Month: May 2021

Authored (mostly satirically-ish) by CJ Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

On April 1, 1933, shortly after Hitler was appointed chancellor, the Nazis staged a boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany. Members of the Storm Troopers (“die Sturmabteilung,” or the “Storm Department,” as I like to think of them) stood around outside of Jewish-owned stores with Gothic-lettered placards reading “Germans! Defend yourselves! Do not buy from Jews!”

The boycott itself was a total disaster — most Germans ignored it and just went on with their lives — but it was the beginning of the official persecution of the Jews and totalitarianism in Nazi Germany.

Last week, here in “New Normal” Germany, the government (which, it goes without saying, bears no resemblance to the Nazi regime, or any other totalitarian regime) implemented a social-segregation system that bans anyone who refuses to publicly conform to the official “New Normal” ideology from participating in German society. From now on, only those who have an official “vaccination pass” or proof of a negative PCR test are allowed to sit down and eat at restaurants, shop at a “non-essential” stores, or go to bars, or the cinema, or wherever.

Here’s a notice from the website of Prater, a popular beer garden in Berlin:

Of course, there is absolutely no valid comparison to be made between these two events, or between Nazi Germany and “New Normal” Germany, nor would I ever imply that there was. That would be illegal in “New Normal” Germany, as it would be considered “relativizing the Holocaust,” not to mention being “anti-democratic and/or delegitimizing the state in a way that endangers security,” or whatever. Plus, it’s not like there are SA goons standing outside shops and restaurants with signs reading “Germans! Defend yourselves! Don’t sell to the Unvaccinated and Untested!” It’s just that it’s now illegal to do that, i.e., sell anything to those of us whom the media and the government have systematically stigmatized as “Covid deniers” because we haven’t converted to the new official ideology and submitted to being “vaccinated” or “tested.”

Protesting the new official ideology is also illegal in “New Normal” Germany. OK, I think I should probably rephrase that. I certainly don’t want to misinform anyone. Protesting the “New Normal” isn’t outlawed per se. You’re totally allowed to apply for a permit to protest against the “Covid restrictions” on the condition that everyone taking part in your protest wears a medical-looking N95 mask and maintains a distance of 1.5 meters from every other medical-masked protester … which is kind of like permitting anti-racism protests as long as the protesters all wear Ku Klux Klan robes and perform a choreographed karaoke of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama.

Who says the Germans don’t have a sense of humor?

I don’t mean to single out the Germans. There is nothing inherently totalitarian, or fascist, or robotically authoritarian and hyper-conformist about the Germans, as a people. The fact that the vast majority of Germans clicked their heels and started mindlessly following orders, like they did in Nazi Germany, the moment the “New Normal” was introduced last year doesn’t mean that all Germans are fascists by nature. Most Americans did the same thing. So did the British, the Australians, the Spanish, the French, the Canadians, and a long list of others. It’s just that, well, I happen to live here, so I’ve watched as Germany has been transformed into “New Normal Germany” up close and personal, and it has definitely made an impression on me.

The ease with which the German authorities implemented the new official ideology, and how fanatically it has been embraced by the majority of Germans, came as something of a shock. I had naively believed that, in light of their history, the Germans would be among the first to recognize a nascent totalitarian movement predicated on textbook Goebbelsian Big Lies (i.e., manipulated Covid “case” and “death” statistics), and would resist it en masse, or at least take a moment to question the lies their leaders were hysterically barking at them.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Here we are, over a year later, and waiters and shop clerks are “checking papers” to enforce compliance with the new official ideology. (And, yes, the “New Normal” is an official ideology. When you strip away the illusion of an apocalyptic plague, there isn’t any other description for it). Perfectly healthy, medical-masked people are lining up in the streets to be experimentally “vaccinated.” Lockdown-bankrupted shops and restaurants have been converted into walk-in “PCR-test stations.” The government is debating mandatory “vaccination” of children in kindergarten. Goon squads are arresting octogenarians for picnicking on the sidewalk without permission. And so on. At this point, I’m just sitting here waiting for the news that mass “disinfection camps” are being set up to solve the “Unvaccinated Question.”

Whoops … there I go again, “relativizing the Holocaust.” I really need to stop doing that. The Germans take this stuff very seriously, especially with Israel under relentless attack by the desperately impoverished people it has locked inside an enormous walled ghetto, and is self-defensively ethnically cleansing.

But, seriously, there is no similarity whatsoever between Nazi Germany and “New Normal” Germany.

Sure, both systems suspended the constitution, declared a national “state of emergency” enabling the government to rule by decree, inundated the masses with insane propaganda and manipulated “scientific facts,” outlawed protests, criminalized dissent, implemented a variety of public rituals, and symbols, and a social segregation system, to enforce compliance with their official ideologies, and demonized anyone who refused to comply … but, other than that, there’s no similarity, and anyone who suggests there is is a dangerous social-deviant extremist who probably needs to be quarantined somewhere, or perhaps dealt with in some other “special” way.

Plus, the two ideologies are completely different.

One was a fanatical totalitarian ideology based on imaginary racial superiority and the other is a fanatical totalitarian ideology based on an imaginary “apocalyptic plague” … so what the hell am I even talking about? On top of which, no swastikas, right? No swastikas, no totalitarianism! And nobody’s mass murdering the Jews, that I know of, and that’s the critical thing, after all!

So, never mind. Just ignore all that crazy stuff I just told you about “New Normal” Germany. Don’t worry about “New Normal” America, either. Or “New Normal” Great Britain. Or “New Normal” wherever.

Get experimentally “vaccinated.” Experimentally “vaccinate” your kids. Prove your loyalty to the Reich … sorry, I meant to global capitalism. Ignore those reports of people dying and suffering horrible adverse effects. Wear your mask. Wear it forever. God knows what other viruses are out there, just waiting to defile your bodily fluids and cause you to experience a flu-like illness, or cut you down in the prime of your seventies or eighties … and, Jesus, I almost forgot “long Covid.” That in itself is certainly enough to justify radically restructuring society so that it resembles an upscale hospital theme park staffed by paranoid, smiley-faced fascists in fanciful designer Hazmat suits.

Oh, and keep your “vaccination papers” in order. You never know when you’re going to have to show them to some official at the airport, or a shop, or restaurant, or to your boss, or your landlord, or the police, or your bank, or your ISP, or your Tinder date … or some other “New Normal” authority figure.

I mean, you don’t want to be mistaken for a “Covid denier,” or an “anti-vaxxer,” or a “conspiracy theorist,” or some other type of ideological deviant, and be banished from society, do you?

On average, 86 percent of people surveyed for the Statista Global Consumer Survey in 39 countries said that their diet contained meat – highlighting, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes, that despite the trend around meat substitutes and plant-based products, eating meat remains the norm almost everywhere in the world.

In only five out of the 39 countries – Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, China and India – fewer than 80 percent of respondents said that they ate meat.

The latter country had the lowest score at 43 percent meat eaters. China, which had the second-lowest result in the survey, still counted 75 percent of respondents saying they ate meat.

You will find more infographics at Statista

India’s penchant for vegetarian fare is connected to Brahmanism or Vedic religion, a belief system connected to the caste of Brahmans, which are highly regarded in the Indian caste system, making vegetarianism equally desirable.

In Western countries, vegetarianism is more often tied to environmental concerns or concerns over unethical practices in meat production.

To satisfy the hunger for meat, 333 million tons of meat were produced worldwide in 2020. Because meat consumption typically increases as countries grow wealthier, that number has been rising.

Authored by Techno Fog via The Reactionary,

There’s a fight brewing in a DC federal court over Fusion GPS’s internal correspondence and records. And they’re losing.

Background

In 2017, the owners of Alfa Bank (we’ll call them Alfa Bank for the purposes of this article) sued Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson for their publication of false statements accusing Alfa Bank of “bribery, extortion, and interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.”

Now, the Alfa Bank is on offense. They have filed a motion to compel, asking the Court to require Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson to produce nearly 500 critically important documents improperly withheld as privileged.

Fusion/Simpson have fought the production of the documents, arguing that they are subject to the “attorney-client privilege” and otherwise privileged and not subject to production.

These are weak legal arguments – and the attorneys for Alfa Bank recognize it. First, Fusion/Simpson previously admitted the purpose of their work was political, and not for the purposes of any ongoing litigation.

Alfa Bank further observes that Glenn Simpson has even testified that the purpose of his work was pure politics, saying his goal was to “to expose an opponent’s vulnerabilities, provide source material for the media, and feed attack ads.”

As their motion argues:

Perkins Coie did not engage Defendants to perform legal or litigation-focused work; rather, Defendants have admitted (and publicly boasted) that Perkins Coie engaged Defendants in a “political context” to perform “political work.”

Second, even if these 500 documents were subject to the attorney-client privilege (and they most certainly are not), that privilege was waived when Simpson/Fusion leaked their research to third parties, including the media and government officials.

One has to be curious about exactly why Fusion GPS and Glenn Simpson are putting up such a fight to keep these 500 documents hidden. We think it’s because thus far, the public hasn’t seen the communications between Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS/Glenn Simpson or the internal Fusion GPS correspondence.

What are they hiding? Let’s take a look.

During the Alfa Bank litigation, attorneys for Fusion/Simpson have filed “privilege logs,” which give brief explanations on the type of document and the privilege that prevents its disclosure.

By their very nature, privilege logs don’t reveal much information.

What we see in the latest court filings, however, is that Fusion/Simpson want to keep secret e-mails and attachments that include their ongoing research and likely their internal observations about strategy and the veracity of their work/sources.

For example, recall that Christopher Steele was the source of a Mother Jones article titled “A Veteran Spy has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump.”

The David Corn article (which led to the FBI’s “termination” of Steele as an “official” source) was a cause of a lengthy e-mail chain (excerpt below) at Fusion GPS. This discussion even included the obtuse anti-Trump/Barr writer Lloyd Green. (Not that Lloyd Green is important, but more that the outsider included in the e-mails defeats their privilege argument.)

According to a report in Israel’s prominent Channel 12 news outlet, multiple Israeli pilots which were engaged in bombing operations over Gaza during this month’s eleven days of fighting voiced that they often leveled entire buildings to “vent frustration”. 

A series of pilots were interviewed under anonymity so they’d be willing to speak more freely on things like the controversial ‘roof tapping’ procedure which warns residents in buildings to get out minutes before they are pummeled, as well as the air force’s techniques for entirely flattening buildings. 

A total of nine high-rise buildings had essentially collapsed in their own footprints during the bombardment, including the al-Jalaa media building which housed Associated Press and Al Jazeera offices. This would often involve a series of precision strikes at specific angles aimed at a structure’s base. Additionally multiple hospitals and other health facilities had also been hit during the aerial campaign which in all took 248 Palestinian lives, among these 66 children, and wounding close to 2,000 more. 

One Israeli pilot, identified only as “Major D” in the Channel 12 report, stunned by saying he sought to intentionally level entire towers as “a way to vent frustration” over Hamas’ rocket fire and attacks on Jewish Israelis. 

“I went on a mission to carry out air strikes with a feeling that destroying the towers is a way to vent frustration over what is happening to us and over the success of the groups in Gaza,” the pilot explained according to a translation in Middle East Eye. Major D added: “We failed to stop the rocket fire and to harm the leadership of these groups, so we destroyed the towers.”

The report further detailed that Israel’s military says the intent of such tower-leveling actions is “to damage Hamas assets” but also “to deter the terrorist organizations in Gaza from continuing to launch rockets at Israeli cities.”

As Palestinians return to their destroyed homes in Gaza after the ceasefire, an Israeli pilot said destroying Gaza’s residential towers was a way of “venting frustration.” pic.twitter.com/OmRnLutHBb

— AJ+ (@ajplus) May 25, 2021

As for the rocket count from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Israel’s defense ministry has tallied nearly 4,000 rockets over the period between May 10 and May 21 – after which the current ceasefire (which is over 5 days in) took effect.

While many of these rockets were brought down by the Iron Dome anti-air system, which the US has committed to replenishing for its closest Mideast ally, an unprecedented number scored hits in urban and residential areas, killing 12 civilians and injuring hundreds. 

Authored by Jayant Bhandari via Acting-Man.com,

Scavengers Out in Full Force

I have just returned from a visit to my family in India. It was hard to escape. To get to the US from India, I needed a COVID test. The Indian government has seriously restricted who can provide COVID testing, treatment, and vaccination. Private doctors and hospitals that are not approved face brutal legal consequences if they provide COVID treatment.

India’s experience with the COVID pandemic was particularly unpleasant… [PT]

Emergency powers were centralized early last year in the hands of the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. He gave himself direct control over the bureaucrats of the states, making local governments largely impotent and dependent on him.

Getting vaccinated, the Indian way. pic.twitter.com/GztV3nhnbs

— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) May 12, 2021

In their supreme wisdom, government bureaucrats concluded that because the prefix “COVID-” exists in treatment, vaccination, and testing, they must all be performed at the same place. For my test, I sat in a petri dish of COVID, with those coming out positive sitting right next to me. Desperate, vulnerable old people, who merely wanted to get their jabs, sat among us. Those who were sick for reasons other than COVID were among us too, for the government has required everyone who is sick to be tested for COVID first .

A microcosm of how everything is done in India, the tests were given haphazardly, with samples getting mixed up, nurses spending most of their time fighting among themselves, and — lacking a lineup system — people crowded together, pushing and breathing into the mouths of one another.

A few days earlier, the government had given notice of the rate of tests and further restricted where they could be performed. A bribe-taking system would have been my preference to bypass government restrictions, but no such system has evolved yet. Nevertheless, corruption has exploded, and self-centeredness, apathy, a dog-eat-dog environment has come to the surface. You see this everywhere; the scavengers are out in full force.

I went to a private COVID hospital. The situation in government hospitals is far worse, beyond my capacity to cope with it.

The World’s Worst Lockdown

Yet the story of COVID in India is hardly about COVID as such, which is nothing more than a trigger. More than twice as many people died of fairly easily treatable tuberculosis in 2020 than of COVID. Instead, this is a story of foolish rulers, completely hollowed out institutions, and a pathetically irrational and tribal society.

India’s Hunger Games: There is no history of Indians fighting back, for they lack moral consciousness. They also know that if they do fight back, their nails will get pulled out and they will be beaten with the stick on the sole of the feet, the usual practice. Courts do nothing. pic.twitter.com/228lSn3ejw

— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) May 13, 2021

The lockdown that India declared in March 2020 was the world’s most atrocious. It was a nationwide curfew, with no-one allowed to leave home, not even to shop for groceries. The police destroyed grocery shops that dared to open. It took the government a couple of days to realize that people needed to buy food — the original decision had been a shot from the hip, completely bereft of any effort to think things through. During the four-month curfew, the police ruthlessly beat up people, particularly those who looked poor. Trains, flights, and all transportation had come to a complete, grinding halt.

India’s Hunger Games: Given an India a stick, and you can be assured he will use it. Give him a position of power, and he will abuse it, exploit people and humiliate them. Indians have no moral consciousness. They feel no righteous anger. They are either exploiters or exploited. pic.twitter.com/TZ7qD97dvX

— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) April 27, 2021

India’s Hunger Games: The old way to control covid has come back with a vengeance. Destroy food and livelihood so that people instead die of hunger. There is no plan, only shooting from the hip. pic.twitter.com/xXB1nWrufI

— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) April 16, 2021

Many people relished to no end that they were allowed to restrict and abuse others, doing so by masquerading as do-gooders with the support of the law, inflicting pain on those who did not resist and taking the appalling results in stride. They then experienced elevated, sadistic, perhaps even sexual pleasure. As always, the exploiters and the exploited were two sides of the same coin, though forever interchangeable — the reason why India never finds an escape from its drudgery.

India’s Hunger Games: Police humiliating people to make them self-responsible. Only the stupid Indian regime knows how this adds up. pic.twitter.com/BVuqDUEbhR

— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) May 3, 2021

When people were allowed to go out grocery shopping, the government required shops to open for limited hours each day, as if the virus were more dangerous at other hours. This led to overcrowding — so the opening hours were restricted further! Soon shops were instructed to open only for a limited number of days each week. After a year of this policy, the government is still unsure why crowding has continued to worsen.

India’s Hunger Games: Restricting opening hours of shops, according to the rulers, results in more social distancing. If that does not work, they do more of the same. This has been going on for a year. Now, grocery shops, in places, are open for only 4 hours, thrice a week. pic.twitter.com/m7AlFQa0el

— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) April 22, 2021

The country has actually been barricaded, making it look like a war zone, with many roads and highways entirely closed off. The remaining streets have only one side open for two-way traffic, leading to numerous head-on collisions. The barricades are not fluorescent, a technology that Indian safety experts have yet to appreciate.

Train services are minimal, and only a very limited number of security lineups is open at airports. The government believes this promotes social distancing. Wherever one is permitted to go, one is facing neck-to-neck over-crowding.

After a year of lockdown, the government hasn’t a clue how to control covid. They make utopian policies that do not work in India. Every new lockdown measure creates massive chaos, which spreads covid more than it contains. Here is Delhi, just before lockdown is to take effect. pic.twitter.com/5JC6h3RMZM

— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) April 20, 2021

With the city barricaded, it took me forever to get to the airport. To protect politicians (from COVID and increasingly from irate citizens), large areas where they live have been completely closed off. Sick people cannot find a way to get to the hospital, although only those keen on dying should actually go there.

Shortages Everywhere

No hospital that is allowed to dispense COVID treatment has the beds, oxygen, or medicine available. Not one. A single dose of critical medicine, otherwise sold for $10, is selling for as much as $1,000. I even heard a price of $7,000. Oxygen cylinders, usually priced at around $10, today go for as much as $1,000, if you can find them. It is worth remembering that more than 80% of Indians live on less than $2 a day.

While people are desperately looking for oxygen cylinders, those savvy enough have stockpiled them and medicines at home. What would have been a slight shortage has snowballed into a complete disappearance from the market. So bad is the situation that people in top political positions are pleading for them on social media. One person I know had to get the governor of his state to let his relative be given priority in cremation.

The girl killed herself. The Indian police, instead of moving her body in a car or an ambulance, forced it on her father to walk with her body for 35 km for autopsy. This is the kind of apathy Indian institutions have. pic.twitter.com/DfL7wIEeSI

— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) May 12, 2021

Getting an ambulance (which is no more than a broken taxi with a metallic stretcher) for a short ride, can cost many hundreds of dollars, in some cases running into thousands. Those who haven’t lived in India may find it hard to imagine, but this is not unique to these COVID days. India has never had a functioning ambulance system. That is why hundreds of thousands lacking help to get to the hospital die in the streets every year.

India’s Hunger Games: Indian way to send bodies to crematorium. pic.twitter.com/TWgalZj6mz

— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) May 2, 2021

But this is not a compassionate country. I was brought up in India, but I learned the meaning of “compassion” only when I left the country. During the past year, the police have brutalized many people in India, but not one Indian court has taken a suo motu interest in charging the police. Justice is merely some words scribbled on parchment.

Early this year, when Indian COVID cases were falling rapidly, there were talks about how the use of turmeric in Indian food, cow urine and dung in “treatment,” the “goodness of Indian genes,” and India’s “ancient, spiritual civilization” were behind the success. India was advertising itself as the savior of the world.

Treatment for covid: Cow dung. pic.twitter.com/TWycysEKQj

— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) May 12, 2021

In fact – if facts mean anything –  the Indian diet is among the worst in the world, full of carbohydrates, sugar and oil, and poor in nutrients and proteins. It is the kind of diet that makes one susceptible to chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension. And a year of lockdown has seriously reduced the health of everyone. Those who could afford to sit at home gained weight, lost general immunity, and did not exercise. Poor people became much poorer, victims of massive unemployment and relatively high inflation. The beggars on the street remind one of the impoverished 1980s.

Hospitals Are For Dying

India has 0.5 hospital beds per 1,000 people, a fraction of what is required — only 5% of hospital beds are in ICUs. Even before COVID hit, Indian hospitals were overflowing with patients. They occupied every single bed, often with more than one person in every bed, and the space in corridors and between the gate and the buildings. I have never seen this any other way.

Japan had no lockdown. Its 2020 death rate fell. Covid has been chiefly a test of how well the institutions work, people manage their health, and the health system is structured. After a year, India hasn’t organized even the basics. pic.twitter.com/6IrjDulL15

— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) April 21, 2021

Doctors and nurses are very ill-trained, lack competence, and are arrogant and heavy-handed. It is natural selection; the better ones tend to leave for the West. I have never been to a hospital — not even a private one — where work flowed correctly. My earliest memory of visiting a hospital is of two nurses giggling when one had given a wrong injection to a patient.

India’s Hunger Games: Dealing with the dead, the Indian way. pic.twitter.com/W7eyxulxPx

— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) May 2, 2021

Many years ago, someone I was helping out ended up in a government hospital. The doctor wanted to amputate his hand, for it was the easiest thing to do. We had to smuggle him out by bribing the policeman to a private hospital where his bones, with some work, could be set in place. Also, many years back, my granddad died, struggling for oxygen. He had gone to a private hospital, in his scooter, for a minor checkup. They ended up doing a few operations on him. While he struggled, the two doctors argued about how the pressure difference provided oxygen and drained urine.

India’s Hunger Games: The problem is not covid but an extraordinarily corrupt and apathetic medical system with no accountability. And these scenes are nothing new—I have never seen it any other way in India. One should avoid hospitals as much as one can pic.twitter.com/WqfoH9kD7Q

— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) May 4, 2021

The Indian medical system is one big orgy of doctors exchanging commissions for cross-referring to each other and getting laboratory tests done, making it the most corrupt sector of Indian society, worse than the government itself. Organ harvesting is not unknown. You go to an Indian hospital to die — and absolutely every Indian has stories to tell about this.

Lacking a functioning legal system, killer hospitals and doctors face no consequences. Today, given the new rules, COVID patients are removed from the sight of their families, ensuring that apathetic medical workers can do whatever they want.

India’s Hunger Games: Sadists, who have very fragile egos, want citizens to beg and self-flagellate before they do their jobs. When people genuflect, the low-lives running feel they are gods. One must be reminded that the exploiters & the exploited are two sides of the same coin pic.twitter.com/sf2tIdGNlR

— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) April 28, 2021

Oxygen is very easy and cheap to produce, but even that has been in shortage forever. The sight of patients sitting outside hospitals with their oxygen cylinders is common and always has been. One must have government approvals to run, operate, and supply oxygen. Indian hospitals — even the big ones — do not have oxygen-producing plants.

India’s Hunger Games: You must realize that this is the second season of the games. Sadism is ramping up, incompetence is surfacing, and institutions have devolved into tyranny, the stick & the uniform. Happy hunger games. pic.twitter.com/FSf3yhqoUP

— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) April 29, 2021

Merchants of Death and Grotesquely Stupid Rulers

India, of course, doesn’t have a clue what crisis management is about, which is the primary reason behind today’s crisis. COVID is merely the straw that broke the camel’s back. Lacking a crisis management unit or reflective thought, “managers” miss the fact that a slight shortage of critically needed items can create massive deficits as people start hoarding these essentials. Indians who are sane are ensuring that they keep their sick relatives outside the hospital system and are setting up improvised ICUs at home.

A few years ago there was a lot of talk about India providing medical tourism. Then it disappeared from the map, for those who did go to India for treatment realized that they were taking huge risks with their lives. Indian government hospitals exist only in name; Indian private hospitals are cesspits of corruption, incompetence, and utter apathy. I know no Indian who does not have a close relative who died because of the mess Indian hospitals are in. But they still cost a fortune to use, bankrupting millions of Indians every year. The COVID crisis is minting money for the merchants of death, leaving millions in desperate financial situations.

Let us do some simple math. India has approximately 700,000 hospital beds, very few of which are in ICUs, and a large number of which are reserved for politically connected people. For beds that are available, oxygen supply and doctor availability have always been a problem. With 400,000 new COVID cases happening every day, the system had to fall apart, regardless of the fact that only a tiny proportion of the population required hospitalization.

At least in mourning, one expects relatives to join in shouldering the dead to the crematorium. The absence of medical institutions in India has left society is fear-based paralysis. So this man is carrying his dead teen-daughter. pic.twitter.com/XxaJqDxgw0

— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) May 17, 2021

The problem isn’t the number of cases, which is negligible as a proportion of the population, but the shiver of fear that the nonexistent medical infrastructure has sent down the spine of society. The country is drowning in fear and mourning, and this crisis can hardly be blamed on COVID. It must be blamed on the grotesque — almost incomprehensible — stupidity of its rulers. The government has no plans. Worse, it is doing the exact opposite of what should be done.

Modi centralized everything in precisely the opposite way from what he should have done. After a year, he still has no clue that limiting opening hours of grocery stores does not decrease crowding but increases it. Similarly, he doesn’t know that it makes no sense to send those looking for vaccination and testing to places where COVID patients are. Yet, over a month ago, he declared a win over COVID. He organized massive gatherings for election canvassing — just the thing to celebrate vanquishing an epidemic, right?

At least in mourning, one expects relatives to join in shouldering the dead to the crematorium. The absence of medical institutions in India has left society is fear-based paralysis. So this man is carrying his dead teen-daughter. pic.twitter.com/XxaJqDxgw0

— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) May 17, 2021

Merely a Symptom

About 28,000 Indians die every day. These days, 3,000 people extra people die of COVID, a slight increase in overall deaths. The blame doesn’t go as much to COVID for filling up India’s crematoria as it goes to a lack of excess capacity. People have always waited in line for cremation. While the international media shows how packed crematoria are, this is nothing unusual, except that a 10% increase in cremations has clogged the system.

India’s Hunger Games: Indian’s problem is not covid, but the absence of institutions, and no planning. A slight increase in hospitalization, oxygen, and medicine need has brought the system crashing down. pic.twitter.com/Cy4DLuZKkw

— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) May 2, 2021

But COVID is real, and there are cases everywhere. Entire families are affected. Many people my family knows have died. The death rate is guaranteed to increase as time goes by. India has stopped treating people for anything other than COVID. People are dying of kidney failures, heart attacks, lack of trauma care, etc. And COVID patients cannot get oxygen.

Those who get into the hospitals are getting overdosed for COVID by the clueless medical staff. Those who should get expensive medicine get something else instead, while what they paid for gets smuggled out by nurses — when the patients are removed from the sight of their relatives, there is no one to check on what is happening.

Those lucky enough to find a bed in a private hospital are spending at American rates. But this isn’t just the problem in COVID days. This has always been a problem.

India’s prime minister,  Narendra “Teflon” Modi – despite his numerous blunders, he has yet to suffer a backlash from voters. In fact, his popularity appears to be perfectly intact so far, which is quite astonishing. [PT]

Over the last year, Modi spent a lot of time making noise, patting himself on his back, and destroying the economy, sending at least 75 million new people into desperate poverty. But he and his yes-men failed to organize such simple things as oxygen, new beds, and logistics for essential medicine. It would have made a lot more sense to quadruple beds in Indian hospitals rather than destroy at least 10% of the economy, as Modi did in 2020. He should have set up a system to make the medical profession accountable. Had he done these things, the recent COVID spike would not have been much of an event.

After years of a love affair with Modi, the international media have left him as rats leave a sinking ship. All fingers are now pointing at him, as if India, the biggest democracy in the world, would change course if only he were to be removed. Alas, all this pain and suffering is nothing unusual for India. The West is simply overreacting to the visible aspects of COVID.

There is no evidence that democracy leads to more liberty and peace. As the character of the masses increasingly reflects in the democratic institutions, what you get is more violence and decadence. Post-election scenes from in West Bengal (India): pic.twitter.com/7r6SlvyN9S

— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) May 4, 2021

The Indian government is merely a symptom of India’s tribal culture. Indians vote along the lines of their caste, their religion, a politician’s offer of freebies, etc. They lack moral and social consciousness, thus it is hard to believe that they would elect a government in possession of same — Modi is just a symptom.

India does not have a COVID crisis. India has a government crisis. More fundamentally, it has a crisis of irrationality. There is never any planning and forward-thinking, neither at the individual nor at the institutional level. The nation is always at the precipice of disaster. Over the past 73 years of so-called independence, Indians have hollowed out the institutions the British left behind. These fragile institutions are now collapsing.

India’s Hunger Games: The hungry and sick must come out. And the sadists absolutely love it. The inertia of the British system is coming to an end. Can the hollowed-out institutions survive? pic.twitter.com/OxskrKjeVz

— Jayant Bhandari (@JayantBhandari5) April 12, 2021

India’s population is ten times larger than it was before the British arrived. With all benefits bestowed on India by the British slowly getting neutralized, it does not take great mathematical skills to realize that eventually the Indian population will, without continual help from the West, revert to its former equilibrium, 10% of what it is today. COVID or whatever else will merely be the catalyst.

A Twitter user who appears well rounded with 3D-printing technology tweeted Saturday about the consequences if every “Nerf gun/foam dart gun were to suddenly become an 80% receiver.” 

Twitter user “00MEAT” said while the Biden administration is going after ghost guns and unserialized weapons. There could be a “list of consequences if every Nerf gun/foam dart gun were to suddenly become an 80% receiver, and if the ATF were to suddenly consider 80% receivers as firearms. I’ll just let you imagine what the below image is.” 

00MEAT continued: “I mean, think of the children, does the ATF really want to go after every kid once they have an 80% sbr?” 

With some fiddling around with basic computer-aided drafting software, 00MEAT was able to create the “Nerf .22 adapter,” which could theoretically “make every foam dart gun everywhere into an 80% receiver.” 

They even built a Nerf .22 adapter and attached it to the child’s play weapon that can easily be bought at Walmart or Amazon. 

“There we go. Every nerf gun is now an 80% or greater receiver. If you have a kid with a nerf gun, please let the ATF know you don’t want your kid charged with purchasing a firearm while under 21.”

00MEAT responds to someone asking, “What do I need to make this?” 

They said: “A 3d printer, a washer, and a nail. I used a little epoxy to glue the nail in and put the new head on the dart. Also 2 small screws. to attach the barrel. The blowback is definitely going to be a problem and I don’t know of the dart will hit it hard enough to set it off.” 

What it appears is the lower receiver of the Nerf gun fires the dart with a modified firing pin at the bullet in the slightly modified barrel. 

00MEAT ranted some more:

“Mirror Mirror on the wall, who’s the biggest FFL of them all? That’s right, it’s Walmart. With aisles full of nerf guns that are “readily convertible to a firing state”. What does that proposed new rule say that FFLs have to do with such devices again? Serialize and record them?” 

They concluded: “Don’t they also have to do a background check? and also cannot sell to anyone under 21? That’s not good for sales. Somebody with lots of lawyers should do something about this rule, 2021R-05. @Hasbro @Walmart.” 

The takeaway, in 00MEAT’s view, is that big-box retailers have aisles of Nerf guns that, under ATF’s proposed new rule Definition of “Frame or Receiver” and Identification of Firearms, could be classified as a weapon “readily convertible to a firing state.” 

Just imagine if the new rule was proposed – would that mean, besides 80% lowers bought online or at gun stores, Nerf guns could also be serialized? That would crush sales of big-box retailers and Amazon and piss off many parents who have kids that all they want to do this summer is play Nerf with their friends with no masks. 

By Bloomberg reporter and commentator Sofia Horta e Costa

China’s battle to maintain stability in its financial markets took a surprising shift on Tuesday when stocks surged the most since July, buoyed by record buying via exchange links in Hong Kong. Traders will be keen to see whether the gains extend on Wednesday.

There were few obvious catalysts for the rally, which came after an almost three-month stretch where the CSI 300 Index appeared stuck in a tight trading range. It may be that investors shifted cash from the commodities market as authorities intensified their efforts to cool price gains in raw materials. Mutual funds may be looking to juice their returns to make up for a lackluster few months. Perhaps traders are betting officials want to see a strong market leading up to the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party on July 1.

Bullish technicals added grease to Tuesday’s gains, with the CSI 300 closing 77 points above its 100-day moving average — a difficult resistance level for the index since March. The CSI 300 last breached that line almost exactly a year ago, just before one of the fastest rallies in Chinese stocks of the past decade. The yuan punched past 6.4 per dollar in offshore trading — also a key level for chart watchers — further enticing overseas buyers of Chinese assets.

Whatever the trigger — and in China, such outsized gains are often driven by sentiment — the sudden stock rally is another example of how quickly a trading frenzy can start in China. Imported inflation and capital inflows are complicating monetary decisions for the central bank, which has pledged to stick to its tightening path with no “sharp turn” in policy. Endorsing an even stronger yuan to offset inflation — an idea floated by one official before the article was deleted — would be a risky strategy if Beijing wants to avoid one-way bets. Ensuring a “basically stable” currency remains a key priority for financial stability.

For now, kicking the ball of money into the stock market and away from commodities may be the lesser of two evils. At least higher stock prices won’t pressure inflation, and the wealth effect might even provide a much-needed boost to consumer confidence. For a government obsessed with control, an overheating stock market would be more easily tamed than an overheating economy.

Among the hardest hit cities from the Covid pandemic was New York: it was a hotbed for cases early on, much of the city relies on tourism and hospitality for income, and the Mayor – well, he’s the slightest bit in over his head.

As we move past the one year anniversary of when those in government finally figured out that Covid could be a problem, the country – including New York – is finally starting to re-open. But the pace of that re-opening is modest, at best, the New York Times pointed out this week. 

While trends are moving in the right direction – for example, New York City’s official unemployment rate declined slightly to 11.4 percent in April, from 11.7 percent in March – the speed with which the recovery has taken hold isn’t accelerating anywhere near as quickly as the city was shut down. 

Of those additions, 15,000 restaurant jobs came back last month and the city’s restaurants had 3 times as many employees last month as they did in April 2020, during the worst of the shut down. 

Barbara Byrne Denham, senior economist at Oxford Economics, told the NYT: “For the restaurants, we have two very strong forces at work. Most of them are allowed to reopen, and many people are very eager to eat out.”

Heading into May, New York has added back about 375,000 of the 900,000 total jobs it lost due to Covid. Economists think it will still take “at least a couple years” for those numbers to go back to normal. James Parrott, an economist with the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School, thinks a full recovery may not come until 2023 or 2024. He called April’s gains in New York a “relatively strong rebound”. 

New York had “been on a decade-long expansion that produced more jobs and lower unemployment than at any time on record” heading into the pandemic. Unemployment was below 4% for 11 straight months and wages were rising at a “robust rate” for several years. 

But in those two months in 2020, government lockdowns were successful in shuttering all of those gains, and unemployment spiked to 20%.

Denham continued: “New York City has trailed the rest of the U.S. every single month on every single measure. The city lost more jobs and a higher share of its jobs than any other city did, and only Las Vegas has recovered more slowly than New York.”

Nationwide, the U.S. added just 266,000 jobs last month. Elena Volovelsky, a labor market analyst for the state Department of Labor, still thinks New York City’s rate of recovery lacks the nationwide pace. “In the next few months, the recovery of jobs in hotels and other business that cater to tourists could become more robust,” she said. “Hotel employment has yet to rebound and remains weak, having lost about 37,000 jobs since last year.”

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

The head of US Space Command said Saturday that the “Chinese” are the top “pacing threat” facing the US not only on Earth but also in space. “Our pacing threat is the Chinese, so we are watching how they are growing their space capability,” said Army Gen. James Dickinson said in Tokyo during a visit to US Forces Japan.

Space Command is different than the military branch known as Space Force. The command integrates other military branches for space operations and would oversee any future wars in space. “The Space Force is responsible for organizing and equipping space forces. We are about warfighting,” Dickinson said, explaining the difference between the two organizations.

The Pentagon recently identified China as the top “pacing threat” facing the US military, a phrase US military leaders are now repeating.

Beijing is serving the Pentagon as a reason to justify massive military spending. After President Biden requested an all-time high military budget of $753 billion for 2022, the Pentagon said its share of $715 billion was needed to confront China.

When it comes to space, competition with China, as well as Russia, is the focus of US Space Command and Space Force leaders to justify the new branch and command’s existence. “Space is very important right now,” Dickinson said.

“We are seeing what our competitors are doing in space.” Dickinson said the US is watching China’s space program “very closely.”

President Biden has made it very clear that China is the foreign policy priority of his administration. In his first address to Congress, Biden said the US is in competition with Beijing to “win the 21st century.” He’s framed the relationship as an ideological battle between “autocracy” and “democracy.”