GOV/MIL Main "Great Reset" Thread

[marsh]

Study claims stress from ‘anti-vaccine misinformation’ causing adverse effects - The Counter Signal

A study on the National Institute of Health’s website suggests that most COVID-19 vaccine adverse effects are due to stress from “anti-vaccination misinformation.”

thecountersignal.com

Study claims stress from ‘anti-vaccine misinformation’ causing adverse effects

MIKE CAMPBELL
November 25, 2022

A study on the National Institute of Health’s website suggests that most COVID-19 vaccine adverse effects are due to stress from “anti-vaccination misinformation.”

Study claims stress from ‘anti-vaccine misinformation’ causing adverse effects.
“In the era of Covid 19 and mass vaccination programs, the anti-vaccination movement across the world is currently at an all-time high,” says Australian researcher Dr. Raymond Palmer.

“Fear mongering and misinformation being peddled by people with no scientific training to terrorise people into staying unvaccinated is not just causing people to remain susceptible to viral outbreaks, but could also be causing more side effects seen in the vaccination process,” he wrote.



Palmer said heart incidents are one of the most commonly reported vaccine adverse effects. He also pointed to one study that suggests these adverse effects have no known correlation with the COVID vaccines.

“Is the fear mongering around vaccines causing many of these perceived side effects by inducing unnecessary stress in vulnerable people?” he asks.

“Is the movement and character of anti-vaccination information that may strike fear into the general population causing anxiety and vascular constriction resulting in pathologies such as dizziness, hyperpnea, fainting, blood clotting, stroke and heart attack?”



Palmer says it’s “highly probable” that many adverse reports from recent COVID vaccines are related to mental stress-induced myocardial ischemia, which is “a condition where blood flow to the heart is restricted due to emotional distress.”

Rebekah Barnett, an investigative journalist from Australia, says she contacted Palmer to ask him where he got his Ph.D., who funded the project, and whether he thinks stress from lockdowns and politicians’ COVID fear-mongering could also contribute to emotional stress.



Barnett reports that Palmer was evasive about his education and claimed the lockdown and government-related stress was “different” than the stress caused by “anti-vaccination misinformation.”

Earlier this year, CTV reported that traffic noises might contribute to the rise in heart attacks. Moreover, a recent study from the Lancet suggests it could be from breathing air.

 

[marsh]

New Thinking on Mass Formation Psychosis ⋆ Brownstone Institute

We need to think and act much bigger against totalitarianism. We are not that small or downtrodden, nor as isolated. We can win, and we will.

brownstone.org

New Thinking on ‘Mass Formation’ (Psychosis)

BY Paul FrijtersPAUL FRIJTERS, Gigi FosterGIGI FOSTER, Michael BakerMICHAEL BAKER NOVEMBER 23, 2022 PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY 20 MINUTE

As individuals slowly emerge from the fog that descended on them in March 2020, the sense of disorientation and anxiety is palpable. Some of those who took part in the fanaticism and bullying are rewriting or memory-holing what they actually said and did. Others have proposed a pandemic amnesty, as if everyone is just waking up after a drunken night and vaguely remembered they did some stuff they probably shouldn’t have, but hey, it was all well-intended. Everyone makes mistakes so let’s just move on.

What actually happened to the millions of people who kept the covid circus going? What forces were operating on their minds that are now finally starting to recede? Will another madness descend, and if so, why and when?

In his book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, professor of clinical psychology Matthias Desmet talks about ‘mass formation,’ a phenomenon historically given the moniker ‘crowd formation.’ Desmet claims that most of the world population coalesced into a crowd in the early part of 2020. The narrative of that crowd came to dominate the public sphere, the political sphere, and the private sphere, making it classically ‘totalitarian,’ an event Desmet puts in a broad historical and technological perspective. The issues he raises are fundamental for understanding what is likely to happen next, and for charting our own roles as members of Team Sanity in the next few years.

Crowds formed in early 2020
Desmet’s central thesis is one with which we wholeheartedly agree, and it is nearly identical to what appears in our own writings: the populations of many countries became crowds in February-March 2020, obsessed with seeking protection from a new virus. The elites responded to the call for sacrifice and safety by issuing propaganda and ordering health rituals that were eagerly embraced and amplified by their populations. People abandoned their individuality and critical thinking, using their minds not to question the totalitarian controls that removed their basic freedoms, but to rationalise and evangelise them.

In describing how individuals think and behave in these crowds, Desmet draws on centuries of sociological thought, including the works of Elias Canetti, Gustav Le Bon, Hannah Arendt, and particularly the Frankfurt School. He admitted in his July 2022 interview with John Waters (and again in a nearly identical interview with Tucker Carlson in September 2022) that it took him a few months in 2020 to recognise that crowds had formed. We too only recognised the crowd formation several months into the madness, in about June 2020. It had been so long in the West since this phenomenon occurred on this scale that the very possibility seems to have slipped out of our collective consciousness. We know of no commentator who identified the crowd formation right at the start and wrote about it.

Although the covid crowds are now slowly dispersing, the damage is so great and the lessons that humanity’s actions during this period have taught us are so unpalatable and challenging that they send a shudder through those of us who didn’t participate.

The population led the government, not the other way around
One key implication of the crowd dynamic is that there is no single culprit, no head of the snake, no enemy that planned the covid saga ages ago. In crowds, both the population and its leaders get caught in the maelstrom of the adopted narrative, dragging them all into a wild ride that, unlike a ride in an amusement park, has no predictable pathway or ending. Yes, the elites take on the roles of jailers and autocrats, but these are roles demanded of them by their own populations. Should they refuse to play as requested, they would quickly be cast aside and replaced by others who are prepared to do the business. As Desmet points out, removing any part of the elites would have made no difference, as it would make no difference now.

A telling example of this dynamic played out in London in March 2020. Rishi Sunak, the then UK Treasurer (now Prime Minister), recently reminded us of what happened in those days: the medical establishment and the politicians did in fact try to follow the received wisdom of 100 years of medical science and resisted locking down, but such was the uproar in the British population that the government caved in and instigated lockdowns anyway.

One of us was in London then and can verify from personal experience that this is exactly how it was. The UK government’s feeble resistance crumbled under a tidal wave of fear. After the politicians had succumbed to public pressure, the institutional medics fell in line, pushing to the forefront media hounds like Neil Ferguson, who had a special penchant for playing up apocalyptic scenarios that lent themselves to totalitarian solutions.

By implication, Desmet dismisses the idea that the Chinese were behind it all, or that the World Economic Forum, the CIA, the WHO, or some small group of cliquey pro-lockdown medics plotted the catastrophe like the evil geniuses you see in James Bond movies. Sure, several groups sniffed a chance at more power once the stampede was underway, or advanced their long-held agendas and wish lists, but no one saw it all coming or had worked out how to manipulate billions of people to fall for it.

The trajectory of stocks in those early days exemplified the surprises: huge drops (including, for example, in the Big Tech sector) in February-March 2020, followed by huge increases for particular sectors (like, for example, Big Tech) after May 2020 when the markets started to work out what had really happened and who was benefitting from the new realities. If anyone had known in advance how all the chips would fall, that person would now be the richest individual in the world.

We completely agree with Desmet’s thinking on all of this, although the implication of no ‘grand conspiracy’ is irritating for many in Team Sanity who like the simplicity of a culprit on which everything can be blamed. It’s the easy way out. Yet, is it really likely that the many US judges across the country who were reluctant to enforce the US Constitution were somehow all directed by nefarious Chinese?

Is it useful to think that the decisions by individual EU countries to mask and inject young children to within an inch of their lives is really all part of a WEF plot hatched 20 years ago? No. One should blame those US judges and EU legislators themselves for what they decided to do, both because the ‘grand conspiracy’ alternative is extraordinarily unlikely and because assigning individual blame for individual actions is a pillar of Western judicial thinking. Holding people accountable for what they did is much more confronting and politically difficult than externalising blame, but it is what needs to be done in order for justice to be restored.

Did too much ‘enlightenment’ prime populations for crowd formation?
Desmet argues — and here we part ways with him — that populations had become psychologically primed for crowds in recent decades. He also proposes solutions that we find unconvincing.

Desmet identifies rationalism, mechanistic thinking and atomisation in modern society as jointly having caused a high ambient level of loneliness and anxiety. He then claims that the rise in these phenomena created a large group of people eager to adopt a common cause, so as to fill the void in their lives. This is in fact an old argument, also run by Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School, writing in the 1950s. Charlie Chaplin’s brilliant movie Modern Times had a similar flavour: a factory worker on an assembly line, feeling alienated from others, lonely, and impressionable, becomes a sitting duck for the call of the crowd.

It is easy to agree with Desmet if you look only at the US or China. One can easily argue that in these two countries in the lead-up to covid, alienation was rising and mechanistic, and ‘rational’ thinking had created a belief that complex social problems could be controlled and remedied with technology. Further pre-2020 trends in consumerism and the gradual replacement of many social relations by direct interactions with the state in health, education, and other domains can well be said to have catalysed the emergence of an atomised and lonely population, desperate for common threats to bind them.

The rise of what we have elsewhere called ‘bullshit jobs’ that leave people without a sense of worth or dignity, digital replacements for in-person relationships and communities that cannot offer the security and affirmation available from the in-person varieties, and high levels of inequality that make many people feel inferior, were arguably like fuel on the fire. These elements are all consistent with Desmet’s contention that modernity itself had readied humanity for a new era of crowds.

However, let us take a wider point of view, in which this reasoning begins to look less valid as an explanation for what happened in early 2020.

For one, the covid panic swept around the whole world, across many different cultures and many different types of economies. For Desmet’s story to be true, the same ‘dry tinder of modernity’ argument should hold everywhere, and it should also be true that the few countries in which the madness was staved off (Sweden, Nicaragua, Tanzania, Belarus) should be united in lacking that dry tinder.

Yet the panic did not turn only the peoples of the lonely West into crowds, but also those living in the emotionally warmer regions of Latin America, the largely agricultural societies of sub-Saharan Africa, the strongly religious and family-oriented Arab gulf countries, and the super-secular state of Singapore.

Why did some countries escape the madness, if not because they had escaped the corrosive elements of modernity? The main reasons appear to have more to do with random luck than with these countries’ relationships with technology or with the rationalist beliefs of the Enlightenment. Tanzania’s president immediately countered the narrative, trying to protect his country. Nicaragua was wary of any medical story coming from beyond its borders.

Belarus was being run by a dictatorship that did not want to weaken its own country at that time. Sweden had plenty of mechanistic rational thinkers, but also happened to have a quite peculiar set of health institutions manned by particular people, Anders Tegnell and Johan Giesecke, who pushed back on behalf of the people they served. If we had to put these separate stories under one heading, it might be “courageous patriotism serendipitously surfacing in the right place at the right time.”

As empiricists, we cannot help observing that the international pattern of crowd formation seen in 2020 does not fit the argument that modernity created the ‘dry tinder’ allegedly required for the covid crowds to form. It does not fit the claim of our fellow Brownstone author Thorsteinn Siglaugsson, who was following Desmet’s argument, that “a healthy society does not succumb to mass formation.” We think this is too optimistic, and moreover too convenient.

The empirical record also does not fit Giorgio Agamben’s explanation for what happened. He notes that decades of power grabs perpetrated under safety theatre created a population used to being ruled by fear and rulers used to wielding fear. That story rings true for Italy (on which Agamben was commenting) but does not explain the emergence of covid crowds everywhere in the world in 2020.



Part 1 of 2

 

[marsh]

Part 2 of 2

Another fact discordant with the Desmet hypothesis is that well-being and social connections were in fact improving for decades in Europe in the lead-up to 2020, as reflected in the data graphed above. The early 2000s was a golden age of positive psychology, with thousands of self-help books on mindfulness and wellness selling millions of copies, and whole countries adopting community-formation policies like the well-being initiatives of the UK National Lottery. The US might have become lonelier in the past 30 years, but that is not true for much of Europe, which seemed to have worked out how to have peaceful and prosperous societies. Societies sporting many corrupt governments and high inequality, yes, but happy and sociable populations anyway.

A good example of an extremely socially connected and happy place full of confident citizens believing in themselves was Denmark, a country consistently in the top five happiest countries in the world for a decade. Yet, Denmark was a very early lockdowner (following Italy). The Danes did snap out of it relatively quickly, but they were swept along initially just like everyone else, notwithstanding their high social cohesion, low levels of corruption, and lack of loneliness.

We deduce that there was nothing special about the mindset of humanity in January 2020 that made it more susceptible to crowd formation. A more convincing narrative, to our minds, is that the potential is always there in every group and every society to turn into a crowd, merely to be awakened by a strong emotional wave. In the case of covid, it was a wave of fear awakened by a blizzard of hyped-up doomsday reports on mass media about a novel respiratory virus.

The key thing explaining how the covid fear swept across the world is then (social) media. New information systems allowed for a self-enforcing wave of anxiety to be transmitted person-to-person at scale across the mediums of information sharing, in an extended and deadly worldwide super-spreader event.

Yes, that wave was manipulated and amplified for all sorts of reasons, but the existence of shared social media across the world was the real enabler of the emergence of the covid crowds. Mass media is the tinder for global crowd formation, not a mechanistic view of the world, the rationalism of the Enlightenment, or the supposed loneliness of people with meaningless jobs. In our view, humanity does not need to be anxious in order to be moulded into a crowd. All that is needed is a megaphone of one sort or another, a medium through which excitement gets shared with many. With mass media spanning the globe, a major worldwide panic was bound to happen sooner or later.

Should we turn our back on ‘enlightenment?’
Desmet explicitly opposes the ideals of the Enlightenment, following the same line of thought as the Frankfurt School. The argument goes that the process of reasoning about others creates an ‘othering,’ by virtue of making others an object of analysis and thus something that is placed slightly out of reach of more immediate empathy. Desmet notes that this ‘othering’ disconnects people from their own empathy.

He is right about the effects of ‘othering,’ but that effect is not unique to reason. Any form of commenting on others, such as trying to explain the behaviour of others in terms of, say, their relation to a god, has that same effect of turning other people into objects of thought. The religiously excused ‘othering’ of heretics in the Middle Ages allowed crowds to burn their fellow men at the stake.

A similar argument goes for mechanistic world views. Humans have used tools to influence nature for millennia, changing their environment purposefully and constantly. While the Enlightenment saw the breakthrough of a specific type of thinking about others and a whole new set of tools, it didn’t invent othering and environment-moulding, but rather it led to the replacement of previous ways of doing these things that were no less ‘othering’ or divorced from nature.

View attachment 380679

As a simple example, one might reflect on the fact that England was virtually covered with forest before humans colonised it, after which there was a steady decline in forest cover for centuries as land became used for agriculture, with forest cover increasing again only in the last 100 years (see below). It’s hard to argue for picking out the Enlightenment period (post-1700) as particularly ‘divorced from nature.’



Mechanistic and rationalist thinking have also brought humanity huge benefits that we cannot imagine our species giving up. Mechanised agriculture, mechanised mass transport, mass education, mass information, mass production: these are quintessential parts of the modern economy that have helped humanity grow from 300 million poor people in Roman times to nearly 8 billion much wealthier and longer-lived people today.

There is simply no going back on that progress. Humanity does not give up the axe it invented to chop wood simply because the axe will also be used to kill others. Rather, humanity develops shields, as a countermeasure to the heightened killing potential, while further perfecting the axe as a wood-chopping tool. That is surely what we are going to do this time too. We are not going to regress on technology, including technologies of the mind that are right now working so well for us in so many areas.

More deeply, while we sympathise and agree with Desmet’s soulful appeal for acknowledgements of the limits to rationality, the human need for mysticism and empathic connection, and the good that comes from courageous, principled decision-making, we do not think that such appeals help societies make much progress. For one, moral appeals from the sidelines always sound a bit desperate. The truly powerful have armies and media to enforce their will and crush any such calls into oblivion. Also, when society really wants to remember lessons far into the future, it looks for something to write into history books that is less fickle than morals.

Edmund Burke, the English conservative philosopher, captured this fact nicely with his contention that it is through our education, laws, and other institutions that we remember the deep knowledge learned over centuries as to what works and what does not. Learning from our current mistakes will similarly have its long-term effect via change to our institutions. We won’t stop mass education, mass transport, national taxation, or most of the other activities societies have adopted over millennia in order to thrive in competition with other societies. We will simply tweak the institutions involved in the current set of problems using the insights gleaned from the mistakes and successes of the last round of history.

In the long run, then, the name of the game is not moral appeals but institutional evolution. Even the French revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks, who both used brutal methods to overhaul their societies, in reality kept the vast majority of the existing institutions in place. The French revolutionaries did not destroy the existing bureaucracy or army structures they inherited from the royal court of the Bourbons, but expanded and modernised them.

The Soviets did not do away with large agricultural estates they inherited from the Russian aristocracy, but collectivised them. The French did not do away with the existing scientific institutions of the late 18th century that had been royally commissioned, but set them to other tasks.

The Soviets did not demolish the harbours and other infrastructure the Czars had left them, but built more of them. In similar fashion should we expect our time to have its imprint on the institutions handed down to future generations. To our minds, thinking about how to change and adapt our institutions is the main intellectual program of Team Sanity: to have good plans ready on how to improve things in many areas, both locally and nationally.

While Desmet dreams openly about the ‘end’ of mechanistic, rationalist, and Enlightenment thinking, we do not see those elements disappearing any century soon. Yes, humanity might stumble upon better community narratives, and manage to embed a greater general appreciation of the limits to reason and control – an area in which we have many suggestions to offer – but that is not really an end to modernity.

Are crowds really mad?
Even more deeply, we somewhat disagree with Desmet that crowds are innately ‘out of their minds’. Desmet himself avoids the word ‘psychosis’, but does speak of crowd members being as if under hypnosis. Having witnessed the devastation wrought by the covid crowds around the world, it is appealing to ‘other’ the crowd phenomenon itself and put it, and those who succumb to it, into a box labeled ‘poor mental health.’ Yet crowds are more like high-octane groups: running on an unusually high level of intensity and connectedness, they are extremely focused and allow no diversity of openly expressed opinions or pursued interests.

Crowds may lead to destruction, but they are merely more intense, faster to act, and more aggressive towards non-believers than ‘regular’ groups. They are mad from the point of view of those not going along with them, but do they emerge or survive due to a dysfunctionality – a psychosis? If so, then most of the world is psychotic, drawing into question whether that word then really means anything.

Crowds can in fact be agents of creative destruction, often leaving their countries with new institutions that turn out to serve a useful function and are kept for centuries. Just think of our systems of mass education that push a common view of history, combined with a single language, a single set of ideals encoded in law, national festivities, allegiance to the flag, and so on.

Sociologists and writers like Elias Canetti have long recognised that all this is crowd-propagated propaganda. It is called the ‘socialisation’ function of education, and it is part of the heritage of the nationalistic crowds of the 18th to 20th centuries, kept on because it is so efficient in galvanising peoples into nation states.

Desmet’s view of crowds is medicalised, but in the long arc of history, crowds and the wars they initiate can be seen as mechanisms of creative social destruction. Crowds are certainly extremely dangerous, but one should not only fear them. Just as our ancestors did, we face deep social problems, like inequality, for which stampeding crowds may be the only realistic solution.

Whither the stampede?
We agree completely with Desmet’s judgment that the stampede is not over yet, even though in several places the covid madness is coming to a clear end. Like him, we believe that populations are now susceptible to even more draconian and violent forms of totalitarianism, partly because the elites are busy installing an increasing number of totalitarian control structures, partly because populations are now eager to avoid the truth of what they have been party to, and partly because perhaps as much as 95% of the people have become poorer and angrier as a result of being exploited while in their ’crowd state.’

Desmet’s key observation is that in many Western countries and regions, the political, administrative and corporate elites have now become used to totalitarian control. Those elites use propaganda to overwhelm independent thinking in the population, thus keeping the crowd alive, while moving from excuse to excuse until they are unseated. That eventual unseating will require a major collapse of their totalitarian structures, so quite possibly that will only occur after the crowd turns even more destructive.

In a recent interview, Desmet opined that we are easily looking at another eight years of crowd madness in much of the West. We think in similar time frames, and for the same basic reason: the structures of totalitarianism have grown stronger, particularly with the normalised acceptance of government propaganda adopted by private media companies and the relentless sharing of that propaganda across social media platforms, which are also busy censoring alternative views. The elites have now realised the true extent of the power they wield and they are hungry for more. They won’t stop until they are ousted. People with that kind of power rarely, if ever, do.

Like Desmet, we also believe that totalitarianism will come crashing down eventually, because totalitarianism is very inefficient and loses out against other models of society. Dark times nonetheless lie ahead, for years at least.

What to do?
This brings us to the final and most speculative aspect of Desmet’s thinking: his call for ‘Truth Speak.’ He wants Team Sanity to sincerely speak truth to the crowds, believing that crowds start exterminating ideological rivals from within as soon as the unwelcome truth no longer buzzes around, and that this process will lead to the eventual fracturing of the crowd.

We could not agree more with the way Desmet describes the role of the Truth Speaker. We have each played this role during these times and have felt personally the poetic and empathic tendencies that it draws upon and enhances. This has been and continues to be a deeply spiritual journey.

Yet, playing that role is enough to nourish ourselves intellectually, or to inspire others. We need to act on the assumption – the belief – that we will eventually win.

This means that Team Sanity should turn its mental energies to designing different or amended institutions for the whole of society to adopt when the madness has come crashing down. We should compete for space with the totalitarians where we can. Local groups that educate their own children are important, even though they are an open and hence a somewhat risky challenge to totalitarianism. Ditto for health organisations, Team Sanity consumer initiatives, new free academies, and other structures in which we can all live more freely.

While the inner world of the Truth Speaker might be our last refuge, even if we feel we have nothing else and are completely overpowered by fanatical totalitarians who deny us all other space and companionship, we need to think and act much bigger. We are not that small or downtrodden, nor as isolated. We can win, and we will.

 

[marsh]

https://www.newsmax.com/politics/restaurants-thanksgiving-inflation/2022/11/24/id/1097880/

Chef Andrew Gruel to Newsmax: Soaring Food Costs 'Killing' Restaurants

By Jay Clemons | Thursday, 24 November 2022 06:28 P

Video on website 5:45 min

Andrew Gruel, the executive chef for upscale restaurants and bistros such as Big Parm, Butterleaf, Two Birds, Lolo's Tacos and Calico Fish House, said American families are feeling the pinch of high inflation and soaring food prices during the Thanksgiving holiday.

"This year ... it's actually less expensive to go out and eat at a restaurant ... than stay in and prepare your own Thanksgiving meal. That's crazy!" Gruel told Newsmax Thursday afternoon, while appearing on "The Chris Salcedo Show" with guest host Benny Johnson.

The executive chef said the Biden administration wants the public to believe that food prices — particularly proteins, such as turkey — have increased only 20% to 25% from previous years.

"But anyone who's been to the store knows it's significantly higher," said Gruel, who estimates that some food items have gone up 75% to 100% during this period of high inflation under President Joe Biden.

As a consequence of exorbitant food and ingredient prices, Gruel said that restaurants across the board have incurred "double-digit" declines in revenue over the past year or so.

"Restaurants can't even keep up with the price hike," said Gruel. "It's hard to set the prices, because we don't know where [inflation] is going next."

These volatile prices are ostensibly "killing" the restaurant industry, said Gruel, who also said that restaurateurs have been unfairly cast as "greedy" over the past two-plus years — dating back to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"What you're going to see [soon] is a disaster for the restaurant industry," said Gruel.

Price hikes on the national level typically have a lag time of two or three months for restaurants, said Gruel. And yet, "we're already seeing a number of [restaurant] closings."

Gruel then added: "Open, close ... open, close. It's a bad cycle [for restaurants]; and then we became the villains" for charging higher prices.

 

[marsh]

Green Bombshell: New Evidence Points to the Annual Slaughter of Millions of Bats by Onshore Wind Turbines

New evidence indicates that millions of bats are being slaughtered every year by wind turbines. This astonishing figure of wildlife

dailysceptic.org

Green Bombshell: New Evidence Points to the Annual Slaughter of Millions of Bats by Onshore Wind Turbines

BY CHRIS MORRISON 24 NOVEMBER 2022 11:00 AM

New evidence indicates that millions of bats are being slaughtered every year by wind turbines. This astonishing figure of wildlife massacre arises from a reasonable extrapolation of casualty numbers collected by a group of German zoologists. Their data cover a number of years, and more specifically a recent two-month detailed survey at a wind farm near Berlin. Germany has nearly 30,000 onshore wind turbines, and the researchers suggested their findings translated to 200,000 bat fatalities every year in that country alone. Land-based wind turbines are common across many parts of the world, and a total figure running into millions is possible.

The researchers note that the annual German losses of bats will “cause a decline of populations of high collision-risk species”. They warn that this population decline “could manifest rapidly”, since mostly females and juvenile bats get killed by turbines. Bats have low reproductive rates and may not be able to compensate quickly for the casualties, they note.

The paper is of considerable interest and the full methodology of the field work, along with considerations about turbine age and operational curtailments, are shown here. The researchers took data going back 20 years from the national carcass repository in Germany and from a detailed 2021 two-month search of the ground near three turbines west of Berlin. It was estimated that nearly 300 bats died during the 2021 field survey, and this equated to 55 casualties per megawatt generated.

These are shocking figures. Bat ‘migrations’ were occurring at the time of the field survey, but such movement is common in bat populations. The UK has 14 GW of installed onshore wind capacity, or 14,000 MW. A multiplication of 55 casualties per MW produces 770,000 bat deaths. Of course all this installed capacity is unlikely to be in continual use, and periods of low bat movement and hibernation will lower the death toll considerably. But promoters of green energy need to be specific about the annual bat carnage they are prepared to accept – 50,000 deaths, 100,000, 200,000? The U.K. Government’s own in-house green activist unit, the Committee for Climate Change, is recommending that Britain should more than double its onshore wind capacity to 29 GW by the end of the decade.

Bat conservation protections are common across the U.K. and building developments are sometimes halted to accommodate their habitats. But far less robust measures seem to be in place for any ‘green’ projects. The Bat Conservation Trust (BCT) notes there has been evidence of bat collisions with wind turbines for 20 years, but it supports the development of wind power. It supports “mitigation” measures that are known to be “successful in reducing the impacts of wind turbines on bats”. It would be useful if the BTC could put an actual figure on an acceptable death toll.

Bats species are thought to make up a third of U.K. mammal fauna and occur in most lowland habitats across the U.K. But wind turbines present a danger to many flying animals in various habitats. Earlier this year, a group of American ecologists discovered “distinct patterns of population – and subpopulation level – vulnerability for a wider variety of bird species found dead at renewable energy facilities”. Their paper examined numerous wind and solar facilities in California and found birds at greatest risk were raptors such as golden eagles, kites and owls. These birds are often all-year residents around wind farms, where they require open skies to catch wind currents. For their part, the wind turbines generate enormous air fluctuations, while massive blade tips travel at over 150 mph.

As is often the case, animal charities appear conflicted between the promotion of ‘green’ energy and protecting the lives of bats and birds. In the U.K., Andrew Dodd from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) said we clearly needed more offshore wind turbines, “and the RSPB supported that”. But favourable spots in the North Sea are starting to fill up and, said Dodd, “we have to avoid development in the most sensitive areas”.

Dodd made his comments in a BBC report surrounding the permission for the giant Hornsea Three development, an area frequently visited by kittiwakes.

These birds are at particular risk, since they have been spotted trying to slalom their way through such fields springing up in the North Sea. The energy secretary at the time, Alok Sharma, is said to have acknowledged that wildlife would be harmed by Hornsea Three, but granted consent on the ‘balance of benefits’. The cynical might note that the same ‘balance of benefits’ argument was curiously absent from the recent onshore gas fracking ban – reliable and secure energy supplies, against the risk of earth tremors equivalent to someone falling off a chair.

Journalist James Delingpole has been a long-time environmental critic of wind farms: “If you really hate nature, you’ll love wind farms. Not only do they destroy the landscape, blight views, increase flooding but… they kill rare birds and bats on an industrial scale.”

 

[marsh]

Biden's not-so-subtle lurch toward dictatorship

In the wake of the midterm elections, President Joe Biden was asked during a rare press conference, in reference to Twitter’s new owner, whether he thought Elon Musk was a threat to national security. With a pause and a smirk, the president said that topic was “worthy of being looked at.”

www.washingtonexaminer.com

Biden's not-so-subtle lurch toward dictatorship
By Richard Stern November 24, 2022 06:00 AM

In the wake of the midterm elections, President Joe Biden was asked during a rare press conference, in reference to Twitter’s new owner, whether he thought Elon Musk was a threat to national security. With a pause and a smirk, the president said that topic was “ worthy of being looked at. ”

With those words, Biden made it clear that if you even seem to oppose his politics, your private life will be under the direct scrutiny of the state. Despite his constant prattle about saving our democracy, Biden seems to think he’s running an authoritarian police state.

In truth, the federal government already maintains entities that review acquisitions such as Musk’s for anything from foreign influence to anti-competitive business practices. After many months in which Musk’s negotiations to purchase Twitter happened in full public view, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said last week that she sees no basis for the government to investigate that purchase.

Despite Musk’s having followed the law, Biden, on a whim, wants to change the game. Suddenly, and after years of Twitter and other social media having significant foreign investors, a normal and transparent voluntary transaction is a potential “threat to national security.”

Biden signaled his desire to strip off the veneer of the rule of law and use the power of the presidency as a dictator would—by his whim and without respect for the rules that everyone else must abide by.

It is important to remember that, unavoidably, all government actions are rooted in government’s coercive power. As such, it is crucial for the federal government to act within the bounds of the Constitution and in a precise and careful fashion to avoid lurching into tyranny.

The mechanisms of our Constitution lay out one sacred duty of the federal government—to protect each of our natural rights. The Framers intended this design to ensure that the government could not interfere arbitrarily with civil society. The goal was to ensure protection of rights and not otherwise invade our personal lives with the coercive whims of bureaucrats and politicians.

With the protection of our individual freedoms, America developed a strong and flourishing civil society and became the most prosperous and advanced nation on Earth—a beacon of liberty and a model for the rest of the world.

A core component of our civil society is the free market. It is a system where everyone’s natural rights are defended and where everyone plays on the same field and by the same rules. A free market is a place where talent and determination are not suppressed and where innovations lift the standard of living for all.

Tragically, our free society has given way to increasing government manipulation — weakening our communities and civic institutions along the way.

Niche corporate and political interest groups stopped focusing on how to produce value for other people and instead on how to persuade politicians to regulate in their favor—a system where you’re rewarded for wielding the manipulative power of government, not for providing value to society.

We stand now at a place where the federal, local, and state governments consume and redirect more than a third of what Americans work hard to produce, and where the burden of regulations is an additional quarter of our economy . Put differently, out of your five-day workweek, two days are there just to feed the government.

This isn’t the free society and free market our Founders envisioned, where the government serves the people. This steady fall into a controlled society has been the playbook of the Left—a callous shortchanging of most families to concentrate power and money in the hands of a well-connected few.

What does it say of our nation if the president, with no accountability and in deference to no law or electorate, can on a whim command the people as if he regards us all as his property? What does it say that the president can marshal the force of government against a single individual for simply not sharing his politics?

With his shameful comment on Musk and Twitter, Biden made it clear that the rules apply as he sees fit, to whom he sees fit. There can be no prosperity in a country where your right to the fruits of your labor is not sacrosanct, and where the law is applied unevenly to favor those connected to the regime.

The Biden administration has acted with reckless irreverence toward our institutions and continued the intentional chipping away of the rule of law. The administration increasingly has weaponized the federal government against the American people.

We’ve seen the Biden administration come for industry after industry and sap the strength of our nation through an onslaught of regulations . He has unleashed an inflationary plague that already has stolen $7,400 from the average American family.

One need only look to the coal industry to see the honorable and necessary occupations that Biden now attacks. If history is any guide, heads of state who recklessly abuse the natural rights of their people rarely curtail their own crusade.

Biden may have directly named Elon Musk at that press conference, but his threat was aimed at every household in America.

 

[marsh]

California's chilling medical misinformation law is an affront to the US constitution

A clear attempt to suppress free speech.

reclaimthenet.org

• Issue: November 24, 2022

California’s chilling medical misinformation law is an affront to the US constitution​

A clear attempt to suppress free speech.

• By Didi Rankovic
• Posted 6:03 pm

More confusion and controversy is emerging over the way so-called Covid (mis)information is treated, particularly regarding legislation aimed at “disciplining” medical professionals and making sure they toe some unclear and poorly defined lines, which undermines their right to free speech.

In California, a new law, A.B. 2098, is proving to be so bad in terms of First Amendment-protected speech that it has produced some unusual bedfellows among civil rights groups – all in a bid to get it repealed.

The law’s goal is to give California’s Medical Board powers to include sharing Covid “misinformation” with patients among the transgressions that are considered as unprofessional conduct by doctors. Covered here is false or misleading information about the nature and risks of the virus, prevention and treatment, as well as the development, safety, and effectiveness of Covid vaccines.

This month, the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) filed a federal lawsuit, contesting A.B. 2098’s constitutionality, alleging vagueness and inconsistency with the First Amendment.

This is the second lawsuit of the kind targeting the new law, since the Justice Legal Center (JLC), acting on behalf of two physicians, filed one in October arguing similar points against the legislation. The ACLU’s Northern and Southern California chapters then submitted a brief in support of JLC’s case.

The NCLA, meanwhile, is representing five more doctors in its lawsuit, and somewhat surprisingly, given that they tend to be at odds on political and ideological grounds, this time the non-profit is effectively supported in its claims by the ACLU.

But the bill California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law in September (due to take effect on January 1) seems to be egregious enough to bring them together in opposing its provisions. For one, doctors are to be disciplined if they disseminate misinformation or disinformation related to Covid, but the way misinformation is defined is as advice that is “contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus.”

That is unacceptably vague from the legal point of view and is the essence of the legal battles to bring A.B. 2098 down. Judging by his statements at the time, even as he signed the bill, Newsom was aware of the First Amendment implications. According to him, this piece of legislation is in fact “narrowly tailored” to tackle only extreme examples of physicians who in direct interaction with a patient “act with malicious intent or clearly deviate from the required standard of care.”

The lawsuit made note of the governor’s statement, to dismiss it as not alleviating the problem of the law’s overly broad wording – and recalling that when it comes into force, A.B. 2098 will be implemented “as written,” rather than as “explained” after the fact.

And what is written is that the Medical Board – which in addition to disciplining also licenses doctors – should make sure their communications with patients adhere to the “contemporary scientific consensus,” even if the law does not define that crucial requirement at all. The fear is that regardless of the way the board decides to define this “consensus,” it will be used to suppress dissent, and therefore the law “discriminates against speech based on viewpoint,” as per the NCLA.

More than being undefined in terms of legislation, logic also stands in the way of properly defining “contemporary scientific consensus,” the group argues, given how many times during the pandemic scientists and doctors made radical U-turns on both prevention and treatment of the disease caused by the coronavirus. Another key question is, what is the threshold of a scientific community that forms “consensus” and who its members are – namely, their number, field of expertise, etc.

And even disregarding Covid alone, the nature of scientific study means that whatever is consensus on an issue today can – and should, for the sake of progress – change tomorrow.

In addition to the First Amendment violations, where doctors would be punished for expressing their views, the filing claims that the law also breaches their 14th Amendment rights which concern due process guarantees, because of the definition of acceptable speech that is so vague as to be unconstitutional.

But California state legislators who supported the law argued that its goal is to protect patients from “ineffective and potentially dangerous treatments” against Covid.

The problem with this is that the board already has powers to deal with gross negligence, incompetence, and the like behavior by medical professionals.

The law causes doctors to be subjected to punishment for sharing their opinions regarding Covid and if the board thinks they deviate from the pre-determined consensus.”

 

[marsh]

Trillions Upon Trillions of Dollars of Wealth Is Being Wiped Out as the “Everything Collapse” Accelerates

Have you checked on the health of your investments lately? If not, you may be surprised to find out where

ourgoldguy.com

Trillions Upon Trillions of Dollars of Wealth Is Being Wiped Out as the “Everything Collapse” Accelerates (Gold)

by Michael Snyder
November 24, 2022

Have you checked on the health of your investments lately? If not, you may be surprised to find out where things currently stand. As the “everything collapse” accelerates, trillions upon trillions of dollars of wealth is being wiped out. Many that thought that they were financially set for the rest of their lives are now in panic mode as asset values rapidly crumble. Just look at what happened to Sam Bankman-Fried. He was worth 16 billion dollars coming into this month, and now the value of his assets has been “reduced to zero”. In fact, when you factor in all the money that he owes to creditors, it is likely that his net worth is actually less than zero.

That is how fast it can happen. Overall, the cryptocurrency industry “has lost more than $1.4 trillion in value this year”…

The cryptocurrency market has lost more than $1.4 trillion in value this year as the industry has been plagued with problems from failed projects to a liquidity crunch, exacerbated by the fall of FTX, once one of the world’s largest exchanges.​

FTX wasn’t the first domino to fall, and it certainly won’t be the last. In fact, now we are being warned that Genesis “may need to file for bankruptcy”…

Digital-asset brokerage Genesis is struggling to raise fresh cash for its lending unit, and it’s warning potential investors that it may need to file for bankruptcy if its efforts fail, according to people with knowledge of the matter.​

Ouch. If Genesis fails, that is going to hurt. So why is Genesis in so much trouble? Well, it turns out that Genesis had “$175 million locked in an FTX trading account”…

Genesis has spent the past several days seeking at least $1 billion in fresh capital, said the people, who asked not to be identified because discussions are private. That included talks over a potential investment from crypto exchange Binance, they said, but funding so far has failed to materialize.​

The rush for funding was precipitated by a liquidity crunch at the lender after the sudden collapse of FTX, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges. Genesis halted redemptions shortly after revealing on Nov. 10 that it had $175 million locked in an FTX trading account.​

Needless to say, that 175 million dollars is now gone and it isn’t coming back. Meanwhile, Coinbase continues to spiral downhill as well. According to Axios, the market cap for Coinbase has now fallen under 10 billion dollars…

The market capitalization of Coinbase just dropped below $10 billion. This time last year, it was more than $70 billion.​

Of course it isn’t just the crypto industry that is in enormous trouble. For years, Tesla’s stock price just kept going higher and higher. But now Tesla’s market value is about 670 billion dollars lower than it was at this time last year…

Business Insider reports that Tesla’s market valuation has plummeted by nearly $700 billion from its peak a year ago. Insider notes that the $670 billion decline is equivalent to the market value of three Disneys, four Nikes, or six Starbucks.​

Meanwhile, ordinary U.S. consumers are losing a tremendous amount of wealth as well. According to the New York Post, U.S. homeowners “lost a staggering $1.3 trillion in home equity in the third quarter”…

US homeowners lost a staggering $1.3 trillion in home equity in the third quarter during a major slump in the housing sector, according to data published by mortgage analytics firm Black Knight on Tuesday.​

​

Home equity – broadly defined as the value of a homeowner’s property minus what is still owed on their mortgage – has plummeted during a rapid market correction.​

​

The equity losses in just three months were “by far the largest quarterly decline on record by dollar value and the largest since 2009 on a percentage basis,” according to Black Knight data & analytics president Ben Graboske.​

We have never seen a quarter like that before. Not even during the crisis of 2008 and 2009 did we see such a huge quarterly loss. A new housing crash is here, and it has already gone global. In fact, Spain has already developed a plan to offer “mortgage support relief” to over a million Spanish households…

Spain’s cabinet on Tuesday gave its approval to mortgage relief support for more than one million vulnerable households and help for middle-class families a day after the government and banks reached an agreement in principle.​

The measures are subject to final negotiations with banking associations, Economy Minister Nadia Calvino said, adding that banks had a month to sign up ahead of their planned implementation next year.​

Sadly, we will see much more government intervention all over the western world as this nightmare gets even worse in the months ahead. The pace of layoffs is really starting to pick up, and there is a lot of fear out there right now. Just about everyone can feel that very tough times are in front of us, and some experts are now issuing bold pronouncements that are quite chilling. For example, Nouriel Roubini is warning that what we are facing is probably going to be “as bad as during the Global Financial Crisis”…

“History suggests it’s going to be near mission impossible to avoid a hard landing. You’re going to get not only inflation, not only a recession, but what I call the ‘Great Stagflationary Debt Crisis.’ So it’s much worse than the ’70s, and it’s probably as bad as during the Global Financial Crisis.”​

Actually, if all we go through is a repeat of what we experienced in 2008 and 2009 we would be extremely fortunate.

Because the truth is that it isn’t just the economy that is failing.

As I have repeatedly warned my regular readers, what we are now witnessing is literally the collapse of everything.

Our entire society is slowly but surely coming apart at the seams all around us, but most people still expect that conditions will eventually return to “normal”.
Unfortunately, “normal” has left the building, and a tremendous amount of pain is ahead.

 

[marsh]

Cancel Culture's War On History, Heritage, & The Freedom To Think For Yourself | ZeroHedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

Cancel Culture's War On History, Heritage, & The Freedom To Think For Yourself​

THURSDAY, NOV 24, 2022 - 08:50 PM
Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“All the time - such is the tragi-comedy of our situation - we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible… In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. ​

​

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”​

- C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man​

There will come a time in the not-so-distant future when the very act of thinking for ourselves is not just outlawed but unthinkable.

We are being shunted down the road to that dystopian future right now, propelled along by politically correct forces that, while they may have started out with the best of intentions, have fallen prey to the authoritarian siren song of the Nanny State, which has promised to save the populace from evils that only a select few are wise enough to recognize as such.

As a result, we are being infantilized ad nauseum, dictated to incessantly, and forcefully insulated from “dangerous” sights and sounds and ideas that we are supposedly too fragile, too vulnerable, too susceptible, or too ignorant to be exposed to without protection from the so-called elite.



Having concluded that “we the people” cannot be trusted to think for ourselves, the powers-that-be have taken it upon themselves to re-order our world into one in which they do the thinking for us, and all we have to do is fall is line.

Those who do not fall in line with this government-sanctioned group think—who resist, who dare to think for themselves, who dare to adopt views that are different, or possibly wrong or hateful—are branded as extremists, belligerents, and deplorables, and shunned, censored and silenced.

The fallout is as one would expect.

Cancel culture - political correctness amped up on steroids, the self-righteousness of a narcissistic age, and a mass-marketed pseudo-morality that is little more than fascism disguised as tolerance - has shifted us into an Age of Intolerance, policed by techno-censors, social media bullies, and government watchdogs.

Everything is now fair game for censorship if it can be construed as hateful, hurtful, bigoted or offensive provided that it runs counter to the established viewpoint.

In this way, the most controversial issues of our day—race, religion, sex, sexuality, politics, science, health, government corruption, police brutality, etc.—have become battlegrounds for those who claim to believe in freedom (of religion, speech, assembly, press, redress, privacy, bodily integrity, etc.) but only when it favors the views and positions they support.

The latest victim of this rigid re-ordering of the world into one in which vestiges of past mistakes are scrubbed from existence comes from the New York Department of Education, which has ordered schools to stop using Native American references in mascots, team names and logos by the end of the current school year or face penalties including a loss of state aid.

Citing concerns about racism and a need to comply with the state’s Dignity for All Students Act, which requires schools to create environments free of harassment or discrimination, New York officials are telling communities—many of which are named after Native American tribes—that longstanding cultural associations with their towns’ Indian namesakes are offensive and shameful.

More than 100 schools in 60 school districts across New York State have nicknames or mascots that reference Native Americans. The cost to divest their communities of such branded names and images will be significant. One school district estimates that the cost to remove its Indians imagery from the gym floor alone will be upwards of $60,000.

This drive to sanitize New York schools of “offensive” Native American logos and imagery comes on the heels of iconoclastic campaigns to rid the country of anything and anyone that may offend modern-day sensibilities.

Monuments have been torn down, schools and streets have been renamed, and the names of benefactors stripped from prominent signage in the quest for a more enlightened age.

These are not new tactics.
Since the days of the Byzantine Empire, when “Emperor Leo III ordered the destruction of all Christian images on the grounds that they represented idolatry and were heretical,” political movements have resorted to destroying monuments, statues and imagery of the day as a visual means of exerting their power and vanquishing their enemies.

We have been caught in this intolerant, self-righteous, destructive, mob-driven cycle of book-burning, statue-toppling, history-erasing iconoclasm ever since.

As art critic Alexander Adams explains:

“Iconoclasm is an activity evenly distributed between both left and right of the political spectrum, mainly at the extreme ends… The intolerant ideology, which refuses to accept the co-existence of alternative views, takes the stance that…the ideals within the art are no longer utterable or supportable: they are actually injurious and dangerous to the vulnerable… The political activist reserves to himself the right to retrospectively edit our history for his satisfaction by removing monuments, those fixtures of civic life, embedded in the memories of generations… Iconoclasm is an expression of domination and a demonstration of willingness to act—illegally and unethically—to impose the will of one group over an entire population. It asserts control over all aspects of society… The campaigner argues that public art, accumulated piecemeal over 1,000 years of history, must reflect our society and values today—even if that means altering or erasing stories of the values our past society expressed via its monuments, or suppressing evidence of how we arrived at our current situation… The iconoclast believes that it is only the values of today that count—that it is only her values that count. She takes it upon herself to correct history through monstrous acts of egotism. That correction, when it involves destruction, permanently alters the cultural legacy. It shrinks the breadth of human experience available to the generations which follow ours.”​

In such a world, there can be no debate, no journey to understanding, no chance to learn from one’s mistakes or even make mistakes that are uniquely your own; there is only obedience and compliance to the government, its corporate overlords and the prevailing mob mindset.

Censorship, cancel culture, political correctness, woke-ism, hate speech, intolerance: whatever label you assign to this overzealous drive to sanitize the culture of anything that might be deemed offensive or disturbing or challenging, be assured they are sign posts on a one-way road to graver dangers marked by “suppression, persecution, expulsion and the massacring of people.”

Whether those smashing monuments and erasing history are doing so for noble purposes or more diabolical reasons, the end results are the same: criminalization, confiscation, imprisonment, exile and genocide.

“Look at mobs which gather to smash monuments,” says Adams. “These monuments may be the statues of deposed dictators who terrorized populations, causing untold death and suffering. They may be monuments to fallen soldiers who died defending causes that are no longer fashionable. The mob’s anger is the same. The viciousness and triumphant celebrations are the same. Only the causes differ in seriousness, topicality and justification.”​

Adams continues:

“The Civil War statue destroyers think they are assaulting the posterity of slave owners, but they themselves are in the grip of ideological fervor. They are unaware that they are running a biological code, hardwired in their brains by evolution and activated by political extremists. The activists of today heedlessly erase history they haven’t yet learned to read. ​

They act as the hammer that extremists use to deface the cathedrals and museums our ancestors built.”​

What’s different about this present age, however, is the use of technology to censor, silence, delete, label as “hateful,” demonize and destroy those whose viewpoints run counter to the cultural elite.

“In the last few years,” writes Nina Powers for Art Review, “what is understood to be contentious has become increasingly broadly defined… The range of what counts as acceptable gets smaller and smaller… [W]e thus find ourselves… in the midst of a new culture war in which the freedom to think, feel and express ourselves comes at the risk of economic impoverishment, social ostracism and mob justice.”​

Where this leads is the stuff of dystopian nightmares: societies that value conformity and group-think over individuality; a populace so adept at self-censorship and compliance that they are capable only of obeying the government’s dictates without the ability to parse out whether those dictates should be obeyed; and a language limited to government-speak.

This is what happens when the voices of the majority are allowed to eliminate those in the minority, and it is exactly why James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, fought for a First Amendment that protected the “minority” against the majority, ensuring that even in the face of overwhelming pressure, a minority of one—even one who espouses distasteful viewpoints—would still have the right to speak freely, pray freely, assemble freely, challenge the government freely, and broadcast his views in the press freely.

Freedom for those in the unpopular minority constitutes the ultimate tolerance in a free society.

The alternative, as depicted in Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem, is a world in which individuality and the ability to think for oneself independent of the government and the populace are eradicated, where even the word “I” has been eliminated from the vocabulary, replaced by the collective “we.”

As Anthem’s narrator Equality 7-2521 explains, “It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. . . . And well we know that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone.”

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are not merely losing the ability to think critically for ourselves and, in turn, to govern our inner and outer worlds, we are also in danger of losing the right to do so.

The government’s war on thought crimes and truth-tellers is just the beginning.

 

[marsh]

(Twitter Dumpster dive)

(Climate Change)




(Energy)





(Technology)

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1596018556944404481

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1596018556944404481
1:41 min

(Economy )

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1596126100270505984

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1596126100270505984
1:06 min

(Transhumanism)

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1595915762350309376

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1595915762350309376
1:53 min

(CBDC)

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1596052310873997313

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1596052310873997313
1:40 min

 

[marsh]

(China)

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1595775200053731330

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1595775200053731330
.23 min

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1596042633553518592

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1596042633553518592
.14 min

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1595806264486944768

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1595806264486944768
.05 min

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1596070693820829701

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1596070693820829701
.38 min

 

[marsh]

NATO Doesn't Supersede The US Constitution | ZeroHedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

NATO Doesn't Supersede The US Constitution

THURSDAY, NOV 24, 2022 - 11:00 PM
Authored by Dan McKnight via The Libertarian Institute,

As our government continues to bumble and stumble at full speed towards World War III, the concept of tripwires and the legal authority of Article 5 become required understanding for the vigilant citizen. Last week the American people received the then-breaking news that a missile had landed in Poland and killed two people. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said that this was a purposeful act of war by Russia, and that the West must respond with full kinetic retaliation.

He was joined by his amen corner here in the United States, that group of politicians, regime journalists, and paid lobbyists who have sold out their country for the requisite thirty pieces of silver. The War Party immediately jumped into action: this was what they’ve been waiting, praying for. A catalyst to launch the missiles, and sacrifice the world.

Global Look Press/Keystone Press Agency
Poland, like the United States and nearly all of Europe, is a member of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. (Maybe we should wonder why countries like Poland, Estonia, and Romania are in an “Atlantic” alliance.)

A provision of NATO is Article 5, which popular conception treats as a mandatory obligation to go to war when a member of the alliance is attacked. It’s a one way pass into World War III.

There were just two things wrong with this narrative.

First, as was revealed within forty-eight hours and confirmed by both the Polish government and Biden White House, the missile was Ukrainian, not Russian.

Vladimir Putin had not attacked NATO—purposefully or accidentally. Instead, a Ukrainian air defense missile attempting to intercept a Russian strike went off trajectory killed two Poles across the border.

All of a sudden "collective security" was no longer threatened, and no one on cable news was talking about how this required NATO retaliation on Kiev. (Surprised?)

Secondly, even if it had been a Russian missile, and even if Vladimir Putin himself had aimed directly at that Polish farm, Article 5 obligates the United States to nothing.

The NATO Treaty also has an Article 11, which specifies that the provisions of the alliance will be carried out in accordance with the domestic constitutions and processes of the respective members.

That means a majority vote of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives on a formal declaration of war. Any member of Congress or news talking head saying Article 5 requires an immediate military response without a debate or vote is either lying or woefully uninformed.

And even if the NATO Treaty didn’t have that provision, we’d still rest our argument of Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, the supreme authority of our laws.

We are a sovereign nation, and the American people always have a choice on whether or not to go to war. Any international piece of paper trying to say otherwise be damned.

Unfortunately, the War Party doesn’t always make that choice easy. They bribe politicians with weapon contract profits, flood the corporate press with propaganda, and instruct the American people that they must either commit to endless war or lose their liberty. They manufacture themselves consent.

This crisis continues to demonstrate why we need Defend the Guard. This legislation would prohibit the deployment of a state’s National Guard units into active combat without a declaration of war by Congress.

It’s the best way to tell Washington DC that they can’t go to war without a debate and a vote by the people’s representatives. And if they try, they won’t have the manpower to fight such a conflict because patriotic state legislators won’t allow their National Guard, the backbone of the U.S. Armed Forces, to participate in an illegal war.

I have worked to introduce this bill in over twenty states in the past, and my team is already preparing for the 2023 legislative session. But to be successful I need your support. Visit DefendTheGuard.US to see if a bill has been sponsored in your state, or if you need to contact your representative and state senator. An American people, active and informed, will not be led into World War III by their irresponsible, stupid leaders.

 

[marsh]

New Fauci Emails Reveal Lab Leak Cover-Up Happening in Real Time

There has been renewed interest in the origins of Covid and the lab leak theory this week following the release

dailysceptic.org

New Fauci Emails Reveal Lab Leak Cover-Up Happening in Real Time

BY WILL JONES 25 NOVEMBER 2022 7:00 AM

There has been renewed interest in the origins of Covid and the lab leak theory this week following the release of further emails between senior U.S. Government health official Dr. Anthony Fauci and others as they conspired in early February 2020 to counter the theory and suppress it.

The first thing to note is that the emails confirm that those involved – Fauci, Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust and CEPI, U.K. Chief Scientist Patrick Vallance, Kristian Andersen from Scripps, Germany’s Christian Drosten and more – were not aware prior to late January that the virus was likely to be of lab origin. The question appears to be raised with Fauci by Kristian Andersen via Jeremy Farrar on January 31st 2020. Fauci responds that a group of evolutionary biologists should get together “as soon as possible” to examine the data carefully and that “if everyone agrees with this concern, they should report it to the appropriate authorities”. Notably, Fauci does not seem to know who that is, but says he “would imagine that in the USA this would be the FBI and in the U.K. it would be MI5”. There is no indication here of cover-up instructions having previously been received.

On February 2nd, Fauci writes that, “like all of us, I do not know how this evolved”, and Farrar writes, “on a spectrum if 0 is nature and 100 is release – I am honestly at 50”. On February 4th, Farrar clarifies that in his view it’s “probably not” engineered but it might have come from lab work in other ways:

“Engineered” probably not. Remains very real possibility of accidental lab passage in animals to give glycans… Eddie [Edward Holmes] would be 60:40 lab side. I remain 50:50…​

Christian Drosten, on February 9th, wonders where the idea came from in the first place: “Who came up with this story in the beginning? Are we working on debunking our own conspiracy theory?” He adds that he thought the aim of their discussions was to challenge a “certain theory”: “Didn’t we congregate to challenge a certain theory, and if we could, drop it?” The “certain theory” is understood by the others to be the linking of the virus to HIV as found in a January 2020 pre-print.

Drosten’s questions are quickly answered by other group members. Edward Holmes explains what their group is up to (which, for context, follows the appearance of new data from pangolins):

I don’t know where this story came from, but it has nothing whatsoever to do [with] the HIV nonsense. Please don’t associate this with that. This is a broader story.​

Ever since this outbreak started there have [been] suggestions that the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, if only because of the coincidence of where the outbreak occurred and the location of the lab. I do a lot of work in China and I can [tell] you that a lot of people there believe this and believe they are being lied to. Things were made worse when Wuhan lab published the bat virus sequence – a bat sampled in a different province for which they have a large collection of samples.​

I believe the aim/question here is whether we, as scientists, should try to write something balanced on the science behind this? There are argument for and against doing this.​

​

Personally, with the pangolin virus possessing 6/6 key sites in the receptor binding domain, I am in favour of the natural evolution theory.​

Farrar explains further:

The theory of the origin of the [virus] has gathered considerable momentum not in social media, but increasingly among some scientists, in main stream media, and among politicians.​

​

The aim of this was to bring a neutral, respected, scientific group together to look at the data and in a neutral, considered way provide an opinion and we hoped to focus the discussion on the science, not on any conspiracy other theory and to lay down a respected statement to frame whatever debate goes on – before that debate gets out of hand with potentially hugely damaging ramifications.​

​

With the additional information on the pangolin virus, information not available even 24 hours ago, I think the argument is even clearer.​

​

My preference is that a carefully considered piece of science, early in the public domain, will help mitigate more polarised debate. If not, that debate will increasingly happen and science will be reacting to it. Not a good position to be in.​

Kristian Andersen does acknowledge though that they have been “trying to disprove any type of lab theory”:

Our main work over the last couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory, but we are at a crossroad where the scientific evidence isn’t conclusive enough to say that we have high confidence in any of the three main theories considered.​

Until the pangolin sequences showed up, the consensus in the emails was settling on the proposal that while the virus didn’t appear deliberately engineered it could have resulted from “repeated tissue culture passage” in a lab. While Francis Collins argues this “doesn’t explain the O-linked glycans” which typically emerge in the presence of an immune system, Holmes said, as per the email above, it was possible for “accidental lab passage in animals to give glycans”.

Patrick Vallance, for one, was glad to hear that the pangolin sequences would likely counter the “passage origin”:

Thanks for sharing and thanks to those involved for a really important piece of work. I think this looks pretty balanced and useful. I do think it would be helpful to make sure that the sequence data from the pangolins is included and to indicate what that might mean in terms of a potential prolonged period of adaptation in animals. The glycan point is important and could be given further weight against a passage origin. Once complete I think it would be helpful to publish this.​

The eventual outcome of this discussion was the “Proximal Origins” paper in Nature on March 17th 2020. The final paper largely reflects the prior deliberations, though the earlier assessments of a preference for the lab origin are gone, which the authors would presumably attribute to the arrival of the pangolin sequences. (For the case for the virus being engineered see here; for the case for a lab origin (whether or not engineered) see here; for the problem with the pangolin sequences see here.)

Notably omitted from the published paper are the mentions that research to alter SARS-like bat coronaviruses had been taking place for many years in Wuhan at low biosecurity levels (i.e., BSL-2). Andersen noted on February 8th that “passage of SARS-like CoVs have been ongoing for several years, and more specifically in Wuhan under BSL-2 conditions”. While Andersen’s point seems to be that there was nothing new about this, so no reason to think it was suddenly the cause of a pandemic, equally others would note that it is clearly an accident waiting to happen. Also, who knows how many times it had happened before, but with viruses that just didn’t get very far or do very much?

The scientists are upfront that they are motivated to prevent, to quote Farrar, “hugely damaging ramifications”, by which they appear to mean to themselves as implicated in this research and to the wider field of biodefence virus research.

This sentiment of not wanting to open the ‘can of worms’ of the virus turning out to arise from U.S.-linked virus research is common to the wider biodefence network of the U.S. and its allies. In a June 2021 article in Vanity Fair, we find it cropping up to frustrate investigations of the virus origins again and again.

A months long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, and a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. Government documents, including internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence, found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step. In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese Government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. Government funding of it.​

​

In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former Acting Assistant Secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.”​

Christopher Park, Director of the State Department’s Biological Policy Staff in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, was one among many who transmitted such warnings.

Park, who in 2017 had been involved in lifting a U.S. Government moratorium on funding for gain-of-function research, was not the only official to warn the State Department investigators against digging in sensitive places. As the [State Department] group probed the lab-leak scenario, among other possibilities, its members were repeatedly advised not to open a “Pandora’s box”, said four former State Department officials interviewed by Vanity Fair. The admonitions “smelled like a cover-up”, said Thomas DiNanno, “and I wasn’t going to be part of it”.​

The Vanity Fair article makes clear China was also blatantly covering it up, and that U.S. CDC Director Robert Redfield was instantly suspicious.

On January 3rd 2020, Dr. Robert Redfield, Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, got a phone call from his counterpart Dr. George Fu Gao, head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Gao described the appearance of a mysterious new pneumonia, apparently limited to people exposed at a market in Wuhan. Redfield immediately offered to send a team of specialists to help investigate.​

​

But when Redfield saw the breakdown of early cases, some of which were family clusters, the market explanation made less sense. Had multiple family members gotten sick via contact with the same animal? Gao assured him there was no human-to-human transmission, says Redfield, who nevertheless urged him to test more widely in the community. That effort prompted a tearful return call. Many cases had nothing to do with the market, Gao admitted. The virus appeared to be jumping from person to person, a far scarier scenario.​

​

Redfield immediately thought of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A team could rule it out as a source of the outbreak in just a few weeks, by testing researchers there for antibodies. Redfield formally reiterated his offer to send specialists, but Chinese officials didn’t respond to his overture.​

The intelligence community (IC) of the U.S. and its allies has largely persisted in this cover-up. On April 30th 2020 the office of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence (which at that time was in vacancy) issued a statement that: “The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.” On May 5th 2020 CNN reported a briefing from a Five Eyes intelligence source going so far as to back the Chinese Community Party’s (CCP) wet market theory.

Intelligence shared among Five Eyes nations indicates it is “highly unlikely” that the coronavirus outbreak was spread as a result of an accident in a laboratory but rather originated in a Chinese market, according to two Western officials who cited an intelligence assessment that appears to contradict claims by President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.​

These intelligence briefings were in direct contradiction to the claim made at the time by President Trump that he had seen evidence that gave him a “high degree of confidence” COVID-19 originated in a laboratory in Wuhan. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated that he agreed with Trump’s assessment:

There’s enormous evidence that that’s where this began. We’ve said from the beginning that this was a virus that originated in Wuhan, China. We took a lot of grief for that from the outside, but I think the whole world can see now… there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan.​

There was indeed plenty of evidence, but many of those who had access to it were doing their utmost to bury it. The result was that despite Trump and Pompeo’s insistence, and perhaps in part because of it, the lab leak theory was largely left unexamined and unmentioned for the rest of 2020, as media and fact-checkers suppressed it as a ‘conspiracy theory’.

Come August 2021, however, and with a new President in post, U.S. intelligence published a declassified report that summarised current U.S. intelligence on each theory. This report was, however, still strongly skewed towards the natural origins theory. “Most IC analysts assess with low confidence that SARSCoV-2 was not genetically engineered,” it said. Neither was it an ordinary virus that was being used in a lab: “Four IC elements, the National Intelligence Council, and some analysts at elements that are unable to coalesce around either explanation” back the natural origin theory with “low confidence”, it said. It also rejected early spread, saying the first infection probably occurred “no later than November 2019”, with “the first known cluster of COVID-19 cases arising in Wuhan, China in December 2019”. It cursorily dismissed the growing evidence of banked samples testing positive earlier than this, saying they were probably unreliable.

The report also states the IC does not deem China to have been aware of the virus before the end of December.

The IC assesses China’s officials probably did not have foreknowledge that SARS-CoV-2 existed before WIV researchers isolated it after public recognition of the virus in the general population. Accordingly, if the pandemic originated from a laboratory-associated incident, they probably were unaware in the initial months that such an incident had occurred.​

What makes these denials of early spread, China’s foreknowledge and lab origin so strange is that they contradict a number of reports from the U.S. intelligence community itself. Indeed, the report notes that one intelligence agency, the NCMI, assessed that it was a lab leak with “moderate confidence”. Why can it see the evidence that the others can’t?

Michael Callahan, whom Robert Malone has described as “arguably the top U.S. Government/CIA expert in both biowarfare and gain of function research”, stated in an interview with Rolling Stone in August 2020 that he was already following the virus in November 2019 having been tipped off by Chinese colleagues, and that he even travelled to Singapore to study an outbreak of the “mysterious germ” there.

In early January, when the first hazy reports of the new coronavirus outbreak were emerging from Wuhan, China, one American doctor had already been taking notes. Michael Callahan, an infectious disease expert, was working with Chinese colleagues on a longstanding avian flu collaboration in November when they mentioned the appearance of a strange new virus. Soon, he was jetting off to Singapore to see patients there who presented with symptoms of the same mysterious germ.​

This makes it clear that both the U.S. and China were aware of the outbreak in November 2019, a detail that agrees with other intelligence reports yet is at odds with the August 2021 declassified report’s statements about the assessments of U.S. intelligence.

The recent Senate report, which is presumably based at least in part on U.S. intelligence, states that the CCP made a major safety intervention at the WIV on November 12th 2019, and that Chinese SARS-CoV-2 vaccine research also appears to have begun at that time. Other media reports quote U.S. intelligence sources stating they became aware of an outbreak in China in November 2019 from observations of health facilities and intercepted communications, and that NATO and the Israeli military were briefed at the end of November.

Interestingly, Michael Callahan himself initially told Robert Malone in early February 2020 that the virus was natural, saying “my people have carefully analysed the sequence, and there is no evidence that this virus was genetically engineered”. But by September 2021, following the release of the declassified intelligence report, he implies he actually thinks the virus came from the Wuhan lab and China is covering it up. Did he change his mind, or did he just start saying what he really thinks?

The picture is increasingly coming into focus. The Chinese Government, Fauci & Co and many within the U.S. intelligence community and biodefence network are covering up the origin of the virus and frustrating efforts to investigate it because they are themselves implicated in the research that likely created it and because they do not want biodefence research discredited. It is not, however, a perfect conspiracy as not all agree: some still push for investigations into the lab leak theory and endorse the theory themselves. Nonetheless, enough in those networks are sufficiently motivated to shut down and frustrate the investigations to make the cover-up largely successful.

Where the self-delusion stops and conscious lying begins is hard to say. The Fauci emails reveal scientists simultaneously assessing evidence ‘objectively’ and aiming at a particular conclusion. They appear to be trying to convince themselves as much as anyone else, and they may well have succeeded in convincing themselves – though that doesn’t make them right. How far they are conscious of deceiving others, and how far they have talked themselves into believing something convenient but false or not fully justified on the evidence, is unclear.

My overall conclusion from these emails and the other evidence is that the high degree of messiness and dissent around the lab leak cover-up indicates it does not come so much as a diktat from on high, or from a Grand Puppet Master, but from a general instinct that permeates the U.S. biodefence network owing to that network being highly compromised on risky virus research.

 

[marsh]

Russia Has Issued Over 80K Passports In Annexed Ukrainian Territories | ZeroHedge

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Russia Has Issued Over 80K Passports In Annexed Ukrainian Territories

THURSDAY, NOV 24, 2022 - 11:45 PM
Two weeks ago Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky issued a "10-point plan" for ending the war, which included the demand that Russian troops depart from all of sovereign Ukrainian territory. However, the recent Russian annexation votes for the absorption of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia territories make the likelihood of peace talks very distant at this point.

On Thursday, Russia again sent a resounding message affirming it doesn't plan to let go of these four eastern oblasts. Moscow confirmed it has issued over 80,000 Russian passports the residents of the territories which were declared part of the Russian federation in September.

"Since the addition ... of the four regions into the Russian Federation, and in accordance with the legislation, more than 80,000 people received passports as citizens of the Russian Federation," Valentina Kazakova, a top Interior Ministry official said.

Currently, as the invasion reaches the full nine-month mark, Russian forces do not yet have hold of 100% of any of the territories. In many areas pro-Kremlin troops have actually been pushed back amid the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive.

The United Nations, as well as the Western allies, have consistently condemned the "attempted illegal annexation" of Ukrainian land. Further they have pressed all global nations "not to recognize any changes announced by Russia to borders."

The European Union has also recently vowed to never recognize passports issued in the occupied territories, with Kyiv of course also condemning the 'illegal and invalid' passports. The European Council said earlier in the month: "This decision is a response to Russia's unprovoked and unjustified military aggression against Ukraine and Russia's practice of issuing Russian international passports to residents of the occupied regions."

Meanwhile, a recent Washington Post report has admitted that in these regions, sympathies for Russia among the local Ukrainian population run deep and are more widespread than previously admitted, complicating matters in places like Kherson city, recently recaptured by Ukraine forces amid a broader Russian withdrawal:

But in institutions across this regional capital, from the city council to hospitals and schools, newly restored leaders like Ivanovka are facing a double conundrum. How to rebuild without the thousands of Russia sympathizers who fled? And even more vexing, what to do with those who remain? Thousands in the city held an ambivalence toward the Russians, or even an affinity.

Further the report underscored that "Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in Kherson accepted Russian passports in the hope of receiving benefits. Many more accepted thick envelopes of Russian rubles on top of their pay as an inducement to stay in their jobs."

Australian national broadcaster: Ukrainian civilians stripped, tied up and beaten by vigilantes in shocking videos


There have since emerged widespread reports of "revenge" and retribution attacks on suspected 'Russia-sympathizers' by reconquering Ukrainian forces.

Likely this will continue especially in retaken areas where much of the citizenry accepted Russian passports and participated in the annexation referendum.

 

[marsh]

Post-FTX Regulatory Crackdown Will Erode Liberties, Accelerate Path To CBDC 'Social Engineering' | ZeroHedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

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Post-FTX Regulatory Crackdown Will Erode Liberties, Accelerate Path To CBDC 'Social Engineering'

FRIDAY, NOV 25, 2022 - 04:20 AM
Authored by Michael Washburn via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, and the worldwide outcry over the billions of dollars wiped off the platform, are likely to trigger a massive regulatory reaction that would further erode citizens’ economic freedoms without addressing the issues that fostered demand for an alternative to the fiat dollar, economists have told The Epoch Times.

An international scandal has embroiled FTX and its founder, 30-year-old Sam Bankman-Fried, in the wake of the firm’s crash earlier this month precipitated by a run on the exchange. Since then, reports have emerged that Alameda Research, a crypto hedge fund established by Bankman-Fried, was trading billions of dollars from FTX accounts without clients’ knowledge.

FTX has filed for bankruptcy protection, Bankman-Fried has stepped down from his role as CEO, and John J. Ray III, the former CEO of Enron, has taken over the insolvent company with a plan to sell it off if a successful restructuring is impossible. An estimated 1 million customers and other investors are facing total losses of billions of dollars.

FTX, in a recent court filing, said it owes $3.1 billion to its top 50 creditors, and its collapse has rocked the $839 billion global crypto market. On Nov. 22, the trading value of bitcoin tumbled to $15,480, a two-year low, before edging up slightly to $15,909.

Ray has claimed that subsidiaries of FTX in the United States and abroad “have solvent balance sheets, responsible management and valuable franchises,” but so far the shock and alarm over the exchange’s implosion have shown no sign of abating.

Meanwhile, a number of big names in sports and entertainment, such as comedian Larry David, NBA star Stephen Curry, and quarterback Tom Brady, have become the subject of a probe by the Texas State Securities Board over their public endorsements of FTX. The celebrities have also become the targets of class action lawsuits filed by disgruntled investors, with more expected in the days to come.

Madoff’s Heirs
Observers of the FTX blowup are extremely candid about the severity of the exchange’s mismanagement and the recent historical analogs for its unraveling.

Wayne Davis, a partner at the law firm Tannenbaum Halpern Syracuse & Hirschtritt in New York, drew a parallel with one of the most notorious cases of fraud in the history of finance, that of the Bernard L. Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme bilked some 4,800 clients of $64.8 billion. In both cases, clients were insufficiently attentive to the lack of internal controls, he suggested.

“Madoff comes to mind. Perhaps not the same criminal intent components, but there are certainly similarities as far as investor/customer enthusiasm notwithstanding signs of lax compliance and risk management engagement,” Tannenbaum told The Epoch Times.

Other observers see parallels in earlier events in the development of banking and currencies. Charles Steele, chair of the department of economics, business, and accounting at Hillsdale College in Michigan, said that the blow-up of FTX reminds him of the first stock market bubble and financial crisis to afflict the world, namely the collapse of France’s Banque Royale in 1720.

“Scotsman John Law set up a central bank for the French monarchy that began paying enormous returns on its shares and its sister Mississippi Company. It was heralded as a great triumph of new financial technology, a nearly miraculous breakthrough, but in fact, it was effectively what we now call a Ponzi scheme,” Steele told The Epoch Times.

“In the case of FTX, it appears that Samuel Bankman-Fried was heralded as a crypto genius, but was simply engaged in a lot of shady business disguised as ‘philanthropy,’ using other people’s money. He was apparently the second-largest donor to the Democrat Party campaigns in the 2022 elections, and also was positioning himself to be a major player in the design of federal regulations for cryptocurrency,” Steele added.

The Likely Reaction
The magnitude of the FTX scandal—the amounts of money involved and the number of people suffering possibly permanent financial harm—means that its ramifications are likely to continue to affect all players in the crypto space in coming weeks and months, said Jeffrey Guernsey, a professor of economics at Cedarville University in Ohio. The very lack of a fixed value that made crypto investing exciting for some people may also be among its singular vulnerabilities in the face of emboldened regulators, he suggested.

“While this thought does not originate with me, it is clear that crypto is not a currency, if one attribute of a currency is a stable value. The collapse of FTX certainly puts the entire asset class under review and question and may lead to calls for governmental regulation,” Guernsey said.

Given the priorities of the Biden administration, the notably harsher tone of federal guidance and rulemaking since he took office, and officials’ well-documented hostility to financial innovation and decentralization, the reaction from regulators is likely to be extremely draconian and may even cross lines that the regulators have hitherto respected, observers say. But whether the coming crackdown will address concerns of fiat currency that helped feed demand for alternative exchanges, platforms, and markets is a different question.

“I expect that this debacle will lead to greatly increased federal regulation of cryptocurrencies,” Steele said.

In Steele’s view, the fiasco is likely to speed up the crafting and implementation of central bank digital currencies (CBDC). Steele noted that the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is collaborating with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a joint study, Project Hamilton, whose objective is to devise a CBDC for the United States.

While ignored by many people, this is one of the most potentially concerning recent developments given the unprecedented powers that it stands to place in the hands of a central regulatory authority, he said. While some might initially welcome a CBDC, it could have unforeseen consequences and ultimately could help extend the role of government into people’s lives in ways to which they are so far unaccustomed.

“I think a CBDC is very dangerous, because it would enable a central bank or government to monitor, control, and record every exchange made with the currency. If, for example, a government decided it did not want citizens buying, say, firearms, or perhaps donating funds to a political candidate, the central bank could prevent the transaction. Alternatively, it could have a permanent record of a citizen’s purchases and use these to establish a social credit score for the person,” Steele said.

“In this way, a CBDC could become the ultimate tool of social engineering and tyranny. A true cryptocurrency keeps transactions anonymous, which is one of its great benefits. Governments tend to dislike tools that give citizens such privacy,” he added.



Legitimate Demand
The tragedy of the FTX scandal and the possible meltdown of other crypto entrepreneurs as more and more people panic and seek to redeem their assets is that such platforms arose partly in response to an understandable demand for alternatives to the fiat dollar, or a dollar whose value and use flow from government dictates and are unrelated to any external commodity or asset such as gold. The heavy-handed reaction expected in the coming months as a consequence of FTX’s blow-up is unlikely to take account of this truth.

That’s the view of Brian Domitrovic, a professor of economic history at Sam Houston State University, who sees negative long-term consequences to the country’s abandonment of the gold standard in 1971.

“I don’t think there’s any kind of broad popular support for a fiat dollar, a non-gold dollar. There hasn’t been since 1971. A lot of popular dissatisfaction with this has been very clearly expressed,” Domitrovic told The Epoch Times.

“The Federal Reserve is not a popular institution at all. I think there’s just a general sense on the part of the public that we should have something more like the classical monetary system that we used to have. And I think crypto has tapped into that more effectively than anything since the end of the gold standard,” he added.

The New Non-Fiat
From a certain standpoint, cryptocurrencies took over where gold left off following the shift away from the gold standard, Domitrovic said. Like gold, it is limited in supply and requires mining, though of course not the same kind of mining. In the case of the former commodity, the mining is a process of physical extraction of a substance from the earth, and in the latter, it is mathematical and theoretical in nature.

Despite the differences, both currencies have the effect of eroding centralized power and oversight by making institutions such as the Federal Reserve less integral to the functioning of the economy, Domitrovic said.

“Bitcoin aspires to mimic gold in many respects. This is what you had when money was not a creation of the Federal Reserve,” he added.

Much of today’s demand for bitcoin and kindred currencies flow from a widespread desire to go back to how things were before 1971, Domitrovic argued.

“Before 1971, the United States led the world in becoming the greatest economy ever, with hundreds of millions of people living at high levels of prosperity. There is a very strong reason why people associate the pre-1971 period with a magnificent achievement economically,” he added.

In this analysis, the federal government has sought to maintain centralized oversight over the economy and the level of prosperity attainable by citizens partly by not allowing crypto to compete with the fiat dollar.

“Even if there is fraud, I’m still going to lay a lot of the blame at the feet of the government and the official definition of policy, because they’re not taking crypto as seriously as they should. They consider it non-money,” he said.

 

[marsh]

An Economic Candle Burning From Both Ends | ZeroHedge

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An Economic Candle Burning From Both Ends

FRIDAY, NOV 25, 2022 - 05:40 AM
Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

Some facts of our times follow. As you read, consider your own household and portfolios and how they measure up.

Disposable personal income per capita has been in decline in real terms for 19 straight months. This is not just dollar amounts but dollars adjusted for purchasing power. We are just now level with 2019, which is to say that Americans have lost three years of financial progress.

Savings has hit a new low of 3.2 percent, which is where it stood just after the 2008 financial crisis, and this contrasts with 6 percent rates after 1980 and 10 percent average rates in the postwar period.

Credit card debt just jumped to a 20-year high and is still soaring.



(Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data [FRED], St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker)

Money, credit, and capital are draining from long-term investments, drying up the venture capitalists and putting a tight credit squeeze on large businesses where firings in the professional sector have already begun.

Inflation is still embedded and this is because consumers have come to expect it and adjust their spending habits accordingly, plus wage costs are rising in sectors like hospitality, retail, and manufacturing.

As an example, the latest housing-price data shows annualized inflation at 15.4 percent year over year, even as the buyers’ market is mostly locked up. That’s the very essence of stagflation: rising prices amidst declining output.

It might seem strangely calm out there as we approach the holiday season but the underlying realities are nothing but. An economy cannot live this way, with business deleveraging even as households are taking on ever more debt while the currency is being devalued.

It’s becoming incontrovertible that a conspicuous recession awaits if it is not already here.

What’s unfolding before our eyes is a confirmation of a business cycle theory pushed in the 1920s and 1930s by Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek. The so-called Austrian theory observes the distortions in the production structure that result from central bank attempts to suppress interest rates, which is exactly what the Fed has done.

While the results are not manifested in higher overall prices (think of 2008–2020) such a policy pushes resources out of shorter-term investments into longer-term speculative ventures. The problem is that speculative capital investment in this case is not justified by the existing pool of savings. Indeed, the central bank policies have caused “forced savings” with the result of unsustainable business empires.

Hayek uses ferocious language to describe the wealth transfer that is happening here: “This causes a part of the social dividend to be distributed to individuals who have not acquired legitimate claim to it through previous services, nor taken them over from others legitimately entitled to them. It is thus taken away from this part of the community against its will.”

When things become shaky or prices start to shift, and the central bank starts to back off its pillaging policies, the house of cards starts to fall apart, as resources are drained from long-term speculation to shorter term consumption and the restarting of real savings.

That is precisely where we are in the cycle.

Meanwhile, Washington is still dreaming of new ideas to kill our economic prospects. These include zero-carbon delusions that would literally reverse the Industrial Revolution, a monetary reform that would bake surveillance into every transaction, ridiculous and coercive pandemic planning, and ever higher taxes to transfer resources from us to them.



The failure of the Republicans to retake the Senate or otherwise achieve anything truly decisive puts off possible fixes to this mess far into the future. It is a future we might not have because time is running short. The candle is burning at both ends.

To be sure, we should all in a macroeconomic sense look forward to a new age of more honest finance. The disaster of zero interest rate policy is finally coming to an end. Ben Bernanke’s Nobel Prize notwithstanding, this policy massively distorted capital allocation in the economy, and around the world, for the better part of 14 years. With its end, we are going to get a taste of some economic and financial rationality.

We might even be able to save money without losing money. So in that sense, the man who bears the main responsibility for inflation, Jerome Powell, is the same guy who will finally fix what Bernanke broke all those years ago. Remember those days when everything seemed too good to be true? There was a financial crisis that the Fed magically fixed with no downside.

Except that there was a huge economic, cultural, and social downside. Frugality and prudence gave way to massive excess and a level of craziness in culture we never imagined we would experience. Among the costs are a bloated and overbuilt professional labor sector that would eventually favor and push lockdowns as the answer to a widespread virus. It was just their excuse for staying home and forcing the working classes to bring them groceries.

What made this preposterously unjust system possible was the Fed with Bernanke at the helm. Quantitative easing turns out to mean upending all normal life and paying the horrid price for this a decade and a half later.

As Bloomberg put it: “The great quantitative easing experiment was a mistake. It’s time central banks acknowledge it for the failure it was and retire it from their policy arsenal as soon as they’re able …. That’s why central banks need to admit QE was a mistake. Their credibility is already at stake after they underestimated inflation. Now is the time to take a hard look at monetary policy over the last decade and rethink what worked and what didn’t. Otherwise we’ll be stuck with QE forever.”

As with 1980, and the pain experienced with that recession, we might have rising prosperity to look forward to in about two or three years, at best. But that really does depend on a full policy pivot from D.C. toward massive spending cuts, deregulation, and tax relief. Nothing could be both more urgent and more implausible right now.

As a consequence, we have household budgets stretched beyond any sustainable level. And you know this if you shopped for Thanksgiving groceries, which are up 37 percent over what you paid two years ago.

Right now, consumers and producers are screaming to make it stop. What they mean is that they want life to return back to normal. Sadly, absolutely no one in Washington believes that it is possible or desirable. The best scenario right now is that matters become less bad so quickly. But there will be no going back to 2019 prices under the current plans.

What that means for households is that something needs to change, and fast. The debt needs to be paid off. The credit cards need to be cut up. The dinners out and vacations must be curbed. Frugality needs to become the norm. And not just frugality but actual privation. The middle class needs to change its ways. Sadly, for the poor, there is no way out from what is coming. As for the rich, they will of course be fine as always.

As for government finance, there are no words to describe the amount of red ink. With interest rates rising, so too will be the burden of servicing this debt for the U.S. Treasury. Meanwhile, leadership in Washington looks at this data with a kind of nihilistic who-cares attitude. The old days of public-spirited rulers are gone. It has been replaced by an attitude more like FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried: steal everything that is not nailed down.

The American public is nowhere near woken up to the reality, but Europe knows what is up. The chaos is both political and economic as people have awakened to what their ruling classes have done to them. We also need to be newly aware and start preparing before it is too late.

Some day, historians will look back at our times as a great turning point. We’ve been through calamity and it worsens by the day. Will we enter into a new Dark Age? Or find the light and crawl our way toward it before it is too late?

 

[marsh]

Dr. Malone: More Fauci Emails Prove Collusion & Cover-Up of C-19 Origins, True Vaccine Effects 14:48 min

Dr. Malone: More Fauci Emails Prove Collusion & Cover-Up of C-19 Origins, True Vaccine Effects
galacticstorm Published November 24, 2022

Dr Robert Malone is taking part of a medical conference in Istanbul and takes time out to speak with Steve Bannon War Room

 

[marsh]

Russell Brand says that the rhetoric around tolerance and inclusivity is often used "to mask the fact that behind them lurks totalitarianism." .53 min

Russell Brand says that the rhetoric around tolerance and inclusivity is often used "to mask the fact that behind them lurks totalitarianism."​

The Post Millennial Clips Published November 24, 2022

Russell Brand says that the rhetoric around tolerance and inclusivity is often used "to mask the fact that behind them lurks totalitarianism."

He adds "The people that expound these ideas most vociferously are people like Justin Trudeau..."

 

[marsh]

(segments)

The World Health Organization's pandemic treaty will control us all | Redacted with Clayton Morris 19:46 min

The World Health Organization's pandemic treaty will control us all | Redacted with Clayton Morris​

Redacted News Published November 24, 2022

The World Health Organization has released a draft of its pandemic preparedness plan and the plan is to scoop up a whole lot of power. From you and your country! We go over the pieces that are most concerning of this draft document that we hope makes its way into the recycle bin!

^^^^
This vaccine news is insane, I mean crazy, I mean... | Redacted with Clayton Morris 19:36 min

This vaccine news is insane, I mean crazy, I mean... | Redacted with Clayton Morris​

Redacted News Published November 24, 2022

Do patients who refuse the Covid vaccine need mental health pharmaceuticals? Some doctors in Canada are being told that they should not enable vaccine avoidance and might want to consider medication to change their minds. We talk about how the biopharmaceutical complex is waiting in the wings to solve one medication problem with another medication.

^^^^^
Wait, these clowns are going to let this happen? Putin is furious | Redacted with Clayton Morris 13:26 min

Wait, these clowns are going to let this happen? Putin is furious | Redacted with Clayton Morris​

Redacted News Published November 24, 2022
The United Nations says that it does not have the capability to identify who is shelling the Zaporozhye power plant. Russia has called on the International Atomic Energy Agency to investigate the shelling of the region but their response: No Can Do. They have done plenty of condemning but no actual investigating or moves of any kind to stop it. Now they are saying that they are pretty sure that there are no nuclear safety concerns. But they have lots of time to investigate Iran!

^^^^^
SHOCKING! Elon just exposed the truth we all suspected | Redacted with Natali and Clayton Morris 13:27 min

SHOCKING! Elon just exposed the truth we all suspected | Redacted with Natali and Clayton Morris​

Redacted News Published November 23, 2022
We already knew who gets censored on Twitter and who doesn't but Elon Musk confirmed it. He said that there are no bans on left leaning users, despite how many lies they spread. As outrageous as this is, he says that the Twitter team is looking for ways to make the platform more fair. We're waiting.

^^^^^
Hang on, now the Colorado mass shooter is WHAT? | Redacted with Clayton Morris 21:36 min

Hang on, now the Colorado mass shooter is WHAT? | Redacted with Clayton Morris​

Redacted News Published November 23, 2022
Over the weekend, a mass shooting in Colorado was deemed a hate crime against LGBT people because it took place at a LGBT club. On Tuesday, the accused shooter filed a demand for a preliminary hearing and the filing shows that the shooter is a non-binary person. The shooter’s name is Anderson Aldrich and in the filings, their lawyer refers to Alrich as Mx with the following footnote: “Anderson Aldrich is non-binary. They use they/them pronouns, and for the purpose of all formal filings, will be addressed as Mx. Aldrich.” Does this then unravel the narrative that this is an anti-LGBT hate crime?

 

[marsh]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axGQ-CQFIEA
3:32 min

Elon Musk teases release of info on Hunter Biden laptop censorship​

https://yt3.ggpht.com/ytc/AMLnZu_64n1WvB5AW__6tdA7RqqQiX73ix5yeF****iK1AI=s88-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj
Fox News
Nov 25, 2022
Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., discusses the possible release of information on Twitter's censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story and a recent survey showing Small Business Saturday edging out Black Friday.

 

[marsh]

Con Them With Kindness – “Longtermism” and “Effective Altruism” are the New Faces of Transhumanism

The FTX crypto scandal has unmasked the hypocrisy that drives our “philanthropic” elites

joebot.substack.com

Con Them With Kindness – “Longtermism” and “Effective Altruism” are the New Faces of Transhumanism

The FTX crypto scandal has unmasked the hypocrisy that drives our “philanthropic” elites

Joe Allen
5 min ago

Futurists don’t just predict coming events. They also seek to shape them. Each prediction is framed to bring about change in a certain direction, whether by bold promises or doomsday prophecies.

For instance, when you hear warnings that artificial intelligence could outsmart humankind and destroy us all—or more precisely, if you believe those claims—there is no choice but to rethink your long-term strategy. Maybe you smash the machines preemptively. Or maybe you teach the AI to be nice and then jam a Neuralink trode in your brain to keep up with the conversation.

To the extent our immediate decisions are guided by these imagined futures, we’re all unwitting tools of the futurist.

After the spectacular crash of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, the twin philosophies of “effective altruism” and “longtermism” have invaded the public consciousness. Like an infestation of eusocial termites, once you notice the first effective altruist crawling around the house, you start to see them everywhere.

Effective altruism is an egghead academic movement focused on helping large numbers of people, or perhaps all conscious entities, on a global scale. One popular proposal is to accumulate as much money as possible, then give it away to charity. These strategies often rely on the sorts of elaborate calculations and convoluted ethical frameworks that only “experts” could concoct.

Longtermism takes this do-gooder ball and runs with it into the distant future. Its proponents imagine how our altruistic actions today might benefit all the conscious minds that will eventually come to exist. In theory, that includes untold trillions of humans living in space, as well as mind uploads and AI bots living in vast digital simulations.

You may have problems today. But if we’re gonna be serious about utilitarianism, the highest moral priority belongs to all the cyborg space invaders yet to be. Sorry, but at the end of the day, there are more of them than you.

In practice, these philosophies seem to involve a lot of virtue-signaling and spending of other people’s money. The fat, slovenly FTX frontman Sam Bankman-Fried projected these selfless ideologies as a smokescreen for his crypto Ponzi scheme, where he defrauded investors of billions. Bankman-Fried assured his clients, and the world, that he’d use his gargantuan profits to help save humanity from the next pandemic or nuclear war—or both.

Instead, he blew all the cash on mansions and other luxuries, wasted his time on video games, wrecked his brain with exotic cognitive enhancement drugs, and apparently hosted weird orgies of the repulsive nouveau riche. On the bright side, his hilarious scandal did shed light on the intellectual movements that spawned him, unmasking the delusional arrogance that underpins effective altruism, longtermism, and most elite theorizing.

As I mentioned, both philosophic schools are utilitarian. Advocates seek to maximize happiness for the greatest number of people—or in more universal versions, the greatest number of sentient beings—including all animals and future digital minds. Similar to the ancient belief that the gods require blood to make crops grow, though, they admit sacrifices must be made. As the New York Times writer Walter Duranty said of communist collectivization in 1933, “To put it brutally—you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

For example, if you wanted to stop a deadly pandemic, then for the good of all humankind you’d have to lock vaccine-refusers in their homes. If they kept sneaking out, you’d send cops to beat the living hell out of them or maybe lock them in quarantine camps. When push comes to forced jabs, kill em’ all with kindness.

Of greater interest, both philosophies also overlap and derive from transhumanism—that infamous techno-cult whose members believe humans shall be as gods by merging with machines. Oxford University was the crucible of effective altruism and longtermism, where the well-paid philosopher and avowed transhumanist Nick Bostrom had a decisive impact on the movement.

Bostrom is best known for warning that artificial intelligence is an “existential risk” to humanity in his 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. His ideas were enormously influential on the world’s richest transhumanist, Elon Musk, who suggests we implant brain-computer interfaces to keep pace with machine intelligence.

Bostrom is also a founding member of the Future of Humanity Institute, located at Oxford, to which Musk donated $10 million. Futurists can always use more money to save us from future they’re predicting.



This elite transition from techno-optimism to whitewashed corporate altruism is readily apparent in the global agendas set at the World Economic Forum. In 2016, WEF chairman Klaus Schwab published The Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which he announced the “merging of the physical, digital, and biological worlds.”

Four years later, his infamous tract The Great Reset identified the COVID-19 pandemic an “unprecedented opportunity” to accelerate this technological revolution. Naturally, normal people across the planet were furious. So in December of 2021, Schwab reassured everyone of the elites’ good intentions with a follow-up volume entitled The Great Narrative.

“This emerging narrative is most helpful because it shows that this capacity to care,” he and his co-author wrote, “can be harnessed for social good.”

To put it another way, your bleeding heart can be used like a battery to power the Machine.

—
Longtermism and effective altruism first showed up on my radar last August, when Elon Musk quote-tweeted a plug for William MacAskill’s then forthcoming book What We Owe the Future. “It makes the case for longtermism,” the Oxford philosopher wrote, “the view that positively affecting the long-run future is a key moral priority of our time.” Incidentally, MacAskill was also a mentor to Bankman-Fried, and advised FTX on the mystical path of effective altruism.



In a flash, Musk’s latest TED interview made a lot more sense. “SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, and the Boring Company are philanthropy,” he insisted.

Tesla is accelerating sustainable energy. This is a love—philanthropy. SpaceX is trying to ensure the long-term survival of humanity with a multiple-planet species. That is love of humanity. You know, Neuralink is trying to help solve brain injuries and existential risk with AI. Love of humanity.​

Why did he buy Twitter? “I think civilizational risk is decreased the more we can increase the trust of Twitter as a public platform,” he answered.

Soon after Musk’s “personal philosophy” tweet, Twitter’s algorithms introduced me to the work of Émile Torres. This person may stand on the far left end of the political spectrum, but I’ll readily admit Torres is an excellent writer. The philosopher’s articles in Aeon and Salon expose the basic ideas of longtermism, which Torres calls “the world’s most dangerous secular credo.” As a former longtermist who left the movement in disgust, Torres would know.

This futurist crazy train departs at a quiet station where everyone works to increase overall happiness and decrease suffering, always taking the long view. The farther we chug along, though, roaring past genocidal bioweapons and robotic terminators—and the proposed solutions to these extinction-level events—the quest for well-being goes off the rails.

“Longtermism might be one of the most influential ideologies that few people outside of elite universities and Silicon Valley have ever heard about,” Torres wrote in Aeon. “The crucial fact that longtermists miss is that technology is far more likely to cause our extinction before this distant future event than to save us from it.”

Torres is so spot on here, I’m inclined to ignore those pesky “they/them” pronouns in the Twitter bio. Such day-to-day squabbles seem petty in the face of a dysfunctional techno-dystopia.



As we’ve learned from the recent pandemic freakout, the “cure” is often worse than the disease. It’s the difference between coughing into your sleeve and wearing three masks to go get your tenth booster. Longtermism and effective altruism are comical embodiments of such extremes. They start with a few mosquito nets for starving kids in Africa and end with all-seeing smart dust gathering under your bed.

To illustrate, Nick Bostrom has argued for an inescapable global surveillance system, which involves every citizen wearing “freedom tags” that feed into “patriot stations” so governments can identify potential extinction-level threats, such as illicit artificial superintelligence or basement-made gray goo nanobot swarms. And he was just getting started.

In Superintelligence, Bostrom floated a curious long-term plan to raise average IQ and reduce human stupidity: fertilize an army of fetuses in vitro, screen their genetic codes, select the supreme specimens, implant them in actual women or gestate them en masse in artificial wombs, and then huck the rejects into biowaste bins. He never seems to worry about spawning a brood of emotionless sociopaths, but then, maybe that’s the point.

You want omelets? Better get to crackin’ some eggs.

We already see similar eugenics programs underway in the intelligence-obsessed pronatalist movement. Sam Altman, the gay tech magnate who co-founded OpenAI with Elon Musk, has invested in the company Genomic Predictor, which screens out unwanted zygotes, and another called Conception. According to a fascinating Business Insider exposé, the latter startup “plans to grow viable human eggs out of stem cells and could allow two biological males to reproduce.”

Along similar lines, Vitalik Buterin (the co-founder of Ethereum cryptocurrency, a notable FTX booster, and yet another node in the effective altruism movement) recently suggested that babies should be gestated in plastic bio-bags to safeguard women’s rights:

Disparities in economic success between men and women are far larger once marriage+children enter the picture. Synthetic wombs would remove the high burden of pregnancy, significantly reducing inequality.​

On a long enough timeline—and with enough capital for uninterrupted navel-gazing—longtermists and effective altruists might cook up the ultimate suicidal scheme to eliminate pain. They already have a decent running start.

A few years back, William MacAskill argued “To truly end animal suffering, the most ethical choice is to kill wild predators (especially Cecil the lion).” Sounding like a suburban Buddhist having a bad acid trip, the scrawny vegetarian elaborated:

By killing predators, we can save the lives of the many prey animals like wildebeests, zebras, and buffalos in the local area that would otherwise be killed. … And there’s no reason for considering the lives of predators like lions to be more important than the lives of the prey.​

It’s not hard to imagine this extermination campaign extending to hyper-aggressive human males. Or, with advances in stem cell-derived gametes, you could do away with males altogether. So long as we’re philosophizing, though, why not apply this standard to autistic philosophers? If they ever took over the world—say, through a global technological infrastructure—they’d cause far more suffering than any wild predator.

—
Much of MacAskill’s thinking, and effective altruism as a whole, was inherited from philosopher Peter Singer. In the early 90’s, Singer famously argued that infants—especially the disabled—are fair game for abortion up to thirty days after birth. The premise was this would reduce the suffering of both overburdened parents and their potentially retarded children. It’s just a matter of moral calculation.

Dismissing all regard for the sacred or profane, Singer’s philosophy milks human kindness for all it’s worth, however sour that milk may be. If we’re not killing deformed babies and useless old people, for their own good, we should be freeing the farm animals.

“The only justifiable stopping place for the expansion of altruism is the point at which all those whose welfare can be affected by our actions are included within the circle of altruism,” he wrote in his 1981 book The Expanding Circle. “This means that all beings with the capacity to feel pleasure or pain should be included.”

Today, as the Fourth Industrial Revolution unfolds across the planet, Singer has extended his altruistic extremism to artificial life as well. He recently explained this position on a Big Think episode:

If we created robots who are at our level, then I think we would have to give them, really, the same rights we have. There would be no justification for saying, “Ah yes, but we’re a biological creature and you’re a robot.” I don’t think that has anything to do with the moral status of the being.​

To recap, newborns deserve less moral status than farm animals, while robots deserve human rights. You can’t stop progress!

Regarding the moral value of artificial minds, MacAskill makes similar arguments. In his 2021 paper “The case for strong longtermism,” co-authored with Hilary Greaves for the Global Priorities Institute, he estimates that “digital sentience” should expand the pool of future minds exponentially, maxing out around 10^45—or a quattuordecillion—digital souls expanding out across the Milky Way.

If you weigh this overpopulated cybernetic future against our present-day needs and desires, that’s a whole lotta moral concern.

“Assuming that on average people have lives of significantly positive welfare,” MacAskill and Greaves write, “according to a total utilitarianism the existence of humanity is significantly better than its non-existence, at any given time. Combining this with the fact that both states are persistent, premature human extinction would be astronomically bad.”

The implication is horrific. If our moral purpose is to benefit the greatest number of possible beings, then it’s our moral duty to avoid extinction—such as asteroid impacts or malign artificial superintelligence—by any means necessary.

Taken to its logical conclusion, such moral reasoning would justify anything from starving out present-day populations in order to feed the Machine for future digital minds, to wiping out the huddled masses who are too stupid to understand how important this Machine really is.

After all, what are the 8 billion dumdums living today worth when weighed against the quattuordecillion digital souls who are yet to be born?

Do you wanna colonize the galaxy or not?


Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders who colonized Mars
—

The market-rocking meltdown of FTX, coupled with Sam Bankman-Fried’s moralistic rhetoric, gives us some indication of where longtermism and effective altruism can take us as ruling philosophies. First off, we see how vapid all this corporate virtue-signaling really is. As the firestorm was building, Bankman-Fried was asked via text by a Vox interviewer—who is herself an effective altruist—if “the ethics stuff” is “mostly a front.” He responded:

yeah​

​

i mean that’s not *all* of it​

​

but it’s a lot​

He went on to explain:

it’s what reputations are made of, to some extent​

​

i feel bad for those who get ****ed by it​

​

by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we all say the right shiboleths and so everyone likes us​

The second thing the FTX debacle shows us, by introducing longtermism and effective altruism into the public consciousness, is how pervasive this sort of ideology is among our tech, academic, and economic elites. “Woke” culture, Covidian madness, radical philanthropy—it’s all a new spin on an ancient scam:

“If you don’t obey the Powers That Be, you must be a selfish person. In fact, you’re hardly a ‘person’ at all.”

Finally, this scandal lays bare how easily duped our elites really are, and how stupid they believe us to be. FTX was hyped by everyone from Sequoia Capital and established Oxford professors to island-hoppers like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Even as the lies unravel before our eyes, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal continue to spin the entire affair as a series of unfortunate business decisions. Presently, Bankman-Fried is still scheduled to speak at the NYT DealBook Summit alongside Janet Yellen, Mark Zuckerberg, and Volodymyr Zelensky.

The lunatics really are running the asylum, and should you dare to call out their madness, they’ll have you put in a straitjacket and injected with tranquilizers. It’s long past time to steal the keys and escape this nuthouse. And if there’s any spirit left in us, we’ll leave the asylum burning behind us.

 

[marsh]

Thread by @akheriaty on Thread Reader App

@akheriaty: 1/ UPDATE: from our deposition of Fauci yesterday in the MO v. Biden case. Fauci confirmed that in Feb 2020, Fauci sent Clifford Lane, his deputy at the NAIAD, as the U.S. representative for the WHO...…

threadreaderapp.com

2/ The CCP had announced China had contained the virus through draconian lockdowns--a claim now known to be false. Given the China's pattern of falsified information, Lane and Fauci should have approached this claim with skepticism. Lockdowns were wholly untested & unprecedented.

3/ As our lawyer, @Leftylockdowns1 put it, Fauci "was apparently willing to base his lockdown advocacy on the observations of a single guy relying on reports from a dictator." Not exactly a double-blind randomized trial level of evidence, or indeed, any level of evidence.

4/ Days after Lane returned, WHO published its report praising China’s strategy: “China’s uncompromising and rigorous use of non-pharmaceutical measures [lockdowns] to contain transmission of the COVID-19 virus in multiple settings provides vital lessons for the global response.

5/ "This rather unique and unprecedented public health response in China reversed the escalating cases,” the report claimed. My colleague @jeffreyatucker at the @brownstoneinst gave a tongue-in-cheek gloss of WHO’s misty eyed report: “I’ve seen the future—and it is Wuhan.”

6/ Lockdowns quickly spread from China to the West, as a troubling number of Western apologists besides the WHO also looked to the Chinese Communist Party’s covid response for guidance.

7/ The U.S. & U.K. followed Italy’s lockdown, which had followed China, and all but a handful of countries around the globe immediately followed our lead. Within weeks the whole world was locked down.

8/8 From the very beginning, the evidential basis for this global policy catastrophe was always paper-thin.

We are now living in the aftermath.
More details and background on this case here…

The U.S. Government’s Vast New Privatized Censorship Regime

Fauci, Jean-Pierre, and Facebook execs get asked pointed questions about alleged censorship. Our attorney, Jenin Younes, explains how public-private collusion and censorship violates the Constitution.

aaronkheriaty.substack.com

 

[marsh]

Biden’s National Science Foundation Has Pumped Nearly $40 Million Into Social Media Censorship Grants and Contracts

Foundation For Freedom Online (FFO) is a free speech watchdog dedicated to restoring the promise of a free and open Internet.

foundationforfreedomonline.com

Biden’s National Science Foundation Has Pumped Nearly $40 Million Into Social Media Censorship Grants and Contracts

Nov 22 2022,Mike Benz

SUMMARY

• National Science Foundation (NSF) spent $38.8 million on government grants and contracts to combat “misinformation” since the start of the Biden administration.
• 64 NSF grants totaling $31.8 million were given to 42 different colleges and universities to research the science of stopping viral ideas.
• Some grants explicitly target “populist politicians” and “populist communications” to scientifically determine ”how best to counter populist narratives.”
• When most people think of the National Science Foundation (NSF), they think about the US government investing tax dollars in grand advancements in mathematics, aerospace and engineering.

But under the Biden administration, the fastest-growing field of NSF grant funding appears to be the science of censorship.

At Foundation for Freedom Online, we previously reported the strange fact that the exact two universities who partnered with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to censor the 2020 election received a $3 million joint grant from the National Science Foundation just months after the election ended.

Neither of those two academic “disinfo labs” were taxpayer-funded before the 2020 election. But then, after an election where in effect they exclusively censored the social media opposition of the current administration, suddenly the current administration started hooking them up with government grants.

After that revelation, we investigated every NSF grant issued in 2021 and 2022 relating to social media “misinformation” or “disinformation.” Our goal was to determine the extent to which NSF is spending US tax dollars on censoring US taxpayers.

Our findings were profoundly disturbing.

Since the start of 2021, NSF has issued 64 government grants on the science of “countering” social media “mis/disinformation,” totaling $31.8 million. It has also issued two government grants, totaling $7 million. That brings a total of NSF-funded scientific censorship research to $38.8 million since the start of the Biden administration.

In just two years, those 64 government censorship grants were spread across 42 different colleges and universities. This incredible range of recipients covers every level of the country’s higher education institutions, both regionally and in terms of prestige.

The most highly NSF-funded “Misinformation/Disinformation” grantee universities are:

• State University of New York (SUNY) — 4 unique grants, cumulatively totaling $4.22 million
• George Washington University – 4 unique grants, cumulatively totaling $4 million.
• University of Wisconsin – 3 unique grants, cumulatively totaling $3.83 million
• University of Washington – 3 unique grants, cumulatively totaling $3.52 million

It is notable that #4 on that above list is University of Washington (UW), which is one of the two institutions that DHS worked directly with — and chose as a formal partner — to censor the 2020 election.

For example, below are a few sample videos of the “disinformation” work being done at UW, as explained by UW’s “disinfo lab” founder, Kate Starbird:

Video on website 3:08 min

And here is UW “disinfo” lab founder Kate Starbird using advanced monitoring AI to map out entire networks of people who spread an election narrative her lab helped censor off of social media:

Video on website 2:16 min

In a separate report, we will break down a list of the most highly NSF-funded “Mis/Disinformation” topics (Covid, elections, media distrust, etc.) and the most Orwellian grant descriptions we found.

As a preview of that full-breakdown analysis, below is just one NSF grant we’ll highlight in this report, which is representative of the brazen political targeting being done by the Biden Administration with government funds under the pretext of funding “science.”

On May 1, 2022, NSF gave a $200,000 grant to George Washington University (see full grant details here) with the following grant description:

PANDEMIC COMMUNICATION IN TIME OF POPULISM: This project uses several methods to study how populist politicians distorted Covid-19 pandemic health communication to encourage polarized attitudes and distrust among citizens, thus making them more vulnerable to misinformation....​

​

It also studies how best to counter these populist narratives and develop more effective communication channels. The research studies four areas of communication: government-led pandemic communication, media policy, media coverage, and public attitudes towards the media. The project makes an important contribution to research on populist communication and political polarization by bringing two fields of expertise — populist communication and public health — together.​

​

The project will also study how best to counter these populist narratives and develop more efficient and reliable communication. The focus is on four countries — Brazil, Poland, Serbia, and the US — all led by populist leaders during the pandemic and capture different types of populist responses to the pandemic… This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.​

So this is a government grant, funded by the NSF, which explicitly takes aim at “populist politicians,” “populist communications,” and targets the former “populist leaders” of four countries — including the United States.

To ram the radical bias home, the NSF grant explicitly says the goal of the funding is “to counter these populist narratives.” That is, point blank, just the US government using US taxpayer funds to counter the social media opinions of half of the entire US electorate.

Isn’t the government supposed to work for us?

Methodology

This Foundation for Freedom Online analysis was done through open source review of the public entries available at USAspending.gov. We aggregated this list from the 70 grants and 2 contracts awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) during FY2021 and 2022, filtered by the keywords “misinformation” and “disinformation”: USAspending.gov

We also ran NSF grant searches for other censorship proxy terms like “‘media literacy’, ‘digital literacy,’ ‘resilience,’ and ‘content moderation.’ Here, we found additional grants to add to this list, but we decided not to include those additional entries in the interest of avoiding confusion and keeping this report squarely focused on “mis/disinformation” as a censorship predicate.

Of those 70 in-scope grants, we removed two from our analysis because they predated FY2021 as a start date.

Of that 68-grant subtotal, the aggregate NSF funding amount was $38,634,848 (plus the $7 million in government contracts, netting a total of over $45 million).

However, we wanted to be as charitable and conservative to the NSF as possible, so from there we eliminated grants that had “misinformation” or “disinformation” in the grant description, but where those terms were clearly “shoehorned in” rather than being the direct focus.

Accordingly, we removed four grants from the 68 subtotal because a review of their specific contents appeared to be duplicative or not primarily about “social media misinformation/disinformation” or Internet censorship.

That gave us the 64-grant total. You can find our fully searchable data set of those 64 grants available in the hyperlink below:

NSF Government Grants for "Mis/Disinformation" FY2021-2022 (Raw Data) | PDF | Machine Learning | Social Media

Compiled by Foundation for Freedom Online

www.scribd.com

As noted above, we will be supplementing this report with detailed breakdowns by censorship category and targeting type. If the scale and scope of taxpayer dollars is shocking by itself, trust us, it gets much worse when you see the deep specifics of how the censorship sausage is made in each case.

In the meantime, the takeaway is clear: under the Biden Admin, the NSF is funding the idea that if citizen trust in government cannot be earned organically, then it must be installed by science.


Mike Benz
Executive Director

 

[marsh]

Pentagon fails to pass new financial audit, unable to account for over $2 trillion in assets

As Washington's yearly defense budget hurtles towards the $1 trillion mark, the DoD continues to operate with little to no oversight of its spending p

thecradle.co

Pentagon fails to pass new financial audit, unable to account for over $2 trillion in assets

As Washington's yearly defense budget hurtles towards the $1 trillion mark, the DoD continues to operate with little to no oversight of its spending practices

By News Desk - November 23 2022

The US Department of Defense has, for the fifth straight year, failed to pass a financial audit, with only seven out of the Pentagon’s 27 military agencies receiving a passing grade.

“We failed to get an ‘A’,” Mike McCord, the Pentagon’s comptroller and chief financial officer, told reporters last week, announcing the results of the Pentagon’s fifth-ever financial audit.

“I would not say that we flunked,” he added, despite his office acknowledging that the Pentagon only managed to account for 39 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets.

With this failure, the Pentagon has kept its spot as the only US government agency to have never passed a comprehensive audit. It also highlights the US war department’s persistent lack of internal financial control, its poor budget estimations and rampant overspending.

A clear example of this is the F-35 program, which has gone over its original budget by $165 billion to build a plane tasked to perform many different tasks, none of which it does well.

The Pentagon is slated to buy more than 2,400 F-35s for the Air Force, Marines, and Navy. The estimated lifetime cost for procuring and operating these planes – $1.7 trillion – would make it the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons project ever.

A 2021 Pentagon assessment of the F-35 found 800 unresolved defects in the plane.

There is also the current plan to expand Washington’s ship production, as part of the Pentagon’s obsession with preparing for a potential war with China.

While the Pentagon estimates the average cost of this shipbuilding initiative to be $27 billion per year between 2023 and 2052, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) contends this, claiming that the average annual cost of the plan will be over $31 billion, meaning the Navy is underestimating costs by $120 billion.

Furthermore, in 2019 alone, the Pentagon made $35 trillion in accounting adjustments – a figure larger than the entire US economy.

The Pentagon budget is not only gargantuan, but replete with waste – from vast overcharges for spare parts, and weapons that don’t work, to forever wars with far-reaching human and economic consequences.

These shadowy practices have, however, boosted the profits of US weapons makers like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, with major gains made despite the challenges posed by inflation and supply chain issues caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Along the same lines, the US government is expected to reach a $1 trillion defense budget by 2027, if not before, as the White House has already increased the Pentagon budget to $773 billion for fiscal year 2023.

Earlier this year, reports revealed that the Pentagon is planning a widescale campaign to hasten arms sales to US allies in a bid to compete with other world powers, and to replenish the stockpiles of countries that have provided Ukraine with weapons and military equipment.

Washington has in recent months bolstered its already overbearing presence in West Asia, including in Yemen and Syria, while continuing its aggressive policies against Iran.

The Pentagon is also blamed for abusing US legislation to wage “secret wars” worldwide, of underreporting civilian deaths in US airstrikes, and has on several occasions cleared US troops from responsibility for war crimes.

 

[marsh]

70 Per Cent of Children Aged 7-12 Now Afraid of Climate Change - Survey

More than 70 per cent of children aged 7-12 are now afraid of climate change according to the results of a survey.

www.breitbart.com

Over 70 Per Cent of Children Aged 7-12 Now Afraid of Climate Change – Survey​

PETER CADDLE25 Nov 2022223

More than 70 per cent of children aged 7-12 are now afraid of climate change according to the results of a survey.

More than seven in ten children aged 7-12 are now worried about climate change, research conducted by a UK-based start-up has reportedly found.
It comes amid reports from various experts that children and teenagers of various demographics are experiencing high rates of mental health difficulties, with one school councillor earlier this year saying that anxiety rates have hit an all-time high post-lockdown.

According to a report by Euronews, the survey — which polled 1,000 children born between 2010 and 2015 on their views regarding the environment — found that a total of 71 per cent of respondents were now worried about environmental changes, including the changing climate.

27 per cent of respondents in particular said that the impact changing global temperatures were having on animals is their greatest concern, while just under one in five were most concerned about plastic pollution.

The survey is one of the latest examples of so-called eco-anxiety — extreme worry in relation to the changing climate or dangers to the environment — affecting children at a time when educational systems are focusing more and more on ongoing issues to do with emissions and potential catastrophic rise of sea levels.

For those on the political left, in particular, eco-anxiety appears to be a growing variable, with the European Union even running courses for its workers in the hopes of helping them to deal with the stress brought about by their climate beliefs.

A study published earlier this year found that a significant number of children now also appear to be experiencing “a variety of emotions such as anger, sadness, guilt, and hopelessness that characterize eco-anxiety”, though noted that more research into the phenomenon’s impact on children in particular needed to be done.

Such anxiety comes at a time when many young people are already experiencing major mental health difficulties for a wide variety of reasons, with some experts even suspecting that the on-and-off worldwide COVID lockdowns have had a seriously detrimental effect on the well-being of children.

“Kids have the highest level of anxiety I’ve ever seen: anxiety about basic safety and fear of what could happen,” one Colorado school councillor told a New York Times investigation earlier this year.

Others remarked that their students had ended up “frozen, socially and emotionally, at the age they were when the pandemic started,” seemingly as a result of lockdown-related isolation.

Meanwhile, the CDC has reported that 44 per cent of American teenagers reported themselves as experiencing “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,”.

20 per cent said that they had contemplated suicide, with 9 per cent saying that they had attempted suicide at least once during 2020.

More recent data has shown that teenage girls in the UK are also in the midst of a mental health epidemic, with 54 per cent of 16 and 17-year-olds being reported as experiencing “elevated psychological distress” over the last twelve months.

Nearly one quarter meanwhile said that they had self-harmed within the past year, while 11 per cent reported having attempted suicide.

 

[marsh]

GOP Rep. McClintock: Any Further COVID Funding Needs to Have Prohibition on Mandates

On Tuesday's broadcast of the Fox Business Network's "Kennedy," Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) stated he won't support any further federal coronavirus funding | Clips

www.breitbart.com

GOP Rep. McClintock: Any Further COVID Funding Needs to Have Prohibition on Mandates

IAN HANCHETT24 Nov 202257

View: https://youtu.be/wyYAn80A4_w
4:50 min

On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Kennedy,” Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) stated he won’t support any further federal coronavirus funding unless there is an “ironclad prohibition” against any mandates, closures, or any “other coercive” COVID policies.

After saying he has preconditions for Ukraine aid, McClintock said, “And the same thing applies to the COVID [funding]. First, any more COVID funding’s got to come with an ironclad prohibition against the mandates and the closures and the other coercive policies that have caused so much damage to people’s lives and livelihoods. And I think there also needs to be a full and truthful disclosure of the actual efficacy and risks of the vaccine.”

 

[marsh]

WEF's Klaus Schwab Says Communist China is a 'Role Model'

Klaus Schwab proclaimed that China will be a "role model" as the global community embarks upon a "systemic transformation of the world".

www.breitbart.com

WEF’s Klaus Schwab Says China Will Be a ‘Role Model’ in the ‘Systemic Transformation’ of the World

The World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab proclaimed that Communist China will likely serve as a “role model” for many countries as the global community embarks upon a “systemic transformation of the world”.

In an interview with the Chinese state-run television network CGTN, World Economic Forum (WEF) chairman and founder Klaus Schwab heaped praise on the communist government in Beijing for being a leading figure in his vision of a Great Reset of capitalism to usher in the “world of tomorrow”.

“I respect China’s achievements, which are tremendous over the last over 40 years, I think it’s a role model for many countries,” the Davos chief said, adding that while he believes countries should be able to choose the system they prefer to live under, the “Chinese model is certainly a very attractive model for quite a number of countries.”

“I look very much forward to having a strong Chinese voice in Davos to explain even better to the world what it means to see the party Congress which laid down the principles of the policy [and] what it really means for global collaboration and for global development,” Schwab added.

View: https://youtu.be/AFyFLcavOJ4
15:40 min

He concluded by saying that he has taken “great satisfaction” in seeing the European Union become more “unified” in its thinking following the Chinese virus and the war in Ukraine and that this could lead to deeper ties between Brussels and Beijing.

“I’m very pleased that we speak not only about Chinese-U.S. relations but also again about European-Chinese relations, and I feel despite all the question marks and to a certain extent cautious approach which we see in Europe, I think that very close ties can be established again between China and Europe because there’s such an interwoven economy.”



The comments from the WEF boss followed his attendance at the G20 summit last week in Indonesia, in which Chinese President Xi Jinping finally met with Western leaders after a hiatus in direct contact following the outbreak of the Wuhan virus. At the meeting, world leaders agreed to seek to expand the health security state at the international level.

“We support continued international dialogue and collaboration on the establishment of trusted global digital health networks as part of the efforts to strengthen prevention and response to future pandemics, that should capitalize and build on the success of the existing standards and digital COVID-19 certificates,” the leaders of the G2o nations said in a joint statement.

Though Schwab praised the summit coming to a statement of agreement, he called for more action, saying: “We have to go one step further, we have to have a strategic mood, we have to construct the world of tomorrow. It’s a systemic transformation of the world, so we have to define how the world should look like when we come out of this transformation period.”

China has been at the forefront of implementing a bio-security state since the outbreak of the coronavirus, implementing one of the first vaccine passport apps in the world in March of 2021, after previously imposing a mandatory health mobile phone application, which in addition to sharing health status of individuals with the government also allegedly shared other data collected with police.



China also seems to be in broad agreement with the World Economic Forum on using the issue of climate change to usher in radical changes.

For example, at this year’s WEF summit in Davos, the president of the Alibaba Group Chinese tech giant, J. Michael Evans said the firm, which like all other companies in Communist China is closely linked to the state, will be seeking to implement an “individual carbon footprint tracker” to monitor the behaviour of individuals in terms of their supposed environmental impact.

“We are developing through technology the ability for consumers to measure their own carbon footprint… where are they travelling, how are they travelling, what are they eating, what are they consuming on the platform,” Evans said.

 

[marsh]

GOP Rep. Banks: We'll 'Do Everything' We Can to Block Climate Reparation Payments, We Can Block It

On Monday's broadcast of the Fox News Channel's "Ingraham Angle," Republican Study Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) vowed that Republicans in the | Clips

www.breitbart.com

GOP Rep. Banks: We’ll ‘Do Everything’ We Can to Block Climate Reparation Payments, We Can Block It

IAN HANCHETT24 Nov 2022310

View: https://youtu.be/m46hXDYTQT0
4:00 min

On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Ingraham Angle,” Republican Study Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) vowed that Republicans in the House are “going to do everything that we can” to block the Biden administration from paying into any global climate reparations fund and that regardless of how small the Republican majority in the House is, they can block payments into the fund, which he characterized as something that “might be the most insane thing I’ve ever seen.”

Host Laura Ingraham asked, “Congressman, I have one question for you, will Republicans do everything in their power to stop the funding of any of this theft from the American taxpayer?”

Banks responded, “You better believe it. With even a one, two, three, seat majority in the House, we’re going to do everything that we can to block it and we can. We’ve seen Joe Biden try to force American taxpayers to pay for foreign wars, other people’s student loans. We’ve seen Obamacare, fill in the blank. But to pay for the weather, bad weather in foreign countries out of the pocketbooks of hard-working Americans might be the most insane thing I’ve ever seen.”

 

[marsh]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRRngQgg024
7:55 min

Island Nation Moves to the Metaverse & Crosswords Battle Memory Loss | WEF | Top Stories of the Week​

World Economic Forum
Nov 25, 2022
This week's top stories of the week include: 0:15 This island nation has moved to the metaverse - Rising seas are due to swamp Tuvalu by the end of the century. So the Pacific archipelago of 12,000 people has taken a remarkable step, declaring itself the world’s ‘first digital nation’. 1:39 Crosswords battle memory loss - Researchers studied 107 elderly people with mild cognitive impairment. 4 times a week, they spent half an hour either doing a crossword or completing tasks on a popular brain-training computer platform. Then they were reassessed after 12 and 66 weeks. Crossword players scored better on cognitive decline and daily functioning tests. 2:50 UK is rolling out 'buzz' stops for bees - The UK is planting bee-friendly native flowers on the roofs of roadside bus shelters, creating a parallel transport network for bugs.

Management company Clear Channel aims to convert 1,000 shelters overall with native plants such as pansies and thyme. 4:05 Entrepreneur running 200 marathons for water - Guli is an Australian entrepreneur and environmental activist. She plans to complete Run Blue in time for the UN Conference on Water in March 2023 and to inspire as many people as possible along the way. Guli’s mission has taken her to the front lines of the global water crisis.

This island nation has moved to the metaverse - Rising seas are due to swamp Tuvalu by the end of the century. So the Pacific archipelago of 12,000 people has taken a remarkable step, declaring itself the world’s ‘first digital nation’.
0:15

Crosswords battle memory loss - Researchers studied 107 elderly people with mild cognitive impairment. 4 times a week, they spent half an hour either doing a crossword or completing tasks on a popular brain-training computer platform. Then they were reassessed after 12 and 66 weeks. Crossword players scored better on cognitive decline and daily functioning tests.
1:39
UK is rolling out 'buzz' stops for bees - The UK is planting bee-friendly native flowers on the roofs of roadside bus shelters, creating a parallel transport network for bugs. Management company Clear Channel aims to convert 1,000 shelters overall with native plants such as pansies and thyme.
2:50
Entrepreneur running 200 marathons for water - Guli is an Australian entrepreneur and environmental activist. She plans to complete Run Blue in time for the UN Conference on Water in March 2023 and to inspire as many people as possible along the way. Guli’s mission has taken her to the front lines of the global water crisis.
4:05

 

[marsh]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGRCtFJu-6A
15:42 min

Workers Rebel at iPhone Factory in China​

China Uncensored
Nov 25, 2022
Workers at an iPhone factory in China rebel over Covid measures and failed promises. China's zero covid policy has become chaos, which is why the government is trying to downplay its anti-covid measures. Former US presidential candidate and Mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg apologized to China over remarks former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson made at a Bloomberg forum in Singapore.

 

[marsh]

POSOBIEC: The ‘Great Reset’ should be called what it is—Communism

“The Great Reset is very much like communism in a sense. A name for something and a pitch for something that’s a complete lie. It’s a smokescreen for their true ambitions.”

thepostmillennial.com

POSOBIEC: The 'Great Reset' should be called what it is—Communism​

"The Great Reset is very much like communism in a sense. A name for something and a pitch for something that's a complete lie. It's a smokescreen for their true ambitions."

Alex Timothy
Nov 24, 2022

On Thursday's edition of Human Events Daily, Jack Posobiec explained the motivation behind the push by the World Economic Forum (WEF) to force the Great Reset on the western world.

Klaus Schwab, head of the WEF, is quoted as stating that China is "a role model for many countries," and that it would be "a very attractive model for quite a number of countries."

Video on website 3:37 min

Posobiec begins with the question, "what have I told you now for an entire year about Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum, and their plans for the West?"

"The Great Reset is very much like communism in a sense," Posobiec explains, "a name for something and a pitch for something that's a complete lie. It's a smokescreen for their true ambitions."

"So they'll tell you it's about diversity. They'll tell you it's about equality. They'll tell you it's about the climate. They'll tell you it's about any of these other shibboleths in modern society," he says, describing these beliefs as "pagan theological cults."

"Worshipping equality, worshiping equity, worshiping the climate – which by the way was worshiping nature," he says, "[these things have] been involved in pagan worship for millennia, going all the way back to the dawn of civilization."

Posobiec goes on to explain that by giving these elitist proponents of the Great Reset power, you are led to believe you will "fulfill your purpose in service to your cult."

"But it's all lie," he continues, "because what they want is ... the concept of total government."

"I saw it so often [in Shanghai], we would bring people in from the US," he recalls. "Business leaders ... political leaders ... cultural leaders ... we bring them all in."

"We would tell them our stated goal was that we were going to make China more open and transparent," he says, "and that maybe China would become more democratic and start introducing more political freedoms to the people."

Posobiec worked for the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai in the mid-2000s, during which time he became fluent in Mandarin and traveled all across the country.

"This is why China was allowed to ascend to the World Trade Organization in 1999," he explains. "China was allowed to do that."

He finishes and gives the warning to heed of things to come if our complacency and naivety get the better of us and we allow the WEF to move forward with their plan.

"We said that China is going to become more open and free politically. But it's been the exact opposite, hasn't it? It's been the exact opposite," he says.

 

[marsh]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYTgYw93n_U
23:50 min

If What They're Telling Us Is True, You MUST Be Ready...​

Neil McCoy-Ward
4 hours ago


( Thanksgiving costs - scandal on eggs. Supermarkets gouging on prices and not passing on $ to producers whose costs have gone up. Milk costs and meat - culling of herds to meet methane targets. NIHS Nurse strike - want 19.4% increase.

 

[marsh]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2C0M_99Hkg
23:20 min

American Culture Has Collapsed, Ideological Escalation Is Tearing This Country Apart​

Timcast IRL

(Communism doesn't work on the large scale. Because of the internet, people from different local "realities," such as urban/rural, are arguing because of the difference. The left wants "consensus reality." The state forcing people to share ideology.

 

[marsh]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjghfiCKbS8
6:12 min

China Economic Crash Will Affect The US & Europe​

The Economic Ninja
Nov 25, 2022

^^^^^

China Cuts Reserve Requirement Ratio By 25bps, Boosts Economy With $70BN In Fresh Liquidity | ZeroHedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

China Cuts Reserve Requirement Ratio By 25bps, Boosts Economy With $70BN In Fresh Liquidity
Tyler Durden's Photo
BY TYLER DURDEN
FRIDAY, NOV 25, 2022 - 04:45 AM
Confirming recent rumors and media speculation, late on Fruday after the close of markets, China’s central bank announced it cut the amount of cash that banks must hold in reserve for the second time this year on Friday to shore up the coronavirus-hit economy, a move which analysts said is “not too late”, but also that Beijing needs to roll-out much more supportive policies to kick start to contracting economy.

The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) said the 0.25% cut of the reserve requirement ratio (RRR) to 7.8% will take place on December 5 and inject around 500 billion yuan (US$70 billion) in long-term liquidity.



The PBOC last cut the RRR in April when the central bank announced a 0.25% point reduction following 0.5% points cuts in both July and December last year. Friday’s announcement followed a State Council meeting on Tuesday chaired by Premier Li Keqiang, who said that it was a “critical time” to consolidate the economic recovery for the fourth quarter.

The PBOC said that the move was aimed at maintaining “reasonable and sufficient liquidity” to support the economy at a “reasonable” growth rate, while reiterating that it would not engage in “flood-like” stimulus.

“[The RRR cut will] increase the long-term stable funding sources of financial institutions, enhance the capital allocation capabilities of financial institutions, and support industries and small, medium and micro enterprises that have been severely affected by the epidemic,” the central bank added.

The widely telegraphed (and in some cases, mocked) decision, comes at a time when the world’s second-largest economy is on the verge of contraction and is facing a new round of coronavirus disruptions, with daily infections having already jumped to more than 31,000.

“The impact of the Covid-19 outbreaks is already quite damaging. The RRR cut is reasonable,” said Iris Pang, chief economist for Greater China at ING, quoted by SCMP. She added that the RRR cut was “not too late”, but that it needs to be accompanied by other less conventional monetary policy to boost its effectiveness, especially when it comes to tackling financing problems for small retailers and companies operating in the catering sector. Pang added that the PBOC could instruct banks to lend more, while the central bank could also increase loan to banks via relending programmes to boost funding to small- and medium-sized firms.

Others were more skeptical: efforts by the Chinese government to support the economy will be encouraging in the short-term for equities as it shifts “expectations in a positive direction,” even though the outlook is cloudy beyond that, said Peter Garnry, head of equity strategy at Saxo Bank.

Chinese central bank’s decision to reduce the reserve requirement ratio for most lenders by 25 basis points will have limited impact on the economy, because it will not be as easy as in the past with the Chinese economy in a “different place” structurally
"The credit impulse does not have the same impact as before because the typical receiver -- real estate -- is dealing with financial stress."

China’s economy has been under pressure since October as exports and retail sales fell amid weak business and consumer confidence. “Epidemic prevention is now the biggest constraint on the economy,” said Larry Hu, chief China economist at Macquarie Group. “But the RRR cut is better late than never. The move may now also encourage banks to lend to the real estate sector.”

The cut will also save around 5.6 billion yuan per year for banks in terms of their funding costs, the PBOC added. But Zhang Zhiwei, chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management, said the size of the cut shows that China’s monetary policy has been constrained by the US Federal Reserve’s interest rate increases, which have weakened the yuan significantly since the start of the year.

“[The RRR cut] helps marginally, but the main problem for the economy is not the monetary policy,” Zhang said, adding that more action is needed to minimise the impact of China’s virus control measures.

China has eased its containment measures, including cutting quarantine requirements for international arrivals, but there is still no timetable for a complete exit from Beijing’s zero-Covid policy.

“The reduction in the required reserve ratio that the PBOC just announced will help banks follow through on a directive to defer loan repayments from firms struggling with widening lockdown restrictions,” said Mark Williams, chief Asia economist at Capital Economics.

“Market interest rates may also edge down as a result, even if that’s not the main goal. But few firms or households are willing to commit to new borrowing in this uncertain environment. A small fall in interest rates wouldn’t make a difference.”

 

[marsh]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Vsjf47Mgnk
16:35 min

Neil Oliver - '...it's a toxic hell...'​

Neil Oliver
Nov 25, 2022
‘…I see no true leadership in any of today’s so-called leaders …’ (UK immigration, politics, globalist control - climate crisis. The exploration of Antarctica and leadership.

 

[marsh]

McCarthy Will Block Meaningful Congressional Investigations Exposing The Establishment’s Corruption 1:54 min

McCarthy Will Block Meaningful Congressional Investigations Exposing The Establishment’s Corruption​

Bannons War Room Published November 25, 2022

Natalie Winters: Kevin McCarthy Will Block Meaningful Congressional Investigations Exposing The Establishment’s Corruption Because He’s In On It

(Fauci; Hunter Biden; CCP; the Swamp. McCarthy is controlled opposition.)

 

[marsh]

Investigations Exposing Fauci’s Lies, COVID-19 Origins Pose An Existential Threat To Globalism 1:22 min

Investigations Exposing Fauci’s Lies, COVID-19 Origins Pose An Existential Threat To Globalism​

Bannons War Room Published November 25, 2022

Natalie Winters: Investigations Exposing Fauci’s Lies, COVID-19 Origins Pose An Existential Threat To Globalism

^^^^
Chinese Communist Party Weaponized Lockdowns To Wage Economic And Political Warfare On America 7:04 min

Chinese Communist Party Weaponized Lockdowns To Wage Economic And Political Warfare On America​

Bannons War Room Published November 25, 2022
Chinese Communist Party Weaponized Lockdowns To Wage Economic And Political Warfare On America, Fauci Aided And Abetted Their Agenda

^^^^
Natalie Winters calls out Fauci’s silence and the corruption of Washington leadership 1:55 min

Natalie Winters calls out Fauci’s silence and the corruption of Washington leadership​

RealAmericasVoice Published November 25, 2022
“You’re not going to actually drain the swamp if the person leading the crusade is … controlled opposition.”

Executive editor Natalie Winters joins Steve Bannon on War Room to talk about Fauci’s silence and the corruption of Washington leadership under the Biden administration.

 

[marsh]

The Financial Community Had An “Intent To Exploit The COVID-19 Outbreak” For Their Personal Gain 6:03 min

The Financial Community Had An “Intent To Exploit The COVID-19 Outbreak” For Their Personal Gain​

Bannons War Room Published November 25, 2022
Dr. Malone: The Financial Community Had An “Intent To Exploit The COVID-19 Outbreak” For Their Personal Gain

^^^^
Dr. Malone: Ron Johnson’s COVID-19 Hearings Will Disseminate Left’s COVID-19 Lies And Manipulation 5:15 min

Dr. Malone: Ron Johnson’s COVID-19 Hearings Will Disseminate Left’s COVID-19 Lies And Manipulation​

Bannons War Room Published November 25, 2022

Dr. Malone: Ron Johnson’s COVID-19 Hearings Will Disseminate The Left’s COVID-19 Lies And Manipulation For All Americans
^^^^^
Globalists Are “Doubling Down” On Their COVID-19 Restrictions, G20 Summit Proposes Vaccine Passports 5:05 min

Globalists Are “Doubling Down” On Their COVID-19 Restrictions, G20 Summit Proposes Vaccine Passports​

Bannons War Room Published November 25, 2022

Dr. Malone: Globalists Are “Doubling Down” On Their COVID-19 Restrictions, G20 Summit Proposes Vaccine Passports

 

[marsh]

Republican Constituents All Across The Country Are Begging For McCarthy To NOT Be Speaker

Congressman VA-5 Bob Good: Republican Constituents All Across The Country Are Begging For McCarthy To NOT Be Speaker

rumble.com

Republican Constituents All Across The Country Are Begging For McCarthy To NOT Be Speaker​

Bannons War Room Published November 25, 2022

Congressman VA-5 Bob Good: Republican Constituents All Across The Country Are Begging For McCarthy To NOT Be Speaker

^^^^^
Republicans Will Have The Votes To Elect Any Speaker They Want, The Right Choice Is All That Matters 9:04 min

Republicans Will Have The Votes To Elect Any Speaker They Want, The Right Choice Is All That Matters​

Bannons War Room Published November 25, 2022
Congressman VA-5 Bob Good: Republicans Will Have The Votes To Elect Any Speaker They Want, The Right Choice Is All That Matters

 

[marsh]

The Economic War We MUST Win — Your Future of America Depends on It 4:51 min

The Economic War We MUST Win — Your Future of America Depends on It​

Economic War Room Published November 24, 2022

We are in three economic wars. The first is the foreign economic war against China and the axis of evil. The second is the domestic economic war, which is really about globalists and the elitists of the World Economic Forum and how they want to subjugate you. The third war is the hardest to win but is the most important. It is literally the hope of the U.S. Our American future hinges on winning the economic war of the heart.