Wednesday, March 31, 2021

"The Time To Reason With "These People" Has Long Passed...,"


consentfactory |  There is no place for us in New Normal society. The New Normals know this and so do we. To them, we are a suspicious, alien tribe of people. We do not share their ideological beliefs. We do not perform their loyalty rituals, or we do so only grudgingly, because they force us to do so. We traffic in arcane “conspiracy theories,” like “pre-March-2020 science,” “natural herd immunity,” “population-adjusted death rates,” “Sweden,” “Florida,” and other heresies.

They do not trust us. We are strangers among them. They suspect we feel superior to them. They believe we are conspiring against them, that we want to deceive them, confuse them, cheat them, pervert their culture, abuse their children, contaminate their precious bodily fluids, and perpetrate God knows what other horrors.

So they are discussing the need to segregate us, how to segregate us, when to segregate us, in order to protect society from us. In their eyes, we are no more than criminals, or, worse, a plague, an infestation. In the words of someone (I can’t quite recall who), “getting rid of the Unvaccinated is not a question of ideology. It is a question of cleanliness,” or something like that. (I’ll have to hunt down and fact-check that quote. I might have taken it out of context.)

In Israel, Estonia, Denmark, Germany, the USA, and other New Normal countries, they have already begun the segregation process. In the UK, it’s just a matter of time. The WEF, WHO, EU, and other transnational entities are helping to streamline the new segregation system, which, according to the WEF, “will need to be harmonized by a normative body, such as the WHO, to ensure that is ethical.”

Here in Germany, the government is considering banning us from working outside our homes. We are already banned from flying on commercial airlines. (We can still use the trains, if we dress up like New Normals.) In the village of Potsdam, just down the road from Wannsee (which name you might recall from your 20th-Century history lessons), we are banned from entering shops and restaurants. (I’m not sure whether we can still use the sidewalks, or whether we have to walk in the gutters.) In Saxony, we are forbidden from attending schools. At the Berliner Ensemble (the theater founded by Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel, lifelong opponents of totalitarianism and fascism), we are banned from attending New Normal performances.

We All Know They're Lying - They Know We Know They're Lying - Yet The Lying Continues...,

tomluongo |   It doesn’t matter what issue we’re discussing: masks, vaccines, election fraud, racism, Joe Biden’s health, climate change, the sovereign bond markets, lockdowns.

No matter the issue or the question Biden’s Press Secretary, the uniquely incompetent Jenn Psaki, will be happy to ‘circle back to that later’ but never doing so hoping to just get through the next news cycle without a revolt.

Everyone’s doing the ‘believe me’ look that body language experts talk about all the time.  It’s all so tiresome and exhausting.  And you can feel the level of frustration building like John Cleese’s anger in the sketch.

It even looks to me like the people in the media are getting fed up with having to disseminate the lies.  But, since their access to power and livelihoods depend on playing along with the charade even the best ones act out on the stage prepared for them.

We all know they are lying.  They know we know they are lying.  We know they know that we know they are lying.

And yet the lying continues. 

Worse than that, the dying continues. 

Because that is the net outcome of all this lying, the wasted time and energy billions of people who eventually are asked to fight wars on behalf of these venal liars desperate to retain power and privilege.

The endless lying comes from the need to sell us on a future we don’t want for a price we can’t afford to pay.  That the pols in D.C. think they can bribe us with a couple thousand bucks of stimmy money after they’ve destroyed our quality of life is the clearest sign ever that they are completely out of touch.

But what is clear as well is that they do not care.  They don’t have to care because our government has openly morphed into the phone company from the old Lily Tomlin sketch of a few years after the Pythons’ heyday.

This absurd level of lying betrays the elites’ utter contempt for us.  They’re obsessed with squashing all traces of the only truly four-letter word in Brussels and D.C. “populism.’

Populism is the bane of tyrants and comedy like the Dead Parrot sketch can no longer be tolerated in the coming brave new world where you’ll own nothing and like it… or else.

I can’t stress enough that this obsession with narrative control is equal parts terrifying and hilarious at the same time.

Terrifying because the real world consequences are destroyed businesses, suicidal children, bombed cities, starved local populations, sanctions, threats, embargoes and migrations.

Hilarious because these people are patently absurd.  And we all know that comedy is, unfortunately, tragedy plus time. 

Because if we don’t laugh at this just a little bit the only recourse is insanity and violence.

Meet Spot, Pick, And Stretch - Amazon's New Tireless And Uncomplaining Warehouse Workers

and these workers don't have to stop and pee in a bottle....,

bostondynamics |  Robotic navigation of complex subterranean settings is important for a wide variety of applications ranging from mining and planetary cave exploration to search and rescue and first response. In many cases, these domains are too high-risk for personnel to enter, but they introduce a lot of challenges and hazards for robotic systems, testing the limits of their mobility, autonomy, perception, and communications.

The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge seeks novel approaches to rapidly map, navigate, and search fully unknown underground environments during time-constrained operations and/or disaster response scenarios. In the most recent competition, called the Urban Circuit, teams raced against one another in an unfinished power plant in Elma, Washington. Each team's robots searched for a set of spatially-distributed objects, earning a point for finding and precisely localizing each object.

Whether robots are exploring caves on other planets or disaster areas here on Earth, autonomy enables them to navigate extreme environments without human guidance or access to GPS.

 

The Solution

TEAM CoSTAR, which stands for Collaborative SubTerranean Autonomous Robots, relies on a team of heterogeneous autonomous robots that can roll, walk or fly, depending on what they encounter. Robots autonomously explore and create a 3D map of the subsurface environment. CoSTAR is a collaboration between NASA’s JPL, MIT, Caltech, KAIST, LTU, and industry partners.

“CoSTAR develops a holistic autonomy, perception, and communication framework called NeBula (Networked Belief-aware Perceptual Autonomy), enabling various rolling and flying robots to autonomously explore unknown environments. In the second year of the project, we aimed at extending our autonomy framework to explore underground structures including multiple levels and mobility stressing-features. We were looking into expanding the locomotion capabilities of our robotic team to support this level of autonomy. Spot was the perfect choice for us due to its size, agility, and capabilities.

We got the Spot robot only about 2 months before the competition. Thanks to the modularity of the NeBula and great support from Boston Dynamics, the team was able to integrate our autonomy framework NeBula on Spot in several weeks. It was a risky and aggressive change in our plans very close to the competition, but it paid off and the integrated NeBula-on-Spot framework demonstrated an amazing performance in the competition.” said CoSTAR's team lead Ali Agha of JPL. "The NeBula-powered Spots were able to explore 100s of meters autonomously in less than 60 minutes, negotiate mobility-stressing terrains and obstacles, and go up and down stairs, exploring multiple levels."

 

The Results

Performance of the NeBula-enabled Spots alongside CoSTARs roving and flying robots led to the first place in the urban round of competition for team CoSTAR. For more information about Team CoSTAR's win, see:

Vic Used To "Wear The Blue Vest" But Now He's Just Big Mad And Utterly Helpless...,

trust |  I drove for Amazon from December 2019 until March of 2021, and I want to shed light on the work environment and the way the world's largest online retailer treats its employees. I want to show support for all the people I worked with and drove with, and with those who wear the blue vest across the nation. I support the driver walk-out on Easter Sunday. It's time to show Amazon that drivers are people who deserve better, and not machines who don't need a bathroom break!

When Vic started delivering packages for Amazon in 2019, he enjoyed it - the work was physical, he liked the autonomy, and it let him explore new neighborhoods in Denver, Colorado.

But Vic, who asked to be referred to by his first name for fear of retaliation, did not like the sensation that he was constantly under surveillance. 

At first, it was Amazon’s “Mentor” app that constantly monitored his driving, phone use and location, generating a score for bosses to evaluate his performance on the road.

“If we went over a bump, the phone would rattle, the Mentor app would log that I used the phone while driving, and boom, I’d get docked,” he said.

Then, Amazon started asking him to post “selfies” before each shift on Amazon Flex, another app he had to install. 

“I had already logged in with my keycard at the beginning of the shift, and now they want a photo? It was too much," he said.

The final indignity, he said, was Amazon's decision to install a four-lens, AI-powered camera in delivery vehicles that would record and analyse his face and body the entire shift. 

This month, Vic put in his two-week notice and quit, ahead of a March 23 deadline for all workers at his Denver dispatch location to sign release forms authorising Amazon to film them and collect and store their biometric information.

“It was both a privacy violation, and a breach of trust,” he said. “And I was not going to stand for it.”

The camera systems, made by U.S.-based firm Netradyne, are part of a nationwide effort by Amazon to address concerns over accidents involving its increasingly ubiquitous delivery vans.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment, but has previously told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that access to the footage was limited, and video would only be uploaded after an unsafe driving incident was detected.

Albert Fox Cahn, who runs the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project - a privacy organisation - said the Amazon cameras were part of a worrying, new trend.

"As cameras get cheaper and artificial intelligence becomes more powerful, these invasive tracking systems are increasingly the norm," he said.

 

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

The Vaccine Is An Excuse To Get You To Agree To Surrender All Your Rights

 twitter |  This is the absolute end of the line for human liberty in the West and if you don’t understand why, ask a techie. Once you agree to this platform any functionality can be loaded into it turning off and on access to society, goods, information, movement, based on your behavior.

First, Allow Americans To Prove Vaccination Is Bizarre Language At Best

WaPo’s phrasing is insidious:“vaccine passports – that would allow Americans to prove that they have been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus as businesses try to reopen." First, “allow Americans to prove” is bizarre language. I can try to prove anything. I do not need the federal government’s help to prove anything, necessarily. And to what extent does a government app prove anything? Are fake ID’s held by teenagers not a thing? Second, “as businesses try to reopen.” Try? Business closures were by government edict. 

WaPo |  The Biden administration and private companies are working to develop a standard way of handling credentials — often referred to as “vaccine passports” — that would allow Americans to prove they have been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus as businesses try to reopen.

The effort has gained momentum amid President Biden’s pledge that the nation will start to regain normalcy this summer and with a growing number of companies — from cruise lines to sports teams — saying they will require proof of vaccination before opening their doors again.

The administration’s initiative has been driven largely by arms of the Department of Health and Human Services, including an office devoted to health information technology, said five officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the effort. The White House this month took on a bigger role coordinating government agencies involved in the work, led by coronavirus coordinator Jeff Zients, with a goal of announcing updates in coming days, said one official.

The White House declined to answer questions about the passport initiative, instead pointing to public statements that Zients and other officials made this month.

“Our role is to help ensure that any solutions in this area should be simple, free, open source, accessible to people both digitally and on paper, and designed from the start to protect people’s privacy,” Zients said at a March 12 briefing.

The initiative has emerged as an early test of the Biden administration, with officials working to coordinate across dozens of agencies and a variety of experts, including military officials helping administer vaccines and health officials engaging in international vaccine efforts.

The passports are expected to be free and available through applications for smartphones, which could display a scannable code similar to an airline boarding pass. Americans without smartphone access should be able to print out the passports, developers have said.

Other countries are racing ahead with their own passport plans, with the European Union pledging to release digital certificates that would allow for summer travel.

U.S. officials say they are grappling with an array of challenges, including data privacy and health-care equity. They want to make sure all Americans will be able to get credentials that prove they have been vaccinated, but also want to set up systems that are not easily hacked or passports that cannot be counterfeited, given that forgeries are already starting to appear.

 

God Help Us If You Succumb To A Publicly Issued And Privately Enforced National Vaccination ID

Guardian |  God, I miss the pub. I miss pushing through the door and diving into a pool of sound, all chatter and laughter and sport on the telly. I miss the sight of people’s faces, friendly and relaxed and a bit flushed. I miss finding friends gathered around a table, bantering and gossiping, pausing only to place their order when I ask if anyone needs a drink. I miss weaving through the crowd, taking care not to spill pints or drop crisp packets, catching a flirty glance from a stranger out of the corner of my eye.

What I would give to go to the pub this evening and talk with my friends about everything and nothing. Since many of us work in technology, at some point the government’s “vaccine passports for the pub” plan would come up.

I’d say it is dumb. They would tell me that, no, I am the one who is dumb. We’d hash it out, order another round and set the world to rights. Sadly, it’s a conversation we won’t be having. We’re in lockdown. None of us has tasted a proper pint in months. We’ve had to debate what the prime minister, Boris Johnson, has called “papers for pints” over WhatsApp and FaceTime while sitting at home and walking in the park.

The good news is that pubs open for outdoor service from 12 April and for indoor service from 17 May. The bad news is that Johnson’s “papers for pints” plan is essentially a national ID card by stealth, one that would link our identity to our Covid status – whether we’ve been vaccinated, had a recent negative test or have antibodies.

The UK has already toyed with national ID cards. It rejected them in 2010. As Theresa May, then home secretary, explained in 2010: “This isn’t just about cost savings, it’s actually about the principle, it’s about getting the balance right between national security and civil liberties, and that’s what the new coalition government is doing.”

That was before coronavirus, of course, but just because we’re in a pandemic doesn’t mean that we stop caring about that balance.

Already, the Conservatives have announced plans to introduce a bill to make photo ID mandatory from 2023 for all UK-wide and English elections. There’s no obvious need for it: there was only one conviction for “personation” fraud in the UK in 2019.

Monday, March 29, 2021

Piss-ant, Contemplate Your "Rights" On The Tree Of Woe....,

Ten days ago, I vigorously and explicitly waived in this direction - The Unrivaled Power of Google's Coalition of the Connected - I'm going to try again today. Once you accept that corporations are people under law, and that they wield exponentially greater power and thus rights under law - the nature of our current predicament becomes very straightfoward, simple, and plain.

crushlimbraw |  The government has outsourced tyranny. Let’s see how this black magic is performed.

Expression of Viewpoints is Guaranteed to be Free from Government Abridgement, Even if the Viewpoints are Hateful…

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is a remarkable provision that has, for centuries, protected Americans from the abridgment of their freedom of speech by their government. Even so-called “hate speech” is protected.

The relevant provision states that “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.” As written, the guarantee of free speech originally applied only to the federal government. However, the Supreme Court ruled in Gitlow v. New York that the guarantee had been “incorporated” in the Fourteenth Amendment and the guarantee is now applied to all state and local governments as well.

Now, in practice, there are laws regulating speech (you cannot shout “fire” in a crowded theater, and so on), but such regulations are generally “time, place, and manner” restrictions. Our Courts have universally frowned on what is called viewpoint discrimination:

Viewpoint discrimination is a form of content discrimination particularly disfavored by the courts. When the government engages in content discrimination, it is restricting speech on a given subject matter. When it engages in viewpoint discrimination, it is singling out a particular opinion or perspective on that subject matter for treatment unlike that given to other viewpoints.

And, yes, viewpoint discrimination explicitly includes hateful, hostile, and offensive viewpoints. This position was unanimously upheld by the United States Supreme Court in Matal vs. TamJustice Samuel Alito wrote:

Speech may not be banned on the ground that it expresses ideas that offend.

The disparagement clause denies registration to any mark that is offensive to a substantial percentage of the members of any group… That is viewpoint discrimination in the sense relevant here: Giving offense is a viewpoint.

Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful, but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’

A more explicit statement could not be made. Speech may not be banned for being offensive or hateful. Giving offense is a viewpoint. There is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment.

But Expression of Viewpoints is Not Guaranteed Against Private Abridgement

Government cannot regulate your expression of your viewpoint - but corporations can.

Most people understand that the First Amendment does not apply to private actors on their private property. A person or corporation can choose to allow free speech in their home or business, or can choose to regulate free speech, even viewpoints, as they deem. This “exception” to the First Amendment has been the case since the foundation of Anglo-American law, and it is absolutely necessary to protect the rights of property owners.

For instance, if I am running a bicycle shop, I am absolutely permitted to prevent my employees from putting up posters that say “bicycles suck” or telling my customers to “buy a scooter.” Likewise, if I am running a video game news site, I am absolutely permitted to tell my journalists not to write about the beauties of Sistine Chapel instead. And if I invite you to my home to binge-watch Babylon 5, and you express the offensive viewpoint that Star Trek is better, I am altogether within my rights to make you leave.

Admittedly, there have been occasional exceptions to this rule under the so-called state actor doctrine. Most notably, the US Supreme Court ruled in Marsh v Alabama (1946) that the First Amendment fully applied to expressive activities on the company-owned sidewalks and streets of a company-owned town. The precedent of Marsh v Alabama was expanded in Amalgamated Food Employees Union v Logan Valley Plaza (1968) then overturned in Hudgens v NLRB (1976)Since Hudgens, the state actor doctrine has waned in importance, despite numerous conservative efforts to sue online platforms.

We will put aside the so-far toothless Section 230 for a discussion another day. In general, private corporations can regulate the expression of viewpoints, even though government cannot, and that’s the law.

America's Great Moral, Aesthetic, And Operational Delusion


There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today.”  Arthur Jensen

nautil |  The hero of Atlas Shrugged is John Galt, a supremely self-confident inventor. He has figured out a way to turn static electricity into an inexhaustible source of clean energy. But Galt and his kind are living in an America veering toward the kind of ham-fisted socialism that Rand escaped when she immigrated from the Soviet Union in 1926. Galt brings about a rebellion of the “producers” of the world, like the mythical Atlas shrugging the earth from his shoulders, so that the “looters” and “moochers” can be brought to their senses. The centerpiece of the novel is a speech that Galt delivers to the world by taking over the airwaves with his technical prowess.

Whether conveyed through philosophy or fiction, Rand’s worldview couldn’t function as a moral system if the pursuit of self-interest didn’t end up benefiting the common good. That’s where the invisible hand of the market comes in, a metaphor that was used only three times by Adam Smith in his voluminous writing, but was elevated to the status of a fundamental theorem by economists such as Milton Friedman and put into practice by Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan, who served as Chair of the United States Federal Reserve Board from 1987 to 2006.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work: Everything of value can be represented as a dollar value and therefore can be compared to anything else of value by their relative prices. Making money is the surest way to provide value to people because the best way to make money is to provide what people are most willing to pay for. The system works so well that no other form of care toward others is required. No empathy. No loyalty. No forgiveness. Thanks to the market, the old-fashioned virtues have been rendered obsolete. That’s why Milton Friedman could make his famous claim in 1970 that the only social responsibility of a business is to maximize profits for its shareholders. In Ayn Rand’s fictional rendering, the word “give” is banned from the vocabulary of the Utopian community founded by John Galt, whose members must recite the oath: “I swear by my life and love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine.”

My sequel to Atlas Shrugged is titled Atlas Hugged and its protagonist is John Galt’s grandson. Ayn Rand was not a character in her novel, but since anything goes in fiction, I could transport her into mine as Ayn Rant, John I’s lover and John III’s grandmother. Rant’s son, John II, parlays her Objectivist philosophy into a world-destroying libertarian media empire. John III rebels against the evil empire by challenging his father to a duel of speeches. In the process, he brings about a worldwide transformation based on giving. Atlas Hugged is so anti-Rand that it isn’t even being sold. Instead, it is gifted for whatever the reader wishes to give in return. Eat your heart out, Amazon!

Indefinite Causality

wired |  Over the last five years, a growing community of quantum physicists has been implementing the quantum switch in tabletop experiments and exploring the advantages that indefinite causal order offers for quantum computing and communication. It’s “really something that could be useful in everyday life,” said Giulia Rubino, a researcher at the University of Bristol who led the first experimental demonstration of the quantum switch in 2017.

But the practical uses of the phenomenon only make the deep implications more acute.

Physicists have long sensed that the usual picture of events unfolding as a sequence of causes and effects doesn’t capture the fundamental nature of things. They say this causal perspective probably has to go if we’re ever to figure out the quantum origin of gravity, space and time. But until recently, there weren’t many ideas about how post-causal physics might work. “Many people think that causality is so basic in our understanding of the world that if we weaken this notion we would not be able to make coherent, meaningful theories,” said Brukner, who is one of the leaders in the study of indefinite causality.

That’s changing as physicists contemplate the new quantum switch experiments, as well as related thought experiments in which Alice and Bob face causal indefiniteness created by the quantum nature of gravity. Accounting for these scenarios has forced researchers to develop new mathematical formalisms and ways of thinking. With the emerging frameworks, “we can make predictions without having well-defined causality,” Brukner said.

Progress has grown swifter recently, but many practitioners trace the origin of this line of attack on the quantum gravity problem to work 16 years ago by Lucien Hardy, a British-Canadian theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. “In my case,” said Brukner, “everything started with Lucien Hardy’s paper.”

Hardy was best known at the time for taking a conceptual approach made famous by Albert Einstein and applying it to quantum mechanics.

Einstein revolutionized physics not by thinking about what exists in the world, but by considering what individuals can possibly measure. In particular, he imagined people on moving trains making measurements with rulers and clocks. By using this “operational” approach, he was able to conclude that space and time must be relative.

In 2001, Hardy applied this same approach to quantum mechanics. He reconstructed all of quantum theory starting from five operational axioms.

He then set out to apply it to an even bigger problem: the 80-year-old problem of how to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity, Einstein’s epic theory of gravity. “I’m driven by this idea that perhaps the operational way of thinking about quantum theory may be applied to quantum gravity,” Hardy told me over Zoom this winter.

Sunday, March 28, 2021

Valodya Tells The U.S. Establishment "I Am Not Your Negroe"

theconversation |  The tense test of strength began when Biden was asked about Putin in an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos and agreed he was “a killer” and didn’t have a soul. He also said Putin will “pay a price” for his actions.

Putin then took the unusual step of going on the state broadcaster VGTRK with a prepared five-minute statement in response to Biden. 

In an unusually pointed manner, Putin recalled the US history of genocide of its Indigenous people, the cruel experience of slavery, the continuing repression of Black Americans today and the unprovoked US nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the second world war.

He suggested states should not judge others by their own standards:

Whatever you say about others is what you are yourself.

Some American journalists and observers have reacted to this as “trolling”. It was not. 

It was the preamble to Putin’s most important message in years to what he called the American “establishment, the ruling class”. He said the US leadership is determined to have relations with Russia, but only “on its own terms”.

Although they think that we are the same as they are, we are different people. We have a different genetic, cultural and moral code. But we know how to defend our own interests.

And we will work with them, but in those areas in which we ourselves are interested, and on those conditions that we consider beneficial for ourselves. And they will have to reckon with it. They will have to reckon with this, despite all attempts to stop our development. Despite the sanctions, insults, they will have to reckon with this.

This is new for Putin. He has for years made the point, always politely, that Western powers need to deal with Russia on a basis of correct diplomatic protocols and mutual respect for national sovereignty, if they want to ease tensions.

But never before has he been as blunt as this, saying in effect: do not dare try to judge us or punish us for not meeting what you say are universal standards, because we are different from you. Those days are now over.

 

 

A Nation Of Sheep Ruled By Wolves Owned By Pigs..,

theburningplatform |  What appears to be happening is the last dying gasps of an empire of debt as it thrashes about using un-Constitutional means to control its subjects, while injecting trillions of fiat dollars as an adrenaline treatment for a terminal cancer diagnosis. As a last resort, initiating a global war with Russia and China would certainly distract the masses and keep them from realizing the true enemy within. Turning Washington DC into an armed encampment is not to protect the government from white supremacists. It is to protect the traitorous creatures in Congress and the White House from the citizens when this diabolical plan blows up in our faces.

Inflation is already raging, but the government and Fed tell you it is 1.5%. There are 261 million working age Americans and only 127 million are employed full-time, but the government tells you the unemployment rate is 6.2%, when more than 50% of those capable of working are not. The government will tell you GDP soared in the first quarter at 6%, when we are in the midst of a government created Depression, and the GDP calculation is nothing more than the government borrowing trillions from future generations and giving a minuscule portion to current generations, with the vast majority going into the pockets of billionaire oligarchs, Wall Street, and mega-corporations. The “economic recovery” narrative is entirely false, but the jar shakers know the plebs do not understand math.

The plumbing of our astonishingly crooked financial system began to fail in September 2019, with overnight Repo rates soaring to 10%. The Fed immediately leapt into action by restarting QE (aka No Banker Left Behind) to keep the depth of our debt predicament hidden from the public. A flu released from a Chinese bio-lab, which is highly non-lethal to anyone under 80 years old, has been utilized by the jar shakers to unleash a tsunami of digital fiat (aka debt) to prop up a system being smothered by too much debt.

Since March of 2020, our beloved legislators have added $4.5 trillion to the national debt, a 20% increase in one year. The Fed has done their part by jolting their balance sheet up by $3.5 trillion, an 85% increase in one year. The current administration is saying hold my beer, as they are busy adding another $4 trillion in the next year and the Fed will add another $2 trillion or so to their balance sheet. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of small businesses have been permanently destroyed, while Bezos and the rest of his billionaire buddies have increased their net worth by tens of billions. At least your grandma is earning .015% in her savings account, while her living expenses rise by 10%. Do you get it yet?

Learning From Ants (And Fancy Asians)...,

theburningplatform |  “If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti-Mask. Vax vs. Anti-vax. Rich vs. poor. Man vs. woman. Cop vs. citizen. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar… and why?”Shera Starr

A few weeks ago, I saw the above quote in Jeff Thomas’ article Learning from Ants, and it has been reverberating in my mind ever since. It is a perfect analogy for what has been happening in this country for years, with the jar lately being shaken at a rate faster than a Biden vote count increase at 3:00 am in a swing state. Everyone in this country, and the world, is at each other’s throats. Who is shaking the jar? Why are they shaking the jar? Why do they want us fighting each other?

If they keep us focused on fighting each other, they believe we will not notice their reprehensible criminality, as they manipulate the masses through psychological engineering and the employment of propaganda techniques to push their desired narrative. If you ask someone – who is shaking the jar? – they will likely answer based on the standard left vs right, liberal vs conservative, white vs black paradigm which has been created by those benefiting from conflict. It is always a safe bet to follow the money when trying to identify the culprits.

The elevated intensity of manipulation by those pulling the strings of societal discontent reveals much about their level of desperation in creating more chaos, because the awakening of more to the truth, endangers their wealth, power, and control. They have turned the shaking power up to eleven in the last year, as an implosion of the Ponzi financial system was looming as we entered 2020, and the Deep State oligarchs needed cover to implement a massive injection of liquidity into the veins of Wall Street bankers, the medical industrial complex, and mega-corporations like Amazon, Wal-Mart and Target.

The weaponization of a contagious, but highly non-lethal to anyone under 80 years old, flu became the perfect camouflage of fear to bailout the teetering financial system and creating turmoil, chaos, and distrust among the populace. The non-stop fear mongering was purposely ramped to keep the public distracted while the national wealth pillaging operation proceeded at a breakneck pace behind the scenes. $600 for you and $10 trillion for them.

The monstrous effort to polarize the country by the psychopaths in suits pulling the strings of societal disgruntlement has the ultimate purpose of subjugation and dominion over every aspect of our lives. They no longer feel the need to conceal their treachery, as they openly proclaim their Great Reset, where you will own nothing and be happy – living in a 200 sq ft shipping container, eating synthetic meat, drinking Gates endorsed reprocessed piss, snacking on bugs, and praying their windmill and solar power works on calm cloudy days as a frigid winter storm front arrives.

Saturday, March 27, 2021

Q-Anon Can't Hold A Candle To Blue-Anon On The Coincidence Theory Front...,

LATimes |  In late January, when protesters shut down the vaccine site at Dodger Stadium, his research team tracked a surge in online new world order activity, including posts tagged with #greatreset, #scamdemic and #agenda21, a theory based on a 1990s United Nations resolution that some consider proof of a plot to depopulate the Earth.

The reasons why some Southern Californians have latched onto new world order rhetoric are complex. Finkelstein’s organization found a correlation between places with high incidence of both Black Lives Matter activity and what he terms as pushback against it in the form of anti-mask, anti-lockdown rallies — a mix that fed new world order activity online. Los Angeles County had the greatest abundance of both types of protests, followed by San Diego and Orange counties.

“Where the Black Lives Matter protesters showed up, the quarantine became sort of a counter-cause,” he said. “This idea that ‘we are the ones being victimized.’”

Mia Bloom, professor of Communication at Georgia State University and an expert on QAnon, also pointed out that Southern California is a hotbed of wellness culture, where anti-vaccine sentiment has found a foothold. Last summer, conspiracy theories jumped to Instagram, she said, where women previously more interested in lifestyle content were drawn in, creating an unlikely bridge between liberal and conservative movements.

Levin, Blazakis and others said regardless of why they took hold, new world order theories will likely play a role if the state holds a recall election for Gov. Gavin Newsom this fall. Newsom is already being featured in recall-related memes that portray him as “puppet” of the Chinese Communist Party and complicit in the global takeover. At rallies, he has been portrayed as Hitler and called a tyrant.

Recall supporters have posted on Twitter with hashtags such as #nwo, #trumpsarmy and #Agenda21 among others. Another recall meme posted online showed Newsom with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) with “Nuclear Powered Satan,” written below them. A commenter on an official recall Facebook page called Newsom an “idiot communist,” and a recall founder recently posted about “Beijing Biden.”

A recent analysis of articles by the Network Contagion Research Institute about the California recall for a six-month period from September through March found about 800 articles from just more than 300 sources. Of those sources, 177, or 57%, were classified as disinformation sites or uncategorized. That designation, said researcher Lea Marchl, usually means they cannot be trusted. Similar numbers held true when it came to videos about the recall.

“What’s driving the recall is not merely an honest difference on policy but something that is framed in a deeper and more dark matter,” Levin said. “I’m concerned that people with legitimate, fact-based reasons for wanting to recall the governor are now mixed into those whose currency also is aggression and conspiracy and that is a problem because each feed on each other.”

I Can't Think Of Any "Hypersexualized" Asians, But Sonny Chiba Had A Baaaad White Woman

teenvogue |  Last Tuesday, a suspect entered three different massage parlors in the Atlanta area, killing 8 people. The next day, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long was charged with eight counts of murder. Most of the victims were Asian or Asian American women. Although the suspect’s motives are still under investigation, he claimed to have had a “sex addiction” that prompted the rampage, according to the New York Times. In a recent report by Stop AAPI Hate, there have been about 3,800 reports of hate incidents across the country since March 2020, with women reporting hate incidents 2.3 times more than men.

It’s no coincidence that Asian women are the most vulnerable when it comes to these attacks. This historic wave of anti-Asian racism is frightening and tragic, but its connection to Asian representation, especially Asian women, in America is disturbing.

Let’s start with the fact that there’s clearly a lack of Asian representation in Hollywood. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 5.7 percent of people identify as Asian or Asian American. However, in 2016, they only made up 3.1 percent of film roles according to UCLA’s 2018 Hollywood Diversity Report. Because of this lack of representation, oftentimes portrayals of Asian women in Hollywood have been harmful.

The oversimplified depiction of Asian identity has a deep-rooted history of racism and violence. Often pop culture (films, musicals, TV, operas, etc) has portrayed Asian women as incompetent and fragile foreigners, exotic femme fatales, and subservient “mail-order” wives.

"Consider the heartbroken Cio-Cio San of Madame Butterfly (1904), a Japanese woman who commits suicide after she is abandoned by her white lover,” says Dr. Stephanie Young, an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Southern Indiana. “Madame Butterfly epitomizes the Lotus Blossom (sometimes called the China Doll) trope — feminine, shy, fragile, subservient, and sexually submissive. We see the Lotus Blossom trope in Miss Saigon (1989) and Memoirs of a Geisha (2005). Another popular trope is the Dragon Lady who is cunning and deceitful. She uses her sexuality as a powerful tool of manipulation, but often is emotionally and sexually cold and threatens masculinity. A contemporary example of the Dragon Lady is with the Japanese Yakuza leader O-Ren Ishii (played by Lucy Liu) in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003).

Factcheck: There HAS NOT BEEN A Surge In Anti-Asian Hate Crimes

realclearpolitics |  Before the next of kin were even notified in the horrific shootings last week at three Atlanta-area massage parlors, the narrative was established: The fact that six of the eight victims were Asian women provides the proof that a “surge in hate crimes” against Asian Americans has bubbled up in the U.S. in response to the coronavirus pandemic. That fits neatly with the view of some Americans that our society, at its heart, is racist. 

For contrast, consider the mass shooting this week in Boulder, Colo., in which the suspect is Syrian American. Even though all the victims were of the same race, no one assumes without proof that he was acting out of racial animosity because, of course, they were white. In Atlanta, the shooter killed two white people and injured a Latino. But the killings must still be motivated by anti-Asian hatred, right? 

“Racially motivated violence must be called out for exactly what it is -- and we must stop making excuses or rebranding it as economic anxiety or sexual addiction,” Rep. Marilyn Strickland (pictured) told members of the House a day after the Atlanta shootings. In a CNN interview, Strickland, whose heritage is both African American and Korean American, called the incident a racially motivated hate crime. 

None of the evidence to emerge thus far supports that speculation. 

Like Strickland, I am Korean American, and the idea that someone might randomly attack me at the gym or hurl racist invectives at me in the grocery checkout line makes me uneasy. So I looked into the numbers being used to support the so-called “surge” in attacks. They turn out to be thin, with data points cherry-picked to invoke fear and bolster the wobbly claim that the Atlanta shooter was driven by racism. 

A report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism drew national media attention for identifying a 149% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in 2020 compared to 2019 in 16 of our largest cities. A startling number -- until you learn the actual number of hate crimes in those cities rose from 49 to 122 – in a country of 330 million people.

In my hometown, Houston, there were three last year. The year before, there were none. 

And what about the 3,795 incidents of harassment and discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders documented by Stop AAPI Hate? The group’s data point is even more useless than the 149% increase figure. Stop AAPI (shorthand for Asian American and Pacific Islander) Hate was formed as the coronavirus pandemic took hold in the U.S. and its data has no baseline for comparison.  

But it may be sufficiently frightening to open a line of federal spending directly to Stop AAPI Hate’s member organizations. The group was on Capitol Hill last week to urge lawmakers to address the kind of incidents it tracks and to fund programs supporting the victims.

Friday, March 26, 2021

How About The Fancy Asian Human Traffickers And Local Government(s) Looking The Other Way?

CJR  |  Meanwhile, coverage of the shooting by national media outlets remained vague; reporters seemed reluctant (or were unable) to find details about the victims or pick up reports from the Korean press. Instead, the mainstream press published profiles of the shooter. And when the Atlanta Sheriff’s Office held a press conference on Wednesday morning, the press raced to take down the official statement, which uncritically echoed the suspect’s claims that he suffered from sexual addiction, and which minimized the role of racial animus in his motivation for the killing spree. 

Lee, who had worked the police beat in Korea earlier in his career, was in disbelief. “I’ve never before seen a case where the police suggest: ‘The suspect said it wasn’t the case, therefore it’s not the case,’ ” he says. Worse, the press replicated the official statement in headlines and presented it as breaking news. In most news pieces, the spokesperson’s words were treated as self-explanatory, without additional context or questions. “It was almost as though the press believed what was said to be correct, like they wanted it to be the case,” Lee says.  

To Lee, the official statement was “clearly too absurd to repeat.” He felt no obligation to cover the press conference or to recite the spokesperson’s words. Instead, Atlanta K ran a story that recounted the community response to the official statement, titled: “ ‘Does a bad day mean you can kill someone?’: white police officers’ protection of a white murderer.” 

The press corrected course a day later, but already, public perception of the suspect’s racist and anti-Asian motives had been muddied. The shooter’s explanation for the murders—sex addiction—had been widely circulated, giving weight to long-standing associations between Asian-owned massage shops and illicit sex work. Investigations into the spas in the past week cited suggestive customer reviews and a history of police raids (some of which had been undertaken wrongfully, Lee says), in effect imputing criminality to the women. The media should ask if it is meaningful to determine whether the victims had been offering sexual services, and whether such questions are worth stigmatizing the deceased women and risking harm to family members and other spa workers. This also means that survivors, who have long lived under the radar—fearful of losing their livelihoods and immigration statuses—feel discouraged from talking publicly. “Unless they have immense courage, it’s improbable for these women to want to put themselves out there,” Lee says. 

From the beginning, Lee had feared this sort of scrutiny. Reporters for national media outlets had asked him about criminal activity at the spas, to which he declined to respond. Why speculate on a question that lacks clear relevance to the story at hand? Already, the women have been unfairly immortalized in association with their place of work. The spas could never be a full reflection of who the women were; they were survival jobs—jobs the women might have worked tirelessly to retire from, had they been allowed to live out their lives.

Fancy Asians Are Like Vampires Hiding Among And Exploiting Regular Asian Folks...,

NYTimes |  Sue-ling Wang prided himself on being a self-made businessman.

The son of a farmer in Taiwan, he attended a vocational school that trained students at a factory producing zippers and ballpoint pens. But he made his ascent after arriving in America on a scholarship and obtaining a Ph.D., then starting his own company in the Atlanta area three decades ago.

He appeared at civic events, donated to Republican candidates and ensconced himself in an exclusive country club community northeast of Atlanta where he bought two stately homes, each valued at about $1 million.

Later this year, he will assume the role of head of the World Taiwanese Chambers of Commerce. It is a prestigious post: Taiwan’s government recently produced a 14-minute video of him discussing his life that included a photo of him with the island democracy’s president, Tsai Ing-wen.

“When we go abroad, we are not afraid of hardship, because we must raise our children, we want to glorify our ancestors,” Mr. Wang, himself a father, said in the video.

In telling his immigrant success story, Mr. Wang, 68, did not mention his tie to a business whose employees had little opportunity to follow his path: Gold Spa, one of the three Atlanta-area massage parlors where a gunman last week killed eight people and wounded another.

Six victims were of Korean or Chinese descent, fueling outrage and despair about the surge of anti-Asian violence, particularly against women, in the United States.

But as details about the employees emerged, so too did another narrative: the story of the wealth divide among people of Asian descent in America — a community often viewed by outsiders as monolithic and whose economic disparities have long been misunderstood.

The income gap between the rich and the poor in the United States is, in fact, greatest among Asians, who are considered the most economically divided group in the country, according to the Pew Research Center.

 

 

 

 

Fancy Asians Ruthlessly Exploit Other Asians - So You KNOW They Hate Black Folks....,

fearlessj1111  |  Sociologist Tamara K. Nopper argued against depicting these Black-Asian conflicts as “mutual misunderstanding” in a 2015 article. “The use of ‘mutual’ misunderstanding suggests shared status or power, with each group contributing to each other’s vulnerability and suffering,” Nopper wrote. “The employment of the mutual misunderstanding framework suggests Asian store owners desire identification with and from Black customers across class and race lines. Yet many studies of Asian immigrant storeowners show they hold racist views of Black people and associate them with negative qualities purportedy absent among Asians.”

Asian Americans must admit and rectify the ways we uphold white supremacy, namely our anti-Blackness. Much like the U.S., Asian countries suffer from colorism and caste systems within their own societies. “Anti-Blackness is foundational to the creation of America,” said Diane Wong, an assistant professor and faculty fellow at NYU Gallatin, whose research has focused on the gentrification of Chinatowns and Afro-Asian solidarities. “It’s no secret then that anti-Blackness is reflected in Asian immigrant families, businesses, institutions and interpersonal relationships on a frequent basis.”

As a society, we have “progressed” from lynchings to viral videos of violence against Black people, from police killings and brutality to baseless accusations of criminality. In retail spaces, Black people continue to experience racism and antagonization. When Asians internalize and perpetuate anti-Black racism and violence, we are reifying our complicity and driving a deeper wedge between the minority groups.

It’s important to note that two groups are not equally positioned in larger structures of power, especially when one racial group is profiting off the other, which is oftentimes the case in these violent clashes between Black people and Asians.

“Race is certainly a factor, but it is not the only factor,” Kang, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, said in an interview. Kang’s research has focused on Asian-owned nail salons and their racially diverse customers. “Many nail salon workers are under pressure to work quickly and keep costs down, which does not create the best environment for building customer relations.

The potential for tensions is heightened by the intimacy of the service, which involves direct physical contact, and the fact that many of the workers and owners are immigrants who do not speak the language or understand the culture of their customers.” In these scenarios, the tension is stoked by economic stress: the salon workers who often work for low wages under poor conditions, and the mostly working class clientele who cannot afford to waste money on subpar service.

Kang stressed the importance of putting these largely publicized conflicts in context. “I have observed hundreds of interactions in salons in this neighborhood that were very cordial and where workers and customers were very respectful and appreciative of each other,” she said.

Our perspectives are largely shaped by the way Black-Asian conflict is covered in media. “There is a lot of misinformation when it comes to reporting on salient issues that affect both Black and Asian communities,” Wong said. However, when videos of Asian business owners and workers inflicting violence on Black customers go viral, when Asian American activists protest in support for Peter Liang, an NYPD officer who shot an unarmed Black man in a stairwell, the message received by the public is that Asians do not care about Black lives.

These acts of violence are only a microcosm of the conflict between the minority groups, moments when the tension bubbles up to the surface and pops. There have been many ways statistics about Asian American achievement and the “model minority” myth have been used as a wedge between Asians and other minority groups, most notably through Ed Blum’s anti-affirmative action lawsuit against Harvard.

Many Asian Americans have thrown their support behind ending affirmative action and in support of standardized testing in school admission, placing their own concerns ahead of the communities marginalized by these systems, namely Black, Brown, and indigenous peoples.

 

Fancy Asian Race Politics Fitna Cancel Alison Collins

KRON4 |   San Francisco school board members will move forward to remove Vice President Alison Collins from the board and other committee positions in a special meeting later this week. 

This comes after derogatory tweets Collins made in 2016 recently resurfaced.

On Tuesday night, the school board held a regular meeting where we heard an apology from Collins for the first time.

Despite this apology, Collins still made no suggestion of plans to step down from her position.

That’s why two other school board members plan to introduce a resolution at Thursday’s special meeting, calling for Collins to be stripped of her titles.

The San Francisco School Board met on Tuesday for the first time since derogatory tweets resurfaced from the board’s vice president, Alison Collins.

While Collins gave no indication of plans to resign, she made a public apology.

“I’d like to reemphasize my sincere and heartfelt apologies and I’m currently engaging with my colleagues and working with the community for the good of all children in our district,” Collins said. 

Fellow school board member Jenny Lam called for Collins to make this apology several days ago and stands behind demands for Collins to resign.

“I am not alone when I say I don’t have confidence in Commissioner Collins’s ability to fairly govern a school district that is almost half API with no bias. Restorative justice begins by acknowledging the harm and making the intentional effort to connect with those in the community that has been harmed,” Lam said.

Lam and board member Moliga will introduce a resolution at a special meeting on Thursday, calling for Collins to be stripped of her VP position and committee assignments.

 

 

 

Thursday, March 25, 2021

Has Beijing Rendered The U.S. Military Industrial Complex Redundant And Irrelevant?

tomdispatch |    For the next 40 years, Washington’s secret Cold War weapon, the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, fought its largest and longest covert wars around the rim of Eurasia. Probing relentlessly for vulnerabilities of any sort in the Sino-Soviet bloc, the CIA mounted a series of small invasions of Tibet and southwest China in the early 1950s; fought a secret war in Laos, mobilizing a 30,000-strong militia of local Hmong villagers during the 1960s; and launched a massive, multibillion dollar covert war against the Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

During those same four decades, America’s only hot wars were similarly fought at the edge of Eurasia, seeking to contain the expansion of Communist China. On the Korean Peninsula from 1950 to 1953, almost 40,000 Americans (and untold numbers of Koreans) died in Washington’s effort to block the advance of North Korean and Chinese forces across the 38th parallel. In Southeast Asia from 1962 to 1975, some 58,000 American troops (and millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians) died in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the expansion of communists south of the 17th parallel that divided North and South Vietnam.

By the time the Soviet Union imploded in 1990 (just as China was turning into a Communist Party-run capitalist power), the U.S. military had become a global behemoth standing astride the Eurasian continent with more than 700 overseas bases, an air force of 1,763 jet fighters, more than 1,000 ballistic missiles, and a navy of nearly 600 ships, including 15 nuclear carrier battle groups — all linked together by a global system of satellites for communication, navigation, and espionage.

Despite its name, the Global War on Terror after 2001 was actually fought, like the Cold War before it, at the edge of Eurasia. Apart from the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Air Force and CIA had, within a decade, ringed the southern rim of that landmass with a network of 60 bases for its growing arsenal of Reaper and Predator drones, stretching all the way from the Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily to Andersen Air Force Base on the island of Guam. And yet, in that series of failed, never-ending conflicts, the old military formula for “containing,” constraining, and dominating Eurasia was visibly failing. The Global War on Terror proved, in some sense, a long-drawn-out version of Britain’s imperial Suez disaster.

By grasping the geopolitical logic of unifying Eurasia’s vast landmass — home to 70% of the world’s population — through transcontinental infrastructures for commerce, energy, finance, and transport, Beijing has rendered Washington’s encircling armadas of aircraft and warships redundant, even irrelevant.

Those Farmboys From Langley VA. Are Ready To Do What Proletarian U.S. Military Won't Do...,

greenwald  |  A report declassified last Wednesday by the Department of Homeland Security is raising serious concerns about the possibly illegal involvement by the intelligence community in U.S. domestic political affairs.

Entitled “Domestic Violent Extremism Poses Heightened Threat in 2021,” the March 1 Report from the Director of National Intelligence states that it was prepared “in consultation with the Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security—and was drafted by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with contributions from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).” 

Its primary point is this: “The IC [intelligence community] assesses that domestic violent extremists (DVEs) who are motivated by a range of ideologies and galvanized by recent political and societal events in the United States pose an elevated threat to the Homeland in 2021.” While asserting that “the most lethal” of these threats is posed by “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) and militia violent extremists (MVEs),” it makes clear that its target encompasses a wide range of groups from the left (Antifa, animal rights and environmental activists, pro-choice extremists and anarchists: “those who oppose capitalism and all forms of globalization”) to the right (sovereign citizen movements, anti-abortion activists and those deemed motivated by racial or ethnic hatreds).

The U.S. security state apparatus regards the agenda of “domestic violent extremists” as “derived from anti-government or anti-authority sentiment,” which includes “opposition to perceived economic, racial or social hierarchies.” In sum, to the Department of Homeland Security, an “extremist” is anyone who opposes the current prevailing ruling class and system for distributing power. Anyone they believe is prepared to use violence, intimidation or coercion in pursuit of these causes then becomes a “domestic violent extremist,” subject to a vast array of surveillance, monitoring and other forms of legal restrictions:

Department of Homeland Security report, Mar.1, 2021

It goes without saying that violence of any kind — including that which is politically motivated — is a serious crime under U.S. law, and it is the proper role of the U.S. Government to investigate and prevent it. But there are real and important legal and institutional limits on the authority of the intelligence community to involve itself in domestic law enforcement, or other forms of domestic political activity, that seem threatened here, if not outright violated.

What Is France To Do With The Thousands Of Soldiers Expelled From Africa?

SCF  |    Russian President Vladimir Putin was spot-on this week in his observation about why France’s Emmanuel Macron is strutting around ...