Might I Owe Wuhan Virological Institute Director Shi Zhengli An Apology?

WashingtonTimes |  Chinese government researchers isolated more than 2,000 new viruses, including deadly bat coronaviruses, and carried out scientific work on them just three miles from a wild animal market identified as the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Several Chinese state media outlets in recent months touted the virus research and lionized in particular a key researcher in Wuhan, Tian Junhua, as a leader in bat virus work.

The coronavirus strain now infecting hundreds of thousands of people globally mutated from bats believed to have infected animals and people at a wild animal market in Wuhan. The exact origin of the virus, however, remains a mystery.

Reports of the extensive Chinese research on bat viruses likely will fuel more calls for Beijing to make public what it knows about such work.

“This is one of the worst cover-ups in human history, and now the world is facing a global pandemic,” Rep. Michael T. McCaul, Texas Republican and ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said last week. Mr. McCaul has said China should be held accountable for the pandemic.

A video posted online in December and funded by the Chinese government shows Mr. Tian inside caves in Hubei province taking samples from captured bats and storing them in vials.

“I am not a doctor, but I work to cure and save people,” Mr. Tian says in the video. “I am not a soldier, but I work to safeguard an invisible national defense line.”

China's Han Elites Sacrificed a Province to Save Themselves...,

 bloomberg |  Scenes of chaos and despair are emerging daily from China’s Hubei province, the landlocked region of 60 million people where the new coronavirus dubbed 2019-nCoV was first identified in December, and where it has since cut a wide, deadly swathe.

While cases have spread around the globe, the virus’ impact has been most keenly felt in Hubei, which has seen a staggering 97% of all deaths from the illness, and 67% of all patients.

The toll, which grows larger every day, reflects a local health system overwhelmed by the fast-moving, alien pathogen, making even the most basic care impossible. It’s also an ongoing illustration of the human cost extracted by the world’s largest-known quarantine, with China effectively locking down the region from Jan. 23 to contain the virus’ spread to the rest of the country, and the world.

But Hubei -- known for its car factories and bustling capital Wuhan -- is paying the price, with the mortality rate for coronavirus patients there 3.1%, versus 0.16% for the rest of China.

“If the province was not sealed off, some people would have gone all around the country to try to get medical help, and would have turned the whole nation into an epidemic-stricken area,” said Yang Gonghuan, former deputy director general of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention. 

“The quarantine brought a lot of hardship to Hubei and Wuhan, but it was the right thing to do.”

“It’s like fighting a war -- some things are hard, but must be done.”

Wuhan, home to 11 million people, is a “second-tier” Chinese city, meaning it’s relatively developed but still a step below China’s major metropolises of Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou. It has well-regarded hospitals, but resources lag behind those of more prominent cities.

In the early days of the virus’ spread, prevarication and delay by local officials also allowed the pathogen to circulate more widely among an unsuspecting public.

MSM Coverage: Oh Woe Is We! Meeting Bernie's Requirements, the App is to Blame!!!

LATimes |  On a tense, chaotic night, with the eyes of the nation trained on the Iowa caucuses, that state’s Democratic Party was counting on a slick new smartphone app to make everything go smoothly. 

The app was coded by a tech firm run by veterans of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, one of them a former Google engineer. It was designed to meet new requirements instituted after that year’s contentious Iowa caucuses, in which Clinton narrowly edged out Bernie Sanders. To provide more transparency this time around, the state party promised to report not just the final results but voters’ initial and second choices as well.

With so much more data to tabulate than in previous years, party leaders feared that the established system of reporting numbers by phone would be too slow. A proposal for a “tele-caucus” system enabling virtual voting was rejected as too vulnerable to hacking. An app that could instantaneously relay the numbers as soon as precinct chairs input them, developed by Democratic Party loyalists, looked like the perfect solution.

It turned out to be a crushing failure. 

The firm behind the app is Shadow, an affiliate of ACRONYM, a Democratic nonprofit founded in 2017 “to educate, inspire, register, and mobilize voters,” according to its website. Shadow started out as Groundbase, a tech developer co-founded by Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis, who worked for the tech team on Clinton’s campaign for the 2016 Democratic nomination.

Niemira had previously worked at kiva.org, a nonprofit that makes loans to entrepreneurs and others in the developing world, and Davis had spent eight years as an engineer at Google. ACRONYM’s founder and CEO is Tara McGowan, a former journalist and digital producer with President Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign.

In the days leading up to caucus night, Shadow’s app was seen as “a potential target for early election interference,” according to the Des Moines Register.

Instead, a different problem arose.

Calling Things By Their Real Names

charleshughsmith | In last week's explanation of why the Federal Reserve is evil, I invoked the principle of calling things by their real names, a concept that drew an insightful commentary from longtime correspondent Chad D.:

Thank you, Charles, for calling out the Fed for their evil ways. We have to properly name things before we can properly address them. I would add that the Fed's endless creation of "money" to hand out to connected bankers (not all bankers) is just one facet of the evil. The evil also manifests itself as extraordinary political-economical power in a system that allows legalized bribery disguised as free speech.

One does not need money to speak/write to convey one's thoughts, but what money does allow is the drowning out of speech of those without money by those with a lot of money. In essence, the ultra-rich (i.e. the top .01%) get a huge megaphone to blare their thoughts, many of which are deliberately used to disorient and confuse the common man through the major media and so-called higher institutions of learning. Hence, we get common folk actively fighting for policies and laws that are against their own personal interests, such as promoting "free trade" agreements that are really managed trade agreements, whereby domestic workers are forced to complete with workers in other countries who make a pittance and are not protected by labor or environmental laws.

These agreements are part of a legal, yet unjust, framework that gives unfair, competitive advantages to large, multinational businesses at the expense of their smaller domestic and international competitors, which includes the abridgment of basic rights to settle disputes in a real court of law, not some kangaroo arbitration process with biased "judges".

And we must not forget the bailouts, lack of prosecution for economic crimes, such as fraud and monopolistic and deceptive trade practices, and tax loopholes, all of which are bought in one way or another from the compromised "representatives" and "public servants" within the system.

Trump Impeached for Interfering with A System of "Woke, Self-Serving, Lying and Looting"

mattstoller.substack |  If the goal of economics were to ascertain truthful views about the world, if economics were as its proponents offer, a ‘science,’ then one would remark on the lack of self-policing within the profession. Of course, given that there is limited self-policing at best and the top practitioners in the field are routinely wrong about fundamental questions, we can conclude that uncovering truth may be an incidental outcome of the practice of economics, but it is certainly not the goal of the discipline.

Methodological Biases in Economics

There are three main problems with economics as a ‘science’ that can guide public policy choices. The first is that it is a post-mortem discipline. Economists often assert we need data before drawing conclusions. Economist Thomas Phillipon noted this in his book on the institutional basis of markets that an economist was like that of Sherlock Holmes, asserting ‘data data data, I cannot make bricks without clay.” And yet, there was no data in 2000 when the U.S. changes its policies vis-a-vis China, because the consequences were in the future. There’s nothing wrong with being a study of the past that has a specific quantitative framework, as long as there is a genuine acknowledgment that there’s no science here and projections have no scientific validity whatsoever. 

The second is that using economics to make judgments about the world can be extraordinarily costly and exclusionary. This may or may not be a big deal when considering macro-economic forecasting, but when economics becomes a key part of institutional legal arguments it shades who can use the law to protect their rights. For example, showing that someone robbed me by breaking into my house requires evidence and common sense. But bringing an antitrust lawsuit showing someone robbed me by excluding me from a market often requires millions in economics consulting services. If you don’t have that money, the law becomes meaningless.

The third is that an obsession with quantifying leads to political control by those who have access to data. A well-known example is famous economist Alan Krueger, who was paid by Uber and then wrote widely circulated scholarship based on internal Uber data about the corporation’s wage setting terms. But it’s broader than just one company, most of the big tech platforms work with economists, giving these powerful corporate entities a measure of political control over lines of research. Beyond tech, it’s actually quite hard to get information on a whole host of practices in the economy. For example, the Trump administration had to battle hospitals just to get them to disclose their official price list for different procedures (which isn’t even real considering the extent of secret discounts and rebates throughout the industry).

The First Americans: What Do You Do When You Realize EVERYTHING You've Been Taught Is a Lie?

bbc |  The programme, Ancient Voices, shows that the dimensions of prehistoric skulls found in Brazil match those of the aboriginal peoples of Australia and Melanesia. Other evidence suggests that these first Americans were later massacred by invaders from Asia.

Until now, native Americans were believed to have descended from Asian ancestors who arrived over a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska and then migrated across the whole of north and south America. The land bridge was formed 11,000 years ago during the ice age, when sea level dropped.

However, the new evidence shows that these people did not arrive in an empty wilderness. Stone tools and charcoal from the site in Brazil show evidence of human habitation as long ago as 50,000 years.

The site is at Serra Da Capivara in remote northeast Brazil. This area is now inhabited by the descendants of European settlers and African slaves who arrived just 500 years ago.

But cave paintings found here provided the first clue to the existence of a much older people.

Images of giant armadillos, which died out before the last ice age, show the artists who drew them lived before even the natives who greeted the Europeans.

These Asian people have facial features described as mongoloid. However, skulls dug from a depth equivalent to 9,000 to 12,000 years ago are very different.

Walter Neves, an archaeologist from the University of Sao Paolo, has taken extensive skull measurements from dozens of skulls, including the oldest, a young woman who has been named Lucia.

"The measurements show that Lucia was anything but mongoloid," he says.

The skull dimensions and facial features match most closely the native people of Australia and Melanesia. These people date back to about 60,000 years, and were themselves descended from the first humans, who left Africa about 100,000 years ago. 

But how could the early Australians have travelled more than 13,500 kilometres (8,450 miles) at that time? The answer comes from more cave paintings, this time from the Kimberley, a region at the northern tip of Western Australia. 

Here, Grahame Walsh, an expert on Australian rock art, found the oldest painting of a boat anywhere in the world. The style of the art means it is at least 17,000 years old, but it could be up to 50,000 years old. 

And the crucial detail is the high prow of the boat. This would have been unnecessary for boats used in calm, inland waters. The design suggests it was used on the open ocean.

Managerialism Hijacked, Parasitized, and Controls the American Medical Narrative

hcrenewal  |  A news article that featured an interview with Dr Victor Montori, the senior author of the article, noted in fact that the most recent (2018) list included quite a few CEOs of large for-profit health care corporations.

Among those topping the latest installment of the influential Modern Healthcare power index are the corporate heads of Amazon, Apple, Aetna, Humana, CVS and Minnetonka, Minn.-based United Health/Optum.

The authors concluded that

perceived influence over US health care of chief executives of health systems is increasing. To the extent that the ranking validly reflects influence, the sharp rise in the influence of chief executive officers at the expense of representatives of patients or health professionals may underscore the increasing industrialization of health care. It is not possible to find patients, patient advocates, clinicians, or clinician advocates at the top of this list. This trend placing health care influencers within C-suites, accountable to boards mostly comprising other corporate leaders, may explain the rise of business language and thinking

They suggested that it is possible that there is a

causal association between the concentration of executive influence and problems of patient care derived from efforts to optimize operational efficiency and financial performance, for example, clinician burnout, the heavy burden of treatment afflicting patients with chronic conditions, and the erection of barriers to care to optimize 'payer mix.'

Dr Montori also said in the interview

Americans increasingly find themselves in a corporate-centric healthcare echo-chamber, one in which the public will increasingly approach tough policy decisions having heard only the viewpoint from the top.

'The primary goals of CEOs are to advance the mission of their organization,' Montori says. 'If all that influences healthcare are the ideas of people who advocate for the success of their organizations, people who are not served by them will not have their voices heard.'

Furthermore, he suggested that the public may be befuddled by the current health policy debates, including those about universal health care and the possibility of reducing the power of commercial health insurance companies because

in the rest of the narrative all that they hear is about are the successes of biotech, the successes of tech companies, and the successes of healthcare corporations who achieve high levels of innovation thanks to the bold leadership of their executives. It's why we have been calling for greater awareness of the industrialization of healthcare for some time now

Silly Kneegrows: I KNOW You Don't Believe Nike "Just Did It" For You!?!?

theconservativetreehouse |  From a pure economic/financial perspective this Nike  branding campaign doesn’t make sense…. unless, you realize a much bigger picture. A hidden bigger picture.

On its face, it just seems absurd. Why would any major corporation intentionally stake out a branding position that is adverse to their financial interests?

I’ve spoken to some very excellent business actuaries on this late today; and one specific conversation finally helped to make it all make sense.  During that conversation a good ally shared: “a multinational corporation would never make a branding decision adverse to their financial interests. Unless there is a hidden risk unrelated to what is visible on the surface.” ….

''BINGO, there it is, the lightbulb went on.

A hidden risk that likely has nothing whatsoever to do with Colin Kaepernick.

The bigger risk to Nike has nothing to do with Black Lives Matter, U.S. Consumers, or Antifa-like political advocacy. The bigger financial risk to the Nike Corporation has everything to do with geopolitics and a reset of international trade agreements.

Here’s the hidden aspect with research to back it up.  Nike Inc. has hitched its massive corporate existence to a 10-year business plan that is dependent on the continuance of recently negotiated manufacturing contracts.

The Nike political branding position is reconciled when you look at the bigger picture and see where the real financial risk aligns. The Nike economic decision is to align with China, and by extension North Korea, for a position of mutual benefit. It is all about the proverbial $$$$ and Nike’s best financial play is to mitigate risk and assist Communist China in their trade strategy.

China is willing to subsidize Nike (lower production costs), and replace any dropped revenue, in exchange for mutually beneficial political opposition against Trump and by extension his policies that are a risk to Beijing. As a result there is minimal financial risk to the Nike Corporation.

And with the current multinational Wall Street agenda now being confronted, we should not expect this approach to stop at Nike.

There Will Never Be An Age of Artificial Intimacy?

NYTimes | Years ago I spoke with a 16-year-old girl who was considering the idea of having a computer companion in the future, and she described the upside to me. It’s not that the robot she’d imagined, a vastly more sophisticated Siri, was so inspiring. It’s that she’d already found people to be so disappointing. And now, for the first time, she explained me, people have options. Back then I thought her comments seemed prescient. Now I find them timely.

“There are people who have tried to make friends, but stumbled so badly that they’ve given up,” she said. “So when they hear this idea of robots as companions, well … it’s not like a robot has the mind to walk away or leave you or anything like that.”

This girl had grown up in the time of Siri, a conversational object presented as an empathy machine — a thing that could understand her. And so it seemed natural to her that other machines would expand the range of conversation. But there is something she may have been too young to understand — or, like a lot of us — prone to forget when we talk to machines. These robots can perform empathy in a conversation about your friend, your mother, your child or your lover, but they have no experience of any of these relationships. Machines have not known the arc of a human life. They feel nothing of the human loss or love we describe to them. Their conversations about life occupy the realm of the as-if. 

Yet through our interactions with these machines, we seem to ignore this fact; we act as though the emotional ties we form with them will be reciprocal, and real, as though there is a right kind of emotional tie that can be formed with objects that have no emotions at all.  

A Vast And Lucrative Stream Of Nonsense Flows Into The Peasant Trough...,

NYTimes  |  “So here we have an ancient grid structure, probably built by extraterrestrials, possibly to power their craft, that’s now being reconstructed today by the military.”

Such broad, unverified claims are why “Ancient Aliens” is taken by some to be carnival entertainment (see the Viceland stoner spinoff “Traveling the Stars: Action Bronson and Friends Watch ‘Ancient Aliens’”) — and by others as something darker, a show that traffics in intellectual hucksterism and challenges facts.

“The Idiocy, Fabrications and Lies of ‘Ancient Aliens,’” reads one headline from Smithsonian.com. Another critique, posted to Medium by Barry Vacker, a professor at Temple University, argued that since the Apollo 11 mission, Americans have lacked a popular narrative to explain the vast cosmos and our origins and destiny within it. 

“In ‘Ancient Aliens,’ we can see philosophy’s mediated corpse,” writes Mr. Vacker, who called the show “an attack on logic, rationality, and the nature of evidence.” 

For Kevin Burns, naysayers like Mr. Vacker add little to the discussion. A veteran TV producer who is often confused with the highbrow filmmaker Ken Burns (“I do the ones in color,” he likes to say), he was old enough to remember “Chariots of the Gods?” and to notice similarities with the 2008 movie “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” which Lucasfilm hired him to promote with a TV special. 

Envisioning an updated “Chariots,” he approached the History Channel with the “Ancient Aliens” concept, which grew from a two-hour special into a series.

Purely Unselfconscious And Utterly Fraudulent Neoconservative Intersectionality

thehill |  Conservative commentator Bill Kristol rips Fox News's Tucker Carlson in a new interview, saying his show could be "close now to racism" or "ethnonationalism." 

"I mean, it is close now to racism, white — I mean, I don't know if it's racism exactly — but ethnonationalism of some kind, let's call it. A combination of dumbing down, as you said earlier, and stirring people's emotions in a very unhealthy way," Kristol told CNBC's John Harwood in the interview published on Thursday.

Back from Israel, where you see "that inner freedom, that simple dignity" of "people who remember their heritage & are loyal to their fate."

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) June 4, 2016

Carlson recently questioned the widespread outrage over Trump's reported comments referring to Haiti, El Salvador and African nations as "shithole countries."

"So, if you say Norway is a better place to live and Haiti is kind of a hole, well anyone who’s been to those countries or has lived in them would agree. But we’re jumping up and down, ‘Oh, you can’t say that.’ Why can’t you say that?" Carlson asked.

What Is Art Good For?

frontiersin |  Does neuroaesthetics have a problem? Sherman and Morrissey (2017) criticize the field for focusing narrowly on how art elicits pleasurable responses, and for neglecting its social relevance and impact. Neuroaesthetics, they argue, reduces the experience of art to isolated individuals' ratings in artificial lab settings, and ignores “socially-relevant outcomes of art appreciation or the social context of art creation and art appreciation.” Consequently, it fails to “capture or appreciate the social, cultural, or historical situatedness of the art-object or the person whose experience is being studied.”

There is no question that we know little about the social aspect of art behavior and its underlying psychological and neurobiological mechanisms. Because art is often a transient phenomenon created as function of a social act, as in music, dance, or performance, the features of collective settings surely modulate cognition and affect. Dance, for instance, can coordinate emotional responses to promote social cohesion (Vicary et al., 2017). Nevertheless, the precise way in which social settings influence brain activity when experiencing art remains largely unknown.

We know of no neuroaestetician who would not welcome research on the psychology and biology of art behavior in social contexts. Yet, Sherman and Morrissey (2017) portray neuroaesthetics as dismissing such research topics and promoting an a-social conception of art experience. They fault neuroaesthetics for “conflating the art with aesthetics,” for having “privileged investigating individual judgments of beauty or preference,” for construing art appreciation as a “passive reception of perceptual information from art-objects,” and for discounting “what many would consider the very essence of art: its communicative nature, its capacity to encourage personal growth (…), to challenge preconceptions (…), and to provide clarity on ambiguous concepts or ideas.”

Aesthetic Relativism > Moral Relativism > Cultural Assassination...,

Counterpunch |  In contrast, an ongoing exhibition at the Chicago Art Institute shows the early Soviet arts in all their bustling contradiction and coming-to-be. The CIA could not have produced anything on this scale, which required a world-shaking collision of forces and a belief uncomfortably close to the religious. Malevich, Dziga Vertov, El Lissitzky, Lenin, Mayakovsky… The US, too, had considerable forces at its disposal (Buster Keaton, first and foremost). The strange thing is that this exhibition, mounted in a refreshingly no-nonsense and rather cool style, still manages to inspire, as if the past was waiting for the present to catch up to it. This power lies not so much in the myriad forms of the works, which may be bound in time, but in the pure electricity of their still-disarming presence. Against the morose ideas of ends, the grand mortuary they call ‘history’, against the relegation of past works of art to nostalgia and price, something else appears beside the collages, constructivist paintings, fabrics and living spaces constructed for the great new socialist world. We are always told that Stalin was the culmination of this moment in time. Who says? And who paid him to say it? The answer is obvious. They say that here is only one modernism; that there is only one history (and one power able to declare that it is over); that there is only one self to express; that there is only one public and one art which can express it (sometimes fearfully, it has to be admitted). If this sums up the most banal kinds of socialist realism, it is equally applicable to the art the CIA promoted in the middle of last century. Behind the paintings was the logic of pacification.

Alan Dulles’ influence extends far beyond his admittedly meagre artistic output. The CIA’s most recent work of criticism is the destruction of San’a and Aleppo, where the Agency has taken to task outmoded theories of architecture in an imperial inversion of the Situationists’ support for the Watts riots. And The Intercept informsus that Erik Prince, infamous Blackwater capo, and that old has-been Oliver North are setting up a parallel intelligence agency to defend the embattled President against a rogue CIA. Thus, the old rivalry between Classical and Romantic has returned with a swinging post-modern, mercenary twist. Although painting seems to be off the radar for now, the ideas behind the Abstract Intelligence school await resurrection in another form whose inelegance may delight or offend, depending on the myths necessary for the murder of both the Image and its reflection.

Pompous Posturing Democrats Serve No One But Themselves...,

jessescrossroadscafe | 

"Another example of giving the game away in few words came two nights ago when the liberal-elitist 'Inside Elections' political analyst Stuart Rothenburg spoke on the PBS NewsHour.   'The Democrats as a party'  Rothenburg told NewsHour host and Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member Judy Woodruff,  'are divided between the Bernie Sanders wing and Hillary Clinton wing, the pragmatists and ideologues.'

For Rothenburg, the Clinton wing members are the 'pragmatists,' the realistic adults who want to 'get things done' (one of the great neoliberal president Obama’s favorite phrases and claims).  The Sanders folks are 'ideologues,' a pejorative term meaning people who are mainly about ideology and who are carried away by their own flighty and doctrinal world view. 

This was a slap (an ideological one I might add) at the more progressive and social-democratic faction of the Democratic Party – a blow masquerading as 'objective' and detached political analysis."

Paul Street, Giving the Game Away

If you watch this relatively short video much of what has been puzzling you about the failure of our political system will be made clearer.

Franklin Roosevelt could work tirelessly for the common person because he was already comfortable in his own skin with regard to his social status.  And more importantly, as a result of his long term paralysis he knew how little social status really meant.   As suffering sometimes does, it introduces compassion and empathy, even among the upper crust.

But the New Deal principles were shunned for the credentialed aspirations of those class-climbing, middle class kids who would be rich and acknowledged as members of an elite crowd with the right kinds of bona fides.   There are probably few better recent examples than the Clintons.   Their attitudes towards the average American are paternalistic at best, and highly cynical and patronizing at worst.

They attempted to disguise their credentialed, professional class preferences with 'identity politics.'   But if you look at the culmination of actual policy initiatives, versus platform platitudes, the Democrats, similarly to the GOP, serve no one but themselves.   Winning...

They rely on the 'lesser of two evils' to scrape out the occasional win, when the excesses of the other party drive people to embrace 'hope and change,' and to be largely betrayed once again.

Smearing Trump: A Hack of a "Scoop"

medium |  The author of the Atlantic article, Julia Ioffe, put a period rather than a comma at the end of the text about not wanting to appear pro-Trump or pro-Russia, and completely omitted WikiLeaks’ statement following the comma that it considers those allegations slanderous. This completely changes the way the interaction is perceived.

This is malpractice. Putting an ellipsis (…) and then omitting the rest of the sentence would have been sleazy and disingenuous enough, because you’re leaving out crucial information but at least communicating to the reader that there is more to the sentence you’ve left out, but replacing the comma with a period obviously communicates to the reader that there is no more to the sentence. If you exclude important information while communicating that you have not, you are blatantly lying to your readers.

There is a big difference between “because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source” and “because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source, which the Clinton campaign is constantly slandering us with.” Those are not the same sentence. At all. Different meanings, different implications. One makes WikiLeaks look like it’s trying to hide a pro-Trump, pro-Russian agenda from the public, and the other conveys the exact opposite impression as WikiLeaks actively works to obtain Donald Trump’s tax returns. This is a big deal.

And it made a difference in the way WikiLeaks was perceived, as evidenced by the things people who read the article are saying about Ioffe’s version:

Meet NBCUniversal Counsel and Former Obama Deputy Counsel Kimberly D. Harris

comcast |  Harris provides legal advice to the NBCUniversal senior management team and supervises the legal function, which handles legal matters for all of NBCUniversal’s business units. She also coordinates NBCUniversal’s global regulatory and legislative agenda.

Harris joined NBCUniversal in 2013 from Davis Polk & Wardwell, where she was a partner in the litigation department.

From 2010 to 2012, Harris served in the White House Counsel’s Office, and became the principal Deputy Counsel and Deputy Assistant to the President in 2011. At the White House, she advised senior Executive Branch officials on congressional investigations and executive privilege issues. In addition, Harris developed and implemented the White House response to congressional investigations, and managed litigation matters relating to the President.

From 2009 to 2010, she was Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Division.

Harris first joined Davis Polk & Wardwell as an associate in 1997 and was named a litigation partner in 2007. From 1996 to 1997, she served as a law clerk to the Honorable Charles S. Haight, Jr., U.S. District Court, S.D. New York.

She serves on the boards of directors for Advocates for Children of New York, an organization that provides legal and advocacy services to at-risk students in the New York City school system, and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. Harris is also a member of the Advisory Board for the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law.

Harris graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, and holds a law degree from Yale Law School. She lives in Westchester County, New York with her husband and three sons.

U.S. Justice System Ignores Elite Criminality

libertyblitzkrieg  |  Two very important articles published in recent days serve to once again highlight America’s metastasizing elite criminality problem. A problem which our justice system simply refuses to address.

This corrupt two-tier justice system is something I’ve been focused on from the very beginning of my writings, and I continue to see it as a civilization-level threat for this country if not aggressively addressed and confronted in the very near future.

The two articles in question focus on different aspects of untouchable elite culture in America.

The first relates to the continued fraud pervasive in America’s largest financial institution, while the second covers a thirty year history of predatory sexual behavior by one of Hollywood’s biggest moguls, Harvey Weinstein. 

In both cases, countless people have known and reported on repeated abuses perpetrated by both the institution and the man, yet the U.S. justice system and the vast majority of “elite” culture happily help shield them from justice. Predators are predators, and elite predators are far more dangerous to society that your average street crook, so why does our justice situation deal with it in the exact opposite way?

Let’s start with the blockbuster article published in The Nation by the always informative David Dayen. The article is titled, How America’s Biggest Bank Paid Its Fine for the 2008 Mortgage Crisis—With Phony Mortgages!

Here’s just brief excerpt:

An Odyssey to the Edge of City Life...,

vice |  In the second half of the 20th century, New York City saw a boom in organized crime, with New York and New Jersey at the epicenter of mob rule in the US. Meanwhile, the gay scene had exploded. 

The Mafia—which had a stranglehold on nightlife since the end of Prohibition—spotted a gap in the market. There was a whole new audience who wanted to go to a bar or nightclub to experience the then luxury of being among other gay people. In the aftermath of Prohibition, a new underground scene developed, and naturally the Mafia wanted in on the action. What followed was years of pimping, financial exploitation, the NYPD completely ignoring the LGBT community's concerns, and gossipy FBI files speculating about certain mobsters' sexualities. 

Phillip Crawford Jr., author of the book The Mafia and the Gays, argues that the Mafia were much more than proprietors of illegal nightspots; he says that they are in fact an intrinsic part of the LGBT movement, sparking the Stonewall riots and enabling the gay community to thrive. VICE called him up to talk about all that. 

VICE: Hi, Phillip. When did the link between the gay community and the Mafia begin?
Phillip Crawford Jr: The Mafia was behind many speakeasies in the big cities, such as Chicago and New York, during Prohibition. After Prohibition was repealed, state agencies regulated bars with vague standards against disorderly premises and moral indecency, which were interpreted to prohibit serving gays. Accordingly, the Mafia took its experience with speakeasies and used it to operate gay bars, which involved paying off the police departments and liquor authorities charged with enforcing these discriminatory laws. 

It seems like an unusual fusion...
Well, the Mafia didn't much care about enforcing societal mores or respecting government rules. Ernest Sgroi Sr, one of the principal fronts for gay bars controlled by mob boss Vito Genovese in Greenwich Village, obtained his first liquor license right after the repeal of Prohibition. He was involved with some of the most popular gay bars during the post-war years, including the Bon Soir and the Lion, which started off as nightclubs with live entertainment attracting both straight and gay patrons but ultimately became predominantly gay bars. The Lion was where Barbra Streisand made her first public singing performance in 1960. 

So do you think the Mafia exploited the gay community purely for their own financial ends?
The Mafia controlled most gay bars due to their illegal status, and extracted a monetary premium from the gay community. This recognized both the legal risk the Mob was taking and the near-monopoly status it enjoyed. After all, where else were gay folks going to meet? There were often high cover charges and minimum drink requirements. Moreover, gay men were at risk of blackmail from their Mob overlords. The Mob's exploitation of the gay community was among the reasons for the 1969 protests outside the Stonewall Inn. Indeed, after the Stonewall protests, once of the principal goals of the activist groups such as Gay Activists Alliance and Gay Liberation Front was to get organized crime out of the gay bars.

A Pride Story - Aww, How Sweet, Heroic, and Romantic...,

HuffPo |  In the ’30s and ’40s lesbians formed an unusual alliance when they started working for and with the mafia in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Back then, dressing in a suit was illegal for women — It could mean the difference between life and death. Butch women were taking real fashion risks and the mafia offered lesbians much-needed protection.

Although it might sound surprising to hear about out lesbians working with and for the mob, there was a time in New York City when all the gay clubs were mafia-run. —Vice

There’s always been an attempt to erase women from his-story, but make no mistake, the suffragettes were the first to plant their flag in the Village. The Village was run by lesbians. Working with the mob gave them clout and there was a good amount of money to be made.

Most of the bars in the Village were lesbian...The Village belonged to the gay girls, because the suffragettes had been there first, and they were all queer as pink plates. —Vice

While the mafia used their power to pay off the cops, lesbians in the Village found their own brand of power. Many performed as drag kings, dressed to the nines in suits and ties. They put together acts that included a variety of talents. They worked the biggest drag shows in town, and were some of America’s first drag superstars. Drag was appealing — it meant cash and freedom. Coming out of the Depression, lesbians in Greenwich Village were living it up, buying cars and spending like there was no tomorrow.

“It was mafia bosses who founded hot spots, from the famed Stonewall Inn to the lesbian haunt the Howdy Club to the 181 Club.” —“New York Post”

Off stage, women who broke the dress code oozed with style and sex appeal. Their hair, sleek and daring. Their style choices, undeniably seductive. Women never needed men to tell us what was sexy— We already knew.

Speech as Violence: Political Narrative Construction

A “narrative” is a communication and control device. The intent of a narrative is to “speak” to the emotional subconscious part of you humans. The purpose of narrative is to elicit specific feelings, thoughts, and actions (in that order). What is communicated via narrative can be, but need not be, true. Consequently, narrative need not be truthful to be effective.

Narrative is neither moral or immoral in and of itself. It is a tool. One of the reasons this tool is effective is that the emotional part of you humans (essence) is not ratiocinatively equipped to distinguish fact from fiction. The factual discernment of essence operates at the approximate developmental level of a seven year old child. 

Once narrative is accepted, the human mind will delete information presented to it that does not fit the accepted narrative (not-seeism), or, it will change information to make it fit. The real problem isn’t the use of narrative, it is the the bad character and/or bad intentions of those who are driving the narrative coupled with the arrested development and cognitive vulnerability of those susceptible to uncritically accepting the narrative.

The political establishment in America is desperate to overturn 2016's presidential election results because these results defy the formerly prevailing political narrative. In the process of doing so, their primary narrative constructions have been rendered so transparent that they are revealing the whole methodology and mechanism that they have employed to maintain political control.

Why are our narrative drivers desperate to overturn the election results? Very simple, although he's dirty and sketchy as a trailer-park stripper, Scott Free .45 doesn't have a control file and cannot be extortionately controlled through the conventional mechanisms used to vet presidential candidates.

An acceptable candidate for U.S. president must be susceptible to blackmail. It is increasingly clear to anyone paying attention that most of Congress and most of those who operate or benefit from the Deep State have committed all manner of crimes and are themselves generically susceptible to blackmail.

These miscreants have looked the other way too many times as their elite establishment fellow travelers have committed moral, social, economic, and violent crimes against ordinary citizens, particularly citizens of conscience or color. That is a fact. Possibly the defining fact of American governance for the past fifty years of living memory history.

That said, we will not now distort or detract from our topic by revisiting the multi-generational mountains of drugs and weapons proliferation or the crimes against humanity committed outside U.S. borders. Political co-optation, regime change, natural material resource looting and plundering,  money backed by murder profit seeking, polluting, dumping endless garbage and toxins in the seas… all perpetrated with a little help from our political masters and their prosecutorial minions.

Is there anyone left who is not aware of the outsourcing of American industry and consequent hyper-enrichment of C-Level psychopaths? The outsourcing of American industry to China and Mexico has created havoc for 1/2 the country. The concurrent promotion of degeneracy via dictatorship of celebrity is yet another vile narrative construction created to distract and misdirect the narratively susceptible. But I digress....,

These are merely the myriad not-seen externalities most possess a vague liminal awareness of yet refuse to explicitly call-out, identify, or correct - because the human mind will delete information presented to it that does not fit the accepted narrative. It's not the story we're being told by our dominant narrative-drivers. Consequently, the man-made terror of our situation is not a truth that we are for the most part ready to see. Finally, because once-seen, we would be morally compelled to directly act - our not-seeism signifies not only our susceptibility to political narrative, but also the inertial consumerist comfort, complacency, and cowardice which accompanies our total lack of moral fiber or empathy toward humans lacking the due process window-dressing sometimes accorded U.S. citizens.

Have any American citizens in Congress NOT been rewarded for their narrative complicity?

How dare these miscreant lawyer/preacher disciples of evil make laws and employ oxygen-thieving thugs to intimidate, fine, imprison and torture American citizens. These swamp-dwelling troglodytes wallow in narrative feces and call it government.

They are literally the scum of the earth.