Georgia Getting Busy With The BleachBit On Its Dominion Servers...,

epochtimes |   Attorney Sidney Powell said on Monday that someone had removed a Dominion Voting Systems server from a recount center in Fulton County, Georgia.

“Someone went down to the Fulton center where the votes and Dominion machines were, claimed there was a software glitch and they had to replace the software, and it seems that they removed the server,” Powell told “Lou Dobbs Tonight” in an interview aired on Nov. 30.

Powell added that her team does not know where the server is.

Jessica Corbitt, the director of external affairs for Fulton County, told The Epoch Times on Dec. 1 that the server in question is still on the premises of the recount location at World Congress Center in Atlanta.

Robb Pitt, the chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, told reporters on Tuesday that the county 88 percent through the recount when the Dominion server crashed. The Dominion technician on-site could not resolve the problem so another Dominion representative flew in the day after.

Pitt vehemently denied that his county was involved in any “hanky panky” in relation to the 2020 election.

Dominion’s software and hardware feature prominently in two lawsuits filed by Powell in Georgia and Michigan. The lawsuits claim that the software is vulnerable to manipulation by hackers and was used to alter vote totals in the presidential election.

Powell prefaced her comment by saying that the alleged removal of the server took place when her team was seeking a temporary restraining order against the resetting, wiping, or altering of any of the Dominion machines. A district court judge subsequently granted the temporary restraining order on Sunday night.

Election Fraud Treason By Foreign And Domestic Actors

gnews |  “The Kraken” is the Military’s nickname for the 305th Military Intelligence Battalion in Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

We have all been wondering what was the meaning of this term, what was the meaning of the rumor that a server was seized in a CIA facility in Frankfurt, was the rumor that people were killed or hurt in the raid true, why is it important that Sidney Powell is trained in procedures of Military Tribunals?

WVW-TV broadcast an exclusive interview with General Mike Flynn, General McInerney and Mary Fanning on November 28^th which sheds light on all of these questions. It is a must-listen for anybody who believes in the Constitution, the Republic and finding out the truth about this election.

What we are finding out is that we are facing treason in the homeland and clear interference by foreign actors – aka by the CCP, and others. The dam of closely-held secrets is breaking. The conspiring actors have been trying to hold the dam but the cracks are appearing.

The Constitution did not contemplate cyber-warfare by the CIA on America, a collaboration by media and social media in treason, treason by a major party, and unlimited cyber warfare by foreign actors, all at the same time! We are facing a Constitutional “safe harbor” deadline of December 14^th, but for treason, the President and the Military will not, cannot, stand by and watch this election be stolen. The President swore an oath to protect the American people and the Constitution from all enemies Foreign and Domestic, not to give up because of an artificial deadline. Treason is a matter for a military tribunal. Sidney Powell is trained in the procedures of military tribunals. These charges will be brought to the Supreme Court of the United States, but beyond that, it can be a matter for a military tribunal.

General McInerney also disclosed that his phone has been hacked by the treasonous forces trying to subvert the democratic process in America. His warning to Joe Biden and all the forces arrayed with him was to surrender, the American people will not rest until they are brought to justice for treason.

American Thinker also published an important article (“The smartest man in the room has joined Sidney Powell’s team, Andrea Widburg) on November 28th. Widburg states that Sidney Powell in her Georgia lawsuit included the declaration of Dr Navid Keshawarz-Nia. He is a witness stating that the election was turned in favor of Joe Biden through computer fraud.

Twenty Things About The 2020 Election That Don't Pass The Smell Test

americanthinker |   Americans have common sense, so they can understand when they're being played (for example, when politicians place Americans under house arrest and then ignore their own rules to party and travel).  And they know there is no way on God's green earth that decrepit, demented, corrupt, and terminally stupid Joe Biden fairly won this election.  This post assembles various election anomalies that don't pass the smell test.

J.B. Shurk, who frequently publishes at American Thinker, wrote a knock-out article for The Federalist about Joe Biden's magical performance in the election.  You should read the whole article, but here are four things that don't pass the smell test:

1. Biden allegedly got 80 million votes, which is more than Obama received at his peak, in 2008 — and Biden did this despite losing minority voters to Donald Trump and trailing Trump in voter enthusiasm.

2. Biden broke 60 years of precedent by winning nationally despite losing prodigiously in bellwether states and counties.  The last time this happened was when the mafia got out the vote for John F. Kennedy in 1960.

3. Trump had extraordinary coattails, so much so that even the New York Times admitted that the "Democrats Suffered Crushing Down-Ballot Losses Across America."  Think about that: Biden had no coattails and no enthusiasm, yet he allegedly won a record number of votes.  Smells fetid to me.

4. Biden barely made it through the primaries, while Trump soared, with Trump's performance being a historically sure sign of voter enthusiasm and probable victory — yet Biden, again, allegedly scored an equally historically strong victory.

At The Spectator, Patrick Basham, a professional pollster, also felt that Biden's alleged win cannot pass the smell test.  Again, this is a summary, so you should read the original article:

2020 Election Was The Most Secure In American History

cbsnews  |  Though the transition has begun, President Trump remains largely holed up in the White House tweeting false accusations of a rigged election from behind a crumbling wall of lawsuits. No legal challenge, no recount, no audit has changed the outcome in any state. Mr. Trump's claim that millions of votes were deleted or switched is denied by the official he chose to secure the nation's election systems. Christopher Krebs called the 2020 vote "the most secure in American history" which promptly got him fired. Tonight, in his first interview since he was dismissed, Krebs tells us why he believes the vote was accurate and why saying otherwise puts the country in danger.

Chris Krebs: I have confidence in the security of this election because I know the work that we've done for four years in support of our state and local partners. I know the work that the intelligence community has done, the Department of Defense has done, that the FBI has done, that my team has done. I know that these systems are more secure. I know based on what we have seen that any attacks on the election were not successful.

Two years ago, President Trump put Christopher Krebs in charge of the new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Krebs, a lifelong Republican, was confirmed unanimously by the Senate. 

His agency, known by its acronym, "CISA" helps secure computer systems anywhere that a security breach could be catastrophic, nuclear power plants for example, and the election hardware in all 50 states.

Dr. Navid Keshavarz-Nia Sees Election Fraud - With Certainty

americanthinker |  Professionally, Dr. Kershavarz-Nia has spent his career as a cyber-security engineer.  "My experience," he attests," spans 35 years performing technical assessment, mathematical modeling, cyber-attack pattern analysis, and security intelligence[.]"  I will not belabor the point.  Take it as given that Dr. Kershavarz-Nia may know more about cyber-security than anyone else in America.

So what does the brilliant Dr. Kershavarz-Nia have to say?  This:

1. Hammer and Scorecard is real, not a hoax (as Democrats allege), and both are used to manipulate election outcomes.

2. Dominion, ES&S, Scytl, and Smartmatic are all vulnerable to fraud and vote manipulation — and the mainstream media reported on these vulnerabilities in the past.

3. Dominion has been used in other countries to "forge election results."

4. Dominion's corporate structure is deliberately confusing to hide relationships with Venezuela, China, and Cuba.

5. Dominion machines are easily hackable.

6. Dominion memory cards with cryptographic key access to the systems were stolen in 2019.

Although he had no access to the machines, Dr. Kershavarz has looked at available data about the election and the vote results.  Based on that information, he concluded

1. The counts in the disputed states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia) show electronic manipulation.

2. The simultaneous decision in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia to pretend to halt counting votes was unprecedented and demonstrated a coordinated effort to collude toward desired results.

3. One to two percent of votes were forged in Biden's favor.

4. Optical scanners were set to accept unverified, un-validated ballots.

5. The scanners failed to keep records for audits, an outcome that must have been deliberately programmed.

6. The stolen cryptographic key, which applied to all voting systems, was used to alter vote counts.

7. The favorable votes pouring in after hours for Biden could not be accounted for by a Democrat preference for mailed in ballots.  They demonstrated manipulation.  For example, in Pennsylvania, it was physically impossible to feed 400,000 ballots into the machines within 2–3 hours.

8. Dominion used Chinese parts, and there's reason to believe that China, Venezuela, Cuba interfered in the election.

9. There was a Hammer and Scorecard cyber-attack that altered votes in the battleground states, and then forwarded the results to Scytl servers in Frankfurt, Germany, to avoid detection.

10. The systems failed to produce any auditable results.

Based on the above findings, Dr. Keshavarz-Nia concluded with "high confidence that the election 2020 data were altered in all battleground states resulting in a [sic] hundreds of thousands of votes that were cast for President Trump to be transferred [sic] to Vice President Biden."

Johns Hopkins - A Closer Look At U.S. Deaths

retractionwatch |  A student newspaper at Johns Hopkins has retracted an article claiming that COVID-19 has had “relatively no effect on deaths in the United States.”

The article, “A closer look at U.S. deaths due to COVID-19” (link from the Wayback Machine) was published on November 22 and relied on a presentation by Genevieve Briand, assistant program director of the Applied Economics master’s degree program at Hopkins. 

From the article:

These data analyses suggest that in contrast to most people’s assumptions, the number of deaths by COVID-19 is not alarming. In fact, it has relatively no effect on deaths in the United States.

Not surprisingly, the article was promoted on social media by COVID-19 skeptics. And yesterday, The News-Letter made the article disappear, tweeting:

As is typical in such cases, that earned the article another round of tweets, this time with cries of censorship.

We learned about the deletion this morning, and contacted the editors, along with Briand, for explanations. First, Briand explained the disappearance by saying that as a student newspaper, The News-Letter 

simply rotates the articles it features on a weekly basis so as to showcase as many JHU students articles as possible.

Having cut some of our teeth as student newspaper editors, that didn’t quite wash. The News-Letter’s editors, Rudy Malcom and Katy Wilner, sent us a link to a just-published retraction notice that provides a lot more detail:

After The News-Letter published this article on Nov. 22, it was brought to our attention that our coverage of Genevieve Briand’s presentation “COVID-19 Deaths: A Look at U.S. Data” has been used to support dangerous inaccuracies that minimize the impact of the pandemic.

We decided on Nov. 26 to retract this article to stop the spread of misinformation, as we explained on social media. However, it is our responsibility as journalists to provide a historical record. We have chosen to take down the article from our website, but it is available here as a PDF.

In accordance with our standards for transparency, we are sharing with our readers how we came to this decision. The News-Letter is an editorially and financially independent, student-run publication. Our articles and content are not endorsed by the University or the School of Medicine, and our decision to retract this article was made independently.

Briand’s study should not be used exclusively in understanding the impact of COVID-19, but should be taken in context with the countless other data published by Hopkins, the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

As assistant director for the Master’s in Applied Economics program at Hopkins, Briand is neither a medical professional nor a disease researcher. At her talk, she herself stated that more research and data are needed to understand the effects of COVID-19 in the U.S.

Briand was quoted in the article as saying, “All of this points to no evidence that COVID-19 created any excess deaths. Total death numbers are not above normal death numbers.” This claim is incorrect and does not take into account the spike in raw death count from all causes compared to previous years. According to the CDC, there have been almost 300,000 excess deaths due to COVID-19. Additionally, Briand presented data of total U.S. deaths in comparison to COVID-19-related deaths as a proportion percentage, which trivializes the repercussions of the pandemic. This evidence does not disprove the severity of COVID-19; an increase in excess deaths is not represented in these proportionalities because they are offered as percentages, not raw numbers.

Briand also claimed in her analysis that deaths due to heart diseases, respiratory diseases, influenza and pneumonia may be incorrectly categorized as COVID-19-related deaths. However, COVID-19 disproportionately affects those with preexisting conditions, so those with those underlying conditions are statistically more likely to be severely affected and die from the virus.

Because of these inaccuracies and our failure to provide additional information about the effects of COVID-19, The News-Letter decided to retract this article. It is our duty as a publication to combat the spread of misinformation and to enhance our fact-checking process. We apologize to our readers.

Update, 1200 UTC, 11/28/20: Briand tells us:

The News-Letter is an editorially and financially independent, student-run publication. Their decision to retract the article was their own. Yanni Gu did an excellent at reporting the content of the presentation.

Will Busted Municipalities Use Covid Non-Compliance Fines To Gin Up Revenues?

taibbi |   The most penniless residents of the St. Louis exurb were written up for everything from actual crimes to municipal code violations like “High Grass and Weeds,” “Barking Dog,” and “Dog Running at Large.” Between 2010 and 2014, the city wrote up 90,000 summonses and citations, and the number in the last year of that period was double what it was in the first year. Either crime and dog-barking were skyrocketing, or police were experiencing more pressure to write tickets. As the report wrote:

The City’s emphasis on revenue generation has a profound effect on FPD’s approach to law enforcement. Patrol assignments and schedules are geared toward aggressive enforcement of Ferguson’s municipal code, with insufficient thought given to whether enforcement strategies promote public safety or unnecessarily undermine community trust and cooperation… The result is a pattern of stops without reasonable suspicion and arrests without probable cause…

For a lot of Americans, this was the first time they were introduced to the idea that cash-strapped municipalities were using the justice system as a means of generating revenue. The grotesque angle was that cities were so desperate that they were reduced to systematically ticketing people who couldn’t pay.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Taibbi’s Iowa for criminal justice “fees.” Hard to believe that the Midwest used to be truly innovative and “progressive” once upon a time. Hollowed out, the state and local municipal elites cannibalize their institutions and their populace at the altar of the local financial elites who decided to hollow them out in the first place. I know they’re making choices on the winners and the losers so they can maintain their own hierarchy. But if you cannibalize your state and regional areas long enough, and even that little bit of hierarchy these careerist political elites manage to maintain can be taken away once they are no longer needed to manage the decline. 

That whole ‘tax breaks for jobs’ filtered down to even poorly paid, seasonal, or short term jobs. Think of the tax abatements local cities give to a Walmart or Amazon warehouse center; with the poor pay, the large infrastructure costs the city bears, and the lost tax revenue the local property owners end up paying for the tax abatements with rises in their property tax. (Until the city is faced with revolt by the voters for ever increasing property tax.) Then there’s the loss of Main St. jobs that the giant chains displaced.

Now it’s the big national, usually out-of-state, apartment complex developers asking for, and in many cases receiving huge property tax abatements to develop (in many cases “excess) complexes. The local property tax can’t be raised much higher to cover the lost tax revenues to the city, and the city is on the supporting end for roads, water, and electricity infrastructure. The profits from these complexes then leave the city and most often even the state. The jobs created for construction are short term. 

It’s a next loss to the city’s tax base. It’s a gift to giant real estate developers. One of the lures the developers in my area use is that their apartments are so great that they’ll attract the “creative class” to live here, and of course “every city needs to attract the creative class”. Sure. Right. It doesn’t take many of these to punch large holes in a city budget.

So, here we are. In the name of “build it and they will come” cities and counties and even states have wrecked their budgets, and now they’re increasing turning to fines and fees, too often from the poorest and defenseless, to try making up the shortfall.  I’d love to see every city, county, state examine all the tax abatements for businesses they’ve given out over the past 20-30 years and examine which ones of what type have actually improved their budgets and economy, and which have been a net loss to their budgets.

Resisting The Great Reset Equals "Hating Democracies For Their Freedoms"

bloomberg |  Poland and Hungary are going for broke. After meeting in Budapest yesterday, Prime Ministers Mateusz Morawiecki and Viktor Orban reiterated their threat to veto $2.2 trillion of European Union spending, even at the risk of losing their share.

For Orban and Morawiecki, this isn’t about money. It’s about the bloc’s decision to tie funds — including access to the pandemic rescue package — to democratic standards.

Both right-wing nationalist governments are outraged at EU charges of democratic backsliding. But in holding up the budget in defiance of Brussels and fellow EU leaders, they may find themselves on an unsustainable path.

Donald Trump’s election defeat isn’t the only sign that the populist wave is fading. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is again looking for better ties with the west, while in Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro’s favored candidates all lost in the first round of municipal elections that were a de facto midterm referendum on his rule.

tomluongo |  Because the Great Reset is predicated on a few things occurring.

1. The EU having a budget and mechanism in place where the Commission has tax/spend and debt issuance capability.
2. This gives them the political bludgeon necessary to consolidate power in Brussels the same way income tax redistribution undermined Federalism in the U.S.
3. Extending the COVID-19 narrative to purposefully destroy what’s left of the middle class in Europe and the U.S.
4. Donald Trump being overthrown as President of the U.S. restoring power there to those loyal to the WEF.
5. All Populist leaders in Europe – like Matteo Salvini, Geert Wilders, Boris Johnson, Germany’s AfD, Austria’s Freedom Party — neutralized leaving Orban alone against Angela Merkel.
6. Brexit undermined to the point where either Boris Johnson’s government falls or the U.K. collapses into a failed police state indistinguishable from V for Vendetta.
7. Control not only over traditional television media but also the flow of information through the newer social media networks, limiting access to any countervailing narratives.

Most of these are in place. Johnson’s personal weakness has squandered one of the greatest political victories of the past century in less than a year.

Trump’s chances of overturning a fraudulent election are at best a coin flip, and realistically, vanishingly small.

AfD has been neutralized in Germany. Italy’s electoral situation is mixed. Austria has been consolidated under a fake populist Sebastian Kurz.

Local police are openly despotic in enforcing the most draconian lockdown regulations.

But Orban and Moraweicki have stood their ground. Trump is standing his ground. David Frost in the U.K., not Boris Johnson, is standing his ground. Will their example inspire others to do the same?

It’s a good question. The sheer desperation of articles like one from the Spectator, entitled “The Visegrád bloc are threatening to tear apart the EU,” speaks volumes when the author realizes the Visegrads don’t hate the EU for its freedom:

Resetting the Future of Work Agenda: Disruption and Renewal in a Post-COVID World

weforum |  presents the experiences and lessons learned from the COVID-19 response of the World Economic Forum’s broader future of work industry community, encompassing more than 60 CHROs of leading global employers as well as a the Forum’s network of Preparing for the Future of Work Industry Accelerators, comprising more than 200 senior HR leaders, education technology and learning providers, academia and government stakeholders across nine industries. The report is intended as a call to action for companies and organizations globally to update and reset their future of work preparedness agendas for a more relevant and inclusive post-pandemic “new” future of work.

The time frame is ten years – by 2030 – the UN agenda 2021 – 2030 should be implemented.

Planned business measures in response to COVID-19:

• An acceleration of digitized work processes, leading to 84% of all work processes as digital, or virtual / video conferences.

• Some 83% of people are planned to work remotely – i.e. no more interaction between colleagues – absolute social distancing, separation of humanity from the human contact.

• About 50% of all tasks are planned to be automated – in other words, human input will be drastically diminished, even while remote working.

• Accelerate the digitization of upskilling / reskilling (e.g. education technology providers) – 42% of skill upgrading or training for new skills will be digitized, in other words, no human contact – all on computer, Artificial Intelligence (AI), algorithms.

• Accelerate the implementation of upskilling / reskilling programs – 35% of skills are planned to be “re-tooled” – i.e. existing skills are planned to be abandoned – declared defunct.

• Accelerate ongoing organizational transformations (e.g. restructuring) – 34% of current organizational set-ups are planned to be “restructured’ – or, in other words, existing organizational structures will be declared obsolete – to make space for new sets of organizational frameworks, digital structures that provide utmost control over all activities.

• Temporarily reassign workers to different tasks – this is expected to touch 30% of the work force. That also means completely different pay-scales – most probably unlivable wages, which would make the also planned “universal basic salary” or “basic income” – a wage that allows you barely to survive, an obvious need. – But it would make you totally dependent on the system – a digital system, where you have no control whatsoever.

• Temporarily reduce workforce – this is projected as affecting 28% of the population. It is an additional unemployment figure, in disguise, as the “temporarily” will never come back to full-time.

• Permanently reduce workforce – 13% permanently reduced workforce.

• Temporarily increase workforce – 5% – there is no reference to what type of workforce – probably unskilled labor that sooner or later will also be replaced by automation, by AI and robotization of the workplace.

• No specific measures implemented – 4% – does that mean, a mere 4% will remain untouched? From the algorithm and AI-directed new work places? – as small and insignificant as the figure is, it sounds like “wishful thinking”, never to be accomplished.

• Permanently increase workforce – a mere 1% is projected as “permanently increased workforce”. This is of course not even cosmetics. It is a joke.

This is the what is being put forth, namely the concrete process of implementing The Great Reset.

 

The Mass Of The American Public Is Not Interested In Learning The Truth

southfront  |  The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized.”

Edward Bernays (1928)

“With the Hunter Biden Expose, Suppression is a Bigger Scandal Than The Actual Story “ (Article Title)

Matt Taibbi (2020)

Bernays, drawing on Walter Lippmann, as Hermann and Chomsky also did in Manufacturing Consent in 1988, got it right.

Matt Taibbi got it almost right.

“Almost”, because he seems to suggest that media censorship, redaction and news blackouts, as in the case of the Hunter Biden scandal, are exceptional events, when they are really just examples of what the Main Stream Media (MSM) does all the time: a time-honored tradition that has been a fixture of the Western World since before WWI. What Bernays called “conscious and intelligent manipulation” — molding your mind on behalf of a small group of people, “ the invisible government that is the true ruling power” — is what the media was set up to do, its main job with the advent of general literacy and newspapers.

Lippmann and Bernays claimed that this kind of subtle authoritarian control is what people wanted, an idea that Adolph Hitler naturally liked, as he did most things American. And, today’s mainstream media seem to agree — people don’t want to think for themselves.

At least, that belief is implicit in the redaction of the Hunter Biden story — along with the news blackout of Joe Biden’s past — coupled with constant repetition of Joe Biden’s faux virtues and the enthusiastic whitewashing of his cabinet of neocons and neoliberals. Redaction and Repetition” are the two, all-important R’s of mind control.

 

Biden Administration Will Camouflage Corruption With A Diversity Figleaf

caitlinjohnstone |  There has never been a better time to be a woman, minority or member of the LGBT community who works in the DC establishment and thinks the poor should be made into pet food.

The New York Times has published an article titled "Could Limiting Corporate Candidates Hurt Biden’s Diversity Push?", for the benefit of all those normal everyday readers who've been lying awake at night wondering if limiting corporate candidates might hurt Biden's diversity push.

The article's authors warn against the nonexistent, completely imaginary threat of the next presidential administration rejecting corporatists for cabinet positions to appease the Democratic Party's progressive wing, claiming that doing so would be "narrowing the candidate pool" in a way that hurts Biden's stated aim of creating an administration that is as diverse as America. Because apparently executive positions in the corporate and financial sector are the only place you can find ethnic minorities in America.

“Groups from the far left throw out edicts, but these don’t reflect the realities of the American experience or inequality, the racial wealth gap, and may prove counterproductive to diversify the administration and to implement policies that work for all Americans,” NYT is told by a member of the influential DC lobbying firm Mehlman Castagnetti.

The New York Times is warning of the pressing danger of the Biden administration conceding too much to "the far left" at a time when progressive politicians have reportedly already been ruled out as candidates for cabinet positions due to concerns of appearing to be too far left, and when members of the Biden camp are already waving off demands from progressives using the phrase "we don't negotiate with terrorists".

Vox has also put out an article celebrating diversity without regard to policies or behavior titled "President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team is one of the most diverse ever", subtitled "Biden wants his administration to 'look like America.' His transition team is a start."

"Thus far, 46 percent of Biden’s transition staff are people of color and 41 percent of senior staff are people of color," Vox reports. "More than half of the transition staff — 52 percent — are women, and 53 percent of senior staff are women."

 

What Politics Will You Profess In The Era Of Diminishing Returns?

theamericanconservative  |  Jeff Rubin, author of The Expendables: How the Middle Class got Screwed by Globalization, has an answer to the above question that is easily deduced from the subtitle of his book. The socio-economic arrangements produced by globalization have made labor the most flexible and plentiful resource in the economic process. The pressure on the middle class, and all that falls below it, has been so persistent and powerful, that now “only 37 percent of Americans believe their children will be better off financially than they themselves are. Only 24 percent in Canada or Australia feel the same. And in France, that figure dips to only 9 percent.” And “[i]n the mid-1980s it would have taken a typical middle-income family with two children less than seven years of income to save up to buy a home; it now takes more than ten years. At the same time, housing expenditures that accounted for a quarter of most middle-class household incomes in the 1990s now account for a third.”

The story of globalization is engraved in the “shuttered factories across North America, the boarded-up main streets, the empty union halls.” Rubin does admit that there are benefits accrued from globalization, billions have been lifted up out of poverty in what was previously known as the third world, wealth has been created, certain efficiencies have been achieved. The question for someone in the western world is how much more of a price he’s willing to pay to keep the whole thing going on, especially as we have entered a phase of diminishing returns for almost all involved.

As Joel Kotkin has written, “[e]ven in Asia, there are signs of social collapse. According to a recent survey by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, half of all Korean households have experienced some form of family crisis, many involving debt, job loss, or issues relating to child or elder care.” And “[i]n “classless” China, a massive class of migrant workers—over 280 million—inhabit a netherworld of substandard housing, unsteady work, and miserable environmental conditions, all after leaving their offspring behind in villages. These new serfs vastly outnumber the Westernized, highly educated Chinese whom most Westerners encounter.” “Rather than replicating the middle-class growth of post–World War II America and Europe, notes researcher Nan Chen, ‘China appears to have skipped that stage altogether and headed straight for a model of extraordinary productivity but disproportionately distributed wealth like the contemporary United States.’”

Although Rubin concedes to the globalist side higher GDP growth, even that does not seem to be so true for the western world in the last couple decades. Per Nicholas Eberstadt, in “Our Miserable 21st Century,” “[b]etween late 2000 and late 2007, per capita GDP growth averaged less than 1.5 percent per annum.” “With postwar, pre-21st-century rates for the years 2000–2016, per capita GDP in America would be more than 20 percent higher than it is today.”

Stagnation seems to be a more apt characterization of the situation we are in. Fredrik Erixon in his superb The Innovation Illusion, argues that “[p]roductivity growth is going south, and has been doing so for several decades.” “Between 1995 and 2009, Europe’s labor productivity grew by just 1 percent annually.” Noting that “[t]he four factors that have made Western capitalism dull and hidebound are gray capital, corporate managerialism, globalization, and complex regulation.”

 

 

Fiat Authority Has No Power A Competent Man Is Bound To Acknowledge

counterpunch |  In effect, the governor used his authority to pull us into an alternative narrative in which we were people who watched out for each other, not only for ourselves as we ordinarily do, when chips are not down. Just as on the Right, people follow their talk-radio-supplied narrative of Big Government and elites out for themselves, people on the Left must have a larger narrative; in our case one that can authorize for us the Truth (I capitalize in order to designate the highest, most inclusive Truth) of interdependence – unless our aim, like that on the Right, is to keep capitalism going no matter what. 

I still just can’t. First, can we mandate education on the Holocaust and actual genocides? Wearing masks indoors at suburban stores ain’t it.

But there’s something more insidious here about the callousness around us these days, outnumbering the rest of us in some states. https://t.co/uH6BzFqRqI

— Mayor Q (@QuintonLucasKC) November 20, 2020

Long ago, we lost the unifying myth of religion that now is replaced in liberal reality with unchecked anti-authoritarianism and its correlative, cancel culture. The function of myth is to unify, to provide a kind of “immunity” that allows people to hold contrary realities in imagination, without having to cancel the other or oneself. Contrarily, with no persuasive reason to “stick together,” each existing in our frail “micro-realities,” like catty girls on the playground we have to make objectionable people not exist. A healthy immunity that could allow us to stop reflexively fending off “otherness,” will not come from Big Pharma, but only from expanded imaginations.

Without a narrative of inclusion, a narrative of hate is all our imaginations are left with to feed on exuberantly. Last week I read one of those smug editorial pieces in the NYTimes that serves to keep divisiveness alive and well in stunted liberal hearts, rather than to encourage healing (that doesn’t sell papers!). Columnist Frank Bruni took on Ivanka and Jarrod, seeming to delight in imagining their being friendless in NYC, and “getting theirs” after Trump’s loss. And it works! As I read, delicious feelings of sweet revenge rose up in me: Yes! Bring them down into the mud! Let them see what it feels like!

Whether or not our leaders can resist politicizing it, and despite the massive anti-mask rebellions going on across the country, feeding on Fox news, talk radio and social media-spread theories, the pandemic crisis calls us unambiguously to that Truth of interdependence that not only makes an injury to one an injury to all; it makes one’s own good and the good for all the same, not artificially kept separate as they are in “normal” liberal reality. That people must fend off the Truth that puts the common good first is due as much to liberalism’s unchecked, reflexive anti-authoritarianism, based at its core in deep wounds inflicted by a rudderless, profits-driven zeitgeist that rewards individuals with the emblems of success (NY Times columnist!), as to uneducated Trump-followers’ resentments.

Though one could be forgiven for thinking liberals had just recently heard of it, the Truth of interdependence is not new, even in western civilization. Religious tradition gives us beautiful phrases like the “Kingdom of God,” the “brotherhood of man,” the “body of Christ” that point to this all-embracing inclusivity. The words are metaphors for realities only imagination can grasp, but not beyond the capacity of the heart to experience and to hunger after. Scripture, after all, is poetry put to the use of the institution. Western societies, sacrificing poetry for power, failed to attain the inclusiveness that was basis for their own religions. We became top-down missionizers, conquerors, colonial settlers and exploiters, always capable of exclusion and cruelty in the name of a higher, civilizing purpose.

Contrary to popular “wisdom,” surrender to the truth of the “Kingdom of God” is not sacrifice of individual freedom. It’s not simply the opposite of selfish egoism. Rather, this highest most inclusive truth favors individuality as the expression of freedom. Under its uncompromising terms of wholeness and interrelatedness, action one takes on behalf of genuinely “selfish” concerns, say, for personal meaning and occasional joy, is not egoistic; serving soul it serves the whole. Equally, action on behalf of oppressed others follows naturally from the prior liberation of one’s personal soul, that, in liberal reality has been deemed inferior and goes undefended (i.e., the “original injustice” that impels us to forsake our creative spirit for bourgeois rewards).

Neither Ironic Or Hypocritical - Become Competent - Command Respect - Stop Begging...,

 

medium |  In a vacuum, the story of Netflix pulling Chappelle’s Show from the platform at the request of its star and creator is a feel-good story. Of course it is. Dave Chappelle left Comedy Central when he felt he was creatively compromised. After a period of relative exile, he’s now making as much money with Netflix as he left on the table before and wields enough power and respect for the multibillion-dollar company to honor his wishes.

It’s a story of perseverance, betting on yourself, and leveraging your gifts to write your own legacy. Again, in a vacuum. But Chappelle, one of the most dissected and gravitational figures in pop culture, will never live in a vacuum. And in order to properly contextualize his power move — as related in “Unforgiven,” an 18-minute performance the comic uploaded to Instagram yesterday — we have to establish its deep irony.

For the past few years, since his return to mainstream consciousness, Chappelle has taken it upon himself to wave the flag of comedians’ right to tell any types of jokes they want, no matter whom they offend. To prove this point, Chappelle has peppered his stand-ups with jokes at the expense of the trans community. And as members of that community have voiced their anger and hurt over these jokes (which are among the least funny or creative in his arsenal), Chappelle has only responded with defiance and more disregard. He’s labeled the backlash as censorship or cancel culture instead of thoughtfully addressing the feelings and worries from a community continuously terrorized by prejudice and hate.

So it’s quite the plot twist that Chappelle is engaging in the same sort of behavior he’s railed against for the past few years. Sure, Chappelle’s initial anger over Chappelle’s Show being streamed on HBO Max and Netflix came from the fact that he wasn’t getting paid for it. But that ship has sailed. Chappelle will never see another dime from Chappelle’s Show. No, the reason he reached out to Netflix was, by his own words, over something other than finances:

I like working for Netflix because when all those bad things happened to me, that company didn’t even exist. And when I found out they were streaming Chappelle’s Show, I was furious. How could they not know?

So you know what I did? I called them, and I told them that this makes me feel bad. And you want to know what they did? They agreed that they would take it off their platform just so I could feel better. That’s why I fuck with Netflix. Because they paid me my money, they do what they say they’re going to do, and they went above and beyond what you could expect from a businessman. They did something just because they thought that I might think that they were wrong.

Read that again. Chappelle does words for a living. He didn’t say he called and asked for Netflix to remove the show because of money. He said he called to say “this makes me feel bad.” And Netflix responded by pulling the show “just so I could feel better.”

Arbitrary, Unscientific, And Conflicting Lockdown Restrictions Confusing The Carens

theatlantic  |  Two weeks ago, I staged a reluctant intervention via Instagram direct message. The subject was a longtime friend, Josh, who had been sharing photos of himself and his fiancé occasionally dining indoors at restaurants since New York City, where we both live, had reopened them in late September. At first, I hadn’t said anything. Preliminary research suggests that when people congregate indoors, an infected person is almost 20 times more likely to transmit the virus than if they were outside. But restaurants are open legally in New York, and I am not the COVID police. Josh and I had chatted several times in the early months of the pandemic about safety, and I felt sure that he was making an informed decision, even if it wasn’t the one I’d make.

As weeks passed, my confidence began to slip. The number of daily new cases in NYC started to balloon, heightening the risk of transmission in any closed space, but Josh kept going to restaurants. Maybe he was misunderstanding something about the risk. Maybe he’d want to know. The next time he posted about COVID-19, I told him, as gently as I could, that if he was trying to stay safe, it would be a good idea to stop dining indoors.

My suspicions were correct. Because the state and city had reopened restaurants, Josh, who asked to be identified only by his first name to protect his privacy, assumed that local health officials had figured out a patchwork of precautions that would make indoor dining safe. He and his fiancé had even gone one extra step, making a Google Map of places they knew were being particularly strict with temperature checks. They were listening to the people they were told to listen to—New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently released a book about how to control the pandemic—and following all the rules.

Josh was irritated, but not because of me. If indoor dining couldn’t be made safe, he wondered, why were people being encouraged to do it? Why were temperature checks being required if they actually weren’t useful? Why make rules that don’t keep people safe?

Across America, this type of honest confusion abounds. While a misinformation-gorged segment of the population rejects the expert consensus on virus safety outright, so many other people, like Josh, are trying to do everything right, but run afoul of science without realizing it. Often, safety protocols, of all things, are what’s misleading them. In the country’s new devastating wave of infections, a perilous gap exists between the realities of transmission and the rules implemented to prevent it. “When health authorities present one rule after another without clear, science-based substantiation, their advice ends up seeming arbitrary and capricious,” the science journalist Roxanne Khamsi recently wrote in Wired. “That erodes public trust and makes it harder to implement rules that do make sense.” Experts know what has to be done to keep people safe, but confusing policies and tangled messages from some of the country’s most celebrated local leaders are setting people up to die.

Governmentality Censorship Of Controlaspecies Conversation

mises |  YouTube, the dominant video platform owned by Google, decided yesterday to remove a Mises Institute video. This decision apparently lasts for all eternity, cannot be appealed to an actual human, and comes with this friendly admonition: "Because it’s the first time, this is just a warning. If it happens again, your channel will get a strike and you won’t be able to do things like upload, post, or live stream for 1 week." 

The video, a talk by Tom Woods titled "The Covid Cult" with more than 1.5 million views, was recorded at our live event in Texas two weeks ago. It offered challenges to the official narrative surrounding the coronavirus, particularly with respect to mask mandates. Woods's talk featured several charts showing rises in Covid "cases" across multiple cities and countries not long after imposing mask rules, demonstrating how such rules apparently have little effect on slowing transmission of the virus.

The speech was nothing less than a heartfelt tour de force against the terrible lockdowns and pseudoscience plaguing the debate over Covid, and a call to reexamine tradeoffs and priorities. It was, as you might imagine, a mix of unassailable data combined with our friend Tom's strong prescription for liberty and personal choice rather than centralized state edicts.

In other words, YouTube had no earthly business removing it. This kind of discourse seems to me the best and highest use for YouTube, its most important function.  

"Big Digital," as Professor Michael Rectenwald terms tech companies, have become "governmentalities": supposedly private enterprises turned into instruments of state power and state narratives. This sordid process is different for each company, (some are more complicit than others, a few are heroically non-compliant) but it involves a mix of early start-up funding; connections and contracts with state agencies, particularly relating to defense and surveillance; and propaganda campaigns in service of state narratives. Rectenwald explains this phenomenon in his own recent talk titled "The Google Election":

Thanksgiving Gift Basket In My Inbox This Morning

Upon the request of Pennsylvania Senator Doug Mastriano (R), the state's Senate Majority Policy Committee held a public hearing to discuss election issues and irregularities at 12:30 ET 

- and - 

Sidney Powell filed two lawsuits - one in Michigan and one in Georgia - late Wednesday alleging massive schemes to rig the election for Joe Biden.

In Georgia, Powell claims in a 104-page complaint filed in the US District Court in Atlanta that the purpose of the scheme was "illegally and fraudulently manipulating the vote count to make certain the election of Joe Biden as president of the United States."

In Michigan, Powell filed a 75-page complaint seeking to set aside the results of the election, claiming that "hundreds of thousands of illegal, ineligible, duplicate, or purely fictitious ballots" enabled by "massive election fraud" facilitated Biden's win in the state.

- finally - 

The U.S. Supreme Court has temporarily barred New York from enforcing strict attendance limits on places of worship in areas designated coronavirus hot spots, in a decision released late Wednesday.

The court ruled that Gov. Andrew Cuomo's executive order violated the First Amendment's "free exercise" clause, and actively discriminated against religious institutions.

 

Barack Obama: Best Asset Ever....,

glenngreenwald  |  Just months before the CIA heralded Obama’s unique ability to sell the war and ensure its continuation, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee awarded Obama its highest honor for what it called “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” adding: “for 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman.”

Yet the CIA, as it so often does, knew the hidden truth: that Obama’s most important value was in prettifying, marketing and prolonging wars, not ending them. They saw him for what U.S. Presidents really are: instruments to create a brand and image about the U.S. role in the world that can be effectively peddled to both the domestic population in the U.S. and then on the global stage, and specifically to pretend that endless barbaric U.S. wars are really humanitarian projects benevolently designed to help people — the pretext used to justify every war by every country in history.

Many have questioned why the CIA would be so vehemently opposed to Donald Trump’s candidacy, and then his presidency. Though he did question many of their most prized pieties — from regime change wars such as in Syria to the ongoing viability of NATO after the fall of the Soviet Union — and did harshly criticize their intelligence failures (which is what prompted Chuck Schumer’s pre-inauguration warning that they would exact revenge on him for doing so), it’s not as if Trump were some sort of peacenik President. He made good on his campaign promise to escalate bombing campaigns in the name of fighting terrorism with fewer constraints than before.

But one major reason for the contempt harbored for Trump among security state operatives was his inability and unwillingness to prettify barbaric U.S. actions and to pretend that the U.S. is something other than it is. Recall the fury and rage provoked in 2017 when, in response to a question by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly about Putin’s use of violence against journalists and others, Trump responded: "There are a lot of killers. You think our country's so innocent?"

The rage from that comment was obviously not driven by any doubts about the truth of Trump’s statement. No sentient person would recognize it as anything other than true. The anger was due to the fact that presidents are not supposed to tell the truth about the U.S. and what it does in the world (just as Presidents are supposed to pretend they hate despots even as they support them in every conceivable way). As the 2010 CIA memo reflects, useful presidents are those, like Obama, skilled at deceiving the world and propagandizing them to view U.S. aggression as benign, so as to allow even democratically elected leaders to act in contradiction to public opinion when doing so suits U.S. interests. 

From The Afghan Opium Trade To The American Opioid Epidemic....,

The CIA doesn't give a damn for the military-money-congressional complex wars. The CIA cares about its own power, money, methods, and means - like the Mafia. They don't want a war with the people paying their (official) expenses so they keep their real scope of operations on the down-low.

Best believe they don't give a damn about what congress wants, what the president wants, or what the people want. They lied about Osama bin Laden doing his international man of mystery thing from a James Bond cave complex in Afghanistan because the Taliban cut off the supply of opium by more than 90%. The United Nations was helping the Taliban eradicate opium production. But once the USA and allies liberated Afghanistan from the rule of the Taliban that the USA had created to resist the Soviets, opium production mysteriously skyrocketed to levels higher than before the Taliban started its eradication program.

As noted previously, the obvious and predictable and actual consequences of an action being the real reason for the action, it was this resumption of the opium trade out of Afghanistan that was the real reason for the intelligence supplied by the CIA on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. The Pakistani intelligence service, ISI, is the CIA's Karachi branch office, the junior partner in this trade. The existence of a never-ending stream of military and CIA transports into and out of Afghanistan and Pakistan - whose contents can never be examined because "national security" - is the primary global smuggling method. The war profiteering, the extra-judicial powers afforded by the Patriot Act and the eternal War on Terror, is just a bonus.

As for the Afghan people, living in one of the poorest and least developed failed states in the world, lacking roads, airports, shipping, etc, and subject to military total information awareness surveillance on the ground, in the air, and from space, 24/7/365, these medieval peasants have somehow managed to smuggle millions of kilograms of one of the most illicit substances in the world every year for the past 819 years - "Afghanistan has been the world's leading illicit opium producer since 2001."

Everyone wants the troops to leave Afghanistan except the Pentagon brass and the CIA. They have prevailed over two presidents and are now ready to manipulate a third into intensifying the war.

 

Consider:

 

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

Why are we continuing to train these Afghanis who then shoot our soldiers in the back? Afghanistan is a complete waste. Time to come home!

4:05 PM · Aug 21, 2012

Barack Obama @BarackObama

VP Biden on Afghanistan: "We are leaving in 2014. Period."

4:05am · 12 Oct 2012

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

I agree with Pres. Obama on Afghanistan. We should have a speedy withdrawal. Why should we keep wasting our money -- rebuild the U.S.!

9:59 PM · Jan 14, 2013

Barack Obama @BarackObama

President Obama: "By the end of next year, our war in Afghanistan will be over."

3:58am · 13 Feb 2013

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

We should leave Afghanistan immediately. No more wasted lives. If we have to go back in, we go in hard & quick. Rebuild the US first.

8:10 PM · Mar 1, 2013

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

We should have the small remaining number of our BRAVE Men and Women serving in Afghanistan home by Christmas!

1:28 AM · Oct 8, 2020

M.K. Bhadrakumar explains why the Pentagon prevailed over two presidents:

The Pandemic Is Over But The Assault On Your Civil Liberties Has Only Just Begun

aier |  This video provides one of the most erudite and informative looks at Covid-19 and the consequences of lockdowns. It was remarkable this week to watch as it appeared on YouTube and was forcibly taken down only 2 hours after posting. The copy below is hosted on LBRY, a blockchain video application. In a year of fantastic educational content, this is one of the best we’ve seen.

Consider the presenter’s bio:

Dr. Michael Yeadon is an Allergy & Respiratory Therapeutic Area expert with 23 years in the pharmaceutical industry. He trained as a biochemist and pharmacologist, obtaining his PhD from the University of Surrey (UK) in 1988.

Dr. Yeadon then worked at the Wellcome Research Labs with Salvador Moncada with a research focus on airway hyper-responsiveness and effects of pollutants including ozone and working in drug discovery of 5-LO, COX, PAF, NO and lung inflammation. With colleagues, he was the first to detect exhaled NO in animals and later to induce NOS in lung via allergic triggers.

Joining Pfizer in 1995, he was responsible for the growth and portfolio delivery of the Allergy & Respiratory pipeline within the company. He was responsible for target selection and the progress into humans of new molecules, leading teams of up to 200 staff across all disciplines and won an Achievement Award for productivity in 2008.

Under his leadership the research unit invented oral and inhaled NCEs which delivered multiple positive clinical proofs of concept in asthma, allergic rhinitis and COPD. He led productive collaborations such as with Rigel Pharmaceuticals (SYK inhibitors) and was involved in the licensing of Spiriva and acquisition of the Meridica (inhaler device) company.

Dr. Yeadon has published over 40 original research articles and now consults and partners with a number of biotechnology companies. Before working with Apellis, Dr. Yeadon was VP and Chief Scientific Officer (Allergy & Respiratory Research) with Pfizer.