Wednesday, March 31, 2021

Life Support Ruminations

 Grazing Ruminants,


  I keep ruminating upon the next step in the decline and fall of Globo-Cap. The Hudson/Escobar interview is very long, but this starts "part-2" in my mind.
http://thesaker.is/in-quest-of-a-multipolar-economic-world-order-with-michael-hudson-and-pepe-escobar/

Michael Hudson: [01:11:30] 
  I can’t give you hope. I am all in favor of public banking and I’m on Ellen Brown’s board of directors for her group. However, supposing you had a public bank in Baltimore and the public bank said, we want to provide credit for Baltimore people to be able to afford homes. They would still have to out create enough credit and enough debt to outbid what commercial banks are lending other people that want to buy houses there. So, you can’t have an Island of efficiency and public banking in a system that basically is still financialized. The problem is systemic.

It goes to the courts. You talk about seceding. Then of course it’s possible. And people in Texas were talking about seceding in the 1840s when it was largely a German population. There were more publishers publishing German language books in Texas than there were English language books. But now, I think the way Texans think, if they were to succeed it is not going to be along the lines of public banking that you want . It would be a private bank owned by the oil companies that calls itself, a public bank. We’re in a world of Orwellian rhetoric.

What can the Americans do? They already have voted. We have democracy, they’ve voted for what they wanted to do. What did they vote for? They want shorter lifespans, lower wages, less education and less public services. Their choice is to get these things by a Democrat or by a Republican. But that’s the only choice they have. Other countries have a choice to emigrate, as the Ukrainians and the Greeks and Latvians have done. But I have no idea where Americans can emigrate to.


John again: I personally think Hudson is drawing a bleak, no-way-out picture to avoid drawing attention to what he may see as possible paths out. The military-industrial-financial complex DID use "Super Imperialism" as their cookbook, after all...

  There is (as yet) no way out of the financialized, extractive vampire capitalist bleeding box that encloses America. 
Hudson talks of "revolution" as the only way, and in broad terms. He goes into the current regime being incapable of keeping any contractual obligation, which includes domestic social-contracts with Americans. 
Social Security has been gutted already. It is still paying out claims, but it is bled dry. It is no longer a cash cow for globo-cap. It keeps Americans placated. 
As long as American "consent" is needed by globo-cap, Social Security entitlements need to keep going out every month.

  The extractive system has to extract from somewhere to keep paying maintenance expenses like S.S.
The rest of the world has been accepting $US, backed by US credit, for stuff they make, and shipping that stuff to Americans, which supports Americans every day. It's not so much "trade" as extraction, since the US does send some grain, and licensed intellectual property, but mostly military enforcers.
  The rest of the world knows it is paying to be enslaved, supporting the system which enslaves and bleeds it. Russia, China, Iran, Turkey and India and Pakistan all know the score.
  So do Germany and Japan, but they are regional intermediaries of the imperial system. The intermediaries are important bellwethers. They need to maintain a favorable position in global economy as the hegemony of Western Global Capitalism under the Petrodollar regime is replaced. This transition needs to be "peaceful", at least not WW-3.
 
  Monetary transition needs a parallel trade and finance system. There is always gold.
"Digital gold" is gold. Physical gold has done more ocean travel in recent years, but it mostly travels conceptually via the internet.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is a working parallel trade organization, which Hudson and Escobar discuss.  
"The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is an intergovernmental organization founded in Shanghai on 15 June 2001. The SCO currently comprises eight Member States (China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan), four Observer States interested in acceding to full membership (Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran, and Mongolia) and six “Dialogue Partners” (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Turkey)."
​https://dppa.un.org/en/shanghai-cooperation-organization#:~:text=The%20SCO%20currently%20comprises%20eight,Cambodia%2C%20Nepal%2C%20Sri%20Lanka%20and

  Within those nations, trade is increasing in various non-dollar accounting instruments.  The use of the $US as both a means of extraction and a means of bullying-exclusion from global trade has thrust the imperative upon China, Russia, pariah-states and tribute-states alike to build a parallel global trade and finance system. Trust is shot these days, so I think gold-backed cryptocurrency will have to be the fallback.
  The Fed can't print gold, so the Fed loses out. The rest of the world can't be bled, so "TROW" gets a better trade position going forward. 
There will be massive disruption of trade and accounting, but maybe that will come first. 
Maybe disruption of global financial accounting will happen, and the world will be forced into some degree of debt jubilee and financial reset. 
The technology exists.
  A non-extractive global financial regime would not really need central bankers, but maybe just trade accounting at a national level. The rationale for such an arrangement has existed longer than any living human, and was broadly seen as inevitable before the 1980s, as Hudson lays out. Keynes understood trade balances well. So does Hudson.

  In the best case scenario the American people will get less consumer-stuff, and more agency and autonomy. 
Less cheap stuff will come into the Port of Los Angeles, but we will again be able to devise and create, not merely "comply". 
We will work out local economies efficiently, as we, and all of our ancestors have always done. 
We will need to focus a lot more locally. 

The $US has also kept Americans divided and conquered at the local and regional levels. 
At least Americans, some Americans, can still vote with their feet. (I see lots of out-of-state-plates in Austin.)
That stands to really hurt the people who cannot move away from places like Chicago and Detroit.
 
  American cities and states will need broad debt-forgiveness, but those trapped people still need food, water, shelter, fuel, community and medical care. 
Debt payments fund "retirements". How will retired-people be supported and cared for? They need physical protection, too.

  Parasitic gangs need productive-economy options, decent jobs. Parasitic-gang members have the same needs as everybody else, and need a better job-offer. A national infrastructure and public works project has been the historical answer. 
Some people will be abrasive, lazy, scheming and will do crap work. They still need to be rehabilitated from outright criminality. 
Grow vegetables together.

  I think that local money, community banking can come in at this point. A gold-backed $US will be forced upon the current seat of empire. 
No more free-printing.

There could be national reserve currency, backed by gold and silver, and local credit money, through community banking. 

 The local credit money should  stay local. Distant extraction of rents should really be eliminated, since it "kills the host".
Local communities would create local credit for local projects, as Ellen Brown sees in the Bank of North Dakota, and Hudson mentions.
Land/housing rents and natural monopolies , like utilities should be community property, not modes of capital extraction to distant power centers.
Bank mortgages are rent extraction to distant financial power centers.
There is a lot in the interview and transcript which is worthy of careful consideration. 
Pepe Escobar brings a lot of focus to Brazil, to the Amazon. 
Globo-cap really wants to chew up and burn and extract the Amazon.

Little Guy

Monday, March 29, 2021

Lost Opportunities

 Renting Life,

  Everything that made industrial capitalism rich, everything that made America so strong in the 19th century, through its protective tariffs, through its public infrastructure investment all the way down through world war two and the aftermath, was that we had a mixed economy in America. Europe also had a mixed economy, and in fact, every economy since Babylon has had a mixed economy.
  But in America you’ve had something entirely different since 1980. Something that was not foreseen by anybody, because it seemed to be so disruptive: namely, the financial sector saying, “We need liberty – for ourselves, from government.” By “liberty” they meant taking planning and subsidy, economic and tax policy, out of the hands of government and put into the hands of Wall Street. The result was libertarianism as a “free market.” In the form of a centralized economy that is concentrated in the hands of the financial centers – Wall Street, the City of London, the Paris Bourse. What you’re having today is an attempt by the financial sector to take on the role that the landlord class had in Europe, from feudal times through the 19th century. It’s a kind of resurgence of feudalism.
  If you look at the last 200 years of economic theory from Adam Smith and Marx, onward, everybody expected a mixed economy to become more and more productive, and to free itself from the landlords – and also to free itself from banking...
  But in the United States and England, you have finance becoming something completely different. Banks don’t lend money to build factories. They don’t create money to make means of production. They make money to take over existing assets. Some 80% of bank loans are mortgage loans to transfer the ownership of real estate.
  But of course, that’s what created a middle class in the United States. The middle class was able to buy its own housing. It didn’t have to pay rent to landlords or absentee owners, or to warlords and their descendants as in England and Europe. They could buy their own homes. What nobody realized is that if you borrowed the money to take a mortgage, there’s still an economic rental value. Most of it is no longer paid to the landlords. It’s paid to the banks. And so in America and Europe, the banks now play the role that landlords played a hundred years ago...
​  ​The fight really is against government that would do anything that is not controlled by the 1%, and by the banks. Essentially, the merger between Finance, Insurance and Real Estate – the FIRE sector. So, you have a relapse of capitalism in the West back into feudalism, but feudalism with a financialized twist much more than in medieval times.
​ The fight against China, the fear of China is that you can’t do to China what you did to Russia. America would love for there to be a Yeltsin figure in China to say, let’s just give all of the railroads that we’ve built, the high-speed rail, let’s give all the factories to individuals and let them run everything. Then Americans will lend them the money or buy them out and thus control them financially. China’s not letting that happen. And Russia stopped that from happening. The fury in the West is that the American financial system is unable to take over foreign resources and foreign agriculture.​..
  What’s is ironic now is what has happened in the last few years in the fight against Russia and China. America has killed the free lunch. It said, okay, now we’re going to have sanctions against Russia and China. We’re going to grab whatever money you have in foreign banks, like we grabbed Venezuela’s money. We’re going to excommunicate you from the SWIFT bank clearing system. So, you can’t use banking. We’re going to put sanctions against banks that deal with you.
​  ​So Russia and China have seen that they can’t deal with dollars anymore, because the United States just unilaterally rejected their use by any country that does not follow its military and financial diplomacy. If countries do have dollars as reserves and lend them back to the United States, it’s going to spend them on building more military bases around Russia and China, to make them waste their money on military defense spending. So, America itself has ended the free lunch, by the way in which it’s fighting against China and Russia.
​  ​And now Russia and China, as you pointed out, are de-dollarizing. They’re trading in each other’s currency. They’re doing the opposite of what Bretton Woods tried to create. They’re inspiring monetary independence from the United States.​..
​  At issue is what kind of an economy we need in order to raise living standards and, wages and self-sufficiency and preserve the environment. 
What is needed for the ideal world that we want?​    [Description follows...]
​  The banks fear this because they see that Modern Monetary Theory no longer gives them control. They want the rich One Percent to be able to have a choke point on the economy, so that that people cannot survive without borrowing and paying interest. They want to control the choke points to extract economic rent. So you have the West turning into a rent-extractive economy, a rent-seeking economy. The ideal of Russia, China, and other countries is that not only of Mar​x,​ but also of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and even Ricardo in the sense that the aim of classical economics was to free economies from economic rent. The American economy is all about extracting rent through the real estate sector, the financial sector, the health insurance sector, monopolies and the infrastructure sector.
  The US economy has been Thatcherized and Reaganized. The result is a fight of rentier economic systems against China and Russia.​..
 Industrial capitalism was evolving toward socialism. It was socialized medicine, socialized infrastructure, socialized schooling. 
So, the fight against socialism is also a fight against what made industrial capitalism so successful in the United States and Germany.
​  ​What you’re seeing now is a fight for what direction civilization will follow.​..
...And it was expected that once you had capitalism free of the landlord class, free of something that wasn’t really industrial capitalism at all (it was a carry-over from feudalism), you wouldn’t have this overhead of the idle 1%, only consuming resources and going to war.
​  ​World War I changed all that. Already in the late 19th century the landlords and the banks fought back. They fought back largely through the Austrian School of individualism and the English marginalists, and they euphemized it as free markets. That slogan meant giving power to the monopolists, to the oppressors, to violence. A free market was where armies can come in, take over your country, impose a client dictatorship like Pinochet in Chile or the neo-Nazis in Ukraine. Americans call that a free market. The Free World was a world centrally planned by the American military and finance. So, it’s Orwellian double-think.​..
  Well, as opposed to that, you have economies that are not run by a rentier class, and that do not have a banking class and landlord class controlling the economy. The kind of arrangement that you had in Germany in the late 19th century: government, industry and labor coordinated. The question was how to provide the financing for industry so that banks can provide not only industrial capital formation, but public funding to build infrastructure and uplift the population.
​  ​China is doing just what made America rich in the 19th century, and what made Germany rich. It’s the same logic of industrial engineering. This plan is based on economic expansion, environmental preservation and economic balance instead of concentration, so this is going to be a growing economy. So, you’re having a growing economy outside of the United States and a shrinking economy in the States and its satellites in Europe.
​  ​Europe had a choice: Either it could shrink and be an American satellite economy, or it could join the growth. Europe has decided unanimously to forego growth and become a set of client oligarchies and kleptocracies. It is willing to let its financial sector take over just as in America. That’s a “free market,” because I’m told by American officials that they can just buy the European politicians, they’re bribable.


How did these guys trust each other back then? What was the secret? They were clearly murderous scoundrels. 
Secret societies? Help me out.​  Samo Burja:
​  With a handshake and a reputation at stake, you could sail to the other end of the world, spending years out of contact with your business partners, yet secure in knowing they would honor their word. This trust at a distance provided the conditions for ocean-based commodity markets to beat regional commodity markets. After this material transformation, the plantations in the New World and workshops in India became logistically closer to a city than shepherds living in geographically nearby hills. 
​  ​Before this point, city-based labor markets had the highest impact on society, while the role of markets in exchanging the raw resources of the countryside for the finished products of the city was minor and easily replaced by customary trade. With the social technologies of long-distance commerce, the labor market of a city became connected to a commodity market that could match its pace, opening massive potential to make the city a center of material production.
​  ​Creating those markets involved mass dislocation. Armies rip people from their homes and turn them into soldiers; this was well understood in antiquity. During industrialization, the shock of dislocation from previous social ties combined with a newly institutionalized environment to produce distress not too dissimilar from the shock of incarceration or hazing.​..
​  ​The strange spiritual practices, scientific exploration of human psychology, and at times outright ideological cults of the founding cohort gave way to a more shallow type of knowledge. This was a knowledge of levers and buttons, rather than the first principles which built those levers and buttons.
​  ​When times change—and you don’t need or can’t sustain the full pace of industrialization anymore—the vast masses of the industrial population prove themselves difficult to demobilize from their war of production. They can’t be returned to the social fabric of agricultural society, since the urban environment that enabled the agricultural hinterland to function no longer exists. The countryside has become an industrial resource base, rather than the setting for a pre-industrial way of life.
​  ​The solution of overproducing white-collar jobs is at first natural and then dysfunctional. Bureaucracies decay in a way that is much less visible than the decay of factories. 
​ ​The real upward mobility of dysfunctional agriculturalists to functional industrial workers is replaced by the on-paper upward mobility of functional industrial workers to dysfunctional knowledge economy workers. Despite these measures, the real downward mobility is eventually made apparent.​ 
(I see it, peekaboo!​ Hey, where do competent workers go, now?​)​ ...​
​  ​If this is correct, then post-industrial society isn’t our name for the next stage of civilizational progress. Instead, the term is true in its most literal and pessimistic interpretation: a society after and without industrial civilization. Such a society doesn’t even have the social infrastructure of agricultural civilizations. This means it cannot even mint the preliminary social capital needed to reindustrialize. Likewise, we have lost the implicit knowledge upon which our industrial systems functioned even as recently as a few decades ago. That knowledge cannot be regained absent the people who actually built and understood those systems.
​  ​What then follows is slow decay, first of production and then of advanced technology itself. At a macro scale, this is the deep root of civilizational collapse.​..
Mostly, the adjustment to decline would just be an invisible lowering of expectations. When political incentives at all layers of the government pyramid go against ascertaining the truth of a situation, the truth isn’t ascertained.
​  ​Social scientists wouldn’t see it coming, since official numbers would be about as reliable as public health messaging during a pandemic. Wealth can shrink by 1% per year for a century, while measures such as GDP can show continued growth by 2% per year. The Soviet Union’s era of stagnation had 30 years of solid growth according to their metric of NMP (Net Material Product). American economists only noticed and revised our GDP estimates for the Soviet Union after its collapse.​..
  ​Whatever solution our civilization might find to escape the post-industrial trap, it will require social technologies of production and knowledge very different from anything we’ve seen before. A good place to start would be a new basis for friendship that defeats atomization, and a truthfulness that is compatible with political loyalty.​ 
{Spiritual ​honesty​?}

Why Putin's Pipeline is Welcome in Germany:​  (l​ower​ rent)
  In his meeting with Stoltenberg in Brussels, Blinken warned that Western companies participating in building Nord Stream 2, which is 90% complete, would face sanctions mandated by Congress:
​  ​“President Biden has been very clear in saying that he believes the pipeline is a bad idea; it’s bad for Europe, bad for the United States,” said Blinken, adding, U.S. law “requires us to sanction companies participating in the efforts to complete the pipeline.”
​ ​What is behind American opposition to Russian natural gas going to Germany, and from there to NATO Europe?
​​First, the pipelines bypass Ukraine and Poland, cutting those countries out of the transit revenue. 
Second, we want NATO Germany to buy our own shale-produced natural gas.

​Better refloat that boat! Russia does already have a fleet of icebreakers...
Russia Pitches Frosty Arctic Sea Route As Superior Alternative To Blocked Suez Canal

"Biden" floats a rival plan for global trade to counter China's Belt-and-Road initiative, "New Silk Road" to Boris Johnson. 
Both of these men are titular heads of government within the rentier globalist/Atlantacist financial capitalist order. 
What can this rentier new-world-order have to offer that is not rentier extraction? 
This is a head-fake, a narrative-adjustment.

But, but, but what else can there possibly be? This is the riddle of the Sphinx.
Monetary adaptation to planetary emergency: addressing the monetary growth imperative
Conclusion: In any economy where money hoarding and accumulation is not curtailed, and where most of the money in circulation is issued by private banks as debt, with or without interest, there will be a system-wide scarcity of money available to people and organisations to service their debts – unless, that is, there is continual economic growth. To avoid the deleterious implications of a shortfall of money in an economy, policies are used to maintain economic growth, which is therefore a form of imperative on society. This MGI may be accentuated, at a system-wide level, by the practice of full-reserve re-lending of money. Interest is not the main driver of the imperative, but because it increases the transfer of money to those who are wealthy and more likely to hold that money in a stagnant form that is not available for debt servicing by others, interest charges may indeed exacerbate the MGI. We conclude that the debt-money system creates a competition for money between debtors and savers which is resolved through creation of more debt-money, which in turn drives growth and the resulting ecological and climate emergency.

Adam Gaertner on the use of ivermectin against COVID. Thanks Jeremy.
Look at the graph of what Niceragua did with ivermectin. 
Ivermectin use continues to be suppressed by hook, crook and threats.​ 
Do take 5000 units per day of vitamin-D, won't you?

Surgeon Warns Vaccinating People Infected With COVID Could Cause ‘Avoidable Harm’
In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Dr. Hooman Noorchashm says we’re taking the COVID pandemic problem, where a half-percent of the population is susceptible to dying, and compounding it by vaccinating people who are already infected.

​Gilad Atzmon has more on that story, with a focus on the relationships between Pfizer, the Israeli government, and Israeli vaccine trial subjects without informed consent.
​  In Israel yesterday, an independent legal body that calls itself the Civilian Probe (CP)* published its finding regarding the catastrophic impact of the Pfizer vaccine on the nation.
​  ​In their report, which they submitted to the Attorney General and the Health Minister, the committee listed a chain of critical legal and ethical failures that point at a possible attempt to mislead not just Israelis but also the entire world. Since the beginning of January I have been reporting on an undeniable correlation between vaccinations, cases and deaths (here , here, here and here ). The CP confirms my suspicions but their study also presents alarming medical findings regarding the scale of lethal side effects. 
​  ​In the document the CP points at a government attempt to conceal its dealing with Pfizer.​..​
​  ​“What do we learn from the facts on the ground?” the CP report asks. “An examination of mortality data published by the government shows that there is a correlation between number of vaccinations and the number of deaths. The excess mortality is noticeable among people up to 70 and also among adults over the age of 70, and remains even after offsetting the deaths attributed to Corona. In the population over the age of 70 - in January 2021 an excess mortality of 19.5% was observed compared to October 2020 - the month when the corona data were highest, and 22.4% compared to January 2020. In the younger population - an excess mortality of 7% was observed in January 2021 compared to the month October 2020 - the month in which the corona death numbers were the highest, and 7% compared to January 2020. It should be noted that this trend continues in the following month as well.”
​  ​As mentioned above I have been writing about the devastating correlation between vaccines and deaths since early January. In Britain and the USA, we detect identical correlation between mass vaccination and death. However, far more problematic is the realm of side effects, something which governments, the WHO, the corrupted pharmaceutical industry, and of course social media giants attempt to suppress in the most Orwellian manner. The Israeli CP seems to have produced the first robust report on Pfizer’s vaccine side effects. They published a table of their findings, which they summarize here:
​  ​“As one can detect looking at the table - there are close to 200 deaths, and this - only by examining about 800 reports of cases of serious side effects. As mentioned, the CP is still working on analyzing side effects and we have hundreds of additional reports that are subject to analysis. Our study so far indicates that about 25% of deaths are from people under the age of 60. About 15% of them are under 50 years old. 7 of the deceased are at young ages - below age 30. Also, the study identified 27 cases of heart problems in people under the age of 60, of which 24 cases are among young people aged 17-30.  Regarding the issues to do with female medical complications (including labor-complication, delayed menstruation or irregular menstruation, etc.) - it should be noted that the committee has about 200 additional reports that have not yet been included in the final list of our findings.”
[We tried to report vaccination side effects in a patient ​at our clinic ​last week. It was extremely cumbersome, an intimidating process, and we are not sure that we were successful.​ The RN left a recorded message.​ No organization can afford what it takes to report mild-to-moderate side effects within this ​US ​format.]

​Major vaccine-industry advocate... ​
White House health adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci declared Sunday that children either need to be vaccinated or must wear face masks if they want to play together.

​Look at these graphics. Texas is sliding into natural herd immunity. 
This was happening already before vaccinations started. 
Peak cases were in mid January. 
Spring break didn't even cause an uptick.
12% of Texans are fully vaccinated.​ 
Kids are mostly back in school.
https://www.texasobserver.org/tracking-covid-19-in-texas/

A​t least the threat of global shipping through the arctic with Russian icebreakers is now forestalled!​ 
The Ever Given is out of the Suez Canal, thanks to full (super) moon, high tide, big tugs and dredging.

​Unmoored​

Thursday, March 25, 2021

False Targets

 Shell-Gamed,


Was this intentional? Whose interests might be served? 
Pepe Escobar looks at the nation-state chessboard, but who are the real players?
​  ​It took 18 years after Shock and Awe unleashed on Iraq for the Hegemon to be mercilessly shocked and awed by a virtually simultaneous, diplomatic Russia-China one-two...
Yet it was the Hegemon who first crossed the diplomatic Rubicon. The handlers behind hologram Joe “I’ll do whatever you want me to do, Nance” Biden had whispered in his earpiece to brand Russian President Vladimir Putin as a soulless “killer” in the middle of a softball interview...
​  ​Then came Putin’s cool, calm, collected – and quite diplomatic – response, which needs to be carefully pondered. These sharp as a dagger words are arguably the most devastatingly powerful five minutes in the history of post-truth international relations.
​  ​In For Leviathan, it’s so cold in Alaska, we forecasted what could take place in the US-China 2+2 summit at a shabby hotel in Anchorage, with cheap bowls of instant noodles thrown in as extra bonus.
​  ​China’s millennial diplomatic protocol establishes that discussions start around common ground – which are then extolled as being more important than disagreements between negotiating parties. That’s at the heart of the concept of “no loss of face”. Only afterwards the parties discuss their differences...
​  ​Oh dear. There was not a single State Dept. hack with minimal knowledge of East Asia to warn the amateurs you don’t mess with the formidable head of the Foreign Affairs Commission at the CCP’s Central Committee, Yang Jiechi, with impunity.
​  ​Visibly startled, but controlling his exasperation, Yang Jiechi struck back. And the rhetorical shots were heard around the whole Global South.
They had to include a basic lesson in manners:
​  ​“If you want to deal with us properly, let’s have some mutual respect and do things the right way”.
But what stood out was a stinging, concise diagnostic blending history and politics:
​  ​The United States is not qualified to talk to China in a condescending manner. The Chinese people will not accept that. It must be based on mutual respect to deal with China, and history will prove that those who seek to strangle China will suffer in the end.​..
​  ​The incompetence of the “diplomatic” arm of the Biden-Harris administration beggars belief. Using a basic Sun Tzu maneuver, Yang Jiechi turned the tables and voiced the predominant sentiment of the overwhelming majority of the planet. Stuff your unilateral “rules-based order”. We, the nations of the world, privilege the UN charter and the primacy of international law.
​  ​So this is what the Russia-China one-two achieved almost instantaneously: from now on,
the Hegemon should be treated, all across the Global South with, at best, disdain.​..
​  And yet nobody is trembling in their boots. Right on cue with Russia-China, Iran has stepped up the game, with Ayatollah Khamenei issuing the guidelines for Tehran’s return to the JCPOA.
1. The US regime is in no position to make new demands or changes regarding the nuclear deal.
2. The US is weaker today than when the JCPOA was signed.
3. Iran is in a stronger position now. If anyone can impose new demands it’s Iran and not the US.
​  ​And with that we have a Russia-China-Iran triple bitch slap on the Hegemon.
​  ​In our latest conversation/interview, to be released soon in a video + transcript package, Michael Hudson – arguably the world’s top economist – hit the heart of the matter:
​  ​The fight against China, the fear of China is that you can’t do to China, what you did to Russia. America would love for there to be a Yeltsin figure in China to say, let’s just give all of the railroads that you’ve built, the high-speed rail, let’s give the wealth, let’s give all the factories to individuals and let the individuals run everything and, then we’ll lend them the money, or we’ll buy them out and then we can control them financially. And China’s not letting that happen. And Russia stopped that from happening. And the fury in the West is that somehow, the American financial system is unable to take over foreign resources, foreign agriculture. It is left only with military means of grabbing them as we are seeing in the near East. And you’re seeing in the Ukraine right now.

Bush: 'You Are Either With Us, Or With the Terrorists' - 2001-09-21
https://www.voanews.com/archive/bush-you-are-either-us-or-terrorists-2001-09-21

​Thanks Eleni.  A Wilderness Of Lies
​  ​Similarly, the militarization of Washington is becoming another topic for regime experts to analyze. The bizarre reaction of the inner party to the very peaceful demonstrations in January makes no sense at face value. There must be another reason for why they are telling the citizens that they will shoot the next demonstrators who come into the city to petition their rulers for redress. The question is, what are they plotting next?
​  ​That is the problem with black-box government. When Brezhnev was in control of the party, people did not need to know what was going inside the Kremlin, because the Kremlin was predictable. It is why Russians who remember those days look back fondly on those times. It was a time relatively free of politics. They woke up every day knowing the rules were going to be the same as they were yesterday. When the black box became unstable, no one could be sure of anything.
​  ​This is the state of the American regime. No one knows what is really going behind the razor wire and Army troops patrolling it. We are left to analyze video of Biden falling down the stairs of Air Force One and reading the body language of his handlers. Amateur linguists try to tease meaning out of his incoherent mutterings on Zoom sessions. The other geriatrics running the party are scrutinized by regime analysts, looking for clues to contextualize their behavior.
​ Like the Soviet empire, the American empire is now a confusing black box. It does things and makes noises, but none of it can be accepted on its face, so the world is left to guess. As citizens, we are forced to rely on private networks and create our own narratives to explain what we are seeing. There is the public truth and then millions of private truths. This is the result of black-box government. It is a wilderness of lies.


​Up to half of us might be domestic-terrorists, or at least sympathetic to domestic-terrorists.​
Glenn Greenwald:  The U.S. Intelligence Community, Flouting Laws, is Increasingly Involving Itself in Domestic Politics
 Involvement of the intelligence community in the domestic activities of U.S. citizens is one of the most dangerous breaches of civil liberties and democratic order the U.S. Government can perpetrate. It was after World War II when the CIA, the NSA and other security state agencies that wield immense and unlimited powers in the dark were created in the name of fighting the Cold War. Legal and institutional prohibitions on wielding that massive machinery against the American public were central to the always-dubious claim that this security behemoth that operates completely in the dark was compatible with democracy. As the ACLU noted, “in its 1947 charter, the CIA was prohibited from spying against Americans, in part because President Truman was afraid that the agency would engage in political abuse.”
  Since then, Truman’s fear has been realized over and over. Some of the worst post-WW2 civil liberties abuses have been the result of breaches by the CIA and other agencies of this prohibition. As the ACLU documents, the CIA in the 1960s was caught infiltrating and manipulating numerous domestic political activist groups. Under the auspices of the War on Terror, entire new bureaucracies (such as the Department of Homeland Security) and new legal regimes (such as the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act) were designed to erode these long-standing limitations by dramatically increasing surveillance powers aimed at U.S. citizens. And by design, the infiltration of these security state agencies in U.S. domestic politics has dramatically escalated.

​  ​As the first War on Terror was escalating, The Washington Post — under the headline “CIA Is Expanding Domestic Operations” — reported in October, 2002, that “The Central Intelligence Agency is expanding its domestic presence, placing agents with nearly all of the FBI's 56 terrorism task forces in U.S. cities.” ​...
  ​In the years following, two NSA whistleblowersWilliam Binney and Edward Snowden — both cited their horror over the turning of the surveillance machinery against American citizens as the reason for their decision to denounce their agency. One of the aspects that most disturbed me about the Russiagate conspiracy theory from the start was that it was created and disseminated by the CIA and related agencies with the intent, first, to alter the outcome of the 2016 election, and then to undermine the elected president with whom they were at war.​..
​ The head of the Church Committee, Sen. Frank Church (D-ID), made clear in his iconic quote on Meet the Press in 1975 that those reforms were primarily motivated by fears that the U.S. Government would one day turn its vast intelligence powers onto the American people, rendering core civil liberties an illusion.​..
...the Biden administration, along with leading Democrats such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), have been stating explicitly that one of their top priorities is the adoption of new laws designed to import the Bush/Cheney/Obama War on Terror onto U.S. soil for domestic purposes.


Old & New media: the many roads to perdition, John Ward, The Slog​
​  ​Some examples from this weekend. The Telegraph runs a piece saying scientists are “excited” about a new type of test that can ‘help senior citizens get treatment more quickly’. It was so exciting, in fact, that the bedazzled journo forget to tell us what it is. Or how it works. Or why it might be better than simply giving the over 60s Ivermectin whether they have symptoms or not. It’s pure virtue signalling, designed to distract from the unsolved mystery of why experimental not-quite-vaccines that import mRNA (and kick other nasties down the road) have been preferred to HCQ/Zinc and Ivermectin….both of which were targeted by a concerted smear campaign from health bureaucrats, most notably the US and French.​..
​  Above all, the golden rule is no opeds or speculation about the bigger game in play.
You can mention that Covid has made Rishi Sunak’s life difficult. You can express the view that Biden’s spending splurge and opened borders may have risks attached. You can suggest that the EU has some existential problems. But don’t mention what the IMF is up to, don’t ask why “temporary” Zirp is still with us nine years later, and under no circumstances suggest that the Gigarich have everything to gain from a virus that miraculously appeared within months of them all hinting at ‘the danger’.
Because that sort of non-violent terrorism, of course, is also wild conspiracy theory.


​So what is the use of lockdowns? Really? To what interests are lockdowns useful? 
They keep going on and on. They don't reduce "excess deaths". They must do something right.
Lockdown One Year On – It doesn’t work, it never worked & it wasn’t supposed to work

​Consolidation of power at the top. Does that end up hurting anybody? 
What does "power" do? What is "power"?​ Do Google, the CIA and NSA have a "thing"?
Leaked Docs Show Obama FTC Gave Google Its Monopoly After Google Execs Helped Obama Get Re-Elected
Leaked documents from the FTC's 2012 investigation of Google show exactly what is wrong with the state of American antitrust enforcement.
​  ​Records and reporting about the 2012 investigation suggest the FTC did so while bending to political pressure from the Obama White House — which was, in turn, bending to political pressure from Google. William Kovacic, a former FTC chair under President George W. Bush, reviewed the more than 300 pages of documents leaked to Politico and concluded the agency overlooked “what many experts and regulators would consider clear antitrust violations,” calling the specificity of issues outlined “breathtaking.”

​The interests who Angela Merkel serves cannot afford to let her lose power​ just yet. 
She has to backtrack and take the blame as lockdowns crumble against German's sense of their unfairness.
"I Take Full Responsibility": Merkel Cancels Draconian Easter Lockdown Amid Backlash From Furious Germans
Merkel is dropping the plan after it inspired an intense public backlash and resistance by politicians in the opposition and Merkel's coalition.

​Is Pfizer more powerful than Argentina on the global chessboard? 
Where are the actually powerful humans, whose interests are served?
The game is certainly not what we envision it to be when a vaccine maker can take military bases of "sovereign nations" as "collateral" against future-lawsuits from vaccine-injured citizens.​

This was inevitable, and it looks bad, so don't let people look at it. Oops.
Now, what is Plan-B?
Border Facility Photos Leak Revealing Hundreds Of Children Huddled In "Terrible Conditions"
​(​I​ humbly submit that giving these teenagers ivermectin prophylaxis from COVID, and flying them "home" with some money in their pockets, and some money for the home-government, is the cheapest and most expeditious option to the current American administration.)​

A Yale Oncologist had to care for immunocompromised cancer-chemotherapy patients,as they languished with COVID. Thanks Jeremy.
​  ​“When you have people that can’t breathe for five, six, eight, nine months and they tried multiple drugs and supplements with no success, and you give them ivermectin,” Dr. Santin said of long-haul patients, “and you see that they start immediately feeling better, this is not placebo. This is real.”
​ The majority of patients improved within one to three days, he said, particularly those with breathing problems, debilitating fatigue and chest pain. Two draft studies from Peru have reported improvement with ivermectin in long-haul patients; several physicians, like Santin, have also had anecdotal success.
​  ​Beyond his outpatients, Santin has treated family members and friends infected with COVID in both his home community in Connecticut and in his native Italy via telemedicine. There, he prescribed ivermectin to more than 15 families, in which parents, children or others had became infected; the goal was both to treat early and prevent severe COVID, as studies have shown ivermectin does.
​  ​“I have not a single one that right now had to go to the hospital to receive oxygen,” he said. “I have no doubt ivermectin saved my 88-year-old father’s life.” His father survived COVID despite high blood pressure, cardiac disease that led previously to seven stents and open heart surgery, and lung problems. “If I can save you,” he said referring to his father, “I can tell you, I save anybody.”

False Spirituality Is The Friend Of Corrupt Power. True Spirituality Is Its Enemy.  Caitlin Johnstone

​Repeatedly Misled​

Tuesday, March 23, 2021

Celestial Winds

 Star Seeds,


  This past Saturday we had a very modest Spring Equinox garden party, with more lovely food than we could disposition, good company, and intellectually engaging conversation about life, the universe and everything. Mel, who has worked extensively for NASA in Florida and Texas, was talking about new scientific findings about the heliosphere and the plasma fields of interstellar space. He said that this is public information, but that they are making it obscure, not publicizing it. I google-searched and all I found was stuff "debunking" "Electric Universe" models, and the electric universe and thunderbolts sites following them.

  Mel was able to help me with this main link to the IBEX information: 

This seems to be the best overview:
NASA’s IBEX Charts 11 Years of Change at Boundary to Interstellar Space

​The shape of the "heliosphere" (helio-croissant?) is also a hot topic, and I saw it presented as-a-fact in 2 different forms in various of the NASA explanatory articles. This seems to be the thing we are not supposed to think about too much. All of this information fits best with "electric universe" in gross terms. This does not definitively endorse any specific theory of astrophysics, but it may open up a can of electric eels that jump out and squirm around.
Uncovering Our Solar System’s Shape
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/uncovering-our-solar-system-s-shape
NASA’s Cassini, Voyager Missions Suggest New Picture of Sun’s Interaction with Galaxy

​Interstellar space is full of hazards to life-forms: Cosmic radiation, plasma fields, highly energized particles. (There are also these flows of highly energized particles within our heliosphere, which are not called "silly-string", so I won't call them that, but it keeps popping into my mind.)
We are protected by our planetary magnetosphere and radiation belts, and that protection lies within the massive, hard working protective shield of our mother-star. It's like the "force shields" on Star Trek.​ It is plowing through the interstellar magnetic field.
NASA’s IBEX Observations Pin Down Interstellar Magnetic Field

​Charles Hugh Smith picks up our regularly scheduled programming:
How We Stumbled to the Edge of the Cliff
​  ​Now that we're teetering on the edge of the cliff, it might be a good idea to retrace how we stumbled down to this crumbling, precarious ledge. As I've discussed for the past 15 years, there are a handful of systemic forces that have taken us to the point of no return.

1. Demographics have reversed from tailwinds to headwinds...
2. The fuel of postwar prosperity, oil, is no longer cheap enough or abundant enough.​..
3. The balance between labor and capital has collapsed. $50 trillion in earnings has been transferred to the Financial Aristocracy from the bottom 90% of American households over the past 45 years.​..
4. The nation's leadership elite no longer trusts the citizenry. The entire purpose of what passes for leadership now in the U.S. is to bamboozle, lie, prevaricate and obscure how the nation's resources are being squandered globally and domestically.
5. The central bank's magic does not work forever.​..
Just a thought, but removing the blindfold might be a good idea here. The edge is crumbling and the bottom is a long way down.

​About that conversation in Alaska, between high level representatives of the US and China last week:
The United States, said Yang, in one of the most dismissive diplomatic rejoinders I have ever heard, does not have the ‘qualifications’ to address China ‘from a position of strength’. F, my dear Blinken, you. [..] The Anchorage outrage was not an isolated incident. On the contrary, though it is early days yet in the Biden-Harris (or Harris-Biden) administration, a pattern of contempt for America and its leaders seems to be taking hold. In the course of a ‘what-flavor-is-your-milkshake’ valen- er, interview with George ‘I <3 Hillary’ Stephanopoulos, Biden was asked if he thought Russian president Vladimir Putin was a ‘killer’. He answered yes, in response to which Putin said he wished Biden the best of health and suggested they livestream a debate. Can you imagine what that would be like?

Putin is 1000x Biden, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer 
  In the space of just 24 hours, Joe Biden and Antony Blinken managed to make Donald Trump look like a perfect diplomat. And we must wonder why that is. Why did Biden call Putin a soulless killer, and Blinken invoke a 20 minute tirade from Chinese top diplomat Yang Jiechi in Alaska? Is it just stupidity, which is quite possible, or is it orchestrated, which you might suspect given it took so little time to insult America’s alleged two biggest adversaries? ...
  It’s time that people understand Joe Biden is an entirely scripted actor. Not well-scripted, and not a good actor, but still. His comments about Putin being a “killer with no soul” are insane, they scrape the bottom of the bottom of the barrel of diplomacy, they insult not just Putin, and thereby all of Russia, and threaten world peace, but they’re not his. They were written for him. Biden keeps reminding me of Max Headroom, an early MTV thing. Cartoon character. Scripted.
  The CIA, Pentagon, NATO, Boeing, Raytheon, you name them, all badly need to conserve the image of Putin as Satan, because he’s their “raison d’être”. Putin is the figurehead for why the US spends 10 times more than Russia on “defense”, and still ends up with inferior weaponry. The CIA thought they had it all won when they put Yeltsin in the Kremlin, and started to take over all resources of the country with the most natural resources on the planet.
​  ​And then Putin came, and prevented that take-over.​..
​  Joe Biden only has a veneer, a semblance, of credibility, and that’s only because US media never ask him any serious questions. Not just because he never did any press-ops after becoming president, but also because even if he did, they still wouldn’t.
​  ​Putin, on the other hand, saved his country from America, globalism, and the worst outgrowths of capitalism and neocons. The US no longer has any meaningful dialogue with Russia anymore, which is of course utterly insane (but yeah, the narrative), but the Alaska meeting does give us an insight into where this train is about to be headed next.

  It seems likely that Biden and his team are deliberately provoking a crisis with Russia in order to justify a geopolitical policy of hardening hostility towards Moscow.
 Foremost in this context is the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and the American objective to terminate that project. The day after Biden sent relations with Russia into a downward spiral, his Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that the U.S. would be imposing tough new sanctions on “any entity involved the Nord Stream 2 pipeline”. Blinken stated there was “a whole of government commitment in the United States to stopping” the gas supply project between Russia and Europe. It cannot be overstated that the $11 billion pipeline is a huge geopolitical issue. It is front and center to Washington’s global ambitions. The Americans want to kill it in order to sell their own more expensive gas to Europe for decades to come.


It's The Debt, Stupid, Tom Luongo
​ Fear is the antithesis of liberty.
Fear makes people crazy.  It robs them of their reason and allows unscrupulous politicians to run wild stoking it for their own cynical purposes.
  And the cynical purpose du jour is the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. It intends to destroy the current economy and build it back better by taking total control over the flow of capital via surveillance and digital money.
  They sell this to their constituency as a sustainable and green economy, an equitable one built on the false premise that capitalism is unfair...
The fear is a narrative to mask the real problem we’re facing, which the World Economic Forum and the Democrats know all too well.
  The unsustainability eating away our economy isn’t a function of capitalism’s rapaciousness, it’s a func..tion of debt.  While debt has its place in any good economic system, it’s use is also a two-edged sword...
​  ​Debt is the thing choking off any prospect of growth, post COVID.  This knowledge is what animates the Millennial generation to strange acts of rebellion like creating a short squeeze on Game Stop’s stock and bidding up the price of Bitcoin.​..
​  Because it isn’t a recovery we’re now facing, even though major states like Florida and Texas are operating close to normal now.  It’s a loss of confidence in the people in charge of this insanity.
​  ​Because interest rates also rise when the investors, the buyers of the debt, look at the landscape and say, “Nope, I need a better return than 1% on ten-year money because I don’t think you’re likely to pay me back.”
​  ​That’s what has the Biden administration spooked right now.  The fear they are projecting onto us via COVID-19 is really their fear that we’ll stop believing a word that comes out of their mouths.

https://tomluongo.me/2021/03/17/its-the-debt-stupid/

It Is Time To Remove The Debt Barrier To Economic Growth, Paul Craig Roberts and Michael Hudson​
​  ​Out of habit, American economists worry about federal debt. But federal debt can be redeemed by the Federal Reserve printing the money with which to retire the bonds.  The debt problem rests with individuals, companies, and state and local governments.  They have no printing press.​..
​  We propose to deal with the debt crisis by forgiving debts as was done in ancient times.  Our basic premise is that  debts that cannot be paid won’t be. Widespread foreclosures and evictions would further worsen the distribution of income and wealth and further constrain the ability of the economy to grow.  Writing debt down to levels that can be serviced would clear the decks for a real recovery.  Income that would be siphoned off in debt service would instead be available to purchase new goods and services.​..
​  ​Policymakers did not endorse our proposal, but, in effect, policymakers adopted our policy.  However, instead of forgiving the debt itself, they forgave payment of the debt service.  Individuals and businesses who cannot pay their landlords or lenders cannot be evicted or foreclosed until June.  This doesn’t hurt the lenders or banks, because the loans are not in default, and their balance sheet is not impaired. The banks add the unpaid payments to their assets, and their balance sheets remain sound.
​  ​When June arrives, the prohibition against eviction and foreclosure will have to be extended as the accrued debt service cannot be paid. Extending the moratorium on foreclosures and evictions will just build up arrears.  Is the implication a perpetual moratorium?
​  In financialized capitalism, the main purpose of bank loans is to refinance existing investments, not to expand productive capacity with which to service the debt.  It is not possible to grow out of debt in a financialized economy, because too much income is used for debt service.  The way to deal with this problem is to write down debts.
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2021/03/15/it-is-time-to-remove-the-debt-barrier-to-economic-growth/

​John Ward, The Slog, has outdone himself with this excellent research about COVID vaccines.
Pay special attention to his analysis of the evidence regarding, "That's silly; they can't change your DNA".​
​  ​A couple of years ago, a close friend lent me a book he’d just finished reading, about the behaviour of DNA in the process of evolution. By the popular science author David Quammen, the book is called The Tangled Tree, and is largely about the work of a genius, Carl Woese, who pretty much proved that the vertical ‘Tree of Life’ proposed by Darwin was wrong. Woese helped prove the existence of HGT (horizontal gene transfer) showing that vast amounts of human DNA structure are variously animal, insect, and even plant in origin. Quammen calls this
​ ‘….an explosive recognition of the bizarre, counterintuitive phenomenon called horizontal gene transfer and the role it has played throughout the history of life. That explosion occurred during the 1990s but had deep precedents, even before Woese’s work opened the door to appreciating its unimaginable prevalence and significance.’
​  ​He wrote that in 2018 of course, before Sars Cov2 reared its variously useful, geopolitical, economic, demonic and hyped head. Every day in almost every way, governments around the world tell us one enormous lie. They tell lots of smaller ones too (see latest Slog Essay) but this 14 pounder is a veritable pike of a Gigafib. It is this: that they know the new vaccines from Astrazeneca and Pfizer are perfectly safe.


First, they got all that nice R&D money, and blanket immunity from liability. Now for the PAYOFF.
(I'll just keep taking my vitamin-D, a little zinc, and I have ivermectin, zinc and doxycycline in case I get sick.)
DRUGMAKERS PROMISE INVESTORS THEY’LL SOON HIKE COVID-19 VACCINE PRICES
Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson pledged affordable vaccines — but only as long as there’s a “pandemic.”

  While the companies have enjoyed a boost in goodwill from the rush to develop vaccines, drug industry executives have noted, the public is still sensitive to drug pricing and the reputational risk has, so far, curtailed their ability to reap large financial rewards.
​  ​But that environment, they hope, will change once the pandemic ends: a date that drugmakers themselves reserve the right to declare. Pharmaceutical officials, speaking at recent conferences and on calls with investors, say they expect the virus will linger, morphing from a pandemic into a perennial endemic. And as Covid-19 mutations continue to spread and booster shots may be required on a regular basis, leaders from the three companies are enthusiastic about cashing in.​..
​  ​“You know, Americans are amazed that they’re getting vaccines for free,” said Prabhala. “And of course they’re not because they’ve already paid for them once and now they’re amazed that they’re not paying for them twice.”

​"Somebody else's problem"​
​  ​Swan’s research suggests sperm counts could reach zero by 2045. Zero. Let that sink in. That would mean no babies. No reproduction. No more humans. Forgive me for asking: why isn’t the UN calling an emergency meeting on this right now? The chemicals to blame for this crisis are found in everything from plastic containers and food wrapping, to waterproof clothes and fragrances in cleaning products, to soaps and shampoos, to electronics and carpeting.

FBI Crime Stats Prove “White Supremacy” Not Responsible For Hate Crime Threat to Asians​  
(Wait, that just adds up to 51.5% Where are the Asian perpetrators against Asians in this analysis?​.)
​  ​As the Washington Examiner highlights, citing FBI statistics, whereas whites comprise 62% of the population, they committed 24% of crimes against Asians in 2018.
​  ​In comparison, blacks, who comprise 13% of the population, committed 27.5% of all violent crimes against Asian Americans in 2018.

​Extinct Rebel​

Thursday, March 18, 2021

Russians Kill Everybody

Seeking Truth,

Helen of DesTroy (Thanks Wiggs, RUSSIAN Alert!)
​  ​Faith in Big Brother’s willingness to toss out a last-minute lifesaver has bred a profound laziness into the American media establishment – a phenomenon some have dubbed ‘truth decay’ – that has wrecked not just its quality, but its believability. The media establishment, effectively dominated by just six companies – Time Warner, Disney, News Corporation, Comcast, Viacom and CBS – survives to fight another day, but at what cost? Even the most amateur-hour alt-media enterprise comes off more believable than an article from the Washington Post or the New York Times, which bear up each other’s falsehoods only to see themselves further discredited, driving their former audiences into what they insist on dubbing the ‘fringe’ – outlets populated by their own former employees who, no longer capable of looking themselves in the eye after a workday spent lying furiously to their public, are abandoning their former employers like rats deserting the proverbial sinking ships.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/518367-establishment-media-cartel-narrative-collapse/

Glenn Greenwaldd, via the ​slanderous, ​pro-Russian, renegade Substack platform:
How Do Big Media Outlets So Often "Independently Confirm" Each Other's Falsehoods?

​Rumored "Russian asset", Paul Craig Roberts. Thanks Wiggs (Where are you from?)​
​  ​Putin came to power as the American neoconservatives were girding up to establish US and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. As General Wesley Clark told us, seven countries were to be overthrown in 5 years. The American preoccupation with the Middle East permitted Putin to throw off American overlordship and reestablish Russian sovereignty.  Once Washington realized this, the American establishment turned on Putin with a veng​a​nce.  
​  ​Stephen Cohen, Jack Matlock (Reagan’s ambassador to the Soviet Union), myself and a few others warned that Washington’s refusal to accept Russian independence would reignite the Cold War, thus erasing the accomplishment of ending it and resurrecting the specter of nuclear war. But Washington didn’t listen.  Instead, Cohen and I were put on a list of “Russian agents/dupes,” and the process of trying to destabalize Putin began.  In other words, once an American colony always an American colony, and Putin became the most demonized person on earth.
​  ​Today (March 17) we had the extraordinary spectacle of President Biden saying on ABC News that President Putin is a killer, and “he will pay a price.”  This is a new low point in diplomacy.  It does not serve American interests or peace...
​  ​In the United States Russian Studies has degenerated into propaganda.  Recently, two members of the Atlantic Council think tank, Emma Ashford and Matthew Burrows, suggested that American foreign policy could benefit from a less hostile approach to Russia. Instantly, 22 members of the think tank denounced the article by Ashford and Burrows.
​  ​This response is far outside the boundaries of the 20th century Cold War.  It precludes any rational or intelligent approach to American foreign policy.  Sooner or later the Kremlin will comprehend that it is confronted by a gangster outfit of the criminally insane.  Then what happens?

​Are the Russians getting suspicious of America?​
Russian ambassador to US summoned back to Moscow for consultations on future relations with Washington

​Them's Fightin' Words!
Putin Responds To Biden's "Killer" Slur: "It Takes One To Know One"
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/putin-responds-biden-killer-slur-it-takes-one-know-one

​(Irish-Russian?)  ​RFK, Jr. to President Biden: No. 1 Driver of Vaccine Hesitancy Is Mistrust of Regulators
Children’s Health Defense Chairman RFK, Jr. says transparency, robust science and a functional surveillance system are the only ways to build public trust for the COVID vaccine.


Peter McCullough MD testified to the Texas Senate Wednesday of last week about the failure of American medicine to serve patients by prescribing repurposed, FDA approved medicines, for early treatment of SARS-C0V-2. (He and I do treat this way, and we were supposed to meet outside the Capitol, but were likely separated by different COVID-testing tents.)

"The Rights of the Naturally Immune"? That's Crazy-Talk! Vaccine passport or call out for room service in your quarantine!

A top Norwegian health official tasked with investigating a series of three high-profile cases of health-care workers under the age of 50 being hospitalized for similar cases of rare blood clots after receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine have proposed a theory that's bound to infuriate AstraZeneca, along with the EMA and WHO... he has a new theory about what caused the reactions in the health workers, and unfortunately, per Holme, the AstraZeneca jab acted as the trigger.​..
"We have the reason. Nothing but the vaccine can explain why these individuals had this immune response," he states...
Holme concluded: "We’re talking about relatively young people that have become very sick here, and died, that probably wouldn’t have got such a serious case of Covid."

Infection with SARS-CoV-2 variants does not induce complete immunity, so MUST VACCINATE ALSO. (Have ya got any vaccine we can buy?)
(In context: No coronavirus immunity is completely reliable. Vaccines provide less protection than prior infection ALWAYS. Coronavirus immunity wanes between 6-12 months. People with weaker immune systems from age, disease or medical treatments have less protection in any case.)
The study, published in the Lancet medical journal, looked at millions of people who took PCR coronavirus tests through Denmark’s nationwide mass-testing initiative last year.
Just 0.65% of those who tested positive for the virus during Denmark’s spring surge  showed a positive result during the country’s second wave in the fall, suggesting a protection rate against reinfection of 80.5% according to a team of researchers from Statens Serum Institut in Copenhagen.

Among people 65 and over, the protection rate was just 47.1%.
Both are higher reinfections rate than other studies have found, a commentary published by Lancet noted.

​ ​Thanks Jeremy:
The WEF’s ‘Great Reset’ should more accurately be called the ‘Great Take Over’.
​  ​Transnational corporations in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic have been seeking to cement their control of global governance, ensuring it serves the interests of business and profits rather than the well-being of humanity.
​  ​Big tech, for example, many of them WEF partners (Amazon Web Services, Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, to name a few), have been greatly profiting from the coronavirus restrictions whilst simultaneously shadowbanning, deplatforming, demonetizing, and removing lawful user content that has been deemed by them, through non-transparent processes, to contradict unelected “global health authorities”.
​  ​Big tech companies allege that users who contradict “global health authorities” risk the “safety” of their users.​..
​  Although I explicitly stated my reply was not an appeal (in order to be abundantly cautious that they would treat it as an appeal), I received an email back to say that I’d lost my appeal! I wrote back asking how I could lose an appeal that I never made, only to get a reply to say sorry that the decision is final.

​Poisoned Well​ 

Wednesday, March 17, 2021

Pandemic Is Passe'

 Spring Refugees,


  It is spring break in Texas and Jenny and I never saw the Bucky's at Interstate-10 and Highway 183 nearly as crowded as it was last Sunday. Bucky's huge parking lot and gas pumps were all jammed. Gasoline went from under $2 per gallon to over $2.50 a gallon this month, because people are burning it.

  A couple of weeks ago (Republican) Governor Abbot declared that mandatory masking would end, because COVID infections, hospitalizations and deaths had dropped below a threshold. There was fear and derision in (Democratic) Austin, but it has been fading fast.

  The two camps in Texas are both done with COVID. The fearful maskers have increasingly "had both shots" and are making up for a year of lost socialization. We looked at a house in San Antonio, with our daughter and her husband that same last Sunday. As we walked out, an elderly couple, Bill and Yolanda, introduced themselves, explained that their house had the same plan, and invited us to join them on their walk around the neighborhood, to their house and into it, without masks (We offered). "We've both had both of our shots". Bill and Yolanda were very friendly and helpful.

  Yesterday at Home Depot I heard an older, and apparently at-risk woman with a mask declaring things about "the whole year" of the pandemic, in the recent-past tense, to a Returns employee.
The vaccinated elderly are broadly engaging their social calendars, making up for that missed year.

  The Rural Patriots were already done with COVID, though the elderly have become used to wearing masks while shopping, the Yoakum newspaper gave up showing people wearing masks in official photographs by early February. Group photos with masks became group photos without masks again.

  At the clinic, there are very few COVID tests each day now, like 5-6, not 35-36, and a positive result is a surprise again.

  This looks like herd-immunity. After the Valentine's Day Ice Storm, people have had enough, and are getting outside, and have been socially engaging each other on the streets , almost like we used to do in the 1970s. 
It's at least normal to engage openly and in a friendly way with strangers one encounters. 
Eye contact and smiles are way up over last year.

  We will know by April Fool's Day if the Governor's gamble was right. 
I suspect he may have won big, and half the state will credit him, while the other half credits the vaccines.
I credit our immune systems and getting out in the sunlight more since it came back a month ago.

  Texas traffic is up to pre-pandemic levels, and I suspect the whole economy will be there soon. 
People are done with the COVID-Pandemic-Lockdown. 
Everybody has a politically acceptable out. 
Everybody opts out.

  Jenny and I are hosting a Spring Equinox Garden Party in Yoakum Saturday. 
People seem enthusiastic about participating. 

Busy Spring Gardener 
(pictured with Jenny this morning)