Monthly Archives: June 2021

On the Road to Serfdom ?

Is a “Climate Lockdown” on the horizon?

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by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

If and when the powers-that-be decide to move on from their pandemic narrative, lockdowns won’t be going anywhere. Instead it looks like they’ll be rebranded as “climate lockdowns”, and either enforced or simply held threateningly over the public’s head.

At least, according to an article written by an employee of the WHO, and published by a mega-coporate think-tank.

Let’s dive right in.

THE REPORT’S AUTHOR AND BACKERS

The report, titled “Avoiding a climate lockdown”, was written by Mariana Mazzucato, a professor of economics at University College London, and head of something called the Council on the Economics of Health for All, a division of the World Health Organization.

It was first published in October 2020 by Project Syndicate, a non-profit media organization that is (predictably) funded through grants from the Open society Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and many, many others.

After that, it was picked up and republished by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), which describes itself as “a global, CEO-led organization of over 200 leading businesses working together to accelerate the transition to a sustainable world.”.

The WBCSD’s membership is essentially every major company in the world, including Chevron, BP, Bayer, Walmart, Google and Microsoft. Over 200 members totalling well over 8 TRILLION dollars in annual revenue.

In short: an economist who works for the WHO has written a report concerning “climate lockdowns”, which has been published by both a Gates+Soros backed NGO AND a group representing almost every bank, oil company and tech giant on the planet.

Whatever it says, it clearly has the approval of the people who run the world.

WHAT DOES IT SAY?

The text of the report itself is actually quite craftily constructed. It doesn’t outright argue for climate lockdowns, but instead discusses ways “we” can prevent them.

As COVID-19 spread […] governments introduced lockdowns in order to prevent a public-health emergency from spinning out of control. In the near future, the world may need to resort to lockdowns again – this time to tackle a climate emergency […] To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently.

This cleverly creates a veneer of arguing against them, whilst actually pushing the a priori assumptions that any so-called “climate lockdowns” would a) be necessary and b) be effective. Neither of which has ever been established.

Another thing the report assumes is some kind of causal link between the environment and the “pandemic”:

COVID-19 is itself a consequence of environmental degradation

I wrote an article, back in April, exploring the media’s persistent attempts to link the Covid19 “pandemic” with climate change. Everybody from the Guardian to the Harvard School of Public Health is taking the same position – “The root cause of pandemics [is] the destruction of nature”:

The razing of forests and hunting of wildlife is increasingly bringing animals and the microbes they harbour into contact with people and livestock.

There is never any scientific evidence cited to support this position. Rather, it is a fact-free scare-line used to try and force a mental connection in the public, between visceral self-preservation (fear of disease) and concern for the environment. It is as transparent as it is weak.

“CLIMATE LOCKDOWNS”

So, what exactly is a “climate lockdown”? And what would it entail?

The author is pretty clear:

Under a “climate lockdown,” governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling.

There you have it. A “climate lockdown” means no more red meat, the government setting limits on how and when people use their private vehicles and further (unspecified) “extreme energy-saving measures”. It would likely include previously suggested bans on air travel, too.

All in all, it is potentially far more strict than the “public health policy” we’ve all endured for the last year.

As for forcing fossil fuel companies to stop drilling, that is drenched in the sort of ignorance of practicality that only exists in the academic world. Supposing we can switch to entirely rely on renewables for energy, we still wouldn’t be able to stop drilling for fossil fuels.

Oil isn’t just used as fuel, it’s also needed to lubricate engines and manufacture chemicals and plastics. Plastics used in the manufacture of wind turbines and solar panels, for example.

Coal isn’t just needed for power stations, but also to make steel. Steel which is vital to pretty much everything humans do in the modern world.

It reminds me of a Victoria Wood sketch from the 1980s, where an upper-middle class woman remarks, upon meeting a coal miner, “I suppose we don’t really need coal, now we’ve got electricity.”

A lot of post-fossil utopian ideas are sold this way, to people who are comfortably removed from the way the world actually works. This mirrors the supposed “recovery” the environment experienced during lockdown, a mythic creation selling a silver lining of house arrest to people who think that because they’re having their annual budget meetings over Zoom, somehow China stopped manufacturing 900 million tonnes of steel a year, and the US military doesn’t produce more pollution than 140 different countries combined.

The question, really, is why would an NGO backed by – among others – Shell, BP and Chevron, possibly want to suggest a ban on drilling for fossil fuel? But that’s a discussion for another time.

AVOIDING A “CLIMATE LOCKDOWN”

So, the “climate lockdown” is a mix of dystopian social control, and impractical nonsense likely designed to sell an agenda. But don’t worry, we don’t have to do this. There is a way to avoid these extreme measures, the author says so:

To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently […] Addressing this triple crisis requires reorienting corporate governance, finance, policy, and energy systems toward a green economic transformation […] Far more is needed to achieve a green and sustainable recovery […] we want to transform the future of work, transit, and energy use.

“Overhaul”? “reorienting”? “transformation”?

Seems like we’re looking at a new-built society. A “reset”, if you will, and given the desired scope, you could even call it a “great reset”, I suppose.

Except, of course, the Great Reset is just a wild “conspiracy theory”. The elite doesn’t want a Great Reset, even if they keep saying they do…

…they just want a massive wholesale “transformation” of our social, financial, governmental and energy sectors.

They want you to own nothing and be happy. Or else.

Because that’s the oddest thing about this particular article, whereas most fear-porn public programming at least attempts subtlety, there is very definitely an overtly threatening tone to this piece [emphasis added]:

we are approaching a tipping point on climate change, when protecting the future of civilization will require dramatic interventions […] One way or the other, radical change is inevitable; our task is to ensure that we achieve the change we want – while we still have the choice.

The whole article is not an argument, so much as an ultimatum. A gun held to the public’s collective head. “Obviously we don’t want to lock you up inside your homes, force you to eat processed soy cubes and take away your cars,”they’re telling us, “but we might have to, if you don’t take our advice.”

Will there be “climate lockdowns” in the future? I wouldn’t be surprised. But right now – rather than being seriously mooted – they are fulfilling a different role. A frightening hypothetical – A threat used to bully the public into accepting the hardline globalist reforms that make up the “great reset”.

Many thanks to all the people on social media who brought this to our attention.
Western Hegemony's Collapse

Dollar’s Purchasing Power Plunged At Fastest Pace Since 1982

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Authored by Wolf Richter via WolfStreet.com,

…and it’s a lot worse than it appears.

The Consumer Price Index jumped 0.6% in May, after having jumped 0.8% in April, and 0.6% in March – all three the steepest month-to-month jumps since 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics today. For the three months combined, CPI has jumped by 2.0%, or by an “annualized” pace of 8.1%. This current three-month pace of inflation as measured by CPI has nothing to do with the now infamous “Base Effect,” which I discussed in early April in preparation for these crazy times; the Base Effect applies only to year-over-year comparisons.

On a year-over-year basis, including the Base Effect, but also including the low readings last fall which reduce the 12-month rate, CPI rose 5.0%, the largest year-over year increase since 2008.

In terms of the politically incorrect way of calling consumer price inflation: The purchasing power of the consumer dollar – everything denominated in dollars for consumers, including their labor – has dropped by 0.8% in May, according to the BLS, and by 2.4% over the past three months, the biggest three-month plunge in purchasing power since 1982:

On an annualized basis, the three-month drop in purchasing power amounted to a drop of 9.5%, and this eliminates the Base Effect which only applies to year-over-year comparisons.

That plunge in purchasing power is “permanent” not “temporary.”

Yup, the current plunge in purchasing power is permanent. And the plunge in purchasing power in the future is also permanent.

The only thing that might make a small portion of it “temporary” is if there is a period of consumer price deflation, which has happened for only a few quarters in my entire life, for example in the last few months of 2008, which is indicated in the chart above. So I’m not getting my hopes up.

The rest of the time, we’ve had lots of decline in purchasing power. And that has proven to be rock-solid “permanent,” and we never got that lost purchasing power back.

Durable Goods inflation exploded by 10.3% from a year ago.

And it jumped by 3.0% in May from April, the biggest month-to-month jump since 1980. The problem is across the board, but the biggest biggie is used vehicles.

Used Vehicle CPI exploded by nearly 30% year-over-year, and by 7.3% just in May. I have long been fuming about and dissecting the reasons behind this price surge, based on data from the auto industry. And it is now seriously showing up in used-vehicle CPI.

This chart shows the actual CPI as a price index, not the year-over-year percentage change of that index. This eliminates the issue of the Base Effect.

But “hedonic quality adjustments” over the years have held down the CPI for used vehicles, producing this astonishing chart above, where the index in 2020 was below where it had been 20 years earlier, even as in the real world, used vehicles got a lot more expensive. Only the scary-crazy price spikes in May and April pushed the index above its level 20 years ago.

These hedonic quality adjustments are applied to account for improvements in vehicles over the years, such going from a three-speed automatic transmission to a 10-speed electronically controlled transmission. The price increases theoretically associated with “quality improvements” are removed from the CPI.

In theory, CPI attempts to measure price changes of the same item over time; and when the price change is based on improvements, it is not inflation because you’re getting more as you pay more.

In practice, this has led to a consistent, purposeful, politically convenient, and bipartisan understatement of inflation as measured by CPI.

New Vehicle CPI repressed by hedonic quality adjustments. The adjustments have practically eliminated the appearance of inflation as measured by CPI in new vehicles, even though new vehicles have gotten a lot more expensive, with the cheapest cars disappearing from the automakers’ lineups.

Nevertheless, year-over-year new vehicle prices rose 3.3%, the biggest increase since 2012, despite vigorous hedonic quality adjustments. Note how the index used to rise into the mid-1990s, at which point the hedonic quality adjustments were applied and forced the index back down:

For a dose of reality, data from the auto industry shows that the “average transaction price” (ATP) of new vehicles sold to retail customers in May jumped to $38,255. The ATP is a function of the price of new vehicles sold and of the mix of new vehicles sold. Based on data provided by J.D. Power, the ATP has jumped by 28% over the past seven years since 2014. Note the huge jump since June 2020:

Services CPI jumped 3.1% year-over-year, held down by fake homeownership cost index.

About two-thirds of the overall CPI is for services. They include the biggest biggie of all: housing – more on that in a moment. They also include healthcare, insurance, education, subscriptions for services such as broadband, cellphone, streaming, etc.

The CPI for services rose by 3.1% year-over-year and jumped by 0.5% in May. Over the past three months, the CPI for services rose 1.3%, for an annualized increase of 5.2%.

The actual plunge in purchasing power is even worse.

Housing costs – rent and homeownership costs combined – account for about one-third of overall CPI – it’s the biggest category in CPI.

The rent component of CPI, called “rent of primary residence” (=7.7% of total CPI in May) has been rising month after month this year at a constant 0.2%, including in May, and is up 2.2% over the 12-month period.

The homeownership component, called “Owners’ equivalent rent of residences” (=23.8% of overall CPI in May), ticked up just 0.3% for the month and a mind-bendingly low 2.1% for the 12-month period, despite the explosion of home prices over the past 12 months.

The reason this homeownership component completely misses the red-hot inflation in housing – the loss of the dollar’s purchasing power with regards to homes – is that it’s based on surveys of homeowners’ estimates of how much their home would rent for. It is a measure of rent, as guessed by the homeowner (red line in the chart below).

The Case-Shiller Home Price Index is a more realistic house-price inflation measure. It’s based on the sales-pairs method, measuring the price changes over time for the same house, soared by 13.2% year-over year, the red-hottest increase since December 2005 (purple line):

The loss of purchasing power is “permanent.”

So, hedonic quality adjustments for durable goods, such as new and used vehicles, plus the elegant fiction of “Owners’ equivalent rent of residences” for housing costs, plus some other CPI reduction methods, such as “substitution,” see to it that the actual loss of purchasing power of the consumer dollar – and of labor that is paid in dollars – is far worse than even these very ugly inflation data released today.

And this loss of purchasing power is permanent. It won’t suddenly come back, except fractionally during these minor bouts of deflation we get every now and then.

What’s “temporary” is the pace of the loss of purchasing power, in the sense that it changes every month.

For sure, the spike in used vehicle prices cannot go on infinitely. At some point it will have to back off. But then other prices will spike, such as airline tickets, hotel bookings, restaurant meals, or insurance.

Inflation is a game of whack-a-mole. One pops up as another backs off. So it could very well be that CPI inflation may be 4% next May, down from 5% now, and we’ll be celebrating that the 5% was “temporary,” and was replaced by 4%, hahahaha. But the purchasing power of the dollar that is lost every month is lost permanently.

The End is Here

Inflation Is Starting To Get Really Crazy… And It Is Worse Than You Think

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Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Inflation is making headlines all over the country, but the mainstream media is not being honest about the true severity of the crisis. We are being told that the official rate of inflation is still in single digits, but what we aren’t being told is that the way inflation is calculated has changed dramatically over the years. In fact, according to Forbes “the government has changed the way it calculates inflation more than 20 times” over the past 30 years. The rate of inflation directly affects so many other things in our system, and the government would like to keep that number as low as possible. So they tinkered and tinkered with the formula until they got it just where they wanted it.

But even with the highly modified formula that they are now using, the rate of inflation still rose at the fastest pace in almost 13 years last month…

The consumer price index, which represents a basket including food, energy, groceries, housing costs and sales across a spectrum of goods, rose 5% from a year earlier. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been expecting a gain of 4.7%.

The reading represented the biggest CPI gain since the 5.3% increase in August 2008, just before the financial crisis sent the U.S. spiraling into the worst recession since the Great Depression.

We all remember what happened in the months following August 2008.

Hopefully we will not have a repeat of that.

Of course the truth is that consumer prices are not just rising at a 5 percent rate in the United States right now.

According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if the rate of inflation was still calculated the way that it was back in 1990, it would be above 8 percent right now.

And if the rate of inflation was still calculated the way that it was back in 1980, it would currently be sitting at about 13 percent.

But 5 percent inflation sure sounds a whole lot better than 13 percent, doesn’t it?

One thing that I am keeping a very close eye on is food inflation. Earlier today, I came across a story from one CBS affiliate in which they used the term “sticker shock” to describe what consumers are now experiencing at the grocery store…

You may have noticed a significant jump in prices at the grocery store.

More and more grocery shoppers are experiencing sticker shock every day. The price of food — especially meat, fruit and vegetables — is going up.

If prices were increasing at just a 5 percent annual rate, that wouldn’t be a big deal.

Sadly, the reality is much worse than that, and that is especially true for meat prices. According to one deli owner, the true rate of inflation for meat prices is “probably closer” to 20 or 30 percent…

Jeff Cohen, a deli owner and meat wholesaler, said those factors are making the price of meat out of control.

“They said on national news it’s 10 percent. But that’s not true. it’s probably closer 20, 30 percent,” Cohen said.

We will continue to get a lot of happy talk from the Biden administration and from the Federal Reserve, but this is becoming a real national crisis.

When CBS News interviewed one shopper in Maryland, she said that she is now spending about twice as much on groceries as she did before…

Abby Walter said she started noticing her grocery bill creeping up earlier this year. Prior to January, the Maryland resident had typically spent about $75 a week on groceries. Now her bill is averaging about $150 or even more.

I still remember when I could get an entire shopping cart of food for just 25 dollars.

Now if I can get an entire cart of food for less than 200 dollars, I consider that to be a monumental achievement.

I try really hard to take advantage of sales and make every dollar stretch as far as I can. But these days some of the sale prices are higher than the old regular prices.

As global commodity prices have exploded higher in recent months, companies have been forced to pass those increases along to consumers, but they are attempting to use language that will not cause widespread alarm…

If you ask Pampers maker Procter & Gamble Co., it’s not raising prices, it’s “taking pricing.” Rival Unilever, known for Dove soap and Axe body spray, says it’s been “very active with pricing.” The prize for creativity — so far at least — has been home-improvement retailer Lowe’s Cos., whose finance chief told investors Wednesday that it was “elevating our pricing ecosystem.”

What in the world is a “pricing ecosystem”?

I would love to have a representative from Lowe’s define that for me.

Executives from General Mills are also using language that borders on the absurd…

Then there’s cereal maker General Mills Inc., whose jargon includes arcane phrases like “strategic revenue management” and “holistic margin management,” which is not language you’d ever find on the back of a box of Lucky Charms. The company uses those terms so often, in fact, that its CEO now just refers to them by the acronyms SRM and HMM.

Why can’t they just say that they are “raising prices”?

These days, I cringe whenever I go down the cereal aisle. It is hard for me to believe that cereal prices are so high now, but I know that they will eventually get a whole lot higher.

We have way too many dollars chasing way too few goods and services, and instead of taking emergency measures to get inflation under control our leaders seem intent on making things even worse.

The Biden administration wanted to spend 2 trillion dollars on infrastructure, but a group of U.S. Senators is currently working on a “compromise deal” that would only provide 1.2 trillion dollars in new infrastructure spending.

This is on top of the trillions upon trillions of dollars that we have already borrowed and spent during this crisis.

We can’t do this anymore.

It is complete and utter insanity.

But our politicians in Washington don’t seem to care. They are going to continue to borrow and spend giant mountains of money that we do not have, and the Federal Reserve is going to continue to shovel enormous gobs of cash into the financial system.

So more inflation is on the way, and the standard of living for most Americans is going to continue to go down.

Scamdemic - Corona Virus

China Locks Down 15 Million People For 100 Cases of “Delta Variant”

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by Marc Slavo via: SHTFplan.com

The ruling class in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong is carrying out mass testing and has locked down entire areas of the province to try to control a “flare-up” of coronavirus cases in Guangzhou. The “flare-up” consists of 100 cases of the “Delta variant” and 15 million others are now prisoners of the state.

The psychos are not giving up on their lockdowns.

The city has cited the Delta variant of the coronavirus, first detected in India, as a driver behind the uptick in cases it has reported since the latter part of May. The Delta strain is known to be highly transmissible.

Guangzhou, a city of over 15 million people and the provincial capital, has reported 96 of the over 100 cases in Guangdong province in this latest outbreak. –CNBC

Should we do some quick math? 1 out of 15 million is .0000066667% of people. That’s what a Chinese province is locking down for. Yike. We’ve always been slaves to the government, but this planet has reached a level of totalitarian control that is almost beyond comprehension.

Liwan, still the worst-hit district, has imposed strict lockdowns on certain streets. Some areas are not letting people in and out of a certain zone and residents are not allowed to leave their building. Twenty-four-hour checkpoints have been set up to monitor movement in and out of these areas. –CNBC

The mainstream media continues to attempt to normalize lockdowns as something we should just submit to without question. And it isn’t just China. Australia recently locked down again for 26 cases of COVID and the United Kingdom is threatening to NOT lift their over a year-long lockdown because of the “Delta variant.”

Australia Institutes Strict Lockdowns AGAIN After 26 Tested Positive For COVID

Guangzhou has carried out over 16 million tests between May 26 and midnight on June 5. Of those tests, they found 100 that were positive.

Still think this is about health? It is not and it has not been since day one. How anyone can read those numbers apply logic and critical thinking and still come up with lockdowns as the best solution is beyond comprehension. We would be delusional at this point to assume another lockdown cannot happen in police state USA.

Scamdemic - Corona Virus

How Fanatics Took Over The World

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Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via DailyReckoning.com,

Early in the pandemic, I had been furiously writing articles about lockdowns. My phone rang with a call from a man named Dr. Rajeev Venkayya. He is the head of a vaccine company but introduced himself as former head of pandemic policy for the Gates Foundation.

Now I was listening.

I did not know it then, but I’ve since learned from Michael Lewis’s (mostly terrible) book The Premonition that Venkayya was, in fact, the founding father of lockdowns. While working for George W. Bush’s White House in 2005, he headed a bioterrorism study group. From his perch of influence – serving an apocalyptic president — he was the driving force for a dramatic change in U.S. policy during pandemics.

He literally unleashed hell.

That was 15 years ago. At the time, I wrote about the changes I was witnessing, worrying that new White House guidelines (never voted on by Congress) allowed the government to put Americans in quarantine while closing their schools, businesses, and churches shuttered, all in the name of disease containment.

I never believed it would happen in real life; surely there would be public revolt. Little did I know, we were in for a wild ride…

The Man Who Lit the Match

Last year, Venkayya and I had a 30-minute conversation; actually, it was mostly an argument. He was convinced that lockdown was the only way to deal with a virus. I countered that it was wrecking rights, destroying businesses, and disturbing public health. He said it was our only choice because we had to wait for a vaccine. I spoke about natural immunity, which he called brutal. So on it went.

The more interesting question I had at the time was why this certified Big Shot was wasting his time trying to convince a poor scribbler like me. What possible reason could there be?

The answer, I now realized, is that from February to April 2020, I was one of the few people (along with a team of researchers) who openly and aggressively opposed what was happening.

There was a hint of insecurity and even fear in Venkayya’s voice. He saw the awesome thing he had unleashed all over the world and was anxious to tamp down any hint of opposition. He was trying to silence me. He and others were determined to crush all dissent.

This is how it has been for the better part of the last 15 months, with social media and YouTube deleting videos that dissent from lockdowns. It’s been censorship from the beginning.

For all the problems with Lewis’s book, and there are plenty, he gets this whole backstory right. Bush came to his bioterrorism people and demanded some huge plan to deal with some imagined calamity. When Bush saw the conventional plan — make a threat assessment, distribute therapeutics, work toward a vaccine — he was furious.

“This is bulls**t,” the president yelled.

“We need a whole-of-society plan. What are you going to do about foreign borders? And travel? And commerce?”

Hey, if the president wants a plan, he’ll get a plan.

“We want to use all instruments of national power to confront this threat,” Venkayya reports having told colleagues.

“We were going to invent pandemic planning.”

This was October 2005, the birth of the lockdown idea.

Dr. Venkayya began to fish around for people who could come up with the domestic equivalent of Operation Desert Storm to deal with a new virus. He found no serious epidemiologists to help. They were too smart to buy into it. He eventually bumped into the real lockdown innovator working at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.

Cranks, Computers, and Cooties

His name was Robert Glass, a computer scientist with no medical training, much less knowledge, about viruses. Glass, in turn, was inspired by a science fair project that his 14-year-old daughter was working on.

She theorized (like the cooties game from grade school) that if school kids could space themselves out more or even not be at school at all, they would stop making each other sick. Glass ran with the idea and banged out a model of disease control based on stay-at-home orders, travel restrictions, business closures, and forced human separation.

Crazy right? No one in public health agreed with him but like any classic crank, this convinced Glass even more. I asked myself, “Why didn’t these epidemiologists figure it out?” They didn’t figure it out because they didn’t have tools that were focused on the problem. They had tools to understand the movement of infectious diseases without the purpose of trying to stop them.

Genius, right? Glass imagined himself to be smarter than 100 years of experience in public health. One guy with a fancy computer would solve everything! Well, he managed to convince some people, including another person hanging around the White House named Carter Mecher, who became Glass’s apostle.

Please consider the following quotation from Dr. Mecher in Lewis’s book: “If you got everyone and locked each of them in their own room and didn’t let them talk to anyone, you would not have any disease.”

At last, an intellectual has a plan to abolish disease — and human life as we know it too! As preposterous and terrifying as this is — a whole society not only in jail but solitary confinement — it sums up the whole of Mecher’s view of disease. It’s also completely wrong.

Pathogens are part of our world; they are generated by human contact. We pass them onto each other as the price for civilization, but we also evolved immune systems to deal with them. That’s 9th-grade biology, but Mecher didn’t have a clue.

Fanatics Win the Day

Jump forward to March 12, 2020. Who exercised the major influence over the decision to close schools, even though it was known at that time that SARS-CoV-2 posed almost risk to people under the age of 20? There was even evidence that they did not spread COVID-19 to adults in any serious way.

Didn’t matter. Mecher’s models — developed with Glass and others — kept spitting out a conclusion that shutting down schools would drop virus transmission by 80%. I’ve read his memos from this period — some of them still not public — and what you observe is not science but ideological fanaticism in play.

Based on the timestamp and length of the emails, he was clearly not sleeping much. Essentially he was Lenin on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution. How did he get his way?

There were three key elements: public fear, media and expert acquiescence, and the baked-in reality that school closures had been part of “pandemic planning” for the better part of 15 years. Essentially, the lockdowners, over the course of 15 years, had worn out the opposition. Lavish funding, attrition of wisdom within public health, and ideological fanaticism prevailed.

Figuring out how our expectations for normal life were so violently foiled, how our happy lives were brutally crushed, will consume serious intellectuals for many years. But at least we now have a first draft of history.

As with almost every revolution in history, a small minority of crazy people with a cause prevailed over the humane rationality of multitudes. When people catch on, the fires of vengeance will burn very hot.

The task now is to rebuild a civilized life that is no longer so fragile as to allow insane people to lay waste to all that humanity has worked so hard to build.

Scamdemic - Corona Virus

Two-tier Societies Are Emerging, with Dwindling Rights for the Unvaccinated. Why Do Governments Consider Them such a Threat?

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By Rachel Marsden, columnist, political strategist and host of an independently produced French-language program that airs on Sputnik France. Her website can be found at rachelmarsden.com

While the authorities keep saying that Covid-19 vaccination isn’t obligatory – at least, not yet – good luck trying to live a normal life without it. It’s clear the ostracization of those who haven’t had the jab is well underway.

Last year, at this time, Covid-19 cases fell significantly without any substantial measures, as everything opened up for the summer and the powers-that-be in some countries allowed life to return to normal for a few months, all in the absence of vaccination.

This year, exactly the same phenomenon observed in 2020 is being attributed to mass inoculation. The narrative is that this is what’s saving us from Covid. And now the pressure’s on to force everyone into compliance, lest they want to live any semblance of normal life, beginning with summer travel.

Holiday options are shaping up to be quite different, depending on whether you’re vaccinated or not. France is now exempting vaccinated travelers from Europe and zero-Covid countries from quarantine and testing. But even vaccinated travelers from the US and elsewhere need to produce a negative test result before their flight, which begs the question, if the vaccine is so reliable, why do you need to test at all?

Unvaccinated travelers from outside Europe aren’t allowed to come to France for tourism. And if they must, for an imperative reason, a pre- and post-flight test and seven-day quarantine is imposed on arrival.

Canada currently forces its own returning citizens – the only travelers for whom the border is open – to quarantine in a government-designated facility at the traveler’s prepaid expense of up to $2,000, where they await a negative test result before completing the remaining 14-day quarantine at home. The hotel quarantine could be scrapped sometime this summer, but only for fully vaccinated returning Canadians – despite the fact that a scientific expert panel advised the government to drop the hotel quarantine altogether.

So, hassle-free travel to these countries and others is almost fully dependent on vaccination, even though these same governments have so little faith in the jab itself that they still require vaccinated travelers to be tested unless they’re coming in from a place where Covid-19 is so rare as to be virtually non-existent. Makes you wonder what the point of vaccine-based travel restrictions are if they’re viewed as so shoddy they can’t be trusted to prevent spread.

These rules reflect what we’ve already been told: that the vaccine doesn’t prevent disease or transmission, but rather reduces the likelihood of severe illness in the relative few who may have been prone to it.

Nor is the vaccine seemingly enough to allow life to go back to pre-pandemic norms in some places, even as the annual virus season draws to an end and summer ramps up. While some countries’ swimming pools and gyms are back to relatively normal capacity and use, others are still making patrons sign up for limited time slots and swim up one lane and down another in order to maintain social distancing between length swimmers – presumably, so they don’t risk infecting someone while breathing during front crawl.

Meanwhile, some American and Canadian universities are requiring Covid vaccination as a condition of attendance this fall. Why is all this necessary when it doesn’t stop transmission and anyone who’s worried about getting a serious form of Covid has already had the shot?

A medical advisory panel in France is also recommending that the vaccine be obligatory for certain public-facing professions and for school kids. This effectively means that any individuals who choose not to vaccinate – either because they already have natural immunity from the disease or figure that what they risk from the disease isn’t worth the potential long-term risks of taking a vaccine based on new, experimental technology – are going to find themselves with limited options.

There’s absolutely no justification for forcing anyone to vaccinate – for travel or otherwise. This mantra being bandied about that everyone has to do their part and take the shot in order to protect others is just total nonsense. The proof is in the lack of confidence that governments themselves are showing this summer by demanding that even the fully vaccinated take Covid tests.

The jab protects one person: the jabbed. That’s it. And no one should be ostracized or inconvenienced as a result of making a different choice for whatever reason. This highly personal medical decision is being misrepresented as some kind of collective necessity and is marginalizing those wanting to make a choice that’s different from the one that governments are pushing.

Since self-protection from serious forms of Covid-19 is in the hands of each individual, why exactly is the individual who chooses differently considered such a threat?

Cultural/Ideological Divide

Medical Journal Publishes Study Attacking ‘Whiteness’ as a ‘Malignant, Parasitic-lik e Condition’

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via RT

A prominent medical journal for US psychoanalysts has published a study demonizing “whiteness” as a “malignant, parasitic-like condition to which white people have a particular susceptibility.”

The study, which was given a platform late last month by the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, went on to portray whiteness as a disorder that doesn’t yet have a permanent cure. “Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable and perverse,” wrote author Donald Moss, a white New Yorker who has more than four decades of experience in private practice. “These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples.”

While it’s “nearly impossible” to eliminate such appetites, Moss said, they can be effectively treated with a combination of “psychic and social-historical interventions.” But medical professionals can only hope to “reshape” those appetites for the better, such as reducing their intensity, altering their aims and, in some cases, “turn those aims to the work of reparation.”

Moss’s claims were so astounding that some observers speculated that the journal article was fictional and perhaps satirical of anti-white wokeness. But the peer-reviewed study is real, and the former New York University educator appears to have plenty of like-minded in mental health circles. Last October, the American Journal of Community Psychology published an article calling for greater awareness and understanding of “whiteness,” as well as interventions to “dismantle whiteness.”

Just last week, it came to light that New York-based psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Aruna Khilanani had lectured at Yale University in April on “the psychopathic problem of the white mind.” “I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step,” Khilanani told students and faculty. She likened white patients to a “demented, violent predator who thinks they are a saint or superhero.”

The Ivy League school hosted the virtual lecture and made a recording available on its website, with restricted access. When controversy over the lecture surfaced, Yale issued a statement saying that the tone and content of Khilanani’s talk were “antithetical to the values of the school.”

The whiteness study provoked outrage on social media. “The entire mental health industry is irreparably broken – absolutely infested with this kind of madness,” podcast host Matt Walsh said on Twitter.

Other commenters found the article chilling, likening Moss’s language to Nazi propaganda against Jews in the 1930s and suggesting that a final solution is in the works.

“The language of genocide,” one observer said, while another warned, “We should be scared. Next is hospitalizing those afflicted by whiteness, reprogramming them, then extermination of many.”

Scamdemic - Corona Virus

Daszak: “…you insert the spike proteins from those viruses, see if they bind to human cells”

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Authored by Natalie Winters via TheNationalPulse.com,

EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak – who collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on research funded by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease – appears to boast about the manipulation of “killer” SARS-like coronaviruses carried out by his “colleagues in China” in a clip unearthed by The National Pulse.

Daszak made the admission at a 2016 forum discussing “emerging infectious diseases and the next pandemic,” which appears to be at odds with Fauci’s repeated denial of funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

While describing how his organization sequences deadly viruses, Daszak describes the process of “insert[ing] spike proteins” into viruses to see if they can “bind to human cells” as being carried out by his “colleagues in China”:

“Then when you get a sequence of a virus, and it looks like a relative of a known nasty pathogen, just like we did with SARS. We found other coronaviruses in bats, a whole host of them, some of them looked very similar to SARS. So we sequenced the spike protein: the protein that attaches to cells.Then we…

Well I didn’t do this work, but my colleagues in China did the work. You create pseudo particles, you insert the spike proteins from those viruses, see if they bind to human cells. At each step of this you move closer and closer to this virus could really become pathogenic in people. 

“You end up with a small number of viruses that really do look like killers,” he adds.

The comments follow growing evidence that Fauci’s NIAID has deep financial and personnel ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology – and that Daszak’s EcoHealth alliance was one of the primary proxies funneling the money to the Chinese Communist Party lab.

Over a dozen research papers carried out under a $3.7 million National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) grant list the Wuhan Lab’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Director Shi Zhengli as a co-author alongside Daszak. Shi has included these Fauci-backed grants on her resume.

The Wuhan lab has also listed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as one of its “partners,” secretly erasing the mention in March 2021.

[category scamdemic – corona virus]

Western Hegemony's Collapse

5x More EU Companies to Expand in China Than Not

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The European Union Chamber of Commerce in China published a new survey titled “European Business in China Business Confidence Survey 2021,” which stated European businesses are onshoring some of their supply chains and investing more in China. Out of the 585 European Chamber member companies operating in China, about 60% were expected to expand operations in the country, up from 51% last year. Half of the respondents reported profit margins in China were higher than their global average, increasing from 38% a year prior.

“As 2020 progressed, the resilience of China’s market provided much-needed shelter for European companies amidst the storm of the COVID-19 pandemic. Revenue trended only slightly downward, with 75% of respondents either maintaining or increasing revenue y-o-y, and profitability remained steady. On that foundation, optimism about near-term growth in China surged by 20 percentage points, and the number of European companies either expanding or looking to expand their business in China has increased,” the chamber said.

A quarter of respondents are onshoring some of their supply chains to China, with 4% attempting to entirely onshore. About 10% are diversifying future investment into other countries but will leave operations in China untouched. Only 4% are shifting investments out of China, with 1% fully divesting. “In other words, five times as many companies are onshoring as there is offshoring,” the chamber said.

Perhaps the European business community has concluded that it doesn’t have the industrial strength to compete with the Chinese economic powerhouse. This is terrible news for President Joe Biden, who continues to follow down the path of former President Trump’s decoupling movement of the US and Western allies against rising China.

But unlike the Cold War of the last century, this confrontation will be significantly intertwined with economics.

While the US attempts to decouple from China, its allies, mainly in Europe, are bowing down to China and have decided to join as they can’t compete. This will complicate Biden’s vision of the US and its Western allies in leading the world economically and militarily in the 21st century.

Western Hegemony's Collapse

China Mulls Unprecedented Legislation To Counter Western Sanctions

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via ZeroHedge

Beijing is poised to take an unprecedented step in its latest efforts to combat US and Western sanctions which have recently been ratcheted up particularly surrounding the Uyghur issue in Xinjiang. A draft law is now being examined by the National People’s Congress (NCP) which would shield Chinese entities and institutions from “the unilateral and discriminatory measures imposed by foreign countries” and ultimately the “long arm jurisdiction” of the United States, according to state media.

Called the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law, a vote by lawmakers is expected soon after a series of reviews by committees under the NPC, it will allow or possibly even require quick retaliatory measures in instances a foreign country targets a Chinese company, entity or individual with punitive legal measures – ensuring a greater level of tit-for-tat escalation. In short it would mean the power of the Chinese government to sanction all who comply with US/EU sanctions by drawing a bright red line, forcing entities to choose whether to comply to Washington’s side or Beijing’s side. Or in even simpler terms, it’s something which the United States has already long practiced – for example in the case of far-reaching Iran sanctions which blacklisted European or other companies which had dealings with the Islamic Republic.

Prior session of the National People’s Congress (NPC), via Xinhua

According to an expert quoted by the state-run Global Times, the law “will deter foreign governments, notably the US and the EU, from resorting to long-arm jurisdiction,…if Chinese entities are hit with unjustified sanctions, the proposed law is supposed to crystallize actionable countermeasures against the foreign governments and institutions…expecting the legal effort to make up for losses that Chinese entities would suffer.”

It’s intended to further boost Beijing’s legal firepower in hitting back – again which practically translates to any future measures out of the US or EU like to be automatically met with escalation in terms of trade disruptions or immediate measures targeting US or Western companies wishing to do business in China.

“Legal experts said that speeding up legislation in foreign-related fields is necessary as it’s important to use legal measures to safeguard the legitimate rights of Chinese institutions, enterprises and citizens,” GT comments further. “Especially in recent years, the US government has been imposing sanctions on some Chinese entities such as high-tech firms Huawei and ZTE for so-called national security risks, and sanctioned a number of senior Chinese officials under the US’ so-called Xinjiang and Hong Kong bills last year.”

And here’s more from the state publication:

While the EU has a regulation to protect against the effects of the extraterritorial application of legislation adopted by a third country and the US owns a large number of “legal ammunition” in terms of long-arm jurisdiction, China lacks relevant laws in response to the external legal weapons, Qi Kai, an associate professor of the Institute of Globalization and Global Issues at China University of Political Science and Law, told the Global Times on Monday.

Chinese commentators are treating it as a necessary ‘deterrence’ measure, but Rabobank details…

The example of the Australian government’s decision to tear up Victoria’s Belt and Road agreements with China is given as a “wake-up call” for China to“broaden the extraterritorial reach of its own legislation.” In other words, the proposed law would have allowed China to impose countermeasures on Australia, or demand compensation, for Canberra following Australian federal law within its own territory – because it harmed Chinese interests. Of course, the US, and now EU and UK –and Hong Kong– extend their legal remits outside their geographical territory. Now China is going to join in – and in the opposite direction to the West’s legal moves. This potentially leaves Western firms damned-if-they-do and damned-if-they-don’t, which is a wake-up call for those who haven’t heard any of the alarm bells so far. It’s also another factor likely to play into supply-chains and inflation over time, even if mentioning it is as popular as Invermectin.

* * *

In particular Chinese media has highlighted the West’s using stories of Xinjiang-related human rights abuse to “spread rumors and suppress China.”

The timing of the new legislation’s likely near-future passage will be interesting, given that as it’s being mulled over the G-7 summit will be underway in the UK (starting Friday), where it’s expected that Joe Biden and other world leaders representing the US, UK, Canada, Japan, Germany, France and Italy – and other guess countries – will produce a statement that’s heavily critical of China especially on the human rights front.