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The Missing Piece Of The Covid-19 Death Puzzle: Co-InfectionSunday 02 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
Funny thing we realized on the way to the funeral parlor to bury our friends and loved ones who were vaccinated against COVID-19 coronavirus, that the vaccine didn’t work. COVID-19 vaccines, like flu shots, don’t work as well for new strains of the virus. For that, you will need perpetual immunization, say vaccine makers. Faulty test Oh, there are people dying, 7700 every day in the US. But was their passing solely attributed to COVID-19? Since the COVID-19 fatality numbers are exaggerated by a PCR nasal swab test that results in 97% false positives (all of the COVID-19 PCR tests during the past 14 months have been found to be invalid), there is no way to confirm deaths were caused by COVID-19 or COVID-19 was a bystander, the difference between dying OF COVID-19 or dying WITH COVID-19! Deaths are being drummed up to create fear and false demand for vaccines. The vaccinated are the super-spreaders Also, in case you hadn’t heard, “a resurgence in both hospitalizations and deaths will be ‘dominated by those that have received two doses of the vaccine,” says the respected Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group. “At least 60 percent of all new COVID-19 cases are occurring in people who were already vaccinated.” So far, hundreds who have been vaccinated got sick again and some have died. This is being reported in different locations. We have a vaccine that reduces severity of symptoms but not the ratio of hospitalizations and deaths among infected subjects! The so-called “super-spreaders” are the asymptomatic RNA-vaccinated (Pfizer/ Moderna) individuals that shed the virus. In an anticipated misdirection, the unvaccinated will then be mistakenly blamed for the spread of the virus and a predicted witch hunt will ensue for the anti-vaxxers, a development foreseen in my March 26, 2021 posting. How can the death data be accurate? But how could a mutated common cold virus kill off humans like flies? Well, at no time were any human populations dying like flies. As stated in prior reports, the percentage of people dying of COVID-19 who reside outside of nursing homes is but one-quarter of one-percent. Vaccination, which is said to be 95% effective, but that is not 95 out of 100 in hard numbers. On an accumulated basis as of May 1, 2021 in the U.S., 31,889,171 laboratory- confirmed infections (9.7% of the population) with 568,836 questionable deaths (0.0017% or 1.7 per thousand). But even these numbers are fallacious. If the PCR nasal swab test were properly performed, then 97% COVID-19 infections as a cause of death cannot be confirmed. Only 6% of deaths were without co-morbid conditions (diabetes, heart disease, etc.), meaning maybe only 34,130 COVID-19 deaths solely attributed to COVID-19 instead of 568,836 – for a true fatality risk 0.0001 or 1 in 10,000. That means 10,000 must be vaccinated to spare 1 life. While the serious side effect rate for the vaccines is very small, it exceeds the number who will potentially benefit from vaccination. Your chance of benefiting from vaccination is nil. And vaccination will not prevent infections or deaths if your immune system is not intact, or if the strain of the virus does not match the vaccine. Furthermore, according to the CDC, excess deaths were only reported among non-COVID-19 fatalities. Yes, something other than COVID-19. That is explained by the lockdown syndrome where anxiety-laden Americans are drinking so much alcohol, and spending sleepless nights, drinking coffee and tea to stay awake in the day, not realizing these practices block vitamin B1 that controls the autonomic nervous system. Vitamin B1 deficiency may mimic the symptoms of COVID-19, for which a vaccine would be worthless. Americans are forced to give up their livelihoods over contrived deaths. The infection mortality rate How are face masks, social distancing and hand washing, going to meaningfully reduce your risk of dying from COVID-19 when only 1 in 10,000 are at risk? Humans are continually exposed to pathogens. Exposure to pathogenic bacteria and viruses cannot be completely blocked by face masks, distancing or hand washing. It is the status of your immune system that determines whether you become ill, not the wearing of masks, washing of hands or distancing from others. Once infected, if your immune system is healthy, you will develop antibodies and T-cells naturally and be protected from every strain of coronavirus. With close to 40% of deaths occurring among aged individuals in nursing homes and 85% of reported deaths occurring among patients who are 65 years of age or older, the risk of dying for most of the U.S. adult population from COVID-19 is remote. The major lesson is that advanced age and concomitant weak immunity are the major risk factors for fatal lung infection, not failure to wear masks or unwashed hands. To ensure your immune system is operational, the consumption of supplemental zinc, vitamins A, C, D, and selenium (halts viral mutations), being essential nutrients, should be standard for self-care. Your immune system is a “universal vaccine.” There is no viral strain that the immune system cannot quell. Your immune system is far superior to vaccines. So, what is to fear about infection if you develop natural immunity? Face masks and social distancing reduced flu deaths? Really? Let’s also not overlook the scientific sleight of hand going on. Health authorities are disingenuously asking the public to believe that flu deaths vanished in this initial year of COVID-19, giving credit for their onerous measures to stop the spread of the virus, as if all the face masks and social distancing can selectively block the flu but not a coronavirus (??). How do it know? That is a preposterous idea. Major public health agencies cannot be relied upon for life-saving information. Flu deaths over-reported for years Health authorities continually harp that this COVID-19 pandemic could be as deadly as the flu. But there never were all those flu deaths that the Centers for Disease Control reports. The American Lung Association reported flu-related deaths as low as 257 (2001), 274 (2010) and 727 (2002) while the CDC continues to report an average of 36,000 flu deaths per year in a contrived seasonal epidemic to drum up flu vaccination. How can Americans have any trust in COVID-19 vaccines when they are touted by public health agencies that proffer fake data like this? Why is anyone even thinking of getting vaccinated? With all of the falsehoods, contrived threats of infection and death, false-positive tests, over-stated effectiveness of vaccines, mutant strains for which there is no immunization, and a remote chance of ever benefiting from immunization, as well as unproven experimental vaccines, it is a wonder why, at the end of April, 2021, close to a third of the US population is fully vaccinated. Americans are voluntarily walking the plank. But Americans say they didn’t have a choice, their employer required it or they can’t travel without a vaccination certificate. Isn’t it difficult to believe that the United States, the most developed country and with the most advanced healthcare system in the world, with fortified foods, public hygiene, modern medicines and plentiful doctoring, and only 4% of the world’s population, as of July 2021 is responsible for approximately 26% of its COVID-19 cases and 24% of its COVID-19-deaths? If it is so critical for the world to get vaccinated, why are there more than 130 countries that haven’t administered a single vaccine? Vaccines are mostly being distributed in advanced countries where vaccine makers can make money. Other pathogens involved It is an over-simplification to believe a mutated common- cold virus, that had obviously undergone “gain of function” alterations, has singularly become a “natural born killer.” That is the failure to educate the public that other pathogens, namely bacteria and fungi, are involved in mortal-stage infectious lung diseases. This is called co-infection. This is the missing piece of the COVID-19 puzzle, which vaccination will not prevent. The Spanish flu was really the Spanish TB You would likely be surprised to learn that deaths from a flu virus (H1N1) was not the sole cause of the 1918 Spanish flu that was reported to have killed millions worldwide. Demographer Andrew Noymer at University of California Berkeley found a huge die off of people who had tuberculosis, a mycobacterial infection, in 1919, the year after the Spanish flu. In one study researchers found TB was associated with influenza death, but there were no influenza deaths among non-TB-infected subjects! Secondary bacterial infections Secondary bacterial infections are reported as the most common causes of death in the flu pandemic of 1918, the bacterium Streptococcus pneumonia in particular. Secondary bacterial infections were also reported in the 2009 Swine flu pandemic. The fact is, most hospitalized COVID-19 patients acquire a secondary bacterial infection. Secondary infections significantly decrease survival of COVID-19 patients, particularly those in the ICU. In Wuhan China a secondary infection was reported in 50% of non-survivors and only 1% of survivors. In another study those patients with severe COVID-19 were 2.9 to 18.2 times more likely to have coinfections with bacteria or fungi. It is possible that some patients die from bacterial coinfection rather than the COVID-19 virus itself. In the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic among an estimated 300,000 deaths, 30-55% of deaths were from bacterial pneumonia. But you don’t read about pneumonia deaths in the current pandemic, likely miscategorized as COVID-19 deaths and subsequently reported in the news media. In another study, 35% of patients with critical disease were found to have secondary bacterial infection compared with only 4% with moderate and 9% with severe disease. The most common pathogen that causes pneumonia in the hospital is fungi. In one study of COVID-19 patients 80% had fungi in their lungs. Natural remedies that address bacteria viruses and fungi At this point it is important to recognize there are not enough antibiotics or even vaccines to go around if a true pandemic is in play. This means self-care is important. Most everyone says they have experienced COVID-like symptoms in the past year or so and 99.7% got well on their own. It is important in self-care to address bacterial and fungal infections as well as viruses. In a study done at Cornell University over a decade ago it was found that four herbal remedies (garlic, oregano, allspice, and cloves) killed all forms of bacteria. All of these herbals overcome antibiotic resistance. The primary active ingredient in fresh-crushed garlic, allicin, has been shown to have anti-viral, anti-fungal, and anti-bacterial properties. While most garlic pills do not yield allicin due to stomach acid degradation of the enzyme that produces allicin, an alkalinized garlic capsule negates acidity to yield as much allicin as a fresh-crushed clove of garlic. Garlic also does not induce antibiotic resistance. Oil of oregano contains carvacrol, a strong antifungal and antibacterial agent. Carvacrol is not subject to anti-bacterial resistance. The red wine molecule resveratrol is known to have unusual anti-fungal, anti-bacterial and anti-viral action. “Resveratrol demonstrates the action of antimicrobials against a remarkable bacterial diversity, viruses, and fungi.” Dr. Thomas Levy advocates for the use of fine nebulized droplets of hydrogen peroxide which selectively kills all bacteria, viruses and fungi without harming healthy cells. Nebulizers are available online or from local medical suppliers. Read Dr. Levy’s book RAPID VIRUS RECOVERY, a free online ebook. COVID-19 vaccines only target a single strain of coronavirus. Coinfection dramatically increases mortality. Make sure your regimen of home remedies addresses bacteria, viruses and fungi. The post The Missing Piece Of The Covid-19 Death Puzzle: Co-Infection appeared first on LewRockwell. |
Who’s Lysenko-ing Now?Sunday 02 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
Trofim Lysenko was a government-sponsored agronomist and biologist favored by Stalin and the CCCP. By favored, I mean put in charge, given power to define the terms and settle the science, and by government edict, was not to be criticized by man or beast. You know, like Tony Fauci. In the Lysenko era, from 1927 through Stalin’s death in 1953, Soviet academia, media, and party publicly rejected the ideas of Darwin’s natural selection and Mendelian genetics in favor of the early 1800’s ideas of Lamarck, who believed characteristics acquired during an organism’s life could be passed on genetically to the next generation. It wasn’t until 1962 that the Soviet state formally repudiated Lysenko’s theories. You see, Lysenko’s ideas were uniquely suited to the politics of the day in the USSR under Stalin. Not only could people be made into the perfect Soviet man or woman, but plants and animals could be good socialists as well, not competing but cooperating towards achieving political goals. From this article, we find: Official support only spurred Lysenko’s theories or “Soviet Darwinism” to ever more absurd heights. By 1939, he was so widely supported that after an extended struggle with geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, who debunked Lysenko’s work, Lysenko came into control of almost all of the Soviet food research. In 1948, his ideas were made universal law at a party conference in a speech edited by Stalin himself. By then, Lysenko was given to making outstandingly weird assertions like wheat could be induced to produce rye or that inorganic substances could be combined to create life. We chuckle, because we were not in the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1962, struggling to understand why centralization and communism wasn’t delivering the food we needed. We laugh, because we weren’t one of the 10 million Ukrainians and others starved to death in the Holodomor. We smile and nod because we were not Nikolai Vavilov, who disagreed with Lysenko’s illogical and increasingly crazed theories. Vavilov “was subsequently arrested and imprisoned before dying of starvation in 1943. Any further scientist who dared to question Lysenkoism risked being discredited, imprisoned, or even killed.” In the US, let it not be said that our leading media outlets, like The Nation, have forgotten Lysenko and his state-promoted and state-mandated pseudo-science, with its denial of any and all contrary evidence, political sponsorship for political agendas, and intolerance for the scientific method of inquiry. They have not forgotten. But they never understood it either. The Nation bravely attacks “the state” and its Orange Leader, opining in July 2020, “By the time this is all over, several hundred thousand Americans will lie in their graves, felled by a man-made epidemic. Man-made not in the sense of a super-virus created by a mad scientist in a lab but manufactured: perpetuated by policy choices, decisions made by politicians to ignore the best scientific advice offered to them, or to turn to their own Lysenkos, who tell them what they want to hear, no matter the consequences. This week, the White House decided it was time to go after Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a leading HIV/AIDS researcher, and a figure who has advised six presidents during outbreaks of infectious diseases, including Ebola, SARS, and H1N1 influenza. His crime? Speaking out more bluntly about the risk of Covid-19 in the United States, the failures of our policies thus far, and what new restrictions will likely need to be put in place to address the outbreaks now raging in dozens of states across the country.” A mere 9 months later, one wonders whether the breathless and outraged defense of Fauci was significant at the time because it was a public attack on Trump, or whether the author was secretly working for the Babylon Bee. Tony Fauci not only was NOT fired by Trump but rather given massive power to shape the policy, science, and messaging, he was also kept on by the current elderly hostage of the Oval Office. Fauci, like Lysenko, has gone from ignoring proven science and history in dealing with contagion and coronaviruses, to being described as “an unhinged lunatic,”with good reason. One article counts 19 examples of backtracked, idiotic or fantastical pronouncements in the past year. And the hits just keep on coming. Like Lysenko, Fauci has profited in his decades of state support, personally and financially, without ever being held to account for scientific dereliction, and the damning outcomes of his advice and actions. When Obama outlawed “gain of function” viral studies on bat coronaviruses, Fauci used millions of taxpayer funding to move his pet research to Wuhan Level IV lab, to continue that gain of function research on bat coronaviruses. To challenge Fauci — in any way – has meant deplatforming, silencing, and threats by the state – whether these challenges take the form of scientific critique, alternative treatments, questions about the nature and effectiveness of messenger RNA injections, the meaning of the word “experimental” and “vaccine,” the role billionaire misanthrope enablers who haven’t taken a biology class in 50 years, memes, comedic routines, jokes, ridicule or even innocent questioning of his hypocrisy, appearance and diktats. All is forbidden.
Lysenko’s public “science” facilitated and justified the Soviet state’s most pure 20th Century obsession, which was at once and always the obliteration of individual and free human thought and agency, along with the more casual and absolutely literal obliteration of actual individuals and communities and demographics. Tony Fauci’s role in our great national tragedy – of lockdowns, destruction of personal and community economies, deadly assaults on health, education, family, mobility and social commerce – continues to facilitate and justify the US state’s most pure 21st century obsession, at once and always the obliteration of individual and free human thought and agency, along with the more casual and absolutely literal obliteration of individuals and communities and demographics. The fundamental wrongness and mundane intellectuality of Lysenko was a perfect match for a state seeking total control 100 years ago. Lysenko died a forgotten old man, an embarrassing reminder of the kind of stupidity and avarice that makes mountains of the dead, and shatters reason. What will the future hold for Tony Fauci? The post Who’s Lysenko-ing Now? appeared first on LewRockwell. |
Cradle-to-Grave Stimmy: How We Got HereSunday 02 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
You would think that knuckleheads like Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell would finally wake up. Last night the biggest spender since LBJ and FDR combined laid-out Part 3 of a $6 trillion in 100 days spending spree – which comes on top of the Donald’s $4 trillion fiscal bacchanalia last year. Yet the bond vigilantes barely wiggled their small toe. Indeed, at 1.65%, the 10-year UST is still buried deep below the running inflation rate, which rate itself is on the verge of liftoff. Still, today’s negative 50 basis point real yield on the benchmark UST is only the culmination of a 30-year campaign by the Greenspan Fed and his heirs and assigns to destroy honest price discovery in the bond pits on the misbegotten theory that cheap debt fosters growth, prosperity and wealth. No, what it actually does, among countless other ills, is unshackle the politicians to bury future generations in unspeakable debts. Thus, if the real spread on the 10-year (purple area) was even +200 basis points, as it was at the turn of the century, the 10-year UST would now be yielding 4.25%. At that level, even Easy Janet (Yellen) would not have blessed Sleepy Joe’s $6 trillion spend-a-thon and centrists like Senator Manchin would have been a lot more than merely “uneasy” upon its presentation to the Congress. 33-Year Destruction of Honest Bond Prices by the Fed: 10-Year UST Yield Minus Inflation
So we actually do understand what the Biden Administration is doing. With what amounts to free money on offer, the Progressive/Left has spotted a once in a lifetime opportunity to saddle the American public with the kind of Cradle-to-Grave Stimmy that they have always dreamed about. Until recent times, of course, they were invariably stopped cold by the bond vigilantes, which is to say, honest yields in the UST trading pits. But now the bond vigilantes have been lobotomized many times over and the denizens of the once-and-former party of the old time fiscal religion are waking up this morning to wonder what hit them. After all, how do you compete with free maternity leave, free child care, free preschool, free elementary and secondary education, free community college, nearly free university, virtually free ObamaCare, free elderly care and, to boot, after $3,600 per child tax credits, essentially no income taxes at all for upwards of 75% of adult Dem voters? That is, the Dems are going with universal free stuff for all while the going is good. The rather despicable Svengali who ran the Obama White House and then ran Chicago into the ground from the mayor’s office, Rahm Emanuel, made that clear as a bell when he explained the Dems’ true political calculation this week to the Washington Post: “Once everyone’s in, all the parents want in. Then it’s not a poor person’s program or a poverty program. It’s an education program. . . . That to me, that is essential. It changes the center of gravity once it’s for everybody.” So now Sean Hannity and his Foxified Republicans are belatedly waking up, emitting a cloud of purple rhetoric about the impending fall of America to socialism. But we have a news flash: Financial socialism has been underway for several decades now because on Wall Street all the boys and girls get a trophy, while risk and loss have been essentially vaporized by the central bankers. So the Dems are making bold to extend those blessings to the unwashed masses and have drafted the central bank as their fiscal handmaid. After all, do you think that JayPo thinks he has a snowball’s chance in the hot place of being reappointed when his term ends next year if he doesn’t keep on monetizing $120 billion of Uncle Sam’s prodigious emissions each and every months, at least? In its morning editorial, the Wall Street Journal got that part right: We’d call the price tag breathtaking, but by now what’s another $2 trillion? Add $2 trillion or so each for the Covid and green energy (“infrastructure”) bills, and that’s $6 trillion of new spending in 100 days. That doesn’t include the regular federal budget of more than $4 trillion a year. No worries, mate, the Federal Reserve will monetize the debt. So the question recurs. Where was the GOP when the props were being pulled out from under fiscal rectitude by the Fed per the chart above? Alas, to a man and woman – except for Ron and Rand Paul and a handful of others – they have been AWOL for the better part of three decades on the single most important requisite of capitalist prosperity: Namely, sound money and honest free market price discovery in the money and capital markets. Indeed, three of the four worst Fed Chairman in its history – Greenspan, Bernanke, and Powell – were appointed by Republican presidents, while the Republican members of the House and Senate financial services committees regularly tripped over each other genuflecting to these prosperity-wreckers during their periodic appearances on Capitol Hill. It was not always this way. Your editor, the late Congressman Jack Kemp, Senator Paul Laxalt, and some others actually got a gold standard plank in the 1980 GOP platform. And during the brutal inflation purge necessarily conducted by the great Paul Volcker thereafter, most Republicans stood their ground for sound money and relieved themselves of whatever dalliance with Keynesian economics they had been infected with during the Nixon era. Unfortunately, the easy money Texas pol who got the US Treasury brief during the Gipper’s second term, Jim Baker, effected the most destructive financial decision of modern times. Paul Volcker was by no means ready to leave his post when his second 4-year term expired in 1987, nor should he have. But Baker, who didn’t much believe in sound money, forced him to retire per an alleged understanding at the time of his 1983 reappointment. By 1987, however, Volcker had proven himself to be the greatest Fed chairman in its history and more suited than any one else to complete the task of restoring a semblance of sound money after the inflationary disaster of the 1970’s. Unfortunately, the uncured Reagan deficits were starting to catch-up. That is to say, the US economy was booming after Morning in America incepted in late 1983 and the bond vigilantes were soon having their way in the bond pits. As it happened, the 10-year yield had fallen from 16% to a low of 7.1% in February 1987 in response to Volcker’s conquest of inflation. But owing to still $200 billion deficits as far as the eye could see, that’s all she wrote. In a classic “crowding out” sequence, rising private demand for capital came crashing up against Uncle Sam’s ample elbows, causing rates to head swiftly skyward. During the next nine months the benchmark yield rose by more than 300 basis points – until the newly installed Greenspan essentially cried Uncle in the aftermath of Black Monday on October 19th and turned on the printing presses, full speed ahead. Little did the world yet know, but then and there the death dirge of the bond vigilantes incepted and the GOP’s amnesia about sound money and fiscal rectitude began its long ascent. You can blame this pivotal inflection point on Baker because the Gipper was a sound money, gold standard man at heart. Reagan would have likely reappointed Volcker on his own motion, but his diary from March 16, 1987 makes clear why that didn’t happen: Then Jim Baker – re the Aug. end of the term for Volcker as Chrmn. for the Fed. Reserve Board. We are going to see if Alan Greenspan will take the job if Paul will step down gracefully. The fact is, Baker didn’t want rising rates and a crowding-out driven recession in front of the 1988 election because his Texas friend and mentor, George Bush the Elder, was next in line. So he had convinced Reagan that Volcker had to go and that Alan Greenspan was just as sound on money matters and a Republican to boot. In fact, back in the day (the 1950s and 1960s) Greenspan had been a gold standard believer and even a sometimes member of Ayn Rand’s coterie. But after going to Washington as Ford’s CEA chairman in 1974, his true colors materialized. That is, he proved to be less a man of conviction than one of conviviality. He desperately wanted to be accepted by the powers that be in Washington, and at length to be lionized by them. In any event, he stopped the bond vigilantes cold in the fall of 1987 and thereafter kept the bond pits flush with whatever fiat credit was needed to keep interest rates in check and a generational financial boom gathering stream. Last Act of the Bond Vigilantes, Eruption of 10-Year Yield in 1987
To be sure, during the 1990s and thru the end of Greenspan’s term in January 2006 the rise of new technology and the internet did give a boost to economic performance. Still, there is no doubt that financialization was Greenspan’s signature legacy. During his tenure, main street households experienced a 165% gain in wage and salary income, even as their financial assets soared by 280%. As a consequence, the 5.7X ratio of financial assets to earned income in 1987, which had prevailed in that zone during the decades of postwar prosperity, soared to 8.4X by the time Greenspan left the Fed in Q1 2006. Ratio of Household Financial Assets To Wage and Salary Income, 1987-2006
Here’s the thing. All that fantastic inflation of financial assets got intermediated by Wall Street one way or another. As a result, the center of lobbying power on the GOP side of Washington subtly but steadily shifted over time. That is, when the big Reagan budget cut and tax cut packages were passed by a Democratic Congress in 1981, it was due to the fire power of the main street lobbies from back home. These included local bankers, home-builders, car dealers, real estate agents, life insurance agents, drug store operators, lumberyards, small manufacturers, wildcat oil drillers, main street merchants and doctors, lawyers etc. They all hated big deficits, high interest rates, intrusive Washington bureaucracy and Big Government generally. And it was, in fact, the main street business lobby and relatively honest money that kept Leviathan in check. As Greenspan took his bows 25 year later, however, the center of lobbying power had shifted to Wall Street and the financial industry, even as Greenspan’s decades of Keynesian central banking and easy money had sent the bond vigilantes into permanent hibernation. Needless to say, the financial industry knows whereupon its bread is buttered, and has functioned as the Fed’s potent advocate and shield in the political wars of Washington. At length, therefore, the GOP members of the House and Senate finance and banking committees were bought and paid for by the new financial industry lobbying power. Soon, nary an ill-word was spoken about the Fed from the Republican side of the aisle, even as it destroyed honest price discovery in the bond pits and gutted the bond vigilantes that had kept the old main street lobbies vigilant and the GOP wedded to its old time fiscal religion. Alas, last night they found out to their shock and dismay that the rogue central bank they manned, fostered and coddled for three decades has now paved the way for a genuine social democratic, free-stuff-for-all moment in American political history. Of course, what remains of the Trumpified GOP actually believes that the real problem in America is that the Donald’s idiotic wall on the Mexican border remains unfinished and scheduled for effective demolition. Soon they will find out, however, that it is not Hispanic immigrants looking for work in America that voted them out of office. It was the 12 unelected money-pumpers on the all-powerful FOMC – an American monetary politburo – that allowed their political enemies to finance social democracy by monetizing the mountains of debt that have been and will be issued to finance it. This AM some right-wing pundits posted this warning about the import of Sleepy Joe’s spend-a-thon. Except, other than some symbolic tax nicking of the 1% that may yet happen, the slogan would better read, “monetizing our way to prosperity”. That’s really how we got here.
PEAK TRUMP, IMPENDING CRISES, ESSENTIAL INFO & ACTION Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner. The post Cradle-to-Grave Stimmy: How We Got Here appeared first on LewRockwell. |
Cancel Culture Comes Home: Walter Duranty and the New York TimesSunday 02 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
Last summer, when cinemas were open in France, I saw the film Mr; Jones and wrote about it for LRC. As I wrote then, the film dramatizes “the voyage of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones (played by the English actor James Norton) to the Soviet Union in 1933 where he became an eye witness of the forced famine in Ukraine now called the Holodomor, (the word is from the Ukranian meaning murder by hunger). The Holodomor, which consisted of the slow tourtured murder of millions of Ukranian peasants by Stalin’s Communist Party, is barely known by the general public, especially compared to the Holocaust perpertrated by Hitler’s Nazis.” Also in that article I wrote about Walter Duranty, the New York Times reporter in Moscow at the time. “The response from that era’s mainstream media, the foreign correspondents stationed in Russia, was akin to the cancel culture of today. Taking the lead was the Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent for the New York Times (isn’t it always the Old Gray Lady?) Walter Duranty, known as Stalin’s apologist. From the book on Duranty by S.J. Taylor the events are known. A Soviet press officer told the correspondents that their credentials would be denied unless they repudiated Jones. They even made a party out of the meeting to come up with the phrases to call Jones a liar in all but name. Duranty’s response to Jones included perhaps the most cynical excuse for power ever uttered. “But–to put it brutally–you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and the Bolshevik leaders are just as indifferent to the casualties that may be involved in their drive toward socialism an any General during the World War who ordered a costly attack in order to show his superiors that he and his division possessed the proper soldierly spirit.” While admitting that there had been “food shortages” there was no “death from starvation” but only “widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.” Jones responded in the Times (printed about a month later after the furor had died down, but much more from that newspaper than we could expect today) that he would stick to the facts that he had found on the ground, interviewing peasants themselves, not learned second hand through government sources. Jones even felt pity for these compromised journalists who had to be “masters of euphemism and understatement.”” I was recently contacted by the Duranty Revocation Subcommittee of the U.S. Committee for Holodomor-Genocide Awareness to alert me of their new national campaign to demand the revocation of the 1932 Pulitzer Prize awarded to Walter Duranty.
The Ukranian Weekly explains that the Duranty revocation campaign has the following goals: First, to build a network of journalists and educators, empowering them to continue writing articles, editorials, and promoting the great travesty of mistruths and lies perpetrated by Walter Duranty. Second, to request that the Ukrainian American community, especially students, use social media to promote an awareness campaign to help with media pitching, design work and writing. Third, announce a social media contest to develop and post Duranty memes with the hashtag #RevokeDurantyPulitzer. Fourth, spur a worldwide petition on change.org for the revocation of Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize. The Committee maintains an information packed website to learn more about the Holodomor. One historical item posted is a State Department memo from 1931 filed from Berlin, where Duranty had stopped in during his vacation. It is the smoking gun for his complicity, but also critically important to note is the complicity of the New York Times itself. The memo states, “In conclusion, Duranty pointed out that, ‘in agreement with the NEW YORK TIMES and the Soviet authorities,’ his official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet régime and not his own.” I support the efforts of the Committee to expose the pedalling of false news 80-90 years ago. It is sweet irony to see cancel culture applied to the New York Times where more than ever they are still a key propagator of various flavors of propaganda. The post Cancel Culture Comes Home: Walter Duranty and the New York Times appeared first on LewRockwell. |
A Lesson from History: Transgender Mania is a Sign of Cultural Collapse Camille PagliaSunday 02 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
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Police Shootings vs. Medically Caused Death; How the News Shapes Public Perception And Controls MindsSunday 02 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
Well, Mr. Wilson, I want to thank you for appearing before this committee today. It’s been many years since you served as the CEO of one of the largest news networks in the world. Many years since I was ousted, yes. We’re not here to discuss that today. No. We want your point of view on news media in general. How they shape public perception. Mr. Chairman, let me start with this. Every year in the US, people commit about 1.2 million violent crimes. That would be murder, rape, aggravated assault, and robbery. That many? Yes. Have you ever seen a full-length news documentary revealing, step by step, the recovery of a victim of one of those crimes? Why, no. I haven’t. If such a documentary were produced, it would show the surgeries to repair the wounds, the hospital stay, the period of rehabilitation in another facility, the arrival at home, the anguish of friends and family, the economic hardship, the attempt at psychological recovery, and so on—over a long period of time. I’ve never seen anything like that on television. I’ll tell you why, Mr. Chairman. Viewers watching it would finally understand, up close, the effects of violent crime. And therefore, they would hold the perpetrators, the criminals, more accountable and responsible. And THAT would bring about a change in our culture. News media don’t want that change to occur. Why not? Because news media are devoted to enlisting public sympathy for the criminal. That’s their agenda. It’s a destructive agenda. That’s a very serious charge, Mr. Wilson. Yes, sir, it is. But it’s just the beginning of what I have to say here today. Let me continue. According to available statistics, the police in America shoot and kill about 1200 people a year. A few of those shootings cause major upheavals in society. Protests and riots. Every year, in America, the medical system kills 225,000 people. There is no upheaval. The news media don’t cover this fact in any way at all. Are you sure about that medical statistic, Mr. Wilson? It’s a conservative estimate, Mr. Chairman. I’ll offer one citation out of several. Author, Dr. Barbara Starfield, a revered public health expert at Johns Hopkins. July 26, 2000, the Journal of the American Medical Association. Her review was titled, “Is US Health really the Best in the World?” She stated: 106,000 deaths result from the administration of FDA-approved medicines. 119,000 deaths come as a result of mistreatment and errors in hospitals. That’s astounding, Mr. Wilson. Yes, it is. Yet, no coverage from the news media. The police shoot and kill 1200 Americans a year. The medical system kills 225,000 Americans a year. So imagine would happen if the media covered the medical deaths in the same way they cover four or five police shootings that lead to protests and riots. And you’re saying the news media intentionally ignore the medically caused deaths? Yes. Of course. Well, television news is supported to a great degree by pharmaceutical advertisers. Correct. And those advertisers would remove their money if medically caused death suddenly became a leading story, night after night, on the evening news. But there is more to the story. Which is? The medical system is a cornerstone, a pillar, a foundation of society. People pay homage to it. In order to maintain the kind of society we have now, people must believe in the foundation. Otherwise…a collapse would occur. You’re really saying the news media are propping up— Yes, I am, Mr. Chairman. Take that figure—the medical system causes 225,000 deaths in America every year. That would be 2.25 MILLION deaths per decade. And we’re not even talking about the millions of other people who are maimed by the medical system and manage to survive. I’m trying to picture what you’re— Let me go even further, Mr. Chairman. Suppose one news network devoted a week of coverage to ONE PERSON killed by the medical system. Up close. The period of suffering, the death, the effect on family, the incredible emotional distress and pain and turmoil, the financial burden, and so on. And then, at the end of the week, the news anchor stated: THIS HAPPENS TO 225,000 PEOPLE IN AMERICA EVERY YEAR. 2.25 MILLION PEOPLE EVERY DECADE. There would be a national uproar. And, I suggest, Mr. Chairman, this is the only way the US medical system can be reformed and rebuilt from the top. But it will never happen. The news media will not permit it. Therefore, the medical system has to be rebuilt from lower levels—ultimately, by the people themselves. So how are news media shaping the public perception of the medical system? I hope that’s a rhetorical question, Mr. Chairman. The public is led to believe we have a system with only RARE adverse effects. This belief is created and cultured by news media. They are complicit in the crime. Reprinted with permission from Jon Rappoport’s blog. The post Police Shootings vs. Medically Caused Death; How the News Shapes Public Perception And Controls Minds appeared first on LewRockwell. |
Can Colleges and Employers Legally Require You To Get Vaccinated?Sunday 02 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
A slew of colleges and universities are embracing COVID vaccine mandates, telling students if they want to attend classes on campus, they’ll need to be vaccinated. Meanwhile, a look at job postings across the country reveals many employers are requiring job candidates to get vaccinated, or promise to get vaccinated within 30 days of hire. Whether you’re a job hunter or a college student, you may soon face the prospect that your future plans could hinge on your willingness to get the COVID vaccine. But can colleges and employers legally require it? The answer is … complicated. Colleges and universities are moving to mandate More than 100 colleges across the country will require students to receive COVID vaccines in order to attend in-person classes in the fall, though most will allow medical and religious exemptions. The list of colleges that will require the vaccine includes Stanford, Rutgers, University of Notre Dame, Duke University, Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins and Yale. Other colleges and universities have said they will require athletes or those who live on campus to get a shot, according to The New York Times. Many schools, including Boston College, Morehouse College in Georgia, University of California and the California State University systems and George Washington University have similar requirements for employees before they will be allowed to return to in-person teaching. Colorado’s major public universities announced Wednesday they will require students, faculty and staff to get COVID vaccinations before beginning the fall semester. The mandate means more than 170,000 students — most of the state’s college students — will be required to be vaccinated, according to enrollment data from the Colorado Department of Higher Education. Although private colleges make up the bulk of schools with vaccine mandates, some public universities have also moved to require COVID vaccination. Students and employees of the University System of Maryland will be required to get vaccinated, said Chancellor Jay A. Perman, who is most concerned about the UK virus variant, which he described in his announcement last week as “more contagious.” “That’s what we’re preparing for,” Perman said, “more infectious, more harmful variants that we think could be circulating on our campuses come fall.” Rutgers University announced in March it would require all students be vaccinated in order to enroll for the 2021 fall semester. The announcement prompted Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to remind university officials that federal law prohibits mandating products approved under the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). In a letter to Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway, Kennedy, who also serves as chief legal counsel for CHD, wrote: “Federal law 21 U.S.C. § 360bbb-3(e)(1)(A)(ii)(III) requires that the person to whom an EUA vaccine is administered be advised, ‘of the option to accept or refuse administration of the product, of the consequences, if any, of refusing administration of the product, and of the alternatives to the product that are available and of their benefits and risks.’ “This right of refusal stems from the fact that EUA products are, by definition, experimental and forced participation in a medical experiment could result in injury. Under the Nuremberg Code, no one may be coerced to participate in a medical experiment. Consent of the individual is ‘absolutely essential.'” According to I. Glenn Cohen, expert on medical ethics and professor at Harvard Law School, there is no federal guidance for colleges and universities mandating COVID vaccination, but there is a well-established practice of universities mandating students receive specific vaccines as a condition of attendance, with exemptions difficult to obtain. Cohen pointed to a recent case where the California trial court upheld an influenza vaccine mandate by the University of California, a public university, and drew the analogy to K-12 public school mandates. Public universities are on even surer footing with COVID vaccination requirements because there’s a greater public health risk with COVID, Cohen wrote on the Harvard Law Review Blog. Private colleges are not required to grant religious exemptions under federal law, though some states have the Religious Freedom Restoration Acts (RFRAs), which may be interpreted to require public colleges and universities to provide religious exemptions, Cohen said. However, both public and private colleges and universities are subject to the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and/or its sister statute the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 that require accommodations for students with disabilities, which potentially includes those with medical contraindications to vaccines. There are also arguments surrounding bodily autonomy and the fact that all COVID vaccines currently approved for EUA in the U.S. are experimental vaccines. Cohen, like Kennedy, pointed to federal law, which requires notifying recipients “of the option to accept or refuse administration of the product …” What about employers? A recent survey gathered data from more than 1,800 in-house lawyers, human resources professionals and C-suite executives to analyze plans, strategies and concerns related to COVID vaccination among their workforces. Results showed fewer than 0.5% of companies currently mandate COVID vaccination for all employees, 6% plan to mandate it for all workers once vaccines are readily available and/or fully approved by the FDA and 3% said they plan to mandate vaccination only for certain workers, such as those in customer-facing roles. Of those surveyed, 43% said they were unsure and still weighing the possibility of mandating vaccination, while 12% said they planned to bar unvaccinated employees from certain activities, such as travel or interaction with colleagues or customers. Colleen Connell, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, said government and businesses have the power to impose vaccination requirements to protect public health if justified by data, and the right to refuse vaccines on religious grounds is not absolute. If people claiming religious exemptions are preventing society from reaching herd immunity, then the “government has a right to insist on vaccinations,” Connell said. Private employers also have that right as long as they permit religious and public health exemptions and they don’t implement a vaccination program in an arbitrary or discriminatory way — though “hospitals have long required their employees to get annual flu shots,” Connell added. According to Bloomberg Law, employers generally have legal authority to require their employees get vaccinations, so long as they adhere to federal laws requiring religious and medical accommodations in the workplace. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reaffirmed that authority in December, specific to COVID. However, as The Defender reported in January, attorneys Mary Holland, CHD president, and Greg Glaser argued states and employers under federal law can’t mandate EUA COVID vaccines. Holland and Glaser wrote: “If a vaccine has been issued EUA by the FDA, it is not fully licensed and must be voluntary. A private party, such as an employer, school or hospital cannot circumvent the EUA law, which prohibits mandates. Indeed, the EUA law preventing mandates is so explicit that there is only one precedent case regarding an attempt to mandate an EUA vaccine.” On April 1, Pfizer and BioNTech offered an updated look at the efficacy of their COVID vaccine. The new efficacy data, plus a safety analysis comprising data from more than 12,000 people who were fully immunized for at least six months, allow Pfizer to file a drug application with the FDA to turn the shot’s EUA into a full approval, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in a statement. “They know they’re on very shaky legal ground with mandates while vaccines are EUA,” said Holland. “However, these vaccines will likely be licensed, approved and federally recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices in the near future. Yet even then there will be serious legal questions about the validity of licensure and whether these vaccines reach the high threshold for a mandate via Jacobson v. Massachusetts –– the 1905 landmark precedent legalizing vaccine mandates.” Currently, all 50 states are considering legislation to prevent employers from mandating vaccinations and to protect current and prospective employees who refuse vaccination from discrimination and retaliation. “I would predict that there will be measures passed in at least a few states that either restrict employers or restrict the concept of a vaccine passport or other proof of vaccination,” said Lowell Pearson, an attorney at Husch Blackwell LLP in Jefferson City, Missouri. Pearson said governors likely don’t have authority to restrict employer mandates via executive orders. Lawmakers in Missouri are considering HB 838 — which would bar public employers from requiring their workers get vaccinated or imposing vaccine requirements for entry to public spaces. State legislatures in Ohio, Oklahoma and Tennessee are considering bills that go further than the Missouri measure, proposing a ban on vaccine mandates by any entity, including private-sector employers. Idaho has proposed legislation prohibiting COVID vaccine mandates by any company contracting with the state government. Only the Wisconsin legislature has sent a bill to the governor this year proposing to ban workplace vaccine mandates, and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers vetoed it. Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. CHD is planning many strategies, including legal, in an effort to defend the health of our children and obtain justice for those already injured. Your support is essential to CHD’s successful mission. The post Can Colleges and Employers Legally Require You To Get Vaccinated? appeared first on LewRockwell. |
Anti-War Group Releases Activist Guide To End Militarized Policing in USSunday 02 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
In an effort to curtail police militarism, anti-war group Win Without War on Thursday released an activist guide titled Stop Militarizing Our Communities: 5 Things You Need to Know About the 1033 Program. The activist guide was authored by Tanaya Sardesai, a student at Pomona College and a former intern at Win Without War, and centers on the Department of Defense’s 1033 program, which is responsible for supplying military weaponry to domestic law enforcement. “Foreign policy and domestic policy are intertwined,” said Sardesai. “Violence committed against communities of color abroad fuels violence against communities of color at home. We must end state violence and knee-jerk militarism, wherever it occurs. Ending the 1033 program is a small but necessary step toward that.” The 1033 program, also referred to as the Law Enforcement Support Office Program, is characterized by Win Without War as a byproduct of colossal U.S. Pentagon budget and a hyper-militarized foreign policy that perpetuates ongoing conflicts around the world. “Militarism abroad and militarism at home are inseparable,” explained the group in a statement. “One of the key ways our endless wars have blown back to exacerbate violence and undermine human security in the United States is through the DoD’s 1033 program.” The guide elucidates the correlation between U.S. foreign policy and police militarization and concludes both systems are designed to sustain weapon manufacturers profits, the prison system, and the defense industry—at the expense of the working class and marginalized communities. According to the guide, the 1033 program provides free military-grade weapons to local police officers and incentivizes their use by contractually requiring the weapons be used within a year or returned to the federal government. There is little oversight required under 1033 contracts and equipment often goes missing or is used improperly without accountability. Police officers do not receive mandatory federal training under the program, leaving local agencies to train weapon recipients with little guidance. “This further reinforces the ‘us vs. them’ mentality that is responsible for such devastation around the world,” explains the guide. “A lack of instruction exacerbates these issues by imbuing officers with the confidence to use deadly weapons without training.” The post Anti-War Group Releases Activist Guide To End Militarized Policing in US appeared first on LewRockwell. |
What Do Confederate Monuments and German Composer Richard Strauss Have in Common?Sunday 02 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
Readers of these occasional pieces will know that in addition to political issues, I also sometimes take a look at cultural questions, especially the role that film, music, and the arts play determining the direction of our civilization. The arts are both the natural product and the creative work of our culture, a kind of essential gloss which more than most anything else expresses our values, our innermost beliefs, and, yes if within the Christian tradition, our devotion and thanks to our Creator. Thus, mankind from the earliest times has demonstrated its innermost convictions and understanding of who it is in the scheme of things and its place in that creation by artistic activity. But the arts are more than just an emanation, more than a creative outflowing which expresses what a culture means or represents. Just as the great cathedrals of the High Middle Ages in architecture and Gregorian chant in music illustrated the religious—as well as artistic—sensibility of that society, the environment created by such works of art redounded also to strengthen and support the beliefs and understanding of those in that society. Years ago, when I was in grad school in Spain, I recall engaging in a long-running discussion with another grad student, from England, over the role that cultural environment—our cultural ambiance and what we hold dear in it—plays in buoying up and offering real sustenance to a population. A culture—a society—in which its symbols and public iconography offer a reflection of what that society holds dear and believes can also strengthen and confirm the weakest of its members. The late philosopher Frederick Wilhelmsen used the term “anneal,” in that a cultural environment bursting with symbols and reminders of its innermost beliefs acts similarly on a personal level to strengthen how friends with like views buttress each other: I am confirmed in my perspective by the fact that the friends surrounding me, who may be more precise and more adept in expression, give me encouragement, affirm me, and, in effect, make it easier for me to express myself without feeling isolated or perhaps doubting my own veracity. In the older rural regions of France and Spain, dotted with ancient roadside crosses and small rural chapels and churches—or, in the landscape of the American South with its once very visible public display of the iconography and symbolism of monuments to its heroes and heroic epic, its Second War of Independence, 1861-1865—such public honor and significance indicated what that society held dear and important, but also reminded us, as the late Mel Bradford once wrote, “who we are” as a people and, indeed, as a civilization. The unforgivable sin against Creation made by every Puritan reformer or iconoclast, whether a Cromwellian devil intent on uprooting the rich heritage of English culture in music and architecture, or a Communist commissar presiding over the despoliation of an ancient Russian Orthodox chapel, comes down essentially to the same thing: the destructive and anti-natural tendency that suppresses and separates man from His Creator and the creative inspiration implanted within man that enables him to both render honor to the Creator as well as express that divinely-granted gift through the arts. The arts—music, painting, architecture, film, and other areas of human creativity—present publicly the essential symbols of civilization, what it esteems and holds dear, they give it a certain continuity, add to and enrich its traditions, while, as I have said, strengthening us and the weaker among us in our beliefs and understanding of ourselves. It has been a major accomplishment of the progressivist social justice warriors—the “woke” demonic revolutionaries—to understand that to defeat and undo the hated West, our Western and Christian civilization, the most effective means was through education and the arts, through corrupting our cultural environment and our system of learning (and its transmission to our progeny). Not so much through head-on attacks politically, which as Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci admitted a century ago had been largely ineffective, but via a “long march” through our educational and cultural institutions, the artefacts of our culture, would victory come. This is why, in effect, the supposed “opposition” of the establishment conservative movement—”Con Inc.”—and Republican Party to the progressivist revolution has not only been ineffective, but at times positively nugatory and disastrous to the defense of Western culture. You can’t win a battle…a war…by half-measures, by splitting hairs, by attempting to placate the ravenous Beast of Revolution by sacrificing, even tepidly, some principles which form part of the whole of that culture in hopes that other principles (and maybe your financial assets!) will somehow survive the assaults. Thus the utter foolishness and insanity of “Con Inc.” in eagerly giving up and joining the maddened herd demanding the eradication of memorials and symbols of Southern heritage, those monuments to our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, to their courage, their suffering, and their resilience. That attempt we now see every night on Fox News or spouted from the mouths of a Senator Tim Scott or Senator Lindsey Graham. In the words of the late Archbishop Fulton Sheen, “If you do not live what you believe, you will end up believing what you live.” If we do not oppose the Revolution and the destruction of our culture root-and-branch to its face, we eventually become like the isolated and deserted Aleksandr Kerensky in the Winter Palace in late 1918 who, after disauthorizing and disarming real opposition to the Bolsheviks, hoping to somehow placate them, ended up with nothing and no one to halt their victorious take-over of power in Russia. The modern progressivist Left understands this all too well; it is a truth that too many of our self-declared modern defenders of Western culture have either forgotten, or due to their fear of the Left, refuse to understand. It is why St. Pius X reminded us in 1910 that “…the true friends of the people are neither revolutionaries, nor innovators: they are traditionalists.” Our battle, and it is a battle to the death, must encompass not just our faith but our art, music, literature, our entire culture, what we surround ourselves with, what we teach our children and expose them to, what we pass on, and, if possible, add to. And it is precisely why we must appreciate and praise those giants of our civilization who have preceded us and made our culture richer and more agreeable by their creativity. *************** I pass on an essay I originally wrote back in late 2019; recently, I very slightly updated it, and it was published by The Unz Review. I offer it today, as a contribution to that battle. Richard Strauss and the Survival of Western Culture BOYD D. CATHEY • APRIL 26, 2021 For a number of years I’ve greatly admired and enjoyed the music of the German composer Richard Strauss (1864-1949). In his early years prior to the First World War, he was considered forward-looking, even musically avant-garde. Indeed, the aged defender of the German classical tradition—and another favorite—Max Bruch (d. 1920), found Strauss’ compositions too advanced and straying from that tradition. Yet Strauss was formed in the richly productive culture of southern Germany, Bavaria and the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, and, even if he experimented with harmony and vocal lines in his operas Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909), he never really departed from that early musical formation and an inspiration that he drew from his love of his native Bavaria and of imperial Vienna and the brilliant society that accompanied and informed it.[1] Son of noted musician and horn player in the Bavarian Court Opera Franz Strauss, from an early age, Richard received a thorough and complete musical education, demonstrating extraordinary talent in composition when only in his teens. By the late 1880s and 1890s, his symphonic tone poems, including Don Juan (1888), Death and Transfiguration (1889), and Also Sprach Zarathustra (1896) had established his fame throughout Europe and the United States. But it was later, in opera, that his eventual and permanent renown and preeminence would be secured. In many ways as I listen to Strauss, I hear a great champion of Western culture, standing athwart the onrushing decline of Western music and art during the first half of the twentieth century. Recently, I went back to listen in detail to several of Strauss’s vocal works. Re-hearing them, I reflected on their significance and resonance as our society sinks deeper into cultural decay. Undoubtedly, Strauss’ most famous operatic work is Der Rosenkavalier (Dresden, 1911)—The Cavalier of the Rose. With a superb libretto by the great German dramatist and essayist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who shared Strauss’ conservative convictions,[2] Der Rosenkavalier is a gloriously sentimental story of love and nobility, set in Vienna in the mid-18th century. Like some of Mozart’s stage works, it is essentially a comedy of manners, but one that pays deep and wistful honor to a bygone era and to a cultivated society that seemed to be disappearing even as Strauss was composing it. Indeed, through its comedic action runs, as well, a continuing, not so concealed sense of regret, a sense of loss of those customs, those standards and beliefs, those artistic traditions which made society worth fighting for. The famous Act II waltz-sequence, with buffoonish character Baron Ochs dancing about, is justly famous. But even more so is the scintillating and wistful final scene, a trio, in which the Marschallin gives up her young lover Octavian to her rival Sophie, with both resignation and a special dignity that characterized the age. The famous color film from the early 1960s with the legendary Elisabeth Schwarzkopf remains a remarkable work of art in itself. “Im Abendrot,” with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf; Georg Szell conducting the London Symphony As in Die Frau ohne Schatten, the “Four Last Songs,” and in his operas Der Rosenkavalier and Arabella set in the glory days of Habsburg Vienna, Strauss evoked marvelously a past time of civility, high culture, and grace—a time in which the Christian faith annealed the culture, ironically reminding us in our barren age of just what we have thrown away and lost. And in so doing he joined the battle for our civilization and our future, a battle that continues and encompasses our cultural institutions and traditions, our art, our architecture, our film, our music, and so much more—integral elements that help shape and form us, and without which our lives are made barren and susceptible to disintegration and dissipation. Too many times our contemporary society does not know how to compare and contrast the real achievements of our historic Western Christian civilization with the present cultural detritus that surrounds and threatens to inundate us. Recall the great writer Hilaire Belloc’s statement about our civilization now surviving off the fumes of a once-great culture. Is this not where we are in 2021? Our challenge today is to preserve what is being lost, not only our precious faith under such severe assault, but the incomparable historic culture that it produced and in which it flourished. That task is multi-faceted and must encompass those noble and sublime accomplishments that form our true artistic legacy. Strauss, despite his wistful celebration of a golden past, never lost hope for the future. Nor can we. Notes [1] There is a superb, two-hour BBC documentary, “Richard Strauss Remembered” (1984), narrated by Sir John Gielgud, with numerous rare photographs and historical film clips of Strauss, his performances and events in his life. Although never released formally on DVD, the private Encore label issued it, and it has been available through the Berkshire Record Outlet. [2] Dr. Paul Gottfried has written perceptively on Hugo von Hofmannstahl and his traditionalist and aristocratic vision of Europe, a vision reflected in his dramas and other literary works: “After the First World War, this literary giant [Hofmannstahl] devoted the remainder of his short life to reviving a popular interest in medieval Austrian culture. His most famous contribution to this effort is the German version of Everyman (Jedermann), which he brought to the stage at Salzburg and which became an annual production there. Despite his outspokenness as an Austrian patriot, Hoffmannsthal called for a “new European ego” in an address in Berne in 1916. The problem of cultural and social dissolution that the War had unleashed seemed to the distinguished author to have affected the entire continent; and in the interwar period, Hoffmannsthal contributed to Karl Anton von Rohan’s “Europäischer Revue,” a leading advocacy publication for European unity, a process that the editor Rohan, an Austrian nobleman, hoped to see take place according to traditionalist and presumably pro-Habsburg principles. In a speech in Munich in January 1927, Hofmannsthal famously called for a “conservative revolution” aimed at bringing back a true European identity. This speech was specifically critical of the Germans for “their productive anarchy as a people.” Hoffmannsthal contrasted the sentimental outpouring to which his German cousins were prone to a “binding principle of form,” which he thought necessary for the restoration of a Europe of nations. Unlike T.S. Eliot, Hofmannsthal wrote as a close friend of royalty as well as someone who was an aesthetic and cultural reactionary.” [Paul Gottfried, “Puritans or Habsburgs,” The Unz Review, May 8, 2007.] (Republished from New English Review by permission of author or representative) The post What Do Confederate Monuments and German Composer Richard Strauss Have in Common? appeared first on LewRockwell. |
Gold Is Laughing at PowellSunday 02 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
Recently, my colleague, Egon von Greyerz, and I had some unabashed yet blunt fun calling out the staggering levels of open hypocrisy and policy desperation unleashed by former Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan. Poor Alan was an easy target of what I described as the “patient zero” of the reckless interest rate suppression and unbridled monetary expansion policies of the Fed which have always led to equally reckless boom and bust cycles in markets and economies. But let us be fair to comical Fed Chairmen like Greenspan, as he is not alone in making a mockery of his post at the Eccles Building. With the exception of Paul Volker and William Martin, the sad truth is that nearly every person who has sat in that lead Chair of a private bank masquerading as a “Federal” reserve has made the bank, and themselves, a public embarrassment. As the legendary private investor Jim Rogers recently observed on Kitco news, almost all central bankers effectively lie and obfuscate facts as part of their job description (and job preservation) at the Fed. A Central Banker’s Job Description For the most part, over-hyped Fed Chairs know how to run up debt levels and create lots of money to appear “accommodative” to markets in the short term and then blame “animal spirits” on the disasters which always follow longer term. In fact, if I had to come up with the most honest and historically-confirmed job description for a Fed Chairman, I would post the following job-post on LinkedIn: “Seeking D.C.-based expert fluent in double-speak, comfortable with unsustainable debt expansion and handy with a money printer. Ivy League credentials a plus.” The Latest Nonsense from Powell As for double-speak, Mr. Powell is now seeking to outshine ol’ Mr. Greenspan’s art of spin with stunning elan. At a recent economics club in Washington, Powell was both shameless and brilliant in his ability to spew fantasy with the skill of a circus promotor yet maintain the straight face of a circuit judge. Specifically, Powell tried to downplay the U.S. debt elephant in the room by admitting to its horrific size yet promising a miracle policy shift sometime down the road… That is, he was unable to deny what he described as the “unsustainable path” of current U.S. debt levels growing “meaningfully faster than economic growth,” but was quick to comfort anyone gullible enough to believe him that for now “there is no question of our ability to service our debt for the foreseeable future.” Ahhhh. Such calming words, such confidence, such market-placating guidance. A Brief Translation of Fed-Speak But now, let’s translate Powell’s Fed-speak into real-speak and get a deeper look into the mind of a first-rate spin-seller. When Powell says “there is no question of our ability to service our debt for the foreseeable future,” he is actually telling a kind of partial truth. Congratulations Jerome. Yes, so long as the Fed decides to print trillions more fiat dollars and artificially cap yields and interest rates, the Fed can indeed “service” it’s nearly $30T in public debt for the “foreseeable future,” as the cost of that debt is forced to the basement of history. But what Powell forgets to say, quite cleverly, is that the “foreseeable future” of which he is telegraphing is nothing more than a future of equally foreseeable and grotesquely expanded, and hence, debased U.S. dollars, which is needed to monetize that truly unsustainable debt. Needless to say, such money printing is great news for gold… But Powell’s ability to spin fantasy gets even more pronounced with his next great lie masquerading as policy comfort. Specifically, and to wit, Powell then says, in the same breath, that “at some point in the distant future, when the economy is in better shape,” the Fed will then be in a better position “to deal with the debt issue then.” Ahhhh. That’s just wonderful, no? At some point in the “distant future” the Fed will magically “deal” with our debt issue. Hmmm. Did Powell Take a Math Course? Read a History Book? But here’s the problem with Powell’s kindergarten logic and truth-challenged phraseology: That “distant future” of “economic growth” is mathematically and historically impossible. Impossible. Why? Because once a nation crosses the Rubicon of 100% debt to GDP, and once a nation’s currency has lost greater than 98% of its inherent value due to fiat money expansion (as is the case today), economic growth has never, not once in the entire history of the financial world, ever occurred. Stated more simply, that “distant future” of “economic growth” in which the Fed “deals” with our debt problem is an open lie, no different than Bernanke’s 2009 promise that QE1 was “temporary” and would end by 2010. If Powell would like, I am happy to send him (or Monsieurs Greenspan and Bernanke) a few high-school text books on basic math, or maybe one or two essays on market history to help him (them) regain both a conscience and facts. Jerome, my weblink is found below. Don’t Forget the Endless Larry Summers Ah, but let us not just poke fun at central bankers’ struggles with history and math. Our increasingly sordid world of so-called “financial Leadership” hardly ends at Constitution Ave. My former Harvard President and one-time Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, for example, is no less of a master at promoting his image while ignoring his mistakes. Mr. Summers, the god-father of deregulating the otherwise toxic, uber-levered and price-fixing OTC derivatives market, deserves an honorable mention. Under his watch in 1998, that derivatives market went from $95T to $670T despite open warnings from Brooksley Borne at the CFTC. Meanwhile, Summers was openly insulting her while slapping backs with bankers and promising the world not to worry about their master plan to expand this once-safe futures exchange. But less than a decade after telling Congress that he and his banker friends were more than capable of managing OTC derivatives risk, that same market, as well as the S&P (and the Harvard endowment) tanked by greater than 50% in a matter of weeks in 2008. Today, the same Mr. Summers who helped crash the markets in 2008 is suddenly working on re-branding himself, warning the world, correctly, about the inflation to come. In fact, he specifically observed that the U.S. has “embarked on one of the least responsible macro-economic policies that the US has had in the last 40 years.” Well Larry, maybe the current inflationary direction of the U.S. is the worst thing seen in the last 40 years, but rest assured of this: Your de-regulation of the openly toxic derivatives market comes in at a close second for some of the worst policies I’ve seen in the last 40 years… The post Gold Is Laughing at Powell appeared first on LewRockwell. |
Unsportsmanlike ConductSunday 02 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
NEW YORK—What follows has been covered ad nauseam, but I wonder why people were surprised at the planned football breakaway Super League. Professional sports in Europe now follow the American way, which means money comes before tradition, hometown loyalty, and lastly the fans, the schmucks who live and die for their teams. The bottom line in American sports is what it’s all about, and European football has a lot to learn from the closed shop that has made American sports zillions and zillions. I’ll be brief. American football, baseball, and basketball teams are privately owned, and no matter how badly they perform, they cannot be relegated to a minor league, à la in Europe. The owners of pro teams vote and decide the rules—or changes to those rules—accept or reject who can join the exclusive circle, and vote to ban for whatever reason any interloper trying to crash the exclusive club. The specter of promotion or relegation does not exist in American sports, and it is viewed as a particular European perversion unwelcome to the billionaires’ club that owns professional sports. Not a bad deal for a certain few. So it was only a matter of time that a closed-shop deal would perform a come-hither dangle in front of such pure and noble sportsmen as Stan Kroenke, John Henry, and the ghastly Glazers. When I was a boy, professional players such as my hero—and later on friend—Mickey Mantle were bought at a very young age by a major-league team like the New York Yankees, and remained Yankee property for life. It was, in a way, indentured service. Then a player named Vida Blue sued baseball and a new deal was signed giving the opportunity to professional ballplayers to become free agents after a certain amount of time. You know the rest. Players discovered agents, agents discovered lawyers, and suddenly owners discovered judges ready to throw the book at monopolistic practices, unless. So the owners opened up their pocketbooks wide, but managed to keep the closed shop firmly shut. Sports in America come under entertainment and are subservient to television scheduling, while sponsors make the laws. Profit is what pro sports—like everything else in the country—are all about. The New York Mets are a baseball team that began rather late, back in the early ’60s, and the new franchise was financed by a group that actually invented baseball in the 19th century, the Doubleday family. I was stepping out with a girl whose grandmother, Mrs. Payson, was the principal owner. The Mets were fun and lost more games than any team in history before they became the miracle Mets in 1969 that won the whole kit and caboodle. Before her granddaughter and I broke up, Mrs. Payson explained to me why professional teams like baseball had thrived: They were exempted from antitrust laws by Washington, D.C., at the very start of the 20th century, and owners of professional teams were ready to get down and dirty in order to keep their closed-shop privileges. Payson was a grand old lady and is no longer with us, and she sold her shares to two real estate sharks whose moneyman was someone named Bernie Madoff. The post Unsportsmanlike Conduct appeared first on LewRockwell. |
Food as Medicine — The Answer to Mounting Health CrisesSunday 02 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05
Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco, has written a number of excellent books about health. His latest, “Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine” goes deep into the details of how changes in our food supply have damaged our metabolic health. (The created term “metabolical” is actually a portmanteau of the words “metabolic” and “diabolical.”)
The Two Primary Keys In summary, it boils down to two primary key issues or problems. The first is that the medical establishment doesn’t want you to know that drugs were never intended or designed to treat the foundational cause of chronic disease. They merely treat the symptoms.
The other problem is that the food industry doesn’t want you to know that virtually all foods are intrinsically good for you until they’re processed, and processed foods make up a majority of the foods people eat. As noted by Lustig:
Indeed, once you understand the molecular pathways, when you understand the transcription factors and the actual mechanisms of action of various diseases, and the various drugs used to treat them, you can easily see that they do not treat the underlying problem. And that’s why people don’t get well.
The History of Medicine In his book, Lustig does an excellent job of presenting the history of our food and medical systems, and the various pressures that led us down the path to where we are today. For example, a significant part of why medical doctors are so clueless about health today is because Big Pharma was placed in charge of their education. The drug industry, in turn, was a distinct profit-making scheme from its inception. In 1910, Abraham Flexner, an educator, wrote the Flexner Report, which turned out to be a turning point in terms of creating evidence-based modern medicine, while simultaneously eliminating many health-related factors, including nutrition and preventive medicine. His brother, Simon Flexner, a pathologist and pharmacist, was the first president of Rockefeller University. One of the reasons the Flexner Report eliminated certain aspects of medicine was because John D. Rockefeller, president of Standard Oil, was also in the pharmaceutical business. He was trying to sell coal tar, a byproduct of oil refining, as a treatment for a range of ailments. So, Rockefeller was seeking new profit avenues. “He basically said we have to get drugs and especially coal tar into the hands of physicians who can prescribe it,” Lustig says. The only way to do that was by overhauling the medical system and shifting the focus to pharmaceuticals.
The adulteration of our food can actually be traced back to around 1850. In Great Britain, the industrial revolution was a turning point where two things happened at the same time. One, people in sweatshops worked long days and didn’t have time to cook proper meals, so they ended up eating processed biscuits laden with sugar, which had become available from other British colonies like Barbados. This undernourished them in terms of antioxidants, fatty acids and other important nutrients. The second big dietary change was canning, which exposed people to lead poisoning as the cans were made of lead. Why You Shouldn’t Focus on Food Labels By now, you’ve probably trained yourself diligently to read food labels. The problem is that the label will not tell you what’s been done to the food. “This is one of the reasons why nobody’s getting better because there’s nothing to learn from the label that will actually help you,” Lustig says. According to Lustig, a food is healthy if it satisfies two criteria:
A food that does neither is poison, and any food that does only one or the other, but not both, is somewhere in the middle. Real food, because it has fiber, protects your liver and nourishes your gut. Processed food is fiberless, and the reason for this is because fiber decreases shelf life. By removing the fiber from the food, it prevents it from going rancid, but it also makes it inherently unhealthy. Essentially, “in an attempt to try to increase availability, decrease wastage, we turned our entire food supply on its head in order to create commodities rather than make food available,” Lustig says. Then, in the 1970s, Richard Nixon told the U.S. agriculture secretary, Earl Butts, to come up with a plan to decrease food prices, as fluctuating food prices were causing political unrest. The result was the start of monoculture and chemical-driven farming.
Refinement Makes Everything Worse While Lustig argues that the refinement of carbohydrates is the primary culprit that makes processed food so bad for your health, I believe processed fats may be an even bigger contributor. Omega-6 linoleic acid (LA), in particular, is a pernicious metabolic poison. In 1850, the LA in the average diet was about 2% of total calories. Today, it’s between 20% and 30%. While we do need some omega-6, since your body does not make it, the point is we need nowhere near the amount we’re now getting.
In addition to those issues, polyunsaturated fats such as LA are highly susceptible to oxidation, and as the fat oxidizes, it breaks down into harmful sub-components such as advanced lipid oxidation end products (ALES) and oxidized LA metabolites (OXLAMS). These ALES and OXLAMS also cause damage. One type of advanced lipid oxidation end product (ALE) is 4HNE, a mutagen known to cause DNA damage. Studies have shown there’s a definite correlation between elevated levels of 4HNE and heart failure. LA breaks down into 4HNE even faster when the oil is heated, which is why cardiologists recommend avoiding fried foods. LA intake and the subsequent ALES and OXLAMS produced also play a significant role in cancer. HNE and other ALES are extraordinarily harmful even in exceedingly small quantities. While excess sugar is certainly bad for your health and should typically be limited to 25 grams per day or less, I believe LA is far more damaging overall. As explained by Lustig:
Real Food Is the Answer The key, then, is to eat whole food, which is naturally rich in fiber and low in sugar. On a side note, free radicals are not all bad. They’re also biological signaling molecules, and if you indiscriminately suppress them, which is the danger you run into when using very high amounts of antioxidant supplements, it can backfire. The best way is to get your antioxidants from your food, and real food not only provides antioxidants, but also doesn’t create excessive ROS, so you get help from both ends, as it were. As for the type of diet you choose, any diet can work, provided it’s right for your metabolism. The only diet that does not work for anyone is a processed food diet. Solutions, Solutions Now that you know the root problems, what solutions does Lustig suggest? For starters, education alone is not enough, he says. We need education plus implementation. And that requires a different societal response.
The first step of personal intervention is figuring out if you’re sick. “And don’t ask your doctor because they don’t know how to figure it out,” Lustig says. In Chapter 9 of his book, he lists clues that can help you self-diagnose. In terms of addressing your health problems, your primary “treatment” will be to make, possibly significant, changes to how you shop and eat. As a general, easy-to-follow rule, if it has a label, don’t buy it. Real food does not have ingredient labels. Lustig’s book also includes guidance on how to read food labels in cases where you might not have an option.
Barring legislative success, we’re left with litigation. Already, there are a number of lawsuits in the works, several of which Lustig is a part of. Ultimately, we must restructure the entire food system so that all stakeholders benefit. “And we have to demonstrate to them how they can benefit,” Lustig says. Subsidies Are the Biggest Hindrance to Change Can the food industry make money selling real food? Lustig believes the answer is yes, and in his book, he details how real food makes both financial and ecological sense. The key is to remove subsidies, which currently grease the wheels of the processed food industry.
To learn more, be sure to pick up a copy of Lustig’s book, “Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine.” You can also find a wealth of information on his website, RobertLustig.com, including media appearances, audio recordings, video lectures, books, articles and upcoming events where you can hear him speak. The post Food as Medicine — The Answer to Mounting Health Crises appeared first on LewRockwell. |
It is becoming more evident each day that the wizard wannabes channeling 
from https://youtu.be/V0EQNQssk6U
May 03, 2021
from https://youtu.be/UuC5mCL9HC8
May 03, 2021 at 02:29AM
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