Month: August 2020

A lab in Nevada is reporting the first confirmed coronavirus reinfection case in the US. A Nevada man who suffered from the coronavirus in April tested positive again in June after testing negative weeks prior. Doctors suspect that the man was infected with a different strain of the virus, citing genetic evidence isolated in a Nevada lab.

It’s just the latest suggestion that certain mutations of the virus could be more infectious, or more deadly, than others.

While skeptics have claimed that people shouldn’t jump to conclusions because personal details about the case haven’t been disclosed, it’s worth noting that the man is reportedly 25, putting him in the middle of the age group that is most likely to be infected with the virus.

The man, from Washoe County, tested positive in April, then negative two times in May before testing positive again in June, according to a statement from the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory shared with the press.

He initially sought treatment after complaining of a soar throat and fever. After finally testing negative weeks later, the patient said he felt well for a month, before seeking treatment again in late May.

A large group of hundreds of thousands of patients worldwide have emerged as “long haulers”, people whose viral symptoms linger for weeks, sometimes going away for a few days, only to come roaring back.

But that doesn’t appear to be the case here. According to the Washington Post, scientists with the medical school at the University of Nevada at Reno and the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory used advanced testing that sequenced the genetic strains, finding they were distinct between the infections.

Laboratory workers worked with scientists from the University of Nevada at Reno School of Medicine to ensure that two samples wouldn’t be confused or tainted in the lab, according to a report in the Reno Gazette-Journal. The scientists even enlisted the help of the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office to carry out confirmed “identity testing” on the patient.

Mark Pandori, director of the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory, said the two positive tests were “genetically distinct.”

“We examined the genomic material of the viruses and samples to investigate this,” Pandori said. “It is just one finding, but it shows that a person can possibly become infected with SARS-CoV-2 a second time.”

[…]

“It’s significant in that it’s the first of its kind,” Pandori said. “We know that people can get reinfected by viruses even though they’ve been vaccinated or have had exposure. There was a great unknown as to whether we would see that with [COVID-19] so we know that it can happen now.”

According to Pandori and his fellow scientists at the state laboratory, there have only been three other cases of confirmed reinfection worldwide: two cases in Europe and one in Hong Kong, which was confirmed a week ago.

It’s just the latest evidence to suggest that perhaps instead of focusing on racial diversity during Phase 3 trials, vaccine makers might instead want to make sure a diversity of SARS-CoV-2 strains are represented.

Authored by Maurus Adam via The Mises Institute,

Riots against police have not only occurred in the US. Two events have spurred a public debate in Germany recently.

On the night of June 20, police officers in Stuttgart stopped a 17-year-old to check for drugs in an area popular with young partygoers. Two to three hundred people in the crowd of bystanders sympathized with the young man and attacked the police. The situation escalated into riots and lootings. Forty stores were damaged, 9 looted, and 32 police officers were injured. The damage is estimated at between six and seven figures. Police believe that as many as five hundred people participated in the riots. Twenty-five arrests were made the same night; 12 of the arrested were German citizens and 3 of them had an immigrant background. The rest were citizens of other EU and non-EU countries. On the night of July 18, police officers in Frankfurt were attacked in front of the opera. Five police officers were injured, several vehicles damaged. Witnesses reported that the crowd of five to eight hundred people cheered when bottles hit the police. Thirty-nine people were arrested. All but one woman were young men between the ages of 17 and 23; most of them had an immigration background.

These events seem small compared to the riots in the USA, but there are important similarities: young people united against the police after several months of covid-19 restrictions. The events in Stuttgart and Frankfurt were found to be spontaneous outbreaks of violence without a political motivation. This is despite the fact that there have been Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Germany as well against alleged racism in the police, which were followed by riots in the US. These demonstrations may just have served as a catalyst for built-up anger. The root cause of this violence is the government’s massive interference in personal liberties through drug prohibition and the lockdowns.

The Drug War and Racism

Twelve percent of German residents are non-Germans. In 2018, the latest year of available official statistics, 27 percent of the suspects in drug offenses (all nonviolent) were non-Germans. Non-Germans do not have German citizenship. Suspects with German citizenship and an immigration background are treated as Germans. There are no numbers on this group, and there are no numbers on police checks on the street. There is, however, a general sentiment that police target people perceived as foreigners more than “ethnic” Germans, that they check people with an immigrant background more than those without one. This has caused skeptical to downright hostile sentiment against the police, not only in this group but among their peers.

The above statistics need to be read with care. The Bundeskriminalamt (equivalent to the FBI) reports on suspects, not convicted offenders, here. There is also no data on spontaneous checks. But there is one very important aspect to this data: 11 percent of the suspects were boys between 14 and 18 years old, 16 percent were young men between 18 and 21, and 61 percent were men above 21. There is no data on the older age groups, but it is clear that overwhelming majority of suspects are male, and most probably of  a younger age.

The Effects of the Lockdown

People in Germany have seen massive restrictions of their personal freedom unseen in West Germany since the end of World War II. Businesses were closed, factories shut down, and meeting people outside your household was banned for a while and limited later. How could the government enforce such drastic measures? Etienne de la Boetie (The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude) has argued that all governments rest on the consent of their citizens. In this case, the government has bought this consent by promising to save lives and save the economy with huge spending financed by public debt so that no one will have to pay more taxes. A key group of supporters of the government is public employees. In September 2019, before covid-19, 45.28 million people in Germany were employed. The state (all levels) employed 4.8 million, or 10.6 percent. In addition to that, there were around 18 million retirees (18.2 million in 2017). They also receive their income from the state. This means that there is a very large group of people whose financial well-being was not sacrificed during the lockdowns. But who did not get this payoff? According to the union of public employees, only 2.7 percent of public employees are under the age of 25.

Young people did not get these massive handouts from the state. On the contrary, they are the ones who will have to pay back the €156 billion public debt that the state has taken on to provide “relief.” Their schools and universities have been closed, lectures are mainly online now, which can decrease the quality of teaching. Beyond that, they are the ones who will then have to pay the pensions of the older generation that did receive the handouts. In Germany, the currently employed pay the pensions of the retired. Demographic development will increase the amount that the employed generation has to pay. Right now there are 2.1 employed people for every person who is retired. The younger generation faces economic distress right now and in the future.

This situation is aggravated by banning social contact and closing places where younger people meet with their peers. Third places outside the home and the workplace are essential for communicating values and boundaries. For several months, there have been no outlets for the prevention violence in young men through boxing gyms, etc. They were locked up for weeks, which leads to aggression and is especially bad for young men who would naturally be rebellious. If testosterone-laden boys cannot meet with their friends (and, probably more important, their girlfriends), cannot release energy at the gym, and are not receiving any value-oriented education, there are solid conditions for escalating violence.

The Way Forward

The violence against the police is an outbreak of anger against the state, a state that has continuously interfered with their personal liberty and property. A group of mayors from the green party, the Social Democrats, and the Christian conservatives in an open letter appealed to the government to support a policy in which all young people in Germany would be forced to work for one year in what they called “basic social service” (gesellschaftlicher Grunddienst), similar to the mandatory “social year” we had before. Some media commentators enthusiastically embraced this idea. This is the wrong way forward. One really wonders about the sensibility of these politicians, who write in the same letter:

Young people do not learn respect, acceptance, tolerance on Wikipedia, Facebook, and Instagram, but in the interaction with others. At the place of apprenticeship. In the [sports] club. During everyday life. Here one practices the discourse and contact with others….These social training places are becoming less and less.

The way forward is not in complaining about such social places becoming less, because that is not the problem. The way forward is to stop threatening further restrictions, to stop advocating “a new normal” without social interaction, and to stop harassing young people for every decision they want to make for themselves. The federal police already implicitly recognizes drug offenses as victimless crimes (it collects statistics only on offenders, not victims, in contrast to their data for violent crimes). They should stop treating them as crimes outright. After all, 60 percent of the drug offenses are related to cannabis alone. Leave the young people alone. Let them make friends. Let them learn. End the government intrusion in their lives.

North Korea, on Saturday, allegedly broadcasted a mysterious encrypted message to its spies, for the first time on YouTube, reported Yonhap News Agency. 

The video clip, uploaded on the state-run Radio Pyongyang’s YouTube account, had a female announcer read off a series of numbers and said this is “an information technology review assignment of the remote education university for No. 719 expedition agents.”

The announcer repeated phrases such as “No. 23 on Page 564, No. -19 on Page 479” in the minute-long broadcast. The video, titled “0100011001-001,” was viewed several thousand times before it was deleted. Here are some of the screenshots of the video:

This could be the latest example of cryptography blended with social media that Pyongyang uses to communicate instructions to its secret agents in other countries. 

YouTube user Sneed Chuck appears to have recorded the now-deleted video. 

However, Martyn Williams, founder of North Korea Tech website, was quoted by NK News as saying the media reports of the now-deleted video were false:

“North Korea doesn’t run the channel,” Williams said. “It’s run from Mexico and was only recently renamed to Pyongyang Broadcast Station– which is incorrect anyway, and the [official] radio station is called Pyongyang Broadcasting Station.”

He said there are dozens of websites and social media accounts that appear to be North-Korean run but are managed by individual users in Mexico, that frequently record or copy content and repost. 

Williams said Radio Pyongyang’s YouTube account did precisely that…

“The recording uploaded was obviously recorded off the radio,” he said. “It wasn’t clear and contained interference,” Williams continued – a point that “also indicates it’s not from the source.”

With no authenticity of the video’s contents, it remains anyone’s guess if the spy codes were, in fact, instructions to North Korean secret agents. However, the two Koreas have historically interjected codes into music, tv shows, and other media content over the decades to communicate with spies in enemy territory. 

Authored by Fred Reed,

Plumbing The Colonials

This admirable column gets a modest trickle of mail from European readers, for some reason chiefly in France and Italy but some from the Nordic realms. While these correspondents are intelligent and thoughtful, and sometimes translate my maunderings into their languages, they do not give a comprehensive view of what Europe thinks of the United States—the populations, I mean, not the politicians, who think what will profit them, but actual people. A question of particular interest to me is why Europe, and Europeans, put up with America.

For example, European countries seem to be almost entirely subservient to the US, vassals, protectorates held in quiet contempt by America. Do not you in Europe obey almost every wish of the Americans? Do you not do everything for their benefit, not your own? How could they not scorn you?

The whole world sees this. England wanted to use Huawei in its Five G installation, but Mommy Washington said no. Boris Johnson wriggled and squirmed like a trained seal hoping to be given a fish…and then obeyed. Europe almost always obeys. Huawei wanted to build a research center in England, but Mr. Trump cracked the whip. England appears poised to obey. As usual.

“Yass, Bwana. Yassuh. What you say, boss.”

This is the England of Nelson and Churchill and the Battle of Britain? “Yass, Bwana”? How do you stand it?

Yes, I know, you Brits hide your subservience by saying that you have a “special relationship” with America, as if you were somehow coequals. In reality, the special relationship is only that of Most Servile Vassal.

But this acceptance of humiliation is not unique to England. You know this. Americans certainly know it.

All of Europe wanted to trade with Iran, as did Russia and China, countries representing far more population and GDP than America does. and you all supported the nuclear deal. But Washington said no. When Mother America gives orders, you all obey like circus dogs—Why do you do this? When did Europe become a gentleman’s club of bootlickers?

It is in your interest to buy natural gas from Russia, and whether it is in your interest or not it is certainly your business. But no. Washington says you cannot have Nordstream II…and you roll over, yes, with little whimpers of protest, but you take it. You must buy American gas, more expensive than Russian. But I think you know what Washington really wants, which is to make you dependent on America for energy. And it is working.

If you control a country’s sources of energy, you control the country. We see that around the world America is going for the oil: Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Syria, the UAE. Too much of the world tolerates this, but Europe is worse. When Trump tells England to confiscate (“steal,” in plain English) Venezuela’s gold, it does. Yass, Bwana. And when Trump tells Germany—Germany, for God’s sake, the country of Frederick the Great, Bismark, Guderian—to recognize Guaido, Germany rolls over and spreads.

Everything you do seems to be for America’s benefit, not your own. Bojo docilely bans Huawei’s Five G, which sets back Europe’s adoption of an important technology by years—for the sole benefit of America.

Thus do we Yanks milk our colonials. Poor widdle fings.

You let America do this to you. “Yass, Bwana.” The Americans treat you almost as enemies, yet you treat them as friends. Richard Grenell comes to Germany as American ambassador, and begins barking orders to German businesses. American senators bluntly threaten to devastate the port of Macron commercially if it allows Russia’s pipelaying ships to enter. Incredible. The US pretends to be your ally, your guardian, your mother, yet it places heavy sanctions on you if you do not abandon a pipeline that is none of its business.

Why do you send European soldiers to fight America’s war in Afghanistan, a country in which you have no stake? Or Iraq? Or anywhere else? Washington regards you as sepoys, as its native troops. It uses you as a fig leaf of respectability to cover America’s unending aggression. But you do it, for America’s benefit, not your own. How charitable of you.

There is no end to your groveling. You have no need of NATO, the North American Treaty Organization, America’s prison guard in Europe. Countries cannot be sovereign and independent with foreign troops on their soil. Whether you call them occupation forces or something less candid, they in their tens of thousands, their dozens of bases, are a foreign presence.

They are there for America’s purposes, not yours. You certainly do not need them to defend you against Russia which is far inferior to Europe in population, GDP, military expenditure and which, as your intelligence services tell you, is not mobilizing. But to defend yourselves against this grave but nonexistent danger, you must spend mor on the military—which means buy more American arms.

Of course your own militaries cling to NATO. Their jobs and bases depend on it. NATO gives them the chance to go to Afghanistan and be just like real soldiers and to pretend that they are not without purpose. The bars and restaurants around the bases in Europe depend on the military dollar. Military men are often more loyal to their international comrades than to their own populations. Once military forces have encysted in a country, it is devilishly hard to get them out, and they will always find some budgetary pretext, send money.

Can you not see that America is playing you for fools in its creeping encirclement of Russia? Then, if America starts a war with Russia, it will be fought in…Europe. When was the last time America fought an American war in America? And you don’t even control your own armies.

“Yass, Bwana. What you say, Bwana. You de boss.” God almighty.

I would much like to hear what Europeans really think about all of this. Thanks.

As the shooting of a man in Portland last night intensifies Americans’ fears about mounting violent crime and the increasingly out of control “protest movement” spawned by the killing of George Floyd, the Financial Times has chosen to write a story about Sweden that could offer some insight into the mindset of the American “silent majority”.

Now that Sweden has successfully beaten back its coronavirus outbreak, politicians in the country are pivoting to focus on a new issue that has emerged in the aftermath of the economic destruction wrought by the global outbreak. Even though Sweden never locked down its economy, it suffered an even larger economic contraction than its Nordic neighbors.

This, combined with years of heightened migration fueled by crises in the Middle East and Africa, has continued to fuel growth in crime across stodgy Sweden.

When President Trump tweeted about the crime wave in Sweden, the mainstream media dismissed the president’s concerns as simply regurgitating a ‘bogus’ story invented by Fox News, a claim echoed by Sweden’s center-left political establishment. The truth, however, is much more complicated, and much more sensitive, than this denialism might suggest.

And now that the COVID-19 numbers are down, the country is starting to focus on the rising rates of violent crime, spurred in part by a series of particularly brutal crimes that have taken place in recent weeks. Whether its reports about criminals setting up their own roadblocks in Gothenburg, a 12-year-old girl shot and killed in gang crossfire, or a beating that verged on torture, right-wing politicians, led by a right-wing party called the Sweden Democrats that was mostly shunned until a few months ago, have seized on this latest crime wave as Sweden’s “second pandemic.“

“There is a big frustration and anger at the developments,” Mattias Karlsson, parliamentary leader of the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats, the country’s third-largest political party, told the Financial Times. “Our laws are too soft, the police don’t have the means to investigate this very serious crime.”

On Friday night, a large riot broke out in an immigrant suburb of Sweden’s third city Malmo after far-right sympathisers burnt a Koran. Ulf Kristersson, head of the main centre-right opposition party, the Moderates, used his summer speech on August 24 to accuse the government of failing to act after more than 200 shootings and 24 deaths this year. “The deadly violence is Sweden’s second pandemic,” he added.

Interestingly enough, the issue of crime is becoming a bigger political liability for Sweden’s ruling Social Democrats than their handling of the coronavirus. And it’s a natural fit for the ‘anti-migrant’ right because most of the criminal suspects are immigrants.

The governing Social Democrats had until recently enjoyed a boost in the polls from their handling of the coronavirus pandemic where they have largely followed the recommendations of state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell while ploughing billions of krona into the economy.

But a nascent conservative bloc – involving Mr Kristersson’s Moderates and the Christian Democrats from the mainstream centre-right, plus the previously shunned Sweden Democrats – is increasingly attacking the government on law and order and migration as many of the suspected criminals are immigrants.

One academic expert quoted in the FT story said that while the liberal government’s “libertarian” approach to tackling the pandemic had “discombobulated” Swedish conservatives, the crime issue is giving conservatives a rare opportunity to completely turn the tables on their competition.

Nicholas Aylott, senior lecturer in political science at Sodertorn University, said the Swedish right had been “discombobulated” by the country’s COVID-19 strategy where the centre-left suddenly rallied around a “libertarian” approach of not having a formal lockdown. But he argued the resurgence in violence had dented the centre-left hopes that coronavirus could tilt the debate more towards the economy and big government. “The violence is becoming so grotesque it is bound to displace pretty much everything else,” he added.

The conservative line is pretty straight forward: attempts at integration and open migration were misguided idealism, and these failed policies have led to “segregation and violence”.

Toward the end of the story, the conservative politician who appeared to be the FT’s main source made an interesting point. In Sweden – as in much of Europe today – the big political disagreements are no longer about economics. They’re about culture.

Mr Karlsson said that “many people are feeling insecure in their everyday life” and argued that Sweden’s immigration and integration policies had failed, leading to “segregation and violence”.

He added: “It’s not really economics or taxes that are the main sources of conflict in Swedish politics — values, identity, crime that is where the debate is.”

And they’re about what kind of society famously open Sweden should become as the world advances further into the 21st Century.

Authored by Mark Petrakis via Off-Guardian.org,

“Those who are serious in ridiculous matters will be ridiculous in serious matters.”

– Cato the Elder

The enduring beauty of fascism is that it requires so little from us… so little independent thought; just our basic belief and adherence to a limited set of popularly-shared directives and narratives that once fully accepted, relieve us of the need to address stubborn questions or to fret over subtle differences of opinion and feeling.

Propaganda reassures us that we are complete, that we know all there is to know, that we are rational, pragmatic and pure, that the science has been settled and that we are a part of something special.

Such a surrender to reductionist narratives cuts across all classes and income brackets. Neither the most educated nor the least uneducated retain any special advantage in the face of powerful consensus-shaping propaganda.

PROPAGANDA is, of course, the life-blood of fascist control. Maintaining the economic, governmental and scientific frameworks of a technocratic-fascist “operating system” is unthinkable without propaganda and disinformation. When truth is seen as a liability to power, it must always be disallowed, and all instances of it effectively penalized.

Radio and television and their constant enabler, popular “science” – operate today as their own religions, reliant for their success upon the devotion of the masses. As McLuhan told us, the experience of electronic media is always more powerful than the specific messaging it contains.

The currency that we use to pay for the electronic spectacle is our attention, and in such hyper-mediated times as these, the charges mount up exponentially, until we find ourselves saddled with soul-crushing denial and disconnection.

Three defining historical moments (among many) have defined the confluence of fascism, propaganda and technology.

1. The fundamental principles of propaganda were first defined 100 years ago by Edward Bernays, often referred to as the father of public relations.

2. Joseph Goebbels served as Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. The stunning successful lessons of his Nazi propaganda programs were not lost on the world’s political and economic leaders in the post-war era, and in the time since then.

3. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was founded in 1947, for the expressed purpose of conducting secret intelligence operations that could serve political aims at the same time they generated huge and untraceable profits. The extent of the CIA’s illegal enterprises necessitated the creation and maintenance of a permanent ministry of disinformation, managed by our own taxpayer-funded “Shadow Government” and “Deep State.”

In retrospect then, it is clear that these propaganda campaigns have proven SO successful, that even today, few of us ever realize how ongoing, vast and wide-spread they are.

Propaganda’s efficacy is so indisputable, that it is commonly the case that those who are the most certain that they are NOT among the propagandized, are in fact its most overt victims.

Corporate media focuses on those stories they are paid to propagate, i.e., those which support the financial and ideological
agendas of their owners, who themselves are all, without exception, central parts of the larger global ruling oligarchy.

A key part of the propagandist’s handbook is to simply leave unexplored stories that they are NOT given approval to manage and control; stories which, we might assume, do not generate sufficient advantage for the owners. Such calculated sins of omission are essential to keeping the mass of believers unperturbed by the vagaries of complexity in the delivery of their daily dogmas.

If an individual were to insist upon learning more about any of these less-discussed stories, they would soon arrive at the realization that while an abundance of relevant facts can easily be found, and often hidden in plain sight, the truth is that most people simply do not WANT to know, think or talk about any such truths that differ from those accepted by their peers, for whom cognitive dissonance causes such literal pain and disorientation, as to keep them docile and compliant to the dictates of the media.

As McLuhan said:

“Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.”

Perhaps, the grandest illusion of all, and which must be maintained at all costs, is that both the world and the stories we tell of it, must be made to appear as though they are generated randomly. It must always appear that the media’s coverage and the comments of experts are entirely free from any preconceived manipulation.

In the terminology of the media, news must always be “Breaking!” – even though in reality, we know the news more closely resembles a cooking show, where ingredients are chopped and sliced before-hand, after which they are mixed and served up live on camera in ways that keep the public hooked on happy hash-slinging and enticingly-scripted recipes.

Technocratic-Fascism, the advanced fusion of the multinational technology-dominated corporatocracy with the authoritarian global and surveillance state, allows its initiates to believe they are a part of something bigger than themselves. Witness the magical left’s lockstep belief in the pure villainy of Donald Trump, or the magical right’s equally lockstep belief in Trump as a self-sacrificing national hero.

Clearly both parties to the constant heist of human freedom need each other to better manage their greed for consumer profit and civilian control. Such mental assaults secondarily require that all truthful motives remain hidden and obfuscated in a fog of weaponized storytelling.

This accounts of course for the abiding value of bullshit, does it not? Bullshit effectively misleads without upsetting the natural order of things, without irreversibly tearing apart the fabric of credibility. Nothing can stand in the way of the constant flow of messaging, profit and growth, which are after all, the primary justifications for all this deceptive disorder.

This is another aspect of what makes technocratic-fascism so irresistible; in realizing how effective it is at knowing us better than we know ourselves. The assumption is that if we were to know ourselves better than the stories we are told, we would not be seduced by such obvious lies. Since we don’t, our “betters” are left with no choice but to keep up the constant barrage of lies, at least until our thinking eventually locks up and we capitulate and collapse, like a stack of wooden blocks.

If for example, we did not always obey or give our attention to propaganda, we would soon grow alarmed by the many contradictions that we are told exist, say between the Covid monster and the daily vaporous disease statistics, or between maskers and non-maskers, between vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, between crushing economic destruction and the mewling need for safety, between the lunatic left and the lunatic right, between black and whites, between males and females… between one piece of orthogonal bullshit and another equally opposing piece of bullshit.

ALL of these dichotomies, of course, are at some fundamental level FALSE… every last one of them, each constructed by skilled media professionals and put in place to overwhelm our critical thinking and that of millions of others from seeing what’s really going on in the limitless background.

In this remarkably cost-efficient way, human energy and intelligence are siphoned off, and directed towards the task of turning us into helplessly confused and easily-controllable “lab rats,” forcibly cut off from each other, lest we experience ourselves as intelligent and sovereign beings. If something like that were to happen, the driving agendas of big business and global governance to keep us marching in lockstep towards a more divided and disempowered fate, would soon disintegrate.

It is in such a state of debilitating surrender that we are divided one subset “targeted” demographic against another; all herded into a wicked mental trap with one side thinking one thing, while the other side thinks something else – such that half of us hate the other and the other half hate the other right back.

At this point, and after so many years of unqualified victories for the industries supported by the propaganda industry, the pathetic truth is that propaganda doesn’t even NEED to be that entertaining anymore. Knowing they have the situation in tow, the purveyors of propaganda can save a ton of money by just being sensational, confrontational and redundant in their narratives.

Recall this quote from the singular Frank Zappa:

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”

Once we have learned to carry on absent the need for verifiable truth, or without the need to discern authentic and honest voices from deceitful and manipulative ones, we gradually lose our interest in so-called “truth,” preferring instead to keep splashing about in unsubstantiated speculation, pompous judgments and opinionated fluff.

Let’s be honest…the only people who might actually CARE what any of us think about the blaring big topics of the day (masks or vaccines or climate change or Black Lives Matter, etc.) are other equally thin-skinned victims of propaganda, who much like the majority of us, still believe that the government cares about them and that the mainstream media is telling them the truth.

That is why a growing number of people have given up on the media’s crudely fictional depiction of reality, and are instead trying to figure out how to thrive and to reconnect energetically with others – and with truths that can only exist OUTSIDE the reach of the propaganda ‘spectacle.”

The media, of course, with their sophisticated surveillance tracking tools knows full well when there is an uptick in negative reactions to their toxic narratives, but since it is also aware that it is after all pushing nothing but sugar water bullshit, it is left with little choice but to double-down and turn the levels up even higher… thus ramming even more bullshit at us.

Whacky Joe Biden, Greedy Green Greta, Covid, Aunt Jemima Race Wars and endless offenses… all come at us so fast and so hard as to leave us bent and broke under the weight of it all, as we stumble around like headless chickens desperately trying to win the approval of our friends by looking like we are at least doing the only “acceptable” thing.

Arriving at his frenzied point of screwball hyper-polarization, is the essential endgame of Propaganda… locking us into its agenda, at the same time it demands that we think we are making these choices of our own FREE WILL!

To get us to that point though, they must keep us constantly preoccupied; agitated, offended, attacking each other and defending ourselves against all threats, both real and imagined. The more they can get us ensnared in mind-numbing opinions and outrages, the less energy and attention will be left to notice the deeper more manipulative agendas of techno-fascism.

Mid 20th Century fascism was woefully limited in its capacities and in what it could extract from its victims… and yet still it worked! The new technocratic-fascism is here to mine the population for all the bio-capital commodification it can. Those who can invent the most efficient and ingenious means of converting human confusion, poverty, crime and illness into impact markets will quickly take their place among the prior generations’ titans of technology.

Once you step back far enough though to experience the sheer SCALE of this ongoing and unlimited propaganda WAR on us, it grows a bit easier to see why so few are able to escape the media’s influence. Oh, for a while perhaps, you can rise above it… but eventually, you will get pulled back down into the muck. Even if you kill your TV, unplug yourself from your media feeds, and turn off the Wi-Fi, each of us, at some point, will relapse and fall off the wagon.

This is because propaganda is not just about what’s in the news or in the media. It’s even more importantly about the broadly consensual layers of social hallucination that are created and shared across all of society, which make it difficult for any of us to function socially, absent those commonly shared reference points and signals that we have convinced ourselves are required in order to allay our anxiety, confusion and isolation… all of which are primary raisons d’etres for propaganda in the first place.

I wish there was one simple way to break propaganda’s voodoo spell. There isn’t. I’m not even sure how to do that for myself, or how I can avoid falling prey to it again, just as I and most of us have done for the great majority of our lives.

What seems obvious to me now is that propaganda in the service of a transhumanist-centered technology has become so pervasive and insidiously forceful, that in many ways, our thinking has ceased to be entirely our own, and that the portion of our soul that remains recognizable as uniquely us, is shrinking fast.

The effect of all this leaves our spirits infected, and easily convertible into compliant puppets under the top-down control of truly diabolically puppet masters, who in order to keep us subservient to their untruths, and to doing whatever we are told, have become masterful at pretending to be something they are not.

This is perfectly exemplified in the character of Bill Gates, who working with his Bain and Co. handlers and account managers, (who previously managed the Iraq War for Dick Cheney) have constructed these elaborate biopharma/ biocapital/ vaccine public health/fear narratives and investment pyramids that are then fed to the media and Wall Street, who reheat and serve them to the public, generating criminal profits while making such that Mr. Gates is always portrayed as an altruistic philanthropist and protector of the public… when any fool can see he is nothing of the sort.

NOT seeing just how obvious and laughable propaganda campaigns have become in this one-size fits all era, leaves us painfully vulnerable and ready to be further subsumed by more of the same.

The complexity of today’s master plans for disinformation are unparalleled compared to the past. Looking back to the 1950’s and 60’s, when all the above long-term plans for centralized and technocratic control were slowly being tested, being part of America’s growing middle-class was actually a pretty sweet deal. It is in a return to more bucolic and “normal” times as these that we pin our nostalgic hopes, by the media but especially by politicians.

“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in, can hope to escape.”

– William S. Burroughs

Looking at our world, we can see that the reach and authority of the transnational global capitalists who run the world’s nation-sized casinos has been cemented. All systems are now in place, up and running LIVE on that criminal syndicate’s vast web of networks. Each one of us has by now been targeted by them for some form of surveillance and financialization – just as “nature” has, just as “disease” has, just as “social justice” has, just as everything will eventually.

The “A.I. control grids” are all active and expanding. The technocratic agendas are now fully ready for prime-time. We have been gradually “shepherded” by propaganda and psychological torture techniques, just as we have also been physically compromised by toxins in the geo-engineered air and water, by disruptive electromagnetic frequency radiation, by weaponized technologies that include the release of nano-particulates inside our bodies (either by way of inhalation or injection) which are then governed by oxygen-absorbing 5G which at the higher millimeter wave frequency, will bring remote alteration of our very DNA under the “persistent” control of A.I., which will guide the process of transmuting us into commodities, into plunderable assets, into digitally-regulated and genetically modified “livestock.”

Sadly, this is where decades of constant acquiescence to propaganda and institutional hypnosis has brought us…bent over, staring at our shoes and bracing for the “BIG ONE.”

I remember in my own youth, being convinced that the evil genius of Hitler and Nazism had somehow transformed the mass of decent German people into BEASTS, possessed by demons, as if in a dark fairy tale… into something less than human.

We know that once we begin to regard others as LESS than us…as something OTHER than us, it is only a short step to unleashing our hate upon them, even to the point of becoming violent and criminal.

Needless to say, these very same psychological imperatives are everywhere apparent today; in how we are instructed by propaganda to regard the Chinese, Russians, Muslims, white supremacist Trumpers, deluded depraved liberals, defective racists, misogynist sexists and quivering face-ists (with their acute disdain for anyone who questions the dogma of e-mask-ulation.)

Same as it ever was, you might say, but as we approach the much-touted singularity with its accompanying convergence of man and machine, how will the media respond in the face of that Huxleyan “solution?” In that light, how might propaganda shift its focus?

I expect it will change-up the pitch and tell us that THIS time, things will be different. This time won’t be like last time. No, this time, things will have changed, so that we will no longer be “brainwashed” by the media as we were before. No, when the coming big change happens to us, it will not be like that. We will rather be transformed into advanced independent humans augmented by perfectly blended combinations of technology, science and engineering.

Our DNA will be carefully crafted by brilliant doctors and scientists to enhance only the “preferred” qualities in their human subjects, and under their wise direction, we will gladly do as we are told. For so great a future, we will willingly offer our support and so grow accustomed to our new life, lest we become like those poor unfortunate souls, so lost in their unreason, that they cannot fully appreciate the wisdom that derives from enthusiastically embracing PROGRESS.

In our leaders inspired and time-tested plans, we will of course have every convenience at our fingertips, such that doors will magically open when we approach. We will be able to download all manner of rich media and data with the blink of an eye. We will be as supermen.

Our definitions of what is valuable and what is not, will fluidly shift to suit changing circumstances. We will see ourselves as the very picture of modernity, and the envy of the world…just as we have always been. We will be as American as our multi-racial forefathers, even though they lived in unenlightened times…long before today’s great social justice transformation allowed us, their proud descendants, to wake each day into this glistening new world.

In such a world, when we ask ourselves what we might be grateful for, we will no longer need to struggle for an answer. We will know exactly what is good, true and beautiful and we will commit ourselves to those lofty ideals each and every day.

Therein too, and most mercilessly, resides the fatal beauty of technocratic-fascism.

President Trump slammed ‘Slow’ Joe Biden in a series of Sunday night tweets, after the former VP issued a weak statement essentially blaming Trump for inciting national violence which has left at least 30 people dead in the wake of a series of police incidents involving black suspects who died or were injured in custody or in altercations.

Instead of condemning violent leftists such as Antifa, Biden instead blamed Trump for “recklessly encouraging violence” and failing to “lower the temperature.”

Not once did Biden mention Antifa or single out the left for causing the vast majority of the violence gripping the nation. Instead, Biden simply used a broad brush stroke and condemned ‘violence of every kind by anyone, whether on the left or the right.’

Biden’s comments – echoed by his running mate Kamala Harris, come after a suspected self-admitted member of Antifa murdered a Trump supporter Saturday night in Portland.

Trump wasn’t having it.

“When is Slow Joe Biden going to criticize the Anarchists, Thugs & Agitators in ANTIFA?” Trump tweeted hours later, adding “When is he going to suggest bringing up the National Guard in BADLY RUN & Crime Infested Democrat Cities & States? Remember, he can’t lose the Crazy Bernie Super Liberal vote!”

When is Slow Joe Biden going to criticize the Anarchists, Thugs & Agitators in ANTIFA? When is he going to suggest bringing up the National Guard in BADLY RUN & Crime Infested Democrat Cities & States? Remember, he can’t lose the Crazy Bernie Super Liberal vote!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 31, 2020

Earlier in the evening, Trump suggested that Biden was being ‘forced out of the basement’ because his poll numbers are plunging – referring to a Politico report that Biden would be traveling on Monday (but not to Kenosha). Trump added that Biden has an ‘interesting’ problem – namely that “He must always be weak on CRIME because of the Bernie Sanders Radical Left voter. If he loses them, like Crooked Hillary did, he is “toast”, and many will vote for me because of TRADE (Bernie was good on trade). Joe MUST always be weak on crime!”

….His problem is interesting. He must always be weak on CRIME because of the Bernie Sanders Radical Left voter. If he loses them, like Crooked Hillary did, he is “toast”, and many will vote for me because of TRADE (Bernie was good on trade). Joe MUST always be weak on crime!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 31, 2020

We would note that Kamala Harris told Late Show host Stephen Colbert just days ago that the riots are never going to stop, and to beware.

I wonder if they’re going to stop .. are they Kamala? I couldn’t quite understand you https://t.co/jshtj8OE8X

— Kirstie Alley (@kirstiealley) August 29, 2020

Harris also raised money last month to bail out Antifa and BLM arrested in the mayhem.

Here is Kamala Harris raising Bail money for violent rioters who injured police & burnt down small businesses. The democrat party & their media are responsible for the carnage & pain the #BidenRiots have caused https://t.co/MxoIjt0CXL

— Melissa Tate (@TheRightMelissa) August 30, 2020

Meanwhile, Biden’s refusal to condemn Antifa has not gone unnoticed:

Biden’s Twitter interns aren’t allowed to say Antifa https://t.co/DaY0Kfczbr

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) August 30, 2020

That sound you hear from Democrats?

Thats them realizing they done fucked up by supporting the riots, I mean “peaceful protests” pic.twitter.com/65LjGZAJPt

— Tim Pool (@Timcast) August 31, 2020

Biden’s statement was the worst possible move. It would have been better for him to say nothing.

— Cernovich (@Cernovich) August 30, 2020

Now let’s see if Biden can salvage his basement blunder. After all, silence is complicity.

Authored by Gary Barnett via LewRockwell.com,

“It is important to remember that government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.”  

– Ludwig Von Mises (1990). “Economic freedom and interventionism: an anthology of articles and essays”

Concerning economics in the United States today, the hierarchy begins with the top tier of self-proclaimed elites, those in central and high level banking, those in the large corporate world, those at the top of the ‘healthcare’ pyramid, and those controlling monetary and economic policy above the level of government, including the class running the large tax exempt foundations. While government is below this level, it is nonetheless responsible for the economic carnage because it is the initiator and enforcer of policies meant to enrich the few at the top at the expense of the many. This could never be more evident than it is today.

This country has gone through hell this year due to policies put into place to combat what has been called a deadly ‘pandemic.’ Considering our history, and current numbers of total death, this ‘pandemic’ has proved to be a fraud. Apparently, that matters not, as the public at large has accepted the propaganda, and has given in to immense draconian measures that have devastated this economy and the natural health of the population. So far, things have gone exactly as planned, and the people have surrendered to the hype to such an extent as to allow the destruction of their natural immune systems and in many cases their livelihoods. This does not bode well for the future if the current trend is not reversed.

The bloated economic systems worldwide have been inflated by a constant increase in the money supply for at least the past 12 plus years. This year alone, that expansion has exploded exponentially, and with no end in sight, and was of course blamed on a virus outbreak. With this kind of expansion, and the coinciding response of lockdowns, business and travel closures, quarantines, and fear mongering, prices have dramatically escalated and unemployment has skyrocketed. Businesses across the country have been shut down, many permanently, and many have been forced into bankruptcy. These of course are small and medium sized businesses for the most part, the backbone of this country. The unemployment caused by this harsh and unwarranted government response, has been unimaginable, and has led to over 40 million people being out of work. This alone has the potential to destroy the economy of this nation, but this is just the beginning.

The destruction of the economy is a necessary aspect of the plan to advance global governance. The more people out of work and dependent on government means that they will be much easier to control. Already mass poverty is evident, and with food supplies dwindling, and so many unable to support their families, starvation among a large part of the population is certainly possible if not probable. These are agendas sought by those in the ruling class that need total compliance in order to restructure the global economic system. This economic collapse coming was imminent, but now is being pushed forward at great speed in order to use this virus scare as the scapegoat for a desired economic reset.

The biggest threat we face now is this coming fall and winter, as this flu season will most likely be much worse than normal due to the purposeful weakening of the immune systems of most Americans. Refusing to bow to state orders, and not accepting any political authority, would certainly stop this onslaught of tyranny in its tracks, even if just a small percentage of the population were to say no to this government response. That has not happened so far, but without that dissent, this country is doomed in my opinion. Imagine what has happened over just the past 6 months, and then double or triple that response. The response seen to date will be dwarfed by the response this winter if the death toll is higher as I predict, and most all those deaths will be blamed on this thing called Covid-19.

It appears that a manufactured ramp up of the state response is coming very soon, as this has been telegraphed for some time by the government and the state run mainstream media. The warnings have been out in the open, and this is with no knowledge whatsoever of what will occur this season. A set up is in place, and the planned next wave is ready to launch in just the next few weeks. Already around the world, much more brutal and oppressive measures are being advanced for non-compliance of mask wearing, distancing, and quarantine evasiveness. It appears that this is in anticipation of much harsher measures to come, and the rulers need to get the public used to an amplification of enforcement so that necessary changes can be made.

This fall and winter is the most important time for this country, maybe the most important time in history.

If mass compliance continues, and if dissent by large numbers of Americans is not forthcoming, life as we know it could end before spring.  The global reset by that time could be advancing at such a pace as to be almost impossible to stop. That would be an untenable situation, as once this reset is in high gear, and even more people are destitute, it will be much more difficult to reverse this totalitarian plot.

With more lockdowns, more quarantine, more isolation, and more destruction of the economy, unemployment will balloon to unheard of levels, causing even more sickness, death, and tyranny at the hands of the state. In addition, the more deaths that occur, the more draconian the policies will become, and the carnage brought by the evil response to this so-called virus will not relent, it will only get worse. Imagine unemployment at 50%, 60%, or more? Imagine no food on the shelves, and no ability to support or feed your families? Imagine hell on earth.

This is all leading to a mandatory global vaccine that will be released some time this fall or winter. If most of the masses line up for this vaccine, something that is now looking possible, the resulting effects of these toxins that are unknown at this time will have already been put into play inside the bodies of most of the population. What harm will that bring, and will it be irreversible?

At this stage, the plan for global governance will have advanced, and we would be on track to establish a cashless society, with all monetary systems becoming digital. This will signal the end of an era that began with freedom, but will end in death, destruction, slavery, and tyranny. This cannot be allowed to happen.

“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.” 

– Albert Camus (2012). “Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Essays”, p.101, Vintage