U.S. Dollar Hegemony Ended Last Wednesday

popularresistance |  Margaret Flowers: You’re listening to Clearing the FOG, speaking truth to expose the forces of greed, with Margaret Flowers. And now I turn to my guest, Michael Hudson. Michael is the president of the Institute for the Study of Long-term, Economic Trends, ISLET. He’s a Wall Street financial analyst and a distinguished research professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, in Kansas City. He’s also the author of numerous books and recently updated his book, “Super Imperialism: The economic strategy of American Empire.” Thank you for taking time to speak with me today, Michael.

Michael Hudson: Well, thanks for having me on Margaret.

MF: You’ve talked a lot and written a lot about dollar hegemony and what’s happening now with de-dollarization. Can you start out by explaining to my listeners what dollar hegemony is and how it has benefited the wealthy class in the United States?

MH: Dollar hegemony seems to be the position that has just ended as of this week very abruptly. Dollar hegemony was when America’s war in Vietnam and the military spending of the 1960s and 70s drove the United States off gold. The entire US balance of payments deficit was military spending, and it began to run down the gold supply. So, in 1971, President Nixon took the dollar off gold. Well, everybody thought America has been controlling the world economy since World War I by having most of the gold and by being the creditor to the world. And they thought what is going to happen now that the United States is running a deficit, instead of being a creditor.

Well, what happened was that, as I’ve described in Super Imperialism, when the United States went off gold, foreign central banks didn’t have anything to buy with their dollars that were flowing into their countries – again, mainly from the US military deficit but also from the investment takeovers. And they found that these dollars came in, the only thing they could do would be to recycle them to the United States. And what do central banks hold? They don’t buy property, usually, back then they didn’t. They buy Treasury bonds. And so, the United States would be spending dollars abroad and foreign central banks didn’t really have anything to do but send it right back to buy treasury bonds to finance not only the balance of payments deficit, but also the budget deficit that was largely military in character. So, dollar hegemony was the system where foreign central banks keep their monetary and international savings reserves in dollars and the dollars are used to finance the military bases around the world, almost eight hundred military bases surrounding them. So, basically central banks have to keep their savings by weaponizing them, by militarizing them, by lending them to the United States, to keep spending abroad.

This gave America a free ride. Imagine if you went to the grocery store and you just paid by giving them an IOU. And then the next week you want to buy more groceries and you give them another IOU. And they say, wait a minute, you have an IOU before and you say, well just use the IOU to pay the milk company that delivers, or the farmers that deliver. You can use this as your money and just you’ll as a customer, keep writing IOU’s and you never have to pay anything because your IOU is other people’s money. Well, that’s what dollar hegemony was, and it was a free ride. And it all ended last Wednesday when the United States grabbed Russia’s reserves having grabbed Afghanistan’s foreign reserves and Venezuela’s foreign reserves and those of other countries.

And all of a sudden, this means that other countries can no longer safely hold their reserves by sending their money back, depositing them in US banks or buying US Treasury Securities, or having other US investments because they could simply be grabbed as happened to Russia. So, all of a sudden this last week, you’re seeing the world economy fracture into two parts, a dollarized part and other countries that do not follow the neoliberal policies that the United States insists that its allies follow. We’re seeing the birth of a new dual World economy.

MF: Wow, there’s a lot to unpack there. So, are we seeing then other countries starting to disinvest in US dollars? You’ve written about how the treasury bonds that these central banks buy up have been basically funding our domestic economy. Are they starting to shed those bonds or what’s happening?

Public Opinion Has Zero-Impact On U.S. Law

upworthy |  Their study took data from nearly 2,000 public-opinion surveys and compared what the people wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners in America has essentially no impact at all.

Put another way, and I'll just quote the Princeton study directly here:

“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."

Really think about that for a second.

If you've ever felt like your opinion doesn't matter and that the government doesn't really care what you think, well … you're right.

But, of course, there's a catch.

...unless you're an "economic elite."

If there's one thing that still reliably gets politicians' attention, it's money. While the opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners in America have a "statistically non-significant impact," Gilens and Page found that economic elites, business interests, and people who can afford lobbyists still carry major influence.

How could it be that our government, designed to function as a representative democracy, is only good at representing such a small fraction of the population? Just follow the money.

Why? Because purchasing political influence is 100% legal.

For example: Let's say a big bank wants a law that would force taxpayers to bail them out again if they repeat the exact same reckless behavior that crashed the global economy in 2008.

It's perfectly legal for our bank to hire a team of lobbyists whose entire job is to make sure the government gives the bank what it wants. Then, those lobbyists can track down members of Congress who regulate banks and help raise a ton of money for their re-election campaigns. Its also perfectly legal for those lobbyists to offer those same politicians million-dollar jobs at their lobbying firms.

Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kansas), shown speaking at an event in 2012, recently attached language originally drafted by lobbyists for CitiGroup to a financial services appropriations bill. Members of Congress who voted "yes" on the bill received, on average, 2.8 times more money from the PACs of CitiGroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase than members who voted "no." Image by Information Technology Innovation Foundation/Flickr.

They can also literally write the language of this new bailout law themselves, then hand it off to the politicians they just buttered up with campaign money and lucrative job offers. And it's perfectly legal for those politicians to sneak the lobbyist-written language through Congress at the last second.

If that example sounds oddly specific, that's because it happened in December 2014. And it happens all the time, on almost every single issue, with politicians of both parties.

A Strictly Limited Parasitic Elite?

charleshughsmith |   The possibility that the United States could fragment is no longer a marginalized topic. Maps displaying various post-U.S. regional configurations accompany essays exploring how and why a break-up of the U.S. would be a solution to regional and ideological polarization, for example, Max Borders' recent article, Dear America: It's Time to Break Up.

But two forces larger than political polarization may fragment nation-states across the globe, including the U.S.: inequality and scarcity. Inequality and corruption go hand in hand, of course, as the wealthiest few influence the state to protect their monopolies and backstop their speculative gains.

Inequality also goes hand in hand with the collapse of nation-states, as this seminal paper explains: Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies.

The parasitic elite can accumulate the majority of income, wealth, political power and resources in eras of expanding abundance, as what's left is enough to support an expanding populace that consumes more per capita every year, i.e. broad-based prosperity.

But once abundance transitions to scarcity, the economy and society can no longer sustain the dead weight of its outsized parasitic elite. The parasitic elite believes its bloated share of resources, wealth and power is not only sustainable but can be expanded without consequence, and so it deploys all its formidable power to keep the status quo unchanged even as scarcity lowers the living standards of the bottom 90% and hollows out the economy.

In effect, the modern central state, regardless of ideological label, optimizes inequality and growth. Once growth falters while inequality continues increasing, the only possible outcome is fragmentation and/or collapse.

Put another way: the status quo is no longer the solution to inequality and scarcity, it is the problem. Private-sector and political elites are incapable of recognizing they are now the problem, and so the rapid unraveling of the status quo will come as a great shock to their magical-thinking confidence in their power.

The elite's delusional "solution" is a seamless, painless transition to a new era of abundance via "green energy." Unfortunately, this vision is 100% magical thinking, as all these projections ignore the physical realities of building out a global energy system that generates energy on the same scale as existing hydrocarbon energy sources. Read these three reports for reality-based assessments:

The "New Energy Economy": An Exercise in Magical Thinking (manhattan-institute.org)

The Delusion of Infinite Economic Growth: Even "sustainable" technologies such as electric vehicles and wind turbines face unbreachable physical limits and exact grave environmental costs. (scientificamerican.com)

Assessment of the Extra Capacity Required of Alternative Energy Electrical Power Systems to Completely Replace Fossil Fuels (PDF, Simon P. Michaux, Geological Survey of Finland) Read the 3-page abstract.

As explained in the first paper, inequality generates collapse and so does a decline in resources, i.e. scarcity. Put the two together and the only possible outcome is collapse of all centralized nation-states that optimize inequality and endless expansion of consumption.

The issue isn't ideological labels or principles, it's whether the state solves problems or covers them up with fake fixes that accelerate collapse.

Nations which want to not just survive but emerge stronger have one path: a revolutionary transformation from "waste is growth" to degrowth, from an economy and state dominated by a parasitic elite to a strictly limited parasitic elite and from abject dependence on fragile supply chains originating in other nations to decentralized, localized independence for essentials.

What Kind Of Crimes Capture "Our" Attention?

darrellowens  |  I don’t really know if there’s a crime wave regardless of the perception that there is one. I don’t trust police statistics besides homicide, home invasion and auto burglaries. I don’t know many people who would make a police report about assault or theft. I worked at a Walgreens with an extensive theft problem and know first hand only extreme cases were reported to the police. In San Francisco, there’s seven fewer homicides, two hundred more burglaries and fifty more motor thefts than last year. Is that a crime wave? I suppose. The entire country has seen increased crime since the pandemic. The only thing that sticks out about San Francisco is the appalling high drug overdoses last year in which no other Bay Area county came close.

Couldn’t help but notice that the vast majority of mob burglaries happened outside of San Francisco, though. I notice that only crimes in San Francisco require public responses from district attorney Chesa Boudin. Alameda County district attorney Nancy O’Malley is never made to answer for the very clear crime wave in Oakland right now. O’Malley virtually never appears in any publication about the endless homicides, the endless dispensary attacks, or even the freeway shootings that have killed two in the last couple months including a mother and a baby, on top of 80 freeway shootings last year in Alameda County. Nothing about district attorney Diana Becton who bears apparently no responsibility for the numerous homicides in Pittsburg and Antioch, or the burglaries in Walnut Creek. Jeff Rosen, Santa Clara County DA, home of the Lululemon and this recent shoe store mob burglary? Never heard of him.

It’s only Boudin, apparently, who’s expected to give public comment to media about crime. Why? It’s not as if he runs SFPD. He doesn’t make staffing decisions, he doesn’t decide who gets arrested and where beat patrols go. He’s a prosecutor. Because he pointed out that punitive behavior isn’t always warranted in every situation, now he’s become target #1 for all social ills in San Francisco with a recall initiative, despite no real evidence that he’s more lenient on prosecutions than his Bay Area counterparts, or that the crime wave is unique to San Francisco.

What really gets to me though is that there is a clear crime wave happening. Oakland’s at its 127th homicide as of typing this. When I started this substack 2 days ago it was at its 126th. Where’s the faces of the victims? Where’s the twitter videos? Who even are these homicide victims? With exception to the murdered KRON guard Kevin Nishita or baby Jasper Wu, we hardly even know them.

Prior to the pandemic, homicides in Oakland were at all time lows, but now the homicide levels for a second year in a row is reaching 1990s levels of death. But since these are mainly confined to East Oakland and West Oakland, and the victims are mostly Black and Brown, nobody really cares. After all, it’s where murder is expected to happen and to the people it's expected to happen to. When crime happens where it’s not supposed to happen like in suburban Walnut Creek or downtown San Francisco, suddenly it gets hyper media focus.

Louis Vuitton and Nordstrom have become incessantly repeated names as if they’re people, not 15 year old Shamara Young, 34 year old Danny McNary Jr, 41 year old Kanawa Long, 22 year old Devani Aleman Sanchez, 24 year old Suiti Mesui, 33 year old Lindsey Logue, 52 year old Dirk Tillotson, 30 year old Willie Lennon III and the list goes on. What about the numerous unidentified people who were gunned down and had their lives taken from them? The media doesn’t care because they died in the zipcodes where society has deemed it acceptable and not news worthy.

There were three instances of shootings in Oakland the weekend of the Louis Vuitton burglary. Two people—two human beings—died. Shot to death by a gun, bled out on the street with their minds in panic. One a 17 year old boy who spent over 6,000 days being born, raised, having life struggles and successes, having family, going to school — all erased in just a few seconds. No follow up stories by newspapers, no check-ins on the family from journalists. No social media outrage. Nothing.

Just another sex and age description in the homicide weekly wrap up. Public dollars goes not to the therapy for the families who lost their relatives or have been terrorized by crackling bullets, not just in Oakland or Antioch but in Bayview-Hunter’s Point or the troubled areas in downtown San Francisco, but instead to free parking and street closures for suburban Black Friday shoppers.

Dopamine Hits For A Population Wracked By Technologically Mediated Addiction...,

technologyreview |  The implant was fine; it was me that was unpaired. I’d fallen out of sync with the city, and I hated it for taking people away from me and leaving me on my own. 

It’s safest to stay indoors: stay home. It’s the only way you can avoid the awkwardness, the disappointment, the fear. Delete Netflix and Uber Eats, install Prime Video and Amazon Restaurants. Stay at home and build your own city, make your own dopamine map. What’s the point of being lonely if you can’t do it by yourself?

At first, I tried to watch only movies set in New York, as though that had some significance. So the Avengers movies seemed a good place to start. I thought maybe watching the city being repeatedly reduced to rubble at a whim—endless computer-generated buildings demolished into nothing more than Technicolor pixel dust—might give me the hits I needed. But the app barely registered a spike for the first two hours and 22 minutes.

It wasn’t until I got to the post-credits scene—the one where the whole team is sitting around, silently eating, in some nameless, unaffiliated NYC shawarma joint—that my phone started to vibrate.

I’m not going to lie: for a fleeting moment I was ecstatic. I couldn’t tell you if it was just the dopamine spike or some joyful relief that the app had actually registered it. I rewound the scene and watched it again. Same spike, but with a slightly lower peak, according to the app. Third time was similar, but the results diminished again. Time to find more content.

At first I thought I’d have to watch whole movies for it to have the same impact—like I needed to build up some sense of connection with or investment in the characters before their friendships had any personal weight—and started earnestly slogging through the entirety of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But a YouTube fluke showed me otherwise. Before I could stop it, autoplay served me a clip from Ant-Man and the Wasp where Ant-Man is playing with his daughter, and my phone vibrated in my lap. Repeatedly. It was a fucking revelation. I didn’t even have to sit through countless rubble-cities and the eternal melodrama and the endless wisecracking and the infinite polygons. Context was dead: all that mattered was fleeting, calculated emotional spikes. 

It’s not hard to find the content once you know where to look. Listicles are your guide—the real maps to dopamine city are called things like “The 10 Most Heartwarming Moments in the MCU” or “The MCU’s 12 Best Friendships” or “Relive These Feel-Good Moments from the MCU.” Start by searching Tumblr and Screen Rant and you’ll find them all. It’s even better and more efficient if they give you the time stamps. Tony and James sniping at each other in Iron Man (00:10:42). Nick Fury buddy-copping with Carol in Captain Marvel (01:48:07). Peter Parker and Ned Leeds in whichever Spider-Man movie that was (00:23:38).

And then there’s the death scenes, which are perfect if you’ve also got some unresolved societal-level mourning to work through. When Killmonger dies in Black Panther. When Quicksilver dies in Age of Ultron. Spider-Man in Infinity War. Peggy in Winter Soldier. When Groot says “We are Groot” in Guardians of the Galaxy 2.

After a while, of course, you don’t need to search it out; it finds you. Before too long, every ad on every web page was screaming at me about young-adult-oriented TV shows I never knew existed and Star Wars spin-off cartoons. My YouTube recommendations filled up with nothing but fan-edited compilations of superheroes weeping, or supercuts of every time Frodo and Sam hugged. 

There was this whole culture I’d avoided, that I thought I was somehow above, that wasn’t for me. An entire industry built to serve up comforting dopamine hits to a population wracked by technologically mediated loneliness, and exhausted by a society that felt like it was in constant, confusing collapse.

 

 

Caitlin Johnstone's Egoic Consciousness Is An Imprecise Reference To Dopamine Hegemony

caitlinjohnstone |  In a society that's enslaved to egoic consciousness as ours is, the things that generate the most public interest will be those which flatter or infuriate common egoic constructs. This is not unique to politics; advertisers have raked in vast fortunes by associating products with common cultural mind viruses like body image issues and personal inadequacy, and TV show hosts like Jerry Springer and Maury Povich figured out decades ago that you can attract massive ratings by letting people feel smug and superior at the sight of poor and uneducated guests acting out emotionally.

To make something go viral, it needs to appeal to the ego. Advertisers understand this. Media executives understand this. Propagandists understand this.

Creating big psychological identity structures out of our politics makes the job of the propagandists so very much easier; it's like a lubricant which lets mass-scale psyops glide smoothly into public consciousness. From there it's a very easy task to get people hating Russia or China for this or that partisan reason, or to get people believing Trump or Biden are helping the American people despite their both continuing and expanding the same murderous and oppressive status quo of their predecessors. 

This is why the partisan divide is the most heated and contentious it's ever been, while the actual behavior of each mainstream party when it's in power brings in only the most superficial of changes. The oligarchs who own the political/media class desire the continuation of the status quo upon which they have built their empire, but they also want to keep the public as plugged in as possible to the partisan perspectives which facilitate the propaganda that cages our minds.

The solution to this, on an individual level, is to dismantle any egoic attachment you might have to either of the mainstream political factions which preserve the status quo. This includes any attachment to the phony populism of progressive Democrats, and it includes any attachment to the phony populism of Trumpian Republicans. These factions within the mainstream factions are themselves propaganda constructs which will never be permitted to advance any agenda that isn't desired by the oligarchic empire; they serve only to keep people who would be inclined to reject mainstream politics plugged in to mainstream politics. 

And of course the ultimate solution to this problem is for humanity to awaken from the ego. All propaganda relies on egoic hooks in public consciousness to circulate itself, so if humanity begins dropping its habit of creating psychological identity structures altogether (which it looks like it might), we will become harder and harder to propagandize. Since humanity's collective problems ultimately boil down to the fact that sociopaths manipulate our minds at mass scale, such a transformation would make a healthy new world not just possible but inevitable.

 

A Startup For Measuring And Monitoring Dopamine Addiction And Hegemony

bloomberg |  Over the next few weeks, a company called Kernel will begin sending dozens of customers across the U.S. a $50,000 helmet that can, crudely speaking, read their mind. Weighing a couple of pounds each, the helmets contain nests of sensors and other electronics that measure and analyze a brain’s electrical impulses and blood flow at the speed of thought, providing a window into how the organ responds to the world. The basic technology has been around for years, but it’s usually found in room-size machines that can cost millions of dollars and require patients to sit still in a clinical setting.

The promise of a leagues-more-affordable technology that anyone can wear and walk around with is, well, mind-bending. Excited researchers anticipate using the helmets to gain insight into brain aging, mental disorders, concussions, strokes, and the mechanics behind previously metaphysical experiences such as meditation and psychedelic trips. “To make progress on all the fronts that we need to as a society, we have to bring the brain online,” says Bryan Johnson, who’s spent more than five years and raised about $110 million—half of it his own money—to develop the helmets.

Johnson is the chief executive officer of Kernel, a startup that’s trying to build and sell thousands, or even millions, of lightweight, relatively inexpensive helmets that have the oomph and precision needed for what neuroscientists, computer scientists, and electrical engineers have been trying to do for years: peer through the human skull outside of university or government labs. In what must be some kind of record for rejection, 228 investors passed on Johnson’s sales pitch, and the CEO, who made a fortune from his previous company in the payments industry, almost zeroed out his bank account last year to keep Kernel running. “We were two weeks away from missing payroll,” he says. Although Kernel’s tech still has much to prove, successful demonstrations, conducted shortly before Covid-19 spilled across the globe, convinced some of Johnson’s doubters that he has a shot at fulfilling his ambitions.

A core element of Johnson’s pitch is “Know thyself,” a phrase that harks back to ancient Greece, underscoring how little we’ve learned about our head since Plato. Scientists have built all manner of tests and machines to measure our heart, blood, and even DNA, but brain tests remain rare and expensive, sharply limiting our data on the organ that most defines us. “If you went to a cardiologist and they asked you how your heart feels, you would think they are crazy,” Johnson says. “You would ask them to measure your blood pressure and your cholesterol and all of that.”

The first Kernel helmets are headed to brain research institutions and, perhaps less nobly, companies that want to harness insights about how people think to shape their products. (Christof Koch, chief scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, calls Kernel’s devices “revolutionary.”) By 2030, Johnson says, he wants to bring down the price to the smartphone range and put a helmet in every American household—which starts to sound as if he’s pitching a panacea. The helmets, he says, will allow people to finally take their mental health seriously, to get along better, to examine the mental effects of the pandemic and even the root causes of American political polarization. If the Biden administration wanted to fund such research, Johnson says, he’d be more than happy to sell the feds a million helmets and get started: “Let’s do the largest brain study in history and try to unify ourselves and get back to a steady state.”

Americans Have Dehumanized One Another To Death...,

eudaeminiaandcompany |   In American life, everything, so much as can be, is private. Almost nothing is public. You go from your big house to your big car to your big sofa and you sit in front of your big TV. Back and forth to and from work you go this way. You barely need to speak to another person at all — except in the way of a commodity. The market mediates all human relationships, more or less — even romantic ones, now, which are brokered by algorithms, and reduced to raw sexuality. Everyone is a commodity.

That sounds like the stuff my favourite teenage punk bands would say. But they were right, the more I think about it. What does it mean when commodified relations are the only ones left in a society?

Well, people grow estranged. From each other. They don’t see each other as fellow travellers anymore, fellow citizens, husbands, mothers, fathers, grandparents…anything.

So what are they? They’re rivals. Adversaries. For what, in what? In a series of games. I shouldn’t call them games, though, because the stakes are very real. One game is played at work — Americans compete for “jobs,” in “jobs,” ferociously. They work famously long hours and get little to no real rest or succour. Why? Because, of course, everything is attached to the “job” — healthcare, retirement, childcare, etcetera. I put it in quotes because the only real point of this is to make billionaires richer — Americans are right where they were in economic terms half a century ago.

Americans are rivals for work, which makes them adversaries for basic resources — money, medicine, food, shelter. And they’re also rivals and adversaries for status. Big cars, big houses, big TVs. Americans are told that status and power are all that count in life, apart from money — and they obey this dictum weirdly mindlessly. They preen on Instagram and spend their money on shinier and bigger and faster things, and go ever deeper into debt. They don’t really regard each other as neighbours, friends, colleagues. They’re rivals in these zero-sum games: for basic resources, by way of production, and then for social status, by way of consumption.

This is a strange story of individualism and materialism run amok, gone haywire, pushed to the extreme. American life is so alienating because, above all, it’s hyper-individualistic. Like I said, you can go a day — a week — without ever talking to another living soul as anything other than a commodity. That is because you are never sharing anything with anybody, something as simple as public space.

Americans famously deny each other healthcare — while carrying guns to Starbucks. Mass shootings are weekly if not daily events. America’s legendary cruelty and hostility isn’t a fiction. And neither is the idea that at its heart is an materialism and individualism gone haywire. Everything is private — that’s a statistical fact, about 85% of America’s economy is private, and just 15% public.

That’s a recipe for selfishness that goes off the charts. When everything is private, and so little public, it’s not just that you don’t rub elbows with anyone else, except as a commodity — and well, commodities are disposable. It’s also that a kind of enmity takes over. You’ve got your big house and big car and big TV. And now you have to keep it. The world becomes a threat, to the hyper individualistic, hyper materialistic personality — and sharing anything with anyone, which is vulnerability, becomes a liability.

 

What Must Be Covered And What Must Be Revealed..,

sovereignman |  Even when we aren’t sick, we should cover our faces in public, just to make the mask-wearers feel better.

Masks Forever

“It no longer signals that a person is sick, or that a person is strange… It is no longer scary or felt to be an imposition on our rights. Mask-wearing can simply signal that we care about others’ health, and about our own.”

Let’s keep an uncomfortable, dehumanizing, air-restricting custom of masking in public, just as a little signal of our empathy. And conversely, if you aren’t willing to mask up for no good reason, you’re a selfish aggressor.

But there’s one more benefit that Dr. Ranney adds in case you’re not sold.

“[Masks have] become a form of self-expression or a marker of being part of the in-group.”

University locks students out for missing weekly Covid test

The University of Michigan announced to students that 718 of them would have their access cards deactivated for all non-residential campus buildings.

These students had failed to take the required WEEKLY Covid-19 test. So now they cannot access cafeterias, classrooms, gyms, and other campus amenities.

Evacuation from deadly volcano eruption is only for the vaccinated

The Prime Minister of St. Vincent ordered an emergency evacuation from areas of the Caribbean island last week as a deadly volcano began erupting.

Cruise ships responded to the emergency to help evacuate residents, and neighboring countries like St. Lucia, Grenada, and Barbados agreed to give shelter to those in need.

But according to the Prime Minister, there was one condition.

Only those already vaccinated against Covid-19 would be eligible for the emergency cruise ship evacuation, and relocation to other islands.

Australian government could require ID for social media use

The Australian parliament released a report called “Inquiry into family, domestic and sexual violence.”

In it, the government recommends forcing social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and even dating apps like Tinder to require government ID in order to use the services.

YouTube censors panel of medical experts over Covid-19 “misinformation”

The Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis recently held a panel discussion to discuss recent research findings related to Covid-19.

The expert panel included four professors of medicine from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford Universities, who are all PhDs and experts in a field of disease research. And that just scratches the surface of their credentials relevant to being considered Covid-19 experts.

 And you can watch the follow up conference here (on YouTube alternative Rumble).

 

 

WHO Finally Gave Up The Aerosol Transmission Booty - Will Truth Now Enter Permissible Discourse?

nature |  On 28 March 2020, two months after the WHO had declared COVID-19 a global health emergency, the agency broadcast a public-health message on Twitter and Facebook. “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne,” it said, labelling claims to the contrary as misinformation. But evidence quickly established that the virus is transmitted by air, and researchers roundly criticized the agency.

The WHO updated its advice on SARS-CoV-2 transmission three months later, acknowledging the possibility that airborne transmission might occur in some community settings. Airborne transmission in “crowded and inadequately ventilated spaces over a prolonged period of time with infected persons cannot be ruled out”, the updated advice says.

Yuguo Li, a building environment engineer at the University of Hong Kong, says that he is disappointed it took the WHO and other health authorities so long. “We would have saved a lot of people” if airborne transmission was recognized earlier, he says.

A WHO spokesperson says the agency has mentioned the importance of ventilation since early in the pandemic.

Others say that the WHO’s position still doesn’t go far enough. “Airborne transmission is dominant,” says environmental epidemiologist Joseph Allen at Harvard University’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. That’s why building controls such as ventilation and air filtration make sense, he says.

The WHO and other health authorities have failed to clearly prioritise measures to improve indoor air quality to reduce the chance of catching COVID-19, says Jose-Luis Jimenez, an atmospheric chemist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “They don’t emphasize how important it is,” he says. What the WHO needs to say is “fact, it goes through the air,” says Jimenez, “we breathe it in.”

A stark message from the WHO would ensure that national health authorities take notice, says Jimenez. Australia, the Netherlands and some other nations still do not acknowledge in their public statements that airborne transmission has a significant role in spreading the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

By the start of this year, concerns over ventilation had reached boiling point. Hundreds of health-care workers, scientists, engineers and occupational health-and-safety experts signed open letters calling on government officials in Canada, the United States, Australia, Colombia and the United Kingdom to address, among other things, poor indoor air quality. These concerted campaigns all urged local or national governments to take steps to reduce airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

One of the problems is that governments and businesses are still spending millions of dollars on surface disinfection, says Jimenez, despite evidence that it is rare for SARS-CoV-2 to pass from one person to another through contaminated surfaces. By contrast, few countries have invested in measures to improve indoor air quality.

 

Christian Nationalism Doesn't Account For Black, Latino, Or Medical Vaccine Hesitancy

nakedcapitalism |  Yves here. I’m running this post with its original headline, although the article doesn’t make terribly clear what “Christian nationalism” is. The author defines is at extreme evangelism but I’m at a loss to understand what makes that “nationalism”. The reason I am running this article is that it discusses an specific issue that IM Doc mentioned back in early February.

And even though we are discussing different subcultures in America, we might as well be talking about different countries. One of the lessons I learned by virtue of deciding to see the world on the McKinsey plan, was that virtually without exception, US companies entering a foreign market would royally screw things up. Even if they’d managed to hire good managers from the new market, the top brass would reject recommended changes to the product or branding to cater to local tastes: “They can’t possibly want that! Of course they’ll prefer our superior dog food!” They almost always had to fail before they’d listen to how the locals thought about things and understand why they wanted what they wanted.

I had sent a link from the Ghion Journal, which was and is pretty up in arms about the Covid vaccines, as an example of vaccine alarmism in the black community. IM Doc said then that he was hearing a lot of reports from doctors in his network in big cities of vaccine hesitancy among blacks and if anything more so among Latinos at that point. But he was the first to alert me to opposition among conservative Christians, beyond those based on the mistaken belief that fetal cells had somehow been used in vaccine development (true in a very strained sense with the J&J vaccine). From his e-mail:

We are seeing all this rage and rush to get vaccinated right now. It is easy to assume there is widespread demand. That is not true…. And then the fun will begin. If you think the anti-mask, anti-lockdown people have been ridiculed and shamed – you have not seen anything yet. I know my Big Pharma and it is obvious they have a stranglehold on our agencies and politicians. They have gotten so used to complete acquiescence that they are becoming supremely over-confident. Trust me, if they think they will get away with forced vaccination of kids for school, they have no idea what they are stepping in. Also, I can think of no quicker way to bankruptcy for airlines and cruise companies then to demand a vaccine passport. They will instantly cut their customer base by 30-40%.

It is not just blacks and Latinos. Our medical and public health elites have their head so far up their ass that they are missing critical cultural and religious issues going on all over this country with regard to the vaccine. For example, my oh so Protestant family members and all their friends back home have zero intention of taking this vaccine. All the talk of vaccine passports and vaccine cards to get in and out of stores and restaurants and events have convinced them that this is the first manifestation of the long anticipated Mark of the Beast. To take the Mark of the Beast is a certain trip to Hell for Eternity….And because of our elites’ complete bungling insensitivity, they have already completely and permanently alienated these people. Again, this is being preached from their pulpits, and no amount of coercion or threats is going to work. I grew up in that environment. I know what I am talking about. They will starve to death before they take The Mark of the Beast.

I have no idea how large this population is. IM Doc gave an estimate for rural America and the South that struck me as high, having lived in the rural upper Midwest, Oregon, and spent a lot of time in Maine. But the point is this is a cohort that is not trivial in size, and its existence has finally gotten the attention of some in the officialdom, too late in the game for them to change course. You’ll see the out-of-touch recommendation in the piece:

…faith leaders can guide their followers and use their pulpits to encourage parishioners that the vaccine is safe and in line with religious doctrines.

That could work with concerns that are based on misinformation, but not ones based on views that see social control/surveillance as evil. There’s no way of prettying up the more heavy-handed schemes to get citizens to take the shot.

And IM Doc, then as now, argued that the bureaucrats have done a terrible job with general practitioners by failing to give the information needed to give honest answers and “best available data” assessments of outcomes and risks:

And again, I will remind you – as a primary care physician I have been tasked with educating patients about these vaccines. I have little if any information about safety. I have zero information on how these vaccines will help death or hospitalizations. I have zero information on how long the immunity will last. I have zero credible and often wildly disparate information about whether it will work on these variants, which are now this month’s panic porn topic on the news. I have very educated patients who come to ask questions all day every day. I will not lie to them, nor will I smile and pass out happy horse shit like so many of my colleagues seem to be doing. The medical elites have put the normal PCPs of this country in a very difficult if not impossible situation.

I hope and pray that all goes well. I, like everyone else, want this to be over. However, if something goes majorly wrong with this gamble, God help us.

Wokeness Is A Colorful, Gendered Figleaf For Disguising Naked Western Imperialism

strategic-culture  |  In The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst, contends that western élites are experiencing a collapse of authority deriving from a failure to distinguish between legitimate criticism and – what he terms – illegitimate rebellion. Once control over the justifying myth of America was lost, the mask was off. And the disparity between the myth and public experience of it became only too evident.

Writing in 2014, Gurri foresaw that the Establishment would respond by denouncing all evidence of public discontent, as lies and disinformation. The Establishment would, in Gurri’s telling, be so constrained within their ‘bubble’ that they would be unable to assimilate their loss of monopoly over their own confected ‘reality’. This Establishment denial would be made manifest, he argued, in a delusional, ham-fisted authoritarian manner. His predictions have been vindicated with Trumpist dissidence denounced as a threat to ‘our democracy’ – amidst a media and social platform crackdown. Such a response would only confirm the suspicions of the public, thus setting off a vicious circle of yet more “distrust and loss of legitimacy”, Gurri concluded.

This was Gurri’s main thrust. The book’s striking feature however, was how it seemed so completely to nail the coming Trump and Brexit era – and the ‘anti-system’ impulse behind them. In America, this impulse found Trump – not the other way around. The point here essentially being that America no longer saw Red and Blue as the two extended wings belonging to the bird of liberal democracy. For something around half of America, the ‘system’ was rigged towards a profiteering 0.1%, and against them.

The key point here surely is whether the élites’ Great Re-set – to reinvent themselves as leaders of the ‘re-vamped’ values of liberalism, overlayered by a newly up-dated, AI and robot-led, post-modernity – is destined to succeed, or not.

Continued ‘westification’ of the globe – the principal component to ‘old’ liberal globalism – though tarnished and largely discredited, remains mandatory, as made clear in the cogent reasoning recently advanced by Robert Kagan: Absent the justifying myth of ‘seeding democracy across the world’ around which to organise the empire, the moral logic of the entire enterprise begins to fall apart, Kagan argued (with surprising frankness). He thus asserts that the U.S. empire abroad is required – precisely in order to preserve the myth of ‘democracy’ at home. An America that retreats from global hegemony, he argues, would no longer possess the cohesive binding to preserve America as liberal democracy, at home either.

Gurri is ambivalent on the élite’s ability to stick fast. He both asserts that “the centre cannot hold”, but then adds that the periphery had “no clue what to do about it”. The public revolts would likely arrive unattached to coherent plans, pushing society into interminable cycles of zero-sum clashes between myopic authorities, and their increasingly furious subjects. He called this a “paralysis of distrust”, where outsiders can “neutralize, but not replace the centre” and “networks can protest and overthrow, but never govern”.

There may indeed be some truth in this latter observation, yet what is happening today in the U.S. is but one ‘battle’ (albeit a key one) in a longer strategic war, reaching far back. The notion of a New World Order is nothing new. Imagined by globalists today, as before, it remains a teleological process of the ‘westification’ of the globe (western ‘universal values’), pursued under the rubric of (scientific) modernism.

James Corbett And Whitney Webb About To Be Defunded And Deplatformed...,

off-guardian |  James Corbett is likely not long for the YouTube world, having received his second warning his channel is on the chopping block.

There are still many platforms on which you can follow his work (detailed in the above video), most importantly his website. We do suggest you subscribe either via email or RSS. (Also here is a list of Corbett’s videos that YouTube has already removed).

For creators out there, this is a timely reminder: ALWAYS have hardcopy back-ups of your work and sign up to multiple platforms. The indy platforms are growing in both number and size. From BitChute to LBRY.tv to social networks like Gab and Parler.

Corbett is not the only independent media facing increased censorship and denial of service. Whitney Webb, a great independent researcher and journalist who has written for many outlets and runs UnlimitedHangout.com, is also in danger of having her Patreon shut down.

Likewise, in just the last few weeks, The Last American Vagabond has had both its twitter shut down and its Patreon put “on review”.

Worrying signs. It looks like we might be in for a spring cull of the alternate media herd. Rest assured, we at OffG are already looking into alternate options, should Patreon (or PayPal) decide we are also persona non grata.

Journalism Is Publishing What Someone Else Doesn't Want Reported, The Rest Is Public Relations....,

greenwald |  As it turns out, we did not have to wait long for the initiation of the censorship campaign aimed at Substack. It has arrived. And amazingly, the trigger for it was my criticism of the work of a front-page New York Times reporter which, as I wrote yesterday, is — like all criticisms of journalists in Good Standing and Decent Liberal Society — being recast as “abuse” and “harassment” and “violence” in order to justify the banning and outlawing of that criticism.

A long-time tech reporter at BuzzFeed who was fired by that outlet in June for serial plagiarism, Ryan Broderick, wrote an article on Wednesday night warning that Substack is now dangerously providing a platform to a “cadre of writers” which, in addition to me, includes such societal menaces as “Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, Jesse Singal, and, I’d argue, Slate Star Codex writer Scott Alexander Siskind.” He darkly notes: “There are more.” This group of writers, he says, is “focusing on culture war Twitter drama about being ‘canceled’ and trans people in bathrooms and woke college students.”

Broderick detailed how he had carefully reviewed a prior article of mine, one that examined the emergence of “tattletale culture” in the country’s largest corporate media outlets, to determine — like the good little diligent junior-high hall monitor that he is — whether it ran afoul of Substack’s terms of service rules against “doxing” and “harassment.”

That article of mine was devoted to a critique of the prevailing journalistic practices at the most powerful and influential media corporations on the planet: The New York Times, CNN, and NBC News. But to Broderick, whether that article should be banned on the grounds of harassment is a close call. While reluctantly conceding that I did not “dox” anyone, he called the article “a vicious screed” and said that the danger signs from my critiques of corporate journalists are clear: “online harassment is a constantly evolving process of boundary testing.” He lamented that Substack’s terms of service are too permissive (“One thing that worried me was how simplistic their definition of harassment was”) and insisted that Substack is soon going to have to step in and put a stop to this:

Right now most of the abuse being carried out by this group is confined to Twitter, but it stands to reason that it will eventually spill over to Substack. And dealing with people like Greenwald is going to be much harder to moderate than your average troll.

[Please permit me to pause here just a moment and marvel at the towering irony that a journalist who spent years at BuzzFeed doing absolutely nothing of value and then got fired for serial plagiarism (again: he got fired for ethical breaches by BuzzFeed) is now, with a straight face, holding himself out as the Guardian and Defender of Real Journalism. Even more amazingly, he believes he is fulfilling that role by demanding that I — not a journalist but just a “troll” who is the enemy of Real Journalism despite having more impactful scoops and journalism awards and, as I detailed yesterday, resulting persecution campaigns from governments than all of these petulant fragile babies combined — be silenced in the name of saving journalism and protecting real reporters like him and his friends from harassment].

In case Broderick’s article was not explicit enough in his demand that Substack start censoring me and others, he took to Twitter to promote his article, where he made that even clearer. He described his article this way: “I wrote about the attacks against @TaylorLorenz and the growing community of right-wing culture warriors and TERFs that are using Substack to network and organize.”

If Corporate Media Hits You It's Journalism, If You Hit Them Back, It's VIOLENCE!!!

greenwald |  The most powerful and influential newspaper in the U.S., arguably the West, is The New York Times. Journalists who write for it, especially those whose work is featured on its front page or in its op-ed section, wield immense power to shape public discourse, influence thought, set the political agenda for the planet’s most powerful nation, expose injustices, or ruin the lives of public figures and private citizens alike. That is an enormous amount of power in the hands of one media institution and its employees. That’s why it calls itself the Paper of Record.

One of the Paper of Record’s star reporters, Taylor Lorenz, has been much discussed of late. That is so for three reasons. The first is that the thirty-six-year-old tech and culture reporter has helped innovate a new kind of reportorial beat that seems to have a couple of purposes. She publishes articles exploring in great detail the online culture of teenagers and very young adults, which, as a father of two young Tik-Tok-using children, I have found occasionally and mildly interesting. She also seeks to catch famous and non-famous people alike using bad words or being in close digital proximity to bad people so that she can alert the rest of the world to these important findings. It is natural that journalists who pioneer a new form of reporting this way are going to be discussed.

The second reason Lorenz is the topic of recent discussion is that she has been repeatedly caught fabricating claims about influential people, and attempting to ruin the reputations and lives of decidedly non-famous people. In the last six weeks alone, she twice publicly lied about Netscape founder Marc Andreessen: once claiming he used the word “retarded” in a Clubhouse room in which she was lurking (he had not) and then accusing him of plotting with a white nationalist in a different Clubhouse room to attack her (he, in fact, had said nothing).  

She also often uses her large, powerful public platform to malign private citizens without any power or public standing by accusing them of harboring bad beliefs and/or associating with others who do. (She is currently being sued by a citizen named Arya Toufanian, who claims Lorenz has used her private Twitter account to destroy her reputation and business, particularly with a tweet that Lorenz kept pinned at the top of her Twitter page for eight months, while several other non-public figures complain that Lorenz has “reported” on their non-public activities). It is to be expected that a New York Times journalist who gets caught lying as she did against Andreessen and trying to destroy the reputations of non-public figures will be a topic of conversation.

The third reason this New York Times reporter is receiving attention is because she has become a leading advocate and symbol for a toxic tactic now frequently used by wealthy and influential public figures (like her) to delegitimize criticisms and even render off-limits any attempt to hold them accountable. Specifically, she and her media allies constantly conflate criticisms of people like them with “harassment,” “abuse” and even “violence.”

That is what Lorenz did on Tuesday when she co-opted International Women’s Day to announce that “it is not an exaggeration to say that the harassment and smear campaign I have had to endure over the past year has destroyed my life.” She began her story by proclaiming: “For international women’s day please consider supporting women enduring online harassment.” She finished it with this: “No one should have to go through this.” Notably, there was no mention, by her or her many media defenders, of the lives she has harmed or otherwise deleteriously affected with her massive journalistic platform.

 

The Beltway Uniparty Intends To Impose Narrative Conformity

greenwald |  Not even two months into their reign as the majority party that controls the White House and both houses of Congress, key Democrats have made clear that one of their top priorities is censorship of divergent voices. On Saturday, I detailed how their escalating official campaign to coerce and threaten social media companies into more aggressively censoring views that they dislike — including by summoning social media CEOs to appear before them for the third time in less than five months — is implicating, if not already violating, core First Amendment rights of free speech.

Now they are going further — much further. The same Democratic House Committee that is demanding greater online censorship from social media companies now has its sights set on the removal of conservative cable outlets, including Fox News, from the airwaves. 

Since when is it the role of the U.S. Government to arbitrate and enforce precepts of “journalistic integrity”? Unless you believe in the right of the government to regulate and control what the press says — a power which the First Amendment explicitly prohibits — how can anyone be comfortable with members of Congress arrogating unto themselves the power to dictate what media outlets are permitted to report and control how they discuss and analyze the news of the day?

But what House Democrats are doing here is far more insidious than what is revealed by that creepy official announcement. Two senior members of that Committee, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Silicon-Valley) and Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-CA) also sent their own letters to seven of the nation’s largest cable providers — Comcast, AT&T, Spectrum, Dish, Verizon, Cox and Altice — as well as to digital distributors of cable news (Roku, Amazon, Apple, Google and Hulu) demanding to know, among other things, what those cable distributors did to prevent conservative “disinformation” prior to the election and after — disinformation, they said, that just so happened to be spread by the only conservative cable outlets: Fox, Newsmax and OANN.

In case there was any doubt about their true goal — coercing these cable providers to remove all cable networks that feature conservative voices, including Fox (just as their counterparts on that Committee want to ban right-wing voices from social media) — the House Democrats in their letter said explicitly what they are after: namely, removal of those conservative outlets by these cable providers:

 

Dr. Cornel West - You Know WHO And WHAT You Must Never Discuss...,

bostonreview |  Harvard hired Dr. Cornel West in 2016 without tenure? This was news to me. Five years ago I wrote what I believed was a tenure review letter for Dr. West; I even named the file “cornel_west_tenure.docx.” I received the request on April 18, 2016. Given Dr. West’s dual appointments in both the Harvard Divinity School and the Department of African and African-American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the request was signed by David Hempton, Dean of Harvard Divinity School, and Claudine Gay, Dean of Social Science in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. It asked me to evaluate Dr. West for a senior appointment as Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy. The letter never states that this was to be a non-tenured appointment, nor is tenure explicitly mentioned. But having received literally hundreds of requests over the course of three decades, I can say it certainly read like a tenured appointment.

Besides, Dr. West had already been tenured at Harvard—and at Yale and at Princeton. Dr. West left his tenured position at Harvard in 2002 after then Harvard president Lawrence Summers questioned his scholarship, his commitment to teaching, and his political advocacy. He took a tenured position at Princeton, where he remained for more than ten years before moving to Union Theological Seminary and then back to Harvard. It never occurred to me that Harvard would bring him back as a contract laborer, especially given the criteria for tenure: the value and originality of scholarship.

It is ridiculous to have to say this, but the public attacks make it necessary: Dr. West is a formidable intellectual who works in the interstices of philosophy, theology, cultural criticism, political analysis, and social critique. He has produced a massive body of work that cuts across forms and disciplines—books, articles, published dialogues, lectures, debates, and commentary displayed across several different media platforms. No need to reproduce his curriculum vitae here. Just consider the fact that Dr. West has been the subject of several scholarly books: Mark David Wood’s Cornel West and the Politics of Prophetic Pragmatism (2000), Rosemary Cowan’s Cornel West: The Politics of Redemption (2002), Clarence Johnson’s Cornel West and Philosophy (2003), and Keith Gilyard’s Composition and Cornel West: Notes Toward a Deep Democracy (2008), to name just a few. Only a handful of Dr. West’s tenured colleagues can make such a claim. And beyond all this, he is an immensely popular teacher and a stalwart supporter of student activism.

Graduate students from across the campus swiftly petitioned the university to reconsider its decision to deny Dr. West tenure. Jonathan L. Swain, Harvard’s director of media relations, would not comment on the petition, but he did say previously that West’s reappointment committee did not have the authority to review him for tenure. To put it bluntly, either the dean, the provost, or the president blocked any possibility of turning Dr. West’s appointment into a tenured position, but no one so far is willing to take responsibility for this decision. Dr. West suspects it has to do with his politics—notably, his active support for the Bernie Sanders campaign and his consistent advocacy for Palestinian human rights. I agree. Harvard has a problem with outspoken, principled faculty who take public positions that question university policy, challenge authority, or might ruffle the feathers of big donors. And when the faculty in question are scholars of color, their odds of getting through the tenure process are slim to none.

 

Joy Reid Is A Sassy Blue-Check Establishment-Negroe Troll Licensed To Say Anything

mediaite  |   “Enter the Republican conspiracy senator from Wisconsin, by way of Moscow, Ron Johnson,” said Joy Reid on her 7 p.m. MSNBC show last week. By way of Moscow? I guess Johnson is a puppet of Putin, or something?

This wouldn’t be much of a story if it weren’t the third most outlandish thing Reid said in the last week. Instead, Reid is empowered to say what appears to be more hyperbolic and vitriolic comments, encouraged by her Twitter followers and, apparently, by her bosses at the NBC News-affiliated cable channel.

On Wednesday night’s Reid Out, the host was opining on the decision by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to “open” the state and end the statewide mask mandate. With the chyron “Texas To End All COVID Precautions” (not true, but moving on), Reid had this to say about Texas and Mississippi: “These states, what they have in common, is they have structures which say black and brown lives matter less. All that matters is that Black and brown people get their behinds into the factory and make me my steaks. Make me my stuff. Get there and do my nails. Work. Get back to work now, and do the things that I, the comfortable, affluent, person need. Isn’t that what we’re seeing?”

There’s a lot here to unpack. Reid’s conclusion is that Texas is going to change Covid rules so “Black and brown people” can… “make me my steaks”? It’s confusing, and offensive — and spoken with such a total certainty, which makes it so much worse.

Which brings us to this tweet from Reid, also from Wednesday and also supremely confident, about what “people on the right” think:

I’ll say it again: people on the right would trade all the tax cuts for the ability to openly say the n-word like in “the good old days.” To them, not being able to be openly racist and discriminatory without consequence is oppression. Trump is the avatar for this “freedom.” https://t.co/RlqAFYe5Zr

— Joy-Ann Pro-Democracy & Masks Reid 😷 (@JoyAnnReid) March 4, 2021

Yes, Reid apparently believes that “people on the right” would like to “openly say the n-word,” and that “not being able to be openly racist” is “oppression” to these people. Note — this is not directed at “racists” or “white supremacists.” It’s not even couching this as “some people on the right.” It’s just a blanket, across-the-board comment, according to Reid, that all people on the right think this way. Theoretically, Joy Reid works with “people on the right” — like Nicolle Wallace. But I mean this sincerely — does Joy Reid really know a single Republican?

Elites Overplayed The Pandemic - Cancellation, Economic Warfare And Gun Control Cards Are Next

alt-market |  This phase of the crisis will happen within a month to two months of any national shutdown. Red states will refuse to comply. State politicians, even if they are part of the agenda, will be too scared to try to enforce federal mandates. They will be compelled by the conservative citizenry to keep their states open. Most people in these areas will ignore mandates.

This will lead to a red state fiscal boom, at least in the beginning, as business continues to thrive in conservative areas while blue states suffer under medical tyranny. Companies will flee leftist states by the thousands and move to any states that remain open and accommodating. This will be short lived, though.

Biden and the federal government will try to retaliate, first by cutting off federal funds to any state that does not bow to their power and refusing to give stimulus to any businesses that relocate. Blue states will be flush with stimulus cash while red states will be forced to reduce or eliminate welfare programs and some pension funds.

Of course, the government has no real money to give, they only have our tax dollars and the fiat that the central bank creates from thin air. The likely response will be that conservative states and citizens will simply stop paying federal taxes. Another reaction will be red states taking over federal lands and utilizing the resources on those lands to rejuvenate their industry and make up for the federal dollars lost.

What this amounts to is a soft secession of conservative regions, which will eventually lead to federal attempts at physical intervention (the economic war will turn into a shooting war). The argument from the establishment will be that conservatives are putting the rest of the country “at risk”, that we are “selfish” and “literally killing grandma”.

Complete Erasure Of Conservatives From The Internet

I expect Biden and Big Tech to further pursue their current witch hunt against conservative voices, far beyond what we have already seen. In order to win a fight with conservatives they will first have to silence us so that our side of the argument is never seen or considered by the rest of the population. If they allow us to be heard, we will undoubtedly win because facts and moral reason are on our side.

It is hard to demonize people that simply want to be free.

But, if you can silence conservatives and moderates, then the narrative can be rigged. The establishment spin doctors can tell people that we don’t actually want freedom; we want something else, something evil and nefarious. They can tell people we are “fascists”, and that we are “racists” and that we actually want tyranny. Who is going to tell the public otherwise when we are removed from all available platforms and our websites are booted off service providers due to “dangerous ideas”?

Gun Control Madness

I know that some people think that leftists under Biden will not try to carry out a widespread gun crackdown and that much of the current talk is merely hollow rhetoric. I disagree. I think the globalists are going for broke, and they need to get as many combat capable firearms as they can from Americans soon. Democrats will push hard for legislation like HR 127.

They will then offer a “compromise” with Republicans and the NRA, cutting out portions of the bill. This will be a trick to make the public think that the new restrictions are a “reasonable compromise”. They think we will breath a sigh of relief and say “Well, at least they didn’t take everything…”

The gun grabbers are delusional.

What will really happen is millions of gun owners will pass local and state laws negating federal restrictions. No conservatives are going to give up their gun rights, allow red flag laws to be implemented or allow high capacity firearms to be limited; not at this stage in the game.

 

"We" Don't Know Bupkis Beyond Whatever You Tell "Us" - And You Ain't Told The Truth Yet!!!

bloomberg  |  More than a year after Covid-19 touched off the worst pandemic in more than a century, scientists have yet to determine its origins. The closest related viruses to SARS-CoV-2 were found in bats more than 1,000 miles from the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where the disease erupted in late 2019. Initially, cases were tied to a fresh food market and possibly the wildlife sold there. Other theories allege the virus accidentally escaped from a nearby research laboratory, or entered China via imported frozen food. Amid all the posturing and finger-pointing, governments and scientists agree that deciphering the creation story is key to reducing the risk of future pandemics.

1. Why don’t we know where it came from?

Where, when and how a pathogen crosses the species barrier and begins spreading in humans can be difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint. Although SARS-CoV-2 is genetically similar to coronaviruses collected from a type of bat, it may have followed a long and convoluted path to Wuhan, a city of 11 million people. Scientists are tracing the earliest known cases to try to establish how they were infected, but the trail backward largely goes cold in early December 2019. Where a new disease starts spreading isn’t necessarily where it spilled over from the animal kingdom to infect the first human. HIV, for instance, is thought to have originated in chimpanzees in southeastern Cameroon, but didn’t begin spreading readily in people until the 1920s, when it reached the city of Kinshasa, hundreds of miles away. Scientists reported that finding in 2014, some three decades after the AIDS pandemic was recognized.

2. Who’s looking?

The World Health Organization was asked in May to help with the research, and a team of 17 international scientists, including one based in the U.S., concluded a four-week joint mission with 17 researchers from China in early February. Their findings are slated to be released in March. Other groups, including an expert panel convened by the medical journal The Lancet called the Covid-19 Commission, are also

3. What do we know so far?

Not much. Bats are the source of two coronaviruses that caused lethal outbreaks in people during the past two decades -- severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS) -- and the flying mammals are considered the reservoir host for SARS-CoV-2 as well as a plethora of other viruses. (A reservoir host is an animal that harbors a pathogen but isn’t sickened by it.) After SARS-CoV-2 emerged, Shi Zhengli, a virologist who heads a group that studies bat-borne coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, identified three closely related viruses collected during the previous 15 years. The closest, which is about 96% identical to SARS-CoV-2, was isolated from swabs and fecal material from Rhinolophus affinis, a species of horseshoe bat, in the southern Chinese province of Yunnan in 2013. Some researchers have linked that particular virus to a mineshaft in Mojiang county in Yunnan, where six men contracted a pneumonia-like disease in 2012 that killed three of them. Although SARS-CoV-2 and the virus from Yunnan may share a common ancestor, they’re not sufficiently similar to indicate SARS-CoV-2 was derived from the Yunnan virus. Sampling of bats in Hubei, the province of which Wuhan is the capital, haven’t found any positive for the pandemic strain. Coronaviruses sharing certain genetic features with SARS-CoV-2 have been found in other Rhinolophus bat species and pangolins, a scaly, ant-eating mammal, elsewhere in Asia, highlighting the broad distribution of related coronaviruses that may have contributed to SARS-CoV-2’s evolution. That’s led to multiple hypotheses for how and where it emerged.

probing the virus’s origins.