teaching Bible in Sunday school. These provided people with a sense of importance.

The key to all these associations was their being independent of government. As government has grown, nearly all these associations have shrunk. Therefore, we have a rule: The more government intrudes in people’s lives, the less important most people feel—unless they work for the government.

Yet, to progressives, government is, or should be, almost everything in people’s lives. It should take care of as many people as possible. This comes at a massive price: The more one relies on the government, the more one will inevitably lack a sense of importance."

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5 former OPCW officials join prominent voices to call out Syria cover-up

"Five former officials from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons have joined a group of prominent signatories to urge the OPCW to address the controversy surrounding its investigation of an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria in April 2018.

Leaks from inside the OPCW show that key scientific findings that cast doubt on claims of Syrian government guilt were censored, and that the original investigators were removed from the probe. Since the cover-up became public, the OPCW has shunned accountability and publicly attacked the two whistleblowers who challenged it from inside.

The “Statement of Concern” is signed by five former OPCW officials, including the organization’s founding leader, José Bustani, and others including Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Tulsi Gabbard, John Pilger, Lord West of Spithead, as well two former senior UN officials, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck.

“The issue at hand threatens to severely damage the reputation and credibility of the OPCW and undermine its vital role in the pursuit of international peace and security,” the statement says. “It is simply not tenable for a scientific organization such as the OPCW to refuse to respond openly to the criticisms and concerns of its own scientists whilst being associated with attempts to discredit and smear those scientists.”"

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Bad “Optics”: On Pseudo-Events and Pseudo-Democracy

"A few weeks ago, during breaks from cleaning up the mess left by burst pipes in my Houston home, I noticed the outrage that ricocheted through the media upon learning that Senator Ted Cruz was not in Texas during the winter storm. He was in Cancun. I was not surprised that CNN and other outlets were taking the opportunity to beat up on Cruz; they wouldn’t miss one. But I was puzzled. Immediate management of disasters doesn’t fall to U.S. Senators. That is primarily the responsibility of the state Governor, and Greg Abbott seemed to be making progress toward getting the power back on.

...

Apparently, a certain kind of person’s suffering is compounded when he knows that someone he dislikes is not suffering the same. The wall-to-wall coverage of Cruz’s trip to Cancun—this non-event—was a cynical attempt to stoke the ire of those prone to this kind of vicarious suffering, the people who suffer more when they know someone else is suffering less. The media, as usual, was deliberately amplifying the resentment of their audience, which in this case meant maximizing the frustrations of people negatively impacted by a weather emergency. That’s a rude ploy, but it represents a growing trend in American journalism: the obsession with “optics.”

It wasn’t really that Sen. Cruz had done something wrong. It wasn’t even that he hadn’t done something right. It was that he did something that looked bad. The “optics” were bad, and that could be leveraged to advance political objectives that were completely unrelated to the weather in Texas. This constant weaponization of optics, something all too common in news media, reveals some troubling realities about contemporary American society and democratic governance.

...

The conventional meaning of “optics” is a field of knowledge that deals with light and vision. The Oxford English (OED) dictionary has a secondary entry with the newer meaning of the word when used as a noun: “The way in which a situation, event, or course of action is perceived by the public[,] Frequently in political contexts.” The earliest known example of this usage cited in the OED (behind a paywall) occurred in the Boston Globe in 1973. That timing is important: just as new visual forms of media (television, fax machines, rudimentary computing) were becoming the predominant channels for public communication, our culture and politics developed a new fixation on appearances.

Around this time, Marshall McLuhan (a media theorist and professor of English at the University of Toronto) became something of a sensation among the intelligentsia, as he was among the first thinkers to offer a rich description of how the changes in mass media were reinventing the social sphere. One of his most famous books (co-authored with Quentin Fiore) was The Medium is the Massage, which explained how the dynamics and operation of a given medium of representation (television, radio, etc.) are actually more powerful than the information that they transmit to the audience.

According to McLuhan, any medium of communication also entails an interpretation of social reality, and enables an “extension” of that reality. That is, the mediated representation of social events controls how audiences receive those events. In turn, this conditioning of the audience’s reception of information brings about some transformation of reality because it changes how people interact with the world. It doesn’t matter so much what reality is; people’s actions are determined by how reality appears to them.

...

McLuhan and Fiore’s title is a nod to this management of perceptions: the medium is “the massage,” because any platform for the sharing of public information will “massage” the collective experience of that reality. They explain: “All media work us over completely. They are so persuasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.”

Thus, media technology creates a doubling of reality where the world of real events is modified by a world of perceptions: there is the pre-existing, external reality to which the media refers and attempts to represent, and there is the manufactured reality that comes into being as an effect of representing that external reality. Because of the ubiquity of mediated ways of interacting with the world (where news outlets serve as middlemen that prescribe the public interpretation of events), these two realities are increasingly indistinguishable. The media takes real events (which are often of marginal concern for society and its governance) and reinvents them as public objects of concern which can then advance all manner of ideological itineraries.

This process of reinvention generates what Daniel Boorstin (American historian and former librarian of Congress) has called “pseudo-events” in his appropriately titled book The Image.

...

Like an event, a pseudo-event also works to broaden the audience of any particular happening, bringing it to the attention of people who would otherwise be unaware. With pseudo-events, however, there is a key difference: the pseudo-event refers to and represents a real event, but its reference to and representation of that event are designed to create and modify realities that are not immediately related to the event.

Referring back to our example, if you were to post “Lost Dog” signs not in order to find your dog, but rather, to elicit pity from a potential romantic partner in the neighborhood, then we’d approach the realm of a pseudo-event. If that was the primary motivation behind the “Lost Dog” signs, you could very well imagine a scenario in which there was no missing dog—no dog at all. Just a guy trying to get attention. Of course, there may well be a lost dog: the event to which the pseudo-event refers is not necessarily a fiction. What’s important here is that the purpose of reclaiming the dog is decidedly secondary. Disseminating the news of the lost dog aims to achieve an external outcome (e.g., getting a date) that had nothing to do with the dog or its departure.

...

Consider the pseudo-event of Officer Sicknick’s body lying in state, after the media falsely reported that he had been bludgeoned to death by protesters with a fire extinguisher. In reality, the only death directly resulting from the Capitol entry was the case of a protester who was killed by the gun of a police officer. Indeed, there were other deaths that appear to have been indirectly related to the breach of the Capitol, but those were due to peripheral causes like a heart attack, suicide, or a stroke. In the public imagination, though, the full death toll of January 6th was directly attributable to Donald Trump and his murderous supporters.

The media manipulation of reality is broader than simply waiting for an event that “looks bad” and using it to create a pseudo-reality to further a partisan agenda. While media outlets will speak openly about “bad optics,” “good optics” also play a role, albeit a quieter one.

When something “looks good” for an ideological opponent of the media (that is, when the representation and dissemination of an event might advance a domestic opponent’s objectives), the event will not be represented. Thus, when video is posted to Twitter of security officials allowing protesters into the Capitol, it will quickly be discredited. Don’t believe your lying eyes. After all, it serves as an obstacle to creating the pseudo-event of the “armed insurrection.” Conversely, when something “looks good” for allies of the media (that is, when it might advance their shared partisan agenda), it will be broadcast extensively to expand the audience and visibility of the event. (Consider the wide dissemination of Ocasio-Cortez’s tearful visit to the southern border to visit the migrant “kids in cages” during the Trump administration.)

...

In a troubling passage from The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan and Fiore describe new media technologies as the greatest modern power in shaping culture, society and international affairs: “Real, total war has become information war. It is being fought by subtle electric information media—under cold conditions, and constantly. [This] cold war is the real war front […] involving everybody—all the time—everywhere.” Whereas the traditional democratic function of media is to equip the public for effective deliberation by informing them about realities pertinent to the national interest, the media now serves as a partisan weapon to undermine domestic opponents of elite ideology."

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Bitcoin Bros Rediscovering Our Monetary Past

"“The discomforting reality for the early idealists,” wrote Izabella Kaminska, a long-time critic of cryptocurrencies, before the price explosion in recent months, “is that 12 years on, the bitcoin ecosystem has more in common with the incumbent one it was hoping to displace than that original utopian vision.”

She’s more right than she knows. In one sense, we should probably celebrate this as it means that bitcoin is approaching the monetary commodity dream it always harbored: it is running into some eternal troubles common to all monetary systems. Even better, we should take the opportunity to teach some monetary history, as those in the crypto world have never been particularly well-versed in our monetary past. The audience they cater to is even less informed and so the “bitcoin heroes” – Saifedean Ammous, Robert Breedlove etc – are celebrated for their wisdom, no matter how rudimentary or inaccurate.

It’s easy to discard an entire field of centuries-long academic inquiries, especially if you’ve never been exposed to it, or only investigated a caricature. Some humility is recommended since, as Denis Patrick O’Brien writes in his collection of scholarly articles The Development of Monetary Economics, “Monetary economics has attracted some of the very best people to have written about economic problems.”

In contrast to Bitcoin’s money supply mechanism, set in stone since its origin, many of bitcoin’s rivals – “alt-coins” or “sh**coins” – want to set their own monetary policy, laid down arcane rules in fancy white papers that only the insiders have the discretion to change. This dispute over rules and discretion about who runs the printing press is about three centuries old if not more, and was thoroughly investigated by the likes of Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Tooke, Horsley Palmer, Walter Bagehot, John Clapham and others.

Some of the seemingly novel features of many cryptocurrency innovations are not so novel, and quickly run into precisely the problems that plagued past economies; these were promptly examined and argued over by monetary economists long since dead and forgotten.

...

Exhibit A: Second Layers. After 2017 – the bull-run, the congestion, the forks and battle over block sizes – the winning faction found an enticing solution to their crowded-mempool problems: second layers like the “Lightning network” or similar services like Liquid (with plenty of others in the works). Instead of settling on Bitcoin’s main blockchain, most minor transactions would take place on a second layer that only occasionally settled on the main network. That way, every on-chain transaction could include many more underlying transactions, netted against each other. Second layers make perfect sense against bitcoin’s inherent supply-schedule problem.

Except that for anyone who looked, this was just old commercial banking systems reinvented, trust sneaking in through the back door. A commercial banking system (with or without a central bank) that freely issues notes and deposits redeemable in some outside currency was also a second layer on top of the main currency layer of the realm (which in our monetary past was often gold or silver). The second-layer solutions sketched right now are supposedly full-reserve and don’t have maturity mismatch, but so started early banking before they developed into the (safe!) fractional reserve banks that bitcoiners detest so much.

...

Exhibit C: Black Boxes Moving Around. Another version of this is bitcoin on side-chains, like the tBTC project or Wrapped BTC, where trusted custodians hold your bitcoins in exchange for a token claim to that bitcoin, a token that itself lives on a different cryptocurrency chain (say Ethereum). Ideally, users could then move bitcoin around at much lower cost than on the Bitcoin main chain; instead of moving actual bitcoin, the user moves a digital box that contains said bitcoin.

In many places of our financial past, we used the shiny metal gold as base money. Moving it, especially in large shipments, was clunky and expensive. In the high seas, ships carrying it could founder and sink; in the woods of Europe lurked thieves. So far, that gold-bitcoin analogy should be clear and obvious.

Financial systems in Britain or the Dutch republic solved this expensive transportation problem by using paper claims to deposited gold. For centuries of international trade Bills of Exchange moved across the world, and only rarely did the underlying base money move. These “Wrapped BTCs” of the past let the expensive underlying asset lay still while paper claims to it moved instead. The financial system in different locations of international trade used bills of exchange – papers of credit – to net out transactions between them, supporting the real economy with a sophisticated and efficient banking system running in the background. In past times that made gold easier to use as money; in crypto times that makes bitcoin, with its highly variable transaction fees, easier to move around.

For all the revolutionary creed that surrounds the emerging monetary commodity that is bitcoin, it seems that its future more and more resembles the past it tried to escape. Happy times for us monetary nerds."

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Science Goes Rogue

"Social justice activists have been arguing for some time that scientific societies and institutions need to address systemic sexism and racism in STEM disciplines. However, their rationale is often anything but scientific. For example, whenever percentages in faculty positions, test scores, or grant recipients in various disciplines do not match percentages of national average populations, racism or sexism is generally said to be the cause. This is in spite of the fact that no explicit examples of racism or sexism generally accompany the statistics. Correlation, after all, is not causation. Without some underlying mechanism or independent evidence to explain a correlation of observed outcomes with population statistics, inferring racism or sexism in academia as the cause is inappropriate.

One might have hoped for more rigor from the leadership of scientific societies and research institutions. Alas, this has not been the case. In the current climate, many have simply adopted popular rhetoric and the jargon of critical theory has begun to dominate communications by these institutions. Pandering and virtue signalling have begun to generate proactive initiatives by the highest levels of the scientific community, often replacing the focus on science itself. Here are a few examples from the past few weeks alone.

...

In December, the American Physical Society (APS), the largest society of physicists in the world, sent out a letter to its membership arguing that Trump’s Presidential Executive Order 13950 on Combatting Race and Sex Stereotyping was “in direct opposition to the core values of the American Physical Society.” The order therefore needed to be rescinded in order to “strengthen America’s scientific enterprise.” The order (since rescinded by Biden) quoted Martin Luther King, stating that in government-supported scientific institutions people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” It argued that materials from places like Argonne National Laboratories that equate “color blindness” and “meritocracy” with “actions of bias,” or from Sandia National Laboratories which state that an emphasis on “rationality over emotionality” is a characteristic of “white male[s],” were inappropriate training materials for government-supported science institutions. It concluded that “it shall be the policy of the United States not to promote race or sex stereotyping or scapegoating in the Federal workforce.”

...

Scientific societies like the APS are, for practical purposes, often managed by functionaries rather than scientists, so perhaps this kind of development is not all that surprising. More surprising, however, was a statement from Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, the largest single agency supporting scientific research in the country. Collins apologized for existing “structural racism in biomedical research” and pledged to address the problem with sweeping changes. He did so at the behest of an Advisory Committee to the Director working group report that called on the NIH to “acknowledge the prevalence of racism and anti-Blackness in the scientific workforce.” And what evidence is provided of this alleged racism and anti-blackness? In 2011, a study found that black investigators had research funding rates 11 percent lower than white researchers, although by 2020 the success rate of black investigators had doubled to 24 percent, compared with 31 percent for white investigators.

...

This week, Scientific American, once a rigorous scientific publication, published an opinion column by several young scientists known for their campaign to call a “scientific strike” against racism following the death of George Floyd. The authors advocate changing the name of the James Webb Space Telescope because Webb, a former NASA administrator, was administrator when the federal government did not adequately respect LGBTQ rights. Webb is not incriminated as a racist or bigot, but as a servant of bigots. So who do the authors suggest that the telescope be named for? If encouraging diversity is the issue, perhaps it should be named the Vera Rubin Space Telescope, after the deceased astronomer who in the 1960s and ’70s provided some of the first compelling evidence of dark matter in our galaxy. Or perhaps the Jocelyn Bell Burnell Space Telescope, after the astrophysicist who, as a graduate student, help discover the first pulsars in 1967 and who some claim was overlooked when the Nobel Prize was awarded to her supervisor. Instead, the proposal is to rename the telescope the Harriet Tubman Space Telescope. Why? Not because Tubman might have made any contributions to astronomy, but because she was a conductor on the Underground Railroad that helped free black slaves in the South, during which she “likely used the North Star” to navigate to freedom.

...

In the face of this transformation, there has been little organized outcry from the scientific community. However, some are now speaking out. The Princeton mathematician Sergiu Klainerman has spoken out strongly against these intrusions of activism into science in particular and academia more generally. Most recently, Jeffrey Burl, an associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Michigan Technological University bravely wrote an open letter demanding an apology for what he called the “racist sentiments” expressed in his university’s Senate Resolution, which condemned white supremacy and racially motivated intolerance at his institution. He argued that these sentiments constituted a hostile work environment for white male scientists like himself, and that he had seen no signs of discrimination against women and people of color in his 28 years at the university. Instead, he argued that “I, as a white male, have been systematically discriminated against for 40 years.” He referred to the fact that when he was hired, there were two job openings, one of which was available to anyone, and one of which was only open to women. Since only a small percentage of the candidates were women, he argued that this hiring was clearly discriminatory. Needless to say, Burl now faces a petition demanding that he be fired.

...

Science as a discipline is supposed to be based on empirical evidence. But if repeating a falsehood often enough makes it true, then science now risks creating a false reality, with grave implications for the future of research and for society more generally."

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“Domestic Terrorism” Goes Transnational: The War on Dissidents Picks Up Momentum

"The claim is often made that President George W. Bush’s war on terror, which produced legislation that was employed to attack Iraq in 2003, eventually morphed into the worst foreign policy mistake in U.S. history when that conflict destabilized the entire region and led to an American multifront military engagement that now appears permanent. Few of those in the policymaking business appreciated that by turning “terrorism” into an especially invidious form of evil allowing governments to arrest or even assassinate without due process and bomb civilians if they fit a profile, Pandora’s box was being opened to expand that authority to commit other heinous abuses of authority.

...

...the Biden Administration thinks it knows exactly who the enemy is. The government already has a working definition of a domestic terrorist, i.e. “If you advocate violence as a tool to further political ends, and take concrete steps to do that, you’re a terrorist.” But if you thought that included groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) you would be wrong. For the Biden Administration it is the stereotyped right-wing extremist, who, among other attributes, is represented by the media and government as coming from the class that Hillary Clinton once described as “deplorables.”

The accepted definition of the enemy defies logic as the rioting, arson, and killing that has taken place over the past year has generally been inspired by Antifa and BLM, resulting in major damage and destruction in various cities and states. But the mobs who wrecked and looted have been mostly set free by the courts in the Democratic Party dominated cities. In Portland Oregon 90% of the rioters were not prosecuted, presumably because the local judicial system believed that their “cause was just.” Against that is the trauma of the January 6th incident at the Capitol, much smaller in scope and damages but obviously terrifying to the media and Congress. Also what did occur bore a more comfortable theme for the Democrats which they have been beating to death ever since – “insurrection caused by right wing extremists who were overwhelmingly white and support Donald Trump.” That’s apparently all one needs to initiate a campaign to get rid of such dissidents.

...

According to the man who almost became a Supreme Court Justice and now appears to be on his way to becoming Attorney General if you attack and seek to destroy a government building when there is no one in it is a different level of criminality than seeking to disrupt what is going on inside during business hours. It clearly is a fine line, or at least Garland sees it that way, but in either case you are making the building non-functional in terms of its intended use. Indeed, groups like BLM have regularly condemned the criminal justice system and if you burn the building down it will be unusable for a long, long time. So clearly what makes something “terrorism” as opposed to only “criminality” is the expectation based on the events of 1/6 that it will be right-wing whites who will be doing the disruption. They are the terrorists."

The label "terrorism" only benefits the elite. Even Antifa aren't terrorists. They are at worst an organized gang. The elites have spent decades training you to see terrorism as a supreme evil so you'll go along with whatever they want to do to "stop" it.

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Trump and Biden Playing Politics: The COVID-19 “Experimental Vaccines” which are “Killing and Injuring People”

"So which American president is going to take full credit for supporting the rapid development of Big Pharma’s Covid-19 vaccines that are already killing and injuring people?

Both Trump and Biden are claiming that it was their efforts that deserves global recognition for fighting a devastating pandemic by rolling out life-saving experimental vaccines.  Fox News was one of the first networks to report on how former President, Donald Trump bragged about his success when he pre-maturely pushed the untested experimental Covid-19 vaccine by “arguing that without him, Americans wouldn’t receive a vaccine for years.”

In a statement, Trump said that

“I hope everyone remembers when they’re getting the COVID-19 (often referred to as the China Virus) Vaccine, that if I wasn’t President, you wouldn’t be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all,” read a statement from the former president.

“I hope everyone remembers!”  Yes Donald, eventually everybody will remember how you pushed an experimental vaccine under Operation Warp Speed, in fact, they will also remember how you even bragged about it!

“Trump’s Wednesday comments came after an event earlier in the day when President Biden announced he would order 100 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine from Johnson & Johnson (J&J)” the report said “after meeting with CEO’s from J&J and Merck, Biden celebrated their partnership to produce the former’s vaccine.”

The Covid-19 vaccine was produced in less than one year.  The actual time frame to produce a safe and effective vaccine takes anywhere from 10-15 years and sometimes even longer because of the complex nature of testing along with various rules and regulations led by government agencies in collaboration with multi-national pharmaceutical companies and they still in many cases, are untrustworthy.

...

No one knows what the long-term effects will be but from what the early reports are showing, the Covid-19 experimental vaccines will unfortunately kill or injure many more people in the foreseeable future.  Trump’s “beautiful shot” will be part of his legacy, one that will remember him as the propagandist who sold himself to Big Pharma and the deep state, the same entities he supposedly tried to remove from power."

Trump's failure on COVID is perhaps the most important disqualifier for a 2024 run. Anyone who recognized from the beginning what the "pandemic" was leading to is infinitely more qualified than Trump. Trump is far too easily manipulated and his response to COVID shows that all too well.

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‘Nothing else explains it’: Norwegian scientists say AstraZeneca DID cause blood clots, as British & Dutch experts dismiss theory

" Norwegian scientists have linked the AstraZeneca vaccine and blood clots – a condition seen in some people that led countries around the world to halt its use. But British and Dutch medics say there’s no evidence for such a link.

“The cause of our patients' condition has now been found,” Pal Andre Holme, the head of a research group at the Oslo University Hospital, told Norway’s VG media outlet. He was referring to the cases of three health workers under the age of 50 who suffered from severe blood clotting after receiving the AstraZeneca jab. One of the medics then died on Monday.

The clotting in those patients was triggered by a very specific “strong immune response” likely caused as a result of the AstraZeneca jab, Holme explained. In collaboration with the University Hospital of North Norway, Holme’s team detected specific antibodies that “activate” platelets and in some cases can lead to blood clots.

Asked by VG if the vaccine was the “most likely” cause of this specific immune response, Holme said he believes “there is no other thing” in the history of the three individual patients which would generate such a response. None of the three patients had a history of similar health issues before, he said.

...

Earlier, a group of nations in Europe and beyond, including Germany, France, Italy and Spain, among others, suspended the rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine amid reports of the potentially fatal blood clotting. Most recently, the Swedish Medical Products Agency said that a previously healthy woman died due to blood clotting a week after taking AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 jab.

The news also triggered the European drug regulator, EMA, to start its own review of all relevant cases. On Thursday, the agency said  it deemed the jab “safe and effective,” prompting several nations, including Italy, Cyprus and Ireland, to restart its use."

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Intersectional Imperialism: A Wholesome Menace

"With Trump-style nationalism out the door, a new era of imperial ideology is upon us. This mutation of the empire’s dominant dogma is manifesting throughout global institutions of economic, political and social control and is materializing in a myriad of conflict theatres.

In order to identify where woke imperialism exists, we have to define it first. So what is it? It’s certainly not the first iteration of hegemonic domination buttressed by moralism.

The doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was officialized by the United Nations in 2005, but its roots really trace back to the NATO bombing campaign of Yugoslavia. During the Obama years, the term “humanitarian intervention” caught on as the main moniker for such actions.

Woke imperialism should be understood as a maturation of these concepts. As corporations have increasingly embraced “rainbow capitalism” to keep up with the sensibilities of an increasingly liberal US public, so too have institutions of United States imperialism refined their pitches to reflect the increasing popularity of identity politics.

...

Earlier this month, NATO tweeted a flashy video claiming “diversity is our strength.”

In light of NATO’s virtue signalling, it’s important to remember that many of the early leaders of NATO were Nazis who dreamed of a Germany that was anything but diverse and inclusive....

...

As I reported following the launch of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, as he railed against neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, Biden worked with neo-Nazi leader Oleh Tahnybok, with the man who is now White House National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, serving as their go-between. Leaked audio from 2014 has Victoria Nuland, Biden’s nominee for Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs under Blinken, admitting as much.

In terms of NATO’s championing of inclusion for people of color, its crowning achievement in this regard came following its bombing of Libya, which gave cover for jihadist militias to sodomize Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to death with a bayonet and paved the way for the reintroduction of slavery on the African continent.

...

The Department of Defense is another leading institution in this trend.

Last week, conservative Fox News host Tucker Carlson attacked the Pentagon. It started with Joe Biden announcing that, under his and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s leadership, the military would be taking steps towards making itself more inclusive to women with policies including an overhaul of hair style restrictions and “maternity flight suits for women.”

While pregnant women are generally banned from riding roller coasters, a policy of allowing them to fly fighter jets does not seem to me to have their best interests in mind, nor those of their children.

While Carlson blasted these policies, his criticism missed the crux of the issue as he argued that they made the US military weaker. The real goal of these policies, however, is to freshen the military’s face for a liberal citizenry. As the Airforce put it in January, “diversity” is a “force multiplier.”

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Beyond promoting themselves as bastions of tolerance, imperialist institutions are also using wokeness to justify foreign resource extraction, violations of sovereignty and international law, military occupation and even coup d’etats.

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As we proceed into the Biden years, identity politics, intersectionality — in a word, wokeness — will be increasingly used to justify the exploits of a racist empire. That is, unless the left is able to adopt a doctrine to counter the empire’s dogma instead of continuing to play into its hands.

The Roman historian Tacitus said “Great empires are not maintained by timidity.” This may be true, but today, the maintenance of empire is justified by its inclusivity. The ability of the US to “flex” on the world stage is contingent on its ability to reference the diversity of it’s ruling class."