Category Archives: culture

A Deeper Dive Into the CDC Reversal 

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By Jeffrey A. Tucker

Source: Brownstone Institute

It was a good but bizarre day when the CDC finally reversed itself fundamentally on its messaging for two-and-a-half years. The source is the MMWR report of August 11, 2022. The title alone shows just how deeply the about-face was buried: Summary of Guidance for Minimizing the Impact of COVID-19 on Individual Persons, Communities, and Health Care Systems — United States, August 2022. 

The authors: “the CDC Emergency Response Team” consisting of “Greta M. Massetti, PhD; Brendan R. Jackson, MD; John T. Brooks, MD; Cria G. Perrine, PhD; Erica Reott, MPH; Aron J. Hall, DVM; Debra Lubar, PhD;; Ian T. Williams, PhD; Matthew D. Ritchey, DPT; Pragna Patel, MD; Leandris C. Liburd, PhD; Barbara E. Mahon, MD.”

It would have been fascinating to be a fly on the wall in the brainstorming sessions that led to this little treatise. The wording was chosen very carefully, not to say anything false outright, much less admit any errors of the past, but to imply that it was only possible to say these things now. 

“As SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, continues to circulate globally, high levels of vaccine- and infection-induced immunity and the availability of effective treatments and prevention tools have substantially reduced the risk for medically significant COVID-19 illness (severe acute illness and post–COVID-19 conditions) and associated hospitalization and death. These circumstances now allow public health efforts to minimize the individual and societal health impacts of COVID-19 by focusing on sustainable measures to further reduce medically significant illness as well as to minimize strain on the health care system, while reducing barriers to social, educational, and economic activity.“

In English: everyone can pretty much go back to normal. Focus on illness that is medically significant. Stop worrying about positive cases because nothing is going to stop them. Think about the bigger picture of overall social health. End the compulsion. Thank you. It’s only two and a half years late. 

What about mass testing?

Forget it: “All persons should seek testing for active infection when they are symptomatic or if they have a known or suspected exposure to someone with COVID-19.”

Oh. 

What about the magic of track and trace?

“CDC now recommends case investigation and contact tracing only in health care settings and certain high-risk congregate settings.”

Oh. 

What about the unvaccinated who were so demonized throughout the last year? 

“CDC’s COVID-19 prevention recommendations no longer differentiate based on a person’s vaccination status because breakthrough infections occur, though they are generally mild, and persons who have had COVID-19 but are not vaccinated have some degree of protection against severe illness from their previous infection.”

Remember when 40% of the members of the black community in New York City who refused the jab were not allowed into restaurants, bars, libraries, museums, or theaters? Now, no one wants to talk about that. 

Also, universities, colleges, the military, and so on – which still have mandates in place – do you hear this? Everything you have done to hate on people, dehumanize people, segregate people, humiliate others as unclean, fire people and destroy lives, now stands in disrepute. 

Meanwhile, as of this writing, the blasted US government still will not allow unvaccinated travelers across its borders! 

Not one word of the CDC’s turgid treatise was untrue back in the Spring of 2020. There was always “infection-induced immunity,” though Fauci and Co. constantly pretended otherwise. It was always a terrible idea to introduce “barriers to social, educational, and economic activity.” The vaccines never promised in their authorization to stop infection and spread, even though all official statements of the CDC claimed otherwise, repeatedly and often. 

You might also wonder how the great reversal treats masking. On this subject, there is no backing off. After all, the Biden administration still has an appeal in process to reverse the court decision that the mask mandate was illegal all along. “At the high COVID-19 Community Level,” the CDC adds, “additional recommendations focus on all persons wearing masks indoors in public and further increasing protection to populations at high risk.”

The problem from the beginning was that there never was an exit strategy from the crazy lockdown/mandate idea. It was never the case that they would magically cause the bug to go away. The excuse that we would lock down in wait for a vaccine never made any sense. 

People surely knew early on of the social, economic, and cultural devastation that would ensue. If they did not, they never should have been anywhere near the control switches of public health. Badges and bureaucracies do not terrify a virus destined to spread to the whole planet. And not one person with even the most casual passing knowledge of coronaviruses could have sincerely believed that a vaccine would magically appear to achieve something never before achieved in the whole history of medicine. 

When the Great Barrington Declaration appeared on October 4, 2020, it caused a global frenzy of fury not because it said anything new. It was merely a pithy restatement of basic public-health principles, which pretty much instantly became verboten on March 16, 2020, when Fauci/Birx announced their grand scheme. 

The GBD generated mania because the existing praxis was based on preposterously unproven claims that demanded that billions of people buy into complete nonsense. Sadly many did simply because it seemed hard to believe that all world regimes but a handful would push such a damaging policy if it was utterly unworkable. When something like that happens – and there never was the hope that it could work – the regime imperative becomes censorship and shaming of dissent. It’s the only way to hold the great lie together. 

So finally, nearly two years later the CDC has embraced the Great Barrington Declaration rather than doing a “quick and devastating takedown” as Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci called for the day after its release. No, they had to try out their new theory on the rest of us. It did not work, obviously. For the authors of the GBD, they knew from the time they penned the document that it was a matter of time before they were vindicated. They never doubted it. 

Dr. Rajeev Venkayya is widely credited with coming up with the idea of lockdowns while he was working for the Bush administration back in 2005. He had no training at all in public health or epidemiology. He later marveled that it fell to him, a young desk-dwelling White House bureaucrat, to “invent pandemic planning.” Maybe he should have demurred that day that George W. Bush asked him to lead the charge to inaugurate a new war on pathogens. 

Somehow his views gained converts, among whom was Bill Gates, the foundation for whom he worked for years. The rest is history. 

In April 2020, Venkayya called me to explain why I needed to stop attacking lockdowns. He said that the planners need a chance to make their scheme work. 

On the phone, I asked the same question over and over: where does the virus go? The first two times, he did not respond. I pressed and pressed. Finally he said there will be a vaccine. 

It’s hard to appreciate just how preposterous that sounded at the time, and I said something along those lines: it would be a medical miracle never before seen to have a shot for a coronavirus that was sterilizing against wild type and all inevitable mutations, and to do it in a reasonable time so that society and economy had not completely fallen apart. 

The whole approach was clearly millienarian at best and utter madness at worst. And here I was, in the thick of global lockdowns, on the phone with the architect of the whole idea, an idea that had reduced billions to servitude, wrecked schools and churches, and sent communities and countries into complete upheaval. I wondered at the time what it would be like to be Dr. Venkayya that day. After all this ended in disaster, would he take responsibility? His LinkedIn profile today says otherwise: he is prepared to “tackle current and future epidemic & pandemic threats as the CEO of Aerium Therapeutics.”

There never was an exit strategy from lockdowns and mandates but they eventually did find an exit nonetheless. It came in the form of a heavily footnoted and opaquely written reversal, published by the main bureaucracy responsible for the disaster. It amounts to a repudiation without saying so. And thus does the great experiment in mass compulsion come to an intellectual end. If only the carnage could be cleaned up by another posting on the CDC’s website. 

By the way, the Biden administration has extended the declaration of Covid emergency. And my unvaccinated friends in the UK still can’t board a plane to come for a visit. 

All of this gives rise to the great question: what was the point? Maybe it was all a mistake and now it is gone forever but that’s unlikely. The intellectuals who pushed this project on the world have a view of the world that is fundamentally ill-liberal. They differ among themselves on the details but the general approach is technocratic central planning rooted in deep suspicion of basic tenets of freedom. 

How many people on the planet have now been acculturated to top-down control, socialized to live in fear, accept whatever comes down from above, never to question an edict, and expect to live in a world of rolling man-made disasters? And was that the point after all, to cultivate low expectations for life on earth and relinquish the soul’s desire for a full and free life? 

Hegemon USA’s War on Humanity

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: StephanLendman.org

In stark contrast to earlier hegemons on the world stage, the empire of lies and mass deception operates globally with super-weapons able to destroy planet earth and all its life forms.

While risking nuclear war with Russia and China, it’s pushing unparalleled genocide to eliminate unwanted millions and billions of people by kill shots at home and worldwide.

Coming to a neighborhood near you and your own, the great reset aims to more greatly enrich the privileged few by transferring maximum wealth from ordinary people to them.

It’s part of a diabolical scheme to transform the world community of nations into ruler/serf societies.

It’s a depopulation scheme to eliminate the unwanted by kill shots, wars, starvation and other diabolical tactics.

It’s a dystopian nightmare wrapped in deceptive socioeconomic mumbo jumbo.

Long before health-destroying kill shots were rolled out, Ernest Hemingway warned that debasing currencies by inflation and wars ruin nations, adding:

“Both bring temporary prosperity.”

“Both bring permanent ruin.” 

“Both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists” — serving special interests and their own.

Britain is the first nation to approve a new Moderna kill shot — what’s crucial to shun.

Phony claims of its safety and effectiveness are similar to earlier approved kill shots.

Irreparable harm to countless millions throughout the US/West and elsewhere revealed a worlds apart reality.

Most everything approved by the Pharma-controlled FDA and CDC are automatically suspect.

Truth-telling Dr. Vernon Coleman minced no words, saying:

“An adequate test of a (new) drug (like Moderna’s) should go on for 10 years at least” before approval or rejection.

The company’s “current (flu)covid booster jab has been given to 9.4 million people.”

“If the new jab is now given to, say 10 million people (with scant testing of far too few people), there could be 10,000 deaths within five seconds if my fearful scenario were to be fulfilled.”

“(T)he conspirators and their bought and paid for collaborators will doubtless now do more killing and maiming.”

“The medical (and nursing) profession care only about their massive pay demands.”

“They don’t seem to give a damn about patients.” 

Weeks earlier, the Pharma-controlled Biden regime’s HHS reported the following:

In cahoots with the US war department, HHS agreed to buy “66 million doses of Moderna’s (new) bivalent (kill shot) booster for potential (sic) use in the fall and winter.”

It’s “in addition to 105 million doses” of Pfizer’s bivalent entry for mass-jabbing with health-destroying toxins.

And this NYT rubbish on new bivalent kill shots:

Saying they’ll protect against “the original virus and (more scariant then variant) omicron” ignored the following like earlier.

The so-called SARS-CoV-2 virus doesn’t exist.

During flu season — now called covid year-round — all strains are virtually alike.

Not a dime’s worth of difference separates one from others.

Claims made about all brands of kill shots were fabricated to mind-manipulate maximum numbers of people to unwittingly self-inflict harm.

Since health-destroying mass-jabbing began in December 2020, millions of healthcare professionals throughout the US/West were sacked for refusing to go along with what causes irreparable harm on the phony pretext of protecting what’s too precious to lose.

Dedicated to “honest healthcare solutions,” to medicine as it should be practiced, co-founder of America’s Frontline Doctors (AFD), Simone Gold MD JD, was falsely arrested on January 6, 2021.

She and others were wrongfully accused entering a “restricted building” on Capitol Hill, as well as for “violent entry and disorderly conduct (sic).”

Their police state mistreatment was for the “crime” of exercising their First Amendment rights of “freedom of speech…(to) peaceably assemble, and…petition the government for redress of grievances.”

Events of that day were planned by undemocratic Dems, an anti-Trump false flag that preceded ascension to power of unelected Biden/Harris on January 20, 2021.

Gold had nothing to do Dem-sponsored violence.

In June, she was unconstitutionally sentenced to two months imprisonment — to intimidate and silence her.

On Monday, she was able to issue the following statement by email, saying:

“I remain in this Miami prison, serving time for a bogus trespassing charge.”

Limited to 15-minute computer time sessions, she expressed gratitude for countless letters of support and prayers on her behalf, adding:

“Even the prison staff noted the volume of supportive mail.”

“I am both humbled and strengthened. Thank you!” 

“All incoming female inmates are put into a punishment isolation cell under the guise of a ‘quarantine.’ ” 

“They told me it wasn’t for punishment, but it was certainly a punishing and inhumane experience.”

“Another form of arbitrary punishment is moving me, along with other inmates, to new cells with no notice.”

“A guard simply yells my name, and I’m expected to move at any moment.”

“My staff knows that if I stop emailing or calling, it’s because they  moved me or possibly put me back into isolation.”

Gold also explained the following:

“I’ve noticed activity in the prison that makes me fearful for my own safety.”

Yet she stressed:

“My spirits are high. I am more determined than ever to keep fighting for you and medical freedom.”

Along with unjustifiable prison time, Gold faces 12 months of supervised release and was fined $9,500.

Because of her activism for healthcare as it should be and opposition to toxic kill shots, Gold will remain vulnerable to rearrest on fabricated charges — and perhaps imprisonment longer-term ahead.

Separately as reported by the Epoch Times:

“Nurses who witnessed ‘brutal’ hospital (flu/covid) (mis)treatment protocols kill patients paint a bleak picture of what is taking place in state and federally funded health care systems.”

Nurse practitioner, Stacy Kay, explained the following:

What’s going on is “horrific, and they’re all in lockstep” with each other. 

Unwilling to go along with the health-destroying system, she “left the hospital system” involved in harming patients instead of aiding their recovery “to start her own early treatment private practice,” saying: 

“They will not consider protocols outside of what’s given to them by the (Pharma-controlled) CDC and NIH. And nobody is asking why,” adding:

“I’ve seen people die with their family watching via iPad on facetime. It was brutal.”

As a former intensive care nurse, she often saw tragedy on the job.

Grievous mistreatment of flu/covid patients “had (her) waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat with chest pains.”

“I hated my job,” she said. 

“I hated going to work.”

“I was stressed in a way I’ve never been before in my entire life.”

As explained before in my writing, jabbed individuals comprise the vast majority of flu/covid outbreaks, along with one or a combination of other serious illnesses, including heart disease and cancer.

All things flu/covid is the mother of all state-sponsored, MSM supported, scams — with mass-extermination and elimination of what little remains of greatly eroded freedoms in mind.

That’s the dismal state of things throughout the US/West and elsewhere.

Largely in the eye of the storm at this time, the worst of things likely lies ahead.

We’ve Been Lied To Our Whole Lives About Everything That Matters

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Stories about protagonists who’ve been misguided their whole lives about something very important have been emerging in our culture for generations, and they continue to delight audiences in the box office to this day.

The pauper was really a prince. Luke was Darth Vader’s son. Keanu Reeves had been living in a computer simulation. Bruce Willis was really a ghost. Jim Carrey’s whole world was the set of a TV show, and everyone in his life had been lying to him since his infancy.

This theme repeats so often because it strongly resonates with people. And it strongly resonates with people because it’s exactly what is happening.

From our earliest moments we are trained to fit in with a society that was designed from the ground up by the powerful in the service of the powerful. As soon as we are old enough to get curious about the world and how it works our heads are filled with lies about such matters, by our education systems, by the media we consume, by our parents who were indoctrinated in the same way, and by the very culture we find ourselves immersed in from day one.

These stories about a character who’s been deceived about life resonate so strongly with us because on some level we all suspect it might be true of our own lives as well. They whisper to something hidden and sacred within us that has always sensed that there’s something not quite right with the way we are perceiving things.

We’ve spent our whole lives marinating in lies which serve the powerful. We’re deceived into believing that we live in a democracy whose government acts in accordance with the will of the voting public. We’re deceived into believing our political systems are driven by two warring ideological factions whose divisions are naturally occurring phenomena in our society instead of the product of deliberate social engineering. We’re deceived into believing our government is basically good, and that it stands in opposition to foreign governments who are pure evil. We’re deceived into believing the way things are is the only way they could possibly be.

We’re deceived into believing false things about the ways we gather information and form our understanding of the world. We’re deceived into believing the news media tell us the truth about what’s going on. We’re deceived into believing that everything we hear from our side of the political partisan divide is true and trustworthy. We’re deceived into believing the partisan filters which have been placed over our perception of national and world events by indoctrination are entirely reliable instruments for interpreting information and drawing conclusions.

We’re deceived into believing false things about ourselves. We’re deceived into believing that we are successful if we can become dominant capitalists and wealthy ladder climbers, and that we are failures if we don’t turn the gears of industry and climb over others to get ahead. We’re deceived into believing that we are good if we uphold the made-up, power-serving rules of law, of culture and of religion, and that we are bad if we transgress them. We are deceived into believing that we need to keep accomplishing, achieving and obtaining, that we need to keep earning money and approval, so that we might one day feel adequate at some imaginary point in a future which never arrives.

If we really commit to uprooting the untruth that’s been planted in us, we can even discover that we’ve been deceiving ourselves about the way we experience reality. That the perception of oneself as a finite character who is separate from the world is based on false assumptions about the way experience is happening, unhelpful mental habits born of incorrect premises, and overlooked aspects of our own consciousness. That we’ve been making ourselves miserable with false beliefs about who and what we are.

This civilization is the set of the Truman Show, and we are all Truman.

But because we are all Truman, we can only walk off the set if we walk off together. There is no option to leave as an individual, because even if you know it’s all lies, you’re still stuck in a world full of humans whose behavior is driven by lies.

Awakening to reality as an individual can for this reason sometimes be more uncomfortable than remaining asleep in the dream, because you’re like Truman after he realizes it’s all a sham, but before he escapes. At times you’re just stuck there, freaking out at the actor who’s playing your mother while she tries in vain to cut to a commercial break. It can be distressing for you, and it can be distressing for the people around you who aren’t yet on the same page.

The only way we’re getting off the set of the Truman Show is if we can all succeed in waking each other up from the lies which built it. Until then we’ll be stuck in a world of poverty, war, exploitation, degradation, ecocide, and suffering. It’s not until enough of us have unplugged our minds from the matrix of lies that we’ll be able to use our strength of numbers to force real change.

Only then will we be able to escape.

Only then will we be able to walk off the set.

Only then will we be able to turn to the audience and say, “In case I don’t see ya: good afternoon, good evening, and good night!”

And then turn around, and walk out the door, and begin our adventure into reality.

Saturday Matinee: A Man Called Ove

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By Odie Henderson

Source: RogerEbert.com

“A Man Called Ove” tells the familiar story of the curmudgeonly old man whose grumpy life is brightened by forces beyond his control. These forces take the guise of a much younger person who provides a sense of purpose for the old hero. A film like this rises or falls not only with its central performance, but also with its ability to engage the viewer’s emotions in a credible, honest fashion. Movies like this tend to get dismissed as “manipulative” because audience sympathy for the protagonist is at least partially elicited by flashbacks to a litany of tragic or unfair past events. But all movies are manipulative by default; the effectiveness of that manipulation is the more valid measurement to inspect. On that scale, “A Man Called Ove” is a morbidly funny and moving success.

Adapting Frederick Backman’s Swedish best seller, writer/director Hannes Holm doesn’t veer too far from the storytelling structure we’ve come to expect. Instead, he tweaks expectations with the way he presents the material, and his grip on the film’s tricky, tragicomic tone is masterful. For example, several flashbacks are cleverly presented as the “life flashing before one’s eyes” moments triggered by the suicide attempts of Ove (Rolf Lassgård). Ove is a widower whose daily visits to his recently deceased wife’s gravesite end with his verbal promise to join her in the afterlife. His failures of self-annihilation are due more to bad timing than botched attempts—he is constantly interrupted by neighbors or some distracting event going on in his housing complex. Priding himself on his reliability, Ove feels compelled to stop killing himself to address each interruption.

Keep in mind that the black humor in this situation doesn’t arise from any mockery of Ove’s pain over missing his spouse. That is presented as real, understandable pain. Instead, the humor comes from Ove’s stubbornness as a creature of habit. Perpetually enforcing neighborhood rules nobody cares about nor adheres to, Ove can’t resist the opportunity to scold those who violate them. Yet, for all his crabbiness, there’s a level of selflessness inherent in Ove’s character, a trait he finds infuriating yet he begrudgingly accepts. His wife, Sonja, played as a young woman in the flashbacks by Ida Engvoll, sees this in the younger version of Ove (Filip Berg), and the much older Ove acknowledges it after much bitching and griping. It’s almost as if Sonja is sending him interruptions from beyond the grave just so he can have an excuse to complain to her like he’s done every day since her passing. This compulsive adherence to routine will keep Ove distracted.

Also distracting Ove is the new, young family who moves next door to him. They start off on the wrong foot by crushing his mailbox while ignoring his sign about not driving in the area, and the noise from their young kids is a major annoyance to the childless Ove. Though the husband is originally from the area, his pregnant wife Parvaneh (Bahar Pars) is of Iranian descent and new to the country. It is she who constantly irritates Ove while simultaneously endearing herself and her family to him. Many of his suicide attempts are interrupted by her, and their eventual father-daughter style bond is often predicated on Ove’s opinion that his help is required because he thinks her husband is an idiot.

“You survived struggle in Iran, moving here and learning a new language, and being married to that idiot,” Ove tells her after taking up the task of her driving instructor, “driving a car should be no problem!” Of course, she can’t drive it wherever Ove has those “no driving” signs everybody else ignores.

Admittedly, “A Man Called Ove” throws everything but the kitchen sink at poor Ove. There’s a shocking death early on that haunts him (and us), and he is the recipient of several slights by higher ups at work and in the government. The marriage between the shy Ove and the jovial Sonja is full of love but fraught with personal tragedies. There’s an almost Job-like mercilessness to some of the fates that befall him, yet the film never dwells on them. Instead, they’re presented rather stoically and serve as a means for us to understand why Ove is who he is. This is a movie that softens its hero by giving him a cat, which sounds syrupy until you see how jacked up and scraggly this cat is. “He likes to shit in private,” says Ove to Parvaneh. “Please give him that courtesy.”

One gets the sense that the novel (and the award-winning film version) is so beloved because Ove represents a Scandinavian everyman who saunters on no matter what life throws at him. His admirable resilience toughens like leather, and his love of Saab and hatred of Volvo plays like a beautiful in-joke aimed straight at the hearts of his compatriots. That rivalry even costs him a friendship, though that same friend’s subplot also presents Ove angrily battling the unfeeling agents of bureaucracy that caused him such agony as a young man. Holm pulls everything together in a well-crafted, satisfying package that is nicely balanced between comedy and pathos.

As Ove, Lassgård gives one of the year’s best performances. He’s well supported by the other actors (and the aforementioned cat), but this is a rich, complex performance that is both funny and moving. It would have been easy to just let Ove coast by on his amusing grouchiness, but Lassgård lets us see so deeply under that protective exterior. We feel as if we’ve walked a mile in Ove’s shoes and absorbed his catharsis as our own.

Watch A Man Called Ove on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/5563258

A Most Peculiar Recession

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

So what are conventional pundits missing today? I would start with three dynamics.

Only old people experienced real recessions–those in 1973-74 and 1980-82. Recessions since then have been shorter and less systemic.

In the good old days, a recession laid waste to entire industries which never recovered their previous employment. People who were laid off couldn’t find another job. Major sectors of the economy dried up and blew away. Jobs were scarce and there was an oversupply of people looking for work.

We’re told consumer confidence is in the dumps and everyone expects the worst: recession! Oh Lordy. Interestingly, there isn’t much evidence of this near-panic behaviorally. Everyone’s tightening their belts and battening down the hatches, but it’s not the cliff-dive we see in a real recession.

There’s certainly a lot of froth to be scraped off the latte, but what I’m curious about are the armatures of the economy and what I’m seeing is the crowd ignoring key dynamics because they’re so busy pushing the Recessionary Play-Doh into the old playboard.

The entire notion that there is a hard and fast line indicating “recession” is not realistic or useful. The economy dropped 1% for two quarters in a row, quick hit the alarm, go to DefCon 1. Uh, OK, right.

The more useful approach is to look at data points as mostly signal noise that fail to reflect or illuminate the core dynamics of the economy. Here’s an example: the stagflation of the 1970s is a hot topic as the financial punditry compares then to now, seeking evidence of similarities strong enough to predict a Lost Decade ahead.

One key factor that’s rarely (if ever) mentioned was the staggering cost of cleaning up America’s industrial sector and polluted skies and waterways at the same time that the Cold War required the U.S. to strengthen its allies by allowing them unfettered access to the U.S. marketplace–exports to the U.S. that had a price advantage due to the dominance of the dollar and the relative weakness of allies’ currencies.

1972 exchange rates indicate that the Japanese yen was 302 to $1–an enormous advantage when compared to recent exchange rates of around 110 yen to the USD.

What few current pundits seem to grasp is the dominant dynamic of the entire era of 1945-1992 was the Cold War with the Soviet Union and its client states and allies. Strengthening allies’ economies was a core goal and so the costs to the domestic economy had to be absorbed: there was no choice.

The costs of cleaning up the nation and its vast industrial base was an enormous drag on the economy. The value of the trillions of dollars (in current dollars) invested was not in boosting profits, it was in restoring what had been heedlessly destroyed and damaged by rampant dumping of waste and pollutants and improving the health and well-being of the citizenry.

Check out the smog in early 1970s TV series filmed in Los Angeles for a taste of what was cleaned up.

But in a mind-boggling failure of conventional economics, our financial punditry is blind to the impact of the most consequential economic realities of the 1970s–the Cold War and the lengthy, painful, costly clean-up of the nation and its industrial base–on stagflation.

One reason for this abject failure is these dynamics were difficult to measure, so they weren’t measured.We only manage what we measure and so if we don’t measure it, it doesn’t exist. If we measure things in a no-longer-relevant manner, for example GDP, we continue to act as if this misguided measure is of supreme importance when the reality is it’s dangerously misleading.

So what are conventional pundits missing today? I would start with three dynamics:

1. For the first time in multiple generations, there is a structural scarcity of labor. For a variety of reasons, there are fewer people willing to do the work at the offered wage than there are jobs. This is not temporary, it is demographic and social, not simply economic. All the supposedly easy fixes– automate everything, etc.–are not that easy.

2. The strength of the U.S. dollar is exporting inflation, to the benefit of the domestic economy. After offshoring critical supply chains–a disaster that will take years to reverse–now the U.S. is offshoring inflation and the resulting demand destruction.

3. Global capital flows are reversing. capital flowed from the Core to the Periphery to reap the gains of globalization. Now the flow is reversing and capital is flowing from the Periphery to the Core to preserve capital and lock in lower-risk returns. What looks expensive to those earning U.S. dollars may look cheap and secure to those fleeing depreciating currencies and assets.

In my analysis, these are consequential dynamics that merit little attention in conventional financial analysis.

There is much more to say but glance at these two charts: real (i.e. adjusted for official inflation) median household income and real Broad U.S. Dollar Index.

If we’re not measuring or pondering the core structural dynamics of the economy, we’re not going to make sense of no-longer-relevant data. This is a most peculiar recession, and few seem to be asking if the reason is we’re missing what’s changed structurally.

Charts courtesy of St. Louis Federal Reserve Database (FRED))

Repression, Terror, Fear: The Government Wants to Silence the Opposition

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” — President Harry S. Truman

Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Lockdowns.

This is not the language of freedom. This is not even the language of law and order.

This is the language of force.

This is how the government at all levels—federal, state and local—now responds to those who speak out against government corruption, misconduct and abuse.

These overreaching, heavy-handed lessons in how to rule by force have become standard operating procedure for a government that communicates with its citizenry primarily through the language of brutality, intimidation and fear.

We didn’t know it then, but what happened five years ago in Charlottesville, Va., was a foretaste of what was to come.

At the time, Charlottesville was at the center of a growing struggle over how to reconcile the right to think and speak freely, especially about controversial ideas, with the push to sanitize the environment of anything—words and images—that might cause offense. That fear of offense prompted the Charlottesville City Council to get rid of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that had graced one of its public parks for 82 years.

In attempting to err on the side of political correctness by placating one group while muzzling critics of the city’s actions, Charlottesville attracted the unwanted attention of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and the alt-Right, all of whom descended on the little college town with the intention of exercising their First Amendment right to be disagreeable, to assemble, and to protest.

That’s when everything went haywire.

When put to the test, Charlottesville did not handle things well at all.

On August 12, 2017, government officials took what should have been a legitimate exercise in constitutional principles (free speech, assembly and protest) and turned it into a lesson in authoritarianism by manipulating warring factions and engineering events in such a way as to foment unrest, lockdown the city, and justify further power grabs.

On the day of scheduled protests, police deliberately engineered a situation in which two opposing camps of protesters would confront each other, tensions would bubble over, and things would turn just violent enough to justify allowing the government to shut everything down.

Despite the fact that 1,000 first responders (including 300 state police troopers and members of the National Guard)—many of whom had been preparing for the downtown rally for months—had been called on to work the event, and police in riot gear surrounded Emancipation Park on three sides, police failed to do their jobs.

In fact, as the Washington Post reports, police “seemed to watch as groups beat each other with sticks and bludgeoned one another with shields… At one point, police appeared to retreat and then watch the beatings before eventually moving in to end the free-for-all, make arrests and tend to the injured.”

“Police Stood By As Mayhem Mounted in Charlottesville,” reported ProPublica.

Incredibly, when the first signs of open violence broke out, the police chief allegedly instructed his staff to “let them fight, it will make it easier to declare an unlawful assembly.”

In this way, police who were supposed to uphold the law and prevent violence failed to do either.

Indeed, a 220-page post-mortem of the protests and the Charlottesville government’s response by former U.S. attorney Timothy J. Heaphy concluded that “the City of Charlottesville protected neither free expression nor public safety.”

In other words, the government failed to uphold its constitutional mandates.

The police failed to carry out their duties as peace officers.

And the citizens found themselves unable to trust either the police or the government to do its job in respecting their rights and ensuring their safety.

This is not much different from what is happening on the present-day national scene.

Indeed, there’s a pattern emerging if you pay close enough attention.

Civil discontent leads to civil unrest, which leads to protests and counterprotests. Tensions rise, violence escalates, police stand down, and federal armies move in. Meanwhile, despite the protests and the outrage, the government’s abuses continue unabated.

It’s all part of an elaborate setup by the architects of the police state. The government wants a reason to crack down and lock down and bring in its biggest guns.

They want us divided. They want us to turn on one another.

They want us powerless in the face of their artillery and armed forces.

They want us silent, servile and compliant.

They certainly do not want us to remember that we have rights, let alone attempting to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully, whether it’s protesting politically correct efforts to whitewash the past, challenging COVID-19 mandates, questioning election outcomes, or listening to alternate viewpoints—even conspiratorial ones—in order to form our own opinions about the true nature of government.  

And they definitely do not want us to engage in First Amendment activities that challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

Why else do you think Wikileaks founder Julian Assange continues to molder in jail for daring to blow the whistle about the U.S. government’s war crimes, while government officials who rape, plunder and kill walk away with little more than a slap on the wrist?

This is how it begins.

We are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.

In the wake of the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol, “domestic terrorism” has become the new poster child for expanding the government’s powers at the expense of civil liberties.

Of course, “domestic terrorist” is just the latest bull’s eye phrase, to be used interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist,” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.”

This unilateral power to muzzle free speech represents a far greater danger than any so-called right- or left-wing extremist might pose. The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

Watch and see: we are all about to become enemies of the state.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.

So what’s the answer?

For starters, we need to remember that we’ve all got rights, and we need to exercise them.

Most of all, we need to protect the rights of the people to speak truth to power, whatever that truth might be. Either “we the people” believe in free speech or we don’t.

Fifty years ago, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas asked:

“Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us? The constitutional theory is that we the people are the sovereigns, the state and federal officials only our agents. We who have the final word can speak softly or angrily. We can seek to challenge and annoy, as we need not stay docile and quiet… [A]t the constitutional level, speech need not be a sedative; it can be disruptive… [A] function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.”

In other words, the Constitution does not require Americans to be servile or even civil to government officials. Neither does the Constitution require obedience (although it does insist on nonviolence).

Somehow, the government keeps overlooking this important element in the equation.

Will Truth Be Criminalized?

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By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

The Establishment’s determination to close down narrative-challenger Alex Jones has put Sandy Hook back in the news.  As First Amendment protection is fading, I checked to see what I had written about Sandy Hook.  I was relieved to see that I had only reported on the skepticism and asked questions.

My search of the IPE archives brought up my articles on other controversial shootings–Las Vegas and Orlando–and the Oklahoma City Bombing.  The common thread in all of these incidents is that the narrative is established the minute the news is reported, and officials and media never vary from the narrative.  As soon as it happens, the government and the media already know what happened.  No investigation ever takes place.  It was the same for President Kennedy’s assassination, his brother’s assassination, 9/11, the Gulf of Tonkin, Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Assad’s use of chemical weapons, the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, etc.

Legitimate questions about the narratives are ignored by officials and media who seem to be involved in a conspiracy to bury the truth.  Skeptics, no matter how prominent or fact-based are demonized as “conspiracy theorists” unworthy of attention.  

Clearly, America no longer has a media watchdog.  America has a propaganda ministry for official narratives.

What this tells us should shock every American, every US puppet government, and Washington’s chosen enemies–Russia, China, and Iran–respect  for truth is hard to find in the American media and the American government.

In the not distant future, it will become actionable to doubt the presstitues and the government on the grounds that doubt implies disbelief and disbelief is a crime or proves that you are a foreign agent.  Slander and libel will evolve to apply to media and government as institutions.  As we are so gullible, so trusting, we are going to be reduced to silence or praise.  Silence will bring official suspicion.  Praise of the false narratives will bring career success and rewards.  This is the stark situation that we face.

It is unclear that anything can be done to rectify this situation.  Older Americans generally are comfortable with the idea that government and media have integrity.  This is their picture of the  bygone world that they grew up in.  Younger people have been indoctrinated in schools that government and media protect blacks, homosexuals, and transgendered from racist, homophobic and transphobic white people who use normality as an illegitimate standard of approval. Sodom and Gomorrah are approved, but not the white family unit.

Can we believe that there is a future for freedom in America when Democrats, media, CIA, FBI, and NSA can create a narrative of President Donald Trump as a Russian agent?

Can we believe that there is a future for freedom in America when the same collection of schemers can create a show trial of the President of the United States planning a coup by a couple of hundred unarmed supporters seizing the government of the United States by walking around in the Capitol and sitting in Nancy Pelosi’s chair?

Can we believe that Americans sufficiently stupid to believe such implausible narratives have any possibility of holding on to their freedom?