9/11 Wars In Iraq, Afghanistan, And Pakistan Killed 500,000 People: Brown University Study

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A shocking new study produced by Brown University finds that between 480,000 and 507,000 people were killed during America’s Post-9/11 Wars. The study examined the three "war on terror" conflicts of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan — the latter an extension of the Afghan war and focus of US drone attacks. 

The half million figure accounts for both combatant and civilian deaths from direct fighting and war violence, however the number could be much higher as the study didn't account for the perhaps far higher number of civilians killed through infrastructure damage, such as hospitals or water supplies becoming inoperable, or other indirect results of the wars.

Tragically, civilians make up over 50% of the roughly 500,000 killed, and the study estimates further that both US-backed foreign forces and opposition militants each sustained over 100,000 deaths. 

In terms of American forces, the report finds that over 60,000 US troops were either killed or wounded within the three post 9/11 conflicts. This includes 6,951 US military personnel killed in Afghanistan and Iraq since US invasions of those countries in 2001 and 2003. 

Concerning the now seventeen year long "forgotten war" in Afghanistan, the study concluded, according to VOA:

Fatalities in Afghanistan, as of October 2018, stood at about 147,000 people, including Afghan security forces, civilians and opposition fighters. The figure also included the deaths of 6,334 American soldiers and contractors, as well as more than 1,100 allied troops.

Notably the Brown study explicitly calls out the US government's attempts to "paint a rosy picture" of the wars which has shielded the true scope of American and foreign civilian casualties from the American public. 

From the newly published study, Human Cost of the Post-9/11 Wars: Lethality and the Need for Transparency:

Full accounting of an accurate total death toll has been “inhibited by governments determined to paint a rosy picture of perfect execution and progress,” according to the report.

Essentially this is the Brown report acknowledging Washington's massive and consistent propaganda efforts throughout close to two decades of the so-called "war on terror". 

The report also notes the chaos of war and inaccessibility of dangerous locations prevents a narrower, true, and more accurate accounting:

Indeed, we may never know the total direct death toll in these wars. For example, tens of thousands of civilians may have died in retaking Mosul and other cities from ISIS but their bodies have likely not been recovered.

In addition, this tally does not include “indirect deaths.” Indirect harm occurs when wars’ destruction leads to long term, “indirect,” consequences for people’s health in war zones, for example because of loss of access to food, water, health facilities, electricity or other infrastructure. 

Some estimates in the past compiled by independent watchdog groups and polling organizations have put the death toll in Iraq alone at over one million people. 

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'Humanities Hijacked by Ideologues': Jordan Peterson Excoriates Western Academia

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In her efforts to trade punches with the popular intellectual, the GQ journalist bit off more than she could chew, leaving with her tail between her legs.

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The Zika Scare: a Political and Commercial Maneuver of the Chemical Poisons Industry

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Aedes aegypti mosquito potentially carrying the Zika virus. Courtesy Wikipedia.

Researchers discovered the Zika virus in the Zika forest of Uganda – in 1947. It is a virus not much different than the viruses causing dengue, yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, West Nile fever, and St. Luis encephalitis. The Zika virus eventually spread throughout most of the world. Mosquitoes carry and spread the Zika virus. But for decades the Zika disease afflicting humans was free of brain deform or the shrinking of the infant’s brain  known as microcephaly (a Greek term meaning tiny brain-head).

The 2016 Olympics in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

I heard the name Zika for the first time in 2016 during the Summer Olympics in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Reporting on the PBS Newshour offered warnings for those going to Brazil. Other large media went almost berserk. They were shouting that women near the Olympics site were giving birth to babies with tiny brains. They blamed Zika virus. They blamed the mosquitoes for the malformation of the brain of the babies. The Olympics should be delayed or moved to another country. Brazil was dangerous.

Imagine hundreds of athletes and hundreds of thousands of tourists returning to Europe and the  United States with this dreadful Zika disease, especially pregnant women likely giving birth to deformed babies.

Astonishing as these unverified news stories were, government agencies rushed to give them credence. I heard representatives of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention repeating the questionable newspaper and TV stories about the Zika virus. In addition, CDC keeps saying that fighting Zika virus-carrying mosquitoes in Brazil and Florida with a neurotoxin named “naled” is harmless. After all, farmers and mosquito controllers have been spraying naled for more than fifty years in the United States.

CDC said nothing about the deleterious effects of naled: that this chemical is an organophosphate compound linked to chemical warfare agents: targeting and harming the central nervous system and the brain of man and beast, of birds and insects and fish, of all wild animals.

So, what caused the tiny brains of Brazilian babies during the 2016 Summer Olympics? The Zika virus-infected mosquitoes or pesticides sprayed intensely in the environment, including in the drinking water of the urban slum mothers afflicted by the Zika virus?

Poverty and Poisons

A Berkeley team of scientists published a 2017 study in which they said: “Zika is, and will continue to be, a disease of the urban poor.” A group of physicians from Argentina and Brazil had already explained why.

In a February 2016 report, they argued that the Zika disease in Brazil, and other tropical countries, is not simply a disease of infected mosquitoes stinging pregnant women. They saw the Zika disease as a symptom of a much larger pathology: that of deforestation, the destruction of flora and fauna, massive pesticide sprayings of the natural world and cities, ecological imbalance, global warming and inequality.

Furthermore, these physicians say the massive air spraying of toxic pesticides against mosquitoes is “criminal” and “useless”: nothing but a political and a commercial maneuver of the chemical poisons industry.

They reported that there are countries like Colombia where the Zika virus causes disease but not microcephaly. In Brazil, however, the population that suffers from the Zika virus disease and, potentially, from microcephaly, has been drinking water intentionally treated with pyriproxyfen. This is a potent teratogen that causes monstrous changes in the development of the mosquito, foreclosing its chance of growing normally.

Pyriproxyfen: Insect and Human Growth Regulator?

Experts describe pyriproxyfen as an “insect growth regulator” – an apt name for a chemical made up of insect parts and chemicals formulated into a biological bomb: destroying the insect from within: wrecking the insect’s embryogenesis and metamorphosis to adult.

This powerful biological weapon — that annihilates mosquitoes or other insects – is not benign to humans drinking it in their water or exposed to it in any other way like in spraying it against mosquitoes. In fact, it harms human blood and the liver.

The real danger of pyriproxyfen, however, comes from what it does to developing mosquitoes: giving them malformations, which cause “death or incapacity.” The developing mosquito can’t grow wings or mature external genitalia. It moves to death through its disrupted evolution to a nymph or larva. Pyriproxyfen makes it impossible for the developing mosquito to become an adult.

The physicians from Argentina and Brazil urge us to get off our horse of hubris and think in biological terms. About 60 percent of our genes are identical to the genes of insects like the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that potentially carry the Zika virus. In addition, they emphasize our evolution – going from the zygote to embryo to fetus to newborn — is not that much different than the development process of the mosquito: larva-pupa-adult.

The implications of this biology, including the effects of pyriproxyfen on mosquitoes, are frightening. It is not out of the question that, under certain conditions, like massive and chronic sprayings of the environment, pyriproxyfen could probably do to people what it does to mosquitoes. It has the potential of becoming a “human growth regulator.” Is microcephaly one of the deadly consequences of that potential?

Environmental and Political Origins of Teratogens

“Malformations detected in thousands of children from pregnant women living in areas where the Brazilian state added pyriproxyfen to drinking water is not a coincidence, even though the Ministry of Health places a direct blame on Zika virus for this damage, while trying to ignore its responsibility and ruling out the hypothesis of direct and cumulative chemical damage caused by years of endocrine and immunological disruption of the affected population,” wrote the physicians from Argentina and Brazil.

What these scientists are saying is that Brazil, like the Unites States, is hooked on toxic sprays, used all over the country for decades. In about five years, vector control is projected to approach $ 20 billion per year earnings for the poisons industry.

Like America, Brazil, Argentina and other Latin American countries hire experts from the industry to run their mosquito spraying programs. These experts have been occupying key positions in ministries of health.

Second, the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization have vector control committees that decide what chemical should be sprayed in what country. The Argentinian and Brazilian physicians accuse these pesticide committees of “imperial” policies. They say the “hegemonic strategies” they advocate for “diseases spread by mosquitoes and multiplied by poverty” avoid the threats from bad sanitation, lack of safe drinking water, and responsible health policies. Instead, such programs rely entirely on the spraying of chemicals.

Such practices “demobilize the population” because they leave the people out of decisions, relying instead on the killing of mosquitoes. However, the sprays also affect the population, making people sick and weak. In addition, the sprays kill the natural predators of mosquitoes, which necessitate additional spraying, the only winners being the poisons industry.

Many of the chemicals targeting mosquitoes are endocrine disruptors, weakening the immune system of the exposed population. So, adding pyriproxyfen to that soup of chemicals and adding it to the drinking water and intimate environment of impoverished slum dwellers, you are asking for big trouble: the birth of babies with tiny brains.

“The governments of Mercosur [Mercado Comun del Sur – Southern Common Market of countries of South America] are causing alarm with the threat of Zika and microcephaly, proposing ‘more of the same.’ The agribusiness is offering the services of the ‘Soya Air Force’ to be used for spraying over cities and villages…. To social inequality, these epidemics will add health inequalities, and governments with their chemical attacks will generate environmental inequality,” wrote the physicians from Argentina and Brazil.

These inequalities are increasing ecological damage and the schism between the rulers and the ruled: the vast majority of the people. The rulers cover up the harms with the prestige of international health organizations, universities, business, experts – and the media. Brazil enforced its Zika policies with soldiers.

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'Phenomenally saddening': inside the sordid world of America's for-profit colleges

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The new documentary Fail State, executive produced by Dan Rather, tells the 50-year tale of profit-driven colleges scamming society’s most vulnerable

In 2014, film-maker Alex Shebanow read about Corinthian Colleges, one of America’s largest for-profit college companies, while working on a documentary about student loan debt.

Relying heavily on federal student loans, from which it took $1.4bn in yearly revenue, Corinthian was on the brink of collapse after the department of education halted the company’s flow of federal funding due to evidence of rampant fraud in its reporting of grades and job placements.

Continue reading...

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Inside the Crazy Corruption Scandal That Ensnared Leonardo DiCaprio and the Hollywood Elite

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Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast

The Wolf of Wall Street is the story of Jordan Belfort, a New York City stockbroker who, during the late 1980s and 1990s, committed rampant fraud through his brokerage house Stratton Oakmont. Directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, it’s one of the best films of both this decade and the illustrious auteur’s career, a hilarious and shocking black comedy about the limitless depths of human greed and the insane corruption that dominates the American financial sector.

And in a twist of jaw-dropping irony, the film itself is an example of the very wretched thing it depicts.

Premiering at DOC NYC on Friday, November 9, Sam Hobkinson’s The Kleptocrats is an eye-opening peek at the global embezzlement and money-laundering scandal that helped give birth to The Wolf of Wall Street. It’s a true-life tale of leaders putting themselves above their constituents, of wannabe big shots reveling in their astounding ill-gotten gains, and of investigative journalists driven to bring covert crimes to light. Moreover, it’s a snapshot of the shadier side of stratospheric celebrity life, given that it involves not only DiCaprio and Scorsese, but also the likes of Paris Hilton, Kanye West, Jamie Foxx and Robert De Niro—the last of whom, at one point, responds to pointed questions from The Hollywood Reporter’s Alex Ritman by telling him, “Yeah, well, I don’t fucking appreciate it, excuse me. Get the fuck outta here. Goodbye.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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NYTimes Op-Ed Recognizes "The Other America" - Midterms Are A Warning To Democrats

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Authored by Bret Stephens, op-ed via The New York Times,

Stop manning imaginary barricades, and start building real bridges to the other America.

For months we’ve heard from sundry media apocalypticians that this year’s midterms were the last exit off the road to autocracy. On Tuesday, the American people delivered a less dramatic verdict about the significance of the occasion.

In a word: meh.

Are you interested in seeing Donald Trump voted out of office in two years? I hope so - which is why you should think hard about that “meh.” This week’s elections were, at most, a very modest rebuke of a president reviled by many of his opponents, this columnist included, as an unprecedented danger to the health of liberal democracy at home and abroad. The American people don’t entirely agree.

We might consider listening to them a bit more - and to ourselves somewhat less.

The 28-seat swing that gave Democrats control of the House wasn’t even half the 63 seats Republicans won in 2010. Yet even that shellacking (to use Barack Obama’s word) did nothing to help Mitt Romney’s chances two years later. The Republican gain in the Senate (the result in Arizona isn’t clear at this writing) was more predictable in a year when so many red-state Democrats were up for re-election. But it underscores what a non-wave election this was.

It also underscores that while “the Resistance” is good at generating lots of votes, it hasn’t figured out how to turn the votes into seats. Liberals are free to bellyache all they want that they have repeatedly won the overall popular vote for the presidency and Congress while still losing elections, and that the system is therefore “rigged.”

But that’s the system in which everyone’s playing — and one they had no trouble winning in until just a few years ago. To complain about it makes them sound like whiners in a manner reminiscent of Trump in 2016, when he thought he was going to lose. It’s also a reminder that, in politics, intensity is not strategy. You have to be able to convert.

The Resistance didn’t convert.

It didn’t convert when it nominated left-wing candidates in right-leaning states like Florida and Georgia. It didn’t convert when it poured its moneyinto where its heart was — a lithesome Texas hopeful with scant chance of victory — rather than where the dollars were most needed. It didn’t convert when it grew more concerned with the question of how much Trump did not pay in taxes than with the question of how much you pay in taxes.

It didn’t convert when Chuck Schumer chose to make Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court the decisive political test of the year. It didn’t convert when it turned his initial confirmation hearing into a circus. It didn’t convert when media liberals repeatedly violated ordinary journalistic standards by reporting the uncorroborated accusations against Kavanaugh that followed Christine Blasey Ford’s.

Above all, it didn’t convert the unconverted.

It doesn’t take a lot to get the average voter to tell you what he doesn’t like about Donald Trump: the nastiness, the divisiveness, the lying, the tweeting, the chaos, the epic boastfulness matched by bottomless self-pity. As my colleague Frank Bruni has astutely observed, Trump is as transparent as they come: You don’t need a Ph.D. in psychology to know that the president is an insecure narcissist with daddy issues.

Then again, what does the average voter think about the people who pompously style themselves “the Resistance”? I don’t just mean the antifa thugs and restaurant hecklers and the Farrakhan Fan Club wing of the women’s movement, though that’s a part of it.

I mean the rest of the Trump despisers, the people who detest not only the man but also contemn his voters (and constantly let them know it); the ones who heard the words “basket of deplorables” and said to themselves: Bingo. They measure their moral worth not through an effort at understanding but by the intensity of their disdain. They are — so they think — always right, yet often surprised by events.

I was a charter member of this camp. Intellectual honesty ought to compel us to admit that we achieved precisely the opposite of what we intended. Trumpism is more entrenched today than ever. The result of the midterms means, if nothing else, that the president survived his first major political test more than adequately. And unless Democrats change, he should be seen as the odds-on favorite to win in 2020.

To repeat: I’d hate to see that happen. I want Trump, and Trumpism, to lose. But if the Resistance party doesn’t find a way to become a shrewder, humbler opposition party, that’s not going to happen. The day Democrats take charge in the House would be a good opportunity to stop manning imaginary barricades, and start building real bridges to the other America.

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From Economic Crisis To World War III

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Authored by Qian Lu via Project Syndicate,

The response to the 2008 economic crisis has relied far too much on monetary stimulus, in the form of quantitative easing and near-zero (or even negative) interest rates, and included far too little structural reform. This means that the next crisis could come soon – and pave the way for a large-scale military conflict.

The next economic crisis is closer than you think. But what you should really worry about is what comes after: in the current social, political, and technological landscape, a prolonged economic crisis, combined with rising income inequality, could well escalate into a major global military conflict.

The 2008-09 global financial crisis almost bankrupted governments and caused systemic collapse. Policymakers managed to pull the global economy back from the brink, using massive monetary stimulus, including quantitative easing and near-zero (or even negative) interest rates.

But monetary stimulus is like an adrenaline shot to jump-start an arrested heart; it can revive the patient, but it does nothing to cure the disease. Treating a sick economy requires structural reforms, which can cover everything from financial and labor markets to tax systems, fertility patterns, and education policies.

Policymakers have utterly failed to pursue such reforms, despite promising to do so. Instead, they have remained preoccupied with politics. From Italy to Germany, forming and sustaining governments now seems to take more time than actual governing. And Greece, for example, has relied on money from international creditors to keep its head (barely) above water, rather than genuinely reforming its pension system or improving its business environment.

The lack of structural reform has meant that the unprecedented excess liquidity that central banks injected into their economies was not allocated to its most efficient uses. Instead, it raised global asset prices to levels even higher than those prevailing before 2008.

In the United States, housing prices are now 8% higher than they were at the peak of the property bubble in 2006, according to the property website Zillow. The price-to-earnings (CAPE) ratio, which measures whether stock-market prices are within a reasonable range, is now higher than it was both in 2008 and at the start of the Great Depression in 1929.

As monetary tightening reveals the vulnerabilities in the real economy, the collapse of asset-price bubbles will trigger another economic crisis – one that could be even more severe than the last, because we have built up a tolerance to our strongest macroeconomic medications. A decade of regular adrenaline shots, in the form of ultra-low interest rates and unconventional monetary policies, has severely depleted their power to stabilize and stimulate the economy.

If history is any guide, the consequences of this mistake could extend far beyond the economy. According to Harvard’s Benjamin Friedman, prolonged periods of economic distress have been characterized also by public antipathy toward minority groups or foreign countries – attitudes that can help to fuel unrest, terrorism, or even war.

For example, during the Great Depression, US President Herbert Hoover signed the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, intended to protect American workers and farmers from foreign competition. In the subsequent five years, global trade shrank by two-thirds. Within a decade, World War II had begun.

To be sure, WWII, like World War I, was caused by a multitude of factors; there is no standard path to war. But there is reason to believe that high levels of inequality can play a significant role in stoking conflict.

According to research by the economist Thomas Piketty, a spike in income inequality is often followed by a great crisis. Income inequality then declines for a while, before rising again, until a new peak – and a new disaster. Though causality has yet to be proven, given the limited number of data points, this correlation should not be taken lightly, especially with wealth and income inequality at historically high levels.

This is all the more worrying in view of the numerous other factors stoking social unrest and diplomatic tension, including technological disruption, a record-breaking migration crisis, anxiety over globalization, political polarization, and rising nationalism. All are symptoms of failed policies that could turn out to be trigger points for a future crisis.

Voters have good reason to be frustrated, but the emotionally appealing populists to whom they are increasingly giving their support are offering ill-advised solutions that will only make matters worse. For example, despite the world’s unprecedented interconnectedness, multilateralism is increasingly being eschewed, as countries – most notably, Donald Trump’s US – pursue unilateral, isolationist policies. Meanwhile, proxy wars are raging in Syria and Yemen.

Against this background, we must take seriously the possibility that the next economic crisis could lead to a large-scale military confrontation. By the logicof the political scientist Samuel Huntington , considering such a scenario could help us avoid it, because it would force us to take action. In this case, the key will be for policymakers to pursue the structural reforms that they have long promised, while replacing finger-pointing and antagonism with a sensible and respectful global dialogue. The alternative may well be global conflagration.

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'Left' Organizes "Response Events" In 900 Cities To Protest Firing Of Jeff Sessions

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Authored by Michael Snyder via The American Dream blog,

Well, that escalated quickly. On Wednesday, President Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and by the end of the day major leftist organizations had already put together protests in 900 U.S. cities to make a “public demand for action to correct this injustice”. 

It truly is amazing how rapidly these groups were able to put up web pages promoting these events and get the call out on social media.  It is almost as if they knew that this was coming.  MoveOn.Org is one of the organizations that is spearheading this effort, and their page promoting these protests is identical to the page promoting these protests on trumpisnotabovethelaw.org.  According to both pages, the protests will be held on November 8th at 5 PM local time…

BREAKING: PROTESTS CALLED FOR THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 5 PM LOCAL TIME

Donald Trump has installed a crony to oversee the special counsel’s Trump-Russia investigation, crossing a red line set to protect the investigation. By replacing Rod Rosenstein with just-named Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker as special counsel Robert Mueller’s boss on the investigation, Trump has undercut the independence of the investigation. Whitaker has publicly outlined strategies to stifle the investigation and cannot be allowed to remain in charge of it. The Nobody Is Above the Law network demands that Whitaker immediately commit not to assume supervision of the investigation. Our hundreds of response events are being launched to demonstrate the public demand for action to correct this injustice. We will update this page as the situation develops.

Anyone that thought that the midterm elections would calm down the level of strife in this country was just being delusional.

The truth is that the left was holding back during the run up to the midterm elections because they didn’t want to turn any potential voters against their candidates.  Now that the midterm elections are over, they are free to do whatever they want.

The far left group Common Dreams is also participating in these “response events”, and the following is what their website says about them…

Progressive organizations have announced coordinated protests to take place in cities and communities nationwide on Thurdsay, November 8th at 5 PM (local time) in the wake of President Donald Trump’s firing of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Right after Trump forced Sessions to resign, the White House announced that Matthew Whitaker—a DOJ official who has shown open hostility to the probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller—would now serve as acting AG and be put in charge of the ongoing investigation.

It is quite funny that the left is getting so bent out of shape regarding the firing of an Attorney General that many of them absolutely hated.

But of course the truth is that this is all about the Mueller investigation.  After all this time, many on the left are still holding out hope that this could be a way to get rid of Donald Trump, and they are deeply concerned that the dismissal of Sessions could greatly endanger that investigation.

And of course top Democratic leaders are adding fuel to that fire.  For example, the following is what former Attorney General Eric Holder is saying…

Former Attorney General Eric Holder said on Twitter he worries Session’s exit could negatively impact Robert Mueller’s investigation.

“Anyone who attempts to interfere with or obstruct the Mueller inquiry must be held accountable,” Holder tweeted. “This is a red line. We are a nation of laws and norms not subject to the self-interested actions of one man.”

No, we are not a nation of laws.

If we were a nation governed by the rule of law, Hillary Clinton would have been put in prison a long time ago.

The only reason the left is using this sort of rhetoric is because they are desperate to take down Trump.

The reality of the matter is that Jeff Sessions had been doing an absolutely horrible job, and he should have been fired over a year ago.  Trump showed a tremendous amount of patience keeping him on until now, and he should be applauded for finally making a change.

The man taking over for Sessions, Matthew Whitaker, has made some very interesting comments regarding the Mueller investigation, and this has pushed the left into a tizzy.  The following comes from a Washington Post article entitled “Trump just reminded us that he’s still a dangerous authoritarian madman”…

Democrats immediately pounced on the news that Sessions chief of staff Matthew Whitaker will now replace him, pointing to highly questionable comments he’s made about the Mueller probe. Before becoming Sessions’ chief of staff, Whitaker suggested regulations allowed for Trump to put in an acting replacement for the attorney general — meaning one who would not have to be confirmed by the Senate — who could, if he wished, starve the Mueller probe of funds:

“So I could see a scenario where Jeff Sessions is replaced with a recess appointment,” Whitaker said, “and that attorney general doesn’t fire Bob Mueller, but he just reduces his budget to so low that his investigation grinds to almost a halt.”

Hopefully Whitaker puts that plan into action.

The Mueller investigation has been a witch hunt from the very beginning, and after all this time they still don’t have anything on Trump.

If Congress had been doing their job, they would have shut down this investigation long ago.

Now Trump is finally taking action, and the left is freaking out.

It will be very interesting to see how successful the protests are on Thursday.  I have a feeling that we are about to see a huge temper tantrum on the streets of America, and it isn’t going to be pretty.

#SaveOurSessions

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New York Lawmakers Want to Screen Gun Buyers’ Social Media History for Hate Speech

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A pair of New York legislators is drafting a bill that would make social media history checks part of the process of purchasing a gun.

Under the legislation, gun purchasers would have up to three years of their social media history potentially scrutinized by authorities, New York outlet WCBS NewsRadio reports. The internet search history of prospective gun buyers would face searches going back up to one year.

“A three-year review of a social media profile would give an easy profile of a person who is not suitable to hold and possess a firearm,” said Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, who has proposed the legislation with New York State Senator Kevin Parker.

Adams described the searches, which would involve scouring social media posts for hate speech, as basic police work.

“If the police department is reviewing a gang assault, a robbery, some type of shooting, they go and do a social media profile investigation,” Adams said.

There are some obvious flaws with the legislation.

First, comparing the search of a prospective gun buyer’s internet history to routine police investigations is odd. When an assault, robbery, or shooting occurs, police are investigating a crime. That is not the case with someone trying to buy a firearm; the buyer is simply trying to make a lawful purchase. This bill is closer to what one might call pre-crime, an idea that has served as a plot device in dystopian literature for more than half a century. (The 2002 Tom Cruise movie Minority Report, a story that centers around a state that has figured out how to stop crimes before they happen, was based on a 1956 Philip K. Dick novel.)

There is also the issue of privacy. Peering into people’s search histories and social media posts is a highly invasive act. Some social media pages are public by design, but others are not. Would authorities be able to snoop in these? Presumably so considering the legislation would allow authorities to snoop in the search histories of prospective gun buyers.

Additionally, there is the issue of defining hate speech, a notoriously nebulous term. (Europe has already shown where the road of state-regulated hate speech takes us.) What authority would determine what speech qualifies as “hateful”? To deny someone a fundamental right based on the state’s interpretation of “hate speech” would be an affront to constitutional principles.

The right to bear arms and free speech are arguably the two most fundamental rights enshrined in the US Constitution.

These are rights beyond the reach of government.

“...the Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities,” wrote Walter Lippmann. “It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively.”

The only thing New York lawmakers are missing in this misguided effort, as Walter Olson quipped at Cato, is “for New York to quarter troops on the homes of applicants with especially bad social media postings.”

--

This article has been republished with permission from Foundation for Economic Education.

[Image Credit: Air Force photo by Margo Wright]

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Major Math Error Puts Widely-Cited Global Warming Study On Ice

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An widely-circulated study which concluded that global warming is far worse than previously thought has been called into question by a math error, reports the Daily Caller's Michael Bastasch. 

Princeton scientist Laure Resplandy and researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography concluded in October that the Earth's oceans have retained 60% more heat than previously thought over the last 25 years, suggesting global warming was much worse than previously believed.

The report was covered or referenced by MSM outlets worldwide, including the Washington Post, New York Times, BBC, Reuters and others. 

The Washington Post, for example, reported: "The higher-than-expected amount of heat in the oceans means more heat is being retained within Earth’s climate system each year, rather than escaping into space. In essence, more heat in the oceans signals that global warming is more advanced than scientists thought." 

The New York Times at least hedged their reporting, claiming that the estimates, "if proven accurate, could be another indication that the global warming of the past few decades has exceeded conservative estimates and has been more closely in line with scientists’ worst-case scenarios."

Unfortunately for the Princeton-Scripps team, it appears that their report has been proven inaccurate. 

Independent scientist Nic Lewis found the study had “apparently serious (but surely inadvertent) errors in the underlying calculations.” Lewis’ findings were quickly corroborated by another researcher. -Daily Caller

"Just a few hours of analysis and calculations, based only on published information, was sufficient to uncover apparently serious (but surely inadvertent) errors in the underlying calculations," wrote Lewis in a blog post published on climate scientist Judith Curry's Climate Etc. website. 

After correcting the math error, Lewis found that the paper's rate of oceanic warming "is about average compared with the other estimates they showed, and below the average for 1993–2016."

Lewis's conclusion was replicated and supported by University of Colorado professor, Roger Pike, Jr., who tweeted his work. 

Lewis found the study’s authors, led by Princeton University scientist Laure Resplandy, erred in calculating the linear trend of estimated ocean warming between 1991 and 2016. Lewis has also criticized climate model predictions, which generally over-predict warming.

Resplandy and her colleagues estimated ocean heat by measuring the volume of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the atmosphere. The results: the oceans took up 60 percent more heat than previously thought. The study only sent alarm bells ringing, especially in the wake of the United Nations’ latest climate assessment. -Daily Caller

Lewis is correct that the linear trends reported by Resplandy et al are not matched by what the data indicate. See figure below which I just created based on data provided by Resplandy et al.
Mistakes happen in science, that's no crime.
What matters more is what you do next. /END pic.twitter.com/ylFqZngbmm

— Roger Pielke Jr. (@RogerPielkeJr) November 6, 2018

PS. You can read Lewis here @curryja --> https://t.co/lOKW8s0ESD
Here is the Lewis figure I just replicated. It's a big error at the core of paper's findings. pic.twitter.com/ifSa0yALNu

— Roger Pielke Jr. (@RogerPielkeJr) November 6, 2018

Resplandy has yet to respond to Lewis regarding the errors her found in her math, writing on Tuesday "To date I have had no substantive response from her, despite subsequently sending a further email containing the key analysis sections from a draft of this article." 

Lead of Princeton press release on Resplandy et al. was that IPCC has gotten things wrong & repeated by NYT, WP, E&E, USAT etc.
We've known peril in relying on single studies to overturn decades of assessed literature
Signature moment now for climate folkshttps://t.co/i7t6WOz28K

— Roger Pielke Jr. (@RogerPielkeJr) November 6, 2018

Similarly, niether Resplandy nor co-author Ralph Keeling responded to the Daily Caller's request for comment. 

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CIA's 'Surveillance State' Is Operating Against Us All

ORIGINAL LINK

Authored by Sharyl Attkisson, op-ed via The Hill,

Maybe you once thought the CIA wasn’t supposed to spy on Americans here in the United States.

That concept is so yesteryear...

Over time, the CIA upper echelon has secretly developed all kinds of policy statements and legal rationales to justify routine, widespread surveillance on U.S. soil of citizens who aren’t suspected of terrorism or being a spy.

The latest outrage is found in newly declassified documents from 2014. They reveal the CIA not only intercepted emails of U.S. citizens but they were emails of the most sensitive kind — written to Congress and involving whistleblowers reporting alleged wrongdoing within the Intelligence Community.

The disclosures, kept secret until now, are two letters of “congressional notification” from the Intelligence Community inspector general at the time, Charles McCullough. He stated that during “routine counterintelligence monitoring of government computer systems,” the CIA collected emails between congressional staff and the CIA’s head of whistleblowing and source protection.

McCullough added that he was concerned about the CIA’s “potential compromise to whistleblower confidentiality and the consequent ‘chilling effect’ that the present [counterintelligence] monitoring system might have on Intelligence Community whistleblowing.”

“Most of these emails concerned pending and developing whistleblower complaints,” McCullough stated in the letters to lead Democrats and Republicans at the time on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees — Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), and Reps. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.).

The March 2014 intercepts, conducted under the leadership of CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, happened amid what’s widely referred to as the Obama administration’s war on whistleblowers and mass surveillance scandals.

Is that legal?

According to the CIA, the spy agency has been limited since the 1970s to collecting intelligence “only for an authorized intelligence purpose; for example, if there is a reason to believe that an individual is involved in espionage or international terrorist activities” and “procedures require senior approval for any such collection that is allowed.”

But here’s where it gets slippery. It turns out the CIA claims it must engage in “routine counterintelligence monitoring of government computers” to make sure certain employees aren’t doing bad things. Poof! Now, all kinds of U.S. citizens and their communications can be swept into the dragnet — and it’s deemed perfectly legal. It’s just an accident or “incidental,” after all, if the CIA happens to pick up whistleblower communications with the legislative branch.

Or maybe it’s a lucky break for certain CIA officials.

The only reason we know any of this now is thanks to Sen. Chuck Grassley(R-Iowa), whose staffers were among those spied on. Grassley says it took four years for him to get the shocking “congressional notifications” declassified so they could be made public. First, Grassley says, Clapper and Brennan dragged their feet, blocking their release. Their successors in the Trump administration were no more responsive. Only when Grassley recently appealed to current Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who was sworn in on May 17, was the material finally declassified.

“The fact that the CIA under the Obama administration was reading congressional staff’s emails about Intelligence Community whistleblowers raises serious policy concerns, as well as potential constitutional separation-of-powers issues that must be discussed publicly,” wrote Grassley in a statement.

Legal or not, there was a time when this news would have so shocked our sensibilities — and would have been considered so antithetical to our Constitution by so many — that it would have prompted a swift, national outcry.

But today, we’ve grown numb. Outrage has been replaced by a cynical, “Who’s surprised about that?” or the persistent belief that “Nothing’s really going to be done about it,” and, worst of all, “What’s so bad about it, anyway?”

Some see the intel community’s alleged abuses during campaign 2016 as its own major scandal. But I see it as a crucial piece of a puzzle.

The evidence points to bad actors targeting candidate Donald Trump and his associates in part to keep them — and us — from learning about and digging into an even bigger scandal: our Intelligence Community increasingly spying on its own citizens, journalists, members of Congress and political enemies for the better part of two decades, if not longer.

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Researcher Jailed After Uncovering Deadly Virus Delivered Through Human Vaccines

ORIGINAL LINK

If you have been following stories in recent years of scientists and researchers who make discoveries that are threatening to the Deep State and the bottom line of Big Pharma, you will have seen the pattern before. Those doctors are often ‘persuaded’ to recant their studies, offered bribes or other benefits to distance themselves from or even destroy their data, and even threatened with jail time or, if a legal case is too difficult to fabricate against them, they may simply be killed.

Such is the tale of molecular biologist Judy A. Mikovits, PhD, in the disturbing true story first detailed in this Natural News article that included the video below of how she was thrown in prison for research that led to the discovery that deadly retroviruses have been transmitted to twenty-five million Americans through human vaccines.

Isolating The Virus

With a well-established history of working for the National Cancer Institute as a cancer researcher, Dr. Mikovits worked with human retroviruses like HIV. Her work focused on immunotherapy research. In 2009, she was working on autism and related neurological diseases. She found that many of the study subjects had cancer, motor-neuron disorders and chronic fatigue Syndrome (CFS). She believed a virus may have been responsible for these symptoms, and through her research, she isolated the viruses that turned out to come from mice.

It looked like a virus, it smelled like a virus, a retrovirus, because those are the types of viruses that disrupt the immune system. And several other investigators back in the 90s had actually isolated retroviruses from these people but the government called them ‘contaminants,’ that they weren’t real and that they didn’t have anything to do with the disease. Well, we isolated a new family of viruses that were called xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus. So these viruses were murine leukemia viruses, mouse viruses.

So spin forward two years, our paper published in one of the best scientific journals in the world in Science, October 8th, 2009. Usually that makes one’s career, in my case it ended my life as a scientist as I knew it.

Virus Delivered Through Vaccines

Dr. Mikovits’ paper, in and of itself, did not immediately bring the wrath of the powerful pharmaceutical industry. However, when a paper published 2 years later made the connection between this new virus and vaccines, then Mikovits’ research findings became too dangerous for the Deep State. Here is how Mikovits explains it in the video:

So in 2011, another AIDS researcher in a journal called Frontiers in Microbiology wrote a paper that really cost me a lot; I didn’t know that he was going to write this paper, but it basically said the most likely way that these murine leukemia virus-related viruses, these types of viruses, entered humans, was through vaccines.

So when did we start vaccines? 1953, 1934, right in the 30s with the polio, and what we were doing to attenuate, to make the virus less pathogenic, less toxic, is we were passing them through mouse brains, so we were passing them through the brains of mice, and every scientist who works with these viruses, and worked at the National Cancer Institute recognized the possibility that if you put human tissue and mouse tissue together the possibility is that you’re going to pick up a virus that is silent, in the mouse, that is it doesn’t hurt the mouse, but it kills the human, or causes serious disease in the human.

Deep State Comes Knocking

It was not long after the implications from the paper became clear and the Deep State saw the threat that was being posed to the vaccine industry that their powerful mechanisms of cover-up, obfuscation, and deception were activated:

I was fired, jailed, without cause, without hearing, without any civil rights at all, just drug out of my house in shackles one day, on November 18th, 2011, I refused to denounce the data, I refused to say it was a mistake, we have the data, I showed the data, I showed all of the data, and I just refused, they basically said tell everybody you made it all up, and you can go home. And if you don’t, we’ll destroy you. And they did.

She was arrested without a warrant and held in jail for 5 days without the opportunity for bail as a fugitive from justice, and was given a 4-year gag order. Her career was destroyed. Her story is documented in the book Plague: One Scientist’s intrepid Search For the Truth about Human Retroviruses and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Autism, and Other Diseases.

Ironically, the FDA has now approved a testing protocol to detect retroviruses in the U.S. blood supply which is worth millions of dollars, and based in large part on Dr. Mikovits’ research, but it is being managed by Big Pharma. So while this distinguished scientist is now bankrupt and without employment, others are allegedly capitalizing on her research to earn millions of dollars to clean up the U.S. blood supply.

The Takeaway

Whistleblowers in all fields of human endeavor need to get the attention and the support of the Awakening Community. Brave people like Dr. Judy Mikovits show us that it is possible to keep your integrity even under tremendous pressure being brought down by the Deep State. We need to hear and proliferate their stories, since they provide us important insights into the way the world really operates, and help us to distinguish between those seeking the truth and those hiding it. Let’s all work together in continuing to remove the veils of deception in our world.

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The Fourth Turning & War Of The Worlds

ORIGINAL LINK

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

“In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party. The catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic that underlies all of these scenarios: An initial spark will trigger a chain reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies. The core elements of these scenarios (debt, civic decay, global disorder) will matter more than the details, which the catalyst will juxtapose and connect in some unknowable way. If foreign societies are also entering a Fourth Turning, this could accelerate the chain reaction. At home and abroad, these events will reflect the tearing of the civic fabric at points of extreme vulnerability – problem areas where America will have neglected, denied, or delayed needed action.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe

The paragraph above captures everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen during this Fourth Turning. It was written over two decades ago, but no one can deny its accuracy regarding our present situation. The spark was a financial crash. The response to the financial crash by the financial and governmental entities, along with their Deep State co-conspirators who created the financial collapse due to their greed and malfeasance, led to the incomprehensible election of Donald Trump, as the deplorables in flyover country evoked revenge upon the corrupt establishment.

The chain reaction of unyielding responses by the left and the right accelerates at a breakneck pace, with absolutely no possibility of compromise. A new emergency or winner-take-all battle seems to be occurring on a weekly basis, with the mid-term elections as the likely trigger for the next phase of this Fourth Turning.

There is no positive outcome which will come from these elections. The no holds barred ad campaigns being waged by both sides have sunk to new despicable lows. Winning at all costs is what matters. The Republicans were always going to retain the Senate, but now look like they will gain seats. The overwhelming consensus among the fake news media for months has been for Democrats to retake the House by picking up 20 to 30 seats. The attempted Brett Kavanaugh lynching by left wing extremists and left-wing media, along with the left wing financed third world caravan, has dialed up the intensity and enthusiasm of Trump supporters. The tone of the mainstream media has grown worried and increasingly venomous as they see their lock on the House possibly slipping away.

Either result is likely to deepen the anger, hate, violence and turmoil, which has already been elevated to levels portending civil chaos, if not civil war. If Democrats take control of the House, their agenda will be to impeach Trump, pass legislation designed to make Trump look bad, block everything Trump tries to do, and position themselves to win back the presidency in 2020. The frustration of gridlock will lead to Trump utilizing Executive Orders as his means to accomplish his agenda. Not being able to accomplish his domestic goals will lead a bored Trump into foreign escapades, which could potentially lead to unanticipated military conflict. All previous Fourth Turnings have ended in all out war, with death on a grand scale.

If the Republicans pull a 2016-like upset and retain control of the House, the fury and rage from the left-wing haters will surely violently erupt in their social justice enclaves of loathing. There will be lawsuits and recounts as Soros and his minions fund dissent and violent uprisings. The Democrats will be apoplectic if they do not retake the House. If you think the fake Russia-gate witch hunt, surveillance state attempted coup, screeching pussy hat wearing feminazis perpetrating fake criminal accusations against good men, Soros funded illegal immigrant caravan photo ops, and libelous propaganda media inciting violence, was bad, the coming venom, viciousness, and violent upheaval will make the first two years of Trump’s reign look like a pleasant walk in the park. The linear thinking low IQ press and intellectual yet idiot academics are unable to conceptualize the mood change in this country which will drive events going forward.

The generational alignment of Fourth Turnings is creating the dynamics leading to the increasing intensity, distress and high likelihood of aggression, hostility and war. These crisis periods strike like clockwork on an eighty-year timetable. The 2008 financial crisis struck seventy-nine years after the 1929 stock market crash that catalyzed the Great Depression/World War II Fourth Turning.

In another example of history rhyming, this past week was the anniversary of the nationwide panic initiated by Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of War of the Worlds in 1938 – exactly 80 years ago. A clearly fictional account of evil Martians attacking our country should not have done anything but entertain Americans still suffering through the Great Depression. But, the mood of the country certainly contributed to the terrified overreaction. According to History.com:

Perhaps as many as a million radio listeners believed that a real Martian invasion was underway. Panic broke out across the country. In New Jersey, terrified civilians jammed highways seeking to escape the alien marauders. People begged police for gas masks to save them from the toxic gas and asked electric companies to turn off the power so that the Martians wouldn’t see their lights. One woman ran into an Indianapolis church where evening services were being held and yelled, “New York has been destroyed! It’s the end of the world! Go home and prepare to die!”

Orson Welles was not purposely trying to terrify the nation, but events during 1938 and the seemingly never-ending hard times had the nation on edge. Germany had invaded and occupied Austria before creating a crisis with threats about invading Czechoslovakia and starting another world war. Neville Chamberlin became notorious as the most famous appeaser in world history by declaring “Peace in our time” after handing Czechoslovakia to Hitler.

War would break out one year later, ultimately engulfing the entire world and resulting in the deaths of 65 million people. The economy and stock market had re-crashed again in 1937, leading to more pain and suffering across the land. The masses were mentally beaten down, frightened by the possibility of war, and susceptible to fear invoking events or narratives. Welles accidently touched a raw nerve and instantly created panic.

Here we are eighty years later and the mood of the country is similarly on edge. We are ten years into an “economic recovery” for Wall Street, while Main Street still struggles to make ends meet. Real wages have barely budged in two decades, while energy, healthcare, food, rent, and education costs have soared for the common people. The initial phase of the financial crisis devastated the retirement savings of millions and resulted in millions more getting kicked out of their houses by Wall Street bankers, who committed fraud and were rewarded by a taxpayer funded bailout and free money provided by their puppets at the Federal Reserve.

The billionaire bailouts provoked the populist revolution, resulting in the elevation of Trump to the presidency. Phase two of the financial crisis will erase two-thirds from the stock market and once again wipe out the life savings of millions.

With left and right already at each other’s throats, the devastation of another stock market crash will undermine what little trust remains in the debt ponzi financial system and the Ivy League educated MBA psychopaths in suits running Wall Street banks. The curtain will be pulled back and the feckless academics running the Federal Reserve will be revealed as nothing but doddering fool money printers who devalued our currency into oblivion.

Americans should be fearful about the bursting of the everything bubble, but they continue to be paralyzed by normalcy bias, cognitive dissonance, and propaganda from those in power, foolishly believing all is well. Instead, the mainstream media functions as Orson Welles, convincing large swaths of the public to fear phantom Russians, mad bombers sending fake bombs to leftists from his Trump decorated van, compensated marching Hondurans 1,000 miles from our borders, evil Syrian dictators, non-existent Iranian nuclear bombs, global warming, and worst of all – plastic straws.

The core elements of this crisis, as predicted by Strauss & Howe, continue to propel this Fourth Turning like the molten ingredients of an ongoing volcanic eruption engulfing everything in its path, leading to a global conflagration. The core elements of debt, civic decay, and global disorder continue to juxtapose and interact in unknowable ways, but the stormy passage towards death and destruction is undeniable. Our civic fabric has been torn asunder, while our financial house of cards teeters under the unbearable weight of trillions in unpayable debt, and proxy and trade wars morph into all out military conflict.

My assessment of where we stand regarding the core elements of this crisis is as follows:

Debt

• Total credit market debt in the U.S. when the debt created financial crisis struck in 2008 was $51 trillion. Our “brilliant” leaders have “solved” our debt crisis by adding another $17 trillion of debt, bringing the total to $68 trillion. Total credit market debt as a percentage of GDP at 344% is exactly where it was in 2007 before the crisis. What is even more staggeringly stupid is tens of trillions (student loans, subprime auto, corporate junk bonds, government bonds) cannot and will not be repaid.

• The national debt in 2007 stood at $9 trillion (up from $5.7 trillion in 2000) and presently sits at $21.7 trillion, while accelerating at a $1.3 trillion annual rate. It will close in on the $23 trillion level by the end of this fiscal year. As a percentage of GDP it has risen from 62% in 2007 to 108% in 2019. Rogoff and Reinhart proved that once countries surpass 90%, eventual collapse is certainty. Taleb has declared our financial system to be far more fragile today than in 2007.

• Interest on the national debt reached a record level of $523 billion in fiscal 2018, up $64 billion over fiscal 2017. It is poised to blow that number away in fiscal 2019, tracking to reach $600 billion, as interest rates continue to rise. With the current out of control government spending, interest on the debt will account for 13% of the budget and will account for an increasing slice of the pie going forward.

• With over $200 trillion of unfunded liabilities staring the country in the face in the foreseeable future, Social Security ($1 trillion), Medicare ($600 billion), and Medicaid ($400 billion) outflows growing rapidly, interest on the debt ($600 billion) growing at 17% per year and corrupt politicians funding thousands of worthless pork projects, ramping up military spending while slashing corporate taxes is a recipe for disaster. Who will buy this debt without requiring better than a 0% real return?

• Consumer debt outstanding now stands at a record high of $3.94 trillion, up from $2.65 trillion in 2008 when the Wall Street created debt crisis hit. Real wages (even using the fake BLS inflation data) for real people haven’t budged one iota since 2008, but the amount of debt carried by average people is up 49%. The average auto loan exceeds $30,000 (all-time high) and the length exceeds 70 months (all-time high). Millions of Americans are surviving month to month on their credit cards. With rates rising and Americans up to their eyeballs in debt (again), the auto and housing markets have stalled and will fall. The amount of debt to be written off this time will be staggering. Are you ready to bail out Wall Street again?

• The U.S. debt situation is bad enough, but the entire world followed our lead in a coordinated attempt to prop up a failed global financial system with more debt. Global debt has soared from under $140 trillion in 2007 to over $240 trillion today, up 70% since before the debt crisis. Governments, corporations and individuals have done the exact opposite of what needed to be done to put the world back on a sustainable financial path. Instead of beginning the process of living within our means, liquidating the criminal banks, jailing those responsible, and addressing our out of control spending, we allowed our Deep State rulers to double down on the debt and accelerate the speed towards the fiscal cliff. This was all done to benefit the few at the expense of the many, as the Deep State looting and pillaging campaign continues unabated. Next stop……

Civic Decay

• The social distress we are experiencing in the country is nothing new, despite the outrage proclaimed by linear thinking mainstream media talking heads who have zero understanding of history or the cyclical nature of mankind across the centuries. The incivility among corrupt congress politicians is child’s play when compared to Alexander Hamilton being shot dead by Aaron Burr or Andrew Jackson’s feud with John Quincy Adams. Democrat congressman Preston Brooks almost beat Republican senator Charles Sumner to death with a walking cane in the Senate chambers in 1856. The vitriol being spewed by Democrats and Trump is nothing new in politics, but during Fourth Turnings compromise is not possible. There will be clear winners and losers when all is said and done.

• Violence, aided and abetted by the corporate propaganda media, is being fueled by race, religion, nativism, gender and class. Open warfare is being waged on many fronts. White males have been used as the whipping boy of the left, and the backlash is happening, with the election of Trump as a result. The Democrats have enslaved inner city blacks in their ghetto plantations with their failed welfare policies and victim card tactics. The potential loss of this voting block has Democrats seething with fear and lashing out wildly in all directions.

• The Left and Right had operated with a wink and a nod regarding illegal immigrants pouring into our country for decades as the Democrats expected more votes and the Republicans saw cheap labor for their corporate constituents. Trump upset the apple cart and revealed the hypocrisy of politicians on both sides of the aisle. The 20 million or so illegals in the country are a net drain on our social welfare system, but business owners and the rich benefit from cheap labor and suppressed wages for the plebs. The highly publicized caravan appears to be designed to rile up the masses for voting purposes and to distract the average American from their deteriorating economic plight.

• The most significant cause of civic decay has clearly been the decades of degraded public-school socialization disguised as education. They have created generations of non-critical thinking droids who have been taught that feeling is the same as thinking. The entire social justice warrior/safe space crowd owes its existence to this indoctrination by politically correct government drones in schools across America. It’s a disease without any cure. Average Americans can’t add, subtract, spell, speak, or think for themselves. It’s almost as if the ruling class designed our educational system to create millions of people who would not question what they are told and could be manipulated easily through Bernaysian propaganda techniques.

• Those running the show proclaim technology to be the savior of mankind. Instead it has contributed to the dumbing down of America. Millions are addicted to their iGadgets. They walk into traffic while tweeting, texting, or facebooking. With history and literature at their fingertips, Americans choose to watch cat videos and follow the adventures of the Kardashians. Social media has created a nation of brain-dead zombies wandering the streets, adding no value and living vacuous, shallow, worthless lives. Technology has been a boon for the Deep State and their accomplices Google, Facebook, Twitter and the MSM in controlling and manipulating the pliable weak minds of the masses. Is it a wonder there are so many hopeless mentally damaged individuals committing mass murder on a consistent basis.

Global Disorder

• In addition to the massive accumulation of unpayable government debt by the EU, China, Japan and emerging market countries; proxy wars rage in Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan; Muslim hordes are overrunning Europe; NATO pushes Russia towards conflict; and Trump wages trade wars with the whole world. The animosity between countries builds, the fragility of the global order increases and the risk of a politician doing something spectacularly stupid is higher than it has been in decades.

• The billionaire elitists who were implementing their one world order unimpeded through globalization and open border policies, have been thrown for a loop by the ascension of Trump and other populist leaders across the globe. Trump declaring himself a nationalist is met with howls of racism, ridicule and scorn by the globalists who have been in control for decades. The rise of Orban in Hungary, Salvini in Italy, and Bolsonaro in Brazil mark a drastic shift in mood across the globe towards nationalism and away from unfettered immigrant flows into their countries. Macron, Merkel and May are on their way out, as populism rages across Europe.

• It is a fact China and Asia have been utilized by globalist corporate entities to maximize their profits through wage arbitrage. It is a fact China and many other countries erect trade barriers to protect their markets will pretending to embrace free trade. Trump’s aggressive stance on trade pacts is warranted for the most part. But world trade is a complex mechanism dependent upon thousands of variables and companies making decisions based upon known factors. With a trade war in progress and no certainty of what will happen, companies delay making investments and signing deals. The result will be decreased trade and increased possibility of global recession.

• With Trump supplying an increasingly hostile and volatile world with arms as his primary economic jobs program, is it any wonder the Middle East is a tinderbox of religious hatred, slaughter, and chaos. The U.S. militarily supports a country that bombs innocent civilians in Yemen, treats women like cattle, murders journalists, funds jihadists, and has lots and lots of oil. We prop up a dictators in Egypt and Turkey, but have done everything in our power to overthrow the dictator in Syria. We economically support Israel as they work against our interests around the globe. A showdown with Iran, in the works for over a decade, inches ever closer as we intimidate other countries into shunning Iran economically.

• There are no good guys when it comes to world leaders. They all lie, cheat and steal. They all have huge egos and believe they are the smartest person in the room. They are arrogant and their hubris is ultimately their downfall. Putin and Xi can play the long game. They don’t have an opposition party contesting everything they do or say. They are leaders for life, or until they are overthrown. They are as nationalist as Trump. They have nuclear arms. They have large militaries. They have major economic problems. These leaders will do whatever they feel is in the best interest of their countries. Threats and bluster from a reality TV NYC real estate mogul does not make them quiver with fear. When economic pain sweeps across the world during the coming financial collapse, trade wars will morph into real wars.

 

Anyone who doesn’t perceive the darkening clouds portending the most dangerous portion of this Fourth Turning crisis is either willfully ignorant, an Ivy League educated “Intellectual Yet Idiot”, an MSM talking head, or a Deep State apparatchik. Ten years into the last Fourth Turning was 1939, the outset of the bloodiest global conflict in world history. Any doubt there really is a Deep State, controlling our lives, surveilling our electronic interactions, manipulating our minds through propaganda techniques, and keeping us distracted with technology, sports, and social media, has been obliterated by Trump drawing these evil characters out of the shadows and into the spotlight as they have attempted a blatant coup against a sitting president.

The current paradigm had been very profitable for the ruling elite, as their propaganda laden production convinced the masses they were making economic progress as they feel deeper in debt and were free as the surveillance state grew ever larger. The curtain will soon be pulled back to reveal it all as an illusion.

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.” – Frank Zappa

No one can predict the exact events which will propel the remainder of this Fourth Turning. But one thing is sure, things will not return to normal until we withstand and conquer the grim challenges ahead. Those who think the stock market can continue to ascend after being elevated by the Fed for nine years are delusional. Those who don’t think debt matters are ignorant of history and how societal mood changes drive greed and panic. Those who discount the possibility of global war because we are too civilized evidently do not understand human nature and our warring nature.

This Fourth Turning will intensify no matter the outcome of the mid-term elections. It will not end until the existing social order is swept away and there are clear winners and losers. I don’t pretend to know what will happen, but I won’t be surprised when things take a turn for the worse. You can’t sit this out. You should prepare as your resources and life situation allow. Courage, strength, wisdom and adaptability will be required to survive the coming challenges. Approaching the coming storms with eyes wide open, large doses of common sense, teamwork and self sufficiency offer you the best possibility of coming out the other side.

Strauss and Howe did not make predictions, but they put forth an educated guess of potential outcomes. Millions of factors and humans will interact in an unknowing way to produce the ultimate outcome. We all may have to make individual decisions which will impact the outcome. Shirking our responsibilities out of fear is not an option when the potential outcomes could end civilization as we know it. We should all do everything in our power to produce outcome #4.

1. This Fourth Turning could mark the end of man. It could be an omnicidal Armageddon, destroying everything, leaving nothing. If mankind ever extinguishes itself, this will probably happen when its dominant civilization triggers a Fourth Turning that ends horribly. For this Fourth Turning to put an end to all this would require an extremely unlikely blend of social disaster, human malevolence, technological perfection and bad luck.

2. The Fourth Turning could mark the end of modernity. The Western saecular rythm – which began in the mid-fifteenth century with the Renaissance – could come to an abrupt terminus. The seventh modern saeculum would be the last. This too could come from total war, terrible but not final. There could be a complete collapse of science, culture, politics, and society. Such a dire result would probably happen only when a dominant nation (like today’s America) lets a Fourth Turning ekpyrosis engulf the planet. But this outcome is well within the reach of foreseeable technology and malevolence.

3. The Fourth Turning could spare modernity but mark the end of our nation. It could close the book on the political constitution, popular culture, and moral standing that the word America has come to signify. The nation has endured for three saecula; Rome lasted twelve, the Soviet Union only one. Fourth Turnings are critical thresholds for national survival. Each of the last three American Crises produced moments of extreme danger: In the Revolution, the very birth of the republic hung by a thread in more than one battle. In the Civil War, the union barely survived a four-year slaughter that in its own time was regarded as the most lethal war in history. In World War II, the nation destroyed an enemy of democracy that for a time was winning; had the enemy won, America might have itself been destroyed. In all likelihood, the next Crisis will present the nation with a threat and a consequence on a similar scale.

4. Or the Fourth Turning could simply mark the end of the Millennial Saeculum. Mankind, modernity, and America would all persevere. Afterward, there would be a new mood, a new High, and a new saeculum. America would be reborn. But, reborn, it would not be the same.

Breathe deep the gathering gloom
Watch lights fade from every room

Cold-hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colours from our sight
Red is grey is yellow white
But we decide which is right
And which is an illusion

Breath Deep the Gathering Gloom – Moody Blues

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Sarah Lawrence Prof writes Op-Ed about lack of intellectual diversity - and social justice warriors want him kicked off campus

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Conservative Prof. Samuel Abrams becomes target of harassment and is thrown under bus by administration after his NY Times Op-Ed, proving his point. Professor Samuel Abrams is a conservative-leaning tenured professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College. He is active in Heterodox Academy, a group of almost 2000 academics devoted to intellectual diversity on campus. Prof. Abrams recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about the lack of ideological diversity among administrators at his school and elsewhere. The column, titled Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators, brought together research Prof. Abrams had done on left-leaning bias among college professors and administrators, and how it stifles open debate. This warped ideological distribution among college administrators should give our students and their families pause. To students who are in their first semester at school, I urge you not to accept unthinkingly what your campus administrators are telling...

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9 Years Into Common Core, Test Scores Are Down, Indoctrination Up

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It’s been about nine years since the Obama administration lured states into adopting Common Core sight unseen, with promises it would improve student achievement. Like President Obama’s other big promises — “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” — this one’s been proven a scam.

“If you set and enforce rigorous and challenging standards and assessments; if you put outstanding teachers at the front of the classroom; if you turn around failing schools — your state can win a Race to the Top grant that will not only help students outcompete workers around the world, but let them fulfill their God-given potential,” President Obama said in July 2009.

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Politicians Now Threatening And Encouraging Violence In The Land Of The Free

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Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

“Between now and November 6, you better put a catcher’s mask on your face because I’m going to stomp all over your face with golf spikes.”

Unfortunately this isn’t trash talk from some middle school bully… it’s a public threat made by a Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate to his incumbent opponent.

With the midterm elections tomorrow, I wanted to take some time today to remind you who your vote actually supports.

Politics has likely never been more divisive in the US… and the politicians continually stoke this flame, often times, like with the quote above, inciting their constituents to carry out violent acts against the opposing party.

It’s completely despicable that this has become the state of government in the land of the free… instead of focusing the public’s attention on solving the big problems the US faces (like debt), politicians stoke partisan flames to advance their own self interests.

And they encourage outright violence. One congresswoman encouraged supporters to attack members of the Cabinet if they saw them in public…

“If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

Calling for violence because you don’t agree with the opposing party is totally pathetic. It’s something I’d expect to see in a third-world country, not the world’s leading economic power.

And it’s one of the many, many reasons I don’t vote.

At the end of the day, you’re forced to choose between two, self-serving candidates who will say whatever BS they have to gain/retain power.

People think they can use their vote to get “the right guy in power.” But the truth is, the new guy just turns into the last guy… because the whole system is broken.

The government spends almost every tax dollar it takes in to pay interest on its debt and on entitlements like social security and Medicare.

And the government’s own projections show the country going only deeper and deeper into debt.

So any choice leads to the same set of dire, economic consequences.

And by voting, you’re saying you accept the current system. You may have your gripes, but you ultimately believe it’s fair and it works.

The reality is, there are far better ways to actually vote.

For one, you can vote with your feet… that’s something I did a decade ago when I moved abroad.

But that’s not for everybody… some people can’t just move.

But you can also vote with your dollars. You should take all the legal steps at your disposal to reduce what you owe the government.

If you don’t like the candidates, simply stop participating in the system. Stop giving them resources to squander “for your benefit.”

Remember, the government spends YOUR money, not theirs. So if you want them to stop wasting money, stop giving them so much.

One way to do this is to move to Puerto Rico, where you can pay 4% corporate tax and zero tax on capital gains through Acts 20 and 22.

I recently decided to do this.

You can also take advantage of opportunity zones.

Normally, you’d pay 23.8% capital gains tax (including the Obamacare surcharge). But through opportunity zones, you can trade in overpriced stocks and real estate and invest that money in designated “opportunity zones” across the US.

Not only will you defer your initial capital gains tax for up to seven years… you’ll pay ZERO capital gains tax on that new investment, forever.

I’ve got to stress, you should always follow the law when reducing taxes. Luckily, there are lots of incredible and completely legal ways to drastically reduce the taxes you pay.

So while everyone else lines up to vote in the midterms, then proudly posts a picture of their “I voted” sticker on social media…

Just remember, there are better ways to make your vote count.

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