GOV/MIL Main "Great Reset" Thread

marsh

On TB every waking moment

End-stage America: The torrents of campaign cash and illegal immigrants continue to pour in

Special to WorldTribune.com
By Michelle Malkin

All the world’s a stage, especially two heated months before Election Day. So you’ll have to forgive me for not joining the theatrical media frenzy over Martha’s Vineyard being overrun by illegal aliens. It’s just another naked open-borders exhibition by both political parties that makes a miserable mockery of our country’s immigration policies.

Yes, I said both parties.

Violent criminals released from Venezuelan prisons are known to have traveled in migrant caravans heading to the U.S. southern border.

Sure, Republican governors are exposing the grand hypocrisy of limousine liberals who preach diversity and tolerance while walling off their exclusive colony. Rah-rah, sis-boom, ha-ha-ha. Hilarity abounds. So many memes and viral videos! What a riot giggling about which Democratic city illegal aliens should be sent to next.

Of course, mass-migration-pimping Democrats are as guilty of “human trafficking” as their counterparts now acting as travel agents for the Third World cheap-labor pipeline. Don’t need to tell me. I’ve written three bestsellers and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of columns on the subject over the past 30 years.

But whether it’s Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis dumping Venezuelans on Martha’s Vineyard or Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott shuttling Mexicans to the Big Apple and D.C. swamp or former Democrat President Barack Obama chartering illegal alien flights to military bases across New England (a story I first broke back in 2014), the script is always the same:

One side claims to be tough on borders. The other screams “racism” and “xenophobia.” Then leaders in both parties pocket big donations from the same globalist special interests — Big Agriculture, Big Business and Big Tech — and pretend to join hands on “immigration reform.” All the illegal alien pawns settle in for the long haul — collecting driver’s licenses from Democrat and Republican governors, sanctuary status from both Democrat and Republican mayors, in-state tuition discounts across the country, bountiful health, welfare and legal services, and eventual amnesty, green cards, U.S. citizenship, entitlement benefits and voting rights.

That’s bipartisan America Last stuntsmanship for you. Not so funny anymore, is it?

I can hardly stomach cable news anymore. Two decades ago, when I guest-hosted for Bill O’Reilly and worked as a contributor to Fox News, the illegal alien invasion I reported on was taken seriously. Now, I’m persona non grata in “America’s newsroom,” while two-faced snakes like Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio score prime Fox News headlines for bashing the Biden administration’s illegal immigration chaos.

“This is what happens when you have an administration that basically is telling people if you come into this country illegally, you’re going to get to stay,” Rubio complained.

Now, that’s funny. Rubio is a “Gang of Eight” darling of open-borders millionaires and billionaires who soaked up money from Facebook’s foreign labor-addicted lobbying group FWD.us and furiously flip-flopped on amnesty like a swamp circus clown on meth.

One side claims to be tough on borders. The other screams “racism” and “xenophobia.” Then leaders in both parties pocket big donations from the same globalist special interests — Big Agriculture, Big Business and Big Tech — and pretend to join hands on “immigration reform.”

Reminder: Facebook founder Zuckerberg personally donated to Rubio, as did pro-H-1B expansionist Silicon Valley CEOs from Oracle, Cisco and Seagate. Microsoft, founded by leading foreign tech-worker H-1B visa/illegal alien amnesty cheerleader Bill Gates, was Rubio’s No. 2 corporate donor for years. Paul Singer, the treacherous hedge fund billionaire, was also a top Rubio backer. Singer helped fund the National Immigration Forum along with fellow hedge fund billionaire George Soros. NIF propped up a faux “grass-roots” initiative of religious conservatives, dubbed the Evangelical Immigration Table, to lobby for the Gang of Eight amnesty mob.

Not to pick on Little Marco, but since his open-borders hypocrisy is representative of the vast majority of election-year politicians, it is worth pointing out that while he lambastes the Biden administration for providing incentives to Venezuelan illegal aliens to stay, he whitewashes his own all-star role in sponsoring such chaos-creating inducements. His Senate office has clogged my email box for years with press releases touting his support for endless “temporary protected status” designations, renewals and expansions for illegal aliens from Haiti, Ukraine and, yes, Venezuela.

As I’ve reported repeatedly, the TPS program signed into law by GOP President George H.W. Bush in 1990 was supposed to provide short-term relief and shelter to people from foreign countries hit by natural disasters, environmental catastrophes, civil war, epidemic diseases or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions.” They were always expected to go back home when those conditions improved. But three decades and dozens of bipartisan extensions later, nearly a half-million beneficiaries have turned TPS into TINO: Temporary in Name Only. Illegal aliens from El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua were added to the list, followed by citizens of Haiti, Nepal, Syria, Angola, Sudan, Yemen, Montserrat and more. To date, we’ve granted sacrosanct TPS status to more than 400,000 people from a total of 22 countries who have grown increasingly entitled to automatic renewal of their “temporary” protections.

But ignore the immigration anarchy. Swamp Democrats and Republicans are both raising gobs of campaign cash over Martha’s Vineyard mayhem. Their media sycophants are raking in clicks and giggles for “owning” each other. And end-stage America keeps getting owned. The joke’s on us.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

EXCLUSIVE: Venezuelans Expected To Flood The US Border Due To A ‘Perception’ They Can Stay Indefinitely, Internal DHS Report Says

Jennie Taer on September 22, 2022

The Department of Homeland Security is warning of an uptick in illegal migrants from Venezuela crossing the southern border, according to an internal memorandum exclusively obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Some Venezuelans have the “perception that once they reach the border, they have a greater chance of remaining in the United States, based on a misunderstood perception of temporary protected status,” the memo stated.

Authorities at the border have seen the number of Venezuelan migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border triple, compared to the last fiscal year, and DHS indicates the trend will continue.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sounded the alarm over a potential surge in Venezuelans illegally crossing into the U.S. due to an incorrect understanding of U.S. immigration policy, according to an internal memo obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The recent alert mentioned a number of reasons that Venezuelans are increasingly coming to the U.S., including political changes, new visa requirements, a lack of resources due to the COVID-19 pandemic and poor economic conditions in Latin American countries they’ve fled to. There’s a possibility that many are also coming because of the protections for Venezuelans already in the U.S.

“Deteriorating opportunities for Venezuelans in Latin America coupled with changing immigration policies will likely increase Venezuelans’ decision to travel to the U.S. southwest border (SWB) via the Darien Gap and Mexico,” the memo stated. “Venezuelans may also be pulled to the United States by the perception that once they reach the border, they have a greater chance of remaining in the United States, based on a misunderstood perception of temporary protected status.”

There’s no exact date on the memo, which cites a report as recent as Sept. 7.

Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is currently granted to Venezuelans who were in the U.S. as of March 8, 2021. DHS in July announced an 18-month extension for those already in the program to renew their statuses.

Out of the 153,905 Venezuelan migrants encountered at the southern border between October 2021 and August 2022, only 988 were expelled under Title 42, the pandemic public health order used to quickly remove illegal migrants from the country, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data.

The number of Venezuelan migrants encountered in fiscal year 2022 is over triple the number encountered the previous fiscal year, when 1,270 Venezuelans were expelled under Title 42, according to CBP. The Biden administration attempted to end Title 42, but the policy remains due to a court order.

The reason many Venezuelans aren’t sent back under Title 42 is because the U.S. doesn’t have diplomatic relations with Venezuela, which refuses to allow for deportation flights, Cato Associate Director of Immigration Studies David Bier previously told the DCNF.

“This is true for deportations from Mexico as well,” Bier said. “The Trump administration also put a flight ban in effect for Venezuela, meaning no flights are allowed to go there. Nonetheless, some expulsions are still happening via third countries, but it’s much more difficult.”

There are around 5.75 million Venezuelan refugees and migrants living in Latin American and Caribbean countries, according to the Inter-Agency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela.

Around 3.7 million of them live in Colombia and Peru, where they face “violence, hate, abuse, sexual and labor exploitation, and discrimination,” according to the memo. In places like Colombia, Venezuelans are often the prey of armed criminal organizations looking for “cheap recruits.”

“An exodus from these two countries alone would be a major concern as it could potentially signal larger waves of Venezuelan migrants to emigrate to the United States,” the memo said.

Panama is home to around 144,500 Venezuelans, who are at risk of losing their “pathways to residency” because of legislation that is set to expire, making their best option to come to the U.S. illegally.

“Without access to legal status, migrants cannot apply for work permits and are forced to seek jobs in the informal market, making them vulnerable to exploitation,” the memo said. “For those qualified to renew their regularization status, the 2,600 USD smuggling fee is cheaper than paying regularization costs in Panama.”

Venezuelans have also been further unwelcomed in Chile, where 448,100 of them reside, because of anti-illegal immigration protests and police-led evictions.

The issues are forcing Venezuelans to leave Latin America and go to the U.S., where they believe they will be protected, the memo stated.

DHS didn’t respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Byron Donalds Delivers Must-See Demolition of Democrat Economic Policy During Hearing

By Bonchie | 8:30 PM on September 22, 2022

Rep. Byron Donalds may not get as much press as some other Republican politicians, but he’s an impressive figure who deserves to be heard. That was on display on Thursday during a House hearing centering on the country’s economic woes.

Donalds pressed witnesses on what has caused the current inflation crisis and labor shortage, and in doing so, he absolutely demolished Democrat economic policy. It’s a must-see for people who value solid arguments over shallow gotchas.

The clip is a little over two minutes long, and it’s worth every second.

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1572957091819655168
2:20 min

Donalds begins by laying out the major problem, and it’s one the left desperately wants to avoid. Namely, when a government starts blowing money out like crazy to people who didn’t earn it, you are left with too many dollars chasing too many goods. Donalds presses the witness on the wisdom of that policy. She initially tries to duck the question, accusing the Republican of blaming “working people.” That’s when Donalds just goes off.

He goes on to say that he’s not blaming working people, but that if you have people getting money who haven’t exchanged their labor for it, you end up with a shortage of labor due to people choosing not to work. That labor shortage then leads to the supply chain crises the nation has endured.

As Donalds further notes, it was the American Rescue Plan that caused all this. The decision to kneecap the economy and cause massive inflation was made Joe Biden and the rest of the Democrat Party. They now want to pretend this all just happened by chance, but it was willfully done by economically illiterate politicians seeking glory rather than good policy.

Donalds asks another witness if his description is fair, with the answer being “yes, I think that’s a fair description.” It was a mic-drop moment and the Republican wasn’t done yet. He then made the next obvious point, which is that the only reason gas prices are down is that Biden has emptied the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. In other words, you paid for those reserves with your tax dollars, and the president has used them as a political tool to make you think you are getting taken coming and going.

Donalds ends with his main point, which is that the Biden administration is blaming corporations for higher prices when it was Democrat policies that caused all of this. When you create a labor shortage for political gain, that leads to the supply chain issues we have, which ultimately leads to higher prices. That’s called supply and demand, and just because Democrats thought the rules of economics didn’t apply to them doesn’t mean they aren’t responsible for the consequences.

Keep an eye on Donalds. This guy has already made a name for himself in a crowded House GOP, and I think his future only gets brighter from here.
 
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marsh

On TB every waking moment

House Dems Passed a Bill That Is a 1st Step to Nationalizing Police

By M Dowling -September 22, 202211

The House passed the Invest to Protect Act today. Liz Cheney was too busy with her Jan. 6 witch hunt committee to show up. It would be a dangerous bill if it could pass the Senate. It allows the DoJ to provide grants to police departments of their choosing while getting their claws into several areas of local policing. It’s a first step to nationalizing the police.

The bill directs the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services within the Department of Justice to award grants to local and tribal governments that employ fewer than 200 law enforcement officers. Grant funds may be used for various activities, including providing de-escalation training and improving recruitment and retention.

House Democrats reached an agreement Wednesday to vote on a series of bills that provide millions of dollars to local law enforcement and also include accountability measures.

Democrats want the bill before the election to counter their bad image from their years of trashing the police and pushing pro-criminal policies.

“Some Democrats had urged passage of the package ahead of the midterm elections as a counter to GOP attacks that paint Democrats as anti-police. Moderate and vulnerable swing-district Democrats have argued that “defund the police” language led to the party losing a surprising number of House seats in the 2020 election,” The Washington Post reports.

The groups of mostly Democrats were able to strike a deal to fund police departments with 125 officers or fewer and direct some money to officer training, community safety, and police accountability. The money may not be used to make new hires but can be used for signing bonuses as well as mental health efforts.

“It’s critical for policing that we have the backs of law enforcement because every day they have ours,” NJ Democrat Jeff Gottheimer said.

They will not likely get the 60 votes in the Senate to pass it. This is a purely political move to improve the Democrat brand.

THIS IS THE DANGEROUS SECTION
The package includes reforms to ensure police funding is used to support smaller police departments, along with investments in de-escalation training and $250 million for mental health resources for officers. A major goal is to reduce fatal encounters between police and people with mental illness. It includes language around police accountability that would allow the Justice Department to have preferential consideration over which police departments are permitted to receive the grants. It will also allocate $50 million of the funding to go toward data collection on police practices and community safety.

This gives the federal government control over local police with the funding they need. It’s the beginning of the nationalization of police. It’s the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent.

THE DEMOCRAT TALKING POINT
“With this package, House Democrats have the opportunity to model a holistic, inclusive approach to public safety, and keep our promise to families across the country to address this issue at the federal level,” Far left Reps Ilhan Omar and Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in a statement.

“These are efforts to repair their image with voters who blame them for higher crime rates,” said Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., the chair of the Republican Study Committee. “The Democrats know that their anti-police rhetoric over the last few years has harmed them in key districts that they need to keep the majority, which they are not. This is a top-of-the-list item for voters.”

(COMMENT: The "5150" conundrum of the small police force. 5150 in California is a mental health police call. In my county, the police/sheriff would respond. The person cannot be incarcerated by law. There is no detox center. The county mental health people will not access status if the person is under the influence of alcohol or drugs. The local hospital does not have a "rubber room" to detox or detain someone acting abnormally.

LE sits with the person in the waiting room until they are sober enough to access by County Behavioral Health (CBH). The LE officer is unavailable to take other calls or patrol. The CBH people then must find a drug/alcohol recovery center to take the person or a mental health facility. There are none in the county because the entire population is only 44,000. The state mental health facilities are overflowing and won't take new people.

So, do you think that mental health "encounter training" for LE will fix this situation?
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Former Los Alamos nuclear scientists aiding Chinese weapons project, study says

15 worked in the section of Los Alamos that designs nuclear weapons.

By Ben Whedon
Updated: September 22, 2022 - 7:47pm

More than 160 former researchers with the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico have joined Chinese advanced weapons programs over the past several decades, according to a recent study from the private security firm Strider Technologies.

Between 1987 and 2021, the communist government in Beijing enticed 162 scientists who at some point worked at the New Mexico lab to work on a range of nuclear and weapons research programs, Bill Gertz of the Washington Times reported. Of these, 15 worked in the section of Los Alamos that designs nuclear weapons.

"Former Los Alamos scientists have made, and continue to make, considerable contributions to the PRC hypersonic, missile and submarine programs that present an array of security risks for the United States and the entire free world," Strider asserted in its report.

Strider CEO Greg Levesque warned that Beijing would gain a significant technological edge should it continue poaching American scientists.

"Our research shows [China] has seen a significant return on their investment with advances in critical military technologies," he said. "Now, more than ever, it is a national security imperative for the U.S. and our allies to identify and protect leading talent in both the public and private sectors."

The report comes amid Chinese saber-rattling over its claims to sovereignty over Taiwan. President Joe Biden suggested the U.S. would intervene militarily if China attempted to take the island, though the White House this week walked back those comments.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Massive Arrests As Russia Starts Military Mobilization For Ukraine War

Thursday, September 22, 2022 | Tag Cloud Tags: Military, Putin, Russia, Ukraine, War

By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News

MOSCOW/BUDAPEST (Worthy News) – Russia has begun mobilizing reservists to fight in Ukraine after suffering massive setbacks, despite protests across the country. President Vladimir Putin’s order to call up 300,000 Russians with military experience prompted many to express outrage, leading to arrests across the country.

They risked lengthy prison terms or being sent to the deadly front lines of Ukraine. Yet, in defiance of strict regulations, demonstrators dared to shout what many Russians seemed to think these days: “No to war! No to war!” And “No to Mobilization!”

Aggressive riot police pushed protestors, women, and men to the ground or against a window.

Many were taken as cattle into awaiting buses, facing an uncertain future. Up to 1,400 anti-mobilization protesters are reported to have been detained in dozens of cities, including Moscow, since Wednesday.

However, demonstrators say they won’t give up their struggle.

“I am not afraid, I am not afraid of anything,” a mother said while nearby riot police detained protestors like her. “The most valuable thing they can take from us is our children’s lives. I won’t give them my child’s life.”

Another young woman suggested that the rallies come too late. “We should have been afraid before. The worst already happened.”

MANY KILLED

The woman referred to the tens of thousands of Russian soldiers believed to have been killed or wounded in Ukraine, though the Kremlin gives lower figures. Police used force against protestors in cities across Russia, ranging from Moscow and St. Petersburg to Novosibirsk in Siberia.

Russian authorities are now considering pushing protestors away from the cameras into Ukraine. However, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has not denied media reports that some protesters were already given draft papers.

With as many as 300,000 reservists forced to join the Russian invasion of Ukraine, many are trying to leave Russia. People queue at airports, but many flights are no longer available.

Tickets to visa-free destinations such as Istanbul; Dubai; Yerevan, Armenia; and Almaty, Kazakhstan, were either sold out for the next several days, or their prices had skyrocketed.

Despite all the misery, there was hope for some inmates, with Ukraine celebrating a prisoner exchange that saw more than 200 prisoners of war released by Russia.

They include more than 100 members of the controversial Azov Battalion, seen as heroes by Kyiv for mounting resistance at a steelworks in the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol.

Separately , British nationals also freed have arrived back in Britain. But with the war continuing and four Russian-occupied territories planning referendums on joining Russia, many more people are expected to be detained or killed.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

‘Exceeded Their Authority’: Judge Strikes Down Biden Administration’s Head Start COVID Mandate​

By Zachary Stieber
September 21, 2022 Updated: September 22, 2022

The mask and COVID-19 vaccine mandate imposed on the federal Head Start program was struck down on Sept. 21 by a U.S. judge who said the mandate is clearly outside the power of the agency that promulgated and enforced it.

“The Court finds the Agency Defendants have exceeded their authority by implementing the Head Start Mandate because Congress only gave Agency Defendants the power to ‘modify’ Head Start performance standards. The Head Start Mandate is not a modification,” U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, said in a 27-page ruling.

Federal law says the government can impose standards on Head Start, a program for young children in low-income families who aren’t yet attending school, related to administrative and financial management standards, standards relating to the condition and location of facilities, and other standards the secretary of health finds appropriate.

Defendants, including Health Secretary Xavier Becerra, had claimed that the law enabled the imposition of the dual mask–vaccine mandate, but Doughty said they were wrong.

“There is nothing in 42 U.S.C. [Section] 9836a which would allow Agency Defendants to make medical decisions for employees and volunteers, and/or to require two (2), three (3), and four (4), year-old students to wear masks the majority of the day,” he said. “There is a disconnect between the Agency’s challenged actions and its assigned mission and expertise. Agency Defendants’ expertise is not making medical decisions for its students, volunteers, or employees.”

Doughty took the unusual step of permanently striking down the mandate. That means it is no longer in place unless an appeals court or the Supreme Court steps in.

The permanent injunction is in place for 24 states, all of which sued the Biden administration over the mandate in December 2021.

The states are Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

“Today’s ruling is a victory for the rule of law and for health care freedom,” Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt, a Republican, said in a statement.

“We stood up and fought the Biden administration’s illegal mandates on behalf of Kansas kids, teachers, and parents, and today, we all won.”

“Louisiana teacher Sandy Brick has been serving her students through adversity and uncertainty the last two years. Today, this decision vindicates her right to teach without sacrificing her freedom,” added Sarah Harbison, general counsel at the Pelican Institute for Public Policy.

Brick is a Head Start employee in Louisiana who filed a suit that was merged with the suit filed by the attorneys general of the 24 states.

The Department of Health and the Administration for Children and Families, which oversees Head Start, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The Biden administration announced this week that it would soon rescind the Head Start mask mandate, which is in place for all workers and children aged 2 and older, but would keep the vaccine mandate, which applies to all workers and many contractors and volunteers, in place.

^^^^^^
:applaud: Another "Congressionally delegated authority" ruling beats down the Executive Diktat.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Bill Gates: Future Pandemics, Reducing the Population & Tracking Vaccines​

By
Michelle Edwards
- January 19, 2022
Screenshot / Analytics India

On Tuesday, Bill Gates warned of pandemics yet to come that are worse than the current one. His comments come as he continues to push vaccines through his Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation (CEPI). Gates founded the global partnership—which is focused on developing vaccines—in 2017 in Davos along with the governments of Norway and India, Wellcome, and the World Economic Forum (WEF).

A prominent vaccine-based giver, Bill Gates publicly discussed his plan to reduce the world population by 10 or 15 percent in a 2010 TED talk. Notably, Gates’ depopulation agenda came on the heels of a secret 2009 meeting of billionaires he’d assembled to allegedly discuss shrinking the world’s population. During his notorious February 2010, TED talk—with over 8.1 million views—Gates unveiled his vision for the future, his significant role in pushing vaccines, his views on climate change, and his goal of zero-carbon emissions globally by 2050. In the talk, Gates specifically outlined his vision to depopulate humankind by over one billion people, stating:

“The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s heading up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that [the world population] by 10 or 15 percent.”

Untitled.jpg


Screenshot / HCG Found in WHO Tetanus Vaccine in Kenya Raises Concern in the Developing World; Open Access Library Journal; A chronology of milestone events leading up to and including the current research project based on the WHO “tetanus” campaign in Kenya 2013-2015.

May 2009 Meeting of “The Good Club” & Gates’ Obsession with Vaccines​

The 2009 clandestine meeting of billionaires that huddled before Gates’ TED presentation included Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, David Rockefeller, Eli Broad, George Soros, Ted Turner, Oprah Winfrey, and Michael Bloomberg. Citing a story in the Times of London, the WSJ points out that on May 5, the billionaire philanthropists (dubbed “The Good Club”) met behind closed doors in Manhattan at the private residence of the president of Rockefeller University. According to the article, the world’s wealthiest discussed health care, education, “and—by far the most controversial—slowing the global population growth.” The article stated:

“Taking their cue from Gates, they agreed that overpopulation was a priority,” the article said, adding that “this could result in a challenge to some Third World politicians who believe contraception and female education weaken traditional values.”

In addition to Gates, the hush-hush meeting was organized by Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Buffet, who shifted over $31 billion of his assets to Gates around the same time. A probable precursor to the Great Reset widely promoted by Klaus Schwab and the WEF, the meeting was held in response to the significant global economic downturn and the “multiple health and environmental crises plaguing the globe.” During the intimate dinner and discussion, the oligarchs discussed their primary concern for the planet, followed by Gates’ billionaire friends and other major foundations contributing to his foundation’s vaccine efforts.

Gates-The-Good-Club.jpg
Screenshot / WSJ

Already involved in vaccines for fertility regulation, the Rockefeller’s clear involvement in population control is discussed in more detail later in the article. Like the Rockefellers, CNN founder Ted Turner has voiced concerns about overpopulation for decades. A 1996 interview with Audubon magazine quoted Turner as saying, “We’re all 5 billion of us on this little earth swimming around in space, and there’s too many of us. A total (world) population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.” Some even believe Turner is the anonymous creator behind the Georgia Guidestones—the granite tablets that sit atop a rural hill about 30 minutes from CNN headquarters. The First Guide says in the engraved script:

“Maintain humanity under 500 million in perpetual balance with nature.”

With pandemics offering a platform to mass-distribute vaccines, “The Good Club” gathering occurred at the height of the H1N1 swine flu “pandemic.” In April 2009, just a month before the billionaire’s meeting, Gates and the World Health Organization (WHO) were advised by Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, London, that “40 percent of people in the UK could be infected [with H1N1] within the next six months if the country was hit by a pandemic.”

Global-Vaccine-Coverage.jpg
Screenshot / World Bank Group “How to End the COVID-19 Pandemic by March 2022.” Sources: The COVAX, Duke Global Health Innovation Center, World Population Prospects, news sources.

Notes:Includes only known pre-purchases of vaccines with reported efficacy greater than 50% in Phase 3 trials. Some deals for which the number of courses is not available in the public domain may not have been recorded.

Orders by multilateral organizations (e.g., the COVAX AMC, European Union, African Union) are distributed to eligible members in proportion to their population. China is allocated all uncontracted production capacity of Sinovac, Sinopharm, and CanSino. Russia is allocated all uncontracted production capacity of Gamaleya, and India is allocated all uncontracted production capacity of Bharat Biologics, and the uncontracted doses of the domestically-licensed AstraZeneca/Oxford and Novavax, which are under license for production in the country by the Serum Institute of India (SII).

Among his many alliances, Ferguson is Principal Investigator for the Gates Foundation, Gavi and COVAX; the Director of the WHO‘s Collaborating Center for Infectious Disease Modeling; an Adviser to the WHO on multiple disease topics, including COVID-19; an Adviser to U.S. government agencies, departments, and states for pandemic modeling, planning, and response; and a past consultant on pandemic threats to the World Bank.

Undoubtedly, with generous support from Bill Gates, Ferguson is largely responsible for the first coronavirus Lockdown Model launched on March 11, 2020, that was implemented around the world. Based on initial predictions of 600,000 deaths in the U.K., the mathematical model has since been reformulated at least three times by Ferguson. His latest predictive model was used to justify the Fourth Wave Lockdowns that swept across Europe in late 2021. With both the funding and the power to turn fiction into reality, Gates himself has spent a fortune on predictive pandemic models to illustrate what sort of event will kill the most people in the near future.

Daily-Deaths.jpg
Screenshot / IHME Global COVID-19 Projections; Daily Deaths

Video on website 1:28 min

November 2010 Meeting on the Future of Cell Phones in Health Care​

Shortly after speaking at the TED conference, Bill Gates was a keynote speaker at the November 2010 mHealth Summit organized by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH, which, by 2010, had received $300 million in donations from Bill Gates), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Microsoft External Research. Hosted by the United Nations Foundation, the stated goal of the mHealth Alliance is to promote the use of mobile devices to improve global health, especially in low-income nations. The partnership was created in 2008 by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Vodafone Foundation, the UN Foundation and includes founding members of MHealth Alliance, including HP, GSM Association, and Norad.

View: https://youtu.be/eABaojTtW54
1:36 min

Speaking to an audience of over 2,000 conference attendees from around the world, Gates declared the simple critical health care metric that “we as a society” should constantly be trying to improve is the number of children who die before age 5. At the time of his speech, Gates said that number was 8.5 million. He pointed out that in 1960, it was 20 million. According to Gates, the dramatic reduction in deaths—from 20 million to 8.5 million—is the direct result of vaccines.

Providing ongoing funding to scientists worldwide to research mobile phone applications for improving health, Gates was asked his views on the critical applications for mobile health and specific examples of what will be most impactful. With Gates also funding every major global health initiative of the last two decades, he set the stage to support digital vaccine passports when he responded:

“Vaccines are going to be the key. How would cell phones fit in? If you knew, if you could register every birth on a cell phone, get fingerprints, get a location, then you could take these systems where you go around and make sure the immunization happens, you could run them in a more effective way.

When I think about the biggest impacts of cell phones, I think of patient reminders. [Also], remind mothers to do various things, particularly in that first year of life. [With] this sort of digital patient record, the high payoff is in vaccination coverage.”


The event, which featured over 100 exhibitors, was held in Washington, D.C., and was sponsored by Verizon Wireless. Other sponsors joined Verizon, including Abbott Labs, American Telemedicine Association, CTIS, McKesson Foundation, Microsoft Research, Qualcomm, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Skype, the West Wireless Health Institute, and Pfizer.

gates-global-influence.jpg
Screenshot / revisesociology.com

Study Supports WHO & Gates Depopulation Agenda​

Repeating his intent to curb population growth, Gates told CNN’s Sanjay Gupta in 2011 that “the benefits [of vaccines] are there in terms of reducing sickness, reducing population growth.” Repeatedly, Gates’s alarming quotes have disturbed those aware of his preoccupation with vaccines. His quotes have raised concerns that perhaps a sinister motive for population reduction might be the driving force behind Gates’ obsession.

These depopulation concerns were highlighted in 2014 when three independent accredited biochemistry labs in Nairobi tested samples from vials of the Gates-funded WHO tetanus vaccines. The tests revealed that nearly 3 million women unknowingly received vaccines laced with a sterilant and contraceptive.

Moreover, a 2017 Open Access Library paper on the incident, titled “HCG Found in WHO Tetanus Vaccine in Kenya Raises Concern in the Developing World,” supported 2014 concerns raised by the Catholic Church asserting an “abortifacient vaccine was being used as a tetanus prophylactic.” Indeed, the authors concluded:

“Given that hCG was found in at least half the WHO vaccine samples known by the doctors involved in administering the vaccines to have been used in Kenya, our opinion is that the Kenya “anti-tetanus” campaign was reasonably called into question by the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association as a front for population growth reduction.”


Further backing up the notion that what happened in Kenya was part of a well thought out plan between Gates and the WHO to reduce the global population, a 1968 Annual Report of The Rockefeller Foundation (p. 52) calls for “progress on immunological methods, such as vaccines, to reduce fertility.”

Twenty years later, The Rockefeller Foundation’s 1988 Annual Report mentions a substantial grant given to India for “a large anti-fertility vaccine for women.” Then, another generous donation is listed on page 56 “for research on a potential contraceptive vaccine based on beta-hCG synthesized bacteria”—just a few years before the experiments in Mexico, Nicaragua, and the Philippines that took place in 1993.

Rockefeller-foundation.jpg
Screenshot / The Rockefeller Foundation 1988 Annual Report, pg. 56

As signs continue to point to an end of the current pandemic, Gates’ Tuesday proclamation of future catastrophic pandemics is just one of many he’s made over the years as he funds and orchestrates global exercises to prepare vaccines for them. At the 2017 Munich Security Conference in Germany, he warned the world about a potential catastrophe, predicting:

“Whether it occurs by a quirk of nature or at the hand of a terrorist, epidemiologists say a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year. And they say there is a reasonable probability the world will experience such an outbreak in the next 10 to 15 years.”

TED talk on energy and climate on website 27:32 min
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
The Good Club


( This article is more than 13 years old)
They're called the Good Club - and they want to save the world

Paul Harris in New York reports on the small, elite group of billionaire philanthropists who met recently to discuss solving the planet's problems

Sat 30 May 2009 19.01 EDT

It is the most elite club in the world. Ordinary people need not apply. Indeed there is no way to ask to join. You simply have to be very, very rich and very, very generous. On a global scale.

This is the Good Club, the name given to the tiny global elite of billionaire philanthropists who recently held their first and highly secretive meeting in the heart of New York City.

The names of some of the members are familiar figures: Bill Gates, George Soros, Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, David Rockefeller and Ted Turner. But there are others, too, like business giants Eli and Edythe Broad, who are equally wealthy but less well known. All told, its members are worth $125bn.

The meeting - called by Gates, Buffett and Rockefeller - was held in response to the global economic downturn and the numerous health and environmental crises that are plaguing the globe. It was, in some ways, a summit to save the world.

No wonder that when news of the secret meeting leaked, via the seemingly unusual source of an Irish-American website, it sent shock waves through the worlds of philanthropy, development aid and even diplomacy. "It is really unprecedented. It is the first time a group of donors of this level of wealth has met like that behind closed doors in what is in essence a billionaires' club," said Ian Wilhelm, senior writer at the Chronicle of Philanthropy magazine.

The existence of the Good Club has struck many as a two-edged sword. On one hand, they represent a new golden age of philanthropy, harking back to the early 20th century when the likes of Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Carnegie became famous for their good works. Yet the reach and power of the Good Club are truly new. Its members control vast wealth - and with that wealth comes huge power that could reshape nations according to their will. Few doubt the good intentions of Gates and Winfrey and their kind. They have already improved the lives of millions of poor people across the developing world. But can the richest people on earth actually save the planet?

The President's House of Rockefeller University is on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The university's private campus, full of lush green trees, lies behind guarded entrances and a metal fence. It overlooks the East River, only a few blocks away from the United Nations.

It was here, at 3pm on 5 May, that the Good Club gathered. The university's chancellor, Sir Paul Nurse, was out of town but, at the request of David Rockefeller, had allowed the club to meet at his plush official residence. The president's house is frequently used for university events, but rarely can it have played host to such a powerful conclave. "The fact that they pulled this off, meeting in the middle of New York City, is just absolutely amazing," said Niall O'Dowd, an Irish journalist who broke the story on the website irishcentral.com.

For six hours, the assembled billionaires discussed the crises facing the world. Each was allowed to speak for 15 minutes. The topics focused on education, emergency relief, government reform, the expected depth of the economic crisis and global health issues such as overpopulation and disease. One of the themes was new ways to get ordinary people to donate small amounts to global issues. Sources say Gates was the most impressive speaker, while Turner was the most outspoken. "He tried to dominate, which I think annoyed some of the others," said one source. Winfrey, meanwhile, was said to have been in a contemplative, listening mood.

That the group should have met at all is indicative of the radical ways in which philanthropy has changed over the past two decades. The main force behind that change is Gates and his decision to donate almost all his fortune to bettering the world. Unlike the great philanthropists of former ages, Gates is young enough and active enough to take a full hands-on role in his philanthropy and craft it after his own ideas. That example has been followed by others, most notably Soros, Turner and Buffett. Indeed, this new form of philanthropy, where retired elite businessmen try to change the world, has even been dubbed "Billanthropy" after Gates. Another description is "philanthro-capitalism".

Yet the implications of the development of philanthro-capitalism are profound. It was fitting that the Good Club was meeting near the UN. The club members' extreme wealth makes it as powerful as some of the nations with seats inside that august chamber.

Proponents of philanthro-capitalism would argue that they are also more effective in doing good for ordinary people. Indeed the club's members have given away about $70bn in the past 12 years. That is far beyond what many individual countries can afford to do with their own social policies and aid budgets.

"They have assets that rival the social spending budgets of many countries," said Professor Paul Schervish, director of Boston College's Centre on Wealth and Philanthropy.

There is little doubt that members of the Good Club have done amazing work. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with a current endowment of more than $30bn, is the biggest philanthropic organisation ever. Just one of its projects, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, is estimated by the WHO to have prevented 3.4 million deaths in just eight years.

The Soros Foundation has done valuable work setting up democratic institutions and independent media across the former Soviet bloc. These titans of philanthropy have also started a trend among the slightly less wealthy. While Gates's and Soros's efforts bestride the world, major philanthropists have emerged in specific regions like India or Latin America funding their own pet ideas and projects. Gayle Peterson, co-founder of Headwaters Group Philanthropic Services, recently gave advice to a businessman who wanted to set up a foundation to give away $280m annually in south-east Asia. "He told us: I want to be just like Bill Gates," she said.

But there is a potential downside to the growth of these "über donors", especially if the whims of individuals start to take precedence over the expertise of professionals.

The strange truth is that giving away billions of dollars is difficult and fraught with risk. There can be waste, mismanagement and poor investment. At the same time it can actually do harm. "If you are putting enormous amounts of money into a community that can't cope with it, then you can implode that community," Peterson said.

Others are even more outspoken at the growing dominance of a tiny handful of billionaires in the development sector. "The problem with any Good Club is that all the people might not be 'good'. Or at least not 'good' in universal definitions," said Louise Uwacu, the Rwandan-born founder of the Canadian education charity Positivision.

There is also the issue of accountability. Even the most repressive of national governments is on some level beholden to its own people, or has the capacity to change and reform under popular pressure. But who votes for the Good Club?

Such sceptical sentiments might spring from the Good Club's decision to meet in such secrecy in New York. In many ways that was understandable. All its members are sensitive about privacy because of their unique mixes of fame and wealth. The covert nature of the discussion also allowed them to speak freely about sensitive issues. "I think they just wanted to be able to be candid. The secrecy allowed that," said Wilhelm.

But some people are crying conspiracy. The cloak-and-dagger aspect of the meeting has prompted some to accuse the Good Club of being a sort of Bilderberg Group for philanthropy, with an equally nefarious agenda of global power politics. That idea has particular power on the Christian right of America, which has reacted angrily to the idea that the club discussed birth control and overpopulation. Experts in the philanthropy field think that this negative image can be countered by more openness for future Good Club meetings.

"If they do hold more meetings, and every indication is that they will, I think people would want them to be more public. After all, they can make decisions that affect millions of peoples' lives," said Wilhelm.

That is true. If the members of the Good Club wish to wield their undoubted power, they may have to get used to the idea of doing it more openly.

The American tradition of great donors

Bill Gates
The co-founder of Microsoft is the biggest philanthropist the world has ever seen. Through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,he controls more than $30bn in assets - not bad for a computer geek from Seattle. Often ranked as the world's richest man, he has donated virtually his entire fortune to philanthropy, focusing on combating diseases in the developing world.

Henry Ford
As well as being the father of the US car industry and the inventor of the modern production line, Ford has been a major force in philanthropy. He made a vast fortune and left virtually all of it to the Ford Foundation, which by 2007 had more than $13bn in assets.

George Soros
Hungarian-born Soros is a hugely successful US currency speculator and financier. But he is also well known for his philanthropic works. Focusing on political democratisation and creating an independent media, he has funded projects mainly in the former Soviet republics. A political liberal, he is also a funder of the Centre for American Progress.

Andrew Carnegie
This Scottish-born American industrialist made a huge fortune in steel and industry at the end of the 19th century. He devoted the rest of his life to philanthropy, especially education, founding libraries, museums and universities in Britain and America. He wrote of the responsibilities of the wealthy in two books, Triumphant Democracy and the Gospel of Wealth.

John D Rockefeller
The man whose name became a byword for unimaginable wealth made his
fortune in oil. Often regarded as the richest person in history, Rockefeller spent the last 40 years of his life in effective retirement, setting up various foundations and funding philanthropic causes. His special interests were in the fields of science and medicine.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
mRNA Jabs Destroy 'the Factory of Masculinity': Dr. Naomi Wolf [VIDEO] 22:56 min

mRNA Jabs Destroy ‘the Factory of Masculinity’: Dr. Naomi Wolf [VIDEO]
BY VIGILANT FOX
SEPTEMBER 22, 2022

^^^^^
Naomi Wolf Discusses The Vaccine Bioweapon And Suppression Of Harm To Women From Vaccines 13:26 min

Naomi Wolf Discusses The Vaccine Bioweapon And Suppression Of Harm To Women From Vaccines​

Bannons War Room Published September 20, 2022

^^^^^^
Naomi Wolf: COVID Vaccines Affected Sexual Development in Boys 1:56 min

Naomi Wolf: COVID Vaccines Affected Sexual Development in Boys​

The Gateway Pundit Published September 7, 2022
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Are We Just One Big Storm Away Climate Lockdowns?​

I & I Editorial Board
September 23, 2022

While we never thought that the coronavirus pandemic was engineered to soften us up for harsher climate lockdowns to come later, we did note that our ruling class was watching our reactions to its repressive rules to see how far it could go the next time. Today we’re alarmed that “the next time” might be here soon.

In November 2020, we said we were afraid that the country was being conditioned to just take whatever is dished out by power-hungry officials, elected and unelected, and were troubled that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, could say “now is the time to do what you’re told” with minimal condemnation and no demands that he be fired.

Nearly two years later, it’s clear that our concerns were justified.

We find the evidence in a Sept. 14 World Economic Forum document topped by the title “‘My Carbon’: An approach for inclusive and sustainable cities.”

The report says there have been “significant developments” over the last five to seven years “on social, environment and technology fronts that could help realize” the goals “for shaping the future towards smart and sustainable cities.”

Example No. 1 was the public response to the pandemic lockdowns.

COVID-19 was the test of social responsibility – A huge number of unimaginable restrictions for public health were adopted by billions of citizens across the world. There were numerous examples globally of maintaining social distancing, wearing masks, mass vaccinations and acceptance of contact-tracing applications for public health, which demonstrated the core of individual social responsibility.
Are we misreading the intentions of the World Economic Forum? Unlikely. Read the entire document. It’s impossible to not come away with the stomach-churning feeling that the WEF saw in the pandemic lockdowns a model for climate lockdowns.

Never give it the benefit of the doubt. This is an organization that trains politicians and activists to follow the progressive playbook to remake our world not through cooperation between liberated people but coercion directed by those who wield the power of government.

It has told us we will own nothing and like it, that it’s determined to establish a “fascist economic model” and recalibrate “a whole range of human rights that are playing out online,” including “freedom of speech,” and is working toward eventually tracking our carbon footprints. It aims to push through the self-empowering “Great Reset,” which reminds us far too much of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” and not just in name only.

The WEF and its soldiers have made a fetish out of “democracy,” but as soon as they can manufacture an “emergency,” such as the ginned-up fears of man-caused global warming, even that goes out the window. The elites who make up the organization’s leadership and its trainees who’ve been spread across the world in positions of influence and power flat-out want us to be their slaves, doing what they tell us when they tell us. End of rights, the end of individuality, one big socialist, global government. The WEF believes not in economic freedom but an economy centrally planned for the entire globe.

Another phrase for that is “economic tyranny.”

We hope to find one day that our unease was an overreaction, that there is no agenda, unspoken or otherwise, to shut down personal and economic freedoms to pursue the ghost of global warming. But we’ve seen too many powerful politicians and previously eminent institutions claim that climate change is man’s biggest threat. So it’s a really slim hope.
— Written by the I&I
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
1663915732285.png

‘My Carbon’: An approach for inclusive and sustainable cities
Sep 14, 2022

Sustainable Development Impact Meetings
  • While transport and buildings are the major drivers for emissions in cities, the share of individual emissions is significant.
  • Personal carbon allowance programs have had limited success due to a lack of awareness and fair mechanism for tracking emissions.
  • Yet there have been major developments in recent years that could help realise "My Carbon" initiatives.
Cities across the world account for almost 75% of our total carbon emissions. As countries move towards implementing their pledges for a net zero future, urban areas will remain the action ground for decades to come. While transport and buildings are the major drivers for emissions in cities, the share of individual emissions are significant at around 40%.

Inclusivity of citizens is becoming the most important element of success or failure in the journey towards sustainability. Community-led initiatives can make a significant contribution towards sustainability, increase resilience and social cohesion. There have been numerous examples of personal carbon allowance programs in discussions for the last two decades, however they had limited success due to a lack of social acceptance, political resistance, and a lack of awareness and fair mechanism for tracking “My Carbon” emissions.

Our world is transforming – big community trends for sustainable cities

There have been significant developments in last five to seven years on social, environment and technology fronts that could help realise “My Carbon” initiatives for shaping the future towards smart and sustainable cities.
Specifically, to mention three developments in this context:

1. COVID-19 was the test of social responsibility – A huge number of unimaginable restrictions for public health were adopted by billions of citizens across the world. There were numerous examples globally of maintaining social distancing, wearing masks, mass vaccinations and acceptance of contact-tracing applications for public health, which demonstrated the core of individual social responsibility.


AI can also help strengthen circular economy business models for sustainable cities. Image: Figure adapted from World Economic Forum and Accenture (2018)

2. Fourth Industrial Revolution technology breakthroughs – Advances in emerging technologies like AI, blockchain and digitization can enable tracking personal carbon emissions, raise awareness and also provide individual advisories on lower carbon and ethical choices for consumption of product and services. The World Economic Forum’s Scale 360 initiative demonstrates the use of fourth industrial revolution technologies across the whole life cycle of products and services.

There have been major advances in smart home technologies, transport choices with carbon implications, the roll-out of smart meters in providing individual choices to reduce their energy-related emissions, the development of new personalized apps to account for personal emissions, and better personal choices for food and consumption-related emissions. AI can also help strengthen circular economy business models like product as a service models, demand predictions, and smart asset management by combining real time and historical data from products and users.

There is a significant number of programs and applications enabling citizens to contribute towards carbon emissions by providing them in-depth awareness on the choices of personal carbon for food, transport, home energy and lifestyle choices.

jZlTdr1FjLtJ44WxBi-PAJPSLfC3ipV1KX6c17b7wuc.png


Energy efficiency apps like Svalna, give suggestions and statistics regarding greenhouse emissions and offer ways to reduce your personal footprint, which will aid sustainable cities. Image: Svalna

These energy efficiency apps give suggestions and statistics regarding greenhouse emissions and offer ways to reduce your personal footprint. Keeping track of energy consumption in the home and motivating people to make lifestyle changes and to contribute your share towards the betterment of the environment.

3. Raised awareness and ownership for nature and environment – In the last few years, there is an increased awareness and public concern on climate change and specially among youth. The UNDP’s “Peoples’ Climate Vote” reflects that over 64% of people believe climate change is a global emergency. A new Pew Research Center survey in 17 advanced economies found widespread concern about the personal impact of global climate change: 80% of citizens say they are willing to change how they live and work to combat the effects of climate change. Young adults, who have been at the forefront of some of the most prominent climate change protests in recent years, are more concerned than their older counterparts about the personal impact of a warming planet in many public surveys.
LOFPsY9CFiAOrr-QFTKQOHg4ZX7z2rQ3XyGZxfEFCPg.png

What next? Sustainable cities enabled through smart communities

The three trends provide strong evidence towards enabling a social movement for “My Carbon” initiatives by enabling public-private partnerships to help curate this program. It is suggested to drive a three-way approach to shape this movement.

6do9nWnCVlVnM8CQJ8_e0Wf9YsyVtpHqt5LQaZzDPds.png


The three trends provide strong evidence towards enabling a social movement for “My Carbon” initiatives for sustainable cities.

Such economic action will need policy enablement from city leadership through extensive discussion between stakeholders to arrive at a fair and inclusive approach.

The levers of Cognitive Enablement and Social Norms will be much more impactful through citizen engagement programs and learnings from the above-mentioned trends need to be captured to design these programs. Innovative AI and machine-learning capabilities would help capture embedded emissions in goods and services, and could help in providing individuals with tailored and timely advice on how to reduce their lifestyle emissions.

VJE2oJ2LGKh3QooRZx5LtgSo4OelsvlxxjGwx64wb8o.png



Finally, it is significant that all stakeholders across the value chain come together and contribute towards achieving a net-zero future by leaving no one behind.

^^^^^
Radio Davos: Carbon offsets. How do they work?
34:48 min
View: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7Cbn20EZ2HnyjeOuv5r0a9?go=1&sp_cid=47b93e0dce0d0a950bffd2e65da3216c&utm_source=embed_player_p&utm_medium=desktop
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
Biden Claims Deporting Illegals Back to Venezuela, Cuba or Nicaragua ‘is not rational” 6:10 min

Biden Claims Deporting Illegals Back to Venezuela, Cuba or Nicaragua ‘is not rational”​

One America News Network Published September 22, 2022

As migrants continue to flood the southern border, information has surfaced that prisoners in Venezuela are being released. There are claims these same repeat offenders are being embedded into caravans headed to the U.S. Despite this new information, Biden said deporting illegals back to Venezuela, Cuba or Nicaragua is “not rational.” One America’s Natasha Sweatte spoke with a Venezuelan immigrant to get a deeper understanding of the chaos ensuing down south.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
This could be a DISASTER and Putin knows it | Redacted with Natali and Clayton Morris 19:58 min

This could be a DISASTER and Putin knows it | Redacted with Natali and Clayton Morris​

Redacted News Published September 22, 2022

The northern part of Ukraine will hold a referendum vote on whether or not to join Russia. How can we be sure that vote is safe and secure? Journalist Eva Bartlett joins us to talk about continued Ukrainian aggression and how this will go in the upcoming days.

^^^^^^
Putin issues DEVASTATING warning to NATO if they even try it | Redacted with Clayton Morris 19:23 min

Putin issues DEVASTATING warning to NATO if they even try it | Redacted with Clayton Morris​

Redacted News Published September 22, 2022

Is the U.S., NATO and Europe now at war with Russia? Is this the war they've been wanting all along? If so, what can we expect from it when we move beyond the rhetoric? We break this down with military analyst Scott Ritter.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GAtV5S67AE
14:56 min

Episode 637 - HIMARS Expert Preston Stewart​

Sep 22, 2022

AMLnZu8Pg8FmHuLKjnl6HB0_aJ5h8H2h0AJywhSjbYBe=s88-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj

The Hot Zone With Chuck Holton

Preston Stewart is a US Army officer who makes short youtube videos explaining the war in Ukraine. He's built a huge audience doing so. On this episode, we have a great conversation you won't want to miss.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
Michael Yon @MichaelYon
Sep 22, 2022 at 11:35pm
Note I just sent to Private Group
And then decided what the heck, just publish it:


Note to the group included the above link, and then:

Conditions are pushing huge numbers of ‘migrants’ through Darien Gap. US under intense demographic attack. Here in Europe, some countries like Luxembourg already lost the demographic attack. Surrendered without a peep — now about 50% ‘migrants.’ Dangerous streets. I witnessed about ten street fights over four days in downtown Luxembourg City last month. All appeared drug related.

Germany collapsing on the energy front. Plans to deploy Bundeswehr on German streets starting in about a week.

At home in USA, no amount of preps will work if we do not plug the border and begin mass deportations.

Conditions building for global famines including across Europe and United States.

Germany cutting down massive swaths of forest. I just crisscrossed about a thousand miles through Germany including the last few days from Hungary through Austria and back here to Amsterdam. Been here in Europe three months on this trip after leaving straight from Mexico watching the invasion into Texas.

Last week I was at BASF in Ludwigshafen, Germany. BASF and others such as Yara have either stopped or severely reduced Haber-Bosch production of ammonia.

Cannot stress enough that we are going into global famines and USA is set for invasion through Darien corridor, where I have spent about four months since Biden inauguration. Darien is invasion route funneling huge numbers of Asians, Africans, Cubans, Haitians, and South Americans.

Last year I took two congressmen into Darien Gap and showed them the flows there. Jordan Peterson flying here to Netherlands today and I will spend two days with him showing the energy/food issues here.

We are in a state of war. For serious people who want to come see for themselves, I will be back in Texas in about a week and can give a private roundup in Dripping Springs or Austin area.

We literally are in a state of war.

Good morning from Amsterdam.

^^^^^^

Fire in Argentina refinery kills three

A fire in an oil refinery in southwestern Argentina has killed at least three people

ByThe Associated Press
September 22, 2022, 12:44 PM ET

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina -- A fire at an oil refinery in southwestern Argentina killed at least three people early Thursday, according to local authorities.

Firefighters worked throughout the morning to extinguish the blaze that started at a storage tank at the New American Oil refinery, about 120 kilometers (75 miles) from the provincial capital of Neuquen, .

The fire quickly spread throughout the refinery and local media outlets published video showing a massive explosion followed by dark clouds of smoke rising from the facility.

Three workers at the refinery died, said Mayor Gustavo Suárez of the nearby town of Plaza Huincul,

The cause of the fire is under investigation, the Neuquen provincial government said.

The fire quickly “took over the entire refinery,” said Roberto Bello, a law enforcement officer with the Neuquén Police Department.

The Private Oil Workers’ Union of the Río Negro, Neuquén and La Pampa provinces called for a workers’ strike, saying it is “fed up with the lack of commitment to the life of workers.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
15:50 min

Using Science to Refute Climate Hysteria​

The New American Published September 22, 2022

Dr. Howard Hayden is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Connecticut, and the author of many books on energy, science and environmental topics. He is also publisher of The Energy Advocate, www.energyadvocate.com, a monthly newsletter that promotes unbiased science and technology. A natural-born teacher, Dr. Hayden is a master of taking complex scientific subjects and breaking them down in understandable terms for the average layman.

In this video, Dr. Hayden discusses his aim in publishing The Energy Advocate: to reach the “educated layman” with truth about environmental issues in order to expose the deceptiveness and myth of man-made global warming.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Stop ‘Totalitarian Bureaucratic State’ By Building Parallel Institutions, Says Dutch Lawmaker & Opposition Leader​

By Liberty Sentinel Staff 5 hours ago

Dutch statesman MP Baudet says the totalitarian agenda of Deep State globalists can be defeated by building parallel societies and institutions.

The globalist forces behind the European Union and beyond are seeking to build a “bureaucratic totalitarian state” to crush freedom and national identity, treating people as children or even animals, warned Dutch Member of Parliament (MP) Thierry Baudet in this interview on The Sentinel Report.

The globalists admire the Communist Chinese model with no freedom for citizens, and total power for the elites, added the Forum for Democracy founder and chief in this episode of The Sentinel Report with Alex Newman.

“They are unaccountable, nobody can vote them out of office, … and they have a mandate to regulate anything they want, including energy and food rationing,” MP Baudet warned, adding that the government was now waging war on farmers and others.

MP Baudet, who hopes to have the Netherlands withdraw from the EU, also lamented the deliberate destruction of Europe’s Christian heritage. He said civilization itself was at risk as its foundations are being destroyed.

Speaking on the latest Swedish election, which saw the anti-mass migration Sweden Democrats win big, MP Baudet said that was hopeful. However, he also warned that today, politicians have very little say, as the bureaucratic Deep State continues operating.

“I’m very skeptical of political, top down change,” he said. “Instead, we need to build parallel societies. Like Americans, we have to think like settlers … set up our own schools, build our own news channels and talk shows, start our publishing houses.”

“We really need to make a community for people like us who want to resist globalism and preserve our European civilization,” continued the prominent Dutch lawmaker and opposition leader, praising Trump but noting that even Trump was unable to stop the machine.

But it’s not too late to stop it. In fact, it is absolutely necessary, he added, calling for building a “parallel world” as his party recently opened an elementary school.

His new book, The Covid Conspiracy, can be pre-ordered now.
Watch the interview below:

Deep State Globalists Seek Totalitarian Bureaucratic State, Warns Dutch Lawmaker & Opposition Leader 30:38 min

Deep State Globalists Seek Totalitarian Bureaucratic State, Warns Dutch Lawmaker & Opposition Leader​

Liberty Sentinel Published September 22, 2022

he globalist forces behind the European Union and beyond are seeking to build a "bureaucratic totalitarian state" to crush freedom and national identity, treating people as children or even animals, warned Dutch Member of Parliament (MP) Thierry Baudet in this interview on The Sentinel Report.

The globalists admire the Communist Chinese model with no freedom for citizens, and total power for the elites, added the Forum for Democracy founder and chief in this episode of The Sentinel Report with Alex Newman.

"They are unaccountable, nobody can vote them out of office, ... and they have a mandate to regulate anything they want, including energy and food rationing," MP Baudet warned, adding that the government was now waging war on farmers and others.

MP Baudet, who hopes to have the Netherlands withdraw from the EU, also lamented the deliberate destruction of Europe's Christian heritage. He said civilization itself was at risk as its foundations are being destroyed.

Speaking on the latest Swedish election, which saw the anti-mass migration Sweden Democrats win big, MP Baudet said that was hopeful. However, he also warned that today, politicians have very little say, as the bureaucratic Deep State continues operating.

"I'm very skeptical of political, top down change," he said. "Instead, we need to build parallel societies. Like Americans, we have to think like settlers ... set up our own schools, build our own news channels and talk shows, start our publishing houses."

"We really need to make a community for people like us who want to resist globalism and preserve our European civilization," continued the prominent Dutch lawmaker and opposition leader, praising Trump but noting that even Trump was unable to stop the machine.

Baudet also warned that the Dutch were losing their history and traditions faster than almost any nation in the world, as church attendance plummets amid the decline of Western civilization.

But it's not too late to stop it. In fact, it is absolutely necessary, he added, calling for building a "parallel world" as his party recently opened an elementary school.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Why Orwell Matters

THURSDAY, SEP 22, 2022 - 08:00 PM
Authored by Bruno Waterfield via Spiked-Online.com,

Most people think that George Orwell was writing about, and against, totalitarianism – especially when they encounter him through the prism of his great dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

This view of Orwell is not wrong, but it can miss something. For Orwell was concerned above all about the particular threat posed by totalitarianism to words and language. He was concerned about the threat it posed to our ability to think and speak freely and truthfully. About the threat it posed to our freedom.

He saw, clearly and vividly, that to lose control of words is to lose control of meaning. That is what frightened him about the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia – these regimes wanted to control the very linguistic substance of thought itself.

And that is why Orwell continues to speak to us so powerfully today. Because words, language and meaning are under threat once more.

Totalitarianism in Orwell’s time
The totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union represented something new and frightening for Orwell. Authoritarian dictatorships, in which power was wielded unaccountably and arbitrarily, had existed before, of course. But what made the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century different was the extent to which they demanded every individual’s complete subservience to the state. They sought to abolish the very basis of individual freedom and autonomy. They wanted to use dictatorial powers to socially engineer the human soul itself, changing and shaping how people think and behave.

Totalitarian regimes set about breaking up clubs, trade unions and other voluntary associations. They were effectively dismantling those areas of social and political life in which people were able to freely and spontaneously associate. The spaces, that is, in which local and national culture develops free of the state and officialdom. These cultural spaces were always tremendously important to Orwell. As he put it in his 1941 essay, ‘England Your England’: ‘All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official – the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the “nice cup of tea”.’

Totalitarianism may have reached its horrifying zenith in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR. But Orwell was worried about its effect in the West, too. He was concerned about the Sovietisation of Europe through the increasingly prominent and powerful Stalinist Communist Parties. He was also worried about what he saw as Britain’s leftwing ‘Europeanised intelligentsia’, which, like the Communist Parties of Western Europe, seemed to worship state power, particularly in the supranational form of the USSR. And he was concerned above all about the emergence of the totalitarian mindset, and the attempt to re-engineer the deep structures of mind and feeling that lie at the heart of autonomy and liberty.

Orwell could see this mindset flourishing among Britain’s intellectual elite, from the eugenics and top-down socialism of Fabians, like Sidney and Beatrice Webb and HG Wells, to the broader technocratic impulses of the intelligentsia in general. They wanted to remake people ‘for their own good’, or for the benefit of the race or state power. They therefore saw it as desirable to force people to conform to certain prescribed behaviours and attitudes. This threatened the everyday freedom of people who wanted, as Orwell put it, ‘the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above’.

Edmond O'Brien as Winston Smith and Jan Sterling as Julia, in an adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, 3 June 1955.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, this new intellectual elite started to gain ascendancy. It was effectively a clerisy – a cultural and ruling elite defined by its academic achievements. It had been forged through higher education and academia rather than through traditional forms of privilege and wealth, such as public schools.

Orwell was naturally predisposed against this emergent clerisy. He may have attended Eton, but that’s where Orwell’s education stopped. He was not part of the clerisy’s world. He was not an academic writer, nor did he position himself as such. On the contrary, he saw himself as a popular writer, addressing a broad, non-university-educated audience.

Moreover, Orwell’s antipathy towards this new elite type was long-standing. He had bristled against the rigidity and pomposity of imperial officialdom as a minor colonial police official in Burma between 1922 and 1927. And he had always battled against the top-down socialist great and good, and much of academia, too, who were often very much hand in glove with the Stalinised left.

The hostility was mutual. Indeed, it accounts for the disdain that many academics and their fellow travellers continue to display towards Orwell today.

The importance of words
Nowadays we are all too familiar with this university-educated ruling caste, and its desire to control words and meaning. Just think, for example, of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have turned ‘fascism’ from a historically specific phenomenon into a pejorative that has lost all meaning, to be used to describe anything from Brexit to Boris Johnson’s Tory government – a process Orwell saw beginning with the Stalinist practice of calling Spanish democratic revolutionaries ‘Trotsky-fascists’ (which he documented in Homage to Catalonia (1938)).

Or think of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have transformed the very meanings of the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’, divesting them of any connection to biological reality. Orwell would not have been surprised by this development. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he shows how the totalitarian state and its intellectuals will try to suppress real facts, and even natural laws, if they diverge from their worldview. Through exerting power over ideas, they seek to shape reality. ‘Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together in new shapes of your own choosing’, says O’Brien, the sinister party intellectual. ‘We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull… You must get rid of these 19th-century ideas about the laws of nature.’

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the totalitarian regime tries to subject history to similar manipulation. As anti-hero Winston Smith tells his lover, Julia:

‘Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.’

As Orwell wrote elsewhere, ‘the historian believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course. From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned.’

This totalitarian approach to history is dominant today, from the New York Times’ 1619 Project to statue-toppling. History is something to be erased or conjured up or reshaped as a moral lesson for today. It is used to demonstrate the rectitude of the contemporary establishment.

But it is language that is central to Orwell’s analysis of this form of intellectual manipulation and thought-control. Take ‘Ingsoc’, the philosophy that the regime follows and enforces through the linguistic system of Newspeak. Newspeak is more than mere censorship. It is an attempt to make certain ideas – freedom, autonomy and so on – actually unthinkable or impossible. It is an attempt to eliminate the very possibility of dissent (or ‘thoughtcrime’).

As Syme, who is working on a Newspeak dictionary, tells Winston Smith:

‘The whole aim… is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller… Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’

The parallels between Orwell’s nightmarish vision of totalitarianism and the totalitarian mindset of today, in which language is policed and controlled, should not be overstated. In the dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the project of eliminating freedom and dissent, as in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, was backed up by a brutal, murderous secret police. There is little of that in our societies today – people are not forcibly silenced or disappeared.

However, they are cancelled, pushed out of their jobs, and sometimes even arrested by the police for what amounts to thoughtcrime. And many more people simply self-censor out of fear of saying the ‘wrong’ thing. Orwell’s concern that words could be erased or their meaning altered, and thought controlled, is not being realised in an openly dictatorial manner. No, it’s being achieved through a creeping cultural and intellectual conformism.

The intellectual turn against freedom
But then that was always Orwell’s worry – that intellectuals giving up on freedom would allow a Big Brother Britain to flourish. As he saw it in The Prevention of Literature (1946), the biggest danger to freedom of speech and thought came not from the threat of dictatorship (which was receding by then) but from intellectuals giving up on freedom, or worse, seeing it as an obstacle to the realisation of their worldview.

Interestingly, his concerns about an intellectual betrayal of freedom were reinforced by a 1944 meeting of the anti-censorship organisation, English PEN. Attending an event to mark the 300th anniversary of Milton’s Areopagitica, Milton’s famous 1644 speech making the case for the ‘Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing’, Orwell noted that many of the left-wing intellectuals present were unwilling to criticise Soviet Russia or wartime censorship. Indeed, they had become profoundly indifferent or hostile to the question of political liberty and press freedom.

‘In England, the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats’, Orwell wrote, ‘but that on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all’.

Orwell was concerned by the increasing popularity among influential left-wing intellectuals of ‘the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness’. The exercise of freedom of speech and thought, the willingness to speak truth to power, was even then becoming seen as something to be frowned upon, a selfish, even elitist act.

An individual speaking freely and honestly, wrote Orwell, is ‘accused of either wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privilege’.

These are insights which have stood the test of time. Just think of the imprecations against those who challenge the consensus. They are dismissed as ‘contrarians’ and accused of selfishly upsetting people.

And worst of all, think of the way free speech is damned as the right of the privileged. This is possibly one of the greatest lies of our age. Free speech does not support privilege. We all have the capacity to speak, write, think and argue. We might not, as individuals or small groups, have the platforms of a press baron or the BBC. But it is only through our freedom to speak freely that we can challenge those with greater power.

Orwell’s legacy
Orwell is everywhere today. He is taught in schools and his ideas and phrases are part of our common culture. But his value and importance to us lies in his defence of freedom, especially the freedom to speak and write.

His outstanding 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’, can actually be read as a freedom manual. It is a guide on how to use words and language to fight back.

Of course, it is attacked today as an expression of privilege and of bigotry. Author and commentator Will Self cited ‘Politics and the English Language’ in a 2014 BBC Radio 4 show as proof that Orwell was an ‘authoritarian elitist’. He said: ‘Reading Orwell at his most lucid you can have the distinct impression he’s saying these things, in precisely this way, because he knows that you – and you alone – are exactly the sort of person who’s sufficiently intelligent to comprehend the very essence of what he’s trying to communicate. It’s this the mediocrity-loving English masses respond to – the talented dog-whistler calling them to chow down on a big bowl of conformity.’

Lionel Trilling, another writer and thinker, made a similar point to Self, but in a far more insightful, enlightening way. ‘[Orwell] liberates us’, he wrote in 1952:

‘He tells us that we can understand our political and social life merely by looking around us, he frees us from the need for the inside dope. He implies that our job is not to be intellectual, certainly not to be intellectual in this fashion or that, but merely to be intelligent according to our lights – he restores the old sense of the democracy of the mind, releasing us from the belief that the mind can work only in a technical, professional way and that it must work competitively. He has the effect of making us believe that we may become full members of the society of thinking men. That is why he is a figure for us.’

Orwell should be a figure for us, too – in our battle to restore the democracy of the mind and resist the totalitarian mindset of today. But this will require having the courage of our convictions and our words, as he so often did himself. As he put it in The Prevention of Literature, ‘To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly’. That Orwell did precisely that was a testament to his belief in the public just as much as his belief in himself. He sets an example and a challenge to us all.
 
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marsh

On TB every waking moment

‘Polluters must pay’: UN chief calls for windfall tax on fossil fuel companies​

António Guterres said money raised should be diverted to vulnerable nations suffering losses caused by climate crisis

View: https://youtu.be/KQurDJCPaNU
00:46 min
'Polluters must pay': UN secretary general calls for global windfall tax on energy companies – video

Oliver Milman and Julian Borger in New York
Tue 20 Sep 2022 15.08 EDT

Countries should impose windfall taxes on fossil fuel companies and divert the money to vulnerable nations suffering worsening losses from the climate crisis, the United Nations secretary general has urged.

Countries should impose windfall taxes on fossil fuel companies and divert the money to vulnerable nations suffering worsening losses from the climate crisis, the United Nations secretary general has urged.

António Guterres said that “polluters must pay” for the escalating damage caused by heatwaves, floods, drought and other climate impacts, and demanded that it was “high time to put fossil fuel producers, investors and enablers on notice”.
 
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marsh

On TB every waking moment

Austria's Record Influx Of Illegal Immigrants Could Swing Presidential Election To The Right

FRIDAY, SEP 23, 2022 - 02:00 AM
Authored by John Cody via Remix News,

Illegal immigration will loom large on the minds of Austrians as they head to vote in October’s presidential elections...

Austria’s government is under pressure to tackle its border crisis after 3,000 illegal immigrants entered the country this week, a new record that already surpassed a fresh record reached in the first week of September this year. The new migrant crisis, which is dominating headlines in Austria, is now posing a challenge to the pro-refugee president, Alexander van der Bellen, who is running for reelection on Oct. 9.

Austria has faced a massive influx of refugees this year, registering 47,000 people crossing into the country, which is up from 19,000 in 2021. Most of these illegal immigrants are from the Middle East and Asia, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. With polling consistently showing that Austrians are opposed to mass immigration, and with the memory of horrific gang rapes and terrorist attacks committed by foreigners still fresh in the country’s mind, the population may second-guess awarding van der Bellen with the presidency once again.

With 3,000 illegal immigrants crossing Austria’s border in just one week, there are warnings that the country may see 100,000 new arrivals this year.

“The bad records follow one another every week, but that still does not seem to incite the current interior minister, Gerhard Karner, to act,” said Hannes Amesbauer, security spokesman for the conservative Freedom Party (FPÖ) party, who warned against “100,000 illegal refugees.”

Austria is already facing massive integration problems. One in four people in Austria have foreign origins, and when it comes to schools, kindergartens, hospitals, and housing, the country is under increasing pressure. In addition, Austrians prisons are already overburdened, with 50 percent of all prisoners of foreign origin while this demographic group making up 21 percent of the Austrian population. In addition, 30 percent of all welfare recipients in the country are also of foreign origin. However, those numbers can be misleading, as many of the foreigners are of European origin, such as Germans and Italians. The reality is that Africans, Asians and Middle Easterners make up an even smaller portion of foreigners, yet these are the groups that are most likely to commit a crime in the country and be imprisoned.

Migration a major theme in Austria politics
The social-democratic SPÖ party, currently a member of the opposition, has also criticized the government’s response.

“The interior minister is completely overwhelmed by the asylum programs,” the party claimed, noting an inability to seek “reasonable” international solutions.

The issue of illegal migration has dominated Austrian politics for years, however, the FPÖ has been most adamant about tackling the issue, with the most restrictive immigration policies being implemented by the previous FPÖ interior minister, Herbert Kickl.

Currently, van der Bellen is polling at 45 percent, and the FPÖ presidential candidate, Walter Rosenkranz, is far behind at 18 percent. However, if van der Bellen fails to break 50 percent in the first round, he would likely face Rosenkranz, at which point it could be a much tighter race. In 2016, FPÖ’s candidate for president nearly won in the second round.

The FPÖ warned in 2020 that there are serious expenditures being allocated to integrating foreigners, and with inflation biting into Austrian’s pocketbooks, the conservative party is working to further highlight this issue in 2022. The party stated in Austria’s National Council that the provision and care of “uninvited foreigners” is a burden on the budget in various areas and devours “huge sums” of the state’s money, according to Austrian newspaper Vol.at.

Kickl, the former interior minister, said social transfers to foreigners in the country amount to €2 billion in expenditures from basic care to family benefits, including integration, social assistance, health care, labor market policy, and education.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Global Food Supply Crises May Worsen Due To Poor US Harvest

FRIDAY, SEP 23, 2022 - 03:30 AM
Authored by Bryan Jung via The Epoch Times,

U.S. agriculture has been facing a poor harvest this year, aggravating the global food supply crisis, industry executives have said.

The supply of food worldwide has been tight, since Russia’s war in Ukraine cut off vital shipments of resources needed to make fertilizer and grain products from the region.

Several high-level executives from big agricultural firms such as Bayer, Corteva, Archer Daniels Midland, and Bunge, told The Wall Street Journal that it will take at least two more years of good harvests in North and South America to ease the supply pressures.

“The current market expectation is that global grain and oilseeds markets need two consecutive normal crop years to stabilize global supplies,” said Chuck Magro, chief executive of Corteva, at an investor presentation this week.

This year’s grain harvest has fallen below normal yields in the West, hindering efforts to restock global crop supplies he explained.

The United States and South America, two of the world’s major crop exporters, faced persistent drought conditions this summer.

The hot summer worsened drought conditions in states throughout the U.S. Grain Belt, which saw a major reduction in the harvest due to lack of water and a wet spring planting season earlier in the year.

The Agriculture Department announced on Sept. 12, that it had lowered its nationwide corn production estimates to 13.9 billion bushels.

This is 3 percent lower than its projections in August, about 8 percent lower than the total amount harvested last year.

Projections for soybean production estimates in September were down 3 percent from August, down slightly from 2021.

Maintaining a Food Truce
Global recession fears have also weighed on food commodity markets and the prolonged conflict in Ukraine has not helped matters.

Wheat price futures at the Chicago Board of Trade have risen 17 percent over the past 12 months, according to the WSJ.

Corn is up by about 28 percent, while soybeans jumped 14 percent.

Food prices skyrocketed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February.

Crop prices began to ease after a July agreement between Russia and Ukraine—brokered by Turkey through the United Nations—allowed more than a million tons of grain stored in Ukraine to be exported via the Black Sea.

Around 15 percent of grain stocks in Ukraine have been lost since the invasion in February, according to the Ukraine Conflict Observatory, a U.S.-based NGO.

Ukraine was only able to export about 40 percent of the grain it normally shipped during that period before the Black Sea agreement, according to Juan Luciano, CEO of Archer Daniels Midland, at a September investor conference.



A combine harvests wheat in a field near the village of Zghurivka, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv region, Ukraine on Aug. 9, 2022. (Viacheslav Musiienko/Reuters)

Luciano said the deal has allowed the country to boost shipments to about 60 percent of previous capacity and that it could be boosted to 80 or 90 percent if the agreement holds.

However, Russian President Vladimir Putin, said earlier this month, that his country may pull out of the deal, accusing the West of diverting Ukrainian grain to their own countries instead of allowing it to arrive in countries in the developing world that needed it most.

Putin’s statement led to the latest jump in wheat prices, which had been declining since the deal.

Western leaders immediately accused the Kremlin of spreading misinformation about the destination of Ukrainian grain that was to be shipped out of the Black Sea

“Contrary to Russian disinformation, this food is getting to Africa, the Middle East and Asia,” said European Commission President Charles Michel at a U.N. conference.

Russian officials said that items in the agreement that allowed their country to sell its fertilizer and other agricultural products amid sanctions were being violated.

Experts are warning that disruptions in fertilizer shipments due to the war are seriously affecting harvests around the world.

Agriculture executives have strongly urged that the deal be renewed by late November when it expires, to avoid pressure on global food stockpiles.

Global Food Crisis
The U.N.’s Global Food Security Summit on rising food insecurity on Sept. 20, warned of a devastating crisis next year if the war continues.

Representatives from the United States joined officials from the European Union and the African Union to discuss the effect of the conflict in Ukraine on food prices.

“As we’ve seen over the last years as a result of Covid, before that climate change and, more recently, conflict—notably Russia’s aggression against Ukraine—profound food insecurity touches well over 200 million people on this planet, including, of course, in Yemen,” said U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who urged renewal of the Black Sea agreement.

The executive director of the U.N. World Food Program, David Beasley, told the U.N. Security Council last week, that the world is now facing “a global emergency of unprecedented magnitude,” with a real risk of “multiple famines” this year.

He said that 345 million people are facing starvation, with 70 million directly affected by food shipments disrupted by the war in Ukraine.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently said that while enough food is being produced worldwide, the main problem was distribution.

This summer, UNICEF and the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, said that between 702 and 828 million people were impacted by hunger last year, due to disruptions caused by the pandemic.

Guterres stated that if the current situation in Ukraine does not stabilize in 2022, “we risk to have a real lack of food” by 2023.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

The Fed Is Finally Seeing The Magnitude Of The Mess It Created

FRIDAY, SEP 23, 2022 - 05:45 AM
Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

When asked about price inflation in his Sunday interview with 60 Minutes, President Biden claimed that inflation "was up just an inch...hardly at all."

Biden continued the dishonest tactic of focuses on month-to-month price inflation growth as a means of obscuring the 40-year highs in year-over-year inflation. This strategy may yet work to placate the most ignorant voters, but people who are paying attention know that price inflation continues to soar.

Thus, while Biden may be pretending that it's all no big deal, the Federal Reserve knows it better do something about price inflation which even the Fed now admits shows no signs of even moderating.

Another 75 Basis Points​

On Wednesday, the Fed's Federal Open Market Committee announced that it will again raise the federal funds rate by 75 basis points. According to the FOMC's press release:

Inflation remains elevated, reflecting supply and demand imbalances related to the pandemic, higher food and energy prices, and broader price pressures. ...
The Committee decided to raise the target range for the federal funds rate to 3 to 3-1/4 percent and anticipates that ongoing increases in the target range will be appropriate. In addition, the Committee will continue reducing its holdings of Treasury securities and agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities, as described in the Plans for Reducing the Size of the Federal Reserve's Balance Sheet that were issued in May. The Committee is strongly committed to returning inflation to its 2 percent objective.

This is, by far, the most hawkish announcement yet out of the Powell Fed and no doubt reflects the fact the Fed has finally come to terms with the fact that inflation is not transitory—as the Fed long insisted—and is now impossible to deny. Last month, CPI inflation rose 8.2 percent, year over year, marking six months of year-over-year price inflation rates over 8 percent and near 40-year highs.



Moreover, in its summary of economic projections, many FOMC committee members said they expected the target policy rate to reach or exceed 4.25 percent this year, and exceed 4.5 percent in 2023. Projections of economic conditions, however, continued to be relatively rosy with the report suggesting that GDP growth will stay above zero for the foreseeable future while unemployment maxes out at only 5 percent.

In spite of two quarters in a row of shrinking GDP over the past year, and in spite of many indicators of brewing recession—such as falling home prices and an inverting yield curve—the committee is still clinging to the idea that the Fed can steer a "soft landing" in which inflation will be reined in with no more than some moderate slowing in economic growth.

Although the recent hikes in the target fed funds rate suggest an increasingly hawkish position, the Fed nonetheless continues to take only the most tepid steps when it comes to reducing the size of the Fed's portfolio. Such a move would directly reduce the money supply by reversing QE, and it would also reduce asset prices by producing a small deluge of government bonds and mortgage-backed securities flowing back into the market.

While the Fed is allowing some government bonds to continue to roll off the portfolio, we shouldn't expect any drastic moves here. It's been nearly four months since the Fed announced plans to reduce the portfolio, yet the actual reduction continues to be miniscule. Moreover, in Powell's press conference on Wednesday, when asked about selling off the Fed's mortgage-backed securities, Powell responded "It's something I think we will turn to, but that time — the time for turning to it has not come ... It's not close."

Even now, after immense and rapid price inflation over the past two years, the Fed is still too afraid of fragility in the housing market to put much of its $2 trillion MBS portfolio back into the private sector.



This sends a mixed message as to how much the Fed is really committed to reducing price inflation, but it's clear Powell was trying to project a hawkish tone on Wednesday overall.

Powell spoke of "significantly reducing the size of our balance sheet" and also emphasized that ending the current bout of inflation will require pain in the form of job losses. He also emphasized that there is no short-term solution, strongly implying that the current effort to end inflation could possibly take years.

Powell expressed fears that price inflation will become much harder to address once the population comes to expect inflation as routine. He also noted that price inflation in housing "is going to remain high for some time." Powell then reiterated that there is no way to "wish away" inflation, but that the only way he sees the Fed can do something about inflation is by "slow[ing] the economy." (See 1:35:00 here.)

The question remains, however, as to whether or not the Fed and the federal government can politically tolerate a sizable period of rising interest rates and a decline in the monetary growth rate.

A decline in the monetary growth rate is trouble because it points to recession. Our bubble economy is now so addicted to easy money, that even a slowing in monetary expansion can send the economy's many zombie companies into a tailspin. Rising rates are a problem because they can lead to sizable increase in the federal government's debt-service payments. This could lead to a fiscal crisis without cuts to popular government spending programs. Virtually no one in Washington wants that.

Some key warning signs are already flashing "recession," such as the inverting yield curve. For example, the 10-year yield minus the 2-year yield has been negative since July, and at the most negative level since the early 1980s.



This will amount to immense pressure on the Fed—from wealthy Wall Streeters, elected officials, and corners of the economic Left—to return to quantitative easing.

Expect more attacks on the Fed's tightening policy, but most of these attacks get things backward when it comes to understanding the problem with Fed policy. As even Fed economists are now beginning to understand, the Fed must tighten now or risk truly galloping inflation in the near future. Many casual observers will then view this tightening as the "cause" of the economic pain that will follow.

Yet, the Fed's real incompetence is already behind us. That came over the past decade when the Fed absolutely refused to end its quantitative easing efforts even as the economy was clearly in an accelerating expansion. This was especially obvious after 2017, and yet Powell stuck with the usual monetary inflation, because that was the popular thing to do. Then, when the covid crisis, came, all restraints on monetary inflation were completely abandoned.

Now, thanks to Powell's mistakes, price inflation is supercharged, and even he admits it could take years of economic stagnation or decline to bring it under control. The sheer level of ineptitude would be shocking if it were not so common for central bankers. For those people, their entire "strategy" can be summed up—as Peter St. Onge puts it—"Hike til it breaks, cut til it inflates."

There's not much more to it than that. That's the best all those PhD's at the Fed have managed to come up with. Thanks to Powell and Yellen and Benernake and Greenspan, we've living with the consequences of the Greenspan Put, followed by a decade of QE, followed by the "panic and print money" mania of the past two years. It's great that Powell is finally figuring out what the real world looks like. Unfortunately he's years behind.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Butter Prices Soar as Dairy Production Declines Ahead of Holiday Baking Season​

ETHAN LETKEMAN22 Sep 2022183

A decline in dairy production is contributing to a surge in butter prices as American families prepare for the holiday baking season.

The price of butter — one of the most important ingredients for baked goods — has risen by 24.6 percent since last year, for an average price of $4.77 per unit in August, according to the Bureau of Labor statistics. Butter prices outpaced most other grocery store items in inflation except for eggs, which increased by 39.8 percent from last year.

While consumers have been paying 13.5 percent more since last year for overall grocery prices, they are paying even paying more for dairy products at 16.2 percent more. Grocery store prices increased slightly from July to August, after record-high surges from June to July, Breitbart News documented.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the reason for the increase in butter prices is that milk production has decreased due to cow shortages and labor shortages, among other factors, although farmers have reportedly been increasing their herds.

As a result, there has been a two percent decrease in butter production in July, while butter in cold storage facilities has also declined by 21 percent since last month, the UDSA recorded.

One Minnesota dairy farmer noted that he has had to cut butter production at his facility from five to ten percent because of short staffing.

“It’s the second shift that typically runs over family time that’s become harder and harder to fill,” Marshall Reece, senior vice president with Associated Milk Producers Inc., told the Journal.

Reese noted that this was not a problem before the pandemic.

Another reason for the decrease in butter production is that hot summer temperatures negatively affect cows’ ability to produce milk, especially in California, where ongoing droughts have resulted in less animal feed, one dairy expert told Bloomberg.

High demand from retailers is also contributing to rising butter prices ahead of the fall and winter baking season.

Reese warned retailers not to “go crazy” in discounting butter during the holiday season because dairy farmers may not be able to keep up with the production to supply the market.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

House GOP Makes Migration Policy Promises for 2023​

NEIL MUNRO22 Sep 2022299

Rep. Kevin McCarthy has announced the House GOP’s migration policy campaign promises for 2023, saying it would pass legislation to bar the employment of illegal migrants.

McCarthy’s “Commitment to America” is useful for voters before the election. But the written promises will also help GOP supporters and legislators overcome likely bipartisan opposition to reform policies if the GOP gains majority control of the House in November. And those promises also provide a platform for a wider range of migration reforms that can shift wealth and political power to ordinary Americans.

The campaign promise was applauded by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR):

FAIR has been proud to stand with the strongest-ever assembled coalition of public interest groups and former immigration officials in calling for legislation right out the gate to end a border crisis deliberately instigated by the Biden administration. We thank Republican leaders for listening to our expertise and insight, and stand ready to work with them on turning the immigration component of the Commitment to America into legislative text.

Democrats have an open borders agenda, Republicans now have a secure borders agenda. It’s time for the American people to decide.

The document includes a chapter titled “A Nation That’s Safe.”

In turn, that chapter includes a section titled “Secure the Border and Combat Illegal Immigration,” which says:

Record illegal border crossings under this Administration have led to more drugs, more crime, and a demoralized Border Patrol who are hamstrung from carrying out their law enforcement mission. The situation at the border has become both a national security and humanitarian crisis and must be addressed immediately.

The section includes a link marked “Show our plan to regain control of the southern border,” which promises to:
  • Fully fund effective border enforcement strategies, infrastructure, and advanced technology to prevent illegal crossings and trafficking by cartels
  • End catch-and-release loopholes
  • Require proof of legal status to get a job
  • Eliminate welfare incentives
The items on the agenda would sharply narrow the legal loopholes that have been used by President Joe Biden’s deputies to invite and reward at least three million illegal economic migrants into the United States since January 2021.

The vast southern inflow adds to the normal annual economic inflow of about two million assorted legal migrants, visa workers, illegals who take jobs after arriving as tourists, and migrants who overstay their visas.

In 2022, these huge inflows may bring in almost one migrant for every American who turns 18 — or one migrant for every American who is born — this year.

This replacement-scale migration has an enormous economic impact that is resolutely ignored by the establishment media.

Biden’s legal and illegal migration is unfairly skewing the economy in favor of investors by pressuring down Americans’ wages.

It is also boosting rents and housing prices, and pushing up inflation for a wide variety of goods, such as used autos and baby food. For example, economists say housing costs comprise one-third of inflation — and those higher housing costs are being spiked by roughly five million legal and illegal migrants since 2021.

Many business groups and donors rationally support this federal Extraction Migration policy, which provides them with an imported stimulus of cheap workers, government-aided consumers, and high-occupancy renters.

This policy also minimizes marketplace pressure on coastal investors to invest in heartland states, including Sen. Mitch McConnell’s state of Kentucky. For example, the coastal investors in New York and California who might be pressured in a growing economy to hire employees in distant Kentucky, Nebraska, Ohio, and other heartland states, can instead hire busloads of grateful, reliable, and cheap workers at downtown bus stations each day.

Interestingly, the McCarthy plan also mentions the huge death toll of Biden’s migration. That may encourage Republicans to shame Democrats for the growing death toll of Biden’s migration — just as Democrats tried to stigmatize Republicans in 2018 and 2020 with the poll-tested theme of “child separations.”

McCarthy’s border agenda is partly based on the consensus plan developed by a wide range of immigration reform groups. In May, the consensus plan was presented to McCarthy and other GOP leaders, including Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN).

The consensus plan has been boiled down into a broader plan released in July. The plan, titled, “House Republicans: We Must Secure the Southern Border,” includes a long list of important commitments for the House Judiciary Committee.

The House’s committee on homeland defense has played a minor role in shaping border policy, partly because GOP leaders have allowed a pro-migration Republican from New York to chair the committee. The chairman, Rep. John Katko, for example, recently announced he would help border security by cutting grass:

Clear the Carrizo Cane and Salt Cedar. These invasive species along the Rio Grande River impede CBP’s activities along the border. The non-native plant is also an obstacle for first responders and should be eradicated.

Katko has announced his retirement, which was forced by the arrival of many poor, government-dependent migrants into New York state’s high-migration/high-cost economy.

McCarthy’s border-focused agenda is markedly different from the evasive, non-committal statements offered on September 20 by McConnell.

“Orderly legal immigration is part of what makes America strong: Anarchy and open borders make us weak,” McConnell said, adding: “well-to-do blue enclaves are finally witnessing the smallest fraction of the challenges that open borders have forced on working-class communities all across our country.”

McConnell did not explain how migration imposes different pressures on “well-to-do blue enclaves” and “working-class communities.”

But he did emphasize the pocketbook damage of inflation. “In Clifton, Colorado, the director of one local food bank reports that she had served 1,000 more families in the first half of this year than the first half of last year,” McConnell said, adding a quote from the director: “They cannot short their rent bill, but they can short their grocery bill … they come here so [charity] can fill the gap.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
(Comment: or why we can't have nice things)

Watch: Mitch McConnell Zigzags on GOP Immigration Politics​

video on website 5:19 min

Illegal migration makes the U.S. weak, but legal immigration “helps make us strong,” and the pocketbook pain of inflation is “another matter,” GOP leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), said in a revealing speech on the Senate floor.

The address spotlights the GOP leaders’ tactical zigzags between corporate donors’ profits and GOP voters’ pocketbooks as it tries to win a Senate majority in November.

“There was a time where discussion on immigration was very simple,” said Jon Feere, a former executive at the Department of Homeland Security who now works with the Center for Immigration Studies.

The focus was entirely on border security. But those times are long gone. Americans now understand the larger impact that immigration has on wages, on social services. A lot of those issues have been front and center in political conversations over the past five years, six years.

McConnell’s floor speech shows the party’s zigzag script for 2022.
“Orderly legal immigration is part of what makes America strong: Anarchy and open borders make us weak,” McConnell said in his September 20 speech, adding:

[The southern inflow] is record-shattering. Two million apprehensions only count the subset of people that were actually caught. Experts estimate hundreds of thousands more people on top of that number who simply got away …

There’s nothing compassionate or humane about the border crisis that Democrats’ mixed signals and failed policies have unleashed. It’s not fair to American citizens. It’s not fair to law enforcement. And it’s not fair to the people who’ve been encouraged to undertake desperate and dangerous journeys by years of Democrats signaling to the world that there are no real consequences for breaking our laws and cutting in line.

McConnell declined to detail why he thinks “orderly legal immigration… makes America strong.”

But many business groups and donors support the federal government’s Extraction Migration policies. Those policies provide them with an imported stimulus of cheap workers, government-aided consumers, and high-occupancy renters.

Curiously, McConnell also declined to shame Democrats for the huge and growing death toll of Biden’s migration — even though Democrats tried to stigmatize Republicans in 2018 and 2020 with the poll-tested theme of “child separations.”

1663940062646.png

But he did add a rare populist spin.

He described the Democratic uproar over Gov. Ron DeSantis’ transfer of about 50 migrants to Democrats’ summer hideaway on Martha’s Vinyard in Massachusetts, saying:

According to one report from early 2021, the Biden administration was already filling Greyhound buses with people turning up at our border and dropping them into various destinations from the South to the Midwest to the Northeast. Ah, but it was never to Martha’s Vinyard.

So these well-to-do blue enclaves are finally witnessing the smallest fraction of the challenges that open borders have forced on working-class communities all across our country.

McConnell’s spin admits the economic conflicts caused by migration with his depiction of a conflict between “well-to-do-blue enclaves” and “working-class communities.”

But he tactfully avoided likely complaints from his donors by not explaining what he meant by the “challenges that open borders have forced on working-class communities.”

Then McConnell literally turned the page on that divisive topic.

In his next breath, and reading from a new page, he said:

Now, on another matter. Washington Democrats’ runaway inflation has caused a nationwide crisis. It has put working families and small businesses in a bind from coast to coast. Since President Biden took office inflation has shot up a staggering 13.2 percent. For the average American household, this translates to hundreds and hundreds of extra dollars every month working overtime just barely — barely — tread water.

McConnell had been silent about immigration economics, but he was happy to explain the pocketbook costs of inflation that are opposed by both voters and donors.

The director of the Jessamine County Food Pantry in Nicholasville says, “Our numbers here are going up like crazy… We have problems actually getting food now. We’re actually not giving away as much as we were just a couple months ago because I can’t find it, and I can’t afford it sometimes when I can find it.”

And of course, these challenges aren’t limited to our Commonwealth [of Kentucky].

“In Clifton, Colorado, the director of one local food bank reports that she had served 1,000 more families in the first half of this year than the first half of last year. “They cannot short their rent bill, but they can short their grocery bill. And so they come here so I can fill the gap.”

Yet food banks for Americans and buses for migrants are two sides of the same open-borders coin.

Biden’s migration is unfairly pressuring down Americans’ wages. It is also boosting rents and housing prices, and pushing up inflation for a wide variety of goods, such as used autos and food. For example, economists say housing costs comprise one-third of inflation — and those higher housing costs are being spiked by roughly 5 million legal and illegal migrants since 2021.

Federal immigration economics also impoverishes McConnell’s state of Kentucky. The coastal investors in New York and California who might be tempted to hire employees in Kentucky, Nebraska, Ohio, and other heartland states now the federal government’s Extraction Migration strategy delivers a new cohort of grateful, reliable, and cheap workers to downtown bus stations each day.

The migration-caused economic pressure is also threatening to split the GOP’s political coalition of donors and voters, just as Donald Trump split it in 2015 and 2016 to win the GOP nomination.

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1572348041289424897
.30 min

“Everyone is aware that there is an economic impact from mass immigration,” said Feere, adding:

It’s just that the Republicans who are currently running the party don’t want to side with working-class Americans and would prefer the debate goes back to one that is largely focused on national security, border security — and [avoid] a serious conversation about what’s in America’s best interests from an [national] economic and [pocketbook] wage perspective.

“Border security is easy to talk about — [and] they want to go back to the Bush-era thinking on immigration,” said Feere.
 

Old Greek

Veteran Member

House GOP Makes Migration Policy Promises for 2023​

NEIL MUNRO22 Sep 2022299

Rep. Kevin McCarthy has announced the House GOP’s migration policy campaign promises for 2023, saying it would pass legislation to bar the employment of illegal migrants.

McCarthy’s “Commitment to America” is useful for voters before the election. But the written promises will also help GOP supporters and legislators overcome likely bipartisan opposition to reform policies if the GOP gains majority control of the House in November. And those promises also provide a platform for a wider range of migration reforms that can shift wealth and political power to ordinary Americans.

The campaign promise was applauded by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR):

FAIR has been proud to stand with the strongest-ever assembled coalition of public interest groups and former immigration officials in calling for legislation right out the gate to end a border crisis deliberately instigated by the Biden administration. We thank Republican leaders for listening to our expertise and insight, and stand ready to work with them on turning the immigration component of the Commitment to America into legislative text.

Democrats have an open borders agenda, Republicans now have a secure borders agenda. It’s time for the American people to decide.

The document includes a chapter titled “A Nation That’s Safe.”

In turn, that chapter includes a section titled “Secure the Border and Combat Illegal Immigration,” which says:

Record illegal border crossings under this Administration have led to more drugs, more crime, and a demoralized Border Patrol who are hamstrung from carrying out their law enforcement mission. The situation at the border has become both a national security and humanitarian crisis and must be addressed immediately.

The section includes a link marked “Show our plan to regain control of the southern border,” which promises to:
  • Fully fund effective border enforcement strategies, infrastructure, and advanced technology to prevent illegal crossings and trafficking by cartels
  • End catch-and-release loopholes
  • Require proof of legal status to get a job
  • Eliminate welfare incentives
The items on the agenda would sharply narrow the legal loopholes that have been used by President Joe Biden’s deputies to invite and reward at least three million illegal economic migrants into the United States since January 2021.

The vast southern inflow adds to the normal annual economic inflow of about two million assorted legal migrants, visa workers, illegals who take jobs after arriving as tourists, and migrants who overstay their visas.

In 2022, these huge inflows may bring in almost one migrant for every American who turns 18 — or one migrant for every American who is born — this year.

This replacement-scale migration has an enormous economic impact that is resolutely ignored by the establishment media.

Biden’s legal and illegal migration is unfairly skewing the economy in favor of investors by pressuring down Americans’ wages.

It is also boosting rents and housing prices, and pushing up inflation for a wide variety of goods, such as used autos and baby food. For example, economists say housing costs comprise one-third of inflation — and those higher housing costs are being spiked by roughly five million legal and illegal migrants since 2021.

Many business groups and donors rationally support this federal Extraction Migration policy, which provides them with an imported stimulus of cheap workers, government-aided consumers, and high-occupancy renters.

This policy also minimizes marketplace pressure on coastal investors to invest in heartland states, including Sen. Mitch McConnell’s state of Kentucky. For example, the coastal investors in New York and California who might be pressured in a growing economy to hire employees in distant Kentucky, Nebraska, Ohio, and other heartland states, can instead hire busloads of grateful, reliable, and cheap workers at downtown bus stations each day.

Interestingly, the McCarthy plan also mentions the huge death toll of Biden’s migration. That may encourage Republicans to shame Democrats for the growing death toll of Biden’s migration — just as Democrats tried to stigmatize Republicans in 2018 and 2020 with the poll-tested theme of “child separations.”

McCarthy’s border agenda is partly based on the consensus plan developed by a wide range of immigration reform groups. In May, the consensus plan was presented to McCarthy and other GOP leaders, including Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN).

The consensus plan has been boiled down into a broader plan released in July. The plan, titled, “House Republicans: We Must Secure the Southern Border,” includes a long list of important commitments for the House Judiciary Committee.

The House’s committee on homeland defense has played a minor role in shaping border policy, partly because GOP leaders have allowed a pro-migration Republican from New York to chair the committee. The chairman, Rep. John Katko, for example, recently announced he would help border security by cutting grass:

Clear the Carrizo Cane and Salt Cedar. These invasive species along the Rio Grande River impede CBP’s activities along the border. The non-native plant is also an obstacle for first responders and should be eradicated.

Katko has announced his retirement, which was forced by the arrival of many poor, government-dependent migrants into New York state’s high-migration/high-cost economy.

McCarthy’s border-focused agenda is markedly different from the evasive, non-committal statements offered on September 20 by McConnell.

“Orderly legal immigration is part of what makes America strong: Anarchy and open borders make us weak,” McConnell said, adding: “well-to-do blue enclaves are finally witnessing the smallest fraction of the challenges that open borders have forced on working-class communities all across our country.”

McConnell did not explain how migration imposes different pressures on “well-to-do blue enclaves” and “working-class communities.”

But he did emphasize the pocketbook damage of inflation. “In Clifton, Colorado, the director of one local food bank reports that she had served 1,000 more families in the first half of this year than the first half of last year,” McConnell said, adding a quote from the director: “They cannot short their rent bill, but they can short their grocery bill … they come here so [charity] can fill the gap.”
Does anyone believe this RINO's Promisse's anymore?
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Tom Cotton: Border Crisis Is Biden’s ‘Deliberate Policy’ Chosen by Design​

Video on website 8:08 min

Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) said Thursday on FNC’s “The Faulkner Focus” that the large number of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border creating a strain on our immigration systems is the “deliberate policy” of President Joe Biden.

Cotton said, “Since he took office, we have 5 million illegal aliens who have entered our country, and we know where almost none of them are.”

He continued, “All we do is send them into the interior of our country and say pretty, please report for a hearing at some point in the future. Whether it is Joe Biden’s government, whether it is the Democratic mayor of El Paso, whether it is Republican governors, it is really unfortunate that we have migrants boarding buses and planes and going north into our country. Joe Biden should be putting them on buses and planes and sending them south, back to their own countries.”

He added, “These men and women of Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement signed up to enforce the law, to protect our border, to defend our sovereignty, and Joe Biden will not let them do it.”

Cotton concluded, “Make no mistake, what you saw the border, what I saw the border last year when I traveled there, it is not an accident, it is not an unintended consequence, it is not bad luck, it is what Joe Biden and the Democrats want. It is what they campaigned on. It is the deliberate policy they have chosen by design. That is why the American people will vote them out of office in November.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Jamie Dimon Says Stopping Oil and Gas Funding Would Be ‘Road to Hell for America’​

JOHN CARNEY22 Sep 2022826

J.P. Morgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon on Wednesday rejected in the strongest terms the idea that the country’s largest banks should stop funding new oil and gas production and exploration.

The chief executive of the largest U.S. bank was testifying before a House panel with other bank executives. Representative Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan Democrat, claimed that preventing temperatures from rising more than 2.7 degrees in the coming decades would require no new fossil fuel production.
“Please answer, yes or no. Does your bank have a policy against funding new oil and gas products?” Tlaib asked.

“Absolutely not and that would be the road to Hell for America,” said Dimon.
Tlaib responded by saying that every J.P. Morgan Chase customer who benefits from the Biden administration’s student loan relief program should close their account. Earlier in the hearing, Dimon had criticized the Biden administration’s program, calling it “badly done.”

Gasoline prices hit a record high this year as oil soared. U.S. oil production has lagged because of underinvestment in the sector, in part driven by the popularity of ESG funds that shun fossil fuels. Climate change activists have sought to pressure banks and others to avoid investing in oil, gas, and coal production regardless of the costs to the U.S. economy.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has spotlighted the dangers of Europe’s lack of energy security. Because Europe has underinvested in fossil fuel energy infrastructure at the behest of so-called climate change pressure groups, it is perilously dependent on Russia for natural gas. Soaring energy prices in Europe a likely to push economies there into a deep recession and have prompted the U.K.’s new conservative government to enact an enormous spending program aimed at keeping household energy bills in check.

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1572695102082142209
1:05 min

Jane Fraser, the chief executive of Citigroup, also said her bank would not stop funding fossil fuels.

“We will continue to invest in and support clients who are investing in fossil fuels and in helping them transition to cleaner energy,” Fraser said.
Brian Moynihan, chief of Bank of America, took a less combative tone in response to Tlaib’s question.

“We are helping our clients make a transition. And that means we are lending to both oil and gas companies and to new energy companies,” he said. “We’re helping monitor their course toward the standard you are talking about.”

Wells Fargo’s CEO said he agreed with Moynihan.

Before Tlaib ended her line of questions, she again attacking Dimon, telling him “you obviously do not care about working-class people.”

Tlaib ended her questions by threatening banks with regulations requiring them to stop funding fossil fuels.

“If your financial institutions are not going to follow through on your net zero commitments, then regulators—including the Federal Reserve and Congress—must step in and make them,” Tlaib said.

The Biden administration has recently elevated Yue (Nina) Chen to serve as chief climate risk officer for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, one of the primary regulators of banks in the U.S. She is thought to support the kind of regulations Tlaib mentioned.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

China Faces ‘Severely Aging Society’ with 400 Million Elderly by 2035​

JOHN HAYWARD22 Sep 2022257

Wang Haidong, director of the Department of Aging and Health at China’s National Health Commission, on Tuesday announced demographic studies that showed China will become a “severely aging society” by 2035, with 30 percent of its vast population over 60 years old.

China’s state-run Global Times quoted Wang saying the communist regime is under “great pressure to cope with the aging scenario,” because the “old-age dependency ratio” is about to skyrocket, hitting its peak around 2050.

In other words, as with many other industrialized countries – but on a titanic scale, and faster – China is reaching the point where longer lifespans and collapsing birth rates with leave it without enough young workers to bear the cost of caring for retirees.

Wang took pains to assure reporters that China has adequate resources to handle its elderly for the time being, although he made it sound like his government was not so much caring for them as warehousing them:

Speaking about the development in care of the elderly, Wang said as of 2021, pension system covered 1.03 billion and the health insurance covered 1.36 billion of the 1.4 total population. Long-term care services are pioneered in 49 cities, covering 145 million people.

There have been 8 million beds in 360,000 care centers as of first quarter of 2022, and more than 1.75 million beds in medical-care centers nationwide.
More than 40,000 learning centers are established for the elderly to study while cultural facilities and tourist sites are open to them for free or at discounted prices to encourage the elderly to participate in recreational activities, Wang said.

Wang said the regime “will be implementing national strategies for the situation and figure out a unique path to cope with it,” but so far none of its remedies have worked to stem China’s demographic collapse.

Alarm bells began sounding several years ago, as Chinese health experts began projecting net population decline by 2025, and a few postulated negative population growth might have already arrived in some regions.

In July of this year, leading demographer Huang Wenzheng said negative growth “will be the dominant trend for a long time,” describing it as “an inevitable result of a long period of low fertility rate.”

Huang noted previous dire predictions of demographic decline may have actually underestimated how rapidly new births would decline. China posted the lowest birth rate in its modern history last year, possibly because the coronavirus pandemic and its lockdowns made it harder than ever for people to date, and the terrified population lost its remaining enthusiasm for having children.

China first loosened up its infamous “One Child Policy” of mandatory contraception and abortions, then began actively encouraging citizens to have two children, then realized the tough arithmetic of population growth means even larger families will be needed.

Chinese officials labored to dispel the sense developed by young professionals, in China and many other societies around the world, that having children is too expensive and frustrates the career ambitions of young parents. One of China’s techniques along these lines was to impose strict controls on the price of private tutoring, which upwardly-mobile parents saw as an expensive necessity if their children were to succeed.

China pumped out propaganda to encourage having multiple children and offered prospective parents a slew of incentives, from tax benefits and housing credits to subsidies for child care and insurance. None of this seems to be working as well as demographers hoped.

China will still have plenty of people in 2035 or 2050, and while the declining ratio of young workers to elderly people is burdensome, it should not be catastrophic for a country as prosperous as China claims to be.

The big problem is that China’s dreams of economic global dominance are thoroughly dependent upon having a vast supply of workers, and it looks like they will not be showing up for work in the necessary numbers two or three decades from now.

Human capital is simply indispensable for sustaining the explosive growth China’s 21st Century agenda requires, especially when abundant cheap labor is such a major component of Beijing’s export strategies. China’s military ambitions demand both soldiers and industrial workers to produce high-tech munitions.

As Foreign Policy noted in July, if current projections for both counties hold up, China will reach the end of this century with roughly half the population of India. Meanwhile, the U.S. is struggling with its own demographic decline, but it is far less severe than China’s at present, and the vastly higher per capita income of Americans means China’s dream of becoming the world’s top economy will probably only endure for a few years, if it happens at all.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Texas Governor Orders ‘Dismantling’ of Mexican Cartel ‘Terrorist’ Organizations​

BOB PRICE21 Sep 2022335

Texas Governor Greg Abbott designated specific Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations and ordered the Department of Public Safety to begin dismantling their infrastructure. The move comes as record levels of the deadly drug fentanyl are being pushed across the border.

“Fentanyl is a clandestine killer, and Texans are falling victim to the Mexican cartels that are producing it,” Governor Abbott said during a border security round table in Midland, Texas, on Wednesday. “Cartels are terrorists, and it’s time we treated them that way. In fact, more Americans died from fentanyl poisoning in the past year than all terrorist attacks across the globe in the past 100 years. In order to save our country, particularly our next generation, we must do more to get fentanyl off our streets.”

Specifically, the governor identified the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation Cartels (CJNG) as terrorist organizations. He requested President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris create federal terrorist designations for these cartels and others producing and distributing fentanyl.

Abbott also directed the Texas Department of Public Safety and other law enforcement agencies to identify Texas gangs that support Mexican drug cartels. He directed that the funds of these gangs and other criminal enterprises that are supporting the cartels.

In the letter to Washington, D.C., Abbott wrote:

Mexican drug cartels terrorize the United States and its citizens every day, leaving thousands of dead bodies in their wake. Their latest weapons of choice are the millions of tiny pills laced with fentanyl that they pour across our southern border. As a result, it is necessary, now more than ever, for you to designate the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, and any similarly situated Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations under Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). This move would help us fight back against these terrorists and disrupt their deadly attacks on America.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 75,000 Americans died from drug overdoses that involved fentanyl between February 2021 and February 2022. To put that in context, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism reports there were 3,905 deaths of Americans in terrorist attacks worldwide between 1995 and 2019, most of them occurring on September 11, 2001. In this light, the magnitude of the terrorism related to the introduction of fentanyl by Mexican drug cartels is astonishing.

The reason for the explosion of fentanyl deaths in America is that the Mexican drug cartels are trafficking fentanyl across our southern border at a greater rate than ever, thanks to your openborder policies.

“In an April 2021 letter to you both, I made this request for designation. There was no action, no response,” Abbott concluded. “But if you are ready to make Americans safer, it will be better late than never. As the number of American deaths continues to rise due to the cartels’ terrorist behavior, now is the time to act. We do not have more time to waste.”

Officials in the governor’s office added, “With Mexican drug cartels disguising fentanyl as counterfeit pills and targeting children with ‘rainbow fentanyl’ pills, the Governor emphasizes in his letter that immediate decisive action is needed from the Biden Administration to combat this deadly crisis impacting the nation.”

The governor met in Midland for a border security round table attended by DPS Director Steve McCraw, DPS Regional Director West Texas Region Jose Sanchez, Midland County Judge Terry Johnson, Ector County Sheriff Mike Griffis, Midland County Sheriff Chief Deputy Benny Matlock, Odessa Police Chief Mike Gerke, Midland Police Chief Seth Herman, and Midland Memorial Hospital District Police Chief Steve McNeill.

The governor also directed state agencies on Tuesday to begin preparations for the next session of the Texas Legislature. The governor ordered the agencies to “outline statutory changes, budget priorities, and other initiatives that will enhance the state’s ability to interdict the synthetic opioid, provide emergency overdose treatment, and expand substance abuse treatment programs.”

“We must take all appropriate actions to inform Texans of this danger and prevent additional deaths,” Abbott said to the agency leaders. “Together we can help bring awareness to the threat posed by fentanyl and do our part to address this crisis.”

Under Operation Lone Star, the Texas Department of Public Safety and Texas National Guard seized more than 335 million lethal doses of fentanyl, the governor’s office reported.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Russia's Oil Exports Are Set To Plunge Next Year

FRIDAY, SEP 23, 2022 - 06:25 AM
By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com (emphasis ours),

Nearly seven months after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Russian oil exports have been quite resilient and just 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) below pre-war levels.

But come December, Russian oil supply could plunge by more than one million bpd after the EU embargo on Russian oil imports by sea enters into force. In February, another one million bpd could then come offline due to the EU's fuel embargo.

So far this year, Russia has managed to divert a lot of cargoes previously sent to Europe to buyers in Asia, predominantly China and India. As of December - and two months later when the EU oil product embargo kicks in - Russia will have to find a home for 2.4 million bpd of its oil if it is to keep its oil exports at current levels, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in its Oil Market Report last week.

The global oil market will have to prepare itself for a loss of 2.4 million bpd supply when the EU embargo kicks in; an additional 1 million bpd of products and 1.4 million bpd of crude will have to find new homes. This could result in deeper declines in Russian oil exports and production, the IEA said. The Paris-based agency expects oil production in Russia to fall to 9.5 million bpd by February 2023, which would be a plunge of 1.9 million bpd compared to February 2022.

Around half of the Russian supply that will have to find new buyers could be diverted to Asia and the Middle East this winter, according to research by energy data firm Kpler cited by Bloomberg.

Some 1 million bpd of Russian oil could go to some Middle Eastern countries and Indonesia, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka in Asia, as well as Brazil and South Africa, according to Kpler's estimates.

If this happens, there would be another major shift in global oil trade flows. Indonesia could replace some of the oil it's currently importing from OPEC member Nigeria, while Pakistan could import lower volumes of Arab Light, the flagship crude grade of OPEC's top producer and the world's largest crude oil exporter, Saudi Arabia, the energy research firm says.

In the Middle East, "The temptation might be to feed Urals into the refineries and let the likes of Arab Light flow freely in Asia," Kpler notes.

Currently, Europe imports over 1 million bpd of Russian crude, attempting to fill up before the EU-wide embargo on Russian oil imports by sea comes into effect.

Going forward, the EU and the G7 hope to keep Russian oil flows coming with a price cap that would allow maritime transportation services for Russia's oil if that oil is sold at or below a certain price.

While clever in theory, the price cap plan could lead to much higher oil prices because trade flows will be upended again, tankers are in short supply, and Russian oil exports—still remarkably resilient—would plunge, analysts say.

Yet, Putin can simply make good on his promise to halt all energy supply—including crude, fuels, natural gas, and coal—to the countries that sign up to cap the price of Russian oil. This would tighten the market and send oil prices surging.

"It's unclear how and where the storm will land, "but it is looming," Rystad Energy said in research last month.

EU imports of Russian crude are expected to dwindle to just 600,000 bpd by December 2022—a nearly 2.5 million bpd drop from the 3 million bpd before the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the energy research firm said.

Yet, Rystad Energy expects that Russia will be able to redirect a significant portion of crude volume—or 75% in a base-case scenario—to Asia and other markets.

Regardless of how much crude and products Russia manages to place with non-EU buyers later this year, the next disruption of global oil flows is now looming.

* * *
Continuing to expand on OilPrice's note on the "looming" threat that global oil markets will get even tighter next year because plunging Russian oil output would only mean oil price pain worldwide will be prolonged.

Last month we noted oil prices could be set for a comeback despite "bearish sentiment" amid recession threats as global central bankers aggressively tighten monetary policy to combat the highest inflation in decades.

Goldman Sachs recently told clients its Brent price forecast for this quarter was revised to $110 a barrel, down from a previous projection of $140 per barrel, though the investment bank still believes the case for higher oil prices could materialize in 2023.

Goldman also revised its fourth-quarter Brent price forecast to $125 a barrel from $130 per barrel. As for the 2023 projection, it left prices unchanged at $125 per barrel.

"We believe that the case for higher oil prices remains strong, even assuming all these negative shocks play out, with the market remaining in a larger deficit than we expected in recent months," the analyst said.

With that in mind, SPR releases are set to end this fall, and OPEC has struggled with spare capacity issues to bring on new production.



This could suggest crude may soon find a bottom.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Synthetic Salvation — On Genomics, Mind Uploads, and the Quest for Immortality​

Our elites want to live forever. The rest of us will make for rich compost​


Joe Allen
15 min ago

Fear of death is intrinsic to human life. As our years accumulate, we watch friends and family drop off, one by one, disappearing from our presence and lingering only in memories.

Barring some miracle, divine or otherwise, we’re all soon to follow, down to the sweetest baby ever born.

Unfazed by this horror, the faithful are emboldened by belief in resurrection or reincarnation—a direct participation in the eternal. For religious people, the body is just a vehicle for a transcendent soul. The mystery of death is a rite of passage.

For the materialist, there is only this world, beyond which the dying meet total annihilation. The brain dissolves into black nothingness. Consciousness ends with the Big Zero at the end of our lives. And for all sentient beings, and all memory of our existence, there awaits the Big Zero at the end of the universe.
The cosmos is nothing but atoms and the void. To make matters worse, the atoms are slowly freezing to death.

Wallowing in this trance of sorrow, our elites, and most anybody else, would pay anything to live forever—or just a little longer. Held in thrall by old age, disease, and death, they put faith in biomedical protection racketeers who swear they can keep the Reaper at bay.

Today, it’s the vaxx-addicts and maskholes.

Tomorrow, it’ll be needle-pocked mutants with blinking devices stuck all over them, who pray to AI for a place in the cloud.

Transhumanism offers synthetic salvation through three basic methods—bio longevity, bionic continuity, and digital immortality.

Genomics will stop aging on the cellular level. Bionics will keep the body running with replacement parts. Once artificial intelligence is sufficiently advanced, mind uploads will allow eternal communion with the digital deities whom techies are busy creating.

“I think that there’s a good probability,” the human-reptile hybrid, Jared Kushner, recently said, “that my generation is—hopefully with the advances in science—either the first generation to live forever, or the last generation that’s gonna die.”

A more likely scenario? This is the first generation to merge with the machine, and the last generation to regret it.

Kushner is not alone. Many of our credulous elites, from Wall Street to the World Economic Forum, have been ensnared by a techno-religion. Its unfrocked priests are the scientists and futurists who push radical gene therapies, brain-computer interfaces, and various life-logging gadgets. As the actual technology becomes more and more sophisticated, you can be sure every atheist and his lapsed uncle will fall prey to this cosmic scam.

And for those who can’t afford it? Well, you know, there’s only so much room on the lifeboat.


Bio Longevity

In order to cheat death, at least for awhile, the first method is to preserve the body at the cellular level. One proposed line of attack is to correct defective genes and defuse the cell’s innate self-destruct programs. With the discovery of the CRISPR-Cas9 molecule in 2012, geneticists now have the power to easily knock out faulty genes, and even insert new, superior genetic codes.

Joe Biden’s recent executive order, the National Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative, has slated $2 billion for these “high-risk, high reward” projects to “write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers.”

There are also less invasive procedures, to be used in conjunction with gene-editing, such as munching pricey vitamins morning, noon, and night, or gaining self-knowledge through Internet of Bodies surveillance devices—wearable trackers which feed every biometric data point into an artificial intelligence system, putting flesh on the bones of your “digital twin.” In theory, the resulting simulation could be used as a reference point for targeted gene-editing.

“By preventing 90 percent of medical problems,” Ray Kurzweil wrote in The Singularity is Near, “life expectancy grows to over five hundred years. At 99 percent, we’d be over one thousand years. We can expect that the full realization of the biotechnology and nanotechnology revolutions will enable us to eliminate virtually all medical causes of death.”


Inspired by this sort of statistical fantasy, Big Tech oligarchs are pouring billions into various life extension laboratories:
  • SENS Research Foundation – Co-founded by the transhumanist Aubrey de Grey in 2009, this organization seeks to halt and reverse aging. “No matter what caused a given unit of damage in the first place,” they assure us, “the same regenerative therapeutics can be used to repair it.”
  • Altos Labs – Founded by Jeff Bezos and the corporate transhumanist Yuri Milner in 2021, this is a “new biotechnology company focused on cellular rejuvenation programming to restore cell health and resilience, with the goal of reversing disease to transform medicine.”
  • Calico Labs – Acquired by Google in 2015 at the behest of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, this company is focused on “the convergence of biology and technology, coupled with a long-term perspective and funding” to “cure death.”
  • Methuselah Foundation – Bankrolled by Peter Thiel (along with many other immortality start-ups), this foundation is on a mission to “make 90 the new 50 by 2030.”
And the list goes on and on. By all appearances, billionaires fear death as if hell awaits, and they’ll pay any amount to avoid it. If you’re lucky, you too might add a few years to your life through trickle-down immortality.

If these gene-therapies and 3D-printed organs fail to keep your carcass shambling along, there are always cryonic doctors who’ll freeze you right before you die, and then thaw you out once these transhumanists finally get their shit together.

Alcor Life Extension, for example, charges $80,000 to freeze your head, and $200,000 for the full body treatment. It’s a small price to pay for a shot at immortality.

Bionic Continuity

The second method is to replace failing tissues and organs with mechanical parts. We do this already with pacemakers, prosthetic limbs, cochlear implants, dental implants, deep brain stimulation devices, and flag-raising penile implants. In a real sense, the entire plastic surgery industry—from hair transplants to rubber duck lips to silicone boobs—is a means to stave off our inevitable dissolution, if only on a superficial level.

Transhumanists foresee a day, just over the horizon, when more advanced prosthetics will offer superior functionality—including brain function. We’ll have Swiss Army knives for fingers and versatile artificial genitals, sort of like today’s transgenders, but presumably way, way better. Any prospective immortal had better hope so.

This cyborg dream was fleshed out in the early 20th century by the Marxist thinker J.D. Bernal. “Already we know the essential electrical nature of nerve impulses,” he wrote in 1929, “it is a matter of delicate surgery to attach nerves permanently to apparatus which will either send messages to the nerves or receive them. And the brain thus connected up continues an existence, purely mental and with very different delights from those of the body, but now perhaps preferable to complete extinction.”

Bernal compared this bionic transformation to the metamorphosis of a butterfly, albeit one with hideous wings. “Apart from such mental development as his increased faculties will demand from him,” he speculated, “he will be physically plastic in a way quite transcending the capacities of untransformed humanity.”


Screenshot: “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991)

As we hurtle toward this nightmare in the 21st century, futurists claim it’ll soon be possible to model the entire human brain—down to the last electrochemical thought pattern—using artificial intelligence. The transhumanist guru Ray Kurzweil predicts this will be accomplished by 2029. (It’s unclear if that will be early in the year, or just in time for Christmas.)

Following the AI-created digital template, doctors will replace our dying neurons with artificial neurons. Bit by bit, our meat brains will be transformed into a latticework of lightning fast transistors. It’s an upgraded mind-brain that could last forever—so be sure to get a warranty.

Would this mechanical monster still be you, though? The idea is that a pattern is a pattern, and the human “soul” is just a pattern of information. It doesn’t matter what the medium may be. Think of it this way—if you replaced every thread in a sweater, strand by strand, with artificial wool, it would still feel like the same old sweater. Maybe even better.

In a similar manner, many believe your personal consciousness will survive the transition from gray matter to circuitry. This mind-machine merger would be like looking out at the world through your smartphone—forever. You’d hardly notice the difference.

“If you think about replacing the neurons one at a time by prosthetic neurons made of silicon,” explains the philosopher of consciousness and NYU-employed transhumanist, David Chalmers:

Just say I replace ten percent of my brain with silicon chips...do it one at a time, and keep going and keep going...and they interconnect with the other ones in a perfect way. … I think as long as you do it gradually, and replace the neurons one by one, then it’s gonna be like getting prosthetic limbs or artificial heart.

You’re gonna be replacing parts of me, but I’m gonna be present throughout, and I think I could even stay conscious.

Of course, these artificial neurons haven’t been developed yet—not even close—but they will be one day. You’ll see. Have a little faith. Scientists are working hard. It’s a solid investment.

Digital Immortality
The third method to attain quasi-eternal life is basically the digital side of bionic continuity. Rather than, or in addition to, replacing neurons with artificial neurons, the mind will be gradually uploaded to a computer, where the patterns of one’s personality can be entombed in perpetuity.

Transhumanists delight in pointing out we’re already doing this. Everyone from toddlers to creaky old codgers is feeding their inner self into Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Amazon, third-party data vultures, and any intelligence agencies with backdoor access to these companies. Perhaps one day these corporations and agencies will sell our digital twins back to us so we can inhabit our digital wraiths.

“Currently, when our human hardware crashes,” Ray Kurzweil wrote, “the software of our lives—our personal ‘mind file’—dies with it. However, this will not continue to be the case when we have the means to store and restore the thousands of trillions of bytes of information represented in the pattern that we call our brains.”

Kurzweil believes injectable nanobots are the key to this uploading process. These microscopic robots will travel through the brain, mapping every neuron and synapse, creating a perfect facsimile of the “soul” in a computer. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

As with most transhumanists, Kurzweil was deeply influenced by the Carnegie Mellon roboticist Hans Moravec, who in 1988 described a gruesome uploading procedure now known as the “Moravec Transfer.” Basically, the patient commits suicide by having his or her brain scraped off, like whittling an onion, with each skin copied in silico:

You are fully conscious. The robot surgeon opens your brain case and places a hand on the brain’s surface. This unusual hand bristles with microscopic machinery, and a cable connects it to the mobile computer at your side. …

The surgeon’s hand sinks a fraction of a millimeter deeper into your brain instantly compensating its measurements and signals for the changed position. The process is repeated for the next layer, and soon a second simulation resides in the computer, communicating with the first and with the remaining original brain tissue.

Layer after layer the brain is simulated, then excavated. Eventually your skull is empty...your mind has been removed from the brain and transferred to a machine.

Some would call this biohorror, but transhumanists revere the “Moravec Transfer” as a pioneering vision of synthetic salvation.

One of Kurzweil’s distinguished disciples, the transgender tech innovator Martine Rothblatt, proposes a kinder, gentler man-machine merger by way of mind-cloning.

“This blessing of emotional and intellectual continuity or immortality,” she (he? whatever) wrote in Virtually Human, “is being made possible through the development of digital clones, or mindclones: software versions of our minds, software-based alter egos, doppelgangers, mental twins.”

In other words, with sufficiently detailed surveillance, our personal data can be processed through artificial intelligence to create a new, more durable “soul” in silico.

“When the body of a person with a mindclone dies,” Rothblatt goes on, “the mindclone will not feel that they have personally died, although the body will be missed in the same ways amputees miss their limbs but acclimate when given an artificial replacement. … The mindclone is to the consciousness and spirit as the prosthetic is to an arm that has lost its hand.”

Having been baptized in electromagnetic waves, you will become your digital ghost, floating forever among the AI angels.

The metaphysics of this process make no sense, but then, why should the transhuman techno-cult be any more realistic than traditional cults? Their delusions would be funny if they weren’t constantly intruding upon our lives through ubiquitous screens and surveillance devices, and blasted into our brains with wall-to-wall propaganda.

“If anything,” Rothblatt conceded in a TED interview, “I’m perhaps a bit of a communicator of activities that are being undertaken by the greatest companies in China, Japan, India, the U.S., Europe.”

You have to wonder if we’ll have social credit scores in heaven.

So You Want To Live Forever—Good Luck With That
Humanity is composed of three primary elements—the spiritual, the biological, and the technological. At best, we are eternal souls enshrined in bodies, with exceedingly powerful tools in our hands. At worst, we’re bumbling monkeys in the Machine.

As the materialist worldview erodes our spiritual consciousness, we’re left with nothing but mortal bodies. When God is dead, technology is exalted as the highest power, holding out the promise of free WiFi and synthetic salvation.

The delusion of physical immortality, whether bodily or digital—or both—is capturing our elites’ imaginations. It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to figure out that if they actually managed to live forever, and the planet has finite space and resources, some number of us will have to become compost for their biomechanical gardens.

Personally, I don’t mind the idea of being turned into mulch. That’s the fate of every man and woman ever born. What is eternal will endure.

My fear, writhing deep in my paranoid brain stem, is that our technocratic rulers, sweating over flawed calculations, are willing to huck us into the mulchers long before our time.

God will not be mocked. Nor will Mother Nature. I’m certain that, in the course of time, every billionaire cyborg and half-retarded upload will shuffle off this mortal coil. Unfortunately, I also suspect they’d happily push the rest of us offstage while they do their apocalyptic jig.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Risk Of Global Recession In 2023 Rises Amid Simultaneous Rate Hikes

FRIDAY, SEP 23, 2022 - 12:25 PM
Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

Central banks cut in unison in response to Covid. They are now hiking in unison. What can go wrong?...



Will more 'key swipes' lead to higher GDP? A wealth manager wonders...

World Bank chart on tightening fiscal stance[/B][/SIZE]

Super Thursday Actions

The Wall Street Journal reports Interest-Rate Hikes Come Thick and Fast
  • Switzerland: Raised rates by 0.75 point to 0.5%, making it one of the last central banks to exit negative territory.
  • U.K.: The Bank of England raised its key rate by 0.5 point to 2.25%, and will start selling some of its bond holdings.
  • Norway: Increased rates by 0.5 point to 2.25%.
  • Indonesia: Raised its benchmark rate by 0.5 percentage point to 4.25%.
  • Taiwan: Moved its discount rate up by 0.125 point to 1.625%.
  • The Philippines: Upped its benchmark overnight borrowing rate by half a point to 4.25%.
  • South Africa: Took the main repo rate up 0.75 point to 6.25%.
  • Japan: The Bank of Japan kept its benchmark rate at minus 0.1%. Tokyo later intervened to shore up the yen.
  • Turkey: Cut its main rate by 1 percentage point to 12%, continuing its contrarian easing campaign.

Risk of Global Recession in 2023 Rises Amid Simultaneous Rate Hikes

The World Bank says Risk of Global Recession in 2023 Rises Amid Simultaneous Rate Hikes

Central banks around the world have been raising interest rates this year with a degree of synchronicity not seen over the past five decades—a trend that is likely to continue well into next year, according to the report. Yet the currently expected trajectory of interest-rate increases and other policy actions may not be sufficient to bring global inflation back down to levels seen before the pandemic. Investors expect central banks to raise global monetary-policy rates to almost 4 percent through 2023—an increase of more than 2 percentage points over their 2021 average.

Unless supply disruptions and labor-market pressures subside, those interest-rate increases could leave the global core inflation rate (excluding energy) at about 5 percent in 2023—nearly double the five-year average before the pandemic, the study finds. To cut global inflation to a rate consistent with their targets, central banks may need to raise interest rates by an additional 2 percentage points, according to the report’s model. If this were accompanied by financial-market stress, global GDP growth would slow to 0.5 percent in 2023—a 0.4 percent contraction in per–capita terms that would meet the technical definition of a global recession.

“Global growth is slowing sharply, with further slowing likely as more countries fall into recession. My deep concern is that these trends will persist, with long-lasting consequences that are devastating for people in emerging market and developing economies,” said World Bank Group President David Malpass. “To achieve low inflation rates, currency stability and faster growth, policymakers could shift their focus from reducing consumption to boosting production.

Policies should seek to generate additional investment and improve productivity and capital allocation, which are critical for growth and poverty reduction.”

The study highlights the unusually fraught circumstances under which central banks are fighting inflation today. Several historical indicators of global recessions are already flashing warnings. The global economy is now in its steepest slowdown following a post-recession recovery since 1970. Global consumer confidence has already suffered a much sharper decline than in the run-up to previous global recessions. The world’s three largest economies—the United States, China, and the euro area—have been slowing sharply.

Under the circumstances, even a moderate hit to the global economy over the next year could tip it into recession.

Is a Global Recession Imminent?

The World Bank Report ponders the question Is a Global Recession Imminent?
  • Kenneth Rogoff, April 26, 2022: The odds of recession in Europe, the United States, and China are significant and increasing, and a collapse in one region will raise the odds of collapse in the others… The risks of a global recession trifecta are rising by the day.
  • Jeffrey Frankel, August 25, 2022: A global recession is entirely avoidable… Even by laxer criteria like GDP growth below 2.5 percent, global recession is very far from inevitable.
  • Anne O. Krueger, August 25, 2022: Whether the balance of risks is toward inflation, recession, or a smooth landing from current turbulence depends on unknowns such as the duration of the Ukraine war… …. But a global recession is certainly not inevitable.
  • Jim O’Neill, August 25, 2022: If these two economies (the US and China) are both in their respective versions of recession, then that will virtually guarantee a global downturn. Given their current weaknesses and challenges, such a scenario is quite possible… But I am less convinced of this than I probably was a few months ago…
  • Stephen S. Roach, August 25, 2022: Notwithstanding the pitfalls of forecasting anything these days, my cracked and worn crystal ball sees a global recession occurring in the next year…. Collectively, Europe, the US, and China make up about half of world GDP on a purchasing-power-parity basis. With no other economy able to fill the void, I am afraid a global recession does indeed appear inevitable.

Global Recession Definition

There is no consensus on the definition of a global recession.

Some economists suggest anything under 2.5 percent growth, some use per-capita growth, some mean declining real GDP.

Fantasyland Projections vs the Inevitable

Jeffrey Frankel is in pure Fantasyland believing 2.5 percent growth is possible. Roach is undoubtedly correct.

China is in the midst of an imploding property bubble. Europe will have a severe recession due to a war-related energy crisis, and the US consumer is struggling under the weight of Fed rate hikes and a housing crash.

First we had unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus. Now we have unprecedented monetary tightening but still loose fiscal conditions.

The Real Question

In general, central bankers shifted from the stern to the bow and back again, in unprecedented amounts, hoping first to cause inflation, now to stop it.

When does this central bank massive flip-flopping cause a global currency crisis?

That's the real question because a major global recession is inevitable.
Meanwhile, we have wildly optimistic Fed forecasts.

Examining Fed GDP Projections For 2022 and 2023



Please consider Wildly Optimistic Forecasts: Examining Fed GDP Projections For 2022 and 2023

100% of Fed participants expect no less than an all-time GDP high in the 4th quarter! The median expectation is greater.

The Fed is not making predictions, the Fed is making Fantasyland wishes.
What an incredulous hoot.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

EU Watchdog Proposes A Suspension Of Energy Derivatives Trading

FRIDAY, SEP 23, 2022 - 11:05 AM
By Irina Slav of OilPrice.com

The temporary suspension of trading in energy derivatives could help return EU energy markets to balance, the EU’s financial markets regulator has proposed.

The suspension would only apply when prices reach a certain level, the European Securities and Markets Authority, or ESMA, explained, noting that the number of such temporary suspensions in the past few weeks has been very low despite already existing circuit breaker mechanisms in use.

“We would envisage these mechanisms to trigger halts for a limited period of time only and in exceptional circumstances, for instance, in case of extreme volatility spikes that may lead to disorderly trading conditions,” Verena Ross, chairwoman of ESMA, wrote in a letter to John Berrigan, director-general of the EC’s financial stability, financial services, and capital markets union department.

“In our view such a measure, by allowing pauses in trading, would support a more orderly price discovery process as it is intended to provide more time to market participants to process the flow of information during extreme market stress scenarios,” Ross also wrote.

Interestingly, the Financial Times reported this week that the European Commission had privately admitted there was little that could be done by way of intervention in energy markets, and that the stress on the market was not a result of a “malfunction” as some officials claimed earlier.

ESMA’s springing into action comes in response to a liquidity crisis on European energy markets, resulting from the heightened price volatility, especially in natural gas. Because of this volatility, a lot of players in the energy market have found themselves in a position where they cannot respond to margin calls because they had not anticipated them when they made their trading decisions.

The EC has pledged to help, including by direct intervention in the market and by direct liquidity injections to companies in need of one.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
Peter Navarro: The Dow Jones Is Heading For 25,000 7:29 min

Peter Navarro: The Dow Jones Is Heading For 25,000​

Bannons War Room Published September 23, 2022

(No summary given. Did not watch)

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^^^^

Steve Cortes: Joe Biden Collapsed The Bond Market​

Bannons War Room Published September 23, 2022

1663980780661.png
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The latest economic news all points to a worst possible combination under Joe Biden: persistent, soaring inflation with an intensifying recession. In contravention of any normal business cycle, Biden and Pelosi and Schumer usher in the toxic stagflation combination unseen in America since the 1970’s: surging prices with crashing growth.

Last week brought the dismal news that inflation remains deeply embedded within the American economy. The harsh reality, as relayed by the numbers, points to a lasting shift in overall pricing that is anything but “transitory.” The broad

CPI came in red hot, well above expectations at 8.3%, one of the highest numbers in 40 years. But the details revealed even worse hurdles for struggling Americans.

For example, the basket of “have to” items that everyone must purchase – Gasoline, Groceries, and Utilities – increased at an astounding 24% annualized pace. Here is the breakdown of the “Cortes Staples Basket”:



Those items are primarily commodity-based, and the price increases largely emanate from Biden’s ludicrous war on domestic American energy production. But even away from commodity items, inflation for services soars, as well. In many ways, this services inflation presents a more problematic kind of price pressure, because once such costs rise, they rarely, if ever, go back down. Hence, have a look at this basket of “stickier” inflation.



This broad inflation across goods and services culminates in a fierce re-pricing of interest rates in our economy. In fact, the benchmark bond market for the entire economy (and the whole world), the Ten Year Treasury Note, has been crushed in prices in recent months under Biden. Interest Rates, or yields, move opposite to price. So, 10 Year Treasury Interest Rates hit a brand new Biden high at 3.80% this week, the highest such levels since 2011.

Here's the chart of woe: (Sorry pay wall)
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
(Netherlands)

The Entire Dutch Cabinet STORMS out the Building After Having Their Egos Shattered by Thierry Baudet 1:54 min

The Entire Dutch Cabinet STORMS out the Building After Having Their Egos Shattered by Thierry Baudet​

Red Voice Media Published September 23, 2022

"Those people, the ones storming off, the heirs of this criminal ideology that caused the French and Russian revolutions, an ideology that transformed into cultural Marxism in the second half of the 20th century. They set the agenda for modern globalism."
 
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