ORIGINAL LINK UK Researcher Predicts Over 250,000 Chinese Will Have Coronavirus In Ten Days
When it comes to estimating the human capital and potential fallout from a highly contagious epidemic, arguably the most important variable is the R0 ("R-naught") value of the disease, which represents the average number of secondary cases arising from an average primary case in a entirely susceptible population. That's the technical definition, a simpler one is that the R0, or basic reproductive number, of a contagious disease is the number of cases that a case of the disease generates over the course of its infectious period in a susceptible population. The higher this number, the more dangerous the disease, the more lethal the outcome.
Some indicative R0s are 0.9 – 2.1 for the common flu while the 1918-1919 pandemic-causing Spanish flu was estimated to have ranged from 1.4 – 2.8, with a mean of 2. Some other notable R0s are shown below, and note that SARS was between 2 and 5:
So what about the R0 of 2019-nCoV, also known as the coronavirus that has claimed over three dozen lives in China and infected (at least) 1,000 people? Naturally, since the disease is most active in China which is notoriously opaque especially when it comes to matters that can cause a mass panic, the best one can do is guess, and that's what the World Health Organization did yesterday when it issued a statement on the coronavirus epidemic with the following projection:
Human-to-human transmission is occurring and a preliminary R0 estimate of 1.4-2.5 was presented. Amplification has occurred in one health care facility. Of confirmed cases, 25% are reported to be severe. The source is still unknown (most likely an animal reservoir) and the extent of human-to-human transmission is still not clear.
Needless to say, while 2.5 is quite high, and in line with that of the Spanish flu epidemic which infected about half a billion people back in 1918, killing as many as 100 million before it eventually fizzled out, the real coronavirus R0 number may end up being far higher. That is the working hypothesis of Jonathan Read, a UK expert on the transmission and evolutionary dynamics of infectious diseases, who has published a paper with four colleagues that estimates transmission parameters for the Wuhan coronavirus, calculates that the R0 of 2019-nCoV to be between 3.6-4.0 or roughly the same as SARS, and reaches a conclusion about spread of the coronavirus epidemic that is frankly terrifying.
This is a major problem because Reed estimates that only 5.1% of infections in Wuhan are identified (as of Jan 24), "indicating a large number of infections in the community, and also reflecting the difficulty in detecting cases of this new disease." Furthermore, since all of this is happening in China which is not known for making the most socially-beneficial decisions under pressure, there is an ominous possibility that Reed is actually overly optimistic.
Huge public hygiene crisis seems to have erupted in #Wuhan. This video clip was once posted on Weibo but now deleted. The lady in the clip says dead bodies were left at hospital aisles untreated whereas doctors are taking care of other patients alongside them. #WuhanPneumoniapic.twitter.com/8ARaEHDbXC
Reed wastes no time to get to his terrifying conclusion which is that if no change in control or transmission happens, then further outbreaks will occur in other Chinese cities, "and that infections will continue to be exported to international destinations at an increasing rate."
As a result, in 10 days time, or by February 4, 2020, Reed's model predicts the number of infected people in Wuhan to be greater than 250 thousand (with an prediction interval, 164,602 to 351,396);
Reed also predicts that by 4 Feb 2020, the countries at greatest risk of importing infections through air travel are Thailand, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, USA, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and Vietnam. In short: much of Asia will infected, and from there, the rest of the world awaits.
Critically, Reed's model alleges that Beijing was woefully late in its response and that recently imposed "travel restrictions from and to Wuhan city are unlikely to be effective in halting transmission across China; with a 99% effective reduction in travel, the size of the epidemic outside of Wuhan may only be reduced by 24.9% on 4 February."
Reed's prediction is in line with other modelling studies of travel restrictions, which find that reducing travel only serves to delay the epidemic reaching other locations, rather than suppressing the spread entirely. Still, it is important to note that his model only considered air travel, and did not consider the potential impact of travel restrictions relating to land transportation.
That said, Reed admits there is a chance that he is wrong, largely due to using flawed assumptions:
Our findings are critically dependent on the assumptions underpinning our model, and the timing and reporting of confirmed cases, and there is considerable uncertainty associated with the outbreak at this early stage.
Yet even with these caveats in mind, Reed's work suggests that a basic reproductive number for this 2019-nCoV outbreak is materially, perhaps catastrophically higher compared to other emergent coronaviruses, "suggesting that containment or control of this pathogen may be substantially more difficult."
Even assuming that most of Reed's assumptions are overly harsh and pessimistic, his summary leaves little hope that the Coronavirus epidemic will be contained any time soon:
"We are still in the early days of this outbreak and there is much uncertainty in both the scale of the outbreak, as well as key epidemiological information regarding transmission. However, the rapidity of the growth of cases since the recognition of the outbreak is much greater than that observed in outbreaks of either SARS or MERS-CoV. This is consistent with our higher estimates of the reproductive number for this outbreak compared to these other emergent coronaviruses, suggesting that containment or control of this pathogen may be substantially more difficult."
Finally, while Reed makes no observations on the potential mortality associated with nCoV, one can make a broad observation: late on Friday, China's Hubei province reported 15 additional coronavirus deaths, which added to the previously reported 26 casualties, bringing the total to 41. And with roughly 1,100 confirmed cases, this means that the mortality rate of the diseases has just jumped from roughly 2.5% to 4%. Which means that if Reed is correct, and if 250,000 people in Hubei alone will be infected by February 4, no less than 10,000 Chinese people will be dead in the next 2-3 weeks.
What happens after that - with China effectively paralyzed by fear and the economy grinding to a halt as nobody leave their home - is anyone's guess.
We are being told that the coronavirus outbreak which is currently escalating at an exponential rate probably started with a snake. Perhaps that is true, but a lot of researchers are now pointing out some really odd “coincidences” regarding this outbreak. For example, China’s very first biosafety-level-4 lab is located just 20 miles away from […]
Should city governments dictate where you can shop for food? If your neighbors see a need for a store, and happily patronize it, should outsiders shut down that option?
The people who actually shop at dollar stores love them. The most frequent customers are seniors on fixed incomes, cash-strapped students, and busy parents. If you don’t have a car or access to public transit, there’s probably one within five miles of your house. If you drive, there’s a dollar store on your way to just about anywhere.
In a compact space, dollar stores stock household staples like toothpaste, toilet paper, soap, and pet supplies at rock-bottom prices. Only Dollar Tree still prices all its goods at $1, but Family Dollar and Dollar General might have 10,000 products for that price, and reasonable deals on $2-$10 goods. It’s a place where almost anyone on any budget can splurge a little on treating themselves.
Sixty-two percent of adults surveyed by brand intelligence firm Morning Consult say Dollar Tree “has a positive effect on my community” (compared to 51 percent for Starbucks and 59 percent for Target.)
People who can afford more choices – driving out to a big-box store, buying in bulk, ordering online, patronizing a farmer’s market – simply can’t see the perspective of someone for whom the dollar store is the most practical option.
Relatively wealthy dollar store detractors exhibit the obliviousness of an out-of-touch aristocracy. According to legend, Marie Antoinette, queen of France, when told that her subjects were going hungry for want of bread, responded blithely, “Let them eat cake.”
Now, politicians and middle-class activists seek to ban sources of $1 bread with an unspoken, “Let them eat Whole Foods.”
“Terrible food...and such small portions!”
Opponents of dollar stores often contradict each other or even themselves.
Critics objected when suburban growth sent stores running for whiter, more affluent suburbs. But dollar stores’ explicit attempts to reverse this trend – to set up affordable retail options in poorer, underserved neighborhoods – are somehow also the target of scorn.
You’ll also hear critics claim dollar stores engage in “predatory” behavior by offering prices that are simultaneously too low (undercutting potential competitors) and also too high (as compared to a per-unit cost at the Costco 15 miles away.)
Haters complain retail jobs offered by dollar stores are “low quality and low-wage” but also that dollar stores don’t create enough of these low-quality, undesirable jobs. One is reminded of the Woody Allen line complaining about a restaurant’s “terrible food...and such small portions!”
A Tulsa councilwoman begrudgingly confirmed that dollar retailers offer essentials like toothpaste and school supplies, bread and eggs, in areas where supermarkets “have consistently failed.” Why this is condemnable, rather than laudable, she does not explain.
With backward economic thinking, CNN claimed dollar stores “limit poor communities’ access to healthy food,” blaming low-cost retailers for the gaps they try to fill.
Bans on walkable, ultra-affordable stores do nothing to increase the availability of fresh food; they merely stamp out the only existing option.
A Failure to Relate
So if not those surface-level concerns, what’s really driving dollar-store bans? Could it be a simple lack of empathy?
In the neighborhoods and rural areas where dollar retailers are most popular, they offer affordable groceries to those with tight budgets, packed schedules, and limited mobility.
These laws are proposed by people who don’t shop in dollar stores and can’t understand why anyone would want to.
A planner and architect from Baltimore said dollar stores were popping up in poorer neighborhoods, “like a parasite.” Bill Torpy, columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution said County Commissioners were right to be “disgusted” as dollar stores moved in (the headline has since been changed to “rightly sees little value in”).
Residents of Chester, Vermont, rejected a proposed dollar store because residents feared “the beginning of the end for Chester’s Vermontiness.” Dollar store skeptics nationwide say they value “community character” and reject the “unsightliness” of dollar store signage.
For people with cars, free time, and disposable income, “just drive two miles to the grocery store” may seem like benign advice. But for people just getting by, it’s dismissive of their real challenges.
If the same work had been done by a food bank – 30,000 locations providing ultra-affordable, shelf-stable groceries, concentrated in areas with the most need – would we applaud it?
Perhaps, but only if the signage were subtle and they weren’t close enough that people could walk to them. We wouldn’t want to look like the kind of neighborhood that needs those.
It’s not wrong to care about community character or beautiful streets. But it’s an injustice to care about them so much that you’ll use government power to block (other) people’s access to affordable bread, pencils, and toilet paper. And it adds condescending insult to injury to claim to be doing so “for their own good.”
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This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.
Joseph Chamie, the former director of the United Nations Population Division, recently published an article entitled “Should women stay single?” It presents a grim view of married life, and seems to answer the question largely in the affirmative. Chamie writes:
Single women generally experience fewer stresses and compromises than married women. Furthermore, single women feel more empowered, enjoying greater personal autonomy and freedoms than married women largely because they don’t juggle challenging multiple roles at work and home.
… Meanwhile, people try alternatives to marriage. While marriage poses negative effects on women’s health and longevity, dog ownership provides benefits for men and women, such as lower blood pressure and reduced cholesterol. Dogs readily express appreciation and provide nonjudgmental companionship.
... With greater gender equality, expanding opportunities for women and increasing individualism, women are more deliberate on making fateful decisions about marriage, with more deciding to remain single.
Chamie’s words raise the question of what true freedom is, and what a good life is. Is the best life a life with the least stresses, the freedom to do anything, and no-one around to have to compromise with; a life in which you can experience as much pleasure as possible?
On the question of what makes a good life, Socrates said at his trial:
You, my friend--a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens--are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honour and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, something that you never consider or heed at all?'
... For I don't do anything except go around persuading you all, old and young, not to take thought for your social standing or your properties, but first and chiefly to care about the great improvements of the soul.
The great philosophers of the past, such as Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, thought virtue more important than pleasure, wealth, or power.
Chamie presents a more hedonistic conception of the good life. It sounds attractive to have fewer annoyances to contend with, the autonomy to enjoy fine wine and leisurely afternoons, and the opportunity to focus solely on professional success which might well feel like it comes with more accolades than maintaining a home or bringing up children. Yet, take these to the extreme and you get selfishness, greediness, addiction, and laziness. Not to mention that society is in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, partially as a result of smaller and less connected families.
Why is it that we don’t particularly revere the image of the eternal pleasure seeker who lives purely for themselves? We don’t tend to want people to say at our funeral that we lived a life of every pleasure on offer and never had to compromise; mostly we would rather they talked about our work ethic, sacrifice and love. Perhaps, because that is what we too really consider a good life to be.
In Socrates’ view, the truly free person is someone who has overcome themselves, to live as simply as possible and have few wants. While counterintuitive, it makes sense that someone who exercises no control over their desires becomes a slave to themselves and is probably made unhappy by it.
Thus, those who do seek to develop virtue may find themselves with a greater sense of satisfaction and purpose in their lives. A sort of paradox where you perhaps have less immediate pleasure, but greater overall joy.
In this view, the challenge and sacrifice of family and love is indeed worth it. For one, both parenthood and marriage are profound experiences of personal growth in which spouses/parents are challenged to grow in virtue through denying their own immediate needs constantly, and overcoming all sort of challenging situations and tests of their patience. Watching my babies emerge into the world, I felt I encountered the miraculous and obtained a higher purpose. The highest professional success in a workplace, or the autonomy to do whatever I want when I want, still pale in comparison to the overwhelming love and joy gained -- despite the very real suffering. The majority of wives I know genuinely love their husbands, love their babies and children, love the easy company of someone who is always there, and love having the love of family in their lives. It is a lot to give up.
But if Chamie is indeed right that many men are hard to live with, perhaps society needs to better articulate the self-giving love of marriage so that both men and women might better strive to live up to it. Perhaps parents need to try to bring up virtuous boys who do not seek the hedonistic lifestyle Chamie himself seems to advocate for women, thus making better husbands. But in my experience at least, while men may never have a women’s eye for detail (I think it’s fair to say that if you compare an all-girls flat or household to an all-boys flat or household you will often encounter differences in the form of small touches of beauty and detail), they are increasingly conscious of doing their fair share of work and childcare.
Though, over and above men's apparent unwillingness to contribute very much, Chamie writes that single women are happier “largely because they don’t juggle challenging multiple roles at work and home.” Perhaps, then, society should envision a wider range of options for women than simply remaining single or juggling “multiple roles at work and home.” A more flexible job market is one answer for women who wish (or have) to maintain work, but consider creating a home under their own influence and care to be very important too.
Moreover, being a mother or homemaker should be viewed as a respected and attractive identity in its own right, rather than constantly belittled. If you take Chamie’s individualistic ideal to the extreme, there would be no future of humanity in just one generation, no babies or children at all. His isn’t a view which seems to take stock of the value of parents at all.
The family is fundamental to the life of every society, and it is a fallacy to think that mothers (or stay-at-home dads) aren’t contributing to the economy and fulfilling an important and necessary societal role. They are shaping the future generation who will fill a future workforce and, if brought up properly, hopefully be productive and virtuous.
Yet, parenthood is not a job that can be couched in purely economic or social terms. Parents are charged with the care of people they love, not widgets or nameless office staff, normally on autonomous terms. As Socrates defines the good life, it is certainly the stuff of “wisdom, truth and the greatest improvement of the soul,” as you struggle to be better for love of your children and future generations.
Great art, literature and music is so often about love or sacrifice. Let us not abandon humanity’s great vision of beauty, joy, virtue and sacrificial love, in return for one of individualistic and short-lived pleasure.
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This article is republished from MercatorNet under a Creative Commons license.
While water fluoridation was never adopted or has been eliminated in many areas around the world, including most of western Europe,1 many U.S. water systems2 still add fluoride chemicals such as fluorosilicic acid3 (also known as hydrofluorosilicic acid) to their municipal water supplies.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article is a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine.
This impeachment fiasco is merely the latest in a never-ending series of distractions, distortions, and political theater aimed at diverting the public’s attention from the sinister advances of the American Police State.
Don’t allow yourselves to be distracted, diverted or mesmerized by the cheap theater tricks.
This impeachment spectacle is Shakespearean in its scope: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Nothing is the key word here.
Despite the wall-to-wall media coverage, nothing will change.
Mark my words: the government will remain as corrupt and self-serving as ever, dominated by two political factions that pretend to be at odds with each other all the while moving in lockstep to maintain the status quo.
So President Trump’s legal team can grandstand all they want about the impeachment trial being “an affront to the Constitution” and “a dangerous perversion of the Constitution,” but that’s just smoke and mirrors.
You know what is really “an affront to the Constitution”? The U.S. government.
We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward trajectory now, and things are moving fast.
The republic has fallen.
The Deep State’s plot to take over America has succeeded.
The American system of representative government has been overthrown by a profit-driven, militaristic, corporate oligarchy bent on total control and global domination through the imposition of martial law here at home and by fomenting wars abroad.
Even now, we are being pushed and prodded towards a civil war, not because the American people are so divided but because that’s how corrupt governments control a populace (i.e., divide and conquer).
These are dangerous times.
These are indeed dangerous times but not because of violent crime, which remains at an all-time low, or because of terrorism, which is statistically rare, or because the borders are being invaded by foreign armies, which data reports from the Department of Homeland Security refute.
No, the real danger that we face comes from none other than the U.S. government and the powers it has granted to its standing armies to rob, steal, cheat, harass, detain, brutalize, terrorize, torture and kill American citizens with immunity.
The danger “we the people” face comes from masked invaders on the government payroll who crash through our doors in the dark of night, shoot our dogs, and terrorize our families.
This danger comes from militarized henchmen on the government payroll who demand absolute obedience, instill abject fear, and shoot first and ask questions later.
This danger comes from greedy, power-hungry bureaucrats on the government payroll who have little to no understanding of their constitutional limits.
This danger comes from greedy politicians and corporations for whom profit trumps principle.
You want to know about the state of our union? It’s downright scary.
Consider, if you will, all of the dastardly, devious, diabolical, dangerous, debilitating, deceitful, dehumanizing, demonic, depraved, dishonorable, disillusioning, discriminatory, dictatorial schemes inflicted on “we the people” by a bureaucratic, totalitarian regime that has long since ceased to be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”
Americans have no protection against police abuse. It is no longer unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later, such as the 16-year-old teenager who skipped school only to be shot by police after they mistook him for a fleeing burglar. Then there was the unarmed black man in Texas “who was pursued and shot in the back of the neck by Austin Police… after failing to properly identify himself and leaving the scene of an unrelated incident.” And who could forget the 19-year-old Seattle woman who was accidentally shot in the leg by police after she refused to show her hands? What is increasingly common, however, is the news that the officers involved in these incidents get off with little more than a slap on the hands.
Americans are little more than pocketbooks to fund the police state. If there is any absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off. This is true, whether you’re talking about taxpayers being forced to fund high-priced weaponry that will be used against us, endless wars that do little for our safety or our freedoms, or bloated government agencies such as the National Security Agency with its secret budgets, covert agendas and clandestine activities. Rubbing salt in the wound, even monetary awards in lawsuits against government officials who are found guilty of wrongdoing are paid by the taxpayer.
Americans are no longer innocent until proven guilty. We once operated under the assumption that you were innocent until proven guilty. Due in large part to rapid advances in technology and a heightened surveillance culture, the burden of proof has been shifted so that the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty has been usurped by a new norm in which all citizens are suspects. This is exemplified by police practices of stopping and frisking people who are merely walking down the street and where there is no evidence of wrongdoing. Likewise, by subjecting Americans to full-body scans and license-plate readers without their knowledge or compliance and then storing the scans for later use, the government—in cahoots with the corporate state—has erected the ultimate suspect society. In such an environment, we are all potentially guilty of some wrongdoing or other.
Americans no longer have a right to self-defense. In the wake of various shootings in recent years, “gun control” has become a resounding theme. Those advocating gun reform see the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms as applying only to government officials. As a result, even Americans who legally own firearms are being treated with suspicion and, in some cases, undue violence. In one case, a Texas man had his home subjected to a no-knock raid and was shot in his bed after police, attempting to deliver a routine search warrant, learned that he was in legal possession of a firearm. In another incident, a Florida man who was licensed to carry a concealed firearm found himself detained for two hours during a routine traffic stop in Maryland while the arresting officer searched his vehicle in vain for the man’s gun, which he had left at home. Incidentally, the Trump Administration has done more to crack down on Second Amendment rights than anything the Obama Administration ever managed.
Americans no longer have a right to private property. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government. Likewise, if government officials can fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, praying with friends in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof, and raising chickens in your backyard, you’re no longer the owner of your property.
Americans no longer have a say about what their children are exposed to in school. Incredibly, the government continues to insist that parents essentially forfeit their rights when they send their children to a public school. This growing tension over whether young people, especially those in the public schools, are essentially wards of the state, to do with as government officials deem appropriate, in defiance of the children's constitutional rights and those of their parents, is reflected in the debate over sex education programs that expose young people to all manner of sexual practices and terminology, zero tolerance policies that strip students of any due process rights, let alone parental involvement in school discipline, and Common Core programs that teach students to be test-takers rather than critical thinkers.
Americans are powerless in the face of militarized police. In early America, citizens were considered equals with law enforcement officials. Authorities were rarely permitted to enter one’s home without permission or in a deceitful manner. And it was not uncommon for police officers to be held personally liable for trespass when they wrongfully invaded a citizen’s home. Unlike today, early Americans could resist arrest when a police officer tried to restrain them without proper justification or a warrant—which the police had to allow citizens to read before arresting them. (Daring to dispute a warrant with a police official today who is armed with high-tech military weapons and tasers would be nothing short of suicidal.) As police forces across the country continue to be transformed into outposts of the military, with police agencies acquiring military-grade hardware in droves, Americans are finding their once-peaceful communities transformed into military outposts, complete with tanks, weaponry, and other equipment designed for the battlefield.
Americans no longer have a right to bodily integrity. Court rulings undermining the Fourth Amendment and justifying invasive strip searches have left us powerless against police empowered to forcefully draw our blood, strip search us, and probe us intimately. Accounts are on the rise of individuals—men and women—being subjected to what is essentially government-sanctioned rape by police in the course of “routine” traffic stops. Remember the New Mexico man who was subjected to a 12-hour ordeal of anal probes, X-rays, enemas, and finally a colonoscopy—all because he allegedly rolled through a stop sign?
Americans no longer have a right to the expectation of privacy. Despite the staggering number of revelations about government spying on Americans’ phone calls, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Google searches, emails, bookstore and grocery purchases, bank statements, commuter toll records, etc., Congress, the president and the courts have done little to nothing to counteract these abuses. Instead, they seem determined to accustom us to life in this electronic concentration camp.
Americans can no longer rely on the courts to mete out justice. The U.S. Supreme Court was intended to be an institution established to intervene and protect the people against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds. Yet through their deference to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency, the justices of the Supreme Court have become the architects of the American police state in which we now live, while the lower courts have appointed themselves courts of order, concerned primarily with advancing the government’s agenda, no matter how unjust or illegal.
Americans no longer have a representative government. We have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age, let’s call it the age of authoritarianism. In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups. It is not overstating matters to say that Congress, which has done its best to keep their unhappy constituents at a distance, may well be the most self-serving, semi-corrupt institution in America.
In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism: a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled. Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain: Fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes. Sound familiar? Clearly, we are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests. We have moved into “corporatism” (favored by Benito Mussolini), which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism. Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests—not elected by the citizenry—rule over the many.
History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a totalitarian state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom. Even with its constantly shifting terrain, this topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America’s new normal. From Clinton to Bush, then Obama and now Trump, it’s as if we’ve been caught in a time loop, forced to re-live the same thing over and over again: the same assaults on our freedoms, the same disregard for the rule of law, the same subservience to the Deep State, and the same corrupt, self-serving government that exists only to amass power, enrich its shareholders and ensure its continued domination.
Elections will not save us.
I haven’t even touched on the corporate state, the military industrial complex, SWAT team raids, invasive surveillance technology, zero tolerance policies in the schools, overcriminalization, or privatized prisons, to name just a few, but what I have touched on should be enough to show that the landscape of our freedoms has already changed dramatically from what it once was and will no doubt continue to deteriorate unless Americans can find a way to wrest back control of their government and reclaim their freedoms.
There can be no denying that the world is indeed a dangerous place, but what the president and his cohorts fail to acknowledge is that it’s the government that poses the gravest threat to our freedoms and way of life, and no amount of politicking, parsing or pandering will change that.
It is easy to be diverted, distracted and amused by the antics of politicians, the pomp and circumstance of awards shows, athletic events, and entertainment news, and the feel-good, wrapped-in-the-flag evangelism that passes for religion today.
What is far more difficult to face up to is the reality of life in America, where unemployment, poverty, inequality, injustice and violence by government agents are increasingly norms, and where “we the people” are at a distinct disadvantage in the face of the government elite’s power grabs, greed and firepower.
The Constitution doesn’t stand a chance against a federalized, globalized standing army protected by legislative, judicial and executive branches that are all on the same side, no matter what political views they subscribe to: suffice it to say, they are not on our side or the side of freedom.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the powers-that-be want us to remain distracted, divided, alienated from each other based on our politics, our bank accounts, our religion, our race and our value systems. Yet as George Orwell observed, “The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.”
You either believe in freedom or you don’t. It’s that simple.
Everything else is just a deadly distraction. As Orwell observed in 1984:
“All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.”
Former vice president Joe Biden’s extraordinary campaign memo this week imploring U.S. news media to reject the allegations surrounding his son Hunter’s work for a Ukrainian natural gas company makes several bold declarations.
The memo by Biden campaign aides Kate Bedingfield and Tony Blinken specifically warned reporters covering the impeachment trial they would be acting as “enablers of misinformation” if they repeated allegations that the former vice president forced the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor, who was investigating Burisma Holdings, where Hunter Biden worked as a highly compensated board member.
Biden’s memo argues there is no evidence that the former vice president’s or Hunter Biden’s conduct raised any concern, and that Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin’s investigation was “dormant” when the vice president forced the prosecutor to be fired in Ukraine.
The memo calls the allegation a “conspiracy theory” (and, in full disclosure, blames my reporting for the allegations surfacing last year.)
But the memo omits critical impeachment testimony and other evidence that paint a far different portrait than Biden’s there’s-nothing-to-talk-about-here rebuttal.
Here are the facts, with links to public evidence, so you can decide for yourself.
Fact: Joe Biden admitted to forcing Shokin’s firing in March 2016.
It is irrefutable, and not a conspiracy theory, that Joe Biden bragged in this 2018 speech to a foreign policy group that he threatened in March 2016 to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid to Kiev if then-Ukraine’s president Petro Poroshenko didn’t immediately fire Shokin.
“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden told the 2018 audience in recounting what he told Poroshenko
“Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations event.
Fact: Shokin’s prosecutors were actively investigating Burisma when he was fired.
While some news organizations cited by the Biden memo have reported the investigation was “dormant” in March 2016, official files released by the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office, in fact, show there was substantial investigative activity in the weeks just before Joe Biden forced Shokin’s firing.
The corruption investigations into Burisma and its founder began in 2014. Around the same time, Hunter Biden and his U.S. business partner Devon Archer were added to Burisma’s board, and their Rosemont Seneca Bohais firm began receiving regular $166,666 monthly payments, which totaled nearly $2 million a year. Both banks records seized by the FBI in America and Burisma’s own ledgers in Ukraine confirm these payments.
To put the payments in perspective, the annual amounts paid by Burisma to Hunter Biden’s and Devon Archer’s Rosemont Seneca Bohais firm were 30 times the average median annual household income for everyday Americans.
For a period of time in 2015, those investigations were stalled as Ukraine was creating a new FBI-like law enforcement agency known as the National Anti-Corruption Bureau ((NABU) to investigate endemic corruption in the former Soviet republic.
There was friction between NABU and the prosecutor general’s office for a while. And then in September 2015, then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt demanded more action in the Burisma investigation. You can read his speech here. Activity ramped up extensively soon after.
In December 2015, the prosecutor’s files show, Shokin’s office transferred the evidence it had gathered against Burisma to NABU for investigation.
In early February 2016, Shokin’s office secured a court order allowing prosecutors to re-seize some of the Burisma founder’s property, including his home and luxury car, as part of the ongoing probe.
Two weeks later, in mid-February 2016, Latvian law enforcement sent this alert to Ukrainian prosecutors flagging several payments from Burisma to American accounts as “suspicious.” The payments included some monies to Hunter Biden’s and Devon Archer’s firm. Latvian authorities recently confirmed it sent the alert.
Shokin told both me and ABC News that just before he was fired under pressure from Joe Biden he also was making plans to interview Hunter Biden.
Fact: Burisma’s lawyers in 2016 were pressing U.S. and Ukrainian authorities to end the corruption investigations.
Burisma’s main U.S. lawyer John Buretta acknowledged in this February 2017 interview with a Ukraine newspaper that the company remained under investigation in 2016, until he negotiated for one case to be dismissed and the other to be settled by payment of a large tax penalty.
Documents released under an open records lawsuit show Burisma legal team was pressuring the State Department in February 2016 to end the corruption allegations against the gas firm and specifically invoked Hunter Biden’s name as part of the campaign. You can read those documents here.
In addition, immediately after Joe Biden succeeded in getting Shokin ousted, Burisma’s lawyers sought to meet with his successor as chief prosecutor to settle the case. Here is the Ukrainian prosecutors’ summary memo of one of their meetings with the firm’s lawyers.
Fact: There is substantial evidence Joe Biden and his office knew about the Burisma probe and his son’s role as a board member.
The New York Times reported in this December 2015 article that the Burisma investigation was ongoing and Hunter Biden’s role in the company was undercutting Joe Biden’s push to fight Ukrainian corruption. The article quoted the vice president’s office.
In addition, Hunter Biden acknowledged in this interview he had discussed his Burisma job with his father on one occasion and that his father responded by saying he hoped the younger Biden knew what he was doing.
Fact: Federal Ethics rules requires government officials to avoid taking policy actions affecting close relatives.
Office of Government Ethics rules require all government officials to recuse themselves from any policy actions that could impact a close relative or cause a reasonable person to see the appearance of a conflict of interest or question their impartiality.
“The impartiality rule requires an employee to consider appearance concerns before participating in a particular matter if someone close to the employee is involved as a party to the matter,” these rules state. “This requirement to refrain from participating (or recuse) is designed to avoid the appearance of favoritism in government decision-making.”
Fact: Multiple State Department officials testified the Bidens’ dealings in Ukraine created the appearance of a conflict of interest.
In House impeachment testimony, Obama-era State Department officials declared the juxtaposition of Joe Biden overseeing Ukraine policy, including the anti-corruption efforts, at the same his son Hunter worked for a Ukraine gas firm under corruption investigation created the appearance of a conflict of interest.
In fact, deputy assistant secretary George Kent said he was so concerned by Burisma’s corrupt reputation that he blocked a project the State Department had with Burisma and tried to warn Joe Biden’s office about the concerns about an apparent conflict of interest.
Likewise, the House Democrats’ star impeachment witness, former U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovich, agreed the Bidens’ role in Ukraine created an ethic issue. “I think that it could raise the appearance of a conflict of interest,” she testified. You can read her testimony here.
Fact: Hunter Biden acknowleged he may have gotten his Burisma job solely because of his last name.
In this interview last summer, Hunter Biden said it might have been a “mistake” to serve on the Burisma board and that it was possible he was hired simply because of his proximity to the vice president.
“If your last name wasn’t Biden, do you think you would’ve been asked to be on the board of Burisma?,” a reporter asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Probably not, in retrospect,” Hunter Biden answered. “But that’s — you know — I don’t think that there’s a lot of things that would have happened in my life if my last name wasn’t Biden.”
Fact: Ukraine law enforcement reopened the Burisma investigation in early 2019, well before President Trump mentioned the matter to Ukraine’s new president Vlodymyr Zelensky.
This may be the single biggest under-reported fact in the impeachment scandal: four months before Trump and Zelensky had their infamous phone call, Ukraine law enforcement officials officially reopened their investigation into Burisma and its founder.
The effort began independent of Trump or his lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s legal work. In fact, it was NABU – the very agency Joe Biden and the Obama administration helped start – that recommended in February 2019 to reopen the probe.
NABU director Artem Sytnyk made this announcement that he was recommending a new notice of suspicion be opened to launch the case against Burisma and its founder because of new evidence uncovered by detectives.
Ukrainian officials said that new evidence included records suggesting a possible money laundering scheme dating to 2010 and continuing until 2015.
A month later in March 2019, Deputy Prosecutor General Konstantin Kulyk officially filed this notice of suspicion re-opening the case.
And Reuters recently quoted Ukrainian officials as saying the ongoing probe was expanded to allegations of theft of public funds.
The implications of this timetable are significant to the Trump impeachment trial because the president couldn’t have pressured Ukraine to re-open the investigation in July 2019 when Kiev had already done so on its own, months earlier.
For a complete timeline of all the key events in the Ukraine scandal, you can click here.
ORIGINAL LINK Brazil Charges Glenn Greenwald With Cybercrimes
Prosecutors in Brazil charged American journalist Glenn Greenwald with cybercrimes on Tuesday for his role in spreading embarrassing text messages that exposed corruption within the Brazilian judicial system, according to the New York Times.
In a 91-page criminal complaint made public on Tuesday, Greenwald is accused of participating in a "criminal organization" that spread text messages which called into question the "integrity, professionalism and motives of key members of Brazil’s justice system — particularly of figures directly involved in the investigation of a vast corruption scheme that resulted in the imprisonment of powerful business and political figures."
Greenwald - who moved to Brazil in 2005 with his husband David Miranda - now a congressman, went beyond simply receiving the texts and publishing newsworthy information according to prosecutors.
Citing intercepted messages between Mr. Greenwald and the hackers, prosecutors say the journalist played a “clear role in facilitating the commission of a crime.”
For instance, prosecutors contend that Mr. Greenwald encouraged the hackers to delete archives that had already been shared with The Intercept Brasil, in order to cover their tracks.
Prosecutors also say that Mr. Greenwald was communicating with the hackers while they were actively monitoring private chats on Telegram, a messaging app. -New York Times
Greenwald - an attorney, rose to international prominence in 2013 for his role in the release of classified documents revealing America's extensive NSA surveillance apparatus, after National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked documents to Greenwald, who worked for The Guardian at the time.
In 2016, Greenwald launched The Intercept Brasil, which began publishing articles based on the leaked text exchanges last June.
The articles raised questions about the integrity, professionalism and motives of key members of Brazil’s justice system — particularly of figures directly involved in the investigation of a vast corruption scheme that resulted in the imprisonment of powerful business and political figures.
Greenwald could not immediately be reached for comment.
Solidarity with @ggreenwald against the fascist Brazil regime. Lot of liberal hacks have been drooling to see Greenwald to get stomped, maybe now some of them will come to their senses.https://t.co/vGFTlsI6AF
The FBI assesses anti-government, identity-based, and fringe political conspiracy theories very likely motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part, to commit criminal and sometimes violent activity.
ORIGINAL LINK
The British government secretly funded Reuters in the 1960s and 1970s at the behest of an anti-Soviet propaganda unit linked to British intelligence and concealed the funding by using the BBC to make the payments, declassified government documents show.
Many government officials with long entrenched power are unwilling to give up any of that power. In their minds, they have a right to control our lives as they see fit, with complete indifference to our wishes. To avoid rebellion, they need to hide this fact as much as possible. They want the citizens to believe the lie that we are a nation of laws with equal justice under the law. To advance this lie, they have staged many theatrical productions that they call “investigations”. They try to give us the impression that they want to expose the facts and punish wrongdoing.
Most of the big ‘investigations’ in the news in recent years have not been at all what they pretended to be. The sham investigations of Hillary’s email, or the Clinton Foundation, or Weiner’s laptop, or Uranium One, or Mueller’s witch hunt, or Huber’s big nothing, or the IG’s whitewash, or the Schiff-Pelosi charades, have all been premeditated deceptions.
There are three types of investigations that call for different deceptions by the Deep State.
The first type is the rare honest investigation. Examples would be the attempt to find the truth about Fast and Furious (Obama’s gunrunning operation), or the IRS scandal (Obama’s weaponizing of government). In response to real investigations, the criminals do two things… lie and hide evidence. Key evidence, even if it is under subpoena, just disappears. In the IRS case, Lois Lerner’s relevant email and the email of 6 others involved in the scheme was just “lost”. The IRS “worked tirelessly” to find the email, but hard drives had been destroyed and back-up drives were missing, so the subpoenaed evidence could not be provided.
For the Deep State, hiding and destroying evidence of guilt is standard operating procedure. They simply report a “glitch” that destroyed the key evidence and that’s the end of it. Or, they simply redact the portions of the record that would expose the truth. To my memory, no one ever suffers any consequences for this. Even now, Director Wray and others are tenaciously withholding evidence.
The second type of ‘investigation’ is when the Deep State pretends to investigate the Deep State. In these ‘investigations’ the outcome is known in advance, but the script calls for pretending, sometimes for years, that it an honest investigation is underway.
There was nothing about the Hillary investigations that had anything to do with finding facts. The purpose from the beginning was exoneration. Key witnesses were given immunity and many were allowed to attend each other’s interviews. There were no early morning swat team raids to gather evidence. Evidence was destroyed with no consequences.
When Anthony Weiner’s laptop was found to contain over 340,000 Hillary emails in a file named “insurance”, the FBI did not rejoice about finally getting the ‘lost’ email. No, they hid the discovery for weeks until a New York agent threatened to go public. Then, quite miraculously, Peter Strzok found a way to very quickly examine 340,000 messages and found that there was nothing at all that was incriminating. No rational person would believe that.
The dirty cops are so comfortable about getting away with lies like this that Huber can announce that he found no corruption, when it is readily apparent that he did not interview key witnesses. He even turned away whistleblowers who wanted to submit evidence. A real investigator, Charles Ortel, could have given Huber a long list of Clinton Foundation crimes. Like the Weiner laptop fake investigation, you don’t find crimes if you don’t really look for them.
The dirty cops are so confident in their ability to deceive the public that they just announced that the FISA court reforms will be managed by David Kris. Kris has been a defender of FBI misconduct and he attacked Devin Nunes for telling the truth about the FISA court. They don’t even care about the appearance of fairness. They do what they want.
IG investigations have proven to be flimsy exonerations of Deep State criminality. Any honest observer can see that there was a carefully organized plan by top officials to control the outcome of the Presidential election. This corrupt plan involved lying to the FISA court, illegal surveillance and unmasking of citizens and conspiring with media partners to make sure lies were widely circulated to voters. The government conspirators and the majority of the media were functioning as nothing more than a branch of Hillary’s campaign. That’s a lot of power aimed at destroying Trump.
To an IG investigator, this monumental scandal was presented to us as nothing to be very concerned about. Yes, a few minor rules were inadvertently broken and there did appear to be some bias, but there was no reason at all to think that bias effected any actions. If the agencies involved make a training video and set aside a day for a training meeting, then that should satisfy us completely.
The third type of investigation involves investigating an imaginary crime for political reasons. The Mueller investigation and the impeachment investigation are two examples of this. Probably as a justification for illegal surveillance they were already doing, the conspirators pretended that there was powerful evidence that Trump was colluding with Putin to win the election. Lies about this issue propelled the country into 3 years of stories about nothing… stories and investigations about something that never happened. Never in the history of nothing has nothing been so thoroughly covered.
Because there was nothing, and because it was known from the start that, “there is no big there, there”, the Mueller Team used several irrelevant legal actions to prolong the belief that they were closing in on Trump. Mueller arranged for their media partner, CNN, to film the early morning swat team raid on 67 year old Roger Stone’s home. It was very dramatic and very un-necessary. Also, some small-time Russian troll farms were indicted so that the word “Russia” could fill the news, prolonging the desired myth. One of the indicted firms did not even exist. The others did not appear to favor any one candidate and much of their activity was after the election.
Mueller led a 40 million dollar investigation looking for a crime. That effort failed at finding any collusion, but it did play a role in the Democrats winning a majority in the House of Representatives. That then enabled another investigation of an imaginary crime for political purposes. A scripted hearsay ‘whistleblower’ submitted lies that allowed Adam Schiff to continue his own campaign of lies. You know the rest of the story. Trump is being falsely charged for doing what Biden bragged about doing.
The Deep State and the media appear to believe that we are fooled by these fraudulent investigations. We are not fooled. We are tired of the lies and the arrogance.
We are increasingly angry that there is a double standard of justice in this country. There is a protected class of people who are not prosecuted for their crimes. This needs to end.