Rationalizing The Great Reset: Is There More At Work Than Absolute Capitalism?

thelocal.se |  Published every two years, the WWF Living Planet Report documents the state of the Earth, including its biodiversity, ecosystems, the demand on natural resources and what that means for humans and wildlife.

And the 2016 edition shows that Swedes are currently living lifestyles that would require the equivalent of four Earths to sustain – 4.2 to be precise.

Sweden ranks alongside the likes of the USA, UAE and Canada as one of the worst countries in the report when it comes to its consumption footprint, which the WWF defines as the area used to support a defined population's consumption.

The footprint, measured in global hectares, includes the area needed to produce the materials a country consumes, and the area needed to absorb its carbon dioxide emissions.

According to the study, Sweden consumes the equivalent of 7.3 global hectares per capita. For perspective, nearby Germany consumes 5.3, Tanzania consumes 1.3, and the USA consumes 8.2.

The WWF highlighted Sweden as being a big importer of consumer goods produced by fossil fuels, particularly from China. The Nordic nation has high indirect carbon dioxide emissions as a result.

“Sweden and Swedes are very good at many things and we have come far in our conversion of energy production even if there is still a lot left to do. We have advanced technology, knowledge and understanding of sustainability issues, but we don't speak a lot about the impact of consumption of items which are produced in an unsustainable way,” Swedish WWF CEO Håkan Wirtén told news agency TT.

In order to improve its sustainability, the WWF recommended that the Swedish government should bring in a target to reduce consumption-based emissions, work out a strategy to halve Sweden's meat consumption, and ban the sale of newly produced cars which run on fossil fuels by 2025 if possible.

“A big part of the Swedish footprint comes from transport. The government should set a target for consumption-based emissions so that we can actually start to measure the emissions we cause in other ways through our imports,” the WWF's Wirtén said.

According to the WWF, Sweden's consumption footprint can be broken down as 32 percent on food, 29 percent on travel, 18 percent on goods, 12 percent on accommodation and nine percent on services.

Sweden Chose Herd Immunity - Ignored Great Reset Fear-Mongering - And Did Just Fine

mises |  As soon as it became clear that the Swedish state had no plans to implement harsh lock downs, global media organizations like the New York Times have implemented what can only be described as an ideological jihad against Sweden.

For many weeks, there has been an incessant drumbeat of articles with titles touting the "the failure of the country's no-lockdown coronavirus strategy," that "Sweden Has Become the World's Cautionary Tale," and "How Sweden Screwed Up."

It is common to read articles stating that Sweden has one of the world's worst death rates for COVID-19.

This, however, remains a matter of perspective.

Sweden's total deaths per million in population as of July 14 is 549. That's considerably lower than the deaths per million rate in the UK, which is 662, and in Spain, which is 608. In Belgium, the death rate is 884.

Moreover, the Sweden deaths per million is many times better than the rates found in New Jersey and New York: 1,763 and 1,669.

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An astute reader, however, will quickly notice that articles condemning Sweden's "failure" rarely if ever mention these comparisons. Instead, anti-Sweden articles are careful to only mention countries with far lower deaths per million, usually Denmark and Norway. A nonspecific stock phrase is generally inserted which repeats that Sweden has: "a far higher mortality rate than its neighbours."

Articles about countries with far more deaths per million than Sweden often make excuses for those governments. In May, for example, the BBC repeated the Belgian government's talking points, which attempted to explain that things aren't as bad as they seem in Belgium. In places where harsh lockdowns were implemented—such as New York or the UK— the explanation is that these countries implemented their lockdowns too late.

The Great Reset Is An Engineered Genocide: The Amerindian Shows How That Works Out...,

technologyreview |  “The traditional forms of living a good life were going to be destroyed,” writes Lear. “But there was spiritual backing for the thought that new good forms of living would arise for the Crow, if only they would adhere to the virtues of the chickadee.”

Today the Crow—just like the Sioux, the Navajo, the Potawatomi, and numerous other native peoples— live in communities that struggle with poverty, suicide, and unemployment. But these communities are also home to poets, historians, singers, dancers, and thinkers committed to indigenous cultural flourishing. The point here is not to glamorize indigenous closeness to “nature,” or to indulge a naive longing for lost hunter-warrior values, but to ask what we might learn from courageous and intelligent people who survived cultural and ecological catastrophe.

Like Plenty Coups, we face the destruction of our conceptual reality. Catastrophic levels of global warming are practically inevitable at this point, and one way or another this will bring about the end of life as we know it.

So we have to confront two distinct challenges. The first is whether we might curtail the worst possibilities of climate change and stave off human extinction by limiting greenhouse-gas emissions and decreasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. The second is whether we will be able to transition to a new way of life in the world we’ve made. Meeting the latter challenge demands mourning what we have already lost, learning from history, finding a realistic way forward, and committing to an idea of human flourishing beyond any hope of knowing what form that flourishing will take. “This is a daunting form of commitment,” Lear writes, for it is a commitment “to a goodness in the world that transcends one’s current ability to grasp what it is.”

It is not clear that we moderns possess the psychological and spiritual resources to meet this challenge. Coming to terms with the situation as it stands has already proved the struggle of a generation, and the outcome still remains obscure. Successfully answering this existential challenge may not even matter at all unless we immediately see substantial reductions in global carbon emissions: recent research suggests that at atmospheric carbon dioxide levels around 1,200 parts per million, which we are on track to hit sometime in the next century, changes in atmospheric turbulence may dissipate clouds that reflect sunlight from the subtropics, adding as much as 8 °C warming on top of the more than 4 °C warming already expected by that point. That much warming, that quickly—12 °C within a hundred years—would be such an abrupt and radical environmental shift that it’s difficult to imagine a large, warm-blooded mammalian apex predator like Homo sapiens surviving in significant numbers. Such a crisis could create a population bottleneck like other, prehistoric bottlenecks, as many billions of people die, or it could mean the end of our species. There’s no real way to know what will happen except by looking at roughly similar catastrophes in the past, which have left the Earth a graveyard of failed species. We burn some of them to drive our cars.

Nevertheless, the fact that our situation offers no good prospects does not absolve us of the obligation to find a way forward. Our apocalypse is happening day by day, and our greatest challenge is learning to live with this truth while remaining committed to some as-yet-unimaginable form of future human flourishing—to live with radical hope. Despite decades of failure, a disheartening track record, ongoing paralysis, a social order geared toward consumption and distraction, and the strong possibility that our great-grandchildren may be the last generation of humans ever to live on planet Earth, we must go on. We have no choice.

Have We Entered A Financial Extinction Event?

charleshughsmith |  The lower reaches of the financial food chain are already dying, and every entity that depended on that layer is doomed.

Though under pressure from climate change, the dinosaurs were still dominant 65 million year ago--until the meteor struck, creating a global "nuclear winter" that darkened the atmosphere for months, killing off most of the food chain that the dinosaurs depended on. (See chart below.)

The ancestors of modern birds were one of the few dinosaur species to survive the extinction event, which took months to play out.

It wasn't the impact and shock wave that killed off dinosaurs globally--it was the "nuclear winter" that doomed them to extinction. As plants withered, the plant-eating dinosaurs expired, depriving the predator dinosaurs of their food supply.

This is a precise analogy for the global economy, which is entering a financial "nuclear winter" extinction event. As I've been discussing for the past few months, costs are sticky but revenues and profits are on a slippery slope.

Businesses still have all the high fixed costs of 2019 but their revenues are sliding as the "nuclear winter" weakens consumer spending, investment in new capacity, etc.

Despite all the hoopla about a potential vaccine, no vaccine can change four realities: one, consumer sentiment has shifted from confidence to caution and from spending freely to saving. This is the financial equivalent of "nuclear winter": there is no way to return to the pre-impact environment.

Two, uncertainty cannot be dissipated, either. There are no guarantees a vaccine will be 99% effective, that it will last more than a few months, that it won't have side-effects, etc. There are also no guarantees that consumers will resume their care-free spending ways as credit tightens, incomes decline, risks emerge and the need for savings becomes more compelling.

Three, consumer behavior and uncertainty have already changed, and so businesses that cannot survive on much lower revenues won't last long enough to emerge from the "nuclear winter" of uncertainty and a shift in sentiment.

Four, assets based on 2019 revenues, profits and demand are now horrendously overvalued, and the repricing of all assets will bring down the predators, i.e. the banks.

As I've noted here before, the top 10% of households account for almost 50% of consumer spending. These households are older, and own the majority of assets --between 80% and 90% of stocks, bonds, business equity, rental real estate, etc. This is the demographic with the most to lose in returning to care-free air travel, jamming into crowded venues and cafes, etc.

The Great Reset Has 28 Million Americans About To Be Homeless....,

cnbc |  Key Points

• The coronavirus pandemic could result in some 28 million Americans being evicted, one expert said. 
• By comparison, 10 million people lost their homes in the Great Recession. 
• Here’s what we can expect from this crisis.

Emily Benfer began her career representing homeless families in Washington, D.C.

Her first case involved a family that had been evicted after complaining to their landlord about the holes in their roof. One of the times she met with the family, one of the children, a 4-year-old girl, asked her: “Are you really going to help us?” Benfer struggled with how to answer.

“I’d met them too late,” she said. “I couldn’t stop the eviction. They had already been sleeping on the subway, and in other people’s homes. And you could see the effects it was taking on them.”

Today, Benfer is a leading expert on evictions. She is the chair of the American Bar Association’s Task Force Committee on Eviction and co-creator of the COVID-19 Housing Policy Scorecard with the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. Throughout the public health crisis, Benfer has been investigating how states are dealing with evictions and sharing what she finds in a public database. 

CNBC spoke with Benfer about the coming eviction crisis and what can be done to turn it around. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Nick Cannon, You Know You Done F'd Up, Right? Dwayne Put On A Dress Just For Saying Your Name!!!

variety |  “ViacomCBS condemns bigotry of any kind and we categorically denounce all forms of anti-Semitism. We have spoken with Nick Cannon about an episode of his podcast ‘Cannon’s Class’ on YouTube, which promoted hateful speech and spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. While we support ongoing education and dialogue in the fight against bigotry, we are deeply troubled that Nick has failed to acknowledge or apologize for perpetuating anti-Semitism, and we are terminating our relationship with him. We are committed to doing better in our response to incidents of anti-Semitism, racism, and bigotry. ViacomCBS will have further announcements on our efforts to combat hate of all kinds,” the company said.

On Monday, Cannon said on Twitter and Facebook that he has “no hate in my heart nor malice intentions” and doesn’t condone hate speech. He also said that he holds himself “accountable for this moment” and takes full responsibility for his actions.

Late on Tuesday and well into the early hours of Wednesday, the host began retweeting scores of messages of support from fans, some of whom condemned ViacomCBS for severing ties with Cannon and expressed concern for the future of long-running MTV sketch comedy series “Wild ‘N Out,” which Cannon has hosted since its 2005 debut and recent expansion to sister network VH1. Cannon also retweeted a number of his critics who called him the N-word. 

I want to clarify my now deleted tweet. I was not supporting or condoning what Nick Cannon specifically said, but I had expressed my support of him owning the content and brand he helped create 🙏🏾

— DWade (@DwyaneWade) July 15, 2020

He later issued a lengthy statement on Facebook, demanding an apology from ViacomCBS as well as full ownership of “Wild ‘N Out.”

The host has had a relationship with Viacom since he was an actor on Nickelodeon in the ’90s, and into the 2000s with “Wild ‘N Out.” More recently, he’s been known as the host of “The Masked Singer” on Fox and hosted “America’s Got Talent” on NBC from 2009-2016. He’s also launching a syndicated daytime talk show in September with Debmar-Mercury.

Why Exactly Is Eric Weinstein Caping Up For Bari Weiss?

Before There Was SJW Cancel Culture, Bari Weiss Was An Arch-Zionist Neocon Cancel Queen

thegrayzone | Did neocon cancel queen Bari Weiss stage her NY Times resignation to fuel her career?

  

A closer look at the events surrounding Bari Weiss’ resignation suggests she omitted some critical details about her toxic presence inside the paper, and may have staged her resignation to drum up publicity for her next move.

Back on June 3, neoconservative Sen. Tom Cotton published an op-ed in the New York Times calling for the US military to crack down on Americans protesting lethal police violence. The decision to publish the editorial touched off outrage among Times staff, with many demanding to know how such a fascistic piece made it into print.

It turned out that the staffer who edited the piece, Adam Rubenstein, was a card-carrying neocon hired by the Times in early 2019. Rubenstein was a former editor for the now-defunct Weekly Standard founded by William Kristol – the neocon leader responsible for rustling up pro-Israel money to support Cotton’s electoral ambitions.

New York Times staff claimed that the Cotton op-ed “was edited” by Rubenstein and other staffers “had not been aware of the article before it was published.”

The editorial disaster prompted the dismissal of op-ed page editor James Bennet, who had initially defended running Cotton’s screed.

Before joining the Weekly Standard, Rubenstein was a pro-Israel activist at Kenyon College who once attempted to cancel an appearance by the Palestian poet Remi Kanazi on the grounds that Kanazi was “part of a focus-grouped and incubated hatred.”

 

Rubenstein’s hiring by the Times complimented its hiring of Bari Weiss and fellow anti-Palestinian bigot Bret Stephens in 2017. In her resignation letter, Weiss acknowledged, “I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in [the Times’] pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives.”

In 2018, Weiss and Stephens responded to a critic who had called them “Zionist fanatics of near-unhinged proportions.” The two retorted: “The word ‘near’ should not have been a part of the sentence. Otherwise, we happily plead guilty as charged.”

When Rubenstein joined them at the paper, he became Weiss’s personal editor. Both Weiss and Stephens had risen to prominence at the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, where Rubenstein had also worked as a Robert Bartley Fellow.

When the Cotton column calling for a military crackdown on Black Lives Matter ran less than a year later, the Times’ neocon problem finally came to a head.

This June 5, as 300 non-editorial staffers planned a virtual walkout, Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger convened an all-hands meeting. During the question-and-answer session, according to a report by Vice, employees demanded to know “whether Opinion staff editor and writer Bari Weiss would be fired for ‘openly bad mouth[ing] younger news colleagues on a platform where they, because of strict company policy, could not defend themselves’; whether the opinion section had suggested the topic of the op-ed to Cotton; and what the Times would do to help retain and support Black employees.”

Times staff seemed to be pointing a finger at Weiss and her neocon network for soliciting the Cotton op-ed.

When Weiss resigned on July 14, she complained that colleagues “have called me a Nazi and a racist… Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers.” Yet she failed to acknowledge her apparent role in the Cotton op-ed affair, which was clearly the source of her colleagues’ outrage, painting herself instead as a blameless victim of “illiberal” cancel culture.

Is Alice Walker REALLY A Proud Anti-Semite?

bariweiss |  It took the paper two days and two jobs to say that the Tom Cotton op-ed “fell short of our standards.” We attached an editor’s note on a travel story about Jaffa shortly after it was published because it “failed to touch on important aspects of Jaffa’s makeup and its history.” But there is still none appended to Cheryl Strayed’s fawning interview with the writer Alice Walker, a proud anti-Semite who believes in lizard Illuminati. 

NYTimes |  Today, I’m going to call Alice Walker. She won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her novel, The Color Purple. She was the first black woman to win that prize. She also won the National Book Award that year. She’s published many books, novels, poetry collections, essay collections. And she really for many decades now has been telling the truth about who we are and how we struggle and how we persist. Her most recent book is a collection of poetry called Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart. I’ve been reading it the past few days. It’s terrific.

tabletmag |  Alice Walker was given another uncritical platform at a premier outlet which proffered no mention or questions about her anti-Semitic history. That outlet? A popular New York Times podcast.

For Wednesday’s episode of Sugar Calling, Walker was interviewed about her life under lockdown by host and author Cheryl Strayed. Remarkably, in her questions, Strayed quoted verbatim from the very Times interview where Walker promoted David Icke, asking her about the “kinship” with Jane Eyre she’d expressed there, but not about the anti-Semitism she’d voiced.

If it seems unbelievable that the Times would knowingly repeat its mistake of feting Walker without foregrounding her bigotry, that’s because it is: The episode was made in error, not malice. When I raised the issue with Strayed and detailed Walker’s prejudicial past to her, she was shocked and explained that neither she nor her producers were aware of the author’s anti-Semitic backstory. “I had no idea and neither did the producers who make the show,” she said. “You’re correct that I read that interview and asked her about Jane Eyre, but I didn't know anything about the Icke book until yesterday. If I’d known, I wouldn't have asked Alice Walker to be on the show.” Saying she was “mortified,” Strayed promptly deleted her posts promoting the episode on social media. It was a rare expression of genuine contrition and accountability that is all too rare in my experience reporting on these matters.

The problem here is not Cheryl Strayed, who responded admirably to a difficult situation. The problem is The New York Times, which in 2018 did not respond admirably to the same situation, and left their original interview with Walker untouched, with no annotations to indicate to subsequent readers that Walker was promoting anti-Semitism in it.

At the time, after it became a national scandal, the Times book editor did not apologize and told reporters that in such an interview, “we would never add that a book is factually inaccurate, or that the author is a serial predator, or any kind of judgment on the work or the writer. We do not issue a verdict on people’s opinions.” Asked if “in retrospect, would you have done anything differently with the column by Ms. Walker?” the editor answered, “No.” Thus, even after the controversy, the Times did not amend the piece to inform future readers that one of the books that Walker recommended in it was a vicious anti-Semitic screed.

Thank GAWD Smart Bruvvas Have Never Fallen For The WEF/BLM Buhshidt

nonsite |  In light of recent events we thought to republish Adolph Reed’s 2016 essay on racial disparity and police violence. We include a new introduction to the piece by Cedric Johnson, “The Triumph of Black Lives Matter and Neoliberal Redemption,” that considers the essay in view of the contemporary situation.   

 

Some readers will know that I’ve contended that, despite its proponents’ assertions, antiracism is not a different sort of egalitarian alternative to a class politics but is a class politics itself: the politics of a strain of the professional-managerial class whose worldview and material interests are rooted within a political economy of race and ascriptive identity-group relations. Moreover, although it often comes with a garnish of disparaging but empty references to neoliberalism as a generic sign of bad things, antiracist politics is in fact the left wing of neoliberalism in that its sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the distribution of goods and bads in the society, an ideal that naturalizes the outcomes of capitalist market forces so long as they are equitable along racial (and other identitarian) lines. As I and my colleague Walter Benn Michaels have insisted repeatedly over the last decade, the burden of that ideal of social justice is that the society would be fair if 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources so long as the dominant 1% were 13% black, 17% Latino, 50% female, 4% or whatever LGBTQ, etc. That is the neoliberal gospel of economic justice, articulated more than a half-century ago by Chicago neoclassical economist Gary Becker, as nondiscriminatory markets that reward individual “human capital” without regard to race or other invidious distinctions.

We intend to make a longer and more elaborate statement of this argument and its implications, which antiracist ideologues have consistently either ignored or attempted to dismiss through mischaracterization of the argument or ad hominem attack.1 For now, however, I want simply to draw attention to how insistence on reducing discussion of killings of civilians by police to a matter of racism clouds understanding of and possibilities for effective response to the deep sources of the phenomenon.

Available data (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/?tid=a_inl) indicate, to the surprise of no one who isn’t in willful denial, that in this country black people make up a percentage of those killed by police that is nearly double their share of the general American population. Latinos are killed by police, apparently, at a rate roughly equivalent to their incidence in the general population. Whites are killed by police at a rate between just under three-fourths (through the first half of 2016) and just under four-fifths (2015) of their share of the general population. That picture is a bit ambiguous because seven percent of those killed in 2015 and fourteen percent of those killed through June of 2016 were classified racially as either other or unknown. Nevertheless, the evidence of gross racial disparity is clear: among victims of homicide by police blacks are represented at twice their rate of the population; whites are killed at somewhat less than theirs. This disparity is the founding rationale for the branding exercise2 called #Black Lives Matter and endless contentions that imminent danger of death at the hands of arbitrary white authority has been a fundamental, definitive condition of blacks’ status in the United States since slavery or, for those who, like the Nation’s Kai Wright, prefer their derivative patter laced with the seeming heft of obscure dates, since 1793. In Wright’s assessment “From passage of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act forward, public-safety officers have been empowered to harass black bodies [sic] in the defense of private capital and the pursuit of public revenue.”3

This line of argument and complaint, as well as the demand for ritual declarations that “black lives matter,” rest on insistence that “racism”—structural, systemic, institutional, post-racial or however modified—must be understood as the cause and name of the injustice manifest in that disparity, which is thus by implication the singular or paramount injustice of the pattern of police killings.

But, when we step away from focus on racial disproportions, the glaring fact is that whites are roughly half or nearly half of all those killed annually by police. And the demand that we focus on the racial disparity is simultaneously a demand that we disattend from other possibly causal disparities. Zaid Jilani found, for example, that ninety-five percent of police killings occurred in neighborhoods with median family income of less than $100,00 and that the median family income in neighborhoods where police killed was $52,907.4 And, according to the Washington Post data, the states with the highest rates of police homicide per million of population are among the whitest in the country: New Mexico averages 6.71 police killings per million; Alaska 5.3 per million; South Dakota 4.69; Arizona and Wyoming 4.2, and Colorado 3.36. It could be possible that the high rates of police killings in those states are concentrated among their very small black populations—New Mexico 2.5%; Alaska 3.9%; South Dakota 1.9%; Arizona 4.6%, Wyoming 1.7%, and Colorado 4.5%. However, with the exception of Colorado—where blacks were 17% of the 29 people killed by police—that does not seem to be the case. Granted, in several of those states the total numbers of people killed by police were very small, in the low single digits. Still, no black people were among those killed by police in South Dakota, Wyoming, or Alaska. In New Mexico, there were no blacks among the 20 people killed by police in 2015, and in Arizona blacks made up just over 2% of the 42 victims of police killing.

What is clear in those states, however, is that the great disproportion of those killed by police have been Latinos, Native Americans, and poor whites. So someone should tell Kai Wright et al to find another iconic date to pontificate about; that 1793 yarn has nothing to do with anything except feeding the narrative of endless collective racial suffering and triumphalist individual overcoming—“resilience”—popular among the black professional-managerial strata and their white friends (or are they just allies?) these days.

The Great Reset's Anti-Racist (Cancel Culture) Programme

WEF |  In the US, COVID-19 has taken a disproportionate toll on African-American communities, low-income people and vulnerable populations such as the homeless. In Los Angeles, the death rate for black citizens is nearly three times that of its wealthiest residents. The fact that the pandemic affected so disproportionately black communities is a reflection not just of historic racism but also their continuation in existing systemic inequalities. In America, as in many other countries, people who face racial discrimination and marginalization are more likely to be unemployed or underemployed and have poor housing and living conditions. As a result, their access to health care is more limited and they suffer more from pre-existing health conditions that make COVID-19 particularly deadly.

The great challenge for all those who share leadership responsibilities is to respond to the crisis in a way that integrates the hopes of the future. While reflecting on the aspects that a future social contract might follow, the opinions of the younger generation must be integrated, as they are the ones who will be asked to live with it – the same generation that is now so engaged at the vanguard of the fight against racism. They have taken to heart the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

Their adherence is decisive, and therefore to better understand what they want, it is necessary for them to be heard. This is made all the more significant by the fact that the younger generation is likely to be more radical than the older one in redefining the social contract.

The pandemic has tragically ended lives but it has also upended them. A whole generation across the globe will be defined by economic and often social insecurity, with millions due to enter the work force in the midst of a profound recession. Even for the most advantaged amongst them, starting off in deficit – many students have educational debts – is likely to have long-term effects. Already the millennials (at least in the Western world) are worse off than their parents in terms of earnings, assets and wealth. They are less likely to own a home or have children than their parents were.

Now, another generation (Gen Z) is entering a system that it sees as failing and that will be beset by longstanding problems exacerbated by the pandemic. As a young student told The New York Times: “Young people have a deep desire for radical change because we see the broken path ahead”.

The worst response the world can have in this situation is further polarization, narrow thinking and the search for simplistic solutions ­– a terrain favourable for propagating rumours, misinformation and hatred. The COVID-19 pandemic has unequivocally shown that the world is deeply interconnected and yet also largely bereft of solidarity between nations, and often even within nations.

Who'da Thunk Davos Man Is A Big Ole Social Justice Warrior?

The World Economic Forum · Niall Ferguson - A historian's view

WEF | We could try to go back to the world we had before the pandemic, he said, but that risked "the amplification of many of the trends we see today: polarisation, nationalism, racism and ultimately social unrest and conflicts."

A great reset of how the economy and society run would do the opposite, he said.

It was also a time to support those who had been left behind. Juliana Rotich, Venture Partner at Atlantica Ventures in Nairobi, said we were at an inflection point.

"There’s an opportunity to centre the reset on those who are most vulnerable, those on the edge where it only takes something like a pandemic to slide into poverty."

Other speakers at the launch echoed Schwab's concerns about inequality and racism.

Microsoft President Brad Smith made a direct reference to the racial conflict in his own country, and how the Great Reset could be part of the solution.

"Data, and technology more broadly, are indispensable tools to solving almost any of the problems that we confront," he said.

"And so when it comes to protecting people’s fundamental rights, as we are seeing in the United States today, we have been focused for several years on using data to shine a light on disparities, for example, between the practices of police on African-Americans and blacks in the United States in comparison with other populations - that is a slice of what we’ll need to address around the world."

In a passionate address, Kristalina Georgieva, the head of the International Monetary Fund said the Great Reset would result in a "greener, smarter, fairer world".

"We know this pandemic, if left to its own devices, will deepen inequality," she said.

"But if we were to concentrate in investing in people, in the social fabric of our societies, in access to opportunities and education for all, in expansion of social programmes - then we can have a world that is a better world for all."

Nothing To See Over Here - Just Testing The New Tools Of Herd Manipulation And Control...,

off-guardian  |  In early 2020, Neil Ferguson of the UK’s Imperial College used a scare tactic to predict that 80% of Americans would be infected and that there would be 2.2 million American deaths – neither of which materialized. Yet Ferguson’s extremism accomplished its intended purpose in establishing the basis for draconian Lockdown requirements. Ferguson later retracted his earlier prediction down to 20,000 fatalities.

With current infection fatality rate at 0.20%, Lockdowns have been devoid of science and are based on arbitrary, contradictory and inconsistent requirements.

Just a few examples come to mind, such as liquor stores and big chains are considered ‘essential’ and remain open but stand-alone, independent, mom ‘n pops are not. Barbers may be open but hair salons may not. While it is advised to get tested for Covid19, a colonoscopy or other elective surgery are not allowed. While vitamins C and D and Sunshine strengthen the immune system, all outdoor sport programs have been canceled.

In an unexpected development, a recent JP Morgan study asserted that the Lockdowns failed to “alter the course of the pandemic” as it “destroyed millions of livelihoods” and that as infection rates ‘unrelated to often inconsistent lockdown’ measures decreased, fewer outbreaks were reported as the quarantines were lifted.

As the official narrative of the Covid19 as an existential threat has collapsed, it is interesting to follow how ‘hot spots’ occur just as a particular State, like Florida, announces re-opening.

Those new hot spots encourage a reinvigorated debate over mandatory face masks and social distancing with its success depending on a duplicitous media instilling panic and a naive public still believing Covid19 to be more dangerous than seasonal flu.

Once Understood As The Sum Of Elite Fears - The Great Reset Is Here To Stay

voxeu |  One great unknown about COVID-19 is whether individuals who recover from it can be reinfected. At the emergence of any new virus, it is impossible to know whether immunity is permanent or wanes, until enough time has passed for longitudinal studies to take place. At the moment, and with limited available data, medical scientists and epidemiologists are instead comparing SARS-CoV-2 to related coronaviruses, such as HCoV-HKU1 and HCoV-OC43, which are known to exhibit waning immunity. An early contribution by Kissler et al. (2020) assumed that immunity to SARS-CoV-2 wanes in approximately 45 weeks. A recent medical study (Long et al. 2020) found a significant drop in specific antibody levels after three months. Nevertheless, the duration of immunity in general is still far from understood. 

In Giannitsarou et al. (2020), we explicitly consider a setting in which immunity is temporary. We derive a stylised optimal containment policy and contrast it to policies assuming that once recovered, individuals are forever immune. 

We work with a flexible epidemic model known as SEIRS (Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered-Susceptible). The model allows for natural births and deaths, disease induced deaths, a pre-symptomatic state in which individuals are exposed to the virus and can be infectious without exhibiting symptoms, and importantly, waning immunity.  In such a framework, because immunity may slowly disappear from recovered people, there is the potential for a second (and even third) wave of infection.

In summary, we find that if immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is temporary, the disease will become endemic. The optimal policy will make an initial effort to reduce the first great infection wave and then engage in a permanent low level management of the persistent infection in the population in order to keep it under control. In practice, this means that partial lockdown or social distancing measures may become the norm for some years to come. 

Our analysis assumed that, currently, the only policies at our disposal are broad-based non-medical interventions such as social distancing and lockdown measures. At the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, such policies proved to be extremely costly from social, economic, and health care perspectives. But going forward, we expect that individuals, businesses, and governments are likely to adapt how they do things and operate to mitigate the costs of this initial dramatic shock. People may become more cautious in everyday dealings, businesses may come to depend less on third parties or off-shoring, while other organisations such as schools, transport, intermediate goods producers, and local governments may find innovative ways to become more flexible and resilient in the ways they deliver services and products. We hope that with creativity and resourcefulness, humanity will learn to navigate and live with the disease, should it turn out to be here for the long term.

The Pritzkers Are Marriot - Marriot International Is A World Economic Forum Strategic Partner

wirepoints |  Let’s start with a central claim Governor JB Pritzker made Wednesday in his testimony about COVID-19 policy before the United States House Committee on Homeland Security: “We instituted [his mandate to wear masks] in Illinois on May 1st, one of the first in the nation, and it aligns with our most significant downward shifts in our infection rate,” he said.

That’s simply untrue and his own administration’s data show why. Infections turned down well before his mask order went into effect on May 1. We laid it out in detail in early June.

The evidence of the day-to-day course of the virus closest to being timely is hospitalizations for it, as Pritzker himself has said. Deaths provide another index. However, hospitalizations and deaths lag the actual course of the virus, and that lag time is provided directly by the Center for Disease Control. 

Adjusting for those lags shows that the virus peaked in Illinois around April 15 or April 18 – before the mask order even went into effect.

Progress from the mask order would not have shown up until mid-May, which is when Pritzker’s “science and data” projected the virus would peak. Those projections are now proved to have been wrong even before they were announced. Our full analysis, using the state’s own numbers and the CDC adjustments, includes the details.

And what about Pritzker’s suggestion for going forward, which made national headlines — a federal mask mandate for the whole nation?

In his testimony Pritzker said, “If there’s one job government has, it’s to respond to a life-threatening emergency. But when the same emergency is crashing down on every state at once, that’s a national emergency, and it requires a national response.”

But remember what he said in April when President Trump and Vice President Pence were roundly rebuked – properly – for claiming that the federal government could override state emergency orders and reopening plans? Pritzker was among the critics. “Well, I think [Trump] is going to issue some advice about it, but it is true that it’s up to the governors to make decisions about the executive orders we put in place,” Pritzker said.

And Pritzker says Trump alone should issue the national mask order, with no legislation. Executive authority for that is highly questionable. On executive power, at least he is consistent. It’s also his position that he can micromanage much of the state through an emergency order he claims can be renewed for as long as he alone chooses.

Watch the video of the rest of his testimony and you will see that the gist of it is that, when the federal government failed, it was his administration that stepped up with the right response, which is how much of the press summarized his testimony. When asked later to elaborate on what lessons Illinois officials gained from handling the pandemic, Pritzker offered no specifics, saying only, “There’s an awful lot of learning that’s taken place from March until now, so yes I think we’ve created a path for someone in the future to follow.”

This Great Reset Is Not A Master-Plan - It's Fear Of Global Revolution And Retribution

stevenguinness  |  Corporate membership is essential for the World Economic Forum to spread its influence, but in the end every single member is in compliance with the agenda, objectives, projects and values of the WEF. These take precedent over all else.

Also in concurrence with the WEF are the organisation’s Board of Trustees. Three of these include the current Managing Director of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde and former Bank of England governor Mark Carney. The Trilateral Commission are also represented amongst the trustees through Larry Fink and David Rubenstein.

To add some historical context to the WEF, the group dates back to 1971 when it was originally founded as the European Management Forum. At the time the conflict in Vietnam was raging, social protest movements were building and the United States was about to relinquish the gold standard. By 1973 when the post World War Two Bretton Woods system collapsed and the Trilateral Commission was formed, the Forum had widened its interest beyond just management to include economic and social issues. From here onwards political leaders from around the world began to receive invitations to the institution’s annual meeting in Davos.

The World Economic Forum is classified today as the ‘International Organisation for Public-Private Cooperation‘, and is the only global institution recognised as such. It is in this capacity that the forum ‘engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.’

Like how the Bank for International Settlements acts as a forum to bring central banks together under one umbrella, the WEF plays the same role by uniting business, government and civil society.

The WEF declare themselves as being a ‘catalyst for global initiatives‘, which is accurate considering ‘The Great Reset‘ agenda originates at the WEF level. And it is initiatives like ‘The Great Reset‘ and the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution‘ which the WEF say are distinguished by ‘the active participation of government, business and civil society figures‘.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) narrative was developed out of the World Economic Forum back in 2016. The WEF have confidently asserted that because of 4IR, ‘over the next decade, we will witness changes tearing through the global economy with an unprecedented speed, scale and force. They will transform entire systems of production, distribution and consumption‘.

Not only that, but the world is on the verge of witnessing ‘more technological change over the next decade than we have seen in the past 50 years.’

The group now plan to use ‘The Great Reset‘ as their theme for the 2021 annual meeting in Davos as a vehicle for advancing the 4IR agenda. 4IR is marketed as a technological revolution, where advancement in all the sciences ‘will leave no aspect of global society untouched.’

And like their global counterparts, such as the BIS and the Trilateral Commission, the WEF nurture their agenda gradually and seek to maintain their focus on the long term rather than ‘the emergencies of the day‘.  In their own words, ‘success is measured not only in terms of immediate results – we understand that real progress takes time and sustained commitment.’

For my next article we will look into the specifics of ‘The Great Reset‘ agenda as well as what global planners are seeking to achieve out of Covid-19.

Cases Are Up Because Testing Is Up - But Hospitalizations and Deaths Are Not...,

theatlantic |  For the past few weeks, I have been obsessed with a mystery emerging in the national COVID-19 data.

Cases have soared to terrifying levels since June. Yesterday, the U.S. had 62,000 confirmed cases, an all-time high—and about five times more than the entire continent of Europe. Several U.S. states, including Arizona and Florida, currently have more confirmed cases per capita than any other country in the world.

But average daily deaths are down 75 percent from their April peak. Despite higher death counts on Tuesday and Wednesday, the weekly average has largely plateaued in the past two weeks.

The gap between spiking cases and falling-then-flatlining deaths has become the latest partisan flashpoint. President Donald Trump has brushed off the coronavirus surge by emphasizing the lower death rate, saying that “99 percent of [COVID-19 cases] are totally harmless.” On Tuesday, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned Americans against “[taking] comfort in the lower rate of death” just hours before Trump tweeted triumphantly: “Death Rate from Coronavirus is down tenfold!”

In the fog of pandemic, every statistic tells a story, but no one statistic tells the whole truth. Conservatives seeking refuge in today’s death counts may find, in a matter of days, that deaths are clearly resurging and their narrative is rapidly deteriorating. But liberals, too, should avoid the temptation to flatly reject any remotely positive finding, for fear that it will give succor to the president.

What follows are five possible explanations for the case-death gap. Take them as complementary, rather than competing, theories.

Technology Review Finally Catches Up With CNu On Aerosol Transmission

technologyreview |  “I honestly don’t know what people are waiting for,” says microbiologist Chad Roy of Tulane University in the US. “It doesn’t take WHO coming out to make a proclamation that it’s airborne for us to appreciate this is an airborne disease. I don’t know how much clearer it needs to be in terms of scientific evidence.” 

So what does “airborne” really mean in this context? It’s basically an issue of size. We’re pretty sure that SARS-CoV-2 is spread through tiny droplets that contain viral particles capable of leading to an infection. For a virus to be airborne, however, means a few different things, depending on the expert you’re talking to. Typically it means it can spread via inhalation over long distances, perhaps even through different rooms, of small particles known as aerosols.

“That’s why when you ask some of the professionals if the virus is airborne, they’ll say it’s not, because we’re not seeing transmission over those sorts of distances,” says Lisa Brosseau, a retired professor of public health who still consults for businesses and organizations.

There is also some debate on what we mean by “aerosol.” The droplets that carry viral particles through the air can come in all sorts of sizes, but while the larger ones will drop quickly to the ground or other surfaces, the smaller ones (just a few microns across) can linger in the air for a while, giving them a chance to be inhaled. The word is mostly used to describe these smaller particles, although Brosseau would prefer the term “aerosol transmission” to cover the entire gamut of inhalable viral particles being expelled into the air—large and small alike. 

If SARS-CoV-2 is airborne, it’s far from the only disease. Measles is notorious for being able to last in the air for up to two hours. Tuberculosis, though a bacterium, can be airborne for six hours, and Brosseau suggests that coronavirus superspreaders (people who seem to eject a larger amount of the virus than others) disseminate the virus in patterns that recall the infectiousness of tuberculosis.

Brosseau, however, says that though masks can limit the spread of larger particles, they are less helpful for smaller ones, especially if they fit only loosely. “I wish we would stop relying on the idea that face coverings are going to solve everything and help flatten the curve,” she says. “It’s magical thinking—it’s not going to happen.” For masks to really make a difference, they would need to be worn all the time, even around family.

Brosseau does believe the evidence is trending toward the conclusion that airborne transmission is “the primary and possibly most important mode of transmission for SARS-CoV-2.” She says, “I think the amount of time and effort devoted to sanitizing every single surface over and over and over again has been a huge waste of time. We don’t need to worry so much about cleaning every single surface we touch.” Instead, the focus should be on other factors, like where we spend our time.

Exaggerated Risk of Transmission of COVID-19 by Infected Surfaces

thelancet |  A clinically significant risk of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) transmission by fomites (inanimate surfaces or objects) has been assumed on the basis of studies that have little resemblance to real-life scenarios.

The longest survival (6 days) of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) on surfaces was done by placing a very large initial virus titre sample (10⁷ infectious virus particles) on the surface being tested. Another study that claimed survival of 4 days used a similarly large sample (10⁶ infectious virus particles) on the surface.  A report by van Doremalen and colleagues found survival of both SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 of up to 2 days (on surfaces) and 3 days (in aerosols generated in the laboratory), but again with a large inoculum (10⁵–10⁷ infectious virus particles per mL in aerosols, 10⁴ infectious virus particles on surfaces).

Yet another study found long survival (5 days) of human coronavirus 229E on surfaces with what I would still consider a substantially large viral load (10³ plaque-forming units) in a cell lysate. However, using a cell lysate rather than purified or semipurified virus might enable initial viral proliferation or protection from the effects of the sample drying out.

None of these studies present scenarios akin to real-life situations. Although I did not find measurements of coronavirus quantities in aerosol droplets from patients, the amount of influenza virus RNA in aerosols has been measured, with a concentration equivalent to 10–100 viral particles in a droplet, with even fewer infectious influenza virus particles capable of growth in a plaque assay.

By contrast, one study found human coronavirus 229E to survive for only 3 h, and human coronavirus OC43 to survive for 1 h, after drying on various surfaces including aluminum, sterile latex surgical gloves, and sterile sponges. In a study in which the authors tried to mimic actual conditions in which a surface might be contaminated by a patient, no viable SARS-CoV was detected on surfaces.

A 2020 literature review included most of the studies I have cited here (and others), but adds no new research, and in my view, does not critically evaluate previously published studies. I am not disputing the findings of these studies, only the applicability to real life. For example, in the studies that used a sample of 10⁷, 10⁶, and 10⁴ particles of infectious virus on a small surface area,^1, these concentrations are a lot higher than those in droplets in real-life situations, with the amount of virus actually deposited on surfaces likely to be several orders of magnitude smaller.

Hence, a real-life situation is better represented in the work of Dowell and colleagues in which no viable virus was found on fomites.

No Fault, No Attribution Key To The Great Economic Reset

foxnews |  Hours before she boarded an April 28 Cathay Pacific flight to the United States, the respected doctor who specialized in virology and immunology at the Hong Kong School of Public Health had plotted her escape, packing her bag and sneaking past the censors and video cameras on campus.

She had her passport and her purse and was about to leave all of her loved ones behind. If she was caught, she knew she could be thrown in jail -- or, worse, rendered one of the "disappeared."

Yan told Fox News in an exclusive interview that she believes the Chinese government knew about the novel coronavirus well before it claimed it did. She says her supervisors, renowned as some of the top experts in the field, also ignored research she was doing at the onset of the pandemic that she believes could have saved lives.

She adds that they likely had an obligation to tell the world, given their status as a World Health Organization reference laboratory specializing in influenza viruses and pandemics, especially as the virus began spreading in the early days of 2020.

Yan, now in hiding, claims the government in the country where she was born is trying to shred her reputation and accuses government goons of choreographing a cyber-attack against her in hopes of keeping her quiet.

Yan believes her life is in danger. She fears she can never go back to her home and lives with the hard truth that she’ll likely never see her friends or family there again.