Dripping With "Permitted Narrative" DIA Analyst Grudgingly Admits Military Truth

newsweek |  Russia's conduct in the brutal war tells a different story than the widely accepted view that Vladimir Putin is intent on demolishing Ukraine and inflicting maximum civilian damage—and it reveals the Russian leader's strategic balancing act. If Russia were more intentionally destructive, the clamoring for U.S. and NATO intervention would be louder. And if Russia were all-in, Putin might find himself with no way out. Instead, his goal is to take enough territory on the ground to have something to negotiate with, while putting the government of Ukraine in a position where they have to negotiate.

Understanding the thinking behind Russia's limited attacks could help map a path towards peace, experts say.

In nearly a month since Russia invaded, dozens of Ukrainian cities and towns have fallen, and the fight over the country's largest cities continues. United Nations human rights specialists say that some 900 civilians have died in the fighting (U.S. intelligence puts that number at least five times UN estimates). About 6.5 million Ukrainians have also become internally displaced (15 percent of the entire population), half of them leaving the country to find safety.

"The destruction is massive," a senior analyst working at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) tells Newsweek, "especially when compared with what Europeans and Americans are used to seeing."

But, the analyst says, the damage associated with a contested ground war involving peer opponents shouldn't blind people to what is really happening. (The analyst requested anonymity in order to speak about classified matters.) "The heart of Kyiv has barely been touched. And almost all of the long-range strikes have been aimed at military targets."

In the capital, most observable to the west, Kyiv city authorities say that some 55 buildings have been damaged and that 222 people have died since February 24. It is a city of 2.8 million people.

"We need to understand Russia's actual conduct," says a retired Air Force officer, a lawyer by training who has been involved in approving targets for U.S. fights in Iraq and Afghanistan. The officer currently works as an analyst with a large military contractor advising the Pentagon and was granted anonymity in order to speak candidly.

"If we merely convince ourselves that Russia is bombing indiscriminately, or [that] it is failing to inflict more harm because its personnel are not up to the task or because it is technically inept, then we are not seeing the real conflict."

In the analyst's view, though the war has led to unprecedented destruction in the south and east, the Russian military has actually been showing restraint in its long-range attacks.

As of the past weekend, in 24 days of conflict, Russia has flown some 1,400 strike sorties and delivered almost 1,000 missiles (by contrast, the United States flew more sorties and delivered more weapons in the first day of the 2003 Iraq war). The vast majority of the airstrikes are over the battlefield, with Russian aircraft providing "close air support" to ground forces. The remainder—less than 20 percent, according to U.S. experts—has been aimed at military airfields, barracks and supporting depots.

 

 

A Strictly Limited Parasitic Elite?

charleshughsmith |   The possibility that the United States could fragment is no longer a marginalized topic. Maps displaying various post-U.S. regional configurations accompany essays exploring how and why a break-up of the U.S. would be a solution to regional and ideological polarization, for example, Max Borders' recent article, Dear America: It's Time to Break Up.

But two forces larger than political polarization may fragment nation-states across the globe, including the U.S.: inequality and scarcity. Inequality and corruption go hand in hand, of course, as the wealthiest few influence the state to protect their monopolies and backstop their speculative gains.

Inequality also goes hand in hand with the collapse of nation-states, as this seminal paper explains: Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies.

The parasitic elite can accumulate the majority of income, wealth, political power and resources in eras of expanding abundance, as what's left is enough to support an expanding populace that consumes more per capita every year, i.e. broad-based prosperity.

But once abundance transitions to scarcity, the economy and society can no longer sustain the dead weight of its outsized parasitic elite. The parasitic elite believes its bloated share of resources, wealth and power is not only sustainable but can be expanded without consequence, and so it deploys all its formidable power to keep the status quo unchanged even as scarcity lowers the living standards of the bottom 90% and hollows out the economy.

In effect, the modern central state, regardless of ideological label, optimizes inequality and growth. Once growth falters while inequality continues increasing, the only possible outcome is fragmentation and/or collapse.

Put another way: the status quo is no longer the solution to inequality and scarcity, it is the problem. Private-sector and political elites are incapable of recognizing they are now the problem, and so the rapid unraveling of the status quo will come as a great shock to their magical-thinking confidence in their power.

The elite's delusional "solution" is a seamless, painless transition to a new era of abundance via "green energy." Unfortunately, this vision is 100% magical thinking, as all these projections ignore the physical realities of building out a global energy system that generates energy on the same scale as existing hydrocarbon energy sources. Read these three reports for reality-based assessments:

The "New Energy Economy": An Exercise in Magical Thinking (manhattan-institute.org)

The Delusion of Infinite Economic Growth: Even "sustainable" technologies such as electric vehicles and wind turbines face unbreachable physical limits and exact grave environmental costs. (scientificamerican.com)

Assessment of the Extra Capacity Required of Alternative Energy Electrical Power Systems to Completely Replace Fossil Fuels (PDF, Simon P. Michaux, Geological Survey of Finland) Read the 3-page abstract.

As explained in the first paper, inequality generates collapse and so does a decline in resources, i.e. scarcity. Put the two together and the only possible outcome is collapse of all centralized nation-states that optimize inequality and endless expansion of consumption.

The issue isn't ideological labels or principles, it's whether the state solves problems or covers them up with fake fixes that accelerate collapse.

Nations which want to not just survive but emerge stronger have one path: a revolutionary transformation from "waste is growth" to degrowth, from an economy and state dominated by a parasitic elite to a strictly limited parasitic elite and from abject dependence on fragile supply chains originating in other nations to decentralized, localized independence for essentials.

Power And Prestige Seeking In A Collapsing Economic World Order...,

interfluidity  |  I was reading Matt Stoller’s newsletter this morning:

To put it into words, the problem we have is corruption in the government contracting world, aided by immense amounts of useless overpaid make work. In 2011, an antitrust attorney did a report on how we overpay for government contracting. In service of ‘shrinking government,’ policymakers chose to set up a system where instead of hiring an engineer as a government employee for, say, $120,000 a year, they paid a consulting firm like Booz Allen $500,000 a year for a similar engineer. The resulting system is both more expensive and more bureaucratic.

Here’s one example I grabbed from a public government contracting schedule. The rate negotiated by the government’s General Services Administration for Boston Consulting Group is $33,063.75/week to get a single relatively junior contractor.

I’m certainly with Matt on general disgust at the gorging of the trough by the contactor-consultancy complex, and have long favored rebalancing government employment away from contractors, back towards directly employed civil servants. So, yay. That’s the correct position, and it’s an easy one to take, so I take it.

But it is a bit too easy. The Boston Consulting Group may be charging $33,063.75 per week for the services of a single kind-of-bright conformist straight out of business school. But that kid, he isn’t getting paid $1.7M a year. He’s probably “only” paid 10% of that. From that take, his managers and their managers, their assistants and his, not to mention of course the firm’s shareholders, are all getting a piece of that sweet government slop. And all those guys and gals, they are living in places like Arlington, VA, and some of them have families and mortgages on houses they indebted themselves perhaps millions of dollars to inhabit.

There are people at the top of the American food chain who are stupid rich, for whom questions of making ends meet and financial security are laughably distant. People like that, they are easy to deal with. If it was “us” (whoever the fuck we are) versus only them, politics would be easy. We’d have taxed the billionaires to pay their fair share a long time ago.

But most of the people towards the top of the American food chain are not stupid rich, but stupidly rich. They “make” sums of money that by any fair reckoning, obviously in a global context but even in an American context, are huge. But they plow that affluence into bidding wars on incredibly (if artificially) scarce social goods. Nobody “needs” to live in Arlington (or my own San Francisco). No one’s kid “has” to go to private school (or for the more woke among us, notionally public schools rendered exclusive by the cost of nearby housing). If you make price your first priority in, say, shopping for preschool or daycare, perhaps you can find something reasonable.

But most of us, if we are no longer free, young, and single, if we are rich enough to pay the vig you have to pay to be sure your kid’s preschool will in fact be “safe” and “nurturing”, well, we pay it. If we haven’t rigged our housing choice so that the local public school is good enough, we pay up for a private school. If we can afford to be choosy, if we are really rich, we pay up for the private school that devotes significant resources to the searches and scholarships that deliver, in Nikole Hannah-Jones memorable words, a “carefully curated integration, the kind that allows many white parents to boast that their children’s public schools look like the United Nations.” It is extraordinarily expensive to be both comfortable and some facsimile of virtuous. You’ll never see as many rainbow flags as you see in Marin County.

The point of this is not that you should have sympathy for the Arlingtonians (or San Franciscans). Fuck ’em (er, us). But you are missing something important, as a matter of politics if nothing else, if you don’t get that the people who are your predators financially are, in their turn, someone else’s prey. Part of why the legalized corruption that is the vast bulk of the (dollar-weighted) US economy is so immovable is that the people whose lobbyists have cornered markets to ensure they stay overpaid are desperately frightened of not being overpaid, because if they were not overpaid they would become unable to make all the absurd overpayments that are now required to live what people of my generation (and race, and class) understood to be an ordinary life. It’s turtles all the way down, each one collecting a toll and wondering how it’s gonna pay the next diapsid.

Perhaps the most straightforward examples of all this, much more sympathetic than Boston Consulting Group swindlers, are doctors. It’s well and good to rail against health insurance companies and big pharma, and really, fuck ’em so hard they disappear into perpetual orgasm and we never have to encounter them again. But we know that healthcare in the US is exorbitantly expensive compared to anywhere else, and we also know, even if it is not shouted as loudly in political stump speeches, that a big part of this is that doctors are paid roughly twice as much in America as they are paid elsewhere in the developed world.

But what would it mean, really, to cut US doctors’ salaries in half? In theory, if you are the most imperceptive sort of economist, it means they could live as well as doctors do in Europe, which is not so bad. US doctors are paid twice as much in what is imaginatively described as “real terms”, so they should be able to purchase the same goods and services with their income as their European peers do. Where’s the problem?

But economists’ “real terms” do not measure the realest terms at all, the social relations in which the dance of our production and consumption is embedded. If you cut doctors’ salaries in half tomorrow, they would have to sell their mortgaged, absurdly expensive homes. At half their present salary, doctors would no longer be able to afford to live amongst “peer” professions like lawyers, management consultants, middling corporate executives, and the employees of surveillance monopolists. Doctors would fall precipitously from the social class, embedded in geography and consumption habits, to which many of them even now cling only precariously. More calamitously, they would lose the capacity to produce or reproduce membership in that social class for their children, often the most expensive amenity American professionals seek to purchase.

Doctors in France don’t have this problem because they live in a society less stratified than the one that we are unfortunate to inhabit. In societies in which the lives and prospects of the rich and less rich are not so divergent, people can afford to be a bit less rich. After all, even in the United States, the problem is not scarcity in a straightforward economic sense. We can build, to a first approximation, as much great housing as we want. The skills required to care for and educate kids are reproducible. They could be elastically and economically supplied. The scarcity of a slot at Harvard (and that slot’s many antecedents, all the way back to birth) has little to do with some ingrained incapacity to educate wonderful teachers.

The solution to the problem of “positional goods”, which are inherently zero-sum and inelastically supplied, is supposed to be the infinite multiplicity of social dimensions over which we can measure our positions (ht Arjun Narayan). The most famous exposition of this view is perhaps David Brooks’ from On Paradise Drive:

“Know thyself,” the Greek philosopher advised. But of course this is nonsense. In the world of self-reinforcing clique communities, the people who are truly happy live by the maxim “Overrate thyself.” They live in a community that reinforces their values every day. The anthropology professor can stride through life knowing she was unanimously elected chairwoman of her crunchy suburb’s sustainable-growth study seminar. She wears the locally approved status symbols: the Tibet-motif dangly earrings, the Andrea Dworkin-inspired hairstyle, the peasant blouse, and the public-broadcasting tote bag… Meanwhile, sitting in the next seat of the coach section on some Southwest Airlines flight, there might be a midlevel executive from a postwar suburb who’s similarly rich in self-esteem. But he lives in a different clique, so he is validated and reinforced according to entirely different criteria and by entirely different institutions… [H]e has been named Payroll Person of the Year by the West Coast Regional Payroll Professional Association. He is interested in College Football and tassels. His loafers have tassels. His golf bags have tassels. If he could put tassels around the Oklahoma football vanity license plate on his Cadillac Escalade, his life would be complete.

It’s hard to know, from this excerpt, which of these two is richer, the anthropology professor or the payroll guy. Both crouch together in the eternal middle class of unreserved coach seating on a Southwest Airlines flight. And in that skyward netherworld, On Paradise Flight, Brooks would be right. When there are not objective correlates of anyone’s definition of positional status, each of us can choose whichever measure of position flatters us most. We need agree only that is it gauche to try to impose our values on others for us all to live as happiest and best, quietly pitying our inferiors even as we cheerfully pass along a bag of pretzels.

But what it means to live in a stratified society, precisely what it means to live in a stratified society, is that there are objective correlates to position along dimensions that individuals and communities cannot themselves choose. There are positional dimensions whose importance is a social fact, not arbitrary, but real as social facts are, by virtue of their consequences. In such a society, positional goods with desirable correlates, inherently scarce and inelastically supplied, become extremely valuable. In some societies, those goods may be rationed by custom, or by heredity, by caste or race. But to the degree that a society is “liberal” and capitalist, they will be price-rationed, as they largely (but incompletely) are in our American society.

The "Masters" Don't Quite Know What To Do With A Woke And Out LGB Community

tinkzorg |  In recent days, the phrase ”Let’s go Brandon!” has taken on a life of its own. At one point, four out of ten songs on the Spotify top 10 list were called ”Let’s go Brandon”. People are saying it as a form of greeting, or wearing it on t-shirts. For some, this is just a funny gag. For others, it is a source of significant and growing dread; dread about what is happening politically in the United States, and what the future now looks to have in store for them.

For those of you who don’t know the context: at a recent NASCAR event in New Jersey, the crowd could be heard chanting ”Fuck Joe Biden!” after the race. During an interview with the winner of the race – a man named Brandon Brown – the flustered reporter, hearing the chant, then says on camera that the crowd must be very enthused for Brandon, as they’re all chanting ”Let’s go Brandon!” in his honor. Of course, they crowd is doing no such thing, and she and everyone else knows it. This little episode, on its own, is hardly very remarkable or significant. Others slowly pick up on the story and mock the journalist involved. But at this point, it is merely just another day of ”fake news”, another day of the liberal media being the liberal media.

However, like a dangerous respiratory virus, this little ”Brandon incident” then incubates for a week or two, before blossoming out into something far more serious, into a true social event. People start saying ”Let’s go Brandon!” at random, both as a mockery of the sitting president, but also as a way to mock the now increasingly toothless media apparatus, who fewer and fewer seem to take seriously at all. And this is where things become truly interesting: as at least one pilot then tells his passengers ”Let’s go Brandon!” before takeoff, liberal America starts to actually freak out. At this point, think pieces are produced by NPR and others claiming that there’s a new form of conspiratorial ”code speak” that ”racists” are now using to note their displeasure with the sitting president. Others demand the offending pilot be fired, as it is obvious that he isn’t really saying ”Let’s go Brandon!”, he’s actually saying ”Fuck Joe Biden!”. The irony here should be quite obvious, as liberals are now decrying people for playing along with the very same cover story they invented out of thin air to cover up what is clearly growing dissatisfaction with president Biden.

Some have taken this to be just another funny episode of ”internet humor” leaking into the real world. But this is, to put it frankly, the delusions of an intellectual class who themselves enjoy being ironic on the internet, and who then quite myopically assume that everyone else must think and act the way they do. Middle aged female nurses, as a rule, do not use 4chan, nor are they versed in, or at all interested in, the finer points of ironic ”internet humor”. Political humor, coming from normal, working class people, might superficially resemble that of irony-poisoned college graduates. But in reality, they have very little in common.

Moreover, there’s a very large, very obvious flaw in this explanation of events. Again, the crowds at that NASCAR race weren’t chanting ”Let’s go Brandon!” they were chanting ”Fuck Joe Biden!”, and by all accounts, they certainly weren’t being ironic about that. No coded language was intented, no mental jiu-jitsu performed. Only when the media tried to use its incredibly hollow and thoroughly unimpressive powers of ”mind control” did people start with ironic mockery, and that mockery was aimed both at the president as well as the clear powerlessness of the chattering classes to control the narrative or get people to believe them. And so, perhaps unsurprisingly, when airplane passenger hear the phrase ”Let’s go Brandon!” spoken over the intercom, they don’t necessarily hear just a joke, but also a reminder that a political conflict they had tried to suppress is very much still real.

But even with all this said, many a reader will probably want to ask a simple question: why does any of this matter? Though I would argue that the sudden explosion of ”Let’s go Brandon!” in American culture actually means a very great deal, to truly explain why this joke is so funny to some, and so unnerving to others, we have to do so by way of a metaphor. To truly understand why many liberals are so scared of what others consider to still be merely a harmless joke, we have to talk a bit about a concept known as Kantai Kessen, the Japanese naval war doctrine during World War II. Do not worry, the relevance of this concept to today’s America will hopefully become clear as we go along.

Elite Capture Moral Cowardice And Epistemic Deference

thephilosopher |  A fuller and fairer assessment of what is going on with deference and standpoint epistemology would go beyond technical argument, and contend with the emotional appeals of this strategy of deference. Those in powerful rooms may be “elites” relative to the larger group they represent, but this guarantees nothing about how they are treated in the rooms they are in. After all, a person privileged in an absolute sense (a person belonging to, say, the half of the world that has secure access to “basic needs”) may nevertheless feel themselves to be consistently on the low end of the power dynamics they actually experience. Deference epistemology responds to real, morally weighty experiences of being put down, ignored, sidelined, or silenced. It thus has an important non-epistemic appeal to members of stigmatized or marginalized groups: it intervenes directly in morally consequential practices of giving attention and respect. 

The social dynamics we experience have an outsize role in developing and refining our political subjectivity, and our sense of ourselves. But this very strength of standpoint epistemology – its recognition of the importance of perspective – becomes its weakness when combined with deferential practical norms. Emphasis on the ways we are marginalized often matches the world as we have experienced it. But, from a structural perspective, the rooms we never needed to enter (and the explanations of why we can avoid these rooms) might have more to teach us about the world and our place in it. If so, the deferential approach to standpoint epistemology actually prevents “centring” or even hearing from the most marginalized; it focuses us on the interaction of the rooms we occupy, rather than calling us to account for the interactions we don’t experience. This fact about who is in the room, combined with the fact that speaking for others generates its own set of important problems (particularly when they are not there to advocate for themselves), eliminates pressures that might otherwise trouble the centrality of our own suffering – and of the suffering of the marginalized people that do happen to make it into rooms with us.

The dangers with this feature of deference politics are grave, as are the risks for those outside of the most powerful rooms. For those who are deferred to, it can supercharge group-undermining norms. In Conflict is Not Abuse, Sarah Schulman makes a provocative observation about the psychological effects of both trauma and felt superiority: while these often come about for different reasons and have very different moral statuses, they result in similar behavioural patterns. Chief among these are misrepresenting the stakes of conflict (often by overstating harm) or representing others’ independence as a hostile threat (such as failures to “centre” the right topics or people). These behaviours, whatever their causal history, have corrosive effects on individuals who perform them as well as the groups around them, especially when a community’s norms magnify or multiply these behaviours rather than constraining or metabolizing them.

For those who defer, the habit can supercharge moral cowardice. The norms provide social cover for the abdication of responsibility: it displaces onto individual heroes, a hero class, or a mythicized past the work that is ours to do now in the present. Their perspective may be clearer on this or that specific matter, but their overall point of view isn’t any less particular or constrained by history than ours. More importantly, deference places the accountability that is all of ours to bear onto select people – and, more often than not, a hyper-sanitized and thoroughly fictional caricature of them.

The same tactics of deference that insulate us from criticism also insulate us from connection and transformation. They prevent us from engaging empathetically and authentically with the struggles of other people – prerequisites of coalitional politics. As identities become more and more fine-grained and disagreements sharper, we come to realize that “coalitional politics” (understood as struggle across difference) is, simply, politics. Thus, the deferential orientation, like that fragmentation of political collectivity it enables, is ultimately anti-political.

Deference rather than interdependence may soothe short-term psychological wounds. But it does so at a steep cost: it can undermine the epistemic goals that motivate the project, and it entrenches a politics unbefitting of anyone fighting for freedom rather than for privilege, for collective liberation rather than mere parochial advantage.

The Origin Of All Political Power Is In The Barrel Of A Gun

thesenecaeffect | The Monastic order of the Templars (Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici), was founded in 1119 as a military force to defend the Christian holdings in the Holy Land. In time, the order evolved into a financial structure: the Templars became bankers and they developed a sophisticated money transfer system that helped pilgrims and warriors to move to and from the Holy Land and to transfer money from Europe to Palestine and back. They have been termed "the first multinational corporation" in history. 

As you may imagine, the Templars were rich, despite the term "pauperes" (poor fellows) in their name. They had land, castles, palaces, and, of course, plenty of gold and silver. The problem was that, with the loss of the last lands controlled by the Christian crusaders in the Holy Land, at the end of the 13th century, they had become useless: no more crusades, no need of a banking system to finance them. 

At that point, the Templars attracted the attention of the king of France, Phillip IV, in dire need of money, as kings normally are. In 1307, he ordered the arrest of all Templars and the confiscation of their properties.  Most of the leaders were burned at the stake after that they had confessed under torture all sorts of evil misbehaviors: spit on the cross, deny Christ, engage in indecent kissing, worship the devil, and other niceties. 

As exterminations go, this one didn't involve large numbers: we read of 54 executions in France in 1310. Probably there were more in other countries, but the total cannot be higher than a few hundred. Nevertheless, it had a big impact: it is said that the fame of Friday the 13th as an unlucky day originates from the date of the arrest of the Templars: Friday, October 13, 1307.

The question is, of course, can it happen again? How about our class of hyper-rich, the "100 billion dollar club," that includes well-known names such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and a few more? They are clearly going to become trillionaires in the near future. But a house full of gold is hard to defend, as we read in the Tao Te Ching. Could our Internet barons follow the destiny that long ago befell another class of financial tycoons, the Templars?

As usual, the key to the future is in the past. Examining the destiny of the Templars, we may understand the factors that may lead to the extermination of a powerful (but not enough) financial guild. 

First of all, why were the Templars exterminated? I argued in previous posts (one, two, and three) that certain categories of people can be exterminated and their possessions confiscated when they are 1) wealthy, 2) clearly identifiable, and 3) militarily weak, The Templars clearly satisfied the first two rules but not necessarily the third: after all, they were a military order. Yet, when the King of France descended on them, they didn't even try a military reaction. It may be that the prowess of the Templar Knights was much overrated: they were more like a private police force for a financial organization, not a real military force. But it may also be that it was exactly the presence of this force that hastened their downfall. Sometimes, a little military power may be worse than none at all, since it invites a decapitation strike. This is probably what happened to the Templars, exterminated just to make sure that they would not become a threat. 

The story of the Templars is just an example of a power struggle that has very ancient origins. One of the earliest written texts we have was written by the Sumerian priestess Enheduanna who complained with the Goddess that her temple had been desecrated by a local warlord. Enheduanna does not say if the warlord was after the temple's money, but we know that, at that time, temples were also banks, a tradition that remained unchanged for millennia. For instance, as late as during the first century AD, we have the record of a local leader who raided the temple of Jerusalem and attacked the resident bankers, most likely in order to finance an armed insurrection against the Roman governor. 

Temples and warlords remained in an uneasy relationship with each other during the Roman Empire, but a few centuries later, raiding Pagan temples became the normal way to finance the Roman armies, a tradition started by Emperor Constantine 1st ("The Great") during the early 4th century AD. Less than a century later, Emperor Theodosius 1st ("The Great") was the last emperor who still could find Pagan temples to raid for their gold and silver. Then, no more temples, and no more Roman Empire.

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty Puts Everything On The Line In Defense Of Truth And Principles

aaronkheriaty  |  Here is the latest move by the University of California in response to my lawsuit in Federal court challenging their vaccine mandate on behalf of Covid-recovered individuals with natural immunity. Last Thursday Sept 30th at 5:03 PM I received this letter from the University informing me that, as of the following morning, I was being placed on “Investigatory Leave” for my failure to comply with the vaccine mandate. I was given no opportunity to contact my patients, students, residents, or colleagues and let them know I would disappear for a month. Rather than waiting for the court to make a ruling on my case, the University has taken preemptive action:

You might be thinking, a month of paid leave doesn’t sound so bad. But the language is misleading here, since half of my income from the University comes from clinical revenues generated from seeing my patients, supervising resident clinics, and engaging in weekend and holiday on-call duties. So while on leave my salary is significantly cut. Furthermore, my contract stipulates that I am not able to conduct any patient care outside the University: to see my current patients, or to recoup my losses by moonlighting as a physician elsewhere, would violate the terms of my contract.

It came as no surprise that, since my request for a preliminary injunction was not granted by the court, the University would immediately begin procedures to dismiss me. However, in the complicated legal game of three-dimensional chess I did not anticipate this particular development: the current administrative designation, where I am neither able to work at the University nor permitted to pursue work elsewhere, was not a development I had anticipated. The University may be hoping this pressure will lead me to resign “voluntarily,” which would remove grounds for my lawsuit: if I resign prior to being terminated by the University, I have no legal claim of harm.

I have no intention at this time of resigning, withdrawing my lawsuit, or having an unnecessary medical intervention forced on me, in spite of these challenging circumstances. You may be wondering about the CA Department of Public Health vaccine mandate mentioned in the University’s letter above: yes, I am subject to two mandates, the UC mandate as a faculty member and the CA State mandate as a healthcare provider. Regarding the latter mandate, I filed a similar lawsuit in Federal court last Friday against the State Public Health Department. I will post more later on that case as it develops.

Although this is a challenging time for me and my family, at this time I remain convinced that this course of action is worthwhile. I am grateful for your ongoing encouragement, prayers, and support. I want my readers to know that am taking legal action not primarily for myself, but for all those who have no voice and whose Constitutional rights are being steamrolled by these mandates. As I wrote in my first post:

Authoriteh's Restive About What You Peasants Get Up To With Synthetic Biology

FT  |  Paul Dabrowa does not know if it is illegal to genetically modify beer at home in a way that makes it glow. The process involves taking DNA information from jellyfish and applying it to yeast cells, then using traditional fermenting methods to turn it into alcohol. But he is worried that it could be against the law given that it involves manipulating genetic material. “This stuff can be dangerous in the wrong hands, so I did that in an accredited lab,” he says, adding that he himself has only got as far as making yeast cells glow in a Petri dish. For the most part Dabrowa, a 41-year old Melbourne-based Australian who styles himself as a bit of an expert on most things, prefers to conduct his biohacking experiments in his kitchen. He does this mostly to find cures for his own health issues. Other times just for fun.

In recent years the community of hobbyists and amateurs Dabrowa considers his kin has been energised by the falling cost and growing accessibility to gene-editing tools such as Crispr. This has led to an explosion of unchecked experimentation in self-constructed labs or community facilities focused on biological self-improvement.

Despite a lack of formal microbiological training, Dabrowa has successfully used faecal transplants and machine learning to genetically modify his own gut bacteria to lose weight without having to change his daily regime. The positive results he’s seen on himself have encouraged him to try to commercialise the process with the help of an angel investor. He hopes one day to collect as many as 3,000 faecal samples from donors and share the findings publicly.

Much of his knowledge — including the complex bits related to gene-editing — was gleaned straight from the internet or through sheer strength of will by directly lobbying those who have the answers he seeks. “Whenever I was bored, I went on YouTube and watched physics and biology lectures from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology],” he explains. “I tried the experiments at home, then realised I needed help and reached out to professors at MIT and Harvard. They were more than happy to do so.”

At the more radical end of the community are experimentalists such as Josiah Zayner, a former Nasa bioscientist, who became infamous online after performing gene therapy on himself in front of a live audience. Zayner’s start-up, The Odin — to which Crispr pioneer and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School George Church is an adviser — has stubbornly resisted attempts to regulate its capacity to sell gene-editing kits online in the idealistic belief that everyone should be able to manage their own DNA.

These garage scientists might seem like a quirky new subculture but their rogue mindset is starting to generate consternation among those who specialise in managing biological threats in governments and international bodies.

In 2018 the states that are signatories to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) identified gene editing, gene synthesis, gene drives and metabolic pathway engineering as research that qualifies as “dual use”, meaning it is as easy to deploy for harmful purposes as it is for good.
 

A Voluntary Product Of The System Publicly Threatening To Tear The System Down On Social Media?

Fist Tap Dale...,

General Oliver Otis Howard Was A White Union General And Head Of The Freedmen's Bureau

WSWS  |  New York Times Magazine staff writer and 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones announced in an exclusive interview on “CBS This Morning” with co-host Gayle King that she was rejecting an offer of tenure from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC).

Instead, Hannah-Jones explained that she would accept a tenured professorship at Howard University in Washington D.C. as the Knight Chair in Race and Reporting at the Cathy Hughes School of Communication.

Hannah-Jones will join writer Ta-Nehisi Coates (who wrote We Were Eight Years in Power about the Obama administration) in founding the Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard. The center will be financed with $20 million from the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation and an anonymous donor.

According to a university press release, the new center “will focus on training and supporting aspiring journalists in acquiring the investigative skills and historical and analytical expertise needed to cover the crisis our democracy is facing.”

The 1619 Project was published by the New York Times in August 2019 and has been promoted with millions of dollars in funding and a school curriculum developed by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. It falsely roots American history in an enduring racial conflict between blacks and whites.

Hannah-Jones’ lead essay, for which she won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, argued that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery against the British monarchy and that President Abraham Lincoln was little more than a garden-variety racist. 

The response of preeminent American historians Gordon Wood, James McPherson, James Oakes, Clayborne Carson, Victoria Bynum and others exposed the New York Times' effort to reinterpret American history. The World Socialist Web Site, in addition to interviewing these historians, has thoroughly refuted the falsifications of the 1619 Project and the lead essay written by Hannah-Jones.

Her other writings have descended into outright racism against whites. The historical falsifications which she promotes and her limited journalistic record since beginning to write for the Times in late 2014—just 23 articles—would certainly qualify as red flags in her application for tenure.

FTC Chair Lina Khan And Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) Partner To Rein In Big Tech

greenwald |  The politics of this debate have become fascinating. There are key members in both parties who seem loyally devoted to shielding Facebook, Google and others from any meaningful reform, while an increasingly vocal bipartisan coalition — led by Cicilline and Buck — is clearly serious about using their legislative power to usher in more competition and reform. 

I spoke with Rep. Buck earlier today about his trajectory when it comes to fighting Big Tech, why so many Republicans and conservative think tanks remain so captive to Silicon Valley monopolies, and whether the ideological and partisan scrambling visible on this issue is reflective of a broader realignment or at least ideological scrambling that is changing the nature of coalitions on foreign and economic policy as well.

Buck has become one of the most informed and thoughtful Congressional voices on the dangers posed by Silicon Valley, and, as a result, I found our 30-minute discussion quite illuminating.

 

There's Nothing Virtuous About The Professional And Managerial Frauds Serving The Empire

danwright  |  Catherine Liu lives among these people and seems rather fed up. Her new book Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class makes it crystal clear that she is having a lot of passive-aggressive lunch meetings with other members of the University of California, Irvine faculty.

Liu admits the book is a polemic against the PMC, which is refreshing if for no other reason than most of the work posing as professional scholarship on politics and culture today makes polemical arguments under the guise of sober expertise. There is nothing more PMC than laundering your particular personal agenda under the mask of objective technical analysis.

However, Liu focuses on another way the PMC mask their will to power: moral preening. She claims the professional managerial class hoards virtue for itself as part of its war against the working class. Which is to say, Liu recognizes that the PMC and the working class are, in fact, class enemies.

Building on the work of Barbara Ehrenreich, she accepts that the PMC at one time played a positive role in society by challenging the barbarity of earlier iterations of capitalism; specifically when members of the PMC were advocates for creating professional standards in fields like medicine and social research, and were advocating for welfare state economic reforms. But as the post-World War 2 capitalist settlement soured and neoliberalism became ascendant, Liu claims “the PMC preferred to fight culture wars against the classes below while currying favor with the capitalists it once despised.”

This was not a moral awakening, but an awokening. A power play by the PMC to secure their class position within the capitalist system using the lofty language of social justice to defend basic material interest.

Liu analyzes some of the tactics the PMC use to mystify class relations, and concludes that “whenever it addresses economic crisis produced by capitalism itself, the PMC reworks political struggles for policy change and redistribution into passion plays, focusing on individual acts of ‘giving back’ or reified forms of self-transformation.”

Think global, act local. And what is more local than yourself? I just ate some fully organic non-GMO trail mix. I’m saving the world one nutty crap at a time. You’re welcome.

But it goes beyond delusional upper class savior complexes and I’m a good person branding exercises. There is an underlying logic to the mystification of class relations by the PMC as Liu says that “As a class the PMC loves to talk about bias rather than inequality, racism rather than capitalism, visibility rather than exploitation.”

Is there any doubt that this is so? For when it comes to economic exploitation, the PMC has a PhD in changing the subject. They manage to always come up with an explanation for economic problems that ensures the blame never falls on capitalism itself. We could have higher wages if people stopped being racist!

Liu breaks down her analysis of the PMC into their standpoint on: professionalism, child-rearing, art, and sex. Mercifully, the book is a short read (77 pages in my copy) because the PMC are some of the most trite and boring people you will ever encounter and reading about their lifestyle and cultural pretensions is less pleasant than listening to one of those neurotic trust fund brats scream about a triggering Halloween costume.

The main argument of the book, or so it seems to me, is that the professional managerial class of present is actively working against building socialism in the United States. That the PMC could really be considered the prime obstacle to unifying the working class as they continually divide working people along the rigid lines of identity to serve their own class interests:

AG Merrick Garland Vows To Get Leakers Of Sacred Billionaire Tax Information

cracked |  On today's installment of our government undoubtedly having their priorities perfectly in check, newly-minted Attorney General Merrick Garland promised legislators that investigating the source of the alleged billionaire income tax data included in ProPublica's explosive report earlier this week stands firmly at the top of his agenda. 

“I promise you, it will be at the top of my list,” the former Supreme Court nominee told Sen. Susan Collins, during a Wednesday Senate Appropriations Committee budget hearing, per CNBC. Although the shocking ProPublica article, likely to be the first in a series, details how billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg, and George Soros allegedly used legal loopholes to pay next to nothing in personal income taxes, Garland is seemingly more concerned with how, exactly, the outlet obtained the data than why the ultra-wealthy allegedly aren't paying their fair share.

“Senator, I take this as seriously as you do. I very well remember what President Nixon did in the Watergate period — the creation of enemies lists and the punishment of people through reviewing their tax returns,” Garland explained. “This is an extremely serious matter. People are entitled, obviously, to great privacy with respect to their tax returns.” 

Despite the AG's evident passion on maintaining the sanctity of the rich's tax returns, it seems officials are already on the case – namely IRS Commissioner, Charles Rettig. “He said that their inspectors were working on it, and I’m sure that that means it will be referred to the Justice Department,” Garland explained. “This was on my list of things to raise after I finished preparing for this hearing.” Mr. Garland, if you're reading this, I know I may be a constant source of embarrassment for our mutual alma mater – Niles West High School – but you're really giving me a run for my money with this nonsense. 

The report, which aims to dispel the long-running myth "that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most," claims that through a series of legal loopholes – namely the fact that intangible assets, like stock earnings and increases in property value, are not taxable – some of America's richest business people have been paying much less than what some say they should to Uncle Sam. While ProPublica has stayed tight-lipped on how, exactly, they obtained these documents illustrating this phenomenon, which they claimed they received in “raw form, with no conditions or conclusions," the information included seemingly passed a reportedly rigorous fact-checking process. "In every instance we were able to check — involving tax filings by more than 50 separate people — the details provided to ProPublica matched the information from other sources," they explained.

 

Have Elites Acquired The Technology To Rule Without The Gentry?

michaelochurch  |   In a society like ours, the upper and lower classes have more in common with each other than either has with the middle class. The upper and lower classes “live like animals”, but for very different reasons. The upper classes are empowered to engage their primal, base urges; the lower classes are pummeled with fear on a daily basis and regress to animalism not out of moral paucity but in order to survive. People in the lower class live lives that are consumed entirely by money, because they lack the means of a dignified life. Those in the upper class, likewise, experience a life dominated by money, because maintaining injustices favorable to oneself is hard work. So, even though the motivations are different (fear at the bottom, greed at the top) the lower and upper classes are united in what the middle class perceives as “crass materialism” and, therefore, have strikingly similar cultures. Their lives are run by that thing called “money” toward which the middle classes pretend– and it is very much pretend– to be ambivalent about. The middle classes are sheltered, until the cultural protection, on which their semi-privileged status depends, runs out.

The “middle-est” of the middle class is the Gentry. Here we’re talking about people who dislike pawnbrokers and stock traders alike, who appear to lead a society from the front while its real owners lead it from the shadows. This said, I have my doubts on the matter of there being one, singular Gentry. I would argue that corporate middle management, the clergy, the political establishments of both major U.S. political parties, TED-talk onanist “thought leaders” and media personalities, and even Instagram “influencers” could all be called Gentries; in no obvious or formal way do these groups have much to do with one another. Only in one thing are they united: by the middle 2010s it became clear that both the Elite (bourgeoisie) and Labor (self-aaware proletariat) were fed up with all these Gentries. Starting around 2013, an anti-Gentry hategasm consumed the United States, and as a member of said (former) Gentry I can’t say we didn’t deserve it.

Technology, I believe, is a major cause of this. Silicon Valley began as a 1970s Gentry paradise; by 2010, it had become a monument to Elite excess, arrogance, and malefaction. Modern technology has given today’s employers an oppressive power the Stasi and KGB only dreamt of. The American Gentry was a PR wing for capitalism when it needed to win hearts and minds; but with today’s technological weaponry, the rich no longer see a need to be well-liked by those they rule.

For a concrete example, compare the “old style” bureaucratic, paperwork corporation of the midcentury and the “new style” technological one, in which workers are tracked, often unawares, down to minutes. The old-style companies were hierarchical and feudalistic but, by giving middle managers the ability to protect their underlings, ran on a certain sense of reciprocated loyalty– a social contract, if you will– that no longer exists. The worker agreed not to undermine, humiliate, or sabotage his manager; the manager, in turn, agreed to represent the worker as an asset to the company even when said worker had a below-average year. All you had to do in the old-style company was be liked (or, at least, not be despised) by your boss. If your boss liked you, you got promoted. If your boss hated you, you got fired. If you were anywhere from about 3.00 to 6.99 on his emotional spectrum, you moved diagonally or laterally, your boss repping you as a 6.75/10 “in search of a better fit” so you moved along quickly and peaceably. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it worked better than what came afterward.

I’ve worked in the software industry long enough to know that software engineers are the most socially clueless people on earth. I’ve often heard them debate “the right” metrics to use to track software productivity. My advice to them is: Always fight metrics. Sabotage the readings, or blackmail a higher-up by catfishing as a 15-year-old girl, or call in a union that’ll drop a pipe on that shit. Always, always, always fight a metric that management wishes to impose on you, because while a metric can hurt you (by flagging you as a low performer) it will never help you. In the old-style company, automated surveillance was impossible and performance was largely inscrutable and only loyalty mattered– your career was based on your boss’s opinion of you. It only took one thing to get a promotion: be liked by your boss. In the new-style company, devised by management consultants and software peddlers with evil intentions, getting a promotion requires you to pass the metrics and be liked by your boss. In the old-style company, you could get fired if your boss really, really hated you. (As I said, if he merely disliked you, he’d rep you as a solid performer “in search of a better fit” so you could transfer peacefully, and you’d get to try again with a new boss.) In the new-style company, you can get fired because your boss hates you or because you fail the metrics. The “user story points” that product managers insist are not an individual performance measure (and absolutely are, by the way) are evidence that only the prosecution may use. This is terrible for workers. There are new ways to fail and get fired; the route to success is constricted by an increase in the number of targets that must be hit. The old-style hierarchical company, at least, had simple rules: be loyal to your boss. Having been a middle manager, I can also say that the new-style company is humiliating for us– we can’t protect our reports. You have to “demand accountability from” people, but you can’t really do anything to help them.

This, I think, gives us a metaphor for the American Gentry’s failure. Middle managers who cannot protect their subordinates from the company’s more evil instincts (such as the instinct to fire everyone and hire replacements 5 percent cheaper) have no reason to expect true loyalty. They become superfluous performance cops and taskmasters, and even if they are personally liked, their roles are justifiably hated (including by those who have to perform them.)

More On The Ruling Elite And Their Narrative,Technology, And Governance Endgame(s)

indiepf |  What I’ve called the Labor, Gentry, and Elite “ladders” can more easily be described as “infrastructures”. For Labor, this infrastructure is largely physical and the relevant connection is knowing how to use that physical device or space, and getting people to trust a person to competently use (without owning, because that’s out of the question for most) these resources. For the Gentry, it’s an “invisible graph” of knowledge and education and “interestingness”, comprised largely of ideas. For the Elite, it’s a tight, exclusive network centered on social connections, power, and dominance. People can be connected to more than one of these infrastructures, but people usually bind more tightly to the one of higher status, except when at the transitional ranks (G4 and E4) which tend to punt people who don’t ascend after some time. The overwhelmingly high likelihood is that a person is aligned most strongly to one and only one of these structures. The values are too conflicting for a person not to pick one horse or the other.

I’ve argued that the ladders connect at a two-rung difference, with L2 ~ G4, L1 ~ G3, G2 ~ E4, and G1 ~ E3. These are “social equivalencies” that don’t involve a change in social status, so they’re the easiest to transitions to make (in both directions). They represent a transfer from one form of capital to another. A skilled laborer (L2) who begins taking night courses (G4) is using time to get an education rather than more money. Likewise, one who moves from the high gentry (G2) to a 90-hour-per-week job in private wealth management (E4) is applying her refined intellectual skills and knowledge to serving the rich, in the hope of making the connections to become one of them.

That said, these ladders often come into conflict. The most relevant one to most of my readers will be the conflict between the Gentry and the Elite. The Gentry tends to be left-libertarian and values creativity, individual autonomy, and free expression. The Elite tends toward center-right authoritarianism and corporate conformity, and it views creativity as dangerous (except when applied to hiding financial risks or justifying illegal wars). The Gentry believes that it is the deserving elite and the face of the future, and that it can use culture to engineer a future in which its values are elite; while the upper tier of the Elite finds the Gentry pretentious, repugnant, self-indulgent, and subversive. The relationship between the Gentry and Elite is incredibly contentious. It’s a cosmic, ubiquitous war between the past and the future.

Between the Gentry and Labor, there is an attitude of distrust. The Elite has been running a divide-and-conquer strategy between these two categories for decades. This works because the Elite understands (and can ape) the culture of the Gentry, but has something in common with Labor that sets the categories apart from the Gentry: a conception of work as a theater for masculine dominance. This is something that the Elite and Labor both believe in– the visceral strength and importance of the alpha-male in high-stakes gambling settings such as most modern work– but that the Gentry would rather deny. Gender is a major part of the Elite’s strategy in turning Labor against the Gentry: make the Gentry look effeminate. That’s why “feminist” is practically a racial slur, despite the world desperately needing attention to women’s political equality, health and well-being (that is, feminism).

The Elite also uses the Underclass in a different process: the Elite wants Labor think the Gentry intends to conspire with the Underclass to dismantle Labor values and elevate these “obviously undeserving” people to, at least, the status of Labor if not promoted above them. They exploit fear in Labor. One might invoke racism and the “Southern strategy” in politics as an example of this, but the racial part is incidental. The Elite don’t care whether it’s blacks or Latinos or “illigals” or red-haired people or homosexuals (most of whom are not part of the Underclass) that are being used to frighten Labor into opposing and disliking the Gentry; they just know that the device works and that it has pretty much always worked.

The relationship between the Gentry and Elite is one of open rivalry, and that between the Gentry and Labor is one of distrust. What about Labor and the Elite? That one is not symmetric. The Elite exploit and despise Labor as a class comprised mostly of “useful idiots”. How does Labor see the Elite? They don’t. The Elite has managed to convince Labor that the Gentry (who are open about their cultural elitism, while the Elite hides its social and economic elitism) is the actual “liberal elite” responsible for Labor’s misery over the past 30 years. In effect, the Elite has constructed an “infinity pool” where the Elite appears to be a hyper-successful extension of Labor, lumping these two disparate ladders into an “us” and placing the Gentry and Underclass into “them”.

The Rich Have Reached The Zenith Of Their Power In NYC

FT  |   The tax fight is a preamble for an upcoming mayoral election that all sides view as one of the most consequential in New York’s history. The Democratic primary, which is expected to crown the eventual winner in a city where seven out of every eight voters are Democrats, is in June. Business leaders and the wealthy have been nursing existential dread at the possibility of what one prominent property developer calls another “ideological” mayor. That is, someone in the mould of the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, who is limited to serving two terms. Two days after winning the 2013 Democratic primary, De Blasio attended a private lunch with the city’s business leaders and promptly alienated many of them. They expected he would solicit their advice and extend a hand. Instead, the mayor reprised his “tale of two cities” campaign rhetoric, and declared that he cared about the other side. “Faces dropped,” one attendee recalls. 

That divide has only deepened in the ensuing years. De Blasio’s legion of executive class critics deride him as a lazy manager who deploys politicised rhetoric to cover for his own incompetence. While the budget has increased by 35 per cent during his tenure, problems like homelessness and public housing have worsened — even before the pandemic. “The city is at a crossroads. This is truly the most important election of our lifetime and in NYC’s history,” Stephen Ross, chair of The Related Companies, and de facto king of the city’s developers, wrote to fellow business leaders last month as he urged them to join his effort to elect a business-friendly mayor. The race’s outcome, Ross wrote, will determine whether “NYC will rebound or languish”. Looming large for executives like Ross is the grim memory of the 1970s, when a fraying city ended up losing half its Fortune 500 companies — many fleeing to surrounding suburbs — and shedding more than 1m inhabitants. That era also birthed a civic movement. It was christened at a breakfast meeting at the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue in 1971 when the developer Lew Rudin and hotelier Robert Tisch hatched what would become the Association for a Better New York, a group of business leaders who aimed to step in where city government was failing. ABNY’s moguls lobbied the federal government on the city’s behalf. They also brought labour leaders into their tent.

 

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."

When Are You Going To Deal With The Fact That Liberal Elites Keep Failing?

theanalysis |  There’s this fascinating moment, Paul, where the word itself, populism, gets flipped and it goes from being a positive thing, you know, the sort of left-wing worker, farmer/worker movement in the 1890s, it goes from that to be a very negative thing to being, something fearful and dreadful. You know, something that’s paranoid and suspicious, and pathological and anti-Semitic. And that moment when that happens is in the 1950s. It’s a really fascinating place where the writing of history intersects, with history itself, with the making of history.

And the man who is probably single-handedly most responsible for this is Richard Hofstadter, the greatest American historian of his day, probably of the 20th century, and aside here. I got a Ph.D. in American history, that’s what I had meant to do with my life when I was young. I was a big admirer of Hofstadter when I was younger and really looked up to him. He’s an elegant writer and an elegant thinker. You know, he brings together these two, these sort of two great functions of a historian, and I thought he was absolutely wonderful. I really looked up to him when I was younger. But now I’m an adult, and I look back at his masterpiece, which is a book that came out in 1955 called, ‘The Age of Reform’, and now as an adult see very clearly what this book is. It was meant as a history of different reform movements in American life. And, you know talking about which ones succeeded and which ones failed. And it was a vicious attack on populism, on the populist movement of the 1890s. But now, as an adult, I can see that it was something else at the same time. It was a manifesto for Hofstadter’s generation, so it was these two things at the same time.

And let’s begin by saying this is the book that really turned the tables on populism and made it into a negative term, a term that you applied to authoritarians and to people like Donald Trump. Hofstetter went back and looked at the original populist movement and said it was, “it was pathological. It was an expression of status anxiety. Farmers were people who were on their way down, and because they were on their way down, they imagined all these scapegoats for their problems, and, you know, they were cranks. They rejected expertise, they were anti-intellectual, and above all, they were anti-Semitic”. And he actually tried to blame anti-Semitism in America, all of it, basically, on populism, which is ridiculous, which is utterly fatuous, but he said that. This book was massively influential, it was a big bestseller. It won the Pulitzer Prize, it has been described as the most influential work of American history ever published. And Hofstadter’s larger idea, as I said, it was a manifesto for his generation and his sociological cohort.

What I mean by that is he said there are two models for reform. One of them is the populist model, a mass movement of working-class people. And that’s how you get reform by bringing together people at the bottom, and he said that doesn’t work. We can see that doesn’t work because populism was a pathological movement that was delusional. They were all hypnotized demagogues, anti-Semitism, scapegoating, et cetera, all of which turned out to be wrong.

But he said there’s another way to do reform, and that other way is to bring highly educated people together and put them in charge of all the different “organs” that go to make up government and society and business and the military. And they will all get together and sit around a big mahogany table in Washington, D.C. and come to an agreement with one another. And that’s how you get things done. And he said this at the very moment, of course, this is how things work in, as we know in the world of ideas. That was, in fact, what was happening. That his generation of intellectuals was coming out of the Ivy League schools, top flight schools and were taking over the corporations. Up until then, corporations had been run by people who inherited them or people who built them, entrepreneurs, that sort of thing. But now they were going to be run by people with MBA’s. people with economics degrees. People with advanced degrees were running the big departments of the government. People with advanced degrees were running the Pentagon. And Hofstadter and his friends, if you think of the other intellectuals of the time, such as Daniel Bell, that’s what they were celebrating. Remember Daniel Bell had a famous book called. ‘The End of Ideology’. You didn’t need ideology or you didn’t need mass movements, you didn’t need millions of people in the streets like you had in the 1890s and the 1930s. You needed people like Daniel Bell, sitting around a big table and making decisions on your behalf. That was the model in the 1950s and Hofstadter’s great book, ‘Attacking Populism’. By great, I mean spectacularly influential book, ‘Attacking Populism’, was a manifesto for that way of understanding the world. You know, The Organization Man, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, you know what I’m talking about. And so this book is hugely influential. All sorts of other intellectuals at the time start copying it. They start writing about populism and the word takes on this life of its own. It becomes a stereotype. Now, here’s what Hofstadter never admitted in his book. His stereotype comes directly from the democracy scare of 1896. Remember, we talked about that in the last episode. All of the elites in American society getting together and denouncing William Jennings Bryan. Hofstadter just basically took that picture that they assembled and said, Yeah, that’s what populism really was. It really was a bunch of crazy farmers who really had no idea what they were doing and were rejecting the consensus expertise of their day.

Real Resistance Is Not To Republican Rule, But To Donor Class Rule, And Devastation By Both Parties...,

downwithtyranny  | 1. Black Activists to Biden: If You Pick Klobuchar, We May Not Support You

On May 23, Politico wrote that "more than a dozen black and Latino strategists and activists warned in interviews that selecting Klobuchar would not help Biden excite black voters — and might have the opposite effect. Klobuchar would “risk losing the very base the Democrats need to win,” said Aimee Allison, founder of She the People, which promotes women of color in politics."

The reason given was two-fold. High in the article, in the first sentence in fact, the writer announced, "Sen. Amy Klobuchar performed abysmally among black voters in the Democratic primary."

Later, in the third paragraph, the writer said that the Black activists "pointed to Klobuchar’s poor performance among nonwhite voters during the presidential primary as well as her record as a prosecutor in Minnesota."

Adrianne Shropshire of the Clinton-connected BlackPAC is quoted in the sixth paragraph as saying, “It [the activists’ concerns about Klobuchar] comes from her performance in the primary,” and Al Sharpton is quoted as offering this explanation: “It is not her [Klobuchar’s] fault, but she is in the middle of an ongoing battle from the last few presidential races.”

The writer herself helpfully adds, "Klobuchar symbolizes a strategic division within the Democratic Party: whether to focus on winning back white, Midwestern voters who flipped to Donald Trump in 2016, or on activating voters of color who were not excited to vote."

But the article is ostensibly about "Black activists" and their rejection of Klobuchar — it says so even the headline — not about Shropshire and Sharpton's ground-cover explanation.

The writer waits until the eleventh paragraph, a place few readers will get to, before she explains the real reason the activists are concerned — namely, that Klobuchar "would risk losing the very base the Democrats need to win" — and to explain the activists' comment "as well as her record as a prosecutor in Minnesota." There the writer references a Washington Post op-ed penned by those same activists, who write:

A choice such as Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), who failed to prosecute controversial police killings and is responsible for the imprisonment of Myon Burrell, will only alienate black voters.

(Read this AP story to see all of what’s wrong with both the Myon Burrell case and Klobuchar’s handling of it.)

Despite all the obfuscation and Klobuchar-protection by Politico, the bottom line is clear: "Black activists" remember Klobuchar's record as a "tough prosecutor" of blacks and are threatening to fail to support her (and thus Biden) in November if Biden picks her for VP — a clear and open threat to his electoral chances.

In other words, progressive black activists are threatening to abandon the Democrat, Trump or no Trump, over this issue.

Broadly This Mirrors My Observations and Experiences With WhistleBlowing

nakedcapitalism |  I have had a lifetime to think about why I acted (unsuccessfully) and so many others do not.

I remember once reading about inner city police corruption which seems to come and go in cycles. The article proposed credibly that 90% of policemen were essentially followers and would follow the existing culture of their institutions. The key to eliminating corruption is in the other 10%. People like me. 

10% will act according to their own perception of right and wrong. 90% will imitate the culture that surrounds them. Those ten percent can be as easily agents for bad as agents for good. I would not make the claim that some of us are intrinsically good or bad. I have made many bad choices in my life, despite appearing to make myself the hero of this story. I could easily see myself as one of the mavericks who turned a police force corrupt.

But even among the 10%, I think I am part of an even smaller group. I think only 1% are fearless enough to buck the dominant culture. When a police force goes bad, 9% are leading the bad behavior, and 1% are trying to reverse it. Similarly, when a police force is good, 9% are leading the good behavior, and 1% are trying to reverse it. Often the key to protecting an institution is crushing people like me by “hammering the nail that is sticking out.”

Throughout my life I have been the rare person trying to change the culture wherever I go. Usually I am unsuccessful. When I am successful, I sometimes do more harm than good. We should be glad there are not more mavericks in the world. It would be anarchy. We should be glad that 90% of people fundamentally work to protect their institutions, even if those institutions are flawed.

Returning to the role of the enabler, let’s talk about Hillary and Jim Jordan. Of course, both people are part of the 90%. Of course, the Secretary of State, and a coach at a major university, have primary responsibility to protect their institutions. Protecting the institution is the very definition of those roles. Despite the significant power that they could have used to thwart evil, doing so would have undermined their primary roles. And like the Tuck Dean in my story, I am not even convinced they had anywhere near enough insight (if any) to have taken credible action.

In my case I may have done some good, even though it did not feel like it at the time. Although the parents I approached vociferously defended my father, I do know that my fathers’ access to him decreased, and had the situation continued there was less likelihood of those parents remaining enablers. I also know that word got back to my father, and although we broke off any further relationship, he had to be aware that people were watching him.

Years later I discovered that there was open communication amongst our family about my fathers’ predation, which surprised me. I always thought it remained a hidden secret. Maybe my actions had something to do with this. The life lesson for me is that speaking out is effective for would-be enablers despite the violent push-back and self-doubt. It sets the tone for everyone else in your system.