And Now This

Maine Governor Orders Restaurant Staff 

To Wear COVID-Visors Like Dog-Cones

and this:

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Compulsory moral bioenhancement should be covert

This for the better compliance with face-mask- and dog-cone use directives.

Related: 
Digital Freedom Platform:

I hate watching videos, especially conspiracy theory videos, and especially long conspiracy theory videos, but I found this worth watching -- all one hour and fifteen minutes of it:

Plandemic Indoctrination 

Zero Hedge:
As Sweden's COVID-19 Measures Hint At Herd Immunity, US Experts Rethink Lockdown Strategies

Zero Hedge: 
Renowned EU Scientist: COVID-19 Was Engineered In China Lab, Effective Vaccine "Unlikely"

Off Guardian:
Are You Ready for the “No One Could Have Known” Routine?

Notes From the Internets: Face Masks — the New Tin Foil Hat

Wearing Face Masks Makes People Act Careless And Ignore Social Distancing, UK Study Finds

Sweden's Lead Epidemiologist: Wearing Face Masks Is "Very Dangerous"

The Sunk Cost Virus

Sweden Refuses To Mandate Face Masks As Nordic Neighbors Expand Restrictions

He's off to study PPE 

(Note to those unfamiliar with 

British parlance, PPE is an 

abbreviation for a course in 

Philosophy, Politics and 

Economics offered at the 

University of Oxford)

(Source: The Spectator)

History to 'vindicate Swedish COVID-19 strategy'

More Than a Dozen Credible Medical Studies Prove Face Masks Do Not Work Even In Hospitals!

Do Anaesthetists Need to Wear Surgical Masks in the Operating Theatre? A Literature Review with EvidenceBased Recommendations — Short answer? Best not.

The mask is the new tinfoil hat.

‘AeroNabs’ Promise Powerful, Inhalable Protection Against COVID-19

Maund: Welcome To The Global Gulag...

Bait-&-Switch: How they’ve changed the Covid conversation

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide: What Humans Have Added, Won't Just Go Away

Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration — will it kill us all?

Even among the experts, opinions differ. The climate models, which attempt to predict the evolution of a chaotic atmospheric system, will likely always be controversial, but they indicate possible outcomes such as rises in sea level that would inundate the world's most heavily populated regions, a prediction that should give one pause for thought.

Plus, there are two other important and certain outcomes.

One is that as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration rises it progressively impairs human mental function, as demonstrated by recent research by what one must assume are highly competent researchers at Harvard University and one of America's National Laboratories.

The other is that rising atmospheric concentration plays Hell with the biosphere, with effects that include mass species extinctions and, paradoxically, a huge increase in human population as carbon dioxide stimulates agricultural crop yields.

These facts seem now to have been generally accepted, even by major oil companies, with the result that the world is now headed for a broad-ranging set of government mandated actions to slow human-caused carbon dioxide emissions with the aim of achieving zero net emissions by 2050.

Problem is, we will still be left with a hugely elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, which will still be working its effects on the world, speeding the melting of glaciers, ice sheets and frozen soils, disrupting ecosystems and still, therefore, causing havoc.

How to respond?

One might simply hope that, in the course time, the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration would gradually decline to where it was before the industrial revolution and the fossil fuel age. That, however, is a hope sadly to be disappointed. If there were any natural mechanism for lowering the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, the concentration prior to the industrial revolution would already have hit zero, all photosynthetic organisms would have died out, as would the entire animal world, dependent as it is, directly or indirectly, on photosynthetic organisms.

But, in fact, prior to the industrial revolution, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were flat at around 270 part per million for hundreds of thousands of years. Yes, prior to the industrial revolution there would have been some sequestration of carbon dioxide, mainly by geological processes. But sequestration was evidently balanced by natural carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere resulting chiefly from volcanic eruptions. So if carbon dioxide concentrations are be reduced to something like the pre-industrial value it will be necessary for humanity to do something.

What to do?

The only answer, apparently, is CCS: carbon capture and storage.

How to capture and store carbon dioxide is a question subject to many lines of research and pilot-scale testing. Here I will consider only whether this approach to lowering atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is economically viable:

First, how much carbon dioxide are we talking about?

Well here's the math:

The surface area of the world is ca 500 million square kilometers, or five trillion square meters.

The mass of the atmosphere is just over ten metric tons per square meter, or around 500 trillion metric tons in total. Of that, the amount of carbon dioxide that, since pre-industrial times, will have been added to the atmosphere by 2050 is:

500 trillion * (600 – 270)/1,000,000 * 1.84/1.24 = 2.45 trillion tons.

That's quite a lot, but there are methods known today for sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide that are estimated to cost less than $100 per ton. Assuming that further research and development reduces that cost by something like a factor of ten, the cost of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration to the pre-industrial value will be around twenty-five trillion dollars, or about one quarter of the World's yearly GDP.

So, yes, adjusting the World's atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration back to normal, though costly, will be feasible, though depending on technical developments, it may take a few years.

RELATED:
CanSpeccy: 
Rising Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration, Part I: Carbon Dioxide Is Not a Greenhouse Gas

Towards a US-China War? The Creation of a Global Totalitarian System, A “One World Government”?

By William F. Engdahl

Global Research, August 11, 2020: If we step back from the details of daily headlines around the world and try to make sense of larger patterns, the dominant dynamic defining world geopolitics in the past three years or more is the appearance of a genuine irregular conflict between the two most formidable powers on the planet—The Peoples’ Republic of China and the United States of America. Increasingly it’s beginning to look as if some very dark global networks are orchestrating what looks to be an updated rerun of their 1939-1945 World War. Only this time the stakes are total, and aim at creation a universal global totalitarian system, what David Rockefeller once called a “one world government.” The powers that be periodically use war to gain major policy shifts.

On behalf of the Powers That Be (PTB), World War II was orchestrated by the circles of the City of London and of Wall Street to maneuver two great obstacles—Russia and Germany—to wage a war to the death against each other, in order that those Anglo-Saxon PTB could reorganize the world geopolitical chess board to their advantage. It largely succeeded, but for the small detail that after 1945, Wall Street and the Rockefeller brothers were determined that England play the junior partner to Washington. London and Washington then entered the period of their global domination known as the Cold War.

That Anglo-American global condominium ended, by design, in 1989 with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union by 1991. Around this time, with the onset of the Bill Clinton presidency in 1992, the next phase– financial and industrial globalization– was inaugurated. With that, began the hollowing out of the industrial base of not only the United States, but also of Germany and the EU. The cheap labor outsourcing enabled by the new WTO drove wages down and destroyed one industry after the next in the industrial West after the 1990s. It was a necessary step on the path to what G.H.W. Bush in 1990 called the New World Order. The next step would be destruction of national sovereignty everywhere. Here the USA was the major obstacle.

“A little help from our friends…”

For the PTB, who owe no allegiance to nations, only to their power which is across borders, the birth of the World Trade Organization and their bringing China in as a full member in 2001 was intended as the key next step. At that point the PTB facilitated in China the greatest industrial growth by any nation in history, possibly excepting Germany from 1871-1914 and USA after 1866. WTO membership allowed Western multinationals from Apple to Nike to KFC to Ford and VW to pour billions into China to make their products at dirt-cheap wage levels for re-export to the West.

One of the great mysteries of that China growth is the fact that China was allowed to become the “workshop of the world” after 2001, first in lower-skill industries such as textiles or toys, later in pharmaceuticals and most recently in electronics assembly and production. The mystery clears up when we look at the idea that the PTB and their financial houses, using China, want to weaken strong industrial powers, especially the United States, to push their global agenda. Brzezinski often wrote that the nation state was to be eliminated, as did his patron, David Rockefeller. By allowing China to become a rival to Washington in economy and increasingly in technology, they created the means to destroy the superpower hegemony of the US.

By the onset of the Presidency of Xi Jinping in 2012, China was an economic colossus second in weight only to the United States. Clearly this could never have happened–not under the eye of the same Anglo-American old families who launched the Opium Wars after 1840 to bring China to heel and open their economy to Western financial looting–unless the Anglo-Americans had wanted it.

The same British-owned bank involved in the China opium trade, Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (HSBC), founded by a Scotsman, Thomas Sutherland in 1865 in the then-British colony of Hong Kong, today is the largest non-Chinese bank in Hong Kong. HSBC has become so well-connected to China in recent years that it has since 2011 had as Board member and Deputy HSBC Chairman, Laura Cha. Cha was formerly Vice Chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, being the first person outside mainland China to join the Beijing Central Government of the People’s Republic of China at vice-ministerial rank. In other words the largest bank in the UK has a board member who was a member of the Chinese Communist Party and a China government official. China needed access to Western money and HSBC and other select banks such as JP MorganChase, Barclays, Goldman Sachs were clearly more than happy to assist.

“Socialism with Xi Jinping Characteristics…”

All told until 2012 when Xi took charge of the CCP in Beijing, China seemed to be willing to be a globalist “team player,” though with “Chinese characteristics.” However, in 2015 after little more than two years in office, Xi Jinping endorsed a comprehensive national industrial strategy, Made in China: 2025. China 2025 replaced an earlier Western globalist document that had been formulated with the World Bank and the USA, the China 2030 report under Robert Zoellick. That shift to a China strategy for global tech domination might well have triggered a decision by the globalist PTB that China could no longer be relied on to play by the rules of the globalists, but rather that the CCP under Xi were determined to make China the global leader in advanced industrial, AI and bio-technologies. A resurgent China nationalist global hegemony was not the idea of the New World Order gang.

China:2025 combined with Xi’s strong advocacy of the Belt Road Initiative for global infrastructure linking China by land and sea to all Eurasia and beyond, likely suggested to the globalists that the only solution to the prospect of their losing their power to a China global hegemon would ultimately be war, a war that would destroy both nationalist powers, USA AND China. This is my conclusion and there is much to suggest this is now taking place.

Tit for Tat

If so, it will most likely be far different from the military contest of World War II. The USA and most of the Western industrial economies have “conveniently” imposed the worst economic depression since the 1930’s as a bizarre response to an alleged virus originating in Wuhan and spreading to the world. Despite the fact that the death toll, even with vastly inflated statistics, is at the level of a severe annual influenza, the insistence of politicians and the corrupt WHO to impose draconian lockdown and economic disruption has crippled the remaining industrial base in the US and most of the EU.

The eruption of well-organized riots and vandalism under the banner of racial protests across the USA has brought America’s cities to a state in many cases of war zones resembling the cities of the 2013 Matt Damon and Jodie Foster film, Elysium. In this context, anti-Washington rhetoric from Beijing has taken on a sharp tone in their use of so-called “Wolf Diplomacy.”

Now after Washington closed the China Consulate in Houston and China the US Consulate in Chengdu, both sides have stepped up rhetoric. High tech companies are being banned in the US, military displays of force from the US in the South China Sea and waters near Taiwan are increasing tensions and rhetoric on both sides. The White House accuses the WHO of being an agent of Beijing, while China accuses the US of deliberately creating a deadly virus and bringing it to Wuhan. Chinese state media supports the explosion of violent protests across America under the banner of Black Lives Matter. Step-wise events are escalating dramatically. Many of the US self-styled Marxists leading the protests across US cities have ties to Beijing such as the Maoist-origin Revolutionary Communist Party, USA of Bob Avakian.

“Unrestricted Warfare”

Under these conditions, what kind of escalation is likely? In 1999 two colonels in the China PLA, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, published a book with the PLA Press titled Unrestricted Warfare. Qiao Liang was promoted to Major General in the PLA Air Force and became deputy secretary-general of the Council for National Security Policy Studies. The two updated their work in 2016. It gives a window on high-level China military strategy.

Reviewing published US military doctrine in the aftermath of the 1991 US Operation Desert Storm war against Iraq, the Chinese authors point out what they see as US over-dependence on brute military force and conventional military doctrine. They claim, “Observing, considering, and resolving problems from the point of view of technology is typical American thinking. Its advantages and disadvantages are both very apparent, just like the characters of Americans.” They add, “military threats are already often no longer the major factors affecting national security…these traditional factors are increasingly becoming more intertwined with grabbing resources, contending for markets, controlling capital, trade sanctions, and other economic factors, to the extent that they are even becoming secondary to these factors. They comprise a new pattern which threatens the political, economic and military security of a nation or nations… The two authors define the new form of warfare as, “encompassing the political, economic, diplomatic, cultural, and psychological spheres, in addition to the land, sea, air, space, and electronics spheres.”

They suggest China could use hacking into websites, targeting financial institutions, terrorism, using the media, and conducting urban warfare among the methods proposed. Recent revelations that Chinese entities pay millions in ad revenues to the New York Times and other mainstream USA media to voice China-positive views is one example. Similarly, maneuvering a Chinese national to head the US’ largest public pension fund, CalPERS, which poured billions into risky China stocks, or persuading the New York Stock Exchange to list dozens of China companies without requiring adherence to US accounting transparency increase US financial vulnerability are others.

This all suggests the form that a war between China and the US could take. It can be termed asymmetrical warfare or unrestricted war, where nothing that disrupts the enemy is off limits. Qiao has that, “the first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.” There are no Geneva Conventions.

The two Beijing authors add this irregular warfare could include assaults on the political security, economic security, cultural security, and information security of the nation. The dependence of the US economy on China supply chains for everything from basic antibiotics to militarily-vital rare earth minerals is but one domain of vulnerability.

On its side, China is vulnerable to trade sanctions, financial disruption, bioterror attacks and oil embargoes to name a few. Some have suggested the recent locust plague and African Swine Fever devastation to China’s core food supplies, was not merely an act of nature. If not, then we are likely deep into an undeclared form of US-China unrestricted warfare. Could it be that the recent extreme floods along the China Yangtze River that threaten the giant Three Gorges Dam and have flooded Wuhan and other major China cities and devastated millions of acres of key cropland was not entirely seasonal?

A full unrestricted war of China and the USA would be more than a tragedy. It could be the end of civilization as we know it. Is this what characters such as Bill Gates and his superiors are trying to bring about? Do they plan to introduce their draconian dystopian “Reset” on the ashes of such a conflict?
___________
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

America's Fake Revolutionaries

This ‘revolution’ isn’t what it looks like

We’re really witnessing a counter-revolution of the neoliberal class

By Sohrab Ahmari

The Spectator, July 4, 2020: America is not in the middle of a revolution — it is a reactionary putsch. About four years ago, the sort of people who had acquired position and influence as a result of globalisation were turfed out of power for the first time in decades. They watched in horror as voters across the world chose Brexit, Donald Trump and other populist and conservative-nationalist options.

This deposition explains the storm of unrest battering American cities from coast to coast and making waves in Europe as well. The storm’s ferocity — the looting, the mobs, the mass lawlessness, the zealous iconoclasm, the deranged slogans like #DefundPolice — terrifies ordinary Americans. Many conservatives, especially, believe they are facing a revolution targeting the very foundations of American order.

But when national institutions bow (or kneel) to the street fighters’ demands, it should tell us that something else is going on. We aren’t dealing with a Maoist or Marxist revolt, even if some protagonists spout hard-leftish rhetoric. Rather, what’s playing out is a counter-revolution of the neoliberal class — academe, media, large corporations, ‘experts’, Big Tech — against the nationalist revolution launched in 2016. The supposed insurgents and the elites are marching in the streets together, taking the knee together.

Face Masks: The Latest Phase in The Culture War

Foundation for Economic Education, August 6, 2020: Denmark boasts one of the lowest COVID-19 death rates in the world. As of August 4, the Danes have suffered 616 COVID-19 deaths, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.

That’s less than one-third of the number of Danes who die from pneumonia or influenza in a given year.

Despite this success, Danish leaders recently found themselves on the defensive. The reason is that Danes aren’t wearing face masks, and local authorities for the most part aren’t even recommending them.

This prompted Berlingske, the country’s oldest newspaper, to complain that Danes had positioned themselves “to the right of Trump.”

Read more

How George Floyd Died

By Tathasta:

Two months after footage of George Floyd’s death went viral, sparking an epidemic of rioting and violence that killed dozens of people and caused untold damage to countless communities across the country, body cam footage of the incident has finally been made available. Published by the Daily Mail after being leaked to the outlet, the additional video lends crucial context to the fatal encounter between Floyd and Officer Derek Chauvin, and gives insight into the states of mind of both men. 

Given that this tragic episode and the reaction to it has been the most significant story in the country for two months, and one of the most significant of the past decade, you might think that the media would treat the new evidence as a rather big story. But so far the opposite has been the case. The news media, for the most part, has had a noticeably muted reaction to the footage. One might say suspiciously muted. Perhaps that’s because the story the new footage tells is, at the very least, far more complicated than the one the media and activists have been screaming into our ears since May. That story, with which we are all extremely familiar, is that George Floyd was a compliant and peaceful man who was strangled to death by a racist, anti-black, sociopathic cop. It was straightforward, we were told. Quite literally black and white. And the only opinion one can really have about it is the kind of opinion that is easily expressed on a protest sign. 

Of course we’ve known from the beginning that some of this was, to put it gently, not quite accurate. However Floyd was or wasn’t acting on the day of his death, it strains credulity to use a word like “peaceful” to describe a man who once forced his way into a woman’s home and robbed her at gunpoint in front of her child. As for the racism claim, there was perhaps no evidence to disprove it, but neither was any evidence ever presented to support it. It is merely assumed that any white police officer who kills a black suspect no matter the circumstances is motivated, at some level, by racism. Some of them may be so motivated, but the burden of proof is on those who make the claim. Yet those who make the claim rarely acknowledge that there is any burden to meet, much less make any honest attempt to meet it. 

Also, anyone following the story has known for sometime that, according to the medical examiner’s report, Floyd was not strangled to death and did not die from asphyxiation as the media had so confidently declared in the immediate aftermath. It was found that Floyd — who had a pre-existing heart condition and three illicit drugs in his system, including fentanyl, which is 50 times more potent than morphine and known to cause respiratory distress — died of “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restrain, and neck compression.” A medical examination performed by an examiner hired by Floyd’s family contradicted those findings, claiming that Floyd did in fact die of asphyxiation.

That was the status of things prior to this week’s developments: we had a disturbing video without prior context, a bunch of assumptions, and not much more. And those assumptions were considered reason enough to burn our cities. The new footage does not necessarily clarify things — in fact, it does the opposite, adding complications and nuances to an issue that was once assumed to be utterly straightforward. 

The body cameras worn by officers Alex Kueng and Thomas Lane, the first two cops on the scene, show Floyd agitated and uncooperative from the first moment that officers arrive in response to a call from a business owner who accused Floyd of trying to pass off counterfeit bills. Floyd is in his car when law enforcement first shows up. One of the officers draws his weapon because Floyd is initially hesitant to show his hands. Once Floyd places his hands on his head, the gun is holstered. After much coaxing, he is eventually removed from his car and taken over to the police cruiser.

Floyd appears to have trouble walking on his way over to the police car. He shouts “ow” and seems to be in pain even though he is only being grabbed by the arm. Once at the vehicle, he repeatedly refuses to get inside, saying that he’s “claustrophobic,” though he’d just been sitting in his own car without any apparent difficulty (on the contrary he was extremely reluctant to get out of his own vehicle). At one point, as officers try to convince him to get in the car, Floyd says he’d rather lay on the ground. He also says several times that he’s “going to die” and that he can’t breathe — all before he was on the ground. He ends up on the ground because he either falls or pushes himself out of the other side of the police cruiser as officers struggle to get him inside. From that point, the scene unfolds as we all saw on the initial video two months ago.

As previously stated, none of this conclusively exonerates the officers of any and all wrongdoing, but it does establish a few facts that might mitigate their culpability: 

1. George Floyd was not fully cooperative and clearly intoxicated.
2. The officers were calm and reasonable for most of the interaction.
3. George Floyd claimed that he couldn’t breathe and was going to die well before he had a knee on his neck.

4. The officers never did or said a single thing that any reasonable person could construe as racist. 

Point three in particular warrants further consideration. Floyd said he was too claustrophobic to get in the police car and that he might die and couldn’t breathe, even though he’d just been sitting in a car. He was screaming out in pain even though the officers at that point weren’t doing anything that could have caused him physical harm. We should note that he also said his mom just died even though she’d been dead for two years. The officers wouldn’t have known that latter detail, but the point is that cops hear nonsense like this from suspects all day, every day. This can create a “boy who cried wolf” situation where it’s harder to tell when a suspect is actually in distress. When Floyd was on the ground saying he was going to die, it was no different from what he was saying while he was standing, or what he was saying in the car. These facts may not be exculpatory but they certainly are relevant.

The narrative, as it was originally presented, does not take any of these details into account. It demands that we see the event as nothing more or less than a wanton act of random cruelty, with nothing precipitating it and with not even an ounce of blame or responsibility to be shared by Floyd himself. In reality, Floyd may still be the victim of some degree of negligence, but it seems that the murder charge will be difficult to prove. The truth just isn’t that simple. It rarely is. And that’s a lesson we would all do well to remember for the future.

Rep. Jim Jordan Lays Out the Charge of Election Interference Against Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook

Source

Angelo Codevila: The Covid Coup

Panicked by fears manufactured by the ruling class, the American people assented to being put essentially under house arrest until further notice, effectively suspending the habits, preferences, and liberties that had defined our way of life. Most Americans have suffered economic damage. Many who do not enjoy protected status have had careers ended and been reduced to penury. Social strains and suicides multiplied. Forcibly deferring all manner of medical care is sure to impose needless suffering and death. In sum, the lockdowns’ medical and economic dysfunctions make for multiples of the deaths and miseries of the COVID-19 virus itself.

Are there any categories of people who benefited from the shutdowns? Government gained. We know of no employee of federal, state or local government who was furloughed or had his or her pay reduced. On the contrary, all got additional power. The federal government created trillions of dollars, the distribution of which is enriching the usual suspects involved in administration. The teachers’ unions gained the power to extort concessions as a price for reopening schools.

Bad judgments and usurpations—the scam, not the germs—define this disaster’s dimensions. The COVID-19’s devastating effect on the U.S. body politic is analogous to what diseases do to persons whom age (senectus ipsa est morbus) and various debilities and corruptions had already placed on death’s slippery slope.

And as independent businesses were throttled, big ones grew. The biggest, Amazon, was the biggest winner.

Outside of the few who have gained (and are still gaining) power and wealth from the panic, Americans are asking what it will take to end this outrage—not to modify it with any “new normal” decided by who knows whom, on who knows what authority. Since no one in authority is leading those who want to end it, Americans also wonder who may lead that cause. What follows suggests answers.

Prohibitions such as of playing in the park or swimming in the sea are mere devices to train the public to accept unlimited bureaucratic discretion. You may congregate at Costco, but not at church. Failure to obey regulations will land ordinary citizens in jail, while the jails release robbers and child molesters. You may not exceed limits on occupancy or fail to wear a mask. You may not even sing in church. But if you and friends loot and burn the neighborhood store, the police will just stand by. Yet all Democrat governors celebrated and some joined masses of “protests”—forget about masks and social distancing. They did this not for anybody’s health but to to secure another few percentage points of the black vote for their party and to leverage their seizure of power over police forces.

What history will record as the great COVID scam of 2020 is based on 1) a set of untruths and baseless assertions—often outright lies—about the novel coronavirus and its effects; 2) the production and maintenance of physical fear through a near-monopoly of communications to forestall challenges to the U.S.. ruling class, led by the Democratic Party, 3) defaulted opposition on the part of most Republicans, thus confirming their status as the ruling class’s junior partner. No default has been greater than that of America’s Christian churches—supposedly society’s guardians of truth.

We are supposed to believe that all this is dictated by “Science.” In June, 1,200 “health experts” signed a letter approving the BLM protests because, it said, “white supremacy is a lethal public health issue.” But it cautioned that “this should not be confused with a permissive stance on…protests against stay-home orders.” In short, Coronavirus restrictions, like the rest of political correctness’s commandments, are pure political weaponry—nothing short of an inversion of the American people’s priorities, accomplished by nobody’s vote. Ruling class presumption. In short, we are living through a coup d’état.

Read more

Related:

Real Clear Politics: The Myth That Lockdowns Stop Pandemics

Station Gossip: Sweden’s Top Epidemiologist: ‘We See No Point In Wearing Masks’

Hide Out Now: CDC Director Reveals 'Substantial' Cost of Closed Schools as Suicides Eclipse COVID Deaths

Mises Institute: From Lockdowns to "The Great Reset"

Zero Hedge: The Great COVID-Con: Exposing Journalistic Malpractice

Zero Hedge: Protesting Germans Revolt Against 'Muzzle' Facemasks And Pandemic Restrictions

"Our demand is to go back to democracy. Away with these laws that have been imposed on us, away with the masks that make us slave," said one woman, according to the BBC.

Daily Mail: Police condemn Boris's order to enforce mask and social distancing rules and call it an' impossible' task

Off Guardian: 
Crossing the Rubicon: The UK Slips into a Repressive State

Real Clear Politics:
Politics, Not Science, Keeping Schools Closed

Off Guardian: “Honey, I Shrunk the People’s Constitutional Rights!”How Public-Health Officials and Other Administrators Got So Much Power

Barry Norris:
The Biggest Fraud Ever, Part 1: The Hocus "Science" Behind Lockdowns

Breitbart:
Dutch Government Won’t Use Mask Mandate; ‘No Proven Effectiveness’

Covid19: India — Herd Immunity Achieved: Not Many Dead, and Other Remarkable Facts About the Novel Corona Virus

The Spectator reports:

Serological tests on 21,387 residents of Delhi by the Indian Centre for Disease Control suggest that 23.5 per pent of the city’s population have antibodies to Sars-Cov-2, the virus which causes Covid-19. Remarkably, this is a higher proportion than has been measured in New York, where 22.7 per cent were found to have been infected with the virus. The tests in Delhi were carried out between 27 June and 10 July. Since then, the epidemic seems to have peaked and receded. The infection rate comes as a surprise given Delhi’s relatively low numbers of deaths. As the population of Delhi’s National Capital Territory is 16 million, the antibody figures suggest that 3.76 million people in the city have been infected. Up until Saturday, the Indian government had recorded 3,571 deaths in Delhi. That would give an Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of just 0.094 per cent.

The Spectator also reports on the "absence of evidence" concerning the value of wearing a face mask:

A report from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health has reviewed the evidence on whether individuals in the community who don’t have Covid-19 symptoms should wear face masks to reduce the spread of the virus. It says randomised trials show a small protective effect from wearing medical face masks, but a nationwide training programme would be needed as incorrect use limits their effectiveness. On the use of non-medical face masks, it says there is ‘no reliable evidence’. The review concludes that, with infection rates low in Norway, ‘assuming that 20% of people infectious with Sars-CoV-2 do not have symptoms, and assuming a risk reduction of 40% for wearing face mask, 200,000 people would need to wear facemasks to prevent one new infection per week in the current epidemiological situation’. So, ‘wearing face masks... is not recommended for individuals in the community without respiratory symptoms’.

Then there's the fake study authored by Harvard Med School Prof. in the famous medical journal, the Lancet, claiming, falsely, on behalf of big pharma that the cheap, old, and safe drug hydroxyquinoline is ineffective in the treatment of Covid19.

All of which raises two questions: 

(1) why are we led by such apparently useless people as Trump, Trudeau, Johnson, for example, with the only alternative available to the public being people of similar calibre — Joe Biden, for example.

(2) are these buffoonish characters the only ones available or are they post turtles providing cover for those engaged in a transformation of the world: a transformation from a world in which freedom of the individual was among the highest values to a world dominated by a globalist elite where the common man will be seen as nothing more than, for now, a necessary evil, and a form of life to be eliminated as soon as artificially intelligent machinery is available to take his place.

Related:
Detroit Free Press: How a piece of cloth has America going mad
John Ward: Stop forcing people to wear useless masks
YDN: Nearly Twice as Many US Children and Young Adults Died from Flu than Covid19 in Past Year

Elite Destruction of the Democratic Nation State

By Patriot Rising:

How Treacherous Americans Pose the Greatest Threat to Our Nation

 The “Free Press” And Big Tech Use Propaganda To Enslave Us: Control Of Speech And Ban On Firearms.

“THE CONSCIOUS AND INTELLIGENT MANIPULATION OF THE ORGANIZED HABITS AND OPINIONS OF THE MASSES IS AN IMPORTANT ELEMENT IN DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY. THOSE WHO MANIPULATE THIS UNSEEN MECHANISM OF SOCIETY CONSTITUTE AN INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT WHICH IS THE TRUE RULING POWER OF OUR COUNTRY. WE ARE GOVERNED, OUR MINDS ARE MOLDED, OUR TASTES FORMED, OUR IDEAS SUGGESTED, LARGELY BY MEN WE HAVE NEVER HEARD OF. THIS IS A LOGICAL RESULT OF THE WAY IN WHICH OUR DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY IS ORGANIZED. VAST NUMBERS OF HUMAN BEINGS MUST COOPERATE IN THIS MANNER IF THEY ARE TO LIVE TOGETHER AS A SMOOTHLY FUNCTIONING SOCIETY.

“IF WE UNDERSTAND THE MECHANISMS AND MOTIVES OF THE GROUP MIND, IT IS NOW POSSIBLE TO CONTROL AND REGIMENT THE MASSES ACCORDING TO OUR WILL WITHOUT THEIR KNOWING IT. IN ALMOST EVERY ACT OF OUR DAILY LIVES, WHETHER IN THE SPHERE OF POLITICS OR BUSINESS, IN OUR SOCIAL CONDUCT OR OUR ETHICAL THINKING, WE ARE DOMINATED BY THE RELATIVELY SMALL NUMBER OF PERSONS WHO UNDERSTAND THE MENTAL PROCESSES AND SOCIAL PATTERNS OF THE MASSES. IT IS THEY WHO PULL THE WIRES WHICH CONTROL THE PUBLIC MIND.”

~ two quotations from the book, “Propaganda,” by Edward Bernays, Early 20th Century proponent of Propaganda and “Father of Public Relations”

Government, the mainstream media, transnational corporations and global technology companies are all avid users of psychological warfare and have been using it to their advantage and to great effect to control and to direct the public’s thought processes and behavior.

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How many Covid diagnoses are false positives?

By Professor Carl Heneghan*

The Spectator, July 20, 2020: Test, test, test said the WHO. And globally, that’s what everyone did: nearly 300 million tests have been done to detect more than 14 million cases of Sars-CoV-2 so far. The thinking goes: turn up, have your test, and if positive, you must have the disease. But that’s far from the truth. When virus levels in the population are very low, the chances of a test accurately detecting Covid-19 are less than 50 per cent – for reasons that are not very widely understood.

There are two issues about tests to get your head around. The first is the sensitivity of the test: the proportion of people who test positive, out of the population who have the virus. The second measure, specificity, is about the proportion of people who test negative, out of the population who should have tested negative. Finding out the actual values for these two measures is tricky. The Office for National Statistics admits they do not ‘know the true sensitivity and specificity of the test because Covid-19 is a new virus’.

Estimates suggest that roughly 80 per cent of infected people will have a positive test (the sensitivity). Based on the latest data, specificity may be as high as 99.9 per cent for those who test negative. I think this is a bit high, but let’s run with it for now.

Bill Gates and the Billionaires Behind the Drive for Global governance

There are a couple of comments in response to an earlier post on the Corona virus pandemic that I want to respond to with the convenience of a regular post rather than dependence on Blogger's spavined comment software.  

First:

YusefJuly 18, 2020 at 12:10 PM I'm going to take a stab at explaining what's going on from a more "structural" perspective. I want to steer clear of the more lurid conspiracy theory aspects of my understanding to this point. I will explain why. The first structural feature: the concentration of worldwide wealth, first to a small number of nation states; then, within those nation states to a remarkably small number of individuals. The second structural feature: globalization as a fait accompli. It is a done deal now and the global economy and political organization is the reality. Most of what we grew up believing about the economy and political organization (the nation state, democracy, totalitarianism, or communism-- you name it-- it is all obsolete.) About the first structural feature: concentration of wealth. What I want to call attention to is a phenomena we can all agree on: the emergence of a single man named Bill Gates as a world leader of epic power and sway. When I say we can all agree on it, I mean no one doubts Gates is one of the most wealthy and powerful people in the world. (Some people claim he is the second most wealthy--it wouldn't surprise me.) It is not controversial he is heavily invested in vaccines: vaccine research and development, production, and dissemination. This investment is both through his charitable foundation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and in for-profit private companies. (I recall several years ago reading he'd invested 11 billion in a for-profit private company. He likely has increased this. I need to check to see if I can find out where he's at now.) It is not controversial this one man, Bill Gates, contributes more to the funding of the World Health Organization,(WHO) than all but one of the 193 nation-state members. As an aside, note the confluence of structural element number one and number two in this truly extraordinary state of affairs: One man contributing more than all of those nation-states to an organization which is an outgrowth of the United Nations, a signal or earlier attempt (failed) toward a global governance.

That through the investment of vast personal resources, Bill Gates seeks a pivotal role in the global response to a pandemic confirms the role of the money power in the drive for global governance.

Almost 120 years ago, Cecil Rhodes, with the backing of Lord Rothschild and other bankers, created a secret society with the goal of bringing the entire world under British rule. The society still exists and is known by its public face as the British Institute for International Affairs, or Chatham House, and its American spin-off, the Council on Foreign Relations. Rhodes' project, backed as it was by Lord Rothschild and other bankers, thus set the world on course for control by what Carrol Quigley referred to, in his magnum opus, Tragedy and Hope, as the Money Power.

Writing in the 1960's, Quigley assumed that, as at the founding of Rhodes' Secret Society, banks would remain central to the Money Power. However, as the Canadian economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, realized, by the 1960s corporations were increasingly able to control competition and hence fix prices and were thus able to accumulate capital sufficient to their investment needs without resort to the banks. Thus, the Money Power came increasingly to be dominated by corporate managers who pursued globalization for the sole purpose of  profit maximization.

The vast importance of corporations in the process of globalization became evident following the 1994 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to which 128 countries were a party. Under that agreement, great corporations based in Europe, America and Japan were free to move capital and technology to where labor was cheapest, environmental and workplace safety regulations were least onerous, while shipping goods to where prices were highest, and taking profits where taxes were lowest.

Since 1994, however, there has been a further evolution of the Money Power, as vast personal fortunes have been accumulated by entrepreneurs such as Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and dozens of others. What we are seeing now, as you show in the case of Bill Gates and global health policy, is that the globalization project is taking on a more idiosyncratic course as individual plutocrats are able to impose their personal judgment on how the future of the world should unfold.

Second:

YusefJuly 18, 2020 at 12:11 PM Now we have this one man, Bill Gates, exercising influence and power. The exact nature of the way Gates is exercising influence and power IS CONTROVERSIAL. I don't deny it. What needs to be remembered, though, is something which wasn't controversial very long ago in the US, Canada, Britain or any other western democracy: systems of checks and balances and other forms of restraint on ALL exercises of public power and influence. I have to wonder how hard it would be to get people to see, in the case of Bill Gates and this pandemic, we do not have such systems in effect. We don't need the idea of Bill Gates as a psychopathic madman conspiring to depopulate the planet and make himself a trillion dollars richer by manipulating a crisis. All we actually need is recognition he is no longer "one man throwing his two cents into the pot, along with everyone else's two cents." We don't have a war of, or marketplace, of words and ideas duking it out on a level playing field so that in the long run the better ones win. We have one guy, who may very well have the best intentions, pulling strings here and there in the way he thinks is best-- but without any contest of ideas-- not likely the best FOR EVERYONE or, failing that, FOR THE GREATER GOOD. He can't! He has his narrow perspective, his personal experiences, his unconscious desires and drives, his imperfections, limitations, defects of character, intelligence, and personality-- just like all us slobs. (Here and there he may have some quality to recommend him so what, but I alone know at least a dozen smarter and better men.) There are corollaries to this. Gates is not where he is due to his merits. (Not really.) The people beneath him aren't necessarily there due to their merits, either. Gates has business skills, I would say, probably some very rusty computer skills, and he has less knowledge of biology and medicine, I think, than you or I. He is to some degree or other unable to evaluate who is best and what is best. (This is true for so many of our "leaders". They are so out of their depth it is painful. I even felt sorry for Trump. He just plain doesn't know what's going on and he's too old and too stressed to learn.) Gates is going to feel comfortable working with some people, not others, and will, as we all may tend to do, think those are the best. He is going to have, as many wealthy and powerful people do, a bias in favor of those who obtain access to him personally. These people are also not necessarily the best and may be among the worst. They may very well have access because they are powerful enough, or corrupt enough, to get it. I have to stop here. Hopefully you can see where I am going. Every time I have seen a goof-- and there have been so many-- (the 20% hospitalization rate for those infected is an example; so are Neil Ferguson's modeling results), I have been angered and seen it all as a hoax (and conspiracy.) There is plenty of evidence of hoax, conspiracy, gross negligence, and corruption, but what I am thinking now is it has more to do with our global abandonment OF WHAT WORKED WELL ENOUGH for what we all knew had to be avoided and guarded against.

Yes, the problem well stated.

Unfortunately, there seems no obvious way back. Money has always had political influence, and with so much money held by so few, the influence of egocentric, idiosyncratic, or truly insane individuals seems certain to grow.

But Bill Gates`s  strange, not to say Strangeloveian manner and impulses, gives warning to the world, so none can claim ignorance of what may lie ahead.

But what to do?

What do others think?

Meantime:

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When College Degrees Became Proof of Radical Stupidity

Evidence of how stupid college ideas find their way into the public arena can be seen on our daily news. Don Lemon, a CNN anchorman, said, "We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them."  Steven Clifford, a former King Broadcasting CEO, said, "I will be leading a great movement to prohibit straight white males, who I believe supported Donald Trump by about 85 percent, from exercising the franchise (to vote), and I think that will save our democracy." As George Orwell said, "Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them." If the stupid ideas of academic intellectuals remained on college campuses and did not infect the rest of society, they might be a source of entertainment -- much like a circus. Source

What Black Lives Matter and the Smithsonian Institution Aim to Destroy?

What is remarkable about these charts, is not that they state what Black Lives Matter seems to hate about white people, but what the Smithsonian Institution, which created the charts, thinks black people should hate about white people -- Christianity, for instance, notwithstanding that more African Americans consider themselves to be Christians than white Americans (72% versus 65%).

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This Is A Financial Extinction Event

By Charles Hugh Smith

Of Two Minds.com July 15, 2020: The lower reaches of the financial food chain are already dying, and every entity that depended on that layer is doomed.

Though under pressure from climate change, the dinosaurs were still dominant 65 million year ago--until the meteor struck, creating a global "nuclear winter" that darkened the atmosphere for months, killing off most of the food chain that the dinosaurs depended on (See chart).

The ancestors of modern birds were one of the few dinosaur species to survive the extinction event, which took months to play out.

It wasn't the impact and shock wave that killed off dinosaurs globally--it was the "nuclear winter" that doomed them to extinction. As plants withered, the plant-eating dinosaurs expired, depriving the predator dinosaurs of their food supply.

This is a precise analogy for the global economy, which is entering a financial "nuclear winter" extinction event. As I've been discussing for the past few months, costs are sticky but revenues and profits are on a slippery slope.

Businesses still have all the high fixed costs of 2019 but their revenues are sliding as the "nuclear winter" weakens consumer spending, investment in new capacity, etc.

Despite all the hoopla about a potential vaccine, no vaccine can change four realities: one, consumer sentiment has shifted from confidence to caution and from spending freely to saving. This is the financial equivalent of "nuclear winter": there is no way to return to the pre-impact environment.