GOV/MIL Main "Great Reset" Thread
- Thread starter marsh
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marsh
On TB every waking moment
8:49 min
New church hints a ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT is being formed NOW
Nov 29, 2021
Glenn Beck
A ‘One World Government’ is being formed RIGHT NOW, Glenn says, and it’s called the Great Reset. But now, rebuild plans for the damaged Notre Dame Cathedral hint at the formation of a global church, too. And Glenn predicts it will bring darkness. He details the church’s ‘woke’ themes that likely will only cause even more division around the world…
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Luongo: Being Thankful Is The Path To Victory Over Davos
MONDAY, NOV 29, 2021 - 02:00 AM
Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, 'n Guns blog,
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. It is the one day where we celebrate putting aside our differences and doing the most basic thing humans can do together, share a meal.
It is also the one holiday that does nothing to aggrandize The State in all its rotten guises. For that alone it would be my personal favorite. Ultimately this is just a story about two very different people coming together to share the fruits of the harvest and the hunt to begin the long and difficult process of building trust.
Trust, by the way, is the basis for civilization itself. Without trust there is nothing, just The Hunger Games.
It doesn’t matter whether the stories of the first Thanksgiving are true or not. Only those with an obsession with demystifying the world to salve their own inner emptiness care about such historical ‘truths.’
It is the story itself that has power, like all great stories.
It’s a story that is deeply embedded in the Myth of America as the great experiment in governance and rebellion against the colonial powers of Europe.
In the end, that Myth is just that, of course, a myth.
America’s history is much more nuanced and complex, darker and lighter than the foundations of that Myth care to admit. I’m not here to white, brown or even greenwash America’s history any more than an honest British, Italian, Russian, or Chinese person would do to their own.
I’m here to discuss why it is we should be thankful for even having a world where such Myths can even exist.
Of course history is messy. It’s violent and, at times, horrific. Yes, some people suck. Wars happened and will happen. Genocides committed and are yet to be committed.
The big stories we all thrill to on our screens today big and small try to help us navigate what happens when people go mad in groups, lose their sense of propriety and humility, and become obsessed with their own fears at the expense of their empathy.
This is what a breakdown of trust leads to, a loss of civilization.
We live in a time where those in power show their bottomless disdain for humanity by only focusing on those bad parts of it. It’s now grown to even dissing this one American tradition that is one of the last honest lessons for a world spiraling out of control.
Because that is what Thanksgiving is all about. Taking a time out from the harsh reality of existence and being thankful for what you have, not envious of or wistful for what you don’t.
To listen to the race-baiting, soulless apparatchiks screeching about how we should turn Thanksgiving into yet another opportunity to distrust each other before eating a meal devoid of nutrition, i.e. the turkey, desperately imploring us to keep up barriers between family members over COVID is revealing more of their sickness than anyone else’s.
These are people without hope or faith in anything. They are fallen, power-hungry zombies consumed with self-importance painting on a face of empathy while extolling medical apartheid and scapegoating the unvaxxed to fuel their hatred.
These are humanity’s enemies, not a virus with a 0.1% mortality rate or those brave enough to face it without the help of Big Brother.
And yet, we should even be thankful for them.
Because without them as a counter-example, we have no way to gauge our own behavior. We have no mirror to look into and see our own tendencies towards ugliness. Because without that ability to see first hand what it is we do not want to be, we become as lost in our own fugue of self-importance which justifies any amount of violence as they are.
I don’t hate the Joy Ann Reids and the Jenn Psakis of this world. I celebrate their depravity because without them there can be no opportunity to point out just how insane the world they advocate is.
Peaking Duck
Last week I speculated that we had reached Peak Davos. I’m surprised to report that I got a lot less push back from that article than I was expecting.
Right on cue, the morning after our annual celebration of common decency and reconnection with our deracinated families, we are bombarded with a new variant of COVID to bludgeon us with.
On the thinnest trading day of the year in the U.S., when most of us are nursing epic carb hangovers while doomscrolling through our Twitter feeds and trolling Amazon for the best deals on a bunch of shit we know in our hearts we don’t need, they trot out the fear porn nuclear barrage.
The Dow? Down 1119.00 points.
Oil? Down $9.31 per barrel.
Bitcoin? Down $5200, nearly 10%
If you thought you could escape Davos‘ Great Reset, think again. Everything you have will be theirs. Everything you desire — family, home, stability, hope — is subject to their approval. Pay no attention to the timing, the virology, or the logic. Just ab-react in real time to a wholly manufactured farce which if you watched it as a movie after Thanksgiving dinner, you’d shut off for being too contrived.
Honestly, at this point they really should hire some better writers because this movie sucks worse than Captain Marvel did.
The ‘Nu’ variant, or NuVID for short, is evolving so fast even its name had to be quickly changed to Omicron to keep us confused. Is it the Nu variant? or Omicron? People will now spend hours of their lives being corrected about what the name of this thing is so midwits can make themselves feel more informed than their mouth-breathing, unvaxxed brethren they still hate.
We don’t know anything about NuVID than it has evolved multiple new spike proteins and whatever else the gods of virology deign to tell us about it.
Even though we know next to nothing of either the virulence or transmissibility of NuVID, the first response from the usual suspects is to ramp up talk of further locking down populations all over Europe. The world was beginning to get back to some semblance of normal but now everyone is flapping their wings in panic like my ducks do when the dogs hear a noise in the woods and start barking.
We’d faced down our worst fears and were beginning to work through the supply chain issues, the backlogs of paperwork, and had adjusted to new workflows and schedules. Those that stood in opposition to the vaccine mandates wouldn’t be budged from their positions anymore and their protests not televised.
Vaccine distribution centers were shutting down, people were assuming the risk of living, finding sources of ivermectin and HCQ to treat themselves while the Medical Industrial Complex kept trying to get in their way.
And so our reward for being thankful for mostly feeling like we’d gotten through this terrible ordeal — the hysteria over the virus, not the virus itself — was to be threatened again with more of the same.
And, again, I am thankful for this. Because this latest round of fear porn is the most obvious, the most over-the-top, the crudest attempt at psychological warfare Davos has engaged in yet.
That makes it easy to look at and laugh.
But this doesn’t matter to those in charge. If we laugh at them and their seriousness become even more incensed.
They could see their bonds slipping and people getting back to normal. They could see the same massive protests around the world outside their seats of power that I’ve seen and knew it was time to play their next, even more desperate card.
The only thing that I’m even remotely afraid of at this point are the people who still need to believe in all of this.
And yet, we should still be thankful for the confirmation of our knowing they have been lying to us about all of this the entire time.
This will be my last attempt to try to get through to the fearful again. Cases aren’t hospitalizations. And hospitalizations aren’t a death sentence. With the mountain of evidence out there that none of the numbers we’ve been given about COVID were ever accurate why do you think we should believe anything about NuVID?
Trust Should be a Four-Letter Word
It gets back to that basic building block of civilization itself. Trust.
Without it the Pilgrims and the Native Americans couldn’t have sat down around the table together. Without it the Pilgrims wouldn’t have even been able to cross the Atlantic in the first place, or hired the boat that brought them there. Without trust that boat would still have been a glint in the eye of the person dreaming of building it, since it was a project far grander than his meager allotment of time on this planet would have been able to complete.
Davos says it is motivated by a desire to save humanity from itself. It has deemed our civilization unworthy of them and their grand ideas and like angry gods are in the process of wiping it clean from the earth to Build it Back Better, in their image, not ours.
But that idea cannot become real unless we lend it credence, unless we, like them become consumed with the things we’ve lost and will never have rather than embrace that which is in front of us. Civilization isn’t some esoteric thing that can be conjured up by speaking magic words from a mass communications device.
Civilization comes from looking another person in the eye, shaking their hand and making an agreement which both sides honor to the best of their ability.
For a critical mass of people in the West, their trust in the institutions that governed them is gone. It is never coming back.
And without that trust there can be no going back to the old system where Davos moved pieces on the board and we reacted to them within the rules of the game because we thought the rules reinforced civilization.
But we know now that too, is a lie. And for that I am eternally thankful to Davos. Because without their Quixotic and, unfortunately, deadly quest to remake humanity so many people would have never woken up to the reality of their existence.
That’s the reason why I’m more convinced today than before that we’ve reached Peak Davos because today I’m thankful for knowing the community of people ready to take that next first step across the divide and form new bonds of trust which will power the next myths capable of sustaining a better civilization.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Jim Quinn: Fear Of Our Escalating Power Is Leading Elites To Increasingly Reckless Direction
SUNDAY, NOV 28, 2021 - 11:30 PM
Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,
The Wall Was Too High, As You Can See
I wrote an article in December 2012, a week after the Newtown school shooting, called Hey You. My interpretation of this classic Pink Floyd song was related to how our culture has created generations of alienated and isolated people, allowing Big Pharma to peddle their pharmaceutical concoctions to the masses as the “easy” solution to living “normally” in a profoundly abnormal society. My contention was these mass shootings by young men (Newtown, Columbine, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Tucson) were caused by the Big Pharma psychotropic drugs prescribed to all these young killers by sick industry peddlers (aka physicians).
The hugely profitable Big Pharma solution to alienation, isolation and depression is drugs that turn a percentage of those afflicted into psychotic killers. The article’s premise was how our techno-narcissistic society, encouraged and enabled by our totalitarian overlords through mind manipulation, drugs, public education indoctrination, and propaganda, has purposely created the alienation, isolation, and hopelessness to further their goals of power, control, and wealth.
When it comes to dystopian literature, there is always a clash between Huxley’s softer totalitarianism versus Orwell’s boot on your face tyranny when assessing how our governments enforce their dictates upon their subjects. The Wall certainly has an Orwellian bent, as it explores the issues of abandonment, isolation, alienation, authoritarianism, the brutality of war, a tyrannical conformist educational system, and the walls individuals and society build to protect themselves from having to confront reality and deal with the consequences of their actions.
Once alienated from society, having built a wall between yourself and the outside world, attempting to reengage with society can be almost impossible, as the wall becomes too high, and no one can hear your pleas. Sometimes, there is no escape.
The opening lyrics are haunting to me. I have felt like I’ve been out in the cold since the outset of this pandemic of herd madness in March 2020. I’ve gotten older and feel older. While family, friends, and coworkers have been drawn into this vortex of falsity, I feel like I am standing alone behind walls constructed by the government, the media, and society in general. It’s lonely when you chose to make a stand against the lies being peddled 24/7 by corrupt politicians, fake news pundits, faux medical “experts” bought off by Big Pharma, mega-corporations, and Hollywood propagandists playing their parts. These demonic forces have tried to bury the light of truth under an avalanche of lies.
I’m unsure of their true purpose, but I am sure it will not be beneficial to me, my family or the honest hard-working people trying to survive this dystopian nightmare. Most days it feels like the evil forces arrayed against me and other lovers of liberty and freedom have the upper hand and cannot be defeated. I do feel isolated and alienated from the majority, as they have been psychologically manipulated to obey their masters, as their double vaccine dose, now requires a booster after six months, and will require annual boosters for eternity. They will unquestioningly submit, without ever using their critical thinking skills to grasp these are not real vaccines and do not work. I will not give in to their mass psychosis.
Since I was relating the song to the Big Pharma drug induced mass shootings, my 2012 article gravitated towards Huxley’s view of totalitarianism, as he believed our overlords would use pharmaceuticals, conditioning, and mind control to achieve their evil means.
My dire view of our future was just as grim nine years ago as it is today. My belief was the alienation and isolation created by our sprawling, automobile dependent, technology obsessed, government controlled, debt financed society had spread like a cancerous tumor, slowly killing our country. As with most of my early articles I gravitated towards our dire fiscal situation and how it was surely unsustainable. My example was:
It had gone up $51 trillion in 33 years. Well guess what? It now stands at $85 trillion, up another $30 trillion in 9 years, with no deceleration in sight. Since I wrote that 2012 article, the national debt went from $16 trillion to $29 trillion (up 81%), GDP went from $16 trillion to $23 trillion (up 44%), the Dow went from 13,000 to 36,000 (up 177%), and consumer debt went from $2.9 trillion to $4.4 trillion (up 52%).
As usual, the plebs went further into debt, while their overlords saw their trillions in stock holdings almost triple in nine years. I thought the debt growth was unsustainable, but the Fed said hold my beer. Their debt creation orgy accelerates by the minute, with real inflation (as opposed to the fake BLS bullshit) running in excess of 10% hitting average Americans, while the Wall Street oligarchs get richer by the second. Even using the BLS bullshit inflation figures, the USD has lost 17% of its purchasing power since 2012, again screwing the little guy.
The USD has lost 96.4% of its purchasing power since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. So much for meeting their “mandate” of stable prices. Do you get it yet? The Fed’s job is to enrich their owners (bankers & billionaire oligarchs) while enslaving you in debt and making sure your meager wages buy less and less each year. This is where the “You Will Own Nothing and Be Happy” slogan begins to make sense.
The Build Back Better slogan, created by Schwab and his Davos co-conspirators, really refers to building a better wall around the plebs so they remain isolated, alienated and under control. Roger Waters has explained the song Hey You was also an exhortation to make connections with people, help each other, and overcome the alienation and isolation created by those pulling the strings of our societal dystopia.
When I heard the song on the radio the other day, my take on the lyrics is now colored by the last two years of this engineered, weaponized, marketed Covid pandemic. The alienation and isolation have not been a choice of individuals, but a mandate from our authoritarian overlords.
The wall is being built by those who want to destroy our existing structural paradigm and replace it with something they consider better, but which will be far worse for liberty and freedom minded individuals.
A more Orwellian dystopia is being ushered in by Soros, Gates, Schwab and their chief lieutenants Biden, Pelosi, Fauci, Powell, along with the other highly paid apparatchiks in government, media, medical industrial complex, and military industrial complex.
We were already in the death throes of the most dysfunctional, decadent, delusional, debt engendered era in the long history of mankind. Their debt saturated “solutions” from 2008 through 2019 reflected an air of desperation. Those in power realized their stranglehold on the narrative was slipping away and were in danger of seeing a sudden decline in their wealth and control over the masses.
Rather than accept their slightly less profitable fate like normal human beings, these psychopaths have doubled down by using a relatively non-serious flu for anyone under 85 years old and not morbidly obese, to try and implement a new world order, where they continue to reap all the benefits and the masses incur the pain, suffering and death. The diabolical aspects of this evil undertaking are almost too outrageous to believe. They have redoubled their propaganda endeavors in order to convince the ignorant masses to willingly love their servitude.
In today’s circumstances those lyrics reflect this fantasy/nightmare of Covid being used as the justification to destroy our economic system, drive hundreds of thousands of small businesses into bankruptcy, locking people in their homes for months, mandating useless masks as a dehumanization and fear tactic, mandating the injection of an experimental gene therapy into our bodies as a requirement to make a living, and using a bottomless supply of lies and media propaganda to convince an already dumbed down populace to beg for increased levels of servitude to those who haven’t been right about one thing since this scamdemic was launched.
As others have noted, this hasn’t been a pandemic, it’s been an IQ test. And as a society we’ve scored low enough to be put on the short bus to the school for the slow-witted. The global oligarchs began constructing our wall, but millions of willing collaborator Karens and Todds are gleefully adding bricks to that wall.
I’ve been flabbergasted since the outset of this propagandized and highly marketed fearfest, over a strain of the annual flu, by the lack of critical thinking skills exhibited by average Americans and their inability to understand simple mathematical risk calculations when they are told blatant lies by the likes of Fauci, Walensky and a plethora of Big Pharma bribed “medical experts” paraded on the boob tube every day. They have let feelings, emotions, and false narratives guide their actions, rather than facts, data, and scientific proof.
Everyone has the freedom to verify what they are being told and calculate for themselves the 99.7% overall survival rate and 99.999995% survival rate for those under 25 years old. But they have been psychologically compelled to not question the State or embrace their Constitutional freedom to dissent and not comply. They unquestioningly inject their children with these drugs when unequivocal evidence shows a much higher risk from the jab than from Covid. Huxley realized decades ago a weak-minded populace could be easily manipulated. We have now reached peak complicity, compliance and cowering to the national State and those pulling the strings of our government.
Part 1 of 2
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Part 2 of 2
Huxley was not a big fan of technological “progress” as he just saw it as a more efficient means of going backwards. Those who believe technology is the answer to all of our problems are either insanely myopic or profiting from this fallacy. Technology has certainly contributed to allowing corporations to generate profits through efficiencies, marketing, logistics, and replacing human beings with computers and robots.
Technology has also made it very efficient for the State to utilize propaganda, fear, and social indoctrination through electronic media to control the population and manipulate the narrative to suit their diabolic purposes. For the few who dissent from their commands, technology is used to sensor, de-platform, restrain, monitor, and destroy their lives, if necessary.
Modern technology has a dual purpose, as an entertainment aphrodisiac, and an electronic boot stomping on your face forever. They want you distracted, amused, and consumed by trivialities, while they execute their wealth pillaging scheme and slowly build a technological wall which grows ever higher and impossible to escape. Consumption, diversion, and obedience is all they asked.
Societal stability, in the eyes of the sociopath unseen rulers behind the curtain, is based upon state designed happiness, social indoctrination disguised as public education, endless war, fear-based propaganda, and the use of pharmaceuticals to alleviate dissent and wrong thinking. Normalcy, traditional families, community standards, hard work, thrift, self-responsibility, neighborly connections, faith, and self-governing are all antithetical to the societal breakdown required to implement the Great Reset. Therefore, these values are banned in the world we inhabit today.
The best laid plans of the ruling class began to go awry in late 2019, as the gears of the financial system began to grind and fracture. The never-ending Trump coup was floundering under the weight of lies. Their wealth, power, and control were going to take a major hit. So, they decided to pull it. They had laid the groundwork for decades, creating generations trained to value material possessions, require instant gratification, shun critical thinking, let feelings guide their actions, believe debt acquired possessions constituted wealth, trust politicians are working in their best interests, and do whatever those deemed “experts” by the corporate media tell them to do.
They have created tens of millions of mentally ill sheep who only appear normal because they fit in to this profoundly abnormal society, where they forfeited the thinking and decision making for their lives to people like Gates, Soros, Biden, Fauci and Zuckerberg, who despise them. Because of their government created neurosis and cowardly compliance, we are all victims, and the wall we must scale to escape gets higher by the day.
The walls erected within Roger Waters’ lyrics were figurative, referring to the isolation and alienation from society chosen by an individual (himself). My interpretation, based on what myself and many others are experiencing today, is more literal, with the isolation and alienation being created by government and their mentally ill, willfully ignorant advocates of lockdowns, masking, jabs, mandates, passports, quarantine camps, and coercion to command compliance.
This entire pandemic scheme has been designed as a divide and conquer undertaking, with the purpose of implementing their Great Reset plan to own everything while the plebs own nothing and happily do as they are told. For those of us not willing to go along with their plan, they have alternate arrangements in store. We are in the midst of this struggle for the future of our country and the world.
The Party has told you to reject unequivocal facts during this entire engineered psychological operation. They convinced the vast majority of the population to be terrorized by a virus with a 99.7% survival rate that only kills the very old and the very obese. They said it didn’t come from the Wuhan lab and wasn’t funded by Fauci. They convinced the masses masks worked when they knew they didn’t.
They said a fifteen-day lockdown would slow the spread and end the pandemic. They said their vaccines would immunize you from catching Covid before they changed the definition of vaccines and told you it was always supposed to just reduce the symptoms. They have convinced a couple hundred million people to participate in an experiment as guinea pigs for an unproven untested gene therapy.
They continue to proclaim vaccines work, even though they don’t, and of course get your booster, also because they don’t work. They refuse to acknowledge natural immunity to be far more effective and long-lasting than their jabs. No money to be made from natural immunity. They have censored and de-platformed anyone who showed proof ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine worked better than the vaccines.
No money in subscribing either safe and effective treatment. They deny the vaccines have caused millions of adverse reactions and tens of thousands of deaths. They have instructed you to reject all of this evidence of their deceit and demonic designs to abscond with your wealth, freedoms, and liberties.
As we enter Biden’s dark winter, you can sense the desperation of the Party/Deep State/Oligarchy as they employ more coercive and destructive tactics to force the non-compliant to obey and do as they are told. They are attempting to isolate and alienate those who refuse to submit to their clearly unlawful vaccine mandates by excluding them from society and threatening their livelihoods.
The threats and intimidation have succeeded with a significant portion of the holdouts, but tens of millions are refusing to bend the knee. Many feel alone in their resistance to these totalitarian measures, as those in control of the narrative have painted a picture of only a small minority of conspiracy theorists rejecting their Great Reset authoritarian blueprint. The wall seems too high for many.
The truth be told, their blueprint is growing stale, as they desperately attempt to strike fear into the masses with their latest variant of the month. The truth is they fear our opposition. They fear we will inspire more people to resist. They fear we will band together.
They fear the truth, which is the backbone for our resistance. They fear we are heavily armed. They fear us realizing we are actually the majority. They fear they are starting to lose.
Their fear of our escalating power is leading them to make increasingly reckless and drastic pronouncements and demands. The push back to their directives is gaining in intensity. They believe they can make the wall high enough to deter those who could foil their Great Reset scheme. The odds are in their favor because they control the politicians, media, corporations, and the minds of the indoctrinated sheep, but don’t tell me there’s no hope at all.
We have truth, the Constitution, the 2nd Amendment, and millions of liberty-minded truculent partisans who will not bend to their will. We have no choice but to fight, using any means at our disposal. We realize we must stand together, because divided we will fall.
Huxley was not a big fan of technological “progress” as he just saw it as a more efficient means of going backwards. Those who believe technology is the answer to all of our problems are either insanely myopic or profiting from this fallacy. Technology has certainly contributed to allowing corporations to generate profits through efficiencies, marketing, logistics, and replacing human beings with computers and robots.
Technology has also made it very efficient for the State to utilize propaganda, fear, and social indoctrination through electronic media to control the population and manipulate the narrative to suit their diabolic purposes. For the few who dissent from their commands, technology is used to sensor, de-platform, restrain, monitor, and destroy their lives, if necessary.
Modern technology has a dual purpose, as an entertainment aphrodisiac, and an electronic boot stomping on your face forever. They want you distracted, amused, and consumed by trivialities, while they execute their wealth pillaging scheme and slowly build a technological wall which grows ever higher and impossible to escape. Consumption, diversion, and obedience is all they asked.
Societal stability, in the eyes of the sociopath unseen rulers behind the curtain, is based upon state designed happiness, social indoctrination disguised as public education, endless war, fear-based propaganda, and the use of pharmaceuticals to alleviate dissent and wrong thinking. Normalcy, traditional families, community standards, hard work, thrift, self-responsibility, neighborly connections, faith, and self-governing are all antithetical to the societal breakdown required to implement the Great Reset. Therefore, these values are banned in the world we inhabit today.
The best laid plans of the ruling class began to go awry in late 2019, as the gears of the financial system began to grind and fracture. The never-ending Trump coup was floundering under the weight of lies. Their wealth, power, and control were going to take a major hit. So, they decided to pull it. They had laid the groundwork for decades, creating generations trained to value material possessions, require instant gratification, shun critical thinking, let feelings guide their actions, believe debt acquired possessions constituted wealth, trust politicians are working in their best interests, and do whatever those deemed “experts” by the corporate media tell them to do.
They have created tens of millions of mentally ill sheep who only appear normal because they fit in to this profoundly abnormal society, where they forfeited the thinking and decision making for their lives to people like Gates, Soros, Biden, Fauci and Zuckerberg, who despise them. Because of their government created neurosis and cowardly compliance, we are all victims, and the wall we must scale to escape gets higher by the day.
The walls erected within Roger Waters’ lyrics were figurative, referring to the isolation and alienation from society chosen by an individual (himself). My interpretation, based on what myself and many others are experiencing today, is more literal, with the isolation and alienation being created by government and their mentally ill, willfully ignorant advocates of lockdowns, masking, jabs, mandates, passports, quarantine camps, and coercion to command compliance.
This entire pandemic scheme has been designed as a divide and conquer undertaking, with the purpose of implementing their Great Reset plan to own everything while the plebs own nothing and happily do as they are told. For those of us not willing to go along with their plan, they have alternate arrangements in store. We are in the midst of this struggle for the future of our country and the world.
The Party has told you to reject unequivocal facts during this entire engineered psychological operation. They convinced the vast majority of the population to be terrorized by a virus with a 99.7% survival rate that only kills the very old and the very obese. They said it didn’t come from the Wuhan lab and wasn’t funded by Fauci. They convinced the masses masks worked when they knew they didn’t.
They said a fifteen-day lockdown would slow the spread and end the pandemic. They said their vaccines would immunize you from catching Covid before they changed the definition of vaccines and told you it was always supposed to just reduce the symptoms. They have convinced a couple hundred million people to participate in an experiment as guinea pigs for an unproven untested gene therapy.
They continue to proclaim vaccines work, even though they don’t, and of course get your booster, also because they don’t work. They refuse to acknowledge natural immunity to be far more effective and long-lasting than their jabs. No money to be made from natural immunity. They have censored and de-platformed anyone who showed proof ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine worked better than the vaccines.
No money in subscribing either safe and effective treatment. They deny the vaccines have caused millions of adverse reactions and tens of thousands of deaths. They have instructed you to reject all of this evidence of their deceit and demonic designs to abscond with your wealth, freedoms, and liberties.
As we enter Biden’s dark winter, you can sense the desperation of the Party/Deep State/Oligarchy as they employ more coercive and destructive tactics to force the non-compliant to obey and do as they are told. They are attempting to isolate and alienate those who refuse to submit to their clearly unlawful vaccine mandates by excluding them from society and threatening their livelihoods.
The threats and intimidation have succeeded with a significant portion of the holdouts, but tens of millions are refusing to bend the knee. Many feel alone in their resistance to these totalitarian measures, as those in control of the narrative have painted a picture of only a small minority of conspiracy theorists rejecting their Great Reset authoritarian blueprint. The wall seems too high for many.
The truth be told, their blueprint is growing stale, as they desperately attempt to strike fear into the masses with their latest variant of the month. The truth is they fear our opposition. They fear we will inspire more people to resist. They fear we will band together.
They fear the truth, which is the backbone for our resistance. They fear we are heavily armed. They fear us realizing we are actually the majority. They fear they are starting to lose.
Their fear of our escalating power is leading them to make increasingly reckless and drastic pronouncements and demands. The push back to their directives is gaining in intensity. They believe they can make the wall high enough to deter those who could foil their Great Reset scheme. The odds are in their favor because they control the politicians, media, corporations, and the minds of the indoctrinated sheep, but don’t tell me there’s no hope at all.
We have truth, the Constitution, the 2nd Amendment, and millions of liberty-minded truculent partisans who will not bend to their will. We have no choice but to fight, using any means at our disposal. We realize we must stand together, because divided we will fall.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Green Technologies Have A Glaring Problem Of Scale
MONDAY, NOV 29, 2021 - 06:20 PM
Authored by Iddo Wernick via RealClearScience.com,
In the context of the massive attention paid to climate change, nations around the world have committed to substantially reducing and even eliminating their carbon emissions by 2050.
Achieving these goals relies on several ‘green’ technologies that would form the basis of a future energy system. As envisioned, mass deployment of these technologies will encounter fundamental physical limits that call into question their ability to function as replacements for their equivalents in the current energy system. By placing firm targets, nations around the world have committed to terminating their carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 to offer confidence that a better world is achievable if only society implements the right policies and employs the correct technologies. This assumption is inaccurate, based on a view that is at odds with nature.
Due to unavoidable physical constraints, future green technologies offer little promise for achieving economies of scale. Many of the improvements suggested to improve their performance remain marginal and frequently come with the environmental costs of additional embedded energy requirements, extensive land use and greater material complexity. The outcomes achieved under laboratory conditions are not guaranteed to be viable at the scale necessary for them to make a significant difference.
Efforts to improve energy efficiency remain essential, but those efforts are not likely to reduce aggregate energy use. The vehicles and appliances of 2050 will likely be more efficient than those of today, but precisely because of their greater efficiency there will be many more of them. Under almost any scenario, global electricity demand will increase between now and 2050 and meaningful reductions in carbon emissions will need to come from changes in the primary energy supply.
The technological vision implied by national pledges for a carbon neutral 2050 assumes that future societies will be able to:
Technologies designed to capture the radiant energy of the sun or the kinetic energy of the wind must accommodate the inherent randomness of these sources. Nature’s tendency to favor disorder over order (i.e., the 2nd law of thermodynamics) complicates the goal of extracting net energy from sources that rely directly on meteorological conditions. Moreover, the engineering devices deployed to convert these sources into electricity are subject to physical laws that limit their practical efficiency actually converting solar radiation and moving air into useful energy.
Centuries of searching for chemically compatible materials for a battery that can store significant energy, charge quickly, sustain many charge-discharge cycles, and do so safely and reliably have yielded batteries capable of powering appliances but still not well suited to powering vehicles or electric grids. Todays’ electric cars use a considerable amount of energy to transport their own battery packs. Utility scale batteries require massive capital outlays for equipment that offers hours, not days, of storage capacity. Huge economic rewards await those who can solve the technical puzzle of safe, reliable, energy dense batteries, but so far this object remains elusive.
The technical problem of reliably removing carbon dioxide molecules from a mixed gas has been solved. Nonetheless, the removal process requires significant energy that reduces the net amount of useful energy generated when burning hydrocarbons. After decades of research and development, removing CO2 from a post combustion waste stream still requires 20-30% of the total energy generated under ideal conditions.
Clever engineering can finesse technical challenges but cannot overcome fundamental forces of nature. The technologies proposed for meeting future carbon-neutral energy commitments rely on manipulating materials and energy at increasingly microscopic scales.
Typically, proposed technologies rely on employing sophisticated control systems or highly engineered materials that improve efficiency outcomes. However, even pilot-scale advances in green energy technologies may offer little proof of their success when scaled up to mass production and consumption as the same strict tolerances and controlled conditions become more difficult to achieve.
Successful technologies may not succeed instantly and need to emerge over time, but their success cannot be forced by government fiat or the mandates of Five-Year Plans. Widely diffused technologies generally exploit sound scientific principles that benefit the humans they are intended to serve. They offer economic benefit by adding value to goods and services that consumers are willing to pay for. They typically rely on some scientific phenomenon that can be enhanced through the diligence of engineers to innovate in applying it. For example, engineers have learned to control how we burn fuels to create optimal conditions for efficient heat generation and heat transport in power plants, homes and vehicles.
The history of growth in digital processing and communication similarly relies on repeatedly exploiting basic principles in solid state physics with greater and greater engineering skill.
Confidence that green technologies can scale to dominate national energy systems remains based more on marketing claims than on demonstrated operational experience. The national goals set for 2050 present a supreme technological challenge to reduce environmental fallout while raising living standards for billions around the globe. Neither rich nor poor nations can afford to invest in technologies that achieve questionable benefits at the expense of accessible, reliable energy services for its citizens. Technologies that do not scale are destined to remain boutique technologies, the purview of the rich, environmental activists, and politicians that seize upon them to make empty promises.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Democrat-led House passes billions for EVs as Consumer Reports rates them poor for reliability
President Biden's Build Back Better Act includes about $33 billion in tax incentives for the purchase of EVs and $7.5 billion to expand charging infrastructure.
justthenews.com
Democrat-led House passes billions for EVs as Consumer Reports rates them poor for reliability
President Biden's Build Back Better Act includes about $33 billion in tax incentives for the purchase of EVs and $7.5 billion to expand charging infrastructure.
Updated: November 28, 2021 - 10:48pm
The Democrat-led House approved billions of taxpayer dollars for electric vehicles as Consumer Reports assigned poor reliability ratings for some of the newest electric models.
Gasoline and gas-hybrid vehicles rated highest, according to the Consumer Reports 2021 Auto Reliability Report.
Tesla, which manufactures only fully electric vehicles, ranked at the bottom of the list next to Lincoln.
According to CNBC, Consumer Reports "surveyed owners of more than 300,000 vehicles from model years 2000 to 2021, and used that data to make predictions about 269 different 2022 model year vehicles."
According to a Consumer Reports analysis of their survey, "fully-electric SUVs are among the least reliable vehicles."
The Audi E-tron and Tesla Model X came in last in their segment for reliability.
Consumer Reports no longer recommends electric models from Audi, Kia and Porsche.
"High-end electric-powered Sport Utility Vehicles are among the least reliable vehicles, but NOT because of their relatively simple powertrains," reads the latest Consumer Reports reliability report. "Complex electronics are their Achilles Heel, at least for now."
President Biden's Build Back Better Act, passed by the House on Nov. 19, includes about $33 billion in tax incentives for the purchase of EVs. A $7,500 credit jumps up to $12,500 if an individual purchases a union-made EV.
The workforces at Toyota and Honda are not unionized. Toyota has been trying to gain support among the public to oppose the special union tax break, arguing that it penalizes consumers for choosing to buy an EV from a nonunion automaker.
The legislation the House passed also includes $7.5 billion to expand EV charging infrastructure nationally.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
The Democrats Are Driving Up Energy Prices on Purpose
The Democrats Are Driving Up Energy Prices on Purpose
rumble.com
The Democrats Are Driving Up Energy Prices on Purpose (Josh Mandel)
Bannons War Room Published November 29, 2021
Last edited:
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INSANE: World Economic Forum's Predictions for 2030 Include No Property Ownership, Diminished USA, and Syrian CEO's | The Gateway Pundit | by Joe Hoft
The World Economic Forum (WEF) released its 8 predictions for the world in the year 2030. They are insane.
www.thegatewaypundit.com
INSANE: World Economic Forum’s Predictions for 2030 Include No Property Ownership, Diminished USA, and Syrian CEO’s
By Joe Hoft
Published November 30, 2021 at 7:00am
The World Economic Forum (WEF) released its 8 predictions for the world in the year 2030.
They are insane.
The WEF made 8 predictions for the year 2030. Here they are with some comments.
This sounds like Marxism 101.
Using China, the most polluted country on earth as an example for a carbon tax is ludicrous.
The Marxists cheer as the only country stopping them from their world take over is destroyed from within.
Humans become machines and life is no longer relished for the sacred being it is.
How can you have any pudding when you don’t eat your peas?
Syrian refugees will take over after BLM becomes SRM.
When the values that built the West are gone, so is civilization.
People will be begging to get off of this planet if the WEF’s predictions are right.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Lurch speaks on coal…
Posted by Kane on December 2, 2021 12:12 pm
.11 min
‘We have to phase out coal plants five times faster’
marsh
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Figures: US Oil Reserves Released by Joe Biden to Go China and India -- Will Not Put a Dent in US Gas Prices Here at Home | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft
Two weeks ago Joe Biden announced he was going to open the US oil reserves.
www.thegatewaypundit.com
Figures: US Oil Reserves Released by Joe Biden to Go China and India — Will Not Put a Dent in US Gas Prices Here at Home
By Jim Hoft
Published December 2, 2021 at 2:35pm
Two weeks ago Joe Biden announced he was going to open the US oil reserves. This was after he spent the last year blocking pipelines and production here in the United States.
Now we know that the oil reserves are expected to go to India and China.
Who could have guessed it?
And this move by Joe Biden will not put a dent in US gas prices at the pump.
According to the AAA website, US gas prices will not be affected at all after this move.
But maybe China and India will see a price drop?
FOX Business Network reported:
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Michigan Gov. Whitmer withdraws federal suit attempting to stop construction of Line 5 oil pipeline
The governor says she is pivoting legal strategies and will focus on a state lawsuit instead
justthenews.com
Michigan Gov. Whitmer withdraws federal suit attempting to stop construction of Line 5 oil pipeline
The governor says she is pivoting legal strategies and will focus on a state lawsuit instead
Updated: December 2, 2021 - 10:25am
Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer has withdrawn a federal lawsuit against Canadian energy company Enbridge that had been filed in an attempt to shut down the Line 5 pipeline.
Whitmer said earlier this week the state is instead "shifting its legal strategy" and will focus instead on a state lawsuit filed by Attorney General Dana Nessel.
Nessel said in a statement, "I fully support the Governor in her decision to dismiss the federal court case and instead focus on our ongoing litigation in state court. The state court case is the quickest and most viable path to permanently decommission Line 5. The Governor and I continue to be aligned in our commitment to protect the Great Lakes and this dismissal today will help us advance that goal."
Whitmer has drawn consistent criticism for her attempt to shutdown the pipeline, which would cause a loss of jobs in her state, in addition to adding to the already rising cost of energy.
"I am hopeful other lawsuits meet the same fate as this one. We need practicality as we approach this challenge, not pointless litigation and partisan stubbornness," said state GOP Rep. Greg Markkanen.
Fellow GOP state Rep. John Damoose said, "Our officials must stop threatening to shut down the pipeline – a disastrous proposal that would cut off fuel for our communities and increase costs for families."
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(EU)
www.thegatewaypundit.com
Godless EU Equality Minister Helena Dalli Drops Plan to Erase Christmas After Vatican Backlash
By Jim Hoft
Published December 3, 2021 at 7:30am
Godless EU Equality Commissioner Helena Dalli proposed new rules for the European Union this year changing the name of Christmas to “Holiday period.” Dalli also urged Europeans to drop the use of the names Mary and John.
We are witnessing the end of Western society and culture.
What a heart-breaking development..
Dalli backtracked on her proposals but only after the Vatican denounced the move.
Newsmax reported:
Godless EU Equality Minister Helena Dalli Drops Plan to Erase Christmas After Vatican Backlash | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft
Godless EU Equality Commissioner Helena Dalli proposed new rules for the European Union this year changing the name of Christmas to “Holiday period.” Dalli also urged Europeans to drop the use of the names Mary and John.
www.thegatewaypundit.com
Godless EU Equality Minister Helena Dalli Drops Plan to Erase Christmas After Vatican Backlash
By Jim Hoft
Published December 3, 2021 at 7:30am
Godless EU Equality Commissioner Helena Dalli proposed new rules for the European Union this year changing the name of Christmas to “Holiday period.” Dalli also urged Europeans to drop the use of the names Mary and John.
We are witnessing the end of Western society and culture.
What a heart-breaking development..
Dalli backtracked on her proposals but only after the Vatican denounced the move.
Newsmax reported:
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Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Rabobank: The IMF Warning Of "Economic Collapse" Should Get Headlines
FRIDAY, DEC 03, 2021 - 08:49 AM
By Michael Every of Rabobank
"Economic Collapse" you say?
The IMF are warning of “economic collapse”, which should get headlines. Not because the IMF have any kind of track record of being timely or right about anything, but because the Fund so rarely says anything negative for fear of being seen as precipitating the crises which the policies it imposes always end up creating anyway. Besides a total lack of surprise on first seeing the headline, my initial thought was “Yes, but where?” There are so many candidates as:
- Supply chain issues are being swept out to sea in lieu of having a rug large enough. (A ship outside a port is not at a port; a container dumped outside a port is not in a port – success!)
- Just about everyone at the Fed now says tapering needs to be accelerated and rate hikes happen far sooner than we had thought. On top of all the debt we added under Covid. The curve flattening we see speaks volumes on that.
- Janet Yellen says "I'm ready to retire the word transitory. I can agree that that hasn't been an apt description of what we're dealing with." What adjective is she thinking of instead as she pushes more stimulus for groups with the highest marginal propensity to consume without addressing supply-chain issues? Confusingly, Yellen also said the Fed should keep a close eye on rising wages to avoid a 70’s-style "wage-price spiral". THIS IS NOT HER JOB, and without wage gains there is no way to escape the economic paradigm she seems determined to shift…or is it OK to give people benefits, but not for them to earn that money?
- Oil prices
- The US government may see a shut down as soon as this evening, and perhaps even technical debt default, with just one senator now able to force this to happen.
- The Australian Financial Review plaintively asked yesterday how long the can can be kicked on the $7 trillion debt Chinese developers are carrying. Kaisa is now the new Evergrande, it seems, which I was being told repeatedly was a firm-specific “contained” issue a few months ago. It wasn’t. It isn’t. It cannot be given the scale of borrowing and the policy shift away from bubbles. But that doesn’t mean we are going to get a Chinese GFC – just a long growth slowdown, with real financial pain for some investors, and the likelihood surely being that foreign investors are near the top of that list?
- On which note, the race from both the US and the Chinese sides to stop offshore listings of Chinese firms continues apace – with Didi taking the lead in a move back to Hong Kong.
- Moreover, China is warning China-linked US businesses: you cannot ‘make a fortune in silence’, with Vice-foreign minister Xie Feng telling them to push the White House towards a ‘rational’ China policy and end ‘ideological’ conflicts over trade and tech. Many US firms of course will, and if you look at alleged Democratic attempts to drop human rights provisions on imports from Xinjiang in pending legislation, some US politicians are already receptive. However, this also risks making some other politicians warier of US business being in China, and there is an election in 2022. Or, as the WTA show, some firms may just act unilaterally.
- Turkey is slashing rates in the face of rising inflation – which only developed economies can, while not understanding “transitory”. As the lira collapses against the Dollar, Ankara seems to be sending the signal this FX metric does not matter. If it is wrong, the consequences will be painful: hyperinflation is mentioned in a far from unconnected economy. Yet if it is right, the message for the US ought to be clear: and Turkey is extremely important in geostrategic terms.
- The US warns Russia of “terrible consequences” if it moves on Ukraine, as Moscow says Ukraine’s possible move to retake Russian enclaves is a risk to it, giving both the US and Russia a casus belli - yet only one with a military force in place. Russia is also putting missiles on islands contested by Japan.
- The US and Iran are pessimistic about the 2015 nuclear deal, and Israel defiant, as Tehran negotiates how you should in the Middle East – as if you can walk away. By contrast, the US is negotiating like the 1980’s “Wilma, that bird stole my hairpiece!” tourists or European diplomats who think box-ticking stops deadly ticking boxes.) "I have to tell you, recent moves, recent rhetoric, don't give us a lot of cause for ... optimism," says Secretary of State Blinken, trying to keep a poker-face against Russia and Iran (and China) simultaneously, while holding a pair of 2s. (With three US aces not being used ‘because reasons’.)
- OPEC+ may have stuck to a looming output hike, but oil did not fall for long, and longer-term European electricity prices are back at record highs. Imagine if the Russia/Ukraine and Iran thing goes wrong.
- In France, Les Républicains voted for hard-right Ciotti in the first round of voting for their presidential candidate over the better-known ‘French sovereignty first’ Barnier: the victor wants a referendum ‘to stop mass immigration’, and to set up ‘a French Guantánamo bay’. If he wins, he will be competing against Le Pen, who needs no explanation, and newcomer Zemmour, who is literally running on a “they will not replace us” platform. And President Macron, who is hardly a cultural leftist of late, having just reintroduced Greek and Latin into schools. Of course, none of this has anything to do with ECB acronyms, so markets will blindly shrug it all off, (hard) right?
- Regardless, markets are already seeing lunatic volatility anyway, with hedge funds allegedly piling out, retail pundits piling in, and some funds almost certainly seeing year-to-date gains made via let’s-ignore-underlying-risks-and-buy-all-of-the-things strategies suddenly wiped out, leaving them only a few trading days between now and year end to ensure their books don’t close looking as ugly as the IMF’s description of the economic outlook. Expect Hail Mary trading in response?
Remind me again – how did these very poor countries get so much debt without servicing ability in the first place? Why wasn’t the IMF advising capital controls and Hamiltonian-style growth models to prevent it? And why aren’t these countries allowed to tell their central banks to buy all their worthless assets at par to bail everyone out? After all, that’s what developed economies get to do!
On top of this we also have a US payrolls report today that may actually matter – and regular readers will know it’s rare that I say that. The expectation is 550K after 531K last month.
Anything stronger or weaker and goodness knows where Powell, Yellen, curves, the Dollar, China, Turkey, Russia, and Iran, as well as Europe (and US tourists in it shouting “Wilma, that bird stole my hairpiece!”) will sit. Or slump.
Hey, but Happy Friday.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Rep. Devin Nunes: Democrats Create Water Crisis, Blame Global Warming
Democrats create electricity and water shortages and wildfires while blaming "climate change" and "global warming," Rep. Devin Nunes said.
www.breitbart.com
Exclusive — Rep. Devin Nunes: California Democrats Create Water Shortages, Brownouts, Wildfires and Blame ‘Global Warming’
ROBERT KRAYCHIK3 Dec 2021104
Democrats impose policies that create electricity and water shortages and wildfires while blaming “climate change” and “global warming,” Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) noted on Friday’s edition of the Breitbart News Daily podcast with host Alex Marlow.
“California is not out of water because of global warming,” Nunes stated. “These fires aren’t happening because of global warming, Your electricity price isn’t going up because of global warming and not [having] enough solar panels. These are bad policies.”
Audio on website 1:11:08 min
Nunes highlighted California’s planned shutdown of its only nuclear power plant as an example of how Democrat policies — marketed as “environmental” — artificially increase energy costs.
He said, “I know they really want the nuclear power plant closed, but … they’re worried [that if they] close it, we’re going to go from brownouts – or just rolling brownouts -– to blackouts, and that’s where this is going to head.”
Water shortages across California are also driven by leftist “environmental” politics, Nunes noted.
“For going on 40 years now, there’s been an attack by the radical left on every industry in California,” he stated. “It started with agriculture [with] the radical left, the environmental greens going after our water supply, and essentially what they’ve done is they’ve run us out of out of water.”
View: https://soundcloud.com/breitbart/rep-devin-nunes-r-ca-december-3-2021
23:11 min
Nunes linked California’s wildfires to the state’s poor forest management policies grounded in ostensibly environmental concerns.
“Why are the forests burning up?” he asked. “Well, you’re told in school — and you’re told by the mainstream media — you’re told it’s global warming. The world is ending. [Media show] a fire in the background and you think it must be global warming, la-dee-da, but it’s not. The timber is burning up because they ended the timber industry 20 years ago. If you don’t bring [fuelwood] out of the mountains, guess what? It burns, and that’s what we’re doing.”
Nunes warned of worsening economic damage across California due to the state’s increasingly onerous government.
He concluded, “For the last few years, it’s been the golden goose, which is Silicon Valley and venture capital. Now I believe that the golden goose’s head’s been cut off. I could be wrong about this, but you’ve seen just in the last few years long-time companies like HP, Oracle, Tesla — one of the biggest companies — all have moved out of the state.”
marsh
On TB every waking moment
America's Shocking Descent Into a Feudal 3rd World Society
The Left is quickly transforming the United States into a Third World S*hole, beginning with Democrat cities and the acceptance of crime with few repercussions and whatever filth protected classes such as the homeless choose to leave. Sites to shoot up drugs are proliferating with one recently...
www.independentsentinel.com
America’s Shocking Descent Into a Feudal 3rd World Society
M. Dowling
December 4, 2021
The Left is quickly transforming the United States into a Third World S*hole, beginning with Democrat cities and the acceptance of crime with few repercussions and whatever filth protected classes such as the homeless choose to leave. Sites to shoot up drugs are proliferating with one recently established in New York City by communist Mayor Bill de Blasio, née Warren Wilhelm.
The new rule is stealing is okay. Multimillionaire actor Seth Rogen, who is well-guarded, claims thefts from cars are minor things to lose. For him, that might be true, but not the rest of us peons.
Unfortunately, it is the ideology spreading around cities like San Francisco and LA, where homeless and other vagabonds can break into anyone’s car without fear of repercussions. In those cities, people can steal up to $950 per theft without any problem at all. They can then do whatever they want with the stolen goods.
Victor Davis Hanson calls it Third Worldization: the utter breakdown of the law and the ability of the rich within such a feudal society to find ways to avoid the violent chaos.
VDH, who has traveled throughout the mid-East, southern Europe, Mexico, and Asia Minor for the past 45 years, said contemporary America bears common characteristics to Third Word Society.
“Whether in Cairo or Naples, theft was commonplace. Yet property crimes were almost never seriously prosecuted,” he wrote at RealClearPolitics.
“In a medieval-type society of two rather than three classes, the rich in walled estates rarely worry that much about thievery. Crime is written off as an intramural problem of the poor, especially when the middle class is in decline or nonexistent.”
He does cite differences in America’s new criminality, however.
“One is the virtual impunity of it. Thieves now brazenly swarm a store, ransack, steal, and flee with the merchandise without worry of arrest.
“Second, the Left often justifies crime as a sort of righteous payback against a supposedly exploitative system. So, the architect of the so-called 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, preened of the riotous destruction of property during the summer of 2020: “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.”
“Third Worldization reflects the asymmetry of law enforcement. Ideology and money, not the law, adjudicate who gets arrested and tried, and who does not,” he states.
There were 120 days of continuous looting, arson, and lethal violence during the summer of 2020. Rioters burned courthouses, police precincts, and an iconic church. About 14,000 were arrested but were released without bail. Most had charges dropped. Very few are awaiting charges, VDH points out. [Now we have smash and grab, a logical extension of Democrat policies.]
By contrast, the one-day rampage on the Capitol on J6 resulted in solitary confinement and harsh jail conditions, even for misdemeanors. They included lengthy prison stays for hundreds and is now the subject of a witch hunt committee run by Democrats and two never Trumpers.
The convicted J6 rioters or simple paraders are facing long prison sentences, and many are given court-appointed deprogrammers for lawyers.
VDH writes: A common denominator to recent controversies at the Justice Department, CIA, FBI, and Pentagon is that all these agencies under dubious pretexts have investigated American citizens with little or no justification – after demonizing their targets as “treasonous,” “domestic terrorists,” “white supremacists,” or “racists.”
“In the Third World, basic services like power, fuel, transportation, and water are characteristically unreliable: in other words, much like a frequent California brownout,” VDH continues.
“I’ve been on five flights in my life where it was announced there was not enough fuel to continue to the scheduled destination. The plane was required either to turn around or land somewhere on the way. One such aborted flight took off from Cairo, another from southern Mexico. The other three were this spring and summer inside the United States.”
While in Algiers and other similar places, VDH saw beggars sleeping on sidewalks, but they couldn’t compare “to the encampments of present-day Fresno, Los Angeles, Sacramento, or San Francisco. Tens of thousands live on sidewalks and in open view use them to defecate, urinate, inject drugs, and dispose of refuse.”
“In the old Third World, extreme wealth and poverty existed in close proximity. It was common to see peasants on horse-drawn wagons a few miles from coastal villas. But there is now far more contiguous wealth and poverty in Silicon Valley. In Redwood City and East Palo Alto, multiple families cram into tiny bungalows and garages, often a few blocks from tony Atherton,” he says.
The rich navigate around the misery of others ignoring them except when virtue signaling and telling the rest of us what to do.
Listen this related video on feudalism:
Rumble video
Victor Davis Hanson on the pre-civilization we are heading for --RESIST 5:39 min
marsh
On TB every waking moment
New Study Finds that Global Carbon Emissions Have Been Flat for a Decade Despite the Leftist Hysteria | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft
Despite the hysterical predictions from unhinged globalists like Al Gore and Sandy Cortez, the total global carbon emissions have been flat for at least 10 years.
www.thegatewaypundit.com
New Study Finds that Global Carbon Emissions Have Been Flat for a Decade Despite the Leftist Hysteria
By Jim Hoft
Published December 4, 2021 at 6:31pm
Despite the hysterical predictions from unhinged globalists like Al Gore and Sandy Cortez, the total global carbon emissions have been flat for at least 10 years.
But facts don’t matter to committed globalists and radical socialists who want to destroy the US energy sector and make the US dependent on the Chinese regime.
Carbon Brief reported:
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Princeton physicist Dr. Will Happer: ‘Is climate change a problem? The answer is NO, it’s not a problem at all & co2 is not a problem at all’
Via CLINTEL: William Happer, one of the most well-known climate optimists/realists in the world, visited The Netherlands on November 15 and 16, on the invitation of CLINTEL. Happer is a phys…
www.climatedepot.com
Princeton physicist Dr. Will Happer: ‘Is climate change a problem? The answer is NO, it’s not a problem at all & co2 is not a problem at all’
Dr. Happer: "The rationale for the crusade against co2, it's almost a religious thing people believe in." .. What are the facts? Is climate change a problem? The answer is NO, it's not a problem at all and co2 is not a problem at all."
1:09:18 min
Via CLINTEL: William Happer, one of the most well-known climate optimists/realists in the world, visited The Netherlands on November 15 and 16, on the invitation of CLINTEL. Happer is a physicist, professor emeritus at Princeton University, former (climate) advisor in the Trump Administration and founder of the US thinktank the CO2 Coalition.
Happer gave a CLINTEL Lecture (full talk with Dutch subtitles) in Amsterdam in which he restated that extra CO2 is no problem for the climate and for humanity. He even thinks that it is beneficial because of the positive effects on plant growth and agriculture.
He also spoke about this theme in two interviews he gave during his visit. The first one, done by public broadcaster Ongehoord Nederland, can be found here. The second one, by De Groene Rekenkamer, can be found here
46:00 min
15:05 min
marsh
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Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Now Or Never: The Great 'Transition' Must Be Imposed
SATURDAY, DEC 04, 2021 - 11:30 PM
Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
A new wave of restrictions, more lockdowns, and – eventually – trillions of dollars in new stimmie cheques may be in prospect...
Were you following the news this last week? Vaccine mandates are everywhere: one country, after another, is doubling-down, to try to force, or legally compel, full population vaccination.
The mandates are coming because of the massive uptick in Covid – most of all in the places where the experimental mRNA gene therapies were deployed en masse. And (no coincidence), this ‘marker’ has come just as U.S. Covid deaths in 2021 have surpassed those of 2020. This has happened, despite the fact that last year, no Americans were vaccinated (and this year 59% are vaccinated). Clearly no panacea, this mRNA ‘surge’.
Of course, the Pharma-Establishment know that the vaccines are no panacea. There are ‘higher interests’ at play here. It is driven rather by fear that the window for implementing its series of ‘transitions’ in the U.S. and Europe is closing. Biden still struggles to move his ‘Go-Big’ social spending plan and green agenda transition through Congress by the midterm election in a year’s time. And the inflation spike may well sink Biden’s Build Back Better agenda (BBB) altogether.
Time is short. The midterm elections are but 12 months away, after which the legislative window shuts. The Green ‘transition’ is stuck too (by concerns that moving too fast to renewables is putting power grids at risk and elevating heating costs unduly), and the Pharma establishment will be aware that a new B.1.1.529 variant has made a big jump in evolution with 32 mutations to its spike protein. This makes it “clearly very different” from previous variants, which may drive further waves of infection evading ‘vaccine defences’.
Translation: a new wave of restrictions, more lockdowns, and – eventually – trillions of dollars in new stimmie cheques may be in prospect. And what of inflation then, we might ask.
It’s a race for the U.S. and Europe, where the pandemic is back in full force across Europe, to push through their re-set agendas, before variants seize up matters with hospitals crowded with the vaccinated and non-vaccinated; with riots in the streets, and mask mandates at Christmas markets (that’s if they open at all). A big reversal was foreshadowed by this week’s news: vaccine mandates and lockdowns, even in highly vaccinated areas, are returning. And people don’t like it.
The window for the Re-Set may be fast closing. One observer, noting all the frenetic Élite activity, has asked ‘have we finally reached peak Davos?’. Is the turn to authoritarianism in Europe a sign of desperation as fears grow that the various ‘transitions’ planned under the ‘re-set’ umbrella (financial, climate, vaccine and managerial expert technocracy) may never be implemented?
Cut short rather, as spending plans are hobbled by accelerating inflation; as the climate transition fails to find traction amongst poorer states (and at home, too); as technocracy is increasingly discredited by adverse pandemic outcomes; and Modern Monetary Theory hits a wall, because – well, inflation again.
Are you paying attention yet? The great ‘transition’ is conceived as a hugely expensive shift towards renewables, and to a new digitalised, roboticised corporatism. It requires Big (inflationary) funding to be voted through, and a huge parallel (inflationary) expenditure on social support to be approved by Congress as well. The social provision is required to mollify all those who subsequently will find themselves without jobs, because of the climate ‘transition’ and the shift to a digitalised corporate sphere. But – unexpectedly for some ‘experts’ – inflation has struck – the highest statistics in 30 years.
There are powerful oligarchic interests behind the Re-Set. They do not want to see it go down, nor see the West eclipsed by its ‘competitors’. So it seems that rather than back off, they will go full throttle and try to impose compliance on their electorates: tolerate no dissidence.
A 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless” by then dissident and future Czech President Vaclav Havel begins mockingly that, “A SPECTRE is haunting Eastern Europe: the spectre of what in the West is called ‘dissent’”. “This spectre has not appeared out of thin air. It is a natural and inevitable consequence of the present historical phase of the system it is haunting.” Well, today, as Michael Every of Rabobank notes, “the West has polarisation, mass protests, riots, talk of obligatory vaccinations in Europe, and Yanis Varoufakis arguing capitalism is already dead; and that a techno-feudalism looms”. Now, prompting even greater urgency, are the looming U.S. midterms. Trump’s return (even if confined just to Congress), would cut the legs from under BBB, and ice-up Brussels too.
It was however, precisely this tech revolution, to which Varoufakis calls attention, that both re-defined the Democrat constituency, and turned tech oligarchs into billionaires. Through algorithmically creating a magnetism of like-minded content, cascaded out to its customers, it has both smothered intellectual curiosity, and created the ‘un-informed party’, which is the today’s Managerial Class – the party of the credentialed meritocracy; the party, above all, smugly seeing themselves as the coming era’s ‘winners’ – unwilling to risk a look behind the curtain; to put their ‘safe space’ to the test.
Perversely, this cadre of professionally-corralled academics, analysts, and central bankers, all insist that they completely believe in their memes: That their techno-approach is both effective, and of benefit to humanity – oblivious to the dissenting views, swirling around them, down in the interstices of the internet.
The main function then of such memes today, whether issued by the Pharma Vaccine ‘Command’; the MMT ‘transition’ Command; the energy ‘transition’ Command; or the global managerial technocracy ‘transition’, is to draw a ‘Maginot line’ – a defensive ideological boundary, a “Great Narrative” as it were – between ‘the truth’ as defined by the ruling classes, and with that of any other ‘truth’ that contradicts their narrative. That is to say, it is about compliance.
It was well understood that all these transitions would overturn long-standing human ways of life, that are ancient and deeply rooted and trigger dissidence – which is why new forms of social ‘discipline’ would be required. (Incidentally, the EU leadership already refer to their their official mandates as ‘Commands’). Such disciplines are now being trialled in Europe – with the vaccine mandates (even though scientists are telling them that vaccines cannot be the silver bullet for which they yearn). As one high ‘lodge’ member, favouring a form of global governance notes, to make people accept such reforms, you must frighten them.
Yes, the collective of ‘transitions’ must have their ‘Big, overarching Narrative’ – however hollow, it rings (i.e. the struggle to defend democracy against authoritarianism). But it is the nature of today’s cultural-meme war that ultimately its content becomes little more than a rhetorical shell, lacking all sincerity at its core.
It serves principally, as decoration to a ‘higher order’ project: The preservation of global ‘rules of the road’, framed to reflect U.S. and allied interests, as the base from which the clutch of ‘transitions’ can be raised up into a globally managed order which preserves the Élite’s influence and command of major assets.
This politics of crafted, credentialised meme-politics is here to stay, and now is ‘everywhere’. It has long crossed the partisan divide. The wider point here – is that the mechanics of meme-mobilisation is being projected, not just in the western ‘home’ (at a micro-level), but abroad, into American ‘foreign policy’ too (i.e. at the macro-level).
And, just as in the domestic arena, where the notion of politics by suasion is lost (with vaccine mandates enforced by water-cannon, and riot police), so too, the notion of foreign policy managed through argument, or diplomacy, has been lost too.
Western foreign policy becomes less about geo-strategy, but rather is primordially focussed on the three ‘big iconic issues’ – China, Russia and Iran – that can be given an emotional ‘charge’ in order to profitably mobilise certain identified ‘constituencies’ in the U.S. domestic cultural war.
All the various U.S. political strands play this game.
The aim is to ‘nudge’ domestic American psyches (and those of their allies) into mobilisation on some issue (such as more protectionism for business against Chinese competition), or alternatively, imagined darkly, in order to de-legitimise an opposition, or to justify failures. These mobilisations are geared to gaining relative domestic partisan advantage, rather than having strategic purpose.
When this credentialled meme-war took hold in the U.S., millions of people were already living a reality in which facts no longer mattered at all; where things that never happened officially, happened. And other things that obviously happened never happened: not officially, that is. Or, were “far-right extremist conspiracy theories,” “fake news,” or “disinformation,” or whatever, despite the fact that people knew that they weren’t.
Russia and China therefore face a reality in which European and U.S. élites are heading in the opposite direction to epistemological purity and well-founded argument. That is to suggest, the new ‘normal’ is about generating a lot of contradictory realities, not just contradictory ideologies, but actual mutually-exclusive ‘realities’, which could not possibly simultaneously exist … and which are intended to bemuse adversaries – and nudge them off-balance.
This is a highly risky game, for it forces a resistance stance on those targeted states – whether they seek it, or not. It underlines that politics is no more about considered strategy: It is about being willing for the U.S. to lose strategically (even militarily), in order to win politically. Which is to say gaining an ephemeral win of having prompted an favourable unconscious psychic response amongst American voters.
Russia, China, Iran are but ‘images’ prized mainly for their potential for being loaded with ‘nudge’ emotional-charge in this western cultural war, (of which these states are no part). The result is that these states become antagonists to the American presumption to define a global ‘rules of the road’ to which all must adhere.
These countries understand exactly the point of these value and rights-loaded ‘rules’. It is to force compliance on these states to acquiesce to the ‘transitions, or, to suffer isolation, boycott and sanction – in a similar way to the choices being forced on those in the West not wishing to vaccinate (i.e. no jab; no job).
This approach reflects an attempt by Team Biden to have it ‘both ways’ with these three ‘Iconic States’: To welcome compliance on ‘transition issues’, but to be adversarial over any dissidence to mounting a rules framework that can raise the ‘transitions’ from the national, to the supra-national plane.
But do the U.S. practitioners of meme-politics, absorb and comprehend that the stance by Russia-China – in riposte – is not some same-ilk counter-mobilisation done to ‘make a point’?
That their vision does stand at variance with ‘the rules’? Do they see that their ‘red lines’ may indeed be ‘red lines’ literally? Is the West now so meme-addicted, it cannot any longer recognise real national interests?
This is key: When the West speaks, it is forever looking over its shoulder, at the domestic, and wider psychic impact when it is ‘making a point’ (such as practicing attacks by nuclear-capable bombers as close to Russia’s borders as they dare). And that when Russia and China say, ‘This is our Red Line’, it is no meme – they really mean it.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Ferguson: Omicron Sounds The Death Knell For Globalization 2.0
MONDAY, DEC 06, 2021 - 05:00 AM
Authored by Niall Ferguson, op-ed via Bloomberg.com,
On top of an intensifying cold war between the U.S. and China and other seismic changes, the rapid spread of Covid-19’s newest variant could finish off our most recent phase of global integration.
“Somewhere out there,” I wrote here two weeks ago, “may lurk what I grimly call the ‘omega variant’ of SARS-CoV-2: vaccine-evading, even more contagious than delta, equally or more deadly. According to the medical scientists I read and talk to … the probability of this nightmare scenario is very low, but it is not zero.”
Indeed. Little did I know, but even as I wrote those words something that appears to fit this description was spreading rapidly in South Africa’s Gauteng province: not the omega variant, but the omicron variant.
As I write today, major uncertainties remain, but what we know so far is not good. People are emotionally predisposed to look on the bright side — we are all sick of this pandemic and want it to be over — so it pains me to write this. Nevertheless, I’ll stick to my policy of applying history to the best available data, even if it means telling you what you really don’t want to hear.
First the data: South African cases were up 39% on Friday, to 16,055. The test positivity rate rose from 22.4% to 24.3%, suggesting that the true case number is rising even faster. A Lancet paper suggests that Omicron is likely by far the most transmissible variant yet. There are three possible explanations for this:
- A higher intrinsic reproduction number (R0),
- An advantage in “immune escape” to reinfect recovered people or evade vaccines, or
- Both of the above.
(Reinfection is defined as an individual testing positive for Covid-19 twice, at least 90 days apart.) Since mid-November, the daily number of reinfections in South Africa has jumped far faster than in any previous wave. In November, the hazard ratio was 2.39 for reinfection versus primary infection, meaning that recovered individuals were getting Covid at more than twice the rate of people who had never had Covid before. And this was when omicron made up less than a quarter of confirmed cases. By contrast, the same study found no statistically significant evidence that the beta and delta variants were capable of reinfection. And, crucially, at least some of these new infections are leading to serious illness. On Thursday, the number of Gauteng patients in intensive care for Covid almost doubled from 63 to 106.
Data from a private hospital network in South Africa that has over 240 patients hospitalized with Covid indicate that 32% of the hospitalized patients were fully vaccinated. Note that around three-quarters of the vaccinated in South Africa received the Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE vaccine. The rest got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
Yet these are not the data that worried me the most last week. Those had to do with children. Between Nov. 14 and 28, 455 people were admitted to hospital with Covid-19 in Tshwane metro area, one of the largest hospital systems in Gauteng. Seventy (15%) of those hospitalized were under the age of five; 117 (25%) were under 20. And this is not just a story of precautionary hospitalizations. Twenty of the 70 hospitalized toddlers progressed to “severe” Covid. Up until Oct. 23, before experts estimate omicron began circulating, under-fives represented only 1.8% of cumulative Covid hospital admissions in South Africa. As of Nov. 29, 10% of those now hospitalized in Tshwane were under the age of two.
If this trend holds as omicron spreads to advanced economies — and it is spreading very fast, confirming omicron’s high transmissibility — the market impact could be much bigger than is currently priced in. Unlike with the delta wave, many schools would return to hybrid instruction, parents would withdraw from the labor force to provide childcare and consumption patterns would again shift away from retail, hospitality and face-to-face services. Hospital systems would also face shortages of pediatric intensive care beds, which have not been much needed in prior Covid waves.
South Africa’s top medical advisor Waasila Jassat noted on Dec. 3 that hospitalizations on average are less severe than in previous waves and hospital stays are shorter. But she also noted a “sharp” increase in hospital admissions of under-fives. Children under 10 represent 11% of all hospital admissions reported since Dec. 1.
Here’s what we don’t know yet. We do not know how far prior infection and vaccination will protect against severe disease and death in northern hemisphere countries, where adult vaccination rates are much higher than in South Africa (just 24%). And we do not know if omicron will prove as aggressive toward children in those countries, especially the very young children we have not previously contemplated vaccinating. (Because South Africa has limited testing capacity, we do not know the total number of under-fives infected with omicron in Gauteng, so we do not know what percentage of children are falling sick.) We may not know these things for another week, possibly longer. So panic is not yet warranted. Nor, however, is wishful thinking. It may prove a huge wave of mild illness, signaling the final phase of the transition from pandemic to endemic. But we don’t know that yet.
Now the history.
First, it makes all the difference in the world whether or not children fall gravely ill in a pandemic. Covid has so far spared the very young to an extent rarely seen in the recorded history of respiratory disease pandemics. (The exception seems to be the 1889-90 “Russian flu,” which modern researchers suspect was in fact a coronavirus pandemic.) The great influenza pandemics of 1918-19 and 1957-58 killed the very young as well as the very old. The former also carried off young adults in the prime of life. The latter caused significant excess mortality among teenagers. Up until this point, Covid was the social Darwinist disease: It disproportionately killed the old, the sick and the gullible (the vulnerable people who allowed themselves to be persuaded that the vaccine was more dangerous than the virus).
A hundred years ago, many experts would have hailed such a disease for the same reasons they promoted eugenics. We think differently now. However, emotionally and rationally, we still dread the deaths of children much more than the old, the sick and the foolish. The moment children become seriously ill — as has already happened in Gauteng — the nature of the pandemic fundamentally alters. Risk aversion will be far higher in the Ferguson family, for example, if its youngest members are vulnerable for the first time.
The second historical point is that this may be how our age of globalization ends — in a very different way from its first incarnation just over a century ago. The first age of globalization, from the 1860s until 1914, ended with a bang, not a whimper, with the outbreak of World War I. Within a remarkably short space of time, that conflict halted trade, capital flows and migration between the combatant empires. Moreover, the war and its economic aftershocks strengthened and ultimately empowered new political movements, notably Bolshevism and fascism, that fundamentally repudiated free trade and free capital movements in favor of state control of the economy and autarky. By 1933, the outlook for liberal economic policies seemed so utterly hopeless that, in a lecture he gave in Dublin, even John Maynard Keynes threw in the towel and embraced economic self-sufficiency.
Now, there is an argument (made by my Bloomberg colleague and occasional editor James Gibney) that the pandemic will not kill globalization. I am not so sure. Defined too broadly, to include any kind cross-border interaction, the word loses its usefulness. Yes, there were all kinds of “transnational networks in science, health, entertainment,” as well as increasingly ambitious international agencies between the wars. But the fact that (for example) the Pan European movement was founded by Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi in the 1920s does not mean that the subsequent decades were a triumph of European integration. There was a great deal of international cooperation and cross-border activity between 1939 and 1945, too. That does not mean that the 1940s were a time of globalization. For the word to be meaningful, globalization must refer to relatively higher volumes of trade, capital flows, migration flows and perhaps also cultural integration on a global scale.
On that basis, globalization peaked — or maybe “maxed out” would be more accurate — in around 2007. Calculate it how you like: Whether the ratio of global exports to GDP, the ratio of gross foreign assets to GDP, global or national migrant flows in relation to total population, they all tell the same story of a sustained rise of globalization hitting a peak around 14 years ago.
The economic historian Alan M. Taylor has long argued that we should measure globalization by looking at current account imbalances, which tell us when a lot of trade and lending are happening. On that basis, too, globalization peaked in 2007.
Even Before Covid, Trade and Lending Were Trending Down
Source: Our World in Data from Maurice Obstfeld and Alan M. Taylor, "Global Capital Markets: Integration, Crisis, and Growth," Japan–US Center UFJ Bank Monographs on International Financial Markets; and International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook Database.
Note: The data shown is the average absolute current account balance (as a percentage of GDP) for 15 countries in five-year blocks. The countries in the sample are Argentina, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, U.K., U.S..
Since the financial crisis of 2008-9, however, the volume of world trade has flatlined relative to the volume of industrial production. The U.S. current account deficit peaked in the third quarter of 2006 at -6.3% of GDP. The latest read? -3.3%.
The same story emerges when one turns to migration. The foreign-born share of the U.S. population rose rapidly from its nadir in 1970 (4.7%) to a peak of 13.7% in 2019. But the rate of growth clearly slowed after 2012. It remains below its historic peak of 14.7%, back in 1890. Data for net migration similarly point to peaks prior to the financial crisis. Net emigration from South Asia peaked in 2007, for example. So did net immigration to the United Kingdom.
Not-So-Open Borders
Source: United Nations Population Division
What about cultural globalization? My guess is that peaked in 2012, which was the last year that imported films earned more at the Chinese box office than domestic productions. The highest-grossing movie in the history of the People’s Republic is this year’s “Battle of Lake Changjin,” a Korean War drama in which heroic Chinese troops take on the might of the U.S. Army—and win. (Watch the trailer. Then tell me globalization is going to be fine.)
Part 1 of 2
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Part 2 of 2
What has caused globalization to recede? Let me offer a six-part answer.
First, global economic convergence. This may come as a surprise. An influential story over the past two decades was Branco Milanovic’s thesis that globalization had increased inequality. In particular, Milanovic argued in 2016 that “large real income gains [had] been made by people around the median of the global income distribution and by those in the global top 1%.
However, there [had] been an absence of real income growth for people around the 80-85th percentiles of the global distribution.” He illustrated this argument with a famous “elephant chart” of cumulative income growth between 1988 and 2008 at each percentile of the global income distribution.
On closer inspection, the elephant was a statistical artifact. Strip out the data for Japan, the former Soviet Union and China, and the elephant vanishes. The story Milanovic’s chart told was of the decline of ex-Soviet and Japanese middle-class incomes following the collapse of the USSR and the bursting of Tokyo’s bubble in 1989-90, and the surge of Chinese middle-class incomes, especially after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001.
The real story of globalization turns out to be a sustained reduction in global inequality as Chinese incomes caught up rapidly with those in the rest of the world, combined with big increases in national inequality as the “one percent” in some (not all) countries got a whole lot richer. At the heart of globalization was what Moritz Schularick and I called “Chimerica”—the symbiosis between the Chinese and American economies that allowed American capital to take advantage of low-cost Chinese labor (offshoring or outsourcing), American borrowers to take advantage of abundant Chinese savings, and American consumers to take advantage of cheap Chinese manufactures.
It could not last. In 2003 Chinese unit labor costs were around a third of those in the U.S. By 2018 the two were essentially on a par. In that sense, the glory days of globalization were bound to be numbered. For as Chinese incomes rose, the rationale for relocating production to China was bound to become weaker.
Secondly, and at the same time, new technologies — robotics, three-dimensional printing, artificial intelligence — were rapidly reducing the importance of human labor in manufacturing. With the surge of online commerce and digital services, globalization entered a new phase in which data rather than goods and people crossed borders, even if the Great Firewall of China partly cordoned off China’s internet from the rest of the world’s.
Chimerica, as Schularick and I argued back in 2007, was in many ways a chimera — a monstrous creature with the potential to precipitate a crisis, not least by artificially depressing U.S. interest rates and inflating a real estate bubble. When that crisis struck in 2008-9, it was the third blow to globalization. For those who suffered the heaviest losses in the United States and elsewhere, it was not illogical to blame free trade and immigration. A 2015 study by the McKinsey Global Institute showed clearly that people in the U.S., U.K. and France who saw themselves as “not advancing and not hopeful about the future” were much more likely than more optimistic groups to blame “legal immigrants,” “the influx of foreign goods and services,” and “cheaper foreign labor” for, respectively, “ruining the culture and cohesiveness in our society,” “leading to domestic job losses” and “creating unfair competition to domestic businesses.”
The only surprising thing was that these feelings took as long as seven years to manifest themselves as an organized political backlash against globalization, in the form of Britain’s vote to exit the European Union and America’s vote for Donald Trump. Dani Rodrik’s famous trilemma — which postulated that you could have any two of globalization, democracy and sovereignty — was emphatically answered in 2016: Voters chose democracy and sovereignty over globalization. This was the fourth strike against “the globalists,” a term invented by the populists to give globalization a more easily hateable human face.
The financial crisis and the populist backlash didn’t sound the death knell for globalization.
They merely dialed it back — hence the plateau in trade relative to manufacturing and the modest decline (not collapse) of international capital flows and migration. The fifth blow was the outbreak of Cold War II, which should probably be dated from Vice President Mike Pence’s October 2018 Hudson Institute speech, the first time the Trump administration had taken its anti-Chinese policy beyond the confines of the president’s quixotic trade war (which only modestly reduced the bilateral U.S.-Chinese trade deficit).
Not everyone has come to terms with this new cold war. Joseph Nye (and the administration of President Joe Biden) would still like to believe that the U.S. and China are frenemies engaged in “coopetition.” But Hal Brands and John Lewis Gaddis, John Mearsheimer and Matt Turpin have all come round to my view that this is a cold war — not identical to the last one, but as similar to it as World War II was to World War I. The only question worth debating is whether or not, as in 1950, cold war turns hot. There is no Thucydidean law that says this is inevitable, as Graham Allison has shown. But I agree with Mearsheimer: The risk of a hot war in Cold War II may actually be higher than in Cold War I. Nothing would kill globalization faster than the outbreak of a superpower war over Taiwan. (And “The Battle of Lake Changjin” is blatantly psyching Chinese cinemagoers up for such a conflict.)
The decoupling of the U.S. and Chinese economies would almost certainly have continued even if the sixth blow — the Covid pandemic — had not struck. It has been astounding how little the Biden administration has changed of its predecessor’s China strategy.
However, the pandemic has delivered the coup de grace — “a brutal end to the second age of globalization,” as Nicholas Eberstadt put it last year.
True, the volume of merchandise trade has recovered even more rapidly in 2021 than the World Trade Organization anticipated back in March. But the emergence of a new, contagious and lethal coronavirus has caused a collapse of international travel and tourism. The number of passengers carried by the global airline industry plunged by 60% in 2020. It will be not much better than 50% of its pre-pandemic level this year. International tourist arrivals are down by even more this year than last year — close to 80% below their 2019 level. In Asia, international tourism has all but ceased to exist this year.
Meanwhile, both the U.S. and the Chinese governments keep devising new ways to discourage their nationals from investing in the rival superpower. Didi Global Inc., the Chinese Uber, just announced it is delisting its shares from the New York Stock Exchange. And the pressure mounts on Wall Street financiers — as Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio discovered last week — to wind up their “long China” trade and stop turning a blind eye to genocide in Xinjiang and other human rights abuses. Next up: the campaign to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.
Strikingly, a growing number of Western sports stars and organizations such as the Women’s Tennis Association are already willing to defy Beijing — in the case of the WTA by suspending tournaments in China in response to the disappearance of the tennis star Peng Shuai, who accused a senior Communist Party official of sexually assaulting her. China’s leaders should be even more worried by a recent Chicago Council of World Affairs poll, which showed that just over half of Americans (52%) favor using U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China invades the island — the highest share ever recorded in surveys dating back to 1982.
Last month I asked a leading American lawmaker how he explained the marked growth in public hostility toward the Chinese government. His answer was simple: “People blame China for Covid.” And not without reason, as Matt Ridley’s new book “Viral” makes clear.
For the avoidance of doubt, I do not foresee as complete a collapse of globalization as happened after 1914. Globalization 2.0 seems to be going out with a whimper — or perhaps a persistent cough — rather than with a bang. Income convergence and technological change were bound to reduce its utility. Having overshot by 2007, globalization settled at a lower level after the financial crisis and was less damaged by populist policies like tariffs than might have been anticipated. But the advent of Cold War II and Covid-19 struck two severe blows. How far globalization is rolled back depends on how far the two phenomena persist or worsen.
Maybe — let us pray — the alarming data from Gauteng will not imply a major new wave of illness and death in the wider world. Maybe the omicron variant will not, after all, be that nightmare variant I have feared: more infectious, more lethal, vaccine-evading, not ageist.
But omicron is only the 15th letter in the Greek alphabet. In all of Africa only 7.3% of the population are fully vaccinated and there are countless immunocompromised individuals with HIV. Even if omicron turns out to be, like delta, a variant we can live with, there is still some non-zero chance that at some point we get my “omega variant.” In that scenario, the pandemic does not oblige us, weary as we are of it, by ending, but recurs in a succession of waves extending for years. One begins to wonder if China will ever lift its stringent restrictions on foreign visitors. Under such circumstances, I see little chance of Cold War II reaching the détente phase earlier than Cold War I.
In addition to applying history, I have come to believe that we should also apply science fiction, on the principle that its authors are professionally incentivized to envision plausibly the impact of social, technological and other changes on the future. (Fact: an Italian sci-film called “Omicron,” in which an alien takes over a human body, was released in 1963.) No living author is better at this kind of thing than Neal Stephenson, whose “Snow Crash” coined the word “metaverse,” and whom I got to know — appropriately via Zoom — through my friends at the Santa Fe Institute.
When Stephenson and I met for a late-night Scotch at a bar in Seattle a few weeks back, we swiftly found common ground. Never have I seen a longer list of wines and spirits: We could have scrolled down on the iPad the server handed us for an hour and still not reached the end.
Eventually, we found the malt whisky. And immediately we agreed: Laphroaig — the standard 10-year-old version.
Stephenson’s latest novel is “Termination Shock.” Buy it. You will be catapulted into a future Texas of intolerable heat, man-eating hogs, and other nightmares, the effect of which will be to make your present circumstances seem quite tolerable. Part of Stephenson’s genius is his use of the throwaway detail.
“RVs,” he writes, were “already at a premium because of Covid-19, Covid-23 and Covid-27.”
It’s not really part of the plot, but it stopped my eyeballs in their tracks. And remember: He predicted the metaverse. In 1992.
What has caused globalization to recede? Let me offer a six-part answer.
First, global economic convergence. This may come as a surprise. An influential story over the past two decades was Branco Milanovic’s thesis that globalization had increased inequality. In particular, Milanovic argued in 2016 that “large real income gains [had] been made by people around the median of the global income distribution and by those in the global top 1%.
However, there [had] been an absence of real income growth for people around the 80-85th percentiles of the global distribution.” He illustrated this argument with a famous “elephant chart” of cumulative income growth between 1988 and 2008 at each percentile of the global income distribution.
On closer inspection, the elephant was a statistical artifact. Strip out the data for Japan, the former Soviet Union and China, and the elephant vanishes. The story Milanovic’s chart told was of the decline of ex-Soviet and Japanese middle-class incomes following the collapse of the USSR and the bursting of Tokyo’s bubble in 1989-90, and the surge of Chinese middle-class incomes, especially after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001.
The real story of globalization turns out to be a sustained reduction in global inequality as Chinese incomes caught up rapidly with those in the rest of the world, combined with big increases in national inequality as the “one percent” in some (not all) countries got a whole lot richer. At the heart of globalization was what Moritz Schularick and I called “Chimerica”—the symbiosis between the Chinese and American economies that allowed American capital to take advantage of low-cost Chinese labor (offshoring or outsourcing), American borrowers to take advantage of abundant Chinese savings, and American consumers to take advantage of cheap Chinese manufactures.
It could not last. In 2003 Chinese unit labor costs were around a third of those in the U.S. By 2018 the two were essentially on a par. In that sense, the glory days of globalization were bound to be numbered. For as Chinese incomes rose, the rationale for relocating production to China was bound to become weaker.
Secondly, and at the same time, new technologies — robotics, three-dimensional printing, artificial intelligence — were rapidly reducing the importance of human labor in manufacturing. With the surge of online commerce and digital services, globalization entered a new phase in which data rather than goods and people crossed borders, even if the Great Firewall of China partly cordoned off China’s internet from the rest of the world’s.
Chimerica, as Schularick and I argued back in 2007, was in many ways a chimera — a monstrous creature with the potential to precipitate a crisis, not least by artificially depressing U.S. interest rates and inflating a real estate bubble. When that crisis struck in 2008-9, it was the third blow to globalization. For those who suffered the heaviest losses in the United States and elsewhere, it was not illogical to blame free trade and immigration. A 2015 study by the McKinsey Global Institute showed clearly that people in the U.S., U.K. and France who saw themselves as “not advancing and not hopeful about the future” were much more likely than more optimistic groups to blame “legal immigrants,” “the influx of foreign goods and services,” and “cheaper foreign labor” for, respectively, “ruining the culture and cohesiveness in our society,” “leading to domestic job losses” and “creating unfair competition to domestic businesses.”
The only surprising thing was that these feelings took as long as seven years to manifest themselves as an organized political backlash against globalization, in the form of Britain’s vote to exit the European Union and America’s vote for Donald Trump. Dani Rodrik’s famous trilemma — which postulated that you could have any two of globalization, democracy and sovereignty — was emphatically answered in 2016: Voters chose democracy and sovereignty over globalization. This was the fourth strike against “the globalists,” a term invented by the populists to give globalization a more easily hateable human face.
The financial crisis and the populist backlash didn’t sound the death knell for globalization.
They merely dialed it back — hence the plateau in trade relative to manufacturing and the modest decline (not collapse) of international capital flows and migration. The fifth blow was the outbreak of Cold War II, which should probably be dated from Vice President Mike Pence’s October 2018 Hudson Institute speech, the first time the Trump administration had taken its anti-Chinese policy beyond the confines of the president’s quixotic trade war (which only modestly reduced the bilateral U.S.-Chinese trade deficit).
Not everyone has come to terms with this new cold war. Joseph Nye (and the administration of President Joe Biden) would still like to believe that the U.S. and China are frenemies engaged in “coopetition.” But Hal Brands and John Lewis Gaddis, John Mearsheimer and Matt Turpin have all come round to my view that this is a cold war — not identical to the last one, but as similar to it as World War II was to World War I. The only question worth debating is whether or not, as in 1950, cold war turns hot. There is no Thucydidean law that says this is inevitable, as Graham Allison has shown. But I agree with Mearsheimer: The risk of a hot war in Cold War II may actually be higher than in Cold War I. Nothing would kill globalization faster than the outbreak of a superpower war over Taiwan. (And “The Battle of Lake Changjin” is blatantly psyching Chinese cinemagoers up for such a conflict.)
The decoupling of the U.S. and Chinese economies would almost certainly have continued even if the sixth blow — the Covid pandemic — had not struck. It has been astounding how little the Biden administration has changed of its predecessor’s China strategy.
However, the pandemic has delivered the coup de grace — “a brutal end to the second age of globalization,” as Nicholas Eberstadt put it last year.
True, the volume of merchandise trade has recovered even more rapidly in 2021 than the World Trade Organization anticipated back in March. But the emergence of a new, contagious and lethal coronavirus has caused a collapse of international travel and tourism. The number of passengers carried by the global airline industry plunged by 60% in 2020. It will be not much better than 50% of its pre-pandemic level this year. International tourist arrivals are down by even more this year than last year — close to 80% below their 2019 level. In Asia, international tourism has all but ceased to exist this year.
Meanwhile, both the U.S. and the Chinese governments keep devising new ways to discourage their nationals from investing in the rival superpower. Didi Global Inc., the Chinese Uber, just announced it is delisting its shares from the New York Stock Exchange. And the pressure mounts on Wall Street financiers — as Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio discovered last week — to wind up their “long China” trade and stop turning a blind eye to genocide in Xinjiang and other human rights abuses. Next up: the campaign to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.
Strikingly, a growing number of Western sports stars and organizations such as the Women’s Tennis Association are already willing to defy Beijing — in the case of the WTA by suspending tournaments in China in response to the disappearance of the tennis star Peng Shuai, who accused a senior Communist Party official of sexually assaulting her. China’s leaders should be even more worried by a recent Chicago Council of World Affairs poll, which showed that just over half of Americans (52%) favor using U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China invades the island — the highest share ever recorded in surveys dating back to 1982.
Last month I asked a leading American lawmaker how he explained the marked growth in public hostility toward the Chinese government. His answer was simple: “People blame China for Covid.” And not without reason, as Matt Ridley’s new book “Viral” makes clear.
For the avoidance of doubt, I do not foresee as complete a collapse of globalization as happened after 1914. Globalization 2.0 seems to be going out with a whimper — or perhaps a persistent cough — rather than with a bang. Income convergence and technological change were bound to reduce its utility. Having overshot by 2007, globalization settled at a lower level after the financial crisis and was less damaged by populist policies like tariffs than might have been anticipated. But the advent of Cold War II and Covid-19 struck two severe blows. How far globalization is rolled back depends on how far the two phenomena persist or worsen.
Maybe — let us pray — the alarming data from Gauteng will not imply a major new wave of illness and death in the wider world. Maybe the omicron variant will not, after all, be that nightmare variant I have feared: more infectious, more lethal, vaccine-evading, not ageist.
But omicron is only the 15th letter in the Greek alphabet. In all of Africa only 7.3% of the population are fully vaccinated and there are countless immunocompromised individuals with HIV. Even if omicron turns out to be, like delta, a variant we can live with, there is still some non-zero chance that at some point we get my “omega variant.” In that scenario, the pandemic does not oblige us, weary as we are of it, by ending, but recurs in a succession of waves extending for years. One begins to wonder if China will ever lift its stringent restrictions on foreign visitors. Under such circumstances, I see little chance of Cold War II reaching the détente phase earlier than Cold War I.
In addition to applying history, I have come to believe that we should also apply science fiction, on the principle that its authors are professionally incentivized to envision plausibly the impact of social, technological and other changes on the future. (Fact: an Italian sci-film called “Omicron,” in which an alien takes over a human body, was released in 1963.) No living author is better at this kind of thing than Neal Stephenson, whose “Snow Crash” coined the word “metaverse,” and whom I got to know — appropriately via Zoom — through my friends at the Santa Fe Institute.
When Stephenson and I met for a late-night Scotch at a bar in Seattle a few weeks back, we swiftly found common ground. Never have I seen a longer list of wines and spirits: We could have scrolled down on the iPad the server handed us for an hour and still not reached the end.
Eventually, we found the malt whisky. And immediately we agreed: Laphroaig — the standard 10-year-old version.
Stephenson’s latest novel is “Termination Shock.” Buy it. You will be catapulted into a future Texas of intolerable heat, man-eating hogs, and other nightmares, the effect of which will be to make your present circumstances seem quite tolerable. Part of Stephenson’s genius is his use of the throwaway detail.
“RVs,” he writes, were “already at a premium because of Covid-19, Covid-23 and Covid-27.”
It’s not really part of the plot, but it stopped my eyeballs in their tracks. And remember: He predicted the metaverse. In 1992.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Aramco Chief Warns Of "Social Unrest" If Fossil Fuels Are Abandoned Too Quickly
MONDAY, DEC 06, 2021 - 08:00 PM
China has promised not to build more coal-fired power plants abroad, but it's scrambling to build more plants at home in the latest indication that coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, will likely be with us for some time. And while ESG has become the hot factor trade du jour, analysts who know the energy space have warned that a rush to renewables could lead to energy hyperinflation, and that the UN's goal of achieving global carbon neutrality by 2050 is more of a pipe dream that could have terrible consequences for humanity.
Amin Nasser, the chief executive of Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, has called on global leaders to continue investing in fossil fuels in the years ahead, or run the risk of spiraling inflation and social unrest that could force them to jettison emissions targets altogether, according to the FT.
Amin Nasser
Nasser was speaking at the World Petroleum Congress in Houston, Texas. He added that there's an "assumption" that the world can transition to green energy with the flip of a switch, but that's just not accurate.
This isn't the first hint at just how unrealistic climate change goals have become. Earlier this year, the IEA warned that all new gas and oil exploration projects would need to be abandoned immediately if the world were to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Exxon has considered following through on this to try and appease ESG-crazy investors.
Nasser also warned that the world is facing an increasingly chaotic transition to green energy.
That oil prices feed through to inflation is hardly anything new.
Already, higher oil and gas prices have forced President Biden to reckon with his climate goals.
Despite Biden's promises to lead the US on a transition away from oil, the president tried to blunt the rise in oil prices by unloading millions of barrels from the strategic petroleum reserve.
But that of course is like slapping a band-aid on a bullet wound. The real problem is the years of neglect and under investment in the energy patch as market forces suppressed commodity prices. Nasser touched upon this as well, telling the FT that the majority of "key stakeholders" in the industry and politics agreed on the risks of under-investment, but were unwilling to say so openly. "They say so in private...[t]hey should say the same in public," Nasser said.
Put another way: virtue-signaling about climate change and green energy will fall out of favor as soon as most consumers feel it in their pockets.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Dear Leader Biden Ignores Peril of Covid Crackdowns to Democracy
President Joe Biden will seek to boost his sagging approval ratings this week with an international virtual summit whooping up
conservativeplaybook.com
Dear Leader Biden Ignores Peril Of Covid Crackdowns To Democracy
by Jim Bovard
December 6, 2021
President Joe Biden will seek to boost his sagging approval ratings this week with an international virtual summit whooping up democracy. The Treasury Department will publicize the event by slapping financial sanctions on “individuals who are engaged in malign activities that undermine democracy and democratic institutions around the world.”
But lying, power-hungry politicians will probably not be on the target list.
The White House says the summit of more than 100 nations will focus on “Defending against authoritarianism.” But Biden has no problem with the biggest authoritarian abuse of our times — the rise of Cage Keeper Democracies where citizens’ ballots merely designate who will place them under house arrest.
The Freedom House report “Democracy under Lockdown” says “the condition of democracy and human rights has worsened in 80 countries” since the pandemic’s start. Last month, Sweden’s International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance declared that America and other nations imposed COVID measures “that were disproportionate, illegal, indefinite or unconnected to the nature of the emergency.” It warned that “established democracies are increasingly adopting authoritarian tactics.”
The Australian government has set up detention camps to lock up anyone suspected of contact with COVID-positive individuals. Austria and Germany imposed nationwide lockdowns that nullified millions of citizens’ freedom of movement. When New Zealand imposed a lockdown, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern ordered her captive citizenry: “Do not congregate, don’t talk to your neighbors.” Britain unleashed some of the most absurd restrictions, including prohibiting couples who live in different homes from having sex indoors. Dozens of nations have used the military to enforce COVID restrictions, heightening “the risk of unchecked excessive force and the normalization of increasingly militarized civil life after the pandemic,” the Swedish think tank reported.
The COVID Iron Fist hit home for New Yorkers on Monday when Mayor Bill de Blasio decreed that all private-sector workers must be double-vaxxed and even 5-year-old children must be jabbed if they want to eat at McDonald’s. Blas is claiming the same dictatorial power that numerous federal judges have ruled Biden does not possess. Gov. Andrew Cuomo was equally power-crazed: Remember his order to New York sheriffs to intrude into people’s homes to enforce his mask mandate during Thanksgiving dinners last year.
Governors in state after state imposed lockdowns that former Attorney General Bill Barr aptly called “the greatest intrusion on civil liberties” since slavery’s end. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito lamented that the pandemic “has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.” The shutdowns of businesses, schools, churches and synagogues dismally failed to prevent roughly 150 million Americans from becoming infected with COVID.
Unfortunately, there is no sign Team Biden will disavow this demolition of democracy.
The prez continues to urge businesses to pretend his vaccine mandate is still binding, despite a long string of federal-court losses. Last week, fearing that rising COVID cases will decimate his approval ratings, Biden revealed new restrictions as part of his “COVID-19 Winter Plan.” When asked whether unvaxxed Americans would be banned from domestic flights, Biden COVID Czar Jeff Zients replied, “We will continue to look at all options — everything is on the table.”
Biden policymakers have also considered banning all interstate travel by the unvaxxed. They suffer from “totalitarian envy”: Centers for Disease Control chief Rochelle Walensky gushed praise for the “really strict lockdowns” inflicted by Communist China.
Biden’s democracy summit will also be “addressing and fighting corruption.” Is this intended to add Monty Python-style comic relief to the event, considering that the invitation list includes many of the world’s most corrupt nations? Will Hunter Biden make a surprise guest appearance to offer tips on how to avoid indictment while massively profiting from insider ties? Will 10 percent of any summit proceeds be siphoned off for “the Big Guy”?
Promising to vanquish worldwide corruption is a favorite throwaway line for American politicians. In 2010, President Barack Obama proclaimed at the United Nations that the US government would be “leading a global effort to combat corruption.” Six years later, pirouetting at an international Anti-Corruption Summit, Secretary of State John Kerry denounced corruption as “a poison that erodes trust, robs citizens of their money and their future and stifles economic growth in the places that need it most.”
But pious rhetoric did not deter Team Obama from turbocharging corruption in Afghanistan with reckless US aid, turning it into the most corrupt nation on earth and helping spur massive discontent that led to the Taliban victory.
Don’t expect Biden to pay heed to the rise of despotic democracies. But if ballots cannot leash winning politicians, then elections can become coffin nails for freedom. The State Department boasts that this week’s summit will “provide a platform for leaders to announce both individual and collective commitments, reforms and initiatives to defend democracy.”
As long as democracies fail to protect citizens against elected rulers who feel entitled to boundless power, international summits will only inflame the cynicism and bitterness of downtrodden citizens.
Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr, CC BY 2.0. James Bovard is the author of 10 books and a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
The Seven Levels of Covid Tyranny From Lockdowns Through to Purity Cults
First level of explanation: Panic Over a few weeks of March 2020, the collective consciousness of Western nations moved from
conservativeplaylist.com
The Seven Levels of Covid Tyranny From Lockdowns Through to Purity Cults
by Edward Hadas
December 6, 2021
First level of explanation: Panic
Over a few weeks of March 2020, the collective consciousness of Western nations moved from curiosity about the new virus in China to serious worry, then to communal fear, and finally to total panic. This highly contagious and self-reinforcing terror – passed back and forth, with no subsequent immunity, among political leaders, various types of scientific experts, the media, and much of the populace – is the most obvious explanation of the hasty enactment of unprecedentedly extreme measures that were supposed to control what fearful thoughts had turned into a threat to civilisation.
The field on which these panic-weeds grew has been well-prepared. The soil was turned over by a half-scientific cult which had recruited Bill Gates, probably the largest non-governmental funder of public health research and initiatives.
The ground was fertilised by the popular culture, including a TED talk by Gates and the film Contagion. Irrigation was provided by research into using viruses as biological weapons (technically into countering such use by understanding how it could be done). This war-thinking probably encouraged some public health professionals to both fear the worst and countenance society-damaging interventions that the World Health Organisation and all national authorities explicitly recommended against.
The belief that a virus could be a new sort of Black Death that threatened civilisation was never close to rational in any scientific sense, since the global population is both healthier now than at any time in the past and has far more medical and technological resources than were available even a few decades ago. However, as will become clear, Covid-19 elicited responses that were anything but scientific in any modern sense.
The panic story is true, but it is misleading. What needs to be explained is not the emotional incontinence of individuals, even of individuals who should have known better. Such breakdowns are not surprising – courage, prudence, and temperance are virtues that are hard to learn and easy to lose.
What is surprising is, first, the total failure of well-established bureaucratic and political systems that were designed to resist panic.
i) Bureaucratic: All modern states have extensive public health bureaucracies, which have generally had an underlying culture that is humanistic rather than authoritarian. To deal with pandemics, the bureaucracies all have carefully written guidelines that should reinforce deeply embedded institutional memories. The overriding principle of these guidelines is the paramount value of minimising interruptions to normal life.
ii) Political: The rule of law in Western countries is supposed to be built around the protection of “rights.” Even if national panic leads the executive branch to try to restrict these “rights,” the legislative and judicial branches have the explicit responsibility of defending them.
The second surprise is the ease with which the general public discarded their supposed “liberal” or “Christian-style” values. Politicians and pundits in every Western country assumed well into March that these values were so strongly held, outside of the definitely non-post-Christian and non-liberal People’s Republic of China, that their citizens would not accept oppressive, Chinese-style restrictions on their freedom (at least for very long and not without a clear reason).
There are two possible families of explanations for this litany of fearful failure, which has continued for almost two years.
i) It was justified. The threat to public health from Covid-19 was in fact so great and continues to be so great that it is worth sacrificing everything else for the effort to fight it.
ii) Neither the system nor the social values were as strong as previously believed.
The first type of explanation is completely unpersuasive. In March 2020, there was no good reason to ignore the established procedures of dealing with pandemics. The disease was undoubtedly frightening, but those procedures were created exactly to help the responsible officials respond calmly and realistically to frightening diseases.
Even if the panicked emulation of Chinese repression could initially have been justified, it was clear by June 2020 that such measures were disproportionate to the danger posed by Covid-19.
By then, deaths in the first wave had peaked and were declining in most countries. Calmer scientists were persuasively arguing that Covid-19 would settle into the typical pattern of infectious viruses – becoming less dangerous as the population’s immunity increased and evolution led to more contagious but less severe variants.
In addition, treatments for all sufferers improved significantly and estimates of the case fatality rate steadily fell. Initial panic cannot explain the continued copying of formerly unthinkable policies. Something more was going on.
Second level of explanation: Mass hysteria
One suggested deeper explanation is what scientists and social scientists call hysteresis: an initial state determines the path of future states. In simple words, moments of panic led to the institutionalisation of mass hysteria. There is a well-developed model of mob action: irrational groupthink supports and is supported by claims of some higher principle that demands extreme action; this leads to increasing extremism and the hysterical blaming of failures on both inadequate vigilance and on traitors and dupes; the government adopts and encourages the mob mentality; there are fervent efforts to exclude and condemn perceived opponents to the mob’s desires; the resistance to evidence that contradicts the accepted narrative becomes increasingly desperate.
The lockdown-cult fits this model very well. Mass hysteria helps explain why the original panic did not subside. Further, the shared hysterical belief that this pandemic was fully outside of the normal course of nature helps explain the long-lasting inability to remember the well-developed understanding of viral infections.
However, this explanation is still not totally adequate. Human systems, unlike mechanical ones, are never totally determined. It was certainly possible that experts, politicians, and the general public would have recovered quickly from the initial panic. Indeed, it was likely, since there were several months during which the pandemic waned and knowledge increased. The choice to turn down the path to persistent hysteria needs to be explained.
In more detail, mass hysteria does not explain many things: why political and cultural leaders and their institutions were so willing to believe that this pandemic actually was outside of the normal course of nature; why neither leaders nor led developed resistance to hysteria despite increasing scientific knowledge and first-hand experience of the disease’s very limited mortality among the not-very-old and even the healthy elderly population; why most of the media around the world enthusiastically spread misleading alarmist theories and minimised reports of encouraging developments. Most profoundly, it does not explain the willingness of most of the population to accept unprecedented and clearly damaging restrictions on communal and private life and, in many countries, on public education.
Third Level of explanation: Selfish motivations
The calculated self-interest of individuals and organisations is a more profound and more persuasive explanation than the blind force of mass hysteria. Some public health professionals have found fame and political influence by spreading panic. Some power-hungry politicians relish the ability to impose restrictions.
The scientific-commercial-philanthropic vaccine complex has gained prestige from the hopes placed in its products. Purveying fear and tragedy has benefited the reputations and revenues of many leading media organisations. Amazon and other online merchants gain greatly from lockdowns and the fear they encourage. Some well paid and influential workers have enjoyed working from home or being paid not to work.
Other people may use Covid-19 as a means, or an excuse, to promote a political or cultural agenda. Opponents of globalisation and proponents of stronger global governance, critics of industrialisation and enthusiasts for more intrusive governments, techno-utopians yearning for a culture of vaccinations and constant testing: for all them disaster is an opportunity, so they happily promote a disastrous interpretation of the present, as the first stage in their preexisting desire for some sort of “great reset” in the near future.
Desires for monetary gain, power, praise, and influence have certainly helped prolong the narrative of disaster and the antisocial anti-Covid policies. Powerful people and institutions were well-placed to take advantage of fear and foolishness, and have done so. Their actions have probably helped extend and intensify the restrictions.
However, this level of explanation is still too superficial. Overall, most powerful people and institutions have suffered more than they have gained from the restrictions – by any standard, including the standard of their own self-interest. If the greed and ambitions of all the powerful were the only forces shaping the response to the pandemic, the response would have been much less disruptive than it has been.
Also, people and institutions that do not gain at all from the restrictions have also been very enthusiastic about them. There has been far more enthusiasm than public complaining from religious leaders, many teachers, lobbyists and litigants for individual rights, left-wing politicians who are generally concerned for the poor, and doctors generally concerned for overall public health. They have often cast aside supposedly deeply held principles to cheer on authoritarian rule, tight restrictions on normal social life, the suspension of basic rights, and policies that cause far more damage to the poor than to the rich.
Conspiracy theorists have an explanation for the mass abandonment of self-interest and principles. They argue that some cabal of malicious or misguided geniuses has outwitted the system and addled the minds of almost all the supposed leaders (who are really their pawns), the leading experts (half-innocent dupes), and the vast majority of common people (ignorant and easily led). Such implausible claims hardly advance the debate.
A more reasonable conclusion is that the anti-Covid restrictions are too widely endorsed by basically well-intentioned people to be explained simply as a triumph of selfishness or self-interest. The widespread sense that such tough restrictions are needed and even beneficial must reflect something more profound: dissatisfaction with the existing order and the appeal of domineering governments (fourth level of explanation), a debased understanding of the value of life (fifth level), the dislocation of some primal balance in human expectations from the world (sixth level), or the persistence of an unscientific purity cult (seventh level).
These explanations all refer to thoughts or psychological-cultural “framings” that exist largely outside of the realm of conscious reflection. In the murky world of the unconscious, views that are rationally inconsistent can be held simultaneously, and a single emotion can be “overdetermined” by several complementary trains of non-conscious thought. The following four types of explanation can all be true, each in its own way.
Fourth level of explanation: the failure of liberalism
Political problems are a good explanation for political decisions. The decision to impose lockdowns was bad according to the standards of Western and Western-style democracies, and many of those democracies are in bad shape: Brexit was dragged in after a dodgy referendum; the corrupt non-politician Trump was elected U.S. president and inspired a cult following; non-traditional politicians – Macron, Salvini, Modi, Duterte, and Bolsonaro – have come into power around the world; traditional party systems have disintegrated in many European countries. It can be argued that Western political systems were overall too fragile to resist popular hysteria.
The argument is not very persuasive, however. Almost all these supposedly weak governments were strong enough to draft and enforce unprecedentedly intrusive regulations. Most of them also managed to design effective programs to compensate workers and businesses for income lost because of these restrictions. Political-bureaucratic systems with these abilities could easily have followed the practically less demanding existing procedures for pandemics, including encouraging calm among the public. They chose not to. That choice needs to be explained.
Leaving aside venality, which tends to lead to inaction on all policy fronts, the most persuasive political explanation for the easy and enthusiastically received imposition of authoritarian controls that lack any good public health justification is that the politicians and peoples of today’s nominal democracies actually have strong non-democratic, authoritarian tendencies.
Certainly, gigantic welfare states and extensive regulation suggest that the classical liberal focus on the government responsibility to protect negative liberty (freedom from constraints) is now deeply subservient to the governmental responsibility to provide the governed with some sort of positive liberty (freedom to flourish according to the government’s standard of flourishing).
Among non-traditional liberals (non-libertarians in the American vocabulary, non-neoliberals in the European discourse), enlightened despotism has often been considered the most appropriate form of rule for the development of positive freedom. The imposition of oppressive public health rules for the good of the people whose lives are being disrupted can be described as supposedly enlightened despotism.
The “supposedly” is needed, because the enlightenment is imaginary. Indeed, the fervent commitment to anti-Covid lockdowns suggests an all too typical authoritarian inability to use available knowledge wisely and an equally typical tendency to exercise more force than any outside observer would consider enlightened.
There is the second political explanation. Rather than thinking of intrusive restrictions as manifestations of the desire for authoritarian rule and rulers, the anti-pandemic expansion of government bureaucracies into everyday private life can be explained as the latest step in the expansion of what can be called the Intrusive State.
States have increasingly subsumed and tamed rival authorities (churches, families, businesses), while encouraging subjects/citizens to consider the State to be the ultimate judge of the people’s good. They exercise their power primarily through rational, extensive, and basically competent bureaucracies, in which moral standards are optional. (For people interested in social philosophy, the idea of the State’s seemingly expansion is Hegelian, the preeminence of bureaucracy is Weberian.)
The Intrusive State is generally quite popular with the people whose lives it increasingly controls. Most people seem to crave the State’s protection, especially when they feel threatened. Indeed, their respect for their governments is so extreme that they readily believe that the State should and can control natural phenomena, including highly contagious viral respiratory infections. The intrusively ruled people are very happy to participate in the processes of control, so they willingly obey the State’s commands to suspend their normal economic and social lives.
The two models I have just presented, popular enthusiasm for authoritarian governments and the relentless rise of the Intrusive State, are complementary rather than alternative explanations of the ready welcome for, and almost universal obedience of, cruel and pointless restrictions and closures. Either or both are much better explanations than either fear or mass hysteria.
Part 1 of 2
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Part 2 of 2
Fifth level of explanation: Decline of civil society
Intrusive States claim to promote the common good. They set up programmes that encourage mutual support in times of need; they build material, cultural, and spiritual resources that are widely shared; they protect the future from the depredations of the present; they preserve the virtuous memory of the past; they limit the strong and guard the weak; they pass on the goods and wisdom of this generation to the next. Overall, the Intrusive States’ promotion of public health, including the response to viral pandemics, belongs on this list. It is a service to the common good.
In comparison to even the most beneficent Intrusive State, however, smaller communities are often better stewards of the common good. The contemporary organs of what Hegel called civil society range from ethnic communities to churches, from employers to healthcare networks, from associations of merchants to unions of workers. These communal groupings, each with its own structures of membership, leadership, and ambition, are well suited to determine the most humane way for a society to deal with many types of problems, including many aspects of pandemics.
However, the vitality and responsiveness of civil society as a whole have diminished sharply over the past century or so. Most groups have lost much of their autonomy, yielding authority to increasingly intrusive Political States. By 2020, both the authority and autonomy of independent civil society had faded away in all the areas relevant to the hysteria over Covid-19: healthcare systems, emergency response networks, research facilities, charities, and the monetary-financial system. In effect, almost all the politically relevant organisations of civil society that might have resisted had effectively been absorbed into the governments and bureaucracies of Intrusive States.
The heated “culture wars” and some anti-government reporting from mass media show that civil society has not been fully extinguished in liberal democracies. In this crisis, though, independent voices were too weak to create a strong opposition. On the contrary, as mentioned, governments’ anti-pandemic agendas were (and are) widely supported by politicians and intellectuals of both left and right and by almost all the leading media. Similarly, religious and business leaders rushed to endorse the authoritarian agenda.
The decline of civil society not only reduced resistance to governmental hysteria. It also made that hysteria more likely in the first place, by impoverishing the once rich dialogue of social groups. The officials and bureaucrats of intrusive governments talked almost exclusively to each other, experiencing no significant challenges from civil society. It was almost inevitable that they would become a self-referential monolith that easily yielded to authoritarian temptations, both petty and grand.
The response of the “people’s” governments of the old Soviet bloc to environmental degradation is a good example of the underlying issue. With civil society effectively banned in those countries, it was literally impossible for the genuine people to find representatives who could articulate and develop an economic and political agenda that combined pollution control with maximising industrial production. In the civil silence, government officials had no reason to address this problem, so they did not. Similarly, in the face of anti-Covid policies that amounted to an assault on humanity, civil society was so weak that humanity could barely speak out.
Sixth level of explanation: Biopolitics
In the before-time: Conception, birth, health, illness, and death were laden with religious meaning for as long as societies were religious. However, these mysteries of life were rarely political. The plague described by Thucydides, which is symbolic of Athens’ political decay, is a rare exception – and the biology-political connection is made by the author, not by the city-state’s rulers and citizens.
Biopower for the sake of power: In the last few centuries, religious awe and authority have eroded along with religious faith, and governments have increasingly taken power over bodies (as explained by Michel Foucault). They have exercised this new biopower by promoting sanitation in the 19th century, hygiene and nutrition in the first half of the 20th century, and vaccines and certain sexual behaviours in the second half.
All these State powers persist, but in the 21st century, biopower is expanding to control the motion and location of bodies that are potentially ill; that is of all bodies. The justification for taking this additional control is an overriding concern for health, a concern that leaves little room to strive for more than the narrowest sorts of human flourishing. The animalistic thinking of biopower is essentially inhuman, but rulers who love power are inevitably drawn to treating their subjects as simply actual or potential vectors of disease.
The fear of death: When a pandemic is believed to threaten widespread deaths in a culture that lacks the spiritual framework needed to deal with the fear of death, then respect for the fullness of life-before-death – love, family, community, culture – easily comes to be considered superfluous. All that matters is “bare life” (a term popularised by Giorgio Agamben).
The mastery of nature: Hubristic modern cultures are to some extent based on the premise and promise of achieving every greater human control over nature. From that perspective, it is easy to believe that the inability to keep people from dying in a viral pandemic is a sign of scientific and governmental failure. Because “saving” lives carries so much cultural weight, it appears reasonable to destroy the quality of many lives in order to delay the deaths of even a relatively few people.
The campaign for Zero-Covid is bad science, but it fits well the desire to treat the virus as a military-style enemy that is expected to surrender unconditionally to human willpower. Lost years of school, deaths of despair, emotional distress, and even deaths from untreated conditions are mere collateral damage in the battle to ward off this natural disorder.
Expiation 1: Contemporary societies are too atheistic for a widespread belief in acts of God.
However, while Covid-19 was rarely interpreted as a sign of divine anger, it was widely seen as Nature’s punishment for some sort of human hubris. Different, contradictory social sins have been blamed: excessive and careless use of technology, inadequate technological efforts to counter viral threats, and the vanity of thinking humans could have a totalitarian control of Nature. The confidence that nature is cursing humanity encouraged the easy conflation of the disease with the all-too-human inhumane responses to it.
Expiation 2: When the mysteries of life were still religious, governments often helped propitiate the angry disease-bringing Gods by supervising socially demanding sacrifices. In the logic of sacrifice, the more innocent the victim, the more effective the offering will be. Governments that have taken up this religious biopower are keeping up the sacrifices. The anti-Covid restrictions offer up innocence in the form of children’s education, the pleasures of travel and entertainment, and the health of the poorer members of the community. In this symbolic language, which is largely impervious to empirical evidence, such great sacrifices are very potent.
The cost of failure: While the sacrifices are powerful, the inability to eliminate death or respiratory viral infections ensures that no sacrifices are ever fully successful. Rulers, like the priests whose role they have usurped, respond to this failure with ever-greater sacrifices. As Covid continues to strike, more of the fullness of life is offered up and there is ever more willingness to let people, especially those defined as suitable victims, die or suffer great harm.
Seventh level of explanation: Purity
In the popular imagination, modern scientific cleanliness has been combined with traditional ritual purity. People still tend to divide the human body and its world into zones and times of purity and impurity. The refusal of politicians and public health experts to recognise and reject this pure-impure thinking allows it to shape attitudes towards Covid.
Those attitudes are often scientifically unsound. Purity rules separate the unclean outside world from the clean body and eliminate unavoidable bodily pollution. They do this by removing impurities and ritually purifying, most often through washing and isolation. However, humans cannot live without some potentially illness-bearing and clearly microscopic creatures.
Indeed, impure dirt and illness can bring us more of the purity of health, by making us more resistant to future attacks by other impure “germs.” Conversely, the impure virus that causes Covid-19 cannot be warded off by washing, disinfecting, or ritual actions such as wearing masks.
Modern societies can usually just about manage the tension between the primordial fear of impurity and the reality of many health-promoting human relationships with bacteria and viruses. We both use antibacterial soap and accept having seasonal colds. The uneasy balance was broken in the hysteria created by the especially impure infectious disease of Covid-19.
Without an approved cultural language of purity, modern discourse has largely turned to two euphemisms that are approved. One is “science.” The technically trained priests of the purity cult are consulted as oracles, as in news headlines beginning, “Scientists tell government…”, which are generally followed by some proclamation of doom or counsel of suffering.
Non-priests are expected to be grateful for the commanded sacrifices of personal, social and professional life, for the sake of the cult – no one wants to be a source of impurity. The quasi-religious gratitude is expressed as a “belief in science.”
“Safety” is the other modern euphemism for purity. Ignoring the actual scientific evidence, the cultic priests prescribe many sorts of polluting contact as unsafe. They also prescribe the wearing of approved facial amulets (masks), which they say increase safety, also ignoring most of the actual scientific evidence.
Like some religions, the purity cult includes a sharp duality between the pure elect and the unclean others. Membership in the elect requires rigorous adherence to the purity regulations.
It brings a confidence in one’s own moral superiority that is often expressed as disdain for those who have less purity. Sociological analysis, which shows that the purity-elect of Covid-19 are typically members of the social and economic elite while the burden of disease falls heavily on the poor, probably reinforces this division.
The power-cult of governments helps enforce the purity cult. Governments mandate visible signs of adherence to the purity cult (social distancing, mask-amulets) and command ritual isolation for people declared impure, even if they are not ill. The political authorities reject mitigation through naturally acquired herd immunity as impure. Only the sterilised needles of vaccines can fully restore humanity to its original purity.
Conclusion: A pseudo-holy, power-hungry mess
The combination of mass hysteria, self-interest, authoritarian politics, and an unacknowledged purity cult brings many, many unfortunate outcomes. Most obvious is the multipronged assault on humanity, the prohibition of or restrictions on many important human activities, from worship and shopping to educating the young and visiting the ill. There is also subtler damage to healthcare, social trust, social unity, trust in the media, and whatever was left of constitutional democracy.
Most restrictions have been lifted in most of the world, and the rest will presumably be lifted in due course. However, the damage they have done will last for many years. Most obviously, lost healthcare and schooling will blight some lives and harm many others. More subtly: the isolation of work-from-home will damage and deform many careers; the isolation of antisocial distancing will have lasting effects on community mental health; the unequal burden of Covid-19 and the anti-Covid policies will widen social and economic divisions; and the official endorsement of a neo-pagan science cult will undermine public health policymaking.
The prolonged closure of roughly half of the schools in the United States is particularly harmful, and is a particularly clear example of the toxic interaction of the various levels of explanation.
Teachers’ mass hysteria, their unions’ quest for authoritarian power, the participation of the media in the hysteria-authoritarian movements, the willingness to sacrifice innocent victims (children) as an exercise of bio-power, and the desire to avoid the impurities created by children playing, touching, and having physical fun – all these have combined to maintain a policy that is astoundingly cruel and totally contrary to any scientific, sociological, or moral logic.
Perhaps the worst aspect of the response to Covid-19 is the precedent it sets. Barring a revulsion of the scale that produced Germany’s multi-decade reeducation programme after the fall of the Nazi regime, most people in the Western world will accept that the authoritarian-biopower-purification responses were reasonable in 2020-2021 and will remain reasonable in the future.
Such a grand revulsion is improbable, as there seem to be no brakes on any of the deep historical, cultural, and spiritual forces that lead to authoritarian governments, random exercises in bio-power, and anti-scientific purity cults.
No substantial group seems capable of preventing a recurrence of these policies or the continuation of the anti-viral purity cult. All the natural loci of resistance – left-wing politicians, civil liberties advocates, religious leaders, and all sorts of academics – endorsed the waves of restrictions with few qualms. Only the libertarian right has stood fairly firm against the tide, and that movement hardly exists outside of the United States.
This downward spiral of explanations for the scientifically senseless anti-Covid-19 policies will be depressing for people who have rejected the dominant narrative of heroic necessity.
However, there is no need for despair.
On the contrary, the restrictions and compulsion have caused more than enough pain to change perceptions, if only the people can learn to see through their fear, their misplaced trust in authorities and authoritarian governments, and the numerous illusions supported by both culturally embedded patterns of thought and a consciously manipulative established media.
Knowledge of what has gone wrong can ultimately fortify society against the attacks of unreason.
Image via Picmonkey. Article cross-posted from Brownstone Institute.
Fifth level of explanation: Decline of civil society
Intrusive States claim to promote the common good. They set up programmes that encourage mutual support in times of need; they build material, cultural, and spiritual resources that are widely shared; they protect the future from the depredations of the present; they preserve the virtuous memory of the past; they limit the strong and guard the weak; they pass on the goods and wisdom of this generation to the next. Overall, the Intrusive States’ promotion of public health, including the response to viral pandemics, belongs on this list. It is a service to the common good.
In comparison to even the most beneficent Intrusive State, however, smaller communities are often better stewards of the common good. The contemporary organs of what Hegel called civil society range from ethnic communities to churches, from employers to healthcare networks, from associations of merchants to unions of workers. These communal groupings, each with its own structures of membership, leadership, and ambition, are well suited to determine the most humane way for a society to deal with many types of problems, including many aspects of pandemics.
However, the vitality and responsiveness of civil society as a whole have diminished sharply over the past century or so. Most groups have lost much of their autonomy, yielding authority to increasingly intrusive Political States. By 2020, both the authority and autonomy of independent civil society had faded away in all the areas relevant to the hysteria over Covid-19: healthcare systems, emergency response networks, research facilities, charities, and the monetary-financial system. In effect, almost all the politically relevant organisations of civil society that might have resisted had effectively been absorbed into the governments and bureaucracies of Intrusive States.
The heated “culture wars” and some anti-government reporting from mass media show that civil society has not been fully extinguished in liberal democracies. In this crisis, though, independent voices were too weak to create a strong opposition. On the contrary, as mentioned, governments’ anti-pandemic agendas were (and are) widely supported by politicians and intellectuals of both left and right and by almost all the leading media. Similarly, religious and business leaders rushed to endorse the authoritarian agenda.
The decline of civil society not only reduced resistance to governmental hysteria. It also made that hysteria more likely in the first place, by impoverishing the once rich dialogue of social groups. The officials and bureaucrats of intrusive governments talked almost exclusively to each other, experiencing no significant challenges from civil society. It was almost inevitable that they would become a self-referential monolith that easily yielded to authoritarian temptations, both petty and grand.
The response of the “people’s” governments of the old Soviet bloc to environmental degradation is a good example of the underlying issue. With civil society effectively banned in those countries, it was literally impossible for the genuine people to find representatives who could articulate and develop an economic and political agenda that combined pollution control with maximising industrial production. In the civil silence, government officials had no reason to address this problem, so they did not. Similarly, in the face of anti-Covid policies that amounted to an assault on humanity, civil society was so weak that humanity could barely speak out.
Sixth level of explanation: Biopolitics
In the before-time: Conception, birth, health, illness, and death were laden with religious meaning for as long as societies were religious. However, these mysteries of life were rarely political. The plague described by Thucydides, which is symbolic of Athens’ political decay, is a rare exception – and the biology-political connection is made by the author, not by the city-state’s rulers and citizens.
Biopower for the sake of power: In the last few centuries, religious awe and authority have eroded along with religious faith, and governments have increasingly taken power over bodies (as explained by Michel Foucault). They have exercised this new biopower by promoting sanitation in the 19th century, hygiene and nutrition in the first half of the 20th century, and vaccines and certain sexual behaviours in the second half.
All these State powers persist, but in the 21st century, biopower is expanding to control the motion and location of bodies that are potentially ill; that is of all bodies. The justification for taking this additional control is an overriding concern for health, a concern that leaves little room to strive for more than the narrowest sorts of human flourishing. The animalistic thinking of biopower is essentially inhuman, but rulers who love power are inevitably drawn to treating their subjects as simply actual or potential vectors of disease.
The fear of death: When a pandemic is believed to threaten widespread deaths in a culture that lacks the spiritual framework needed to deal with the fear of death, then respect for the fullness of life-before-death – love, family, community, culture – easily comes to be considered superfluous. All that matters is “bare life” (a term popularised by Giorgio Agamben).
The mastery of nature: Hubristic modern cultures are to some extent based on the premise and promise of achieving every greater human control over nature. From that perspective, it is easy to believe that the inability to keep people from dying in a viral pandemic is a sign of scientific and governmental failure. Because “saving” lives carries so much cultural weight, it appears reasonable to destroy the quality of many lives in order to delay the deaths of even a relatively few people.
The campaign for Zero-Covid is bad science, but it fits well the desire to treat the virus as a military-style enemy that is expected to surrender unconditionally to human willpower. Lost years of school, deaths of despair, emotional distress, and even deaths from untreated conditions are mere collateral damage in the battle to ward off this natural disorder.
Expiation 1: Contemporary societies are too atheistic for a widespread belief in acts of God.
However, while Covid-19 was rarely interpreted as a sign of divine anger, it was widely seen as Nature’s punishment for some sort of human hubris. Different, contradictory social sins have been blamed: excessive and careless use of technology, inadequate technological efforts to counter viral threats, and the vanity of thinking humans could have a totalitarian control of Nature. The confidence that nature is cursing humanity encouraged the easy conflation of the disease with the all-too-human inhumane responses to it.
Expiation 2: When the mysteries of life were still religious, governments often helped propitiate the angry disease-bringing Gods by supervising socially demanding sacrifices. In the logic of sacrifice, the more innocent the victim, the more effective the offering will be. Governments that have taken up this religious biopower are keeping up the sacrifices. The anti-Covid restrictions offer up innocence in the form of children’s education, the pleasures of travel and entertainment, and the health of the poorer members of the community. In this symbolic language, which is largely impervious to empirical evidence, such great sacrifices are very potent.
The cost of failure: While the sacrifices are powerful, the inability to eliminate death or respiratory viral infections ensures that no sacrifices are ever fully successful. Rulers, like the priests whose role they have usurped, respond to this failure with ever-greater sacrifices. As Covid continues to strike, more of the fullness of life is offered up and there is ever more willingness to let people, especially those defined as suitable victims, die or suffer great harm.
Seventh level of explanation: Purity
In the popular imagination, modern scientific cleanliness has been combined with traditional ritual purity. People still tend to divide the human body and its world into zones and times of purity and impurity. The refusal of politicians and public health experts to recognise and reject this pure-impure thinking allows it to shape attitudes towards Covid.
Those attitudes are often scientifically unsound. Purity rules separate the unclean outside world from the clean body and eliminate unavoidable bodily pollution. They do this by removing impurities and ritually purifying, most often through washing and isolation. However, humans cannot live without some potentially illness-bearing and clearly microscopic creatures.
Indeed, impure dirt and illness can bring us more of the purity of health, by making us more resistant to future attacks by other impure “germs.” Conversely, the impure virus that causes Covid-19 cannot be warded off by washing, disinfecting, or ritual actions such as wearing masks.
Modern societies can usually just about manage the tension between the primordial fear of impurity and the reality of many health-promoting human relationships with bacteria and viruses. We both use antibacterial soap and accept having seasonal colds. The uneasy balance was broken in the hysteria created by the especially impure infectious disease of Covid-19.
Without an approved cultural language of purity, modern discourse has largely turned to two euphemisms that are approved. One is “science.” The technically trained priests of the purity cult are consulted as oracles, as in news headlines beginning, “Scientists tell government…”, which are generally followed by some proclamation of doom or counsel of suffering.
Non-priests are expected to be grateful for the commanded sacrifices of personal, social and professional life, for the sake of the cult – no one wants to be a source of impurity. The quasi-religious gratitude is expressed as a “belief in science.”
“Safety” is the other modern euphemism for purity. Ignoring the actual scientific evidence, the cultic priests prescribe many sorts of polluting contact as unsafe. They also prescribe the wearing of approved facial amulets (masks), which they say increase safety, also ignoring most of the actual scientific evidence.
Like some religions, the purity cult includes a sharp duality between the pure elect and the unclean others. Membership in the elect requires rigorous adherence to the purity regulations.
It brings a confidence in one’s own moral superiority that is often expressed as disdain for those who have less purity. Sociological analysis, which shows that the purity-elect of Covid-19 are typically members of the social and economic elite while the burden of disease falls heavily on the poor, probably reinforces this division.
The power-cult of governments helps enforce the purity cult. Governments mandate visible signs of adherence to the purity cult (social distancing, mask-amulets) and command ritual isolation for people declared impure, even if they are not ill. The political authorities reject mitigation through naturally acquired herd immunity as impure. Only the sterilised needles of vaccines can fully restore humanity to its original purity.
Conclusion: A pseudo-holy, power-hungry mess
The combination of mass hysteria, self-interest, authoritarian politics, and an unacknowledged purity cult brings many, many unfortunate outcomes. Most obvious is the multipronged assault on humanity, the prohibition of or restrictions on many important human activities, from worship and shopping to educating the young and visiting the ill. There is also subtler damage to healthcare, social trust, social unity, trust in the media, and whatever was left of constitutional democracy.
Most restrictions have been lifted in most of the world, and the rest will presumably be lifted in due course. However, the damage they have done will last for many years. Most obviously, lost healthcare and schooling will blight some lives and harm many others. More subtly: the isolation of work-from-home will damage and deform many careers; the isolation of antisocial distancing will have lasting effects on community mental health; the unequal burden of Covid-19 and the anti-Covid policies will widen social and economic divisions; and the official endorsement of a neo-pagan science cult will undermine public health policymaking.
The prolonged closure of roughly half of the schools in the United States is particularly harmful, and is a particularly clear example of the toxic interaction of the various levels of explanation.
Teachers’ mass hysteria, their unions’ quest for authoritarian power, the participation of the media in the hysteria-authoritarian movements, the willingness to sacrifice innocent victims (children) as an exercise of bio-power, and the desire to avoid the impurities created by children playing, touching, and having physical fun – all these have combined to maintain a policy that is astoundingly cruel and totally contrary to any scientific, sociological, or moral logic.
Perhaps the worst aspect of the response to Covid-19 is the precedent it sets. Barring a revulsion of the scale that produced Germany’s multi-decade reeducation programme after the fall of the Nazi regime, most people in the Western world will accept that the authoritarian-biopower-purification responses were reasonable in 2020-2021 and will remain reasonable in the future.
Such a grand revulsion is improbable, as there seem to be no brakes on any of the deep historical, cultural, and spiritual forces that lead to authoritarian governments, random exercises in bio-power, and anti-scientific purity cults.
No substantial group seems capable of preventing a recurrence of these policies or the continuation of the anti-viral purity cult. All the natural loci of resistance – left-wing politicians, civil liberties advocates, religious leaders, and all sorts of academics – endorsed the waves of restrictions with few qualms. Only the libertarian right has stood fairly firm against the tide, and that movement hardly exists outside of the United States.
This downward spiral of explanations for the scientifically senseless anti-Covid-19 policies will be depressing for people who have rejected the dominant narrative of heroic necessity.
However, there is no need for despair.
On the contrary, the restrictions and compulsion have caused more than enough pain to change perceptions, if only the people can learn to see through their fear, their misplaced trust in authorities and authoritarian governments, and the numerous illusions supported by both culturally embedded patterns of thought and a consciously manipulative established media.
Knowledge of what has gone wrong can ultimately fortify society against the attacks of unreason.
Image via Picmonkey. Article cross-posted from Brownstone Institute.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
As US Invests in Clean Energy, There's a Big Problem: China Controls the Supply Chain
America's clean energy transition is underway, bolstered by money in the new infrastructure bill. Over the next decade, consumers will start to see options to power their homes, businesses, and even vehicles through renewable resources.
As US Invests in Clean Energy, There's a Big Problem: China Controls the Supply Chain
12-03-2021
Caitlin Burke
America's clean energy transition is underway, bolstered by money in the new infrastructure bill.
Over the next decade, consumers will start to see options to power their homes, businesses, and even vehicles through renewable resources.
"We're standing at an inflection point in world history. We have the ability to invest in ourselves and build an equitable, clean energy future and in the process, create millions of good paid jobs and opportunities around the world," President Biden said speaking at the Glasgow Climate Change Conference in November.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which is now law, provides money to pursue the administration's overall plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions at an accelerated pace. The bill provides $65 billion for clean energy transmission and the electric grid.
Some states are already implementing renewable energy sources. Virginia-based, Dominion Energy, launched an offshore wind pilot program over the summer and is now moving forward with a large-scale commercial wind project.
"The pilot program, the total rating of the project is 12 megawatts (MW), whereas the commercial project will be 2,600 MW. So that 12 MW at peak output powers 3,000 homes in our Virginia service territories. Whereas that 2,600 MW will power up to 660,000 homes at its peak output," said GTHollett, the Director of Offshore Wind for Dominion Energy.
The pilot turbines are the first built in federal waters, and just one rotation of the powerful arms could power a home for an entire day.
"It's a nice compliment to solar power. So solar power will produce the most energy in the middle of the day, in the summer, that'd be actually when we have the lightest wind for offshore wind. But then in the nights and in sort of the winter portion of the year, you're getting more power out of offshore wind, so it sort of ebbs and flows almost opposite of the solar power," Hollett explained to CBN News.
Fossil fuels will remain part of the larger power generation mix as a reliable backup, but when the clean sources are producing, they'll knock the fossil fuels out, helping to reduce the state's carbon footprint.
Experts say it's important for the Biden administration to stick to this slow phasing in of renewables, especially for consumer acceptance. If the old supply goes away too fast, while demand stays the same, prices would skyrocket. We're seeing some of that right now at the gas pump.
During the pandemic, oil production decreased because people weren't traveling. When restrictions eased, people started moving again, while production stayed at pandemic levels.
"Fuel prices, our pump prices, is the most transparent energy price consumers, voters, see. They see it every day they drive down the road, and so nothing makes you angrier as when you have to pay 30 percent, 40 percent more for the same thing that you were paying just a few months before. So you see this juxtaposition between wanting to move forward with transitioning, but also do that in a way that doesn't harm consumers, harm voters," said Frank Fannon, the inaugural Asst. Sec. of State for Energy Resources under former President Donald Trump.
Fannon now runs an advisory firm focused on all aspects of the energy transition. One thing he says needs much more focus, is the critical minerals required to make clean energy happen.
"You know, wind turbines and solar panels just don't show up. They have to be created and there's an entire supply chain and there are minerals and metals that go into that supply chain to realize these clean carbon-free forms of energy. The U.S. isn't in control of that supply chain today, China is," Fannon told CBN News.
The Trump administration sought to create an alternative supply chain. The goal: avoid more reliance on our greatest competitor, ensure clean energy is developed in a manner upholding U.S. values and remains attractive to investors who value human rights, environmental protections, and transparency.
The Biden administration has continued this approach.
Fannon says the next step would be using funds from the new infrastructure bill towards accelerated development of mining in North America.
"You can't get to the clean energy transition without metals and mining. You can't get there. So we have to deploy this money in a way that makes sense and gets some real returns, which means building stuff," said Fannon.
There are also efforts underway to reshore major manufacturing facilities so that we aren't having to import the parts that make up things like wind turbines and solar panels. The new infrastructure bill offers manufacturing tax credits, and also cuts through some red tape like permit timelines.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
22:11 min (start at 5:59 min)
Auschwitz, 75 years on: "Do not be indifferent", says death camp survivor Marian Turski
Jan 27, 2020
FRANCE 24 English
Auschwitz survivor Marian Turski follows, addressing the crowd from the podium, telling the story of his evacuation from Auschwitz just days before it was liberated in a virtual death march with hundreds of fellow inmates of the camp.
[COMMENT: Lessons from the past. How the cycle of "othering" begins.]
marsh
On TB every waking moment
17:32 min
Oil & gas expert SLAMS Biden’s energy moves: ‘Bad from DAY ONE’
Dec 6, 2021
Glenn Beck
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Richest Man in the World - Elon Musk - Calls for Congress to Throw Out Biden's 'Build Back Better Bill' | The Gateway Pundit | by Joe Hoft
Elon Musk says that the US Congress should throw out Biden’s ‘Build Back Better Bill’. Just the News reports: Musk argued that the federal government should “get out of the way and not impede progress,” emphasizing that the government should be a “referee” rather than a “player on the field.”...
www.thegatewaypundit.com
Richest Man in the World – Elon Musk – Calls for Congress to Throw Out Biden’s ‘Build Back Better Bill’
By Joe Hoft
Published December 7, 2021 at 8:21am
Elon Musk says that the US Congress should throw out Biden’s ‘Build Back Better Bill’.
Just the News reports:
“Honestly, I would just can this whole bill,” said Musk, ranked number two on the 2021 Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans. “Don’t pass it. That’s my recommendation.” *
* In recent days Musk is reported as the richest man in the world.
The far-left media doesn’t like Musk’s common sense approach, courage to share it and his tweets. The latest list of some of Musk’s disliked tweets is as follows:
Crazy leftists don’t realize Americans like someone who speaks the truth and thinks with common sense for themself. This is why they liked President Trump.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
8:13 min
CDC - Why Critical Thinking Is Dangerous!
Dec 7, 2021
AwakenWithJP
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Energy Experts Dismiss Liz Warren's Complaints: "It's Econ 101, Not Rocket Science"
TUESDAY, DEC 07, 2021 - 09:20 AM
By Chris Woodward of Delaware Valley Journal
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s latest attempt to “turn up the heat” on the energy sector sparked a backlash from industry leaders who say the real problem comes from policies the Massachusetts’ Democrat has endorsed.
In recent letters to natural gas producers, Warren blasted what she called their “corporate greed” and demanded an explanation for the record exports of natural gas at the same time prices are rising in the U.S.
Warren wants the industry to respond to questions about “the extent to which these price increases are being driven by energy companies’ corporate greed and profiteering as they moved record amounts of U.S. gas out of the country,” she wrote.
She got a response, but not the one she demanded.
Leaders in the natural gas sector responded with a letter of their own, dismissing Warren’s comments as a diversion, one intended to distract consumers from the impact of the energy policies she’s championed.
Warren is an aggressive supporter of the Green New Deal, which would drastically restrict the production of oil and natural gas. In her state of Massachusetts, policies blocking the expansion of natural gas pipelines have resulted in Russian LNG tankers in Boston Harbor bringing fuel to the Bay State.
And those constituents are paying the price, according to Callahan.
“Number one, her region has very high energy costs, and her region is severely capacity-constrained when it comes to pipeline infrastructure,” Callahan said. “A Carnegie Mellon study from within the year pointed out that due to those pipeline constraints, customers in the New England region paid upwards of $1.8 billion in excess energy costs during just one month in 2014.”
Republican National Committee spokesperson Allie Carroll said Warren’s latest attempt to blame energy companies for the results of Biden and Democrats’ war on energy is an insult to hardworking Pennsylvanians.
Pennsylvania is the nation’s second-largest producer of natural gas, and attacks on the industry have an impact on the state’s economy.
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz also pushed back on Warren’s approach.
Meanwhile, Europe is facing fuel scarcity as winter approaches and some of the nations are turning back to coal to meet immediate demands. American exports are vital, experts say.
Frank Macchiarola, American Petroleum Institute (API) Senior Vice President of Policy, Economics and Regulatory Affairs, also has a message for U.S. policymakers.
“They play a critical role in spurring long-term investment in U.S. natural gas supplies as well as expanded pipeline capacity to deliver the energy America and the world needs while driving down emissions,” says Macchiarola. “Rising natural gas costs reflect an imbalance between supply and demand that is exacerbated in regions like the northeast due to added state-level policy restrictions on building much-needed gas infrastructure that has made the region more reliant on foreign imports.”
Callahan believes Warren should “support infrastructure expansion” to get product where it is needed, domestically and globally.
“We felt the need to set the record straight, that the rhetoric is dangerous,” said Callahan.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
The war on a virus has resulted in colossal failure, and the ruling class is determined to cover up this undeniable reality
The sunk cost fallacy.
dossier.substack.com
The war on a virus has resulted in colossal failure, and the ruling class is determined to cover up this undeniable reality
The sunk cost fallacy.
The war on a virus is long lost, and the sunk costs keep piling up.
Whether you believe that this was all to bring about a Great Reset or some of the actors involved genuinely wanted to stop a virus, the result is now clear. The war on COVID-19 is over and it has resulted in colossal loss. Not a single battle was won. They lost the war, they know they lost the war, and now the losing side of the war — the global “elite” — is attempting to cover up this reality by any means necessary, even if it means dragging the entirety of humanity down with them.
Ben M. @USMortalityAustralia's Covid Internment Camp! via: youtube.com/watch?v=mGFdWc… 20:14 min
December 2nd 2021
Watch: Disturbing Confrontation Inside Australia's 'Gold Standard' COVID Internment Camp
View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1466712921266814977
1:27 min
Movement Passes for 5 year olds in New York City and San Francisco. Prison for the non compliant in Austria and Germany. Detention centers for troublesome citizens in Australia and New Zealand. What do all of these places have in common? First and foremost, as The Dossier readers know well by now, none of these measures are backed by any legitimate scientific precedent. The global “elite” forcibly drafted billions of people into fighting a "war on a virus,” and that war has been an abysmal failure. Now, almost two years into this war, the ruling class won’t give it up. Far from surrendering this unwinnable war, the “generals” of this struggle have decided to attempt to bring us down with them into colossal defeat.
BREAKING: @NYCMayor announces new #COVID19 protections for New York City, including: • Vaccine mandate for private sector employees • Vaccine proof for indoor dining, fitness and entertainment required for children ages 5-11
https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/1467846216797110273/vid/640x360/Jhn39nJoacqexyXI.mp4?tag=14 .49 min
@LyndonxAustria: Unvaccinated will be formally asked to get vaccinated starting February 15; those who fail to comply one month later will face penalties,draft law. Penalties for non-compliance: €600 every 3 months. Max penalty 3,600 euros. Failure to pay result in prison sentences.
December 5th 2021
The people, organizations, and governments in charge of fighting our “war on a virus” have lost in devastating fashion. Far from a successful global effort to stop a virus, these ruling factions and power centers have failed the billions of people drafted into this war without the consent of the governed. From Los Angeles to Sydney to Moscow to Rio to New York to Paris to London and everywhere in between, almost every government on every level across the world, with very few exceptions, committed incredible harm against their populations in the name of stopping a virus. And they have absolutely nothing to show for it.
US Surgeon General: “Get vaccinated and boosted. You use testing judiciously before you gather, you gather in well-ventilated spaces and use masks…your risk can be quite low and your holidays can be quite fulfilling.” Psycho..
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1467604712400822278/pu/vid/480x270/QlQrs447uM8ABV13.mp4?tag=12 .15 min
https://twitter.com/MichaelPSenger/status/1468008616124817416?s=20
They threw every “public health expert” class instrument in the book at the COVID-19 pandemic, and nothing worked. But the people in charge don’t want to be blamed for the chaos they wrought. That’s bad politics, and not an ideal situation for those who believe that they are the personification of science itself. So instead of admitting to gross, criminally negligent and now purposeful failure, these maniacal saboteurs are doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on sunk costs for the masses. The “elites” know nothing is working, but they’d rather take everyone down with them than to admit to wholesale failure.
The mayor of New York announced today that 5 year olds will be forced to show proof of vaccination to eat at a restaurant, because vaccine passports work Except there’s absolutely no difference between New York & nearby counties without vaccine passports They’re always wrong
https://twitter.com/ianmSC/status/1467937693577269251?s=20
The masks failed. The lockdowns failed. Every single overhaul of society to accommodate the Safety Regime failed. And now it’s becoming pretty clear that the Big Pharma mRNA injection regime failed, too. The people did not fail the ruling class. Whether we like it or not, the people complied en masse. According to so many metrics, compliance with these pseudoscientific measures was off the charts. Almost everyone wore the masks. Almost everyone stayed in their homes to “stop the spread.” An estimated 8+ billion COVID shot doses have been administered. Citizens across the world placed overwhelming, virtual blind trust in these governments to protect them from a virus.
With 99.6% of adults partially vaccinated and 92.2% fully vaccinated, vaccine passports & additional restrictions, cases in Portugal are higher than they’ve been since early February The commitment of politicians to pointless & destructive interventions is absolutely astonishing
https://twitter.com/ianmSC/status/1467960504605757440?s=20
Humanity is left with a tremendous sunk cost, with the ruling class having drafted billions into this mess, resulting in hundreds of millions of lost lives and livelihoods. Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, Boris Johnson, Angela Merkel, the World Health Organization, the World Economic Forum, The New York Times, The Chinese Communist Party, Pfizer, Moderna, Facebook, Google, Twitter, the CDC, the FDA and the list goes on. These people, governments, and organizations should be defined by this era and the suicidal “war on a virus” that they forced upon the world. And everyone should always remember the incredible human suffering spawned by these actors.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Dear Leader Biden's Latest Statement on Gas Prices Is a Harbinger of the Emerging Neo-Marxist Narrative - The Liberty Daily
If you love the news, check out The Liberty Daily's homepage. Anyone who thinks the Biden regime’s incompetence is to blame for skyrocketing gas prices, inflation, and the supply chain crisis needs to take a closer look at what they’re doing. They’re not failing miserably. They’re accomplishing...
thelibertydaily.com
Dear Leader Biden’s Latest Statement on Gas Prices Is a Harbinger of the Emerging Neo-Marxist Narrative
By J.D. Rucker • Dec. 8, 2021
Anyone who thinks the Biden regime’s incompetence is to blame for skyrocketing gas prices, inflation, and the supply chain crisis needs to take a closer look at what they’re doing. They’re not failing miserably. They’re accomplishing EXACTLY what they set to accomplish.
The latest example of the shift from sound policies to the formation of their Neo-Marxist agenda came during a speech Joe Biden delivered today in which he proudly said something that even Barack Obama would never have uttered. He touted their efforts to slightly reduce energy prices, then gave the ultimate qualifier.
“We’re going to keep at it to make sure the American people are paying their fair share for gas,” he said.
And in case anything thinks he may have read it wrong from the teleprompter, as he often does, notice that he speaks the key words slowly, precisely, and with emphasis. This is the message they fully intended to send today. They are normalizing socialist phrases and homogenizing them with standard American capitalist principles.
Any administration working on behalf of the American people would strive to lower gas prices to acceptable levels. That’s not what this regime wants. They know that cheap gas means their climate change hysteria agenda will have a harder time making sense. Rather than lower the costs of renewable energy by promoting innovation and allowing the technology to catch up with demand, they are attempting to force demand by making energy scarce and expensive.
Gas isn’t the only target. They’re doing the same thing with our broken supply chain. They don’t really want to “fix” it. They want to normalize scarcity so the people will own less and accept it.
All of this is designed to help usher in The Great Reset to have a society they believe will embrace the mantra, “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.”
They’re right about one thing. If we don’t stop the radical lurch that’s happening in halls of government across the country, we will own nothing. They’re also right in their notion that all of the peasants (anyone other than the elite) will be equal in level of happiness. What they won’t tell you is that it means everyone will be equally miserable, destitute, and broken.
It was one phrase enunciated by a bungling old man pretending to be President, but in those words we should realize that their Neo-Marxist agenda is in full-swing. They aren’t failing.
They’re succeeding with the evil plan to bring forth America’s demise.
Here’s the video:
Rumble video on website .12 min
[COMMENT: Since a large portion of gas prices is tax for roads, bridges, etc., vehicles, such as EV or combinations thereof, should be levied a mileage tax so they don't continue to evade their "fair share" of infrastructure costs.]
marsh
On TB every waking moment
‘This is the final battle’: RFK Jr. shows Fauci’s record of pushing vaccines at expense of health - LifeSite
Fauci has turned the National Institutes of Health into 'the biggest vaccine company in the world,' said Kennedy.
www.lifesitenews.com
OPINION
‘This is the final battle’: RFK Jr. shows Fauci’s record of pushing vaccines at expense of health
Fauci has turned the National Institutes of Health into 'the biggest vaccine company in the world,' said Kennedy.
Dr.Joseph Mercola
Wed Dec 8, 2021 - 3:31 pm EST
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- Robert F. Kennedy Jr. describes the coalition of sinister forces — intelligence agencies, pharmaceutical companies, social media titans, medical bureaucracies, mainstream media and the military — that are using a health crisis to impose totalitarian control worldwide
- Anthony Fauci isn’t acting alone, but he’s become a prominent face of the medical cartel and medical technocracy that is wrapped up in obliterating constitutional rights globally
- Big Pharma’s infiltration of regulatory and public health agencies goes back more than 100 years to the creation of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913, which took control of the U.S. medical school system
- Fauci controls a $6.1 billion budget that he distributes to colleges and universities to do drug research for various diseases, and another $1.7 billion that comes from the military to do bioweapons research
- Fauci’s NIAID conducted barbaric and illegal drug experiments on foster children; at least 85 children died as a result
- Waking up to Fauci’s façade is necessary to understand the orchestrated planned use of pandemics to clamp down totalitarian control
You can find all of the details in Kennedy’s bestselling book, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” which contains more than 2,200 footnotes backing up its data. The truth is, Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) — part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) — isn’t acting alone.
But he’s become the prominent face of the medical cartel and medical technocracy that is wrapped up in obliterating constitutional rights globally. And, as an authoritative medical figure and trusted adviser to six presidents, Fauci’s words are treated as gospel, despite the atrocities he’s committed.
Regulatory agencies turned into pharmaceutical companies
Because of financial entanglements between pharmaceutical companies and the agencies that regulate them, public health agencies in the U.S. have been turned into veritable pharmaceutical companies. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, for instance, receives 45% of its annual budget from Big Pharma, Kennedy explains.
The NIH, meanwhile, owns thousands of pharmaceutical patents, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spends $4.9 billion a year out of its $12 billion budget buying and distributing vaccines. “It is the biggest vaccine company in the world,” Kennedy says. The NIH actually owns half the patent for Moderna’s COVID-19 injection, which means that if the shot is approved and/or mandated, it will make billions of dollars as a result.
“Tony Fauci was able to choose, to designate, four of his high-level employees who each get individual patent shares,” Kennedy explained. “They will collect $150,000 a year for life if the Moderna vaccine is approved, which it has been.” Fauci’s agency, the NIAID, in particular, no longer looks out for public health — and Fauci doesn’t either; his priority is pharmaceutical promotion.
How Rockefeller took control of the medical school system
One of the important parts of Kennedy’s new book is exposing the connection of Fauci to Bill Gates and helping uncover how Gates patterned his strategy after Rockefeller. The information was so compelling that I had my team create the video above to put together the facts in the book into an easy-to-watch video so you can digest the material more easily.
Big Pharma’s infiltration of regulatory and public health agencies goes back more than 100 years to the creation of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913. Just two years earlier, John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company had been ruled an unreasonable monopoly and split into 34 companies, which became Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Amoco, Marathon and others.
The breakup only served to increase Rockefeller’s wealth, however, and the foundation he created under his named was deemed “a menace to the future political and economic welfare of the nation.”
The Foundation, in partnership with Andrew Carnegie and educator Abraham Flexner, then set out to centralize U.S. medical schooling, orienting it to the “germ theory” of disease, which states that germs are solely responsible for disease and necessitates the use of pharmaceuticals to target said germs.
With that narrative in hand, Rockefeller financed the campaign to consolidate mainstream medicine, adopt the philosophies of the growing pharmaceutical industry and shutter its competition.
Rockefeller’s crusade caused the closure of more than half of U.S. medical schools, fostered public and press scorn for homeopathy, osteopathy, chiropractic, nutritional, holistic, functional, integrative and natural medicines, and led to the incarceration of many practicing physicians.
The full story, including how the Rockefeller Foundation imbued its philosophy, precepts and ideologies into the League of Nations Health Organization, which turned into the World Health Organization, can be found in “The Real Anthony Fauci.”
Chronic diseases skyrocket under fauci’s lead
In 1984, when Fauci was appointed director of NIAID, 11.8% of Americans had a chronic disease. Contrast that to today, when 54% are now suffering from chronic illness. Fauci doesn’t talk about this public health failure — at least not publicly — but as Kennedy noted, it was Fauci’s job to figure out why autism, allergies and so many other diseases have increased, identify the toxins causing them and eliminate them.
“Fauci could have prevented the whole thing,” Kennedy noted, referring to the epidemic of chronic diseases now plaguing Americans, but instead of running a true public health agency Fauci turned it into an incubator for pharmaceutical products. According to Kennedy, between 2009 and 2016, 240 new drug products were approved by the FDA, and all of them came from Fauci.
“He has a $6.1 billion budget that he distributes to colleges and universities to do drug research for various diseases,” Kennedy said. “He has another $1.7 billion that comes from the military to do bioweapons research, and that is why he had to do the gain of function … He was locked into that; 68% of his personal salary comes from doing military/bioweapons research that used to be called ‘dual use’.”
Fauci has long promoted Gain-of-Function research
Dual use research is so named because it involves research on select agents and toxins that could either benefit society or destroy it, depending on whether or not it falls into the wrong hands. Fauci specifically spoke about dual use research of concern (DURC), which involves 15 potentially deadly pathogens like smallpox and Ebola virus, at a hearing before the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs at the U.S. Senate, held April 26, 2012.
DURC involves seven categories of research experiments, according to the CDC, which includes gain of function (GOF) and which may enhance the harmful consequences of the agent or toxin, among others. Because GOF and DURC can be used to make pathogens more readily able to infect humans, they pose major biosecurity risks.
After the 2001 anthrax attacks, the CIA began pouring money into bioweapons research. The Pentagon was nervous about conducting such studies because it was prohibited, so cohorts funneled money to Fauci to do it, Kennedy said. Because he called it dual use “vaccine research,” it was allowed to continue.
Another moratorium was placed on U.S.-funded GOF research in October 2014, after a string of concerning events, including publication of controversial GOF studies and high-profile “incidents” at U.S. biocontainment laboratories, led to more than 300 scientists launching a petition calling for an end to GOF research.
That moratorium was lifted in December 2017, but in the meantime Fauci continued his controversial research by funneling money to the Wuhan lab in China, partnering with Chinese military scientists, and teaching them how to take bat coronaviruses, and make them transmissible to human beings.
“Fauci was giving them millions and millions of dollars,” Kennedy said, “but the biggest contributor was the CIA, and the Pentagon through DARPA.” The three were all working in tandem, teaching the Chinese how to weaponize bat viruses.
Fauci experiments killed at least 85 children
Fauci’s sordid past goes back to the AIDS crisis, which is now being used as a template for what’s happening during COVID-19, and the fabrication of past pandemics, including Zika virus, for the purpose of selling pharmaceuticals and advancing totalitarian control.
One of the most atrocious acts, however, included barbaric and illegal experiments that the NIAID conducted on children, testing pharmaceuticals. Fauci “got control of foster homes in seven states and turned pharmaceutical companies loose on these children,” Kennedy said.
A graveyard was found in Hawthorne, New York, with a pit covered by an Astroturf carpet that had hundreds of tiny coffins piled up with the bodies of these children inside, Kennedy said.
“After New York, he took that roadshow to Africa and ended up killing many pregnant mothers and getting away with it.”
(See website for the rest of the article ‘This is the final battle’: RFK Jr. shows Fauci’s record of pushing vaccines at expense of health - LifeSite)
marsh
On TB every waking moment
8:05 min
ESG IS HERE: Citi’s latest step to further the GREAT RESET
Dec 9, 2021
Glenn Beck
Glenn has warned about ESG scores — environment, social, and governance — for months now. They’re a key tenet to the Great Reset and could be used to control YOUR finances. If you have a low ESG score — due to certain purchases or investments the far-left deems ‘un-woke’ — then you could face major difficulties securing loans or other services from the world’s biggest banks. Now, Citi just announce its latest decision to move this plan one step further. Per Bloomberg, ‘Citigroup Inc. will eventually expect borrowers to have a credible plan for measuring and reducing their carbon footprint as part of the bank’s pledge to achieve net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions.’ ESG IS HERE!
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Ron Paul: Biden's "Democracy Summit" Is A Joke
WEDNESDAY, DEC 08, 2021 - 11:00 PM
Authored by Ron Paul,
On December 9-10 President Biden will preside over an online “Summit for Democracy,” which claims it will “bring together leaders from government, civil society, and the private sector to set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies today through collective action.”
What a joke. This is not about promoting democracy. It's really about undermining democracy worldwide with US interventionist foreign policy.
Yes, the conference is anti-democracy, not pro-democracy.
The countries whose elected leaders do the bidding of the United States – disregarding the wishes of those who elected them – are to be favored with an invitation to this “virtual” event.
The countries that pursue domestic and foreign policy that is independent from the demands of the US State Department and CIA are not allowed into Washington’s sandbox to play.
Much of the world has seen through the pettiness of such an infantile approach. It is like the fairy tale of the emperor with no clothes. None of the sycophantic foreign leaders graced with an invitation to the banquet dare point out that the US is in the business of undermining democracy overseas, not promoting it.
Color revolutions, where elected governments are overthrown with US backing, is about the only thing the US exports these days. Ask the Ukrainians how their US-backed overthrow in 2014 has worked out for them. Ask any victim of US anti-democratic “color revolutions” about the US commitment to democracy.
For Washington, democracy means “you elect who we tell you to elect.”
European Union member country Hungary is the only EU country not invited to participate in the “Summit for Democracy” even though it has undeniably held fully democratic elections since the end of communism 30 years ago. There is no question that Hungary is a democratic country, but it is not invited to Biden’s “Summit for Democracy.”
Why? Because the Biden Administration does not like Hungary’s democracy. It does not like the fact that the Hungarian people have voted for a conservative government that occasionally pursues foreign and domestic policies at odds with the dictates of Foggy Bottom and Langley.
The Biden Administration does not like that Hungary resisted the mass invasion of refugees from countries and cultures absolutely alien to Hungary’s history. Biden does not like the fact that Hungarians have voted time and time again for a conservative government that openly professes Christian values. But what they hate most is that when Washington says “jump,” Budapest doesn’t always ask “how high?”.
It’s a petty game that has already backfired like all of Washington’s idiotic interventionist initiatives. For example, in the Hungarian situation, Washington’s childish snub of Hungary has meant that the rest of the European Union cannot participate in the summit as the EU.
Washington’s intervention overseas is always an own-goal. Sanctioning Russia over phony Russiagate has resulted in more Russia-China cooperation. The US tells Iran it must not sell oil anywhere, and similarly-demonized China cuts a good deal for Iranian oil.
It won’t shock anyone that Russia and Iran – which both hold elections no less democratic than those in Ukraine, where opposition parties are outlawed and their leaders jailed – are not invited to Biden’s little party. But no doubt their absence will be more than made up by North Macedonia, Suriname, and Micronesia. Democracy summit? More like propaganda summit! What a joke!
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Biden signs executive orders to make all government vehicles electric & buildings renewable powered
A series of new executive orders aims to make the federal government carbon neutral by 2050
justthenews.com
Biden signs executive orders to make all government vehicles electric & buildings renewable powered
A series of new executive orders aims to make the federal government carbon neutral by 2050
Updated: December 9, 2021 - 9:35am
President Biden has signed a series of executive orders to make the federal government carbon neutral.
The Democrat president on Wednesday ordered federal agencies to purchase electric vehicles, harness wind, solar, and nuclear energy to power facilities, and to use sustainable building materials. The goal is for the federal government to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2050.
In the next decade, Biden wants the government to cease purchasing electricity produced from sources that emit carbon dioxide. By 2035, the administration wants all new federal cars and truck purchases to be zero-emissions. Right now, only about 1.5% of the government fleet is electric vehicles. The government buys about 50,000 vehicles a year. In fiscal 2021, only 650 of those were electric.
Unlike some executive orders, which must undergo and often arduous process before taking effect, procurement rules can take effect almost immediately. However, the risk of a future administration overturning them is ever present.
Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, voiced dissatisfaction with the administration's plan.
"This is not build back better," he said, referring to Biden's trillion-dollar spending bill now in the Senate. "It's another backbreaking move to build bigger bureaucracy."
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Biden Signs EO to Mandate Greening of Federal Infrastructure
Biden signed an executive order to make the vast fleet of government vehicles and thousands of federal buildings carbon-emission free by 2050.
www.breitbart.com
Biden Signs Executive Order to Mandate Greening of Federal Vehicles, Buildings by 2050
1
KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images
PENNY STARR9 Dec 2021139
President Joe Biden on Wednesday signed an executive order (EO) to spend taxpayer money to make the vast fleet of government vehicles and thousands of federal buildings nationwide carbon-emission free by 2050.
“The executive order will reduce emissions across federal operations, invest in American clean energy industries and manufacturing, and create clean, healthy, and resilient communities,” the White House said of the executive order.
The order also calls for the government to cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 65 percent by the end of this decade.
AOL reported on the EO:
Tax-payer funded National Public Radio (NPR) reported the Executive Order is a redux of one issued by President Barack Obama but “even stronger.”
“So realistically, how much of these – the changes in these orders, how much can this administration accomplish before a potential change in administration?” a host on All Things Considered asked reporter Jeff Brady.
“Certainly getting all of this done would be a tall order, but there are some specific examples,” Brady said. “The Interior Department plans to transition its fleet of about 100 motorcycles that the U.S. Park Police use. They appear to be on track to do that mostly before the end of Biden’s first term.”
The reporter praised Biden for starting the transition from fossil fuels to alternative energy.
“But, you know, what’s really important here is that by setting deadlines for agencies to accomplish these goals, they aim to start these transitions now,” Brady said. “So even if a future president reverses the executive order, there’s still a lot that’s already been done.”
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Leftist media notices that Biden has a Build Back Better problem
NPR reports that the poll signals “major warning signs for Biden and fellow Democrats.”
thepostmillennial.com
AMERICAN NEWS Dec 9, 2021 8:56 AM EST
Leftist media notices that Biden has a Build Back Better problem
NPR reports that the poll signals "major warning signs for Biden and fellow Democrats."
Hannah NightingaleWashington DC
December 9, 2021 8:56 AM2 Mins Reading
After months of Democratic lawmakers and media pushing the benefits of the Build Back Better Agenda, only a minority of the American public appear to support the plan.
In a NPR/Marist national poll released on Thursday, they revealed that Americans have mixed opinions on Biden’s keystone social safety net legislation. NPR reports that the poll signals "major warning signs for Biden and fellow Democrats."
Rumble video on website 6:29 min
41 percent of respondents said that they support the legislation. 34 percent said that they opposed it, while a notable 25 percent said they were unsure about it.
74 percent of Democrat respondents said they supported the bill, compared to just 13 percent of Republicans, and 36 percent of independents.
51 percent said they were pessimistic that the legislation would lower inflation, which has beens steadily rising throughout the Biden presidency.
Nearly half, 46 percent, said they are optimistic that the legislation would help create better paying jobs. Another 46 percent said that they were pessimistic that the legislation would help people like them.
"They [Democrats] don't have a unified message for what they're doing, and that does not bode well for the party," said Barbara Carvalho, director of the Marist Poll.
The Build Back Better legislation fared worse than the recently passed Infrastructure bill, where 56 percent of respondents said they supported it.
56 percent, though, said that they were pessimistic that the bill would lower inflation, but 53 percent were optimistic that it would create better paying jobs.
69 percent said the legislation would make process towards improving roads and bridges.
Democratic lawmakers have pushed the Build Back Better legislation in recent months, with many top figures, including President Biden, stating that the bill would not add to the deficit, or add taxes to those making lower incomes.
"They don't add a single penny to the deficit," he said in October. "And they don't raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. In fact, they reduce the deficit."
President Biden received little credit for getting $1,400 stimulus checks to Americans early in his presidency, an incentive that he spearheaded. Just 17 percent believed Biden was responsible, with the majority, 40 percent, saying that Democrats in Congress were responsible.
A notable 17 percent said that Republicans were responsible for the checks going out, though no Republicans voted for the measure.
"It doesn't look like he's leading the charge even though it's his bill," said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion. "It's an issue of the messaging out of the White House."
In a November poll from NPR/Marist, respondents said that inflation was their number one concern at the moment. The December survey showed that Americans doubt these large scale bills will help address this issue.
"They're [Democrats] not connecting the dots between concern about inflation and what's happening in Washington, either with the infrastructure bill or Build Back Better," Carvalho said, who said this should "absolutely" be a red flag for the party.
Biden also scored low in his job approval, with just 42 percent stating that they approve. This marks the lowest number, tying with November’s results, during the duration of his presidency so far.
Of those that disapproved, 38 percent said they strongly disapproved. While 76 percent of Republicans strongly disapproved of the job Biden is doing, only 38 percent of Democrats strongly approved.
The NPR/Marist poll was conducted between November 30 and December 6, 2021, with 1,172 survey takers.