Absent Probable Cause Biden And Obama DID Spy On Trump

TheHill |  The Washington press corps seems engaged in a collective demonstration of the legal concept of willful blindness, or deliberately ignoring the facts, following the release of yet another declassified document which directly refutes prior statements about the investigation into Russia collusion. The document shows that FBI officials used a national security briefing of then candidate Donald Trump and his top aides to gather possible evidence for Crossfire Hurricane, its code name for the Russia investigation.

It is astonishing that the media refuses to see what is one of the biggest stories in decades. The Obama administration targeted the campaign of the opposing party based on false evidence. The media covered Obama administration officials ridiculing the suggestions of spying on the Trump campaign and of improper conduct with the Russia investigation. When Attorney General William Barr told the Senate last year that he believed spying did occur, he was lambasted in the media, including by James Comey and others involved in that investigation. The mocking “wow” response of the fired FBI director received extensive coverage.

The new document shows that, in summer 2016, FBI agent Joe Pientka briefed Trump campaign advisers Michael Flynn and Chris Christie over national security issues, standard practice ahead of the election. It had a discussion of Russian interference. But this was different. The document detailing the questions asked by Trump and his aides and their reactions was filed several days after that meeting under Crossfire Hurricane and Crossfire Razor, the FBI investigation of Flynn. The two FBI officials listed who approved the report are Kevin Clinesmith and Peter Strzok.

Clinesmith is the former FBI lawyer responsible for the FISA surveillance conducted on members of the Trump campaign. He opposed Trump and sent an email after the election declaring “viva the resistance.” He is now under review for possible criminal charges for altering a FISA court filing. The FBI used Trump adviser Carter Page as the basis for the original FISA application, due to his contacts with Russians. After that surveillance was approved, however, federal officials discredited the collusion allegations and noted that Page was a CIA asset. Clinesmith had allegedly changed the information to state that Page was not working for the CIA.

Strzok is the FBI agent whose violation of FBI rules led Justice Department officials to refer him for possible criminal charges. Strzok did not hide his intense loathing of Trump and famously referenced an “insurance policy” if Trump were to win the election. After FBI officials concluded there was no evidence of any crime by Flynn at the end of 2016, Strzok prevented the closing of the investigation as FBI officials searched for any crime that might be used to charge the incoming national security adviser.

Documents show Comey briefed President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden on the investigation shortly before the inauguration of Trump. When Comey admitted the communications between Flynn and Russian officials appeared legitimate, Biden reportedly suggested using the Logan Act, a law widely seen as unconstitutional and never been used to successfully convict a single person, as an alternative charge against Flynn. The memo contradicts eventual claims by Biden that he did not know about the Flynn investigation. Let us detail some proven but mostly unseen facts.

Opie and Anthony Caused Roy Den Hollander To Start Killing...,

NYTimes | Roy Den Hollander sounded bitter and angry when he bumped into a former rugby teammate in December at a library in Manhattan. He said he was so sick from a rare cancer that he could die at any moment, wondering aloud if he should sue his doctor for malpractice.

Things kept getting worse for Mr. Den Hollander, a self-described “anti-feminist” lawyer who was known for his misogynistic tirades and the dozens of lawsuits he filed, many frivolous. A Manhattan judge dismissed one of them in May, and a few weeks later, a federal judge in New Jersey named Esther Salas canceled a scheduled hearing in a different suit.

The delay followed years of resentment that he had harbored against Judge Salas over his unfounded claim that she was moving the case too slowly. That, in turn, built upon a lifetime of seething hatred toward women: He accused his mother of preventing him from having a girlfriend, and his ex-wife of marrying him only to obtain a green card.

Mr. Den Hollander’s rage turned to violence this month when he showed up at Judge Salas’s home in New Jersey posing as a FedEx deliveryman and opened fire, killing her 20-year-old son and wounding her husband, investigators said. The judge, who was in the basement at the time, was not injured.

Days before, Mr. Den Hollander, 72, had traveled by train to San Bernardino County, Calif., where he shot and killed a rival men’s rights lawyer at his home, the authorities said.

Hours after the shooting in New Jersey, the police found Mr. Den Hollander’s body off a road in upstate New York with a single gunshot to the head.

In his nearby rental car, investigators found a list naming more than a dozen possible targets, according to people briefed on the investigation. Aside from Judge Salas and the rival lawyer, the list included the names of three other female judges and two oncologists, at least one of whom had treated Mr. Den Hollander.

An examination of Mr. Den Hollander’s life shows how he represented the most violent elements of a male supremacist movement whose discourse online has become increasingly threatening toward women.

Parler Investor Says You're Slaves Of Social Media Companies

americanconservative |  Apparently, there is great commercial value in understanding our attributes and then using what is learned. Sometimes this is in our interest, but many times it is not.

In the digital world, companies dissect us and package us for commercial gain without compensating us—and too often without our consent. That is not merely an invasion of our privacy, but in actuality is a theft of our personal property.

In any free society, respect for the individual is predicated upon his or her sovereignty. Our most important property right is our right to ourselves. If we lose ownership of ourselves, we become the property of others.

Social media companies, and other platforms that sell or monetize our data without permission are  appropriating aspects of the sovereign individuals who are their users, and it is a violation of our rights.

These companies really aren’t “social media.” They are not public forums. An actual public forum respects the First Amendment, in spirit, and does not monetize content or personal data. Google, Facebook, Twitter and other tyrannical tech giants are private companies operating opaquely in the digital domain, exempt from discovery or accountability, gifted by Congress with a liability exemption that allows them to do whatever they want. Including deplatforming you.

Rabbi Hillel said, “that which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow.”

If you want the right to speak, to express your ideas and opinions, it would be despicable to you if someone prevented you from doing so. You would not want someone else to persecute, dehumanize,  deplatform or digitally exterminate you.

Such behavior is abhorrent to the ideal of free speech. It is unfathomable that, in the twenty-first century, “I wholly disapprove of what you say and will defend to the death your right to say it,” has, somehow mutated into, “I wholly disapprove of what you say and will digitally exterminate you if you dare try to say it.”

A true public forum eschews censorship of any kind. Freedom of expression, and the exchange of knowledge that goes along with it, can flourish only in an environment where there is no authoritative entity or controlling party, where one speaks by right, not by permission.

Such As You Are - Economic Growth Cannot Be Decoupled From Increased Resource Consumption

vice |  As societies get richer, they consume more resources. That also means they generate more pollution, driving climate change and destroying natural ecosystems.

We need to somehow break this link between material wealth and environmental catastrophe. That’s why financial institutions and governments have been focused on the idea of ‘decoupling’ GDP growth from resource use.

The idea of ‘decoupling’ is driven by the recognition that to stay within the ‘safe limit’ of 1.5 degrees Celsius, we have to dramatically reduce our material consumption of Earth's resources.

The assumption is that it is possible to continue growing the global economy while reducing our actual resource use and material footprint, perhaps by shifting to renewable energy.

This notion has been most recently articulated in the book More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources—and What Happens Next, by Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Financial and other data, McAfee argued, shows we can actually easily reduce our material footprint while continuing to grow our economies in a win-win scenario.

But new scientific analysis by a group of systems scientists and economists who have advised the United Nations seems to pull the rug out from under this entire enterprise. The new research indicates that the conventional approach is based on selective readings of statistical data.

McAfee argues, for instance, that as we are increasing wealth, the productivity motor of capitalism is driving us to greater heights of efficiency due to better technologies. This means we are able to make stuff faster and smaller using less materials and in some cases less energy. And that in turn implies we are causing less pollution. The problem is that this story, according to the new research, ignores how greater efficiency in certain regions or sectors is not slowing down the overall consumption machine. Within the wider system these efficiencies are enabling us to consume even greater quantities of resources overall.

Men's Rights - No Mention Of The Deutschebank-Epstein Moneylaundering Nexus...,

thelastamericanvagabond |  The alleged gunmen who killed the son of Esther Salas, the judge recently assigned to the Epstein-Deutsche Bank case, worked for a company of corporate spies and mercenaries with ties to intelligence and also to Deutsche Bank. 

The news of the shooting of the husband and son of Esther Salas, the judge recently assigned to oversee the Jeffrey Epstein – Deutsche Bank case, caused shock and confusion while also bringing renewed scrutiny to the Epstein scandal just a week after Epstein’s main co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, was denied bail in a separate case.

The case Salas is set to oversee is a class action lawsuit brought by Deutsche Bank investors who allege that Deutsche Bank “failed to properly monitor customers that the Bank itself deemed to be high risk, including, among others, the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.” The case came after the New York state Department of Financial Services had settled with Deutsche Bank over the bank’s failure to cut ties with Epstein-linked accounts, resulting in Deutsche Bank paying a $150 million fine. Deutsche Bank, unlike other financial institutions, failed to close all of its accounts linked to Epstein until less than a month prior to his arrest last year, even though the bank had identified him as “high risk” years before.

Beyond the tragedy of Sunday’s shooting, which claimed the life of Salas’ only child, the quick discovery of the death of the main suspect, Roy Den Hollander, of a “self-inflicted” gunshot to the head before he could be arrested or questioned by authorities has led to speculation that there is more to the official narrative of the crime than meets the eye.

With law enforcement sources now claiming that Esther Salas was not the intended target of the attack and some media reports now suggesting that Den Hollander’s motive was related to his dislike of feminism, it appears there are efforts underway to distance Sunday’s tragic shooting from Salas’ recent assignment to the Epstein case, which occurred just four days before the tragic shooting.

The most likely reason for any such “damage control” effort lies in the fact that both U.S. law enforcement investigations and mainstream media reports have consistently downplayed the connections of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual trafficking and financial crimes to intelligence agencies in the U.S. and Israel. Similarly, Roy Den Hollander previously worked for a New York firm has been described as a “private CIA” with ties to those countries’ intelligence agencies and, also, ties to Deutsche Bank.

Phugg You Gone Do?!?!? La Kosher Nostra STAY Laughing At Your Passive Punk CuckAzz...,

Fist tap Dale |  This is a condensed version of the three hour phone call between survivor Maria Farmer & investigative journalist Whitney Webb. I’ve included all of their discussion relating to Mossad, Mega Group, Les Wexner, and Israel. These are the key pieces of information that the mainstream media won’t touch and is in fact complicit in keeping this decades long blackmail operation continuing. Jeffery Epstein was not the head of the snake, he was only mid management and was assigned by Israeli Intelligence to work for Ghislaine Maxwell in the 80’s, who reported to billionaire Zionist Les Wexner. *Alan Dershowitz decided to yet again attack another Epstein victim smearing Virginia wasn't enough, so he wrote a blast piece accusing Maria Farmer of being a bigoted anti-semite because of this phone call. This is inexcusable- Maria Farmer is a victim of racism by these fake Jewish supremacists INCLUDING Alan "I kept my underwear on" Dershowitz. 

She is not the racist, her captors were. She clearly says she knows its not all Jews in this call, she accuses the elite & mafia for what happened to her & her sister & the other victims. This particular EDITED video is only focusing on the Zionist/ Israeli connections in the phone call, but please take the time to hear out the full 3 hour unedited call with Whitney Webb. Maria Farmer isn't the anti-Semite, nor is Whitney Webb. Alan Dershowitz and this band of criminals hiding behind a Jewish identity to get away with their wicked crimes are the anti-semites. https://www.blacklistednews.com/artic... I hope you guys listen to the full unedited phone call between Farmer & Webb, because there’s a lot I didn’t include in this video. 

You can listen to it here: 

Part 1: https://youtu.be/MGtDj8drWvE 

Part 2: https://youtu.be/kItJSpQeyCg 

You can also read Whitney Webb’s investigative series here: Too Big to Fail: the Epstein Investigation : https://www.mintpressnews.com/categor... 

Hidden in Plain Sight: The Shocking Origins of the Jeffrey Epstein Case: https://www.mintpressnews.com/shockin... Jeffrey Epstein, Trump’s Mentor and the Dark Secrets of the Reagan Era: https://www.mintpressnews.com/blackma... 

Mega Group, Maxwells and Mossad: The Spy Story at the Heart of the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal: https://www.mintpressnews.com/mega-gr... These Scrubbed Reports Reveal New Secrets Into the Prince Andrew-Jeffrey Epstein Relationship: https://www.mintpressnews.com/scrubbe... 

The Genesis and Evolution of the Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton Relationship: https://www.mintpressnews.com/genesis... 

Former Israeli Intel Official Claims Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell Worked for Israel: https://www.mintpressnews.com/ari-ben... 

Whitney Webb is working on writing a book that covers the intelligence aspects of the story. Keep an eye out for her book in late summer! She’s amazing! 

Please feel totally free to re-upload or share this video. I provided a download link because I want to encourage people to expose the criminal Zionist network. The more the REAL story gets out there, the more likely we can bring justice to the victims and put these gangsters away! Wexner, Maxwell, Barak, Netanyahu, Rothschild, Lauder, Bronfman, and Dershowitz are all villains who have been complicit in trafficking children around the world in order to blackmail the political elite to control them for Israel’s agenda. They must be exposed! 

Follow Whitney Webb: https://twitter.com/_whitneywebb 

Follow Maria Farmer: https://twitter.com/ArtisticBlower

All-A-Deez Heaux With Rothschild In They Mouf - IS ANTI-SEMITIC!!!!!

blacklistednews |  Jeffrey Epstein's former defense attorney Alan Dershowitz on Wednesday smeared Epstein victim Maria Farmer as "anti-Semitic" while she's in the middle of undergoing treatment for brain cancer and struggling to survive, let alone defend herself.

As the New York Times reported last year, Maria Farmer and her younger sister Annie were the first people to report Epstein to the FBI and NYPD all the way back in 1996.

Dershowitz on Wednesday evening posted an article he wrote for Newsmax titled, "Key Witness in Epstein Case Made Anti-Semitic Claims," where he took comments of hers condemning Ghislaine Maxwell's alleged supremacist views completely out of context and accused her of sharing "anti-Semitic canards" that sound like they came from "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

In one particularly hilarious example, Dershowitz said Farmer was anti-Semitic for saying Epstein and Maxwell were connected to "The Rothschilds" -- even though Dershowitz himself told Fox News' Laura Ingraham on Fox News late last year that he was introduced to Epstein through Lynn Forester de Rothschild!

"Farmer claimed to have evidence that the Israeli Mossad hired Jeffrey Epstein to video tape prominent American political leaders committing acts of pedophilia so that Israel could blackmail them into doing their bidding," Dershowitz said, "and that the entire conspiracy was under the protection and direction of 'The Rothschild's.'"

Dershowitz also constructed this quote of hers where he compiled multiple of her statements into one:

"They are 'Jewish supremacists'" and they are "all connected" through a mysterious organization called MEGA, which is run by Leslie Wexner who is "the head of the snake."

As a reminder, the former Prime Minister of Israel and head of Israeli Military Intelligence, Ehud Barak, was pictured hiding his face while entering Jeffrey Epstein's New York City townhouse (which was given to him for free by pro-Israel billionaire Les Wexner) in 2016.

EXCLUSIVE: Married Israeli politician Ehud Barak is seen hiding his face entering Jeffrey Epstein's NYC townhouse as bevy of young beauties were also spotted going into mansion - despite his claim he NEVER socialized with the pedophile and his girlshttps://t.co/wQBJDkfVzt

— HomerB (@HomerB33) July 16, 2019

Barak also reportedly regularly visited Epstein's other apartment building in New York (which was majority owned by Epstein's mysterious brother Mark who bought the apartments off Les Wexner) where underage girls say they were trafficked.

Jeffrey Epstein: Israeli Politician Ehud Barak Crashed at Epstein Apartment Building, Neighbors Say https://t.co/yM89xoKKBs

— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) August 6, 2019

Nonetheless, according to Epstein-defender Alan Dershowitz, it's "paranoid drivel" (and apparently now anti-Semitic!) to suggest Epstein is connected to the Mossad.

Imagine A Virus So Contagious And Deadly You Have To Be Tested To Know You Have It!

To Find Out Who Rules Over You, Find Out Who You MAY NOT Criticize

For 100 minutes, not a single truth was discussed outside the truth that Abraham Cooper is supremely arrogant about being in a position of strength and control, and very explicitly says as much to the slobbering, grinning, and thoroughly chastened and humiliated negroe "celebrity".

Nick Cannon's jaws and knees must really, really hurt after a hundred minutes of grinning, bowing and scraping before this nasty little Brooklyn mensch.

Finally, isn’t it in the nature of contemporary culture, with its emphasis on entertainment, consumption, and sex, to be the perfect environment in which to hide many “Invisible Gorillas”? Isn’t it a whirlwind of fixations and distractions, replete with untold numbers of “woke” viewers happy to report that they’ve been enthusiastically counting passes and have the accurate number? Isn’t it rather the axiom of our time that, from the idiotic Left to the idiotic Right, Invisible Gorillas stroll freely and unhindered, laughing and waving as they go, hidden in plain sight?

Tried to tell you where this is headed last week Manifesto of Secure Tolerance

The No Lives Matter Movement And Mask Non-Compliant Unsafe "Others"...,

off-guardian |  The mask-wearing phenomena is interesting on several counts; one is that it seems to be a completely artificial concoction. Another is the opposing idea that there is good logical argument for wearing one.

It does look as if there is a conscious manipulation of an archaic psychological complex (the innate fear of “different” deeply seated in a very old truth about neighboring tribes), i.e., “taking advantage of a psychological, although illogical, propensity” in order to push along the agenda of the manipulators — but who or what is the manipulator? I leave that question up to the reader, and other authors, to contemplate. 

We again have seen historically the manipulation of a populace to hate “other” that is fabricated by the state. The most obvious in recent years is the Nazi vilification of the Jews. Even more recently Muslim’s have been similarly targeted as “other to be feared” by the US Government. Mexicans and immigrants in general have been as well. 

Many people believe that other marginalized peoples, races, people of certain sexual orientations, other religious groups as well as women, have been purposely and maliciously marked as “other” by the state. The rationalization for this action generally comes under the insistence that it is for the “good of the people.” Therefore the groups identified as dangerous are to be avoided, chastised, abused, shamed and even violently harmed for being the “enemy.” 

This all may seem like a stretch to some people, and yes, it can be subtle—at least a conscious and nefarious intention or agenda behind it can be subtle. With regard to the mask-wearing/not wearing phenomena the process has happened so quickly it is relatively easy to follow its progress. In the beginning, mask-wearing was considered unnecessary in the effort to minimize disease transmission.

In fact, several official reports were clear that masks simply could not prevent the tiny virus particles to reach the inner sanctum of the human body where it would wreak havoc—a popular analogy was the dubious efficacy of throwing dirt at a chain-link fence in order to reach the other side. Then the tables begin to turn, as “case” numbers began to escalate during the horrid spectre of “the second wave” — mask-wearing became a new focus. 

However, an interesting thing happened with the public. They began to take it all very personally.

Seeing someone not wearing a mask did not translate to a logical response such as avoiding that mask-less person to lessen the possibility of infection, but rather the response was to mark that person as the selfish enemy who was purposefully trying to spread disease, or at least didn’t care about that possibility. Again, it didn’t seem that people even considered the person a physical threat, but more an emotional one, as someone that isn’t decent.

Vilification became the weapon to attack this marked enemy with, that and shaming, as well as denigration. “They are out to destroy us, the decent people who care about life, grandma, community and what is good in the world.” That is what marking “other” is all about—identification of the enemy, either moral enemy, or physical enemy.

The eminent Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung made popular a phrase, “participation mystique,” which had already been invented by Lévy-Brühl, a French scholar and philosopher who lived in the early part of the 20th Century.

Roughly, and simply speaking, “participation mystique” refers to a collective human compulsion to project an identity on to a group of people that is largely imaginative or symbolic. This is probably where a concept like “herd mentality” originates, or even a more common phrase we are hearing these days, “sheeple” — people who seem to follow blindly an official narrative. 

It also applies to “conspiracy theorists,” “tin foil hat wearers,” and in the context of this article, “selfish no-mask-wearers.” This projection that Jung speaks of is generally unconscious, or at least the impetus for it is. What becomes the basis for fear, hate, disgust, or whatever other derogatory term and emotion that sputters forth when confronting the object of the projection is again unconscious and archaic in origin. 

If any group of people can be identified as other, and conscious manipulative propaganda from a controlling entity has always been good at marking groups that are unsympathetic to the entity’s agenda as “other,” then it is easy to conjure up this magic of unconscious projection in a group as they move against another, identified and marked, group.

Population-Consumption-Climate-Control - The .00001%'s No Lives Matter Movement

realworldeconomicsreview |  Ten years ago, the rich and powerful Rockefeller Foundation played through and favorably described a scenario in which a pandemic would lead to autocratic forms of government with total surveillance and control of citizens. Now it has published a pandemic plan to make this scenario a reality.

According to the preamble by the President of the Foundation, it took two weeks to set up and edit this plan, implicating a large number of “experts and decision-makers from academia, business, politics and government – across industries and political ideologies” and publish it in glossy on April 21, 2020, under the title “National Covid-19 Testing Action Plan: Pragmatic steps to reopen our workplaces and our communities”.

I became aware of this plan through a German translation of an article by Dux Morales in the Italian newspaper il manifesto about it. As I read through this my breath stood still. 

Two weeks seems a very short time for such a comprehensive work with allegedly many contributors and about 25 signers. However, the Foundation had ten years to prepare for this moment. So it wasn’t a hollow phrase in the 2010 publication, which already included the “Lock-Step” pandemic response scenario, telling decision-makers in foundations: ” Scenarios are designed to stretch our thinking about both the opportunities and obstacles that the future might hold; they explore, through narrative, events and dynamics that might alter, inhibit, or enhance current trends, often in surprising ways.”.

In the current brochure, the Rockefeller Foundation proposes, along with other recommendations, to form a Pandemic Testing Board, modelled on the War Production Board, which was an agency of the US to supervise and plan war production during World War II. This new powerful technocratic council is designed to consist of nine representatives from business, government, acadimia, universities and labor, and the order seems not to be random. Microsoft and Google are probably at the top of the list of candidates for this council.

The name of one of the four authors of the proposal caught my eye immediately: E. Glen Weyl, techno-libertarian market radical, Microsoft research manager and long-time campaigner for the legalisation and reintroduction of debt bondage, precisely for migrants.

Another author is Ganesh Sitaraman, professor of law at Vanderbilt University and former researcher at the “Counterinsurgency Training Centre” in Afghanistan. The third is Julius Krein, former hedge fund manager and head of the right-wing nationalist journal American Affairs, which emerged from the Journal of American Greatness. The renowned ethics professor Danielle Allen is allowed to dilute a bit this toxic cocktail of authors.

In wartime, anything goes

As in wartime, the Pandemic Board should have the power to confiscate and order the production of whatever is needed to achieve testing capacity in a short time, a capacity to test so many people a day that the majority of Americans, and possibly the entire world population, can be tested for Covid-19 on a weekly basis. This, it is said, is necessary to get the economy back on track.

Congruously, the state should guarantee test providers a fair price, “e.g. $100” per test. Where companies invest, governments are to relieve them from any risk for their great profit prospect by a guarantee to order tests.

A pandemic corps of 300,000 testers and contact tracers will have to perform police-like tasks towards a reluctant population – even if the latter is not stated explicitly in the brochure -, because “the infection status must be known for people to participate in many societal functions “. In other words: Those who cannot prove that they are corona-free will not be allowed to go to work and even less to participate in social life.

In order to “enable more complete contact tracing”, apps and tracking software should be used as extensively as possible, recording and reporting who is close to whom.

The foundation innocently writes that laws must be passed to prevent dismissal due to infection. As if that had even the slightest chance of happening in a country where in many states you can be dismissed for any reason with two weeks’ notice, including when you are being called up for jury duty.

The global unique ID under a new name

The brochure also promotes the plan to introduce a globally unique identification number for everyone, which the Rockefeller Foundation has already been busy pushing forward with the ID2020 total surveillance project, but now under the name “unique patient identification number”. Everyone is declared a patient here.

This unique “patient” number will provide information on the viral status, antibody status and finally the vaccination status of each citizen. But not only that. The database is to be a hyper database that will be linked to pretty much any other database with personal information, from attendance lists in schools, passenger lists of any kind of transport, or ticket sales at events. Of course, privacy is to be preserved. What else?

In order to identify populations at risk and to achieve performant contact tracing and decision support, powerful analytical tools must operate across any such platform of data. Existing obstacles in accessing and collating data by such analysis instruments (i.e. artificial intelligence) need urgently be removed. Recent progress towards this goal through new regulation is praised.

The Blasted Thing's Invisible...,

charleshughsmith |  The word privilege is much bandied about now. I've been writing about privilege for many years, and ended up writing a book about the source (and thus the end) of privilege: Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege.

Privilege and inequality are two sides of the same coin. Those with privilege get more than everyone else without actually creating more value, which is the definition of inequality.

What few seem to grasp is the absolute source of inequality / privilege is our financial system, specifically the way we create and distribute money.

Few people connect the dots between a central bank (the Federal Reserve) creating money out of thin air and giving the super-wealthy first dibs on this new money, and the vast inequalities of wealth and power that are widening to the point of social disorder on a grand scale.

While the majority may not fully understand the source of inequality, they do intuit that billionaires got the mine and the rest of us got the shaft. Since humans are social apes and social apes have a sense of fairness, even within pecking orders with a few at the top, the inherent unfairness of our financial system generates resentment and indignation, while the lack of understanding generates frustration.

My colleague Mark Jeftovic penned a post explaining how those closest to the Fed's money spigot get wealthier for doing absolutely nothing but being close to the spigot. This is the most basic structure of our financial system and economy. Everything else flows from this simple mechanism. On Cantillionaires, Sycophants and Losers.

Put another way: while the rest of us earn money by creating goods and services, those close to the Fed's money spigot create absolutely nothing but they get billions of dollars at rates of interest that are essentially zero, or adjusted for inflation, less than zero.

 As a result, they can outbid the rest of us for all the assets that generate income.

The Great Reset Is "What They're Doing" - Question Is, What're You Going To Do?

bloomberg |  A major new study of the relationship between carbon dioxide and global warming lowers the odds on worst-case climate change scenarios while also ruling out the most optimistic estimates nations have been counting on as they attempt to implement the Paris Agreement.

A group of 25 leading scientists now conclude that catastrophic warming is almost inevitable if emissions continue at their current rate, even if there’s less reason to anticipate a totally uninhabitable Earth in coming centuries. The research, published Wednesday in the journal Reviews of Geophysics, narrows the answer to a question that’s as old as climate science itself: How much would the planet warm if humanity doubled the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere?

That number, known as “equilibrium climate sensitivity,” is typically expressed as a range. The scientists behind this new study have narrowed the climate-sensitivity window to between 2.6° Celsius and 3.9°C.

That’s smaller than the current range accepted by  the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has for almost a decade used a spread between 1.5°C to 4.5°C—a reading of climate sensitivity that has changed little since the first major U.S. climate science assessment in 1979. Improving these estimates is “sort of the holy grail of climate science,” says Zeke Hausfather, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute and one of the study’s authors.

Climate sensitivity is one of the most iconic numbers in climate science, but it’s not necessarily intuitive. The range isn’t a projection; it’s more like a speed limit that influences projections. “It informs all the other things—like 2100 warming projections, for example—that depend on the sensitivity of our models, and our scenarios,” Hausfather says.

What gave the authors confidence is that three independent lines of evidence—the modern temperature record, geological evidence, and the latest Earth systems models—all agreed on the same answer. Kate Marvel, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University’s applied math and physics department, also contributed to the new paper. She answered questions for Bloomberg Green about the scope and meaning of the new work.

What is “equilibrium climate sensitivity,” and why is it so important?

It's basically answering this question: How hot is it going to get? People are sometimes really surprised. They’re like, “You guys have one job like, why do you not know this?”

The number one determinant in how hot it's going to get is what people are going to do. If we gleefully burn all the fossil fuels in the ground, it's going to get very hot. If we get extremely serious about mitigating climate change—cutting our emissions, moving off fossil fuels, changing a lot about our way of life—that will have a different impact on the climate. As a physical scientist, “What are we going to do?” is totally above my pay grade.

So Much Trouble In The World...,

strategic-culture |  As the Covid-19 pandemic continues its deadly march around the world, a number of relatively dormant conflicts, as well as several well-known flash points, stand ready to place the world on the edge of a major armed conflict. History shows us that during times of stress – economic depression, religious strife, vacuums of political leadership, and public health crises like that which is now plaguing the world – the chances for war increase commensurately.

India and China, which fought a border war in 1962, are against faced off at several key border locations stretching from Ladakh in the western Himalayas to Arunachal Pradesh in the eastern sector of the mountain range. The resurgent border conflict between the world’s most populous and second-most populous nations is exacerbated by the Covid-19 virus that has taken a toll on what had been the burgeoning economies of both nuclear-armed countries. Deaths and injuries among Indian and Chinese border troops have resulted from fights, with sticks and rocks being used as weapons. A wider and deadlier conflict may result if the weapons used are India’s T-90S tanks and Apache helicopters – now engaged in exercises along the border – and armed Chinese troops that have penetrated some 8 kilometers beyond the 1962 truce line, which is officially called the Line of Actual Control (LAC), in eastern Ladakh. Meanwhile, the number of Covid cases in India has climbed about one million.

In Barbara Tuchman’s widely-acclaimed book on the factors that resulted in the First World War, “The Guns of August,” she wrote, “Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers – danger, death, and live ammunition.” All the plans of nations large and small to prevent a repeat of the so-called Spanish flu of 1918, which ravaged the battlefield trenches of France, have largely proven ineffective. The world is now being subjected to Tuchman’s danger and death – the danger of the uncontrolled pandemic and the mounting death toll arising from it. The current missing ingredient of live ammunition may, if cooler heads do not prevail, result in a modern-day “guns of August.” Continued economic dislocation and a deepening global recession is all that is needed as a catalyst for military standoffs from the Himalayas and South China Sea to the Caribbean waters off Venezuela and the 38^th parallel of Korea to turn into hot war zones purposely or by accident.

Straining SO HARD Against The Great Reset Leash - But Not Comprehending That No Lives Matter!!!

unz |  Let’s assume that the events of the last five months are neither random nor unexpected. Let’s say they’re part of an ingenious plan to transform American democracy into a lockdown police state controlled by criminal elites and their puppet governors. And let’s say the media’s role is to fan the flames of mass hysteria by sensationalizing every gory detail, every ominous prediction and every slightest uptick in the death toll in order to exert greater control over the population. And let’s say the media used their power to craft a message of terror they’d repeat over and over again until finally, there was just one frightening storyline ringing-out from every soapbox and bullhorn, one group of governors from the same political party implementing the same destructive policies, and one small group of infectious disease experts –all incestuously related– issuing edicts in the form of “professional advice.”

Could such a thing happen in America?

What’s most astonishing about the Covid-19 operation is the manner in which the elected government was circumvented by public health experts (connected to a power-mad billionaire activist.) That was a stroke of genius. Most people regard the US as a fairly stable democracy and yet, the first sign of infection triggered the rapid transfer of power from the president to unelected “professionals” whose conflicts of interest are too vast to list. Equally fascinating is the fact that the lockdowns were not the brainchild of Donald Trump but the mainly Democrat governors who shrugged-off any Constitutional limits to their power and arbitrarily ordered people to stay in their homes, wear masks and avoid close physical contact with other humans. All of this was done in the name of “science” and condoned under “emergency powers” despite the fact that mass quarantines of healthy people have no historical precedent or scientific basis. No matter, this was never about science or logic anyway, and it certainly wasn’t about saving lives. It was always about power, pure, unalloyed political power. The power to push the economy into freefall destroying millions of jobs and businesses. The power to bail out Wall Street while diverting attention to a fairly-mild infection that kills roughly 1 in every 500 people. The power to create a permanent underclass willing to work for table scraps or less. And the power to fundamentally restructure human relations so that normal intimacies like handshakes, hugs or social gatherings are entirely banned. This, of course, was the most ambitious part of the project, the basic changes to human interaction that date back thousands of years, and which are now seen as an obstacle to a new order in which the individual must be isolated, desensitized and kept in a constant state of fear to be more easily controlled and manipulated.

On top of that, all of this is taking place in plain sight where anyone with even minimal critical thinking skills should be able to see what is happening, but very few do. Why is that?

Fear. Fear has gripped the population and is preventing typically intelligent, perceptive people from seeing something that’s right beneath their noses. Check out this clip from an article titled “When Will the Madness End?”:

“What’s happening now is a spread of this serious medical condition to the whole population… The public is adopting a personality disorder … paranoid delusions, and irrational fear. … It can happen with anything but here we see a primal fear of disease turning into mass panic….

…. Once fear reaches a certain threshold, normalcy, rationality, morality, and decency fade and are replaced by shocking stupidity and cruelty.…..We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. ..…

…This is made far worse by politics, which has only fed the beast of fear. This is the most politicized disease in history, and doing so has done nothing to help manage it and much to make it all vastly worse.” (“When Will the Madness End?“, AIER)

We’re not saying that Covid doesn’t kill people, and we’re not suggesting that Covid is a bioweapon released on the public for nefarious purposes. (although that’s certainly a possibility.) What we’re saying is that scheming elites and their allies in the media and politics see every crisis as an opportunity to advance their own authoritarian agenda. In fact, the restructuring of basic democratic institutions can only take place within the confines of a major crisis. That’s why the CIA, the giant corporations, the WHO and the Gates Posse gathered for meetings that anticipated an event just like the Covid outbreak. They needed a crisis of that magnitude to achieve their ultimate objective; total control. That’s what they mean when they say there will be “no return to normal”, they mean they’re replacing representative government with a new totalitarian model in which the levers of state power will be controlled by them. So while the virus outbreak might be coincidental, the management of the crisis certainly is not.

Drug Gang Governance Livestock Management In The PanicDemic

Time |  In spring, as Colombia settled into a nationwide COVID-19 lockdown, some Colombians received troubling new guidelines—and not from the government. In remote parts of 11 of the country’s 32 states, armed groups began enforcing their own quarantine measures, according to a report published July 15 by Human Rights Watch. Through pamphlets and WhatsApp messages, the groups laid out curfews, restrictions on movement, categories of essential work, and more. These restrictions were sometimes stricter than government rules, and punishments for breaking them far more serious.

One pamphlet seen by HRW, released in early April by Marxist guerrillas the National Liberation Army (ELN) in the northern Bolívar department, warned that fighters would be “forced to kill people in order to preserve lives” because residents had not “respected the orders to prevent Covid-19.”

Latin America is the current center of the pandemic, with more than 3.5 million cases across the region and numbers in many countries still rising sharply. Analysts say COVID-19 is worsening the region’s problem with “criminal governance” – where the state loses control over a part of its territory as non-state armed groups, such as drug gangs and guerrilla forces, take over and effectively govern small areas. Groups in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and elsewhere have taken on the fight against COVID-19, allowing them to claim an interest in the public good, and strengthen their violent grip on local communities—in a way that could be permanent.

Which armed groups control territory in Latin America?

The nature of criminal governance varies hugely between regions and countries across Latin America, according to Chris Dalby, managing editor of investigative news site InSight Crime, which examines organized crime in the region. But it tends to take hold, he says, in poor or remote areas where the state presence is weak; that is, where the government has failed to provide effective law enforcement, public services, and economic opportunity.

In Colombia, armed groups are mostly a legacy of the country’s decades-long conflict with rebel groups. Though the Colombian government reached a landmark peace deal with the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2016, other guerrilla groups, including the ELN, and paramilitary forces remain powerful in some rural areas. In Brazil, drug traffickers exert more influence than the police in some of the favela neighborhoods that lie on the outskirts of large cities, with the largest gang being the First Capital Command (PCC) in São Paulo. In Mexico, drug cartels, such as the Sinaloa Cartel in the northwest of the country, have similar control over poor communities.

These distinct groups use their territories for a range of illicit businesses: drug trafficking, people trafficking, illegal mining, extortion rackets and more. But they often also provide resources and public services for communities, as a way of legitimizing their control and buying loyalty. During the pandemic, with many money-making activities harder to carry out thanks to national restrictions on movement and businesses, many groups have leaned into this role of governing, Dalby says. “They’ve taken the opportunity to reaffirm that control.”

In March, after COVID-19 started to spread through Brazil, gangs in Rio de Janeiro favelas drove through streets using a loudspeaker to tell residents they were putting a curfew in place and threatening violence if they did not comply, according to Brazilian newspaper UOL. Traffickers reportedly also handed out hand soap, and issued edicts banning tourists from entering the area in case they infect the residents. In Mexico, in April, drug cartels handed out boxes of food and other basic supplies to people struggling with the economic impact of the pandemic. Images circulated in Latin American media showed packages branded with the names of cartels.

In Colombia, some armed groups implemented stricter restrictions than the government did on people’s movement, humanitarian workers and community leaders told HRW, allowing no exceptions for accessing health services or banks during curfews, for example. People who did not comply with the rules faced brutal punishments: HRW documented at least 8 killings of civilians who apparently did not abide by COVID-19 measures imposed by armed groups between March and June.

Zheng-Li Shi..., Gurrl We Coming For Your Dome-Piece

counterpunch |  Our proposal is consistent with all the principal undisputed facts concerning SARS-CoV-2 and its origin. The MMP proposal has the additional benefit of reconciling many observations concerning SARS-CoV-2 that have proven difficult to reconcile with any natural zoonotic hypothesis.

For instance, using different approaches, numerous researchers have concluded that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein has a very high affinity for the human ACE2 receptor (Walls et al., 2020; Piplani et al., 2020; Shang and Ye et al., 2020; Wrapp et al., 2020). Such exceptional affinities, ten to twenty times as great as that of the original SARS virus, do not arise at random, making it very hard to explain in any other way than for the virus to have been strongly selected in the presence of a human ACE2 receptor (Piplani et al., 2020).

In addition to this, a recent report found that the spike of RaTG13 binds the human ACE2 receptor (Shang and Ye et al., 2020). We proposed above that the virus in the mine directly infected humans lung cells. The main determinant of cell infection and species specificity of coronaviruses is initial receptor binding (Perlman and Netland, 2009). Thus RaTG13, unlike most bat coronaviruses, probably can enter and infect human cells, providing biological plausibility to the idea that the miners became infected with a coronavirus resembling RaTG13.

Moreover, the receptor binding domain (RBD) of SARS-CoV-2, which is the region of the spike that physically contacts the human ACE2 receptor, has recently been crystallised to reveal its spatial structure (Shang and Ye et al., 2020). These authors found close structural similarities between the spikes of SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 in how they bound the human ACE2 receptor:

“Second, as with SARS-CoV-2, bat RaTG13 RBM [a region of the RBD] contains a similar four-residue motif in the ACE2 binding ridge, supporting the notion that SARS-CoV-2 may have evolved from RaTG13 or a RaTG13-related bat coronavirus (Extended Data Table 3 and Extended Data Fig. 7). Third, the L486F, Y493Q and D501N residue changes from RaTG13 to SARS CoV-2 enhance ACE2 recognition and may have facilitated the bat-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (Extended Data Table 3 and Extended Data Fig. 7). A lysine-to-asparagine mutation at the 479 position in the SARS-CoV-2 RBD (corresponding to the 493 position in the SARS-CoV-2 RBD) enabled SARS-CoV to infect humans. Fourth, Leu455 contributes favourably to ACE2 recognition, and it is conserved between RaTG13 and SARS CoV-2; its presence in the SARS CoV-2 RBM may be important for the bat-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2″ (Shang and Ye et al., 2020). (italics added)

The significance of this molecular similarity is very great. Coronaviruses have evolved a diverse set of molecular solutions to solve the problem of binding ACE2 (Perlman and Netland, 2009; Forni et al., 2017). The fact that RaTG13 and SARS CoV-2 share the same solution makes RaTG13 a highly likely direct ancestor of Sars-CoV-2.

A further widely noted feature of SARS-CoV-2 is its furin site (Coutard et al., 2020). This site is absent from RaTG13 and other closely related coronaviruses. The most closely related virus with such a site is the highly lethal MERS (which broke out in 2012). Possession of a furin site enables SARS-CoV-2 (like MERS) to infect lungs and many other body tissues (such as the gastrointestinal tract and neurons), explaining much of its lethality (Hoffman et al., 2020; Lamers et al., 2020). However, no convincing explanation for how SARS-CoV-2 acquired this site has yet been offered. Our suggestion is that it arose due to the high selection pressure which existed in the miner’s lungs and which in general worked to ensure that the virus became highly adapted to the lungs. This explanation, which encompasses how SARS-CoV-2 came to target lung tissues in general, is an important aspect of our proposal.

The implication is therefore that the furin site was not acquired by recombination with another coronavirus and simply represents convergent evolution (as suggested by Andersen et al., 2020).

An intriguing alternative possibility is that SARS-CoV-2 acquired its furin site directly from the miner’s lungs. Humans possess an epithelial sodium channel protein called ENaC-a whose furin cleavage site is identical over eight amino acids to SARS-CoV-2 (Anand et al., 2020). ENaC-a protein is present in the same airway epithelial and lung tissues infected by SARS-CoV-2. It is known from plants that positive-stranded RNA viruses recombine readily with host mRNAs (Greene and Allison, 1994; Greene and Allison, 1996; Lommel and Xiong, 1991; Borja et al., 2007). The same evidence base is not available for positive-stranded animal RNA viruses, (though see Gorbalenya, 1992) but if plant viruses are a guide then acquisition of its furin site via recombination with the mRNA which encodes ENaC-a by SARS-CoV-2 is a strong possibility.

A further feature of SARS-CoV-2 has been the very limited adaptive evolution of its genome since the pandemic began (Zhan et al., 2020; van Dorp et al., 2020; Starr et al., 2020). It is a well-established principle that viruses that jump species undergo accelerated evolutionary change in their new host (e.g. Baric et al., 1997). Thus, SARS and MERS (both coronaviruses) underwent rapid and readily detectable adaptation to their new human hosts (Forni et al., 2017; Dudas and Rambaut, 2016). Such an adaptation period has not been observed for SARS-CoV-2 even though it has now infected many more individuals than SARS or MERS did. This has even led to suggestions that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had a period of cryptic circulation in humans infections that predated the pandemic (Chaw et al., 2020). The sole mutation consistently observed to accumulate across multiple studies is a D614G substitution in the spike protein (e.g. Korber et al., 2020). The numerically largest analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes, however, found no evidence at all for adaptive evolution, even for D614G (van Dorp et al., 2020).

The general observation is therefore that Sars-CoV-2 has remained functionally unchanged or virtually so (except for inconsequential genetic changes) since the pandemic began. This is a very important observation. It implies that SARS-CoV-2 is highly adapted across its whole set of component proteins and not just at the spike (Zhan et al., 2020). That is to say, its evolutionary leap to humans was completed before the 2019 pandemic began.

It is hard to imagine an explanation for this high adaptiveness other than some kind of passaging in a human body (Zhan et al., 2020). Not even passaging in human cells could have achieved such an outcome.

Two examples illustrate this point. In a follow up to Shang and Ye et al., (2020), a similar group of Minnesota researchers identified a distinct strategy by which the spike (S) protein (which contains the receptor bind domain; RBD) of SARS-CoV-2 evades the human immune system (Shang and Wan et al., 2020). This strategy involves more effective hiding of its RBD, but it implies again that the spike and the RBD evolved in tandem and in the presence of the human immune system (i.e. in a human body and not in tissue culture).

The Andersen authors, in their critique of a possible engineered origin for SARS-CoV-2, also stress the need for passaging in whole humans:

“Finally, the generation of the predicted O-linked glycans is also unlikely to have occurred during cell-culture passage, as such features suggest the involvement of an immune system” (Andersen et al., 2020).

The final point that we would like to make is that the principal zoonotic origin thesis is the one proposed by Andersen et al. Apart from being poorly supported this thesis is very complex. It requires two species jumps, at least two recombination events between quite distantly related coronaviruses and the physical transfer of a pangolin (having a coronavirus infection) from outside China (Andersen et al., 2020). Even then it provides no logical explanation of the adaptedness of SARS-CoV-2 across its whole genome or why the virus emerged in Wuhan.

By contrast, our MMP proposal requires only the one species jump, which is documented in the Master’s thesis. Although we do not rule out a possible role for mixed infections in the lungs of the miners, nor the possibility of recombination between closely related variants in those lungs, nor the potential acquisition of the furin site from a host mRNA, only mutation was needed to derive SARS-CoV-2 from RaTG13. Hence our attention earlier to the figure from P. Zhou et al., 2020showing that RaTG13 is the most closely related virus to SARS-CoV-2 over its entire length. This extended similarity is perfectly consistent with a mutational origin of SARS-CoV-2 from RaTG13.

In short, the MMP theory is a plausible and parsimonious explanation of all the key features of the COVID-19 pandemic and its origin. It accounts for the propensity of SARS-CoV-2 infections to target the lungs; the apparent preadapted nature of the virus; and its transmission from bats in Yunnan to humans in Wuhan.