2021 is Already Optimized for Failure

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

One sure way to identify a system “optimized for failure” is if all the insiders are absolutely confident the system is “optimized for my success”.

I often discuss optimization here because it offers an insightful window into how systems become fragile and break down. When we optimize something, we’re aiming to get the most bang for our buck: maximize our efficiency, profit, productivity, etc., while minimizing our costs.

To maximize our goal, whatever it is–profits, power, whatever– we strip away redundancy and buffers because these add costs and don’t boost our desired output. They create resilience, i.e. the ability to survive disruptions, but the logic of optimization is relentless: get rid of all extraneous costs, because resilience doesn’t boost the bottom line.

This trade-off–trading resilience for optimization–looks brilliant when everything goes according to plan. But when events veer outside the narrow parameters of the optimized system, the system breaks down: supply chains break, safety procedures fail, and so on.

Even more consequentially, optimization strips away anti-fragility, Nassim Taleb’s term for the ability to not just survive disruptions but emerge stronger and more adaptable.

What happens when inflexible, sclerotic systems optimized to benefit self-serving insiders encounter chaotic turbulence or conditions outside the expected parameters? They collapse because the system is optimized for failure. Put another way: when a system is optimized to benefit insiders at the expense of resilience and anti-fragility, it is effectively optimized to fail because life is not programmable to a steady-state, predictable stability.

2021 is already optimized for failure in key ways:

1. The mRNA vaccines have not been properly tested to answer essential questions such as: can a vaccinated individual retain enough of the virus to infect an unvaccinated individual?

As I explained before, the only way to really test a viral vaccine is to put the vaccinated volunteers in a controlled setting saturated with the virus for many hours. If none of the volunteers have any virus in their post-exposure serological tests, then the vaccine works. If the volunteers still have the virus but didn’t become severely ill, this doesn’t mean they can’t infect others.

One of the problems is the goal of the Covid vaccine trials wasn’t to determine if the virus was eliminated by the volunteers’ immune system; the goal of the trials was to determine whether the vaccinated individuals became severely ill with Covid or not–with “severely ill” being conveniently left undefined.

Individuals who’d already had Covid and who took the vaccine were not tested separately for safety and after-effects, so this remains an unknown.

The unanswered questions about the vaccines’ real-world results will be answered in due time, but not in the lab; they’ll be answered in a public-health “experiment” without precedent.

If you wanted to design a testing process that was optimized for failure, you’d end up with this haphazard, hurried process careening toward approval. The trials and testing of the Covid vaccines are not equivalent to those applied to previous generations of vaccines.

The bigger the claims and the harder the sell, the greater the number of red flags raised. If a product works as wonderfully as advertised, it will sell itself. If “consumers” have to be coerced into buying the product, that speaks volumes–whether we’re free to discuss it or not.

2. The fiscal-monetary “solution” being readied for 2021–print/borrow as many trillions as needed to prop up zombie corporations and obsolete institutions–is optimized for failure. The unstated goal here is to save everything that’s been rigged to benefit self-serving insiders and never mind the consequences: we’ve “proven” we can print infinite trillions with no ill effects.

This appears to be true until diminishing returns hit the wall and linear dynamics suddenly spin into non-linear semi-chaos. At that point, all the levers that we reckoned were god-like in their stability and power–the Treasury selling bonds which the Federal Reserve then buys, and all the other financial tricks and manipulations–no longer work as expected.

3. The sacrosanct “solutions” that we worship as secular gods–central bank-dominated “markets” and the machinery of politics–are both optimized for failure. The “market” and politics have both incentivized extremes of indebtedness, leverage, corruption, fraud and waste, all under the happy belief that the banquet of consequences will never be served. Alas, the tables are groaning with consequences that have been piling up for 12 long years of excess speculation, manipulation and happy-talk PR.

The policies of the past 20 years boil down to this: if we keep blowing ever-larger private-sector asset bubbles, rewarding the few who own most of these assets, this “wealth” will magically restore our economic health. This is of course completely delusional: by concentrating wealth in the hands ofthe few, the policies have also concentrated political power in these same hands.

Ours is a system perfected for extremes of inequality and corruption.

If you set out to design a social-political-economic system that was supremely optimized for failure, you’d end up with America’s status quo. Today’s financiers are like French nobles being led off in chains discussing their next glorious party, oblivious to the end-game just ahead. The political class are like the elites haggling over games in Rome’s Forum in 475 AD, months before what was left of the empire collapsed in a heap.

4. America’s social cohesion has been lost, leaving only empty platitudes, suppression and coercion. “We’re all in this together” shouts the captain of the galley as those chained to the oars are flogged to keep a thoroughly corrupt and illusory “growth” alive. With civic virtue lost to the moral corruption of maximizing private gain by any means available, the foundations of society have crumbled, as I explained in Moral Decay Leads to Collapse.

One sure way to identify a system optimized for failure is if all the insiders are absolutely confident the system is optimized for my success regardless of how many policies serve the infinite greed of insiders and how many red warning flags are ignored.

When will the central bankers pay for all the wealth inequality and misery they’ve caused?

By Mitchell Feierstein

Source: RT.com

Janet Yellen’s been nominated by Joe Biden as Treasury Secretary, despite a poor record as Federal Reserve chair. This is typical of the unwarranted confidence placed in the central bankers who’ve caused so much financial pain.

The US Federal Reserve was established on December 23, 1913, and, despite its name, it is not a bank or part of the federal government. The Federal Reserve (or ‘Fed’) is owned and acts on behalf of its members, such as JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Berkshire Financial Services. Do you think the Fed cares about the wealth inequality its reckless policies have caused – policies that have benefited the .01 percenters that own it? Since 1913, the US dollar’s value has declined by 97 percent. Can the Fed really be considered to be doing a good job?

Consider, for example, these remarkable comments from central bankers. In March 2007, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said the subprime mortgage crisis was “likely to be contained,” and in May of that year, he added, “The vast majority of mortgages, including even subprime mortgages, continue to perform well. We do not expect significant spillovers from the subprime market to the rest of the economy or to the financial system.” 

In October 2007, he said, “It is not the responsibility of the Federal Reserve – nor would it be appropriate – to protect lenders and investors from the consequences of their financial decisions.”

In November 2010, during a Federal Reserve conference on Georgia’s Jekyll Island, former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan said a lesson he learnt from the 2008 crisis is how the taxpayers implicitly subsidized the “financial intermediary system in the US.” He went on to point out that “there was rampant fraud in a lot of what was going on in these markets. We need far higher levels of enforcement of fraud on statutes – not new ones, existing ones. Things were being done that were certainly illegal and clearly criminal.” The look on then Chairman Bernanke’s face when Greenspan dropped this truth bomb was priceless.

In 2015, the Financial Times reported how the Bank of Japan’s Haruhiko Kuroda “reimagined” its monetary policy on the belief in Peter Pan’s ability to fly. No wonder Japan’s economy has had no growth for nearly 40 years. And the frightening part is the West began embracing this failed economic model years ago.

Then there was Fed chief Janet Yellen, who, in 2017, said she didn’t believe we would see another financial crisis in our lifetime. How many times were Yellen’s economic forecasts during and after the global financial crisis proven wrong? Too many to count.

She often repeated how the Fed’s temporary emergency measures would be removed and we would have ‘lift-off’ of interest rates. But, of course, none of this ever happened, and we are still waiting, over 12 years later. Yellen kept bailing out billionaires with near-zero interest rates while killing savers and increasing the wealth inequality gap. The oligarchs of Silicon Valley love Yellen. And Wall Street adores her, as well as the Fed’s magic printing presses, with their unlimited capability.

Yellen’s counterpart at the time, Mark Carney, who was the head of the Financial Stability Board and the Bank of England, as well as the ex-governor of the Bank of Canada, was singing from the same hymn sheet. Carney, mirroring the policies of Bernanke and Yellen, inflated grotesque property bubbles in Canada and the UK by pushing interest rates to 900-year lows, eviscerating savers and elderly retirees while landing taxpayers with the bailout bill for the billionaires and bankers who’d blown up the system.

Carney is another who got it wrong about normalized interest rates in both the economies his policies destroyed. He promised “escape velocity” in the UK, but, like Yellen’s ‘lift-off,’ both crashed on the launch pad. Their policies still protected and enhanced the oligarchy, though.

Central bankers such as Yellen and Carney were paid handsomely for this. One must surmise that their ilk always intended to enrich the powerful oligarchs in the cantons of Wall Street, London, and Silicon Valley to the detriment of everyone else. This is the model: propaganda, lies, and censorship are used to ensure globalism that fosters tyrannical rule, which, in turn, is beneficial to maintaining the status quo demanded by the oligarchy. Be an obedient apparatchik and earn a golden parachute when you exit.

The policies of these two central bankers have created the most significant wealth inequality ever seen and have allowed for the financial plunder that benefited the .01 percent and turbo-charged the oligarchy. But now, Yellen and Carney have transformed themselves into social justice warriors, championing equality, racial equity and climate change. In fact, Joe Biden has deified Yellen, saying, “We might have to ask Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the musical about the first Treasury Secretary, Hamilton, to write another musical for the first woman Treasury Secretary, Yellen.” 

It beggars belief how, after years of lies and economic destruction, lipstick is put on pigs to re-brand the oligarchs’ go-to patsies, Yellen and Carney. And now, Yellen may get a chance to do some serious damage should she become Treasury Secretary. When considering central bankers like these, we should remember the old maxim: beware of false prophets.

No Escape from Our Techno-Feudal World

By Pepe Escobar

Source: Global Research

The political economy of the Digital Age remains virtually terra incognita. In Techno-Feudalism, published three months ago in France (no English translation yet), Cedric Durand, an economist at the Sorbonne, provides a crucial, global public service as he sifts through the new Matrix that controls all our lives.

Durand places the Digital Age in the larger context of the historical evolution of capitalism to show how the Washington consensus ended up metastasized into the Silicon Valley consensus. In a delightful twist, he brands the new grove as the “Californian ideology”.

We’re far away from Jefferson Airplane and the Beach Boys; it’s more like Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” on steroids, complete with IMF-style “structural reforms” emphasizing “flexibilization” of work and  outright marketization/financialization of everyday life.

The Digital Age was crucially associated with right-wing ideology from the very start. The incubation was provided by the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), active from 1993 to 2010 and conveniently funded, among others, by Microsoft, At&T, Disney, Sony, Oracle, Google and Yahoo.

In 1994, PFF held a ground-breaking conference in Atlanta that eventually led to a seminal Magna Carta: literally, Cyberspace and the American Dream: a Magna Carta for the Knowledge Era, published in 1996, during the first Clinton term.

Not by accident the magazine Wired was founded, just like PFF, in 1993, instantly becoming the house organ of the “Californian ideology”.

Among the authors of the Magna Carta we find futurist Alvin “Future Shock” Toffler and Reagan’s former scientific counselor George Keyworth. Before anyone else, they were already conceptualizing how “cyberspace is a bioelectronic environment which is literally universal”. Their Magna Carta was the privileged road map to explore the new frontier.

Those Randian heroes

Also not by accident the intellectual guru of the new frontier was Ayn Rand and her quite primitive dichotomy between “pioneers” and the mob. Rand declared that egotism is good, altruism is evil, and empathy is irrational.

When it comes to the new property rights of the new Eldorado, all power should be exercised by the Silicon Valley “pioneers”, a Narcissus bunch in love with their mirror image as superior Randian heroes. In the name of innovation they should be allowed to destroy any established rules, in a Schumpeterian “creative destruction” rampage.

That has led to our current environment, where Google, Facebook, Uber and co. can overstep any legal framework, imposing their innovations like a fait accompli.

Durand goes to the heart of the matter when it comes to the true nature of “digital domination”: US leadership was never achieved because of spontaneous market forces.

On the contrary. The history of Silicon Valley is absolutely dependent on state intervention – especially via the industrial-military complex and the aero-spatial complex. The Ames Research Center, one of NASA’s top labs, is in Mountain View. Stanford was always awarded juicy military research contracts. During WWII, Hewlett Packard, for instance, was flourishing thanks to their electronics being used to manufacture radars. Throughout the 1960s, the US military bought the bulk of the still infant semiconductor production.

The Rise of Data Capitala 2016 MIT Technological Review report produced “in partnership” with Oracle, showed how digital networks open access to a new, virgin underground brimming with resources: “Those that arrive first and take control obtain the resources they’re seeking” – in the form of data.

So everything from video-surveillance images and electronic banking to DNA samples and supermarket tickets implies some form of territorial appropriation. Here we see in all its glory the extractivist logic inbuilt in the development of Big Data.

Durand gives us the example of Android to illustrate the extractivist logic in action. Google made Android free for all smartphones so it would acquire a strategic market position, beating the Apple ecosystem and thus becoming the default internet entry point for virtually the whole planet. That’s how a de facto, immensely valuable,  online real estate empire is built.

The key point is that whatever the original business – Google, Amazon, Uber – strategies of conquering cyberspace all point to the same target: take control of “spaces of observation and capture” of data.

About the Chinese credit system…

Durand offers a finely balanced analysis of the Chinese credit system – a public/private hybrid system launched in 2013 during the 3rd plenum of the 18th Congress of the CCP, under the motto “to value sincerity and punish insincerity”.

For the State Council, the supreme government authority in China, what really mattered was to encourage behavior deemed responsible in the financial, economic and socio-political spheres, and sanction what is not. It’s all about trust. Beijing defines it as “a method of perfecting the socialist market economy system that improves social governance”.

The Chinese term – shehui xinyong – is totally lost in translation in the West. Way more complex than “social credit”, it’s more about  “trustworthiness”, in the sense of integrity. Instead of the pedestrian Western accusations of being an Orwellian system, priorities include the fight against fraud and corruption at the national, regional and local levels, violations of environmental rules, disrespect of food security norms.

Cybernetic management of social life is being seriously discussed in China since the 1980s. In fact, since the 1940s, as we see in Mao’s Little Red Book. It could be seen as inspired by the Maoist principle of “mass lines”, as in “start with the masses to come back to the masses: to amass the ideas of the masses (which are dispersed, non-systematic), concentrate them (in general ideas and systematic), then come back to the masses to diffuse and explain them, make sure the masses assimilate them and translate them into action, and verify in the action of the masses the pertinence of these ideas”.

Durand’s analysis goes one step beyond Soshana Zuboff’s

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism when he finally reaches the core of his thesis, showing how digital platforms become “fiefdoms”: they live out of, and profit from, their vast “digital territory” peopled with data even as they lock in power over their services, which are deemed indispensable.

And just as in feudalism, fiefdoms dominate territory by attaching serfs. Masters made their living profiting from the social power derived from the exploitation of their domain, and that implied unlimited power over the serfs.

It all spells out total concentration. Silicon Valley stalwart Peter Thiel has always stressed the target of the digital entrepreneur is exactly to bypass competition. As quoted in Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, Thiel declared, “Capitalism and competition are antagonistic. Competition is for losers.”

So now we are facing not a mere clash between Silicon Valley capitalism and finance capital, but actually a new mode of production:

a turbo-capitalist survival as rentier capitalism, where Silicon giants take the place of estates, and also the State. That is the “techno-feudal” option, as defined by Durand.

Blake meets Burroughs

Durand’s book is extremely relevant to show how the theoretical and political critique of the Digital Age is still rarified. There is no precise cartography of all those dodgy circuits of revenue extraction. No analysis of how do they profit from the financial casino – especially mega investment funds that facilitate hyper-concentration. Or how do they profit from the hardcore exploitation of workers in the gig economy.

The total concentration of the digital glebe is leading to a scenario, as Durand recalls, already dreamed up by Stuart Mill, where every land in a country belonged to a single master. Our generalized dependency on the digital masters seems to be “the cannibal future of liberalism in the age of algorithms”.

Is there a possible way out? The temptation is to go radical – a Blake/Burroughs crossover. We have to expand our scope of comprehension – and stop confusing the map (as shown in the Magna Carta) with the territory (our perception).

William Blake, in his proto-psychedelic visions, was all about liberation and subordination – depicting an authoritarian deity imposing conformity via a sort of source code of mass influence. Looks like a proto-analysis of the Digital Age.

William Burroughs conceptualized Control – an array of manipulations including mass media (he would be horrified by social media). To break down Control, we must be able to hack into and disrupt its core programs. Burroughs showed how all forms of Control must be rejected – and defeated: “Authority figures are seen for what they are:  dead empty masks manipulated by computers”.

Here’s our future: hackers or slaves.

 

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Are Americans Rational?

By Dmitry Orlov

Source: Club Orlov

I’ve been holding back on commenting on current events because they are far too silly. At this point it is safe to say that the elections in the US have been thoroughly botched and that, no matter who is ultimately chosen as president for the next four years, enough questions will remain in the minds of enough people to thoroughly delegitimize the national leadership in the eyes of at least half the country.

Just this morning I got a missive from Paul Craig Roberts containing the following bullet points:

• Joe Biden’s Twitter account has 20 million followers. Trump’s Twitter account has 88.8 million followers.

• Joe Biden’s Facebook account has 7.78 million followers. Trump’s Facebook account has 34.72 million followers. How likely is it that a person with four to five times the following of his rival lost the election?

• Joe Biden, declared by the biased presstitutes to be president by landslide, gave a Thanksgiving Day message and only 1,000 people watched his live statement. Where is the enthusiasm?

• Trump’s campaign appearances were heavily attended and that Biden’s were avoided. Somehow a candidate who could not draw supporters to his campaign appearances won the presidency.

• Despite Biden’s total failure to animate voters during the presidential campaign, he received 15 million more votes than Barack Obama did in his 2012 re-election.

• Biden won despite underperforming Hillary Clinton’s 2016 vote in every urban US county, but outperformed Clinton in Democrat-controlled Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia, the precise cities where the most obvious and most blatant electoral fraud was committed.

• Biden won despite receiving a record low share of the Democrat primary vote compared to Trump’s share of the Republican primary vote.

• Biden won despite Trump bettering his 2016 vote by ten million votes and Trump’s record support from minority voters.

• Biden won despite losing the bellwether counties that have always predicted the election outcome and the bellwether states of Ohio and Florida.

• Biden won in Georgia, a completely red state with a red governor and legislature both House and Senate. Somehow a red state voted for a blue president.

• Biden won despite the Democrats losing representation in the House.

• In Pennsylvania 47 memory cards containing more than 50,000 votes are missing.

• Pennsylvania 1.8 million ballots were mailed out to voters, but 2.5 million mail-in ballots were counted.

Roberts is a Republican and therefore believes that the Democrats stole the election. A Democrat, once it turns out that Trump won after all, would believe the opposite. But that makes no difference because, as I keep repeating, the US is not a democracy and it doesn’t matter who is its president.

It is not a democracy because the vast majority of votes—all Democratic votes in Republican states and all Republican votes in Democratic states—are simply thrown away. That’s roughly half the electorate who have no chance of making their vote count in the state where they live. Of course, they could move to a different state, in which case their vote would be thrown away for the opposite reason—lost as part of a superfluously large majority.

This is easy enough to explain to any rational person—but not to the vast majority of Americans, for whom such logic goes in one ear and comes out the other. In short, they are not rational. Worse than that, their leaders are not rational either. This brings us to the second point—that it doesn’t matter who is president.

Trump keeps talking about making America great—by bringing manufacturing back from China. Except that the opposite has happened over the past four years: China’s industrial production has continued to grow (although more slowly than before) while in the US it has continued to decline. Nor is is there any reason at all to think that this is going to change over the next four years.

Biden keeps talking about America continuing as the leader of the free world—except that America is no longer the leader of much of anything and there is no reason to think that anything can be done to reverse this slide. Thus, no matter who becomes (or remains) president, the US administration will continue to wallow in nostalgia while steadfastly refusing to admit defeat.

This defeat has multiple elements. First, the shale oil gamble is over. Drilling rates have collapsed, many shale oil companies are bankrupt, and US oil production is set to plummet from over 12 million barrels per day at its peak to around 5 million by next June (according to Art Berman, whose opinion I trust). After that point the US will once again become a major oil importer, and since no other swing producers are available this will drive up oil prices, perhaps beyond the previous all-time record of $150/barrel, resulting in a US oil import bill of half a trillion dollars a year. But it is doubtful whether that much extra oil can be produced at almost any price.

Second, national bankruptcy is looming ever closer. The federal government now overspends its revenues by a factor of two or more, meaning that for every dollar of federal revenue it borrows and spends at least two. Previously, despite its already ridiculous size and exponential growth rate, US federal debt could be given an appearance of legitimacy because enough foreign buyers could be found for it; but this is no longer the case. And so this debt is looking less and less legitimate because it is being monetized—simply printed into existence—as the Federal Reserve degenerates into a pure pyramid scheme.

Third, the US dollar (along with some other currencies to which it is tied) is poised on the edge of a hyperinflationary wipe-out. In an effort to shore up the economy a great deal of money has been unleashed into the economy and it went chasing after stocks, keeping it from triggering hyperinflation. Thus we have the truly bizarre combination of a record-high stock market along with record-high bankruptcies, foreclosures and evictions. At some point confidence in the stock market will evaporate and all of this notional money will go chasing after anything that isn’t made of paper (with the possible exception of toilet paper). Much of this notional money will evaporate as people liquidate their stock holdings, but enough will remain to result in hoarding and hyperinflation. The US dollar will devalue internationally and the US will lose access to imports.

Fourth, the US has lost its lead militarily, definitely to Russia and possibly to China and Iran. Its major military asset is its aircraft carrier fleet, which is by now completely useless because it can be destroyed using conventional weapons from a safe stand-off distance which is greater than the reach of its aircraft. Consequently, it cannot be deployed close enough to an enemy shore to make its aircraft useful. US military bases, hundreds of which are scattered all over the globe, but mostly clustered along Russia’s and China’s borders, are also useless militarily, as demonstrated by Iran’s rocket attacks against two of them in Iraq. In short, the entire US military is by now more of a liability than an asset—likely to draw the US into a military confrontation which it cannot win.

Now, do you hear these points discussed in the national media, in the course of the election campaign or otherwise? Do these points come up at all in conversations with colleagues, neighbors, friends and family? Are these topics of discussion in high school civics classes? (Wait, what high school civics classes?) No? And yet they are real, and their consequences are at this point unavoidable, and refusing to acknowledge them will only exacerbate their effects.

Collapse is bad enough when you and everyone around you can acknowledge it. But if everyone from the president (pick either one) to the lowliest convenience store clerk is incapable of accepting it as real and thinking through some of the immediate consequences, that makes it much, much worse. I refuse to accept any of the responsibility for this dreadful state of affairs; I’ve been doing all I can to warn people for a decade and a half now. It is now pointless for me to issue any more warnings. All I can do now is watch the inevitable unfold.

Corrupt Science and Elite Power: Your Techno-Slavery is Now Imminent

By Robert J. Burrowes

Do you like to believe that scientists are studying the evidence – whether in relation to Covid-19 or anything else – and delivering high quality knowledge that can be used to guide public policymaking so that it might better serve the interests of ordinary people?

It is certainly a comforting idea, isn’t it?

After all, we have long been told that science is an ‘evidence-based approach’ to understanding particular phenomena and thus providing accurate guidance on how to proceed to achieve productive outcomes.

Unfortunately, this claim is just propaganda for the unwary.

In his 2005 study of the validity of published medical research, John P. A. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine who also studies scientific research itself, explained why ‘It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false.’ Most? False? Here is what Professor Ioannidis concluded but you can read his entire article, cited below.

For starters, there are a range of what might be labeled methodological problems: inadequate sample size, outcomes so small that reliably gauging impact was impossible (leading, for example, to excessive ‘false positives’), and variability in research designs, definitions, outcomes and analytical modes. In addition, research in ‘hotter’ scientific fields – such as whether the SARS-Cov-2 virus exists or for a Covid-19 vaccine – may cause research teams to prioritize pursuing and disseminating their most impressive ‘positive’ results at the expense of rigor. But, importantly, Ioannidis also identified conflicts of financial and other interests (‘very common in biomedical research’) as well as prejudices (commitment to a particular theory or their own ‘findings’, research conducted purely to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure, and suppression via the peer review process of findings that refute their own, thus condemning their field to perpetuate false dogma) as explanations why scientific research findings are ‘less likely’ to be true.

In essence, the ‘scientific research’ that avoided/survived all of these hurdles is considerably less than we might expect and certainly less than half. See ‘Why Most Published Research Findings Are False’.

So that was in 2005. Do you think that the situation might have improved?

In an article just published in relation to Covid-19 in the British Medical Journal, Kamran Abbasi explains that ‘When good science is suppressed by the medical-political complex, people die.’ But is this happening?

Politicians and governments are suppressing science. They do so in the public interest, they say, to accelerate availability of diagnostics and treatments. They do so to support innovation, to bring products to market at unprecedented speed. Both of these reasons are partly plausible; the greatest deceptions are founded in a grain of truth. But the underlying behaviour is troubling.

Science is being suppressed for political and financial gain. Covid-19 has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public health. Politicians and industry are responsible for this opportunistic embezzlement. So too are scientists and health experts. The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency – a time when it is even more important to safeguard science.

For a discussion of four examples of how the UK’s pandemic response involves suppression of science or scientists, including by simply preventing scientists keen to expose the truth from having access to appropriate mass media outlets, see ‘Covid-19: politicisation, “corruption,” and suppression of science’. (And if you want to read more about how this initial corruption was exploited for political and financial gain, see ‘Cronyism and Clientelism: The Tories’ outsourcing of the pandemic response’.)

The most important point of suppression, of course, is the fact that there is no scientific proof that a virus, labeled SARS-Cov-2 exists, as Dr Andrew Kaufman, among others, has been patiently and endlessly explaining from the beginning. For one of his more recent explanations, watch ‘ZERO Evidence that COVID Fulfills Koch’s 4 Germ Theory Postulates – Dr. Andrew Kaufman & Sayer Ji’.

Moreover, according to Dr Kaufman, ‘there is no evidence of anyone dying from any novel illness’. See ‘Unmasking the Lies Around COVID-19: Facts vs Fiction of the Coronavirus Pandemic’. So what has happened?

As Dr Kaufman explains: Early scientific papers on the subject suggested an association (not causation) between a novel coronavirus ‘with human to human transmission and severe human infection’ whereas a subsequent key ‘scientific’ paper that made a claim which helped drive the global response to COVID-19 ‘flat out lied’ about their results: ‘Following the first outbreaks of unexplained pneumonia in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, a new coronavirus was identified as the causative agent in January 2020.’ See ‘Identification of Coronavirus Isolated from a Patient in Korea with COVID-19’. In fact, Dr Kaufman points out: ‘they cannot reference any science to back that up whatsoever’.

Moreover, subsequently to this paper, another article – see ‘I study viruses: How our team isolated the new coronavirus to fight the global pandemic’ – declared ‘The emergence of a new coronavirus in a market in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 set in motion the pandemic we are now witnessing in 160 countries around the world’. But again, Dr Kaufman counters, ‘no evidence was provided at all’ to support this claim: ‘just flat out lies’. For the details and citation of all the scientific sources for this explanation of how the Covid-19 ‘rumour mill’ got started, see ‘The Rooster in the River of Rats’ or ‘Koch’s Postulates: Have They Been Proven for Viruses?’

Of course, Dr Kaufman is not the only doctor or researcher who has worked tirelessly to expose this lie.

After extensively documenting his case in ‘Flaws in Coronavirus Pandemic Theory’, long-time medical researcher David Crowe noted shortly before his death mid-year that ‘despite the epidemic of testing…. There is no proof that a virus is being detected’. In fact: ‘What is being published in medical journals is not science, every paper has the goal of enhancing the panic by interpreting the data only in ways that benefit the viral theory, even when the data is confusing or contradictory. In other words, the medical papers are propaganda.’

Jon Rappoport, another long-time medical researcher who has been documenting medical fraud for decades, comes to the same conclusion after explaining, again, the complete failure of anyone in the medical industry to purify a unique virus which then causes a unique disease. See ‘Death by killing old people, not COVID – The Basic Deception’.

Meanwhile, do you know what you have? An unproven virus. A fake. A story about a virus.

Therefore, all your diagnostic tests ‘for the new virus’ are a sham. They’re based on something you never demonstrated in the first place.

Therefore, all those people, those elderly people dying for obvious reasons in nursing homes, and in their lonely apartments, and in hospitals all over the world? You obviously have no proof they’re dying from a virus. How could you? You never properly discovered a new virus.

Most notably, perhaps, Torsten Engelbrecht and Konstantin Demeter, the authors of ‘COVID19 PCR Tests are Scientifically Meaningless’, wrote to the authors of four of the principal, early 2020 papers claiming discovery of a new coronavirus and each of them in their response ‘concede[d] they had no proof that the origin of the virus genome was viral-like particles or cellular debris, pure or impure, or particles of any kind. In other words, the existence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA is based on faith, not fact.’

Moreover, Engelbrecht and Demeter also wrote to Dr Charles Calisher, a prominent and veteran virologist, asking if he knew of ‘one single paper in which SARS-CoV-2 has been isolated and finally really purified’. His answer? ‘I know of no such a publication. I have kept an eye out for one.’

But you can read the paper by Engelbrecht and Demeter if you want to consider the other efforts they made, unsuccessfully, including by contacting prominent institutions such as the Robert Koch Institute in Germany, to locate documented proof that a purified SARS-CoV-2 virus had been isolated.

If you would like to read more about the non-existence of the virus, including fraudulent attempts to represent it, see ‘Only Poisoned Monkey Kidney Cells “Grew” the “Virus”’ or ‘Dr. Tom Cowan explores the COVID virus invented out of sheer nonsense’.

More fundamentally, according to Dr Stefan Lanka: ‘Contrary to what most people believe, there are no pathogenic viruses.… All claims about viruses as pathogens are wrong and are based on easily recognisable, understandable and verifiable misinterpretations…. A real and complete virus does not exist anywhere in the entire “scientific” literature.’ See ‘The Misconception Called “Virus”: Measles as an example’.

To reiterate in the words of two other authors: ‘there is no original scientific evidence that definitively demonstrates that any virus is the cause of any disease’. See What Really Makes You Ill? Why everything you thought you knew about disease is wrong. But you can read more in ‘Dismantling the Virus Theory – The “measles virus” as an example’ and watch the video interview The Real Science of Germs: Do Viruses Cause Disease?

Another option you have if you are seriously interested in the truth is to spend the time to seek out the documented scientific proof that the ‘virus’ labeled SARS-CoV-2 has been isolated, purified and proven to cause a consistent set of disease symptoms among those it ‘infects’, which is then labeled Covid-19. So far, the many of us who have searched for this document – including some of the world’s leading virologists – have not found it.

Suppression of this fact – that there is no SARS-CoV-2 virus and, hence, no Covid-19 disease – is vital, of course, because if everyone knew that there is no Covid-19 disease (and there are simple explanations for the ill-health and deaths: see ‘Halting Our Descent into Tyranny: Defeating the Global Elite’s Covid-19 Coup’), it would be impossible to run the terror campaign that is being conducted to take complete control of our lives in accordance with the longstanding elite plan now manifesting as The Great Reset’ of the World Economic Forum. See also: Covid-19 – The Great Reset.

So I invite you to read the above two WEF documents, both readily available, to see if you like the look of what has been planned for you without your knowledge, involvement or consent

The World Economic Forum and The Great Reset

What is the World Economic Forum and what does it mean by ‘The Great Reset’?

The British nonprofit social justice organization Winter Oak in their article ‘Klaus Schwab and His Great Fascist Reset’ answers the first question by referencing the WEF website:

The WEF describes itself as ‘the global platform for public-private cooperation’, with admirers describing how it creates ‘partnerships between businessmen, politicians, intellectuals and other leaders of society to “define, discuss and advance key issues on the global agenda”.’

The ‘partnerships’ which the WEF creates are aimed at replacing democracy with a global leadership of hand-picked and unelected individuals whose duty is not to serve the public, but to impose the rule of the 1% on that public with as little interference from the rest of us as possible.

So while the World Economic Forum ‘provides a platform for the world’s 1,000 leading companies to shape a better future’ – see Our Partners’ – and pays lip service to its network of ‘communities’, you will find little more than tokenism when it comes to human constituencies that you and I might consider important in any forum genuinely representative of humanity. Constituencies either not represented or under-represented include women; indigenous peoples; people living in poverty or extreme poverty; Muslims; people from Africa, Asia and Central/South America; working class people; small-scale farmers; disabled people and members of the LGBTQIA community. There are others.

So what does ‘The Great Reset’ mean for those of us who are ‘ordinary people’ and, therefore, not involved in its planning? Here is a sample from authors with a non-elite perspective.

Jeremy Loffredo interviewed scholar, environmentalist, food sovereignty advocate and author Dr. Vandana Shiva, which he recorded in the article ‘World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” Plan for Big Food Benefits Industry, Not People’.

Loffredo noted that in Schwab’s book Covid-19 – The Great Reset, he writes ‘global food security will only be achieved if regulations on genetically modified foods are adapted to reflect the reality that gene editing offers a precise, efficient and safe method of improving crops’. In response Shiva disagreed, arguing that the ‘WEF is parading fake science’, and ‘for Mr. Schwab to promote these technologies as solutions proves that The Great Reset is about maintaining and empowering a corporate extraction machine and the private ownership of life.’

‘The Great Reset is about multinational corporate stakeholders at the World Economic Forum controlling as many elements of planetary life as they possibly can. From the digital data humans produce to each morsel of food we eat.’

Referring to the WEF’s partner organization the EAT Forum, an aim of which is ‘to replace wholesome nutritious foods with genetically modified lab creations’ framed as ‘healthy and sustainable’, Shiva observes that ‘EAT’s proposed diet is not about nutrition at all, it’s about big business and it’s about a corporate takeover of the food system.’

Shiva argued that ‘all of the science’ shows that diets should be centered around regional and geographical biodiversity.

Professor Michel Chossudovsky in his article The Covid “Pandemic”: Destroying People’s Lives. Engineered Economic Depression. Global “Coup d’Etat”?’ outlines some essential elements of the nature of this global coup:

It’s the destruction of people’s lives. It is the destabilization of civil society. And for What?

The Lies are sustained by a massive media disinformation campaign. 24/7, Incessant and repetitive ‘Covid alerts’ for the last ten months. … It is a process of social engineering…. The entire urban services economy is in crisis…. Free Speech is suppressed.

The lockdown narrative is supported by media disinformation, online censorship, social engineering and the fear campaign. Medical doctors who question the official narrative are threatened. They lose their jobs. Their careers are destroyed.

Those who oppose the government lockdown are categorized as ‘anti-social psychopaths’….

In colleges and universities, the teaching staff is pressured to conform and endorse the official covid narrative. Questioning the legitimacy of the lockdown in online ‘classrooms’ could lead to dismissal.

Google is marketing the Big Lie. The opinions of prominent scientists who question the lockdown, the face-mask or social distancing are ‘taken down’….

The March 11 2020 Lockdown project uses lies and deception to ultimately impose a Worldwide totalitarian regime, entitled ‘Global Governance’ (by unelected officials)…. All of which is spearheaded by the installation of a global totalitarian State which is intent upon breaking all forms of protest and resistance.

The Covid vaccination program (including the embedded digital passport) is an integral part of a global totalitarian regime….

The UN system is also complicit. It has endorsed ‘global governance’ and The Great Reset.

In his article ‘Who Pressed the Great Reset Button?’ Dr. Joseph Mercola explained that:

The Great Reset refers to a global agenda to monitor and control the world through digital surveillance. You’ll be tied to it through an electronic ID linked to your bank account and health records, and a social credit ID that will end up dictating every facet of your life.

Not one area of life will be left untouched by The Great Reset plan, which aims to reform everything from government, energy and finance to food, medicine, real estate, policing – even how we interact with our fellow human beings.

The globalist technocracy is using the COVID-19 pandemic to bypass democratic accountability, override opposition, accelerate their agenda and to impose it on the public against our will.

Whitney Webb in her article US – UK Intel Agencies Declare Cyber War on Independent Media’ has also written extensively on aspects of The Great Reset coup and in this article highlights the hazards associated with vaccination and the efforts to silence those critical of it.

In just the past week, the national-security states of the United States and United Kingdom have discreetly let it be known that the cyber tools and online tactics previously designed for use in the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ are now being repurposed for use against information sources promoting ‘vaccine hesitancy’ and information related to Covid-19 that runs counter to their state narratives….

Both countries are preparing to silence independent journalists who raise legitimate concerns over pharmaceutical industry corruption or the extreme secrecy surrounding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccination efforts, now that Pfizer’s vaccine candidate is slated to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by month’s [November’s] end.

Pfizer’s history of being fined billions for illegal marketing and for bribing government officials to help them cover up an illegal drug trial that killed eleven children (among other crimes) has gone unmentioned by most mass media outlets, which instead have celebrated the apparently imminent approval of the company’s Covid-19 vaccine without questioning the company’s history or that the mRNA technology used in the vaccine has sped through normal safety trial protocols and has never been approved for human use. Also unmentioned is that the head of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Patrizia Cavazzoni, is the former Pfizer vice president for product safety who covered up the connection of one of its products to birth defects.

Essentially, the power of the state is being wielded like never before to police online speech and to deplatform news websites to protect the interests of powerful corporations like Pfizer and other scandal-ridden pharmaceutical giants as well as the interests of the US and UK national-security states, which themselves are intimately involved in the Covid-19 vaccination endeavor.

In an earlier article, Coronavirus Gives a Dangerous Boost to DARPA’s Darkest Agenda’ Webb pointed out that:

Technology developed by the Pentagon’s controversial research branch [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] is getting a huge boost amid the current coronavirus crisis, with little attention going to the agency’s ulterior motives for developing said technologies, their potential for weaponization or their unintended consequences.…

Those who are fearful and desperate will not care that the vaccine may include nanotechnology or have the potential to genetically modify and re-program their very being, as they will only want the current crisis that has upended the world to stop.

In this context, the current coronavirus crisis appears to be the perfect storm that will allow DARPA’s dystopian vision to take hold and burst forth from the darkest recesses of the Pentagon into full public view. DARPA’s transhumanist vision for the military and for humanity presents an unprecedented threat, not just to human freedom, but an existential threat to human existence and the building blocks of biology itself.

Tessa Lena in her article ‘The Great Reset for Dummies: Where do we go from here?’ explains:

The practical aim of the Great Reset is to fundamentally restructure the world’s economy and geopolitical relations based on two assumptions: one, that every element of nature and every life form is a part of the global inventory (managed by the allegedly benevolent state, which, in turn, is owned by several suddenly benevolent wealthy people, via technology) – and two, that all inventory needs to be strictly accounted for: be registered in a central database, be readable by a scanner and easily ID’ed, and be managed by AI, using the latest ‘science.’ The goal is to count and then efficiently manage and control all resources, including people, on an unprecedented scale, with unprecedented digital precision – all while the masters keep indulging, enjoying vast patches of conserved nature, free of unnecessary sovereign peasants and their unpredictability. The king’s world feels far more predictable and relaxed when the chaos of human subjectivity is contained for good.

Plus, as a potentially lucrative aside, a bunch of these tightly managed ‘assets’ can be also turned into new financial instruments and traded. Game on!

In other words, it’s an ‘efficient’ global feudalism that goes much farther than its medieval brother since the scanner is all-seeing: every person, every mineral, and every berry is digitally tagged and tracked. Under that framework, every peasant has a function that is derived not from the mystery of life, and not from their inner calling – but from AI, the master of efficiency and the servant of the king. Ideally, the peasants can be convinced that it’s good for them (or necessary to be safe, see ‘contact tracing’) and that this is what progress and happiness are like – but if not, there are other ways, from classic violence to virtual prisons to ‘morality pills.’

In his article ‘Analysis: Globalists’ reboot of the world and their plans for us’ Jacob Nordangård outlines his interpretation of what is happening:

The Corona crisis is the trigger for a global coup d’état of monumental dimensions. It is the beginning of a new era, with a new international economic order that risks completely destroying human freedoms. Tyrants have now taken over to forcibly steer us into a ‘climate smart’ and ‘healthy’ world through the World Economic Forum’s new techno-totalitarian roadmap – ‘The Great Reset’….

On June 13, 2019, Klaus Schwab, President of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and UN Secretary-General António Guterres signed a partnership between their two organisations….

The agreement includes six focus areas [and] also states that the WEF’s fourth industrial revolution is an important component in implementing the agenda. Digitisation is seen as the key….

This means that the world’s tech giants (which are part of the WEF working groups) will solve the world’s problems through the use of AI, satellites, robotics, drones and the Internet of Things, and with synthetic food on the menu….

We have paid and will have to pay a high price for something that has been exaggerated beyond all proportions and which has been used as a trigger to introduce a new techno-totalitarian order.

Sarah Westall’s video presentation of the research by Grace Van Berkum – see ‘We are Being Played’ – about the future of global governance in ‘Multi-Decade Globalist Plan’ offers a comprehensive and horrifying view, which is only touched upon here:

The New World Order where there are no borders and only one government…. It is an entire comprehensive, meticulous plan for changing our entire world. No detail has not been addressed…. Covid-19 starts the journey of world globalization.….It is impossible for this crisis to be made only in the last [eleven] months. The sections on global governance and the fourth industrial revolution have been planned for decades…. The plan is for one government to have complete control of all of us. Artificial intelligence controlling our business, our food, our money, our privacy. And our freedom is to be abolished forever…. Years and years and years of elite mastermind plotting and planning on how to take over the world come together on this one website.

Covid-19 is just the first step to get the ball rolling… A scared and divided world is easy to dominate, crushing the economy and installing fear-based reactions is how you get an entire world to behave and start from scratch. All of the data and all of the videos throughout the site are updated daily, supporting propaganda is published and released daily, written by those determined to take over the world and all 7.7 billion inhabitants. You have to be able to understand this feel-good language and read between the lines to know what is really being said. I have had to re-read some things ten times to truly understand what the bottom line was but also truly understand what they were not addressing….

Using Covid-19 to harness the power of revolution to change the economy… characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres…. In its most pessimistic, dehumanized form, the Fourth Industrial Revolution may indeed have the potential to ‘robotize’ humanity and thus to deprive us of our heart and soul. The Fourth Industrial Revolution will change not only what we do but also who we are… and sooner than we think it may lead to human augmentation….

The present vast overpopulation, now far beyond the world carrying capacity, cannot be answered by future reductions in the birth rate due to contraception, sterilization and abortion, but must be met in the present by reduction of numbers presently existing. This must be done by whatever means necessary.

The bulk of humanity has become expendable. We were good for the elite to have around when they could exploit our labor and enjoy the fruits of humanity’s talents. But information technology research and advisory firm Gartner predicts that at least one-third of jobs now performed by humans will be replaced by software, robots, and smart machines by 2025.

Robots do not require food, health benefits nor do they require a minimum wage…. According to Ray Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google, by 2029 robots and other forms of technology will have reached human levels of intelligence and functionality….

Analysing the WEF’s Resetting the Future of Work Agenda: Disruption and Renewal in a Post-COVID World former World Bank economist Peter Koenig in his article ‘The Post Covid World, The WEF’s Diabolical Project: “Resetting the Future of Work Agenda” – After “The Great Reset”. A Horrifying Future’ outlines elements of the ‘horrifying future to some 80%-plus of the (surviving) population’ which ‘The Great Reset’ promises.

These elements include 84% digitization of work, 83% of people working remotely, automation of 50% of tasks, temporary and permanent reductions of the workforce resulting in massive, permanent unemployment for at least 30%, vaccination containing nanochips that combined with 5G and 6G technologies will enable control of your behaviour or kill you outright in accordance with the eugenicist plan to reduce the human population.

In his article Dystopian “Great Reset”: “Own Nothing and Be Happy”, Being Human in 2030’, Colin Todhunter focuses on the fact that:

The Great Reset entails a transformation of society resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance as entire sectors are sacrificed to boost the monopoly and hegemony of pharmaceuticals corporations, high-tech/big data giants, Amazon, Google, major global chains, the digital payments sector, biotech concerns, etc.

Using COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions to push through this transformation, the great reset is being rolled out under the guise of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ in which older enterprises are to be driven to bankruptcy or absorbed into monopolies, effectively shutting down huge sections of the pre-COVID economy. Economies are being ‘restructured’ and many jobs will be carried out by AI-driven machines.

In a short video, the WEF predicts that by 2030, ‘You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy’.

More fundamentally, as I explain in the article ‘Beware the Transhumanists: How “Being Human” is being Re-engineered by the Elite’s Covid-19 Coup’ and as mentioned above, if the transhumanist agenda is successfully implemented as part of ‘The Great Reset’, individual human identity will vanish along with human volition.

Of course, it should not be forgotten that while this coup is taking place, there has already been a great number of disastrous outcomes. These include the staggering cost, in terms of everything from mental health, violence in the family home, loss of livelihood and hugely increased deaths from starvation – see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully’ – to an acceleration in the path to human extinction on four separate counts. See ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup to Destroy Humanity that is also Fast-Tracking Four Paths to Human Extinction’.

What can we do to halt ‘The Great Reset’ and defend ourselves from the elite coup?

Fortunately, we can do a great deal, particularly if we recognize that many issues must be tackled simultaneously and while we cannot all participate in everything, we will maximize our impact if we support the vital role that others play and we act strategically.

Moreover, we only have to build on what is happening already. Despite being largely ignored or denigrated by the corporate media, resistance to one or other features of the coup is already substantial. For just one example, see this summary: ‘Anti-Lockdown Protests All Across Europe’. For an example of the legal challenges to the coup, which are set to proceed in many countries, watch this video interview of Dr. Reiner Fuellmich: ‘Lockdowns, masks & vaccines’.

So, first, if you still find it difficult to believe that people would do this, rest assured that those organizing this, and their agents, are not sane. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’. Complicating this, unfortunately, is the fact that many people are victims and easily conned by propaganda. See ‘Why Do Most People Believe Propaganda and False Flag Attacks?’

Nevertheless, as noted above, there is widespread resistance to what is happening already – awareness of which is suppressed by the corporate media, of course – so our task is to build on that resistance and increase its strategic impact.

So, if you would like to be part of the campaign to defeat the elite coup, see the list of strategic goals necessary to achieve this outcome here: Coup Strategic Aims.

If you wish to campaign to avert one or more of the four most immediate paths to human extinction, you can see a list of strategic goals for doing so here: Campaign Strategic Aims.

If you wish to nurture children to be better equipped to understand what is happening and far more able to critique it, see ‘My Promise to Children’.

If you wish to reduce your vulnerability to elite control, consider joining those who recognize the critical importance of reduced consumption and greater self-reliance by participating in The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth. In addition, you are welcome to consider signing the online pledge of The Peoples Charter to Create a Nonviolent World.

Finally, if you want a better fundamental understanding of how we reached this point, see Why Violence? and Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice.

More simply, if you like, you might consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

  1. I will listen deeply to children. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.
  2. I will not travel by plane
  3. I will not travel by car
  4. I will not eat meat and fish
  5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
  6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
  7. I will not own or use a mobile (cell) phone
  8. I will not buy rainforest timber
  9. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
  10. I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
  11. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
  12. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
  13. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
  14. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

 

Conclusion

The coup currently being conducted by the global elite has been carefully planned and prepared over several decades. This is evident from documents published by the World Economic Forum and other elite organizations, many elite gatherings which have discussed the subject, interim measures adopted along the way and the extraordinary measures being taken to prevent any meaningful discussion or debate, in violation of our ‘right to free speech’, about the threat supposedly posed by Covid-19 and the merits or otherwise of ‘The Great Reset’. See ‘“Collective Narcissism” and the “Dark Triad”: Those Who Protest against the “Official” Covid-19 Narrative are Categorized as “Psychopaths”. Is It A Witch Hunt? and ‘There’s no vaccine for the infodemic – so how can we combat the virus of misinformation?’

Given that the fundamental aim of the coup is to substantially reduce the human population and keep those still alive, subject to permanent surveillance as well as mind and behavioural control, as ‘techno-slaves’ to the global elite, the time to resist is now.

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of Why Violence? His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

Our Frustrations Run Far Deeper Than Covid Lockdowns

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The reality is the roulette wheel is rigged and only chumps believe it’s a fair game.

It’s easy to lay America’s visible frustrations at the feet of Covid lockdowns or political polarization, but this conveniently ignores the real driver: systemic unfairness. The status quo has been increasingly rigged to benefit insiders and elites as the powers of central banks and governments have picked the winners (cronies, insiders, cartels and monopolies) and shifted the losses and risks onto the losers (the rest of us).

We now live in the world the 19th-century French economist Frederic Bastiat so aptly described: “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

As I noted in The One Chart That Predicts our Future, ours is a two-tier society and economy with a broken ladder of social mobility for those trying to reach the security of the technocrat class and a well-greased slide for everyone who trips and slides from relative security down to the ever-expanding ALICE-precariat class: assets limited, income constrained, employed.

As Bastiat observed, those rigging the system to benefit themselves always create a legal system that lets them off scot-free and a PR scheme that glorifies their predation as well-deserved rewards that are the natural due of their enormous appetite for hard work and innovation.

You know, hard work and innovation like this:

JPMorgan Makes $1 Billion From Gold Trading After Paying $1 Billion Fine For Manipulating Gold Trading.

Embezzling a couple billion dollars also earns you a get out of jail free card: none of the perps in Wall Street’s skims, scams and frauds ever gets indicted, much less convicted, and none of Wall Street’s legalized looters ever goes to prison.

And this is a fair and just system? Uh, right. Meanwhile, the reality is the roulette wheel is rigged and only chumps believe it’s a fair game. Those who know it’s rigged have essentially zero agency (control / power) or capital to demand an unrigged game or finagle their way into the elite class doing the skimming.

The net result is soaring frustration with a patently unfair system that’s touted as the fairest in the entire world. Gordon Long and I do a deep dive into the frustrations with systemic unfairness in our new video, The Frustrations of Unfairness Are Reaching a Boiling Point.

The key takeaway in my view is the unfairness isn’t limited to the economy, society or politics– it’s manifesting in all three realms. It isn’t just frustration with domestic issues–the global economic order is also a source of unfairness and powerlessness.

We each drew up a list of specific drivers of unfairness / frustration. Here’s my list:

And here’s Gordon’s list:

There is much more in our presentation. These are the dynamics that are tearing apart our social cohesion and that will soon start destabilizing the economy–regardless of how much “money” the Federal Reserve prints.

“The Great Reset” Already Happened

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Put another way: the elites have cannibalized the system so thoroughly that there’s nothing left to steal, exploit or cannibalize.

The global elites’ techno-fantasy of a completely centralized future, The Great Reset, is addressed as a future project. Too bad it already happened in 2008-09. The lackeys and toadies tasked with spewing the PR are 12 years too late, and so are the critics listening to the PR with foreboding.

Simply put, events outran our understanding of them. The future already manifested while we were trying to cram the present arrangement into an obsolete conceptual framework.

In broad-brush, the post-World War II era ended around 1970. The legitimate prosperity of 1946-1970 was based on cheap oil controlled by the U.S. and the hegemony of the U.S. dollar. Everything else was merely decoration.

The Original Sin to hard-money advocates was America’s abandonment of the gold standard in 1971, but this was the only way to maintain hegemony. Maintaining the reserve currency is tricky, as the nation issuing the reserve currency has to supply the global economy with enough of the currency to grease commerce and stock central bank reserves around the world.

As the global economy expanded, the only way the U.S. could send enough dollars overseas was to run trade deficits, which in a gold standard meant the gold reserves would go to zero as trading partners holding dollars would exchange the currency for gold.

So the choice was: give up the reserve currency and the hegemony of the U.S. dollar by jacking up the dollar’s value so high that imports would collapse, or accept that hegemony was no longer compatible with the gold standard. It wasn’t a difficult decision: who would give up global hegemony, and for what?

Many other dynamics changed around the same time: social, cultural, political. These charts reflect the end of the postwar era and the ushering in of a new era.

Again in broad-brush, the key economic dynamic was the decline of labor’s share of the economy in favor of capital. Those who had only their labor to sell lost purchasing power, while those who could borrow or access capital benefited enormously. The charts below tell the story: labor’s share of the national income has stairstepped lower for 50 years (since 1970) while the super-wealthy’s share has outpaced everyone else 15-fold.

The dominance of financial capital is visible in the third chart, as private-sector financial assets are now 6 times the nation’s GDP, double the percentage of the postwar era.

This capital-friendly era was rocket-boosted by financialization in the 1980s, technology in the 1990s and globalization in the early 21st century. You can see each advance of capital’s top tier–the top 0.1%–in the chart below: the top 0.1% first pulled away in the 1980s financialization, stutter-stepped in the early 1990s and then exploded higher as technology fueled capital’s leverage and exposure to the gains reaped by computers and the Internet.

Alas, these extremes are not stable or sustainable, and so each wave ends in a devastating crash. The income of the top 0.1% took a hit as the dotcom bubble burst, but then China’s entry into the WTO saved the day as rampant globalization and additional extremes of financial leverage and fraud boosted their fortunes in the 2000s.

The dual extremes of financialization and globalization created the 2008 bubble, and its collapse almost took down the entire global capital house of cards. Central banks, ultimately financed by the Fed to the tune of $29 trillion, twice the size of America’s entire GDP, instituted The Great Reset under the usual guise of “emergency measures” which then became permanent policies.

The Great Reset led to the hyper-centralization of control over the global economy’s money as central banks coordinated unprecedented money-printing and financial repression, which includes zero-interest rate policies (ZIRP), as the debt-bubble would pop if rates aren’t nailed down to zero.

All the PR being spewed about The Great Reset is the final frantic flailing of a system that’s drowning in its own excesses. The 50-year long era of the few enriching themselves as the expense of the many has ended, for the same reason eras of extreme exploitation always end–the elites got too greedy and overshot the economy’s ability to sustain their rapidly expanding share of the income and wealth.

Put another way: the elites have cannibalized the system so thoroughly that there’s nothing left to steal, exploit or cannibalize. The hyper-centralized global money control has run out of rope as the cheap oil is gone, debts have ballooned to the point there is no way they’ll ever be paid down, and the only thing staving off collapse is money-printing, which holds the seeds of its own demise.

Allow me to summarize the only way The Great Reset envisioned by global elites can actually manifest: The Martians arrive towing huge meteorites of pure lithium and gold, and rather than incinerating the global elites, they hand the global elites the meteorites to further their concentration of wealth and power.

Short of that science fiction, this sucker’s going down. The Great Reset has already run its course after 12 long years of artifice, fraud and trickery. So global elite shills, lackeys, factotums, toadies and apparatchiks–prepare for your Wil-E-Coyote moment of truth.

America’s Economy Cannot Survive Another Lockdown, And The Cult Of The Reset Knows It

By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.us

The U.S. economy has been on the verge of collapse for at least a decade, ever since the crash of 2008 and the subsequent explosion in fiat stimulus from the Federal Reserve. While the mainstream media has always claimed that central bankers “saved” us from another Great Depression, what they actually did was set us up for a far worse scenario — a stagflationary implosion of our society.

Here is the primary problem: By injecting trillions of bailout dollars into the system, the Federal Reserve prevented the economy from going through its natural purging cycle. This cycle would have been painful for many, but survivable, and it would have removed large amounts of excess debt, parasitic corporations that produce little or nothing of use, as well as numerous toxic assets with no legitimate value. For a real free market to function, weak or corrupt elements must be allowed to fail and die. Instead, central banks around the world and most prominently the Fed kept all of those destructive elements on life support.

This has created what amounts to a “zombie economy:” a system that needs constant outside support (stimulus) in order to continue moving forward. In the process of keeping zombie corporations and other parts of the body alive, healthy parts of the economy, like the small business sector, get devoured.

The zombie economy is, however, highly fragile. All it takes is one or two major shocks to bring it down, and the moment this happens the whole facade will disintegrate, leaving the public in panic and disarray. This is what is happening right now in 2020, and it will get much worse in 2021.

Bailouts encourage and reward unhealthy financial behavior, and this is why national debt, corporate debt and consumer debt have recently hit historic highs. When every pillar of the economy is encumbered with the weight of debt, any instability has the possibility of bringing all those pillars down at once. The Federal Reserve turned the U.S. into an economic time bomb, and the Fed is itself more like a suicide bomber than some kind of fiscal savior.

The “Great Reset”

I first heard the term “global reset” or “great reset” back in 2014/2015. I wrote an article about how the reset was actually a long term process in my article The Global Economic Reset Has Begun. Christine Lagarde was the head of the IMF back then, and she mentioned it briefly in multiple interviews.

I made a mental note of it because it seemed planted into the discussion very awkwardly, as if it was scripted. I rarely heard it mentioned for years after that. In 2020, as we descend into social and economic chaos, I’m seeing the phrase used everywhere in the media and by globalists.

Over the past decade, globalist institutions have come up with numerous phrases that seem to refer to a worldwide planned and dramatic shift in human society sometime in the near future. The “great reset” is just another phrase for “the new world order.” It is important to understand that the reset these people are talking about has actually been engineered and staged for many years. This is not something that just popped up in 2020 — they have been talking about it since at least 2014. And before that, they talked about the new world order, and “multilateralism,” and the “multi-polar world order,” and Agenda 2030, etc.

The reset is the catalyst phase of an agenda that has been in the works for a long time now. The goal, as they have openly admitted many times, is to centralize the entire globe into one monetary structure, one highly interdependent and socialized economy, and eventually one faceless and unaccountable governing body.

One of the biggest obstacles to the finalization of the reset and the formation of the new world order has been liberty-minded populations across the planet — most of all, the liberty-minded people within America. The U.S. has to be destabilized or eliminated; the old world order has to be brought down before the new world order can be introduced. The people have to be beaten down and desperate, so that when the globalists offer their “reset” as the solution, the people will gladly accept it without question — simply because they want the economic pain and uncertainty to stop.

A common statement made by globalists from Klaus Shwab at the World Economic Forum to the current Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, is that the coronavirus pandemic is the “perfect opportunity” to trigger the “great reset.” As globalist Rahm Emanuel is famous for admitting, in crisis there is opportunity to do things you were not able to do before.

In other words, when people panic in the face of crisis, they become easy to manipulate. And, if a crisis doesn’t happen naturally, then why not create a crisis from thin air and use that to cause panic?

Enter the economic lockdowns…

The lockdowns have not only been proven to do nothing to stop the spread of the coronavirus, but they are also a clear attack on what’s left of our economic system. The small business sector in particular is being gutted as more than 60% of those that shut down during the first lockdown were unable to reopen. Small businesses provide more than half of all employment in the U.S.. When they collapse, the U.S. economy will have nothing left except the big-box corporations that the Fed put on life support over a decade ago.

Real unemployment, which is already at 26%, will skyrocket even further if a second national lockdown is initiated. The speedy collapse of the U.S. economy will be assured, and the “great reset” can commence. At least, that is what the globalists want to happen…

With the U.S. presidential election currently being contested, it is hard to say how the next few months will play out in detail. As I have been pointing out since July, a contested election is the best possible scenario for the globalists because it creates a Catch-22 situation:

  1. If Trump stays in office, the political left will accuse him of usurping the presidency and there will be mass riots in the streets. Conservatives will be tempted with the idea of bringing in martial law to suppress rioters, and such measures will undermine the flow of the U.S. economy, causing its fragile structure to implode.
  2. If Biden enters the White House, then he will attempt a Level 4 lockdown similar to the lockdowns we have seen in Australia, France, Germany and the UK; perhaps even worse. Our economy will crumble, conservatives will revolt, and Biden will attempt martial law measures.

Either way, the globalists get their crisis, and therein their opportunity.

Surviving the lockdowns and deterring the globalists

But here is where things get less certain for the elites. If liberty-minded Americans organize immediately for security and mutual aid, we can defuse the Catch-22. If we provide for our own security within our own communities, there will be no rationale for Trump to institute martial law. Community security is an awesome deterrent against leftist rioting and looting, and basic economic trade can continue.

By extension, if we organize our own community security as well as localize our economies with barter and trade, we also act as a deterrent to Biden and any ideas he might have of enforcing national lockdowns. The point is, we can’t allow the globalists to dictate the terms of the crisis. We must act to change the rules of the game.

The reset is not a natural inevitability, it is a con, a trap. No matter how bad the crisis in our nation becomes, it is the people — namely the liberty-minded people — who will determine the future, not the globalists. Their plan relies on our panic. Instead of panic, let’s show them a unified front and a plan of our own.