lewrockwell--2020-09-24--Two Possibilities: a US_China-Russia Partnership or WWIII

The Pentagon ’ s new military report on China released on September 1st has demonstrated that the outdated and deadly Cold War mentality which has wrought such destruction upon the world since the end of WWII has not only become more deeply embedded into the psyche of dominant foreign policy officials in the Pentagon , it demonstrated that the current American establishment is totally unfit to survive in today ’ s nuclear age .
In our nuclear age , Hobbesian laws of the jungle will only result in mass extermination .
If we are to survive beyond the coming decade @ @ @ @ @ @ @ higher moral paradigm befitting of human dignity becomes hegemonic .
If one wishes to play the role of Alice and join the tea party which these Pentagon Mad Hatters are hosting , one would be expected to believe that the belligerent aggressor in the Pacific theater is not the America which has spread its military tentacles around China ’ s backyard since Obama ’ s Asia Pivot that was announced in 2012 , but rather China itself .
The authors of the Pentagon report assert that it is China who is interested in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ law ” , conquering the weak of the Pacific and overtaking the US as a globally hegemonic power , both militarily and with their Belt and Road Initiative , which the Washington Consensus has labelled a debt trap .
Putin ’ s People : ... Belton , Catherine Best Price : $ 19.92 Buy New $ 19.95 More recently , Pompeo has sent Undersecretary of State Keith Krach to Taiwan to belligerently organize bilateral free trade deals and several military deals worth $ 7 billion which the current basket-case leadership of Taiwan is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the best psychological assessments of this report came from former Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter who made the point that the Pentagon authors suffer deeply from a disorder which Freud called “ projection ” ( attributing your own neurotic obsessions onto others ) .
In his RT op ed Ritter states : “ By projecting its own failed global ambitions onto China , the Department of Defense is failing to address the real reasons behind China ’ s military expansion.
” In this regard , the practices of debt trap diplomacy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decades since WWII—at the helm of the IMF and World Bank—have been projected onto China .
What is ignored in this assessment is the simple fact that debt slavery has provably increased among all recipients of western conditionality-laced loans for decades , with NO actual industrial development or genuine infrastructure that could empower those nations to repay those loans , China has done the opposite .
Every nation which has accepted China ’ s help along the New Silk Road with its African and South American extensions has benefited immeasurably with local manufacturing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have never been permitted by those western technocrats running the levers of credit for decades .
The September 1st Pentagon report tries to prove its claims by referring to China ’ s ambitions to double their nuclear deterrent arsenal from its current 215 to 430 by 2030 but completely ignores the fact that America itself owns over 3800 nuclear warheads ( with an additional 2000 in storage ) and has stated repeatedly its willingness to use them .
Why does China think it needs to upgrade this arsenal ?
According to the Pentagon @ @ @ @ @ @ @ global military ambitions to replace the USA .
The Return of Great Po ... Kroenig , Matthew Best Price : $ 25.10 Buy New $ 25.95 The reality is that China is merely responsive to the obvious containment/full spectrum dominance agenda which the USA has unleashed in recent years .
These operations feature war games throughout the Pacific and THAAD missile systems in South Korea which can easily be transformed into a first strike infrastructure which many game theorists believe can take out China ’ s ability to respond to a future attack @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bases outside of China ( except for one sole base in Djibouti ) is totally ignored as is the existence of over 800 U.S. military bases spread across the globe , with an abundance clustered around the perimeters of Russia and China .
Celebrating the 75th anniversary of Japan ’ s surrender , Philip Davidson ( head of the US Indo Pacific Command ) echoed the Pentagon report saying : “ An emboldened Communist Party of China seeks to change the world to one in which Chinese national power is more important than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ words of Mark Esper who had earlier announced the report on August 26 saying “ China ’ s global ambitions include establishing a security presence at strategic access points , such as its base in Africa , to enhance its ability to project power globally and across all domains .
Clearly , China seeks to undermine the free and open order itself , which impacts every nation supporting and benefiting from this system.
” In response to this supposed undermining of “ the free and open order ” , Esper brags that America @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can deter , compete and , if necessary , fight and win across all domains : air , land , sea , space , and cyberspace.
” While China is certainly trying to improve its military capabilities in the face of western aggression , Esper brags that the USA is supporting the “ rule of law ” by providing F35 aircraft to Japan , Seahawk helicopters to India and F-16 jets and Abrams tanks to Taiwan under a $ 160 billion military investment program in the Indo Pacific !
$ 400 million are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ infrastructure throughout the Philippines , Vietnam , Indonesia , Malaysia , Thailand , the Maldives , Sri Lanka and Bangladesh .
Singapore has signed a treaty to extend US military presence for another 15 years and Australia… well don ’ t get me started on Australia .
Putinomics : Power and ... Miller , Chris Best Price : $ 7.00 Buy New $ 19.29 To make matters worse , Admiral Davidson launched into a renewed anti-Chinese attack on September 17 saying the U.S. must boost “ billions of dollars of defense capability ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ systems in the colony are only directed at North Korea with 120 degrees of protection , but require a full 360 degree protection to include China .
The admiral also called for offensive capabilities saying “ China has a profound advantage in ballistic missiles against the Unites States , and a profound advantage in ground-launched cruise missiles .
We have to get into that offensive force as well.
” Commenting on the anti-Chinese war buildup , Russian Ambassador Antonov told Nikkei Asian Review stated “ Russia , for its part , will never @ @ @ @ @ @ @ including China ” ( referring to the US-Japan-Australia-India Quad ) .
He continued by saying : “ Unfortunately , Washington promotes anti Chinese sentiments and its relations with regional countries are based on their support for such an approach.
” While the list of aggressive militaristic policies goes on ( and I am not even including the anti-Russian military programs that have come to a head with this past week ’ s B-52 flyover NATO countries and September 17 unveiling of NATO ’ s Atlantic Command under anti-Russia warhawk Admiral Andrew Lewis ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dragging the world ever closer to nuclear war with the Bulletin for Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock now registering at 100 seconds to midnight .
But there is another way to go .
An infinitely saner policy orientation has been announced loudly by the joint leadership of Russia and China who have made their anti-war commitments crystal clear for anyone wishing to use their minds in the west .
First off , let ’ s take a look at the powerful message celebrating the end of WWII sent by Xi Jinping to Putin on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the ] international community should join China and Russia to advance the building of a community with a shared future for mankind , so as to allow future generations to enjoy a world featuring lasting peace , universal security and common prosperity ” .
Xi continued “ the Chinese and Russian peoples fought side by side and forged an unbreakable great friendship with blood , laying a solid foundation for the high level development of bilateral relations ” Putin in turn responded to Xi saying “ World War II , which was the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tens of millions of lives .
The Soviet Union and China bore the brunt of the struggle against Nazism and militarism and sustained the biggest losses in the fight to defeat the Nazi aggressors ” .
Putin stated that the “ ties of friendship and mutual assistance which grew stronger between the two nations during the war , are now promoting the dynamic development of Russian-Chinese relations of comprehensive partnership and strategic interaction ” .
China ’ s Vision o ... Ward , Jonathan D T Best Price : $ 16.00 Buy New @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of coexistence and cooperation to the USA , Chinese Ambassador to Washington Cui Tiankai stated on September 3rd that the USA and China needs “ to recapture the spirit of cooperation from WWII… At that time , China and the USA fought shoulder to shoulder during WWII leaving an indelible mark in the shared history of our two countries ” .
By invoking this forgotten historical dynamic that once animated world policy , Ambassador Cui demonstrated a profound understanding of both history and future problem solving needed to avoid a global tragedy .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ merely about the past , but the true statesman recognizes that history is actually about the future… not merely because we might best “ avoid repeating past mistakes ” as some Santayana-followers assume , but rather because understanding the past ( and the outcomes that SHOULD HAVE BEEN if not for the artificial abortions of potential ) allows us to re-discover characteristics about ourselves , our nations and our cultures which we in our corrupted states of being have forgotten .
The awareness of these dormant noble characteristics that once fueled great moments @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and its elected leaders to rally around moral principles that their nation once embodied under saner times .
None other than the great Machiavelli expressed this principle clearly in his third book on Livy when he noted that a corrupt republic or religious institution has only one chance to avoid collapse after it has travelled on the road of corruption for too long… renovation via a rediscovery of its original principles : “ It is a truth clearer than light that , without such renovation , these bodies can not continue to exist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is to bring them back to their original principles .
For , as all religious republics and monarchies must have within themselves some goodness , by means of which they obtain their first growth and reputation , and as in the process of time this goodness becomes corrupted , it will of necessity destroy the body unless something intervenes to bring it back to its normal condition .
Thus , the doctors of medicine say , in speaking of the human body , that “ every day some ill humors gather which must @ @ @ @ @ @ @ insight beautifully when he says : “ looking back at history for a right perspective of the future .
Just as President Abraham Lincoln said ‘ the best way to predict the future is to create it ’ .
At this moment , China and the U.S. need to recapture the spirit of cooperation from WWII and join hands to confront our common enemies in the new era… lets work together to realize the vision enshrined in the UN Charter : ‘ To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war and to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ life in larger freedom.
” Superpower Showdown : H ... Wei , Lingling Best Price : $ 17.93 Buy New $ 16.84 One can cynically balk at the words of Ambassador Cui , or even Xi and Putin , all three of whom have made their offers of cooperation known to the west on many occasions and all three of whom have expressed their awareness of the better angels of America ’ s forgotten nature , which was expressed by the exemplary leadership of George Washington , Abraham Lincoln , Franklin Roosevelt and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ itself is threatened with civil war , anarchy , martial law and total economic collapse internally , it is vital that President Trump tap into the better angels of America ’ s nature by firing Pompeo , and warmly embracing Putin ’ s offers for a P5 emergency summit before the clock strikes midnight .
The author of this paper had the privilege of hosting a recent seminar on the history of US-Russian friendship from the 1780 League of Armed Neutrality that helped America win its war for independence , to Lincoln ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ saved the Union from dissolution and FDR ’ s strategic alliance with Russia and China which saved the world from the City of London ’ s Frankenstein monster .
The content of this seminar is accessible here .
The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation .

The Pentagon’s new military report on China released on September 1st has demonstrated that the outdated and deadly Cold War mentality which has wrought such destruction upon the world since the end of WWII has not only become more deeply embedded into the psyche of dominant foreign policy officials in the Pentagon, it demonstrated that the current American establishment is totally unfit to survive in today’s nuclear age. In our nuclear age, Hobbesian laws of the jungle will only result in mass extermination. If we are to survive beyond the coming decade, it is high time that a higher moral paradigm befitting of human dignity becomes hegemonic.
If one wishes to play the role of Alice and join the tea party which these Pentagon Mad Hatters are hosting, one would be expected to believe that the belligerent aggressor in the Pacific theater is not the America which has spread its military tentacles around China’s backyard since Obama’s Asia Pivot that was announced in 2012, but rather China itself. The authors of the Pentagon report assert that it is China who is interested in expansionism, overthrowing the “rule of law”, conquering the weak of the Pacific and overtaking the US as a globally hegemonic power, both militarily and with their Belt and Road Initiative, which the Washington Consensus has labelled a debt trap.
Putin’s People: ... Belton, Catherine Best Price: $19.92 Buy New $19.95 (as of 03:12 UTC - Details) More recently, Pompeo has sent Undersecretary of State Keith Krach to Taiwan to belligerently organize bilateral free trade deals and several military deals worth $7 billion which the current basket-case leadership of Taiwan is all too happy to oblige.
One of the best psychological assessments of this report came from former Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter who made the point that the Pentagon authors suffer deeply from a disorder which Freud called “projection” (attributing your own neurotic obsessions onto others). In his RT op ed Ritter states:
“By projecting its own failed global ambitions onto China, the Department of Defense is failing to address the real reasons behind China’s military expansion.”
In this regard, the practices of debt trap diplomacy that the Euranglosphere has engaged in for decades since WWII—at the helm of the IMF and World Bank—have been projected onto China. What is ignored in this assessment is the simple fact that debt slavery has provably increased among all recipients of western conditionality-laced loans for decades, with NO actual industrial development or genuine infrastructure that could empower those nations to repay those loans, China has done the opposite. Every nation which has accepted China’s help along the New Silk Road with its African and South American extensions has benefited immeasurably with local manufacturing, finance, and cultural upshifts that have never been permitted by those western technocrats running the levers of credit for decades.
The September 1st Pentagon report tries to prove its claims by referring to China’s ambitions to double their nuclear deterrent arsenal from its current 215 to 430 by 2030 but completely ignores the fact that America itself owns over 3800 nuclear warheads (with an additional 2000 in storage) and has stated repeatedly its willingness to use them.
Why does China think it needs to upgrade this arsenal?
According to the Pentagon, it is because the Chinese have global military ambitions to replace the USA. The Return of Great Po... Kroenig, Matthew Best Price: $25.10 Buy New $25.95 (as of 05:05 UTC - Details)
The reality is that China is merely responsive to the obvious containment/full spectrum dominance agenda which the USA has unleashed in recent years. These operations feature war games throughout the Pacific and THAAD missile systems in South Korea which can easily be transformed into a first strike infrastructure which many game theorists believe can take out China’s ability to respond to a future attack. The none-existence of foreign Chinese military bases outside of China (except for one sole base in Djibouti) is totally ignored as is the existence of over 800 U.S. military bases spread across the globe, with an abundance clustered around the perimeters of Russia and China.
Celebrating the 75th anniversary of Japan’s surrender, Philip Davidson (head of the US Indo Pacific Command) echoed the Pentagon report saying: “An emboldened Communist Party of China seeks to change the world to one in which Chinese national power is more important than international law”.
Davidson echoed the words of Mark Esper who had earlier announced the report on August 26 saying “China’s global ambitions include establishing a security presence at strategic access points, such as its base in Africa, to enhance its ability to project power globally and across all domains. Clearly, China seeks to undermine the free and open order itself, which impacts every nation supporting and benefiting from this system.”
In response to this supposed undermining of “the free and open order”, Esper brags that America is “modernizing our forces so we can deter, compete and, if necessary, fight and win across all domains: air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace.”
While China is certainly trying to improve its military capabilities in the face of western aggression, Esper brags that the USA is supporting the “rule of law” by providing F35 aircraft to Japan, Seahawk helicopters to India and F-16 jets and Abrams tanks to Taiwan under a $160 billion military investment program in the Indo Pacific!
$400 million are being spent to create an anti-China military infrastructure throughout the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Maldives, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Singapore has signed a treaty to extend US military presence for another 15 years and Australia… well don’t get me started on Australia. Putinomics: Power and ... Miller, Chris Best Price: $7.00 Buy New $19.29 (as of 03:33 UTC - Details)
To make matters worse, Admiral Davidson launched into a renewed anti-Chinese attack on September 17 saying the U.S. must boost “billions of dollars of defense capability” to Guam complaining that the current THAAD systems in the colony are only directed at North Korea with 120 degrees of protection, but require a full 360 degree protection to include China. The admiral also called for offensive capabilities saying “China has a profound advantage in ballistic missiles against the Unites States, and a profound advantage in ground-launched cruise missiles. We have to get into that offensive force as well.”
Commenting on the anti-Chinese war buildup, Russian Ambassador Antonov told Nikkei Asian Review stated “Russia, for its part, will never participate in coalitions against third countries, including China” (referring to the US-Japan-Australia-India Quad). He continued by saying: “Unfortunately, Washington promotes anti Chinese sentiments and its relations with regional countries are based on their support for such an approach.”
While the list of aggressive militaristic policies goes on (and I am not even including the anti-Russian military programs that have come to a head with this past week’s B-52 flyover NATO countries and September 17 unveiling of NATO’s Atlantic Command under anti-Russia warhawk Admiral Andrew Lewis) the fact is that these neocons are dragging the world ever closer to nuclear war with the Bulletin for Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock now registering at 100 seconds to midnight.
But there is another way to go.
An infinitely saner policy orientation has been announced loudly by the joint leadership of Russia and China who have made their anti-war commitments crystal clear for anyone wishing to use their minds in the west.
First off, let’s take a look at the powerful message celebrating the end of WWII sent by Xi Jinping to Putin on September 3rd saying that “all [the] international community should join China and Russia to advance the building of a community with a shared future for mankind, so as to allow future generations to enjoy a world featuring lasting peace, universal security and common prosperity”. Xi continued “the Chinese and Russian peoples fought side by side and forged an unbreakable great friendship with blood, laying a solid foundation for the high level development of bilateral relations”
Putin in turn responded to Xi saying “World War II, which was the largest tragedy in human history, claimed tens of millions of lives. The Soviet Union and China bore the brunt of the struggle against Nazism and militarism and sustained the biggest losses in the fight to defeat the Nazi aggressors”. Putin stated that the “ties of friendship and mutual assistance which grew stronger between the two nations during the war, are now promoting the dynamic development of Russian-Chinese relations of comprehensive partnership and strategic interaction”.
China’s Vision o... Ward, Jonathan D T Best Price: $16.00 Buy New $16.99 (as of 04:08 UTC - Details) Extending this highly Confucian/Christian principle of coexistence and cooperation to the USA, Chinese Ambassador to Washington Cui Tiankai stated on September 3rd that the USA and China needs “to recapture the spirit of cooperation from WWII… At that time, China and the USA fought shoulder to shoulder during WWII leaving an indelible mark in the shared history of our two countries”.
By invoking this forgotten historical dynamic that once animated world policy, Ambassador Cui demonstrated a profound understanding of both history and future problem solving needed to avoid a global tragedy. Most people get confused thinking history is merely about the past, but the true statesman recognizes that history is actually about the future… not merely because we might best “avoid repeating past mistakes” as some Santayana-followers assume, but rather because understanding the past (and the outcomes that SHOULD HAVE BEEN if not for the artificial abortions of potential) allows us to re-discover characteristics about ourselves, our nations and our cultures which we in our corrupted states of being have forgotten. The awareness of these dormant noble characteristics that once fueled great moments in the past, allows a citizenry and its elected leaders to rally around moral principles that their nation once embodied under saner times.
None other than the great Machiavelli expressed this principle clearly in his third book on Livy when he noted that a corrupt republic or religious institution has only one chance to avoid collapse after it has travelled on the road of corruption for too long… renovation via a rediscovery of its original principles:
“It is a truth clearer than light that, without such renovation, these bodies cannot continue to exist; and the means of renewing them is to bring them back to their original principles. For, as all religious republics and monarchies must have within themselves some goodness, by means of which they obtain their first growth and reputation, and as in the process of time this goodness becomes corrupted, it will of necessity destroy the body unless something intervenes to bring it back to its normal condition. Thus, the doctors of medicine say, in speaking of the human body, that “every day some ill humors gather which must be cured.”
Ambassador Cui expresses this insight beautifully when he says: “looking back at history for a right perspective of the future. Just as President Abraham Lincoln said ‘the best way to predict the future is to create it’. At this moment, China and the U.S. need to recapture the spirit of cooperation from WWII and join hands to confront our common enemies in the new era… lets work together to realize the vision enshrined in the UN Charter: ‘To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.”
Superpower Showdown: H... Wei, Lingling Best Price: $17.93 Buy New $16.84 (as of 11:50 UTC - Details) One can cynically balk at the words of Ambassador Cui, or even Xi and Putin, all three of whom have made their offers of cooperation known to the west on many occasions and all three of whom have expressed their awareness of the better angels of America’s forgotten nature, which was expressed by the exemplary leadership of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.
While the USA itself is threatened with civil war, anarchy, martial law and total economic collapse internally, it is vital that President Trump tap into the better angels of America’s nature by firing Pompeo, and warmly embracing Putin’s offers for a P5 emergency summit before the clock strikes midnight.
The author of this paper had the privilege of hosting a recent seminar on the history of US-Russian friendship from the 1780 League of Armed Neutrality that helped America win its war for independence, to Lincoln’s alliance with Czar Alexander II which saved the Union from dissolution and FDR’s strategic alliance with Russia and China which saved the world from the City of London’s Frankenstein monster. The content of this seminar is accessible here.
The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.


lewrockwell--2020-09-24--In Unprecedented Monetary Overhaul, The Fed Is Preparing To Deposit ‘Digital Dollars Directly to Eac

In Unprecedented Monetary Overhaul, The Fed Is Preparing To Deposit ‘Digital Dollars Directly to Each American

Over the past decade , the one common theme despite the political upheaval and growing social and geopolitical instability , was that the market would keep marching higher and the Fed would continue injecting liquidity into the system .
The second common theme is that despite sparking unprecedented asset price inflation , prices as measured across the broader economy – using the flawed CPI metric and certainly stagnant worker wages – would remain subdued ( as a reminder , the Fed is desperate to ignite broad inflation as that is the only way the countless trillions of excess debt can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to do so ) .
The Fed ’ s failure to reach its inflation target – which prompted the US central bank to radically overhaul its monetary dogma last month and unveil Flexible Average Inflation Targeting ( or FAIT ) whereby the Fed will allow inflation to run hot without hiking rates – has sparked broad criticism from the economic establishment , even though as we showed in June , deflation is now a direct function of the Fed ’ s unconventional monetary policies as the lower yields slide , the lower the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the harder the Fed fights to stimulate inflation , the more deflation and more saving it spurs as a result ( incidentally this is not the first time this “ discovery ” was made , in December we wrote “ One Bank Makes A Stunning Discovery – The Fed ’ s Rate Cuts Are Now Deflationary “ ) .
In short , ever since the Fed launched QE and NIRP , it has been making the situation it has been trying to “ fix ” even worse while blowing the biggest asset @ @ @ @ @ @ @ recently accepted that its preferred stimulus pathway has failed to boost the broader economy , the blame has fallen on how monetary policy is intermediated , specifically the way the Fed creates excess reserves which end up at commercial banks instead of “ tricking down ” all the way to the consumer level .
To be sure , in the aftermath of the covid pandemic shutdowns the Fed has tried to short-circuit this process , and in conjunction with the Treasury it has launched “ helicopter money ” which has resulted in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ via PPP loans , as well as to end consumers via the emergency $ 600 weekly unemployment benefits which however are set to expire unless renewed by Congress as explained last week , as Democrats and Republicans feud over which fiscal stimulus will be implemented next .
And yet , the lament is that even as the economy was desperately in need of a massive liquidity tsunami , the funds created by the Fed and Treasury ( now that the US operates under a quasi-MMT regime ) did not make their way to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ end consumers .
CQR Men ’ s All Co ... Buy New $ 23.98 Which is why we read with great interest a Bloomberg interview with two former Fed officials : Simon Potter , who led the Federal Reserve Bank of New York ’ s markets group i.e.
, he was the head of the Fed ’ s Plunge Protection Team for years , and Julia Coronado , who spent eight years as an economist for the Fed ’ s Board of Governors , who are among the innovators brainstorming solutions to what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ difficult problem facing the Fed : get money swiftly to people who need it most in a crisis .
The response was striking : the two propose creating a monetary tool that they call recession insurance bonds , which draw on some of the advances in digital payments , which will be wired instantly to Americans .
As Coronado explained the details , Congress would grant the Federal Reserve an additional tool for providing support—say , a percent of GDP [ in a lump sum that would be divided equally and distributed ] @ @ @ @ @ @ @ insurance bonds would be zero-coupon securities , a contingent asset of households that would basically lie in wait .
The trigger could be reaching the zero lower bound on interest rates or , as economist Claudia Sahm has proposed , a 0.5 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate .
The Fed would then activate the securities and deposit the funds digitally in households ’ apps .
As Potter added , “ it took Congress too long to get money to people , and it ’ s too clunky .
We need a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the bonds quickly without going to the private market .
On March 15 they could have said interest rates are now at zero , we ’ re activating X amount of the bonds , and we ’ ll be tracking the unemployment rate—if it increases above this level , we ’ ll buy more .
The bonds will be on the asset side of the Fed ’ s balance sheet ; the digital dollars in people ’ s accounts will be on the liability side.
” Essentially , the Fed is proposing creating @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which are stuck within the financial system , and which it can deposit directly into US consumer accounts .
In short , as we summarized “ The Fed Is Planning To Send Money Directly To Americans In The Next Crisis “ , something we reminded readers of on Monday : So this morning , as if to confirm our speculation of what comes next , Cleveland Fed president Loretta Mester delivered a speech to the Chicago Payment Symposium titled “ Payments and the Pandemic “ , in which after going through the big @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the matter at hand .
Lee Men ’ s Perfor ... Buy New $ 27.88 In the section titled “ Central Bank Digital Currencies ” , the Cleveland Fed president writes that “ the experience with pandemic emergency payments has brought forward an idea that was already gaining increased attention at central banks around the world , that is , central bank digital currency ( CBDC ) .
” And in the shocking punchline , then goes on to reveal that “ legislation has proposed that each American have an account at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deposited , as liabilities of the Federal Reserve Banks , which could be used for emergency payments .
” But wait it gets better , because in launching digital cash , the Fed would then be able to scrap “ anonymous ” physical currency entirely , and track every single banknote from its “ creation ” all though the various transactions that take place during its lifetime .
And , eventually , the Fed could remotely “ destroy ” said digital currency when it so decides .
Oh , and in the process @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , as it would both provide loans to US consumers and directly deposit funds into their accounts , effectively making the entire traditional banking system obsolete .
Here are the details : Other proposals would create a new payments instrument , digital cash , which would be just like the physical currency issued by central banks today , but in a digital form and , potentially , without the anonymity of physical currency .
Depending on how these currencies are designed , central banks could support them without the need for commercial bank @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ digital wallets combined with central-bank-facilitated transfer and redemption services .
The demand for and use of such instruments need further consideration in order to evaluate whether such a central bank digital currency would allow for quicker and more ubiquitous payments in times of emergency and more generally .
In addition , a range of potential risks and policy issues surrounding central bank digital currency need to be better understood , and the costs and benefits evaluated .
The Federal Reserve has been researching issues raised by central bank digital currency for some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a technology lab that has been building and testing a range of distributed ledger platforms to understand their potential benefits and tradeoffs .
Staff members from several Reserve Banks , including Cleveland Fed software developers , are contributing to this effort .
The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is also engaged in a multiyear effort , working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , to experiment with technologies that could be used for a central bank digital currency .
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has established an innovation center , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , to identify and develop in-depth insights into critical trends and financial technology of relevance to central banks .
Experimentation like this is an important ingredient in assessing the benefits and costs of a central bank digital currency , but does not signal any decision by the Federal Reserve to adopt such a currency .
Issues raised by central bank digital currency related to financial stability , market structure , security , privacy , and monetary policy all need to be better understood .
Amazon Essentials Men & ... Buy New $ 19.50 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ turning on a plan that sees the Fed depositing “ digital dollars ” to “ each American ” , a stunning development that essentially sees the Fed bypass Congress , endowing the Central Bank with targeted “ fiscal stimulus ” capabilities , and which could lead to a dramatic reflationary spike as it is the lower income quartile segments of US society that are the marginal price setters for economic goods and services .
And having already implemented Average Inflation Targeting , the resulting burst of inflation would be viewed by the Fed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it would have to persist for a long time over the “ average ” period whatever it may end up being ) , to tighten monetary policy .
In fact , even as inflation rages – which some alternative inflationary measures to CPI suggest it already is – the Fed will have a semantic loophole in explaining just why it needs to keep inflation scorching hot even as the standard of living in America collapses to the benefit of a handful of asset holders .
Why ?
The CBO showed the answer yesterday @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the coming years which inflates away the hundreds of trillions in federal debt , the unprecedented debt tsunami that is coming would mean the end to the American way of life as we know it .
And to do that , the Fed is now finalizing the last steps of a process that revolutionizes the entire fiat monetary system , launching digital dollars which effectively remove commercial banks as financial intermediaries , as they will allow the Fed itself to make direct deposits into Americans ’ “ digital wallets ” , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ entire Legislative branch redundant , as a handful of technocrats quietly take over the United States .
Reprinted with permission from Zero Hedge .
The Best of Tyler Durden

Over the past decade, the one common theme despite the political upheaval and growing social and geopolitical instability, was that the market would keep marching higher and the Fed would continue injecting liquidity into the system. The second common theme is that despite sparking unprecedented asset price inflation, prices as measured across the broader economy – using the flawed CPI metric and certainly stagnant worker wages – would remain subdued (as a reminder, the Fed is desperate to ignite broad inflation as that is the only way the countless trillions of excess debt can be eliminated and has so far failed to do so).
The Fed’s failure to reach its inflation target – which prompted the US central bank to radically overhaul its monetary dogma last month and unveil Flexible Average Inflation Targeting (or FAIT) whereby the Fed will allow inflation to run hot without hiking rates – has sparked broad criticism from the economic establishment, even though as we showed in June, deflation is now a direct function of the Fed’s unconventional monetary policies as the lower yields slide, the lower the propensity to spend. In other words, the harder the Fed fights to stimulate inflation, the more deflation and more saving it spurs as a result (incidentally this is not the first time this “discovery” was made, in December we wrote “One Bank Makes A Stunning Discovery – The Fed’s Rate Cuts Are Now Deflationary“).
In short, ever since the Fed launched QE and NIRP, it has been making the situation it has been trying to “fix” even worse while blowing the biggest asset price bubble in history.
And having recently accepted that its preferred stimulus pathway has failed to boost the broader economy, the blame has fallen on how monetary policy is intermediated, specifically the way the Fed creates excess reserves which end up at commercial banks instead of “tricking down” all the way to the consumer level.
To be sure, in the aftermath of the covid pandemic shutdowns the Fed has tried to short-circuit this process, and in conjunction with the Treasury it has launched “helicopter money” which has resulted in a direct transfer of funds to US corporations via PPP loans, as well as to end consumers via the emergency $600 weekly unemployment benefits which however are set to expire unless renewed by Congress as explained last week, as Democrats and Republicans feud over which fiscal stimulus will be implemented next.
And yet, the lament is that even as the economy was desperately in need of a massive liquidity tsunami, the funds created by the Fed and Treasury (now that the US operates under a quasi-MMT regime) did not make their way to those who need them the most: end consumers. CQR Men’s All Co... Buy New $23.98 (as of 05:22 UTC - Details)
Which is why we read with great interest a Bloomberg interview with two former Fed officials: Simon Potter, who led the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s markets group i.e., he was the head of the Fed’s Plunge Protection Team for years, and Julia Coronado, who spent eight years as an economist for the Fed’s Board of Governors, who are among the innovators brainstorming solutions to what has emerged as the most crucial and difficult problem facing the Fed: get money swiftly to people who need it most in a crisis.
The response was striking: the two propose creating a monetary tool that they call recession insurance bonds, which draw on some of the advances in digital payments, which will be wired instantly to Americans.
As Coronado explained the details, Congress would grant the Federal Reserve an additional tool for providing support—say, a percent of GDP [in a lump sum that would be divided equally and distributed] to households in a recession. Recession insurance bonds would be zero-coupon securities, a contingent asset of households that would basically lie in wait. The trigger could be reaching the zero lower bound on interest rates or, as economist Claudia Sahm has proposed, a 0.5 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate. The Fed would then activate the securities and deposit the funds digitally in households’ apps .
As Potter added, “it took Congress too long to get money to people, and it’s too clunky. We need a separate infrastructure. The Fed could buy the bonds quickly without going to the private market. On March 15 they could have said interest rates are now at zero, we’re activating X amount of the bonds, and we’ll be tracking the unemployment rate—if it increases above this level, we’ll buy more. The bonds will be on the asset side of the Fed’s balance sheet; the digital dollars in people’s accounts will be on the liability side.”
Essentially, the Fed is proposing creating a hybrid digital legal tender unlike reserves which are stuck within the financial system, and which it can deposit directly into US consumer accounts. In short, as we summarized “The Fed Is Planning To Send Money Directly To Americans In The Next Crisis“, something we reminded readers of on Monday:
There still appears to be some confusion about the endgame. The Fed itself spelled it out. The Fed Is Planning To Send Money Directly To Americans In The Next Crisis: “by getting money to consumers you can limit the depth and duration of a recession”https://t.co/bG03TxiviT — zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 22, 2020
So this morning, as if to confirm our speculation of what comes next, Cleveland Fed president Loretta Mester delivered a speech to the Chicago Payment Symposium titled “Payments and the Pandemic“, in which after going through the big picture boilerplate, Mester goes straight to the matter at hand. Lee Men’s Perfor... Buy New $27.88 (as of 05:22 UTC - Details)
In the section titled “Central Bank Digital Currencies”, the Cleveland Fed president writes that “the experience with pandemic emergency payments has brought forward an idea that was already gaining increased attention at central banks around the world, that is, central bank digital currency (CBDC).”
And in the shocking punchline, then goes on to reveal that “ legislation has proposed that each American have an account at the Fed in which digital dollars could be deposited, as liabilities of the Federal Reserve Banks, which could be used for emergency payments. ”
But wait it gets better, because in launching digital cash, the Fed would then be able to scrap “anonymous” physical currency entirely, and track every single banknote from its “creation” all though the various transactions that take place during its lifetime. And, eventually, the Fed could remotely “destroy” said digital currency when it so decides. Oh, and in the process the Fed would effectively disintermediate commercial banks, as it would both provide loans to US consumers and directly deposit funds into their accounts, effectively making the entire traditional banking system obsolete. Here are the details:
Other proposals would create a new payments instrument, digital cash, which would be just like the physical currency issued by central banks today, but in a digital form and, potentially, without the anonymity of physical currency. Depending on how these currencies are designed, central banks could support them without the need for commercial bank involvement via direct issuance into the end-users’ digital wallets combined with central-bank-facilitated transfer and redemption services. The demand for and use of such instruments need further consideration in order to evaluate whether such a central bank digital currency would allow for quicker and more ubiquitous payments in times of emergency and more generally. In addition, a range of potential risks and policy issues surrounding central bank digital currency need to be better understood, and the costs and benefits evaluated. The Federal Reserve has been researching issues raised by central bank digital currency for some time. The Board of Governors has a technology lab that has been building and testing a range of distributed ledger platforms to understand their potential benefits and tradeoffs. Staff members from several Reserve Banks, including Cleveland Fed software developers, are contributing to this effort. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is also engaged in a multiyear effort, working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to experiment with technologies that could be used for a central bank digital currency. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has established an innovation center, in partnership with the Bank for International Settlements, to identify and develop in-depth insights into critical trends and financial technology of relevance to central banks. Experimentation like this is an important ingredient in assessing the benefits and costs of a central bank digital currency, but does not signal any decision by the Federal Reserve to adopt such a currency. Issues raised by central bank digital currency related to financial stability, market structure, security, privacy, and monetary policy all need to be better understood.
Amazon Essentials Men&... Buy New $19.50 (as of 05:22 UTC - Details) To summarize, the wheels are already turning on a plan that sees the Fed depositing “digital dollars” to “each American”, a stunning development that essentially sees the Fed bypass Congress, endowing the Central Bank with targeted “fiscal stimulus” capabilities, and which could lead to a dramatic reflationary spike as it is the lower income quartile segments of US society that are the marginal price setters for economic goods and services. And having already implemented Average Inflation Targeting, the resulting burst of inflation would be viewed by the Fed as insufficient on its own (as it would have to persist for a long time over the “average” period whatever it may end up being), to tighten monetary policy. In fact, even as inflation rages – which some alternative inflationary measures to CPI suggest it already is – the Fed will have a semantic loophole in explaining just why it needs to keep inflation scorching hot even as the standard of living in America collapses to the benefit of a handful of asset holders.
Why? The CBO showed the answer yesterday:
Absent a massive burst of inflation in the coming years which inflates away the hundreds of trillions in federal debt, the unprecedented debt tsunami that is coming would mean the end to the American way of life as we know it. And to do that, the Fed is now finalizing the last steps of a process that revolutionizes the entire fiat monetary system, launching digital dollars which effectively remove commercial banks as financial intermediaries, as they will allow the Fed itself to make direct deposits into Americans’ “digital wallets”, in the process also making Congress and the entire Legislative branch redundant, as a handful of technocrats quietly take over the United States.
Reprinted with permission from Zero Hedge.
Calvin Klein Men&rsquo... Buy New $70.80 (as of 05:22 UTC - Details) Amazon Essentials Men&... Buy New $20.50 (as of 05:22 UTC - Details)
The Best of Tyler Durden


lewrockwell--2020-09-24--The End of Reality?

The End of Reality?

In 1888 , the year before he went insane , Friedrich Nietzsche wrote the following in Twilight of the Idols : So , if you feel you also may be going insane in the present climate of digital screen life , where real is unreal but realer than real , the apparent is cryptic , and up is down , true is false , and what you see you don ’ t , it has a history .
One hundred and thirty-two years ago , Nietzsche added that “ something extraordinarily nasty and evil is about to make its debut.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the bloody butcher ’ s bench known as the twentieth century was the result .
Nihilism stepped onto center stage and has been the star of the show ever since , straight through to 2020 .
Roberto Calasso puts it this way in Literature and the Gods : The Twilight of the Id ... Nietzsche , Friedrich Best Price : $ 4.29 Buy New $ 8.97 Obviously , we haven ’ t gotten our bearings .
We are far more adrift today on a stormy electronic sea where the analogical circle of life @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and “ truths ” like numbers click into place continuously to lead us in wrong , algorithm-controlled directions .
The trap is almost closed .
Of course , Nietzsche did not have the Internet , but he lived at the dawn of the electric era , when space-time transformations were occurring at a rapid pace .
Inventions such as photography , the phonograph , the telephone , electricity , etc .
were contracting space and time and a disembodied “ reality ” was being born .
With today ’ s Internet and digital @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and completely disembodied .
It does nothing but look at its image that is looking back into a lifeless void , whose lost gaze can ’ t figure out what it ’ s seeing .
Take , for example , the phonograph , invented by Thomas Edison in 1878 .
If you could record a person ’ s voice , and if that person died , were you then listening to the voice of a living person or one who was dead ?
If the person whose voice was recorded was alive and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ compressed earthly space .
The phonograph suppressed absence , conjured ghosts , and seemed to overcome time and death as it captured the flow of time in sound .
It allowed a disembodied human voice to inhabit a machine , an early example of downloading .
“ Two ruling ambitions in modern technology , ” writes John Durham Peters in his wonderful book , Speaking into the Air , “ appear in the phonograph : the creation of artificial life and the conjuring of the dead.
” Many people started to hear voices @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deluded .
Soon , with the arrival of cinema , they would see ghosts as well .
Today , speaking ghosts are everywhere , hiding in hand-held devices .
It ’ s Halloween all year round as we are surrounded by electronic zombies in a screen culture .
This technological annihilation of space and time that was happening at a frenetic pace was the material background to Nietzsche ’ s thought .
His philosophical and epistemological analyses emerged from German intellectual life of his time as well , where theologians and philosophers were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be understood in situ , i.e.
, within its historical and social place or context .
Literature and the Gods Calasso , Roberto Best Price : $ 11.11 Buy New $ 10.58 Without going into abstruse philosophical issues here , suffice it to say , Nietzsche was suggesting that not only was God dead because people killed him , but that knowledge was a fiction that changed over time and was a human construction .
All knowledge , not just science , had to be taken “ as if ” it were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ trick but falsely reassuring , for most people could not accept this , since “ knowledge ” was a protection racket from pain and insanity .
It still is .
In other words , not only had people murdered God , but they had slain absolutes as well .
This left them in the lurch , not knowing if what they knew and believed were really true , or sort of true – maybe , perhaps .
The worm of uncertainty had entered modern thought through modern thought .
While the average person @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , they did , through the inventions that were entering their lives , and the news about Darwin , science , religion , etc.
, realize , however vaguely , that something very strange and dramatic was under way .
Life was passing from substance to shadow because of human ingenuity .
It is similar to what so many feel today : that reality and truth are moving beyond their grasp as technological forces that they voluntarily embrace push everyday life towards some spectral denouement .
An inhuman , trans-human , on-line electronic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ everything that preceded it , like an Andy Warhol copy of a copy of a Campbell ’ s soup can with a canned mocking laugh track that keeps repeating itself .
All this follows from the nineteenth century relativization of knowledge , or what at least was taken as such , for to say all knowledge is relative is an absolute statement .
That contradiction goes to the heart of our present dilemma .
This old feeling of lostness is perhaps best summarized in a few lines from Mathew Arnold ’ s 19th @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : But that was then .
Today , the Joker ’ s sardonic laughter would suffice .
The Unnamable Present Calasso , Roberto Best Price : $ 9.99 Buy New $ 14.74 I am sitting outside as I write , sipping a glass of wine before dinner .
Although New England fall weather is approaching , a nasty mosquito is buzzing around my head .
I hear it .
I am in killer mode since these bastards love to bite me .
This is real life .
If I went into the house @ @ @ @ @ @ @ computer screen – news , social media , anything – I would be entering another dimension .
Screen life , not real life .
The society of the spectacle .
No real mosquitoes , no wine , no trees swaying in the evening breeze .
In his novel , The Sun Also Rises , written between Nietzsche ’ s time and now , Ernest Hemingway , a man who surely lived in the physical world , writes of how Robert Cohn , the boxing champion from Princeton University , wants Jake Barnes , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ take a trip with him to South America .
As they sit and talk in Paris , Barnes says no , and tells Cohn , “ All countries look just like the moving pictures.
” Whether Hemingway was being ironic or not , or simply visionary , I don ’ t know .
For in the 1920s , before passports and widespread tourism , there were many places you could only see if you traveled to them and they would never appear in moving pictures , while today there is almost no place @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the internet or television .
So why go anywhere if you ’ ve already seen it all on a screen ?
Why travel to nowhere or to where you have already been ?
Déjà vu all over again , as Yogi Berra put it and everyone laughed .
Now the laugh is on us .
This is neither an argument nor a story .
It ’ s real .
I am trying to get my bearings in a disorienting situation .
Call it a compass , a weather-vane , a prayer .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Call me crazy .
Perhaps this writing is just an “ as if.
” About fifteen years ago , I was teaching at a college where most communication was done via email .
I was , as they say , out of the loop since I didn ’ t do email .
I was often asked why I didn ’ t , and I would repeatedly reply , like Melville ’ s Bartleby , because “ I prefer not to.
” Finally , in order to keep my job , I succumbed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me , I went “ on-line.
” There were 6,954.7 emails in my in-box from the past three years .
In those three years , I had performed all my duties scrupulously and hadn ’ t missed a beat .
Someone showed me how to delete the emails , which I did without reading any , but I had entered the labyrinth .
I went electronic .
My reality changed .
I am still searching for Ariadne ’ s thread .
Ruin of Kasch Calasso , Roberto Best Price : $ 5.30 Buy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ yet a machine and refuse the invitation to become one .
It ’ s a very insistent invitation , almost an order .
Neil Postman ( Oh such a rich surname ! )
sums it up well in Technopoly : The Surrender of Culture to Technology : Postman wrote that in 1992 , before the computer and the internet became ubiquitous and longer before on-line living had become de rigueur – before it was being shoved down our throats as it is today under the cover of COVID-19 .
There is little doubt @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what Klaus Schwab , the Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum ( WEF ) , calls COVID-19 : The Great Reset , that involves a total acceptance of the electronic , on-line life .
On-line learning , on-line news , on-line everything – only an idiot ( from Greek , idiotes , a private person who pays not attention to public affairs ) would fail to see what is being promoted .
And who controls the electronic life and internet ?
Not you , not I , but the powers that be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ elites .
Goodbye body , goodbye blood – “ I don ’ t think we should ever shake hands ever again , to be honest with you , ” said Dr. Anthony Fauci , the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases ( NIAID ) in support of human estrangement .
Peter Koenig , one of the most astute investigators of this propaganda effort , puts it this way : Like everything , of course , this push to place life under the aegis of cyberspace has a history , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to convince people that they too are machines without existential freedom .
Thus the ongoing meme pumped out for the past three decades has been that we are controlled by our brains and that the brain is a computer and vice versa .
Brain research has received massive government funding .
Drugs have been offered as the solution to every human problem .
So-called diseases and disorders have been created through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( DSM ) and matched to pharmaceutical drugs ( or the revers ) for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been reduced to a figment of deluded imaginations .
People are machines ; that ’ s the story , marvelous machines .
They have no freedom .
If one wishes an example of techno-fascism , there is one from the art world .
Back in the 1920s and 1930s there was an art movement known as Futurism .
Its leader proponent was an Italian Fascist , friend of Mussolini , Filippo Tommaso Marinetti .
The futurists claimed that all life revolves around the machine , that the machine was god , that it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be obeyed .
They extolled war and speed and claimed that humans were no more significant than stones .
Patriotism , militarism , strength , method , and the kingdom of experts were their blueprint for a corporate fascist state .
The human eye and mind would be re-educated to automatically obey the machine ’ s dictates .
Now we have cyberspace , digital machines , and the internet , an exponential extension of the machine world of the 1930s and the rise of Mussolini , Fascism , and Hitler .
That this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new and future normal by trans-national elite forces should not be surprising .
If human communication becomes primarily digitally controlled on-line and on screens , those who control the machines will have achieved the most powerful means of mind control ever invented .
That will be MKULTRA on a vast scale .
Surveillance will be complete .
Yes , there are places on the internet where truth is and will be told , such as this site where you are reading this ; but as we can see from today ’ s growing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ elites and intelligence forces who control the companies that do their bidding will narrow the options for dissenting voices .
Such censorship starts slowly , and then when one looks again , it is a fait accompli .
The frog in the pan of slowly heating cold water never realizes it is being killed until it is too late .
Free speech is now being strangled .
Censorship is widespread .
The Sun Also Rises : Th ... Hemingway , Ernest Best Price : $ 9.99 Buy New $ 11.67 The purpose of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , obsess , depress , and then repress the population .
The overlords accomplish this by the “ peculiar linking together of opposites – knowledge with ignorance , cynicism with fanaticism – [ which ] is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society , ” writes Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four .
“ The official ideology abounds with contradictions even where there is no practical reason for them.
” One look into one ’ s life will suffice to see how the overlords have set people against each other .
It ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ conquer .
Trump vs. Biden , Democrats vs. Republicans , whites vs. blacks , liberals vs. conservatives .
Pure mind games .
Contradictions every day to create social disorientation .
Orwell describes Doublethink as follows : Nietzsche said that along with the real world we have done away with the apparent as well .
Digital online life has accomplished that .
It has allowed the rulers – through the media who are the magicians who serve them – to create counterfeit news and doctored videos at will , to present diametrically opposed points @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and to push breaking news items so fast that no one half-way sane could keep up with their magic shows .
Nietzsche obviously didn ’ t foresee this technology , but he sensed the madness that the relativity of knowledge and the technology of his day would usher in .
The popular 1990s term “ Information Superhighway , ” meaning the internet and all digital telecommunications , was the perfect term to describe this lunacy .
Get on that highway and go as fast as you can while trying to catch the meaning @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as you speed to nowhere .
For not only does censorship , propaganda , disinformation , mixed messages , and contradictions line the road you are traveling , but contextless information overload is so heavy that even if you were stopped in a traffic jam , there is too much information to comprehend .
And if you think this Superhighway is a freeway , think again , for the cost is high .
No one puts out their hand and asks you to pay up ; but the more you travel down this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ missing a bit of flesh here and some blood there .
And without a speed pass , you are considered road kill .
To make matters much worse , they say we need 5G to go much faster .
Paul Virilio , who has devoted himself to the study of speed ( dromology ) , puts it this way in Open Sky : And yet I don ’ t have a simple answer to the internet dilemma .
You are reading it on-line and I am posting it there .
It is very @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Can we just walk away from it ?
Maybe .
Perhaps like those few who , in Ursula K. Le Guin ’ s excruciating story , “ The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas , ” we may decide the price for our conveniences and so-called happiness is too high and that there are hidden victims that this techno-scientific “ progress ” creates beneath its veneer of efficiency .
Others , us , our children , all children , who are reaching out not for speed and machines , but for the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to destroy .
In Le Guin ’ s story , the price nearly all the citizens of Omelas are willing to pay for their happiness and comfort is the imprisonment of a single child .
Perhaps we should consider what we are doing to all the world ’ s children and their futures .
My friend Gary recently sent me this letter .
I believe it sums up what many people feel .
There is a vast hunger for reality and truth .
The analog life .
How to live it – the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ artificial intelligence/digital controllers try to reduce us to machines .
Reading Gary ’ s words reminded me of those of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton ’ s definition of the Unspeakable : Yes , real time , real life – as we do our little dances .
Can we do our little dances and preserve reality ?
I ’ m not sure .
The Best of Edward Curtin

In 1888, the year before he went insane, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote the following in Twilight of the Idols:
We have got rid of the real world: what world is left? The apparent world perhaps? … But no! Along with the real world we’ve done away with the apparent world as well.
So, if you feel you also may be going insane in the present climate of digital screen life, where real is unreal but realer than real, the apparent is cryptic, and up is down, true is false, and what you see you don’t, it has a history. One hundred and thirty-two years ago, Nietzsche added that “something extraordinarily nasty and evil is about to make its debut.” We know it did, and the bloody butcher’s bench known as the twentieth century was the result. Nihilism stepped onto center stage and has been the star of the show ever since, straight through to 2020. Roberto Calasso puts it this way in Literature and the Gods:
Here we are, announces Nietzsche, and it would be hard not to hear a mocking ring in his voice. We thought we were living in a world where the fog had lifted, a disenchanted, ascertainable, verifiable world. And instead everything has gone back to being a ‘fable’ again. How are we to get our bearings … This is the paralysis, the peculiar uncertainty of modern times, a paralysis that all since have experienced.
The Twilight of the Id... Nietzsche, Friedrich Best Price: $4.29 Buy New $8.97 (as of 05:25 UTC - Details) Obviously, we haven’t gotten our bearings. We are far more adrift today on a stormy electronic sea where the analogical circle of life has been replaced by the digital, and “truths” like numbers click into place continuously to lead us in wrong, algorithm-controlled directions. The trap is almost closed.
Of course, Nietzsche did not have the Internet, but he lived at the dawn of the electric era, when space-time transformations were occurring at a rapid pace. Inventions such as photography, the phonograph, the telephone, electricity, etc. were contracting space and time and a disembodied “reality” was being born. With today’s Internet and digital screen life, the baby is full-grown and completely disembodied. It does nothing but look at its image that is looking back into a lifeless void, whose lost gaze can’t figure out what it’s seeing.
Take, for example, the phonograph, invented by Thomas Edison in 1878. If you could record a person’s voice, and if that person died, were you then listening to the voice of a living person or one who was dead? If the person whose voice was recorded was alive and was miles away, you had also compressed earthly space. The phonograph suppressed absence, conjured ghosts, and seemed to overcome time and death as it captured the flow of time in sound. It allowed a disembodied human voice to inhabit a machine, an early example of downloading.
“Two ruling ambitions in modern technology,” writes John Durham Peters in his wonderful book, Speaking into the Air, “appear in the phonograph: the creation of artificial life and the conjuring of the dead.”
Many people started to hear voices, and these people were not called deluded. Soon, with the arrival of cinema, they would see ghosts as well. Today, speaking ghosts are everywhere, hiding in hand-held devices. It’s Halloween all year round as we are surrounded by electronic zombies in a screen culture.
This technological annihilation of space and time that was happening at a frenetic pace was the material background to Nietzsche’s thought. His philosophical and epistemological analyses emerged from German intellectual life of his time as well, where theologians and philosophers were discovering that knowledge was relative and had to be understood in situ, i.e., within its historical and social place or context. Literature and the Gods Calasso, Roberto Best Price: $11.11 Buy New $10.58 (as of 05:25 UTC - Details)
Without going into abstruse philosophical issues here, suffice it to say, Nietzsche was suggesting that not only was God dead because people killed him, but that knowledge was a fiction that changed over time and was a human construction. All knowledge, not just science, had to be taken “as if” it were true. This was a consoling mental trick but falsely reassuring, for most people could not accept this, since “knowledge” was a protection racket from pain and insanity. It still is. In other words, not only had people murdered God, but they had slain absolutes as well. This left them in the lurch, not knowing if what they knew and believed were really true, or sort of true – maybe, perhaps. The worm of uncertainty had entered modern thought through modern thought.
While the average person did not delve into these revolutionary ideas, they did, through the inventions that were entering their lives, and the news about Darwin, science, religion, etc., realize, however vaguely, that something very strange and dramatic was under way. Life was passing from substance to shadow because of human ingenuity.
It is similar to what so many feel today: that reality and truth are moving beyond their grasp as technological forces that they voluntarily embrace push everyday life towards some spectral denouement. An inhuman, trans-human, on-line electronic life where everything is a parody of everything that preceded it, like an Andy Warhol copy of a copy of a Campbell’s soup can with a canned mocking laugh track that keeps repeating itself. All this follows from the nineteenth century relativization of knowledge, or what at least was taken as such, for to say all knowledge is relative is an absolute statement. That contradiction goes to the heart of our present dilemma.
This old feeling of lostness is perhaps best summarized in a few lines from Mathew Arnold’s 19th century poem, “Dover Beach”:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
But that was then. Today, the Joker’s sardonic laughter would suffice. The Unnamable Present Calasso, Roberto Best Price: $9.99 Buy New $14.74 (as of 05:25 UTC - Details)
***
I am sitting outside as I write, sipping a glass of wine before dinner. Although New England fall weather is approaching, a nasty mosquito is buzzing around my head. I hear it. I am in killer mode since these bastards love to bite me. This is real life. If I went into the house and connected to the Internet on the computer screen – news, social media, anything – I would be entering another dimension. Screen life, not real life. The society of the spectacle. No real mosquitoes, no wine, no trees swaying in the evening breeze.
In his novel, The Sun Also Rises, written between Nietzsche’s time and now, Ernest Hemingway, a man who surely lived in the physical world, writes of how Robert Cohn, the boxing champion from Princeton University, wants Jake Barnes, the book’s protagonist, to take a trip with him to South America. As they sit and talk in Paris, Barnes says no, and tells Cohn, “All countries look just like the moving pictures.”
Whether Hemingway was being ironic or not, or simply visionary, I don’t know. For in the 1920s, before passports and widespread tourism, there were many places you could only see if you traveled to them and they would never appear in moving pictures, while today there is almost no place that is not available to view beforehand on the internet or television. So why go anywhere if you’ve already seen it all on a screen? Why travel to nowhere or to where you have already been? Déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra put it and everyone laughed. Now the laugh is on us.
***
This is neither an argument nor a story. It’s real. I am trying to get my bearings in a disorienting situation. Call it a compass, a weather-vane, a prayer. You can call me Al or Ishmael. Call me crazy. Perhaps this writing is just an “as if.”
***
About fifteen years ago, I was teaching at a college where most communication was done via email. I was, as they say, out of the loop since I didn’t do email. I was often asked why I didn’t, and I would repeatedly reply, like Melville’s Bartleby, because “I prefer not to.” Finally, in order to keep my job, I succumbed and with the laptop computer they provided me, I went “on-line.” There were 6,954.7 emails in my in-box from the past three years. In those three years, I had performed all my duties scrupulously and hadn’t missed a beat. Someone showed me how to delete the emails, which I did without reading any, but I had entered the labyrinth. I went electronic. My reality changed. I am still searching for Ariadne’s thread. Ruin of Kasch Calasso, Roberto Best Price: $5.30 Buy New $7.99 (as of 05:25 UTC - Details)
***
But I am not yet a machine and refuse the invitation to become one. It’s a very insistent invitation, almost an order. Neil Postman (Oh such a rich surname!) sums it up well in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology:
The fundamental metaphorical message of the computer, in short, is that we are machines – thinking machines, to be sure, but machines nonetheless. It is for this reason that the computer is the quintessential, incomparable, near perfect machine for Technopoly. It subordinates the claims of our nature, our biology, our emotions, our spirituality. The computer claims sovereignty over the whole range of human experience, and supports its claim by showing that it ‘thinks’ better than we can…John McCarthy, the inventor of the term ‘artificial intelligence’…claims that ‘even machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs…What is significant about this response is that it has redefined the meaning of the word ‘belief’ … rejects the view that humans have internal states of mind that are the foundation of belief and argues instead that ‘belief’ means only what someone or something does … rejects the idea that the mind is a biological phenomenon … In other words, what we have here is a case of metaphor gone mad.
Postman wrote that in 1992, before the computer and the internet became ubiquitous and longer before on-line living had become de rigueur – before it was being shoved down our throats as it is today under the cover of COVID-19.
There is little doubt that we are being pushed to embrace what Klaus Schwab, the Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), calls COVID-19:The Great Reset, that involves a total acceptance of the electronic, on-line life. On-line learning, on-line news, on-line everything – only an idiot (from Greek, idiotes, a private person who pays not attention to public affairs) would fail to see what is being promoted. And who controls the electronic life and internet? Not you, not I, but the powers that be, the intelligence agencies and the power elites. Goodbye body, goodbye blood – “I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in support of human estrangement.
Peter Koenig, one of the most astute investigators of this propaganda effort, puts it this way:
The panacea of the future will be crowned by the Pearl of the Fourth Industrialization – Artificial intelligence (AI). It will be made possible by a 5G electromagnetic field, allowing the Internet of Things (IoT). Schwab and Malleret [Schwab’s co-author] won’t say, beware, there is opposition. 5G could still be blocked. The 5G existence and further development is necessary for surveillance and control of humanity, by digitizing everything, including human identity and money. Speaking into the Air:... Peters, John Durham Best Price: $7.60 Buy New $28.00 (as of 03:35 UTC - Details) It will be so simple, no more cash, just electronic, digital money – that is way beyond the control of the owner, the truthful earner of the money, as it can be accessed by the Global Government and withheld and / or used for pressuring misbehaving citizens into obeying the norms imposed from above. You don’t behave according to our norms, no money to buy food, shelter and health services, we let you starve. No more travel. No more attending public events. You’ll be put gradually in your own solitary confinement. The dictatorial and tyrannical global commandeering by digital control of everything is the essence of the 4th Age of Industrialization – highly promoted by the WEF’s Great Reset.
***
Like everything, of course, this push to place life under the aegis of cyberspace has a history, one that deifies the machine and attempts to convince people that they too are machines without existential freedom. Thus the ongoing meme pumped out for the past three decades has been that we are controlled by our brains and that the brain is a computer and vice versa. Brain research has received massive government funding. Drugs have been offered as the solution to every human problem. So-called diseases and disorders have been created through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and matched to pharmaceutical drugs (or the revers) for scandalous profits. And the mind has been reduced to a figment of deluded imaginations. People are machines; that’s the story, marvelous machines. They have no freedom.
If one wishes an example of techno-fascism, there is one from the art world. Back in the 1920s and 1930s there was an art movement known as Futurism. Its leader proponent was an Italian Fascist, friend of Mussolini, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The futurists claimed that all life revolves around the machine, that the machine was god, that it was beyond human control and had to be obeyed. They extolled war and speed and claimed that humans were no more significant than stones. Patriotism, militarism, strength, method, and the kingdom of experts were their blueprint for a corporate fascist state. The human eye and mind would be re-educated to automatically obey the machine’s dictates.
Now we have cyberspace, digital machines, and the internet, an exponential extension of the machine world of the 1930s and the rise of Mussolini, Fascism, and Hitler. That this online world is being pushed as the new and future normal by trans-national elite forces should not be surprising. If human communication becomes primarily digitally controlled on-line and on screens, those who control the machines will have achieved the most powerful means of mind control ever invented. That will be MKULTRA on a vast scale. Surveillance will be complete.
Yes, there are places on the internet where truth is and will be told, such as this site where you are reading this; but as we can see from today’s growing censorship across the web, those power elites and intelligence forces who control the companies that do their bidding will narrow the options for dissenting voices. Such censorship starts slowly, and then when one looks again, it is a fait accompli. The frog in the pan of slowly heating cold water never realizes it is being killed until it is too late. Free speech is now being strangled. Censorship is widespread. The Sun Also Rises: Th... Hemingway, Ernest Best Price: $9.99 Buy New $11.67 (as of 04:41 UTC - Details)
The purpose of so much internet propaganda is to confuse, obsess, depress, and then repress the population. The overlords accomplish this by the “peculiar linking together of opposites – knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism – [which] is one of the chief distinguishing marks of Oceanic society,” writes Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. “The official ideology abounds with contradictions even where there is no practical reason for them.” One look into one’s life will suffice to see how the overlords have set people against each other. It’s a classic tactic. Divide and conquer. Trump vs. Biden, Democrats vs. Republicans, whites vs. blacks, liberals vs. conservatives. Pure mind games. Contradictions every day to create social disorientation. Orwell describes Doublethink as follows:
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt…To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary…If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. [author’s emphasis]
Nietzsche said that along with the real world we have done away with the apparent as well. Digital online life has accomplished that. It has allowed the rulers – through the media who are the magicians who serve them – to create counterfeit news and doctored videos at will, to present diametrically opposed points of view within the same paragraph, and to push breaking news items so fast that no one half-way sane could keep up with their magic shows. Nietzsche obviously didn’t foresee this technology, but he sensed the madness that the relativity of knowledge and the technology of his day would usher in.
***
The popular 1990s term “Information Superhighway,” meaning the internet and all digital telecommunications, was the perfect term to describe this lunacy. Get on that highway and go as fast as you can while trying to catch the meaning of all the information flashing past you as you speed to nowhere. For not only does censorship, propaganda, disinformation, mixed messages, and contradictions line the road you are traveling, but contextless information overload is so heavy that even if you were stopped in a traffic jam, there is too much information to comprehend. And if you think this Superhighway is a freeway, think again, for the cost is high. No one puts out their hand and asks you to pay up; but the more you travel down this road you’ll notice you are missing a bit of flesh here and some blood there. And without a speed pass, you are considered road kill.
To make matters much worse, they say we need 5G to go much faster.
Paul Virilio, who has devoted himself to the study of speed (dromology), puts it this way in Open Sky:
The speed of the new optoelectronic and electroacoustic milieu becomes the final void (the void of the quick), a vacuum that no longer depends on the interval between places or things and so on the world’s very extension, but on the interface of an instantaneous transmission of remote appearances, on a geographic and geometric retention in which all volume, all relief vanishes.
***
And yet I don’t have a simple answer to the internet dilemma. You are reading it on-line and I am posting it there. It is very convenient and quick. And yet…and yet….
Can we just walk away from it? Maybe. Perhaps like those few who, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s excruciating story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” we may decide the price for our conveniences and so-called happiness is too high and that there are hidden victims that this techno-scientific “progress” creates beneath its veneer of efficiency. Others, us, our children, all children, who are reaching out not for speed and machines, but for the human touch that the on-line propagandists hope to destroy. In Le Guin’s story, the price nearly all the citizens of Omelas are willing to pay for their happiness and comfort is the imprisonment of a single child. Perhaps we should consider what we are doing to all the world’s children and their futures.
My friend Gary recently sent me this letter. I believe it sums up what many people feel. There is a vast hunger for reality and truth. The analog life. How to live it – the question hangs in the air as the artificial intelligence/digital controllers try to reduce us to machines.
Although apparently it isn’t clear if Twain ever said this, it’s still a great quote: (“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed.”) To which “amen” is the only appropriate response. I continue to daily stay abreast of events through the web, and these days much of what passed for “progressive media” simply regurgitates the covid madness as if it had been delivered on stone tablets – rather than by the same MSM that lie to us daily about literally ANYTHING of any importance. There are days I wonder “why” I continue to bother to follow the unfolding madness as if it made some “difference.” I could certainly play guitar more, and I might even get it together to write a few pieces on the nature of our collective madness, for which I have studiously assembled copious notes. I really don’t need any more information or examples – I think I have things covered on that front. Instead I find myself daily doing the little dance we’re all familiar with – uncomfortable with being “uninformed” – yet at almost every turn finding myself being routinely – “misinformed” – and so having to sift through the endless debris to have any chance at developing any coherent understanding of the world. So yes, I totally get the draw of just saying to hell with the internet. After years of shifting through the endless propaganda operations our generation has been subject too, I have no doubt you and I see through most the nonsense for what it is before we even have the proof in hand. Once the rose-colored glasses of ‘American exceptionalism’ are off, one can almost sense and see through the lies in real time even as they are being uttered.
Reading Gary’s words reminded me of those of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s definition of the Unspeakable:
It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said, the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience…
Yes, real time, real life – as we do our little dances.
Can we do our little dances and preserve reality? I’m not sure.
Reprinted with the author’s permission.
The Best of Edward Curtin


lewrockwell--2020-09-24--Snacks on a Plane – How To Beat Airline Mask Mandates

Flight attendants give inside information on how to safely fly without having to wear a mask .
The globalist psyop can be defeated with one simple trick – SNACKS .
I want to read you a couple of emails that have been sent to me from people who work for airlines .
The first email reads , ‘ Hi David , I ’ m a long time Flight Attendant .
Don ’ t wan na say which , but I ’ ve been flying part 121 air carrier for many years and numerous airlines.
’ ” The email from the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ m so freaking disturbed about this mandatory mask thing , which has totally ruined my work morale .
Crew can not do anything without getting fired .
It just makes our job much more difficult to deal with this absurdity .
The Passengers must stand their ground !
” Knight agrees , “ That ’ s right folks , we have to take back our freedoms from the ground up , even when it comes to flying.
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Flight attendants give inside information on how to safely fly without having to wear a mask. The globalist psyop can be defeated with one simple trick – SNACKS.
I want to read you a couple of emails that have been sent to me from people who work for airlines. The first email reads, ‘Hi David, I’m a long time Flight Attendant. Don’t wanna say which, but I’ve been flying part 121 air carrier for many years and numerous airlines.’”
The email from the flight attendant continues, “I’m so freaking disturbed about this mandatory mask thing, which has totally ruined my work morale. Crew can not do anything without getting fired. It just makes our job much more difficult to deal with this absurdity. The Passengers must stand their ground!”
Knight agrees, “That’s right folks, we have to take back our freedoms from the ground up, even when it comes to flying.”
Read the Whole Article
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666,666,666 Immigrants

Center-left Vox pundit Matthew Yglesias ’ new book One Billion Americans : The Case for Thinking Bigger is actually two contradictory polemics .
The book is both a sensible call for making family formation more affordable for younger Americans , and a demented demand for tripling the population of the United States ( currently one-third of a billion ) via immigration , thus ruining the chances of tens of millions of actual Americans to afford marriage and children .
There ’ s really no way to reconcile Yglesias ’ two requests : —We should figure out smart ways to make @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so they can have children as well as careers ; and —We should also encourage the rest of the world to crowd into the U.S. and horn in on the birthrights of American citizens .
Yglesias ’ main argument for adding 666,666,666 immigrants is that this would help us compete with populous China .
One Billion Americans : ... Yglesias , Matthew Best Price : $ 22.09 Buy New $ 18.52 Just think of the possibilities !
If we had two-thirds of a billion more immigrants , we could conscript a humongous army @ @ @ @ @ @ @ give us some place to dump all the teeming masses of immigrants .
Seriously , Yglesias argues , we couldn ’ t have won WWII or the Cold War without a big population .
Of course , mid-20th-century USA was far more unified , due to the immigration shutdown in the 1920s that wisely ruled that no interest groups would be allowed to use immigration to change the country ’ s ethnic balance .
Hence , the political system was more cooperative and functional than today when Democratic pundits like Yglesias ’ partner @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that immigration will bury whiteness and complaining that whites are paranoid about being replaced .
Now Democrats envision using immigration to alter the racial balance to achieve perpetual one-party rule .
One obvious problem with this plan , however , is that all the immigrant ethnicities would then turn on each other in a struggle to control the capital of the world .
Why compete with the United State militarily if you can use your co-ethnic immigrants to simply subvert the USA from within ( such as this week ’ s example of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for China on Tibetan exiles ) , especially if Washington were so foolish as to invite in two-thirds of a billion immigrants ?
But these days the Chinese are slowly learning how to play the White Guilt card against America .
In an era when extirpating the vanishing phenomenon of White Privilege obsesses the American establishment , it ’ s inconceivable that we would take effective steps to Americanize the tens of millions of new Chinese immigrants .
Always remember , diversity is our strength !
Foreigners are who we are .
So @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going to be ?
The Democrats haven ’ t dreamed up any strategy for keeping their United States of Diversity from turning into a circular firing squad other than to scream ever harder at white men as the designated scapegoats .
Indeed , one reason for this summer ’ s mania over whites supposedly oppressing blacks is because blacks vaguely realize that the white man ’ s days are numbered due to immigration .
Once the immigrants take over , nobody will take seriously anymore African-Americans ’ sad stories about George Floyd , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ blacks had better guilt-trip whites fast into making expensive concessions because the next rulers of America sure aren ’ t going to fall for black tears .

Center-left Vox pundit Matthew Yglesias’ new book One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger is actually two contradictory polemics. The book is both a sensible call for making family formation more affordable for younger Americans, and a demented demand for tripling the population of the United States (currently one-third of a billion) via immigration, thus ruining the chances of tens of millions of actual Americans to afford marriage and children.
There’s really no way to reconcile Yglesias’ two requests:
—We should figure out smart ways to make life a little less stressful for Americans so they can have children as well as careers; and
—We should also encourage the rest of the world to crowd into the U.S. and horn in on the birthrights of American citizens.
Yglesias’ main argument for adding 666,666,666 immigrants is that this would help us compete with populous China. One Billion Americans:... Yglesias, Matthew Best Price: $22.09 Buy New $18.52 (as of 05:28 UTC - Details)
In short, Yglesias seems to imply, America must invite the world in order to invade the world.
Just think of the possibilities! If we had two-thirds of a billion more immigrants, we could conscript a humongous army and militarily conquer the world…which would finally give us some place to dump all the teeming masses of immigrants.
Seriously, Yglesias argues, we couldn’t have won WWII or the Cold War without a big population.
Of course, mid-20th-century USA was far more unified, due to the immigration shutdown in the 1920s that wisely ruled that no interest groups would be allowed to use immigration to change the country’s ethnic balance. Hence, the political system was more cooperative and functional than today when Democratic pundits like Yglesias’ partner at Vox Ezra Klein alternate between boasting that immigration will bury whiteness and complaining that whites are paranoid about being replaced.
Now Democrats envision using immigration to alter the racial balance to achieve perpetual one-party rule.
One obvious problem with this plan, however, is that all the immigrant ethnicities would then turn on each other in a struggle to control the capital of the world. Why compete with the United State militarily if you can use your co-ethnic immigrants to simply subvert the USA from within (such as this week’s example of an immigrant NYPD officer arrested for spying for China on Tibetan exiles), especially if Washington were so foolish as to invite in two-thirds of a billion immigrants?
Germany would have liked to do that using German immigrants in 1917, but the self-righteous WASP ruling class proactively crushed any German-American resistance with heavy-handed assimilation methods, such as banning Beethoven concerts.
But these days the Chinese are slowly learning how to play the White Guilt card against America. In an era when extirpating the vanishing phenomenon of White Privilege obsesses the American establishment, it’s inconceivable that we would take effective steps to Americanize the tens of millions of new Chinese immigrants. Always remember, diversity is our strength! Foreigners are who we are.
So, how American are these One Billion going to be?
The Democrats haven’t dreamed up any strategy for keeping their United States of Diversity from turning into a circular firing squad other than to scream ever harder at white men as the designated scapegoats.
Indeed, one reason for this summer’s mania over whites supposedly oppressing blacks is because blacks vaguely realize that the white man’s days are numbered due to immigration. Once the immigrants take over, nobody will take seriously anymore African-Americans’ sad stories about George Floyd, redlining, and Emmett Till. So blacks had better guilt-trip whites fast into making expensive concessions because the next rulers of America sure aren’t going to fall for black tears.
Read the Whole Article


lewrockwell--2020-09-24--Is Evidence Masks Don’t Work Being Purged From the Internet?

The dentistry journal Oral Health Group has removed a research paper from its website which found masks do not work to halt the spread of disease .
They claim the paper is “ no longer relevant in the current climate ” .
The article – “ Why Face Masks Don ’ t Work : A Revealing Review ” – has been used as a source before by us before ( see here ) , and was a great collation of all the research studies done on the effectiveness of masks as a disease prevention tool .
In general it found @ @ @ @ @ @ @ no value as infection preventatives .
The author , John Hardie ( BDS , MSc , PhD , FRCDC ) , is a 30-year veteran of dental practice , specialising in infection control .
The paper had over 30 references and sources from academic journals and peer-reviewed studies .
GEER Head Mask Full Fa ... Buy New $ 79.99 It ’ s hard to say exactly when the article was taken down , but the Wayback Machine shows it to be intact on 25th of June , simply missing from July 2nd-9th , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ July 10th .
Fortunately once something is on the internet it is there forever , and you can view an archived version of the article here .
The statement itself is worth reading , not for what it says so much as what it doesn ’ t say : Note it doesn ’ t say the work was “ inaccurate ” or “ factually incorrect ” , only that it is “ no longer relevant in our current climate ” .
It also doesn ’ t say if it was taken down at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that he has formally repudiated his work .
This is not the first time evidence that masks don ’ t work has been removed from the internet .

The dentistry journal Oral Health Group has removed a research paper from its website which found masks do not work to halt the spread of disease. They claim the paper is “no longer relevant in the current climate”.
The article – “Why Face Masks Don’t Work: A Revealing Review” – has been used as a source before by us before (see here), and was a great collation of all the research studies done on the effectiveness of masks as a disease prevention tool. In general it found the evidence suggested masks have little to no value as infection preventatives.
The author, John Hardie (BDS, MSc, PhD, FRCDC), is a 30-year veteran of dental practice, specialising in infection control. The paper had over 30 references and sources from academic journals and peer-reviewed studies.
GEER Head Mask Full Fa... Buy New $79.99 (as of 04:45 UTC - Details) It’s hard to say exactly when the article was taken down, but the Wayback Machine shows it to be intact on 25th of June, simply missing from July 2nd-9th, and replaced with the current statement on July 10th.
Fortunately once something is on the internet it is there forever, and you can view an archived version of the article here.
The statement itself is worth reading, not for what it says so much as what it doesn’t say:
If you are looking for “Why Face Masks Don’t Work: A Revealing Review” by John Hardie, BDS, MSc, PhD, FRCDC, it has been removed. The content was published in 2016 and is no longer relevant in our current climate.
Note it doesn’t say the work was “inaccurate” or “factually incorrect”, only that it is “no longer relevant in our current climate”. It also doesn’t say if it was taken down at the author’s request, or that he has formally repudiated his work.
This is not the first time evidence that masks don’t work has been removed from the internet.
Read the Whole Article