Dealing With Covid19: A Conversation with Stanford University Professor, John Ioannidis, America's Most Distinguished Epidemiologist

 By SAURABH JHA, MD

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a testing time for the already testy academic discourse. Decisions have had to be made with partial information. Information has come in drizzles, showers and downpours. The velocity with which new information has arrived has outstripped our ability to make sense of it. On top of that, the science has been politicized in a polarized country with a polarizing president at its helm.

As the country awoke to an unprecedented economic lockdown in the middle of March, John Ioannidis, professor of epidemiology at Stanford University and one of the most cited physician scientists who practically invented “metaresearch”, questioned the lockdown and wondered if we might cause more harm than good in trying to control coronavirus. What would normally pass for skepticism in the midst of uncertainty of a novel virus became tinder in the social media outrage fire.

Ioannidis was likened to the discredited anti-vax doctor, Andrew Wakefield. His colleagues in epidemiology could barely contain their disgust, which ranged from visceral disappointment – the sort one feels when their gifted child has lost their way in college, to deep anger. He was accused of misunderstanding risk, misunderstanding statistics, and cherry picking data to prove his point.

The pushback was partly a testament to the stature of Ioannidis, whose skepticism could have weakened the resoluteness with which people complied with the lockdown. Some academics defended him, or rather defended the need for a contrarian voice like his. The conservative media lauded him.

In this pandemic, where we have learnt as much about ourselves as we have about the virus, understanding the pushback to Ioannidis is critical to understanding how academic discourse shapes public’s perception of public policy.

Saurabh Jha (SJ): On March 17th, at the start of the lockdown, you wrote in STAT News cautioning us against overreacting to COVID-19. You likened our response to an elephant accidentally jumping off a cliff because it was attacked by a house cat. The lockdown had just begun. What motivated you to write that editorial?

John P.A. Ioannidis (JPA): March seems a long time ago. I should explain my thinking in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like many, I saw a train approaching. Like many, I couldn’t sense the train’s precise size and speed. Many said we should be bracing for a calamity and in many ways I agreed. But I was concerned that we might inflict undue damage, what I’d call “iatrogenic harm”, controlling the pandemic.

To answer your question specifically, I wrote the piece because I felt that the touted fatality rate of COVID-19 of 3.4 % was inflated, but we had so limited data and so much uncertainty that infection fatality rate values as different as 0.05% and 1% were clearly still possible. I was pleading for better data on COVID-19 to make our response more precise and proportionate.

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(With Thanks to Yusef for this link).

Related:
DigWithin:
Has COVID-19 Testing Made the Problem Worse?

(With Thanks to Anastasia for this link).

Malcolm Kendrick:
COVID – why terminology really, really matters

(With Thanks to Peripatetic Commenter for this link).

How George Soros Enables Crime In America

By Newt Gingrich

Zero hedge, September 18, 2020: I have been watching a truly curious phenomenon over the past few days.

It seems there is suddenly a movement in media to silence anyone who speaks out against George Soros - and, specifically, his funding of radical prosecutors seeking to change the criminal justice system by simply ignoring certain crimes.

This happened to me personally this week while I was being interviewed on Fox’s Outnumbered. When I brought up Soros’s plan to get pro-criminal, anti-police prosecutors elected across the country, two of the show’s participants interrupted me and forcefully asserted that Soros was not involved.

This is ludicrous.

Soros’s plan to elect these prosecutors has been well documented already - and it has nothing to do with his spiritual or ethnic background. The Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Politico, USA Today, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, CBS, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel - even Fox News itself, among others, have all thoroughly reported on it.

There are plenty of specific examples of Soros’s work in action.

Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot, who campaigned on the promise that he would not prosecute a host of crimes—including thefts—admitted his campaign was largely funded through Soros or his groups. He has been so dismissive of crime and police that Texas Governor Greg Abbott has had to send in the Texas State Patrol to police large swaths of Dallas.

Soros gave $333,000 to the Safety and Justice PAC in 2016 to support then-Cook County District Attorney candidate Kim Foxx in Illinois—who is currently presiding over terrible violence and mayhem in Chicago, where murders are twice what they were in 2019.

Soros and his organizations spent $1.7 million to help get Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner elected in 2018. Before being elected, Krasner earned a name for himself by suing the Philadelphia Police Department 75 times. Since he took office, dozens of experienced prosecutors have either been fired or resigned. Criminal prosecutions have plummeted and crime has risen. Philadelphia now has the second-highest murder rate among large cities in the country.

Former Hugo Chavez advisor and current San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was also funded by Soros and his groups. Boudin has called prison “an act of violence” and has refused to prosecute a slew of illegal acts, from public urination to the public solicitation of sex, which he deems to be “quality of life crimes.” By the way, Boudin is the foster child of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, of terrorist group Weather Underground fame. His birth parents were convicted and imprisoned for their involvement in an armed robbery-turned-homicide.

One of Soros’s favored PACs spent $402,000 to support a failed San Diego County District Attorney bid by Geneviéve Jones-Wright.

In 2016, a Soros-funded super PAC donated $107,000 to benefit Raul Torrez in his Bernalillo County District Attorney primary—which he won by a 2-to-1 margin. In fact, Soros’s huge funding prompted the Republican running to bow out because it was just too expensive to run against Torrez.

Soros-backed George Gascon is currently challenging Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey, who has been targeted and systematically harassed by Black Lives Matter supporters.

Read more

Covid19: None Dare Call This Murder

The following from LewRockwell.com, presents the theory that Covid19 is a man-made pathogen loosed upon the world to advance the creation of a global empire under which the mass of humanity will be reduced to brainwashed helotry under the ruthless exploitation and control of a plutocratic elite. The theory is plausible. What makes it difficult to evaluate is the difficulty in distinguishing between a government-orchestrated conspiracy and a government balls-up due to a combination of the mundane corruption and sheer incompetence that characterizes most government activity.

By Bill Sardi

Lew Rockwell.com, September 15, 2020: 

The spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus is not a pandemic, it is the biggest crime in human history, since Cain killed Abel and reduced the human population by a quarter.   And there is no world police force to stop this ongoing felony.  At least not yet.

The intentional spread of a man-mutated coronavirus has a covert objective – – to involve the entire world in an exercise through panic and fear to “cultivate a sense of global community.”  It is what the globalists call the Great Reset.

Ruthlessness

The globalists will let nothing stand in the way of their objectives, to eradicate borders, erase history and culture, antiquate and replace religion via technology (immortality via AI), eliminate free enterprise, and destroy the economies of the world and individual livelihoods in order to coerce the world to beg for relief, for vaccines and a global currency, via a single world governance led by arrogant unelected elites whose godless technocratic, transhuman world view will be forced on 7.8 billion souls, or else you or your kids will be taken to quarantine camps.

So quickly the fear of God has been replaced by the instilled fear of COVID.  What is so unexpected is the almost universal voluntary compliance with this out-in-the-open overthrow of modern society operating under the banner of equality.  The masses have largely volunteered to comply.

Fooled by the equity card

Now the poorest people in the world will have an equity card that will give them use of a digital currency that is equal in value to all other world currencies.

Take a gander at the value of various world currencies: the

Indian rupee: worth 1.3-cents
Japanese yen – 9/10ths of a penny
Argentine peso 1.3-cents
Mexican peso 4.6-cents
Kuwaiti dinar $3.26;
Chinese renminbi 14.6-cents.

These currency values are determined on a floating rate by demand.  Low demand = low value.  If a buyer wants to purchase $100 US dollars of pencils from Mexico that would equal 2,133.4 pesos.  The differences in these values are called exchange rates.

Currently the world uses the US dollar as the exchange rate for all foreign transactions, making the US dollar by practice the most in demand.

In the name of financial equality, the Constitution was trashed

With a global currency every currency would be equal.  The value of the US dollar would decline in foreign trade.  Imported goods would cost more.  With the new global currency everybody will be playing with the same money value.  Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Then international companies can do business without having to convert currencies into dollars and a guy in India can directly buy something made in Canada without having to do a wire transfer.

Robotics will be ushered in

As robotics takes over, a guaranteed income will likely follow, since that is the way to totally control the world.  But then Gross Domestic Product is a measure of welfare, not productivity.  People will learn not to work or just pretend to work.  The AI-driven robots will do all the repetitive work cheaper than any human labor.  Then the US doesn’t need to export its jobs to China any longer.  But robots only make unemployment worse, not better.

Generational naivety

The generation of people who are most attracted to this scheme, particularly the poor who can only hope a lottery ticket will bring them out of poverty, never heard Sir Winston Churchill say this:

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of its blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.”

It was Ronald Reagan in 1967 who said at his inaugural address: “Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

Parents in America naively sent their high school graduates to universities that teach Marxist socialism.  Bernie Sanders became their hero, their only hope.  Young students can’t see they have been groomed.

Now there will be no hope of rising up out of poverty.  You won’t be abjectly poor, your overseers will provide subsistence, but no freedom, no opportunity.  You become a slave, never an entrepreneur.  The US Constitution will soon be considered a relic.

When TV does the thinking for people

The world is so slow to catch on.  That is because the conscience of the world, the script by which mankind operates, is being provided by the news media.  It is the global news media that is filling in the blanks for the confused, the global news media that ridicules those who resist vaccination, that does the bidding for the banksters who are at the center of this confusion.

By social distancing, wearing masks, locking down indoors, the populations of the world will feel the “same connectedness,” so we are told.

People don’t know what to think of this.  It is beyond their comprehension.  They let the TV news reporters do the thinking for them.  It’s about a virus, right?  No!

Burning down the political opposition

No one can imagine the fires that were lit in rural Australia and California were targeted to burn down the political opposition and drive human populations into metropolises where their minds are more easily controlled.

Some say these fires were started by directed energy weapons.  The complete devastation of the burned homes in these fires without burnt surroundings was unusual.  Fires burned the California forest in swathes, like an aimed weapon.  California is broke.  Unlike countries that can print more money, states cannot.  Fires force insurance companies to release funds to rebuild, raising employment and property values.

Turn the masses against each other

Turning humans against each other by exploiting racial divides keeps the masses from mounting a push-back against the real instigators of this crime – – the intelligentsia in Europe and the billionaire oligarchs that operate above the law and agencies within US government as well as NGOs (non-government orgs) like the UN that wants to bring down democracy and free enterprise, agencies that despise free market competition, a platform that ironically earned oligarchs billions.

Read more

RELATED: 

British Medical Journal
Cloth masks increased risk of influenza like illness in hospital study

 

Kit Knightly:

Federal Judge Rules Pennsylvania Lockdown “Unconstitutional”

The Covid Conundrum: Rising Positive Test Numbers, Declining Mortality Rates

After peaking in April, at about 5500 per day, reported Covid infections in Britain fell to around 150 a day in July before rising sharply to a total this month of around 3500 per day. However, reported Covid deaths, which also peaked in April at a rate of more than 1000 per day, have fallen continuously amounting now to only about 15 a day. Thus the mortality rate for Covid19 appears to have dropped from around 18% in the spring to only 0.4% now, an almost 50-fold reduction. Why? That is the Covid Conundrum.

Possible explanations include:

1. Viral evolution to a less deadly form.

Evidence? None.

2. More testing.

Evidence? We can assume that the UK government has been cranking up Covid testing programs throughout the epidemic, so this explanation is credible. If, as appears to have been the case, initial testing was largely confined to Covid cases, i.e., people so ill with Covid-like symptoms that they came to medical attention, then early test results would have yielded a vast under-estimate of the population-wide Covid infection rate, assuming, as is now generally accepted, that many Covid infections do not cause serious illness and are often asymptomatic.

3. Better Covid treatment.

Evidence? There are many reports of positive effects of various drugs including the cheap and plentiful hydroxychloroquine, as touted by President Trump, and of the protective effects of Vitamin D and zinc supplements. Meantime, the early reliance on ventilators in the treatment of severe cases seems to have been largely abandoned as ineffective.

4. As a result of increased public awareness of individual risk factor a change in the distribution of Covid infections among population groups differing in risk of Covid mortality by virtue of age or pre-existent conditions.

Evidence? While quantitative data are scarce if they exist, at all, such behavioral changes have surely occurred as knowledge of the risk factors for serious Covid illness have become known. Older people and those with pre-disposing health conditions will have become more careful to limit their risk of infection, whereas most young people will have become more care-free concerning the virus.

Of these four factors, the last, spontaneous behavioral adaptation may be important, but there can be little doubt that changes in Covid testing methods and the expansion of testing programs mean that test data from different periods during the epidemic are not comparable. Moreover, the reliability of many test methods, especially those used early in the epidemic, is questionable. Whether the virus has mutated to a more benign form is possible but unknown.

Pretty certainly, therefore, the decline in Covid mortality in most Northern hemisphere countries indicates the achievement of a rising degree of population immunity combined with the well-established seasonality in Corona virus susceptibility, whereas the rise in reported infections is a consequence of increased testing and an increase in the proportion of the population who are either asymptomatic Covid carriers or those who have recoveved from Covid infection but still carry the virus. The Covid conundrum is thus simply an artifact of Covid testing.

Related:
Wei Li, et al.
High potency of a bivalent human VH domain in SARS-CoV-2 animal models
PETER HITCHENS: How the Government is wading into the swamp of despotism – one muzzle at a time
PAUL JOSEPH WATSON: Author Of Dystopian Classics Predicted 'Use Of Face Masks To Enforce Conformity' 70 Years Ago
MISES INSTITUTE: It's Far Too Late to Think Lockdowns Can Make Covid-19 Go Away
VERNON COLEMAN: The Coronavirus Pandemic That Never Was
Viral Issue Crucial Update Sept 8th: the Science, Logic and Data Explained:

Covid Lies to Keep You Terrorized

Absent strong public health measures, we would expect it to kill something like 0.5% to 1.0% of a nation’s population, and whether or not that’s a large number is a matter of personal opinion.

So declared Ron Unz, publisher of the Unz Review. 

That claim is far from the truth as the case of Sweden demonstrates. There, in the absence of "strong public health measures" there have been 5,846 reported Covid deaths, or about 0.06% of the population. That must be close to the final toll, as Covid deaths in Sweden peaked in March and are now at or close to zero.

Why would a scientifically literate person such as Ron Unz make such a false claim? Mere confusion, perhaps*.

One way in which Covid death rates have been greatly exaggerated has been to confuse, deliberately or otherwise, two measures of the death rate; namely, the "Case Fatality Rate" and the  "Infection Fatality Rate." 

The Covid19 Case Fatality Rate (CFR) is a measure of deaths among confirmed Covid19 cases, the latter being mainly cases of serious illness, which thus came to the attention of the medical profession and were identified as due to Covid19 by a more or less reliable diagnostic methods.

The Covid19 Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) is a measure of deaths among all those infected with Covid19, whether they were seriously ill or not, or whether they were ill at all. The IFR can only be determined if there is population-wide testing for past or present Covid19 infection, for example by means of a reliable serological test for Covid19 antibodies. 

Evidence currently available suggests that the the IFR is only about one tenth of the CFR. Therefore, to mistake the CFR for the IFR will result in an exaggeration of the actual IFR by a factor of around ten. 

But even a ten-fold error does not explain Ron Unz's claim that "absent strong public health measures" Covid19 will "kill something like 0.5% to 1.0% of a nation’s population." To explain that, assuming it is not a straight lie, one must assume that Ron Unz confuses the Infection Fatality Rate with the Population Fatality Rate (PFR). Such confusion assumes a Covid death rate among the population as a whole equal to the Covid death rate among those made sick by a confirmed Covid19 infection, which is nonsense.

But perhaps Ron Unz's claim is a straight lie, which would be consistent with the fact that, when I pointed out the error on his Unz Review post, my comment was deleted.

______
* Cf. Ronald B. Brown, 2000, Public Health Lessons Learned from Biases in Coronavirus Mortality Overestimation.

Related:
Zero Hedge: "It's Like Using A Hammer To Kill A Fly" - Architect Of Sweden's COVID-19 Anti-Lockdown Strategy Finally Vindicated

If you are scared of Covid19, read this

 If you are scared of Covid19, you should read the OffGuardian article, Flu Is Killing More People Than Covid, and Has Been for Months,  that I linked to in my last post. But in case you can't be bothered, here's the key point:

The top lines, solid blue and dashed grey, show respectively, all UK deaths in 2020, and the average number of deaths for the past five years. The rise in the blue line (i.e., the 2020 total death rate), beginning in March, peaking in April and returning to the long-term average in May, shows that over a period of about six weeks there was an abnormal rise in weekly deaths, the excess averaging about 5000 per week for a total excess mortality of, roughly, 30,000 — most likely due to Covid19 infection of  elderly people with other conditions, mostly in poorly managed care homes.

The lower lines show weekly deaths attributed to flu and pneumonia (blue lines dashed and solid) and Covid19 (red line). The peak in Covid19 deaths corresponds with, and accounts for, the peak in all deaths during the March–May period. Thereafter, the Covid death toll falls continuously, approaching zero by the end of July whereas flu and pneumonia deaths continue at what, by the end of August, is a rate many times that of Covid19. Thus, as Kit Knightly, the author of the excellent Off Guardian piece I am quoting states:

“Ah”, some of your may be saying, “this is just evidence that the lockdown, social distancing and masks have worked.”

But that is obviously not the case. Clearly, if these measures did anything to halt viral transmission, the flu deaths would have gone down as well. They have not. They are right in line with the five-year average.

Despite social distancing and wearing masks and hand sanitizer on every corner…the spread of the flu virus has not halted one bit in its usual annual progress through society.

Ergo – the “emergency measures” have little to no impact on viral transmission.

So much for those who keep saying this is not the seasonal flu. Well actually they are correct. It is now less deadly. Which will not, of course, deter the psychopaths in charge from continuing to terrorize the population with Covid fear mongering, while destroying large parts of the economy to the benefit of the big boys such as Amazon, Walmart and the chain stores that will gain greatly from the bankruptcy of many of their small business competitors. 

Covid Induced Madness: First Case Confirmed

 The British Government, under the Premiership of recently recovered Covid19 victim, Boris Johnson, has embarked on a program to conduct up to ten million Covid tests a day at a cost of £100 billion, or $130 billion US, which is almost as much as the Government currently spends annually on Britain's gargantuan National Health Service. 

This is so weird that I for a moment suspected that the date on the British Medical Journal article reporting this extraordinary Government decision must be April 1. But no, the article clearly bears yesterday's date: September 9. 

As further proof, if any were needed, that the British Government is headed by a dangerous madman is the report that as of next Monday, September 14, social gatherings of more than six people are to be banned in England, the penalty for breach of this law starting at £100, and doubling with each subsequent offenses to a maximum of £3200.

All this to control an illness that is now reported to be killing fewer people than flu, and which the Swedes shrugged off with no worse consequences than locked-down, panic-stricken places such as Britain and America. 

Yes, poor old BoJo is clearly a case of Covid-induced insanity. The sooner the Brits gather what collective wits they yet possess and boot the old fool out, the better it will be for them. 

Related:

Hancock’s Half-Hour: the Case of the Covid Positive Seagull on Brighton beach

The Systemic Racism of the Government of Canada

 

Ottawa rolls out $200 million program to boost Black entrepreneurship

"The government will kick in nearly $93 million over the four years."

So our wonderful anti-raciss government is to bilk taxpayers to fund a program that favors a particular racial group. Maybe that's a good thing, but what's certain is that it is a manifestation of systemic Liberal racism. 

CF:

Atlantic Monthly:
The Dictionary Definition of Racism Has to Change

racism “is a system of advantage based on skin color.” 

Exactly, as in, no money under this government program for people who are white, red, yellow or green with pink stripes.

Covid19: Some Random Links

University of Waterloo professor calls pandemic 'COVID fake emergency

Yikes: New York Times Estimates 90% of ‘Positive’ COVID Test Results Really Are Negative!

Gates-backed Covid vaccine causes severe adverse reaction in 20% of human test subjects

Coronavirus: Oxford University vaccine trial paused after participant falls ill

But fortunately:

Vitamin calcifediol (Vitamin D) cut ICU admission of Covid patients from 50% to 2%

And if you take 1000 units of Vitamin D every day before you get Covid19 then you may not even have to go to hospital.

And: 

Adding 50 mg of Zinc once a week could further improve your chances;

Furthermore:

Hydroxychloroquine Reduces Risk Of Death From COVID-19 By 30%, Latest Italian Study Shows

But in any case, try not to worry:

Study by Researchers at UCLA and Stanford Finds Coronavirus “Ten Times Less Fatal than First Thought” (Video)

But for goodness sake:
Don't sing happy birthday

And Some Weird Stuff:

Pharmaceutical Company Filed For Patent Application 9 Months Before Emergence of Covid 19

World Bank: Covid 19 Test Kits Were Ordered in 2017 – The Disease Did Not Exist….. Yet

Covid-19 or Covid-9-11?

And to end on a cheerful note:

Flu is killing more people than Covid19, and has been for months

Inflation, consumer prices, house prices, stock prices and gold

The following are titles of recent articles appearing at Zero Hedge:

5 Reasons The Fed's New Policy Won't Create Inflation

and

Inflation - Running Out Of Road

The first contends that however much money the US Federal Reserve prints it will not succeed in creating a substantial rise in the consumer price index. The second asserts that far from there being no price inflation, an honest consumer price index would show inflation running at an annual rate of 10%.

So how to resolve the contradiction? First, it is necessary to be clear as to what inflation is. As Milton Friedman put it shortly:

Inflation is a monetary phenomenon -- always. 

This of course was not an original insight. Adam Smith wrote at length of the process whereby monetary inflation was achieved by re-minting gold and silver coinage in increased quantities through the addition of base metal.

But the supply of money is not unrelated to prices. As Samuel Johnson observed in 1775, during a visit to the Western Isles of Scotland, eggs were a half-pence a dozen not because eggs were abundant but because pence were scarce.

But the effect of monetary inflation on prices is not necessarily uniform. Thus, inflation does not necessarily affect the consumer price index directly or even at all. In Western economies today, money is chiefly created by banks, central or private, that create money out of thin air by making loans.

These loans are, in the case of the commercial banks, made primarily to facilitate the purchase of big-ticket items, particularly houses and cars, to support speculative stock investments, or to allow corporate stock buy-backs.

Such lending has little effect on the consumer price index, since it does nothing to increase consumption of items, the price of which determine the level of the price index.

Rather, mortgage debt and car loans will tend to suppress the consumer price index by forcing borrowers to divert an increased share of income to interest and capital repayments.

What such loans do affect is the price of houses, cars and stocks that are bid up by the loan-based spending. Thus, if we want to gauge the effect of monetary inflation on prices, we need to look at home prices and stock prices as well as the prices of bread or milk. 

When we take that broader view, we see that the US and many other countries are in the midst of a rapid money-printing-induced price inflation, which greatly enriches the already rich, i.e., the owners of stocks and real estate, while making the poor, relatively speaking, much poorer.

As for gold, the price reflects fear of the consequences of monetary inflation--which is to say fear of the loss of purchasing power of the unit of currency--among those with money but no desire to invest it in stocks or real estate.

Angelo M. Codevilla: The Finger in the Dike Election

Claremont Review of books: On September 11, 2020: United Airlines Flight 93’s passengers defied armed hijackers and fought to take over the cockpit regardless of danger or odds because they realized that certain death was the alternative. Michael Anton’s 2016 essay “The Flight 93 Election,” written for the Claremont Review of Books and later expanded into a book, argued that although Americans did not know what kind of president Donald Trump would be, they should risk all to elect him because they could be very sure that the alternative would be our republic’s death.

In his new book, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return, Anton, now a lecturer and research fellow at Hillsdale College, again urges Americans to vote for Trump, disappointed though they may be with his performance, because they know even better than before how much this country’s ruling class would use control of the presidency to hurt us in our private and public lives for having dared to reject their mastery. Trump, imperfect as he is, is like a finger in a dike that, if removed, would loose a deluge. Anton describes how the Democratic Party-led complex of public-private power has been transforming our free, decent, and prosperous country into its opposite—and how it’s going to do to the rest of America what it has already largely accomplished in California. In the book’s final chapters, he lays out several paths that the current struggle for America’s future might take.

Anton’s commentary on the 2020 election does not belabor the obvious: it is a binary choice. The unprecedented level of opposition President Trump has faced explains, but does not excuse, some of his shortcomings. As Anton puts it: “[t]here’s little wrong with President Trump that more Trump couldn’t solve.” Then he adds what is really radically new about the 2020 election: should the Democrats win, the ruling Left—which includes just about everyone who controls American government and society’s commanding heights—is ready, willing, and eager to implement plans that would make it virtually impossible for conservatives ever to win national elections again. These plans include the importation and counting of non-citizen voters. Elections-by-mail would shift power from voters to those who count the votes, just like in Venezuela. Though reelecting Trump makes the republic’s survival possible, and preserves all manner of good options, it guarantees nothing. Trump’s defeat guarantees disaster—like in 2016, only much more so.

Read more

Related: 

Paul Joseph Watson

Prof: If Dems Win In 2020, It Would Be "Virtually Impossible For Conservatives Ever To Win Again"

Craig Murray on Belarus, Diplomacy and Color Revolutions

There is a misperception in western media that Lukashenko is Putin’s man. That is not true; Putin views him as an exasperating and rather dim legacy. There is also a misperception in the west that Lukashenko really lost the recent election. That is not true. He almost certainly won, though the margin is much exaggerated by the official result. Minsk is not Belarus, just as London is not the UK. Most of Belarus is pretty backward and heavily influenced by the state machinery. Dictators have all kinds of means at their disposal to make themselves popular. That is why the odd election or plebiscite does not mean that somebody is not a dictator. Lukashenko is a dictator, as I have been saying for nigh on twenty years.

My analysis is that Lukashenko probably won handily, with over 60% of the vote. But it was by no means a free and fair election. The media is heavily biased (remember you can also say that of the UK), and the weak opposition candidate was only there because, one way or the other, all the important opposition figures are prevented from standing.

The West is trying to engineer popular opinion in Belarus towards a “colour revolution”, fairly obviously. But they are on a sticky wicket. Western Ukraine was genuinely enthusiastic to move towards the west and the EU, in the hope of attaining a consumer lifestyle. Outside of central Minsk, there is very little such sentiment in Belarus. Most important of all, Belarus means “White Russia”, and the White Russians very strongly identify themselves as culturally Russian. We will not see a colour revolution in Belarus. The West is trying, however.

Unlike many of my readers, I see nothing outrageous in this. Attempting to influence the political direction of another country to your favour is a key aim of diplomacy, and always has been. ...

Read more

Also by Craig Murray:

Novichok, Navalny, Nordstream, Nonsense

Why Fukuyama was right all along

By Aris Roussinos

Unherd, September 1, 2020: The American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama has become, perhaps unfairly, something of a punchline in recent years. Written immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, when global pre-eminence was unexpectedly thrust upon the United States, his National Interest essay The End of History?, later elaborated into a bestselling book, has become a shorthand for liberal hubris. Its central argument, that liberal democracy had essentially won the battle of ideologies and that the arc of history seemed to bend inexorably towards the liberal order, seemed to embody the triumphalist optimism of the 1990s and 2000s, establishing the framework for the politics of the era.

Now that history has returned with the vengeance of the long-dismissed, few analyses of our present moment are complete without a ritual mockery of Fukuyama’s seemingly naive assumptions. The also-rans of the 1990s, Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilisations thesis and Robert D. Kaplan’s The Coming Anarchy, which predicted a paradigm of growing disorder, tribalism and the breakdown of state authority, now seem more immediately prescient than Fukuyama’s offering.

Yet nearly thirty years later, reading what Fukuyama actually wrote as opposed to the dismissive précis of his ideas, we see that he was right all along. Where Huntington and Kaplan predicted the threat to the Western liberal order coming from outside its cultural borders, Fukuyama discerned the weak points from within, predicting, with startling accuracy, our current moment.

Read more

In the Interests of Better Race Relations

Image Source

Employee Fired for Exposing the Fraudulence US Nuke Lab Anti-White Propaganda

It will be interesting to see how soon U-Tube takes this video down.

Related:
'br. Fox News:

Trump ends 'critical race theory' training for federal employees, calls it a 'sickness'

Breitbart:
Google Insider: Bombshell Book ‘Deleted’ Will ‘Shake the Foundations of Silicon Valley’
Zero Hedge:
Sandia Labs Goes Nuclear On Employee Who Sparked Internal Revolt Over Critical Race Theory

Covid19: A Mechanism to Drive New World Order Tyranny?

By Brandon Smith

AltMarket.com, August 26, 2020: All over the Western world ever since 9/11 there have been incremental steps towards what many liberty advocates would call a “police state”; a system in which governments are no longer restricted by the boundaries of civil liberties and are given the power to do just about anything they want in the name of public safety. The use of “the law” as a tool for injecting tyranny into a culture is the first tactic of all totalitarians.

The idea is that by simply writing government criminality into the law books, that criminality somehow becomes justified by virtue of legal recognition. It's all very circular. Whenever government abuse of the people is initiated, it's always initiated in the name of what's “best for society as a whole”. To save society, the individuals that make up a society must be sublimated or destroyed. This mentality is the complete opposite of what the Founding Fathers in America fought and died for, but as Thomas Jefferson once said:

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”

In countries like Australia, which claim to value Western democratic principles of liberty and rule by the people, the perception is that civil rights are codified into the legal framework just as they are in the US. However, there are some glaring differences and issues; specifically, Australian citizens (like many European citizens) have absolutely no means to compel their government or the elites that influence their government to limit themselves. It is these nations, in which the populations have been mostly disarmed and pacified, that any agenda for tyranny will first be established. But we will get to that in a moment...

In Canada, What's the Difference Between a Liberal and a Conservative: Nothing Really

A Statement by Maxime Bernier, Leader of Canada's People's Party:

Two years ago, I resigned from the Conservative Party of Canada and decided to launch a new, principled, and genuinely conservative party, the People’s Party of Canada. I am more convinced than ever that I made the right decision. I said at the time that under Andrew Scheer’s leadership, the Conservative Party had become too morally and intellectually corrupt to be reformed. Instead of articulating a coherent conservative vision, all he did was play identity politics, pander to ethnic and interest groups, and try to steal votes from the Liberals by proposing centre-left policies. Andrew Scheer’s leadership has proven itself to be an utter failure. The party now has a new leader who will follow the same strategy. Erin O’Toole said early in this leadership campaign that Peter Mackay would turn the Conservative Party into the “Liberal-lite Party” if he wins. He was right. What O’Toole did not say is that he, as leader, will do the same thing. Read more

As the leader of a new party without a seat in Parliament, Maxime Bernier looks like a no hoper. Except that:

(1) Bernier is a more experienced and vastly more charismatic politician than Erin O'Toole, the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party of Canada.

(2) US President Donald Trump appears set for a second term during which there is every probability that he will complete America's turn from globalization. 

This raises the question: will Canadians be happy to continue under the corruptionist incompetence of liberal lefties such as Justin Trudeau and the Just departed Tory Party leader Andrew Scheer as the US rebuilds its industrial base, restores full employment, and unhesitatingly imposes tariffs on goods and services from a basically hostile and globalist Canada?

If not, the emergence of a nationalist conservative party in tune with the policies of an increasingly nationalistic US seems entirely possible. Maxime Bernier's People's Party could be that party. 

Related: 

Patrick Buchanan: 

A Most Consequential Presidency

Zero  Hedge:
"From Cotton To Congress In 1 Generation" - Black Republicans Back Trump During RNC Night 1

America: The State of the Nation

Today you can go to jail for reopening a gym that requires masks, social distancing, and constant cleansing with antiseptics. But you will not go to jail if you assemble en masse to riot, unmasked, armored with makeshift padding, umbrellas, and helmets, and you’re free to shout and spray in the faces of officers and fellow looters and rioters alike.

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National Review: The Thin Veneer Of American Civilization... Has Been Blown Away

When Big Tech Becomes the Guardian of Capitalism, Say Good-bye to the Competitive Free Market and the Hidden Hand

By Hugh Charles Smith

All those who believe the 'privatized totalitarianism' of Big Tech 'platform plantations' are 'capitalism' have been brainwashed into servitude by Big Tech's pretense of capitalism.

Though a small point, it is important to note that the author of this generally sound critique of America's present day economic organization misapplies the term capitalism. Capitalism is: an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. From the definition one sees that, contrary to the author's claim, capitalism is what America has got, there being no inherent inconsistency between capitalism and monopolism, the latter being the target of the author's criticism. What America has in large part lost, is competitive free market capitalism, and I say lost, not abandoned because America never had any serious commitment to restricting monopolism. Thus, America has capitalism, but in large part it is a viciously exploitive form of capitalism. Moreover it is something totally opposed to the competitive market capitalism to which Adam Smith attributed an invisible hand that led the capitalist to act in such a way as to promote the public good: As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value, every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Today American capitalism works unimpeded by the invisible hand and thus serves, not the interests of the American people, but only to maximize the accumulation of wealth by a tiny minority at the expense of the rest of society.

What do you call an economy of monopolies without competition or any regulatory restraints? An economy of monopolies that control both the buying and selling in the markets they control? Monopolies with the power to commit legalized fraud and the profits to buy political influence? Monopolies whose black box algorithms are all-powerful but completely opaque to public scrutiny?

Call it whatever you want, but it certainly isn't Capitalism, which requires competition and market transparency to price capital, labor, risk, credit, goods, services, etc.

Black Box Monopoly is the death of Capitalism as it eliminates competition and market transparency.

The American economy is now dominated by Big Tech Black Box Monopolies, and thus what we have isn't a "free market" system (a.k.a. capitalism), it's the pretense of capitalism, a slick PR cover for the most rapacious form of exploitation.

The SillyCon Valley model is simple: achieve monopoly power by scaling the network effect and buying up hundreds of potential competitors with stock "printed" out of thin air. Once monopoly is achieved, buyers and sellers are both captive to the Big Tech monopoly: both buyers and sellers of apps, for example, must submit to the profiteering and control of the Big Tech monopoly.

Once the profits flowing from monopoly pile up, buy back the shares you "printed" to eliminate competition, boosting the wealth of insiders to the moon. Since share buybacks were once illegal, this is nothing but legalized fraud.

Despite the immense destruction these Big Tech monopolies wreak on society, the political power they purchase protects them from any limits. That their platforms now control the flow of data, including political content and adverts, is brushed aside with the usual paradoxical claims of "free markets."

Ironic, isn't it? Big Tech Black Box Monopolies claim they shouldn't be exposed to any regulation because they've destroyed competition and transparency within the letter of the law. Monopoly platforms that control the flow of data, news and narratives are privatized totalitarianism, cloaked by the pretense of capitalism.

Like all totalitarian monopolies, Big Tech now claims "you can't limit us because now you depend on us." In other words, Big Tech is now too centralized and powerful to submit to any socio-political controls.

It's a neat trick, isn't it? Enrich the super-wealthy "investor class" with your buyback-juiced stock valuations, "buying" their loyalty and political pull with these outsized gains to keep your monopoly out of reach of any public scrutiny or limits on your profiteering and privatized totalitarianism.

That our society and economy are now in thrall to privatized totalitarian Big Tech monopolies is straight out of a Philip K. Dick story in which what's perceived as real has been manipulated by those who own the means of manipulation.

We're not just debt-serfs in central-bank feudalism, we're all serfs on Big Tech's platform plantations. If you don't love your servitude with sufficient enthusiasm, Big Tech has a special place for you: the Village of the Deplatformed, a village of ghosts who have disappeared from the platform plantations and who no longer show up in search, social media, app stores, etc.

Just as the Soviets snipped those sent to the gulag out of photos, the privatized totalitarian Big Tech monopolies cut out your selfhood and your income: Deplatformed doesn't just mean you disappear from view, it also means you've been demonetized-- your ability to earn money from your own content has been eliminated.

In effect, your labor, content and selfhood have been expropriated by Big Tech's totalitarian platforms. Big Tech monopolies don't just "own" the plantation of the mind, they own the platform plantations that control what we see, buy and sell, and what the algorithms collect and sell to everyone who wants to influence what we see, buy and sell.

All those who believe the privatized totalitarianism of Big Tech platform plantations are "capitalism" have been brainwashed into servitude by Big Tech's pretense of capitalism. Just because totalitarianism and fraud are now "legal" doesn't mean they're not evil.

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