Clarity And Wisdom As True Today As It Was 25 Years Ago

Let's Talk About Pretty Privileges...,

glamour  |  GLAMOUR spoke to author and body-positive activist Emily Lauren Dick on the impact of pretty privilege, its' dangers, and why we need to be talking about it.

How does pretty privilege impact us?

“[Pretty people] are perceived to be happier, healthier, more confident, and successful. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy because those perceptions are why attractive people actually become those things. An attractive person is more likely to be confident because of their socially accepted looks, so they present well in interviews and stand out.”

Is pretty privilege dangerous?

“I think that any form of privilege can be dangerous if gone unchecked. The fact that a whole group of people can be treated poorly simply because they don’t look a certain way is extremely harmful to a person’s self-esteem and self-worth. Everyone is worthy of love, respect, and kindness.”

“It’s disappointing that anyone would be treated differently than someone more attractive, but it’s downright irresponsible when companies and marketers are upholding this concept by purposefully using it as a strategy to sell more of their products or services.”

Never afraid to use her voice, Leigh-Anne knows how to call out the BS!

"When companies provide free products to ONLY attractive people (not just high follower accounts) to amplify their brand, they actively exclude people who support them. Marketers must stop indirectly and directly telling their customers that they should be like “pretty people” to get them to buy their products.”

“Beauty and diet businesses have created a multi-billion-dollar industry that is built upon the lie that people need to change how they look to be accepted. It’s irresponsible to continue utilising marketing strategies that purposely leave people out and make them feel bad about themselves.”

What can we do?

“It’s up to all of us to challenge internalised biases about privileged people, especially if we are one of the privileged. We must actively challenge our inner thoughts about how unattractive people are less worthy than attractive people. We must ensure that everyone is on a level playing field, especially when they are not. This is inclusion!"

We must ensure that everyone is on a level playing field, especially when they are not. This is inclusion!"

"How is this possible? Question your beliefs, speak up when someone speaks badly about someone who is considered unattractive, recognise your own privilege, hold public officials accountable, and determine other ways to challenge systems of privilege.”

It's about time we all take some notes.

Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah.., ARE YOU SEXUALLY DESIRABLE - OR NOT!!!

coveteur |  Every so often, I’ll receive the occasional you’re so lucky comment from a fellow trans woman. The sentiment is usually in reference to my body or my looks and their proximity and similarities to that of a cisgender woman. In other words, it’s usually in reference to my ability to “pass” in a cisgender world. At first, that comment, you’re so lucky, made me viscerally uncomfortable. It was easy for me to comprehend how passing privilege is a gateway to survival for many trans people, and while it isn’t a privilege afforded to all of us, words like “lucky” or “easy” left me thinking. Thoughts would race in my mind, a feeling of guilt would weigh on my heart, and I would wonder if my attractiveness or “passability” negates how difficult it is to exist as a trans woman in a cis-normative society. To counter my discomfort, I would often reply to such comments with a self-deprecating joke, as if to minimize the existence of my attractiveness as a privilege. A privilege I did not earn nor work for.

I suppose you can say the word “lucky” had become a sore spot for a while. Uncomfortable with looking at the ways in which I benefit from my looks, I was adamant to prove how I wasn’t lucky. After all, at the end of the day, I will always be transgender and that comes with its own prejudice and discrimination, right? To acknowledge the unearned advantages of physical attractiveness felt as if it would undermine everything I had to overcome to get to where I am. I mean, how lucky could I actually be?

In my search to validate how I was feeling, I stumbled across the opposite: Pretty privilege.

Pretty privilege is the concept that pretty people benefit in life from being perceived as beautiful. Studies have shown that pretty people will more than likely receive higher earnings or better grades. But what is beautiful? Like the saying beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, what we find attractive is often thought to be subjective. However, society inherently bases value on certain attributes over others. Those attributes are often based on whiteness, able bodiedness, leanness, straightness, and cisness, to mention just a few. Pretty privilege is much like how being white or being male provides people with unearned advantages in society.

Pretty privilege benefits and hurts all types of people, both cis and trans, across all races and sexualities. The intersectionality of our existence must be addressed when speaking to the topic. Kelsey Yonce refers to intersectionality perfectly in their 2014 thesis, “Attractiveness Privilege: the unearned advantages of physical attractiveness.” Yonce states “intersectionality refers to the idea that different areas of privilege and oppression do not exist in isolation from one another; instead, they overlap and interact with each other in ways that create unique experiences of privilege and oppression for each individual.” For example, the privilege and oppression experienced by a trans woman of color will look very different from the privilege and oppression experienced by a white trans woman, despite both experiencing the stigmatization and oppression of being transgender because of the inherent societal hierarchy towards race.

When speaking to pretty privilege in the context of cisness, it could be argued that the barrier for entry to such a privilege is more difficult for a transgender person because that hurdle is our very sex assigned at birth, my “maleness.” It’s the belief that in order to achieve such a standing in society it would require a distancing from, squandering of, and rejection of our transness as a whole. This reinforces the false reality that in society, a transition is deemed “successful” only when one is conventionally beautiful by cisgender standards. When in actuality we all know the real value a transition can bring to one’s life is more than mere aesthetics or looks, but rather living more fully and freely. Suddenly, it began to feel like not addressing my own pretty privilege head-on would be disadvantageous to what my mission is, and that's to uplift and advocate for all transwomen.

Having defined it, it has become shockingly easy to see how I benefit from such a privilege. In hindsight, pretty privilege in the context of cisness wasn’t something I was always presented with and might be why it has felt so obvious. I haven’t always existed in the world looking like this. While I can acknowledge how I’ve always benefitted from certain privileges like whiteness, able bodiedness, and leanness, benefitting from my “cisness” was a very foreign thing for me. I started my transition 21 months ago, and only two years ago started hormone replacement therapy, followed by a recent facial feminization surgery. As my body and features began to change and become more cis-passing, I had started to witness peoples’ treatment of me change—it was almost as if one day people saw me differently, they started smiling at me as they walked by, doors were held open, and drinks were being bought for me from those who simply wanted my attention. These are only a few small examples, but at first it all seemed unnatural and uncomfortable because my experience in the world had been different for nearly 30 years. The exact moment where it changed is hard to pinpoint, but looking at my transition in its totality, it’s jarring and impossible for me to not see the difference. It is now my responsibility to swallow my guilt and acknowledge that such experiences are not afforded to everyone and I have benefitted from the unearned privilege of assimilating into a cisgender society because of my pretty privilege. This has, in fact, made my transition easier than most but not without its own challenges.

 

On Friday SecDef Lloyd Austin Called Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu

Barrons |  The US and Russian defense chiefs spoke Friday for the first time in months but Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he saw no interest from Moscow for broader talks to end the Ukraine war.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin "emphasized the importance of maintaining lines of communication amid the ongoing war against Ukraine" during the call with his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu, said a US spokesman, Brigadier General Pat Ryder.

Russia's defense ministry confirmed the call and said the two discussed Ukraine without further details.

The defense chiefs last spoke on May 13 when Austin urged Moscow to implement an "immediate ceasefire" in Ukraine.

Russia did not do so, and Kyiv's forces have since regained swathes of territory from Moscow's troops in the east and south of the country with the United States and other Western powers sending in billions of dollars in weapons.

Austin separately spoke with his Ukrainian counterpart Oleksiy Reznikov "to reiterate the unwavering US commitment to supporting Ukraine's ability to counter Russia's aggression," Ryder said.

Blinken said the United States would keep contacts with Russia but said that any broader diplomacy depended on President Vladimir Putin showing an interest "in stopping the aggression."

"We have seen no evidence of that in this moment. On the contrary, we see Russia doubling and tripling down on its aggression," Blinken told a joint news conference with French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna.

Blinken pointed to Russia's recent attacks on power stations and other civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and the mobilization of troops who Blinken called "horrifically, cannon fodder that Putin is trying to throw into the war."

"The fundamental difference is that Ukrainians are fighting for their country, their land, their future. Russia is not and the sooner President Putin understands that and comes to that conclusion, the sooner we will be able to end this war," Blinken said.

 

Andrei Martyanov: Now We Turn Our Attention To A Serious Russian

americanaffairsjournal  |  The book really comes into its own in the long sections on the American economy. These chapters seem especially prescient after Western sanc­tions against Russia failed to stop the invasion or decisively cripple the Russian economy, while causing increasing strains in the West. In a word, Martyanov views American prosperity as largely fake, a shiny wrapping distracting from an increasingly hollow interior.

Martyanov, reflecting his Soviet materialist education, starts by discussing the food supply. He recalls the limited food options available in the old Soviet Union and how impressed émigrés were by the “over­flowing abundance” of the American convenience store. But Martyanov notes that today such abundance is only the preserve of the rich and powerful. He references a 2020 study by the Brookings Institution which found that “40.9 percent of mothers with children ages 12 and under reported household food insecurity since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.” And while some of this was driven by the pandemic, the number was 15.1 percent in 2018. Martyanov makes the case that these numbers reflect an economy that is poorly organized and teetering on the edge. In the summer of 2022, when the food component of the CPI is increasing at over 10 percent a year and rising fast, Martyanov’s chapter looks prophetic.

Martyanov then moves on to other consumer goods. He recalls the so-called kitchen debate in 1959 when Vice President Richard Nixon showed Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev a modern American kitchen. During this debate, Nixon explained to Khrushchev that the house they were in, with all its modern luxuries, could be bought by “any steel worker.” Nixon explained that the average American steel worker earned about $3 an hour—or $480 per month—and that the house could be obtained on a thirty-year mortgage for the cost of $100 a month. Martyanov points out that this is impossible in the contemporary American economy. As vital goods have become less and less affordable for the average American, debt of all types has exploded. He notes that the flip side of this growing debt has been a decline in domestic indus­trial production, which has been stagnant in nominal terms and falling as a percent of U.S. GDP since 2008. “The scale of this catastrophe is not understood,” he writes, “until one considers the fact that a single manufacturing job on average generates 3.4 employees elsewhere in non-manufacturing sectors.”

Needless to say, Martyanov does not believe that America has the most powerful economy on earth. Deploying his old school materialist toolkit, he surveys core heavy industries—including the automotive industry, the commercial shipbuilding industry, and later the aerospace industry—and finds U.S. capacity wanting. He points out that in steel production “China outproduces the United States by a factor of 11, while Russia, which has a population less than half the size of that of the United States, produces around 81% of US steel output.”

Martyanov is particularly critical of GDP metrics as a basis for determining the wealth of a country or the power of its economy, because they assign spending on services the same weight as spending on primary products and manufactured goods. He believes that the postindustrial economy is a “figment of the imagination of Wall Street financial strategists” and that GDP metrics merely provide America with a fig leaf to cover its economic weaknesses. In a separate podcast that Martyanov posted to his YouTube channel, he explains why these metrics are particularly misleading from the point of view of military production. He compares the U.S. Navy’s Virginia-class fast-attack sub­marine and the Russian Yasen-class equivalent. He argues that these are comparable in terms of their platform capabilities, but that the Yasen-class has superior armaments. Crucially, however, he notes that the cost of a Virginia-class submarine is around $3.2 billion while the cost of the Yasen-class submarine is only around $1 billion. Since GDP measures quantify economic output (including military output) in dollar terms, it would appear that, when it comes to submarine output, Russia is pro­ducing less than a third of what it is actually producing. Using a purchasing-power-parity-adjusted measure might help somewhat here, but it would still not capture the extra bang for their buck that the Russians are getting.

A few years ago, it would have been fashionable to dismiss this sort of materialist analysis as old fashioned. Pundits argued that the growing weight of the service sector in the American economy was a good thing, not a bad thing, a sign of progress, not decline. But today, with supply chains collapsing and inflation raging, these fashionable arguments look more and more like self-serving bromides every day.

Next, Martyanov looks at energy. While many American pundits believed that the emergence of fracking technology would make Russian oil and gas less and less important, Martyanov views the shale oil boom as “a story of technology winning over common economic sense.” He believes that America’s shale boom was a speculative mania driven by vague promises and cheap credit. He quotes the financial analyst David Deckelbaum, who noted that “This is an industry that for every dollar that they brought in, they would spend two.” Ultimately, Martyanov argues, the U.S. shale industry is a paper tiger whose viability is heavily dependent on high oil prices.

Martyanov is even more critical of “green energy,” which he views as a self-destructive set of policies that will destroy the energy independence of all countries that pursue them. He also points out that China, Russia, and most non-Western nations know this and, despite lip service to fashionable green causes, avoid these policies.

Finally, Martyanov returns to the collapse of America’s ability to make things. He recites the now familiar numbers about falling manu­facturing output and an increased reliance on imports from abroad. But he also points to the collapse in manufacturing expertise. Martyanov cites statistics showing that, on a per capita basis, Russia produces twice as many STEM graduates as America. He attributes this to a change in elite attitudes. STEM subjects are difficult and require serious intellectual exertion. They often yield jobs on factory floors that are not particularly glamorous. “In contemporary American culture domi­nated by poor taste and low quality ideological, agenda-driven art and entertainment, being a fashion designer or a disc jockey or a psychologist is by far a more attractive career goal,” he writes, “especially for America’s urban and college population, than foreseeing oneself on the manufacturing floor working as a CNC operator or mechanic on the assembly line.”

Rotting from the Head Down

Martyanov’s economic analysis may reflect his Soviet materialist education, but ultimately, he views America’s core problem as being a crisis of leadership. He traces this problem back to the election of Bill Clinton in 1993. Martyanov argues that Clinton represented a new type of American leader: an extreme meritocrat. These new meritocrats believed their personal capacities gave them the ability to do anything imaginable. This megalomaniacal tendency, Martyanov observes, has been latent in the American project since the founding. “Everything American,” he writes, “must be the largest, the fastest, the most efficient or, in general, simply the best.” Yet this character trait has not dominated the personality of either the American people or their leaders, he says. Rather, the Ameri­can people remain today “very nice folks” that “are generally patriotic and have common sense and a good sense of humour.” Yet in recent times, he argues, something has happened in American elite circles that has let the more grandiose and delusional side of the American psyche run amok, and this has happened at the very time when America is most in need of good leadership.

Martyanov believes that America’s extreme meritocrats vastly over­estimate their capabilities. This is because, rather than focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of the country they rule, they have been taught since birth to focus on themselves. They believe that they just need to maximize their own personal accomplishments and the good of the country will emerge as if by magic. This has led inevitably to the rise of what Martyanov characterizes as a classic oligarchy. Such an oligarchy, he argues, purports to be meritocratic but is actually the opposite. A proper meritocracy allows the best and the brightest to climb up its ranks. But an oligarchy with a meritocratic veneer simply allows those who best play the game to rise. Thus, the meritocratic claims become circular: you climb the ladder because you play the game; the game is meritocratic because those who play it are by definition the best and the brightest. Effectively, for Martyanov, the American elite does not select for intelligence and wisdom, but rather for self-assured­ness and self-interestedness.

Adm. Mullen: "Time To Stop Talking Shit And Sit Down At The Table Like Sane Adults"

(Trigger warning for neocons) Fmr. Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Mike Mullen says he's "a little concerned about the language" from Biden on nuclear war & says the US should "do everything we possibly can to try to get to the table" to negotiate with Russia. pic.twitter.com/3FFrXAufO2

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) October 10, 2022

abcnewsgo  |   President Joe Biden’s warning last week that Vladimir Putin was "not joking" about possibly using nuclear weapons was "concerning" and counterproductive to bringing an end to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, retired Adm. Mike Mullen said Sunday.

Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, was asked in an interview on ABC's "This Week" to assess the nuclear risk from Russia after Putin said he would use "all available means" to protect what he called his country's territorial integrity.

“President Biden's language -- we're about at the top of the language scale, if you will. And I think we need to back off that a little bit and do everything we possibly can to try to get to the table to resolve this thing,” Mullen told "This Week" co-anchor Martha Raddatz.

Mullen was referring to what Biden said on Thursday when he warned that for the "first time since the Cuban missile crisis, we have the direct threat of the use of a nuclear weapon if in fact things continue down the path that they are going."

“I don't think there's any such thing as the ability to easily [use] a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon," Biden said then.

The White House has since clarified that the president was not acting on new intelligence of looming danger but was trying to underline the stakes given the current conflict in Ukraine, where Ukrainian forces have recaptured ground in the country's contested eastern and southern regions and have pushed back Russian troops.

On "This Week," Raddatz pressed Mullen on his proposed resolution: “How do you see him [Putin] saving face if he doesn't come to the table? If Ukraine can't figure anything out?”

Diplomacy and international pressure on both Ukraine and Russia would ultimately be key, Mullen argued.

“It's got to end and usually there are negotiations associated with that,” he said. “The sooner the better, as far as I'm concerned.”

 

The American People Want No Part Of The Blob's Failed War On Russia

 

businessinsider | A new poll suggests that many Americans are growing weary as the US government continues its support of Ukraine in its war with Russia and want to see diplomatic efforts to end the war if aid is to continue. 

According to a poll conducted by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Data for Progress, 57% of likely voters strongly or somewhat support the US pursuing diplomatic negotiations as soon as possible to end the war in Ukraine, even if it requires Ukraine making compromises with Russia. Just 32% of respondents were strongly or somewhat opposed to this.

And nearly half of the respondents (47%) said they only support the continuation of US military aid to Ukraine if the US is involved in ongoing diplomacy to end the war, while 41% said they support the continuation of US military aid to Ukraine whether the US is involved in ongoing diplomacy or not.

The Biden administration and Congress need to do more diplomatically to help end the war, according to 49% of likely voters, while 37% said they have done enough in this regard, the poll showed.

"Americans recognize what many in Washington don't: Russia's war in Ukraine is more likely to end at the negotiating table than on the battlefield. And there is a brewing skepticism of Washington's approach to this war, which has been heavy on tough talk and military aid, but light on diplomatic strategy and engagement," said Trita Parsi, executive vice president at the Quincy Institute. 

"'As long as it takes' isn't a strategy, it's a recipe for years of disastrous and destructive war — conflict that will likely bring us no closer to the goal of securing a prosperous, independent Ukraine. US leaders need to show their work: explain to the American people how you plan to use your considerable diplomatic leverage to bring this war to an end," Parsi added.

The poll found close to half of likely US voters (48%) somewhat or strongly oppose the US providing aid to Ukraine at current levels if long-term global economic hardship, including in the US, occurs. Meanwhile, the poll showed that only four-in-10 Americans somewhat or strongly support the US providing aid to Ukraine at current levels if this occurs. 

The poll also found 58% of Americans somewhat somewhat or strongly oppose the US providing aid to Ukraine at current levels if there are higher gas prices and a higher cost of goods in the US, while just 33% somewhat or strongly support continuing aid if this occurs. 

A majority of poll respondents (57%) also said that they think the Russia-Ukraine war will end with a negotiated peace settlement between the two countries, while 61% said they believe the war has impacted them financially on some level.

President Joe Biden has warned that US sanctions on Russia could hurt the US economy, but he has maintained that supporting and defending Ukraine is worth the cost. He's framed the war as a battle between democracy and autocracy.

"Every day, Ukrainians pay with their lives, and they fight along — and the atrocities that the Russians are engaging in are just beyond the pale. And the cost of the fight is not cheap, but caving to aggression is even more costly," Biden said in May. "That's why we're staying in this."

The US has provided over $15 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia launched its unprovoked war in late February. The Ukrainian armed forces have received numerous weapons packages from the US and other partner nations, packages that have included anti-tank missiles, air-defense systems, and long-range rocket artillery that have allowed Ukrainian troops to not only halt Russian advances but even drive Russian forces back.

While Western support has aided Ukraine's war efforts, recent data indicates there are growing concerns about what further support without diplomacy and a continuation of this brutal conflict could mean not just for Russia and Ukraine, but for other countries as well.

"Policymakers are far too sanguine about the risks posed by an indefinite continuation of this war, even minimizing the dangers posed by Vladimir Putin's nuclear threats," said Marcus Stanley, advocacy director at the Quincy Institute.

"Americans largely agree that efforts to strengthen Ukraine's hand on the battlefield need to be accompanied by efforts to secure lasting peace at the negotiating table. However, as Congress approaches another vote to approve military aid to Ukraine this week, there's no sign Washington is exploring opportunities to seek a settlement that preserves and protects Ukraine's independence."

Probable Cause Of Trump's Predicament

Politico  |  “Part of the MAGA movement is kind of a ‘fuck you’ to the government bureaucracy, which you can interpret as the Deep State,” said one former Trump staffer. “People were really dissatisfied with the transition and the outcome of the election. This is the last piece of control that they had [while] in power.”

The weeks after the November elections were among the more chaotic for a Trump White House that had been defined by chaos. The West Wing was left reeling by Trump’s loss to Joe Biden, and the president’s refusal to concede largely froze the transition process in place.

Some aides recalled that staff secretary Derek Lyons attempted to maintain a semblance of order in the West Wing despite the election uncertainty. But he departed the administration in late December, leaving the task of preserving the needed records for the National Archives to others. The two men atop the office hierarchy — then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Trump — took little interest in it, aides and advisers recalled. Meanwhile, responsibility for overseeing the pack up of the outer Oval and dining room, an area where Trump liked to work when not in the Oval Office, was left to Trump’s assistants, Molly Michael and Nick Luna, according to multiple former aides.

Trump, Eggleston surmised, was a victim of his own political impulses. “[H]e denied being defeated so they didn’t really engage in a transition process because he refused to let it happen,” he said. “So that meant that they were in a fairly frantic situation as the inauguration day came.”

For outgoing White Houses, there is typically a debriefing process about classified documents, and then a procedure to turn over government phones and computers. But for many of the last Trump holdouts, that process came after the Capitol riot, a stunning day of violence which triggered heightened security throughout Washington. The security obstacles erected around the White House, aides recalled, created more logistical hurdles for an already exhausted and hollowed-out staff.

Sloppiness ensued in many departments. Many staffers seemed more interested in securing copies of “jumbos” — the giant photos that adorned the West Wing’s walls — than sorting and packing up their files. Those who stayed focused on juggling the operational demands of running a country with the political whims of a president who, until just days before, was trying to cling to power.

There was, simply, not much care for protocol.

“Compared to previous administrations of both parties,” conceded a person familiar with the process, “there was less of a willingness to adhere to the Presidential Records Act.”

 

Nice, Plain English Synopsis Of The Present World Situation

thesaker  |  There have been many explanations for what is going on and the most common is the fight between two possible futures; a multipolar world where there are several power centers in the world, and a unipolar world where the West governs the world. This is correct as far as it goes, but there is another reason which explains why this is happening now and all the urgency and panic in the West.

Recently the New Zealand tech guru Kim Dotcom tweeted a thread about the debt situation in the US. According to him all debt and unfunded liabilities of the US exceed the total value of the entire country, including the land. This situation is not unique to the US. Most countries in the West have debt that can only be paid back by selling the entire country and everything it contains. On top of that, most non-western countries are buried in dollar-denominated debt and are practically owned by the same financiers who own the West.

During the last few decades, the economy of the US and Europe has been falsified on a level that is difficult to believe. We in the West have been living far beyond our means and our currencies have been massively overvalued. We have been able to do this through two mechanisms:

1. The first one is the reserve status of the dollar and the semi-reserve status of the euro which have enabled the West to export digital money and receive goods in return. This has created enormous financial power for the West and enabled it to function as a parasite on the world economy. We have been getting a lot of goods for free, to put it mildly.
2. The second falsification mechanism is the increase in debt to a level where we have essentially pawned everything we own, including our houses and lands, to keep up our living standards. We own nothing now when the debt has been subtracted. The debt has long since become unserviceable – far beyond our ability to pay interests on – which explains why the interest rates in the West are in the neighborhood of zero. Any increase would make the debt unserviceable and we would all go formally bankrupt in a day.

On top of all this, the falsification has created artificially strong currencies in the West which has boosted their purchasing power for goods priced in non-western currencies. These mechanisms have also enabled the West to run bloated and dysfunctional service economies where inefficiencies are beyond belief. We have giant groups of people in our economies that not only create no value but destroy value systematically. What maintains the West’s standard of living now is a small minority of productive people, constant debt increase, and parasitism of the rest of the world.

The people who own all this debt actually own everything we think we own. We in the West own nothing at this point – we only think we do. But who are our real owners? We know more or less who they are because they meet every year at the World Economic Forum in Davos along with the western political elites who they also happen to own.

It is clear that our owners have been getting increasingly worried, and their worries have been increasing in sync with the increased pressure applied by the West on the rest of the world, particularly the Independents. During the last Davos meeting, the mood was bleak and panicked at the same time, much like the panic among the western political elites when the isolation of Russia failed.

What is about to happen

The panic of our owners and their politicians is understandable because we have come to the end of the line. We can no longer keep up our living standards by debt increase and parasitism. The debt is reaching beyond what we own as collateral and our currencies are about to become worthless. We will no longer be able to get free stuff from the rest of the world, or pay back our debt – let alone pay interest on it. The entire West is about to go bankrupt and our standard of living is about to go down by a massive percentage. This is what has our owners panicked and they see only two scenarios:

1. In the first scenario most countries in the West, and everything and everyone within them, declare bankruptcy and erase the debt by diktat – which sovereign states are able to do. This will also erase the wealth and political power of our owners.
2. In the second scenario, our owners take over the collateral during the bankruptcy. The collateral is us and everything we own.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out which scenario was chosen. The plan for the second scenario is ready and being implemented as we speak. It is called ‘The Great Reset’ and was constructed by the people behind the World Economic Forum. This plan is not a secret and can be examined to a certain degree on the WEF website.

The Great Reset is a mechanism for the seizing of all debt collateral which includes your assets, the assets of your city or municipality, the assets of your state, and most corporate assets not already held by our owners.  Fist tap Dale.

Marjorie Taylor Green Channeling Gil Scott-Heron REALLY Brings Home The Terror Of Our Situation

 

Four Hundred Pound Plus Preachers In Purple Support The Ukraine War Machine

BAR  |   On April 4, 1967 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave one of the most significant speeches of his career. In “Beyond Vietnam - Time to Break Silence ” King declared his unequivocal opposition to the war in Vietnam. His very public break with Lyndon Johnson was greeted with derision, including from his own allies, who believed that the president was an ally who should not be attacked. The NAACP board passed a resolution calling King’s statement a “serious tactical mistake” that would neither “serve the cause of civil rights nor of peace.” The media joined in the condemnation, with the New York Times characterizing his comments as “facile” and “slander.” Even Black newspapers such as The Pittsburgh Courier judged his remarks to be “tragically misleading.”

It is important to remember this speech in which he declared that the United States was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” There are individuals and organizations who routinely claim King’s mantle until they fall prey to the war propaganda promoted by the present day purveyors of violence.

The Rev. Dr. William Barber is sadly one such person. In an April 30, 2022 email on the subject Moral Clarity About Our Own Atrocities he made many specious arguments on the issue of war as it pertains to U.S. policy in Ukraine.

“To see the butchery at Bucha or the massacre at Mariupol and do nothing would be to forfeit any claim to moral authority. We know this instinctively. It is why, despite the political gridlock on Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats have acted swiftly to approve historic military aid to Ukraine. In the face of such a moral imperative, it would be anathema for either party to ask, “How are we going to pay for it?”

There is no independent investigation of what the Biden administration and corporate media label as “massacres.” No one who claims to act in the interests of humanity should praise the historic levels of military aid to Ukraine, an oligarchic kleptocracy under U.S. control which depends upon military and police support from openly neo-Nazi formations. So blatant are the connections that in past years members of congress have moved to ensure that these groups are denied U.S. aid .

Furthermore, Rev. Barber ought to know that questions of funding for domestic needs must always be raised. Joe Biden is requesting $33 billion in aid to Ukraine, which means money for the military industrial complex, after ending stimulus payments and other support for struggling people in this country. Barber opens his email with the story of a woman who lost children in her care to a child welfare agency after the termination of the child tax credit program plunged her into poverty. It is disturbing to see Barber’s attempt to have it both ways, demanding help for the poor while also supporting the system that keeps them in their condition.

The child tax credit which kept families afloat disappeared, along with enhanced unemployment benefits, anti-eviction protection, and free covid related treatments to the uninsured. The much vaunted Build Back Better bill is dead and Biden seems uninterested in resurrecting it. It is reasonable to ask the Biden administration for a monetary accounting  and for an explanation of how their actions led to a humanitarian disaster for the Ukrainian people, mass theft from Americans’ public resources, and a risk of hot war with the Russian Federation.

Barber and the Poor People’s Campaign are preparing for a  Poor People’s and Low-Wage Workers Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls taking place on June 18, 2022. His ill conceived email was meant to bring attention to this event but instead he brought attention to the deep connections that liberal politics has with right wing forces. Barber is not alone in his capitulation as members of congress who claim to be progressive march in lock step with imperialism and austerity which create suffering in this country and around the world.

AMLO Mad About $Billions Squandered In Ukraine

abcnews |  Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador started a five-day tour to four Central American countries and Cuba on Thursday by lashing out at the U.S. government.

López Obrador criticized American officials sharply for being quick to send billions to Ukraine, while dragging their feet on development aid to Central America.

On his first stop in neighboring Guatemala, López Obrador demanded U.S. aid to stem the poverty and joblessness that sends tens of thousands of Guatemalans north to the U.S. border. The Mexican leader had been angered that the United States rebuffed his calls to help expand his tree-planting program to Central America.

“They are different things and they shouldn't be compared categorically, but they have already approved $30 billion for the war in Ukraine, while we have been waiting since President Donald Trump, asking they donate $4 billion, and as of today, nothing, absolutely nothing,” López Obrador said.

“Honestly, it seems inexplicable,” he added. “For our part, we are going to continue to respectfully insist on the need for the United States to collaborate.”

López Obrador's pet program, known as “Planting Life,” pays farmers a monthly wage to plant and care for fruit and lumber trees on their farms.

Mexico has asked the U.S. government to help fund the program, something that so far hasn’t happened. Mexico is also touting another program that apprentices young people to companies. Critics say both programs lack accountability.

Mexican Foreign Relations Secretary Marcelo Ebrard wrote in his social media accounts that meetings with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei and other officials focused on development, migration and strengthening bilateral ties.

Ebrard said Mexico was starting the tree program in the Guatemalan province of Chimaltenango.

It is only be the third overseas trip in more than three years for López Obrador, who is fond of saying that the best foreign policy is good domestic policy. The tour is an opportunity for Mexico to reassert itself as a leader in Latin America and will be welcomed by some leaders under pressure from the U.S. government and others for their alleged anti-democratic tendencies.

If It Makes You Sick And Kills You - You May Want To Reconsider Making It Your Identity

rnz  | Days before her death a fat studies conference chaired by academic Dr Cat Pausé was parodied by American conservative figure Steven Crowder.

In a YouTube video watched more than a million times, Crowder pours scorn on Pausé's work and her field of study.

Pausé, who died aged 42 of medical causes 10 days ago, was a fat studies scholar at Massey University in Palmerston North.

Her research and activism attracted controversy and sometimes vitriol.

Shortly before she died Crowder, an American comedian, actor and former Fox News commentator, posted a video to his YouTube page where he, in his words, infiltrates a 2020 fat studies conference hosted by Massey.

Posing as a gender-queer scholar and fat pride activist with a made-up name, Crowder wrote a bogus paper and was accepted to the conference, held online, as a speaker.

A presentation about the paper included false stories of sexual assault.

At the end of his video, Crowder said being accepted without question showed the idiocy of the field.

Comments below the video on YouTube are heavily critical of Cat Pausé and that has continued after news of her death.

Pausé's friend and former Tertiary Education Union Massey representative Heather Warren is not surprised.

"A lot of Cat's research is around how fat bodies and fat people are dehumanised in our society, and the comments online further go to validate that even in death fat people are dehumanised by society and discriminated against by our society."

Warren said her Twitter post about her friend's death attracted only supportive comments, but that was not the case when public figures such as MP Deborah Russell and microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles posted to the platform.

Warren and Pausé had held discussions with Massey about how institutions could better protect academics from online abuse.

It was an issue institutions had to grapple with, because they encouraged academics to use social media to promote their research, yet had social media policies focusing on the conduct of their staff.

 

The Week The Trans Spell Was Broken

unherd |  Not very long ago, the fear of being denounced as a transphobe meant that doubts about extreme gender ideology were confined to private WhatsApp groups and quiet conversations among friends. This is very much no longer the case. Two weeks ago, the Times’s chief sports writer, Matt Dickinson, wrote on Twitter, “Are we really talking about fairness in sport in the transgender debate – or fear and prejudice?”

“Fairness” replied hundreds of women, including some from his own paper. The only replies agreeing with Dickinson were from other male sports writers, insisting that the way the trans women athletes had been treated was “horrendous and disgusting” (John Cross, Daily Mirror ) and “awful” (Martyn Ziegler, The Times) It’s sweet how males always stick together, isn’t it?

Gender ideologues complain that this shift in public tolerance is merely a conservative backlash against trans rights, but they are wrong. What we are seeing is the inevitable result of trans activists – and, most of all, Stonewall – pushing far beyond civil rights for trans people and insisting instead on unpopular and unworkable policies, such as trans women in sport, child transition and any open acknowledgement of female biology.

This third issue caused the Labour Party to have one of its regular internal breakdowns, as its politicians – and leader – became unable to answer the question, what is a woman? And not only could they not answer the question, they couldn’t think of a way to not answer the question, hemming and hawing about it being a “gotcha” question. Yes, it is, interviewers replied, and what we’re trying to get is an answer that a three-year old could provide. Last month, Angela Rayner came up with a solution: “I think we should be taking it off social media and taking it away from commentators,” she intoned solemnly. Ah yes, censorship from the left. That always plays so well! Oddly, only a month earlier Rayner had been loudly insisting that the next leader of the Labour party will be a woman. Presumably that kind of woman-chat is permitted by Rayner, just not what a woman actually is.

The Tories have certainly not been spared from all this. On 30 March, at 2:48am, the Tory MP Jamie Wallis posted on Twitter to say that he’d been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and would like to be trans. Suddenly, his long history of dodginess – from running companies that attracted more than 800 complaints, to being affiliated with a sugar daddy website, to fleeing the site of a car crash – was instantly forgotten and his honesty and courage were trumpeted to parliament’s rafters by, among others, the Prime Minister. It was strikingly reminiscent of that time, in 2015, when Glamour magazine named Caitlyn Jenner Woman of the Year, two months after she was involved in a car accident in which a woman, Kim Howe, died. The district attorney ruled there wasn’t enough evidence to convict Jenner, but Glamour decided they had all the evidence they needed to cite her as the year’s best woman. At least Caitlyn bothered to make an effort: in the sobering light of day, Wallis tweeted, “I remain the same person I was yesterday, and so will continue to use he/him/his pronouns.” So no change at all, then, other than the identity of being trans. Or wanting to be, anyway.

 

Dudes Out'Chere Getting Knocked Up Like Hotcakes - So - Pregnant PEOPLE Not Pregnant Women

WaPo  | Pregnant people who are vaccinated against the coronavirus are nearly twice as likely to get covid-19 as those who are not pregnant, according to a new study that offers the broadest evidence to date of the odds of infections among vaccinated patients with different medical circumstances.

The analysis, based on medical records of nearly 14 million U.S. patients since coronavirus immunization became available, found that pregnant people who are vaccinated have the greatest risk of developing covid among a dozen medical states, including being an organ transplant recipient and having cancer.

The findings come on top of research showing that people who are pregnant or gave birth recently and became infected are especially prone to getting seriously ill from covid-19. And covid has been found to increase the risk of pregnancy complications, such as premature births.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been urging people to get coronavirus shots before or during pregnancy, seeking to dispel fear — widespread in some communities, without scientific basis — that those vaccinations could be harmful. As of March, nearly 70 percent of people who were pregnant had been vaccinated before or during their pregnancy, according to federal data, though disparities persist among racial and ethnic groups.

The new study goes beyond what has previously been understood, suggesting that even pregnant people who are fully vaccinated tend to have less protection from the virus than many other patients with significant medical problems.

“If you are fully vaccinated, that’s magnificent,” said a lead author of the study, David R. Little, a physician who is a researcher at Epic, a Wisconsin company that maintains electronic patient records for nearly 1,000 hospitals and more than 20,000 clinics across the country. “But if you are fully vaccinated and become pregnant, you remain at higher risk of acquiring covid.”

Little said the findings buttress CDC recommendations that additional precautions against the virus should be taken during pregnancy, such as wearing masks and maintaining safe distances. He said the study also suggests that health-care workers should “be on the lookout” for symptoms and encourage testing to detect the virus early, when it is easier to treat.

The data also raises scientific questions that warrant further research into how best to protect pregnant individuals and their babies from infection, according to public health leaders and specialists in pregnancy.

Ukraine And The American Negroe

"Putin's not posing apartheid for Ukrainians. There's not going to be a big land grab like we just kind of gave the Palestinians' land to Israel and now support Israel in securing that land and growing and securing that land. No, it's not like that. These are Ukrainians and they're going to be Ukrainians/Russians at the end of this, too. "There's no ethnic difference, there's no big religious difference. We don't have to worry about concentration camps and apartheid because there's no real difference (ethnically or racially), and this is a real empire, which means that Russia's not going to take anything except they're going to just redirect where they pay their taxes. And so this idea that there's a human rights violation going on in Ukraine . . . well, no, there's a political rights violation going on, but political rights are fickle things, which means that you might not be a sovereign nation if you're right next to Russia. "One of the conditions of sovereignty is not being next to a bigger power that wants to eat you. So like you don't get to be a sovereign nation (in that case). For example, when the Civil War happened and South Carolina wanted to fight against Mr. Lincoln's army, I'm glad that the rest of the nation didn't come in and save South Carolina. There was a human rights violation because one of the reasons they were fighting was to enslave black people, but the conditions in sovereignty in real life are really, actually kind of tricky. And part of it means being able to defend your borders. And I don't want to be stuck in a forever war in Ukraine if it can't defend its borders, and they are Russian. "So there's no reason to believe that there are going to be mass human rights abuses after the Ukraine's taken over. Because it'll be like what they're doing in Chernobyl. "So right now in Chernobyl there's a big worry that like, 'Oh, no. If the Russians bomb Chernobyl then it could be the case that there's a nuclear fallout and there's going to be all this delays and all that stuff.' What they did was the Russians took over Chernobyl and then put the Ukrainian engineers back to work, so like, nothing changed except who the boss is, right? " . . . you saw a little bit of this before 2008 where in the U.S. you talked to people - every now and then they'd get a letter in the mail saying that they used to pay their mortgage to this bank, but now they pay their mortgage to this bank. There's the same mortgage, just to a different bank. That's kind of what, for most of the Ukrainian people, that's going to be their life under Russia. "And that's non-ideal, but it's not something you go to war and threaten world extinction over, right? It's one of the facts of having nation states with asymmetrical power and no world government. To protect borders as is. " . . . from time to time there are going to be skirmishes, and the bigger power is going to win. And when the bigger power is Russia sometimes you've just got to negotiate a surrender. So I wish we would be all for let's negotiate a surrender. Forget the sanctions, let's negotiate surrender and let's stop pretending . . . . because what I don't want at the end of this - a war zone's an awful place - I don't want Kiev after two years of war. That's unnecessary. "And I don't think we should be giving weapons to the Ukrainians. I don't think that's necessary. I think we should be all about telling (Ukrainian president) Zelensky 'All right, well, we can't get you back, we will help you surrender and give you political asylum so you don't have to worry about getting disappeared. But pretty much that's a wrap. We're not going to support you. Which means you should surrender, because they're bigger, stronger, and have just more resources than you do, right? "But instead we're going to give weapons for a ground war, that the Russians are going to win because they're a superior force, speaking the same language, and aren't that foreign to Ukraine. I say that there's not going to be pogroms or genocide because there's not really a difference in the church, either. Like they're all Eastern Orthodox . . . . it's cousins fighting, belligerent cousins fighting, and it's a place we shouldn't get involved. "And now with these sanctions in Russia everyone's prices are going to go up, which is de facto a regressive tax. We don't have to put these sanctions on, right? Instead of just trying to negotiate full-bore surrender, we've launched economic war against Russia. There are going to be sanctions, these sanctions are going to tax everyone, everyone's going to take a hit, and so pretty much we are now paying the price and subsidizing Ukrainians, the Ukrainian war, and I don't think that we should do that, I think we should encourage him (President Zelensky) to surrender and work out favorable terms. . . . . "I don't understand why suddenly we take national borders so seriously when we were so casual about them before. We need to deal with the fact of this kind of politics. If you actually care about the war and the suffering, you want this to end. You just want it to end, right? So this is different than like the Civil War when the issue was slavery. This is just a territorial dispute between one power and another power."