Why The American Military Industrial Complex Is In A Costly Freefall

spectator |  (Ret.) Col. Doug Macgregor, writing in the American Conservative in October:

The generals always knew that the public admission of failure would not simply throw 20 years of graft and deceit into sharp relief; such an admission would expose the four stars themselves to serious scrutiny. To explain the rapid collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan state and the inexcusable waste of American blood and treasure, the American people would discover the long process of moral and professional decline in the senior ranks of the Army and the Marines, their outdated doctrine, thinking, and organization for combat. For the generals it was always better to preserve the façade in Kabul, propping up the illusion of strength, than face the truth.

It was as if the Afghanistan debacle had finally ripped the last scab off the military’s role in the failed enterprise. Suddenly the superstar warrior/monk generals for whom the mainstream media had written endless paeans, before which members of Congress had bowed and scraped, were under the garish light of delayed circumspection.

As a result, there is plenty of talk about what went wrong and what shape the military is in for the future. And certainly just focusing on “the generals” would be shortsighted. This is about the institution — for which America’s trust is actually plummeting. So can the military really afford not to take stock of the cultural, institutional — and yes, political — changes that have swept over it in the last 20 years or more?

“My major concern is military effectiveness,” says (Ret.) Marine Corps. Capt. Dan Grazier, who served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan in a tank battalion and is now a military analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, “that in the rare event where the military does need to be deployed that we can be the most effective, lethal force possible when the situation calls for it.”

After interviews with several infantry veterans who served in the post-9/11 wars, The American Spectator picked up on a familiar theme as the main obstacle for rebuilding the forces and the faith: leadership corrupted by careerism and influenced by outside interests that don’t always coincide with the interests of the national defense.

The forces aren’t healthy: whose fault?

To Grazier’s mind, after 20 years of constant deployments the military is “going to naturally decay.” It’s impossible to sustain systems on a tempo of that measure without undergoing entropy. According to the most recent RAND Corporation study on deployments, 2.7 million service members have served in 5.4 million deployments across the globe since 2001. The National Guard and reserves account for about 35 percent of the total (as of 2015). In fact, thanks to COVID, wildfires, border patrol, and the extra security put on the nation’s capital in January, the Guard was used in 2020 more than any time since World War II. Missions peaked in June when more than 120,000 of its 450,000 members were on duty here or abroad.

Gil Barndollar, who served in Afghanistan with the Marines and is now a fellow with Defense Priorities, says retention will be a concern. These “citizen soldiers” have “become an operational reserve, not the strategic reserve they were originally intended to be,” he told the Spectator. “Manpower is a rollercoaster, the effects on recruiting and retention always have a lag after events and policy decisions.”

He laments that the Guard, of which he is currently a member, has been used to augment the active duty force so that it can maintain what has become protracted, unending overseas conflicts, often using resources and equipment that are needed stateside, particularly helicopters necessary to fight wildfires in western states.

“It hasn’t been just a long year, it’s been a long 20 years,” Army Maj. Gen. Bret Daugherty, commander of the Washington state Guard, said back in January. “I just want to focus on that. We’re all consumed with our domestic operations right now, but it is simultaneous with our overseas deployments, which have not let up one iota.”

Unfortunately, instead of pouring resources and energy into maintaining readiness, much of Washington’s zeal today is about throwing money at shiny new objects: big-ticket weapons systems, ships, and aircraft that either take years to build, become obsolete, or don’t work. A boon to the Beltway defense lobby, not so much for the fighting forces.

“The military has gotten into a lot of bad habits over the last 20 years. If you look at the amount of money that was thrown at the Pentagon, it’s created a lack of discipline,” Grazier charges. “After 9/11 the floodgates were opened wide. That played to the worst tendencies of the military industrial congressional complex.”

Out Of Office, What Do The Hard-Grifting Clintons Have Left To Peddle?

dailycaller |  The Clinton Foundation’s rapid decline in donor cash has alarmed top ethics watchdogs who say it shows clear red flags of political corruption.

Financial disclosures show a precipitous decline in contributions to the Clinton Foundation in the years following former president Bill Clinton and former first lady Hillary Clinton’s fall from the heights of their political power.

The Clinton Foundation received roughly $16.3 million in contributions in 2020, according to their newly released Form 990. This was a 93.6% decrease from the nearly $250 million the charitable organization raked in during 2009 after Hillary Clinton was appointed Secretary of State.

“For years, the Clinton Foundation raised ethical concerns and blurred lines between the foundation, private entities, and the State Department,” said Scott Amey, General Counsel for the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a nonpartisan, independent government corruption watchdog organization.

“Money was pouring in when Hillary Clinton was a senior official and a candidate for president. The fact that foundation donors received special access to the Secretary of State isn’t surprising, nor is the fall in foundation funding after her 2016 election loss. Many people thought people were supporting the former president, but it really looks like they were cozying up to who they thought was going to be the future president — a situation that can’t be repeated,” the POGO General Counsel told the Daily Caller.

“Now, with ethics concerns raised about Mnuchin and Kushner, as well as judges, it is vital that Congress put politics aside and pass an ethics reform package for all three branches of government. Congress must eliminate conflicts of interest, restrict special access, prevent trading on insider knowledge, and stop public servants who cash in for personal or private gain. Recent surveys show that corruption is a major public concern, but with the foxes guarding the henhouse, I’m unsure who will step forward to fix the problem,” said Amey.

“We’ve been seeing a decline in the cash flow to the Clinton Foundation since the 2016 presidential election,” Anna Massoglia told the Daily Caller. Massoglia is an Investigative Researcher at OpenSecrets, a non-profit transparency organization that tracks money in politics.

The Investigative Researcher said that when OpenSecrets spoke with the Clinton Foundation, they explained the strained revenue stream was “due to a lack of events due to an inability to have conferences” and “receiving less money from fundraising events, programs, and services.” Massoglia reasoned that “it would make sense for there to be a significant decrease in 2020 since there were even less in-person events around that time.”

“During the presidential election, of course, Clinton had said that they were going to step back from the foundation for the duration of the election, and if she came into office, that they would wind things down. However, because she was not elected, it was not expected that the foundation would get smaller for any other reason, at least externally,” added Massoglia.

In 2018, Massoglia and OpenSecrets were the first to obtain the Clinton Foundation’s annual 990 Form that showed a $38.4 million revenue stream. While slightly higher than the previous year, donations were still significantly lower than in years when Hillary or Bill Clinton were more influential in American politics.

 

“It Is Dangerous To Be Right In Matters On Which The Established Authorities Are Wrong.” ― Voltaire

americanthinker |  I just finished reading an article on the Big Think website titled "When science mixes with politics, all we get is politics," by Professor Marcelo Gleiser, theoretical physicist, Dartmouth College.  I mistakenly thought the commentary would decry the misuse of science by politicians, but no.  Instead, it decries the mistrust that we, the unwashed masses, have developed for the science establishment in recent years.  Unwittingly, the eminent professor gives us yet more reasons to regard science insiders with skepticism.

He does what so many of his colleagues do, which is to equate science itself with the institutions that purport to advance science.  To question politicized scientists, then, is supposedly unscientific.

Censorship of actual science has been heavy-handed, both by Democrats and by their Big Tech acolytes.  Epidemiologists, virologists, and physicians who do not toe the party line regarding COVID have been intimidated and silenced.  Science that cannot be openly questioned is not science, since the heart and soul of science are to scrutinize every claim from every angle.  If we are to be told we must follow the science, then scientists must explain to us the inductive reasoning that was applied to exclude members of Congress, and their staffs, from the COVID restrictions they imposed on the rest of us.  If scientists are to decry those of us who doubt their word, then they must equally decry the policy of distributing unvaccinated, untested illegal aliens to every state, while denying entry to legal travelers.

To decry only the skeptics, while ignoring the egregious anti-science of many politicians, does nothing to engender trust in the institutions of science.  It does the opposite.

 

Polarization And Tipping Points

scienceblog  |  As polarization has escalated in the U.S., the question of if and when that divide becomes insurmountable has become ever more pressing. In a new study, researchers have identified a tipping point, beyond which extreme polarization becomes irreversible.

The researchers employed a predictive model of a polarized group, similar to the current U.S. Senate, to reveal what can happen when the country faces an attack by a foreign adversary or a global pandemic.

“Instead of uniting against a common threat,” said lead author Michael Macy, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Sociology and director of the Social Dynamics Laboratory in the College of Arts and Sciences, “the threat itself becomes yet another polarizing issue.”

“Polarization and Tipping Points” published Nov. 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The model allows researchers to study the effects of party identity and political intolerance on ideological extremism and partisan division.

“We found that polarization increases incrementally only up to a point,” Macy said. “Above this point, there is a sudden change in the very fabric of the institution, like the change from water to steam when the temperature exceeds the boiling point.”

The dynamics resemble what physicists call “hysteresis loops.”

“We see this very disturbing pattern in which a shock brings people a little bit closer initially, but if polarization is too extreme, eventually the effects of a shared fate are swamped by the existing divisions and people become divided even on the shock issue,” said co-author Boleslaw Szymanski, a professor of computer science and director of the Army Research Laboratory Network Science and Technology Center (NeST) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  “If we reach that point, we cannot unite even in the face of war, climate change, pandemics, or other challenges to the survival of our society.”

The work builds on an earlier general model Szymanski developed to study the interactions of legislators in a two-party political system. Although the model isn’t specifically tuned to distinctive practices, customs, and rules of the U.S. Congress, it was trained using data, and previous research comparing model outcomes to 30 years of Congressional voting records demonstrated strong predictive power. In one finding from that work, the model accurately predicted the shift in polarization in 28 of 30 U.S. Congresses.

There Is No Common Conversation In The U.S. Today

strategic-culture |  COVID-19 is another revelation that there are two separate islands of opinion. Take, for example, the simple factual question – yes or no – did Dr Fauci’s organisation fund gain-of-function experiments in the Wuhan laboratory? A rather important matter, one would think. Snopes, that reliable defender of the status quo, says “unproven” in May in a long-winded piece. Denied by Fauci in May: “The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Two Pinocchios said the WaPo. But finally admitted in October: “a top official at the National Institutes of Health has conceded that contrary to the repeated assertions of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the NIH did indeed fund highly dangerous gain-of-function research on bat-borne coronaviruses in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” And more: “The annual report described the group’s work from June 2017 to May 2018, which involved creating new viruses using different parts of existing bat coronaviruses and inserting them into humanized mice in a lab in Wuhan, China. The work was overseen by the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by Anthony Fauci.” And so May’s conspiracy theory became October’s fact.

Did the virus leak from these US-funded experiments? No one knows but it cannot be ruled out. As to Dr Fauci himself, he may have overreached by telling his critics that he represents science; when even the WaPo carries a piece entitled “Fauci Can’t Use Science to Excuse His Missteps” perhaps his best-before date is nearing. Despite the prayer candles. In this respect, the fate of Robert Kennedy’s book, The Real Dr Fauci, is indicative; it’s Number One on Amazon with 96% five-star ratings. This is the more remarkable because of the full-scale attack on him from the establishment media: he is “the dumbest Kennedy“; “race-baiting ‘documentary’ and disinformation to advance bogus theories and seed anti-vaccine sentiment“; “documented history of promoting debunked theories about vaccines“; banned on social media. Tucker Carlson, in “a new escalation of his anti-science rhetoric”, had an interview “with longtime anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” Nonetheless, a lot of people are buying and reading it. These media campaigns don’t work as well as they used to. Indeed the 29% who had no trust at all probably believe the reverse of what the conventional media says. I know I do: if they’re all shouting the sane thing, I take it as a powerful indicator that the opposite is true. We should read Western media the way the Soviets read theirs.

However, there are unrelenting attempts to create conspiracy theories that all Americans can agree on. For years we have had the conspiracy theory that Putin is behind everything bad; in its current manifestation he’s about to invade Ukraine (or as the US Defense Secretary put it: “an incursion by the Soviet Union into the Ukraine“). Another fast-growing set of conspiracy theories focus on China, the “Wuhan lab leak” being one example. (Dangerous that because of Fauci’s funding of GoF research in Wuhan). China is about to invade Taiwan or starving Uyghers are forced to stuff themselves with pork or tennis players are disappeared; these conspiracy theories are safer. One of the principal pushers of the first conspiracy theory is switching to the other: he senses the change in the party line. And there’s always North Korea where the rats eat the babies and the babies eat the rats.

The China conspiracy theory seems to be working – a survey by the Reagan Foundation found that 52% saw China as the “greatest threat” to the USA (Russia well behind at 14% and North Korea just behind it at 12%). Three years ago Russia was 30% to China’s 21%. More striking is that China has gained twenty points since February. Can the Putin-won-2016/Trump-won-2020 divide be bridged by a Chinadunnit conspiracy theory?

But agreeing on a common enemy is one thing, the internal divisions are something else. In this respect the Reagan Foundation survey cited above is indicative. It finds that disbelief is spreading rapidly in the American population: trust in all institutions is dropping; confidence in the US military is dropping; support for active global leadership is dropping. A survey just now shows a slight majority of American youth regarding their democracy as in trouble. Not the strongest foundation for more foreign adventures.

A deeply divided country: there is no common conversation in the United States today – one person’s conspiracy theory is another’s truth.

Impotent Mask-Compliant Rage...,

theguardian  |  High among the unexpected, non-health compensations of masks is their value as shorthand. At the same time as they impede communication, they offer, anywhere that people exhibit extreme non-compliance, a rapid non-verbal personality indicator that is rivalled only, I would argue, by manspreading. Of course there are many other single but baleful inducements to run for the hills – personalised number plates, not tipping, devotion to the works of Ayn Rand or Judith Butler – but these may take time to discover or may even, on rare occasions, be redeemable.

Mask aversion once fell, just about, into that category. Last summer, anti-maskers could argue that they preferred the previous official guidance. Jenny Harries, now head of the UK Health Security Agency, had indeed treated the world’s mask-wearing nations to her superior, anti-mask theory in March 2020. “You can actually trap the virus in the mask and start breathing it in,” she said. Incredibly, or perhaps as a result if Johnson was involved, she was promoted.

As evidence has mounted to back mask efficacy, Johnson, even with this stimulus to lead by example, has treated masks as if they were a lefty plot against his face. A masked audience watching Macbeth recently noticed that the prime minister, squished into a crowded little theatre, preferred to follow the on-stage psychopathy with his face uncovered. In doing so, he perhaps revealed more about himself than idiot contrariness. Low compliance with containment measures was directly associated in one study with “antisocial traits, especially lower levels of empathy and higher levels of callousness, deceitfulness and risk-taking”. Though it’s too late to save us from Johnson, the psychology of mask behaviour might help to screen out another leader who shouts, when discouraged: “Let the bodies pile high in their thousands.”

Meanwhile, we may be getting closer to understanding the MPs who last week voted, in defiance of scientific advice and majority opinion, against protecting public health. Weren’t they once great respecters of majorities, even narrow ones? But it’s pointless to expect logic. Like the Macbeths, they simply couldn’t help themselves.

Only The 2nd Amendment Keeps Americans From Getting The Iron Boot

unherd |  Perhaps it’s my age, or perhaps it’s just blind prejudice, but when I wake to the news that the Austrian government has interned an entire third of its national population as a danger to public health, a chill runs down my spine.

I look at the news photos of armed, masked, black-clad police stopping people in the streets to ask for their digital papers, and I read stories of others arrested for leaving their own house more than the permitted once a day, and I hear Austrian politicians intoning that those who refuse to accede to the injection are to be shunned and scapegoated until they acquiesce.

Then I watch interviews with “ordinary people”, and they say that the “unvaxxed” had it coming. Some of them say that they should all be jailed, these enemies of the people. At best, the “anti-vaxxers” are paranoid and misinformed. At worst they are malicious, and should be punished.

Then I look across the border at Germany. I see that in Germany, politicians are also considering interning the “vaccine hesitant”, and are also discussing enforcing vaccination upon every citizen. By the end of the winter, says Germany’s refreshingly honest health minister, Germans will be “vaccinated, cured or dead”. There is apparently no fourth option.

They have been busy in Germany. Recently they put up fences in the streets in Hamburg, to separate the Bad Unvaxxed from the Good Vaxxed at the Christmas markets. Outdoors. Perhaps they will also provide the Good people with rocks to throw across those fences. The mood certainly seems ripe. A cartoon recently published in the mainstream, high-circulation newspaper Frankfürter Allgemeine Zeitung featured a man sitting on his sofa playing a first-person shooter game in which the targets were unvaccinated people. The caption described it as “a big hit under the Christmas tree.”

Not that Germans or Austrians have any monopoly on the current march towards authoritarianism in the name of public health. It is entirely globalised. The opinion recently expressed by Pulitzer Prize-winning American art critic Jerry Saltz to his half a million Twitter followers was typical of a new form of class hatred that is somehow acceptable in the age of cancellations and hyper-sensitivity. “My latest Covid thought is ‘Let her rip:’”, he wrote. “Meaning, we who are lucky enough to be triple & double vaxed are pretty protected. Let the rest die. I know they pose a danger to us all. But we are more than 97% protected from them. If they want to die, I say let them die. Freedom.”

Across Europe and the wider world, the picture is the same. Internment. Mandatory medication. Segregation of whole sections of society. Mass sackings. A drumbeat media consensus. The systematic censoring of dissent. The deliberate creation of a climate of fear and suspicion. The deepening demonisation of the “unvaxxed”. Something terrible is rising around us, and we are only just waking up to it.

 

Omicron Bussin Through mRNA Goo Like Hotcakes...,

 

der tagespiegel |  A group of seven Germans between the ages of 25 and 39 were infected with the Omicron variant of the coronavirus in South Africa, even though all of them have already received their booster vaccination. This is what Wolfgang Preiser, a member of the research consortium that discovered the variant, told Tagesspiegel.

“We're seeing a lot of breakthrough infections right now. What we did not know is that even a booster vaccination with Biontech / Pfizer does not prevent this, "Preiser explained to the Tagesspiegel. These infections are the first breakthrough infections reported with the Omicron variant in people who have already received their booster vaccinations.

[Also read: "Live on in your illusion" -  w wants hen's best friend Corona with globules defeat (T +)]

“Of course you shouldn't misunderstand that vaccination doesn't help. On the contrary: It only shows that even the best possible vaccination is obviously not enough to prevent infection - which we already suspected, "said Preiser.

According to a study published by Preiser and his colleagues on the case on Thursday, the tour group was infected as early as late November or early December.

All seven had received at least two of their three vaccinations with an mRNA vaccine. Six of them received the booster vaccine from Biontech, one from Moderna. Six people are under 30 years old and one person is 39 years old.

These vaccines were given to people in this order:

• People 1 to 5: Biontech, Biontech, Biontech
• Person 6: Biontech, Biontech, Moderna
• Person 7: Astrazeneca, Biontech, Biontech

The booster vaccinations were given to the subjects between five and ten months after the second vaccinations. The booster vaccinations were at least a month, but a maximum of two months ago, according to the study. Those affected were among those vaccinated very early in Germany.

According to the study, none of the seven infected people had relevant previous illnesses and none had previously tested positive. Four of them did medical internships in various local hospitals, the other three were on vacation. When they arrived in South Africa in the first half of November, they all tested negative.

 

Omicron: The Atlantic Tirelessly Speculating And Making Shit Up

theatlantic |  Here’s the upshot: Each fully vaccinated person might still be at minimal risk of getting seriously ill or dying from COVID this winter, but the vestiges of normalcy around them could start to buckle or even break. In the worst-case scenario, highly vaccinated areas could also see “the kind of overwhelmed hospital systems that we saw back in 2020 with the early phase in Boston and New York City,” Samuel Scarpino, a network scientist at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute, told me. If only a small percentage of Omicron infections lead to hospitalization, the variant is still spreading with such ferocity that millions of people could need a bed.

Such a scenario would be especially dangerous if those millions of people all needed a bed at the same time. Omicron is so transmissible that cases could peak across the country more or less in tandem, Schiffer and Scarpino both said, which would make it harder for the U.S. to shuffle personnel and ventilators to particularly hard-hit regions. ICU capacities in some states are already stretched thin and health-care workers are resigning en masse, so the harms could be even worse. “If we don’t get serious, if we don’t get the masks on, if we don’t get testing up, we’re going to be back into lockdown again because people will be dying in the hallways of hospitals,” Scarpino said. The prospect of such a surge in hospitalizations is “keeping me up nights, to be honest,” Schiffer told me.

This all would be mitigated if Omicron turns out to cause significantly milder disease than Delta—still a possibility, but far from confirmed—and if the vaccines’ protection against severe disease holds strong. But even in that sunnier version of the future, cases are almost certain to increase in highly vaccinated areas and undervaccinated ones alike, and bring with them a host of disruptions to daily life. Schiffer suggested that in areas with sufficient political will—mostly highly vaccinated ones—high case rates could spur local leaders to institute new shutdowns. In any event, fully vaccinated people are still required to isolate for at least 10 days after a positive test, and anyone they’ve been in contact with might have to stay home from school or work. A positive test in a classroom could send dozens of kids into quarantine, and keep their parents out of work to care for them. Jon Zelner, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, told me that massive disruptions caused by surging Omicron cases this winter could force Americans to reconsider these sorts of procedures.

Read: The new pandemic division tearing Europe apart

Whatever the effects on vaccinated Americans, the Omicron fallout is going to be much more severe for everyone else. In places with low vaccine coverage and strong anti-shutdown politics, inconvenience could be replaced by mass death and even greater grief. And the devastation will almost certainly be greater, on average, in rural communities, poor communities, and communities of color. “It’s unvaccinated people who are going to be at the worst risk for the worst outcomes. And it’s also going to be the folks who don’t have the ability or the luxury to quarantine or just kind of hide out when it looks like the numbers are getting too high,” Zelner said. People working multiple jobs might not have time to get a booster or sick days to use while recovering from side effects. People who live in areas that are underserved by hospital systems will have more trouble finding a bed and receive worse care if they do get sick.

None of these futures are yet written in stone. The scope of the coming hardship will depend on how capable Omicron is of causing severe disease and death. And though Omicron seems likely to overtake Delta, “cases are still low enough with Omicron that we can have a big effect if [we] act early,” Scarpino said—though “acting early was last week.” A month ago, one could still pretend that burden fell on those who lived in some other place, far away from vaccinated people in vaccinated communities. Now that delusion looks shakier than ever.

 

Juicey WTF?!?!?!

 

When the Jussie Smollett incident hit the headlines in early 2019, anyone with a modicum of critical thinking skills could see it was an obvious hoax.

Yet, leftist networks, politicians and celebrities breathlessly amplified Jussie's claim, fueling racial division throughout the country instead of taking the 'wait-and-see' approach that much of the black community took at the time:

Now let's look at who didn't remain silent - and still promoted Jussie's lie.

Then there's this guy...

And this guy...

Katie Perry tweeted at the time: "Standing with and sending love to @JussieSmollett today... this is a racist hate crime and is disgusting and shameful to our country."

Cher tweeted a cryptic boomer message that only level-6 cat ladies can decipher: 

And yet, none of these race-baiting celebrities and politicians who used their massive platforms to promote Jussie's lie have deleted their tweets, or owned up to being an idiot. 

This Plandemic Will Be Over When We Tell You (Uselessly Eating Muggles) It's Over

apnews |  How will the world decide when the pandemic is over?

There’s no clear-cut definition for when a pandemic starts and ends, and how much of a threat a global outbreak is posing can vary by country.

“It’s somewhat a subjective judgment because it’s not just about the number of cases. It’s about severity and it’s about impact,” says Dr. Michael Ryan, the World Health Organization’s emergencies chief.

In January 2020, WHO designated the virus a global health crisis “of international concern.” A couple months later in March, the United Nations health agency described the outbreak as a “pandemic,” reflecting the fact that the virus had spread to nearly every continent and numerous other health officials were saying it could be described as such.

The pandemic may be widely considered over when WHO decides the virus is no longer an emergency of international concern, a designation its expert committee has been reassessing every three months. But when the most acute phases of the crisis ease within countries could vary.

Unvaxxed Uselessly-Eating Muggles Should Be Stripped Of Healthcare Insurance

off-guardian  |  Illinois Representative Jonathan Carroll wants to push through a change to the state’s insurance law that would mean health insurers no longer have to cover unvaccinated people who get Covid, forcing people to pay their medical bills out of pocket.

The Democrat lawmaker told the Chicago Sun-Times:

I think it’s time that we say ‘You choose not to get vaccinated, then you’re also going to assume the risk that if you do catch COVID, and you get sick, the responsibility is on you,’”

The potential corruption and abuse of such a rule should be obvious to anyone familiar with just how mendacious insurance companies can be.

In all likelihood insurance companies will simply demand a negative Covid test before paying anything, and if you test positive, no matter what you were treated for, you will be called a “covid case” and forced to pay out of pocket.

The bill could, essentially, wipe all health insurance off the books for unvaccinated people.

The vaccinated should take no comfort from this, because their vaccinated status is entirely temporary, and subject to rules that could change on a whim.

Any “double jabbed” who misses a booster, or got a brand of vaccine that was subsequently unapproved or discontinued, or wasn’t updated for the latest variant, could suddenly find themselves one of the “unvaccinated” underclass.

Of course, once it applies to vaccination status it can apply to other things. You travelled to the wrong place, or you didn’t wear a mask, you “associated with known anti-vaxxers”.

And, even more concerning, is the potentially slippery slope this starts us down. Unvaccinated don’t get health insurance. Neither do smokers who get lung cancer. Or overweight people who get diabetes. And so on and so on.

The potential good news is that putting this law on the books would require a lot of legal workarounds, including violating or changing the Affordable Care Act, which outlaws removing insurance coverage from someone based on a new medical diagnosis or test result.

Post Pandemic Stress Disorder

off-guardian  |   Doctors are warning that hundreds of thousands of people in the UK could be at increased risk of heart disease or cardiac events.

Speaking to the Evening Standard, psychological therapist Mark Rayner and vascular surgeon Tahir Hussein said that the UK could see “300,000 new patients with heart issues” in the near future.

What’s to blame? Well, that would be “Post Pandemic Stress Disorder”. A new condition “yet to be recognised”, even though “many experts believe it should be”.

It’s a totally real thing. They didn’t just completely make it up. Don’t be cynical.

You see, all the “pandemic” related anxiety and stress has taken such a toll on the public that doctors are predicting a 5% increase in heart disease, nationwide, and not just in the elderly or infirm.

According to Dr Hussein, he is already seeing…

a big increase in thrombotic-related vascular conditions in my practice. Far younger patients are being admitted and requiring surgical and medical intervention than prior to the pandemic.

Now, some of you demented anti-vaxxers out there might be asking crazy questions like “could this increase in blood clots and heart disease be linked to injecting millions of people with an untested vaccine?”

But that’s absurd. And I told you to stop being cynical.

Yes, fine, in the interests of fairness, we should mention it was recently reported that the Astra Zeneca jab can cause blood clots.

It turns out all the people saying that back in March weren’t just conspiracy theorists spreading misinformation after all. They were totally right. But the clots are only rare, so don’t worry. And they sort of know what causes it now, so future batches might be fine.

And yes, also in the interests of fairness, it’s true that both the Pfizer and Moderna shots can cause heart issues too. Both, according to the CDC, can cause pericarditis and myocarditis, the complications of which include heart attacks, heart failure and strokes.

The UK government has even produced special guidelines for dealing with myocardits, “following Covid19 vaccination”.

But, just like the blood clots, this is very rare. Obviously not so rare you don’t need a special guiding document on how to deal with it, but still very very rare.

…the point is, yes, all the major Covid vaccines are known to have cardiac-related side effects, and yes, some doctors are now predicting a major spike in heart-related health problems, but these are totally unrelated.

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.

Have We Finally Reached Peak Davos Yet?

strategic-culture  |  Were you following the news this last week? Vaccine mandates are everywhere: one country, after another, is doubling-down, to try to force, or legally compel, full population vaccination. The mandates are coming because of the massive uptick in Covid – most of all in the places where the experimental mRNA gene therapies were deployed en masse. And (no coincidence), this ‘marker’ has come just as U.S. Covid deaths in 2021 have surpassed those of 2020. This has happened, despite the fact that last year, no Americans were vaccinated (and this year 59% are vaccinated). Clearly no panacea, this mRNA ‘surge’.

Of course, the Pharma-Establishment know that the vaccines are no panacea. There are ‘higher interests’ at play here. It is driven rather by fear that the window for implementing its series of ‘transitions’ in the U.S. and Europe is closing. Biden still struggles to move his ‘Go-Big’ social spending plan and green agenda transition through Congress by the midterm election in a year’s time. And the inflation spike may well sink Biden’s Build Back Better agenda (BBB) altogether.

Time is short. The midterm elections are but 12 months away, after which the legislative window shuts. The Green ‘transition’ is stuck too (by concerns that moving too fast to renewables is putting power grids at risk and elevating heating costs unduly), and the Pharma establishment will be aware that a new B.1.1.529 variant has made a big jump in evolution with 32 mutations to its spike protein. This makes it “clearly very different” from previous variants, which may drive further waves of infection evading ‘vaccine defences’.

Translation: a new wave of restrictions, more lockdowns, and – eventually – trillions of dollars in new stimmie cheques may be in prospect. And what of inflation then, we might ask.

It’s a race for the U.S. and Europe, where the pandemic is back in full force across Europe, to push through their re-set agendas, before variants seize up matters with hospitals crowded with the vaccinated and non-vaccinated; with riots in the streets, and mask mandates at Christmas markets (that’s if they open at all). A big reversal was foreshadowed by this week’s news: vaccine mandates and lockdowns, even in highly vaccinated areas, are returning. And people don’t like it.

The window for the Re-Set may be fast closing. One observer, noting all the frenetic Élite activity, has asked ‘have we finally reached peak Davos?’. Is the turn to authoritarianism in Europe a sign of desperation as fears grow that the various ‘transitions’ planned under the ‘re-set’ umbrella (financial, climate, vaccine and managerial expert technocracy) may never be implemented?

Cut short rather, as spending plans are hobbled by accelerating inflation; as the climate transition fails to find traction amongst poorer states (and at home, too); as technocracy is increasingly discredited by adverse pandemic outcomes; and Modern Monetary Theory hits a wall, because – well, inflation again.

Are you paying attention yet? The great ‘transition’ is conceived as a hugely expensive shift towards renewables, and to a new digitalised, roboticised corporatism. It requires Big (inflationary) funding to be voted through, and a huge parallel (inflationary) expenditure on social support to be approved by Congress as well. The social provision is required to mollify all those who subsequently will find themselves without jobs, because of the climate ‘transition’ and the shift to a digitalised corporate sphere. But – unexpectedly for some ‘experts’ – inflation has struck – the highest statistics in 30 years.

There are powerful oligarchic interests behind the Re-Set. They do not want to see it go down, nor see the West eclipsed by its ‘competitors’. So it seems that rather than back off, they will go full throttle and try to impose compliance on their electorates: tolerate no dissidence.