GOV/MIL Main "Great Reset" Thread

marsh

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MUST SEE: Christina Bobb from OAN Reached Out to Archbishop Vigano from Italy for Christmas Discussion on Good vs. Evil

By Joe Hoft
Published December 27, 2021 at 7:30pm
Christina-Bobb-Archbishop-Vigano.jpg


This week Christina Bobb from OAN discussed current events with Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano.


This past weekend, Christina Bobb shared at the weekly briefing her closing argument. This week’s argument included thoughts from her discussion with Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano from Italy who has been outspoken on COVID actions by elites, vaccines that harm more than help, and the destruction of individual rights.
Evil is real and is trying to redefine us. Will we allow it to? Evil wants us to believe that we can define our morality for ourselves with ultimately leads to depravity. Or, will we announce to all eternity that we know who we are. We know we were created in the image of God and we are good.

The Archbishop says the crisis today can be one through heart surrender to God and his design for this generation. Archbishop Vigano stated in his response to me, “As I said in my message to the citizens of Switzerland, it is not freedom that we must ask for today or to say better. The freedom that we must claim is neither license for the arbitrary will to do whatever we wish. But the freedom to act within the boundaries of the good which today is prevented.”
See more of this exceptional piece below.

Rumble video 4:14 min
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Deep State Transhumanists: Becoming ‘Gods,’ or Building ‘God’? Part Four
by Alex Newman December 27, 2021

Rumble video 19:16 min

Deep State promoters of transhumanism are totalitarians with an affinity for Communist Chinese tyrant who believe that man is evolving through technological and biological upgrades to become like a god, warns The New American magazine’s Alex Newman in part 4 of his series on transhumanism for Behind The Deep State. Some believe and say publicly that they are actually building an Artificial Intelligence god that should be worshiped. Others believe they will achieve immortality by fusing their consciousness with computers. But like Hegel’s outrageous view of the state as god, these horrific and heretical ideas will end in disaster, and the God of the Bible addresses these views directly from Genesis to the New Testament.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Henry Kissinger: AI Will Prompt Consideration of What it Means to Be Human

Event with the former Secretary of State discusses our current lack of knowledge on how to responsibly harness AI’s power.

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December 24, 2021
By T.J. York
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Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger

WASHINGTON, December 24, 2021 – Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger says that further use of artificial intelligence will call into question what it means to be human, and that the technology cannot solve all those problems humans fail to address on their own.

Kissinger spoke at a Council on Foreign Relations event highlighting his new book “The Age of AI: And Our Human Future” on Monday along with co-author and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a conversation moderated by PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff.

Schmidt remarked throughout the event on unanswered questions about AI despite common use of the technology.

He emphasized that the computer systems may be able to solve complex problems, such as in physics dealing with dark matter or dark energy, but that the humans who built the technology may not be able to determine how exactly the computer solved the problems.

Along the lines of this potential for dangerous use of the technology, he stated how AI development, though sometimes a force for good, “plays” with human lives.

He pointed out that to deal with this great technological power, almost every country now has created a governmental to oversee the ethics of AI development.

Schmidt stated that western values must be the dominant values in AI platforms that influence everyday life such as ones that have key implications for democracy.

With all the consideration on how to make AI work so it is effective but also utilitarian, Kissinger noted how much human thinking must go into managing the “thinking” these machines do, and that “a mere technological edge is not in itself decisive” in terms of AI that can compete with adversaries such as China’s diplomatic technological might.
 

marsh

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China Panic-Hoards Half Of World's Grain Supply Amid Threats Of Collapse

TUESDAY, DEC 28, 2021 - 04:44 PM

About two and a half years ago, we told readers China was panic hoarding food, which was several months before the virus pandemic began to spread worldwide; Beijing has managed to stockpile more than half of the world's maize and other grains that have resulted in rapid food inflation and triggered famine in some countries.

In August 2019, we asked the question:
Does China believe that we are on the verge of a major global crisis? The communist Chinese government has always been very big into planning, and it appears that they have decided that now is the time to hoard food, gold and other commodities.
Fast forward today, the answer is most likely "yes." China maintains "historically high levels" of beans and grains stockpiled at COFCO Group's (a major Chinese state-owned food processor) 310 storage facilities in the northeastern part of the country, according to Nikkei Asia.

Qin Yuyun, head of grain reserves at the National Food and Strategic Reserves Administration, told reporters last month, "our wheat stockpiles can meet the demand for one and a half years. There is no problem whatsoever about the supply of food."

Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows China has approximately 69% of the globe's maize reserves in the first half of the crop year 2022, 60% of its rice, and 51% of its wheat.



Since the Chinese plan multiple years out, we've pointed out how a series of disasters and weather events have likely led state officials to forecast a troublesome period of food shortages. China has already observed droughts, floods, and pests that have ruined harvests. More than 20 months of snarled supply chains due to COVID and La Nina weather patterns (second consecutive one) have also produced volatile conditions for food production.

The one thing Beijing cannot have is discontent among its citizens triggered by food shortages and or soaring prices; that's why central planners spent $98.1 billion importing food in 2020, up 4.6 times from a decade earlier, according to the General Administration of Customs of China. For the first eight months of this year, China imported more food than in 2016.



"Over the past five years, China's soybean, maize and wheat imports soared two- to twelvefold on aggressive purchases from the U.S., Brazil and other supplier nations. Imports of beef, pork, dairy and fruit jumped two- to fivefold," Nikkei Asia said.

China's acquisition of the world's food supply has helped push food prices to decade highs. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimated the food price index is currently at a ten-year high.



The Ministry of Commerce has even told households to stock up on food in case of emergencies, all under the guise of the virus pandemic.

Meanwhile, Chinese state media has downplayed the notion China is headed for a food crisis. Chinese President Xi Jinping must keep food supply and prices in order to ensure food security; otherwise, discontent among citizens will increase in the world's second-largest economy.

Nikkei Asia concludes by saying, "throughout history, food shortages have triggered popular unrest. They served as a contributing factor to uprisings that toppled Chinese dynasties."

So without a doubt, Beijing has been stockpiling food to avoid a collapse as central bankers have yet to figure out how to print food from thin air. But don't worry, as the global food situation worsens, we're all likely going to be forced to eat crickets, worms, and grasshoppers.
 

marsh

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'Bidenflation' Is Systematically Destroying The Middle Class

TUESDAY, DEC 28, 2021 - 03:10 PM
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Americans have more money in their pockets than they ever have before.

That sounds like really great news, but it isn’t, because the cost of living is rising much faster than our incomes are.
In addition, much of the “new wealth” that has been created over the past couple of years has ended up in the hands of the very wealthy, and this has caused the gap between the rich and the poor to grow even wider. As for the middle class, it is being systematically hollowed out by “Bidenflation”, and that process is only going to accelerate during the early stages of 2022.



Personally, I don’t like to use the term “Bidenflation” too much, because it is not entirely accurate. Without a doubt, the Biden administration has taken actions over and over again that have made the inflation crisis even worse. But it isn’t as if Joe Biden and his minions are the only ones responsible for this mess.

The creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 started us down the road that we are on today. Of course we could have exited this path at any time if U.S. voters had sent politicians to Washington that were committed to abolishing the Federal Reserve, but they didn’t do that.

In 1971, we reached “the beginning of the end” when President Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard. Today, the value of the U.S. dollar is only a very small fraction of what it was back then.

The U.S. national debt hit a trillion dollars in the early 1980s, and it will hit the 30 trillion dollar mark in 2022. Our politicians have literally been committing national financial suicide, and both major parties are to blame.

In 2009, the Federal Reserve took the destruction of our currency to an entirely new level when they introduced “quantitative easing”. It was supposed to just be a “temporary measure”, but of course the Fed just kept doing it.

Over the past couple of years the Federal Reserve has pumped more fresh money into our financial system than ever before, and this has greatly pleased investors.

But it is also turning our currency into a joke.
Earlier today, I read an email from a reader that was quite alarmed that many new car dealers are now charging $5,000 to $10,000 above the sticker price for many of their vehicles.

Of course the reason why they are able to get such prices is because we are now in a hyperinflationary environment.

Used vehicle prices have been rising very aggressively as well. In fact, Jim Bianco says that they have been going up even faster than Bitcoin
Used auto prices are rising faster than bitcoin and other assets, according to market researcher Jim Bianco.
“If you want to know what the best investment you probably had in 2021, it’s that car sitting in your driveway or in that garage,” the Bianco Research President told CNBC’s “Trading Nation” on Thursday. “It is appreciating faster than the stock market and lately faster than some cryptocurrencies.”
Isn’t that nuts?

Over the past four months alone, the price of used vehicles has increased more than 20 percent
“In the last four months, they’ve gone up in price more than 20%. Not only is that more than the S&P, but over the last four months that’s more than bitcoin itself,” he said. “As of December 15, the latest set of data we’ve got, they’re just accelerating higher and higher right now. There’s no peak at least as of now.”
Home prices are going absolutely haywire as well.
In fact, CNN is reporting that at the end of the third quarter U.S. home prices were up almost 20 percent compared to the same time in 2020…
Homeowners saw average home prices skyrocket nearly 20% through the third quarter compared to a year ago, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency. It was the largest annual home price increase in the history of the agency’s House Price Index. And, in some hot markets, the price increase was double that.
If your income hasn’t also gone up 20 percent over the past year, that means that you are falling behind.

Once upon a time, you could get a huge mansion for $500,000.

Today, half a million dollars will get you a 700 square foot shack.

And Zillow is projecting that home prices will soar even higher in 2022
Over the next 12 months, Zillow foresees U.S. home prices rising 11% overall. While that would mark a slowdown from the 19.5% jump over the most recently measured 12-month window (between September 2020 and September 2021), the predicted price increase would still be a housing market that strongly favors sellers. For perspective, Fortune calculates the average rate of home price growth per year has been 4.6% since 1980.
The amount of money in our pockets is not what matters.
Just look at Venezuela. Almost everyone in Venezuela is a “millionaire”, but almost everyone in the entire country is living in poverty because the money is virtually worthless.

And we are headed down the exact same path.

The standard of living for the vast majority of Americans is eroding a little bit more with each passing day, but for the moment those at the very top of the economic food chain are doing great. In fact, they are buying more champagne than ever before
Champagne sales are surging to record highs as 2021 comes to an end (back above what they were before the COVID pandemic hampered sales and kept people away from celebrations).

Sales in 2021 are expected to top 5.5 billion euros ($6.2 billion), above a previous peak of 5 billion euros two years agobefore the coronavirus pandemic, Jean-Marie Barillere, president of champagne industry group UMC, said.
I hope that they are enjoying these moments, because their laughter will turn to mourning soon enough.

For years and years, people like me have been warning what would happen if we kept systematically destroying our currency.

But our leaders in Washington just kept doing it anyway.

Now a time of reckoning is upon us, and it is going to be so incredibly painful.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Is The Crack-Up Boom Here?

TUESDAY, DEC 28, 2021 - 06:30 AM
Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

Bloomberg News recently solicited advice from Argentinians who lived through that country’s high inflation on how Americans should cope with rising inflation.

The Argentinians suggested Americans spend their paychecks as fast as possible to avoid future price increases. They also suggested taking out loans that can be paid back later in devalued currency.



These strategies may make sense for individuals. However, encouraging debt and discouraging savings is disastrous for the country. Relying on debt and spending one’s paycheck immediately encourages people to seek instant gratification instead of planning for the future. This depletes both economic and moral capital.

November’s 9.6 percent increase in the producer price index, combined with the consumer price index’s increase to levels not seen since the early 1980s, shows why fears of inflation have become the public’s number one concern. Even the Federal Reserve has acknowledged that inflation is not just “transitory.”

The Fed recently announced it is accelerating the timetable to reduce its monthly purchases of Treasury and mortgage-backed securities. The Fed also announced it is planning three interest rate increases next year. However, the Fed plans to increase rates by no more than one percent. So even if the Fed does follow through on its promise to hike rates, it will do little if anything to combat rising prices. If the Fed allowed interest rates to rise to anything approaching market levels, it would make the federal government’s debt servicing costs unsustainable. This puts tremendous pressure on the Fed to maintain low rates.

The biggest victims of the Federal Reserve’s erosion of the dollar are lower- and middle-class Americans whose paychecks do not keep pace with the Fed-caused price increases. Yet many progressives still cling to the fallacy that average workers somehow benefit from continued dollar devaluation.

Progressives are even pushing the Fed to increase its money printing and regulatory activities to fight climate change and racism. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has embraced this “woke” monetary policy. President Biden’s reappointment of Powell and nomination of current Fed board member Lael Brainard (who is seen as more committed to a woke Fed than Powell) for vice chairman suggests the Fed will double down on this toxic mixture of cultural Marxism and so-called modern monetary theory.

Recent polls show Americans expect continued large price increases.
This indicates we may be on the verge of what Ludwig von Mises called a “crack-up boom.” A crack-up boom occurs when the general population realizes that constant currency depreciation is a feature, not a bug, of central banking. This leads people to seek alternatives to government-issued currency and to factor rising prices into their plans. The crack-up boom will likely extend overseas as more countries reject the dollar’s world reserve currency status. This rejection will be driven by a combination of concern over America’s growing debt and resentment of America’s hyper-interventionist foreign policy.

Crack-up booms have historically facilitated the growth of authoritarian political movements. However, this is not inevitable. If those of us who know the truth spread the ideas of liberty to enough people, we may be able to move through the crack-up boom to a rebirth of liberty, peace, and prosperity. Steps in this direction include convincing Congress to cut spending, legalize competing currencies, and end the Fed.
 

vestige

Deceased

Is The Crack-Up Boom Here?

TUESDAY, DEC 28, 2021 - 06:30 AM
Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

Bloomberg News recently solicited advice from Argentinians who lived through that country’s high inflation on how Americans should cope with rising inflation.

The Argentinians suggested Americans spend their paychecks as fast as possible to avoid future price increases. They also suggested taking out loans that can be paid back later in devalued currency.



These strategies may make sense for individuals. However, encouraging debt and discouraging savings is disastrous for the country. Relying on debt and spending one’s paycheck immediately encourages people to seek instant gratification instead of planning for the future. This depletes both economic and moral capital.

November’s 9.6 percent increase in the producer price index, combined with the consumer price index’s increase to levels not seen since the early 1980s, shows why fears of inflation have become the public’s number one concern. Even the Federal Reserve has acknowledged that inflation is not just “transitory.”

The Fed recently announced it is accelerating the timetable to reduce its monthly purchases of Treasury and mortgage-backed securities. The Fed also announced it is planning three interest rate increases next year. However, the Fed plans to increase rates by no more than one percent. So even if the Fed does follow through on its promise to hike rates, it will do little if anything to combat rising prices. If the Fed allowed interest rates to rise to anything approaching market levels, it would make the federal government’s debt servicing costs unsustainable. This puts tremendous pressure on the Fed to maintain low rates.

The biggest victims of the Federal Reserve’s erosion of the dollar are lower- and middle-class Americans whose paychecks do not keep pace with the Fed-caused price increases. Yet many progressives still cling to the fallacy that average workers somehow benefit from continued dollar devaluation.

Progressives are even pushing the Fed to increase its money printing and regulatory activities to fight climate change and racism. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has embraced this “woke” monetary policy. President Biden’s reappointment of Powell and nomination of current Fed board member Lael Brainard (who is seen as more committed to a woke Fed than Powell) for vice chairman suggests the Fed will double down on this toxic mixture of cultural Marxism and so-called modern monetary theory.

Recent polls show Americans expect continued large price increases.
This indicates we may be on the verge of what Ludwig von Mises called a “crack-up boom.” A crack-up boom occurs when the general population realizes that constant currency depreciation is a feature, not a bug, of central banking. This leads people to seek alternatives to government-issued currency and to factor rising prices into their plans. The crack-up boom will likely extend overseas as more countries reject the dollar’s world reserve currency status. This rejection will be driven by a combination of concern over America’s growing debt and resentment of America’s hyper-interventionist foreign policy.

Crack-up booms have historically facilitated the growth of authoritarian political movements. However, this is not inevitable. If those of us who know the truth spread the ideas of liberty to enough people, we may be able to move through the crack-up boom to a rebirth of liberty, peace, and prosperity. Steps in this direction include convincing Congress to cut spending, legalize competing currencies, and end the Fed.
Fight climate change and racism.....



:prfl:
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

"Hello World" - Paralyzed Man With Brain Implant Composes First-Ever Tweet With Mind

MONDAY, DEC 27, 2021 - 10:40 PM

An Australian man with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is the first person to tweet a message to the world using only his thought with no other muscles.

On Thursday, Australian brain computer interface company Synchron published a press release detailing how one of its patients, Philip O'Keefe, 62yo man with ALS, is the first person to tweet directly through thought using an implantable brain-computer interface. O'Keefe's ALS has left him in paralysis.


"Hello, world!" tweeted O'Keefe from Synchron CEO Thomas Oxley's Twitter account. "Short tweet. Monumental progress."

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"My hope is that I'm paving the way for people to tweet through thoughts," he tweeted in a follow-up message.

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According to Synchron, O'Keefe received the Stentrode brain-computer interface in April 2020. ALS has left him unable to communicate with his family or friends.

However, the new small stent-mounted electrode array implanted in his brain through the jugular has allowed him to reconnect with the world.
"When I first heard about this technology, I knew how much independence it could give back to me. The system is astonishing, it's like learning to ride a bike - it takes practice, but once you're rolling, it becomes natural.

"Now, I just think about where on the computer I want to click, and I can email, bank, shop, and now message the world via Twitter," O'Keefe said in a statement.
Synchron claims O'Keefe is reconnecting with the world.
"These fun holiday tweets are actually an important moment for the field of implantable brain computer interfaces," Oxley said in the statement. "They highlight the connection, hope and freedom that BCIs give to people like Phil who have had so much of their functional independence taken away due to debilitating paralysis."
Synchron's implantable brain-computer interface is similar to Elon Musk's mind-machine interface company, Neuralink, which alleges it can "enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs."
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
(China)


China Creates AI Prosecutor That Can Identify Crimes And Press Charges

MONDAY, DEC 27, 2021 - 09:20 PM

Unfortunately, this isn't a joke.
China's Communist-controlled government has reportedly developed an artificial intelligence program that can automatically prosecute crimes committed in the People's Republic, according to a report in the state-friendly South China Morning Post, an English-language, Hong Kong-based newspaper.


The machine can reliably identify eight common crimes such as fraud, gambling, dangerous driving and "picking quarrels", according to researchers cited by the paper.

The AI "prosecutor" can file a charge with more than 97% accuracy based on a verbal description of the case alone.

To be sure, that's not exactly a testament to the algorithm's complexity or quality: China's criminal justice system is notoriously opaque, with courts that have been criticized for being hopelessly slanted in favor of the government. The country's prosecutors have also been criticized for charging those suspected of political disloyalty with criminal offenses like tax evasion.

Recently, China kicked off a transnational dispute with Canada after it arrested two Canadian nationals (a diplomat and a businessman) and sentenced them to lengthy prison sentences over charges that the Canadian government alleges were trumped-up - before being abruptly released once Ottawa had freed the CFO of Huawei after she reached a deal with the American Justice Department.

The prosecution machine was built and tested by the Shanghai Pudong People’s Procuratorate, the country’s largest, and busiest, district prosecution office.
"The system can replace prosecutors in the decision-making process to a certain extent," said Shi and his colleagues in a paper published this month in the domestic peer-reviewed journal Management Review.
According to the SCMP, China isn't the first country to automate some aspects of prosecution.

The application of AI technology in law enforcement has been increasing around the world.
Some German prosecutors have used AI technology such as image recognition and digital forensics to increase case processing speed and accuracy.
China's legal system was an "early adopter".
The application of AI technology in law enforcement has been increasing around the world.

Some German prosecutors have used AI technology such as image recognition and digital forensics to increase case processing speed and accuracy.
China was an early adopter of AI in its legal system, beginning in 2016. Many prosecutors now use an AI tool called "System 206". The tool can purportedly evaluate the strength of evidence, as well as conditions for an arrest - while also assessing the subject's danger to the public. But all existing AI tools have a limited role, because "they do not participate in the decision-making process of filing charges and [suggesting] sentences."
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Exclusive — Victor Davis Hanson: Elites Are Destroying America with Globalism, Leftism, and Tribalism

ROBERT KRAYCHIK28 Dec 2021621

Video 1:45:28 min

Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow sat down with historian and professor Victor Davis Hanson at the latter’s home in Selma, CA, for a wide-ranging interview examining how America is being undermined by a modern globalist aristocracy. Hanson drew from analyses in his latest book, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.

Hanson warned of lessening governmental accountability to citizens via the dissolution of American citizenship. The concept of citizenship, he added, is an essential component of Western civilization.

“The citizen is very rare,” he said. “Civilization is very old — seven thousand years old — but for nearly the first 4,500 years, there were no citizens. They were slaves, or subjects, or tribes, or residents.”

He continued, “[Citizenship is] the idea that you would have people who live in a confined space and they would govern themselves. They would elect their officials They would audit them. They would set their budgets, their expenditures.

They would decide when to go to war, when to have peace. That was a lot of responsibility.”

He explained, “The idea of citizenship is integrated with property rights, he remarked. “Most importantly, [citizenship] seems to have started in the 8th century B.C. on the principal of inheritance, that you planted olive trees or vines on binds on your small plot, and you … own them — the state didn’t own them — and you had the right to pass them on without interference from the state. Like the American Constitution, the protection of property was very important.”

He observed how architects of the globalist enterprise cultivate ethnic and racial agitation to create perceptions of grievance and victimhood among targeted demographic groups. He noted that upward mobility rooted in meritocracy threatens the leftist paradigm of a zero-sum struggle between haves and have-nots.

Neo-Marxist ideology’s substitution of racial struggle for the class warfare framework creates a paradigm of permanent strife between races by framing whites as oppressors of non-whites, he shared. He noted how such a framework, rebranded as “critical race theory,” allows for inclusion of black elites like Oprah Winfrey and LeBron James as members of a supposedly oppressed cohort.

“[Leftists] have always been equality-of-result people,” he said. “They want a bigger government and more government employees to make sure that on the backend we end up equally. We’re all going to be poorer, but more equal; that’s far better than all of us being better off but having [inequality]. They’ve always been that way. They’ve never been successful.”

He continued,

“California, the United States, these were upwardly mobile societies. Then they brought in this bankrupt European idea of critical theory, critical legal theory, critical race theory. It was basically an attack on the establishment that said that all the rules were socially constructed for the protection of what originally was a Marxist idea of elites — oppressive insects that sucked out the blood of the proletariat — and then they that didn’t work.”

Hanson credited former President Barack Obama with amplifying the impact of left-wing racial grievance-mongering.

“If you look at upward mobility among Latinos, and Asians, and African-Americans, it’s going up,” he said. “So they thought, ‘We’re going to lose the victim vote. There’s not going to be a victim vote,’ and there are 17 ethnic minorities that make more per capita than so-called white people — Punjabis, Koreans — so they came up with the idea of diversity.”

He added, “[Leftists] said, ‘If you are non-white, you are diverse, and therefore, no matter what your income, you’re oppressed.’ … It was just a perfect matrix, the perfect paradigm for them. They said anybody who could be wealthy was forever a victim, because unlike class, if your new home burned down, if your your tech job evaporated, you could go down in class and be exploited, but not if you’re Oprah, not if you’re Meghan Markle, not if you’re LeBron, not if you’re the Obamas. You are always oppressed.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
[COMMENT: This is the Politico article referenced several times in Steve Bannon's show as a must read and understand. I am posting it in its entirety, but it is very long.]


The Fed’s Doomsday Prophet Has a Dire Warning About Where We’re Headed
Thomas Hoenig knew what quantitative easing and record-low interest rates would bring.
Dr. Thomas Hoenig, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, speaks at a town hall meeting

Thomas Hoenig speaks at a town hall meeting. | Nati Harnik/AP Photo

By CHRISTOPHER LEONARD
12/28/2021 04:30 AM EST

Christopher Leonard is a business reporter whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Bloomberg Businessweek. He is the author of The Meat Racket and Kochland, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. His new book, The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy, is out January 11.

Thomas Hoenig doesn’t look like a rebel. He is a conservative man, soft-spoken, now happily retired at the age of 75. He acts like someone who has spent the vast majority of his career, as he has, working at one of the stuffiest and powerful institutions in America: the Federal Reserve Bank. Hoenig has all the fiery disposition that one might expect from a central banker, which is to say none at all. He unspools sentences methodically, in a measured way, never letting his words race ahead of his intended message. When Hoenig gets really agitated he repeats the phrase “lookit” a lot, but that’s about as salty as it gets.

This makes it all the more surprising that Tom Hoenig is, in fact, one of America’s least-understood dissidents.

In 2010, Hoenig was president of the Federal Reserve regional bank in Kansas City. As part of his job, Hoenig had a seat on the Fed’s most powerful policy committee, and that’s where he lodged one of the longest-running string of “no” votes in the bank’s history.

Hoenig’s dissents are striking because the Fed’s top policy committee — called the Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC — doesn’t just prize consensus; it nearly demands it. The committee likes to present a unified front to the public because it is arguably the most powerful governing body in American economic affairs. Hoenig’s string of dissents shattered that appearance of unanimity at a critically important time, when the Fed was expanding its interventions in the American economy to an unprecedented degree. It was a hinge point in American history, and the economy has never been the same since.

Between 2008 and 2014, the Federal Reserve printed more than $3.5 trillion in new bills. To put that in perspective, it’s roughly triple the amount of money that the Fed created in its first 95 years of existence. Three centuries’ worth of growth in the money supply was crammed into a few short years. The money poured through the veins of the financial system and stoked demand for assets like stocks, corporate debt and commercial real estate bonds, driving up prices across markets. Hoenig was the one Fed leader who voted consistently against this course of action, starting in 2010. In doing so, he pitted himself against the Fed’s powerful chair at the time, Ben Bernanke, who was widely regarded as a hero for the ambitious rescue plans he designed and oversaw.

Hoenig lost his fight. Throughout 2010, the FOMC votes were routinely 11 against one, with Hoenig being the one. He retired from the Fed in late 2011, and after that, a reputation hardened around Hoenig as the man who got it wrong. He is remembered as something like a cranky Old Testament prophet who warned incessantly, and incorrectly, about one thing: the threat of coming inflation.

But this version of history isn’t true. While Hoenig was concerned about inflation, that isn’t what solely what drove him to lodge his string of dissents. The historical record shows that Hoenig was worried primarily that the Fed was taking a risky path that would deepen income inequality, stoke dangerous asset bubbles and enrich the biggest banks over everyone else. He also warned that it would suck the Fed into a money-printing quagmire that the central bank would not be able to escape without destabilizing the entire financial system.

On all of these points, Hoenig was correct. And on all of these points, he was ignored. We are now living in a world that Hoenig warned about.

The Fed is now in a vise. Inflation is rising faster than the Fed believed it would even a few months ago, with higher prices for gas, goods and automobiles being fueled by the Fed’s unprecedented money printing programs. This comes after years of the Fed steadily pumping up the price of assets like stocks and bonds through its zero-percent interest rates and quantitative easing during and after Hoenig’s time on the FOMC. To respond to rising inflation, the Fed has signaled that it will start hiking interest rates next year. But if that happens, there is every reason to expect that it will cause stock and bond markets to fall, perhaps precipitously, or even cause a recession.

“There is no painless solution,” Hoenig said in a recent interview. “It’s going to be difficult. And the longer you wait the more painful it will end up being.”

To be clear, the kind of pain that Hoenig is talking about involves high unemployment, social instability and potentially years of economic malaise.

Hoenig knows this because he has seen it before. He saw it during his long career at the Fed, and he saw it most acutely during the Great Inflation of the 1970s. That episode in history, which bears eerie parallels with the situation today, is the lodestar that ended up guiding so much of Hoenig’s thinking as a Fed official. It explains why he was willing to throw away his reputation as a team player in 2010, why he was willing to go down in history as a crank and why he was willing to accept the scorn of his colleagues and people like Bernanke.

Hoenig voted no because he’d seen firsthand what the consequences were when the Fed got things wrong, and kept money too easy for too long.
The last time America suffered a long and uncontrolled period of inflation, Thomas Hoenig was given the miserable job of cleaning up the mess it left behind. This was the period that has come to be known as the Great Inflation, a period in the 1970s characterized by long lines at gas stations and price hikes at grocery stores that came so fast price tags were replaced midday. Hoeing came to realize that the institution he worked for, the Federal Reserve, wasn’t just a bystander to this inflation. It had helped create it.

As a bank examiner, Hoenig spent the 1970s watching as the Fed’s policies helped pile on the inflationary tinder that would later ignite. These policies are known as “easy money” policies, meaning that the Fed was keeping interest rates so low that borrowing was cheap and easy. The Fed had kept interest rates so low during the 1960s that they were effectively negative when accounting for inflation by the late 1970s. When rates are effectively negative, that might be called a super-easy money policy. This kind of environment fuels inflation because all that easy money is looking for a place to go. Economists call this phenomenon “too many dollars chasing too few goods,” meaning that everybody is spending the easy money, which drives up the prices of the things they are buying because demand is high.

Importantly, the Fed creates these conditions by creating more and more dollars, or increasing the monetary supply, as the economists say.

As a bank examiner, Hoenig realized another very important thing. Easy money policies don’t just drive up the price of consumer goods, like bread and cars. The money also drives up price of assets like stocks, bonds and real estate. During the 1970s, low interest rates fueled demand for assets, which eventually inflated asset bubbles across the Midwest, including in heavy farming states, such as Kansas and Nebraska, and in the energy-producing state of Oklahoma. When asset prices like this rise quickly, it creates that dreaded thing called an asset bubble.

The self-reinforcing logic of asset bubbles was painfully evident in farming, and it reflected the dynamics that would later play out in the housing bubble and the over-heated asset markets of 2021.

When the Fed kept interest rates low during the 1970s, it encouraged farmers around Kansas City to take on more cheap debt and buy more land. As cheap loans boosted demand for land, it pushed up land prices — something that might be expected to cool off demand.

But the logic of asset bubbles has the opposite effect. Rising land prices actually enticed more people to borrow money and buy yet more land because the borrowers expected the land value to only increase, producing a handsome payoff down the road. Higher prices led to more borrowing, which led to higher prices and more borrowing still. The wheel continued to spin as long as debt was cheap compared to the expected payoff of rising asset prices.

The bankers’ logic followed a similar path. The bankers saw farmland as collateral on the loans, and they believed the collateral would only rise in value. This gave bankers the confidence to keep extending loans because they believed the farmers would be able to repay them as land prices increased. This is how asset bubbles escalate in a loop that intensifies with each rotation, with the reality of today’s higher asset prices driving the value of tomorrow’s asset prices ever higher, increasing the momentum even further.

The bubbles weren’t just confined to farmland. The same thing was happening in the oil and natural gas business. Rising oil prices and cheap debt encouraged oil companies to borrow money and drill more wells. The banks built a whole side business dedicated to risky energy loans to pay for these wells and related mineral leases, all based on the value of the oil they’d produce. In commercial real estate, it was the same thing.

It all came to an end in 1979, with a severity that has never been repeated. Paul Volcker became chair of the Federal Reserve and he was intent on beating inflation by hiking interest rates. Under Volcker, the Fed raised short-term interest rates from 10 percent in 1979 to 20 percent in 1981, the highest they have ever been. This unleashed massive economic havoc, pushing the unemployment rate to 10 percent and forcing homeowners to take out mortgages with 17 percent interest rates or higher. Volcker recognized that when he was fighting inflation, he was actually fighting two kinds: asset inflation and price inflation. He called them “cousins,” and acknowledged that they had been created by the Fed.

Part 1 of 3
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
Part 2 of 3

“The real danger comes from [the Fed] encouraging or inadvertently tolerating rising inflation and its close cousin of extreme speculation and risk taking, in effect standing by while bubbles and excesses threaten financial markets,” Volcker later wrote in his memoir.

When the Fed doubled the cost of borrowing, the demand for loans slowed down, which in turn depressed the demand for assets like farmland and oil wells.

The price of assets collapsed, with farmland prices falling by 27 percent in the early 1980s and oil prices falling from more than $120 to $25 by 1986. This, in turn, created a cascading effect within the banking system. Assets like farmland and oil reserves had been used to underpin the value of bank loans, and those loans were themselves considered “assets” on the banks’ balance sheets. When the loans started failing, the banks had to write down the value of those loans, which made some banks appear insolvent because they suddenly didn’t have enough assets on hand to cover their liabilities. When land and oil prices fell, the entire system fell apart.

“You could see that no one anticipated that adjustment, even after Volcker began to address inflation. They didn’t think it would happen to them,” Hoenig recalled.

Overall, more than 1,600 banks failed between 1980 and 1994, the worst failure rate since Depression.

This was the period when Hoenig traveled around the Midwest, auditing banks to determine if they were still solvent during the recession. Not surprisingly, Hoenig ended up arguing with a lot of bankers when his team declared that the value of the banks’ assets were not sufficient to meet their liabilities.

“They could become quite stressed and quite vocal in their objections,” Hoenig later recalled of the bankers. “You could empathize with them enormously. You could understand the anguish. Lives were destroyed in this environment, people lost everything in this environment. I didn’t blame them for yelling or being distraught.”

John Yorke, a former senior vice president at the Kansas City Fed, observed a stubbornness in Hoenig during that period that persisted through his entire career. Shutting down community banks wasn’t easy, but Hoenig didn’t seem to flinch from the responsibility. “Tom’s German,” Yorke said, referring to the ethnic origin of Hoenig’s name. “He’s strict. There’s rules.”

It would have been easy enough for Hoenig to blame the bankers for making so many risky loans after the bubble burst. Examples of banking grotesquery were abundant. But Hoenig didn’t think the stupidity in lending was entirely the bankers’ fault. The Fed had encouraged the asset bubbles through its easy money policies.

“The fact is, [bankers] made the loans,” Hoenig said. “They made them in an environment of incredible optimism in terms of asset values.” By “optimism,” Hoenig was referring to something called “inflation expectations.” The bankers expected asset prices would continue rising indefinitely, and that very expectation fueled demand for loans, which in turn caused the price to rise. “And that, really, was in part the fault of a decade of too-accommodative monetary policy.”

There were many counterarguments to explain inflation that didn’t blame the Fed. These arguments rested on the idea of “cost push” inflation, meaning that all kinds of forces outside the Fed were pushing price higher. Middle Eastern cartels were boosting the price of oil, for example, while labor unions were pushing up the price of labor. The federal government spent years trying to fight inflation under this theory, even going to far as to impose wage and price controls. It didn’t work.

There is strong evidence to support Hoenig’s view that the Fed was fueling inflation the whole time. In a 2004 report, the Fed economist Edward Nelson wrote that the most likely cause of inflation during the ’70s was something he called “monetary policy neglect.” Basically, the Fed kept its foot on the money pedal through most of the decade because it didn’t understand that more money was creating more inflation. This kind of inflation is called “demand pull” inflation, meaning that the Fed stokes demand, which causes prices to increase.

The author and economist Allan Meltzer, who reconstructed the Fed’s decision-making during the 1970s in his 2,100-page history of the central bank, delivered a stark verdict. It was monetary policy, set by the Fed, that primarily created the problem. “The Great Inflation resulted from policy choices that placed much more weight on maintaining high or full employment than on preventing or reducing inflation,” Meltzer wrote. “For much of the period, this choice reflected both political pressures and popular opinion as expressed in polls.”

Hoenig carried these lessons with him. He was promoted to become the president of the Kansas City Fed, in 1991, which gave him a voting seat on the FOMC. He served there during the long tenure of Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, and then Greenspan’s successor Ben Bernanke. Between 1991 and 2009, Hoenig rarely dissented.

Then came 2010, when he believed the Fed was repeating many of the same mistakes it made in the 1970s.

The FOMC faced a terrible dilemma after the crash of 2008. The central bank had kept interest rates pegged at zero in the wake of the banking crisis, but it didn’t seem to be enough to stoke strong growth. The unemployment rate was still 9.6 percent, close to the levels that characterize a deep recession. While members of the FOMC generally agreed that another recession was unlikely, the committee began considering new and experimental ways to exercise its power.

Hoenig began voting no in 2010 when it became clear that Bernanke wanted to keep interest rates at zero for an extended period of time. A review of Hoenig’s comments during the 2010 FOMC meetings (the transcripts of which become public five years after the fact), along with his speeches and interviews at the time, show that he rarely mentioned inflation. Hoenig was warning about even deeper dangers that might be stoked by keeping interest rates pegged at zero.

But his warnings were also very hard to understand for people who didn’t closely follow the politics of money.

Hoenig, for instance, liked to talk a lot about something called the “allocative effect” of keeping interest rates at zero. The allocative effect wasn’t something that people debated at the barbershop, but it was something that affected everyone. Hoenig was talking about the allocation of money and the ways in which the Fed shifted money from one part of the economy to another. This is what he’d witnessed during the 1970s. The Fed’s policies encouraged or discouraged things like Wall Street speculation that could lead to ruinous financial crashes.

But it also did more than that — encouraging speculation and rising asset prices also shifts money between the rich and the poor because the rich own the vast majority of assets in the United States. Hoenig was worried that a decade of zero-percent interest rates would have the same effect.

Bernanke was unpersuaded by these arguments. When Bernanke published a memoir in 2015, he entitled it The Courage to Act. This captured the theory of Bernankeism, which holds that central bank intervention is not only necessary, but even courageous and noble (Bernanke declined to answer questions about Hoenig’s dissents that were sent to Bernanke in June).

Bernanke pushed the FOMC to keep rates at zero throughout 2010. Then, in August of 2010, with unemployment high and growth sluggish, he publicly unveiled the plan to create $600 billion new bills through an experimental program called “quantitative easing.” This program had been used once before, during the financial crash. But it had never been used in the way that Bernanke proposed it be used in 2010, as an economic stimulus plan to be employed outside of an emergency.

If Hoenig had learned one thing during his decades at the Fed, it was that keeping money too easy for too long could create disastrous side effects that only manifested years later. That’s what happened during the 1970s, and again in the mid-2000s, when low rates fueled the housing bubble. Now Hoenig was being asked to vote for quantitative easing, a super-easy money policy that would encourage risky lending and asset bubbles.

The basic mechanics and goals of quantitative easing are pretty simple. The goal is to pump massive amounts of cash into the banking system at the very moment when there is almost no incentive for banks to save the money, because rates are so low. (When rates are low, banks don’t earn much from saving cash because the cash earns meager interest.) The Fed creates the money as it always has, by using its own team of financial traders who work at the Fed’s regional bank in New York.

These traders buy and sell assets from a select group of 24 financial firms called “primary dealers,” an ultra-exclusive club that includes the likes of JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. The primary dealers have special bank vaults at the Fed, called reserve accounts. To execute quantitative easing, a trader at the New York Fed would call up one of the primary dealers, like JPMorgan Chase, and offer to buy $8 billion worth of Treasury bonds from the bank. JPMorgan would sell the Treasury bonds to the Fed trader. Then the Fed trader would hit a few keys and tell the Morgan banker to look inside their reserve account. Voila. The Fed had instantly created $8 billion out of thin air, in the reserve account, to complete the purchase.
 

marsh

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Part 3 of 3

Morgan could, in turn, use this money to buy assets in the wider marketplace.

Bernanke planned to do such transactions over and over again until the Fed had purchased $600 billion worth of assets. In other words, the Fed would buy things using money it created until it had filled the Wall Street reserve accounts with 600 billion new dollars.

Inside the closed-door FOMC meetings, quantitative easing was debated during 2010 for being what it was — a large-scale experiment that carried unclear benefits and risks. There was more opposition to the plan than was publicly known at the time. Hoenig wasn’t the only FOMC member with strong objections to the plan. The regional bank presidents Charles Plosser, Richard Fisher and Jeffrey Lacker expressed concerns about it, as did a Fed governor named Kevin Warsh.

The Fed’s own research on quantitative easing was surprisingly discouraging. If the Fed pumped $600 billion into the banking system in roughly eight months, it was expected to cut the unemployment rate by just .03 percent. While that wasn’t much, it was something. The plan could create 750,000 new jobs by the end of 2012, a small change to the unemployment rate but a big deal to those 750,000 people.

There were many downsides to the plan, but the risks all played out over the long term. The primary worries were the ones Hoenig pointed out, about risky lending and asset bubbles. But there was also concern that quantitative easing could create price inflation, encourage more government borrowing (because the plan worked by purchasing government debt) and that it would be very difficult to end once it began because markets would become addicted to the flow of new money.

The final vote on quantitative easing was set on Nov. 3, 2010, and opposition was still strong. Lacker, president of the Richmond Fed, said the justifications for quantitative easing were thin and the risks were large and uncertain. “Please count me in the nervous camp,” Lacker said at the time.

Plosser, the Philadelphia Fed president, was blunter. “I do not support another round of asset purchases at this time,” he said. “Again, given these very small anticipated benefits, we should be even more focused on the downside risks of this program.”

Fisher, the Dallas Fed president, said he was “deeply concerned” about the plan.

“I see considerable risk in conducting policy with the consequence of transferring income from the poor, those most dependent on fixed income, and the saver, to the rich,” he said at the time.

According to transcripts of internal FOMC debates, Bernanke defended the plan with an argument that he would use repeatedly in coming years, saying that the Fed faced risks if it didn’t intervene. Bernanke also knew he had the votes to pass quantitative easing. Due to a quirk in the FOMC voting rotation, the critics Fisher, Lacker and Plosser didn’t have a vote that day. Bernanke had personally lobbied Warsh, the Fed governor, who came to an agreement that he’d support quantitative easing, according to Bernanke’s memoir, although he would write an op-ed expressing his concerns about it.

Hoenig believed that there would likely be no going back if the Fed unleashed quantitative easing in late 2008. Just like the 1970s, the Fed might end up keeping money too easy for too long as it tried to juice the job market, chasing short-term gains as it piled up long-term risks.

If Hoenig had voted to support quantitative easing on Nov. 3, he would have almost certainly been praised by his peers. By breaking his long string of dissents that year, he would have allowed the Fed to appear united in the decision to embark on a new and experimental course. But something held him back.

Hoenig has a stubborn streak when it comes to such decision, and it traces back to his long history of working with serious numbers. During his childhood in Fort Madison, Iowa, Hoenig spent his holiday breaks working at his dad’s small plumbing shop. Hoenig was sent to the back room with a clipboard so he could record the inventory of plumbing parts. If he made a mistake, his dad could find himself short of supplies. After graduating high school, Hoenig served as an artillery officer in Vietnam, where he calculated the firing range of mortar shells to ensure they landed near enemy positions rather than on his fellow U.S. soldiers. Hoenig’s upbringing taught him that getting numbers right was a deadly serious job. And he felt a sense of duty to get it right. When he enlisted to fight in Vietnam, he had explained the decision in simple terms to his sister, Kathleen Kelley.

“I remember him saying: ‘You know, I’m an American citizen and I hope to be able to enjoy all the benefits this country offers, so it’s my responsibility,’” Kelley recalled. He would later characterize his string of dissents in this language. He called it his “duty.”

There were 10 votes in favor of quantitative easing. When it was Hoenig’s turn to vote, he answered: “Respectfully, no.”

Hoenig retired from the Fed in late 2011. As he predicted, the round of quantitative easing he voted against was just the beginning. By 2012, economic growth was still tepid enough that Bernanke argued that more quantitative easing was in order. This time, the Fed printed roughly $1.6 trillion. The Fed also kept interest rates remained pegged at zero for roughly seven years, by far the longest stretch in history (rates had touched near-zero in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, but stayed there only briefly).

The Fed tried mightily to reverse its easy money programs, but largely failed to do so. The central bank tried to raise interest rates slowly, while withdrawing some of the excess cash it had injected through years of quantitative easing.

When the Fed tried to withdraw this stimulus, markets reacted negatively. In late 2018, for example, the stock and bond markets fell sharply after the Fed had been steadily raising rates and reversing quantitative easing by selling off the assets it purchased (a maneuver it dubbed “quantitative tightening”). Fed Chair Jay Powell quickly halted those efforts in a move that traders dubbed the “Powell Pivot.”

For Hoenig, the most dispiriting part seems to be that zero-percent rates and quantitative easing have had exactly the kind of “allocative effects” that he warned about. Quantitative easing stoked asset prices, which primarily benefited the very rich. By making money so cheap and available, it also encouraged riskier lending and financial engineering tactics like debt-fueled stock buybacks and mergers, which did virtually nothing to improve the lot of millions of people who earned a living through their paychecks.

In May of 2020, Hoenig published a paper that spelled out his grim verdict on the age of easy money, from 2010 until now. He compared two periods of economic growth: The period between 1992 and 2000 and the one between 2010 and 2018. These periods were comparable because they were both long periods of economic stability after a recession, he argued. The biggest difference was the Federal Reserve’s extraordinary experiments in money printing during the latter period, during which time productivity, earnings and growth were weak. During the 1990s, labor productivity increased at an annual average rate of 2.3 percent, about twice as much as during the age of easy money. Real median weekly earnings for wage and salary employees rose by 0.7 percent on average annually during the 1990s, compared to only 0.26 percent during the 2010s.

Average real gross domestic product growth — a measure of the overall economy — rose an average of 3.8 percent annually during the 1990s, but by only 2.3 percent during the recent decade.

The only part of the economy that seemed to benefit under quantitative easing and zero-percent interest rates was the market for assets. The stock market more than doubled in value during the 2010s. Even after the crash of 2020, the markets continued their stellar growth and returns. Corporate debt was another super-hot market, stoked by the Fed, rising from about $6 trillion in 2010 to a record $10 trillion at the end of 2019.

And now, for the first time since the Great Inflation of the 1970s, consumer prices are rising quickly along with asset prices. Strained supply chains are to blame for that, but so is the very strong demand created by central banks, Hoenig said. The Fed has been encouraging government spending by purchasing billions of Treasury bonds each month while pumping new money into the banks. Just like the 1970s, there are now a whole lot of dollars chasing a limited amount of goods. “That’s a big demand pull on the economy,” Hoenig said. “The Fed is facilitating that.”

Hoenig’s 2020 paper didn’t get much attention. After his retirement from the Fed, he served as stint as vice chairman of the FDIC, where he pushed an unsuccessful proposal to break up the big banks. Now he lives in Kansas City, publishing papers and giving the occasional media interview. He is still issuing warnings about the dangers of runaway money printing, and he is still being mostly ignored.

Hoenig isn’t optimistic about what American life might look like after another decade of weak growth, wage stagnation and booming asset values that primarily benefited the rich. This was something he talked about a lot, both publicly and privately. In his mind, economics and the banking system were tightly intertwined with American society. One thing affected the other. When the financial system benefited only a handful of people, average people started to lose faith in society as a whole.

“Do you think that we would have had the political, shall we say turmoil, revolution, we had in 2016, had we not had this great divide created? Had we not had the effects of the zero interest rates that benefited some far more than others?” Hoenig asked. “I don’t know. It’s a counterfactual. But it’s a question I would like to pose.”
 
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marsh

On TB every waking moment

Here's How The Energy Crisis Turns Into Hunger And Then... War?

WEDNESDAY, DEC 29, 2021 - 07:00 AM
Authored by Chris Macintosh via InternationalMan.com,

We have previously warned about a whopping food crisis and supply problems in the fertilizer market. Well, now is worse because that was BEFORE we had the natural gas crisis. Why is that important?



Natural gas is THE critical input into making fertilizer. Urea is essentially ammonia in solid state, the process of which entails reacting ammonia with CO2.

And we all now know — thanks to the climate nazis — that CO2 is currently the devil. The problem of course is that with no natural gas there is no urea, and with no urea there is no fertilizer. And with no fertilizer… well, we will eat each other.
Here are the spot urea prices.



Something else that we had noted some time back (in Korea) but which now seems like a larger problem.

Here is an article about an Australian farmer who warns the urea supply crisis could halt normal life within weeks.

Here’s what he says:
‘Not only will we not be able to grow cattle and we will not be able to grow food and we will not be able to grow grain or anything like that, but even if we could, we can’t move it, because we can’t turn a wheel in a truck because we have no Adblue,’ [AdBlue is needed for diesel vehicles — half of all trucks on Australian roads run on diesel
As of February we might not have a truck on the road in Australia, we might not have a train on the tracks.
‘So quite literally the whole country comes to a standstill as of February.’
The farmer then, goes on to say:
‘Go and have a look in your cupboard and go and have a look in your fridge and I guarantee just about every single item there, at some point, urea has been used to produce that item, whether it’s a steak or a salad or a can of baked beans.
Moving to Europe, we have a full blown energy crisis unfolding there, made worse by increasingly more destructive policies by the pointy shoes (let’s produce more solar and wind when it’s proven to be both inadequate and massively costly) and a supply chain crisis.

Take a look at European energy prices.



So here we’re now witnessing the beginnings of what promises to be a storm.

Think cold and hungry and you’ve got the right picture.



That electricity comes largely from natural gas, and that natural gas comes from those peaky Russkies.

European Gas Prices Surge Above 100 Euros With Eyes on Russia.
Europe’s benchmark natural gas price rose above 100 euros, or $190 per barrel of oil equivalent, ahead of a series of auctions for pipeline capacity that are seen as a test of Russia’s willingness to ease a supply crunch.

The day-ahead auctions for space on Ukrainian pipelines and capacity at Germany’s Mallnow compressor station will provide a strong signal for how serious Russia is about increasing flows to the west. While the region’s biggest supplier has said it aims to keep refilling European storage sites until the end of December, it hasn’t used short-term auctions to ship more fuel.
So right now we have this situation which is going to make your head spin.

Europe is out of gas. They’ve spent the better part of the last decade getting rid of their own domestic energy, replacing it with baubles and toys, which, while scoring big on the woke scorecard, have proven abysmal at producing… well, electricity.

With Europeans now cold and very shortly hungry we are due for a war.

Remember that historically, the spiraling food prices have caused civil unrest, revolutions, and wars. On the plus side, it has been known to also cure obesity, so there’s that.

Back to urea and food. You can’t make fertilizer without urea and natural gas. As the price of either of these goes higher (both are), it significantly impacts the price of fertilizer. The price of fertilizer impacts in turn the price of food. This is because fert is the second largest cost component of most agricultural production. The first being… you guessed it, diesel.



We now have a bull market not just in urea, but in natural gas, and to top it off in diesel too.

To expect food prices to remain stable when the ingredients to producing it are all rocketing higher impresses us as comically stupid.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

How Education International Is Pushing Teachers’ Unions Into the 4th Industrial Revolution
How Education International Is Pushing Teachers’ Unions Into the 4th Industrial Revolution

Why have teachers’ unions been pushing ed-tech that is driving schools into the 4IR? Look no further than Education International, a global federation tied to UNESCO & the WEF that dominates most teachers’ unions in the US and beyond.

by JOHN KLYCZEK
December 29, 2021

For nearly a hundred years, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) – the two largest teachers’ unions in the United States – have cozied up to corporate foundations, such as the Rockefeller philanthropies and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with multinational technology companies, including IBM and Microsoft. After almost a century of cutting side deals with Robber Barons and Tech Barons alike, the AFT and the NEA are now parroting the Gates Foundation’s “Reimagine Education” campaign, which is being buoyed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Altogether, the AFT, the NEA, the WEF, and UNESCO are all “reimagining” a new post-human education system as they simultaneously push for ed-tech overhauls. As documented in my investigative series, “Teachnocracy,” these overhauls seek to privatize public schools through partnerships with Big Tech corporations that facilitate online “distance learning” to accommodate indefinite classroom health restrictions in a post-COVID world.

In fact, the AFT and the NEA are tethered to the WEF and UNESCO through an entity known as Education International (EI). EI is a Global Union Federation (GUF) that combines “383 member organisations,” including the AFT and the NEA, and collaborates with the WEF and UNESCO. As the intermediary between America’s teachers’ unions and the WEF and UNESCO, EI has been galvanizing the AFT and the NEA into conformity with the “reimagine” ed-tech agendas of these global governance institutions.

To put it bluntly, EI puppeteers the AFT and the NEA using marionette strings that are tied to the WEF and UNESCO. In turn, the AFT and the NEA, along with the other 381 member organizations belonging to EI, are being spurred to “reimagine” schools through corporate ed-tech innovations geared towards advancing the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) that is being accelerated by the WEF and the United Nations (UN) through the policy agendas collectively known as the “Great Reset.”

By consolidating nearly all of the world’s teachers’ unions under a single GUF, EI has been corralling educators across the planet into a uniform global workforce that marches in lockstep with the corporate ed-tech initiatives of internationalist oligarchs at the WEF and UNESCO. Rather than representing the grassroots concerns of local teachers at the international bargaining tables of the WEF and UNESCO, EI has been co-opting unionized educators, including AFT and NEA members, by signing them on to the “Reimagine” and “Reset” campaigns of the WEF and the UN in order to build the ed-tech data-mining infrastructure necessary to globalize the post-human Social Credit economy that underpins the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

How Technocrats Formed EI to Globalize Ed-Tech
In 1946, two years after the Bretton Woods agreement set up the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to finance a new global economy, the World Federation of Education Associations (WFEA), which was founded in 1923, rebranded itself as the World Organization of Teaching Professions (WOTP).

Then, in 1951, the WOTP banded together with several other unions to form the World Confederation of Organizations of Teaching Professions (WCOTP). That same year, the International Federation of Free Teachers’ Unions (IFFTU) was established.

Fast-forward to 1993, and the WCOTP, which was chartered as a union of professional associations, and the IFFTU, which was chartered as a union of trade organizations, merged to form Education International, which now “represent more than 32 million teachers and education support personnel in 178 countries and territories.”

2021-12-29-at-09.22-CleanShot@2x-1024x499.jpg

Origins and History of Education International (EI) (ei-ie.org)

When EI was inaugurated, the President of the WCOTP was Mary Futrell, who was simultaneously the President of the NEA, which is organized as a union of professional associations like the WCOTP. At the same time when EI was founded, the President of the IFFTU was Albert Shanker, who was simultaneously the President of the AFT, which is instituted as a union of trade organizations like the IFFTU. Upon dissolving the WCOTP and the IFFTU, both Futrell and Shanker became the founding Co-Presidents of EI.

By converting the WCOTP and the IFFTU into the singular EI under the leadership of the NEA and AFT presidents, Futrell and Shanker amalgamated America’s two largest teachers’ unions with the world’s two largest international teachers’ unions, thereby homogenizing professional teachers’ associations and school trade organizations under a global bureaucracy bent on technocratically planning the world economy for what is now known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Futrell and Shanker were perfect for the task of stirring up America’s teachers and school workers into an international brigade of workforce developers commissioned to train students for the hi-tech jobs of the future Fourth Industrial Revolution:
  • Shanker was a Trilateral Commission member who collaborated with unnamed “bankers” and “the head of IBM” to set up the global-technocratic school reforms posited by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his 1970 Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era. In this futurist tome, Brzezinski, who co-founded the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller, postulated that the “technetronic era” of schooling would “scientifically” manage student learning through a computerized system of “home-based education through television consoles and other electronic devices” deployed by “business companies” for the purposes of “work-study” job training in the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution. Brzezinski’s vision of workforce homeschooling managed by ed-tech companies was carried out by Shanker, who spearheaded the public-private charter schooling industry, which evolved into virtual charter school corporations that train students for workforce competence through adaptive-learning courseware programmed with cognitive-behavioral conditioning algorithms.
  • Futrell has served as the Co-Director of the Center for Curriculum, Standards, and Technology (CCST), and she has also sat on the Board of Directors of the International Council on Education for Teaching (ICET) as well as the Board of Directors of K12 Inc. The latter company, K12 Inc., is the international virtual charter school company that was set up by US Secretary of Education, William Bennett, after he took over Project BEST (Basic Education Skills through Technology), which was America’s domestic version of UNESCO’s “Study 11.” Futrell was also a Member of the US National Commission for UNESCO, and she was also appointed as the President of Americans for UNESCO.
Thanks to Shanker kicking off the public-private charter school industry for workforce training; and thanks to Futrell directing K12 Inc.’s virtual charter school business in accordance with the ed-tech standards of the CCST and the ICET; these presidents of the AFT, the IFFTU, the NEA, and the WCOTP were instrumental in advancing the proliferation of ed-tech through Project BEST and UNESCO Study 11.

Less than a decade after BEST and Study 11 laid the “information technology” (IT) infrastructure for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Shanker and Futrell consolidated their unionized constituents under the banner of EI in order to galvanize all AFT and NEA teachers into a single herd that can be cattle-driven to follow the globalist directives of multinational corporations in bed with world governance institutions, such as UNESCO and the World Economic Forum.

AFT President Shanker and NEA President Futrell are no longer members of EI. Nevertheless, Education International continues to honor these founding EI presidents by issuing awards and scholarships in their honor: the Albert Shanker Education Award and the Mary Hatwood Futrell Scholarship Fund. Meanwhile, the current President of the AFT, Randi Weingarten, is a current Board Member of EI; Lily Eskelsen Garcia, who was the President of the NEA until September 2020, is the current Vice President of EI; and David Edwards, who was an Associate Director at the NEA, is the current General Secretary of EI. With AFT and NEA officials continuing to hold high office at Education International since the GUF’s inception, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association have been tethering all of the USA’s teachers’ unions to the globalist policies of EI.

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Select members of the current EI Executive Board (ei-ie.org)

Now, with nearly all the world’s unionized teachers bundled under the GUF monolith of Education International, the WEF and UNESCO are bolstering the Fourth Industrial Reset with the help of EI technocrats, including Robert Harris, Susan Hopgood, Fred Van Leeuwen, and Jelmer Evers, who all collaborate with global governance institutions, including UNESCO and the World Economic Forum.

Robert Harris, Susan Hopgood, and UNESCO Globalize Ed-Tech for Social Credit Data-Mining

When Education International was established in 1993, Founding Presidents Shanker and Futrell were accompanied by an Australian educator, Robert Harris, who was also a Founding Member of EI. Prior to becoming a co-founder of EI, Harris was the Secretary-General of the WCOTP, where Futrell was president.

Upon co-founding Education International, Harris “was elected as Executive Director for Intergovernmental Relations, charged with establishing EI’s role as the spokesperson for the world’s teachers and education employees.” Harris also served as EI’s Director of International Relations.

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EI’s founders and founding leaders (ei-ie.org)

Part 1 of 3
 
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marsh

On TB every waking moment
Part 2 of 3

Currently, Harris is a member of the WEF, and he is also the Chair of the Working Group on Education, Training and Employment Policies of the Trade Union Advisory Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Additionally, Harris has also served as the President of the United Nations’ Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) as well as the President of UNESCO’s Conference of NGOs. As an EI liaison to UNESCO, Harris set the stage for Education International’s partnership with UNESCO’s Global Education First Initiative (GEFI), which was steered by EI President Susan Hopgood to pave the way for the new UNESCO Global Education Coalition (GEC) with Big Tech corporations that are members of the WEF.

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Robert Harris’ Profile on the WEF website (weforum.org)

In 1995, approximately one decade after UNESCO Study 11 laid the groundwork for the IT and ed-tech infrastructure for the burgeoning Fourth Industrial Revolution, EI Executive Director Harris spoke at the International Conference on Education hosted by UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education (IBE). During this speech, Harris historicized how EI’s alliance with UNESCO builds on the 1966 partnership between UNESCO and the International Labor Organization (ILO), which called for “authorities and teachers [to] recognize the importance of the participation of teachers, through their [union] organizations . . . to improve the quality of the education service.”

In alignment with this mission to globalize teachers’ unions under the prospects of the 1966 UNESCO-ILO partnership, the 1995 UNESCO-IBE International Conference on Education, which was facilitated by Harris, Futrell, and several other EI bureaucrats, called for the worldwide adoption of ed-tech, including “distance education technologies” that are presently being deployed by Big Tech corporations, such as Microsoft, Google, and IBM, in bed with UNESCO’s EI-endorsed GEC. It should be noted here that UNESCO’s GEC partners with both the WEF and the ILO, the latter of which is the first and oldest UN “specialized agency,” which stems from the League of Nations: the precursor to the United Nations.

Harris’s UNESCO-IBE speech was prefaced by the “Opening Address” from Pat Atkinson, who was the Minister of Education, Training, and Employment in Canada’s Province of Saskatchewan. In this “Opening Address” to the 1995 UNESCO-IBE conference, Atkinson professed that, “n a world of rapidly changing technology and the global marketplace [sic], . . . [w]e must use appropriate technologies to create opportunities for learning. New technologies can become a magic wand for a small child.”

Following these speeches from Atkinson and Harris, the UNESCO IBE laid out the official “Declaration of the 44th session of the International Conference on Education,” which proclaimed that schooling systems should be reformed “in conformity with the aims of the [UN’s] World Declaration on Education for All” by “improving curricula, the content of textbooks, and other educational materials, including new technologies.” In addition, this UNESCO-IBE conference also convened a “Roundtable” discussion during which the panelists emphasized the need “[t]o make better use of communication technologies for and by education (for example, distance education, educational television and radio).”

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The homepage of GEFI (unesco.org)

Fast-forward to the 21st century, from 2012 to 2016, Education International teamed up with UNESCO to drive UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Global Education First Initiative with EI President Susan Hopgood seated on the GEFI Steering Committee. The UNESCO-GEFI project partnered with the World Bank and the Global Business Coalition for Education (GBC-E), which regiments the following multinational technology corporations on its roster of “Member Companies”: Microsoft, Hewlett Packard (HP), Intel, Dell, Lenovo, Accenture, Viacom, and Pearson. Four years after this GEFI/GBC-E partnership, spurred by COVID lockdowns, UNESCO launched its Global Education Coalition (GEC), which is endorsed by Education International along with EI’s satellite, the US National Education Association, in order to disseminate “distance learning” technologies from ed-tech companies, such as Khan Academy, Blackboard Inc., McGraw Hill, Technovation, Virtual Educa, EdTech Hub, and Sesame Workshop. UNESCO’s EI/NEA-sponsored GEC also includes Big Tech corporations, such as IBM, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Huawei, Verizon, Facebook, Zoom, and Qualcomm, all of which simultaneously partner with the WEF, where Robert Harris is a member.

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UNESCO’s Global Education Coalition (unesco.org)

In sum, for almost thirty years, with the help of Robert Harris and Susan Hopgood, UNESCO and EI have been collaborating to build the international ed-tech infrastructure, infrastructure that will be used to data-mine students’ psychometrics for Social Credit algorithms programmed for “human capital management” in the globalstakeholder” economy of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Fred Van Leeuwen, WEF, and UNESCO Push Post-Humanist Ed-Tech for the 4IR

Harris, as a Founding Member of Education International, was also a consultant to EI’s Founding General Secretary: a Dutch Academic named Fred Van Leeuwen, who was the General Secretary of the International Federation of Free Teachers’ Unions under President Shanker until the IFFTU merged with the WCOTP to form EI. Like Harris, Van Leeuwen, who is now Education International’s General Secretary Emeritus, has also been an EI liaison with both the World Economic Forum and UNESCO where he has collaborated with Big Tech corporations to “reimagine” workforce schooling for the global Social Credit economy of the post-humanist Fourth Industrial Revolution envisioned by the WEF’s boss, Klaus Schwab.

As the General Secretary of EI, Van Leeuwen was a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Education Systems in 2012. That same year, he attended the WEF’s Annual Meeting where he participated in an “interactive session” titled “The Education-Entrepreneurship-Employment Nexus.”

At the same time, the WEF’s “Entrepreneurship initiative” was “support[ed]” by technology companies, including Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco. As corporate members of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Education Systems, Intel launched its “Easy Steps digital literacy programme” while Cisco Networking Academy launched programs to train students how to “succeed in a technology-driven world by teaching the skills needed to design, build, manage and secure computer networks – improving their career prospects while filling the global demand for networking professionals.”

In brief, through the WEF’s Global Agenda Council on Education Systems, Van Leeuwen collaborated with Microsoft, Intel, and Cisco to expand global ed-tech systems for the purposes of “creating curricula to meet pressing needs” of the “future labour demands” of the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The WEF’s Global Agenda Council on Education Systems has also pursued the “Education for All” mission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization where Van Leeuwen, as a member of UNESCO’s Senior Experts’ Group, has called for “reimagining” school through post-humanist ed-tech programmed with artificial intelligence (AI) geared for “Social Score” data-mining of students’ psychometrics and biometrics. In a 2015 UNESCO whitepaper entitled “Rethinking Education: Toward a Global Common Good?,” Van Leeuwen and his comrades at the Senior Experts’ Group proclaimed that “[d]igital connectivity holds promise for gains in health, education, communication, leisure and well-being.

Artificial intelligence advances, 3D printers, holographic recreation, instant transcription, voice-recognition and gesture-recognition software are only some examples of what is being tested. Digital technologies are reshaping human activity from daily life to international relations.” In a nutshell, Van Leeuwen and his UNESCO cadre hyped how humanity will be “reshap[ed]” through the post-humanist convergence of AI, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and biometric ed-tech.

Today, through UNESCO’s new Global Education Coalition, which is currently promoted by EI, and the WEF’s Annual Meetings, which EI General Secretary Van Leeuwen has frequently attended, these worldwide ed-tech advances in cognitive-behavioral AI; holographic VR and AR; and socioemotional biometrics and psychometrics have been steadily accelerated by Education International in close cooperation with multinational technology corporations, such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Huawei, and McGraw Hill. In 2013, just two years before Van Leeuwen signed onto the UNESCO “Rethinking Education” whitepaper as the General Secretary of EI, he attended the WEF’s Annual Meeting along with delegates from UNESCO and representatives from these globalist tech companies that are now key players in UNESCO’s GEC


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Promotional material for Microsoft Mixed Reality – Education

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Google Cardboard – Google VR


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Facebook’s Oculus – VR Headsets, Games & Equipment

 
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marsh

On TB every waking moment
Part 3 of 3
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McGraw Hill’s ALEKS

Other Big Tech corporations and ed-tech companies in attendance with Van Leeuwen at the 2013 WEF Meeting include Salesforce, Accenture, HP, Intel, Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba, Cisco, Mozilla, Yahoo! Inc., Adobe, and Cengage Learning.

From this cross section of multinational technology corporations in partnership with the WEF and UNESCO, it is evident that these Big Tech cartels have been globalizing AI, VR, AR, biometric, and psychometric ed-tech for Social Credit data-mining in coordination with the world governance directives of the United Nations and the World Economic Forum with the help of Education International under the leadership of EI General Secretary Fred Van Leeuwen.

To strategize the dissemination of these commercialized ed-tech products through public-private partnerships with corporate philanthropies, several tax-exempt foundations and non-profit organizations also attended the 2013 WEF Meeting, including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Atlantic Council, and the Wellcome Trust: a massive medical research “charity” that is connected to the Galton Institute, formerly known as the British Eugenics Society.

Similarly, to strategize the international funding of worldwide ed-tech proliferation, there were several Big Banks, financial services firms, and fiscal consulting agencies that likewise attended the 2013 WEF Meeting, including Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital, Bilderberger Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Soros Fund Management, Kissinger Associates, the Carlyle Group, Blackstone Group, Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Company, Lloyd’s, Prudential PLC, Visa, Mastercard, Citi Group, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, HSBC Bank, Rothschild GmbH, China Merchants Bank, Deutsche Bank, Bank of Moscow, the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, the Royal Bank of Scotland, the World Bank, the IMF, and the Bank for International Settlements.

Finally, to strategize the multilateral public-private cooperation between Big Banking houses, international financial institutions, globalist tax-exempt foundations, corporate non-profit organizations, multinational ed-tech companies, and Big Tech industries, there were also representatives from the world governance arms of UNESCO, the Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House, and the OECD in attendance at the WEF’s 2013 Annual Meeting, along with EI General Secretary Van Leeuwen.

In the final equation, Van Leeuwen was in the position to relay the WEF’s techno-fascist global governance prospectus back to national teachers’ unions across the planet in order to get educators on board with public-private Big Tech partnerships that virtually condition students for workforce “competence” in the post-humanist Social Credit economy of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Klaus Schwab, Jelmer Evers: Teaching in the Transhumanist 4IR
Three years later, Van Leeuwen endorsed a 2018 book entitled Teaching in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Standing at the Precipice [1]. Authored by several finalists of the Varkey Foundation’s Global Teacher Prize, including Jelmer Evers, who is an EI activist, this Routledge book is basically a call to action for the teaching profession to carry out WEF Chairman Klaus Schwab’s vision for a transhumanist ed-tech system.

To begin with, Teaching in the Fourth Industrial Revolution is sponsored by UNESCO and WEF affiliates, including:
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GEFI Steering Committee Members (unesco.org)
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UNESCO International Commission on Futures of Education
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Sunny Varkey (varkeyfoundation.org)
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Vikas Pota’s profile on the WEF website (weforum.org)

Throughout the chapters of Teaching in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, several WEF whitepapers are cited, including “Realizing Human Potential in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: An Agenda for Leaders to Shape the Future of Education, Gender, and Work”; “New Vision for Education: Unlocking the Potential of Technology”; and the World Economic Forum’s 2016 “Future of Jobs Report: The 10 Skills You Need to Thrive in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

To put the cherry on top, the “Foreword” for Teaching in the Fourth Industrial Revolution is authored by none other than Van Leeuwen’s WEF boss, transhumanist Klaus Schwab, who is the Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum. In this Foreword, Schwab lays out his forecast for a futurist school system in which all human interactions between teachers and students are mediated through Big Data and AI ed-tech analytics:

“innovations in technology today make it possible to synthesize and analyse data to tailor pedagogy to individual student needs and provide feedback in real time; significantly reduce costs; allow students from drastically different parts of the world to collaborate on projects; and create platforms for sharing best practices. . . . Only a strategic integration of personal coaching and digital learning can provide both the technological and human-centered skills necessary to thrive in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

Emphasizing this “integration” of the “digital” and the “personal,” Schwab, whose family roots can be traced back to business connections which were critical to the functioning of the Nazi Reich, invokes the neo-eugenic rhetoric of transhumanism by proclaiming that “[t]he future of education content is thus neither wholly digital nor wholly human but a hybrid.” This trans-eugenic declaration echoes Schwab’s transhumanist profession in his 2016 book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, which states that the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” will “evolve” humans into cyborgs by merging humankind with computers through “a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.” In 2019, at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Schwab reiterated this transhumanist pronouncement: “at the end, what the Fourth Industrial Revolution will lead to, is a fusion of our physical, our digital, and our biological identities.”

Schwab’s transhumanist vision of a bio-digital melding of humans with computers is mirrored multiple times in several chapters of Teaching in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. For example, citing Schwab in “Chapter 1: Education in a Time of Unprecedented Change,” co-author Michael Soskil echoes the WEF Chairman’s techno-hybrid “reimagining” of humanity in a section titled “The New World of Learning,” which examines Schwab’s formulation of the Fourth Industrial Revolution as Soskil asks the following question: “[a]s Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning, the ‘Internet of Things [IoT],’ biotechnological advances, and nanotechnology turn the most imaginative science fiction into reality, we will be forced to continually reevaluate the question, ‘What does it means to be human?’”

In other words, as the human species “evolves” through a transhuman “fusion” of biotech and nanotech programmed with AI linked to the IoT, “the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres,” as Schwab anticipates, will be “blurred,” thus calling into question “[w]hat . . . it mean to be human” as the distinctions between organic, natural life and industrially manufactured machinery are rendered into mere semantic differentiations.

Similarly, citing Schwab in the “Introduction” chapter of Teaching in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, EI member Jelmer Evers explores the WEF Chairman’s transhumanist predictions for “Implantable Technologies, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotics, 3D-Printing, Neurotechnologies and Designer Beings.” It should be noted here that, in “Chapter 8: Flip the System,” co-author Evers, as a member of Education International, champions EI as a global vehicle for unionizing educators by “leverag[ing] new technologies” with “other stakeholders” in order to carry out the UNESCO-ILO “Recommendation Concerning the Status of Teachers,” which calls for “unions to play a crucial role in education policy.”

In the “Acknowledgments” prelude, Evers “thank [EI General Secretary] David Edwards and [EI General Secretary Emeritus] Fred van Leeuwen and all of my [Evers’s] colleagues at Education International and national unions who are an inspiration in their leadership and activism and who have opened up my [Evers’s] eyes in so many ways.” In sum, with support from EI’s former and current General Secretaries, Evers is calling for Education International to regiment teachers’ unions under the banner of UNESCO policies that drive the expansion of transhumanist ed-tech “upgrades” which are exalted by WEF Chairman Schwab.

To put it all together, Fred Van Leeuwen, who is EI’s General Secretary Emeritus, and Jelmer Evers, who is an activist member of EI, have been organizing unionized teachers in coordination with the public-private world governance stratagems of UNESCO, the WEF, and Big Tech. These efforts are aimed at micromanaging technocratic schooling in a transhumanist Fourth Industrial Revolution that is superintended by a Global Union Federation of educators bundled together under the umbrella of Education International.

Of course, the transhumanist bent of EI’s UNESCO-WEF collaborations can be traced back to the eugenic histories of UNESCO and the World Economic Forum.

Indeed, the first Director-General of UNESCO, Julian Huxley, coined the concept of transhumanism as the next phase of eugenics after he served as the President of the British Eugenics Society. Similarly, the World Economic Forum, which has advocated for Malthusian-eugenic population control since the WEF’s inception, was founded by transhumanist Klaus Schwab, whose family tree has roots connected to the eugenic regime of Adolph Hitler. (For a deep dive into the Schwab family’s Nazi-eugenic legacy, read Johnny Vedmore’s “Schwab Family Values”).

Don’t Give Me No GUF
Ever since the WCOTP and the IFFTU were amalgamated into a single GUF under EI in 1993, Education International has been led by globalist technocrats, including Robert Harris, Susan Hopgood, Fred Van Leeuwen, and Jelmer Evers, who all cavort with global governance institutions, such as UNESCO and the WEF. For almost thirty years now, EI Presidents, General Secretaries, and Executive Directors have been signing on to the ed-tech ordinances of UNESCO and the WEF in order to usher in a transhumanist “School World Order” for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In turn, EI’s 383 “member organisations,” including the AFT and the NEA, have been adopting these UNESCO and WEF directives, thereby passing down these transhumanist ed-tech policies to Education International’s “32 million teachers and education support personnel in 178 countries and territories.”

In brief, EI has been steadily corralling the world’s teachers and school employees into a technocentric global workforce that is being shepherded into the Fourth Industrial Revolution under the public-private marching orders of UNESCO, the WEF, and Big Tech. To be frank, it appears that EI, like all other GUFs, has always been commissioned to function as a labor-management arm of the world governance stakeholders of UNESCO, the WEF, and Big Tech.

So, if you’re waiting for EI or any other GUF to lead a worldwide general strike against transhumanist technocracy, don’t hold your breath. Labor movements and strikes must be organized by grassroots efforts from workers on the ground in their local communities. As long as EI or any other GUF globalizes organized labor through top-down efforts orchestrated by world governance institutions, the interests of teachers and workers will continue to be subordinated to the techno-imperialist interests of UNESCO and the WEF in bed with multinational corporations.

If unionized educators and school employees who belong to EI cannot sway their GUF bureaucrats to oppose the transhumanist techno-fascism being pushed by UNESCO and the WEF in collusion with Big Tech, then it might be time for teachers and school staff to drop out of any union affiliations with Education International.

Perhaps it is time for the educational workforce to reassemble new grassroots unions to set up parallel structures that represent the interests of teachers who dissent from the dystopic conditions of the post-human schooling system being thrust upon students by the multilateral imperialism of the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s corporate-technocratic globalism. Until EI can demonstrate that it’s not just a sounding board for UNESCO, the WEF, and Big Tech, I say “don’t give me no GUF.”

Endnote:
Armand Doucet, Jelmer Evers, Elisa Guerra, Nadia Lopez, Michael Soskil, and Koen Timmers, Teaching in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Standing at the Precipice (New York: Routledge, 2018).
 
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Jaybird

Veteran Member

Here's How The Energy Crisis Turns Into Hunger And Then... War?

WEDNESDAY, DEC 29, 2021 - 07:00 AM
Authored by Chris Macintosh via InternationalMan.com,

We have previously warned about a whopping food crisis and supply problems in the fertilizer market. Well, now is worse because that was BEFORE we had the natural gas crisis. Why is that important?



Natural gas is THE critical input into making fertilizer. Urea is essentially ammonia in solid state, the process of which entails reacting ammonia with CO2.

And we all now know — thanks to the climate nazis — that CO2 is currently the devil. The problem of course is that with no natural gas there is no urea, and with no urea there is no fertilizer. And with no fertilizer… well, we will eat each other.
Here are the spot urea prices.



Something else that we had noted some time back (in Korea) but which now seems like a larger problem.

Here is an article about an Australian farmer who warns the urea supply crisis could halt normal life within weeks.

Here’s what he says:



The farmer then, goes on to say:

Moving to Europe, we have a full blown energy crisis unfolding there, made worse by increasingly more destructive policies by the pointy shoes (let’s produce more solar and wind when it’s proven to be both inadequate and massively costly) and a supply chain crisis.

Take a look at European energy prices.



So here we’re now witnessing the beginnings of what promises to be a storm.

Think cold and hungry and you’ve got the right picture.



That electricity comes largely from natural gas, and that natural gas comes from those peaky Russkies.

European Gas Prices Surge Above 100 Euros With Eyes on Russia.



So right now we have this situation which is going to make your head spin.

Europe is out of gas. They’ve spent the better part of the last decade getting rid of their own domestic energy, replacing it with baubles and toys, which, while scoring big on the woke scorecard, have proven abysmal at producing… well, electricity.

With Europeans now cold and very shortly hungry we are due for a war.

Remember that historically, the spiraling food prices have caused civil unrest, revolutions, and wars. On the plus side, it has been known to also cure obesity, so there’s that.

Back to urea and food. You can’t make fertilizer without urea and natural gas. As the price of either of these goes higher (both are), it significantly impacts the price of fertilizer. The price of fertilizer impacts in turn the price of food. This is because fert is the second largest cost component of most agricultural production. The first being… you guessed it, diesel.



We now have a bull market not just in urea, but in natural gas, and to top it off in diesel too.

To expect food prices to remain stable when the ingredients to producing it are all rocketing higher impresses us as comically stupid.
This is bullshit. We produce all the natural gas we need here in the US. Convert some to fertilizer. We can't produce enough piss to go with it?
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Globalist Corporations Begin Seizing Farmland in America Under Eminent Domain to Halt Food Production in the Name of Fighting Climate Change

JD Heyes
December 29, 2021
Globalist Corporations Begin Seizing Farmland in America Under Eminent Domain to Halt Food Production in the Name of Fighting Climate Change


If our own government isn’t jacking up inflation with lousy fiscal and economic policies as well as out-of-control spending, leave it to billionaire global corporatists — with the full backing of the Biden regime –to set us up for major food production shortages over the hoax of ‘human-caused climate change.’

As reported by Humans Are Free, the ‘climate change’ hoaxers are having an effect on the world’s youth, and that will lead to more control over the world’s population, including Americans, if left to continue along the same trajectory. Consider:

— The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report was met with a great deal of alarm.
— Citing the report, the BBC claimed that it represented “code red for humanity.”
— The New York Times chimed in, claiming (without context), “A Hotter Future Is Certain” (and it might be, but that doesn’t mean humans are causing it).
— A headline from the far-left Guardian claimed that major climate changes were “inevitable” and “irreversible” (both true — but again, without context, these predictions can be spun to mean anything).
— Both UK publications, the BBC and The Guardian, cheered the fact that their constant fear-mongering over ‘climate change’ is leading to a massive population decline: 4 in 10 young people are now almost uncontrollably concerned that climate change will destroy the planet in their lifetime.

“According to the survey, nearly half of 16-25-year-olds around the world are hesitant to have children as a result of what they believe is a climate crisis and feel that governments are doing too little to prevent it,” Humans Are Free reported.

Now, what can governments and globalists do with a petrified population?

Control them. And that’s where the threat to our food supplies (and liberties) comes in.

In October, Whitney Webb of Unlimited Hangout reported on one of these plans involving an organization called the Intrinsic Exchange Group, or IEG, which has pledged to save humanity from this alleged catastrophe of climate. According to the organization, with the aid of billionaires, multinational corporations, investors — and, of course, the UN — the org will save our planet from climate extinction.

Webb noted:

In September, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) announced it had developed a new asset class and listing vehicle aimed at “preserving and restoring the natural assets that ultimately underlie the ability for there to be life on Earth.” The vehicle, known as a natural asset company, or NAC, will enable the formation of specialized firms “that own the rights to the ecosystem services produced on a certain piece of land, such as carbon sequestration or clean water.” The natural assets that these NACs commodify will subsequently be maintained, managed, and grown by them.

‘Maintained, managed, and grown’ — to suit the UN’s nonsensical definition of “sustainable,” of course. And since this globalist Marxist organization has always pushed for fewer people on the planet rather than more, because fewer are ‘more sustainable,’ then you can surely guess what this kind of ‘land and food production management’ will look like: Less is more.

And in case you may have thought that this is all just talk, Webb notes that the purchase of land for the stated purpose has already begun in the United States.

Summit Carbon Solutions is working to obtain land in the bread belt, so to speak — northern Iowa — for the proposed Midwest Carbon Express pipeline.
The company, “an offshoot of Summit Agriculture Group, is behind the $4.5 billion Midwest Carbon Express project,” Humans Are Free noted. “It would be the largest carbon capture project in the world with the goal of sending 12 million tons of CO2 annually to western North Dakota, where it can be stored underground.

“Landowners expressed concerns regarding Summit Carbon’s use of eminent domain, which allows the company to build the pipeline on land without consent from the landowner,” the outlet continued, explaining: “Eminent domain is when a government body can acquire private property for public use, with compensation for affected landowners.”

In short, these ‘carbon’ corporations are going to be using this constitutional method (noted in the Fifth Amendment) to control how much food is grown, what kind and how it can be used, and for whom.

“While shady deals like these have been happening in the US for decades, these new corporations — soon to be traded on the stock market casino — aren’t going to be largely focused on land looted in the US,” Humans Are Free reported, adding:

Allegedly, NACs will use the funds from these newly obtained and monetized natural assets to help fight climate change by ‘preserving’ the rain forests, mountains, and lakes mostly abroad. They also vow to change the “conventional agricultural production practices” of farms to make them more efficient and sustainable.

But, the creators of NACs concede the ultimate goal is to extract trillions in profits from natural processes such as photosynthesis, apply intrinsic values to natural processes, and then monetize it.


Trillions in ‘carbon capture’ are about to be made by these ‘environmental’ corporations, and at the expense of our food production land.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Bidenflation Is Destroying The Middle Class; Is It Being Done On Purpose?

by Guest Post | Dec 29, 2021 | Economy
Bidenflation


By Michael Snyder

Americans have more money in their pockets than they ever have before. That sounds like great news, but it isn’t because the cost of living is rising much faster than our incomes. In addition, much of the “new wealth” created over the past couple of years has ended up in the hands of the very wealthy, which has caused the gap between the rich and the poor to grow even more expansive. As for the middle class is being systematically hollowed out by “Bidenflation,” and that process is only going to accelerate during the early stages of 2022.

I don’t like to use the term “Bidenflation” too much because it is not entirely accurate. Without a doubt, the Biden administration has taken actions repeatedly that have made the inflation crisis even worse. But it isn’t as if Joe Biden and his minions are the only ones responsible for this mess.

The creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 started us down the road we are on today. Of course, we could have exited this path at any time if U.S. voters had sent politicians to Washington that were committed to abolishing the Federal Reserve, but they didn’t do that.

In 1971, we reached “the beginning of the end” when President Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard. Today, the value of the U.S. dollar is only a tiny fraction of what it was back then.

The U.S. national debt hit a trillion dollars in the early 1980s, and it will hit the 30 trillion dollar mark in 2022. Our politicians have literally been committing national financial suicide, and both major parties are to blame.

In 2009, the Federal Reserve took the destruction of our currency to an entirely new level when they introduced “quantitative easing.” It was supposed to just be a “temporary measure,” but of course, the Fed just kept doing it.

Over the past couple of years, the Federal Reserve has pumped more fresh money into our financial system than ever before, which has greatly pleased investors.

But it is also turning our currency into a joke.

Earlier today, I read an email from a reader that was quite alarmed that many new car dealers are now charging $5,000 to $10,000 above the sticker price for many of their vehicles.

Of course, they can get such prices because we are now in a hyperinflationary environment.

Used vehicle prices have been rising very aggressively as well. In fact, Jim Bianco says that they have been going up even faster than Bitcoin
Used auto prices are rising faster than bitcoin and other assets, according to market researcher Jim Bianco.
“If you want to know what the best investment you probably had in 2021, it’s that car sitting in your driveway or in that garage,” the Bianco Research President told CNBC’s “Trading Nation” on Thursday. “It is appreciating faster than the stock market and lately faster than some cryptocurrencies.”
Isn’t that nuts?

Over the past four months alone, the price of used vehicles has increased more than 20 percent
“In the last four months, they’ve gone up in price more than 20%. Not only is that more than the S&P, but over the last four months that’s more than bitcoin itself,” he said. “As of December 15, the latest set of data we’ve got, they’re just accelerating higher and higher right now. There’s no peak at least as of now.”
Home prices are going absolutely haywire as well.

In fact, CNN is reporting that at the end of the third quarter, U.S. home prices were up almost 20 percent compared to the same time in 2020…
Homeowners saw average home prices skyrocket nearly 20% through the third quarter compared to a year ago, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency. It was the largest annual home price increase in the history of the agency’s House Price Index. And, in some hot markets, the price increase was double that.
If your income hasn’t also gone up 20 percent over the past year, that means that you are falling behind.

Once upon a time, you could get a huge mansion for $500,000.

Today, half a million dollars will get you a 700 square foot shack.

And Zillow is projecting that home prices will soar even higher in 2022
Over the next 12 months, Zillow foresees U.S. home prices rising 11% overall. While that would mark a slowdown from the 19.5% jump over the most recently measured 12-month window (between September 2020 and September 2021), the predicted price increase would still be a housing market that strongly favors sellers. For perspective, Fortune calculates the average rate of home price growth per year has been 4.6% since 1980.
The amount of money in our pockets is not what matters.

Just look at Venezuela. Almost everyone in Venezuela is a “millionaire,” but nearly everyone in the entire country lives in poverty because the money is virtually worthless.

And we are headed down the exact same path.

The standard of living for the vast majority of Americans is eroding a little bit more with each passing day, but for the moment, those at the very top of the economic food chain are doing great. In fact, they are buying more champagne than ever before
Champagne sales are surging to record highs as 2021 comes to an end (back above what they were before the COVID pandemic hampered sales and kept people away from celebrations).

Sales in 2021 are expected to top 5.5 billion euros ($6.2 billion), above a previous peak of 5 billion euros two years ago before the coronavirus pandemic, Jean-Marie Barillere, president of champagne industry group UMC, said.
I hope they enjoy these moments because their laughter will turn to mourning soon enough.

People like me have been warning what would happen if we kept systematically destroying our currency for years and years.

But our leaders in Washington just kept doing it anyway.

Now a time of reckoning is upon us, and it will be so incredibly painful.
 

Jaybird

Veteran Member
Everyone has to remember. Government produces nothing. Not one red cent. All of this comes out of mine and your paycheck. If that doesn't piss you off nothing will.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

With Build Back Better stalled, the Left pushes Biden to act alone

by Haisten Willis, Staff Reporter
| December 29, 2021 07:00 AM

With the Build Back Better Act wounded, perhaps fatally, by the public defection of West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, liberals are calling on President Joe Biden to go solo in fulfilling his agenda.

But those calls are meeting resistance from opponents who say they're bad policy at best and illegal at worst.

Seattle-based Rep. Pramila Jayapal, leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, penned an op-ed in the Washington Post calling on Biden to enact portions of his Build Back Better plan via executive order.

"We are calling on the president to use executive action to immediately improve people’s lives," Jayapal wrote, adding she'd keep working to push the legislation in Congress. "Taking executive action will also make clear to those who hinder Build Back Better that the White House and Democrats will deliver for Americans."

The $2.4 trillion bill includes programs such as universal preschool, subsidized child care, paid family leave, and Medicare and Medicaid expansion.

Jayapal added in a tweet, "I’m calling on [Biden] to join us on a two track strategy — to enact as many relief programs as possible through Executive Action while we work on this critical legislation.”

It's unclear whether Biden is interested in moving his agenda this way. Even if he was, the legality of such moves is questionable.

Tea Party Patriots Action Honorary Chairwoman Jenny Beth Martin said Biden would be stepping outside the law if he enacted any of the bill's major programs without congressional approval.

"The Constitution does not empower the president to appropriate funds; only congress can do that," she said in a statement provided to the Washington Examiner. "Were he to attempt that, he would be dropping any pretense that he means to preside over anything but the most radical presidency in American history. He would be challenged, and would lose, in the courts of law."

However, a bit of creativity could give Biden wide latitude to move his agenda, according to Cato Institute research fellow William Yeatman. For one, the Senate parliamentarian has already stripped out parts of the act related to climate change and immigration that Biden could theoretically move alone.

Beyond that, there's precedent for using emergency powers to enact policy. For example, President Donald Trump declared an emergency at the southern border to divert funding toward construction of a wall. Biden could theoretically declare a national climate emergency or a COVID-19 emergency to get funding for Build Back Better programs. This would continue a long-standing trend of more legislation coming from the executive branch at the expense of the legislative branch.

“Rep. Jayapal is calling for executive action in the face of congressional failure.

That is a template for both parties today,” Yeatman said. “From a constitutional standpoint, it’s a bizarre situation — a congressional leader asking the president to run roughshod over congressional prerogatives."

Jayapal doesn't specify which parts of Build Back Better Biden should enact unilaterally. Nonetheless, fellow progressives have backed her calls. Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat told CNN this might be "one juncture in history ... where we have to look at all possible options, and [a presidential executive order] is certainly one of them."

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also supports the backup plan.

With Democratic leaders holding out hope to pass the Build Back Better Act despite the opposition of 51 senators, the executive action push may be more of a public pressure campaign than a true call to action. National Review Online editor Philip Klein argued in an opinion piece that progressives are bluffing to dial up the pressure on Manchin.

"The reality is that if the action is legal, it is not likely to come anywhere near what Build Back Better was trying to do," Klein wrote. "And if it actually approximates Build Back Better, it can in no way be constitutional."

Manchin's Dec. 19 statement that he would vote against the social spending bill sent shock waves through Washington. Despite his previous criticisms of the bill, the White House and liberal Democrats said Manchin had broken promises to support the legislative framework.

Whether via executive order or votes on the Senate floor, Democrats pledge to keep the Build Back Better Act alive in 2022. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he'll still call for a vote in January, and Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin told Fox News Sunday that Democrats are united in getting a bill to Biden's desk.

One option he raised is passing some portions of the bill as stand-alone items.

Whether that strategy will satisfy the most liberal Democrats, some of whom still regret that the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was allowed to pass ahead of Build Back Better, remains to be seen.

“We want to see it as comprehensive as possible," Cardin said. "But we need to make sure we have the votes to pass it, so that means it will be different than some of us would like to see."
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6ML6F8wtAo
4:43 min

Realizing You’ve Been Lied to Is Part of the Journey | @You Are Here

Dec 30, 2021


BlazeTV


Many people around the country are realizing their past beliefs may have been incorrect and the world is vastly different than their previous world view. It’s difficult to admit that we may have believed lies or mistruths, but ultimately it leads to vital personal growth. Elijah and Sydney, joined by Gary Franchi, discuss the journey to understanding the truth of the world around us and their personal experiences with it.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Earlier Comments By Vaccine Advocate Raises Eyebrows

By Larry Johnson
Published December 30, 2021 at 7:15am

Just asking the question gets you labeled a conspiracy theorist. But it is a question that merits a discussion and central to that chat is Bill Gates.

The following image has the left in full fury and frenzy. Sites like SNOPES and Lead Stories-FactCheck insist it is a hoax or that Bill Gates is being taken out of context.

Depopulation-Thru-Vaccination-scaled.jpg


So let me present the actual facts (I will link to source and you can check it out for yourself).

Bill Gates did a TED Talk in 2010 with the title, Innovating to Zero.

In the course of that talk Gates said the following:
First, we’ve got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent. But there, we see an increase of about 1.3.
So even though SNOPES and FactCheck scream this is a hoax, Gates did say it and the Sovereign Independent quoted him accurately. But the defenders of Gates insist it was taken out of context, so I will put it into full context.
The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is dedicated to vaccines and seeds. Not my words, that is what Bill Gates said at the start of his Ted Talk:
I’m going to talk today about energy and climate. And that might seem a bit surprising, because my full-time work at the foundation is mostly about vaccines and seeds, about the things that we need to invent and deliver to help the poorest two billion live better lives.
Next, Gates identifies CO2 aka global warming as the central threat:
CO2 is warming the planet, and the equation on CO2 is actually a very straightforward one. If you sum up the CO2 that gets emitted, that leads to a temperature increase, and that temperature increase leads to some very negative effects:
He then identifies his equation with four factors that will determine whether or not we get to zero CO2:
First, we’ve got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. . . .
The second factor is the services we use. . . .

Now, efficiency, “E,” the energy for each service — here, finally we have some good news. . . there are a lot of services where you can bring the energy for that service down quite substantially. Some individual services even bring it down by 90 percent. . . .

[T]his fourth factor — this is going to be a key one — and this is the amount of CO2 put out per each unit of energy.
Bill Gates specifically mentioned vaccines as one factor that would help reduce population. That is not how a vaccine is supposed to work. A vaccine is supposed to immunize recipients against disease and make them healthy. Healthy people reproduce. That increases population, at least over the mid-term.

Some Gates defenders argue that he was simply arguing for slowing population growth:
So, what about the remarks about “new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services”? That is just what specialists studying population growth are saying. As people get richer they get more access to better healthcare so they stop having lots of babies because the risk of their children dying at an early age takes a steep dive. This means the total population stabilizes and stops growing after a while.
Allegations of the Gates Foundation using poor women of color as guinea pigs emerged in 2010 in Ghana:
. . .a former staffer with a government health initiative in Ghana made a shocking claim: a project partially funded by the Gates Foundation had tested the contraceptive Depo-Provera on unsuspecting villagers in the remote region of Navrongo, as part of an illicit “population experiment.” The woman making the charge was the Ghanian-born, U.S.-educated communications officer for another Gates-funded initiative by the Ghanaian government and Columbia University to use mobile phones to improve health care access for rural women and children. She had previously attempted to sue her employer for a multi-million dollar settlement when, after repeated clashes with her boss, her contract wasn’t renewed.
While this claim remains a topic of much dispute and controversy (a good summary of the case is here), there is no dispute about the Gates Foundation role in promoting the COVID vaccines around the world.

So how are those “vaccines” working? Not well. Countries and corporations with high percentage of vaccinated citizens and employees are seeing vaccinated and boosted people contract COVID. In my hometown in Florida, one of the largest hospitals is now reporting that almost 40% of new COVID patients being admitted to the hospital are vaccinated. Two months ago that number was only 18%.

The establishment narrative that vaccines are the key to stopping the spread of COVID is crumbling before our eyes. Alex Berenson is doing a terrific job of reporting on this disaster:
Vaccines don’t stop Covid hospitalizations or deaths. They never have, even at peak effectiveness. A huge US database offers proof
Even at the peak of their protection earlier in 2021, Covid vaccines barely reduced the risk of hospitalizations in vaccinated people who had “breakthrough” infections, new data show.

Vaccinated people in a study published Tuesday had a nearly 1 in 200 chance of of requiring hospitalization for Covid in the first six months after being “fully vaccinated.”
Brian Cates also is doing some great reporting on the Fauci/CDC
Götterdämmerung.
So for more than two years now, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the tightly knit cabal at the top of the US & international virology community engaged in a campaign of suppression and lies in a furious attempt to stave off any accountability for what had actually occurred:

Not only were US tax dollars spent on gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Fauci and Daszak and many others very likely knew all about this and were covering it up, desperate to hide their role in funding a military lab in China that was doing gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses that then somehow escaped the lab and proceeded to wreak havoc around the world.
The list of harm caused by these vaccines is growing, not shrinking. Pregnant women in their first two trimesters face a huge risk of miscarriage. World class athletes who have taken the jab are dropping dead or facing cardiac disability.

And people over 60 who are vaccinated are dying at a higher rate than people over 60 who are not vaccinated.

People, regardless of nationality or type of government, get angry when they realize they have been duped. The promise that COVID vaccines would stop the spread and return life to normal has now been exposed as a fraud. Is COVID helping cool the planet? Well, fewer planes are flying, fewer drivers are on the road and beef is more expensive (which may mean fewer cow farts). The climate fanatics may see this as a positive development, but the biggest threat from COVID is not physical death. It is the death of liberty and an attack on personal freedom. That is the real long-term threat you should worry about.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

The COVID Narrative Is Insane & Illogical... And Maybe That's No Accident

THURSDAY, DEC 30, 2021 - 10:20 PM
Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

Maybe forcing people to believe your lies, even after you admit you’re lying, is the purest form of power...


"Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.”
- George Orwell, 1984
The “Covid pandemic” narrative is insane. That is long-established at this point, we don’t really need to go into how or why here. Read our back catalogue.

The rules are meaningless and arbitrary, the messaging contradictory, the very premise nonsensical.

Every day some new insanity is launched out into the world, and while many of us roll our eyes, raise our voices, or just laugh…many more accept it, believe it, allow it to continue.

Take the situation in Canada right now, where the government has enforced a vaccine mandate on healthcare workers, meaning in British Columbia alone over 3000 hospital staff were on unpaid leave by November 1st.

How have local governments responded to staff shortages?

They are asking vaccinated employees who have tested positive for Covid to work.

Whether or not you believe the test means anything, they notionally do. In the reality they try to sell us every day, testing positive means you are carrying a dangerous disease.

So they are requesting people allegedly carrying a “deadly virus” work, rather than letting perfectly healthy unvaccinated people simply have their jobs back.

This is insanity.

But could anything more perfectly illustrate the priorities of those running the game?

We already know it’s not about a virus, it’s not about protecting the health service and it’s not about saving lives. Every day the people running the “pandemic” admit as much by their actions, and even their words.

Rather, it seems to be about enforcing rules that make little to no sense, requiring conformity at the price of reason, drawing arbitrary lines in the sand and demanding people respect them, making people believe “facts” that are provably untrue.

But why? Why is the story of Covid irrational and contradictory? Why are we told on the one hand to be afraid, and on the other that there is nothing to be afraid of?

Why is the “pandemic” so completely insane?

You could argue that it’s simple happenstance. The by-product of a multi-focused evolving narrative, a story being told by a thousand authors all at once, each concerned with covering their own little patch of agenda. A car with multiple drivers fighting over a single steering wheel.

There’s probably some truth to that.

But it’s also true that control, true control, can only be achieved with a lie.

In clinical psychology one of the diagnostic signs of the psychopath is that they tell elaborate lies, compulsively. Many times they will tell a lie even if the truth would be more beneficial.

Nobody knows why they do this, but I have a theory, and it applies to the swarming groups of little rat minds running the sewers of power as much as it does any individual monstrosity.

If you want to control people, you need to lie to them, that’s the only way to guarantee you have power.

If you are standing in the road, and I yell “look out, there’s a car a coming”, and you move just as a car whips past, I will never know if you moved because I said so, or because there actually was a car.

If my interest is in making sure you don’t get hurt, this would not matter to me either way.

But, what if my only true aim is the gratification of watching you do what I say, simply because I said it?

…well, then I need to scream out a warning of a car that does not exist, and watch you dodge an imaginary threat. Or, indeed, tell you there is no car, and watch you get run over.

Only by doing this can I see my words mean more to you than perceivable reality, and only then do I know I’m truly in control.

You can never control people with the truth, because the truth has an existence outside yourself that cannot be altered or directed. It may be the truth itself that controls people, not you.

You can never force people to obey rules that make sense, because they may be obeying reason, not your force.

True power lies in making people afraid of something that does not exist, and making them abandon reason in the name of protecting themselves from the invented threat.

To guarantee you have control, you must make people see things that are not there, make people live in a reality you build around them, and force people to follow arbitrary, contradictory rules that change day by day.

To truly test their loyalty, their hypnosis, you could even tell them there’s nothing to be afraid of anymore, but they need to follow the rules anyway.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the story isn’t supposed to be believable. Maybe the rules aren’t meant to make sense, they are meant to be obeyed.

Maybe the more contradictory & illogical the regulations become, the more your compliance is valued.

Maybe if you can force a person to abandon their judgment in favour of your own, you have total control over their reality.

We started with an Orwell quote, so let’s end with one too:
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
Isn’t that what we’re seeing now? What we’ve been seeing since the beginning?
People being mind broken into being afraid of something they told isn’t frightening, following rules they are told are not necessary, taking “medicine” they are told does not work.

Maybe forcing people to believe your lies, even as you admit you are lying, is the purest expression of power.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Vanderbilt University Professor Argues That We All Need To Eat Bugs

THURSDAY, DEC 30, 2021 - 03:20 PM
Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

A professor at Vanderbilt University has argued that food authorities in the U.S. and beyond need to follow the example of the European Union and make BUGS, including maggots and worms, a staple of people’s diets.



In a piece published by Bloomberg, professor Amanda Little argues that everyone in the world needs to start dining on insects.

Little writes that the EU “approval confers a kind of dignity to the lowly, protein-rich microbeasts that we foolishly dismiss as pests, and delivers a clear signal that the insect proteins industry is poised for significant growth. Above all, it paves the way for an alternative protein source that should play a critical role in feeding a hotter, more populous world.”

Little argues that in addition to feeding animals on bugs rather than corn, more humans should also begin to eat insects.

Humans have been consuming edible insects — from crickets and grasshoppers to fire ants and termites — since before the dawn of civilization, and 80% of the world’s population throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America, continues to eat bugs today,” Little outlines.

She continues, “But U.S. consumers have been slow on the uptake, even as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved insects for human consumption years ago. A niche market has emerged with snack foods such as Chirp Chips and Exo protein bars. And when the FDA approved insects for pet foods earlier this year, brands including Purina began sourcing bugs for their products.”

The professor further argued that “The environmental benefits of insect proteins both for human and animal consumption are astounding,” adding that “Black soldier fly larvae, in particular, hold promise,” especially in protein powders added to foods.

Yum, maggots for dinner.

The professor also pointed to a recent Washington Post article that suggested it is weird that humans don’t want to eat bugs because crabs and lobsters are effectively big sea bugs.

No.

View: https://youtu.be/TjsPpRZVrzQ
7:40 min

View: https://youtu.be/FWcx97YfWUY
2:28 min

View: https://youtu.be/faztj1qvZRI
4:59 min

We’re still not going to eat bugs:

1640934380645.png

1640934446830.png

Many have pointed out that the war against meat and real vegetable protein is being used as a stepping stone to the bugs:
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

The Great Reset Is Actually a Great Purge Against Humanity
The Great Reset Is Actually a Great Purge Against Humanity

by DR. MATHEW MAAVAK
December 30, 2021

In a recent Op-Ed, I had outlined the causes and ramifications of a looming supply chain crisis. Shortfalls in fundamental goods and services, however, are just the surface symptoms of a silent, protracted war against human merit.

Throughout history, the most universal and indispensable asset has been human resource. Civilizations were built on human ingenuity. Yet, despite the 21st century hoopla over smart cities, smart workers and smart futures of every kind, it is ironic that talent shortages persist in nearly every critical sector. In the United States alone, labor productivity recently hit a 40-year low even as unemployment claims dropped. How does one explain this anomaly? Perhaps, the “no jabs no jobs” mandate has crushed worker morale?

The global labor crisis was brewing for decades and yet nothing was done to address this problem. According to a Korn Ferry study in 2018, global talent shortages were expected to cost $8.452 trillion in lost financial revenue by 2030.

The Wuhan outbreak of 2019 will have added yet-unquantifiable exponentials to this figure.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) nonetheless remains optimistic. WEF founder Klaus Schwab sees an opportunity here to “revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions.” He is of course referring to a totalitarian solution called the Great Reset. The roadmap to this reset has never been satisfactorily explained.

We are only given reductionist soundbites and glossy visual clips which scrupulous avoid some troubling questions: How is the Great Reset going to be achieved? What are the phases, action plans and milestones leading up to 2030?

Is the reset predicated on the erosion of national sovereignty? Can the post-reset world accommodate eight billion plus humans by 2030?

To deflect these niggling questions, the WEF and its ilk have been distracting the public with a daily barrage of alleged existential crises. Unsurprisingly, experts who understood these possible dangers, and who could have played a role in mitigating them, have been systematically locked out from relevant platforms – both at the national and international levels. In their stead, the globalist elite triumphantly promoted the dross of the earth in the name of “inclusivity”, “diversity”, “equality” and “open societies”. The bovine marionettes in charge of our societies today do not possess the intelligence, spunk or moral fiber to question the slew of contradictions, human rights consequences and critical gaps evident in the Great Reset project.

It looks as if our world was deliberately engineered to fail. Vacuous rhetoric like Build Back Better and the New Normal only serves to pull wool over the sheeple’s eyes. Unremitting global lockdowns also shield the elite in a Noah’s ark-type cocoon while the foundations of the Great Reset are being surreptitiously laid. The capstone in 2030 may take the form of an incarnated Tower of Babel that will have total ownership over a decimated global population.

The long-running intellectual pogrom (aka global talent shortage) has been accompanied by an accelerated erosion in individual ownership – just as the WEF had promised. How can you own anything when you are repeatedly subjected to lockdowns that separates you from your source of income? How can you generate new sources of income when interaction-dependent undertakings are suppressed? As recent events have shown, there will be no respite even when you are double-, triple- or quadruple-jabbed. This no longer about a virus; it is about global panoptic control.

Science of Pervasive Insanity
The suppression of global talent has fueled a desideratum of lunatic pursuits dressed-up (or more appropriately “cross-dressed”) as “science”. Medicine is at the forefront of this travesty. Medical experts such as CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky promotes the science of gender-bending when she is not ratcheting up the pandemic narrative. US Assistant Health Secretary Rachel Levine (birth name suppressed by Wikipedia) arguably generates more headlines over gender (mis)pronouns than over the plethora of US healthcare woes.

Bent expertise naturally spawn bent science. Mothers and pregnant women are now redesignated as “birthing people”; men can give birth and lactate against the order of nature; and traditional genders are taxonomized into “people with penises” and “people with vaginas”. It gets worse. Arguments justifying pedophilia include respectable terminologies like Minor Attracted Person (MAP).

This gangrenous “science” also deems traditional spelling, grammar and punctuation norms to be racist as the academia is now a playground for philanthropic blackmail. The ongoing explosion in scientific inanities is simply too exhaustive to be enumerated here. Nonetheless, it is important to note its origins in Marxist theory. Just as Karl Marx advocated an “intrinsic value” for goods and services – rather than the laws of supply and demand — competency must likewise reflect a vague intrinsic “effort”.

The results are predictable. Only the most pliant, clueless and debased are allowed to prosper during the build-up to the Great Reset. (Their fate post-2030 would be obvious to the commonsensical observer). Untold billions have been pumped into the media and universities worldwide to propagate this pandemic of madness. Why? Because it enriches the merchants of mass ignorance.

Albert Einstein’s admonition that “science can flourish only in an atmosphere of free speech” is deemed irrelevant in the New Normal. Repeat a lie a thousand times, it becomes truth; repeat it a million times a day and it becomes a new religion fused with pseudosciences. This naturally leads to the type of mass psychosis or mass formation we are witnessing today.

Traditionally, insanities like these will eventually bury a civilization under the weight of its collective psychosis. Another would rise to offer an alternative, usually via an invasion. To prevent history from repeating itself, the Great Reset was contrived to prevent the emergence of competing power structures. Enter the WEF-centralized Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) and its puppets across the corridors of power far and wide.

Is it any wonder that rejection letters over medical exemptions for COVID-19 vaccines employ the same tone and syntax across different geographical zones?

Who is centralizing these policies, activities and communiques, sometimes down to the last typo?

Casualties of the New Science
The new science is creating more contradictions than consensus. In fact, it is generating nothing but a never-ending pantomime of nonsense. Leaders who want to “save our planet” from climate change have paradoxically reduced their cities into insanitary nightmares. The rot has metastasized into every sector.

But let us return to the pandemic narrative. While “experts” falsely parrot a scientific lie called the “pandemic of the unvaccinated”, they cannot explain why Gibraltar, where more than 99% of the population is vaccinated, is witnessing a COVID surge. Similar patterns are repeated in highly-vaccinated nations. The correlations between high vaccination rates and coronavirus surges continue to be either misrepresented, disparaged or censored. Establishment experts cannot explain why Africa, with its low vaccination figures, is not reeling from the coronavirus.

I have yet to see recent viral clips of Africans gasping for life in COVID isolation wards. Similarly India, with a 30% adult vaccination rate, is faring far better than Malaysia with an alleged 96% inoculation rate for the same cohort as of October/November 2021. These contradictions no longer faze corrupt medical establishments. It is the top-down dictates that matter. If their job depends on including “climate change” on death certificates, then so be it. Lives are now a matter of doctored statistics.

In this cauldron of universal deceit, predators of all forms are having a field day.

In one telling example, lockdowns have enabled rats and other pests to systematically destroy our agricultural lifelines. Yet, robots and drones used to enforce human social distancing are not being redeployed to safeguard our bread baskets. Where is the sense of proportion?

In the line with the long-running war against human talent, highly skilled personnel continue to be purged from critical industries under the pretext of vaccine mandates. Recent purge targets include top nuclear scientists at the sensitive Los Alamos National Laboratory, 12,000 US Air Force personnel and thousands of firefighters and policemen in the United States alone. Hundreds of thousands of doctors and healthcare professionals worldwide are facing the sack for refusing to submit to the vaccine mandate. Imagine the consequences?

The implications go far beyond an arbitrary personnel reshuffle. Among the unvaxxed include the most educated and skilled cohorts in the world. An unusual number of them have PhDs. We need their skills and ideas to resolve a variety of future challenges. But they are also standing in the way of the Great Reset project.

The genocidal Pol Pot would have understood the plot.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Is a Pushback Against Soft Despotism Coming in 2022?

The ruling elite are not going to surrender power without a fight.

Fri Dec 31, 2021

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Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Over the last two years, many of us have been surprised and troubled at how eagerly millions of citizens have surrendered their freedoms to the shifting, contradictory, nakedly politicized diktats of various “experts” and government agencies. Coerced vaccinations, boosters, masks, and social distancing continue to be mandated and just as eagerly obeyed, even in the case of the mild Omicron covid variant. The technocratic Left currently ruling the country has wrung every ounce of unconstitutional power from the sovereign people, a large cohort of whom, especially the cognitive elites, have willingly gone along with every new crisis and command.

As the year ends, signs of a pushback are multiplying. But will such resistance reach the critical mass of voters necessary for liberating us from such “soft despotism” and its wardens?

We shouldn’t be surprised that progressives have seized the opportunity to aggrandize themselves through serial changes on the pretext of an exaggerated crisis. It has long been a truism of history that, as James Madison said in 1788, “there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of power, than by sudden usurpations.”

Nearly half a century later, Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw an even more insidious stealth despotism that could arise in American democracy: “An immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure [the people’s] gratifications and to watch over their fate.” And he prophesized that the bureaucratic regulatory state would be the instrument of this “soft despotism”: a power “absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild” that “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform.” The goal is “to keep [the people] in perpetual childhood,” for this power is “well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.”

The last hundred years have seen such a regime gradually become reality. Crises such as the Great Depression, Two World Wars, and other conflicts and recessions provided the pretexts for expanding and concentrating the powers of federal agencies and their “network of small complicated rules.” And like children, too many citizens have accepted these encroachments, willingly ceding their autonomy and freedom to overseers who bribe them with the redistribution of other people’s money, and with promises “alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate” from the cradle to the grave ––what we call “entitlements” but think are unalienable rights.

Moreover, our unprecedented wealth has obscured the dangers of this dependence and weakening of the habits of self-government. But the contrary bad habits of prioritizing comfort, pleasure, and security insidiously erode our tolerance for risk and suffering, the nonnegotiable, eternal constants of human existence. The covid pandemic has graphically revealed this intolerance for risk, which the “managerial elite” has exploited to leverage more power and authority.

Hence the government and its agencies such as the CDC hyped the dangers of an infectious disease whose victims overwhelmingly comprised the elderly already dying of something else. It didn’t take long to see that the typical victim was 80-years-old and possessed multiple comorbidities like heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. Children and the young––unlike during the Spanish flu––were spared. Masks, lockdowns, and social distancing were mostly pacifiers for soothing anxiety and creating the illusion of control, rather than protecting the vulnerable, even as those measures damaged the economy, impaired education, and multiplied “deaths of despair” like suicide and addiction.

Meanwhile, in Sweden and in states like Florida, the absence of such mandates did not lead to “super-spreader” events, but rather fewer fatalities than countries like England or states like New York with their draconian lockdowns.

These outcomes will surprise no one who understood from the start that after a few months of uncertainty in early 2020, the issue was not the pandemic, but how the pandemic could provide the pretext for expanding government power, and damaging a president whose policies pushed back against the progressives program to “fundamentally transform” the United States. And the way to do that is to erode our unalienable rights and our political freedom, the indispensable tools for checking tyranny and holding office-holders accountable to the people.

Now, however, there are multiple signs that voters are getting fed up with the whole covid endless crises triggered by variants and spikes in infections, a datum that creates big dramatic numbers and increases, but isn’t as significant as death rates. They’re sick of their children’s schools serially opening and shutting, demanding useless masks, and making grammar school kids eat lunch outside in the cold. They’ve had it with the endless parade of “experts,” especially government functionaries unaccountable to either the voters or the market, playing the endless loop of virus porn.

Nor are they fooled by the Dems’ proposed electoral “reform” legislation, which would hijack elections from the states, and put into law many of the shady practices we saw in the 2020 presidential election. And for a year they’ve watched Biden’s feckless incompetence weaken the nation’s prestige and interests abroad as both decline in the face of Iran’s march to a nuclear weapon, China’s threatening Taiwan and our regional allies, and Russia’s positioning tens of thousands of troops and weapons on its border with Ukraine––all the consequences of our shameful skedaddle from Afghanistan that cost 13 dead American troops, left behind billions of dollars in materiel, and stranded hundreds of American citizens and Afghan allies.

Finally, growing numbers of voters have soured on progressives’ “cancel culture” and strong-arm tactics––their “relentless moral condescension, the messianism of mass protests, physical intimidation, social ostracism and demands that you simply shut up”––as the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger describes the treatment of renegade Democrat Senator Joe Manchin, who stopped their Build Back Better binge of green pork and welfare lucre.

Throw in the Biden administration’s abysmal record of failure on every important issue like inflation and border security, and things are looking grim for the Dems.

Biden’s approval numbers have been tanking for months, and now even usually reliable constituencies are disgruntled. An Economist and You.gov poll finds fewer than 3 in 10 adults under 30 approve of the job Biden’s doing. A Zogby poll’s approval numbers for independents, the most critical swing-vote, are particularly ominous. They favor Republican control of Congress by 23 points. And another critical constituency for Democrats, Hispanics, are moving towards Republicans. According to a Wall Street Journal poll in early December, Hispanic support in Congressional races is split evenly at 37% for each party.

As of now, these portents suggest a midterm “shellacking” of the Dems, as Barack Obama called the debacle of the 2010 midterms that hamstrung his ambitions to remake America. And Obama was a well-liked president with tons of voter good will, not a cognitively impaired mediocre grifter.

But let’s not be hasty. The Dems still possess the commanding heights of media, entertainment, popular culture, sports, government agencies, and universities.

They’re still addled by their humiliation at the hands and tweets of Donald Trump, and still thirsting for revenge against him and his supporters, the “bitter clingers,” “deplorables,” and “smelly Wal-Mart shoppers” who refuse to accept the superiority of self-proclaimed “brights” who feel entitled to push them around.

The ruling elite are not going to surrender power without a fight, and we’d better be ready. Next year will determine whether “soft despotism” is our future, or the love of freedom and our unalienable rights will triumph once again.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Domenech: American Elites Are Selling The Nation’s Soul To Communist China

BY: THE FEDERALIST STAFF
DECEMBER 29, 2021

Ben Domenech


Federalist Publisher Ben Domenech said that Americans should not have to accept or approve communist China’s actions in exchange for keeping the “American way of life.”

“The enemies of the American way seek to stoke our divisions, schisms, and sicknesses in pursuit of their own agenda. They use all the tools at their disposal: money, manipulation, and even open propaganda to weaken our country in every way,” Domenech said. “But those urging us toward national suicide don’t just come from within. They are backed from abroad, and no foreign power is a better friend, ally, and master of this effort to drive America to suicide than the Communist Party of China.”

As Domenech notes, communist China uses its influence on “our businesses, our sports, our education, our press, and our government” to move its agenda forward.

“We shouldn’t be surprised by this; they are communists, after all, subversion is what they do. And they get bored subjugating their own people, but China is doing this with the active cooperation of our fellow Americans,” Domenech said.

“Their partners in this project aren’t just malevolent spies manipulating doofus California congressman. It’s none other than our own cultural business and academic elites who they have bought and paid for a thousand times over. Our elites now operate hand-in-glove with the Communist Party of China, doing its bidding even when it harms the freedoms and rights that are the birthright of every American.”

View: https://youtu.be/EokFBEPHwtg
9:01 min

While many U.S. icons and institutions have bowed to the will of the CCP, Domenech noted that this year, the Women’s Tennis Association “refused the cowardice of every other relevant sporting body on the planet, and suspended its Chinese operations.”

“They lost out on huge revenue and growth opportunities. Why? Because there was something the communists could not buy from them: decency, dignity, and the truth,” Domenech said. “Are you getting it yet? Do you see how the nexus between our corrupt elites at home and the Communist Party of China abroad makes them effectively the same threat? Do you see that fighting one means fighting them both? Consider, why does the Communist Party of China care so much about subverting and ending American freedom?”

Domenech said the CCP will use its “American partners” to control “incorrect thinking and viewpoints.”

“This is the biggest threat facing America today. Not Russia, not Islamic terrorism, not even the very real threats on our southern border. This external threat is existential because it is amplified by its alliance with a major internal threat facing America: the malign union of leftist authoritarian elites who seek to corrode this country from within,” Domenech said.

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1476347259637968899
2:06 min

Domenech said the culture war in the U.S. and the fight against communist China are one and the same.

“The monolithic union of American and communist Chinese interests in money that has dominated our national life for the past generation must end,” Domenech said. “The enemy is here, now. He commands the heights of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street. He is poisoning our people in body and mind. He may put Jeff Bezos over his need to demand only five-star reviews, but he does not command us. We are Americans. We are wide awake, and we are ready to fight for our schools, for our governance, for our culture. The future does not belong to you and neither do we. Our minds are free and they are not for sale.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

The Rothschild Empire Is Making Its Move for The Great Reset

Compared to other globalist elites, the Rothschilds have remained relatively quiet during the rise of The Great Reset... or have they?

by JD Rucker
December 31, 2021

The Rothschild Empire Is Making Its Move for The Great Reset


Over the last couple of years, I’ve become a “baby conspiracy theorist.” I was pretty much a “normie” before the pandemic struck and I’ve been playing catch-up ever since. But one name that has been in conspiracy theory circles since the first conspiracy theory circles were formed is the Rothschild banking empire. This is why it was conspicuous that their name has stayed relatively below the radar during the rise of The Great Reset.

While we’ve all been focused on Bill Gates, George Soros, Klaus Schwab, Joe Biden, Prince Charles, the Pope, Xi Jinping, Barack Obama, Anthony Fauci, and all of the known players associated with The Great Reset and the “Plandemic,” the Rothschild name has only occasionally popped up outside of antisemitic circles.

Since I don’t look at race or religion when judging the players, I dismissed these reports. Bad guys are bad guys regardless of race or religion, and no race or religion in particular is inherently part of the conspiracy.

Over the past two or three months, I’ve seen an uptick in activity from the Rothschild camp. One such mention came from Catholic Archbishop Vigano who brought up Lynn Forester de Rothschild in connection with Biden meeting with the Pope:

Every Catholic knows that the killing of a defenseless creature in the mother’s womb is a horrendous crime; and that the most serious scandal is given to the faithful not only by Joe Biden as a convinced supporter of abortion, but also by Bergoglio himself, who is recognized as holding the authority of Supreme Pastor of the Church. His work of demolition knows no respite before the astonished silence of the Cardinals and Bishops.

The very rare exceptions of Pastors who truly have at heart the souls entrusted to them – the example of His Eminence Cardinal Burke stands out among others – are seen with hostility by the majority of their brother Bishops and by the Vatican, in a disturbing subversion of the mission of the Church of Christ, which today has been reduced to climate change, inclusive capitalism, and mass vaccination.

Bergoglio was recently recognized as “moral guide” by the Council for Inclusive Capitalism led by Lynn Forester de Rothschild, and he appointed Jeffrey David Sachs as a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Sachs is the president of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network of the United Nations, a supporter of reducing the global population and of the fight against climate change – this has nothing to do with the mission of the Papacy and ought to lead the Prelates of the Church to seriously ask themselves about Bergoglio’s mental and moral suitability for the role he holds.


Within a couple of weeks of reading this, I started getting word that the Rothschild empire was making more moves in their depopulation agenda that focused on bringing forth The Great Reset even faster than Covid-19 has done.

Of particular interest were financial moves made in the European Union and East Asia that could solidify their control over governments and the narratives being pushed out regarding Covid-19.

No solid news hit my desk for a while, only rumors. Today, a new report came from Free West Media that reinforces the theory they’re much more in bed with the architects of The Great Reset than we’ve seen publicly and they’re starting to make their moves behind the scenes:

A Secret Dutch Deal With the Rothschilds Raises Eyebrows
In the Netherlands, the outgoing culture minister Ingrid van Engelshoven (D66) said that her ministry wanted to make the artwork by a white male “accessible to everyone” again. She had secretly informed all party leaders in the House of Representatives of the cabinet’s plans to purchase a Rembrandt painting. All party leaders were contacted, except FVD leader Thierry Baudet.

It turned out to have been a conscious choice to keep the deal secret: “We had to be sure that the purchase would remain under wraps.” With Baudet there were no guarantees, because of “the way in which he conducts politics with his party”, said the retiring minister. She also claimed not to have been influenced: “I made a decision for myself: the importance of confidentiality weighed more heavily.” But why should such a purchase be kept secret?


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Van Engelshoven is close to WEF pet and D66 party leader Sigrid Kaag. A letter from the WEF, a private organization addressed to Kaag, specifically noted that the participation of her party members would “become a major force in shaping the Great Reset”.

The purchasing process surrounding the canvas, De Vaandeldrager, is surrounded by mystery. No less than 175 million euros is involved in the deal that the Dutch state has concluded with the Rothschild family with Dutch tax money.


Curious concern from a die-hard feminist
Van Engelshoven is a die-hard feminist and a harsh critic of the “white patriarchy”. According to her, there are too many “white men” working at colleges and universities in the Netherlands. Her sudden concern over a painting of a white man by a white man seems strange, to say the least.

Until recently, the minister maintained that the presence of white men at institutions of higher learning leads to “nasty incidents involving intimidation of female employees” and had qualified the decision of the TU Eindhoven to no longer accept white men for new vacancies as “courageous”.

The Dutch Institute for Human Rights later ruled that this decision violated Dutch equality laws.


The deal raises questions
Baudet, together with MP Simone Kerseboom, have been asking questions about the state of affairs. They wanted to know why FVD was not informed and also had questions about the motives of the wealthy Rothschild family. It turns out that no French museum had been willing or able to pay the asking price.

“Were there perhaps certain aspects and/or interests of the Rothschild family involved in the discussions about which you did not wish to receive critical questions?” the MPs ask Van Engelshoven. “In general, how do you view the political positioning of the Rothschild family?”

Kerseboom and Baudet also wanted to know from the minister how this powerful family was connected to the Dutch government. “Do you see the family as an international economic power? If so, how did you factor in this power factor in your decision to transfer a total of EUR 175 million (of which in any case approximately EUR 150 million in tax money) to them?”


Commitment
“Are you aware that with this amount you could support the Rothschild family in pursuing their political and social goals?” they asked. “So can we assume that the cabinet shares the political goals of the Rothschild family?”

The FVD MPs also asked the minister whether other things had been promised to the Rothschild family in addition to financial compensation. Think, for example, of promises or political-social guarantees, but also access to top civil servants and ministers.

The number one trending hashtag on Twitter in Dutch over the last day has been #wefpapers.

Baudet confirmed through his spokesperson that he was indeed kept in the dark by Van Engelshoven. “Apparently the minister watches and listens too much to the mainstream media, because she has a completely distorted image of Mr Baudet. The minister should know how many secrets he has been keeping.”


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Depopulation and Control
For those who aren’t aware, the Rothschilds have been working with other globalist elites for decades to usher in depopulation measures that will keep the world appropriately sized. It is pure evil to want billions of people to die in order to better manage the planet, but from their perspective they’re doing the right thing. Climate change, famine, overpopulation, and limited resources are all valid reasons in their eyes to want to keep strict limits on the number of people who are allowed to exist in their world.

Meanwhile, The Great Reset’s goals of using a Neo-Marxist style of world governance to keep the non-elites equal in our misery is just as nefarious. It’s not the exact same thing as what the Rothschild’s have historically promoted, but it holds the same basic tenets of separation between “them” and the rest of us.

What I’ve been hearing in the aforementioned “conspiracy theory circles” is that the two agendas are being merged to form a Luciferian world order that combines depopulation with control factors that sounds eerily like Bible prophecy. To be clear, I loathe the practice of eisegesis, especially when it comes to Bible prophecy. We’ve seen too many times in recent years when supposedly knowledgeable men and women tell us, “this is it, this is the end!” I’m not one of those people. This is why I rarely write on these topics. There are certain truths we can know from the Bible without having to fit our own paranoid worldview into the equation.

But just as I am not a fan of trying to fit in Bible prophecy into every major world event, so too am I conscious that ignoring world events and dismissing their place in Bible prophecy is a mistake. I do not know for sure if what we’re seeing manifest in this world is the opening stages of the end times, but I know enough to keep my eyes open and squarely focused in the right direction. First and foremost, that’s the Gospel. As events unfold, we also need to discern how it all fits in.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Beware 2022: Technocracy’s War Against Humanity Set to Continue

Patrick Wood
December 31, 2021

Beware 2022_ Technocracy’s War Against Humanity Set to Continue


On the last day of 2021, what better time to reflect on Technocracy’s recent gains and likely trajectory moving into 2022?

Over Christmas, I showcased my Twelve Days of Technocracy articles that were originally written in December 2019. Even though these appear at the bottom of the home page at Technocracy.news, many people had not read them.

The intent of Twelve Days of Technocracy was to provide a primer on Technocracy across several topics, such as central banking, academia, education and political science. It was a fitting way to close out 2019.

To everyone’s shock and dismay, the Great Panic of 2020 (my phrase) started one month later in January.

It’s important to see the principle of Ordo ab Chao at work. This occult latin term translates as “Order out of Chaos” and hints at modern globalization’s theory of “never let a good crisis go to waste.”

Under the cover of chaos, Technocracy thrived during 2020-2021 at spreading its net of control and social engineering. Without chaos, virtually none of Technocracy’s initiatives would have ever gotten off the ground.

The point is this: Technocracy thrives on order, structure and predictability but uses chaos to get there.

Technocrats are masters of social engineering. This should surprise no one because their own magazine, The Technocrat, clearly defined their objectives in 1938:

Technocracy is the science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population… For the first time in human history it will be done as a scientific, technical, engineering problem.”

A Belgian Professor of Clinical Psychology, Dr. Mattias Desmet, recently articulated how this is playing out on a global scale. His concept of “mass formation” (ie, global delusion) is predicated on four conditions that must first be met.
  1. The masses must feel alone and isolated.
  2. Their lives must feel pointless and meaningless.
  3. The masses then must experience constant free-floating anxiety
  4. They must experience free-floating frustration and aggression.
(Note: Free-floating means that there is no discernible source for aggression or anxiety.)

It should be self-evident that all four have been masterfully set into motion with the Great Panic of 2020.

View: https://youtu.be/CRo-ieBEw-8
1:09:47 min

How have Technocrats worked mass formation to their own benefit? Here’s a few observations:
  • National and global identification systems have become mainstream
  • Control over travel via vaccine passports
  • The disintegration of democratic governments and rise of authoritarianism (think Australia, Austria, Great Britain, New Zealand.)
  • Control over propaganda and suppression of free speech and dissent
  • The conduit of needle-to-arm has been firmly established to endlessly feed genetically modified substances into the human population.
Who is in Control?
People are looking to government to set the ship aright. This is futile.

Technocrats control governments, not the other way around. Behind every government leader in the world, there is an unelected and unaccountable hoard of medical technocrats who are dictating policies and telling the politicians what to do.

Thus, yelling at elected officials is completely misdirected and pointless. They are not the power structure.

Politicians throughout the world, and especially in America, have no idea of the vitriolic hatred that Technocracy harbors toward them.

Again, The Technocrat magazine gives the reason: “There will be no place for Politics, Politicians, Finance or Financiers, Rackets or Racketeers.” When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected in 1932, the same year that Technocracy was codified at Columbia University, they publicly called for him to summarily dismiss all elected officials and appoint Technocrats in their place to run the nation. FDR was too shrewd to go along with the proposition.

Looking into 2022
I am quite certain that some positive, “good news” headlines will appear in the first quarter of 2022. For instance, look for Republican optimism at taking back control of the House and Senate during the midterm elections. Omicron could be officially declared to be a nothing-burger and some major corporations might remove mask and/or vaccine requirements. Fauci could resign his post as the nation’s medical Technocrat-in-Chief. At 98, Henry Kissinger might finally join the late David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The point is, sentiment always swings back and forth like a pendulum. Always.

People who are exhausted on bad news will eagerly grab onto something that gives them hope. So, look for the sentiment pendulum to swing toward any perceived good news.

Unfortunately, “hopium” is like an addictive substance that numbs the mind and body, so the net result for many will be to retreat further into their shell of inactivity and denial.

None of this will curtail Technocrat initiatives and practices of social engineering.
There are three big threats to watch in 2022.
  1. Systemic failure of a major financial infrastructure. Global monetary authorities have been running simulations of financial collapse caused by various things, including hacking. This would necessitate rigid digital identities for Internet passports, a takeover of digital currencies.
  2. Supply chain failure. Already very fragile, the global supply chain could seize up like a motor that loses its oil. This could result in crippling shortages of parts, consumer goods and even food.
  3. Major stock market and real estate rout. The Fed is already pledged to remove some liquidity from the economy in 2022. But, is another nuance to “liquidity”. Historically, when bubble-sentiment “pops”, a collapse occurs. Removing money from the system can be a trigger, but when fear set in, buyers run for the hills and refuse to buy falling equities at any price. This can result in a free-fall of prices based entirely on sentiment rather than fundamentals.
Any one or all of these could easily be run as a false flag operation to trick people into accepting Technocrat solutions. However, any crisis will do, whether manmade or not. As I noted above, Ordo ab Chao.

One thing is certain: Technocrats are totally committed to fear mongering, sustaining chaos and even promoting outright panic. Such is their war against humanity. During this time, they will continue unchallenged to install their apparatuses of control.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Global Religion
"With the rise of a new priestly and evangelistic class, we have also witnessed the revelation of a new class of worshippers."

BY GIULIANO BORDONIJANUARY 1, 2022

In my last article in this series, I argued for why I think that, for many, the current COVID-19 vaccines could easily be equated to an idolatrous modern-day Golden Calf upon whom the power to free, deliver, and save has allegedly been bestowed.

Whilst idols, new and old, are countless, there are not too many of them that have managed to gather around themselves a whole, well-organized, global religious system in such a short period of time. Although the sentence before can sound a bit funny in some ways, try asking yourself this question: what are some common components you see present in most religions out there?
  • A deity (or deities) who provides in specific ways for the needs of the worshipers.
  • Priests/prophets/evangelists/oracles who carry the responsibility to convert and communicate to the people how they are supposed to live their lives as per the moral code and teachings of their religious system. They usually are trusted representatives of said religion.
  • Rituals (initiation, purification, sacrifices, graduation, etc.) that allows worshipers access to specific areas (physical and/or spiritual) in the religious life of the community.
  • A set of worldviews, moral codes, and teachings that are designed to affect deeply how worshipers live their lives and interact with others in the immediate and broader communities.
The rise of a new worldview
A worldview is a thought process and a way of understanding and relating to the world which shapes a person both internally and externally. Every person on this planet, knowingly or unknowingly, spouses a worldview that determines virtually everything when it comes to how that person perceives and interacts with the world around him.

It goes without saying that religion permeates almost all if not all, that is related to a worshiper’s worldview. People who seek to live by the teachings and moral codes of their newly found or well-established religious association will find themselves constantly reassessing their lives and making the necessary adjustments to make sure their daily living is in line with the requirements handed down by the religious order and its deity.

We see that reality portrayed in a more dramatic fashion when a person goes through a drastic experience of conversion, usually later in life. Almost all of us can remember at least one or two people in our lives who underwent a massive transformation after a religious experience of conversion. It was as if, suddenly, we were dealing with a totally different person.

The change is usually palpable and uncomfortable for those who use to know that individual before. In the blink of an eye, old habits changed, language, interests, friendships, dress code, etc. This is, in fact, an experience that is seen by some religious groups as a type of new birth, so revolutionary is the nature of the changed that can be witnessed.

Now, I must confess I was hugely surprised when I started to see this same religious-like behaviour rapidly taking place in the lives of many who, so quickly, decided to cast themselves upon the mercies of the vaccines as a means of salvation from the deadly effects of the pandemic.

Here, once again, it is important to clarify that this religious euphoria didn’t happen in the lives of all who ended up getting vaccinated, but it certainly happened in the lives of many who ended up going down that path. We are not talking about people just simply receiving a vaccine with thanks and carrying on with their lives – as it has been the case virtually with all other vaccines in the world up until before this pandemic – but, rather, we are talking about people starting to organize themselves around this new identity, ‘vaccinated’, which started to shape much of what was going to happen in those people’s lives going forward.

That’s when we started to see the Facebook avatars going up, the many selfies with masks and sleeves rolled up, the increasing hostility towards those who were choosing not to be vaccinated, and so on. It is not only that there was a new gospel in town saying that if you want a future worth having, you should get vaccinated, but it is also that people were quickly listening to and believing in that message, to the point where they were becoming less and less able to understand and relate to themselves and to the world apart from this new set of information being released on an almost hourly basis advocating for the wonders of this newfound treasure: the vaccines.

The rise of a new priestly and evangelistic classes
Both the Protestant Reformation and the Age of Enlightenment represented a significant rupture in the way western, and, even to some extent, eastern individuals relate to one of the most ever-present classes on the face of the earth: the priestly class.

Whilst to this day priests are still seen as an important class of people in most societies, it is important to note that, especially in the west, things are definitely not what they once were. Priests used to have the monopoly on the knowledge of the divine and, in most cases, even seen as actual mediators between God and the people, but this is now seldom the case.

In a post-modern world, spirituality continues to present itself more and more as a private matter, with each individual being in charge of interpreting the divine clues with his or her desired measure of assistance from a member of the “official” clergy. The days when people used to say “trust the religious experts and just do what you are told” are behind us.

Well, the paragraph above was what I used to think up until the beginning of this pandemic anyway. Oh, how things have changed so quickly!

With the rise of a new priestly and evangelistic class, we have also witnessed the revelation of a new class of worshippers. The problem is not only that we have a handful of people who are “authorized” to engage in conversations about the vaccines, but mostly that any questioning from the “ignorant” populace has been seen as malign, and there seems to be a desire by many to go back to that dark-ages mentality that produces an intellectual emasculation of the general population.

No questions are allowed without the person questioning being seen as some sort of heretic that should be ostracized. The HTML inquisitional fires are burning hot, cancelling all who wish to speak against this new catholic technocratic religion. Even common folk became, without attending any special seminar on “how to share your faith on the vax using four easy steps”, one of the most organized, outspoken, and persistent evangelistic classes our modern world has ever seen.

To be continued…
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
(UK)

UK Inches Closer To Eliminating Private Car Ownership

FRIDAY, DEC 31, 2021 - 03:00 AM
Authored by Steven Symes via Motorious,

Soon, Brits will own nothing and will be happier for it…
UK Government Transport Minister Trudy Harrison recently spoke at a mobility conference, addressing the future of personal mobility. In her comments, she said it was necessary to ditch the "20th-century thinking centred around private vehicle ownership and towards greater flexibility, with personal choice and low carbon shared transport." That’s right, she said the quiet part loud and showed the hand of a growing number of government officials.
Meanwhile, Dodge is eliminating a popular engine in the United States. Learn more here.
Harrison went on to praise not only public transportation but also bike share services, e-scooters, and ride sharing platforms. All of these are supposed to tune down how much carbon the UK is emitting into the atmosphere. As with all choices, this comes at a cost, particularly for those living in rural areas.



What’s more, 300 residents in Coventry recently expressed interest in giving up their personal cars. The tradeoff from the government reportedly would be a mobility credit worth up to £3,000. This mobility credit program has been going since March of this year, with 73 cars turned in and crushed. No, this isn’t a joke, but I wish it were.

Understandably, many Brits are upset about this. Some have asked if they should start riding their horse instead, all the in the name of “progress.” Others are tying this statement by Harrison with the looming government ban of internal combustion engines for cars by 2030. After all, EVs aren’t exactly cheap, so what better way to force people onto public transportation than by pricing them out of the vehicle market?



I’ve been calling out the elitist plan in some government circles to eliminate the private ownership of cars for some time. For many, the possibility that such a thing could be real leads to their minds lashing out at the source of such news, and so I’ve been called a “crazy conspiracy theorist” among other things for trying to shed light on this disturbing topic. Well, time has vindicated my stance and people in the UK are starting to wake up to the very real possibility they would be completely dependent on the government to be driven anywhere.



If you think this plan is limited to just the UK, you haven’t been paying attention.

There have been other efforts to make private vehicle ownership a thing of the past, including a new measure in Southern California. The 2021 Regional Transportation Plan passed recently by the San Diego Association of Government’s board of directors is a $160 billion initiative just for the metropolitan area to boost public transportation.

That’s a hefty price tag for such a small area, so one of the ways officials have been planning to fund it is by levying a per-mile driving tax against citizens. That was such an unpopular move it was shelved, for now. But I have a funny feeling that driving tax is going to be revisited. Critics say that and other fines, fees, etc. are designed to nuke personal vehicle ownership for all but the wealthy. Expect to see similar measures in other cities and maybe entire states/territories in North America and beyond in the near future.

As unpleasant as politics are, if car enthusiasts and really everyone who enjoys going where they please when they please in their privately-owned vehicle don’t start taking a stand, our freedoms could be severely restricted in ways many have thought weren’t possible. Failing to do something to stop this push will end poorly for just about everyone.

Source: Express
 

Magdalen

Veteran Member
Dear, marsh,

Once again, many thanks for your thorough and continued work. It is much appreciated.

Happy New Year, marsh.

Kindest regards,

magdalen
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Always Watching: New Car Models Sold in the EU Will Soon Record Driving Data

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OTTERSRIED, GERMANY - JANUARY 29: Cars stand halted due to a severe accident that had stopped all traffic on the A9 highway on January 29, 2011 near Ottersried, Germany. Winter school vacation has started for several states in northern Germany and led to traffic conjestion on highways heading south. (Photo …
Sean Gallup/Getty Images
PETER CADDLE31 Dec 2021458

New car models sold in the EU from mid-2022 will be required by law to record driving data that can be viewed in the event of an accident.

New car models, as well as any other road vehicle, sold in the EU from mid-2022 will be required to record technical data, such as the direction of the steering wheel and vehicle speed, so that it can be used in the event of a crash.

The new rule will coincide with the forced introduction of Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) systems for new vehicle models next year.

According to a report by Der Spiegel, a so-called “Event Data Recorder” — also referred to as a “black box”, similar to those already found in aircraft — will possibly enable police to understand if an accident was caused by driver error, depending on the incident.

However, an AFP report claims that, although law enforcement will indeed have access in the event of an accident, insurance companies will not be permitted access to any data recorded.

All data gathered by black boxes will also be anonymised, and — unlike a black box on an aircraft — conversations going on in the car will not be recorded by the device.

Meanwhile, newly mandatory ISA systems, which will warn drivers should they breach the speed limit, are expected to prevent up to 25,000 deaths and over 100,000 injuries every year due to accidents.

However, the EU has clarified on the Commission’s official website that any implemented system must not be able to actually prevent a driver from breaking the speed limit.

1641020214590.png

A large part of the European Union’s work has been placing itself into the lives of Europeans by producing legislation and imposing its vision on industries.

Sometimes, this has caused conflict.

The EU clashed with tech giant Apple after indicating that rules regarding electronic chargers may soon be changing in the bloc.

In an attempt to reduce e-waste, the EU has announced earlier in the year that it will implement a universal charger for smartphones.

While the majority of new devices already use the EU’s favoured USB-C connector, Apple has opted to design its devices to use its own proprietary Lightning connecter, first introduced in 2012.

“We remain concerned that strict regulation mandating just one type of connector stifles innovation rather than encouraging it, which in turn will harm consumers in Europe and around the world,” Apple said in a statement regarding the proposal.

The EU has also announced plans to end the sale of petrol cars by 2035, despite complaints from the European Automobile Manufacturer’s Association, who said that “banning a single technology is not a rational way forward at this stage”.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Economists warn of inflation inequality as poor get slammed by rising prices

PUBLISHED WED, DEC 29 20217:53 PM ESTUPDATED THU, DEC 30 20217:49 AM EST

Ylan Mui@YLANMUI
  • An analysis by the Penn Wharton Budget Model found that low- and middle-income households spent about 7% more in 2021 for the same products they bought in 2020 or 2019, an average of about $3,500.
  • Experts now fear that poverty will rise in early 2022 as pandemic-related federal benefits phase out and President Joe Biden’s sweeping social spending package languishes in Congress.
  • There is one bright spot for low-wage workers: Median wages jumped more than 5% in November for the bottom quartile compared with a year ago.
People shop at a Walmart in Rosemead, California on November 22, 2021, where a few empty shelves were seen in an otherwise well stocked store amid improvements in the supply chain crisis for the end of year holiday season.

People shop at a Walmart in Rosemead, California on November 22, 2021.
Frederic J. Brown | AFP | Getty Images

The coronavirus pandemic has led to a new era of inflation inequality, economists warn, in which poor households bear the brunt of rising prices.

That’s because a bigger portion of their budget goes toward categories that have spiked in cost. Food is up 6.4% over the past year, for example, while gasoline jumped a whopping 58%. And now many people are facing those higher prices as federal stimulus programs fade away.

“They’re essentially looking to stretch a dollar most days,” said Chris Wimer, co-director of the Center on Poverty & Social Policy at Columbia University. “It’s going to lead to difficult choices between putting gas in the car or paying for your kids’ child care or putting food on the table.”

A recent analysis by the Penn Wharton Budget Model found that low- and middle-income households spent about 7% more in 2021 for the same products they bought in 2020 or in 2019. That translates into about $3,500 for the average household.

By contrast, spending by wealthy households went up by only 6%.

Shift in spending for the wealthy
This disparity is typical during inflationary periods, said Kent Smetters, who directs the Penn Wharton model. But since the 1980s — the last time prices rose this quickly — higher-income households have shifted more of their spending away from goods and toward services. For example, in 2020, food was 12.7% of the budget for the top 5% of households, compared with 16% of the budget for the bottom 20%.

Meanwhile, pandemic-related production disruptions have driven up the costs of commodities that poor households rely on.

“What they happen to be buying has been hit harder by the supply crunch,” Smetters said. “It’s broader-based than in the past.”

The findings dovetail with an analysis of credit and debit card data by Harvard Business School economist Alberto Cavallo at the start of the pandemic. He showed that low-income consumers experienced price increases that were roughly double those of wealthier ones.

In 2019, a joint paper from researchers at Columbia and the London School of Economics estimated that about 3 million more people would qualify as living in poverty if their incomes were adjusted for the inflation rates they experience.

Experts now fear that poverty will rise in early 2022 as pandemic-related federal benefits phase out and President Joe Biden’s sweeping social spending package languishes in Congress. Of particular concern is the end of monthly payments of the child tax credit, which provided families with $300 a month for each child younger than 6 and $250 for older kids.

Worry over ending tax credits
According to Columbia, the benefit kept nearly 4 million children out of poverty. The last monthly check was issued Dec. 15.

“You see a pretty clear impact of those payments,” Wimer said. “We’re obviously all worried about January.”

But Republicans fear just the opposite: That more money from Washington will lead to even higher inflation, placing a bigger burden on the poor.

“There are some provisions in this bill that maybe we could have a bipartisan agreement on once inflation calms down,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told reporters earlier this month. “But right now is not the time to add any more federal spending, growing the government, creating a problem for inflation.”

That argument appears to have swayed Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who has raised alarms about the cost of the child tax credit if it were continued over the decade. He has pushed for tighter limits on the benefit and work requirements for other social programs in the package. Without his vote in the evenly split Senate, Democrats cannot pass the bill.

“There’s a case to be made that tax credits are very necessary — that if we weren’t dealing with inflation, these are certainly a way to support the disadvantaged,” said Gustavo Flores-Macias, associate professor at Cornell University. “But the political timing is poor because of inflation.”

There is one bright spot for low-wage workers: They have received some of the biggest pay raises of the pandemic, helping to buffer the rise in prices. As of November, median wage growth over the past year has averaged more than 5% for the bottom quartile, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Meanwhile, average wage growth for the top 25% has slowed this year to just 2.7% as of November.

“This is not a crisis of scarcity. It’s a crisis of everyone having more than what the market can currently supply,” Samuel Hammond, director of poverty and welfare policy at the Niskanen Center. “If we want robust economic growth, we are probably going to have to tolerate higher inflation and rising commodity prices because that is a side effect of booming consumer spending and investment.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Exclusive—J.D. Vance: The Desire to Safely and Securely Live in a Community Is Under Assault
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JD Vance, the venture capitalist and author of Hillbilly Elegy, addresses a rally Thursday, July 1, 2021, in Middletown, Ohio, where he announced he is joining the crowded Republican race for the Ohio U.S. Senate seat being left by Rob Portman. (AP Photo/Jeff Dean)
AP Photo/Jeff Dean
JACOB BLISS1 Jan 202280

J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis and Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate seat from Ohio, told SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Saturday that the basic desire to live in a community safely and securely, while being able to provide for your family, is under assault by corporate and political leadership.

“The basic desire to live in a community in safety and security, to be able to provide for your family, these things are all under assault,” Vance said. “I really believe a combination of corporate leadership — [they] decided they can plunder this country, get rich off of it, even if they ship its wealth off to China — and by political leadership that has no willpower or no desire to push back.”

While he is running for the Senate and has never run for office before, Vance explained that the “craziest thing” to him is that members will complain about their $175,000 salary but will end up spending years of their life in D.C. and end up worth millions of dollars. “You know, not like, like, absolutely everybody has complained about making $175,000 a year. But then people spend 30 years in Washington making $175,000 a year, and they’re worth $50 million afterwards.”

“Like how does that math work out? Right? It’s because our political leadership has realized that it can get wealthy by conspiring with our enemies instead of actually dealing with the very long-term problems that we have,” Vance continued. “I really think this is what’s going on… It’s an alliance between corrupt politicians and bureaucrats, and corrupt multinational corporations, that has made the most powerful nation on, in the world on the verge of collapse.”

Breitbart · J.D. Vance – January 1, 2022
https://soundcloud.com/breitbart View: https://soundcloud.com/breitbart
17:53 min

While Vance talked about the country’s “incredible history,” he said, “one of the things that I hate about the left, they are constantly making us feel ashamed of our great history.” Vance referred to World War II, when “a bunch of 18 and 19-year-old American boys [came] and liberated a continent from fascism and Nazism.” He added that the country’s “legacy” is the “heritage” of the country, such as being the first country to put a man on the moon and having technological achievements and miracles of modern medicine.

Regarding the “greatness” that exists in the country, Vance said, “There are still folks taking care of their kids, going to work, building great things, doing great things.” Still, he explained, the country needs to “build a leadership class” that will be “respectful of the incredible population that we still have in this country.”

Vance emphasized that he still has hope for the United States, which is why he is running for Senate.

“What’s so cool about this country is the people are great,” Vance added. “What is terrible about this country right now is that our leaders are a total disaster.

And if we can get even, even Okay people leading this country, calling the shots [in] our government again, I think we’re going to unleash an incredible century of American Greatness.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Ten Joe Biden 2021 Blunders that Killed the American Energy Renaissance

1,276
A marquee displays gas prices at a Shell station on Monday, Nov. 22, 2021, in San Francisco. President Joe Biden on Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2021, ordered 50 million barrels of oil released from America's strategic reserve to help bring down energy costs, in coordination with other major energy consuming nations, …
Noah Berger/ASSOCIATED PRESS
PENNY STARR1 Jan 20221,403

Joe Biden wasted no time after being sworn in as president in destroying the U.S energy renaissance ushered in during Donald Trump’s presidency which made the country energy independent and a net annual petroleum exporter for the first time since at least 1949.

Through regulations, executive orders, and other means, Biden has driven up the cost of energy for Americans and made the country more dependent on foreign and often unfriendly entities for its energy needs.

Here are ten Biden policies that have ended abundant and affordable energy in America:

1. On his first day as president, Biden canceled completion of the Keystone XL Pipeline, taking away thousands of American jobs, reducing domestic energy production, and driving up the cost of oil.

2. One of Biden’s first actions as president was suspending oil and gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and New Mexico.

3. Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reinstalled regulations that restrict domestic energy production, including resurrecting the “Waters of the United States” rule that limits how farmers and ranchers can use their land.

4. Last month the EPA announced new regulations for methane emissions from oil and gas production, transmission, storage, and distribution. The American Petroleum Institute estimated that the Democrats’ desired ban on oil and gas development on federal lands would cause nearly 1 million Americans to lose their jobs, and cost the U.S. $500 billion to import gas.

5. Biden’s EPA is also pushing a new rule regulating greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles. That regulation is estimated to raise the average vehicle price by $1,000.

6. President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord, citing its harm to American jobs and the U.S. economy. Biden rejoined the United Nation’s globalist project, which will result in more energy regulations and restrictions and drive up the cost of domestic energy, including gasoline and heating.

7. Biden’s decision to put a moratorium on oil and gas leasing on federal land and his goal of banning hydraulic fracking will no doubt please Russia and OPEC as the U.S. loses its energy independence and increases its dependence on foreign oil and gas.

8. Biden vowed to prohibit fracking, which will cause a massive loss in American jobs. “Banning fracking, as Biden has promised to do, would eliminate 19 million jobs between 2021-2025,” according to the House Republican Policy Committee.'

9. Biden’s policies have resulted in skyrocketing prices at the gas pump. A year ago — in November 2020 — the average gas price was $2.11 per gallon. By November 2021, the national average gas price had shot up to $3.42. Americans paid 61 percent more for gas as inflation soared to a 30-year high.

10. Biden’s Build Back Better plan would spend taxpayer dollars to force utilities to use more expensive forms of energy (as called for in the Green New Deal), reducing energy choices and raising costs for American consumers.
 
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