Did The Black Nobility's Power Survive The 20th Century?

The Banks that control the world are run by by the Rothschilds family. Mayer Rothschil 5 sons were sent by their father on his dying bed to control vital parts of Europe through loans and interest.

The Rothschild family is behind The Federal Reserve and the creation of Israel.… pic.twitter.com/eA5VUCegj2

— Dom Lucre | Breaker of Narratives (@dom_lucre) March 8, 2024

archive  |  The black nobility is the base of the global crime syndicate that controls this planet. The black nobility or black aristocracy are the aristocratic families that sided with the papacy under Pope Pius IX after the army of the Kingdom of Italy led by the Savoy family entered Rome on September 20, 1870, overthrew the pope . and the Papal States, and took over the Quirinal Palace, and the nobles later ennobled by the Pope prior to the Lateran Treaty of 1929. 

Any family that produced popes for the Vatican is royalty. Most of the black nobility are Vatican royalty. The black nobility consider themselves sovereign princes. These families earned the title of "black" nobility for their relentless unscrupulousness. They used murder, rape, kidnapping, robbery and all kinds of deception on a large scale, without resisting the achievement of their objectives.

The black nobility were the families that financed and created the holy corporation of the Vatican with the aim of imposing world slavery as a necessary institution, with the sole belief that some are born to rule and others to be ruled. The idea that certain families were born to rule as an arbitrary elite, while the vast majority of a given population is condemned to oppression, servitude, or slavery became the theological position of this elite. The "New World Order" is an attempt to take control of society by these fascist families with the purpose of the total slavery of humanity. 

The Vatican is an imperial nation and is the largest empire in this world. The Vatican City, or the Holy Vatican Corporation, officially the Vatican City State, is a nation that operates as the largest intelligence network in the world. The Holy See is the "All-Seeing Eye" in society and a corporate entity connected to many other corporations and governments through papal and royal statutes. Archbishops and high-level bishops are the overseers of society within their districts and oversee politics, police, business, and organized crime. The same year that the professor of ecclesiastical law and practical philosophy at the University of Ingolstadt, Adam Weishaupt, created the Order of the Illuminati, was the same year that they created the United States as a corporation to run it as their private army and lead I dig the agenda of a "New World Order" for the elites, mainly, thanks to the infiltrated Freemasonry and directed by the Jesuits. The New World Order is a conspiracy of lineage at the top. They are ancient and evil bloodlines that build and destroy empires for control through an order out of chaos. 

Royal and noble houses are corporate entities and claim to rule and own land, resources, and people. Landlords have always been the dominant owners of gold and precious metals. They empower and finance bankers and entrepreneurs to work for them through their corporate homes. They authorize and issue the creation of laws, agencies, the military, companies, and universities. They create and run religions and secret societies. They also finance and organize organized crime syndicates as if they were commercial enterprises. Some of the major royal bloodlines include Savoy, Bourbon, Medici, Glücksburg, Wittelsbach, Nassau-Weilberg, Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Romanov, Grimaldi, Orleans, Braganza, Habsburg, Hannover, Windsor, Saud, Thani, Khalifa, Alouwite , Zogu, Hohenzollern, Orange-Nassau, Bonaparte and Bernadotte. Many royal bloodlines still rule their nations as heads of state such as the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Monaco, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Morocco, Sweden, Norway, and Luxembourg.

The Vatican City State is also a kingdom with the Pope of Rome as its monarch. The Black Nobility are the ancient bloodlines of the Papal States and they own the Holy See and the Vatican. They produced the first popes of Rome and held leadership positions in the Vatican from its inception. The Colonna and Torlonia still hold the hereditary positions of the Assistant Princes to the Papal Throne. The black nobility consider themselves sovereign princes. The Vatican is used as a central point of control and the Holy See is one of the oldest and most criminal corporate entities in existence. The Spanish Catholic Church is immensely rich, it has not suffered the crisis and also enjoys a true tax haven, being free to pay taxes, such as the IBI, works, companies, etc. The vast majority of the assets in their possession and on their accounts are completely opaque. This situation is illegitimate, unfair and presumably illegal, and this occurs with the complicity and consent of the public powers.

The Forbidden Planet (REDUX 3/27/08)

 

 

Synopsis; An expedition is sent from Earth to Altair in the constellation of Aquilae (some 17 light years from Earth) to discover what happened to a colony of settlers on its fourth planet, Altair-4. What they discover is how and why an alien race of geniuses (The Krell) destroyed itself overnight while leaving their technology intact at some point in the distant, distant past.

This is of course one of the greatest movies of all time. Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still set the mold for much else that would follow in the sci-fi genre. Both films set the bar very, very high for storytelling in the realm of humankind's possible psychological development.

 

The Journal Of Social Structure (REDUX 3/30/08)

As above, so below, as within, so without;

Social Network Analysis [1] is an approach to studying organisations focusing on analysing the networks of relationships between people and/or groups as the most important aspect. Going back at least to the 1950's, it is characterised by adopting mathematical techniques especially from graph theory [2, 3]. It has applications in organisational psychology, sociology, and anthropology. An excellent overview of the field is given by Wasserman and Faust [1].

Social Network Analysis provides an avenue for analysing and comparing formal and informal information flows in an organisation, as well as comparing information flows with officially defined work processes. We are interested in applying Social Network Analysis to military organisations, and especially to military headquarters ranging from brigade to national strategic levels.

An important aspect of Social Network Analysis is the visualisation of communication and other relationships between people and/or groups, by means of diagrams. Visualisation of Social Networks has a long tradition, and an excellent historical survey is given by Freeman [4]. Visualisation of Social Networks is important because of the complexity of organisational structure, and the need for good visual representations of how an organisation functions.

A second aspect is the study of factors which influence relationships, for example the age, background, and training of the people involved. Studying the correlations between relationships is also important, since it offers insights into the reasons why relationships exists. These studies can be done using traditional statistical techniques such as correlation, analysis of variance, and factor analysis, but also require appropriate visualisation techniques.

The ultimate goal of Social Network Analysis is often to draw out implications of the relational data, in order to make recommendations to improve communication and workflow in an organisation. This is the major motivation for our Social Network Analysis programme. In previous work [5, 6, 7], we have applied Social Network Analysis to military organisations. In the course of this work, we have found conceptual distance to be the most useful construct in explaining relationships. This is partly because the human brain is skilled at thinking about and visually judging distances. In this paper we argue the benefits of using conceptual distance for analysing Social Networks, and demonstrate how to do so using a case study.

Table of Contents for the Journal in its entirety.

 

Sociometric Reality Mining (REDUX 3/30/08)

 

 

Within the next few years, Pentland predicts, reality mining will become more common, thanks in part to the proliferation and increasing sophistication of cell phones. Many handheld devices now have the processing power of low-end desktop computers, and they can also collect more varied data, thanks to devices such as GPS chips that track location. And researchers such as Pentland are getting better at making sense of all that information.

To create an accurate model of a person's social network, for example, Pentland's team combines a phone's call logs with information about its proximity to other people's devices, which is continuously collected by Bluetooth sensors. With the help of factor analysis, a statistical technique commonly used in the social sciences to explain correlations among multiple variables, the team identifies patterns in the data and translates them into maps of social relationships. Such maps could be used, for instance, to accurately categorize the people in your address book as friends, family members, acquaintances, or coworkers. In turn, this information could be used to automatically establish privacy settings--for instance, allowing only your family to view your schedule. With location data added in, the phone could predict when you would be near someone in your network. In a paper published last May, ­Pentland and his group showed that cell-phone data enabled them to accurately model the social networks of about 100 MIT students and professors. They could also precisely predict where subjects would meet with members of their networks on any given day of the week.

 

Hamilton 68 (Russiagate) The Biggest Khazarian Deception OF ALL TIME!!! (That We Now Know About)

 racket  |  Ambitious media frauds Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair crippled the reputations of the New Republic and New York Times, respectively, by slipping years of invented news stories into their pages. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we can welcome a new member to their infamous club: Hamilton 68.

If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as the single greatest case of media fabulism in American history. Virtually every major news organization in America is implicated, including NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and the Washington Post. Mother Jones alone did at least 14 stories pegged to the group’s “research.” Even fact-checking sites like Politifact and Snopes cited Hamilton 68 as a source. 

Hamilton 68 was and is a computerized “dashboard” designed to be used by reporters and academics to measure “Russian disinformation.” It was the brainchild of former FBI agent (and current MSNBC “disinformation expert”) Clint Watts, and backed by the German Marshall Fund and the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan think-tank. The latter’s advisory panel includes former acting CIA chief Michael Morell, former Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, former Hillary for America chair John Podesta, and onetime Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol. 

The Twitter Files expose Hamilton 68 as a sham:

The secret ingredient in Hamilton 68’s analytic method was a list of 644 accounts supposedly linked “to Russian influence activities online.” It was hidden from the public, but Twitter was in a unique position to recreate Hamilton’s sample by analyzing its Application Program Interface (API) requests, which is how they first “reverse-engineered” Hamilton’s list in late 2017.

The company was concerned enough about the proliferation of news stories linked to Hamilton 68 that it also ordered a forensic analysis. Note the second page below lists many of the different types of shadow-banning techniques that existed at Twitter even in 2017, buttressing the “Twitter’s Secret Blacklist” thread by Bari Weiss last month. Here you see categories ranging from “Trends Blacklist” to “Search Blacklist” to “NSFW High Precision.” Twitter was checking to see how many of Hamilton’s accounts were spammy, phony, or bot-like. Note that out of 644 accounts, just 36 were registered in Russia, and many of those were associated with RT. 

The Hamilton 68 tale has no clear analog in media history, which may give mainstream media writers an excuse not to cover it. They will be under heavy pressure to avoid addressing this scandal, since nearly all of them work for organizations guilty of spreading Hamilton’s “bullshit” stories in volume.

This is one of the more significant Twitter Files stories. Each one of these tales explains something new about how companies like Twitter came to lose independence. In the U.S., the door was opened for agencies like the FBI and DHS to press on content moderation after Congress harangued Twitter, Facebook, and Google about Russian “interference,” a phenomenon that had to be seen as an ongoing threat in order to require increased surveillance. “I do very much believe America is under attack,” is how Hamilton 68 co-founder Laura Rosenberger put it, after watching the tweets of Sonya Monsour, David Horowitz, and @holbornlolz.

The Hamilton 68 story shows how the illusion of ongoing “Russian interference” worked. The magic trick was generated via a confluence of interests, between think-tanks, media, and government. Before, we could only speculate. Now we know: the “Russian threat” was, in this case at least, just a bunch of ordinary Americans, dressed up to look like a Red Menace. Jayson Blair had a hell of an imagination, but even he couldn’t have come up with a scheme this obscene. Shame on every news outlet that hasn’t renounced these tales.

 

 

 

Patriarch Kirill's Epiphany Sermon "Fuck Around And Find Out!!!"

theatlantic |  This Russian propaganda has been amplified and endorsed by an unusual assortment of people in the United States, including the Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs. The propaganda absolves Russia, blames the United States for the war, and has four main tenets: first, that a long-standing American effort to bring Ukraine into NATO poses a grave threat to Russian security. Second, that American shipments of weapons to Ukraine have prolonged the fighting and caused needless suffering among civilians. Third, that American support for Ukraine is just a pretext for seeking the destruction of Russia. And, finally, that American policies could soon prove responsible for causing an all-out nuclear war.

Those arguments are based on lies. They are being spread to justify Russia’s unprecedented use of nuclear blackmail to seize territory from a neighboring state. Concerns about a possible nuclear exchange have thus far deterred the United States and NATO from providing Ukraine with the tanks, aircraft, and long-range missiles that might change the course of the war. If nuclear threats or the actual use of nuclear weapons leads to the defeat of Ukraine, Russia may use them to coerce other states. Tactics once considered immoral and unthinkable might become commonplace. Nuclear weapons would no longer be regarded solely as a deterrent of last resort; the nine countries that possess them would gain even greater influence; countries that lack them would seek to obtain them; and the global risk of devastating wars would increase exponentially.

That is why the greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory in Ukraine.

Russia has about 6,000 nuclear weapons, more than any other country, and for years Putin has portrayed them as a source of national pride. His warnings about their possible use during the war in Ukraine have been coy and often contradictory. “If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened,” Putin said in September, “we will without doubt use all available means to protect Russia and our people—this is not a bluff.” His vow to rely on nuclear weapons only as a defensive measure conveys an underlying threat: An attempt to regain Ukrainian land annexed by Russia and deemed by Putin to be part of “our country” might prompt a nuclear response. He also asserted that the United States and NATO are the ones engaging in “nuclear blackmail,” and that “those who try to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the weathervane can turn and point towards them.” In October, he claimed that Ukraine was planning to launch a nuclear strike on itself—by detonating a warhead filled with radioactive waste—as part of a false-flag operation to make Russia seem responsible. In December, Putin said that the risk of a nuclear war was increasing but suggested once again that the real danger did not come from Russia. “We have not gone crazy,” he said. “We are aware what nuclear weapons are … We are not going to brandish these weapons like a razor, running around the world.”

Although Putin’s comments have been subtle and open to multiple interpretations, the propaganda outlets that he controls have been neither. For almost a year, they have continually threatened and celebrated the possibility of nuclear war. This division of labor allows Putin to appear statesmanlike while his underlings stoke fear and normalize the idea of using nuclear weapons to commit the mass murder of civilians. Julia Davis, a columnist for The Daily Beast, and Francis Scarr, a BBC correspondent, have performed an immense public service: supplying translations of the vicious, apocalyptic, often unhinged rants that have become the norm on Russian television. “Either we lose in Ukraine, or the Third World War starts,” Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of Russia Today and a close ally of Putin’s, said in April. “I think World War III is more realistic, knowing us, knowing our leader … That all this will end with a nuclear strike seems more probable to me.” At various times, Simonyan has discussed nuclear attacks on Ukraine, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, arguing that death would be better than succumbing to “the monstrous organism known as the collective Western world.”

Vladimir Solovyov, another popular broadcaster who is close to Putin, routinely expresses a preference for nuclear annihilation over a Russian defeat. The invitation of Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, to the White House and the U.S. Capitol in December made Solovyov especially angry. “We’ll either win, or humanity will cease to exist, because the Lord won’t stand for the triumph of warriors of the Antichrist,” he said, repeating the new propaganda line that Ukrainians aren’t just Nazis; they’re satanists. “We are Russians. God is with us,” he concluded. Despite his professed hatred for ungodly Western decadence, before the invasion of Ukraine Solovyov owned villas overlooking Lake Como, in Italy.

Why Did France And Germany Participate In U.S. Deception And Aggression Against Russia?

scheerpost  |  The U.S., having no need of or gift for statecraft, has long practiced what I’ve taken to calling the diplomacy of no diplomacy. You can’t expect much from bimbos such as Antony Blinken or Wendy Sherman, Blinken’s No. 2 at the State Department. All they can do is roar, even if they are mice next to any serious diplomat. 

But have the European powers now followed along? I fear to ask because I fear the answer. But I must, given recent events.

Early last year, when Petro Poroshenko stated publicly that the post-coup regime in Kyiv had no intention of abiding by diplomatic commitments it made in 2014-15 to a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine crisis, a few eyebrows arched, but not over many. Who was the former Ukrainian president, anyway? I had him down from the first as a self-interested dummkopf who did what Washington told him to do and nothing more, no shred of statesmanship about him. 

It was another matter when, in early December, Angela Merkel admitted in back-to-back interviews that the European powers were up to the same thing. The objective of diplomatic talks in late 2014 and early 2015, the former German chancellor told Der Spiegel and Die Zeit, was not, as they had pretended, a framework for a federalized Ukraine in the cause of a lasting peace between its hostile halves: It was to deceive the Russians to give Kyiv time to prepare for a military assault on the Russian-speaking provinces in the east, whose people had refused to accept the U.S.–orchestrated coup that brought compulsively Russophobic Nazi-inflected nationalists to power in February 2014. 

Merkel’s revelations came as a shock, of course. But I contrived to mark down her comments as an inadvertent indiscretion in the autumn of a long-serving leader’s years. Merkel made her remarks more or less in passing. There was no boasting in them. She did not seem proud of her duplicity. 

Now François Hollande weighs in. A few days before the year ended, the former French president gave a lengthy interview to The Kyiv Independent. In it he made the Franco–German position perfectly clear: Yes, Merkel and I lied to the Russians when we negotiated the Minsk I and Minsk II Protocols in September 2014 and February 2015. No, we never had any intention of making Kyiv observe them or otherwise enforcing them. It was a charade from the first and—the part of this interview that truly galls—Hollande advanced this as wise, sound statesmanship.

Let us count the betrayals we must assign to the hapless Hollande and the inconstant Merkel. 

The betrayal of Russia and its president will go without saying. It is a matter of record that Vladimir Putin, who participated directly in the Minsk talks, worked long, long hours in the cause of a settlement that would leave Ukraine stable and unified, a freestanding post–Soviet republic on the Russian Federation’s southwestern order.  

Here I will remind readers of the animosity Putin expressed in his New Year’s address, three days after Hollande described the Franco–German sting operation in detail:

The West lied to us about peace while preparing for aggression, and today, they no longer hesitate to openly admit it and to cynically use Ukraine and its people as a means to weaken and divide Russia.

It's Not Just Fauci: Power-Sunstein An AssClown Two-Fer That Doesn't Bode Well....,(REDUX from 3/8/21)

WaPo |  Almost all conversations about roadblocks Trump faces or opposition to his initiatives centered on what was perceived as the media’s biased portrayal of him and his administration, rather than on anything the Democrats were doing.

Republicans and conservatives have grumbled about unfair coverage from the “mainstream media” for decades. But the Trump era has brought us to a new plateau, one where the media has moved from adversarial to oppositional. Many observers, on both right and left, have come to see the media as the leader of the resistance.

If you care about journalism, it’s a disturbing trend. Many in the media would undoubtedly lay much of the blame on Trump’s “fake news” attacks. But peruse the pages or websites of most of our nation’s leading news providers, and it’s easy to understand why such a perception has taken hold, apart from Trump’s claims. 

Former Democratic president Jimmy Carter’s widely reported comments in Maureen Dowd’s recent New York Times column about the media’s coverage of Trump were a welcome acknowledgment of the obvious from someone other than a Trump loyalist. 

“I think the media have been harder on Trump than any other president certainly that I’ve known about,” Carter said. “I think they feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without hesitation.” 

Out of curiosity, I checked the Democratic National Committee’s website this week. Some of the headlines were: “Trump abuses role as commander-in-chief in latest lie.” “Tom Perez on Trump’s executive order to sabotage Americans’ health care.” “Trump’s lapdog Pence must return wasted taxpayer dollars.” 

That’s what you would expect from the opposition party. The problem is, headlines accusing Trump of “sabotage,” “lies” and more are not uncommon from our major media outlets. That’s why I was curious whether the DNC was still bothering to employ a press staff when it has been made so redundant.

Rule Of Law: Elite, Establishment Politics, Psyops, And Livestock Management Methods (REDUX from 5/13/15)

Kahneman |  Another scholar and friend whom I greatly admire, Cass Sunstein, disagrees sharply with Slovic’s stance on the different views of experts and citizens, and defends the role of experts as a bulwark against “populist” excesses. Sunstein is one of the foremost legal scholars in the United States, and shares with other leaders of his profession the attribute of intellectual fearlessness. He knows he can master any body of knowledge quickly and thoroughly, and he has mastered many, including both the psychology of judgment and choice and issues of regulation and risk policy. His view is that the existing system of regulation in the United States displays a very poor setting of priorities, which reflects reaction to public pressures more than careful objective analysis. He starts from the position that risk regulation and government intervention to reduce risks should be guided by rational weighting of costs and benefits, and that the natural units for this analysis are the number of lives saved (or perhaps the number of life-years saved, which gives more weight to saving the young) and the dollar cost to the economy. Poor regulation is wasteful of lives and money, both of which can be measured objectively. Sunstein has not been persuaded by Slovic’s argument that risk and its measurement is subjective. Many aspects of risk assessment are debatable, but he has faith in the objectivity that may be achieved by science, expertise, and careful deliberation.

Sunstein came to believe that biased reactions to risks are an important source of erratic and misplaced priorities in public policy. Lawmakers and regulators may be overly responsive to the irrational concerns of citizens, both because of political sensitivity and because they are prone to the same cognitive biases as other citizens.

Sunstein and a collaborator, the jurist Timur Kuran, invented a name for the mechanism through which biases flow into policy: the availability cascade. They comment that in the social context, “all heuristics are equal, but availability is more equal than the others.” They have in mind an expanded notion of the heuristic, in which availability provides a heuristic for judgments other than frequency. In particular, the importance of an idea is often judged by the fluency (and emotional charge) with which that idea comes to mind.

An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action. On some occasions, a media story about a risk catches the attention of a segment of the public, which becomes aroused and worried. This emotional reaction becomes a story in itself, prompting additional coverage in the media, which in turn produces greater concern and involvement. The cycle is sometimes sped along deliberately by “availability entrepreneurs,” individuals or organizations who work to ensure a continuous flow of worrying news. The danger is increasingly exaggerated as the media compete for attention-grabbing headlines. Scientists and others who try to dampen the increasing fear and revulsion attract little attention, most of it hostile: anyone who claims that the danger is overstated is suspected of association with a “heinous cover-up.” The issue becomes politically important because it is on everyone’s mind, and the response of the political system is guided by the intensity of public sentiment. The availability cascade has now reset priorities. Other risks, and other ways that resources could be applied for the public good, all have faded into the background.

Why DoD Puts Its Bioweapons Labs In African And Failed Eastern European States...,

undark  |  In 2004, an activist named Edward Hammond fired up his fax machine and sent out letters to 390 institutional biosafety committees across the country. His request was simple: Show me your minutes.

Few people at the time had heard of these committees, known as IBCs, and even today, the typical American is likely unaware that they even exist. But they’re a ubiquitous — and, experts say, crucial — tool for overseeing potentially risky research in the United States. Since 1976, if a scientist wants to tweak the DNA of a lab organism, and their institution receives funding from the National Institutes of Health, they generally need to get express safety approval from the collection of scientists, biosafety experts, and interested community members who sit on the relevant IBC. Given the long reach of the $46-billion NIH budget, virtually every research university in the U.S. is required to have such a board, as are plenty of biotechnology companies and hospitals. The committees “are the cornerstone of institutional oversight of recombinant DNA research,” according to the NIH, and at many institutions, their purview includes high-security labs and research on deadly pathogens. 

The agency also requires these committees to maintain detailed meeting minutes, and to supply them upon request to members of the public. But when Hammond started requesting those minutes, he found something else. Not only were many universities declining to share their minutes, but some didn’t seem to have active IBCs at all. “The committees weren’t functioning,” Hammond told Undark. “It was just an absolute joke.”

The issue has gained fresh urgency amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Many scientists, along with U.S. intelligence agencies, say it’s possible that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, emerged accidentally from a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV — a coronavirus research hub in China that received grant funding from the NIH through a New York-based environmental health nonprofit. Overseas entities receiving NIH funding are required to form institutional biosafety committees, and while grant proposals to the NIH obtained by The Intercept mention an IBC at the Wuhan institution, it remains unclear what role such a committee played there, or whether one was ever really convened.

An NIH spokesperson, Amanda Fine, did not answer questions about whether the Wuhan institute has had a committee registered with the agency in the past. In an email, she referred to a roster of currently active IBCs, which does not list WIV. Other efforts by Undark to obtain details about meetings of the Wuhan lab’s IBC were unsuccessful. But so, too, were initial efforts to obtain meeting minutes from several IBCs conducting what is supposed to be both routine and publicly transparent business on U.S. soil. Undark recently contacted a sample of eight New York City-area institutions with requests for copies of IBC meeting minutes and permission to attend upcoming meetings. Most did not respond to initial queries. It took nearly two months for any of the eight institutions to furnish minutes, and some did not provide minutes at all, suggesting that in many cases, the IBC system may be as opaque and inconsistently structured as when Hammond, who eventually testified before Congress on the issue in 2007, first began investigating.

Indeed, recent interviews with biosafety experts, scientists, and public officials suggest that IBC oversight still varies from institution to institution, creating a biosafety system that’s uneven, resistant to public scrutiny, and subject to minimal enforcement from the NIH. Hammond and other critics say these problems are baked into the system itself: As the country’s flagship funder of biomedical research, the NIH, these critics say, shouldn’t also be charged with overseeing its safety.

 

Justin Trudeau You Know You Done Fucked Up, Right?

AP  |  A blockade of the bridge between Canada and Detroit by protesters demanding an end to Canada’s COVID-19 restrictions forced the shutdown Wednesday of a Ford plant and began to have broader implications for the North American auto industry.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, stood firm against an easing of Canada’s COVID-19 restrictions in the face of mounting pressure during recent weeks by protests against the restrictions and against Trudeau himself.

The protest by people mostly in pickup trucks entered its third day at the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. Traffic was prevented from entering Canada, while U.S.-bound traffic was still moving.

The bridge carries 25% of all trade between the two countries, and Canadian authorities expressed increasing worry about the economic effects.

Ford said late Wednesday that parts shortages forced it to shut down its engine plant in Windsor and to run an assembly plant in Oakville, Ontario, on a reduced schedule. 

“This interruption on the Detroit-Windsor bridge hurts customers, auto workers, suppliers, communities and companies on both sides of the border,” Ford said in a statement. “We hope this situation is resolved quickly because it could have widespread impact on all automakers in the U.S. and Canada.”

Shortages due to the blockade also forced General Motors to cancel the second shift of the day at its midsize-SUV factory near Lansing, Michigan. Spokesman Dan Flores said it was expected to restart Thursday and no additional impact was expected for the time being.

Later Wednesday, Toyota spokesman Scott Vazin said the company will not be able to manufacture anything at three Canadian plants for the rest of this week due to parts shortages. A statement attributed the problem to supply chain, weather and pandemic-related challenges, but the shutdowns came just days after the blockade began Monday.

“Our teams are working diligently to minimize the impact on production,” the company said, adding that it doesn’t expect any layoffs at this time.

Stellantis, formerly Fiat Chrysler, reported normal operations, though the company had to cut shifts short the previous day at its Windsor minivan plant.

“We are watching this very closely,″ White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said earlier of the bridge blockade.

Public Opinion Has Zero-Impact On U.S. Law

upworthy |  Their study took data from nearly 2,000 public-opinion surveys and compared what the people wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners in America has essentially no impact at all.

Put another way, and I'll just quote the Princeton study directly here:

“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."

Really think about that for a second.

If you've ever felt like your opinion doesn't matter and that the government doesn't really care what you think, well … you're right.

But, of course, there's a catch.

...unless you're an "economic elite."

If there's one thing that still reliably gets politicians' attention, it's money. While the opinions of the bottom 90% of income earners in America have a "statistically non-significant impact," Gilens and Page found that economic elites, business interests, and people who can afford lobbyists still carry major influence.

How could it be that our government, designed to function as a representative democracy, is only good at representing such a small fraction of the population? Just follow the money.

Why? Because purchasing political influence is 100% legal.

For example: Let's say a big bank wants a law that would force taxpayers to bail them out again if they repeat the exact same reckless behavior that crashed the global economy in 2008.

It's perfectly legal for our bank to hire a team of lobbyists whose entire job is to make sure the government gives the bank what it wants. Then, those lobbyists can track down members of Congress who regulate banks and help raise a ton of money for their re-election campaigns. Its also perfectly legal for those lobbyists to offer those same politicians million-dollar jobs at their lobbying firms.

Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kansas), shown speaking at an event in 2012, recently attached language originally drafted by lobbyists for CitiGroup to a financial services appropriations bill. Members of Congress who voted "yes" on the bill received, on average, 2.8 times more money from the PACs of CitiGroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase than members who voted "no." Image by Information Technology Innovation Foundation/Flickr.

They can also literally write the language of this new bailout law themselves, then hand it off to the politicians they just buttered up with campaign money and lucrative job offers. And it's perfectly legal for those politicians to sneak the lobbyist-written language through Congress at the last second.

If that example sounds oddly specific, that's because it happened in December 2014. And it happens all the time, on almost every single issue, with politicians of both parties.

A Strictly Limited Parasitic Elite?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unidentified Flying Threats? REDUX

The folks must be growing increasingly restive about the Obama candidacy. The NYTimes had this crunchy little morsel in this past week's op-eds.

The United States is no less vulnerable than Britain and France to threats to security and air safety. The United States Air Force or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration should reopen investigations of U.F.O. phenomena. It would not imply that the country has suddenly started believing in little green men. It would simply recognize the possibility that radar alone cannot always tell us what’s out there. A healthy skepticism about extraterrestrial space travelers leads people to disregard U.F.O. sightings without a moment’s thought. But in the United States, this translates into overdependence on radar data and indifference to all kinds of unidentified aircraft — a weakness that could be exploited by terrorists or anyone seeking to engage in espionage against the United States. The American government has not investigated U.F.O. sightings since 1969, when the Air Force ended Project Blue Book, an effort to scientifically analyze all sightings to see if any posed a threat to national security. Britain and France, in contrast, continue to investigate U.F.O. sightings, because of concerns that some sightings might be attributable to foreign military aircraft breaching their airspace, or to foreign space-based systems of interest to the intelligence community.

I love these articles. To me, they're like tchotchkys of the collective unconscious. I expect we'll be seeing lots more such bon mots in the weeks and months to come as the perfect storm afflicting the economy and the American body politic gathers strength. The American political theater will prove jarringly impotent in dealing with the encompassing reality corrections - so it's time once again to inject a little mystery and awe into the otherwise steady diet of bread and circuses...., Originally posted August 2, 2008.

Inwardly Wokeness Is A Weapon, Outwardly Wokeness Is A Disguise

greenwald  |  The British spy agency GCHQ is so aggressive, extreme and unconstrained by law or ethics that the NSA — not exactly world renowned for its restraint — often farms out spying activities too scandalous or illegal for the NSA to their eager British counterparts. There is, as the Snowden reporting demonstrated, virtually nothing too deceitful or invasive for the GCHQ. They spy on entire populations, deliberately disseminate fake news, exploit psychological research to control behavior and manipulate public perception, and destroy the reputations, including through the use of sex traps, of anyone deemed adversarial to the British government.

But they want you to know that they absolutely adore gay people. In fact, they love the cause of LGBT equality so very much that, beginning on May 17, 2015 — International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia — they started draping their creepy, UFO-style headquarters in the colors of the rainbow flag. The prior year, in 2014, they had merely raised the rainbow flag in front of their headquarters, but in 2015, they announced, “we wanted to make a bold statement to show the nation we serve how strongly we believe in this.”

Who could possibly be opposed to an institution that offers such noble gestures and works behind such a pretty facade? How bad could the GCHQ really be if they are so deeply committed to the rights of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and trans people? Sure, maybe they go a little overboard with the spying sometimes, and maybe some of their surveillance and disinformation programs are a bit questionable, and they do not necessarily have the highest regard for law, privacy and truth. But we know that, deep down, these are fundamentally good people working within a fundamentally benign institution. Just look at their flamboyant support for this virtuous cause of social justice.

Large corporations have obviously witnessed the success of this tactic — to prettify the face of militarism and imperialism with the costumes of social justice — and are now weaponizing it for themselves. As a result, they are becoming increasingly aggressive in their involvement in partisan and highly politicized debates, always on the side of the same causes of social justice which entities of imperialism and militarism have so effectively co-opted.

Corporations have always sought to control the legislative process and executive branch, usually with much success. They purchase politicians and their power aides by hiring them as lobbyists and consultants when they leave government, and those bought-and-paid-for influence-peddlers then proceed to exploit their connections in Washington or state capitals to ensure that laws are written and regulations enforced (or not enforced) to benefit the corporations’ profit interests. These large corporations achieve the same goal by filling the campaign coffers of politicians from both parties. This is standard, age-old K Street sleaze that allows large corporations to control American democracy at the expense of those who cannot afford to buy this influence.

But they are now going far beyond clandestine corporatist control of the government for their own interests. They are now becoming increasingly powerful participants in highly polarizing and democratic debates. In the wake of the George Floyd killing last summer, it became virtually obligatory for every large corporation to proclaim support for the #BlackLivesMatter agenda even though many, if not most, had never previously evinced the slightest interest in questions of racial justice or policing.

 

Culture WAR! What Is The Gentrified Karenwaffen Good For? Absolutely Nothing....,

oftwominds  |  Those who lived through The Cultural Revolution are reticent about revealing their experiences. Even in the privacy of their homes in the U.S., their voices become hushed and their reluctance to give voice to their experiences is evident.

The unifying thread in my view is the accused belonged to some "counter-revolutionary" elite --or they were living vestiges of a pre-revolutionary elite (children of the landlord class, professors, etc.)--and it was now open season on all elites, presumed or real.

What generates such spontaneous, self-organizing violence on a national scale? My conclusion is that cultural revolutions result from the suppression of legitimate political expression and the failure of the regime to meet its lofty idealistic goals.

Cultural revolutions are an expression of disappointment and frustration with corruption and the lack of progress in improving everyday life, frustrations that have no outlet in a regime of self-serving elites who view dissent as treason and/or blasphemy.

By 1966, China's progress since 1949 had been at best uneven, and at worst catastrophic: the Great Leap Forward caused the deaths of millions due to malnutrition and starvation, and other centrally planned programs were equally disastrous for the masses.

Given the quick demise of the Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom movement of open expression, young people realized there was no avenue for dissent within the Party, and no way to express their frustration with the Party's failure to fulfil its idealistic goals and promises.

When there is no relief valve in the pressure cooker, it's eventually released in a Cultural Revolution that unleashes all the bottled-up frustrations on elites which are deemed politically vulnerable. These frustrations have no outlet politically because they're threatening to the status quo.

All these repressed emotions will find some release and expression, and whatever avenues are blocked by authorities will channel the frustrations into whatever is still open.

A Cultural Revolution takes the diversity of individuals and identities and reduces them into an abstraction which gives the masses permission to criticize the abstract class that "deserves" whatever rough justice is being delivered by the Cultural Revolution.

As the book review excerpt noted, the definition of who deserves long overdue justice shifts with the emergent winds, and so those at the head of the Revolution might find themselves identified as an illegitimate elite that must be unseated.

I submit that these conditions exist in the U.S.: the systemic failure of the status quo to deliver on idealized promises and the repression of dissent outside "approved" (i.e. unthreatening to the status quo) boundaries.

What elite can be criticized without drawing the full repressive powers of the central state? What elite will it be politically acceptable to criticize? I submit that "the wealthy" are just such an abstract elite.

To protect itself, a repressive status quo implicitly signals that the masses can release their ire on an abstract elite with indistinct boundaries--a process that will divert the public anger, leaving the Powers That Be still in charge.

But just as in China's Cultural Revolution, central authorities will quickly lose control of conditions on the ground. They will maintain the illusion of control even as events spiral ever farther from their control. The falcon will no longer hear the falconer.

The Wholesale Discrediting Of The American Medical Industrial Complex

nakedcapitalism |  Of so many tragedies to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the saddest to me – and probably the one with the longest-reverberating consequences – has been its wholesale discrediting of our health science institutions.

Here we are, over a year into this pandemic, and we cannot get a straight answer on whether or not this relatively cheap and safe drug (ivermectin) saves human lives from COVID-19 or not. Worse, we can’t even seem to properly investigate it. All questions bring hysterics, or hardly-believable obfuscation, or (informed?) outrage, no matter what authority we turn to. The fallout in my own life from watching all this unfold has been… dramatic.

I don’t trust what the CDC says. I don’t trust what the WHO says. I don’t trust what the FDA says. I don’t trust Pfizer and the rest of the pharmaceutical companies any farther than I can throw them. I look with suspicion on my own scientist acquaintances, wondering if they are really following the data, or if they are clinging to a chosen worldview that science in America still works, oh god it still works, oh god it hasn’t been completely discredited, no it cannot be, my life work must have meant something, it must still work, it must still work….??

None of this means that ivermectin works–or for that matter, that it doesn’t work. It means that I have realized, slowly and then all-of-a-sudden, that I cannot know. Nor can any other layperson. We are alone, our economy is collapsing in slow-motion, and our lives are at stake. Or so we think! If we doubt so much, how much more should we really be doubting? I believe, for what it’s worth, that COVID-19 is real and that these experimental vaccines probably won’t kill us. At least… not that many of us.

But I wonder now, in my darker moments, whether the claim of those who don’t believe such things that refusing the vaccination is a “Darwin’s test – pass it and survive” have grokked something that was beyond me, in my previous worldview. How could it have come to this…? And if I am feeling like this, how must people with less scientific background (I attended a science magnet school) be feeling about it all??

Will my children be safe from measles, etc in the years to come? I have vaccinated them with the whole slate, and feel fine about that choice, but will the fallout from this debacle mean the end of herd immunity in America, as trust in the ‘health experts’ collapses into dust? How can we get it back, then – at gunpoint? With all that would imply… is it even worth such a high price…?

Dr. Cornel West - You Know WHO And WHAT You Must Never Discuss...,

bostonreview |  Harvard hired Dr. Cornel West in 2016 without tenure? This was news to me. Five years ago I wrote what I believed was a tenure review letter for Dr. West; I even named the file “cornel_west_tenure.docx.” I received the request on April 18, 2016. Given Dr. West’s dual appointments in both the Harvard Divinity School and the Department of African and African-American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the request was signed by David Hempton, Dean of Harvard Divinity School, and Claudine Gay, Dean of Social Science in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. It asked me to evaluate Dr. West for a senior appointment as Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy. The letter never states that this was to be a non-tenured appointment, nor is tenure explicitly mentioned. But having received literally hundreds of requests over the course of three decades, I can say it certainly read like a tenured appointment.

Besides, Dr. West had already been tenured at Harvard—and at Yale and at Princeton. Dr. West left his tenured position at Harvard in 2002 after then Harvard president Lawrence Summers questioned his scholarship, his commitment to teaching, and his political advocacy. He took a tenured position at Princeton, where he remained for more than ten years before moving to Union Theological Seminary and then back to Harvard. It never occurred to me that Harvard would bring him back as a contract laborer, especially given the criteria for tenure: the value and originality of scholarship.

It is ridiculous to have to say this, but the public attacks make it necessary: Dr. West is a formidable intellectual who works in the interstices of philosophy, theology, cultural criticism, political analysis, and social critique. He has produced a massive body of work that cuts across forms and disciplines—books, articles, published dialogues, lectures, debates, and commentary displayed across several different media platforms. No need to reproduce his curriculum vitae here. Just consider the fact that Dr. West has been the subject of several scholarly books: Mark David Wood’s Cornel West and the Politics of Prophetic Pragmatism (2000), Rosemary Cowan’s Cornel West: The Politics of Redemption (2002), Clarence Johnson’s Cornel West and Philosophy (2003), and Keith Gilyard’s Composition and Cornel West: Notes Toward a Deep Democracy (2008), to name just a few. Only a handful of Dr. West’s tenured colleagues can make such a claim. And beyond all this, he is an immensely popular teacher and a stalwart supporter of student activism.

Graduate students from across the campus swiftly petitioned the university to reconsider its decision to deny Dr. West tenure. Jonathan L. Swain, Harvard’s director of media relations, would not comment on the petition, but he did say previously that West’s reappointment committee did not have the authority to review him for tenure. To put it bluntly, either the dean, the provost, or the president blocked any possibility of turning Dr. West’s appointment into a tenured position, but no one so far is willing to take responsibility for this decision. Dr. West suspects it has to do with his politics—notably, his active support for the Bernie Sanders campaign and his consistent advocacy for Palestinian human rights. I agree. Harvard has a problem with outspoken, principled faculty who take public positions that question university policy, challenge authority, or might ruffle the feathers of big donors. And when the faculty in question are scholars of color, their odds of getting through the tenure process are slim to none.

 

Joy Reid Is A Sassy Blue-Check Establishment-Negroe Troll Licensed To Say Anything

mediaite  |   “Enter the Republican conspiracy senator from Wisconsin, by way of Moscow, Ron Johnson,” said Joy Reid on her 7 p.m. MSNBC show last week. By way of Moscow? I guess Johnson is a puppet of Putin, or something?

This wouldn’t be much of a story if it weren’t the third most outlandish thing Reid said in the last week. Instead, Reid is empowered to say what appears to be more hyperbolic and vitriolic comments, encouraged by her Twitter followers and, apparently, by her bosses at the NBC News-affiliated cable channel.

On Wednesday night’s Reid Out, the host was opining on the decision by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to “open” the state and end the statewide mask mandate. With the chyron “Texas To End All COVID Precautions” (not true, but moving on), Reid had this to say about Texas and Mississippi: “These states, what they have in common, is they have structures which say black and brown lives matter less. All that matters is that Black and brown people get their behinds into the factory and make me my steaks. Make me my stuff. Get there and do my nails. Work. Get back to work now, and do the things that I, the comfortable, affluent, person need. Isn’t that what we’re seeing?”

There’s a lot here to unpack. Reid’s conclusion is that Texas is going to change Covid rules so “Black and brown people” can… “make me my steaks”? It’s confusing, and offensive — and spoken with such a total certainty, which makes it so much worse.

Which brings us to this tweet from Reid, also from Wednesday and also supremely confident, about what “people on the right” think:

I’ll say it again: people on the right would trade all the tax cuts for the ability to openly say the n-word like in “the good old days.” To them, not being able to be openly racist and discriminatory without consequence is oppression. Trump is the avatar for this “freedom.” https://t.co/RlqAFYe5Zr

— Joy-Ann Pro-Democracy & Masks Reid 😷 (@JoyAnnReid) March 4, 2021

Yes, Reid apparently believes that “people on the right” would like to “openly say the n-word,” and that “not being able to be openly racist” is “oppression” to these people. Note — this is not directed at “racists” or “white supremacists.” It’s not even couching this as “some people on the right.” It’s just a blanket, across-the-board comment, according to Reid, that all people on the right think this way. Theoretically, Joy Reid works with “people on the right” — like Nicolle Wallace. But I mean this sincerely — does Joy Reid really know a single Republican?

It's Not Just Fauci: Power-Sunstein An AssClown Two-Fer That Doesn't Bode Well....,

exiledonline |  So who is Cass Sunstein? Like his former “partner” Martha and like his new love Samantha, Cass has devoted his life to pleasing the guild by stuffing its vaults with the sort of forgettable Beigeist nonsense that it likes to see—because no person with a functioning gag reflex could possibly spend decades of his or her life writing endless articles about law and how to make citizens more citizen-y. Cass, however, is the kind of guy who could swallow a pepperoni stick without gagging—just look at the record:  roughly twelve gazillion articles and books on legal issues and behavioral psychology’s relationship to the law. In fact Cass Sunstein is such a prolific Middlebrow in his field that there’s even a joke among his colleagues that Cass is the Kevin Bacon of legal journals. You know, because every legal academic has either done an article with Cass, or done an article with someone who’s done and article with Cass… Seriously, in the lounges, that Kevin Bacon joke really bowls ‘em over. And please don’t mention anything to them about how they’re about three decades late with that joke. They are tenured academics, after all—show some sensitivity, please!

It’s all adding up to a bad 70s East Coast thinking-person’s divorce-drama. I mean the names themselves are earth-toned: Martha; Samantha; Cass. The campus settings; the academic must and competition. The affairs. It’s like a bad Updike book! Which is to say: The Obama Era is a bad Updike book. Rabbit’s Reduxing all over again! And we’re stuck reading it for the next 8 years!

Anyway, so after Cass dumped Martha in Chicago last year, he moved to Harvard where Samantha teaches. Now, both Cass and Samantha teach at Harvard. Which you know had to hurt, like pouring salt into Martha’s wounds, because, like, they didn’t give her tenure at Harvard. (At this moment, cue the Erik Satie soundtrack. Either that or Billie Holiday…Updike is cursing us from the grave! Burn his bones, someone!) Samantha Power is the third segment of this horrible Middlebrow Love Triangle. For Samantha, however, she had a “defining moment” in her biography. That defining moment was Bosnia—the tragedy that attracted hordes of defining-moment-tourists from the West’s top academic and struggling-journalist institutions. Every Orwell-swooning middlebrow secretly cursed under their breath that they’d never be able to duplicate his moral outrage and moral courage without a perfectly defined cause like his—so when Bosnia presented its tragedy on a bloodied platter, Samantha, along with all the David Rieffs and Peter Maas’s and you-name-‘em-if-they-read-Orwell-they-were-in-Sarajevo’s all entered the “watch me being morally outraged on behalf of humanity” competition in Bosnia, then took the “lesson” that “defined” them there, and came away with this: in the future, if America sees slaughter going on in some part of the world we don’t understand, we should bomb the bad guys and save the good guys. Now, don’t get Samantha wrong—she ain’t no George Bush. No no no, she’s totally, totally different. I mean sure, both went to Harvard and all, but really—Samantha Power is soooo smart, and George W. Bush is sooooo stupid.

How smart is she? Samantha wrote a “landmark” book, a book that really bowled over Team Obama, about genocides in the 20th century. Because genocides are really bad, she wants us to know. Not all genocides, mind you—just the genocides she chooses to focus on. She didn’t include in her book the genocides that might muddy up her Dubya-brained moralizing about genocide—anyway, it’s sexist to criticize her for omitting American-led genocides in the 20th century that led to millions of deaths in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Central America, and elsewhere; or Britain’s genocide-guilt in about 2/3 of the globe. Those aren’t officially “genocides” in Samantha’s classification, because that’s not playing by the rules. The rules say very clearly that these are genocides and those aren’t—so for example, when America financed and armed the genocide in East Timor, Samantha writes that America “looked away.” Well, you get the point here.