Saturday, September 5, 2020
Current health guidance is utterly WRONG: Full-fat milk & red meat are good for you. It’s the vegetable oils that can kill you
The release of previously repressed studies shows that if you substitute saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats, this INCREASES the risk of cardiovascular disease. My fellow doctors need to accept the evidence.
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Demonstrations against “New Normal” in Berlin: The Storming of the Reichstag Building on 29 August, 2020
image Berlin August 1 protest
On March 21, 1933, the Nazi-controlled Reichstag passed a law making it a crime to speak out against the government. The “Regulations of the Reich President for Defense from Treacherous Attacks against the Government of …
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Unprecedented US Economic Collapse and Reality Defying Market Bubble
For 24 straight weeks, over a million working-age Americans applied for unemployment insurance (UI) benefits.
What’s been going on since March is unprecedented in US history, likely more of the same ahead and perhaps the worst of times to come.…
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My Hospital Experience and What the Nurses Told Me About COVID-19
JB reports in:
I just got home from back surgery where I spent 4 days in the hospital to start the recovery process. I was able to have some really good conversations with the nurses that were caring for me.
…
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The dangers facing American youth from 'peer contagion'
J.K. Rowling
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Politics.]
By J. Peder Zane
Real Clear Politics
Left-wing activists and the liberals who fear them love signs – the de rigueur accoutrement for today’s virtuous lawn is a poster (or two, or three) declaring that “In this house we believe science is real, black lives matter, love is love.”
Our inner Mr. Spock finds it hard to see the point given that the vast majority of Americans endorse these banalities. It’s the political equivalent of proclaiming, “In this home we breathe air and drink water.” Welcome to the club, pal.
And yet these signs are meant to convey the opposite message: I must take these courageous stands because all around me have abandoned basic principles of decency – and if I don’t signal this, the activists and bien pensants might target me next.
This effort to co-opt basic values, to claim they belong to just one political group, is false, ugly and divisive. It denies the humanity of those who dissent from the left’s aggressive demands. It silences debate by reframing complexities of COVID-19 and policing, race and American history to moral questions. You’re either good or evil.
This Manichaean strategy has risen to the fore because the ascendant left has sought to transform America, no questions asked. Just a few years ago, Democrats believed that we were an essentially good country that had made meaningful strides on race and gender. They agreed that the police were a flawed but necessary tool for maintaining safety.
Not anymore. With a blinding velocity of grievance they have planted a new sign above our fruited plain that reads: This Property Is Condemned. The left excels at finding the speck in their brother’s eye – at deconstructing the failures and hypocrisies of the current system. They are far less capable of acknowledging their own contradictions and laying out specific plans for the new society they wish to construct on the ashes of the old one.
Thus they tell us the issue is not about what they want to do and whether it will work, but about love. That’s our side – are you for us or against us? Journalist Abigail Shrier details one dangerous outcome of this strategy in her new book, “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.”
Most Americans had never given much thought to transgenderism until 2016, when North Carolina Republicans passed a bill restricting single-sex bathrooms to biological boys and girls. Let me say at the outset that I believe the law was stupid and unnecessary; no one was complaining about “men” using the ladies room. But the left went to war, presenting transgenderism as an all-or-nothing civil rights issue. The message: Embrace every demand of trans activists without question or be branded a hater. While acknowledging the need to respect the dignity and equality of trans adults, Shrier’s eye-opening book illuminates the devastating impact this cultural change is having on teenage girls.
She reports that transgenderism has long been a rare condition – historically about one in 10,000 people suffer from the medical condition known as “gender dysphoria.” One of those is the great British writer Jan (nee James) Morris, who eloquently described her struggle and ultimate deliverance in “Conundrum.”
In the last decade, Shrier reports, this figure has increased 1,000 percent. “Two percent of high school students,” she reports, “now identify as transgender.” Shrier notes that transgenderism was so rare among girls that before 2012 “there was no scientific literature on girls ages eleven to twenty-one ever having developed gender dysphoria at all.”
It is likely they existed and no one was looking for them. But that cannot begin to explain the fact that biological girls now account for “70 percent of all gender surgeries.” Shrier reports similar increases in other Western countries, including Canada, Sweden, Finland and the United Kingdom.
Although one would expect that a condition allegedly rooted in DNA would occur somewhat evenly across all races and classes, Shrier’s research found that these girls largely come from white, upper-middle-class families. She reports that Dr. Lisa Littman of Brown University found that one of the best predictors that a girl might feel she was born in the wrong body is having friends who believe they were, too. Littman calls this root cause “peer contagion.”
Shrier notes that contagion is occurring against a broader mental health crisis among America’s youth marked by sharp increases in depression and suicidal ideation. The hardest hit group is young girls who have historically suffered from self-esteem and body image issues far more than boys. The rise of social media, a hothouse of judgment, is also key. So, too, is the online culture where strangers influence children through YouTube videos promising that all their problems will be solved once they transition.
Make no mistake, these girls are in pain. They need help. But Shrier argues persuasively that the woke culture that casts transgenderism as a civil rights issue limits the care they receive. The prevailing medical standard for treatment, she writes, is “affirmative care,” which replaces professional judgment with self-diagnosis. “The therapist must agree, in other words, that a male patient with gender dysphoria who identifies as a woman really is a woman.”
This can have long-term effects because the hormone blockers and surgeries necessary for transition often lead to infertility and other permanent changes.
“Irreversible Damage” tells a frightening story. Though convincing, it is far from the last word on the topic. And that’s the point. Transgenderism is a complex issue that came out of the blue just a few years ago. It demands rigorous research and full-throated debate – not real-time experimentation on youngsters. Instead, the left has sought to silence discussion by casting it as a moral question of tolerance. That’s why Amazon refused to carry ads for Shrier’s book and people like “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling have been attacked by Twitter mobs for claiming that biological sex is real.
More broadly, as the left rushes headlong to erase our past and the traditional pillars of our society – all in the fuzzy name of justice and love -- “Irreversible Damage” shows the damage that often occurs when we fail to ask: With what result?
God, after all, is in the details.
J. Peder Zane is an editor for RealClearInvestigations and a columnist for RealClearPolitics.
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Politics.]
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For Years, Journalists Cheered Assange’s Abuse
Court hearings in Britain over the US administration’s extradition case against Julian Assange begin in earnest next week. The decade-long saga that brought us to this point should appall anyone who cares about our increasingly fragile freedoms.
A journalist and publisher has been deprived of his liberty for 10 years. According to UN experts, he has been arbitrarily detained and tortured for much of that time through intense physical confinement and endless psychological pressure. He has been bugged and spied on by the CIA during his time in political asylum, in Ecuador’s London embassy, in ways that violated his most fundamental legal rights. The judge overseeing his hearings has a serious conflict of interest – with her family embedded in the UK security services – that she did not declare and which should have required her to recuse herself from the case.
Today one year ago we visited #Assange in prison.
He showed clear signs of prolonged psychological #Torture.
First I was shocked that mature democracies could produce such an accident.
Then I found out it was no accident.
Now, I am scared to find out about our democracies… pic.twitter.com/enElUmA1fK
— Nils Melzer (@NilsMelzer) May 9, 2020
All indications are that Assange will be extradited to the US to face a rigged grand jury trial meant to ensure he sees out his days in a maximum-security prison, serving a sentence of up to 175 years.
None of this happened in some Third-World, tinpot dictatorship. It happened right under our noses, in a major western capital, and in a state that claims to protect the rights of a free press. It happened not in the blink of an eye but in slow motion – day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.
And once we strip out a sophisticated campaign of character assassination against Assange by western governments and a compliant media, the sole justification for this relentless attack on press freedom is that a 49-year-old man published documents exposing US war crimes. That is the reason – and the only reason – that the US is seeking his extradition and why he has been languishing in what amounts to solitary confinement in Belmarsh high-security prison during the Covid-19 pandemic. His lawyers’ appeals for bail have been refused.
A sacrificial offering
Briefly, Assange raised the stakes for all journalists by renouncing their god – “access” – and their modus operandi of revealing occasional glimpses of very partial truths offered up by “friendly”, and invariably anonymous, sources who use the media to settle scores with rivals in the centres of power.
Instead, through whistleblowers, Assange rooted out the unguarded, unvarnished, full-spectrum truth whose exposure helped no one in power – only us, the public, as we tried to understand what was being done, and had been done, in our names. For the first time, we could see just how ugly, and often criminal, the behaviour of our leaders was.
Assange did not just expose the political class, he exposed the media class too – for their feebleness, for their hypocrisy, for their dependence on the centres of power, for their inability to criticise a corporate system in which they were embedded.
Few of them can forgive Assange that crime. Which is why they will be there cheering on his extradition, if only through their silence. A few liberal writers will wait till it is too late for Assange, till he has been packaged up for rendition, to voice half-hearted, mealy-mouthed or agonised columns arguing that, unpleasant as Assange supposedly is, he did not deserve the treatment the US has in store for him.
But that will be far too little, far too late. Assange needed solidarity from journalists and their media organisations long ago, as well as full-throated denunciations of his oppressors. He and Wikileaks were on the front line of a war to remake journalism, to rebuild it as a true check on the runaway power of our governments. Journalists had a chance to join him in that struggle. Instead they fled the battlefield, leaving him as a sacrificial offering to their corporate masters.
Reprinted with the author’s permission.
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Ideological Kin: The Progressive Left Hold the Same Values As Tyrants and Oppressors
One the most frequently used debate tactics of today’s Left is comparing their opponents to tyrants of the past. Terms such as “Hitler,” “Stalin” and “Mao” are regularly hurled by the Woke against whoever opposes them, which usually happen to be some variety of conservatives. Levelling pejoratives at their interlocutors is, in fact, the progressive Left’s principal and most favored form of argument whenever their views are questioned.
By now we are all-too familiar with the following scenario which keeps repeating itself with monotonous predictability: A progressive makes a claim about our society or the nature of relations within it. An opponent counters this contention by presenting evidence to the contrary. Instead of engaging with the evidence, the social warrior becomes angry and claims to be offended. He or she then begin begins to shout and accusations of “Hitler,” “fascist” and such fly in a quick succession.
But are such accusations really justified? Do conservatives have the same mindset or hail from the same ideological pedigree as Hitler, Stalin or Mao? And what about those who so self-righteously level these accusations? Where do they really stand in all of this? What are their own ideological roots and credentials?
Fortunately, there is a relatively easy way to cut through the froth of passions and heated rhetoric to get at the truth of the matter. We will do this by taking the three classes in question – tyrants, progressives and conservatives – and place them side by side. We will then look at how their values compare in regard to important issues of practical politics and philosophy. This should help clarify the situation by bringing out the underlying political pedigrees and ideological links.
For the purposes of illustration and personal relatability, we will choose typical representatives for each class. For the first two groups the choices are easy and obvious. Thus, the tyrant category will be represented by the usual suspects: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro and Kim Jong-un. Those in the leftist column will be broadly represented by those who in the contemporary political parlance are called the Woke. The Woke encompass large swathes of today’s Left and include those who would call themselves progressives and social justice activists which, in turn, span subgroups such as anti-racist activists, feminists, BLM, the militant LGBT, homosexual and trans activist among others.
The choice of personnel on the conservative side is more difficult, since it is not easy to find a genuine specimen on the contemporary scene. Most of those who call themselves “conservative” today have compromised their principles in order to appease the media and their progressive critics. From our perspective, there are two well-known living political figures who embody the principles of traditional conservatism. They are Dr Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan. Their worldview is not identical since they each give different weight to different aspects of the conservative tradition. Nevertheless, they are both unmistakable bearers of this tradition whose modern foundations have been laid by Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. Both Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan are former presidential candidates who have exerted considerable intellectual influence and attracted substantial following. However, their refusal to compromise their principles has alienated the Republican establishment and cost them the nomination. Needless to say, each is in his own way is a great moral force.
Even though Dr Paul is usually called a libertarian in the larger historical context, he would be more aptly described as a classical liberal or a traditional conservative. The main reason he is labelled a libertarian today is to distinguish him from the faux conservatives who have muddled the waters of political discourse. These are people who are not conservatives in the true sense of the term, but who nevertheless managed to appropriate this name for themselves. Such types would comprise, for example, the assorted neo-conservatives and moderate leftists who, for reasons of political expediency, insist on being called “conservative.” Some examples would include John Kasich, Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake, Chuck Hegel and William Kristol. Some of them have already signaled they will vote for Joe Biden in the upcoming election. Obviously, anyone voting for the Biden-Harris ticket cannot be a real conservative. And even though these people are sometimes called “Hitlers” and “Stalins” by the progressives, it is only because they are less extreme than those who hurl such accusations.
We now turn to a comparison of positions, view and values held by the representatives of the three categories under examination. We present this information in a graphic which we call “The Ideological Pedigree Table of Values and Views.”
Figure: The Ideological Pedigree Table of Values and Views
The first thing we notice is that except for the very last item there is a unanimous agreement on fundamental principles and values between today’s progressives and social justice warriors on one hand and totalitarians on the other.
What this clearly shows is that the woke Left espouses the same elemental attitudes as the tyrants of the past and present. As far as the basic questions of human life and governance go, their thinking is identical: The two classes share the same mindset and inclinations. Psychologically and ideologically, they are cut from the same cloth.
Many people will be startled by this and may think that in putting together this information we have used some sleight of hand to make the progressive Left look bad. Let us reassure you that this is not the case and that what you see is a straightforward depiction of reality. The graphic above is nothing other than a simple statement of facts. What makes it striking is the way in which these facts are presented. Our approach cuts through political posturing, deception and demagoguery to the basic values that define the worldview of each class. It then organizes this information in a way that brings out the ideological affinities and fault lines, showing where different groups stand in relation to one another.
In a certain sense, the above matrix is to the study of political phenomena as the Periodic Table of Elements is to the study of chemical ones. Mendeleyev’s Table cuts through the surface appearances – such color, odor, texture, etc. – to the underlying essentials. A perceptive man who would not let superficials mislead him, Mendeleyev focused on fundamental properties – the atomic number and electron configuration – and used their values to achieve a highly revealing classification of elements. He then displayed his results in a visually clear way that enables the student to grasp the truth of the matter quickly and intuitively. When we look at the Periodic Table, we can immediately see where various elements fit as well as where they stand in relation to one another. Those equipped with his knowledge can see things for what they are and not be fooled by appearance. To the uninitiated gilding may seem like gold, but when a chemist ascertains the atomic number of the thing in his hand he can easily distinguish the fake from the real.
As Mendeleyev’s Periodic Table mapped out the realm of elements, the Ideological Pedigree Table seeks to map out the ideological landscape. When you encounter an ideological phenomenon – be it a movement, a teaching or a leader – by evaluating it against the values in the Table you will be able to see exactly what kind of political element they are. In the same way that a skilled chemist scientifically ascertains the intrinsic grossness of a metal though it may be covered in gilding, you will now be able to see through the progressives’ veneer of compassion to recognize that they are actually totalitarians at heart.
Let us now make a few remarks and observations on the graphic above.
Based on the information it contains, we can plainly see that – ideologically and attitudinally – the progressives, the Woke and the tyrants are close kin. Even though their language may superficially differ depending on the time and place in which they operate, underneath the rhetoric there is a shared unity of underlying attitudes. Their goal is invariably the same: totalitarian control over their fellow citizens. It could be said that these people belong to a shared brotherhood of oppression.
Because they know well that their positions are indefensible by reason, open discussion is anathema to both the woke and the tyrants. Freedom of speech and expression are their scourge, because their worldview cannot withstand the light of truth. This is why they all seek to suppress it by instituting various forms of political correctness.
Every totalitarian without exception advocates political correctness. Political correctness is the favored instrument of totalitarians of all stripes with which they seek to silence their opponents. It prevents the articulation of facts that are plainly obvious but inconvenient to those who seek to seize or maintain political power by illicit and undemocratic means. In an environment ruled by political correctness truth must not be spoken. Instead one must either stay silent or say the opposite of the truth.
Political correctness takes different forms depending on how much power the totalitarians possess in a given society. In democratic societies it takes the form of institutional speech codes. In totalitarian societies it takes the form of outright state censorship.
All totalitarians – from the mass murdering tyrants to the progressives and the woke – insist on a cancel culture. The cancel culture is the executory arm of political correctness. Its purpose is to punish those who cross the bounds of acceptable speech. The severity of cancellation methods depends on the power that totalitarians wield in a given society. The more power they possess, the more severe the modes of cancellation. In our society modes of cancellation range from being removed from platforms of public discourse to being fired from one’s job.
In totalitarian societies, the cancellation modes normally range from imprisonment to death.
Firing is the highest and most favored mode of cancellation of both the progressives and the tyrants. In our society where progressive totalitarians do not yet possess full state power, serious offenders are cancelled by being fired from their jobs. In totalitarians societies serious offenders are cancelled by a firing squad.
Totalitarians living under democratic systems of government have to settle for less drastic methods of cancellation such as deletion of Twitter accounts and destruction of dissenters’ reputation and livelihood. These forms of cancellation, however, are not failproof. The cancelled can still open another account under a different name and continue propagating their subversive ideas about free speech, freedom of conscience, equal treatment and such.
When directed against dissenters, the bullet, the noose and the gas chamber are nothing other than the manifestations of the cancel culture. These methods are beloved by the tyrants, because they constitute the quickest and the most effective modes of cancellation. They guarantee that persons thus cancelled will never again engage in politically incorrect speech.
Some people may think that today’s progressives and social justice warriors cannot be quite cut from the same cloth as Hitler and Stalin, since they are not guilty of the same depredations. The evidence presented above, however, clearly shows that they are indeed of the same heart and mind. The reason they have not committed the excesses of their tyrannical kin is because they lack the power to do so. To accomplish what Hitler, Stalin and Mao have accomplished you must be in full control of the state apparatus. As of now, western progressives do not have that power, but they are doing their best to obtain it. Because they are actuated by identical beliefs, if they ever attain that power, they will inevitably use it in the same fashion their tyrannical brothers have used theirs.
All tyrants mentioned above have ruined their societies and left millions of corpses in their wake. The progressives will do the same if they ever attain unchecked state power. This is inescapable, since they operate on the same basic values and principles.
Most woke snowflakes are not some gentle caring beings they pretend to be. This is only a mask. This kind of deception and pretense is pervasive among Leftists and has, in fact, been the Left’s modus operandi since the French Revolution. Underneath their posture of fragility, the snowflakes are ruthless hooligans who through various forms of activism and online thuggery have destroyed the reputations and lives of many good and innocent people. Cancel-happy, politically correct, intolerant in their attitudes and merciless when dealing with dissenters, today’s snowflakes are the scions of tyrants.
Despite being regularly accused of being so, true conservatives are certainly no Hitlers or Stalins. Quite to the contrary, conservatives hold positions, views and values that in direct oppositions of those jointly espoused by progressives and tyrants.
The pejoratives that the woke hurl at conservatives are completely ungrounded. Unlike progressives, conservatives share no attitudes or principles with the likes of Stalin, Hitler or Mao. The accusations the progressives make against conservatives are a form of self-projection. The pejoratives they throw at their opponents accurately apply to themselves.
The progressive-social-justice Left encounters very little political opposition these days, because the so-called conservatives have sold out their principles and lack the moral fiber to stand up to the Left’s anti-liberty, inhumane, anti-Western agenda of oppression and destruction.
The values and principles that the progressive Left and tyrants jointly espouse are illiberal, anti-Western and dangerous. If implemented, they cannot but result in oppression, destruction and murder on a large scale. This is the clear lesson and warning of history. Well-meaning, good people should be aware of this. They should not be fooled by the Left’s disingenuous rhetoric and false posturing but should look carefully at what these people really believe and stand for. Forces of oppression and tyranny always initially present themselves as angels of light and liberation. Once in power, however, their true nature manifests itself with tragic consequences. By then, however, it is too late to reverse the course.
There is much more to be said about this, and we shall continue shortly. In the meantime, let us contemplate The Ideological Pedigree Table of Values and Views with care so that we can fully digest the information it contains. It lays bare an important truth about the totalitarian forces that are currently attempting to subvert and take over our society.
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A Rogue Institution and a Clear and Present Danger to Liberty in America
We have never heard more gibberish, double talk, and lies from one podium than we have from Fed Chairman Powell.
There is no other way to say it: The Fed has become a dangerous rogue institution that has usurped plenary power over the financial system.
This is all based on implicit theories that eventually lead to a massive speculative blow-off, even as it sucks the vitality out of the Main Street economy in the interim.
The implicit theory is brazenly simple: The Fed believes that relentless credit expansion fosters greater economic growth and full employment. It believes that there is no practical limit to how much debt the household, business, and government sectors of the economy can tolerate or any notable adverse trade-offs from ever-higher leverage ratios.
Self-evidently, lower interest rates foster more debt issuance.
When economic growth falters for any reason, the Fed’s first action is to push rates even lower. This ratcheting process has gone on for more than three decades, and interest rates have, for all practical purposes, been obliterated.
The chart below takes all the short-run bobbing and weaving out of the GDP data by showing the rolling 20-year average of annual growth.
It is dispositive.
By 2019, the rolling 20-year growth trend had fallen to 2.1% per annum—a figure less than half of the 4.4% level in place exactly 50 years ago.
The above dismal trend line was not for want of trying with the debt elixir.
At the end of 1969, total public and private debt (blue area in the chart below) stood at $1.54 trillion, which has since mushroomed to, well, nearly $78 trillion!
In exactly half a century, the level of debt weighing on the US economy attributable to all borrowers—households, businesses, governments, and financials—is up by 51X.
However, at the same time, the national income or nominal GDP (red area in the chart below), which supports it, has risen by only 21X.
That alone points to the skunk in the woodpile.
Total US Debt vs. Nominal GDP, 1969–2019
The debt-to-GDP ratio in 1969 stood at 1.47X, which had been roughly centered in that area for a century since 1870—an interval that saw the greatest explosion of economic growth, mass prosperity, technological progress, and accumulated wealth in human history.
It happened without any increase in the national leverage ratio at all. It had remained at the golden mean of 1.5X debt-to-income throughout.
Today the total debt-to-national income ratio stands at 3.47X, or exactly two more turns of debt than 50 years ago.
To be sure, two extra turns of debt sounds like investment banker jargon, but the phrase captures the essence of the rot that lies at the heart of the nation’s financial system and economy.
Those two extra turns amount to $43 trillion of incremental debt, which constitutes the millstone crushing economic growth and the rudiments of sustainable prosperity.
Stated differently, at the 1969 national leverage ratio of 1.47X, total public and private debt today would clock in at $32 trillion, not $75 trillion. Had the leverage ratio not tripled over the last half-century, the trend rate of economic growth would not have been cut in half.
After all, aggregate economic growth comes from the sum of labor hours employed and productivity improvements. Given the massive burst of technological innovation ushered in by the computer age since 1969, there should have been no want of the latter.
Today, we are employing barely 60% of the available adult labor hours in the US economy. That means there are more than enough latent labor hours available to support pre-1969 levels of growth.
In the case of the employment/population ratio—even allowing for the fact that in 1969 most jobs were full-time and today there is a huge part-time, gig-based element to the workforce—was 14% lower in February (pre-lockdown) than it was back then.
So if the raw productivity and potential labor hours were there to support a continuation of the 4.0% historical growth rate shown above, why has it faltered to less than half of that level during the last half-century?
As Dustin Hoffman might have said in the iconic moment of The Graduate, which was released on the eve of 1969—malinvestment!
That’s what the massive expansion of debt, the systematic falsification of interest rates, and financial asset prices confected by the Fed has wrought.
Capital and technology have been misallocated and wasted; potential labor resources have been inefficiently deployed or not at all.
The legions of money-dealers and speculators in today’s economy are an example of the former.
An example of the latter is the fact that millions of jobs moved offshore because of the Fed’s inflation of debt and the domestic price-cost-wage structure.
Less Interest, More Debt
Jay Powell and his merry band of money-wreckers would not even recognize the charts above.
They are so caught up in groupthink and recency bias that they are not even aware of where their monetary perfidy has taken the nation’s finances and economic foundation.
Each new economic crisis or shock leads them to the same knee-jerk policy spasm: less interest, more debt!
It also leads them into outright intellectual mendacity, that is, the spurious claim that even tiny upward toggles in rock-bottom interest rates are a mortal threat to the economy and must be suppressed with even more heavy-handed intervention.
In that context, Powell let the cat out of the bag when he made the preposterous claim—and with no if, ands or buts—that the insane $2.8 trillion of new money printed by the Fed since the onset of the lockdown in mid-March was some kind of Bernanke-esque profile in the courage to print.
What he describes below did not happen, not even remotely:
“What happened was markets stopped working. They stopped working, and companies couldn’t borrow, they couldn’t roll over their debt. People couldn’t borrow. Financial turbulence and malfunction, a financial system that’s not working, can greatly amplify the negative effects of what was clearly going to be a major economic shock.
What our tools were put to work to do was to restore the markets to function. I think some of that has really happened, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, and that’s a good thing.”
This is the same Gigantic Lie Ben Bernanke unleashed in the fall of 2008.
We wonder what hay wagon Powell thinks we fell off of.
That’s because he made the same specious argument that Bernanke made in the fall of 2008 when he went off the deep end, taking the Fed’s balance sheet from $900 billion (which took 94 years to accrue) to $2.3 trillion in a mere 13 weeks.
Needless to say, once you get in the price control business for debt, you are inherently in the price control business for all financial assets because the cost of the former drives the discount rate for equities and other long-duration assets.
It is the most egregious folly ever imagined.
It causes a massive windfall to the top 1% and 10%, which own 53% and 88% of the stock, respectively. It also fuels a self-reinforcing speculative mania that eventually collapses under its own weight.
In a debt-saturated system, the Fed’s massive bond purchases never transmit anything outside the canyons of Wall Street. This money-printing madness only drives bond prices higher and cap rates lower. This means relentless and systematic inflation of financial asset prices.
As a practical matter, the bottom 90% don’t own enough stock or even inflated government and corporate bonds to shake a stick at. Instead, what meager savings they have accumulated languish in bank deposits, CDs, or money market funds earning exactly what the Fed has decreed—nothing!
So, when Powell says he’s only trying to help the average American, you have to wonder whether he is just stupid or the greatest lying fraud yet to occupy the Fed’s big chair.
It doesn’t matter why. The Fed is now a rogue institution that comprises a clear and present danger to the future of prosperity and liberty in America.
Reprinted with permission from International Man.
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Press in His Pocket: Bill Gates Buys Media To Control the Messaging
A Columbia Journalism Review expose reveals that, to control global journalism, Bill Gates has steered over $250 million to the BBC, NPR, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, the New York Times, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, Center for Investigative Reporting, Pulitzer Center, National Press Foundation, International Center for Journalists, and a host of other groups. To conceal his influence, Gates also funneled unknown sums via subgrants for contracts to other press outlets.
His press bribes have paid off. During the pandemic, bought and brain-dead news outlets have treated Bill Gates as a public health expert—despite his lack of medical training or regulatory experience.
Gates also funds an army of independent fact checkers including the Poynter Institute and Gannett —which use their fact-checking platforms to “silence detractors” and to “debunk” as “false conspiracy theories” and “misinformation,” charges that Gates has championed and invested in biometric chips, vaccine identification systems, satellite surveillance, and COVID vaccines.
Gates’s media gifts, says CJR author Tim Schwab, mean that “critical reporting about the Gates Foundation is rare.” The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation declined multiple interview requests from CJR and refused to disclose how much money it has funneled to journalists.
In 2007, the LA Times published one of the only critical investigations on the Gates Foundation, exposing Gates’s holdings in companies that hurt people his foundation claims to help, like industries linked to child labor. Lead reporter Charles Piller, says, “They were unwilling to answer questions and pretty much refused to respond in any sort of way…”
The investigation showed how Gates’s global health funding has steered the world’s aid agenda toward Gates’ personal goals (vaccines and GMO crops) and away from issues such as emergency preparedness to respond to disease outbreaks, like the Ebola crisis.
“They’ve dodged our questions and sought to undermine our coverage,” says freelance journalist Alex Park after investigating the Gates Foundation’s polio vaccine efforts.
Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. CHD is planning many strategies, including legal, in an effort to defend the health of our children and obtain justice for those already injured. Your support is essential to CHD’s successful mission.
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The Lancet Rules Russian Covid-19 Vaccine ‘Safe and Effective’
Dr. Scott Gottlieb might soon be forced to eat his words.Trial results reported Friday by the Lancet, the British medical journal responsible for publishing some of the earliest research on the coronavirus, found that Russia’s Gameleya Institute-developed SARS-CoV-2 vaccine is both effective and safe, though scientists cautioned that long-term study is still required.The vaccine, the researchers found, produced an antibody response in all test subjects while causing no serious adverse effects. The results mark the latest stamp of legitimacy for the vaccine developed by the world-reknowned Gameleya Institute, and show how the early and intense skepticism expressed by some in the West might have been premature.The Lancet broke down the results in a series of eight tweets published by its official twitter account.
The new paper reports the findings of two open-label, non-randomised phase 1/2 trials looking at a frozen formulation and a freeze-dried formulation of a two-part #COVID19 vaccine (2/8) pic.twitter.com/fcYqgpjfsl
— The Lancet (@TheLancet) September 4, 2020
The two 42-day trials also confirmed that the vaccine candidates elicit an antibody response (6/8) pic.twitter.com/dPxWT9CCrL
— The Lancet (@TheLancet) September 4, 2020
Russian officials maintain that the vaccine will be made available on an emergency basis in late October or early November. President Trump is desperately scrambling for a US vaccine alternative that can be credibly approved on an emergency basis, so he can say the same.
Meanwhile, in the US…
Read the full Lancet study below:Pi is 0140673620318663 by Zerohedge on ScribdJohnson & Johnson says their experimental coronavirus vaccine prevented hamsters from getting severely ill. $JNJ#WakeUpWithCheddar pic.twitter.com/1N4Njy47me
— Cheddar (@cheddar) September 4, 2020
Reprinted with permission from Zero Hedge.
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Back to School…D’ya Think?
After the spring from hell, and two months of summer staycation, families across the land anxiously await the very dubious reopening of the school year. The Covid-19 virus has revealed structural cracks in the mighty fortress of public education. Some districts remain closed, or only tentatively and partially open. It’s easy to see where this is going.
I got a letter this week from a high school physics teacher in New England — who wants to remain anonymous. He writes:
“…Covid has initiated the death of public ed in America…. The state cannot decide whether we should start full remote or whether we should try some weird hybrid schedule. Nobody can make a decision. The union is pissed. They know most of the classrooms are poorly ventilated and too small and they see nothing but a ‘cruise ship’ scenario unfolding. Remote is terrible, but it is better than nothing….”
Before we go further, remember the first principle of the long emergency: anything organized at the giant scale is liable to fail. During the post-war growth spurt, we consolidated all the nation’s schools into giant districts serviced by the yellow bus fleets bringing thousands of kids together in buildings designed to look like insecticide factories. And when that project was complete, what did we get? Two decades of mass shootings in schools. I don’t think we got the correct message from this — which is that this manner of schooling produces so much ennui and anomie that some kids turn homicidal by the time they hit their teens.
The fact that this condition remains unrecognized, and certainly absent from public discussion, says a lot about our disastrous collective psychology of previous investment: having set up this miserable system at titanic expense, we can’t even think about changing it. Now, as is usual in human history, the process will happen emergently, on its own, whether we like it or not, because circumstances demand it.
Another matter absent from news media is what happens when falling tax revenues start to bite the giant consolidated school districts. My physics teacher correspondent in New England writes:
“School finances are in full reverse mode. Whispered in the hallways before every school committee and in every town council chamber is the awesome reality that sales tax and property tax collections are down 25 – 30 percent. The fear is palpable…. It seems to me that Public Ed as we currently know it will be history in about four years. It is a big edifice. It will take a few years to fully implode, but not a decade. There’s no money left to keep it going as it is.”
And so, “technology” steps in to save the day: remote learning. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but the unintended consequences are pretty grim. Is it realistic to park little kids, say 1st to 6th graders, in front of computer screens for six hours a day? I doubt it. And now that we’ve set things up so that many households need both parents to generate income, who’s around to supervise the remote learning? Personally, I doubt that a majority of even high schoolers will stick to that regimen.
What about the many poor households? The schools may dole out laptops and tablets to them, but what if there’s no Internet service in the home. What if the parents are computer illiterate? What if there are several kids and the household is chaotic? That is the actual reality where many single mothers are on public assistance. As it is, the kids already do badly in regular schooling.
So, then there’s home schooling. A parent buys a curriculum and follows it. Swell. How many parents are actually equipped to do this? And who are the parents — mothers mostly — who get to stay home with the kids at least half the day? I hasten to add that the next iteration of schooling in America probably will grow out of home-schooling efforts, as groups or pods of families organize small ad hoc schools that resemble in structure the one-room schoolhouses of yesteryear. But the journey to that outcome is likely to be messy and rocky, and a lot of children will be left behind. Well, Abe Lincoln managed to get an education with little more than a Bible, a volume of Shakespeare, and a pile of law books.
The colleges have their heads so deep in the sand that you can barely see the ankles of the people-in-charge. It’s absolutely worst at the top of the heap. Case in point, a letter lately sent out to the whole of the Princeton University “community” of students, staff, and faculty by President Christopher Eisgruber (read the whole thing here). Such a reeking dumpster-load of cowardly and disingenuous race-pander has hardly been seen before, even at Harvard, Yale, and Brown, where insincerity flows like Amontillado sherry. Eisgruber writes: “We must ask how Princeton can address systemic racism in the world.” The grandiosity is really something — like, the world has been just sitting around waiting for Princeton to fix it, and now the time is ripe! And, of course, as if quixotic crusades against political hobgoblins will save Princeton.
I have news for you: the colleges and universities are going down hard and hardly just because Covid-19 has interrupted their business plan. Rather, because of the stupendous and gross dishonesty that higher ed has fallen into. The racketeering around college loans was bad enough but the intellectual racketeering around fake fields of study, thought-crime persecutions, and an epic sexual hysteria has disgraced the very mission of higher ed, turned it into something no better than a sick cult, and infected the rest of the culture by seeding many institutions and business enterprises with cultist graduates bent on subjecting the whole of American society to a never-ending Maoist struggle session.
If remote learning is for you, take five free online courses a semester at the Khan Academy and don’t fork over seventy-large to an Ivy League University for pretty much exactly the same thing. Right now, the schools are in turmoil as the students show up, get to partying — or merely convening in small social groups — and whaddaya know, things go all cruise ship. That’s what happened at SUNY Oneonta and Indiana University this week. More to come, I’m sure.
Eventually, you see, thousands of colleges and universities across the land will close or at least downsize severely — if the Maoists don’t torch them after the election. The destiny of many young people today lies not in the hallowed halls of Google, Microsoft, and Goldman Sachs but rather in the fields and pastures across the fertile parts of the country where food must be grown for a dwindling population. Sssshhhh. Don’t tell them that. They’ll just have another tantrum, scream in your face, and cancel you. But the world goes as the world goes, and that’s probably where it’s going.
Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.
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U.N. forced to admit Gates-funded vaccine is causing polio outbreak in Africa
(ZERO HEDGE) This really should be one of the biggest scandals in public health, but it’s given little attention – mainly because of the high-profile nature of the people and organisations involved.
The United Nations has been forced to admit that a major international vaccine initiative is actually causing the outbreak of the very disease it was supposed to wipe-out.
While international organisations like the World Health Organization (WHO) will regular boast about supposedly ‘eradicating polio’ with vaccines, the opposite seems to be the case. Their decades-long campaign to eradicate polio is now killing scores of innocent young people living in poor countries.
Now it seems that health officials are beginning to admit that their plan to stop ‘wild’ polio is backfiring, as scores children are being paralyzed a deadly strain of the pathogen derived from a live vaccine – causing a virulent of polio to spread.
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Greenwald Exposes Journalism’s New Propaganda Tool: Using “Confirmed” To Mean Its Opposite
Authored by Glenn Greenwald via The Intercept,
Outlets claiming to have “confirmed” Jeffrey Goldberg’s story about Trump’s troops comments are again abusing that vital term…
ONE OF THE MOST HUMILIATING journalism debacles of the Trump era played out on December 8, 2017, first on CNN and then on MSNBC. The spectacle kicked off on that Friday morning at 11:00 a.m. when CNN, deploying its most melodramatic music and graphics designed to convey that a real bombshell was about to be dropped, announced that anonymous sources had provided the network with a smoking gun proving the Trump/Russia conspiracy once and for all: during the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump, Jr. had received a September 4 email with a secret encryption key that gave him advanced access to WikiLeaks’ servers containing the DNC emails which the group would subsequently release to the public ten days later. Cable news and online media spontaneously combusted, as is their wont, in shock, hysteria and awe over this proof that WikiLeaks and Trump were in cahoots.
CNN has ensured that no videos of the festivities are available on YouTube for anyone to watch. That’s because the claim was completely false in its most crucial respect. CNN misreported the date of the smoking gun email Trump, Jr. received: rather than being sent to him on September 4 – ten days prior to WikiLeaks’ public release, thus enabling secret access – the email was merely sent by a random member of the public after the public release by WikiLeaks (September 14), encouraging Trump, Jr. to look at those now-public emails.
Though the original false report cannot be viewed any longer (except in small snippets from other networks, principally Fox, discussing CNN’s debacle), one can view the cringe-inducing video of CNN’s Senior Congressional Correspondent Manu Raju explaining, after the Washington Post debunked the story, that “we are actually correcting” the reporting, doing his best to downplay what a massive blunder this was (though the whole thing is fantastic, my favorite line is when Raju says, with no small amount of understatement: “this appears to change the understanding of this story,” followed by: “perhaps the initial understanding of what this email was, perhaps is not as significant based on what we know now”: perhaps):
The CNN page which originally published the blockbuster story contains this rather significant correction at the top:
Washington (CNN) Correction: This story has been corrected to say the date of the email was September 14, 2016, not September 4, 2016. The story also changed the headline and removed a tweet from Donald Trump Jr., who posted a message about WikiLeaks on September 4, 2016.
So mistakes happen in journalism, even huge and embarrassing ones. Other than some petty schadenfreude, why is this worth remembering? The reason is that that sorry episode reflects a now-common but highly corrosive tactic of journalistic deceit.
Very shortly after CNN unveiled its false story, MSNBC’s intelligence community spokesman Ken Dilanian went on air and breathlessly announced that he had obtained independent confirmation that the CNN story was true. In a video segment I cannot recommend highly enough, Dilanian was introduced by an incredibly excited Hallie Jackson — who urged Dilanian to “tell us what we’ve just now learned,” adding: “I know you and some of our colleagues have confirmed some of this information: what’s up?” Dilanian then proceeded to explain what he had learned:
That’s right, Hallie. Two sources with direct knowledge of this are telling us that Congressional investigators have obtained an email from a man named “Mike Erickson” — obviously they don’t know if that’s his real name — offering Donald Trump and his son Donald Trump, Jr. access to WikiLeaks documents… It goes to the heart of the collusion question….. One of the big questions is: did [Trump Jr.] call the FBI?
MSNBC, December 8, 2017
How could that happen? How could MSNBC purport to confirm a false story from CNN? Shortly after, CBS News also purported to have “confirmed” the same false story: that Trump, Jr. received advanced access to the WikiLeaks documents. It’s one thing for a news outlet to make a mistake in reporting by, for instance, mis-reporting the date of an email and thus getting the story completely wrong. But how is it possible that multiple other outlets could “confirm” the same false report?
It’s possible because news outlets have completely distorted the term “confirmation” beyond all recognition. Indeed, they now use it to mean the exact opposite of what it actually means, thereby draping themselves in journalistic glory they have not earned and, worse, deceiving the public into believing that an unproven assertion has, in fact, been proven. With this disinformation method, they are doing the exact opposite of what journalism, at its core, is supposed to do: separate fact from speculation.
CNN ultimately blamed its anonymous sources for this error, but refused to out them by insisting that it was a somehow a good faith mistake rather than deliberate disinformation (how did multiple “good faith” sources all “accidentally misread” an email date in the same way? CNN, in the spirit of news outlets refusing to provide the accountability and transparency for themselves that they demand from others, refuses to this very day to address that question).
But what is clear is that the “confirmation” which both MSNBC and CBS claimed it had obtained for the story was anything but: all that happened was that the same sources which anonymously whispered these unverified, false claims to CNN then went and repeated the same unverified, false claims to other outlets, which then claimed that they “independently confirmed” the story even though they had done nothing of the sort.
IT SEEMS THE SAME MISLEADING TACTIC is now driving the supremely dumb but all-consuming news cycle centered on whether President Trump, as first reported by the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, made disparaging comments about The Troops.
Goldberg claims that “four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day” — whom the magazine refuses to name because they fear “angry tweets” — told him that Trump made these comments. Trump, as well as former aides who were present that day (including Sarah Huckabee Sanders and John Bolton), deny that the report is accurate.
So we have anonymous sources making claims on one side, and Trump and former aides (including Bolton, now a harsh Trump critic) insisting that the story is inaccurate. Beyond deciding whether or not to believe Goldberg’s story based on what best advances one’s political interests, how can one resolve the factual dispute? If other media outlets could confirm the original claims from Goldberg, that would obviously be a significant advancement of the story.
Other media outlets — including Associated Press and Fox News — now claim that they did exactly that: “confirmed” the Atlantic story. But if one looks at what they actually did, at what this “confirmation” consists of, it is the opposite of what that word would mean, or should mean, in any minimally responsible sense.
AP, for instance, merely claims that “a senior Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a senior U.S. Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump’s comments confirmed some of the remarks to The Associated Press,” while Fox merely said “a former senior Trump administration official who was in France traveling with the president in November 2018 did confirm other details surrounding that trip.”
In other words, all that likely happened is that the same sources who claimed to Jeffrey Goldberg, with no evidence, that Trump said this went to other outlets and repeated the same claims — the same tactic that enabled MSNBC and CBS to claim they had “confirmed” the fundamentally false CNN story about Trump Jr. receiving advanced access to the WikiLeaks archive. Or perhaps it was different sources aligned with those original sources and sharing their agenda who repeated these claims. Given that none of the sources making these claims have the courage to identify themselves, due to their fear of mean tweets, it is impossible to know.
But whatever happened, neither AP nor Fox obtained anything resembling “confirmation.” They just heard the same assertions that Goldberg heard, likely from the same circles if not the same people, and are now abusing the term “confirmation” to mean “unproven assertions” or “unverifiable claims” (indeed, Fox now says that “two sources who were on the trip in question with Trump refuted the main thesis of The Atlantic’s reporting”).
It should go without saying that none of this means that Trump did not utter these remarks or ones similar to them. He has made public statements in the past that are at least in the same universe as the ones reported by the Atlantic, and it is quite believable that he would have said something like this (though the absolute last person who should be trusted with anything, particularly interpreting claims from anonymous sources, is Jeffrey Goldberg, who has risen to one of the most important perches in journalism despite (or, more accurately because of) one of the most disgraceful and damaging records of spreading disinformation in service of the Pentagon and intelligence community’s agenda).
But journalism is not supposed to be grounded in whether something is “believable” or “seems like it could be true.” Its core purpose, the only thing that really makes it matter or have worth, is reporting what is true, or at least what evidence reveals. And that function is completely subverted when news outlets claim that they “confirmed” a previous report when they did nothing more than just talked to the same people who anonymously whispered the same things to them as were whispered to the original outlet.
Quite aside from this specific story about whether Trump loves The Troops, conflating the crucial journalistic concept of “confirmation” with “hearing the same idle gossip” or “unproven assertions” is a huge disservice. It is an instrument of propaganda, not reporting. And its use has repeatedly deceived rather than informed the public. Anyone who doubts that should review how it is that MSNBC and CBS both claimed to have “confirmed” a CNN report which turned out to be ludicrously and laughably false. Clearly, the term “confirmation” has lost its meaning in journalism.
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The Tangled Web of Cover Upperers
This is a particularly good video from Amazing Polly, who shows us how IIA contractors, CrowdTangle have been hired by corrupt State Department officials and fake “fact checkers” to stop the spread of news that threatens their global corruption racket.
Launched in 2011, CrowdTangle is a private, invitation-only datamining platform. The Soros-funded NGO, Social Science Research Center (SSRC) is responsible for approving which journalists, academics and researchers are permitted to use CrowdTangle.
Judicial Watch recently received 372 pages of State Department documents from a FOIA request, confirming that the Ukraine Embassy under Marie Yovanovitch used CrowdTangle to illegally monitor Donald Trump, Jr., Rudy Giuliani, and major journalists on social media for their commentary on search terms, including ‘Ukraine’, ‘Biden-Burisma 2020’, ‘Clinton Campaign’ and ‘George Soros’.
Much of the State Department’s corruption in Ukraine was orchestrated by George Soros, who also funds the “journalists” and the “fact-checkers”, who are granted use of the CrowdTangle engine by yet another Soros organization to monitor social media platforms, so they can try to stop the spread of news stories that they don’t like.
Polly says, “So, now, we’re starting to see why it is that when we get a good take on something, when we get a good story that should hopefully open the eyes of all the sleeping people, that very story is the thing they squash immediately, before we even know what’s happened. This is how they do it: CrowdTangle.”
After it was acquired by Facebook, CrowdTangle removed access to the platform from ‘all Department users’ effective October 2019, just as the fake impeachment hearings began. When Yovanovitch was questioned on the issue during the impeachment proceeding in the House, she denied that any illegal monitoring took place.
Polly says, “It’s important to know that all journalism is in support the people who fund them – and the people who fund them are possibly causing the riots; are the ones pushing this vaccine, are the ones with the lockdown narrative. All the same people. And they’re the fact-checkers.”
Contributed by Alexandra Bruce
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Kids Must Learn History to Avoid Being Gaslighted by Media
Growing up, history was one of my favorite school subjects. This might come as a surprise to some. After all, history class is traditionally thought of as the domain of the high school football coach who has very little interest in the subject itself, and therefore, passes little enthusiasm or knowledge of the past along to his students.
Perhaps that is why The Nation’s Report Card finds that only 12 percent of high school seniors are proficient in American history. Perhaps that is why we see the 1619 Project push an alternative history curriculum. Perhaps that’s why we see young radicals destroying historical statues without rhyme or reason. If one has little knowledge of history, or if that knowledge is limited to a narrative that paints our predecessors as evil aggressors, then why would there be any need to revere heroes of the past, the ideas they advanced, or the progress they made?
My story is different. As a child, I learned history through historical fiction, which portrayed the subject as the story it is meant to be – fascinating, intriguing, and even relatable to our day and age. Even the dry history textbooks I encountered in high school and college couldn’t remove the love of history that historical fiction instilled in me as a young child.
I now realize what a special privilege it was to learn history this way, and I wonder if other students would appreciate the past more if they had the same opportunity.
We suddenly have a chance to find out. Gallup reports that 10 percent of parents are choosing to homeschool their children this year. That means that 10 percent of parents now have the chance to make decisions about what their children will read and study, while many other parents, forced into quasi-homeschool through distance learning options, also have the opportunity to direct more of their child’s education.
Might I suggest that parents try the path that I was blessed with in my history lessons?
The beauty of this plan is that learning history doesn’t have to be a chore. It can become evening entertainment as families come together to read stories out loud. The reading lists at Beautiful Feet Books are wonderful places to start in finding titles based on ancient, medieval, and early and modern American history.
So why does all this matter? I’ll let the great author and thinker C.S. Lewis answer that question for me. In an essay from The Weight of Glory, Lewis exhorts:
Most of all, perhaps we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many place is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age. [Emphasis added.]
We’re living in a time where we are hit with huge amounts of information. If you’ve been paying attention lately, you may have noticed that what your own eyes see and what the media reports on are two different things. As such, we need to make sure we, and our children, know how to relate the past to the present in order that they can have a bright future. If we can teach our children that history is enjoyable, they will be more ready to dig into it on their own, and in so doing, they will be more apt to discern what is true and what is false in “the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone” of our time.
Source: Kids Must Learn History to Avoid Being Gaslighted by Media | Intellectual Takeout
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Friday, September 4, 2020
DHS Braces For 'Potential EMP Attack' As Presidential Election Nears
DHS Braces For 'Potential EMP Attack' As Presidential Election Nears Tyler Durden Fri, 09/04/2020 - 21:25
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a new report warning about a "potential" electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack against the U.S.
DHS's warning published Thur. (Sept. 2), or about 60 days until the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 3, indicates there are "evolving threats against the American homeland, most recently highlighting efforts to combat an Electromagnetic Pulse attack which could disrupt the electrical grid and potentially damage electronics."
The department released an EMP status report via the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) that said the "key actions to address known EMP-related vulnerabilities to critical infrastructure."
CISA said an EMP attack could "disrupt, degrade, and damage technology" embedded in critical infrastructure systems. Widespread blackouts could be seen if an EMP was to damage the nation's electrical grid, resulting in additional flare-ups of socio-economic turmoil.
"EMP attacks are part of the emerging threats against our nation and demand a response," said Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli.
"That is why DHS is taking these contingencies very seriously, working diligently to mitigate our risks and equipping our state and local partners with the resources they need to do the same. We've made significant progress and look forward to work ahead," Cuccinelli said.
CISA Director Chris Krebs said top priorities of the agency is to mitigate threats associated with EMPs:
"Over the past year, we have worked with interagency and industry partners to identify the footprint and effects of EMP threats across our National Critical Functions, and are developing sustainable, efficient, and cost-effective approaches to improving the Nation's resilience to EMPs," Krebs said.
To combat these emerging threats, President Trump signed an executive order in March 2019, delegating power to the White House for EMP preparedness.
We recently quoted Peter Vincent Pry, ex-chief of staff of the Congressional EMP Commission, who wrote an op-ed that said the virus pandemic from China has "exposed dangerous weaknesses in U.S. planning and preparation for civil defense protection and recovery, and those weaknesses surely have been noticed by our potential enemies: China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and international terrorists."
Pry warned that "China has been planning to defeat the U.S. with an EMP and cyber "Pearl Harbor" attack for a quarter-century."
DHS nor CISA gave any more information on 'evolving EMP threats' on the American homeland. There was not mention of whether the threat could be from a solar storm or EMP weapons. However, the EMP status report did mention DHS is currently running EMP pilot tests to assess EMP vulnerability on infrastructure:
"Finally, DHS is partnering with other federal departments and agencies, state, local, tribal, and territorial entities and the private sector to field test a more resilient critical infrastructure. There are a number of field demonstration (or pilot) projects planned and underway by both DHS and DOE to assess EMP vulnerability and then deploy, evaluate, and validate EMP mitigation and protection technologies.
"One such pilot is the San Antonio Electromagnetic Defense Initiative, designed to show how an entire region can become resilient against an EMP. These pilots are multisector, multifunction efforts, seeking to ensure key capabilities continue to function in a post EMP environment and that by maintaining those key functions we can expedite a full recovery. Working with federal interagency partners, DHS will play a major role in ensuring communications systems remain operational and, by ensuring key systems which are protected against EMP, are also protected against other threats such as cyber-attacks." - EMP status report
One EMP-expert and friend-of-the-site summed up the report perfectly:
"We recognize the threat and we're working on it and you don't need to know any more than that, thank you for asking..."
The warning comes just two months before the U.S. presidential election...
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Back to School…D’ya Think?
Clusterfuck Nation
For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays
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After the spring from hell, and two months of summer staycation, families across the land anxiously await the very dubious reopening of the school year. The Covid-19 virus has revealed structural cracks in the mighty fortress of public education. Some districts remain closed, or only tentatively and partially open. It’s easy to see where this is going.
I got a letter this week from a high school physics teacher in New England — who wants to remain anonymous. He writes:
“…Covid has initiated the death of public ed in America…. The state cannot decide whether we should start full remote or whether we should try some weird hybrid schedule. Nobody can make a decision. The union is pissed. They know most of the classrooms are poorly ventilated and too small and they see nothing but a ‘cruise ship’ scenario unfolding. Remote is terrible, but it is better than nothing….”
Before we go further, remember the first principle of the long emergency: anything organized at the giant scale is liable to fail. During the post-war growth spurt, we consolidated all the nation’s schools into giant districts serviced by the yellow bus fleets bringing thousands of kids together in buildings designed to look like insecticide factories. And when that project was complete, what did we get? Two decades of mass shootings in schools. I don’t think we got the correct message from this — which is that this manner of schooling produces so much ennui and anomie that some kids turn homicidal by the time they hit their teens.
The fact that this condition remains unrecognized, and certainly absent from public discussion, says a lot about our disastrous collective psychology of previous investment: having set up this miserable system at titanic expense, we can’t even think about changing it. Now, as is usual in human history, the process will happen emergently, on its own, whether we like it or not, because circumstances demand it.
Another matter absent from news media is what happens when falling tax revenues start to bite the giant consolidated school districts. My physics teacher correspondent in New England writes:
“School finances are in full reverse mode. Whispered in the hallways before every school committee and in every town council chamber is the awesome reality that sales tax and property tax collections are down 25 – 30 percent. The fear is palpable…. It seems to me that Public Ed as we currently know it will be history in about four years. It is a big edifice. It will take a few years to fully implode, but not a decade. There’s no money left to keep it going as it is.”
And so, “technology” steps in to save the day: remote learning. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but the unintended consequences are pretty grim. Is it realistic to park little kids, say 1st to 6th graders, in front of computer screens for six hours a day? I doubt it. And now that we’ve set things up so that many households need both parents to generate income, who’s around to supervise the remote learning? Personally, I doubt that a majority of even high schoolers will stick to that regimen.
What about the many poor households? The schools may dole out laptops and tablets to them, but what if there’s no Internet service in the home. What if the parents are computer illiterate? What if there are several kids and the household is chaotic? That is the actual reality where many single mothers are on public assistance. As it is, the kids already do badly in regular schooling.
So, then there’s home schooling. A parent buys a curriculum and follows it. Swell. How many parents are actually equipped to do this? And who are the parents — mothers mostly — who get to stay home with the kids at least half the day? I hasten to add that the next iteration of schooling in America probably will grow out of home-schooling efforts, as groups or pods of families organize small ad hoc schools that resemble in structure the one-room schoolhouses of yesteryear. But the journey to that outcome is likely to be messy and rocky, and a lot of children will be left behind. Well, Abe Lincoln managed to get an education with little more than a Bible, a volume of Shakespeare, and a pile of law books.
The colleges have their heads so deep in the sand that you can barely see the ankles of the people-in-charge. It’s absolutely worst at the top of the heap. Case in point, a letter lately sent out to the whole of the Princeton University “community” of students, staff, and faculty by President Christopher Eisgruber (read the whole thing here). Such a reeking dumpster-load of cowardly and disingenuous race-pander has hardly been seen before, even at Harvard, Yale, and Brown, where insincerity flows like Amontillado sherry. Eisgruber writes: “We must ask how Princeton can address systemic racism in the world.” The grandiosity is really something — like, the world has been just sitting around waiting for Princeton to fix it, and now the time is ripe! And, of course, as if quixotic crusades against political hobgoblins will save Princeton.
I have news for you: the colleges and universities are going down hard and hardly just because Covid-19 has interrupted their business plan. Rather, because of the stupendous and gross dishonesty that higher ed has fallen into. The racketeering around college loans was bad enough but the intellectual racketeering around fake fields of study, thought-crime persecutions, and an epic sexual hysteria has disgraced the very mission of higher ed, turned it into something no better than a sick cult, and infected the rest of the culture by seeding many institutions and business enterprises with cultist graduates bent on subjecting the whole of American society to a never-ending Maoist struggle session.
If remote learning is for you, take five free online courses a semester at the Khan Academy and don’t fork over seventy-large to an Ivy League University for pretty much exactly the same thing. Right now, the schools are in turmoil as the students show up, get to partying — or merely convening in small social groups — and whaddaya know, things go all cruise ship. That’s what happened at SUNY Oneonta and Indiana University this week. More to come, I’m sure.
Eventually, you see, thousands of colleges and universities across the land will close or at least downsize severely — if the Maoists don’t torch them after the election. The destiny of many young people today lies not in the hallowed halls of Google, Microsoft, and Goldman Sachs but rather in the fields and pastures across the fertile parts of the country where food must be grown for a dwindling population. Sssshhhh. Don’t tell them that. They’ll just have another tantrum, scream in your face, and cancel you. But the world goes as the world goes, and that’s probably where it’s going.
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