MIT | Nature has had billions of years to perfect
photosynthesis, which directly or indirectly supports virtually all life
on Earth. In that time, the process has achieved almost 100 percent
efficiency in transporting the energy of sunlight from receptors to
reaction centers where it can be harnessed — a performance vastly better
than even the best solar cells.
One way plants achieve this
efficiency is by making use of the exotic effects of quantum mechanics —
effects sometimes known as “quantum weirdness.” These effects, which
include the ability of a particle to exist in more than one place at a
time, have now been used by engineers at MIT to achieve a significant
efficiency boost in a light-harvesting system.
Surprisingly, the
researchers at MIT and Eni, the Italian energy company, achieved this
new approach to solar energy not with high-tech materials or microchips —
but by using genetically engineered viruses.
This achievement in coupling quantum research and genetic manipulation, described this week in the journal Nature Materials,
was the work of MIT professors Angela Belcher, an expert on engineering
viruses to carry out energy-related tasks, and Seth Lloyd, an expert on
quantum theory and its potential applications; research associate
Heechul Park; and 14 collaborators at MIT, Eni, and Italian
universities.
Lloyd, the Nam Pyo Suh Professor in the Department
of Mechanical Engineering, explains that in photosynthesis, a photon
hits a receptor called a chromophore, which in turn produces an exciton —
a quantum particle of energy. This exciton jumps from one chromophore
to another until it reaches a reaction center, where that energy is
harnessed to build the molecules that support life.
But the
hopping pathway is random and inefficient unless it takes advantage of
quantum effects that allow it, in effect, to take multiple pathways at
once and select the best ones, behaving more like a wave than a
particle.
This efficient movement of excitons has one key requirement: The
chromophores have to be arranged just right, with exactly the right
amount of space between them. This, Lloyd explains, is known as the
“Quantum Goldilocks Effect.”
That’s where the virus comes in. By
engineering a virus that Belcher has worked with for years, the team was
able to get it to bond with multiple synthetic chromophores — or, in
this case, organic dyes. The researchers were then able to produce many
varieties of the virus, with slightly different spacings between those
synthetic chromophores, and select the ones that performed best.
In
the end, they were able to more than double excitons’ speed, increasing
the distance they traveled before dissipating — a significant
improvement in the efficiency of the process.
theguardian |Strange
as it sounds, scientists still do not know the answers to some of the
most basic questions about how life on Earth evolved. Take eyes, for
instance. Where do they come from, exactly? The usual explanation of how
we got these stupendously complex organs rests upon the theory of
natural selection.
You may recall the
gist from school biology lessons. If a creature with poor eyesight
happens to produce offspring with slightly better eyesight, thanks to
random mutations, then that tiny bit more vision gives them more chance
of survival. The longer they survive, the more chance they have to
reproduce and pass on the genes that equipped them with slightly better
eyesight. Some of their offspring might, in turn, have better eyesight
than their parents, making it likelier that they, too, will reproduce.
And so on. Generation by generation, over unfathomably long periods of
time, tiny advantages add up. Eventually, after a few hundred million
years, you have creatures who can see as well as humans, or cats, or
owls.
This
is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks
and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number
of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading.
For one thing, it starts midway through the story,
taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and
irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place. Nor
does it adequately explain how such delicate and easily disrupted
components meshed together to form a single organ. And it isn’t just
eyes that the traditional theory struggles with. “The first eye, the
first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the
foundational motivation of evolutionary biology,” says Armin Moczek, a
biologist at Indiana University. “And yet, we still do not have a good
answer. This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a
time, has so far fallen flat.”
There
are certain core evolutionary principles that no scientist seriously
questions. Everyone agrees that natural selection plays a role, as does
mutation and random chance. But how exactly these processes interact –
and whether other forces might also be at work – has become the subject
of bitter dispute. “If we cannot explain things with the tools we have
right now,” the Yale University biologist Günter Wagner told me, “we
must find new ways of explaining.”
In 2014, eight scientists took up this challenge, publishing an article
in the leading journal Nature that asked “Does evolutionary theory need
a rethink?” Their answer was: “Yes, urgently.” Each of the authors came
from cutting-edge scientific subfields, from the study of the way
organisms alter their environment in order to reduce the normal pressure
of natural selection – think of beavers building dams – to new research
showing that chemical modifications added to DNA during our lifetimes
can be passed on to our offspring. The authors called for a new
understanding of evolution that could make room for such discoveries.
The name they gave this new framework was rather bland – the Extended
Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) – but their proposals were, to many fellow
scientists, incendiary.
royalsocietypublishing | Biological
systems are dynamical, constantly exchanging energy and matter with the
environment in order to maintain the non-equilibrium state synonymous
with living. Developments in observational techniques have allowed us to
study biological dynamics on increasingly small scales. Such studies
have revealed evidence of quantum mechanical effects, which cannot be
accounted for by classical physics, in a range of biological processes.
Quantum biology is the study of such processes, and here we provide an
outline of the current state of the field, as well as insights into
future directions.
1. Introduction
Quantum
mechanics is the fundamental theory that describes the properties of
subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, molecular assemblies and possibly
beyond. Quantum mechanics operates on the nanometre and sub-nanometre
scales and is at the basis of fundamental life processes such as
photosynthesis, respiration and vision. In quantum mechanics, all
objects have wave-like properties, and when they interact, quantum
coherence describes the correlations between the physical quantities
describing such objects due to this wave-like nature.
In
photosynthesis, respiration and vision, the models that have been
developed in the past are fundamentally quantum mechanical. They
describe energy transfer and electron transfer in a framework based on
surface hopping. The dynamics described by these models are often
‘exponential’ and follow from the application of Fermi’s Golden Rule [1,2].
As a consequence of averaging the rate of transfer over a large and
quasi-continuous distribution of final states the calculated dynamics no
longer display coherences and interference phenomena. In photosynthetic
reaction centres and light-harvesting complexes, oscillatory phenomena
were observed in numerous studies performed in the 1990s and were
typically ascribed to the formation of vibrational or mixed
electronic–vibrational wavepackets. The reported detection of the
remarkably long-lived (660 fs and longer) electronic quantum coherence
during excitation energy transfer in a photosynthetic system revived
interest in the role of ‘non-trivial’ quantum mechanics to explain the
fundamental life processes of living organisms [3].
However, the idea that quantum phenomena—like coherence—may play a
functional role in macroscopic living systems is not new. In 1932, 10
years after quantum physicist Niels Bohr was awarded the Nobel Prize for
his work on the atomic structure, he delivered a lecture entitled
‘Light and Life’ at the International Congress on Light Therapy in
Copenhagen [4].
This raised the question of whether quantum theory could contribute to a
scientific understanding of living systems. In attendance was an
intrigued Max Delbrück, a young physicist who later helped to establish
the field of molecular biology and won a Nobel Prize in 1969 for his
discoveries in genetics [5].
All
living systems are made up of molecules, and fundamentally all
molecules are described by quantum mechanics. Traditionally, however,
the vast separation of scales between systems described by quantum
mechanics and those studied in biology, as well as the seemingly
different properties of inanimate and animate matter, has maintained
some separation between the two bodies of knowledge. Recently,
developments in experimental techniques such as ultrafast spectroscopy [6], single molecule spectroscopy [7–11], time-resolved microscopy [12–14] and single particle imaging [15–18]
have enabled us to study biological dynamics on increasingly small
length and time scales, revealing a variety of processes necessary for
the function of the living system that depend on a delicate interplay
between quantum and classical physical effects.
Quantum biology is
the application of quantum theory to aspects of biology for which
classical physics fails to give an accurate description. In spite of
this simple definition, there remains debate over the aims and role of
the field in the scientific community. This article offers a perspective
on where quantum biology stands today, and identifies potential avenues
for further progress in the field.
2. What is quantum biology?
Biology,
in its current paradigm, has had wide success in applying classical
models to living systems. In most cases, subtle quantum effects on
(inter)molecular scales do not play a determining role in overall
biological function. Here, ‘function’ is a broad concept. For example:
How do vision and photosynthesis work on a molecular level and on an
ultrafast time scale? How does DNA, with stacked nucleotides separated
by about 0.3 nm, deal with UV photons? How does an enzyme catalyse an
essential biochemical reaction? How does our brain with neurons
organized on a sub-nanometre scale deal with such an amazing amount of
information? How do DNA replication and expression work? All these
biological functions should, of course, be considered in the context of
evolutionary fitness. The differences between a classical approximation
and a quantum-mechanical model are generally thought to be negligible in
these cases, even though at the basis every process is entirely
governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. What happens at the
ill-defined border between the quantum and classical regimes? More
importantly, are there essential biological functions that ‘appear’
classical but in reality are not? The role of quantum biology is
precisely to expose and unravel this connection.
Fundamentally,
all matter—animate or inanimate—is quantum mechanical, being constituted
of ions, atoms and/or molecules whose equilibrium properties are
accurately determined by quantum theory. As a result, it could be
claimed that all of biology is quantum mechanical. However, this
definition does not address the dynamical nature of biological
processes, or the fact that a classical description of intermolecular
dynamics seems often sufficient. Quantum biology should, therefore, be
defined in terms of the physical ‘correctness’ of the models used and
the consistency in the explanatory capabilities of classical versus
quantum mechanical models of a particular biological process.
As
we investigate biological systems on nanoscales and larger, we find that
there exist processes in biological organisms, detailed in this
article, for which it is currently thought that a quantum mechanical
description is necessary to fully characterize the behaviour of the
relevant subsystem. While quantum effects are difficult to observe on
macroscopic time and length scales, processes necessary for the overall
function and therefore survival of the organism seem to rely on
dynamical quantum-mechanical effects at the intermolecular scale. It is
precisely the interplay between these time and length scales that
quantum biology investigates with the aim to build a consistent physical
picture.
Grand hopes for quantum biology may include a
contribution to a definition and understanding of life, or to an
understanding of the brain and consciousness. However, these problems
are as old as science itself, and a better approach is to ask whether
quantum biology can contribute to a framework in which we can repose
these questions in such a way as to get new answers. The study of
biological processes operating efficiently at the boundary between the
realms of quantum and classical physics is already contributing to
improved physical descriptions of this quantum-to-classical transition.
More
immediately, quantum biology promises to give rise to design principles
for biologically inspired quantum nanotechnologies, with the ability to
perform efficiently at a fundamental level in noisy environments at
room temperature and even make use of these ‘noisy environments’ to
preserve or even enhance the quantum properties [19,20].
Through engineering such systems, it may be possible to test and
quantify the extent to which quantum effects can enhance processes and
functions found in biology, and ultimately answer whether these quantum
effects may have been purposefully selected in the design of the
systems. Importantly, however, quantum bioinspired technologies can also
be intrinsically useful independently from the organisms that inspired
them.
scitechdaily | The first discovery of viruses infecting a group of microbes that may include the ancestors of all complex life has been found, scientists at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) report in Nature Microbiology.
The incredible discovery offers tantalizing clues about the origins of
complex life and suggests new directions for investigating the
hypothesis that viruses were essential to the evolution of humans and
other complex life forms.
There is a well-supported hypothesis
that all complex life forms such as humans, starfish, and trees — which
feature cells with a nucleus and are called eukaryotes — originated when
archaea and bacteria merged to form a hybrid organism. Recent research suggests the first eukaryotes are direct descendants of so-called Asgard archaea.
The latest research, by Ian Rambo (a former doctoral student at UT
Austin) and other members of Brett Baker’s lab, sheds light on how
viruses, too, may have played a role in this billions-year-old history.
Comparison
of all known virus genomes. Those viruses with similar genomes are
grouped together including those that infect bacteria (on the left),
eukaryotes (on the right and bottom center). The viruses that infect
Asgard archaea are unique from those that have been described before.
Credit: University of Texas at Austin
“This study is opening
a door to better resolving the origin of eukaryotes and understanding
the role of viruses in the ecology and evolution of Asgard archaea,”
Rambo said. “There is a hypothesis that viruses may have contributed to
the emergence of complex cellular life.”
Rambo is referring to a hotly debated hypothesis called viral
eukaryogenesis. It suggests that, in addition to bacteria and archaea,
viruses might have contributed some genetic component to the development
of eukaryotes. While this latest discovery does not settle that debate,
it does offer some interesting clues.
The newly discovered
viruses that infect currently living Asgard archaea do have some
features similar to viruses that infect eukaryotes, including the
ability to copy their own DNA
and hijack protein modification systems of their hosts. The fact that
these recovered Asgard viruses display characteristics of both viruses
that infect eukaryotes and prokaryotes, which have cells without a
nucleus, makes them unique since they are not exactly like those that
infect other archaea or complex life forms.
“The most exciting
thing is they are completely new types of viruses that are different
from those that we’ve seen before in archaea and eukaryotes, infecting
our microbial relatives,” said Baker, associate professor of marine
science and integrative biology and corresponding author of the study.
The
Asgard archaea, which probably evolved more than 2 billion years ago
and whose descendants are still living, have been discovered in deep-sea
sediments and hot springs around the world, but so far only one strain has been successfully grown in the lab.
To identify them, scientists collect their genetic material from the
environment and then piece together their genomes. In this latest study,
the researchers scanned the Asgard genomes for repeating DNA regions
known as CRISPR arrays, which contain small pieces of viral DNA that can
be precisely matched to viruses that previously infected these
microbes. These genetic “fingerprints” allowed them to identify these
stealthy viral invaders that infect organisms with key roles in the
complex origin story of eukaryotes.
johnhelmer | “Freeland is not acting alone,” comments the Canadian source. “She’s tried hard to bring everyone into her project [to succeed to the prime ministry], but she can’t get the neo-Confederates to settle down and wait for the project to come to fruition , with her at helm, of course. They’re impatient for the Great White Reset; she needs the Galician dream fulfilled… The military is fine with Canadians, including active and retired service members fighting over there. They are not even pitching a fit about Canadian weapons stocks being emptied in order to be sent over there.”
“If you talk to any of them, they all pretty much have the same mentality. Whatever the West, as they define it, says — white, Christian, capitalist, Anglo, pro-US — goes. The can only see themselves, their career advancement, their ideas of what the country is fighting for within that framework. So they are increasingly upset by even the shallowest semblance of ‘multi-culturalism’ as represented in Ottawa by [Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau and to a degree, Freeland.”
“From what I’ve seen, the evidence of mutiny became apparent when the ‘trucker protest/ freedom convoy’ came up against the government’s activation of theEmergencies Actthis winter. From what I’ve heard, the military chiefs flat-out refused to back [Minister of Public Safety Marco] Mendicino, [Justice Minister and Attorney-General David] Lametti, and [Minister of Emergency Preparedness Bill] Blair, and Freeland, while active and retired officers openly sided with the neo-Confederates who were getting support from the US. It seems that the contradiction here is that the officer corps, heavily committed to the anti-Russia track that cuts across Canadian party lines, is heavily politicized and infected by the neo-Confederate faction in the US. They don’t appreciate what they see as Trudeau’s ‘communism’, and believe that the charges against Cadieu are an expression of it.”
“This is deeply concerning as there can be no doubt that these people know, or strongly believe, that they have the full backing of at least some elements of the US security state, not to mention ‘thin blue line’ law enforcement, militia groups, etc. It’s fascism versus fascism.”
caitlinjohnstone |"American intelligence agencies have less information than they
would like about Ukraine’s operations and possess a far better picture
of Russia’s military, its planned operations and its successes and
failures," NYT told us earlier this month.
"U.S. officials said the Ukrainian government gave them few classified
briefings or details about their operational plans, and Ukrainian
officials acknowledged that they did not tell the Americans everything."
It
seems a bit unlikely that US intelligence agencies would have a hard
time getting information about what's happening in a country where they
themselves are physically located. Moon of Alabama theorized
at the time that this ridiculous "We don't know what's happening in our
own proxy war" line was being pushed to give the US plausible
deniability about Ukraine's failures on the battlefield, which have only gotten worse since then.
So
why are they telling us all this now? Well, it could be that we're
being paced into accepting an increasingly direct role of the US and its
allies in Ukraine.
The other day Antiwar's Daniel Larison tweeted,
"Hawks in April: Don't call it a proxy war! Hawks in May: Of course
it's a proxy war! Hawks in June: It's not their war, it's our war!"
This is indeed exactly how it happened. Back in April President Biden told the press the idea that this is a proxy war between the US and Russia was "not true" and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said "It's not, this is clearly Ukraine's fight" when asked if this is a proxy war. The mainstream media were still framing this claim as merely an "accusation" by the Russian government, and empire spinmeisters were regularly admonishing anyone who used that term on the grounds that it deprives Ukrainians of their "agency".
Then May rolled around and all of a sudden we had The New Yorker unequivocally telling us that the US is in "a full proxy war with Russia" and hawks like US congressman Seth Moulton saying
things like, "We’re not just at war to support the Ukrainians. We’re
fundamentally at war, although somewhat through a proxy, with Russia,
and it’s important that we win.”
And now here in June we've got war hawks like Max Boot coming right out and saying that
this is actually America's war, and it is therefore important for the
US to drastically escalate the war in order to hand the Russians
"devastating losses".
So the previously unthinkable idea that the US is at war with Russia
has been gradually normalized, with the heat turned up so slowly that
the frog doesn't notice it's being boiled alive. If that idea can be
sufficiently normalized, public consent for greater escalations will
likely be forthcoming, even if those escalations are extremely
psychotic.
Back in March when I said
the only "agency" Ukraine has in this conflict is the Central
Intelligence kind, empire loyalists jumped down my throat. They couldn't
believe I was saying something so evil and wrong. Now they've been told
that the Central Intelligence Agency is indeed conducting operations
and directing intelligence on the ground in Ukraine, but I somehow doubt
that this will stir any self-reflection on their part.
rusi | The war in
Ukraine has proven that the age of industrial warfare is still here. The
massive consumption of equipment, vehicles and ammunition requires a
large-scale industrial base for resupply – quantity still has a quality
of its own. The mass scale combat has pitted 250,000 Ukrainian soldiers,
together with 450,000 recently mobilised citizen soldiers against about 200,000 Russian and separatist troops.
The effort to arm, feed and supply these armies is a monumental task.
Ammunition resupply is particularly onerous. For Ukraine, compounding
this task are Russian deep fires capabilities, which target Ukrainian
military industry and transportation networks throughout the depth of
the country. The Russian army has also suffered from Ukrainian cross-border attacks and acts of sabotage,
but at a smaller scale. The rate of ammunition and equipment
consumption in Ukraine can only be sustained by a large-scale industrial
base.
This reality should be a concrete warning to Western countries, who
have scaled down military industrial capacity and sacrificed scale and
effectiveness for efficiency. This strategy relies on flawed assumptions
about the future of war, and has been influenced by both the
bureaucratic culture in Western governments and the legacy of
low-intensity conflicts. Currently, the West may not have the industrial
capacity to fight a large-scale war. If the US government is planning to once again become the arsenal of democracy,
then the existing capabilities of the US military-industrial base and
the core assumptions that have driven its development need to be
re-examined.
Estimating Ammo Consumption
There is no exact ammunition consumption data available for the
Russia–Ukraine conflict. Neither government publishes data, but an
estimate of Russian ammunition consumption can be calculated using the
official fire missions data provided by the Russian Ministry of Defense during its daily briefing.
Number of Russian Daily Fire Missions, 19–31 May
Although
these numbers mix tactical rockets with conventional, hard-shell
artillery, it is not unreasonable to assume that a third of these
missions were fired by rocket troops because they form a third of a
motorised rifle brigade’s artillery force, with two other battalions
being tube artillery. This suggests 390 daily missions fired by tube
artillery. Each tube artillery strike is conducted by a battery of six
guns total. However, combat and maintenance breakdowns are likely to
reduce this number to four. With four guns per battery and four rounds
per gun, the tube artillery fires about 6,240 rounds per day. We can
estimate an additional 15% wastage for rounds that were set on the
ground but abandoned when the battery moved in a hurry, rounds destroyed
by Ukrainian strikes on ammunition dumps, or rounds fired but not
reported to higher command levels. This number comes up to 7,176
artillery rounds a day. It should be noted that the Russian Ministry of
Defense only reports fire missions by forces of the Russian Federation.
These do not include formations from the Donetsk and Luhansk separatist
republics, which are treated as different countries. The numbers are not
perfect, but even if they are off by 50%, it still does not change the
overall logistics challenge.
The Capacity of the West’s Industrial Base
The winner in a prolonged war between two near-peer powers is still
based on which side has the strongest industrial base. A country must
either have the manufacturing capacity to build massive quantities of
ammunition or have other manufacturing industries that can be rapidly
converted to ammunition production. Unfortunately, the West no longer
seems to have either.
Presently, the US is decreasing its artillery ammunition stockpiles. In 2020, artillery ammunition purchases decreased by 36% to $425 million. In 2022, the plan is to reduce
expenditure on 155mm artillery rounds to $174 million. This is
equivalent to 75,357 M795 basic ‘dumb’ rounds for regular artillery,
1,400 XM1113 rounds for the M777, and 1,046 XM1113 rounds for Extended
Round Artillery Cannons. Finally, there are $75 million dedicated for
Excalibur precision-guided munitions that costs $176K per round, thus
totaling 426 rounds. In short, US annual artillery production would at
best only last for 10 days to two weeks of combat in Ukraine. If the
initial estimate of Russian shells fired is over by 50%, it would only
extend the artillery supplied for three weeks.
Unfortunately, this is not only the case with artillery. Anti-tank
Javelins and air-defence Stingers are in the same boat. The US shipped 7,000 Javelin missiles to Ukraine – roughly one-third of its stockpile – with more shipments to come. Lockheed Martin produces about 2,100 missiles a year, though this number might ramp up to 4,000 in a few years. Ukraine claims to use 500 Javelin missiles every day.
asiatimes | The long and short of it is that, while the US and NATO can fight a
short conflict, neither can support a long war because there’s
insufficient equipment in the now-depleted inventory and the timelines
to build replacement hardware are long.
Despite a history of having done so before, starting in 1939, there
is little chance that the US today can put in place a surge capacity, or
that it any longer knows how to do so if it is even feasible.
Based on those circumstances alone – and there are additional,
compelling reasons – the US and NATO should be thinking about how to
end the war in Ukraine rather than sticking with the declared policy of
trying to bleed Russia.
Let’s start by looking back at a time when the United States did know how to plan for surge weapons-building capacity.
WW2 precedent
In 1939 the Roosevelt administration, with Congressional support, passed the Protective Mobilization Act. Ultimately this would lead to the creation of a War Production Board, the Office of Production Management and the marshaling of US industry to fight the Nazis and Japanese
In 1941 the President declared an unlimited national emergency,
giving the administration the power to shift industrial production to
military requirements. Between 1940 and 1945, the US supplied almost
two-thirds of all war supplies to the allies (including the USSR and
China) and for US forces – producing some 297,000 aircraft, 193,000
artillery pieces (all types) and 86,000 tanks (light, medium and heavy).
Russia faced an altogether more difficult challenge because after
Nazi Germany attacked the USSR in June 1941 much of Russia’s defense
industrial infrastructure was threatened. Russia evacuated 1,500
factories either to the Ural Mountains or to Soviet Central Asia. Even
Lenin’s body was moved from Moscow to Tyumen, 2,500 km from Moscow.
Notably, Stalin Tank Factory 183 would be moved from Kharkiv, now a
contested city in the Ukraine war, to the Urals, rebranded as
Uralvagonzavod and situated in Nizhny Tagil. The facility had been a
railroad car maker, so it was suitable for tank manufacturing. The tank
factory relocation was managed by Isaac Zaltzman.
At that factory the Soviets produced a massive number of tanks
(light, medium and heavy), most notably the T-34, the world’s most
successful tank design (based on the Christie tank chassis from the
United States). Altogether the Soviets produced almost 78,000 tanks and
self-propelled guns mounted on tank chassis.
This is now
It is noteworthy that today Russia as well as the US and America’s
NATO partners all face supply problems as the war in Ukraine grinds
on. While the US and Europe maintain a significant commercial industrial
base, needed to supply key components for defense equipment, Russia
lacks an in-depth civilian manufacturing infrastructure – especially in
advanced electronics, sensors and electro-optics.
The US and Europe face a risk because they are increasingly dependent
on high-tech supplies from Asia. Today there are severe supply
bottlenecks, shortages and risk dependencies. Even China, which has a
huge commercial manufacturing infrastructure, faces difficulties in
obtaining the most sophisticated integrated circuits, manufactured only in Taiwan by Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC).
Procurement of defense goods in the US and Europe is episodic, not
continuous. Funds are allocated to purchase a certain quantity of
defense equipment. When the contract is completed and there are no
immediate follow-on purchases, production lines are shut down and
second- and third-tier component suppliers also stop production – or
they shift to work on other projects (and in some cases go out of
business).
This means that if a new order comes in later, the supplier network
and the production lines will have to be started almost from scratch. In
addition to the loss of infrastructure for certain types of weapons,
there is the related loss of skilled factory workers and engineers.
journal-neo |Sadly, the Fed and
other central bankers lie. Raising interest rates is not to cure
inflation. It is to force a global reset in control over the world’s
assets, it’s wealth, whether real estate, farmland, commodity
production, industry, even water. The Fed knows very well that Inflation
is only beginning to rip across the global economy. What is unique is
that now Green Energy mandates across the industrial world are driving
this inflation crisis for the first time, something deliberately ignored
by Washington or Brussels or Berlin.
The global shortages
of fertilizers, soaring prices of natural gas, and grain supply losses
from global draught or exploding costs of fertilizers and fuel or the
war in Ukraine, guarantee that, at latest this September-October harvest
time, we will undergo a global additional food and energy price
explosion. Those shortages all are a result of deliberate policies.
Moreover, far worse
inflation is certain, due to the pathological insistence of the world’s
leading industrial economies led by the Biden Administration’s
anti-hydrocarbon agenda. That agenda is typified by the astonishing
nonsense of the US Energy Secretary stating, “buy E-autos instead” as
the answer to exploding gasoline prices.
Similarly, the
European Union has decided to phase out Russian oil and gas with no
viable substitute as its leading economy, Germany, moves to shut its
last nuclear reactor and close more coal plants. Germany and other EU
economies as a result will see power blackouts this winter and natural
gas prices will continue to soar. In the second week of June in Germany
gas prices rose another 60% alone. Both the Green-controlled German
government and the Green Agenda “Fit for 55” by the EU Commission
continue to push unreliable and costly wind and solar at the expense of
far cheaper and reliable hydrocarbons, insuring an unprecedented
energy-led inflation.
Fed has pulled the plug
With the 0.75% Fed
rate hike, largest in almost 30 years, and promise of more to come, the
US central bank has now guaranteed a collapse of not merely the US debt
bubble, but also much of the post-2008 global debt of $303 trillion.
Rising interest rates after almost 15 years mean collapsing bond values.
Bonds, not stocks, are the heart of the global financial system.
US mortgage rates
have now doubled in just 5 months to above 6%, and home sales were
already plunging before the latest rate hike. US corporations took on
record debt owing to the years of ultra-low rates. Some 70% of that debt
is rated just above “junk” status. That corporate non-financial debt
totaled $9 trillion in 2006. Today it exceeds $18 trillion. Now a large
number of those marginal companies will not be able to rollover the old
debt with new, and bankruptcies will follow in coming months. The
cosmetics giant Revlon just declared bankruptcy.
The
highly-speculative, unregulated Crypto market, led by Bitcoin, is
collapsing as investors realize there is no bailout there. Last November
the Crypto world had a $3 trillion valuation. Today it is less than
half, and with more collapse underway. Even before the latest Fed rate
hike the stock value of the US megabanks had lost some $300 billion. Now
with stock market further panic selling guaranteed as a global economic
collapse grows, those banks are pre-programmed for a new severe bank
crisis over the coming months.
As US economist Doug
Noland recently noted, “Today, there’s a massive “periphery” loaded with
“subprime” junk bonds, leveraged loans, buy-now-pay-later, auto, credit
card, housing, and solar securitizations, franchise loans, private
Credit, crypto Credit, DeFi, and on and on. A massive infrastructure has
evolved over this long cycle to spur consumption for tens of millions,
while financing thousands of uneconomic enterprises. The “periphery” has
become systemic like never before. And things have started to Break.”
The Federal
Government will now find its interest cost of carrying a record $30
trillion in Federal debt far more costly. Unlike the 1930s Great
Depression when Federal debt was near nothing, today the Government,
especially since the Biden budget measures, is at the limits. The US is
becoming a Third World economy. If the Fed no longer buys trillions of
US debt, who will? China? Japan? Not likely.
oftwominds |Many other dynamics changed around the same time: social, cultural, political.These charts reflect the
end of the postwar era and the ushering in of a new era.
Again in broad-brush, the key economic dynamic was the decline of labor's share of the
economy in favor of capital. Those who had only their labor to sell lost purchasing power,
while those who could borrow or access capital benefited enormously. The charts below tell
the story: labor's share of the national income has stairstepped lower for 50 years (since 1970)
while the super-wealthy's share has outpaced everyone else 15-fold.
The dominance of financial capital is visible in the third chart, as private-sector financial
assets are now 6 times the nation's GDP, double the percentage of the postwar era.
This capital-friendly era was rocket-boosted by financialization in the 1980s, technology in
the 1990s and globalization in the early 21st century. You can see each advance of
capital's top tier--the top 0.1%--in the chart below: the top 0.1% first pulled away in the 1980s
financialization, stutter-stepped in the early 1990s and then exploded higher as technology
fueled capital's leverage and exposure to the gains reaped by computers and the Internet.
Alas, these extremes are not stable or sustainable, and so each wave ends in a devastating crash.
The income of the top 0.1% took a hit as the dotcom bubble burst, but then China's entry into the
WTO saved the day as rampant globalization and additional extremes of financial leverage and fraud
boosted their fortunes in the 2000s.
The dual extremes of financialization and globalization created the 2008 bubble, and its
collapse almost took down the entire global capital house of cards. Central banks, ultimately
financed by the Fed to the tune of $29 trillion, twice the size of America's entire GDP,
instituted The Great Reset under the usual guise of "emergency measures" which then
became permanent policies.
The Great Reset led to the hyper-centralization of control over the global economy's
money as central banks coordinated unprecedented money-printing and financial repression,
which includes zero-interest rate policies (ZIRP), as the debt-bubble would pop if rates
aren't nailed down to zero.
All the PR being spewed about The Great Reset is the final frantic flailing of
a system that's drowning in its own excesses. The 50-year long era of the few enriching
themselves as the expense of the many has ended, for the same reason eras of extreme exploitation
always end--the elites got too greedy and overshot the economy's ability to sustain their
rapidly expanding share of the income and wealth.
Put another way: the elites have cannibalized the system so thoroughly that there's nothing
left to steal, exploit or cannibalize. The hyper-centralized global money control has run
out of rope as the cheap oil is gone, debts have ballooned to the point there is no way they'll
ever be paid down, and the only thing staving off collapse is money-printing, which holds the
seeds of its own demise.
Allow me to summarize the only way The Great Reset envisioned by global elites
can actually manifest: The Martians arrive towing huge meteorites of pure lithium and gold,
and rather than incinerating the global elites, they hand the global elites the meteorites to
further their concentration of wealth and power.
Short of that science fiction, this sucker's going down.The Great Reset has already
run its course after 12 long years of artifice, fraud and trickery. So global elite shills,
lackeys, factotums, toadies and apparatchiks--prepare for your Wil-E-Coyote moment of truth.
amidwesterndoctor | One of the tremendously frustrating experiences I have had during my
lifetime has been watching an amazing candidate run for president, be
widely liked by the voting base because of their excellent track record
in standing up for the working class, and then watch the media
systematically torpedo each and every one of their campaigns.
The
only person I have ever seen who was able to address this dilemma was
Donald Trump, as he took a rather unorthodox approach where he
campaigned on the basis of the media being evil. As a result, each time
the media gave him negative attention it helped rather than hindered
his campaign, and before long he was able to pull the mass media into a
symbiotic relationship where it could not help but continually provide
oxygen to Trump’s campaign.
The upside of this approach
was that it provided Trump with the freedom to advance populist
positions that went against the vested interests of the financiers of
the corporate media, something very few other presidents have done. The
downside of this approach was that it was incredibly polarizing, and
divided the country to the point that the left was willing to force
through vaccine mandates as a way of getting back at the right. While
it is important to advance populist positions that go against entrenched
interests (and to expose the systemic corruption within the media),
there was a tremendous cost to the political polarization this approach
created we will likely be stuck with for years to come.
Something
that is often not appreciated about the media is that their business
model is based upon getting as much viewership as possible and to
provide content that appeases their advertisers. For this reason,
content that is critical of any sponsor is never allowed to air. As a
result most media programming is meaningless stories that do not
challenge any vested interest and are emotionally hyped up as much as
possible to antagonize the audience so that the audience is drawn into
caring about them.
Given that the largest sponsor of
the mainstream media is the pharmaceutical industry, it is not
surprising that all news content aggressively promotes the
pharmaceutical party line (the only occasional exceptions I know of are
Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham). One of the ethical journalists who
has spoken out the most on this issue is Sharyl Atkinson, who in one
interview specifically noted that she observed a variety of major
changes occur in the media that coincided with her suddenly being
forbidden from ever discussing vaccine safety concerns on air.
It
is difficult to assign blame for the botched pandemic response to any
single party. However, if I have to identify the key culprit, I would
argue that the rigid censorship by the mainstream media, big tech and
the academic publishing institutions was what allowed the insane
pandemic policy is to march forward despite being clearly in opposition
to most existing scientific evidence. In the same way that
pharmaceutical corruption has gradually taken over the legacy media (the
Gates Foundation for example frequently gives media grants to ensure
their massages dominate the airwaves), these other media venues are
likewise highly susceptible to pernicious influence, which is why
independent media platforms are so critical moving forward.
Study from Senior Editor of the British Medical Journal Peter Doshi, et al, finds the absolute risk of serious AE from mRNA vaccines exceeds the absolute risk reduction of serious covid-19 infection.https://t.co/6JxOyIZVEHpic.twitter.com/PHhODa2dYt
nakedcapitalism | Governments around the world are quickly but quietly designing,
assembling and piloting digital identity systems, often with biometric
components. They include the European Union, which itself comprises 27
member countries, the UK, Australia, Canada and dozens of countries in
Africa, Asia and Latin America. The spread of these systems across the
Global South is being spurred by a new development consensus that
asserts that digital identification can foster inclusive and sustainable
development and is a prerequisite for the realization of human rights.
As the World Bank noted
in 2017, over 1.1 billion people in the world are unable to prove their
identity and therefore lack access to vital services including
healthcare, social protection, education and finance. Most live in
Africa and Asia and more than a third of them are children. In an
ostensible bid to address this problem, the World Bank launched the
Identification for Development (ID4D) program in 2014 with “catalytic
contributions” from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as well as
the governments of the UK, France, Norway and the Omidyar Network.
A Dangerous New Road
The program provides loans to help countries in the Global South
“realize the transformational potential of digital identity,” and has
been rolled out in dozens of countries, mainly in Africa but also in
Asia and Latin America. The program is wrapped up in cosy buzz words
such as “digital development” and “financial inclusion”, but it has led
to the promotion of a dangerous new approach to digital identity
systems. That’s the damning conclusion of a new 100-page study by the
NYU School of Law’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ),
titled Paving the Digital Road to Hell: A Primer on the Role of the World Bank and Global Networks in Promoting Digital ID:
Through the embrace of digital technologies, the World Bank and a broader global
network of actors has been promoting a new paradigm for ID systems that prioritizes what
we refer to as ‘economic identity.’ These systems focus on fueling digital transactions and
transforming individuals into traceable data. They often ignore the ability of identification
systems to recognize not only that an individual is unique, but that they have a legal status
with associated rights.
Still, proponents have cloaked this new paradigm in the language of
human rights and inclusion, arguing that such systems will help to
achieve multiple Sustainable Development Goals. Like physical roads,
national digital identification systems with biometric components
(digital ID systems) are presented as the public infrastructure
of the digital future…
The problem, notes the paper, is that this emerging infrastructure
has “been linked to severe and large-scale human rights violations in a
range of countries around the world, affecting social, civil, and
political rights.” What’s more, the benefits remain “ill-defined and
poorly documented”:
Those who stand to benefit the most may not be those
“left behind,” but a small group of companies and security-minded
governments. The World Bank and the network argue that investing in
digital ID systems is paving the road to an equitable digital future.
But, despite undoubted good intentions on the part of some, they may
well be paving a digital road to hell.
Three Core Functions of Digital ID
The report identifies three core functions of digital identity:
identification (“the process of establishing the identity of an
individual”); authentication (“the process of asserting an identity
previously established during identification”) and lastly, authorization
(“the process of determining which actions may be performed or services
accessed on the basis of asserted and authenticated identity”).
technologyreview | Libertarian attempts to create autonomous mini-civilizations go back at least to the 1960s, but crypto is reinvigorating this old dream with a fresh infusion of cash and hype.
For an idea
of what a corporate-run Bitcoin City might be like, look to a
burgeoning project called Próspera, supported by the Free Private Cities
Foundation in Honduras. While it’s not explicitly billed as a crypto
community, a heavy emphasis on the crypto industry and the backing of
heavyweight Bitcoin investors place Próspera in the same ideological
milieu—a fusion of crypto evangelism and libertarian credos.
Próspera (Spanish for “prosperous”) occupies a small enclave on the
Honduran island of Roatán. The developers have been handed the chance to
model a society from scratch, including its own health, education,
policing, and social security systems.
Honduras amended its
constitution in 2013 to allow the creation of special economic zones
managed by corporations and operating largely outside the country’s
legal and regulatory oversight. The resulting enclaves are known in
English as Zones of Economic Development and Employment (ZEDEs,
pronounced “zeh-dehs”).
The
decision was based on American economist Paul Romer’s proposal for
charter cities—a type of special economic zone in an existing state but
managed by another nation’s government. Considered one of his more outlandish ideas,
they reflect his theories about how to promote foreign investment and
alleviate inequality. Honduran ZEDEs are among the first tests of this
concept, though Romer has held talks with some other governments.
Romer
collaborated with the Honduran government at first, but they parted
ways following disagreements over how his idea was being implemented.
(Romer didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Próspera, which
broke ground in 2020, plans to implement ultra-low taxes, outsource
services typically managed by the public sector, establish an
“arbitration center” in place of a court, and charge an annual fee for
citizenship (either physical or e-residency) that involves signing a
“social contract” the company hopes will discourage misbehavior.
When
I visited the site in February, a central office was one of the few
completed buildings. There was no private Próspera police force, but on
the front desk was a number for Bulldog Security International, a
private security company engaged by hotels on the island that consider
the local police force inadequate. A pair of two-story buildings housed
office workers. The rest was largely a construction site, although a
residential tower block is underway.
A rendering of the future Próspera shows apartments that appear to
take inspiration from the shells of the island’s indigenous conch—soft
curves in pearly coral, cream, and glass. A strip of white sand
separates the apartment block from the gentle lap of the Caribbean Sea.
The
businesses most likely to be drawn here are those keen to escape
regulation in their own countries—Próspera’s chief of staff, Trey Goff,
highlights medical innovation, health tourism, and just about every
facet of the cryptocurrency industry.
“There’s an automatic
degree of overlap with the crypto industry and what we’re doing,” he
says. “Because they see themselves as at the forefront of financial
innovation, and we want to enable that.”
pluralistic | Kids, drug users, political radicals, sex workers and terrorists are
all unwelcome in mainstream society. They struggle to use its money, its
communications tools, and its media channels. Any attempt to do so
comes at a high price: personal risk, plus a high likelihood that some
or all of their interactions and transactions will be interdicted –
their work seized and destroyed or blocked or deleted.
Using a new technology comes at a cost. If it's 1979 and you're Walt
Disney Pictures, you've got no reason to explore the VCR. The existing
system works great for you – and it works great for your audience. You
can always find a movie theater willing to show your movies, your
audience is happy to be seen entering that cinema, and the bank gladly
accepts ticket revenues as deposits.
But if you're into smutty movies, none of that is true. Just mailing
your 8mm films across state lines is risky – maybe it gets seized and
incinerated, maybe a postal inspector shows up at your door with a
search warrant. Most theaters won't show your movies, and most people
don't want to be seen in the ones that will.
Given all those structural barriers, it makes sense that the
technophiles who also happen to be involved in the sex trade will get a
hearing from their colleagues – unlike the traditional media execs whose
endorsement of the VCR made them persona non grata within their
companies. That is, technophilia is a deficit if you're doing something
socially acceptable, and an asset if you're doing something that's
socially disfavored.
Which is why technophiles are leading figures among terrorists and
kids and sex workers and drug users and political radicals. The kids who
left Facebook for Instagram weren't looking for the Next Big Thing;
they were looking for a social media service that their parents and
teachers didn't use. The kids who were technophiles discovered Instagram
and the others followed their lead. They endured the hassle of learning
a new service and re-establishing social connections, because that
hassle was less than the hassle of staying on Facebook, subject to
scrutiny by the adult authorities in your life.
One corollary of this phenomenon is that technophile circles have
disproportionate numbers of socially disfavored people. If you're a
normie who just likes new tech, the services and systems you seek out
will have higher-than-baseline numbers of people into sex, as well as
radicals, kids, druggies and terrorists.
Another corollary of this phenomenon is that the founders of new
technologies will always start out by courting these marginal groups –
they are the vanguard, after all – and then, eventually, turn on them.
Sex workers know this story well. Sex workers' content and
transactions turned companies from Tumblr to Instagram, Paypal to Twitch
into multi-billion-dollar enterprises, whereupon these companies turned
on sex workers and kicked them off the platform, seizing their money
and destroying their creative work in the process.
No one knows this story better than Susie Bright, a pioneering
sex-positive, high-tech feminist author, critic, educator and performer.
Bright helped found the seminal lesbian magazine On Our Backs,
practically invented serious film criticism for pornographic videos,
edited many classic erotic books, and has used the courts to win justice
for many sex-positive causes.
Bright is also a technophile. I met her on The WELL, an early online
service, in the early 1990s. She was already a desktop publishing
pioneer by then (On Our Backs was the first magazine to be laid
out in Pagemaker). Since then, Bright has been at the forefront of
every technological development and human rights struggle for sex
workers.
reddit | Yes,
exactly- someone being the minority doesn't mean they should be out of
sight, and it doesn't mean that the majority's rights are being
infringed by seeing it or having to (the horror!) explain it to kids.
One, kids are a lot less fragile than people think, and two, you can't
shield them from everything. Like you pointed out, the same people would
probably hate to explain the existence of black people, Jews, the
disabled/people in wheelchairs/people with amputations/people with heavy
scarring, pregnant people... Actually, really take a long think about
that last one. Pregnancy is about the closest it gets to explicit sex,
because pregnancy is proof sex happened at some point. And sure, you can
explain the baby's presence without sex- but you can also explain
attraction towards the same sex without sex, too, by describing it the
way you would a straight relationship. They're in love, they're holding
hands, they're kissing. If you can do one, you can do the other. (Worth
noting: the same Texas GOP platform that declared LGBT identity
abominations, also says that all children must be taught that fetuses
are people and that live begins "from fertilization". How do you explain
fertilization without explaining what sex is? The GOP's own platform
undercuts their claim that this is about protecting children from sex.)
I
understand your reluctance to think of children having sexualities.
This is why the split attraction model is used. Have you ever heard
terms like "homoromantic asexual"? The model was used for people like
that, who don't experience sexual attraction but do have romantic, but I
think it would help for you to think of everyone in those terms to
understand this. Most adults are heteromantic (fall in love with adults
of the opposite sex) and heterosexual (want to have sex with adults of
the opposite sex.) Most kids are heteromantic, but don't have sexual
feelings yet, which is why they're okay with movies like Beauty and the
Beast. But some kids are homoromantic. They don't have sexual attraction
yet either, but they do have romantic ones. If you can understand a 12
year old girl having a boyfriend, you can understand a 12 year old girl
having a girlfriend, too.
I think
you are falling into a fallacy of fundamental attribution error. You,
and other heterosexuals, have feelings which may or may not include sex.
But LGBT people are sexualized so severely that people try to assign
sexual meaning even to us just holding hands or kissing each other on
the lips. Our motivations are stripped away by people who insist we are
driven only by sexual desire. That's part of the reason "love is love"
has been such a big part of our messaging; because we have had to
convince people that we even experience love and other emotions separate
from sex in the first place.
When
we get accused of "grooming" kids (and note that they chose a word
associated with child molestation, when they could have, if they really
felt we were changing kids into something else, used "converting" which
would have worked just as well- this is deliberate) we are being made
out such that our existence is inherently that of a sexual deviant
predator.
Truth be told, that's
another insidious layer to the denial that LGBT youth even exist. If
they occur naturally, it weakens the argument that children are being
preyed upon. Only by furthering the narrative that this is an unnatural
behavior that occurs only in either adults or in children who have been
"tainted" by a perverted adult can the narrative be upheld. In other
words, people don't call LGBT people groomers because they are truly
worried about the kids; they mention the kids because it supports the
narrative they have already created.
I
hate to invoke Godwin's Law, but as a Jew, I thought I would bring up
some similarities in the genocidal language and actions used.
You
are probably familiar with a certain picture of a Nazi book burning
immediately before Hitler rose to power. What you are likely not aware
of is that this was the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a sexuality
institute, that studied LGBT people extensively. The first successful
gender confirmation surgery was performed there. The books being burned
in that photo? They were years of studies on LGBT people.
Weimar
Germany, in the years leading up to Hitler seizing power, was known as
the best place in the world to be LGBT. Transgender people were even
allowed to get special markers on their IDs to exempt them from
gender-restricted dress codes. When Hitler seized power, those IDs were
used to imprison trans people. Trans women were treated the same as gay
men and given the pink triangle. Trans men were treated as lesbians and,
while persecuted, were not sent to concentration camps.
After WW2 ended, LGBT people in the camps were sent back to prison to serve out the remainders of their sentences. Some weren't freed until the 1970s.
LGBT
people, leading up to the Holocaust, were accused of grooming and
molesting children. Not coincidentally, Jews were also depicted as
stealing and converting children to Judaism and sinful lifestyles,
particularly in political comics and caricatures.
The
current anti-trans movement is symbiotically fused with antisemitism.
There are countless conspiracy theories that Jewish elites- particularly
George Soros- are funding pharmacies to "trans the children" so they
can make money from the medications and surgeries. Anti-semitism and
transphobia almost always occur clustered together.
The
rise of the Great Replacement Theory is also linked to both of these.
Jews are accused of bringing the immigrants into this country to replace
white people. They're also accused of pushing "the trans" so that white
children will be rendered infertile (despite the huge numbers of trans
people of color, which they ignore) and drive down their numbers. An
Idaho legislator who penned an anti-trans law explicitly says she sees
it as an extension of the pro-life debate due to her worries about
"teenagers losing perfectly healthy reproductive organs."
In
Nazi Germany, the role of women was primarily to make more good little
Aryans and raise them properly. While abortions were often performed
involuntarily on Jews and other undesirables, they were forbidden for
white women. There was a high stigma for infertile women.
Taking
all of these facts into account, I think you can see how it's hard for a
lot of people to believe that the concern over children is actually
genuine. It's something much more sinister and linked to a lot of other
forms of bigotry, and we are seeing echoes of it now.
You
don't call a group of people "groomers" if you want to live peacefully
with them. Pedophiles are seen as subhuman, as dangers to society. Not
one person on the planet wants to coexist peacefully with pedophiles.
(And despite your insistence that they mean "grooming" as in converting,
they never try to invoke that imagery. It's always claims of
perversion, of sexual abuse- pedophilia without ever actually touching a
child.) Once a group is perceived as being a front for pedophiles, it
takes decades of advocacy for them to be seen as human beings again- if they are so lucky as to not be targeted for extermination instead.
This
is genocidal language. It doesn't have to mean genocidal as in trains
and gas chambers. It can also mean things like forcing them in the
closet (which is to say: if you let Jews live, but said them going to
temple was banned, and didn't let them wear their traditional clothing
on the grounds that this was upsetting to children, that would be a form
of genocide), taking their children away (there is a growing sentiment
that LGBT couples should not be allowed to have or adopt children, and
there is only one place that line of thinking leads. If it's grooming to
tell someone else's kids it's
okay to be gay, then it's grooming to tell your own kids, too, which
means any LGBT adult with a child is now a groomer. Not to mention
Texas's new initiative to have parents of trans kids investigated by
CPS, which DeSantis has indicated he is interested in bringing to
Florida), and otherwise making their lives unbearable in an attempt to
drive up suicide rates (Trans people already have a 40% rate of
attempting suicide, and this is higher when they are in unsupportive
environments or those in which they can't access gender-affirming care,
which both Abbott and DeSantis have said they want to ban in all
circumstances in their states).
Further,
there are increasing calls for pogroms against LGBT people from elected
officials, those running for office, and/or people with heavy influence
on elected officials. This has resulted in a sustained campaign of
terror against LGBT people from the alt-right. Just twenty minutes from
my hometown, two weeks ago, a U-Haul full of Patriot Front members was
stopped on their way to attack an LGBT Pride event. At the same event,
there were instances of harassment perpetrated by other groups,
including, you guessed it, parents with kids being called groomers.
The
LGBT community is in danger right now. I understand people like you who
may have concerns, but the problem is that those concerns are often
used as a pretext for the alt-right to radicalize people against LGBT
people. The entire "groomers" rhetoric, for reference, started as a
campaign on 4chan a year or two ago. And look how effective it has been
just in the last six months. Five years ago, anyone who objected to
LeFou being gay in the new Beauty and the Beast movie was laughed off
the internet; if that movie was released now, there would be riots in
Anaheim. This is getting out of hand at an alarming rate, and this
really isn't a good time to be on the fence or "have concerns."
tabletmag | One
of the most powerful yet unremarked-upon drivers of our current wars
over definitions of gender is a concerted push by members of one of the
richest families in the United States to transition Americans from a
dimorphic definition of sex to the broad acceptance and propagation of
synthetic sex identities (SSI). Over the past decade, the Pritzkers of
Illinois, who helped put
Barack Obama in the White House and include among their number former
U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, current Illinois Gov. J.B.
Pritzker, and philanthropist Jennifer Pritzker, appear to have used a
family philanthropic apparatus to drive an ideology and practice of
disembodiment into our medical, legal, cultural, and educational
institutions.
I first wrote about the Pritzkers,
whose fortune originated in the Hyatt hotel chain, and their
philanthropy directed toward normalizing what people call
“transgenderism” in 2018. I have since stopped using the word
“transgenderism” as it has no clear boundaries,
which makes it useless for communication, and have instead opted for
the term SSI, which more clearly defines what some of the Pritzkers and
their allies are funding—even as it ignores the biological reality of
“male” and “female” and “gay” and “straight.”
The
creation and normalization of SSI speaks much more directly to what is
happening in American culture, and elsewhere, under an umbrella of human
rights. With the introduction of SSI, the current incarnation of the
LGBTQ+ network—as distinct from the prior movement that fought for equal
rights for gay and lesbian Americans, and which ended in 2020 with Bostock v. Clayton County, finding that LGBTQ+ is a protected class for discrimination purposes—is working closely with the techno-medical complex, big banks, international law firms, pharma giants, and corporate power
to solidify the idea that humans are not a sexually dimorphic
species—which contradicts reality and the fundamental premises not only
of “traditional” religions but of the gay and lesbian civil rights
movements and much of the feminist movement, for which sexual dimorphism
and resulting gender differences are foundational premises.
Through investments in the techno-medical complex, where new highly medicalized sex identities are being conjured,
Pritzkers and other elite donors are attempting to normalize the idea
that human reproductive sex exists on a spectrum. These investments go
toward creating new SSI using surgeries and drugs, and by instituting
rapid language reforms to prop up these new identities and induce
institutions and individuals to normalize them. In 2018, for example, at
the Ronald Reagan Medical Center at the University of California Los
Angeles (where the Pritzkers are major donors and hold various titles),
the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology advertised several options
for young females who think they can be men to have their reproductive organs removed, a procedure termed “gender-affirming care.”
sonar21 | Are we witnessing the consequences of legalized marijuana causing
contact highs among the intelligence community that surrounds
Washington, DC? How else to explain the parade of political and military
analysts now seized with angst over the growing gulf between what they
claimed would happen to Russia in Ukraine and the stark reality. Hell,
even the CIA is trying to figure out what went wrong with its analysis
and is still getting it wrong. Remarkable.
The problem with the CIA is simple–when you prioritize hiring people
because of their embrace of pronouns and degenerate sexuality over
recruiting accomplished, genuinely educated people equipped with
critical thinking skills, do not be surprised that the juvenile
mediocrities perform poorly. How is a gender fluid “them” with no
military experience and no foreign language skills going to predict the
military outcome of a conflict where the attacking force is outnumbered 3
to 1?
Russia is now a “hollow force?” The only hollow thing in this example
are the empty noggins of the morons masquerading as intelligence
analysts. Check out their excuses for getting it wrong:
The Russian force the US military and intelligence agencies
believed to be a near-peer adversary hasn’t shown up. The force that did
appear had its main thrust blunted by smaller Ukrainian units.
“What
we did not see from the inside was sort of this hollow force” that
lacked an effective non-commissioned officer corps, leadership training,
and effective doctrines, Berrier said of the Russians.
While US
intelligence agencies misinterpreted the effectiveness of the Russian
and Ukrainian militaries, they provided accurate information about
Russia’s intentions in the months prior to Russia’s attack, which began
on February 24.
“When you deal with a foreign actor, analysts
can fall prey to a number of mental traps, from confirmation bias,
availability bias, or even favoring existing analytic lines over new
information,” Michael E. van Landingham, a former Russia analyst at the
CIA, told Insider.
But this is all nonsense. There is this thing called the internet. It
actually allows an inquiring mind to go back in time and see what the
CIA was saying in February and March. This is not my opinion. You may
read the facts for yourself:
9/29 again
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"On this sacred day of Michaelmas, former President Donald Trump invoked
the heavenly power of St. Michael the Archangel, sharing a powerful prayer
for pro...
Quickie
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Hi folks,
At this stage my blogger entries feel like I'm talking on a barbwire
network over a party line, like on Green Acres. I haven't put out a signal
...
Pocahontas, Magawisca, and Religion
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Disney’s Pocahontas (1995) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie
(1827) both present stories based on Pocahontas mythology, the former
directly with i...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...