Saturday, July 25, 2020

‘Home-Schooling Won’t Kill Us. Covid-19 Might.’



Parents and teachers struggle with how to reopen schools safely this fall. Ms. Harris and Ms. Tarchak are senior editorial assistants.

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QUOTE OF THE DAY

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“Once completely freed, the bankers very quickly ran their institutions off the cliff, taking much of the global economy with them. Not only did they create and sell a huge amount of junk, but they turned the financial system into a gigantic casino, one in which they played mainly with other people’s money.

Both parties make a public show of how bitter their conflicts are, and how dangerous it would be for the other party to achieve power, while both prostitute themselves to the financial sector, powerful industries, and the wealthy.”

Charles H. Ferguson



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Friday, July 24, 2020

"Schools Steal This Joy From Children": Homeschool & Outdoor Programs See Huge Surge Amid COVID-19

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"Schools Steal This Joy From Children": Homeschool & Outdoor Programs See Huge Surge Amid COVID-19 Tyler Durden Fri, 07/24/2020 - 19:45

School districts and counties across the US, including counties in COVID-resurgent Texas this week, have mandated that all public and private schools not start their school year until after Labor Day (Sept. 7). Even after that Fall start date, some areas witnessing the current resurgence of cases, such as in California, may not return in person at all or at least go to a half-capacity scenario while offering online options for those families in a position to allow their children to stay home. But concerning online contingency plans, the trend appears to beRemote learning? No thanks.

Bottom line is that school-wise it's a time of extreme uncertainty and anxiety for families across the US. And then there are the difficult questions of assuming the moment a 'normal' school year actually kicks off - will masks be required through the day? will younger students really be able to practice social distancing? will a school shut down completely again the moment a student or staff member gets coronavirus? will on-campus schooling be safe? 

Due to these and other lingering questions, homeschooling is set to explode across the US, despite elites at places like Harvard doing their best to push stereotypes of "insular conservative homeschoolers" and the supposed "dark side" of homeschooling as somehow "detrimental" to societal progress. Regardless, all kinds of 'alternative' and hybrid stay at home schooling programs are now popping up organically amid continued pandemic and 'shutdown' fears. The Wall Street Journal presents hard numbers illustrating the trend in a lengthy report aptly titledAmid Coronavirus, Parents ‘Pod Up’ to Form At-Home Schools.

Via ThoughtCo/Getty Images

Recent polls show up to a third of Americans are "not at all" comfortable sending their children back to in-person schooling given the COVID-19 risks and 'unknowns'. And likely this figure is higher.

The Wall Street Journal describes of the recent polling:

A recent poll of 1,341 families by Pittsburgh-based consumer-research firm CivicScience found that more than one-third of parents with children ages 3 to 17 said they are “not at all” comfortable with a return to school in the fall. In a recent Axios-Ipsos poll of 219 parents of children 18 and under, 71% said they felt sending them to school in the fall presented a moderate or large risk to their household’s health and well-being. Not all families can afford to design their own education program. Some households will see their income decline if one parent works fewer hours to manage academics.

And further, the report details, "In the past three weeks, the National Home School Association has referred about 3,000 parents to local home-schooling groups—compared with a handful, if any, in a typical three-week period says Executive Director J. Allen Weston."

One observable trend taking place across the United States includes families and students gathering in 'pods' to conduct their own small-scale schooling. Neighbors or families who already have connections and trusted friendships with children similar in age plan to gather in small groups of 5 to 10 students at people's homes or even local churches. 

The NYT reported this week that interest in homeschooling is surging this fall due to Covid-19 concerns. Here are some helpful resources.https://t.co/inE88EsCAh

— Kerry McDonald (@kerry_edu) July 18, 2020

Within the homeschool sub-culture these are akin to what's often referred to as "co-ops". This involves a homeschool group teaching children at home for most of the week based on a common curriculum, but coming together as a 'campus' at an outside location (such as a church or rented building, or in a residence) for one or two days of the week. This also takes the form of community field trips or nature outings. It essentially allows for highly independent schooling, yet while maintaining a broader "structure" and interactive social life.

Interestingly, as the WSJ underscores, parents are actually seeing in the set-back of coronavirus shutdowns and delays of traditional campuses..."an opportunity". Consider this damning quote of the current established "system" and the state of public school districts from a commentator cited in the WSJ report:

“Schools steal this joy from children.”

Now parents, at least those with the time and resources to make it happen, can model their child's educational experience very differently from the mundane 8 or 9-hour campus life (which for many students feels more like a prison) regulated by periodic bells and a restrictive atmosphere of procedures set up to move thousands of students from point A to point B throughout the day, or what some authors like John Taylor Ghatto have called "factory model schooling" which is not based on truth-seeking, as all learning should be, but instead on "schooling an industrial proletariat"

Via Louisville Family Fun/Thrive Forest School

In a revealing section on the state of mass public education today, WSJ writes:

Home-schooling experts say the approach isn’t just logging in to school virtually. Instead, parents and students seek educational opportunities in everyday life, from reading food labels to learning about nature as they walk through a park, Mr. Weston says. “Schools steal this joy from children,” he adds, and escalating pressure to meet benchmarks on standardized tests hasn’t helped. Not all states require home-schoolers to take those tests, he says. Across the U.S., about 4 million K-12 students are home-schooled, Mr. Weston estimates. He believes that figure will rise to at least 10 million by the end of the 2020-21 school year.

The report gives an example of how pods of new homeschooling communities are popping up organically in response to the crisis:

Myra Margolin, a full-time mother of a newborn and preschooler in Washington, created a Facebook group for families interested in forming home-schooling pods. She expected about 30 families would join and exchange ideas. The group, which launched July 6, has more than 850 members. “People are freaking out,” Ms. Margolin says, with interests that range from convening free-form play groups to hiring teachers for more structured learning environments.

And other alternative programs like 'homeschool nature programs' and outdoor focused learning programs, and small scale Montessori environments, as well as Charlotte Mason style and classical learning are also soaring in terms of interest. 

Why attack homeschool now, unless you’re afraid people are waking up to reality? “Hilariously, “arithmetic” was also misspelled in the original. It has since been corrected”
Harvard’s Lazy Attack On Homeschooling via @forbes https://t.co/TTYFoKVnrA

— Isaac Crockett (@isaaccrockett1) April 23, 2020

All of this begs the question: given that even before the rise of the pandemic, public school districts in many cities were already in a state of crisis - academically, financially, culturally, and otherwise...

Could the 2020-2021 school year (or lack thereof) be the death knell for mass public education?



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This UFO Hype Is Probably Just The US Military Lying Again

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“No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public” reads a New York Times headline that is understandably attracting a great deal of attention today.

True to form, the Times had to hastily issue an embarrassing correction to the article after initially reporting that former Senate majority leader Harry Reid “believed that crashes of vehicles from other worlds had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades”, when in fact Reid merely believes “crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred”.

 — @tomgara

Still though, it’s understandable that this article has captured public fascination. It reports that a Pentagon unit dedicated to the study of UFOs will begin making some of its investigations public, with the most attention-grabbing quotes coming from a former Pentagon consultant (emphasis mine):

Eric W. Davis, an astrophysicist who worked as a subcontractor and then a consultant for the Pentagon U.F.O. program since 2007, said that, in some cases, examination of the materials had so far failed to determine their source and led him to conclude, “We couldn’t make it ourselves.”
The constraints on discussing classified programs — and the ambiguity of information cited in unclassified slides from the briefings — have put officials who have studied U.F.O.s in the position of stating their views without presenting any hard evidence.
Mr. Davis, who now works for Aerospace Corporation, a defense contractor, said he gave a classified briefing to a Defense Department agency as recently as March about retrievals from “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”

Of course, whenever you see an article reporting anything about the US war machine in The New York Times, your response should always be intense skepticism.

 — @LibertyBlitz

A potentially more revealing quote in this Times article than what was said by Mr Davis was provided by Senator Marco Rubio (again, emphasis mine):

Senator Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who is the acting chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told a CBS affiliate in Miami this month that he was primarily concerned about reports of unidentified aircraft over American military bases — and that it was in the government’s interest to find out who was responsible.
He expressed concerns that China or Russia or some other adversary had made “some technological leap” that “allows them to conduct this sort of activity.”

So the New York Times article offers us two possibilities for these UFO phenomena:

  1. That there are “vehicles not made on this earth” taking a keen interest in US military bases for some strange reason, or
  2. That this is actually some secret super advanced technology possessed by the Russians or the Chinese.

Option #1 makes little sense. Why would a species so advanced that it has mastered interstellar travel have any interest in human governments and their military forces?

Option #2 reminds one of the bogus “missile gap” narrative that JFK dishonestly sold the American public about the Soviets holding military superiority over the US in their nuclear arsenal. And anyway if a foreign government has this military technology, why didn’t they use it to become the top military superpower years ago?

Completely unexamined by the Times, to nobody’s surprise, is a third possibility: that the US war machine is lying.

 — @NPR

As the US-centralized empire continues its campaign to militarize space, new conflicts are emerging with unabsorbed governments along that front, like the recent accusation against Russia by the US Space Force of testing a new anti-satellite weapon in space.

“In a sign outer space could be turning into a theater of war for terrestrial adversaries, it marked the first time the U.S. military has publicly charged Moscow with carrying out a space-based weapons test,” NPR reports.

It is likely that the US power alliance is preparing for such conflicts to increase in frequency and intensity in the coming years, and, as we discussed recently, winning disputes related to international law requires a robust international propaganda campaign. The US military has for years been using the mass media to inflame public interest in alleged military information about UFOs, and it’s entirely possible that it has been doing that for this purpose.

As the US moves further and further into a steadily escalating new cold war against both Russia and China, we should remind ourselves that there was a UFO panic during the last cold war. In a 2002 article titled “Cold War hysteria sparked UFO obsession, study finds”, The Guardian reports the following:

But Clarke and Roberts, whose research is to be published this week in a book called Out of the Shadows , did uncover evidence that the American Secret Service, with the possible connivance of the British, looked at ways of using the public panic over UFOs as a psychological weapon against the Russians.
In CIA memos marked ‘secret’ and seen by The Observer, top officials consider exploiting the UFO craze. ‘I suggest that we discuss the possible offensive or defensive utilisation of these phenomena for psychological warfare purposes,’ wrote CIA director Walter Smith in 1952.
‘Shortly after that meeting the CIA sent a delegation to Britain to discuss UFOs. It is hard to imagine that they did not discuss the psychological warfare aspects of it with their British counterparts,’ Clarke said.

So just from the few glimpses we’ve been granted about this thing from behind the veil of government secrecy, we know for a fact that US government agencies are all too happy to use public fixation on UFOs for the purposes of psychological warfare.

 — @caitoz

It’s probably also worth noting that the US military was researching the use of “flying saucers” in the 1950s. In an article titled “US military’s plans for flying saucers explained in declassified documents”, The Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt reported the following in 2012:

The US air force contracted the work to a now-defunct Canadian company, Avro. In one document, Avro envisaged a “top speed potential between Mach 3 and Mach 4, a ceiling of over 100,000ft and a maximum range with allowances of about 1,000 nautical miles”. That would have sent the flying saucer spinning into the Earth’s stratosphere.
Language in a report labelled “final development summary” was optimistic: “It is concluded that the stabilization and control of the aircraft in the manner proposed — the propulsive jets are used to control the aircraft — is feasible and the aircraft can be designed to have satisfactory handling through the whole flight range from ground cushion take-off to supersonic flight at very high altitude.”

We are told that “the project was cancelled and the craft were never built”, but again, this is the US military we are talking about. It’s entirely possible that if the technology we’re being told to worry about does indeed exist, it is not just terrestrial in origin, but American.

It is very telling that despite the new prevalence of video recording equipment in the pockets of the rank-and-file public around the world, we have not been experiencing a huge increase in footage of UFOs and close encounters of the third kind, yet reports in the mass media of UFO involvement with military personnel have only been increasing. This fact by itself should give you very strong doubts about visitations from ET.

I don’t know about you, but I find it a lot more likely that the US war machine is lying to us once again to advance yet another pre-planned military agenda than that an extremely advanced species flew across the galaxy to stare at a bunch of terrestrial military bases.

Anyway that’s all I’ve got for now. The more the US war machine and its media stenographers tell us we should pay attention to this UFO thing, the more skeptical we should become. Eyes wide, earthlings.

____________________________

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics onTwitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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Twitter QAnon Purge Gives Bigger Monopoly to Corporate Media

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Twitter cites fears QAnon activity will lead to “offline harm” while further empowering corporate media whose “offline harm” includes selling wars that have destroyed entire nations abroad and bled the American people dry at home. 

***
News outlets like CNN …

The post Twitter QAnon Purge Gives Bigger Monopoly to Corporate Media appeared first on Global Research.



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Thursday, July 23, 2020

Watch AI Robo-Barber Cut Hair In Post-COVID World  

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Watch AI Robo-Barber Cut Hair In Post-COVID World   Tyler Durden Thu, 07/23/2020 - 22:10

There were several problems people encountered during the virus pandemic. The first, if you couldn't afford a private barber to make an at-home visit - well, there were no barbershops opened because state governments deemed these businesses non-essential. The second issue, as economies reopened, allowing barbershop to resume operations, people who seriously needed a trim, were still fearful of stepping inside a commercial setting, nevertheless, having a stranger hover over them and touch their head for 15-30 minutes. 

The pandemic has undoubtedly created a confidence crisis in barbershops. To solve this issue, one millennial during the epidemic built an impressive robot that cuts hair. 

Shane Wighton of the YouTube channel Stuff Made Here built what appears to be a robo-barber using AI. 

"There are no buzzers or trimmer involved, just a pair of scissors. And a whole lot of engineering and programming skills," said Nerdist

Here's the general gist of how it works. The cutting mechanism, attached to an adjustable lever, rotates around the head of the "customer." The machine then selects hair and measures how far away it is from the person's scalp. That way it won't accidentally cut them. Then, a vacuum grabs the hair and sucks it up. The hair is pulled tight, just like a human would do, while a small section of locks is portioned off. Then the attached scissors snip away the exposed hair at the correct angle. The entire device is attached to a computer program that allows the user to select the haircut of their choice.

Ultimately it was successful. The built-in safety mechanisms worked, as Wighton was never harmed, and he got a passable haircut. Passable. But there were some issues. A math error made the haircut take four times longer than it should have. The protective mechanism also stopped the machine from cutting hair near his ears. -Nerdist 

Wighton explains in the video how the robot works. There's also a demonstration of the robot cutting the inventor's hair.   

While robo-barbers could instill confidence among consumers in a post-corona world - the more significant issue will be permanent job loss as the virus has forced corporations to adopt automation and AI at hyperspeed. 



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A Headline That Perfectly Encapsulates Mainstream Liberalism:

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“JUST IN: Senate Passes $740 Billion Defense Bill With Provision To Remove Confederate Names Off Military Bases” reads a headline from the digital news site Mediaite, which could also serve as a perfect diagnosis for everything that is sick about mainstream liberal orthodoxy.

The Democrat-led House and Republican-led Senate have now both passed versions of this bill authorizing three-quarters of a trillion dollars for a single year of military spending, both by overwhelming bipartisan majorities, on the condition that the names of Confederate Civil War leaders be removed from military bases.

Unsurprisingly, Security Policy Reform Institute’s Stephen Semler found a direct relationship between how much a House Democrat has been paid by the war industry and how likely they were to have voted for the bloated military budget which also obstructs any attempts to scale down troop presence in Afghanistan.

 — @stephensemler

This is everything that is horrible about the Democratic Party and the ideological position of mainstream liberals. Their leaders have figured out a way to trade hard objects for empty narrative. To get people to consent to almost limitless amounts of thievery, murder and exploitation in exchange for words and stories.

They’ll get rid of Confederate names on bases, but they won’t even slightly reduce the vast fortunes they’re stealing from an impoverished populace and pouring into global slaughter and oppression. They’ll kneel wearing Kente cloth, but they even think about dismantling the US police state. They’ll say “I hear you, and that’s something we’re looking at,” but they’ll never intervene against plutocrats funnelling money away from the needful to add to their unfathomably vast fortunes. They’ll call you whatever gender pronoun you like, but they’ll never do anything to inconvenience the oligarchs and warmongers.

They’ll still make you fight tooth and claw for each empty concession, because otherwise they’d be devaluing the empty, imaginary currency they’re trading you in exchange for the concrete things they want. But in the end there is no amount of narrative the powerful won’t swap out for actual policy changes of substance, because narrative in and of itself has no value. Manipulators understand this distinction with crystal clear lucidity. Their victims do not.

In reality it would be a lot more truthful and authentic for the bases within the US war machine to continue to bear the names of racists, killers and oppressors, since these embody the values of that war machine far better than anything with a more pleasant ring to it. As long as you’re robbing the American people to murder brown-skinned foreigners for corporate interests and geostrategic resource control, you might as well have names which reflect such values on your war machinery.

So I say keep the Confederate names on the bases. Hell, add more of them. Add the names of Nazis, genocidal warlords and serial killers too while you’re at it. It’d certainly be a lot more honest and accurate to have a Fort Jeffrey Dahmer as part of America’s murder machine than a Fort Colin Kaepernick.

 — @medeabenjamin

War is the single worst thing in the world. It is the most evil, insane, counter-productive, wasteful, damaging, kleptocratic and unsustainable thing that human beings do, by a very wide margin. If Americans could viscerally experience all of the horrors that are inflicted by the war machine their wealth and resources are being funneled into, with their perception unfiltered by propaganda and government secrecy, they would fall to their knees screaming with abject rage. They would be in the streets immediately forcing an end to this unforgivable savagery. Which is exactly why America has so much government secrecy and propaganda.

If Americans could see with their perceptions unmanipulated, their response to the news that $740 billion is being stolen from the American people by a sociopathic murder machine in exchange for removing the names of Confederate leaders from its bases would not be “Oh good, maybe we’ll get a Fort Harriet Tubman!” It would be rage. Unmitigated, unforgiving rage. Which is all the status quo deserves. Which is all the Democratic Party exists to prevent.

____________________

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics onTwitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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College women, take heed: Prioritize marriage and family!

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In the last week alone, I’ve spoken with three millennial women (who reached out for coaching) who are all in the same boat: they’re up to their eyeballs in debt, having gotten degree upon degree due to the pressure they felt from their parents and the culture to do something big with their lives. To not let their intellect go to waste. To not worry about finding a man to marry or even having children because, well, they have bigger fish to fry.

These women aren’t just in debt—they’re crestfallen. All they want is to have a family of their own, but they’ve been so conditioned to believe marriage and motherhood constitutes a lesser life, they don’t dare admit this desire. I can’t tell you the number of single women who tell me they’d give up their career in a hot second for a husband and kids.

And it’s not just unmarried women. Many of the wives and mothers I hear from are working at professions they don’t care much about, and want more time at home to be with their kids and to live a slower-paced life. Problem is, they married men who lack ambition (either that, or they had it but took a step back to accommodate their wives’ ambition) and as a result the women became their family’s main breadwinner. And it’s a role most of them hate.

Their predicament was inevitable. For one thing, modern women weren’t taught to look for a man who can provide for a wife and kids. Women are supposed to take care of themselves! That’s the narrative with which these women were raised, so it never occurred to them to look at a man’s professional prospects.

Second, by delaying marriage indefinitely, these women wound up with fewer choices. Good men of strong character, who are conscientious and gainfully employed, tend to marry younger, family-oriented women. These women may or may not have a college degree and/or a career, but they nevertheless view work as a secondary value to their main priority: marriage and family.

Ergo, by the time the career-focused women are around 30 years of age, the pickings are slim. They can look for a man who’s as ambitious as they, and occasionally they will find him—but sheer math means many will not. So they settle on the best they can get: men who are nice and who are safe, but who lack the necessary drive to produce on behalf of their families.

And we can’t dismiss the reason why so many modern men lack drive: because they’ve failed to launch. What did we think would happen in a culture that hails women’s ambition and independence from men and tells men, both verbally and subliminally, that they’re superfluous?

It’s the culture, along with the previous generation of parents, who created this mess. They instilled all the wrong messages and all the wrong values in the modern generation. As a result, women and men are paying the price.

Still, I have hopes for the women of Generation Z. I think they’re witnessing all of this; and while this group has problems of their own—anxiety, mainly—I don’t believe they’ll end up in the same boat as their millennial sisters. I think they will marry earlier, and they will prioritize motherhood. A career will likely be part of their lives, but it will not be the focus of their lives. It will not be their raison d’être.

That’s the crux of the problem for the women who reach out to me: they were taught that their value lies in what they do, rather than in who they are—that if they don’t live lives the way men live theirs, they are failures. And it’s tearing them up inside. One woman broke down after admitting she has spent a decade getting two degrees she doesn’t even want.

This is madness. Going into debt to prove one’s worth and struggling to do what previous generations used to do with ease—find a man and settle down—is hardly progress. There’s nothing empowering about any of this. College women, take heed: Do not let this be your fate! Prioritize marriage and family. Make it the center of your life, and fit everything else in around that.

No offense, but I’d love to not hear from you ten years down the line.

Republished with the author’s permission. Read the original article at SuzanneVenker.com

The post College women, take heed: Prioritize marriage and family! appeared first on MercatorNet.



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More parents are home schooling

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(CS MONITOR) – Teri Carey never expected to teach her children at home. But after weeks of researching how to homeschool, she has now selected instruction materials, withdrawn her son from his local public school, and started math, science, and history lessons with her 7-year-old.

"Obviously COVID had a lot to do with it" says Ms. Carey, from Maynard, Massachusetts, who will also care for her toddler this year. "However, it was less about contracting COVID and the fear of getting sick – that was a part of it – but it was more the atmosphere he'd be learning in," with students and staff wearing masks, desks spaced apart, and limited movement around the building.

"We thought it would be a better learning environment at home," where he will likely feel less nervous, she says.

The likelihood of a sizable uptick in home schooling families this year due to pandemic concerns, along with families experimenting with other forms of remote education, means many parents are rethinking approaches to school. Some of them wonder if such options create more flexibility for their schedules, offer more opportunity to discuss cultural heritage, and better accommodate different learning styles. Such a shift could impact how education is delivered in brick and mortar schools going forward, some educators say.

Read the full story ›

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Bill Binney on Russian “Hacking” – Live

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UPDATE Since posting the link to Bill Binney’s talk, a number of people have been in touch to allege that the hosting organisation, the Schiller Institute, has an objectionable right wing or even racist agenda. I am not aware and have no time now to research. I am however 100% certain that Bill Binney, whom I know, is neither right wing nor in any sense racist, and that he has very important things to say. This does not constitute either an endorsement or a condemnation of the Schiller Institute or anybody else who may be present or speaking.

William Binney, former Technical Director of the National Security Agency (NSA – GCHQ’s much bigger American brother) and the world’s foremost expert in cyber-surveillance, explains why it is impossible that Russia hacked the DNC and Podesta emails for Wikileaks.

From the International Schiller Institute, Washington DC live at 11am in Washington, 4pm in the UK.

Despite the fact that $32 million Mueller Inquiry could find “no concrete evidence” of the hack and Crowdstrike, the source of the original allegation, have admitted there is “no evidence of exfiltration”, the media and establishment persists in the “Russian hacking” narrative. It is stated as accepted fact in the Russophobic report of the Intelligence and Security Committee in the UK.

Yet it is simply untrue, and can be proven to be untrue. See William Binney explain why.

You need to register here
https://schillerinstitute.com/blog/2020/07/20/william-binney-makes-his-case-to-the-world-there-was-no-russian-hack/

The post Bill Binney on Russian “Hacking” – Live appeared first on Craig Murray.



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Wednesday, July 22, 2020

How COVID-19 Will Affect Medical Malpractice and You



Disclaimer: The entire contents of this website are based upon the opinions of Dr. Mercola, unless otherwise noted. Individual articles are based upon the opinions of the respective author, who retains copyright as marked.

ORIGINAL LINK

UK Inquiry Finds Leaders "Ignored" Russian Interference, "Welcomed Oligarchs & Their Money With Open Arms"



FT writes of the newest Russian interference report out of the UK which is now driving headlines, “A long-awaited report into Russian interference in British politics has concluded that Moscow’s influence is 'the new normal' with senior figures with Kremlin links enjoying access to top business

ORIGINAL LINK

UK Inquiry Finds Leaders "Ignored" Russian Interference, "Welcomed Oligarchs & Their Money With Open Arms"

ORIGINAL LINK
UK Inquiry Finds Leaders "Ignored" Russian Interference, "Welcomed Oligarchs & Their Money With Open Arms" Tyler Durden Wed, 07/22/2020 - 04:15

FT writes of the newest Russian interference report out of the UK which is now driving headlines, “A long-awaited report into Russian interference in British politics has concluded that Moscow’s influence is 'the new normal' with senior figures with Kremlin links enjoying access to top business and political leaders.” And further:

The report by the Intelligence and Security Committee concludes that successive governments have “welcomed the oligarchs and their money with open arms, providing them with a means of recycling illicit finance through the London ‘laundromat’, and connections at the highest levels with access to UK companies and political figures”.

Some have observed that it's amazing how without fail these reports filled with explosive 'meddling' allegations are so convenient to those overseeing such investigations: 

A rather convenient outcome for the pro-Brexit, anti-Scottish independence British government which commissioned the report.... just fancy that, etc! pic.twitter.com/V07GtzWpig

— Bryan MacDonald (@27khv) July 21, 2020

The report put out today by UK parliament's cross-party Intelligence and Security Committee comes after an eight-month investigation which examined "Russian influence" in UK politics. It's a 55-page report documenting somewhat nebulous Russian "influence campaigns". 

Despite admission that there's no evidence of Russian interference in the Brexit vote, the new report is still being used to suggest just that.

Former chair of the committee which conducted the UK inquiry, Dominic Grieve, charged the Russia and Brexit issue had been intentionally "glossed over". Grieve said, "There was no government desire to look at it and it hasn't looked at it." 

And look at this astounding follow-up line via CNN:

He added that it "troubled" the committee that there was so little intelligence on Russia's role in the vote.

"Because it seems to me that it was a very significant democratic event, that there is now plenty of evidence of Russian interference in democratic processes, and it there ought really to be a proper focus on whether it happened in this particular case or not," Grieve added.

So there it is: very similar to how the Mueller report in the US fell flat, the very chair of the investigative committee is on record admitting that in essence, we set out from the beginning to "confirm" Russian meddling in Brexit but were disappointed when we didn't find anything... so the only explanation is cover-up!

Meanwhile the report calls for a fuller investigation into alleged Russian manipulation related to the Brexit vote.

Like the big nothing-burger that the Meuller report ended up being, this one in the end will likely prove to be even more suspect. Just look at some of the key sources for the report:

Among the committee's expert witnesses were former MI6 spy Christopher Steele, author of the explosive Trump-Russia dossier that painted a picture of widespread conspiracy of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, a document that Trump has dismissed as "phony" and full of lies.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said ahead of the report’s official publication that he would bet that the document would be “just a new round of evidence-free allegations.”

The Kremlin quickly responded by batting it down as “just a new round of evidence-free allegations” and that with regards to election meddling it ultimately “produced negative results and failed to prove anything.” 



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Tuesday, July 21, 2020

I Don’t Always Believe CIA Narratives. But When I Do, I Believe Them About China.

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My social media notifications have been lighting up the last few days with virulent Chinagaters sharing a video which purports to show Uighur Muslims being loaded onto a train to be taken to concentration camps. It’s actually an old video that had already surfaced last year, but it is magically making the rounds again as a new and shocking revelation in 2020 now that western China hysteria has been officially kicked into high gear, at exactly the same time the US enacts one of the most dangerous and incendiary escalations of recent years in the South China Sea.

 — @CarlZha

Everyone tagging me in this video presents it as a self-evident “gotcha” moment, in exactly the same way Russiagaters spent years tagging me in every HUGE BOMBSHELL WALLS ARE CLOSING IN item of thinly sourced narrative fluff in their debunked conspiracy theory that the Kremlin had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government.

They are one hundred percent certain that the video shows Uighurs being loaded onto a train to go to a concentration camp, solely because that is what the bit of text over the video tells them that that’s what they are seeing. They aren’t looking at the actual data and thinking critically about it, they’re looking at the narrative and believing it on blind faith. Which, in a post-Iraq invasion world, is an absolutely insane thing to do when presented with information about a nation that is targeted by the US-centralized empire.

In reality there’s nothing in the video which tells us that these are Uighur people being sent to a “re-education camp” and not merely a conventional prison transfer of convicted criminals, the likes of which take place in the far more populous US prison system all the time. It’s an unknown. We are told by the BBC’s Andrew Marr (the same Andrew Marr whose phony journalism Noam Chomsky derided years ago) that it has been “authenticated by western intelligence agencies and by Australian experts”, which in practice are the same thing, and that’s really the extent of the evidence. Again, this is an insane source to take on faith in a post-Iraq invasion world.

There are in fact an abundance of reasons to be highly skeptical of the establishment narrative about what is happening to Uighurs in Xinjiang. But that isn’t the point that I am trying to make here.

 — @caitoz

The point I am trying to make here is that the only sane response to any narrative that is being promoted by western intelligence agencies and their media stenographers about governments which have resisted absorption into the imperial blob is intense and unrelenting skepticism. These organizations have such an extensive and well-known history of lying about exactly this sort of thing that they have left us no choice but to withhold belief from anything they say absent a mountain of independently verifiable evidence if we want to have a fact-based relationship with reality.

None of this means that China has a wonderful government. It doesn’t even mean that all the bad things we’re being told about what the Chinese government is doing are false. It’s entirely possible that that video shows exactly what we’re being urgently told to believe it shows. There’s simply no way to be sure one way or the other in an information ecosystem that is so severely tainted by propagandistic narrative manipulation.

Surely the Chinese government is far from sinless. It seems to be a constant that power structures which keep secrets and use propaganda will always wind up doing ugly things. But this doesn’t mean you go believing whatever cold war-facilitating story we are fed by western power structures about it. Not if we want to avoid being duped into serving as pro bono CIA propagandists, unwitting tools of a murderous war machine.

There is a slow-motion third world war underway between the US-centralized power alliance and the nations like China which have resisted being absorbed into it, and that war is being largely facilitated by propaganda. If one doesn’t wish to become a propagandist themselves, one ought to withhold belief from the stories they are told about the terrible, awful things the unabsorbed nations are doing which require extensive sanctions, subversion and interventionism in response.

This doesn’t mean you believe the opposite of what you’re told, it simply means you refrain from believing either way and remain agnostic until presented with hard verifiable proof. Believing damaging narratives about US-targeted governments is exactly as stupid as believing the words of a known compulsive liar about someone you know he hates.

China is such a curious anomaly in the narrative matrix. Many who are normally skeptical of claims by western governments immediately swallow anything they’re told about China. They not only believe all such claims, it never even occurs to them to seriously question them. Like they seem to be genuinely unaware that skepticism of establishment China narratives is even an option. The claims just slide right into the “believe” file in their mind, completely unchecked by anything resembling critical thought.

I argue with people all over the political spectrum about China online, and an astonishing percentage of them have clearly put exactly zero research into critically examining these claims, even if they’re people who are normally relatively critical of western foreign policy. They’re often completely unaware that whatever claims they’re advancing are not just disputed but have large amounts of evidence against them. This is because they’ve done no research whatsoever into finding out what they were told is even true. They’ll do that research on Iran, they’ll do it about Russia, they’ll do it about Syria, but with China all skepticism immediately goes right now the window. It’s the weirdest thing.

Always be intensely skeptical of claims made about governments targeted by the known liars who run the US-centralized empire. Always, always, always, always. If you advance imperialist propaganda, then you are just as culpable for the bloodshed and suffering they help facilitate as the people who are actually launching the missiles.

Stay skeptical, my friends.

___________________________

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics onTwitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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Monday, July 20, 2020

St. Louis Couple Charged With Felony After Using Firearms To Ward Off Trespassing Protesters

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St. Louis Couple Charged With Felony After Using Firearms To Ward Off Trespassing Protesters Tyler Durden Mon, 07/20/2020 - 19:10

A wealthy St. Louis couple who made headlines last month for displaying firearms in front of their home as a group of BLM activists marched towards the Mayor's house will be charged with felony unlawful use of a weapon, and face a misdemeanor charge of fourth-degree assault.

St. Louis' top prosecutor, Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, announced on Monday that she would be filing charges against personal injury attorneys Mark and Patricia McCloskey.

A St. Louis couple defends their home with guns as protesters march through their neighborhood:pic.twitter.com/LqzvrBSREu

— Alex Salvi (@alexsalvinews) June 29, 2020

"It is illegal to wave weapons in a threatening manner -- that is unlawful in the city of St. Louis," Gardner said in a statement, adding that she was recommending community service in lieu of up to four years in prison, according to Politico.

St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner

The McCloskey's defenders - including several GOP leaders, President Trump and  others have urged Attorney General William Barr to investigate Gardner - while Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (R) said in a Friday radio interview that he would likely pardon the McCloskeys if they were charged and convicted.

Gardner responded by suggesting that Trump and other McCloskey defenders are attacking her to distract from "their failed approach to the COVID-19 pandemic" along with other issues, per Politico.

St. Louis, like many cities across the country, has seen demonstrations in the weeks since George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, and the McCloskeys’ home was initially incidental to the demonstration on June 28. Several hundred people were marching to the home of Democratic Mayor Lyda Krewson, a few blocks from the McCloskeys’ home. Krewson had angered activists by reading on Facebook Live the names and addresses of some who had called for defunding police.

The McCloskeys live on a private street called Portland Place. A police report said the couple heard a loud commotion and saw a large group of people break an iron gate marked with “No Trespassing” and “Private Street” signs. A protest leader, the Rev. Darryl Gray, said the gate was open and that protesters didn’t damage it. -Politico

The McCloskeys have repeatedly said they were defending themselves as tensions have flared during destructive and violent BLM riots across the country.

Less than two weeks ago, St. Louis authorities raided the McCloskey residence, confiscating the AR-15 used by Mark McCloskey. The couple said their attorney was in possession of the pistol Patricia McCloskey brandished during the confrontation.



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FedEx Hitman Didn’t Kill Himself

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As most reading this are aware, a gunman disguised as a FedEx delivery driver rang the doorbell of the North Brunswick, NJ home of US District Court Judge Esther Salas on Sunday evening and fatally shot her 20-year-old son and wounded her husband. This occurred 4 days after the Jeffrey Epstein Deutsche Bank case had been assigned to Judge Salas.

Deustche Bank has long been known as a narco-money launderer for the CIA’s drug running operations. On July 15th, the bank was sued for making false and misleading statements before it agreed to pay a $150 million fine for compliance failures linked to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court in Newark, NJ, seeking unspecified damages.

As of last night, the suspect remained at large but early Monday afternoon, it was revealed that the suspect had been found, dead in his car of an apparent self-inflicted gun wound, 130 miles away in Liberty, NY. A FedEx package addressed to Judge Salas was found in the car. It was almost like those Saudi passports found next to the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Heavy.com reported the suspect to be Roy Den Hollender, a “Men’s Rights” activist and attorney who’d launched several frivolous lawsuits and who’d appeared to be unstable for many years. The New York Times reported Hollender brought a lawsuit before Judge Salas in 2015 that challenged the male-only military draft.

It didn’t take long for Tweets of “FedEx hitman didn’t kill himself!” and memes of Hillary Clinton dressed in a FedEx uniform to erupt on Twitter, considering that two Deutsche bank employees who “committed suicide” in 2019 were tied to the same case.

In this video released prior to the discovery of the suspect’s body, former CIA agent, Robert David Steele explains why he doesn’t believe this was a professional hit and he drills down on the seven different types of assassin that might have been involved.

1. Mossad, which Steele says has the most to gain from shutting down the Epstein-Maxwell case. Steele argues they would have assigned at least three members to the hit team and all three members of Salas’ family would have been killed.

2. CIA & FBI, which are “complicit with Mossad with the pedophilia entrapment operations epitomized by Maxwell and Epstein and funded by Wexner,” would also have killed all three – and more likely, with a staged traffic accident. “Whatever the mission was, I don’t think it included just killing the kid and it certainly would have included second rounds if you want someone dead.”

3. Les Wexner. Steele says the Victoria’s Secret owner is a hardcore Zionist who financed Jeffrey Epstein – and he’s also alleged to have funded 9/11. Steele says, “There’s every possibility that Les Wexner was beginning to feel the heat because he was ultimately responsible for everything Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell did with his money and his blessing and his probably participation.”

4. A contract killer hired by one of the hundreds of elite pedophiles that have been captured on video by the Epstein-Maxwell Mossad CIA-FBI operation, “And the contract killer just blew it.”

5. Sayanim agents with US passports recruited by Israel to assist in their operations – and they blew it. Steele then asks, “What happens when everybody across America who has reason to fear for their life if a FedEx truck rolls up to their doorway – or an Amazon Prime truck…this is not cool at all, for either Amazon or FedEx.”

6. The Bloods. Steele says it’s highly possible that it was the husband, who was involved in a Bloods gang case, who was targeted and not Salas. (Steele said this before the box addressed to Salas was found in the suspect’s car).

7. Random. “This could be somebody who lost at poker to the husband and decided to do something about it.

If the shooter was indeed, Hollender, then Steele would be correct that this was not a professional hit. Some are asking if Hollender had a grudge against Salas, why would he wait 5 years – and 4 days after she was appointed to an Epstein case to attack?

The story is developing.

Alexandra Bruce

Contributed by Alexandra Bruce

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Sunday, July 19, 2020

Cancel Government Secrecy: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

ORIGINAL LINK

I’ve been publishing a lot more Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix pieces lately because something shifted here recently and I’ve been having loads more ideas for pithy tweet-sized observations, and if I don’t publish them regularly they’ll be hour-long reads. But don’t worry if you’re more of a fan of the normal essays, I’ll still be putting those out as per usual too.
- CJ

~

Want a healthy world? End secrecy for the powerful, break up all media and fully democratize it, and decriminalize psychedelics. Stop interfering in people’s ability to clearly see what’s going on in their world, in their nation and in themselves, and a healthy system will naturally arise.

~

The amount of power you have over other people should have an exactly inverse relationship to your right to privacy. The more power you have, the less secrecy you should be entitled to. Once your power reaches governmental level, that secrecy should be zero.

How crazy is it that we’ve allowed people to have power over us and also keep secrets from us? That by itself is bat shit insane. And then to let them shame us and punish us when we try to work out what they’re up to behind that wall of opacity?Utter madness.

Nobody running any government should be allowed to have secrets. Yes, this will mean fewer people are interested in getting into government. That’s as it should be. It shouldn’t be enticing. It’s meant to be a vocation, dedicated to public service. Public servants, private citizens. If you want privacy, then power should be made unappealing to you.

~

Government says it needs secrecy to make war on its enemies effectively, and, curiously, the more secrecy we allow it the more wars and enemies it seems to have.

~

Step 1: Legalize government secrecy so you can do evil things in secret.

Step 2: Use government secrecy to do many many evil things.

Step 3: Call anyone who says you do evil things in secret a crazy conspiracy theorist.

~

Government: We need to keep secrets from you.

Public: Why?

Government: We can’t fight the wars against our enemies without secrecy.

Public: But we’re not in any wars and we have no enemies.

Government: Yeah well it’s hard to make them when you don’t let us keep secrets from you.

~

Humanity is trying its best to collectively fix its problems, but trying to do so in a world whose power dynamics are aggressively obscured by propaganda and government secrecy is like trying to hit a bullseye in a dark room. Gotta find a way to turn those lights on so we can hit the target.

~

Rather than pretending to know exactly what type of revolutionary society would best lead to human thriving, you do have the option of just supporting the freeing up of all information and the end of all perception management and letting people figure it out for themselves.

End all government secrecy, end all political secrecy, end all corporate secrecy, end all Wall Street and financial secrecy, end all propaganda, give everyone equal media control, and just let people see clearly what the hell is actually truly going on in their world, and they’ll naturally start using the power of their numbers to push for healthy changes in their own way. Let people see the actual truth of what’s actually happening and stop using mass media to manipulate their understanding of the raw data and they can make informed decisions about what to do.

It’s the authoritarian mind that thinks it knows exactly what’s best for everyone. A respect for people’s self-sovereignty really means you just want powerful manipulators to stop dicking around with everyone’s understanding of the world so they can figure stuff out on their own.

Anyone with any interest in or access to power should be forbidden to keep secrets from the public. Like how crazy is it that DNC officials were allowed to conspire with each other in secret about how they were going to rule America in the first place? No, you don’t get to do that. If you’re part of a power structure, you have to show your work. Period.

If everyone could see what’s really going on they’d create a world that is night-and-day different than the one we have now, and infinitely healthier. Which is why existing power structures pour so much effort into keeping people from seeing what’s really going on.

I personally think that if people had all the information and weren’t being manipulated by powerful interests they’d create a society that takes care of everyone and isn’t driven by the pursuit of profit, but what the hell do I know? Give them clear vision and let them decide.

In any case, nobody’s getting any revolutionary society of any kind as long as the powerful can control what information people have access to and manipulate the way they think and vote. There will be no revolution as long as people are manipulated into supporting the status quo.

~

The first and foremost job of any US president is to serve as a decoy to draw the fire of all public scrutiny toward real power structures.

~

Propaganda is the root of all our problems; people consent to inequality and injustice because they’re manipulated into doing so. And propaganda is only effective because we’ve got an idiotic societal taboo against acknowledging that we can be fooled. That our minds are hackable.

Manipulation only works when you don’t know it’s happening. Those who think they’re too clever to be manipulated (which would be the majority of people) are the most vulnerable to manipulation. If we just made manipulation more shameful than being manipulated, this could change.

You cannot form an accurate worldview without accounting for the fact that powerful people have invested a great deal in manipulating that worldview, and that to some extent they have probably succeeded. Because being manipulated is considered shameful, most don’t look at this.

I have been manipulated and fooled. So have you. It happens to all of us. There’s no shame in it. The shame belongs solely to those doing the manipulating and deceiving. Fraud is a crime for a reason, and the one they charge for that crime is not the victim, it’s the perpetrator.

_____________________

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics onTwitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my books Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone and Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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Bank Of England Governor Signals Central Bank Digital Currency Is Coming

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Bank Of England Governor Signals Central Bank Digital Currency Is Coming Tyler Durden Sun, 07/19/2020 - 09:20

Authored by Steven Guinness,

As confirmed by several economic outlets, including Bloomberg, Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey took part in a VTALK with students this past Monday for Speakers for Schools. When the subject of digital currency came up, Bailey said:

We are looking at the question of, should we create a Bank of England digital currency. We’ll go on looking at it, as it does have huge implications on the nature of payments and society. I think in a few years time, we will be heading toward some sort of digital currency.

The digital currency issue will be a very big issue. I hope it is, because that means Covid will be behind us.

Whilst only a short quote, there are several strands to pick up on here.

Firstly, Bailey stating that the BOE are looking into creating a CBDC is not a new revelation. I posted a series of articles in May which looked extensively at a discussion paper published by the bank days before the Covid-19 lockdown was enforced. The paper, ‘Central Bank Digital Currency – Opportunities, challenges and design‘, went as far as detailing the possible technological composition of a future CBDC. It was in 2014 when the BOE first began discussing digital currencies in their September quarterly bulletin.  Six years on, those discussions have advanced notably.

Secondly, if Bailey’s assertion is correct that ‘in a few years time, we will be heading toward some sort of digital currency‘, this would align with the BOE’s Real Time Gross Settlement renewal programme. In August 2019 I posted an article that outlined what the renewal will consist of (Working in Tandem: The Reform of Payment Systems and the Advance of Digital Technology). From 2023 onwards, the bank wants renewed services of RTGS to begin coming online, and by 2025 for it to be fully rolled out and operational.

Consider that this is taking place amidst the Bank for International Settlements ‘Innovation BIS 2025‘ initiative, something which I have regularly written about. This is the ‘hub‘ which brings all leading central banks together in the name of technological innovation.

The RTGS ‘renewal‘ will allow for the bank’s payment system to ‘interface with new payment technologies’, which given the information that the BOE has so far disseminated would likely include distributed ledger technology and blockchain.

For the bank to introduce a CBDC accessible to the public, they will require the reformation of their systems, which is exactly what is happening.

Thirdly, Bailey admits that introducing a CBDC would have ‘huge implications on the nature of payments and society‘. On the payments front, the BOE are pushing the narrative that any CBDC offering would be a ‘complement‘ to cash. It would not, according to them, mean that cash would be withdrawn from circulation. But as I have noted previously, the General Manager of the BIS, Agustin Carstens, made clear in 2019 that in a CBDC world ‘he or she would no longer have the option of paying cash. All purchases would be electronic.

The trend of digital payments outstripping cash has been present for several years now. My position is that instead of simply outlawing cash, the state will allow the use of banknotes to fall to the point that the servicing costs of maintaining the cash infrastructure outweigh the amount of cash still in circulation and being used for payment. They will take the gradual approach as opposed to prising cash away from the public. In the end it has the same effect but appears less premeditated. From the perspective of the state, it is much more desirable if people are seen to have made the decision themselves to stop using cash, rather than the state imposing it upon the population.

The societal aspect is equally as serious, because those who depend on using cash are finding that access to it is growing more restrictive. This is something I have also posted about (Access to Cash: The Connection between Bank Branch Closures and the Post Office). Rural communities in particularly are being compromised, with some entirely dependent on their local post office to withdraw funds. Matters are made worse when the Post Office network itself is coming under increasing strain.

It was also revealed this week that during the Covid-19 lockdown, over 7,000 ATM’s across the UK were closed due to social distancing measures. This represents over 10% of the UK’s ATM network. Some of these ATM’s still remain out of use, particularly at supermarkets and outside certain bank branches. Equally, some of these branches remain closed four months after the lockdown was introduced, and those that are open are only allowing in a couple of people at a time.

You will recall the hysteria around the supposed dangers of using cash as Covid-19 was labelled a pandemic. On no scientific basis whatsoever, people have been led to believe that handling cash can transmit the virus. This is primarily why cash withdrawals at ATM’s crashed leading into the lockdown by around 50%. This time last year transaction volume was at 50.9 million. Today it is 30.8 million, a 40% drop. From personal experience as a cash office clerk, cash use is now beginning to pick up, but remains well below pre-lockdown levels.

Finally, Bailey commented that he hoped ‘the digital currency issue will be a very big issue‘, because if it was it would mean that ‘Covid will be behind us.‘ A valid question to ask here is why when Covid-19 is ‘behind us‘ should that make the case for a CBDC stronger? The answer lies partly in the growing narrative of life after the pandemic, which plays directly into the World Economic Forum devised ‘Great Reset‘ agenda. Part of the ‘Great Reset‘ includes Blockchain, Financial and Monetary Systems and Digital Economy and New Value Creation.

On first glance, you can see how Covid-19 benefits the drive towards central bank digital currencies.

We are told at every turn that life cannot possibly go back to how it was pre coronavirus, including our relationship with money. Predictably, it did not take global institutions like the BIS long to begin reaffirming the cashless agenda. In April they published a bulletin called, ‘Covid-19, cash, and the future of payments‘ where they stated:

In the context of the current crisis, CBDC would in particular have to be designed allowing for access options for the unbanked and (contact-free) technical interfaces suitable for the whole population. The pandemic may hence put calls for CBDCs into sharper focus, highlighting the value of having access to diverse means of payments, and the need for any means of payments to be resilient against a broad range of threats.

Global planners are seizing on the opportunity that Covid-19 has created. But no one should be deceived into thinking that their prescription for a digital monetary system, with CBDC’s at the center, is only coming to light because of the pandemic. This has been in the works for years.

The banking elites are hoping that once global payment systems have been reformed, CBDC’s will not be far behind. Judging by their own timelines, by 2025 a global network of CBDC’s is a real possibility. The more people that turn away from using cash today, the easier the transition away from tangible assets will prove for those who are angling for it to happen.



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