Masked, Homeless, and Desolate

Posted on July 27, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Personality is persona, a mask…The mask is magic…Larva means mask; or ghost…it also means mad, a case of demoniacal possession.”
Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body

Walk the streets in the United States and many countries these days and you will see streaming crowds of people possessed by demons, masked and anonymous, whose eyes look like vacuums, staring into space or out of empty sockets like the dead, afraid of their own ghosts. Fear and obedience oozes from them. Death walks the streets with people on leashes in lockstep.

That they have been the victims of a long-planned propaganda campaign to use an invisible virus to frighten them into submission and shut down the world’s economy for the global elites is beyond their ken. This is so even when the facts are there to prove otherwise.

It is a clear case, as Peter Koenig tells Michel Chossudovsky in this must-see interview, that is not a conspiracy theory but a blatant factual plan spelled out in the 2010 Rockefeller Report, the October 18, 2019 Event 201, and Agenda 21, among other places.

Who can wake the sleepwalkers up in this cowardly new world where culture and politics collude to create and exploit ignorance?

Fifty-five years ago on, July 20, 1965, Bob Dylan released his song “Like a Rolling Stone.” It arrived like a rocking jolt into the placid pop musical culture of the day. It was not about wanting to hold someone’s hand or cry in the chapel. It wasn’t mumbo-jumbo like “Wooly Bully,” the number one hit. It wasn’t like the pop pap that dominates today’s music scene. It wasn’t Woody Guthrie in slow time.

It beat you up. It attacked. It confronted you. Maybe, if you were alive then, you thought Dylan was kidding you. You thought wrong. Bitching about his going electric was a dodge. He was addressing all of us, including himself.

Still is. But who wants to hear his recent “Murder Most Foul” and read Dylan’s scathing lyrics about the assassination of JFK, the killing that started the slow decay that has resulted in such masked madness. “And please, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” he tells us in capital letters for emphasis. Exactly what all the mainstream media have done, of course, and not by accident.

There are no alibis.

“How does it feel/To be on your own/with no direction home/A complete unknown/Like a rolling stone?”

It was in the mid-1960s when confidence in knowing where home was and how to get there disappeared into thin air. If you left mommy and daddy, could you ever get back from where you were going? Who had the directions?

Absolutes were melting and relativity was widespread. Life was wild and the CIA was planning to make it wilder and more confusing with the introduction of LSD on a vast scale. MKUltra was expanding its scope. Operation Mockingbird was singing so many tunes that heads were spinning, as planned.

The national security state killers were in the saddle, having already murdered President Kennedy and Malcolm X as they sharpened their knives for many more to come. The peace candidate, Lyndon Baines Johnson, had been elected nine months earlier with 61.1% of the popular vote and went immediately to work secretly expanding the war against Vietnam. War as an invisible virus. Who knew?

Who, but a small anti-war contingent, wanted to know?

War takes different forms, and the will to ignorance and historical amnesia endure. War is a disease. Disease is weaponized for war. In 1968 Richard Nixon was elected on a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War and then ramped it up to monstrous proportions, only to be reelected in 1972 by carrying 49 out of 50 states.

Who wants to know now? The historian Howard Zinn once said correctly that this country’s greatest problem wasn’t disobedience but obedience.

What’s behind the masks? The lockstep?

On the same day that Dylan released “Like a Rolling Stone,” Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, just back from a “fact-finding” trip to Vietnam, recommended to LBJ that U.S. troop levels in Vietnam be increased to 175,000 and that the U.S. should increase its bombing of North Vietnam dramatically.

This was the same McNamara who, in October 1963, had agreed with JFK when he signed NSAM 263 calling for the withdrawal of 1,000 military personnel from Vietnam by the end of 1963 and the remainder by the end of 1965. One of the moves that got Kennedy’s head blown open.

Poor McNamara, the fog of war must have clouded his conscience, confused the poor boy, just like Secretary of State Colin Powell holding up that vile vial of “anthrax” at the United Nations on February 5, 2003 and lying to the world about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Powell recently said, “I knew I didn’t have any choice. He’s the President.” How “painful,” to use his word, it must have been for the poor guy, lying so that so many Iraqis could be slaughtered. Of course, he had no choice. These war criminals all wear masks. And have no choice.

Masks, or demonic possession, or both. You?

Also in that fateful year 1965, far out of sight and out of mind for most Americans, the CIA planned and assisted in the slaughter of more than a million Indonesians, led by their man, General Suharto. This led to the coup against President Sukarno, who two years earlier had been on good terms with JFK as they worked to solve the interrelated issues of Indonesia and Vietnam. Their meeting planned for early 1964 was cancelled in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

And the politicians and media luminaries came out in their masks and told the public that communists everywhere were out to get them.

It’s tough being on your own. It hurts to think too much. Or think for yourself, at least. To obey an authority higher than your bosses. “I was tricked” is some sort of mantra, is it not?

You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all did tricks for you

Dylan was lost and disgusted when he wrote the song. His own music sickened him, which, for an artist, means he sickened himself. He had just returned from a tour of England and was sick of people telling him how much they loved his music when he didn’t. He needed to change.

What else is the point of art but change? If you’re dead, or afraid of getting dead, you aren’t going to change. You’re stuck. Stuck is dead. Why wear a mask if you know who you are?

Knowledge, or more accurately, pseudo-knowledge or mainstream media lies, is a tomb “the mystery tramp” sold to us, a place to hide to avoid pain and guilt.

I have read more books than anyone I know. It sickens me.
I know too much. That sickens me.
I sicken myself. All the news sickens me.
I know so much no one believes me.
As Francesco Serpico once told me: “It’s all lies.”
Of course. Dylan and Serpico are blood brothers.
Only art tells the truth. Real art.

Not bullshit pop art. Some say “Like a Rolling Stone” is about Edie Sedgwick, “the girl of the year” in 1965 and one of Andy Warhol’s superstars. Perhaps to a degree it is, but it’s far more than that. It’s about us.

Poor Edie was poisoned by her wealthy family at a young age and barely had a chance. She was an extreme example of a rather common American story. People poisoned in the cradle. Thinking of her got me thinking of Andy Warhol, the death obsessed hoarder, the guy who called his studio “The Factory” in a conscious or unconscious revelation of his art and persona, his wigs and masks and the hold he has had on American culture all these years. Isn’t he the ultimate celebrity?

Warhol once took my photo on a deserted street. His and my secret but this is the truth. West 47th Street on an early Sunday morning, 1980. I guess he thought he was doing art or collecting images for his museum of dead heads. When I asked him why, he said I had an interesting face.

I told him he did too, rather transparent and creepy, but I didn’t want to capture him. He was a ghost with a camera, a face like a death mask, trying to capture a bit of life. I told him I didn’t give him permission to shoot me, but he turned and walked away into the morning mist. The shooters always just walk away in pseudo-innocence.

I then went down the street to the Gotham Book Mart that was my destination and asked James Joyce why he had written “The Dead,” and Joyce, secretive as ever, quoted himself, “Ed,” he said, “Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” Now that was direction.

Only those who know how to play and be guided by intuition are able to escape the living tomb of so-called knowledge; what Dylan called, lifelessness. But that was from “Desolation Row,” released as the closing track of Highway 61 Revisited on August 30, 1965. The only acoustic song on the album. Slow it down to make the point another way. “Like a Rolling Stone” was the opening track.

Do you feel all alone or part of a masked gang roaming the streets incognito? Miss and Mr. Lonely, does that mask help? How do you feel?

Desolation means very lonely. From Latin, de, completely, solare, lonely.

Does that mask help? Do you feel alone together now, one of the crowd?

Do you really want to know about desolation row? It’s here. It was here in 1965, too. Only the true lonely know how it feels to really be all alone.

The Umbrella People, those who some call the deep state or secret government under whose protection all the politicians work, say they want to protect us all from death and disease. They are lying bastards who’ve gotten so many to imitate their masked ways. They can only sing a mockingbird’s song.

Listen to real singers. Dylan has arched the years, as true artists do. Who has paid close attention to what he said this year about the assassination of President Kennedy in his song, “Murder Most Foul”? Or were many caught up in the propaganda surrounding corona virus, and rather than contemplating his indictment of the U.S. government and its media accomplices, were they contemplating their navels to see if a virus had secreted itself in there. Viruses lurk everywhere, they say, and the corporate media made certain to circulate a vaccine about the truth in Dylan’s song. This is normal operating procedure.

We are still on Desolation Row.

“Take Off the Masks.” That was the title of a book by Rev. Malcolm Boyd that I reviewed long ago. He was a gay priest who decided that his mask was a lie. He came out into the light of truth. He had guts.

It is time for everyone to take off the masks. Escape from Desolation Row by seeing what’s going on behind our backs.
Listen to Dylan, long ago – today:

At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
And they bring them to the factory
Where their heart attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row
Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody’s shouting
“Which side are you on?”

The Free Market Is A Failure

Posted on July 20, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By TheHipcrimeVocab

Sorry for the deliberately click-bait-y headline, but I think this message is important to get out there.

In my discussions few months back on What is Neoliberalism, I noted that a core element of neoliberal philosophy is that markets are the only efficient, effective and rational way to distribute goods and services.

Neoliberals profess the idea that only competitive markets can allocate “scarce” resources efficiently, and that it is only such “free” markets that can lift people out of poverty and deliver broad prosperity. They pound it into our heads constantly.

Yet the Covid-19 crisis has illustrated spectacular and pervasive failures of such “free” markets all over the globe, and especially in the U.S. Instead of fairness or efficiency, we see systemic failure in every market we look: the food industry, the medical industry, the retail industry, the employment market. Resources are being destroyed and misallocated on a massive scale

Let’s start with the food industry, because food is the most important thing (nine means from anarchy, and all that). Thousands and thousands of pigs are being slaughtered, their meat left to rot, eaten by no-one, regardless of the forces of supply and demand:

The United States faces a major meat shortage due to virus infections at processing plants. It means millions of pigs could be put down without ever making it to table…

Boerboom, a third-generation hog farmer, is just one of the tens of thousands of US pork producers who are facing a stark reality: although demand for their products is high in the nation’s grocery stores, they may have to euthanise and dispose of millions of pigs due to a breakdown in the American food supply chain.

Meat shortage leaves US farmers with ‘mind-blowing’ choice (BBC)

Potatoes are sitting in Belgian warehouses and left to rot, only two short years after a drought threatened to produce a severe shortage:

Belgium: Lighthearted campaign to ‘eat more fries’ aims to lift heavy load (DW)

Meanwhile, dairy farmers in the U.S. heartland are dumping milk into the ground, to be drunk by no one.

Cows don’t shut off: Why this farmer had to dump 30,000 gallons of milk (USA Today)

In fact, the whole food situation is rather ugly, as this piece from The Guardian summarizes:

This March and April, even as an astounding 30 million Americans plunged into unemployment and food bank needs soared, farmers across the US destroyed heartbreaking amounts of food to stem mounting financial losses.

In scenes reminiscent of the Great Depression, dairy farmers dumped lakes of fresh cow’s milk (3.7m gallons a day in early April, now about 1.5 million per day), hog and chicken farmers aborted piglets and euthanized hens by the thousands, and crop growers plowed acres of vegetables into the ground as the nation’s brittle and anarchic food supply chain began to snap and crumble.

After delays and reports of concealing worker complaints, meatpacking plants that slaughter and process hundreds of thousands of animals a day ground to a halt as coronavirus cases spread like wildfire among workers packed tightly together on dizzyingly fast assembly lines.

Meanwhile, immigrant farmworkers toiled in the eye of the coronavirus storm, working and living in crowded dangerous conditions at poverty wages; at one Washington state orchard, half the workers tested positive for Covid-19. Yet many of these hardest working of Americans were deprived of economic relief, as they are undocumented. Advocates report more farmworkers showing up at food banks – and some unable to access food aid because they can’t afford the gas to get there.

None of this is acceptable or necessary and it’s not just about Covid-19, it’s also illustrative of a deeply deregulated corporate capitalism. America’s food system meltdown amid the pandemic has been long-developing, and a primary cause is decades of corporate centralization and a chaotic array of policies designed to prop up agribusiness profits at any cost.

Farmers are destroying mountains of food. Here’s what to do about it (Guardian)

That doesn’t sound very “efficient” to me, does it? How about you? Free market fundamentalists, care to weigh in?

Meanwhile, hospitals in the United States, which one would think are the most important thing to keep open during a pandemic, are actually closing across the country. These are the very things you want most to be open! Why is this happening? Because health care in the U.S. is a profit-driven enterprise that “competes” in the free market. Because elective procedures—their cash cow—have either been suspended or postponed. U.S. hospitals are closing because they are dependent upon these elective procedures to shore up their profits, and markets rely on profits.

As the deadly virus has spread beyond urban hotspots, many more small hospitals across the country are on the verge of financial ruin as they’ve been forced to cancel elective procedures, one of the few dependable sources of revenue. Williamson Memorial and similar facilities have been struggling since long before the pandemic — at least 170 rural hospitals have shut down since 2005, according to University of North Carolina research on rural hospital closures.

But even as hospitals in cities like New York City and Detroit have been deluged with coronavirus patients, many rural facilities now have the opposite problem: their beds are near-empty, their operating rooms are silent, and they’re bleeding cash.

More than 100 hospitals and hospital systems around the country have already furloughed tens of thousands of employees, according to a tally by industry news outlet Becker’s Hospital Review. They’ve sent home nurses and support staffers who would be deemed essential under state stay-home orders.

Rural hospitals are facing financial ruin and furloughing staff during the coronavirus pandemic (CNN)

And how about allocating labor via impersonal markets? How’s that going? Well, not so well. The workers with the skills most desperately needed on the front lines during the crisis are taking pay cuts and getting laid off left and right. Instead of contributing, they are sitting at home, unable to work even if they wanted to:

At a time when medical professionals are putting their lives at risk, tens of thousands of doctors in the United States are taking large pay cuts. And even as some parts of the US are talking of desperate shortages in nursing staff, elsewhere in the country many nurses are being told to stay at home without pay.

That is because American healthcare companies are looking to cut costs as they struggle to generate revenue during the coronavirus crisis.

“Nurses are being called heroes,” Mariya Buxton says, clearly upset. “But I just really don’t feel like a hero right now because I’m not doing my part.”

Ms Buxton is a paediatric nurse in St Paul, Minnesota, but has been asked to stay at home.

At the unit at which Ms Buxton worked, and at hospitals across most of the country, medical procedures that are not deemed to be urgent have been stopped. That has meant a massive loss of income.

Coronavirus: Why so many US nurses are out of work (BBC)

It’s an ironic twist as the coronavirus pandemic sweeps the nation: The very workers tasked with treating those afflicted with the virus are losing work in droves.

Emergency room visits are down. Non-urgent surgical procedures have largely been put on hold. Health care spending fell 18% in the first three months of the year. And 1.4 million health care workers lost their jobs in April, a sharp increase from the 42,000 reported in March, according to the Labor Department. Nearly 135,000 of the April losses were in hospitals.

As Hospitals Lose Revenue, More Than A Million Health Care Workers Lose Jobs (NPR)

So it doesn’t seem like “free and open” markets are doing so well with either health care or labor.

Meanwhile, U.S. states are competing against each other for desperately needed PPE equipment, bidding up the price and preventing scarce resources from going to where they are most badly needed, which would naturally be where Covid-19 has struck the hardest:

As coronavirus testing expands and more cases of infection are being identified, doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers are scrambling to find enough medical supplies to replenish their dwindling supply.

But state and local governments across the United States are vying to purchase the same equipment, creating a competitive market for those materials that drives up prices for everyone.

“A system that’s based on state and local governments looking out for themselves and competing with other state and local governments across the nation isn’t sustainable,” said John Cohen, an ABC News contributor and former acting Undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security, “and if left to continue, we’ll certainly exacerbate the public health crisis we’re facing.”

“There’s a very real possibility,” he added, “that those state and local governments that have the most critical need won’t get the equipment they need.”

Competition among state, local governments creates bidding war for medical equipment (ABC News)

Yet neoliberals always tell us how important “competition” is in every arena of life.

Failure, failure, failure! Everywhere we look, we see failure. Pervasive, systematic failure. Resources going unused. Surpluses of food being dumped even while people go hungry and line up at food banks. Workers with necessary skills sitting at home, twiddling their thumbs. Other workers unable to even earn a living to support themselves and their families, no matter how badly they want to work. Masks and protective equipment NOT going to where they are most needed, their costs inflating, befitting no one except profiteers even as people die.

Tell me again about how the market is “efficient” at distributing resources. Tell me again about how central planning inevitably results in wasted resources, surfeits and shortages.

And here is the big, bold, underscored point:

The free-marketeers want to trumpet the market’s successes, but they don’t want to own its failures.

Free-market boosters always want to talk about the wonderful benefits of markets. How they allow multiple people to coordinate their activities across wide variations of space and time. How they allow knowledge to be distributed among many different actors. How they favor tacit knowledge that a single entity could not possess. Libraries of encomiums have been written celebrating the virtues of the “free” market. You know their names: The Provisioning of Paris, Economics in One Lesson, Free to Choose, I Pencil, and all of that. Much of what passes for economic “science” is simply cheerleading for markets– the bigger, freer and less-regulated the better.

Okay, fair enough.

But how about market failures? Why don’t they ever talk about that? Because if you read the economics books I cited above, you would come away with the idea that there are no market failures! That, in fact, there is no such thing. That markets, in effect, cannot fail!

If you want to own the successes, you need to own the failures.

Oh, they love, love, love to talk about central planning’s “failures”. They can’t get enough of that. They love to talk about empty shelves in the Soviet Union, long lines at supermarkets, the lack of toilet paper in Venezuela (amusingly, now a problem throughout the capitalist world), and the allegedly long waiting times in “socialized medicine” countries. We are constantly subjected to that drumbeat day after day after day. It’s part of every economics 101 course. Central planning doesn’t work. Central planning is inefficient. Central planning is “tyranny.”

But what about all that stuff I cited above?

Where are all the free-market fundamentalists now?

What is their excuse?

They’ll use special pleading. They’ll argue that it’s exceptional circumstances. That no one could have foreseen a “black swan” event like the global Covid-19 pandemic (despite numerous experts warning about it for years). They’ll tell us that markets work just fine under “normal” circumstances. They’ll say we cannot pass any kind of judgement on the failings of markets during such an unusual event.

Here’s why that argument is bullshit:

Pandemics are a real, and recurring phenomenon in human history. We’ve been incredibly fortunate that we’ve been in rare and atypical hundred-year period from 1918-1919 to today without a global pandemic or novel disease we couldn’t quickly contain and/or eradicate.

But pandemics are always—and always have always been—a societal threat, even if we’ve forgotten that fact. And the experts tell us that there will be a lot more of them in our future, with population overshoot, environmental destruction, encroachment on formerly unoccupied lands and climate change proceeding apace. What that means is this:

If your economic system can’t function properly during a pandemic, then your economic system is shit.

If your economic system only works when conditions are ideal, in fact depends upon conditions being ideal, then, your economic system doesn’t really work at all. If something like a pandemic causes it to seize up and fail, then your economic system is poorly designed and doesn’t work very well. Not only do the free markets graphed on economists’ chalkboards not exist in anywhere the real world, they apparently rely on a blissful Eden-like Arcadia to function as intended—a situation any causal glance at human history tells us is highly unusual. Any disruption and they fall like dominoes. They are about as resilient as tissue paper.

And the stresses are only going to get worse in the years ahead, with climate change making some areas uninhabitably hot, while other places are submerged under rising sea levels. And that’s before we get to the typical natural disasters like volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and earthquakes. And there will be new novel plant diseases as well, unfolding against the increasing resistance of germs to antibiotics.

Will the free market fundamentalists and libertarian market cheerleaders acknowledge this???

Don’t hold your breath.

No, they will continue to lionize “private initiative” at every opportunity, while completely ignoring the stuff I opened this post with. They’ll sweep it under the rug or, more likely, simply handwave it away. They’ll continue to say that we need to scale back government regulation and interference and let the invisible hand sort it all out.

Because discipline of modern economics as practiced today is not a science. It may not even rise to the level of a pseudoscience. It’s PR for laissez-faire capitalism.

Of course, we’ve had market failures before. They occurred all throughout the nineteenth century and during Great Depression, for example. These are well-documented. But many of the things that came out of those bygone market failures to prevent or mitigate them have been systematically and deliberately dismantled over the past generation due to rise of neoliberalism.

And now we’re paying the price.

Karl Polanyi made an important distinction between markets and Market Society. Markets are where people come together to buy, sell, and exchange surplus goods. These have existed throughout history. They are tangential to society; embedded in something larger than it. Such markets can be shut down without causing an existential threat to civilization.

But Market Society is dependent upon impersonal forces of supply and demand and functioning markets for absolutely everything in the society, from jobs to food to health care. Everything is oriented around maximizing private profits, and not human needs. Markets failing to function adequately lead to unemployment, sickness, starvation and death. Shutting them down is an existential threat to civilization.

As Dmitry Orlov wrote in his best-known work, the Russians survived the collapse of the Soviet Union precisely because they didn’t rely on the Market.

Naturalizing markets in this way is an abdication of both causal and moral responsibility for famines, a way to avoid reality and the ethical consequences for people in a position to change things. Markets are not given; they are predicated on a host of laws and social conventions that can, if the need arises, be changed. It makes no sense for American farmers to destroy produce they can’t sell while food banks are struggling to keep up with demand. This kind of thinking is a way for powerful people to outsource ethical choices to the market, but the market has no conscience.

Famine Is a Choice (Slate)

Now, to be clear I’m not necessarily making an argument for or against central planning as opposed to markets. That’s a different discussion.

But my core point is simply this: you cannot discuss market successes without discussing market failures. To do so is intellectually dishonest, disingenuous, and not to mention incredibly dangerous and irresponsible. If economics were a real science, instead of just PR for capitalism, it would take a look at the things I described above, and figure out ways they could have been avoided, regardless of any preconceived ideology or assumptions about the “right” way to arrange a society, or assumptions about how things “should” work. It would seek out ways for society to become, in Nassim Taleb’s terminology, “antifragile.”

But don’t hold your breath for that, either.

Western Liberal Media Attacks Tanzania’s President John Magufuli For Exposing Covid-19 Tests and Population Control in Africa

Posted on July 15, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

From the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Tanzania’s President John ‘The Bulldozer’ Magufuli exposed the fraud behind the Covid-19 testing kits and criticized the mass hysteria in regards to the virus. Several mainstream media networks including Bloomberg News led an attack against Magufuli’s actions regarding how his government has responded to the pandemic. Bloomberg News reporter Antony Sguazzin published ‘Africa’s ‘Bulldozer’ Runs Into Covid-19, Claims God on His Side’, the title itself already mocks Magufuli for mentioning God when it comes to Covid-19, but Sguazzin conveniently bypasses what Magufuli actually said in his article and criticizes him to the point of hostility:

Tanzania’s maverick President John Magufuli has used his strong personality to cow corrupt civil servants and force foreign mining companies to pay millions of dollars in outstanding tax. The coronavirus may be less responsive

What a way for Antony Sguazzin to begin his propaganda piece by calling him the “maverick President”:

Last week, he became the first African leader to declare victory over the virus, even though health data haven’t been released for more than a month. He’s criticized the national laboratory for exaggerating the number of infections, dismissed health experts and discouraged the wearing of masks, all the while saying God will protect Tanzania. Restrictions on social gatherings such as weddings will be lifted from June 29, when schools can reopen

As Squazzin continued his attack by claiming that there were deaths and nighttime burials by health officials in a video published by Al Jazeera that neither confirms or denies the accusations. The video could have been filmed anywhere in the African continent where outbreaks like Ebola and other health crisis have emerged in the past. The US embassy had warned that contracting Covid-19 was “extremely high” in the main city of Dar es Salaam and that hospitals were overwhelmed despite the number of cases being reported by the Tanzanian government at 509 cases and with more than 21 deaths:

But the president’s optimism is belied by reports of deaths and nighttime burials by health officials wearing personal protective equipment. Dozens of Tanzanian truck drivers who had to undergo screening at border posts have tested positive. The U.S. Embassy warned last month that the risk of contracting the virus in the main city, Dar es Salaam, male was “extremely high” and that hospitals were overwhelmed

Sguazzin said that Magufuli’s response to activists who were detained because of their criticism towards his government of how he was handling Covid-19 pandemic was by intimidating the public:

Nicknamed “the bulldozer” for his no-nonsense approach when he was minister of works, Magufuli has made intimidation and bravado a feature of his presidency since assuming office in 2015. His campaign to fight graft — he often fired people while cameras were rolling — earned him widespread praise and elevated his authority within the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi party.

Crackdowns on the media and those who poke fun at the government mean that criticism of how Magufuli is handling the outbreak is mostly restricted to social media. Official information is limited and tightly controlled. At least 13 journalists, students and politicians have been detained since March 23 for distributing information about the virus, Tanzania’s Legal and Human Rights Centre said

The 13 journalists, students and politicians who are being held for distributing information about Covid-19 is a human rights issue and extreme to go that far if all allegations are true. Magufuli’s government’s stance on the LGBTQ community is also extreme since they jail people up to 30 years in prison if you are convicted, but unfortunately that’s happens all over Africa and many countries around the world including in the most brutal dictatorship on the planet who is also a friend to the US is Saudi Arabia, where they execute people from the LGBTQ community but that is rarely mentioned in the mainstream media. Since Magufuli was elected, he has slashed his own salary from $15,000 a month to $4,000 and reduced his government from 30 to 11 ministries. He also cut excessive government spending in various areas including foreign travel by government officials and canceling the World’s AIDs Day in Tanzania and decided to use the funds for AIDS medications. Magufuli also suspended Independence Day in 2015 to declare a national cleanup day to reduce the spread of cholera and to improve the health system in the country. To increase domestic production, it was reported in 2017 that Tanzania banned exporting unprocessed ores for domestic smelting purposes. Magufuli also amended laws to renegotiate mining contracts or even terminate them if fraud is suspected. It’s apparent that Magufuli is a nationalist. Magufuli has done some bad, but he also has done some good, especially when he exposed Covid-19 testing kits as a fraud. Now the Mainstream media is attacking his policies and what he says concerning the Covid-19 consensus. What angered the West and the mainstream media is not what Magufuli is claiming about God, it is what he did to prove that the Covid-19 test kits were inaccurate and that’s what Sguazzin forgot to mention. Magufuli has proved to the world that the covid-19 test kits are a fraud and what the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) claims are on the dangers of the virus is basically false. Magufuli explains how he tested the test takers by instructing his country’s security services to send various samples to the Covid-19 testing labs that were not human:

We took samples from goats, we took samples from sheeps, we took samples from Pawpaws, we even took samples from car oil and we took samples from other different things and we took samples to the laboratory without them knowing and we even named all the samples, like the sample from the car oil, we named it Jabil Hamza, 30 years old, male, the results came back negative. When we took the sample from a jackfruit (durian), we named it Sara Samuel, 45 years old, female. the results came back unconclusive. When we took the samples from a Pawpaw, we named it

Elizabeth Ane, 26 years, female, the results from the Pawpaw came back positive, that it has corona. That means the liquid from the pawpaw is positive.” We took samples from (a bird type) called Kware, the results came back positive. We took samples from a rabbit, the results came back undeterminent. We took samples from a goat and the results came back positive. We took samples from a sheep and it came back negative and so on and so on

This is where Magufuli made his point:

So now when you see this, you have taken the samples and say they are humans and the results come back positive that they have corona, that means all the pawpaws should be in isolation also and when you take goat samples and they are also positive, that means all the goats that we have here by assumption or maybe the goat with the sample which was taken should also should also be in isolation. and when you take jackfruit (durian) and it’s also positive that liquid from the jackfruit (durian) which we named it Elizabeth, meaning Elizabeth the Jackfruit (Durian) that means all the Jackfruits (Durian) should be in isolation also so when you notice something like this, you must know there is a dirty game played in these tests

Magufuli also said that the people who work in the laboratories are most likely bought and paid for by special interests:

That there unbelievable things happening in this country, either the laboratory workers in there are bought by people with money, either they are not well educated which isn’t true because this laboratory is used for other diseases, either the samples which are brought in because even the reagents are imported, because even the swambs are also imported, so it’s a must that something is actually going on

Magufuli earned instant criticism from US and European media networks on his leadership with allegations of corruption and human rights abuses considering the imprisonment of journalists, students and politicians who criticized his government. Whether corruption in the Tanzanian government is true or not, many countries in Africa are corrupt with dictatorships. There was also regime change operations backed by Western powers including the US when they gave the CIA the green light to set up the assassination of Zaire’s President Patrice Lamumba in 1961 and in 1966, the CIA overthrew Ghana’s first president under its new independence, Kwame Nkrumah, a pan-Africanist and an anti-imperialist who authored a book titled ‘Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism’. We must also take into account the centuries old European colonialism since the Portuguese built its trading posts in the late 15th century, followed up by US interventions in Africa during the Cold War leading up to the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) which was created under the George W. Bush regime in 2007. The US military and intelligence apparatus currently have numerous military bases all over Africa in efforts to stop Chinese and Russian influence and to control the natural resources which has basically put the African continent at a disadvantage in comparison to the rest of the world. In this case, Magufuli has actually stood up to the powers that be and took a stand for his people.

Western Imperialism Did Not End: Population Control, Birth Control to Experimenting with Dangerous Vaccines

In 2018, liberal media network, CNN headlined with ‘Don’t Use Birth Control, ‘Tanzania’s President Tells Women In The Country’ said that “Tanzania’s President John Magufuli has told women in the East African nation to stop taking birth control pills because the country needs more people, according to local media reports.” Magufuli was quoted in a local newspaper called The Citizen in a public rally saying that “those going for family planning are lazy … they are afraid they will not be able to feed their children. They do not want to work hard to feed a large family and that is why they opt for birth controls and end up with one or two children only.” According to CNN, “he was quoted in a local newspaper, The Citizen, as saying that those advocating for birth control were foreign and had sinister motives.” Which by all means is true.

Magufuli’s understands how the depopulation agenda works. CNN mentions Jacqueline Mahon the representative for Tanzania for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) who was present at the time at least according to The Citizen quoted Magufuli saying that “I have traveled to Europe and I have seen the effects of birth control. In some countries they are now struggling with declining population. They have no labor force.” Then of course, in an old propaganda tactic which CNN loves to use, they criticized the President on other various issues including his stance on how women lawmakers should dress:

In another development, the speaker of the Tanzanian parliament banned female lawmakers from wearing fake nails and eyelashes in parliament. “With the powers vested in me by the Constitution of the United Republic of Tanzania, I now ban all MPs with false eyelashes and false finger nails from stepping into Parliament,” Job Ndugai said, a day after Magufuli’s comments. The new rules also ban women MPs from wearing short dresses and jeans. Female visitors to parliament are also expected to adhere to the dress code

In September 2018, the World Economic Forum (WEF) website headlined with ‘Bill Gates has a warning about population growth’ it began with “rapid population growth in some of Africa’s poorest countries could put at risk future progress towards reducing global poverty and improving health, according to a report by the philanthropic foundation of Bill Gates.” The site quoted what Gates had told reporters “population growth in Africa is a challenge.” WEF article mentioned what the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation’s own report had discovered in their research and it “found that poverty in Africa is increasingly concentrated in a few countries, which also have among the fastest-growing populations in the world.” The report claimed that “by 2050, it projected, more than 40 percent of world’s extremely poor people will live in just two countries: Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria.” Gates was asked about growing populations and an increase of poverty in Africa and he said that access to birth control combined with investments in health and education for the younger generation was necessary. Gates said that “the biggest things are the modern tools of contraception” and “If you have those things available then people have more control over being able to space their children.”

Forbes magazine recently published ‘Bill And Melinda Gates Have Sharp Words For U.S.’ Lack Of Leadership Role In Fighting Pandemic’ on a virtual Forbes philanthropy summit with the genocidal power couple, Melinda Gates spoke on who should get the vaccines first, and they are black and the indigenous people:

There are 60 million healthcare workers [around the world]. They deserve to get the vaccine first, they’re the ones dealing with this on the front lines, trying to keep us all safe. And then you have to start to tier from there, based on the countries and the populations. Here in the United States, it’s going to be Black people who really should get it first and many indigenous people, as well as people with underlying symptoms, and then elderly people

In other words, black and the indigenous people will be guinea pigs once again. Forbes also reported that “The couple, whose Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed more than $350 million to fight the coronavirus, plans to utilize two nonprofits—The Global Fund To Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance—to help equitably distribute therapeutics and vaccines to developing countries.” There is good news in regards to Africa as Fox news reported about the Covid-19 vaccine trials in South Africa ‘Protest versus Africa’s 1st COVID-19 vaccine test shows fear’ said that “Protesters against Africa’s first COVID-19 vaccine trial burned their face masks Wednesday as experts note a worrying level of resistance and misinformation around testing on the continent” and that the “Anti-vaccine sentiment in Africa is “the worst I’ve ever seen,” the CEO of the GAVI vaccine alliance, Seth Berkley, told an African Union vaccine conference last week.” The Fox news report explains why the African people is concerned:

But the small band of demonstrators who gathered Wednesday at the University of the Witwatersrand, where the trial is based, reflect long-running fears among some in Africa over testing drugs on people who don’t understand the risks.

“The people chosen as volunteers for the vaccination, they look as if they’re from poor backgrounds, not qualified enough to understand” protest organizer Phapano Phasha told The Associated Press ahead of the event. “We believe they are manipulating the vulnerable”

The report also mentioned the controversial French doctor, Jean-Paul Mira, head of intensive care at Cochin hospital in Paris said “If I can be provocative, shouldn’t we be doing this study in Africa, where there are no masks, no treatments, no resuscitation?” comparing the corona virus to previous AIDS studies: “In prostitutes, we try things because we know that they are highly exposed and that they do not protect themselves.” The imperial mentality by the west to control Africa’s population growth and to test Africans with vaccines has been proven time and time again to be dangerous and problematic for the African people. Tanzania’s president John Magufuli has helped expose Western intentions in Africa especially when it comes to the Covid-19 testing kits giving false positive results. The mainstream media quickly criticizes those who do not follow Western instituted depopulation programs from the US and Europe such as Magufuli who actually did something right in the face of Covid-19 hysteria. Magufuli is now the subject of Western media criticism and mockery not because he mentioned God, it’s because he is not following the program, it’s pretty obvious at this point.

Remdesivir for Covid-19: $1.6 Billion for a “Modestly Beneficial” Drug?

Posted on July 14, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Elizabeth Woodworth

Source: Global Research

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has recently “bought” all of Gilead Science’s Remdesivir for $1.6 billion. “500,000 doses at $3,200 per patient – to be available to American hospitals but not for other countries”[6]

That’s $1.6 billion tax dollars for a virtually untested drug showing only marginal efficacy in the hospital setting.

How could such a thing happen?

Introduction

If you believe an urgent call from the Yale School of Public Health that was recently published in the American Journal of Epidemiology— the top epidemiology journal in America — hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) + azithromycin is the quickest and most effective way to halt the Covid-19 pandemic.[1]

According to this Yale statement, hydroxychloroquine – a cheap, natural anti-malarial tree-bark known as quinine for 400 years – is highly effective during Phase 1 of Covid-19, while the virus is loading into the body.

As the first line of defense, it should be immediately, freely, and widely available to symptomatic high-risk patients – through doctors’ offices, outpatient clinics, and hospitals across the land.

Indeed, under the directorship of Dr. Anthony Fauci, a National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) a clinical trial had been launched on May 14 to look into it.[2]

The HCQ + azithromycin protocol is being used successfully by France’s top, award-winning microbiologist, Dr. Didier Raoult. He is director of the Infectious and Tropical Emergent Diseases Research Unit in Marseille (Institut Hospitalo-Universitaire) (IHU), with 200 staff. Raoult, now almost a celebrity in France, has recently published his protocol and results, showing an overall 1.1% case fatality rate.[3]

The same protocol has also been highly successful in China, India, Senegal, and Brazil.[4]

So why suddenly is the U.S. government and the media ignoring recommendations from these top specialists,[5] and waiting, instead, until people get very sick and hospitalized to treat them with the relatively untested drug, Remdesivir, which is administered intravenously?

Why has the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services just bought up all the Remdesivir it could order – 500,000 doses at $3,200 per patient – to be available to American hospitals but not for other countries?[6]

To put Remdesivir’s cost in perspective, the CDC reports that the flu vaccine costs from $12-$18 a dose.[7]

The government, in order to justify its mind-boggling price, would need to show exceptional efficacy in saving lives. Efficacy, that is, once the disease has been allowed, through failure to use the HCQ + azithromycinearly preventive approach, to advance to Phase 2 (the dangerous inflammatory period) and Phase 3 (ICU ventilator intubation, often leading to death).[8]

What do studies say about the efficacy of remdesivir?

There are three main studies that have examined remdesivir as a treatment for Covid-19:

The first, a study of seriously ill patients, was originally reported in the New England Journal of Medicine on April 10, 2020. Treated with “compassionate-use” remdesivir, clinical improvement was observed in 36 of 53 patients (68%).

The article was co-authored by 56 people, some of whom were on the staff of remdesivir’s producer, Gilead Sciences.[9] The study was funded by Gilead, and writing assistance was provided by David McNeel, also of Gilead.[10]

The following day, April 11, the Science Media Centre published expert reactions to the compassionate study from five British university professors. These assessments were not encouraging: “the research doesn’t prove anything at this point;” “the data is almost uninterpretable;” the research should be treated “with extreme caution.”[11]

A Wuhan, China randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of 237 patients was accidentally leaked by the World Health Organization and published in The Lancet. It showed no statistically significant clinical benefits from remdesivir:

“The antiviral medicine remdesivir from Gilead Sciences failed to speed the improvement of patients with Covid-19 or prevent them from dying, according to results from a long-awaited clinical trial conducted in China.” [12]

This Lancet study also found that some 14% of patients in the treatment group died after 28 days, compared to 13% in the group that did not receive the treatment.

And it further reported that “remdesivir was stopped early because of adverse events in 18 (12%) patients versus four (5%) patients who stopped placebo early.”[13]

The preliminary results of a NIAID remdesivir trial of 1063 patients showed a “modest” benefit in a controlled clinical trial:

“The infected people who received remdesivir, an experimental drug made by Gilead Sciences that cripples an enzyme several viruses use to copy their RNA, recovered in an average of 11 days versus 15 in patients who received a placebo. ‘Although a 31% improvement doesn’t seem like a knockout, 100% [success], it is a very important proof of concept,’ said Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).”[14]

Health Policy Watch reported that “the death rate was 8% in the group that received remdesivir compared to 11.6% in the control group, although this result was not statistically significant.” Dr. Fauci told reporters that “what [this trial] has proven is that a drug can block the virus.”[15]

The excerpt below from a June 24 article in the British Medical Journal assesses the problems in the foregoing studies. (One of the four co-authors, Fiona Godlee, is the editor-in-chief of the BMJ):

“A serious imbalance in covid-19 research strongly favours the study of drug treatments over non-drug interventions, with many studies too small or too weak to produce reliable results. Equally concerning is the release of partial or preliminary findings before peer review—often through commercial press releases—that is distorting public perceptions, ongoing evaluations efforts, and political responses to the pandemic.

Remdesivir is a key example. The antiviral drug, made by US company Gilead, was unapproved at the start of the pandemic, but in early April the New England Journal of Medicine published a small descriptive study of a compassionate use scheme for patients with covid-19. Gilead funded the study, a third of the authors were Gilead employees, and Gilead’s press release reported “clinical improvement in 68% of patients in this limited dataset.” Despite being a non-randomised, uncontrolled, company funded study of just 53 patients, media headlines described “hopeful” signs and reported “two thirds” of patients showing improvement.[16]

Two weeks later, the Lancet published a randomised placebo controlled trial of remdesivir from China, finding no statistically significant clinical benefit in the primary outcome of time to clinical improvement. Twelve per cent of participants taking remdesivir stopped treatment early because of adverse events, compared with 5% taking placebo. The trial was stopped before meeting recruitment targets.”[17]

To summarize, the only study demonstrating even marginal efficacy for remdesivir shows it to reduce hospital recovery times 31%, from 15 days to 11 days.

What is the justification for spending $3,200 tax dollars per Covid-19 patient to save four days in hospital, unless it is to shorten hospital stays, thereby saving the average U.S. bed cost of approximately $2000 per day, while delaying hospital saturation that could leave some people untreated to die?

Leaving people untreated to die could cause civil unrest, which may be the covert political reason for spending the $1.6 billion.

None of the studies mention side effects of the drug. In the China study, kidney injury led to discontinuation for one patient, and in its use for ebola, liver risks were identified.[18]

How much does it cost to produce remdesivir?

The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) is a non-profit organization seeking to improve healthcare value through clinical and cost-effective analyses.[19]

In a May 1, 2020 study, the ICER calculated that the cost of producing the remdesivir “final finished product,” including the pharmaceutical ingredients, formulation, packaging, and a small profit margin, was $9.32 US for a 10-day course of treatment. They rounded this up to $10.[20]

Dr. Fauci’s NIAID Clinical Trial Evaluating Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin Closes Early

On June 20, 2020, nine days before the Department of Health and Human Services announced its $1.6 billion purchase of remdesivir on June 29, its NIAID branch closed a clinical trial that had been launched May 14 to investigate whether the inexpensive combination, hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin, might be an effective treatment when given early in the course of the disease.[21]

The Department of Health and Human Services knew that hydroxychloroquine (aka chloroquine) was effective against coronavirus because chloroquine was tested against the SARS-1 virus during the outbreak in 2002. This work was written up in 2005, under the auspices of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, which reports to the Department of Human Health and Services.[22]

Truth, as the saying goes, is stranger than fiction.

Who was responsible for this debacle?

Dr. Fauci has served in the National Institutes of Health under six presidents.

Were these bizarre decisions carried out under his authority? Or were they forced upon him from higher up? Or has he become a victim of regulatory capture[23] by the drug industry?

Whatever the answer, this unprecedented fleecing of the American public should have been shouted from the rooftops, had there been a functioning US media.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Notes

[1] Harvey A. Risch, “Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk Covid-19 Patients that Should be Ramped-Up Immediately as Key to the Pandemic Crisis,” Amer. J. Epid, 27 May 2020 (https://academic.oup.com/aje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/aje/kwaa093/5847586). Risch is Professor at the Yale Schools of both Medicine and Public Health.

[2] National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, “NIH Begins Clinical Trial of Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin to Treat COVID-19,” 14 May 2020 (https://www.niaid.nih.gov/news-events/nih-begins-clinical-trial-hydroxychloroquine-and-azithromycin-treat-covid-19).

[3] Jean-Christophe Lagier, et al, “Outcomes of 3,737 COVID-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin and other regimens in Marseille, France: A retrospective analysis,” Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease, 25 June 2020 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1477893920302817). Rault has 2,300 indexed medical journals in print.

[4] The group “COVEXIT.com – News About Hydroxychloroquine & Other COVID-19 Treatments,” was founded March 29, 2020 by Jean-Pierre Kiekens. It keeps daily track of successful Covid treatments worldwide (https://www.facebook.com/groups/covexit)

[5] Elizabeth Woodworth, “The Media Sabotage of Hydroxychloroquine Use for COVID-19: Doctors Worldwide Protest the Disaster,” Global Research, 30 June 2020 (https://www.globalresearch.ca/media-sabotage-hydroxychloroquine-covid-19-doctors-worldwide-protest-disaster/5717382).

[6] US Department of Health and Human Services, “Trump Administration Secures New Supplies of Remdesivir for the United States,” June 29, 2010 (https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2020/06/29/trump-administration-secures-new-supplies-remdesivir-united-states.html).

[7] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Vaccines for Children Program, “CDC Vaccine Price List,” updated 1 July 2020 (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/programs/vfc/awardees/vaccine-management/price-list/index.html#adflu).

[8] Dr. Raoult identified the three stages of Covid-19 while treating 3,737 patients with HCQ+azithromycin at his own clinic: “At the first viral stage, one must give medicines against the virus, in the second inflammatory phase, one needs to give medications against that [inflammatory] reaction, and then in the third phase, it’s work to be done in intensive care units.” Summarized from Didier Raoult, at: “The Marx Brothers are Doing Science: the Example of RECOVERY,” 9 June 2020 (http://covexit.com/professor-raoult-compares-the-oxford-recovery-trial-academics-to-the-marx-brothers/).

[9] Jonathan Grein, and 55 other authors, “Compassionate Use of Remdesivir for Patients with Severe Covid-19,” New England Journal of Medicine, 11 June 2020 (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2007016), “Editor’s Note: This article was published on April 10, 2020, at NEJM.org.”

[10] Jason D. Goldman, et al., “Remdesivir for 5 or 10 days in Patients with Severe Covid,” New England Journal of Medicine, no date in header (https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa2015301?articleTools=true). Sidebar:“This article was published on May 27, 2020, at NEJM.org.”

[11] Prof. Duncan Richards et al., “Expert reaction to a study about compassionate use of remdesivir for patients with severe COVID-19,” Science Media Centre, 11 April 2020 (https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-a-study-about-compassionate-use-of-remdesivir-for-patients-with-severe-covid-19/).

[12] Ed Silverman, et al, “New data on Gilead’s remdesivir, released by accident, show no benefit for coronavirus patients. Company still sees reason for hope,” StatNews, 23 April 2020 (https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/23/data-on-gileads-remdesivir-released-by-accident-show-no-benefit-for-coronavirus-patients/).

[13] Yeming Wang, et al., “Remdesivir in adults with severe COVID-19: a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multicentre trial,” The Lancet, 16 May 2020 (original online publication 29 April 2020) (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31022-9/fulltext).

[14] Jon Cohen, “Large trial yields strongest evidence yet that antiviral drug can help COVID-19 patients,” Science, 29 April 2020 (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/large-trial-yields-strongest-evidence-yet-antiviral-drug-can-help-covid-19-patients).

[15] Grace Ren, “Conflicting Remdesivir Trial Results Released; Experts Urge More Research,” Health Policy Watch, 29 April 2020 (https://healthpolicy-watch.news/first-remdesivir-rct-shows-no-significant-clinical-benefit-for-severe-covid-19-patients-but-experts-urge-for-more-research/).

[16] Christopher Rowland, “Gilead’s experimental drug remdesivir shows ‘hopeful’ signs in small group of coronavirus patients,” Washington Post, 10 April 2020 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/10/gileads-experimental-drug-remdesivir-shows-hopeful-signs-small-group-coronavirus-patients/).

[17] Ray Moynihan et al.,“Commercial influence and covid-19,” BMJ2020;369:m2456 (Published 24 June 2020) (https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m2456).

[18] Crystal Phend, “Remdesivir Safety Forecast: Watch the Liver, Kidneys,” Medpage Today, 19 May 2020 (https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/86582).

[19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Clinical_and_Economic_Review

[20] Melanie D. Whittington and Jonathan B. Campbell, “Alternative Pricing Models for Remdesivir and Other Potential Treatments for COVID-19,” Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, 1 May 2020 (https://icer-review.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/ICER-COVID_Initial_Abstract_05012020-3.pdf).

[21] National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, “BULLETIN—NIH Clinical Trial Evaluating Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin for COVID-19 Closes Early,” 20 June 2020 (https://www.niaid.nih.gov/news-events/bulletin-nih-clinical-trial-evaluating-hydroxychloroquine-and-azithromycin-covid-19).

[22] Martin J. Vincent et al., “Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread,” Journal of Virology, 22 August 2005 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1232869/).

[23] “Regulatory capture is a theory that regulatory agencies may be dominated by the interests they regulate and not by the public interest.” In: Will Kenton, “Regulatory Capture,” Investopedia, 23 October 2019 (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regulatory-capture.asp).

Elite television news rescued by COVID

Posted on July 7, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Jon Rappoport

Source: NoMoreFakeNews.com

Yet another consequence of the fake pandemic is the propping up of that doddering old fool, elite television news.

The COVID story doesn’t need Walter Cronkite. It only needs wall to wall. From 5AM to midnight, pandemic updates (mixed now with riot coverage), and the network ratings get well. The ratings jump out of the dumpster and rumble on the studio set and do cartwheels.

I’ve written a number of articles about network television news. Here are excerpts—

NEWS ABOUT THE NEWS.

The elite anchor is not a person filled with passion or curiosity. Therefore, the audience doesn’t have to be passionate or filled with curiosity, either.

The anchor is not a demanding voice on the air; therefore, the audience doesn’t have to be demanding.

The anchor isn’t hell-bent on uncovering the truth. For this he substitutes a false dignity. Therefore, the audience can surrender its need to wrestle with the truth and replace that with a false dignity of its own.

The anchor takes propriety to an extreme: it’s unmannerly to look below the surface of things. Therefore, the audience adopts those manners.

On air, the anchor is neutral, a castratus, a eunuch.

This is a time-honored ancient tradition. The eunuch, by his diminished condition, has the trust of the ruler. He guards the emperor’s inner sanctum. He acts as a buffer between his master and the people. He applies the royal seal to official documents.

Essentially, the television anchor is saying, “See, I’m ascetic in the service of truth. Why would I hamstring myself this way unless my mission is sincere objectivity?”

All expressed shades of emotion occur and are managed within that persona of the dependable court eunuch. The anchor who can move the closest to the line of being human without actually arriving there is the champion. In recent times, it was Brian Williams—until his “conflations” and “misremembrances” surfaced, and he was exiled to the wasteland of MSNBC.

The vibrating string between eunuch and human is the frequency that makes an anchor “great.” Think Cronkite, Chet Huntley, Edward R Murrow. Huntley was just a touch too masculine, so they teamed him up with David Brinkley, a medium-boiled egg. Brinkley supplied twinkles of comic relief.

The cable news networks don’t have anyone who qualifies as an elite anchor. Wolf Blitzer of CNN made his bones during the first Iraq war only because his name fit the bombing action so well. Brit Hume of FOX has more anchor authority than anyone now working in network television, but he’s semi-retired, content to play the role of contributor, because he knows the news is a scam on wheels.

There are other reasons for “voice-neutrality” of the anchor. Neutrality conveys a sense of science. “We did the experiment in the lab and this is how it turned out.”

Neutrality implies: we, the news division, don’t have to make money (a lie); we’re not like the cop shows; we’re on a higher plane; we’re performing a public service; we’re a responsible charity.

From the early days of television, there has been a parade of anchors/actors with know-how—intonation, edge of authority, parental feel, the ability to execute seamless blends from one piece of deception to the next:

John Daly, Douglas Edwards, Ed Murrow, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Harry Reasoner, Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, and more recently, second-stringers—Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer, Scott Pelley.

They’re all gone.

Now we have Lester Holt, David Muir, and the newly appointed Norah O’Donnell. They couldn’t sell water in the desert.

Lester Holt is a cadaverous presence on-air, whose major journalistic achievement thus far is interrupting Donald Trump 41 times during a presidential debate; David Muir has the gravitas of a Sears underwear model; Norah O’Donnell, long-term, will have the energy needed to illuminate a miniature Xmas-tree light bulb.

The networks have no authoritative anchor-fathers waiting in the wings. They don’t breed them and bring them up through the minor leagues anymore.

Instead, armies of little Globalists, and ideologues who don’t realize they’re working for Globalists, have been infiltrating the news business. At best, they’re incompetent.

Thus, news-production techniques that enable an ongoing illusion of oceanic authority collapse like magnetic fields that have been suddenly switched off.

The selective mood lighting, the restful blue colors on the set, the inter-cutting of graphics and B-roll footage, the flawless shifts to reporters in far-flung places…it’s as if all these supporting features have suddenly been overcome by actors in a stage play who are abruptly stepping out of character. The spell is broken.

Elite mainstream news, in a fatuous attempt to save itself, is trying a democratic approach. Anchors are sharing more on-air minutes with gaggles of other reporters. But this is counter-productive in the extreme. The News has always meant one face and one authority and one voice and one tying-together of all broadcast elements. It’s as if, in a hypnotherapist’s office, the therapist decides to bring in colleagues to help render the patient into an alpha-state.

If by some miracle, the news bosses could raise Walter Cronkite, “the father of our country,” from the dead and put him back in the chair… but too many years have gone by; years of unaccomplished anchors. The horse is out of the barn, the cat is out of the bag.

This is why major news outlets have been appealing to social media/big tech for help, AKA censorship of independent voices.

One veteran news director told me several years ago, “We don’t have the stars [elite anchors] anymore. The star system is dead. You could comb all the local news outlets in America, and you wouldn’t find one face and voice who could really carry the freight. They’ve vanished. The up and coming people are lame. We’ve made them that way. It’s some cockeyed standard of equality we’ve internalized. And now we’re paying the price.”

The news is all about manipulating the context of stories. The thinner the context, the thinner the mind must become to accept it.

Imagine a rectangular solid. The news covers the top surface. Therefore, the viewer’s mind is trained to work in only two dimensions. Then it can’t fathom depth, and it certainly can’t appreciate the fact that the whole rectangular solid moves through time, the fourth dimension.

First, we have the studio image itself, the colors in foreground and background, the blend of restful and charged hues. The anchor and his/her smooth style.

Then we have the shifting of venue from the studio to reporters in the field, demonstrating the reach of coverage: the planet. As if this equals authenticity.

Actually, those reporters in the field rarely dig up information on location. A correspondent standing on a rooftop in Cairo could just as easily be positioned in a bathroom in a Las Vegas McDonald’s. His report would be identical.

The managing editor, usually the elite news anchor, chooses the stories to cover and has the final word on their sequence.

The anchor goes on the air: “Our top story tonight, more signs of gridlock today on Capitol Hill, as legislators walked out of a session on federal budget negotiations…”

The viewer fills in the context for the story: “Oh yes, the government. Gridlock is bad. Just like traffic on the I-5. We want the government to get something done, but they won’t.”

The anchor: “The Chinese government reports the new flu epidemic has spread to three provinces. Forty-two people have already died, and nearly a hundred are hospitalized…”

The viewer again supplies context, such as: “Flu. Dangerous. Epidemic. Get my flu shot.”

The anchor: “A new university study states that gun owners often stock up on weapons and ammunition…”

The viewer: “People with guns. Why do they need a dozen weapons? I don’t need a gun. The police have guns. Could I kill somebody if he broke into the house?”

The anchor: “Doctors at Yale University have made a discovery that could lead to new treatments in the battle against autism…”

Viewer: “Good. More research. Laboratory. The brain.”

If, at the end of the newscast, the viewer bothered to review the stories and his own reactions to them, he would realize he’d learned nothing. But reflection is not the game.

In fact, the flow of the news stories has washed over him and created very little except a sense of (false) continuity.

Therefore, every story on the news broadcast achieves the goal of keeping the context thin—night after night, year after year. The overall effect of this staging is: small viewer’s mind, small viewer’s understanding.

Next we come to words and pictures. More and more, news broadcasts are using the rudimentary film technique of a voice narrating what the viewer is seeing on the screen.

People are shouting and running and falling in a street. The anchor or a field reporter says: “The country is in turmoil. Parliament has suspended sessions for the third day in a row, as the government decides what to do about uprisings aimed at forcing democratic elections…”

Well, the voice must be right, because we’re seeing the pictures. If the voice said the riots were due to garbage-pickup cancellations, the viewer would believe that, too.

We see Building #7 of the WTC collapse. Must have been the result of a fire. The anchor tells us so. Words give meaning to pictures.

Staged news.

Since the dawn of time, untold billions of people have been urging a “television anchor” to “explain the pictures.”

The news gives them that precise solution, every night.

“Well, Mr. Jones,” the doctor says, as he pins X-rays to a screen in his office. “See this? Right here? We’ll need to start chemo immediately, and then we may have to remove most of your brain, and as a follow-up, take out one eye.”

Sure, why not? The patient saw the pictures and the anchor explained them.

Eventually, people get the idea and do it for themselves. They see things, they invent one-liners to explain them.

They’re their own anchors. They short-cut and undermine their own experience with vapid summaries of what it all means.

For “intelligent” viewers, there is a sober mainstream choice in America, a safety valve: PBS. That newscast tends to show more pictures from foreign lands.

“Yes, I watch PBS because they understand the planet is interconnected. It isn’t just about America. That’s good.”

Sure it’s good, if you want the same thin-context or false-context reports on events in other countries. Instead of the two minutes NBC might give you about momentous happenings in Syria, PBS will give you four minutes.

PBS experts seem kinder and gentler. “They’re nice and they’re more relaxed. I like that.”

Yes, the PBS experts are taking Valium, and they’re not drinking as much coffee as the CBS experts.

When network television news was created in the late 1940s, no one in charge knew how to do it. It was a new creature.

Sponsors? Yes. A studio with a desk and an anchor? Yes. A list of top stories? Yes. Important information for the public? Yes.

Of course, “important information” could have several definitions—and the CIA already had a few claws into news, so there would be boundaries and fake stories within those boundaries.

The producers knew the anchor was the main event; his voice, his manner, his face. He was the actor in a one-man show. But what should he project to the audience at home?

The first few anchors were dry sandpaper. John Cameron Swayze at NBC, and Douglas Edwards at CBS. But Swayze, also a quiz show host, broke out of the mold and imparted a bit of “cheery” to his broadcasts. A no-no. So he was eventually dumped.

In came a duo. Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. NBC co-anchors from 1956 to 1970. Chet was the heavy, with a somber baritone, and David was “twinkly,” as he was called by network insiders. He lightened the mood with a touch of sarcasm and an occasional grin. It worked. Ratings climbed. Television news as show biz started to take off. At the end of every broadcast, there was: “Good night, Chet.” “Good night, David.” The audience ate it up. They loved that tag.

However, rival CBS wasn’t standing still. They offloaded their anchor, Douglas Edwards, a bland egg, and brought in Walter Cronkite, who would go on to do 19 years in the chair (1962-1981). Walter was Chet Huntley with a difference. As he grew older, he emerged as a father, a favorite uncle, with an authoritative hills-and-valleys baritone that created instant trust. Magic. A news god was born.

Despite many efforts at the three major networks, no anchor over the past 40 years has been able to pull off the full Cronkite effect.

The closest recent competitor—until he was fired for lying and exiled to the waste dump at MSNBC—was Brian Williams. Williams artfully executed a reversal of tradition. He portrayed the youthful prodigy, a gradually maturing version of a newsboy who once bicycled along country roads, threw folded up papers on front porches, and knew all his customers by name. A good boy. A local boy. Your neighbor under the maple trees of an idyllic town. Cue the memories.

By the time Williams took over the helm at NBC, television news was decidedly a team operation. There were reporters in the field. The technology enabled the anchor to go live to these bit players, who tried to exude the impression they were actually running down leads and interviewing key sources on the spot—when in fact they could just as easily be doing their stand-ups from a hot dog cart outside 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the home studio of the network—because most of their information was really coming from inside that studio.

Nevertheless, the team was everything. The anchor was a manager, and his job was to impart an authentic feel to every look-in, from the White House to Paris to Berlin to Jerusalem to Beijing to a polar bear on an iceberg.

And local television news was blowing up to gargantuan proportions. Every city and town and village and hamlet seemed to have its own gaggle of hearty faces delivering vital info of interest to the citizenry. Branding and shaping this local phenomenon evolved into: FAMILY. Yes, that was the ticket. These bubbly, blown-dry, enthused, manic news and weather and sports hawks were really “part of the community.” Local News was no longer shoveled high and deep with an air of objectivity. “Aloof” was out. Share and care was in. What that had to do with actual news was anyone’s guess, but there it was. “Hi, we’re your team at KX6, and we feel what you feel and we live here with you and we know when the roads are icy and the wrecks pile up on the I-15 and the cops arrest someone for cocaine possession and when the charity bake sale is coming up to pay for [toxic] meds for seniors and when your cousin Judy passes away we mourn as you do…”

News for and by a fictional collective.

Disney news.

A caricature of a simulacrum of an imitation.

The discovery was: the viewing audience wanted news as a cartoon.

The problem is: this model deteriorates. The descending IQ of the news producers and anchors and reporters undergoes a grotesque revolution. Year by year, broadcasts make less sense. Even on the national scene, NBC hands its prime anchor spot to Lester Holt, who plays the old Addams Family living corpse, Lurch.

ABC, always looking for a new face, goes all in with David Muir, a Sears underwear-model type.

CBS counters with a youngish cipher, Jeff Glor, after ridding itself of Scott Pelley, who, true to his on-camera persona, might show up on The Young and the Restless as a lunatic surgeon doing operations without anesthetic.

The networks are losing it.

It’s a sight to behold.

Cable news is even worse. The longest surviving anchor is Wolf Blitzer at CNN. Wolf’s energy level tops out as a man in a tattered bathrobe, in his kitchen, chatting with his cousin while they play checkers.

When professionals broadcast one absurdity after another, they begin to see the effects are actually strengthening their own position of authority.

It’s a revelation. It’s also a continuation of the tradition of the Trickster archetype. For example, with just a few minor adjustments, Brian Williams can be seen as the sly Reynard the Fox…

From the viewpoint of elite television news, controlling the minds of its audience depends on what’s politely called “cognitive dissonance”:

As the anchor recites a news story, the viewer sees an obvious hole through which he could drive a truck.

The story makes no sense, yet it’s being presented as bland fact. The trusted anchor clearly has no problem with it.

What’s the viewer to do? He experiences a contradiction, a “dissonance.”

For example, this year’s flu vaccine. The US government has admitted the vaccine is geared to a flu virus that isn’t circulating in the population. Therefore, even by conventional standards, the vaccine is useless. But the kicker is, the CDC says people should take the vaccine anyway.

The anchor relays all this information—and never seriously questions the situation, never torpedoes the government for recommending the vaccine.

The average viewer feels a tug, a pulse of discomfort, a push-pull. The vaccine story is idiocy (side one), but the trusted anchor accepts it (side two).

Dissonance.

The top chiefs of news—and top propaganda operatives—anticipate cognitive dissonance. In a real sense, they want it to happen. They make it happen. Over and over.

Why?

Because it throws the viewer into a tailspin. And in that mental state, in his effort to resolve the contradiction, he will normally choose to…give in. Surrender. Believe in the anchor. It’s the easier path.

The viewer will even doubt his own perception. “I see no good reason for Building 7 to collapse, but the news doesn’t bring that up, so…it must be me.”

This is the power of the news. It presents absurdities and then moves right along, as if nothing has happened.

The introduction of contradiction, dissonance, and absurdity parading as ordinary reality is an intentional feature of brainwashing.

On the nightly news, the anchor reports that US government debt has risen by another three trillion dollars. He then cuts to a statement from a Federal Reserve spokesman: the new debt level isn’t a problem; in fact, it’s sound monetary policy; it strengthens the economy.

The viewer, caught up in this absurdity, tries to make sense of it, then gives up and passively accepts it. Brainwashing.

Smoothly transitioning from this story, the anchor relays information from the CDC: vaccination rates must achieve 90% in the population, in order to protect people from dangerous viruses. The viewer thinks, “Well, my daughter is already vaccinated, so if she comes into contact with a child who isn’t vaccinated, why would there be a problem? Why does 90% of the population have to be vaccinated to keep her safe? She’s already vaccinated.”

The viewer wrestles with this craziness for a moment, then gives in and accepts what the CDC and the anchor are saying. More passivity. More brainwashing.

The anchor moves right along to the next story: “The US is experiencing one of the coldest winters in history, further evidence of the effects of global warming, according to scientists at the United Nations.”

The viewer shakes his head, tries to deal with this dissonance, surrenders, and accepts what he is hearing. Deeper passivity is the result. Deeper brainwashing.

On and on it goes, day after day, month after month, year after year, on the news.

Contradiction, absurdity, dissonance; acceptance, surrender, passivity.

The same general formula is used in interrogations and formal mind control. It adds up to disorientation of the target.

Most disoriented people opt for the lowest- common-denominator solution: give in; accept the power of the person of authority.

Among the many supporters of conventional news is the education system. Most teachers never learn logic, and they don’t teach it. The result? Their students never gain the ability or the courage to reject the news and its dissonances.

What little these students gain from 12 or 16 years of schooling they eventually sacrifice on the altar of consensus reality—as broadcast every night on the screen before them.

Salvador Dali, surrealist, was one of the most reviled painters of the 20th century.

He disturbed Conventional Folk who just wanted to see an apple in a bowl on a table.

Dali’s apples and bowls were executed with a technical skill few artists could match—except the apples were coming out of a woman’s nose while she was ironing the back of a giraffe, who was on fire.

“It doesn’t go together! It doesn’t make sense! He’s Satan!”

Yet, these same Folk sit in front of the television screen every night and watch the entirely surreal network news. Elite anchors seamlessly and quickly move from blood running in the streets of a distant land to a hairdryer product-recall to an unseasonal hail storm in Michigan to a debate about public policy on pedophiles to genetically engineered mosquitoes in Florida to a possible breakthrough in storing computer simulations of human brains for later recapture to squirrels gathering nuts in New Jersey.

Nothing surreal about this??

When the elite anchor goes on air and digs in, he’s paid to be seamless. He could be transitioning from mass killings in East Asia to sub-standard air conditioners, and he makes the audience track through the absurd curve in the road.

The elite anchor should have a voice that soothes just a bit but brooks no resistance. It’s authoritative but not demanding.

Scott Pelley (CBS) was careful to watch himself on this count, because his tendency was to shove the message down the viewer’s throat like a surgeon making an incision with an icepick. Pelley was a high-IQ android who was training himself to be human.

Diane Sawyer wandered into sloppiness, like a housewife who’s still wearing her bathrobe at 4 in the afternoon. She exuded sympathetic syrup, as if she’d had a few cocktails for lunch. And she affected a pose of “caring too much.”

Brian Williams was head and shoulders above his two competitors. You had to look and listen hard to spot a speck of confusion in his delivery. He knew how to believe his act was real. He could also flick a little aw-shucks apple-pie at the viewer. Country boy who moved to the big city.

Segues, blends are absolutely vital. These are the transitions between one story and another. “Earlier today, in Boston.” “Meanwhile, in New York, the police are reporting.” “But on the Hill, the news was somewhat disappointing for supporters of the president.”

Doing excellent blends can earn an anchor millions of dollars. The audience doesn’t wobble or falter or make distinctions between what went before and what’s coming now. It’s all one script. It’s one winding weirdness of story every night.

And NOW, we have COVID, and we have riots. The current stories— the lies are egregious and relentless, the editorializing is cheesy. The omissions are Grand Canyons.

Surreal, cognitively dissonant, smoothly blended, outrageous:

The News Business. As Usual.

But with the junior varsity anchors, and their lack of skill, the networks need overwhelming stories to sell their act. They need COVID and riots. They have to have government manufacturing chaos and destruction and tighter control, in order to keep viewers coming back night after night.

You’ve got elite Globalists and elite government on one edge, and elite news on the other edge. They feed into each other. They bolster each other.

So why must they spend so much time censoring dissent?

Because freedom exists.

Because, no matter what, it always will.

And underestimating its power, time and time again, has proven to be a colossal mistake.

America Has Always Been a Dystopia

Posted on July 5, 2020 by Reid Mukai

Too many of us just haven’t been paying attention

By Bryan Merchant

Source: OneZero

“Trump’s American dystopia has reached a new and ominous cliff,” warns a CNN opinion headline. “The last two and a half months in America have felt like the opening montage in a dystopian film about a nation come undone,” writes New York Times columnist Michele Goldberg, in describing the images of militarized police storming U.S. cities to put down protests in the days following George Floyd’s murder, which came on the heels of two months of pandemic, panic, and widespread economic collapse. A very popular post published elsewhere on Medium was titled, bluntly, “America is a Dystopia.”

There is a lot of dystopia talk getting tossed around right now, for reasons that probably seem obvious. Those images we’ve all spent hours staring at on Twitter and cable TV — the military vehicles patrolling suburban streets, the lines of tactical vested officers cordoned around the Lincoln Memorial, the scenes of tear gas blurring flames as masked protesters clash with armed police — match up reasonably well with the aesthetics and broad strokes of a genre that we’ve spent the last 10 years staring at on Netflix and the other channels on cable TV.

But this is not “Trump’s American dystopia.” It is the continued, if inflamed, dystopian state of play as it has laid for centuries. The montage of horrors did not begin only a few months ago or when a cohort of privileged observers suddenly became aghast at the SWAT howitzers and brutal policing tactics when they were seen on suburban streets.

Years of toothless and profitable pop culture dystopias have primed consumers to ignore race, helping to obscure the fact that the real dystopia arrived long ago.

Comparing America to a dystopia has become something of a national pastime.

If we wanted to get pithy about it, we might say that the 2010s were the dystopia decade, a period that saw both the rise of dystopia as a reliably profitable and uniform entertainment format in mass culture and what appeared to be the IRL manifestation of the images and tropes the genre broadcast by decade’s end. The Hunger Games rose to dominate box offices and spawned a follow-on flotilla of similarly shaped YA dystopian fare. Black Mirror mainstreamed a visual mode of bleak cynicism about technology, and critical darlings like Ex Machina, Her, and Mad Max: Fury Road made apocalypses brought about by artificial intelligence and climate change palatable for the intelligentsia. Meanwhile, Blade Runner, RoboCop, Starship Troopers, and Children of Men became frequent touchstones. Partly because they are good films that offered prescient cultural and political commentary, and partly because their visuals provide handy fodder for comparative screen-grabbing on social media while we’re watching high-tech police forces brutalize popular uprisings, climate change-fueled wildfires spread across cityscapes, and A.I. take on alarming new dimensions, like being racist.

As a result, comparing America to a dystopia has become something of a national pastime; a recurring op-ed framework, a subgenre of Twitter commentary — especially during crisis points and moments of mass upheaval.

But what are we actually talking about when we talk about “dystopia”? Gesturing towards a vague constellation of injustices set to the color palette of a “gritty” summer blockbuster and declaring it dystopian won’t cut it — for dystopia to be useful as a cautionary tool for avoiding bad futures, we need to understand exactly what the ingredients setting a society on the road to ruin are. As it stands, much of the modern dystopian discourse seems content to position dystopia as something that is bad, with an air of futurity. To quote Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s famous mocking of Black Mirror: “What if phones, but too much.” What if high-tech cops, what if sea level rise, etc.

“The adjective dystopian implies fearful futures where chaos and ruin prevail,” writes Gregory Claeys, a historian and professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, and author of Dystopia: A Natural History. Though in a historical and literary sense, he says, dystopia most commonly describes “a regime defined by extreme coercion, inequality, imprisonment, and slavery.”

Because its most popular touchstones are science fiction, modern dystopia discourse tends to fixate on profit- or warfare-accelerating technologies — digital surveillance, facial recognition, automation software, drones, technologized weapons — and their capacity to serve the wealthy and powerful in a time of ecological collapse, health crises, and/or widening inequality. Our current moment fits the bill. The coronavirus, mass unemployment, and police brutality against a racial justice uprising are unfolding to the backdrop of SpaceX rocket launches and tech billionaires like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos rapidly expanding their wealth.

When I noted on Twitter that the SpaceX launch was sending astronauts on a for-profit trip into space as a surge of protests swept the country, it struck a chord. Many responded by comparing the events to Elysium, the 2013 Neill Blomkamp film about a future where the poor toil and swelter on Earth while the wealthy live in luxury in a space station that orbits above the Terran rabble.

Others pointed to the great Gil Scott Heron song, “Whitey’s On the Moon.” The musician and poet released it in 1970, one year after the NASA moon landing, which was itself one year after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination provoked a mass nationwide uprising, perhaps the last at a scale comparable to the one we’re seeing today.

Some of the lyrics:

A rat done bit my sister Nell.

(with Whitey on the moon)

Her face and arms began to swell.

(and Whitey’s on the moon)

I can’t pay no doctor bill.

(but Whitey’s on the moon)

Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still.

(while Whitey’s on the moon)

That song was recorded a half-century ago, yet the plight remains the same. It was the same in 1993, when Octavia Butler, in her own magisterial dystopia, Parable of the Sower, set in a mostly Black community in Southern California in the apocalyptic 2020s, described the news of the death of a Mars explorer as eliciting the following reaction: “People here in the neighborhood are saying she had no business going to Mars, anyway. All that money wasted on another crazy space trip when so many people here on earth can’t afford water, food, or shelter.”

Billionaires can afford to send payloads into orbit, to explore space for science and for profit, but we cannot afford to provide health care to the poor or even basic racial equality. That’s what too many of us are missing when we talk about dystopia.

As comparatively radical as a dystopia like Elysium (or, say, Snowpiercer) is — in terms of summer blockbusters, anyway — its critique is limited to class. It glosses over race. It’s Matt Damon versus Sharlto Copley and Jodi Foster and the other white orbital techno-authoritarians. Take a scan through any of the most popular dystopian cinema products of the last decade or so, and you’ll find the same thing; matters of race are omitted almost entirely from the big screen eschatologies. Not only are the genre’s prime exports — Hunger Games, Divergent, Blade Runner, Elysium, RoboCop, the list goes on — written and directed by white people, the protagonists, actors, and even antagonists are nearly uniformly white. And despite many of these being imagined, written, and made in a nation whose founding arrangement was the most dystopian system conceivable, race is never even a component of the conversation in mainstream dystopian cinema, much less what the uprisings are predicated upon. Even the Handmaid’s Tale, which exploded in the wake of Trump’s misogyny-lined ascendency to the presidency, relegates any matter of racial politics deep into the background.

The most influential dystopia of the 21st century, I would argue, is not ‘1984,’ but ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ which alone is responsible for a generation of greed-is-good Republican policymaking.

Angelica Jade Bastién points all this out in “Why Don’t Dystopias Know How to Talk About Race?”, where she explains how this in effect allows white viewers to cosplay as the oppressed, without actually interrogating in any meaningful way what oppression might actually entail or who gets oppressed and why.

“Race is relegated to inspiration, coloring the towering cityscapes of these worlds, while the white characters toil under the hardships that Brown and Black people experience acutely in real life,” Bastién writes. “In this way, dystopias become less fascinating thought experiments or vital warnings than escapades in which white people can take on the constraints of what it means to be the other.”

And in so doing, these popular dystopias appropriate the other’s struggles while conveniently ignoring the actual roots of said struggle. I do still think there’s utility in dystopias and trying to heed their warnings, but only if we recognize what’s being warned against, and only, especially, if we manage to understand that many of the looming “dystopias” perceived by more affluent entertainment consumers have been the realities of plenty of communities who have faced deep inequalities, technologized surveillance, and state oppression for generations already.

There’s a tweet that’s gone viral a number of times over the dystopian decade, each time in slightly different variation. Its most recent iteration came just this January, before the pandemic and the uprising came to dominate dystopia discourse:

https://twitter.com/ElleOnWords/status/1218693768339251200

White dystopia fanboys like me, pundits, columnists, and social media users need to get this through our skulls. To invert a notorious quote attributed to William Gibson, the dystopia has always been here; it just hasn’t been evenly distributed.

The “dystopia” lens too often fixes conditions like those — heavily policed communities, invasive surveillance, state oppression — in the future, and it glosses over the realities of the present and the long histories of oppression of Black communities and bodies, plenty of which was technologically abetted. The writer Anthony Walton noted in a 1999 Atlantic piece, “Technology Versus African Americans,” that from “the caravel to the cotton gin, technological innovation has made things worse for Blacks.” Western technologies, he writes, formed the infrastructure that gave rise to Black slavery:

Arab and African slave traders exchanged their human chattels for textiles, metals, and firearms, all products of Western technological wizardry, and those same slavers used guns, vastly superior to African weapons of the time, in wars of conquest against those tribes whose members they wished to capture… The slave wars and trade were only the first of many encounters with Western technology to prove disastrous for people of African descent. In the United States, as in South America and the Caribbean, the slaves were themselves the technology that allowed Europeans to master the wilderness.

What better fits Claeys description of dystopia — “a regime defined by extreme coercion, inequality, imprisonment, and slavery” — than actual chattel slavery? America was founded as a dystopia.

Yet for white and affluent consumers, the constant generation of novel and fantastic apocalyptic scenarios serves to extend the horizon for the arrival of the hellish conditions contained in dystopia — if oppression is a nebulous but ever-approaching threat, it’s perpetually obscured, lifted away into a sub-fictional ether. It needs not be interrogated, not now, anyway. Which is how power prefers it.

That’s the other thing about dystopia: In many of its guises, it’s a plainly conservative enterprise. The most influential dystopia of the 21st century, I would argue, is not 1984, but Atlas Shrugged, which alone is responsible for a generation of greed-is-good Republican policymaking. The 600,000-page book, which I have (regrettably) read, positions a handful of great white men and women as the only thing keeping society together and inveighs against the millions of working-class “moochers” with a barely veiled racist subtext. (Its author was also openly racist.) Many dystopias are less flagrant but similarly conservative: They highlight the fear that we might all end up like the poor unwashed masses if we are not careful to uphold the social order, not the fear that the poor might never be liberated. And that, in fact, includes the ur-dystopia.

“Visions of the apocalypse are at least as old as 1000 B.C.,” according to the dystopian historian Claeys. “The triumph of chaos over order defined the Egyptian ‘Prophecies of Neferti’ foretold the complete breakdown of society.” In it, the “great no longer rule the land,’ the ‘slaves will be exalted.’” The first dystopia, in other words, was a cautionary tale for the haves against sliding into the world of the have-nots. It’s hard not to shake that vibe from a lot of the Twitter commentariat, pointing at the protests from afar, going “man it’s so dystopian” and moving on to whatever the central animating conflict is in their own personal heroic narratives.

There are still useful deployments of dystopian language — it can certainly be effective shorthand for “this is fucked in a new way, pay attention.” A good example is this series of viral tweets that chronicle a day of peaceful protest where demonstrators were in turn greeted with the creepy electrified visage of Gov. Andrew Cuomo on a towering billboard, beaming down the newly instated curfew. A couple hours later, many protesters would be beaten.

NYC Has Become A Dystopian Novel: What Happened After 8pm Curfew

I’ve been to many protests and marches during my life, but I’ve never seen anything like what we experienced last night.

I think everyone around the country and world needs to understand what’s happening here. pic.twitter.com/kWdgdLxZ6M

— Frederick Joseph (@FredTJoseph) June 3, 2020

And dystopias can still jolt the politically uninvolved to wake up — this podcaster even pointed to Elysium as an entry point into radical politics. But the surfeit of commentary that amounts to “wow, this is like Blade Runner send tweet” needs an upgrade. White viewers like me need to rethink and reevaluate what it means to watch and read popular dystopian fiction, how those products are shaping our perspectives and critiques of the futures and what they’re missing. And many more Black voices clearly need to be added to the mainstream canon and the broader discussion — there’s tons of great Black dystopian fiction; Dhalgren by Samuel Delany, Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor, Zone One by Colson Whitehead, pretty much anything by Ishmael Reed. Who Fears Death is in development for a TV series, which is a start, but these voices need to be better foregrounded and made central to modern dystopia discourse.

A lack of diversity has been a problem in science fiction since the genre’s inception, and it persists. When I went to the Nebulas, a high-profile sci-fi awards conference last year, attendees were overwhelmingly white. The fact that Octavia Butler’s magisterial Parable of the Sower — a dystopia that actually and skillfully manages to interrogate climate change, total economic collapse, privatization, and racist oppression — is somehow not a film or a limited series yet is as scathing an indictment of Hollywood’s insistence on whitewashing dystopias as anything. The book absolutely rips.

This is not to disparage anyone who feels like they’re living in a certain kind of almost-future hell. The number of people who genuinely experience the world as an impending or current dystopia is almost certainly rising in tandem with trends of still-increasing inequality. A decade of jobless recovery ended in 2019 with the highest levels of income inequality in 50 years, and record numbers of people of all backgrounds, even whites, are sliding into poverty and despair, and our encounters with climate change, technological surveillance, conservatism’s hard drift toward authoritarianism, and all of the above being increasingly mediated through digital devices. Our current socioeconomic system is now ideally structured to be a dystopian protagonist generator. It is rewarding elites with unprecedented wealth and luxury, equipping the agents of the state with increasingly advanced weapons and technology, exacerbating ecological collapse, and positioning us all to experience the devastation alone, blinking into a screen, hoping for tiny units of validation from a pithy comment or two about the state of the morass on social media. It is us versus [gestures wildly] all of that, out there.

Which makes it all the more imperative that white fans, pundits, and observers stop ignoring what it has historically meant to experience actual dystopian conditions. It means acknowledging and working to improve the material conditions for those who are surviving the current iteration, and not glibly waving off dystopia as some always-approaching, faceless Empire without zeroing in on the nation’s institutional prejudices, its targets for violence, its specific hatreds. It means we have to stop LARPing in appropriated fictions. It means understanding that this has always been a dystopia — and that those who have always resisted it are at the center of the story.

Is Data Our New False Religion?

Posted on July 3, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Here’s how every modern con starts: let’s look at the data. Every modern con starts with an earnest appeal to look at the data because the con artist has assembled the data to grease the slides of the con.

We have been indoctrinated into a new and false religion, the faith of data. We’ve been relentlessly indoctrinated with the quasi-religious belief that “data doesn’t lie,” when the reality is that data consistently misleads us because that is the intent.

Nobody in the False Religion of Data ever looks at what we don’t measure because that would uncover disruptive truths. My latest book Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World looks at everything consequential that we don’t measure, and since we don’t measure it, we assume it doesn’t exist. That’s the end-game of the False Religion of Data: what’s actually important isn’t measured and therefore it doesn’t exist, while what is measured is artfully packaged to support a narrative that enriches those behind the screen of “objective data-based science.”

The data-based con can be constructed in any number of ways. A few data points can be cleverly extrapolated to “prove” some self-serving claim, a bit of data can be conjured into a model that just so happens to support the most profitable policy option, inconvenient data points can be covertly deleted via “filtering out the outliers,” statistical trickery can be invoked (with a wave of this magic wand…) to declare semi-random data “statistically significant,” and so on, in an almost endless stream of tricks.

Exhibit #1: the official rate of inflation. Here is the data con elevated to artistry. As I explained in Burrito Index Update: Burrito Cost Triples, Official Inflation Up 43% from 2001 (May 31, 2018), apples-to-apples unmanipulated data shows inflation is dramatically reducing the purchasing power of wages, a dynamic that is unevenly distributed: Inflation Isn’t Evenly Distributed: The Protected Are Fine, the Unprotected Are Impoverished Debt-Serfs (May 25, 2017).

While the official statistics on inflation claim an annual rate of 2.5%, unmanipulated estimates (the Chapwood Index for example) find inflation is north of 10% in major U.S. urban areas.

The official data soothsayers’ bag of tricks include completely bogus, made-up “hedonic adjustments” which magically lower the price of real-world goods and services. Autos are supposedly “cheaper” now because they’re so much safer and reliable. Perhaps, but can we be honest and admit they cost a lot more than they did a generation ago?

No, Autos Are Not “Cheaper Now” (June 28, 2019)

The poor fools giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the con artists of Big Data Marketing apparently don’t understand the flimsiness of the “science.” As Mark, Jesse and I discuss in our latest Salon, Algorithmic Guerrilla Warfare, a few purposefully misleading data points turn the entire Big Data Marketing “science” into the familar “garbage in, garbage out.”

And so here we are in the midst of a pandemic, and the battles over “what the data tells us” sound more like religious wars than science. Everybody’s in such a hurry to conjure up a profitable con or make grandiose claims for their narrative that what we aren’t measuring is ignored.

Here’s the raw data I’d like to see collected:

1. What percentage of people under the age of 50 who do not have chronic health conditions who test positive end up with severe symptoms that incapacitate them for weeks or months?

2. What percentage of these younger, healthier people who exhibit severe symptoms have organ damage that doesn’t heal in a few months?

3. What percentage of people who had antibodies for the virus end up coming down with the illness again a few months later?

Collecting this data is non-trivial, and so it may never be collected–partly because the results might not support the approved narratives: whatever data we don’t collect doesn’t exist and can’t disrupt our models, profit centers, narratives, policies, etc.

In the false religion of data, heresy is asking for data that is not being collected because it might reveal unpalatably unprofitable realities. Much safer to burn heretics at the stake than let them question the cons.

Americans Have Already Skipped Payments On More Than 100 Million Loans, And Job Losses Continue To Escalate

Posted on July 2, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Michael Snyder

Source: Economic Collapse Blog

Those that have been hoping for some sort of a “V-shaped recovery” have had their hopes completely dashed. U.S. workers continue to lose jobs at a staggering rate, and economic activity continues to remain at deeply suppressed levels all over the nation. Of course this wasn’t supposed to happen now that states have been “reopening” their economies. We were told that things would soon be getting back to normal and that the economic numbers would rebound dramatically. But that is not happening. In fact, the number of Americans that filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week was much higher than expected…

Weekly jobless claims stayed above 1 million for the 13th consecutive week as the coronavirus pandemic continued to hammer the U.S. economy.

First-time claims totaled 1.5 million last week, higher than the 1.3 million that economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been expecting. The government report’s total was 58,000 lower than the previous week’s 1.566 million, which was revised up by 24,000.

To put this in perspective, let me once again remind my readers that prior to this year the all-time record for a single week was just 695,000. So even though more than 44 million Americans had already filed initial claims for unemployment benefits before this latest report, there were still enough new people losing jobs to more than double that old record from 1982.

That is just astounding. We were told that the economy would be regaining huge amounts of jobs by now, but instead job losses remain at a catastrophic level that is unlike anything that we have ever seen before in all of U.S. history.

With the addition of this latest number, a grand total of nearly 46 million Americans have now filed initial claims for unemployment benefits since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

If you can read that statement and still believe that the U.S. economy is not imploding, I would like to know what you are smoking, because it must be pretty powerful.

Some of the things that we are seeing happen around the country right now are absolutely nuts. For example, earlier this week in Kentucky it was being reported that people were waiting in line for up to 8 hours to talk with a state official face to face about their unprocessed unemployment claims…

The state police said it will be an 8 hour wait from the back of the line to speak to a state employee about unemployment. pic.twitter.com/plGONcpS6n

— Daniel Desrochers (@drdesrochers) June 17, 2020

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

By now, the U.S. economy was supposed to be roaring back to life and we were supposed to be entering a new golden age of American prosperity.

Unfortunately, the truth is that more bad economic news is hitting us on a continual basis, and that isn’t going to change any time soon.

Over the past few days, we have learned that Hilton is laying off 22 percent of its corporate staff, and AT&T has announced that it will be eliminating 3,400 jobs and closing 250 stores…

The wireless carrier AT&T is cutting 3,400 jobs and shutting down 250 stores over the next few weeks, according to a statement from the Communications Workers of America, a union representing AT&T workers.

The AT&T Mobility and Cricket Wireless retail closures will affect 1,300 jobs, while the other layoffs are said to be affecting technical and clerical workers.

Needless to say, all of these job losses are having a tremendous ripple effect throughout the economy.

Without paychecks coming in, a lot of Americans are having a really tough time paying their bills, and the Wall Street Journal is reporting that payments have already been skipped on more than 100 million loans…

Americans have skipped payments on more than 100 million student loans, auto loans and other forms of debt since the coronavirus hit the U.S., the latest sign of the toll the pandemic is taking on people’s finances.

The number of accounts that enrolled in deferment, forbearance or some other type of relief since March 1 and remain in such a state rose to 106 million at the end of May, triple the number at the end of April, according to credit-reporting firm TransUnion.

Wow.

To me, that is an almost unimaginable number, and it has become clear that a tremendous amount of pain is ahead for the financial institutions that are holding these loans.

A lot of people out there are going to keep hoping that there will be some sort of an economic rebound, but the cold, hard reality of the matter is that fear of COVID-19 is going to keep a large segment of the population from resuming normal economic activities for the foreseeable future. And it certainly doesn’t help that the number of confirmed cases in the U.S. has been steadily rising over the past couple of weeks and that the mainstream media has been endlessly warning that a “second wave” is coming.

If you doubt what I am saying, just look at what is happening to the restaurant industry. We had started to see a small bit of improvement in the numbers, but now fear of a “second wave” has caused restaurant traffic to start cratering again…

After three months of slow but consistent improvement in restaurant dining data in the US and across the globe, in its latest update on “the state of the restaurant industry”, OpenTable today reported the biggest drop in seated restaurant diners (from online, phone and walk-in reservations) since the depth of the global shutdown in March.

As shown in the OpenTable graphic below, on Sunday, June 14, restaurant traffic suddenly tumbled, sliding from a -66.5% y/y decline as of June 13 to -78.8% globally.

This was mostly due to a sharp drop in US restaurant diners, which plunged by 13% – from -65% to -78% – the biggest one day drop since the start of the shutdown in the US, and the second biggest one day drop on record.

Business travel is another area where we are seeing signs of big trouble ahead. The following comes from Yves Smith…

Business travel is not coming back any time soon. People are getting accustomed to Zoom. And word may also get out that domestic flying is much worse than it used to be, which will be a deterrent to those who might be so bold as to want to get on a plane. That is a fundamental blow to airlines, airport vendors, hotels, restaurants, and convention centers. Hotel occupancy in April was 24.5% which if anything seems high based on my personal datapoints. The pricings I see say that hotel operators are not expecting much if any improvement through the summer.

Like many of you, I wish that economic conditions would go back to the way they used to be, but that simply is not going to happen.

Yes, we will see economic numbers go up and down over the coming months, but a return to “the good times” is not in the cards.

And what hardly anyone realizes is that this is just the beginning of our problems, and I am working on a new project right now which will explain why this is true in great detail.

So stay tuned, because things are about to get really, really “interesting”.

	You Don’t Have To Wa… on You Don’t Have To Wait For Hal…
	ALL OUT WAR ON THE L… on ALL OUT WAR ON THE LIFE F…
	Pacific.scoop.co.nz… on Killing the Biosphere to Fast-…
	Reid Mukai on Saturday Matinee: Wizards
	Lara/Trace on Saturday Matinee: Wizards

After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Tag Archives: Pandemic

Remdesivir for Covid-19: $1.6 Billion for a “Modestly Beneficial” Drug?

America Has Always Been a Dystopia

Too many of us just haven’t been paying attention