PP NewsBrief: 2021-05-17

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.

========

Ariz. governor signs law allowing clean up of absentee voter lists

"Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) officially signed the state’s newest election integrity law. The Republican signed the bill into law Tuesday. The legislation will make it easier for the state to remove infrequent voters from early voting lists. Additionally, the measure will also reduce the amount of mail-in ballots sent out.

The governor hailed the bill as a victory for voter integrity in the state and the country. Gov. Ducey clarified the legislation will not remove voters from voter rolls and will allow them to still vote in person."

========

Conservative groups rethink strategy to campaign against Democrats’ elections bill

"Ken Cuccinelli, the former acting Department of Homeland Security deputy secretary who now serves as the chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative, said his organization is dumping money into several battle ground states. That money is going to television ads targeted towards moderate Democrats, many of whom seem reluctant to offer their support to the bill.

Similarly, think-tank Heritage Action announced it repurposed a $10 million effort to reform election laws in eight swing states. Instead, that money will fund a television ad campaign that’s set to air through the summer in those same states."

========

Global Casinos: Financial Markets Are a Fraudsters Paradise

"“Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done” (John Maynard Keynes).

In other words, the financial sector should be the servant of the real economy, not its master. Unfortunately, this is not currently the case.

Many of the biggest banks, and many other financial companies, devote most of their resources to activities that provide no benefit to the real world, but which can have negative consequences for everyone else. This post summarises some of the most problematic activities, such as speculation, private equity, hedge funds, vulture funds, and high frequency trading.

...

Currency speculation is where traders buy and sell different currencies in order to make profits. The trade on the international currency exchange markets is over $6 trillion per day, which totals over $2 quadrillion per year. This is over 100 times greater than the total size of international trade in goods, which is only $19 trillion. It is also many times greater than the economy of the whole world, which totalled about $133 trillion in 2019.  The scale of these numbers is rather difficult to comprehend, but for every $1 of genuine trade in physical goods like bananas or cars, there is $100 of currency trading. Therefore, almost all of this is for speculation, which is really just a euphemism for gambling.

Up until the 1970s, this currency trading was much smaller, and it was used to finance genuine trade between countries. Unfortunately banks realised that it could be used as a form of gambling to make enormous profits. Buying and selling large amounts of currency can cause exchange rates to change, sometimes very quickly. A sudden drop in the value of a currency can destabilise a country, as prices for basic essentials rise. In poor countries this can cause widespread poverty virtually overnight.

...

For British people, the most notorious currency trader was George Soros. In 1992 he gambled against Sterling (the financial term used to refer to the currency in Britain) and made $1 billion on what became known as Black Wednesday. It is estimated that the cost to the British taxpayer was £3.4 billion. Soros has subsequently spoken out against the worst aspects of the system. He stated:

“The totally free flow of capital is not advisable, so you need to create some mechanism for introducing stability.”

...

The system of large-scale gambling carried out by the biggest financial companies is much broader than just buying and selling currencies. This is known as derivatives trading. In 2020 the total value of derivatives trades was $600 trillion. There are a wide variety of derivatives, some of them incredibly complex, with names such as futures, options or swaps. This includes some of the investments that were at the heart of the frauds committed during the financial crisis, such as Credit Default Swaps (CDSs).

Gamblers use derivatives to bet on the future price of all manner of things, such as food and oil. Unfortunately, the betting can cause the prices of food and oil to change. Poverty in poor countries increased dramatically in 2007-2008 because gamblers pushed up the price of basic essentials, leading to food riots around the world. Some of these systems of gambling have been described as ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’ due to the potential devastation that they can cause.

...

Shadow banking refers to businesses that carry out banking activities but are not regulated like banks. This includes private equity funds and hedge funds.

Private equity funds have been described as locusts, because they buy, manage and sell companies, siphoning off wealth as they go, by cutting jobs and wages, making fraudulent valuations, and charging excess fees. Inadequate regulation means that they can obtain funds from other countries with no oversight, making them ideal for money launderers. They take payments from selected clients or investors to give them advantages, at the expense of other investors.

...

Courts have no power to punish private equity funds that rip-off investors. At best, a court can insist that money is returned. There have been some fines for misleading investors about fees, and for conflicts of interest but regulators appear powerless to stop fraud. In 2020:

“The SEC issued a scathing report documenting a private equity crime spree that is fleecing pension funds, university endowments and other investors. The timing of the report is particularly important. The SEC’s report reads like a career regulators’ last-ditch plea for help at the very moment they see private equity billionaires on the verge of creating a lawless autonomous zone for themselves.”

...

Hedge-funds specialise in using complex mathematics and sophisticated trading strategies (known as hedging) to gamble on the markets. If they are successful, they keep a chunk of the profits. If they are unsuccessful, the managers lose nothing, as they are using other people’s money. In 2020, 5 hedge fund managers were paid over $1 billion each.

...

Banks invest in technology to get information before anyone else has it. They locate their computers next to financial exchanges (known as co-location), and they build microwave transmitters to carry information between exchanges, such as New York and Chicago.(24) Banks also use computers to make huge numbers of trades in a fraction of a second, with no human involvement (known as high-frequency trading or HFT). The combination of these things enables them to consistently make small profits on huge numbers of trades.

...

Financiers will always try to justify their activities by claiming that they make the markets ‘more liquid’ (easier to buy and sell) or more efficient. However, these techniques are essentially old wine in new bottles. New forms of obtaining information before everyone else; new forms of complexity to hide information; new forms of gambling with other people’s money whilst making someone else take the risks. Insiders have admitted that the purpose of financial engineering is to move around the excess profits (known as rents) in the financial system, and to increase them.(27) If financiers are making huge profits, it is usually coming out of someone else’s pocket.

There is a very strong case for making most currency trading, and most derivatives trading, illegal, and for ensuring that any organisation that is allowed to carry out a small amount of trading cannot destabilize the rest of the financial system. There is also a strong case for banning High Frequency Trading, and for banning the activities of the most exploitative types of hedge funds, private equity funds, and vulture funds."

========

International Corona Research Cohort. The Lawsuit against the CDC, the WHO and the Davos Group

"Some of my students (present and former) and colleagues in Japan have formed an International Corona Research Cohort. Our goal is to produce scholarship that critically examines certain aspects of the Covid-19 narrative. Over the past year, we have observed virtually identical patterns of public messaging to those appearing in the wake of 9/11 and the subsequent “regime-change wars” (Gabbard, 2020). We are pursuing the following hypotheses:

--Are mainstream (corporate) media primarily PR tools owned and/or used by transnational elites as described by Peter Phillips in his latest book Giants: The Global Power Elite(Seven Stories Press, 2018).

--How, through discourse, do agenda-setting media shape human perception and inculcate necessary forms of fear and hysteria in populations to produce unquestioning and reflexively obedient people? What discourse techniques prevail across cultures and national boundaries?

We have recently devised an instrument (in English and Japanese) to measure awareness, perception, and attitude toward the Covid-19 narrative and will use this in surveys to quantify the effectiveness of Government-Corporate PR producing the leading narratives and coercing people – absent informed consent – to join in the global experiment in mRNA therapies (aka vaccines). Since this is an international project, we seek to use the instrument in other languages.

Our project is inspired by the tremendous work of Reiner Fuellmich and the thousands of other attorneys who have joined him as well as hundreds of thousands of physicians and research scientists backing the lawsuit against the CDC, the WHO, and the Davos Group for crimes against humanity in Nuremberg, Germany.

If you wish to join our international effort in the study of these communications, please let me know so we can coordinate and support you appropriately."

This appears to be the faculty page of the professor coordinating the research.

========

All new employees will be required to have Covid-19 vaccine, Delta Air Lines announces

"Delta has said that they will need new hires to already have gotten their Covid-19 vaccinations, though it will not have a mandate for current employees as they have made “great progress” towards herd immunity.

“This is an important move to protect Delta’s people and customers, ensuring the airline can safely operate as demand returns and as it accelerates through recovery and into the future,” the company said in a Friday statement. The new policy will go into effect on Monday.

...

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) announced in December that companies can require employees to get vaccinated, with the two exemptions being disabilities or religious reasons.

American Airlines has also offered employees an extra day off next year to employees who get their vaccinations."

========

Florida governor to pardon everyone in state charged with breaking Covid restrictions

"Appearing Wednesday on Fox News with Florida gym owners Mike and Jillian Carnevale, who were arrested on several occasions and threatened with months in prison for allowing people to enter their business without a face mask, DeSantis said he would overrule the “total overreach” against them.

“This is exactly what we ordered against last summer, many months ago,” the governor declared, before announcing that “effective tomorrow morning” he would “sign a reprieve under my constitutional authority” that would “delay the case for sixty days.”

DeSantis then also revealed that in the coming weeks he would “issue pardons, not only for Mike and Jillian, but for any Floridian that may have outstanding infractions for things like masks and social distancing.”

“The fact is, it’s not even right to be wearing masks when you’re exercising,” he argued, noting that the World Health Organization “advises against it” and that coronavirus restrictions “should be advisory.”"

========

Facebook deletes Ohio group that supports legal exemptions to COVID vaccine mandates

"The Facebook group for Ohio Advocates for Medical Freedom (OAMF), a non-profit that supports legislation that would give people exemptions to vaccine mandates, has been banned from Facebook.

The group had 40,000 members and its President, Stephanie Stock said that Facebook banned the group for sharing mainstream news articles.

OAMF describes itself as an advocate for “your right to choose or refuse any medical treatment or procedure.”

Recently, OAMF has been supporting House Bill 248, the Vaccine Choice & Anti-Discrimination Act. The bill’s sponsor, State Rep. Jennifer Gross, describes it as “legislation that protects individuals who choose not to be vaccinated from discrimination due to vaccine status.”

The removal of this group follows Facebook deleting a 120,000-member group where people shared stories of alleged adverse vaccine reactions last month.

Facebook’s current rules prohibit a wide range of vaccine-related posts including posts claiming vaccines are ineffective, posts claiming vaccines cause blood clots, and posts claiming vaccines change people’s DNA (something Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told his staff during an internal July 2020 meeting).

Facebook also labels any posts discussing the vaccine with “credible information about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines from the World Health Organization.”"

========

Covid-19 ‘health pass’ for social events given green light by French lawmakers on second attempt

"After being defeated in its first attempt on Tuesday evening, President Emmanuel Macron’s ruling party was able to push through the introduction of its pass on Wednesday morning as the government looks to reopen the economy.

It will come into effect on June 9, providing proof that someone has been vaccinated, has had a negative test, or has recently recovered from the virus and therefore has antibodies.

Macron has said the pass won’t be required in everyday public places such as restaurants and bars, but will allow people to safely attend sporting events, music festivals and theme parks.

The bill was passed after Macron’s government agreed to shorten the transition period during which it will be able to re-impose Covid restrictions after France’s state of emergency is lifted on June 2."

========

Democrats move to establish commission on Capitol riot as Republicans start pushing back on official narrative

"Homeland Security Committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi) and ranking member John Katko (R-New York) seem to have agreed on a proposed format and scope of the commission, made up of five Democrats and five Republicans appointed by their party leadership. The commission will only be able to issue subpoenas with a majority vote or agreement between the chair – a Democrat – and the Republican vice-chair. Its report will be due by the end of the year.

...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) hopes to have the commission bill up for a floor vote “as soon as next week,” she said on Friday.

“It is imperative that we seek the truth of what happened on January 6 with an independent, bipartisan 9/11-type Commission to examine and report upon the facts, causes and security relating to the terrorist mob attack,” Pelosi said at a press conference.

...

Most of the 400 or so people arrested in connection with the riot have been charged with trespassing or interfering with government operations. Democrats and corporate media have continued to insist the riot was an “insurrection” directly incited by Trump, with Biden claiming in his joint address to Congress at the end of April that it was “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”"

========

When Journalism Blurs Into Activism—A Canadian Case Study

"While neither of us is a scientist or mathematician by training, we learned that the correct reporting of facts and data is an important component of good journalism. We also learned how easy it is for even objective journalists to garble, ignore, or misunderstand the numbers they cite in their articles. Many writers, ourselves included, start their careers with only a tenuous grasp of many basic mathematical concepts. We generally either teach ourselves how to become informed and competent laypeople, or we recognize our limitations and avoid stories that require these analytical abilities.

As part of this process of learning, we have taught ourselves how to identify red flags when we read stories written by others. It continues to surprise us how many otherwise good articles in high-quality publications reflect a misunderstanding of statistics. As the case study below demonstrates, this trend is particularly worrying now that media outlets that have traditionally held themselves out as politically centrist are openly exhibiting a progressive bias. In the past, when a publication made an error, one might reasonably expect its editors to acknowledge it when it was pointed out. But a growing number of journalists now seem more interested in being ideologically compliant than factually sound.

...

On February 6th, the Toronto-based Globe and Mail newspaper ran an opinion piece titled “Complacent Culpability” (or “Canadian Complacency Is the Killer of Collective Change,” as it appears online). The author, Rachel Ricketts, describes herself as “a spiritual activist and mystic disruptor seeking liberation for Black and Indigenous women, femmes and non-binary folx.” In a passage about systemic racism in Canada, the author related an episode during her kindergarten schooling in British Columbia when “my white teacher attempted to hold me back from Grade 1, explaining to my mother that my Black brain wasn’t as large as those of my white classmates. The sentiment apparently derived from her teachers’ manual in 1989.”

...

The Globe and Mail has sometimes been described as Canada’s newspaper of record. And this seemed like a serious journalistic error on a matter that the author herself rightly describes as being of national importance—specifically, systemic racism. So, we wrote to the Globe’s public editor, Sylvia Stead, indicating that it was “impossible to believe that in 1989, a teaching manual in Canada would spout disproven pseudoscience … Did the editors who vetted this piece ask Ms. Ricketts for some evidence that this claim—because it is not an opinion, but a statement of checkable fact—is true?” We pointed out that this kind of dubious claim unfairly maligns the education system and the teachers who work within it. By presenting the case for systemic racism on the basis of dubious facts, it also detracts from the credibility of other, more realistic, claims made by writers (Ms. Ricketts included) about the difficulties faced by non-white people in our society.

Ms. Stead, a Globe veteran who became the newspaper’s first public editor nine years ago, told us she agreed that the dubious claim had been stated “as fact”; and then, in a subsequent message, told us, “we have fixed the reference. I think the writer meant it as a recollection and not a fact, and frankly, that should have been caught by an editor. I spoke with the editor about it and he agrees. Appreciate hearing from you. It’s a good teaching moment.”

The new version reads as followed: “In kindergarten, my white teacher attempted to hold me back from Grade 1, explaining to my mother that my Black brain wasn’t as large as those of my white classmates. The teacher claimed it was from her teachers’ manual, and had my mother not threatened to sue the school board my educator’s racism would have scarred my academic record from its inception.” There’s also an editor’s note at the bottom that reads, “This article has been updated to clarify that there is no evidence a teacher’s claim was in a manual.”

In other words, the “fix” effectively consisted of inserting the word “claimed” in reference to the unsupported statement. Yet the corrected version still indicates that the teacher’s racism was informed by the sort of educational environment in which one might reasonably expect such a teaching manual to be used. While such terms as “claim” (or “suggest” or “allege”) can be used to protect a writer (and his or her editor) from the accusation that they are peddling falsehoods, they typically don’t protect readers from coming away misinformed.

...

...then two weeks later, the Globe published a much longer piece—more than 4,000 words—titled, “How Canada’s sex traffickers evade capture and isolate victims to prevent their escape.” The piece, written by immigration reporter Janice Dickson, includes the emotionally searing stories of three women who’d been sex trafficked and escaped. It was an interesting feature full of well-reported human-interest details. But both of us were struck by a strange omission. As the title indicates, the piece is presented as an overview of a general trend that suggests a failure of Canadian policy. (The online sub-headline is: “Some women are moved across the country. Others are lured by traffickers at school. Many of them know the perpetrators who keep them isolated and dependent on them.”) Yet despite the article’s length and prominent placement, it didn’t contain any statistics regarding the number of Canadian women victimized by sex trafficking, which is the crux of the issue....

...

Oddly, in the same print edition, we did find a number. It was contained in a related op-ed penned by Julia Drydyk, the executive director of the Canadian Centre to End Human Trafficking, which had just released a report entitled Human Trafficking Corridors in Canada. The two articles were companion pieces. As of this writing, in fact, Ms. Drydyk’s reference to her group’s newly published report is hyperlinked to Ms. Dickson’s article, which, in turn, quotes Ms. Drydyk at length and focuses closely on her organization’s conclusions.

In Ms. Drydyk’s op-ed, she writes that “between 2009 and 2018, there were more than 1,700 incidents of human trafficking reported to law enforcement in Canada.” Since the article is about sex trafficking (these being the first two words of the headline), we naturally interpreted this to mean was that there were 1,700-plus cases of human trafficking involving sexual exploitation....

...

But as an examination of the cited Statistics Canada data shows, this number (the reported figure is 1,708) refers to human trafficking overall, of which sex trafficking is only a subset (albeit a “prevalent” one, as Statistics Canada reports). Human trafficking involves “the recruitment, transportation, harbouring and/or exercising control, direction or influence over the movements of a person in order to exploit that person, typically through sexual exploitation or forced labour.” The subset described as sex trafficking includes only those who “are sexually exploited when forced into prostitution or forced to perform sexual acts including exotic dancing or the production of pornography.” In practice, the United Nations notes, “two major categories of transnational activity can be identified: trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation, and labor exploitation, including the use of child labour.”

...

Perhaps the most important fact for most Canadians interested in this issue is the baseline number of known sex trafficking cases per year. For the period in question, the data tells us that this number is 47—a little less than one per week in a country of 37 million people.

A good-faith effort to educate Canadians about the scope of this problem would also situate Canada within a comparative international context. Though differences in national reporting protocols make international comparisons difficult, data collected by The Counter Trafficking Data Collaborative (CTDC) indicates that Canada’s trafficking volumes are positively minuscule compared to those of most other Western nations. (Here we are referring to all forms of trafficking.)...

...

All of this information is in the public domain, and would have been available to both Ms. Dickson and her editors. Yet none of it was included by the Globe, leaving readers with the impression that Canada is suffering a sex-traffic crime epidemic.

We contacted Ms. Dickson with our concerns about her omissions. “Sexual trafficking is a vile crime,” we noted in our correspondence. “All the more reason to be cautious about reporting it.” She replied that “I’ve been covering this story for two years, and I stand by the facts. Please email our public editor if you feel there are errors.”

This brought us back to Ms. Stead. In our correspondence, we described similar concerns we had with another piece that Ms. Dickson had written (entitled “Only Ontario and Nova Scotia use Crowns who focus solely on sex trafficking”). Ms. Stead responded promptly, indicating that the Globe wouldn’t be issuing a correction.

But in fact, we hadn’t asked for a formal published correction—because, to be fair, nothing Ms. Dickson had written was explicitly false. We hadn’t claimed that it was. Our complaint, rather, was that the reporter had juxtaposed her material in a way that clearly would cause readers to misunderstand the scale of this serious problem.

Our final exchange with the Globe came following the publication of a column by Elizabeth Renzetti on the equally serious (and somewhat related) topic of femicide, a subset of homicide defined by one prominent academic as “the misogynous killing of women by men motivated by hatred, contempt, pleasure, or a sense of ownership.” In a March 24th column titled, “The most dangerous place for women is behind closed doors,” Renzetti properly decried femicide, but then performed a journalistic maneuver analogous to Ms. Dickson’s—by implicitly conflating the number of all women killed in Canada (a measure usually called “female homicides”) with the much narrower category of femicide.

At one point, she notes that 160 women were killed in Canada in 2020, and then proceeds to describe an underlying climate of misogyny—“an ideology that denigrates and dehumanizes women … whether the femicide takes place on a street, or in a workplace, or in a home.” But of course, not all female homicide victims are killed by men (though most are). For 2020, the number of female homicides perpetrated by men is 128, according to the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability. And of those 128, we don’t have any definitive statistical understanding of how many of the killers had misogynistic motivations, which was the declared theme of Ms. Renzetti’s article.

...

Of course, this all may seem like nitpicking to some: The bottom line, surely, is that systemic racism, sex trafficking, and femicide are serious issues that require a serious policy response, and that everything else is mere detail.

But professional journalists have long operated on the basis that details really do matter, especially when it comes to life-and-death matters. There are hundreds of important problems that our governments must address. Reporting honestly on these problems helps inform the creation of coherent, responsible, and balanced policies. Even if the data contained in an article has been rigorously fact-checked, reporting that data in a way that’s calculated to give readers an exaggerated sense of fear or urgency is an intellectually dishonest exercise that can distort public priorities.

...

In all cases, the journalists involved will surely claim that their heart is in the right place, and that they aren’t deliberately spreading misinformation. But if that’s the low bar members of our profession are now being asked to clear, then it’s unclear how we’ll be able to distinguish bad journalism from good propaganda."

========

CDC Admits That It Miscalculated The Risk Of Outdoor Covid Transmission

"The outdoor risk has been a major source of disagreement with many contesting mandatory mask rules for those walking or working or recreating outside. It turns out that, according to the Times, the 10% benchmark is based “partly on a misclassification” of virus transmission in Singapore at various construction sites. Those sites were incorrectly described as outdoor but now appear to have actually taken place in indoor settings. Singapore also classified settings that were a mix of indoors and outdoors as outdoors, including construction building sites.

The real risk is one percent or less.  Yet, cities like Chicago closed whole parks — magnifying the isolation and depression for citizens.  Various cities like New York closed playgrounds despite being outdoors and used by the lowest risk population for Covid. States closed parks and trails that could have been key areas of release for people during lock downs....

...

We spent trillions on this pandemic and the issue of masks and curtailing outside movements was continually in the news. Yet, there appears to have been little time or money spent on the basis for this key component of the mandatory policies supported by the CDC and mandated by many states."

This is why the blind data worshippers are such fools. You can't assume your data is accurate when you're pulling it in from so many sources.

========

The 'Take This Job and Shove It' Recession

"What the chattering class of apologists, toadies, lackeys, factotums and apparatchiks missed about the pandemic lockdown was the tidal change in perceptions of work and life enabled by a withdrawal from the deranging frenzy of work: once people had time to reflect on their lives, mortality, goals, identity and the soaring costs and dwindling rewards of their efforts to "get ahead" via slaving away in a dead-end job / career, the tune that began to haunt their subconscious ruminations was Johnny Paycheck's timeless classic, Take This Job And Shove It (2:31).

Whether anyone in the halls of power cares to notice or not, a mass withdrawal from the workforce is underway. What's remarkable about this swelling exodus is that it isn't confined to one class of workers: low-wage workers are jumping ship en masse, but so are mid-level white-collar workers and well-paid but overworked technocrats in the top 10%.

...

The reality that wages have stagnated for the past 50 years is finally sinking in, and people are responding accordingly. By any realistic measure, most workers have lost ground when the purchasing power of their wages in the 1980s is compared to what their earnings buy now in healthcare, childcare, rent, higher education, property taxes, etc.

The erosion of labor's value has been catastrophic for the bottom 60%. As I recently noted, I was making $12 an hour in 1985, an OK wage but nothing special, and after 36 years of inflation, many workers are still earning $12 an hour--or less. Measured in purchasing power, wages have declined since the early 1970s.

...

Meanwhile, the cost of big-ticket expenses such as healthcare, childcare, rent/housing and higher education have tripled. Even high-earners such as physicians have lost ground, as their salaries in 1985 bought far more goods and services than their salaries do today.

Young high-earners have been flocking to the FIRE movement for years: financial independence, retire early is the upper-middle class way of saying Take This Job And Shove It, as the goal is to save enough earnings by scrimping and saving to exit the workforce for good while still in your early 30s.

Lower-wage workers are finding other workarounds. Much to the consternation of employers, many are milking the extended unemployment payments. But beneath the radar, others have carved out informal-economy niches or found ways to slash their living costs--for example, constructing a micro-home on a cheap plot of rural land and saying good-bye to McMansion dreams and $2,000 a month rents for tiny apartments in decaying urban cores.

...

YOLO (you only live once) isn't just about making risky bets in bubblicious markets--it's about deciding to do something else with you life other than make Corporate America another couple trillion in profits or keep your small business afloat as taxes, fees, penalties, surcharges, rent and every other expense soars.

The pandemic posed a question few had time to ponder: what's the point? What no financial analyst dares confess is the corporate profits they cheer every quarter have come at a cost that many Americans will soon be unable to bear. Millions of highly experienced, essential employees are either planning to quit, retire, cut their hours or switch to lower stress jobs.

...

The Federal Reserve can conjure up trillions of dollars out of thin air to further enrich the nation's parasitic elite, but they can't print experienced, motivated workers or people with entrepreneurial skills.

The danger to the state is not who rebels but who opts out. Outright rebellion suits the state, as it can turn its monopoly on force on the citizenry. But when those keeping everything glued together have had enough and find a way to quit, the entire system starts unraveling in ways the state is powerless to stop.

...

There's only so much inequality and unfairness a workforce can bear, and America is well past that point. To those who claim "people can't afford to quit," just watch. Those who've had enough are finding ways to opt out. There's plenty of woodwork to disappear into."

========

An Army of Big Biotech Companies Is Using Psych Tactics to ‘Create Vaccine Demand’

"About 40% of the total adult population has been fully vaccinated, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Uptake plummeted 25% after a peak in mid-April, and 56.4% of adults have had at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine.

But five million people – about eight per cent of those who took a first dose of the shot – failed to show up for their second dose appointments, according to the CDC.

As a result, excess vaccine stock has been piling up across the country. Chairs sat empty at a Philadelphia mass vaccination site where 4,000 unused doses of vaccines were due to expire. A million doses, representing one out of every four sent to Louisiana by the federal government, were sitting on shelves. One Wyoming county asked the state to stop shipping vaccines because it had a surplus of 20,000 shots; North Carolina closed its vaccination clinics for lack of demand.

...

Many people simply fear the novel vaccine more than the novel virus which, according to the CDC, has an overall 99.4% survival rate for those aged 50-65 who get the infection. The odds go up as people get older but decrease if people are younger. For those under 18, the coronavirus fatality rate estimated by the CDC is 0.00002, which translates into a 99.98% COVID survival rate. In fact, for those under 18, the lifetime odds of being struck by lightning are higher than the odds of dying of the virus.

...

“[P]ublic health experts know that the last inch – getting the vaccine from vial to arm – can be the hardest,” according to the Vaccination Demand Observatory

Launched last week, the Observatory runs a “beta dashboard” of data and resources “intended for select global public health professionals.”

The Observatory was established by a group called the Public Good Projects (PGP) which “designs and implements large-scale behavior change programs for the public good,” UNICEF – which has received $86.6 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation since 2020 – and the Gates-subsidized Yale Institute for Global Health. .

PGP was founded by Joe Smyser, a public health academic who trained at the CDC and has partnered with Google and Facebook. Its board members include executives from Merck pharmaceuticals, Pepsi, Levi-Strauss, the Advertising Council, Sesame Street, Campbell’s, and TikTok.

PGP’s website says that through “media monitoring and bots, grassroots social media organizing, or thought leadership, we deploy our considerable resources and connections to communication for change.”

...

The group has promoted vaccines before. It developed the #StopFlu campaign, recruiting 120 “‘micro’ social media influencers” in the “African American and Latinx communities across eight states” and giving them prompts to sell their audiences the ideas that flu is a serious problem and that healthy people need flu shots.

PGP’s Observatory says it aims to “mitigate…mistrust on all vaccines.” Awash in Brave New World speak, the program’s “three pillars” are “social listening analytics,” a training program, and a “Vaccine Acceptance Interventions Lab” (VAIL) to “draw upon behavioral and social research and insights from social listening” and to develop “inoculation messages to vaccinate people against vaccine misinformation.” These would be “rapid field tested for tone, format and behavior change impact before being implemented.”

In 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) created a new public health field called “infodemiology” – the “science of managing infodemics.” PGP and UNICEF are leading the “Field Infodemiologist Training Program (FITP)” based in UNICEF country offices, government offices, and offices of other “multilateral partners” to train “field infodemic managers” to conduct “public health surveillance for misinformation” and provide “community support in “misinformation outbreaks.

...

In the world of “infodemic management,” one will inevitably come across the name of Jeff French, Professor at Brighton University and author of Strategic Social Marketing: For Behaviour and Social Change, whose text is referenced in most of the guides to mass marketing vaccines. French published a paper in July 2020 with the pandemic just a few months underway and a vaccine reportedly still unavailable for years to come about “Pre-Emptive COVID-19 Vaccination Uptake Promotion Strategy.” His tips have evidently inspired much of the standard pandemic vaccine sell:

• --“Effective campaigning against vaccine misinformation should focus on the dangers of the disease” and “draw on the powerful motivator of fear of loss along with the possibility of gain of positive health”
• --“Appeal to emotions since data alone will not be enough.”
• --Do not put adverse events at the center of  “demand creation efforts” but “be sure to contextualize them” and help audiences understand that “most will be rare and of limited duration.”
• --“Any media management and engagement strategy that is developed will need to include proactive, rolling media briefings, story generation, editorial feeds…and will also need to include 24/7 media monitoring and rebuttal/correction systems.”
• --Authorities should have “agreements in place” about “how and when misleading information and advocates of such information should be removed and flagged as being problematic on social media.”
• --Repeat “positive messaging that emphasizes the protective (individual, family, and community) benefits of the vaccine and the loss associated with not being vaccinated (death, poor health, loss of freedom and social solidarity, inability to travel” etc.)
• --“Partner” with the pharmaceutical industry, other for-profits, and NGOs to promote vaccines.
• --“Seek interventions” with key leaders in the anti-vaccination community and “seek to turn such informants into advocates for vaccination.”
• --“Continue to promote other protective behaviors such as handwashing and physical distancing.”
• --“Integrate financial and non-financial incentives… along with penalties for non-compliance by imposing restrictions on travel, education, or employment.”
• --“Governments will need to deliver and communicate what mix of incentives and penalty interventions will be used to promote demand.”

Behavior modification and operant conditioning techniques are a frequent theme of French’s writings; a 2014 paper he wrote for the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control on vaccine uptake said “behavioural interventions should seek to reward desired behaviours and when appropriate penalise inappropriate behaviour.”

...

It’s easy to find examples of French’s operant psychology marketing methods being played out in the real world pandemic theatre.

The mainstream media have evidently taken the point about “incentives and penalty interventions” on board and “herd immunity” is the new Holy Grail which all who are not reckless criminals should seek. “We’re struggling to get to herd immunity,” CNN’s Michael Smerconish said with the precise tone of fear and alarm that would elicit behavior modification. A full 26% of Americans said they would not take the vaccine, he said, but 44% of Republicans were resisting.

“Those folks jeopardize our ability to get to herd immunity faster,” Smerconish claimed in disgust. “If we don’t get vaccinated and periodically boosted we could prolong the pandemic and find ourselves continuing to fight this battle for years.” He quoted law professor Shanin Specter, who said, “Without a bigger carrot or a bigger stick many Americans will not get vaccinated and we will suffer more death and dislocation.”

The concept of “herd immunity” and how to get there is not settled science. The Great Barrington Declaration, signed by more than 43,000 medical practitioners and 14,000 public health scientists and doctors, proposes that allowing natural immunity to spread while shielding those most vulnerable to COVID infection would be less harmful than blanket lockdowns.

...

Following infodemic guidelines, YouTube’s medical misinformation policy expressly forbids any discussion of natural immunity in herd immunity on its platform."

========

Leading Russiagate conspiracy theorist appointed to key national security role at Biden’s Department of Justice

"Susan Hennessey, a former Obama-Biden administration lawyer who turned to promoting the Russiagate conspiracy theory during Donald Trump’s presidential term, has finally found her landing spot on President Joe Biden’s team.

...

In between her roles with Obama-Biden and now Biden-Harris, Hennessey served as one of the more unhinged voices of the anti-Trump “#Resistance” and supported the Russiagate propaganda campaign through jobs as CNN analyst, Lawfare blog executive editor and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank.

Responding to the appointment, journalist Glenn Greenwald called Hennessey “one of the most deranged Russiagate conspiracists.”

...

Hennessey’s attacks on Trump were wide-ranging, from the more minor “clearly, Melania hates him,” jab, to arguing that FBI officials “were telling the truth” when they misled the court to secretly spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. She even wrote a book saying that Trump was waging “war on the world’s most powerful office.”

When then-presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard suggested in 2019 that the US should pursue calm and better relations with Russia, Hennessey called the Democrat congresswoman “absurd.” She blasted Attorney General Bill Barr last year after the DOJ dropped charges against ex-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, saying there should be mass resignations from the DOJ, despite a review having determined that the case against the retired general was “unjustified.”"

========

I’m Still Not Getting the Vaccine

"The social-pressure aspect is serious business. In one day, Facebook hit me up on the subject five times: “Dan, together we can get COVID-19 vaccines to people worldwide,” “Healthcare workers get their vaccines . . . share their experiences,” “Life after vaccination” (yes, seriously), “Dan, join the millions of people who’ve added a COVID-19 vaccine frame” to their profile pictures—and then it shows me all my friends who did the socially responsible thing. I open the Uber app and it asks me if I want to book a ride to get a vaccine.

Does any of this sound a little disturbing?

One friend who read my last vaccine piece asked: Shouldn’t I get the vaccine not for myself, but for society at large? Clearly, a great many people have done so. In fact, I’d be shocked to learn that more than half of the people getting the shot actually believe it’s good for themselves. Perhaps it impresses you to think that everybody is looking out for everybody else. But to me, it seems as though everybody is scared of everybody else. We’re frightened. We’re sick.

I’d say this is how things would look if powerful people were exploiting our social conscience for their own ends: Create a giant amount of fear that compels people to act without question, even if they worry they may be harming themselves."

========

Are Americans Becoming Sovietized?

"Here are 10 symptoms of Sovietism. Ask yourself whether we are headed down this same road to perdition.

1) There was no escape from ideological indoctrination—anywhere.

...

2) The Soviets fused their press with the government. Pravda or “Truth” was the official megaphone of state-sanctioned lies. Journalists simply regurgitated the talking points of their Party partners.

...

3) The Soviet surveillance state enlisted apparatchiks and lackeys to ferret out ideological dissidents. Recently, we learned that the Department of Defense is reviewing its rosters to spot “insurrectionary” sentiments.

...

4) The Soviet educational system sought not to enlighten, but to indoctrinate young minds in proper government-approved thought. Currently, cash-strapped universities nationwide are hiring thousands of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” staffers and administrators. Their chief task is to scan admissions, hiring, curriculum, and administration of universities. Like good commissars, our diversity czars police compliance with the official narrative that a flawed America must confess, apologize, and renounce its evil foundations.

5) The official Soviet was run by a pampered elite, exempt from the ramifications of its own radical socialist ideologies. So too woke Silicon Valley billionaires talk socialistically but live royally. Coke and Delta Airlines CEOs who hector Americans on their illiberality respectively make over $16 million a year.

...

6) The Soviets mastered Trotskyization, or the rewriting and airbrushing away of history to fabricate present reality. Are Americans any different when they indulge in a frenzy of name changing, nighttime statue toppling, monument defacing, book banning, and “cancellation”?

7) The Soviets created a climate of fear and rewarded stool pigeons to root and rat out all potential enemies of the people. Since when did Americans encourage coworkers to turn in others for an ill-considered word in a private conversation? Why do thousands now scour the internet to find any past incorrect expression of a competitor, rival, or opponent? Why are there now new thought criminals supposedly guilty of climate racism, immigration racism, vaccination racism, and almost anything racism?

8) Soviet law, state prosecutors, and courts were weaponized according to ideology. In America, where and for what reason you riot determines whether you face any legal consequences. Politically correct sanctuary cities with impunity defy the law. Jury members are terrified of being doxxed and hunted down for an incorrect verdict. The CIA and FBI are becoming as ideological as the old KGB.

9) The Soviets doled out prizes on the basis of correct Soviet thought. In America now most concede that Emmy, Grammy, Tony, and Oscar awards or Pulitzer Prizes do not reflect the year’s best television show, song, play, movie, or book—rather than the most politically correct production from the most woke.

10) The Soviets offered no apologies for extinguishing freedom. Instead, they boasted they were advocates of equity, champions of the underclass, enemies of privilege, and therefore could terminate anyone or anything they pleased."

========

Sweden records 30,000 suspected side effects from Covid vaccines, with AstraZeneca’s jab linked to more than half of all reports

"According to the Swedish Medical Products Agency, as of last week, the Scandinavian nation had received 31,844 reports of adverse reactions linked to the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines. Sweden is currently offering three variants of the drug. There are currently 2,103 reports of side effects from the Moderna shot, while the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has been associated with 9,117 health issues. But the number of suspected adverse reactions from the two shots seems relatively small when compared to the 19,961 reports linked to AstraZeneca’s Vaxzevria.

The most common side effects for all three drugs were fever and headache. Other reported adverse reactions included nausea, joint pain, and dizziness.

Notably, the AstraZeneca shot only accounts for about 26% of the roughly 2.7 million vaccines that have been administered so far in Sweden, but makes up around 63% of the side effects reports.

...

Ebba Hallberg, an official with the Medical Products Agency, told Swedish media that it was unusual to receive so many reports of side effects, but noted that the figure was likely high because of public focus on the new vaccines. Healthcare providers are likely only reporting more “serious” side effects, the official theorized. Hallberg also said that it was possible that AstraZeneca was overrepresented in the data because the shot was given to many young people and healthcare workers, who are more tech-savvy and would therefore be more likely to report an issue.

According to one Swedish outlet, the agency has received more reports of suspected side effects over the past several months than it typically does over four years."

========

The Big Lie Strategy of the “Global Super-Rich”. The Weaknesses of the Human Mind

"Understanding why so many highly-educated Americans are incapable of responding to the current crisis, and endorse a vaccine regime that they do not believe in, requires us to look at the larger strategy for manipulating choices offered to establishment intellectuals. In part, it is a matter of lag time. Intellectuals are shocked by the rapid shifts in geopolitics. They find it easier to wallow in self-pity, or to bury their heads in denial. The period of time required for a new generation of committed intellectuals to emerge is not fast enough to keep up with the rate of change—and thus have failed to organize anti-fascist movements like those of the 1930s that formed the kernel of true resistance to totalitarianism.

It is helpful to focus on a few of the false choices, the baited gambits, that have been skillfully set up by the advisors to the super-rich so as to create fissures in American society that fragment the establishment, and create internal conflicts in a predetermined manner, so that no broad consensus is reached and citizens unknowingly do the dirty work for the super-rich.

...

It would not take more than a few minutes of comparison between the tricks used by global finance leaders in London, Paris and Berlin in 1914, and the similar tricks being employed by US and Chinese financial interests today, for citizens to get the idea.

In place of analysis, we are force-fed the tired and trite tale of the “Thucydides trap” endlessly promoted by the highest-paid minion of the investment bankers, the made-to-order prophet lauded and feted by CEOs in New York and Shanghai, Harvard’s own éminence grise Graham Ellison.

If we want to understand what is taking place in the unhealthy “Frankenstein Alliance,” in the pact signed between elites in Washington and Beijing, we must first break out of this foolish “nation state” schemata peddled to intellectuals by global bankers and look directly at the massive collaboration between the super-rich globally for the purpose of destroying the lives of workers, and unfold and unravel their schemes to play American workers against Chinese workers so as to stop any unity of purpose on the part of citizens.

Graham Ellison and his Harvard friends are never going to talk about how Harvard’s de facto majority shareholder Goldman Sachs plans to use economic conflict between the United States and China as a means to push through the complete automation of factories and the massive implementation of AI in both countries in the name of “competition.”

The battle is not so much between Beijing and Washington, although that battle is also plenty real, but more about the drive of global finance to control the assets, the money, the activities, the identity, and the bodies of every single worker in both countries. What cannot be forced through in China, will be forced through in the United States first, or vise versa—or in another country first.

...

That process, even though it can be documented without too much effort using open-source materials, must be dismissed as a conspiracy theory beyond the pale. The only accurate means to understand the conflicts between China and the United States today, we are told by the authorities, is through an analogy to a war between Sparta and Athens in the fifth century B.C.

The possibility that neither China nor America exist today as political units in light of the radical concentration of wealth is the most likely explanation for what we witness today....

...

What no one is going to tell citizens, or even personnel with top secret/SCI clearance, is that the AI being developed is meant to be a weapon to degrade the ability of citizens to think (starting with military personnel) through destructive stimulation of the brain using commercial media, and to divide and confuse the populations of both nations, using different time frames and agendas, so as to soften up the citizens of the Earth for the absolute rule of the super-rich.

Will the next generation micro drones and robots, energy weapons on low-orbit satellites, be used in some glorious Normandy Landing, or Athens-Sparta conflict between civilizations and nation states? Or might the final intention be to employ these weapons so as to attack the citizens of China and of the United States, if they try to resist this global power grab?

...

Multinational investment banks, corporations, and the super-rich that control them, have paid their operators to set up a “false choices” for citizens that are meant to divide us and to discourage organized resistance. Prefabricated liberal-conservative conflicts are core to this effort. Although this effort has gone on for decades, the classified programs to engineer conflicts based on ethnicity, culture or gender, has gone into warp drive as the blatant power grab of the elite becomes increasingly obvious.

Central among the baited gambits offered up is the false choice between addressing climate change and acknowledging that COVID19 is a massive fraud. Anyone who tries to take on both issues at once will find that he or she cannot get anything published anywhere. Everyone is given a choice or choosing one, or the other, or disappearing from public discourse altogether. For the ego-driven “public intellectuals” so accustomed to seeing their precious names in print, the compromise is of little significance.

You can either recognize that the climate is adversely impacted by emissions, the destruction of the ecosystem and by an economy driven by a dangerous model of “growth” and “consumption” or you can argue that COVID19 has no scientific basis and that the forced-vaccine regime is an attempt by rich and powerful to take control of our bodies and to deny us the right to work, to go to school, or to seek medical treatment for random reasons.

On the one side, we see progressive-flavored intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Chris Hedges talking about the danger of fossil fossil fuels and the ignorance of science displayed by Republicans in the pay of the oil companies. Some parts of their arguments are true. Other are tailored to the needs of investment banks....

These progressives also leave Bill Gates book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster” alone, preferring to give the Gates Foundation all the slack it needs to use the “climate crisis” to tighten political and ideological control.

In the other corner we find those, often associated with Donald Trump or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who stand united in their condemnation of the COVID19 “plandemic,” the mask mandate and the vaccine regime. These forces have developed increasingly sophisticated media sources and they support their critiques with substantial scientific data. For the most part, these groups are dismissed out of hand by the Nation or Greenpeace as extremists, or anti-science, when they speak the truth.

As good as the science for these groups may be regarding COVID19 (and it is not always accurate) they are silent on, or even dismissive of, the threats of climate change, the collapse of biodiversity, the destruction of the environment by fracking and micro-plastics. They are willing to stand up to Bill Gates and George Soros, but get wobbly knees when it comes to BP and Exxon."

========

Vaccine Passports Banned in Wyoming

"The Governor of Wyoming has banned vaccine passports, issuing a directive that states no person should be denied access to any places or services based on their vaccination status.

Republican Mark Gordon’s directive outlines that “Vaccine passport programs have the potential to politicize a decision that should not be politicized.”

“They would divide our citizens at a time when unity in fighting the virus is essential, and harm those who are medically unable to receive the vaccine,” Gordon noted.

Gordon also urged that getting a vaccine “is a personal choice based upon personal circumstances.”"