Credit Report Repair News: Digest for May 20, 2021

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Table of Contents What About Covid-19 Vaccination For the 10 Million Americans Taking Immune Suppressive Drugs? ALL OR NONE: A Most Important Detail for Never Wearing a Face Mask The Government’s Emergency Powers Myth The Tightening Noose or Widening Gyre of the Woke Revolution? ‘A State of Fear’ Shocker: Why Is This Substance in the Moderna Covid Vaccine? The GOP’s Impossible Dream of Swaying Black Voters Labor Shortage and Other Disturbing Distortions in the Economy Non-Compliance at Travel Checkpoints — ‘Solutions Watch’ with James Corbett Total Tyranny: We’ll All Be Targeted Under the Government’s New Precrime Program The Tightening of the NATO Noose ‘Everything Is on Fire’

What About Covid-19 Vaccination For the 10 Million Americans Taking Immune Suppressive Drugs? Wednesday 19 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 An estimated 10 million Americans take immune suppressive drugs to quell autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, lupus, Graves’ disease, inflammatory bowel disease.  Over $1 billion of immune suppressive drugs are sold annually to control symptoms of these body-against-itself autoimmune diseases and to prevent organ transplant rejection.  These vulnerable patients were supposed to be screened by a doctor before inoculation with COVID-19 vaccines.  But they have been indiscriminately immunized. True, RNA vaccines don’t expose these patients to actual viruses like common vaccines do.  Antibodies are produced by genetic stimulation of antigens rather than by a viral particle.  But there is question whether the vaccine will adversely affect these patients and take them on a hell ride, or worse. Data in this report In this report, readers need to distinguish flu data from COVID-19 data; and COVID-19 infection from COVID-19 vaccination data; and COVID-19 infection and/or immunization among immune compromised organ donors, the latter group being of greatest concern. Works for the flu The current advice for patients with autoimmune disorders is that vaccination against the flu will still produce some immunity among patients with autoimmune diseases.  Medically immune- suppressed patients are advised they can safely receive flu shots because some antibodies are produced. But what about RNA vaccines for COVID-19 infection among immune-suppressed patients?  There is sparse data available on this topic.  Modern medicine is flying blind here. COVID-19 vaccination maybe not for patients taking immune suppressive medications In a small non-peer reviewed study of 133 fully vaccinated individuals for COVID-19 with RNA vaccines who were taking immunosuppressive medications, antibody levels and virus neutralization was three times lower than in individuals not taking these medications! One of the co-authors in that study reassuringly said: “most patients in the study were able to mount antibody responses in response to SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.” But the troubling study results showed: A 10-fold reduction in patients who used corticosteroids regularly. A 36-fold reduction in patients who use B cell inhibitors. More modest antibody reductions in patients using certain drugs (TNF inhibitors, methotrexate and sulfasalazine, JAK inhibitors and IL-12/23 inhibitors). A review of 30 published studies involving immune-suppressive drugs concluded the use of immune suppressive drugs “can reduce mortality and prevent being placed on ventilators” among patients with COVID-19 infection.  But that report only pertains to patients already under a doctor’s care (likely in the ICU) who were not initially taking an immune-suppressive drug for a chronic autoimmune disease or for organ rejection. Another study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases also showed immunosuppression did not elevate risk for mortality, ventilator use or length of stay in the hospital.  But again, that study doesn’t pertain to immune suppressed patients who have been immunized against COVID-19. COVID-19 RNA vaccines and drugs and autoimmune disease There is some contrary data showing autoimmune disease patients taking COVID-19 RNA vaccines do develop antibodies, though antibody counts are lower. But another study shows 26% of patients with rheumatic disease had no detectable antibody response following RNA vaccination!   For organ transplant patients taking immune suppressive drugs, 57% had no antibody response even after two doses of COVID-19 RNA vaccine! Dr. Fauci sticks his foot in his mouth again Last December, 2020, Anthony Fauci, the nation’s infectious disease “expert,” said: “Patients with compromised immune systems, whether due to chemotherapy or a bone marrow transplant, should plan to be vaccinated against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) when they have the chance… It is clear that if you are on immunosuppressant agents, history tells us that you are not going to have as robust a response as if you had an intact immune system that was not being compromised.  But some degree of immunity is better than no degree of immunity. So, for me, it would be recommended that these people do get vaccinated.” But Fauci was flying by the seat of his pants when he said that.  Dr. Fauci is extrapolating data from flu vaccine studies  These RNA vaccines are completely foreign and new.  This isn’t the flu, it is COVID-19, an engineered-to-kill virus that underwent gain-of-function testing in a laboratory. A report published in Therapeutic Advances in Drug Safety reveals any use of an immune suppressive drug among COVID-19 patients increased the risk for death by 187%! Immune suppressive drugs can also produce symptoms that resemble COVID-19.  So, this topic can be very confusing. Vaccination among immune compromised patients and the flu Experience with flu vaccination may be instructive.  Failure of flu vaccines is associated with advanced age and use of immunosuppression drugs. Epidemiological data produced during the 2009 influenza pandemic have confirmed that immunocompromised patients remain at high risk of influenza-associated complications, namely viral and bacterial pneumonia, hospitalization and even death. The immunogenicity of the influenza vaccine is reduced overall in immunocompromised patients, although a significant clinical protection from influenza is expected to be obtained with vaccination.  Health authorities conclude influenza vaccination is safe in immunocompromised patients. But then again, there is this study among AIDS patients (no vaccine): “In immunocompromised patients, influenza is associated with a high rate of bacterial pneumonia, other opportunistic respiratory infections, hospitalization and even death.”  (Source: Excess Mortality Due To Pneumonia Or Influenza During Influenza Seasons Among Persons With Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Archives Internal Medicine 161(3), 441–446, 2001). What about organ transplant patients on anti-rejection drugs? The news media is now reporting that the 10+ million Americans taking immune-suppressing drugs for organ transplant rejection may not develop adequate antibodies following RNA vaccination. A doctor and organ transplant patient himself on immune suppressant drugs went ahead and got immunized with an RNA vaccine and found he had no antibodies post immunization.   More than half of all organ transplant patients produced no antibodies at all (see below). Close to 40,000 Americans receive organ transplants annually and are placed on anti-rejection drugs. TNF (tumor necrosis factor) inhibitors TNF (tumor necrosis factor(+) inhibitor drugs are commonly used for autoimmune or immune-compromised patients. TNF, tumor necrosis (death) factor, is a small protein that activates the immune system, in particular white blood cells known as macrophages that literally ingest bacteria, viruses and tumor cells.  Macrophages release TNF.  TNF is also a pyrogen (activates fever). Over-active TNF induces inflammation and accompanying pain. TNF-αlpha blockers (etanercept/Enbrel, infliximab/Remicade-Avsola and adalimumab/Humira) are generally associated with an increased risk of infection compared with conventional therapy.  This includes eruption of dormant tuberculosis.  TB is a bacterial lung infection with symptoms similar to those of COVID-19. Also, the risk for lymphoma, pneumonia and other parasitic infections is increased with TNF inhibitors.  Because of this, pharmaceutical TNF inhibiting drugs carry a BLACK BOX warning on their labels. Can dietary supplements quell TNF? A class of natural molecules called polyphenols, commonly found in tea leaves, coffee beans, grapes (wine), and spices (cinnamon, turmeric) are potent TNF inhibitors. The most frequently consumed polyphenols as dietary supplements are resveratrol (grapes), quercetin (apple peel, onions), catechin (tea leaves), caffeic acid and chlorogenic acid (coffee bean), cinnamaldehyde (cinnamon), and curcumin (turmeric spice). Polyphenols in a certain dosage range provide health benefits.  For example, teetotalers do not experience a decline in mortality for coronary artery disease due to abstention from alcohol.  Modest consumption of polyphenol-rich wine reduces coronary artery disease mortality rates. The grape-derived polyphenols in wine provide health benefits, but only in a range of 3-5 glasses of wine providing 60 milligrams of polyphenol per glass.  That would be 3-5 glasses or 180-300 milligrams of polyphenols.  Even then, that is to the point of inebriation. As more polyphenols are consumed, the health benefits vanish.  In fact, excessive polyphenols may be toxic to organs such as the heart, and impair the immune system. For example, the increased consumption of polyphenols from chocolate, alcohol (wine), and other sources during the Christmas holiday parties has been linked the sudden irregularities in heartbeat. Consumers who overdose on polyphenols may experience anxiety reactions, skin rash, flu-like symptoms (could be mistaken for COVID-19), Achilles’ heel tendonitis and a more concerning problem – – lymphoma (cancer of the lymphatic system). The bulk of the scientific literature regarding polyphenols points to modest doses providing optimal health benefits.  This is evidence of hormesis, that a small amount of a “toxin” can activate the body’s defenses rather than the polyphenols themselves producing an effect. Excessive polyphenols may over-inhibit TNF and impair immunity Some avid supplement users are getting into trouble by mega-dosing on polyphenols. My experience is with resveratrol, a red wine polyphenol, and other similar polyphenols (fisetin, quercetin) which are combined in a nutraceutical I formulated – Longevinex®. By utilizing three polyphenols molecular synergism is achieved and a more demonstrative biological effect can be achieved at a far lower dose.  The three polyphenols in Longevinex® provide only 175 milligrams of polyphenols but exert a genetic effect that is 9-fold greater than plain resveratrol. I rarely had to answer questions about Longevinex® side effects until another polyphenol, curcumin (from turmeric spice) was widely marketed on the radio and many consumers began taking Longevinex® + curcumin.   It is among these consumers that I began to hear of side effects, the anxiety, fast heart rate, flu-like symptoms and skin rash as well as Achilles’ heel tendonitis, and another more concerning problem, lymphoma. Curcumin is a very potent TNF inhibitor.  Most brands of curcumin are provided in excessive doses – – 500 to 1000 milligrams.  The companies that market these products, working on a mistaken “more is better” idea, are oblivious to potential side effects, and over-dose consumers, especially when combined with other polyphenol supplements and/or wine drinking. Anecdotally, a couple of cases of lymphoma vanished after I advised Longevinex® users to cease taking accompanying curcumin. Like wine, it is not wise to over-do polyphenol supplements. For example, the polyphenols in Longevinex® have been carefully formulated to avoid overdosage and achieve hormesis.  By combining polyphenols (resveratrol, quercetin, fisetin), molecular synergism is achieved and lower doses actually produced a more demonstrative effect.  Additionally, unlike any other polyphenol product, even when overdosed, the human equivalent of 2800 milligrams of Longevinex® did not induce expected toxicity because of counter-balancing nutrients in the formula.  Furthermore, for assurance of safety and any concerns over potential toxicity, Longevinex successfully passed animal and human toxicity testing, the only polyphenol product to do so. Bottom line: Immune compromised patients, particularly organ transplant patients, receiving TNF inhibiting drugs may be wise to avoid mega-dose natural TNF inhibitors like curcumin and other polyphenols.  Such a combination may complicate immunization against COVID-19. The post What About Covid-19 Vaccination For the 10 Million Americans Taking Immune Suppressive Drugs? appeared first on LewRockwell.

ALL OR NONE: A Most Important Detail for Never Wearing a Face Mask Wednesday 19 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 A California reader writes: Hey Allan, In Whole Foods yesterday, I had my scarf mask below my nose. A Whole Foods worker asked if I would pull my mask over my nose. I said “No, I can’t breathe like that.” He then said they have a sign telling me I’m supposed to wear a mask. I told him, I know I just can’t do it anymore.  He then told me we could have a happy medium. He asked if he could take my temperature and I could get rid of my mask. I told him sure!  I’m still OK covering my face somewhat so I don’t really freak everyone out. He took my temp and everything was cool.  The mask thing is coming to an end!!! -Maskless in California  ——— Your clarity is very important when communicating with another person. Men Must Always Be Clear With Women  You should be very clear with women about your intentions. Certainly it is your right to play all the mind games you want, but it’s not a very decent thing to do to a person and if you do so, you deserve all of the fallout that comes from it and none of the sympathy. A great deal of harm is done by this lack of clarity. The most common reason for a lack of clarity from man to woman is that the man does not know what he wants and has been raised without ever being expected to know such a thing. A secondary reason is a lack of integrity, an uncertainty and unwillingness to make your “yes” mean “yes” and your “no” mean “no.” If you want the answer to a great deal of today’s marital problems, point the finger at the man for not leading. A lack of leadership leads to so many other problems in a relationship. Seldom is it actually the woman’s fault when you get down to it. Be a man. Be clear. Lead. Stop being the wishy-washy guy society calls on you to be. Be the lion you were put on this earth to be. Employees Must Always Be Clear With Employers  You should be very clear with a potential employer about what you want from them and what you are willing to give them in exchange. I’ve never heard of an unhappy employment situation that had enough clear communication. With an employer and an employee, it’s almost impossible to align expectations too thoroughly. Aligning expectations through clear communication of intentions is exactly how a thriving relationship is built. It’s easy to blame the employer for this. Surely the employer is involved in things going wrong. But if you can do a good job at work that needs to be done, and can be the communicator who clearly draws out what that means, you will forever be in demand among employers. If you are willing to lead in your own life, so many problems that plague so many others simply disappear from your life. What Does This Have To Do With Face Masks?  When the face mask rules came along, quite naturally, lots of weak people called it “oppression.” It’s good that they were aware enough of the concept of human decency to be able to identify a face mask as oppression. That is a huge point in their favor that allows them to stand head and shoulders above many others who had not put in the hard work through life to understand this most fundamental aspect of human liberty and human decency. But true to their flip-flopping John-Kerry-esque nature of not standing for anything, many of my peers of the libertarian and conservative persuasion wore a mask DISOBEDIENTLY and complained when that lack of clarity caught up with them. What Does It Mean To Wear A Mask Disobediently?  Pithy sayings, a cheese cloth mask, a silver lined mask, joke masks, masks around the forehead, masks worn with a protruding nose, masks worn around the chin — these are all examples of masks worn disobediently. Countless more examples exists. Blow It In Or Blow It Out  There’s joy in clarity. Are you not sure if your partner is the right one for you? Add some stress to the relationship, and you’ll quickly see things that would have taken much longer to see. Not sure if your job is the right job for you? Add some stress to the relationship, and you’ll quickly see things that would have taken much longer to see. Make a decision. Make a clear decision. Then communicate it clearly to others. This is an admirable way for a man to go through life. What many people do instead with face masks is to make no decision, communicate unclearly by wearing a face mask, only disobediently doing so. Don’t Play The Juvenile Game Of Wearing A Mask Disobediently  Don’t play the juvenile game of wearing a mask disobediently. Either you believe the narrative that a ten cent polypropylene mask from Wuhan saves grandma’s life, or you recognize that statement for the absolute malarkey that it is. Life and death matters are no joke. I can understand why people would get worked up at your disobedient wearing of a face mask: you are communicating that you agree with the gravity of the situation, but don’t care enough to wear it properly. Shame on you for doing that. You mock the people who care when you do such a thing, rather than engaging them in a heartfelt way. How passive-aggressive of you. Shame on you as well for half-heartedly acquiescing to and spreading the oppressive lie that is the face mask. Either it works or does not. Would you tell a lie to your boss to make him feel better? Would you tell a lie to your grandma to make her feel better? Would you tell a lie to your spouse to make her feel better? If so, then you need to evaluate your character, because you are part of the problem. Saying that face masks help to stop the spread of a respiratory virus is a lie. To wear one is to perpetuate a lie. Saying the Covid shot is safe and effective is a lie. To take one is to perpetuate a lie. To say the PCR test is a useful diagnostic test is a lie. To take one is a lie. STOP LYING! If you don’t, and you realize it’s a lie, you are the problem. Don’t blame other people. Blame you. 1.) Your Pithy Sayings On A Mask Are Not Interesting I’ve heard all manner of funny things written on a face mask. Some people send me photos of their clever masks. Sayings on masks are funny. Pithy sayings on a mask that is worn on your face are not. There’s nothing you can write on a mask that makes you anything but either 1.) an imbecile for wearing one or 2.) a coward. If you have a third alternative as to why you wear a mask, I’m all ears.  I have yet to hear one. 2.) Your Bitcoin Mask Is As Uninteresting As It Gets  A man I know was trying to fit in with people who have been in the Bitcoin industry as long as I have, a group sometimes called “OGs.” To fit in, he put on a Bitcoin face mask for Zoom calls. Bitcoin is a technology developed to unlatch the claws of the most evil government entity — the central bank — from the flesh of the American people and people worldwide. Bitcoin is the opposite of a face mask. You miss something about the people who came to the industry early and stayed through thick and thin if you think it’s money rather than ideology that attracts them. That same courageous ideological life that got them into Bitcoin is the same life that has them staring at you like a virtue signaling coward for wearing a Bitcoin mask on a Zoom call, in a profile picture, or in any other scenario. Cowardice masquerading as bravery is a common way cowards mock bravery. YOU ARE WEARING A MASK. THE MASK IS A LIE. IT DOES NOT WORK. YOU ARE DEMONSTRATING FOR OTHERS THAT YOU DON’T HAVE ENOUGH OF A PROBLEM WITH MASKS TO NOT WEAR THEM. YOU ARE TELLING EVERYONE THAT YOU GIVE YOUR TACIT APPROVAL TO A LIE. 2.) Your Cheese Cloth Mask Is Not Interesting 3.) Your Silver Lined Mask Is Not Interesting 4.) Your Artistic Mask That Gets People To Look Twice Is Not Interesting 5.) Your Rhinestone Mask Is Not Interesting  6.) Your Mask Drooping Around Your Nose Is Not Interesting  None of this behavior is cute. It’s not only not cute, it’s very unclear. It’s furthermore unclear on the most important of topics: what it means to be a human, what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, what it means to be an individual, what it means to lead, and what your volition means to you. It’s really not cute. Once again, if you engage in any of this unclear cutesy behavior you are making a choice on what you follow and deserve very little sympathy. YOU ARE WEARING A MASK. THE MASK IS A LIE. IT DOES NOT WORK. YOU ARE DEMONSTRATING FOR OTHERS THAT YOU DON’T HAVE ENOUGH OF A PROBLEM WITH MASKS TO NOT WEAR THEM. YOU ARE TELLING EVERYONE THAT YOU GIVE YOUR TACIT APPROVAL TO A LIE. Stop wearing the mask. Figure out life entirely maskless. Thousands have written me who have done exactly that. Why can’t you also? Stop with being cute. Move on to being dangerous, dangerous to those who mean to enslave you and take from you all that you hold precious. They are not playing around. Why are you? Mask Nazis Are Bad  Some people think the mask is great. They think the mask helps people. Those people have not done their homework. Economist Murray Rothbard commented on economics: “It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.” But this is applicable for all fields. You have no business commenting vociferously on a thing you know nothing about. Theologian Paul Hinlicky takes it even further and comments that one should be better versed on the opinion of an opponent before sharing one’s own opinion. This is the Hinlicky Rule. “You shall not criticize the position of another…until you can state that position with such accuracy, completeness and sympathy, that the opponent himself declares, ‘Yes, I could not have said it better myself!’ Then, and only then, may you criticize. For then you are engaging a real alternative and advancing a real argument. Otherwise you shed only heat, not light.” Know-it-all mask nazis are really bad. I have no love for vocal ignorance, which may add some weight to the following sentence. Libertarian and conservatives who know better and subject themselves to the mask are far worse. Libertarian Mask Wearers Are Worse Than The Mask Nazis  You get that the mask is bad. You get that you don’t want to be in a mask. You just need the right reason to be put into a mask. You aren’t standing up for what you know to be true. So much reading, so much discussion, so many lectures, so many resources went into preparing you for a time such as this, but for what? It was all mental masturbation. With your very inaction you turn magnificent ideas into worthlessness. Did Ludwig von Mises write Human Action, so you could sit idle all day and make uninspiring memes that get 43 likes, a detail that you will bemoan as so low because of censorship? Did Ron Paul run for President, so you could sit idle and say “I wish we had better elected officials,” “Boy, I can’t wait until a better establishment Republican gets in office,” or the equally preposterous “Boy, I can’t wait until a Libertarian gets in office, that’s when life will really change.” It’s not about them. They didn’t run for them. They didn’t write for them. They didn’t alter the trajectory of their lives for them. They did it because that’s their calling. They did it to build on the work of others. They did it for others to build on their work. They did it for people like you to take their work and to apply guts to it. Your guts plus their work leads to amazing change. There are people in our history who are pure guts. Pure chutzpah. Pure warriors. They lived amazing lives by being so brave in their devotion to truth. With each action we take, we choose to live in their shadows and take society on a bad path, or we choose to stand upon their shoulders and to march toward greatness. In your cowardice, there will be no march toward greatness. In your bravery, freedom is yours for the taking, if you will just rise to that occasion. Stop wearing the mask. If you don’t know how, read Allan Stevo’s bestselling “Face Masks in One Lesson,” read his LewRockwell.com writings, and sign up for action alerts and videos on how to never wear a mask again at RealStevo.com. What it all comes down to though is demanding a higher standard for yourself as a person of courage and character, no matter what evil comes against you.  The post ALL OR NONE: A Most Important Detail for Never Wearing a Face Mask appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Government’s Emergency Powers Myth Wednesday 19 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 Shop all books by Judge Napolitano “The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government.” — Ex Parte Milligan, Supreme Court of the United States, 1866. Last week, the media in New Jersey began to ask Gov. Phil Murphy when he would surrender his emergency powers. He claimed emergency powers in March 2020, and he also claimed that those powers are not limited by the Constitution when he said on Fox that the Bill of Rights is above his pay grade. His reply to the media inquiries was that he will surrender them when he surrenders them! I am using the example of Murphy in order to address the concept of emergency powers, but there is no hyperbole here. Murphy quite literally issued executive orders barring folks from doing what the Constitution guarantees them the right to do, and he imposed criminal penalties for violating his orders, and he had folks who defied him arrested and prosecuted. Stated differently, he assumed the powers of the state legislature — which is to write the laws — and he violated his oath to uphold the Constitution. He claimed that somehow he can interfere with the exercise of basic human freedoms — like going to church, going to work, shopping for food, operating a business, assembling and traveling — because he declared a state of emergency. If the government declares an emergency, can it thereby acquire the lawful power to interfere with constitutionally guaranteed freedoms? In a word: No. Here is the backstory. When the states formed the federal government in 1789, they did so pursuant to the Constitution. The Constitution was written to establish and to limit the federal government. In 1791, just two years later, the Constitution was amended to add the Bill of Rights. The original understanding of the Bill of Rights was that it restrained only the federal government by articulating negative rights. A negative right restrains the government from interfering with the exercise of a preexisting right. Thus, the First Amendment does not grant the freedom of speech — because it comes from our humanity — but it does prohibit Congress from infringing upon it. After the War Between the States, Congress sent the 14th Amendment to the states for ratification. Its history is tortuous, and in part repellant, but it was ratified, and it is the law of the land. It has been interpreted and applied by the courts as imposing the Bill of Rights upon the states. Thus, any right expressly or arguably protected from federal interference by the Bill of Rights is protected from state interference as well. The Ninth Amendment — which today restrains the feds and the states — is the work of James Madison’s genius. Madison, who chaired the House of Representatives committee that wrote the Bill of Rights, wrestled along with his colleagues about the best way to protect unenumerated rights. The big-government crowd in Congress did not want any enumerated rights to be expressed. They argued that by listing a few, the unlisted rights would be subject to government assault. The small-government crowd argued that by listing no rights as immune from government interference, the Constitution would invite the government to assault whatever rights it wished. Madison’s solution to all this was to add a Bill of Rights and include the Ninth Amendment. That amendment recognizes that we all have pre-political, fundamental, natural rights — too numerous to enumerate — and prohibits all government from disparaging them. During the War Between the States, Abraham Lincoln did more than disparage them. He ordered the military to arrest newspaper editors and even public officials in the North and confine them without trial because he disapproved of their criticism of him. One of them, Lambdin P. Milligan, sued for his freedom, and he won. In a unanimous decision, cited hundreds of times, the Supreme Court rejected the concept that “emergency” somehow creates or increases government power. The court condemned “emergency” as a doctrine the fruits of which none is “more pernicious.” This condemnation is still the law of the land today, and it applies to the states as well as to the feds. Thus, no matter the exigency — war, floods, pandemic, fear, myth — individual natural rights, protected from government interference by the Ninth Amendment, trump the unconstitutional words of government officials and invalidate their efforts to enforce compliance. Murphy’s orders contain empty words because they do not have the force of law since they were not legislatively created and they directly contradict the Constitution and the Supreme Court’s most definitive interpretations of it. When Murphy became the governor of New Jersey, he took an oath to enforce the Constitution. Whatever personal ignorance or mental reservations he may have had, the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and every public official, federal and state, is bound by it. If government officials could declare an emergency whenever they wished and thereby be relieved of the obligation to defend the Constitution — and the rights it guarantees — then no liberty is safe. Because our rights are natural and individual and because we did not all consent to their suspension, no government may morally or constitutionally suspend them, and we must resist all efforts to do so. Of course, there is a dark side to this. The government that has destroyed liberty and property has also immunized itself from financial liability for the consequences of those destructions. Yet, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, whenever any government destroys liberty and property, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it. Reprinted with the author’s permission. The post The Government’s Emergency Powers Myth appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Tightening Noose or Widening Gyre of the Woke Revolution? Wednesday 19 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 NATO’s military noose round Russia’s borders is being tightened in order to force Moscow to react to surging provocation, Brian Cloughley writes. One of the most recent developments on the NATO front line was a meeting of the so-called ‘Bucharest Nine’ which the analytical agency Stratfor states “is a group of NATO’s easternmost members, including Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. Most of these countries share strategic interests on issues such as deterring potential Russian aggression, keeping close cooperation with the United States, diversifying their sources of energy, and developing joint infrastructure projects.” The purpose of the video get-together, attended by President Biden and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, was, according to the US-NATO military alliance “to take the agenda forward” in its mission “to consolidate views on issues of interest in the Alliance for the participating nations, and to support joint security projects.” In other words, the purpose of the Bucharest Nine is to help NATO exert even further pressure on Russia’s western border regions, as part of the US-NATO confrontation that is being ramped up while the US and its NATO allies retreat from Afghanistan where they have been defeated in a war that has humiliated the world’s most expensive and sophisticated military machines. They’ve been beaten into the ground by a bunch of raggy-baggy militants who don’t have any strike aircraft or drones or tanks or artillery. The Taliban have no intention of permitting democracy in Afghanistan, when they eventually take over, after NATO’s retreat, and the country will be plunged into a maelstrom of theocratic bigotry and barbarity. NATO followed the US into Afghanistan in August 2003 with the mission “to enable the Afghan authorities and build the capacity of the Afghan national security forces to provide effective security, so as to ensure that Afghanistan would never again be a safe haven for terrorists.” It declares that the war and the transition to a training role in 2015, have represented “NATO’s longest and most challenging mission to date: at its height, the force was more than 130,000 strong with troops from 50 NATO and partner nations.” And they still got whipped by a few thousand militants who objected to the presence of foreign forces in their country. So it’s back to Europe for US-NATO, having had a fun-war on Libya in 2011 when it blasted the country in the name of peace. This fandango of savagery was named “Unified Protector” but all it protected was the profits of Western arms manufacturers. After seven months of bombing and rocketing the country, involving 9,600 airstrikes, the then NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen went to Tripoli and declared he was “proud of the part the Organization and its partners played in helping the country and the region.” But as we know only too well, the country is in chaos. As I wrote six years ago, two prominent figures involved in the US-NATO war on Libya were Ivo Daalder, the US Representative on the NATO Council from 2009 to 2013, and Admiral James G (‘Zorba’) Stavridis, the US Supreme Allied Commander Europe (the military commander of NATO) in the same period. As they ended their war, on October 31, 2011, these two ninnies had a piece published in the New York Times in which they made the absurd claim that “As Operation Unified Protector comes to a close, the alliance and its partners can look back at an extraordinary job, well done. Most of all, they can see in the gratitude of the Libyan people that the use of limited force — precisely applied — can affect real, positive political change.” But Human Rights Watch reports that the civil war unleashed by the US-NATO destruction of the country has “hampered the provision of basic services including health and electricity. Armed groups on all sides continued to kill unlawfully and shell indiscriminately, killing civilians and destroying vital infrastructure.” And for those seeking to flee the anarchic bedlam there is no support from NATO countries. The US-NATO military intervention in Libya has resulted in a massive number of human rights atrocities of which the world — and especially Obama, Daalder, Stavridis and Rasmussen — should be deeply ashamed. According to Human Rights Watch, “Migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees in Libya — including thousands intercepted at sea while trying to reach Europe and returned by the European Union-supported Libyan Coast Guard — faced arbitrary detention, during which many experienced ill-treatment, sexual assault, forced labour, and extortion . . .” The only achievements of the US-NATO military alliance in the last twenty years or so have been destruction of Afghanistan and Libya and infliction of destitution and death on countless millions of people. So it is time for the alliance to focus on another sphere of operations in order to try to justify its existence. It’s back to the happy Cold War days, and at the European Council on 6 May Secretary General Stoltenberg was pleased to announce that “Just as we speak, we are deploying thousands of troops as part of a NATO exercise and we do that in Romania. And it demonstrates how we mobilize and exercise NATO troops, and also how we’re able to deploy them across Europe.” Just as they did in Afghanistan. Then came the meeting of the Bucharest Nine, at which President Biden announced overwhelming approval for the confrontation policy and “expressed his support for enhancing NATO’s deterrence and defence posture, as well as the importance of Allies increasing their resilience against harmful economic and political actions by our strategic competitors… he welcomed the opportunity to engage with these Allies – as well as with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who was also in attendance – about Alliance efforts to meet future threats, which will be discussed at the June 14 NATO Summit.” It is all stoking up for an ultimate head-to-head, and there is no indication that President Biden will agree to talk with President Putin before the NATO summit. In fact, even if the White House does begin to consider dialogue rather than confrontation it is unlikely that Biden will withdraw his 2020 declaration that “I think the biggest threat to America right now in terms of breaking up our security and our alliances is Russia.” Biden’s “unshakeable” commitment to NATO, together with his unqualified support for the ‘Bucharest Nine’ and for the increasing NATO military buildup along Russia’s borders are open indications of his intention to continue Washington’s confrontation policy, using NATO as the US front-runner. The surge along “NATO’s Eastern Flank” at present involves manoeuvres called “Steadfast Defender”, which Stoltenberg declares “will test NATO’s readiness and military mobility – with forces deploying across land and sea, all the way from North America to the Black Sea region and off the coast of Portugal.” Although it is evident that US-NATO is not exactly the most efficient military alliance in recent history, given the debacles, destruction and ensuing chaos in Afghanistan and Libya, it is only too evident that it is determined to ensure “rapid reinforcement of NATO’s European Allies by North American forces” in order to exert more military pressure on Russia. As announced by the Pentagon’s John Kirby, the “Defender Europe” NATO manoeuvres in May-June are intended to demonstrate “lethality” in “the Balkan and Black Sea regions in particular”. NATO’s military noose round Russia’s borders is being tightened in order to force Moscow to react to surging provocation. There is no possible benefit to the world, to humankind, in this belligerent confrontation. But the Pentagon and its sub-office in Brussels are determined to intensify NATO’s border buildup and sabre-brandishing. The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation. The post The Tightening Noose or Widening Gyre of the Woke Revolution? appeared first on LewRockwell.

‘A State of Fear’ Wednesday 19 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 Dystopian ‘unelected psychocrats’ have cynically manipulated the British people by weaponising fear to ensure compliance with lockdowns, according to a new book that will cause many to reassess how the virus has been handled. By any measure, the coronavirus situation in Britain should be looking pretty rosy by now, as Covid-19 cases are down, hospital admissions are down, deaths are down and vaccinations are up. The NHS has not been overwhelmed, the pubs are open and the kids are free to hug their gran. So, why the glum faces? Something seemed off kilter last night as the TV news screened images of holiday-hungry Brits arriving in Portugal, a teenage cancer survivor hugging his nan after a year of forced separation and a bunch of lads in a Barnsley pub drinking pints and watching the football play-offs. These scenes of jollity were tempered with news from India of a new variant that had arrived in the UK and was proving wildly virulent, perhaps threatening the freedoms we had longed for, if its spread continued unabated. The message was clear: restrictions on our freedom might have eased from Monday, but we could be back in lockdown unless we can manage this latest  ‘scariant’ from the sub-continent. Stay alert. Stay afraid. I’m sorry, but this time I just don’t buy it. Enough with the scare tactics, the dashboard of death and the prophets of doom. It’s quite clear the vaccine is working. I’ve had both doses on the very clear understanding that it works, and I don’t expect I’ll be hospitalised or die even if I do at some point contract the virus. But PM Boris Johnson and his government are addicted to fear and the control it gives over a compliant public. As journalist Laura Dodsworth makes the case in her new book, ‘A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic’, the British public needs to push back on this constant bait and switch aimed at keeping us all in a perpetual state of anxiety. As soon as we think one doomsday scenario has been overcome, another appears in its place. Psychologist Dr Harrie Bunker-Smith tells Dodsworth the government’s tactics echo those found in an abusive relationship, and she is spot-on. “Abusers will say they won’t do something again, but then they keep doing it,” says Dr Bunker-Smith. “Abuse is not constant, it’s not bad all the time. You have periods of extreme abuse followed by the honeymoon period, where you get flowers and apologies and promises, and then things deteriorate again.” Here’s how the last 24 hours have played out. After months of wearisome lockdown (extreme abuse) the joy was evident on everyone’s faces yesterday, when lockdown eased. A stranger smiled at me and asked if I’d had a hug yet (the honeymoon period). But things quickly soured (the deterioration). No sooner had thousands boarded their flights to the sun than BoJo announced it was inadvisable to travel to countries on the UK’s amber list, that the Indian variant posed a major threat to those who refused to vaccinate, that plans were being drawn up for a return to the loathsome local lockdowns, and that ‘freedom day’ on June 21 was most probably a non-starter. The abuse continued. As Dodsworth discusses, fear diminishes over time, but by announcing an easing of restrictions, the government faced losing the psychological grip over a malleable public that it had worked so hard at establishing and then enforcing by draconian emergency laws. Aided and abetted by what the author calls its team of “unelected psychocrats” – the behavioural insights experts who advise the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) – the government has encouraged the use of fear to control people’s behaviour during the pandemic. One unnamed member of that team, the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours (SPI-B), said they were “stunned by the weaponisation of behavioural psychology” on the British public. Another anonymous member told Dodsworth, “In March [2020] the government was very worried about compliance, and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear.” Gavin Morgan, one SPI-B psychologist who was prepared to be named, admitted, “Clearly, using fear as a means of control is not ethical. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government.”  Establishing control was relatively easy. A straightforward effort was in the choice of data and graphs that were shared with the public at the regular press briefings from Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and Chief Medical Officer for England Professor Chris Whitty. Professor David Paton, a professor of Industrial Economics at Nottingham University, called the duo’s appearances “the ultimate psyop”. Since January last year, the pair and their colleagues have frequently appeared to pronounce the number of Covid-19 cases, hospital admissions and deaths across Great Britain. When you stop to think for just a minute, something was obviously missing from their grim presentations. What about the number of people who’d recovered from the coronavirus? With the bodies stacking up to be carted away by military trucks in Italy, or dumped on the banks of the Ganges in India, no one has bothered to talk about those millions upon millions of people who beat Covid, which would have sent multiple messages. First, this thing is not a death sentence for everyone; second, it’s not even a hospital visit for many; and third, it’s a virus you need to be cautious about, not to fear. As one of Dodsworth’s sources says, “People would have loved headlines about recovery.” LIke many of its media accomplices in ratcheting up the fear factor, the government realises there’s nothing scary about good news, so best just not mention it. It’s not as if the docile journalists we expected to challenge these experts even thought of asking the question. The experts determined the frame of reference for the spread of Covid-19, and told us only what they wanted us to know in order to keep us fearful. Data that never revealed those who had recovered from the virus or were discharged from hospital created a false illusion that this was an ever-escalating red line that would continue on an upwards trajectory, rather than the usual bell jar graph we would expect. It was, and is, a cynically manipulative exercise that remains the go-to strategy in Downing Street. Now, however, thanks to the work of authors such as Dodsworth, the brain fog is lifting, as ‘normal’ beckons on the horizon and more folk are starting to question the government’s judgements on its roadmap out of this crisis. It’s true that the public mood has changed. I’m not sure if it’s the lifting of the holiday ban, the chance to have a pint at the local or the vaccination rollout that’s done it. Maybe it’s all these things and more. The creepy ‘psychocrats’ pulling the strings have been rumbled, and as awareness grows of their role in the government’s inept management of the pandemic, they’ll scuttle under the furniture like cockroaches caught in the light, leaving the politicians fully exposed and expected to explain themselves. And then the real fun begins. The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT. The post ‘A State of Fear’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Shocker: Why Is This Substance in the Moderna Covid Vaccine? Wednesday 19 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 It’s called SM-102. Verifying that it is in the Moderna COVID vaccine, I find a 12/30/20 CDC document titled: “COVID-19 Vaccines: Update on Allergic Reactions, Contraindications, and Precautions.” [1] If you scroll down halfway through the document, you’ll see a chart titled, “Ingredients Included in mRNA COVID vaccines.” (pg 20) The right-hand side of the chart shows ingredients in the Moderna vaccine. The fifth ingredient down is “SM-102: heptadecan-9-yl 8-((2-hydroxyethyl) (6-oxo-6-(undecyloxy) hexyl) amino) octanoate.” Now we go to a document published by the Cayman Chemical Company of Ann Arbor, Michigan: “Safety Data Sheet acc. to OSHA HCS.” (04/11/2021) [2] This data sheet lists the effects of SM-102. Here is the opening note: “For research use only, not for human or veterinary use.” Far from comforting. Then the safety data sheet lights up with adverse effects/warnings re SM-102. For example: “Suspected of causing cancer. Suspected of damaging fertility or the unborn child. Causes damage to the central nervous system, the kidneys, the liver and the respiratory system through prolonged or repeated exposure. Very toxic to aquatic life with long lasting effects.” Several things to point out here. First, what dosage level of, and what duration of exposure to, SM-102 are we talking about? Details on these toxicity factors need to be known. HOWEVER, all that is overridden by the fact that SM-102 is being INJECTED into the body via the Moderna shot. We’re not just talking about inhalation or skin contact. Obviously, the human body has layers of defense against attack. With injection, a number of those layers are bypassed. And once deep within the body, where does SM-102 travel as it causes damage along the way? I doubt that the Cayman safety data sheet even considered the possibility that SM-102 would be injected. The experts and authorities will assure us SM-102 is safe. They’ll say only miniscule amounts are being injected. They’ll say the clinical trials of the vaccine revealed no problems. They’ll parrot, over and over again, as they always do: “safe and effective.” You’re walking along a country path. You see a snake lying just ahead of you. He slowly raises his head and looks at you. On his hood, you read the words: “emergency use authorization granted.” SOURCES: [1] https://emergency.cdc.gov/coca/ppt/2020/dec-30-coca-call.pdf [1b] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RcgAXSKQyw [1b1] https://youtu.be/9RcgAXSKQyw?t=638 [1b2] https://youtu.be/9RcgAXSKQyw?t=840 [2] https://www.caymanchem.com/msdss/33474m.pdf Reprinted with permission from Jon Rappoport’s blog. The post Shocker: Why Is This Substance in the Moderna Covid Vaccine? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The GOP’s Impossible Dream of Swaying Black Voters Wednesday 19 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 Blacks are intensely devoted to the Democratic Party and to corrupt Democratic machines in urban areas, at least partly because they hate Republicans, the white man’s party. It makes no difference how often Fox News tells blacks they are living on the “Democratic plantation,” or that the Democrats are the party of slavery defender John C. Calhoun. They vote for Democrats, even segregationist Democrats like 1952 vice presidential candidate John Sparkman, because blacks have been irremovably in the Democratic camp since 1936. Lipton Matthews addressed this issue in two recent commentaries on this site, generating some controversy. According to Matthews, the Republican Party, and the political right in general, are wasting their energy by trying to convert black voters. Except for Donald Trump’s ability to raise his share of the black vote from about eight percent in 2016 to about 12 percent in 2020, the returns on this recruiting investment have been paltry, making Republican efforts look ridiculous. This was especially true in the runoff race for the U.S. Senate in Georgia in January 2021 when the black vote went overwhelmingly for the two far-left Democratic candidates, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. But Matthews may have been overly generous in explaining why Republican commentators have had trouble winning black Democrats. Personally, I think these party propagandists behave gauchely when they denounce their Southern conservative voters as bigots or call for the removal of the Confederate Stars and Bars even from racing cars, or scolding Joe Biden for (properly) opposing forced busing to achieve racially diverse public schools. But I doubt these Republican talking heads believe their tactics are going to sway the black Democratic masses; nor will Fox News commentators like Sean Hannity and Steve Hilton make strides in this direction by filling their programs with enthusiastic black Republicans, or by claiming that African Americans have joined their racially diverse populist movement en masse. All this is for appearance and is intended to show that the speakers are nice, sensitive people, whom the public could never reasonably accuse of systemic or any other kind of racism. Their rhetoric therefore may not really be aimed at attempting the impossible task of bringing droves of blacks to abandon their revulsion for the GOP and to change their voting and thinking patterns. Saying what should be obvious does not mean that we are rejecting blacks as people. But we should recognize the limited utility of trying to convert groups that are generally hostile to conservatives. I have members of my own family who are so fanatically devoted to the progressive left that I would never expend energy trying to change their minds. One should only try to sway the persuadable. It should also be obvious by now that the Republican media are not accomplishing their stated goal in the way they beg or hustle black Democrats for votes. They wildly overestimate their effectiveness as recruiters and look particularly ridiculous when they pretend that blacks are “the victims” of a political party that most of them adore. Read the Whole Article The post The GOP’s Impossible Dream of Swaying Black Voters appeared first on LewRockwell.

Labor Shortage and Other Disturbing Distortions in the Economy Wednesday 19 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 International Man: According to the recent Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) jobs report, only 266,000 new jobs were created in April—well below the one million new jobs that was expected. At the same time, American businesses are desperately seeking to fill job openings which they can’t fill. A survey by the National Federation of Independent Business found that 44% of small businesses had jobs they couldn’t fill, which is a record high. What’s going on with these seemingly contradictory trends? Doug Casey: First of all, I don’t trust the government’s statistics. Some are surely better than others, but especially when we’re looking at monetary and economic numbers, it’s increasingly apparent that the US government’s statistics are only marginally more reliable than those of the Argentine government at this point. As the US is increasingly politicized, they’ll deteriorate further, fudged and adjusted for propaganda purposes. Eventually, they’ll approach the inaccuracy of those in the old Soviet Union. It’s understandable, I suppose, because people believe in, and love to quote, that old saw of Franklin Roosevelt’s: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” It’s nonsense, of course; you can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. The government likes to publish happy, optimistic numbers for lots of reasons. A belief that economic health is based on psychological smiley faces is prominent among them. Unfortunately, optimism can blow away as easily as a pile of feathers in a hurricane. That said, there are huge distortions that have been cranked into the economy because of the ongoing COVID hysteria, compounded by the government’s reaction to it. It appears there are over 16 million workers collecting unemployment bennies, while there are about 8.5 million job openings, 13% more than in the before times. How is that possible? Lots of fast-food chains are paying $15 an hour, plus recruiting bonuses—and that’s for unskilled labor. There are loads of highly-paid manufacturing and construction jobs going begging. Anyone who wants a job can have one. There are several reasons for this. One is that COVID hysteria is slacking off somewhat but still in high gear. A high proportion of the population wear masks when driving alone, walking alone, or even participating in a Zoom call (presumably to virtue signal). Needless to say, these types are afraid to go to work or be among other people. They want to self-isolate out of fear. They won’t work, or will work less, from hypochondria. Those that will work have to be induced with hazard pay. Meanwhile, a combination of state unemployment benefits, $300 Federal unemployment, and Federal stimmy checks means that a lot of them can take home more not working than working. It’s easier to stay home, get up late, binge-watch Netflix, and collect tax-free money than commute to work. After a year, it can turn into an ingrained bad habit. International Man: Since the beginning of the pandemic, the US government has been sending stimulus checks to Americans—mostly to those who experienced no reduction in their income or job loss. This flurry of free money has led to people choosing not to work. What’s your take on this? Doug Casey: You get what you pay for. And if you pay people to stay at home, they’ll do that. People are consuming more than ever. Retail sales are way up because of all the funny money the government is practically helicopter dumping, while a lot less people are producing. This is a guaranteed formula for economic disaster. And it’s not just an economic failure but a moral failure. They’re being told it’s all right to take free money and not produce anything in exchange. In the long run, the moral failure is even more serious than the economic consequences. The public is being induced to act like children—or even criminals. There is, however, one favorable consequence to all of this. Some of the smarter people collecting their stimmy and unemployment checks can see there’s high demand for labor. I’ll bet lots of Americans are working off the books—unofficially, for cash—so that they don’t compromise their unemployment and stimmy checks. Is it illegal, and arguably immoral? Perhaps. But it’s demonstrating what a massive lie government bailout programs are to millions of people. On the other hand, maybe I’m just a perpetual optimist, always looking on the bright side. The development of a large informal economy, an untaxed shadow economy, is almost inevitable when billions in extra cash, lots of government regulations, and a generally declining standard of living come together in a witch’s brew. It causes huge distortions in the marketplace—and in the way people think the world works. Whole new classes of people will use the government as a milk cow, as well as a predator. This is the way it works in corrupt Third World countries, which the US is increasingly emulating. We no longer have an implicit social contract of fair play; it’s become a war of all against all. This trend is another reason why the government wants to eliminate cash. When everything goes digital—as it already has in China and Sweden—it will be much harder to work off the books. They’ll know about everything you make, everything you spend, everything you own, because it’s all computerized. Let’s hope Americans will resist the trend. But, based upon their bovine acceptance of orders during the Covid hysteria, I doubt it. International Man: It’s clear that the government response to COVID decimated many small businesses. What do you think the government’s further actions will do to the small businesses that survived the pandemic? Doug Casey: It’s part of the phenomenon of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. A big government prefers dealing with big businesses, for lots of reasons. Big government helps big businesses like Amazon, Facebook and Google get much bigger. Little businesses don’t have the capital, the lobbying power, and the bribing power to compete. Government, and the type of people who work for it, are naturally antagonistic to entrepreneurs. They want to see everyone as a regimented employee. I’ve long been of the opinion that 80% of this COVID disaster is a scam. It’s the best means of controlling the masses since the invention of central banking and the income tax. Better, actually, since everybody cares about their health, but not everybody cares about money. That may sound like a conspiracy theory, though I’m not partial to conspiracy theories for a number of reasons. But the fact that this hysteria took over the world so quickly, exclusively benefiting the people in charge, makes me very suspicious. Scared people are much more prone to look for leadership promising to solve a problem. Even if it’s an artificial one they created. The slavish psychology of the average human is a real problem. The capite censi believe they live in a democracy where legislators represent their interests. So they do what they’re told by the representatives of our phony democracy. These busybodies and power grubbers get together to pass new laws. The new laws don’t enshrine wisdom. They simply tell people what they must do and must not do. Every day the legislature is in session further limits the freedom of its subjects. And increases costs—because every new law requires paid enforcers. People who look to legislators to solve their problems are complicit in their own throats being cut. In our recent book Assassin, John Hunt and I highlight the way this works. No government department wants to lose its funding. They have an interest in manufacturing problems simply in order to justify their existence. COVID may turn out to be a classic example of that. International Man: Is Universal Basic Income (UBI) already here to stay for good in the US? What are the investment and other implications? Doug Casey: I believe it is. And it’s going to cement in place the distortions that we were talking about earlier. It’s going to encourage whole new groups of people to do nothing and expect free stuff from the State as their moral right. Americans will increasingly resemble Cargo Cult natives in the South Pacific. The near-term consequence of the trillions of dollars of funny money showered on America is probably going to be a crack-up boom. It’s a paradoxical situation where—in the midst of a declining standard of living—there’s a mad flurry of economic activity. So much new money being pumped into the economy encourages everybody to go out and buy stuff. They have lots of depreciating currency and want to spend it ASAP. But fewer and fewer people are producing, even while more are consuming. It’s called living out of capital. The UBI, free money just for existing, is going to be very hard to take away. Everybody is encouraged to consume promiscuously because that will stimulate the economy. It’s idiotically said to be patriotic to consume. But nobody has to produce. One big question is what will happen to millions of renters now in “forbearance.” They’re not paying the rent, and several million homeowners are also in forbearance. The landlords are going to be looking for back rent, and the banks are going to be looking for mortgage arrears. Are millions going to be kicked out of their apartments and houses? Does this mean we’re going to have a new wave of homeless people? Or will the State just take over their obligations, so we have overtly socialized housing? The small landlords, in particular, will be hurt worst. I’m not sure what the way out is. The country has been painted into a corner. I’m shocked that I don’t see any of this being discussed anywhere. The country is sleepwalking into a living nightmare, and we’re just scratching the surface of all the problems that will have to be confronted in the years to come. Reprinted with permission from International Man. The post Labor Shortage and Other Disturbing Distortions in the Economy appeared first on LewRockwell.

Non-Compliance at Travel Checkpoints — ‘Solutions Watch’ with James Corbett Wednesday 19 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 Comments open on BitChute The post Non-Compliance at Travel Checkpoints — ‘Solutions Watch’ with James Corbett appeared first on LewRockwell.

Total Tyranny: We’ll All Be Targeted Under the Government’s New Precrime Program Wednesday 19 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 “There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America.”― James Bamford It never fails. Just as we get a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, there might be a chance of crawling out of this totalitarian cesspool in which we’ve been mired, we get kicked down again. In the same week that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared that police cannot carry out warrantless home invasions in order to seize guns under the pretext of their “community caretaking” duties, the Biden Administration announced its plans for a “precrime” crime prevention agency. Talk about taking one step forward and two steps back. Precrime, straight out of the realm of dystopian science fiction movies such as Minority Report, aims to prevent crimes before they happen by combining widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs to enable police to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage. This particular precrime division will fall under the Department of Homeland Security, the agency notorious for militarizing the police and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents and veterans; stockpiling ammunition; distributing license plate readers; contracting to build detention camps; tracking cell-phones with Stingray devices; carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities; using the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying out soft target checkpoints; directing government workers to spy on Americans; conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers; carrying out Constitution-free border control searches; funding city-wide surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and other spybots. The intent, of course, is for the government to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful in its preemptive efforts to combat domestic extremism. Where we run into trouble is when the government gets overzealous and over-ambitious and overreaches. This is how you turn a nation of citizens into snitches and suspects. In the blink of an eye, ordinary Americans will find themselves labeled domestic extremists for engaging in lawful behavior that triggers the government’s precrime sensors. Of course, it’s an elaborate setup: we’ll all be targets. In such a suspect society, the burden of proof is reversed so that guilt is assumed and innocence must be proven. It’s the American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick all rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package. What’s more, the technocrats who run the surveillance state don’t even have to break a sweat while monitoring what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, how much you spend, whom you support, and with whom you communicate. Computers now do the tedious work of trolling social media, the internet, text messages and phone calls for potentially anti-government remarks, all of which is carefully recorded, documented, and stored to be used against you someday at a time and place of the government’s choosing. In this way, with the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state. It works the same in any regime. As Professor Robert Gellately notes in his book Backing Hitler about the police state tactics used in Nazi Germany: “There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors.” Here’s the thing as the Germans themselves quickly discovered: you won’t have to do anything illegal or challenge the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal. In fact, all you will need to do is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious to a neighbor, question government authority, or generally live in the United States. The following activities are guaranteed to get you censored, surveilled, eventually placed on a government watch list, possibly detained and potentially killed. Use harmless trigger words like cloud, pork and pirates: The Department of Homeland Security has an expansive list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor social networking sites and online media for signs of terrorist or other threats. While you’ll definitely send up an alert for using phrases such as dirty bomb, Jihad and Agro terror, you’re just as likely to get flagged for surveillance if you reference the terms SWAT, lockdown, police, cloud, food poisoning, pork, flu, Subway, smart, delays, cancelled, la familia, pirates, hurricane, forest fire, storm, flood, help, ice, snow, worm, warning or social media. Use a cell phone: Simply by using a cell phone, you make yourself an easy target for government agents—working closely with corporations—who can listen in on your phone calls, read your text messages and emails, and track your movements based on the data transferred from, received by, and stored in your cell phone. Mention any of the so-called “trigger” words in a conversation or text message, and you’ll get flagged for sure. Drive a car: Unless you’ve got an old junkyard heap without any of the gadgets and gizmos that are so attractive to today’s car buyers (GPS, satellite radio, electrical everything, smart systems, etc.), driving a car today is like wearing a homing device: you’ll be tracked from the moment you open that car door thanks to black box recorders and vehicle-to-vehicle communications systems that can monitor your speed, direction, location, the number of miles traveled, and even your seatbelt use. Once you add satellites, GPS devices, license plate readers, and real-time traffic cameras to the mix, there’s nowhere you can go on our nation’s highways and byways that you can’t be followed. By the time you add self-driving cars into the futuristic mix, equipped with computers that know where you want to go before you do, privacy and autonomy will be little more than distant mirages in your rearview mirror. Attend a political rally: Enacted in the wake of 9/11, the Patriot Act redefined terrorism so broadly that many non-terrorist political activities such as protest marches, demonstrations and civil disobedience were considered potential terrorist acts, thereby rendering anyone desiring to engage in protected First Amendment expressive activities as suspects of the surveillance state. Express yourself on social media: The FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. A decorated Marine, 26-year-old Brandon Raub was targeted by the Secret Service because of his Facebook posts, interrogated by government agents about his views on government corruption, arrested with no warning, labeled mentally ill for subscribing to so-called “conspiratorial” views about the government, detained against his will in a psych ward for having “dangerous” opinions, and isolated from his family, friends and attorneys. Serve in the military: Operation Vigilant Eagle, the brainchild of the Dept. of Homeland Security, calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.” Police agencies are also using Beware, an “early warning” computer system that tips them off to a potential suspect’s inclination to be a troublemaker and assigns individuals a color-coded threat score—green, yellow or red—based on a variety of factors including one’s criminal records, military background, medical history and social media surveillance. Disagree with a law enforcement official: A growing number of government programs are aimed at identifying, monitoring and locking up anyone considered potentially “dangerous” or mentally ill (according to government standards, of course). For instance, a homeless man in New York City who reportedly had a history of violence but no signs of mental illness was forcibly detained in a psych ward for a week after arguing with shelter police. Despite the fact that doctors cited no medical reason to commit him, the man was locked up in accordance with a $22 million program that monitors mentally ill people considered “potentially” violent. According to the Associated Press, “A judge finally ordered his release, ruling that the man’s commitment violated his civil rights and that bureaucrats had meddled in his medical treatment.” Call in sick to work: In Virginia, a so-called police “welfare check” instigated by a 58-year-old man’s employer after he called in sick resulted in a two-hour, SWAT team-style raid on the man’s truck and a 72-hour mental health hold. During the standoff, a heavily armed police tactical team confronted Benjamin Burruss as he was leaving an area motel, surrounded his truck, deployed a “stinger” device behind the rear tires, launched a flash grenade, smashed the side window in order to drag him from the truck, handcuffed and searched him, and transported him to a local hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and mental health hold. All of this was done despite the fact that police acknowledged they had no legal basis nor probable cause for detaining Burruss, given that he had not threatened to harm anyone and was not mentally ill. Limp or stutter: As a result of a nationwide push to certify a broad spectrum of government officials in mental health first-aid training (a 12-hour course comprised of PowerPoint presentations, videos, discussions, role playing and other interactive activities), more Americans are going to run the risk of being reported for having mental health issues by non-medical personnel. Mind you, once you get on such a government watch list—whether it’s a terrorist watch list, a mental health watch list, or a dissident watch list—there’s no clear-cut way to get off, whether or not you should actually be on there. For instance, one 37-year-old disabled man was arrested, diagnosed by police and an unlicensed mental health screener as having “mental health issues,” apparently because of his slurred speech and unsteady gait, and subsequently locked up for five days in a mental health facility against his will and with no access to family and friends. A subsequent hearing found that Gordon Goines, who suffers from a neurological condition similar to multiple sclerosis, has no mental illness and should not have been confined. Appear confused or nervous, fidget, whistle or smell bad: According to the Transportation Security Administration’s 92-point secret behavior watch list for spotting terrorists, these are among some of the telling signs of suspicious behavior: fidgeting, whistling, bad body odor, yawning, clearing your throat, having a pale face from recently shaving your beard, covering your mouth with your hand when speaking and blinking your eyes fast. You can also be pulled aside for interrogation if you “have ‘unusual items,’ like almanacs and ‘numerous prepaid calling cards or cell phones.'” One critic of the program accurately referred to the program as a “license to harass.” Allow yourself to be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun, such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane, for instance: No longer is it unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later. John Crawford was shot by police in an Ohio Wal-Mart for holding an air rifle sold in the store that he may have intended to buy. Thirteen-year-old Andy Lopez Cruz was shot 7 times in 10 seconds by a California police officer who mistook the boy’s toy gun for an assault rifle. Christopher Roupe, 17, was shot and killed after opening the door to a police officer. The officer, mistaking the Wii remote control in Roupe’s hand for a gun, shot him in the chest. Another police officer repeatedly shot 70-year-old Bobby Canipe during a traffic stop. The cop saw the man reaching for his cane and, believing the cane to be a rifle, opened fire. Stare at a police officer: Miami-Dade police slammed the 14-year-old Tremaine McMillian to the ground, putting him in a chokehold and handcuffing him after he allegedly gave them “dehumanizing stares” and walked away from them, which the officers found unacceptable. Appear to be pro-gun, pro-freedom or anti-government: You might be a domestic terrorist in the eyes of the FBI (and its network of snitches) if you: express libertarian philosophies (statements, bumper stickers); exhibit Second Amendment-oriented views (NRA or gun club membership); read survivalist literature, including apocalyptic fictional books; show signs of self-sufficiency (stockpiling food, ammo, hand tools, medical supplies); fear an economic collapse; buy gold and barter items; subscribe to religious views concerning the book of Revelation; voice fears about Big Brother or big government; expound about constitutional rights and civil liberties; or believe in a New World Order conspiracy. This is all part of a larger trend in American governance whereby dissent is criminalized and pathologized, and dissenters are censored, silenced or declared unfit for society. Attend a public school: Microcosms of the police state, America’s public schools contain almost every aspect of the militarized, intolerant, senseless, overcriminalized, legalistic, surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape that plagues those of us on the “outside.” From the moment a child enters one of the nation’s 98,000 public schools to the moment she graduates, she will be exposed to a steady diet of draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior, overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech, school resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining and/or arresting so-called “disorderly” students, standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking, politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those around them, and extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled with the rest, acclimate young people to a world in which they have no freedom of thought, speech or movement. Additionally, as part of the government’s so-called ongoing war on terror, the FBI—the nation’s de facto secret police force—has been recruiting students and teachers to spy on each other and report anyone who appears to have the potential to be “anti-government” or “extremist” as part of its “Don’t Be a Puppet” campaign. Speak truth to power: Long before Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden were being castigated for blowing the whistle on the government’s war crimes and the National Security Agency’s abuse of its surveillance powers, it was activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon who were being singled out for daring to speak truth to power. These men and others like them had their phone calls monitored and data files collected on their activities and associations. For a little while, at least, they became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government. Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, you don’t even have to be a dissident to get flagged by the government for surveillance, censorship and detention. All you really need to be is a citizen of the American police state. The post Total Tyranny: We’ll All Be Targeted Under the Government’s New Precrime Program appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Tightening of the NATO Noose Wednesday 19 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 I expect the Great Reset to fail. Completely. I also expect the Great Reset unleashes chaotic forces no one can control. Honestly, it’s already done so. Look around the headlines today and you can see all the strings pulled by Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum but you can also see the uncontrolled events which reverberate as consequences. I think the little conflict between Israel and Hamas, soon-to-be Hezbollah, qualifies, so does the growing protests against ‘vaccine passports’ over a virus that just replaced the flu in its actual effects. Alistair Crooke recently pointed this out in a piece titled “The Tightening Circle of Replacement Politics.“ One wing to this ‘bird’ is evident in a powerful and (controversial) monologue delivered by Tucker Carlson, a leading (conservative) American political commentator, that is devoted to explaining just why one U.S. party is importing a new electorate to dilute, and replace, the existing U.S. electorate – and has been doing so for a decades. It is the dominating impulse within U.S. politics, Carlson avers; It is ‘replacement politics’. Replacement politics is nothing new. Obama used zip code targeting to flood Minneapolis with Somalis. Now they are represented by one in Congress while the city has been ground zero for the abdication of responsibility by local government at the direction of the WEF. Replacement politics has also morphed pretty quickly, thanks to the race-baiting during Obama’s first two terms, into the corporate/government (or do I repeat myself) program known as the Woke Revolution. The radicalization of maleducated twentysomethings into literal black bloc wearing Brown Shirts was always part of this plan. And the more the Biden Obama administration pushes policies to make life in the U.S. less ordered, the more their ranks can swell regardless of the puppet masters’ wishes. Things like this take on a life of their own. Such is the politics of envy and hate. The Replacement Killers Replacement politics been carefully nurtured with money, training and organization. And the effects of it will be with us long after it burns itself out. It’s also been pursued aggressively in Europe. Remember Saint Angela Merkel? She started this process, under the demands of Schwab and George Soros, after Obama and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blew up Syria and North Africa, quaintly termed the “Arab Spring” and millions across those regions flooded Europe. Since then Merkel has been flip-flopping back and forth, her political fortunes in Germany ebbing and flowing based on how she reacts to shifting poll numbers over this very issue, immigration. If it weren’t for Trump being in the White House I’d almost believe the Coronapocalypse would have been sprung on us if only to save Merkel’s political career until this year’s Bundestag elections, which now look like the increasingly neoconservative Green party will win. This is an outcome created through the manipulations and machinations of the WEF and their dutiful servant Merkel, who has used the Greens to set policy through their presence across the Bundesrat (German Upper House) for years now. Now they’re likely to become the dominant party in the next German government, if the polls are anything close to correct. The thing to try and assess at this point is how much control do Schwab and Co. still have? Because from where I’m sitting and looking at history, these things always spiral out of control. W.B. Yeats’ image of ‘the widening gyre’ in his poem The Second Coming rings true here and there is precious little anyone can do to control the chaos once it starts. That’s what chaos is, after all, by definition. Crooke rightly points out that Mao’s Cultural Revolution quickly got away from him and became an absolute mess which eventually had to be put down. He agrees with me that the ‘fabulist’ program of the Great Reset both from a domestic and foreign policy perspective across Europe and the U.S. will fail. And it will most likely fail. The stresses imposed on U.S. societal cohesion by the launch of the woke cultural revolution may prove too great. The Chinese Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao (as part of his 1966 purge of Party rivals), very quickly devolved into a decentralized, semi-chaotic movement of Red Guards, students and other groups who shared ideas and programs, but who acted quite independent of the Party’s central leadership. Hollywood Vice For me, the best way to assess what’s happening and whether we’ve reached Peak Woke or not is in entertainment. Artists are the ones most open to shifts in the cultural landscape. The good ones get there first, while the propagandists fulminate and seek to block them from having influence. The early indicators are that the stresses caused by ‘going woke’ are forcing major brands to shift course quickly lest they lose their audience. From a culture war perspective Woke-a-Cola had to backtrack on its ‘be less white’ training. Disney had to do the same thing. Both are feeling the pinch in their bottom line. Coke will never recover. Disney will because they didn’t completely destroy Star Wars. Disney’s other major property, Marvel Studios, is thin gruel, culturally and iconographically, and therefore ultimately irrelevant. It was always beatniks, hippies and unrestrained Spiritual Boomerism in four colors. Star Wars matters to the generation on the cusp of taking political power from Schwab’s Boomers. It’s why the anxiety over Disney taking it over was stoked cynically by the big tech firms to divide the fan base. I put nothing past these people. They screwed with the Major League Baseball All-Star Game for pity’s sake. You don’t think they wouldn’t go after a cultural touchstone for a generation like Star Wars? With two good guys who have deep storytelling chops now effectively running Lucasfilm, Dave Filoni and John Favreau, Star Wars will regain ‘the high ground’ in the culture war over the next decade. The other big fight is happening over DC’s pantheon of heroes. There is such internal division within Time-Warner over the direction of DC Comics’ film universe that Warner Bros. and Warner Media are literally fighting a civil war in the trade press. It’s part of what’s driving today’s $43 billion merger between AT&T and Discovery which will split off the whole mess, including CNN and HBO, making a pure media company under the direction of Jason Kilar, who greenlit The Snyder Cut of Justice League in the first place. That’s how much Warner Bros. executives hate Zack Synder and the basic message of his DCEU films. Chaos is bad, men need to be strong and unite against madmen who are irredeemable. Management are furious by the runaway success, across the globe, of his version of 2017’s Justice League. It’s glorious, by the way. This movie touched a deep nerve with a lot of people, especially in China (330 million views in the first 7 days), and whose release, in and of itself, feels like an inflection point. Snyder’s DC films aren’t woke, they are archetypal. The more this story about how Waner Bros’ execs screwing Snyder over gets out, the worse it looks for them and the more momentum the fans have to get stories they want, not the stories the powers want to give them. DC’s icons are, like Star Wars, real mythology and the soulless woke (I would just say ‘commie’) hacks that run Warner Bros. have never known what to do with them because good stories don’t fit the replacement politics agenda. Hollywood is being overrun by Chinese influence looking to tear down our mythologies and the backlash against that as people have begun demanding something better. But the rejection of the Oscars, the cancellation of the Golden Globes, and the rejection of the narcissistic back-slapping of Hollywood by itself are telling you where this is headed. It’s early days in this, but watch these developments carefully. In the culture war business, timing is everything. Maybe 2017 was the wrong time for Snyder’s Justice League, but 2021 was obviously right. Just like 2017 was the wrong time to release The Last Jedi to anxious Star Wars fans. Qualitative Tightening Which brings me back to the tightening noose/widening gyre of replacement politics. Because today there is no coming back from what Schwab et.al. have unleashed. BLM and Antifa have given rise to the very race war they said they were fighting against. Black on ‘XXX ‘violence is rising in ugly ways and when the culture war bus turns back the other way everyone will get runover — BLM and, unfortunately, those blacks that didn’t support it. In any ideologically-possessed movement there is no purity test too stringent to weed out the uncommitted. Purity tests are themselves gyres of increasing intolerance. This is what Mao learned the hard way. To me, Schwab and his Davos Crowd realize now they stepped out from the shadows too early and are in damage control mode. But their Brown Shirts will turn on them too. They sense this shift as the political situations across Europe turn ugly in places like France, where they have no answer to the failing of President Macron and the French military leaders, despite neocon bloviating to the contrary, being proud and capable men of honor who won’t put up this for too much longer. Even as Davos tries to hold onto the power they’ve engineered for their insane Climate Change agenda, the heartland of their woke agenda is boiling over and turning away from them. There is policy inertia, however, we won’t overcome easily and this sets the stage for the chaos of the next decade. So, today Bill Gates is being thrown to the #MeToo sharks as chum hoping that will satisfy our revenge over vaccines that make people sick and don’t stop COVID. Tomorrow it will be Dr. Anthony Fauci for his covering up the origins of COVID-19. The Woke Revolution will turn on AOC as quickly as they’re turning on Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi. Give it another year of BLM/Antifa violence on anyone not them and they’ll be the ones storming the Capitol and they won’t stand around taking pictures and walking within the roped-off areas like the Trump Domestic Terrorists did on January 6th. Unleashing chaos and believing you can control it is the ultimate in hubris. But those the gods seek to destroy first make mad. A theme that plays very well in Snyder’s depiction of Lex Luthor in the unfairly maligned Batman v. Superman – Dawn of Justice. A film sabotaged by its own studio for political and philosophical reasons under feckless leadership. Kind of like the U.S. and Europe today, right? But, more importantly, it’s also a film that shows us clearly what will happen when a madman like Schwab is thwarted, when his carefully crafted plan falls apart because at the moment of peak madness we are reminded of our shared humanity. He unleashes Doomsday, saying, “If man cannot kill god, then the devil will do it!” This is the thing I fear the most, the refusal of men like Schwab to realize when they’ve lost one war and stoke another, turning the tightening noose of replacement politics into an intentional gyre which consumes everyone. It’s been clear to me for more than a year that no matter what happens in the U.S. politically over the next two years, a weaker U.S. means a world where old enmities are let loose, humanity’s darkest impulses encouraged and there aren’t enough people willing to put out the fires. Reprinted with permission from Gold Goats ‘n Guns. The post The Tightening of the NATO Noose appeared first on LewRockwell.

‘Everything Is on Fire’ Wednesday 19 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 “Everything is on fire” – Heraclitus (535-475 BC) What Heraclitus meant was that the world is in a constant state of flux. But the big problem in the next few years is that the world will experience a fire of a magnitude never seen before in history. I have in many articles and interviews pointed out how predictable events are (and people). This is particularly true in the world economy. Empires come and go, economies boom and bust and new currencies come and without fail always go. All this happens with regularity. A GLOBAL FIRE IS COMING But at certain times in history, the fire will be cataclysmic. And that is where the world is now. Explosive fires have started everywhere already. Stock markets are on fire and so are property markets, as well as bond and debt markets. The problem is that fires are initially explosive but always end up implosive. So right now we are in the explosive phase of the fires with markets all going parabolically exponential or should it be exponentially parabolic! We are now at the end of a secular bull market in the world economy which on a global level has reached extremes never seen before in history. Never before has the world seen an explosive fire of this magnitude, fuelled by uber-profligate money printing and credit expansion by central and commercial banks. We have talked about inflation running wild and it is not just happening in stocks. Property markets are literarily exploding, especially the high end. We see this all over the world and not just in the US. In the UK for example, HSBC stated that March saw the highest number of mortgages EVER issued. In Sweden properties sell for up to 40% above asking price in a frenzied bidding war and second hand leisure boats are in such demand that they cost virtually the same as a new boat. And if you want a new boat, there is none available until 2022. It also seems that people are desperate for company after the lockdowns as prices for puppies in the UK are up to 100% higher than last year. Yes, everything is really on fire as people are desperate to just spend, spend, spend after a year of lockdowns and restrictions. AN ECONOMIC BUBBLE OF AIR But explosive fires always end in everything burning down or imploding eventually. And this is just what is going to happen in the next few years. A massive forest fire is not just totally inevitable but is also an absolute necessity. Because economic bubbles consist primarily of air and lots of it. When empires or countries run out of money all they have to replace it is air to keep the economy going. The air consists of false promises combined with lots of air in the form of fake money. Since air is free, governments can produce unlimited amounts of it. And without exception, gullible people want to believe that it is actually real money and not just empty air. The beauty for the government is that they can just produce and borrow trillions of dollars at ZERO cost. And by manipulating interest rates they can borrow this money also at virtually ZERO cost. THE ULTIMATE OF ALL PONZI SCHEMES So first the government manufactures the money at no cost and then they pay NOTHING for the privilege of borrowing that money. This is the ultimate of all Ponzi schemes. No wonder that bank(er)s, hedge funds and wealthy investors are raking it in. The money obviously creates massive bubbles in stocks, bonds, houses, used cars , boats, puppies and other massively overvalued investments and consumer items. Just look at how, for example, the Dow has gone up exponentially and parabolically in the last year in an historically unprecedented straight line. THE US IS BANKRUPT But let’s face it, the US is totally bankrupt. With less than a handful of exceptions, US federal debt has gone up every year since 1930. So here we have the biggest economy in the world which can only hold on to this position by printing itself to a false prosperity at an ever faster pace. Just look at the table below to understand what a government can create out of thin air. After the Gold window was closed in 1971, US federal and total debt as well as money supply has gone Exponentially Parabolic and the dollar, the world’s reserve currency has lost 98%. US Federal Debt up 74X Total US debt up “only” 49X M2 Money Supply up 29X> Debt to GDP 1971: 37% – 2021: 127% But like all exponential curves of a big sample, this one will end in tears. Bubbles are called bubbles because they consist of air. And when bubbles become too big, they ALWAYS and without fail burst and implode. And this is what the US economy as well as the rest of the world can expect next. Fundamentally, US and global stocks are massively overvalued. But we know that overvaluations can last longer than we expect, especially when you are talking about the end of a very long super-cycle which could be 300 years old or even 2,000 years old. Technically markets are giving very clear signals that THE END IS NIGH. Whether that means days weeks or a few months, is totally irrelevant. We know that we are at the end of the most remarkable period in history in regards to money, investments and the economy. Also socially, morally and politically we are reaching a low point in history. Read the Whole Article The post ‘Everything Is on Fire’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

from https://youtu.be/V0EQNQssk6U
May 20, 2021

from https://youtu.be/UuC5mCL9HC8
May 20, 2021 at 03:29AM