"There are two ways to be fooled.
One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true."
- Soren Kierkegaard
So, we rise from the rubble...
Wednesday, December 2, 2020
Gregory Mannarino, "Into The Abyss: The US Economy In FULL ON MELTDOWN"
Gregory Mannarino,
"Into The Abyss: The US Economy In FULL ON MELTDOWN"
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Tuesday, December 1, 2020
"Positive Covid Test? Ask This Question!"
"Positive Covid Test? Ask This Question!"
by Dr. Chris Martenson
"The lockdowns are based on surging "cases" which are based on positive PCR test results. However, what exactly is a positive PCR test result? What does it mean? I'll answer that and give you the answer to the most important question you should ask if you or a loved one gets a positive PCR test result. "What's the Cycle Threshold (CT) value for that test?" Sounds wonky but it's actually really important to understand. A low CT value means someone is loaded with virus. A high value, oppositely, means less of a viral load. Beyond a certain level the load is insufficient to either infect someone else or be of any clinical or epidemiological relevance whatsoever. The problem? Governments all over the country and world are basing their decisions on CT values that are very high. Too high."
"After This New Wave Of Lockdowns, Most People Will Accept Any Solution As They Will Be So Desperate"
"After This New Wave Of Lockdowns, Most People
Will Accept Any Solution As They Will Be So Desperate"
by Epic Economist
"We are about to have another round of lockdowns amid what many have already pointed out as a "very, very dark winter". Hospitals are crowded, people are afraid and the state of our economy is oscillating between being very bad and rolling to the edge of a cliff. So far, national and global leaders’ response to the crisis doesn’t appear to have effectively helped to control the number of cases.
In fact, we presented studies before showing that in countries where strict measures to bend the curb were adopted as opposed to countries that opted for more flexible measures similar rates in the number of cases, recoveries and casualties were observed. The idea of lockdowns might seem like a viable solution to protect people from contagion, but its effectiveness is being questioned by scientists and data analysts.
The side effects of widespread lockdowns only add to people's suffering. It all starts with the massive spread of fear. The mainstream media takes advantage of every possible loophole to explore this narrative and manipulate people to overreact to this situation. In this video, Epic Economist is going to do an epic analysis. We want to disclose how the effects of the crisis are driving millions to complete desperation - and yes, there is a very obscure reason behind it.
The elites continue to feed this catastrophe in order to make many of us hit our breaking points. Soon enough, millions will be unemployed, helpless, hungry, and homeless - in a state of complete despair. It is only when people have no more prospects that the real intentions of all marionettes of the establishment emerge and find the perfect cue to infiltrate our lives.
It's just sad to assume that all of this destruction is being caused in the name of money and power. They say all they want is to control the propagation of the virus. But why not do that through the use of efficient health safety instructions to workers? Is it just easier to shut down everything and lock everyone up?
We have experienced the harsh collateral damages brought by business shutdowns before. In every wave of shutdowns, business activity is suddenly frozen, how are small business owners supposed to find ways to have enough revenue to pay for their staff, their rent, their operational costs? If it wasn't clear before, now it's pretty evident that this is the ultimate opportunity for big conglomerates to watch small business meltdown, and go bankrupt so that they can swallow them up while also annihilating the competition.
The ones who absorb the impact of this chaotic freefall are us. 70 million unemployment claims were filed this year. According to Feeding America, 54 million people could go hungry by early next year. Food banks have witnessed a historic spike in demand. For every adult facing hunger, there are 4 food-insecure children.
On the other hand, with the memory of food shortages still fresh on their minds and moved by the anxiety of further supply chain disruptions, some have been wiping out store shelves in a phenomenon whose name couldn't be more appropriate - panic purchasing. Largely benefiting from this sudden hoarding behavior, major food retailers are readjusting prices for the growing demand. Knowing that they can soar prices by holding back inventory for a while, why wouldn't they do it?
In any case, these are the people who somehow can still afford food. At this stage of the crisis, millions can't. If they can't pay for their own food, how are they supposed to afford rent? With the expiration of federal assistance, those people have no source of income, thereby, in deep food and housing insecurity. 40 million are on the brink of eviction.
They say we must stay at home, but at the same time, millions can lose their homes and no one is doing anything about it. Do you see the ambiguousness? This alarming economic suffering is a weapon on deviant hands. As Michael Snyder said “this is going to perfectly set the stage for the “solutions” that the elite plan to offer all of us in 2021. And once this “dark winter” finally ends, almost everybody will be absolutely desperate to return to their “normal” lives." So if you're wondering where this tortuous road will take us, maybe you should check one of our previous Great Reset videos, which expose the elite's dystopian quest for infinite money, and how they are willing to push us over the edge to get what they want. When we say things are about to get worse, it's because by now we can see that this is just the beginning."
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Related:
“It’s Really Bad”
“It’s Really Bad”
by Brian Maher
"IT’S really bad"... “It” is the condition of small business in one populous American state - the garden state of New Jersey. 31% of its small businesses have remained shuttered since lockups began. In neighboring New York, the figure is 28%.
Combine the two thickly populated states...The lights are out, the machines are down and the cobwebs are up in nearly one-third of small businesses. That is, nearly one in three small businesses is dead - or in a deep coma. “It’s really bad,” laments Eileen Kean, New Jersey state director of the National Federation of Independent Businesses... “And without federal dollars coming into New Jersey, the Main Street stores and other establishments are not gonna make it through the winter.”
Meantime, New Jersey infections are ballooning. The state recently reported 4,669 cases in one day alone. Another lockdown is “on the table,” threatens the governor. Yet will food be on the table this winter… if the lockdown proceeds? Now swim the Hudson…
New York City May Not Recover Until 2025: In New York the outlook is grim; a winter of discontent is likely ahead... “It’s devastating how many restaurants have shuttered and jobs have been lost,” says Mr. Andrew Rigie, executive director of NYC Hospitality Alliances. “And with the infection rate rising and the looming threat of indoor dining closing again, many more will close unless the government provides adequate support to these small businesses.”
What will become of the owners? And the workers? Where will they turn? Mr. Mark Zandi is chief economist at Moody's Analytics. He hazards New York City may not recover until 2025. Why not? Because New York is not structurally designed for social distancing: "This is an event that struck right at the heart of New York's comparative advantages. Being globally oriented, being stacked up in skyscrapers and packed together in stadiums: the very thing that made New York the pandemic undermined New York, was upended by it." Meantime, Broadway remains dark.
Expect a New Recession Starting Now: Lest you think New York and New Jersey suffer exceptional casualty rates, please have another guess… About 30% of small businesses remain shut across the 50 states - on average. Can the next recession be far off as additional lockdowns menace? No, says Jim Rickards: "The economy was in a technical recession from February to July 2020. Then that recession ended and growth resumed from July to November 2020… Now, we’re heading into a second technical recession, which could become quite severe in the first quarter of 2021… The recessions are caused by the imposition of extreme lockdowns…" Most of the new Biden team favor lockdowns even though they don’t work. So, expect more lockdowns. And, expect a new recession starting now as the lockdowns are imposed.
Second-quarter GDP collapsed at an annualized 32% rate… in the dread depths of the pandemic. Can this economy endure another similar lacing? $4.8 Trillion of Lost GDP? The pandemic could steal between $3.2 trillion and $4.8 trillion from the economy over the course of two years. That is according to a freshly hatched USC study. This study likewise concluded that compulsory closings and partial reopenings could inflict a 22% GDP hemorrhaging in one year alone.
Here are additional findings: 54 million to 367 million workdays would be lost due to people getting sick or dying from COVID-19; 2 million to nearly 15 million workdays would be lost due to employees staying home to care for sick loved ones; Job losses could range from 14.7% to 23.8%, and in the worst-case, affect an estimated 36.5 million workers.
The angels and saints tremble at the prospect.Yet fear not - the cavalry is mounting up…
A Bipartisan Spending Bill: Senate “moderates” proposed a bipartisan $908 billion spending bill this morning. Our minions inform us that small businesses would receive some $300 billion of relief. $240 billion would go funneling to state and local governments. $180 billion would sustain the jobless. The remainder would wend its way into the coffers of the airlines and other segments of the transportation industry. At writing, neither party’s kingpins have blessed the plan.
Democrats are bucking for a $2 trillion package. Republicans, meantime, are out for a more modest $500 billion bill. But does the Treasury Department have $500 billion, $908 billion, or $2 trillion stowed away in its strongbox? It does not. The container is empty. The federal government must therefore go upon the borrow… again.
Spending and Debt: As we have written before: Governments incline naturally to spending, as governments incline naturally to roguery, crookery and rascality. Since taxation alone will not fund their sprees, governments incline naturally to debt. The United States government was dreadfully indebted before the pandemic. Now it is plunging deeper and deeper into debt... without the GDP gains to brunt the cost.
Meantime, present yields on its 10-year Treasury bond scrape along at a vanishing 0.93%. Yields on its 30-year Treasury - at 1.58% - run scarcely higher. That is, debt is nearly free. Given these rates…
The United States government can no more resist debt’s seductions than a cat can resist catnip, a bee can resist honey… or a moth can resist flame. The flame is drawing the United States in, surely, inexorably, relentlessly.
Total federal debt presently rises to a record $27 trillion... or 143% of GDP. Never has the ratio been higher. Today’s ratio outdoes the previous record of 121% from 1946 - after the United States emptied its pockets to scotch the Axis. Today it is emptying its pockets to scotch the virus. What is the fracturing point? We do not know. Yet do we wish to find out?
Unproductive Debt: As we have also argued before, here is the greatest defect of United States government debt: It is largely unproductive. It is a millstone about the neck. The lion’s take of federal government borrowings goes to “social welfare” and to service existing debt. That is, it goes largely to non-productive uses. It sedates and depresses - it does not stimulate. We must recall that today’s borrowing represents a claim upon the future, a theft of the future. The more we borrow to consume today… the less we will be able to consume tomorrow.
The Citizen Pays One Way or Another: Government claims no resources of its own. It collects them in one of two ways. It presses a pistol against the citizen’s ribs… and plunders his wallet. That is, it taxes him. Or it takes to the credit markets, empty cup in hand. But even if the government borrows, the pistol goes against the ribs. That is because the citizen must pay taxes to service the debt. And how - again - does the government haul in taxes?
Either way… the citizen pays. Here is our darkest fear: One day, soon or late, we will all be paying - and royally."
"Here Come the Hacks"
"Here Come the Hacks"
By Bill Bonner
"I’m working my a** off with the Christmas stuff that, you know, who gives
a f*** about Christmas stuff and decorations, but I need to do it, right?"
– Melania Trump
WEST RIVER, MARYLAND – "Continuing our “notes from a foreign country”… Driving from Miami to Maryland last week, we noticed the billboards. There were two major themes – God and Mammon. As for God, many were those that urged passers-by to get with the program. Some offered a simple, time-tested formula – “Jesus Saves.” Others were more specific: “Stop the Pain. Follow Christ.”
Multilingual Mammon: But for those who lacked faith in God, there were other saviors on offer. Hardly had we left the airport when a billboard announced, in Spanish: “Injured? Get the aggressive lawyer on your side.” A little further on, another Spanish language billboard suggested that America’s bosses might not be playing fair and square with their wetback employees: “They didn’t pay you? Fight back. Call Juan.”
After leaving the Miami area, the language changed to English. But the pitch was the same. “Injured? I got $795,000 for my client.” “Accident? Call Shimer & Partners. No check for you; you pay us nothing.” One billboard told victims to call “the sevens” – 777-7777. Across the road, they were advertising the nines – 999-9999.
You could get any kind of law firm you wanted. One was clearly Jewish. Another was WASPish. One was Hispanic. Another featured Black lawyers. One claimed to have scored $1.2 million for a client. Another featured an injury victim holding a check for $1.9 million. All the way up the east coast, the signs continued.
Holiday Humbug: What to make of it? In no other country in the world have we ever seen anything like it. But now, we are back at home… only a mile from where we were born. It is autumn. The leaves have almost all fallen to the ground. And this is not the season for pitbull lawyers. Yes, it’s December already. The holiday spirit is upon us.
And yet, many Americans – like the first lady – may be in a sour mood. There are still some 20 million people collecting unemployment benefits. The gap between rich and poor has widened; the stock market has soared while the economy has gone limp. The office parties have been canceled. We even dropped our own annual Christmas party – nobody would come. The CDC is telling people to stay home. And people go around with the holy rag on their faces… not so much to ward off evil spirits (the evidence, such as it is, is mixed) as to show their solidarity with the bien pensant mob.
Stick to the Script: And now, to make things worse – here come the hacks! Here at the Diary, we have no information you don’t have. Nor do we have any insights that you couldn’t find on your own. All we do is try to connect the dots. Dear readers write to tell us that we’ve missed this dot or that one… And surely, we have. Like the stars in the night sky, there are billions of them. What we try to do is take them in… as if they were a Seurat painting… not looking at the individual points of light, but at the pattern. We squint… and what we see, faintly, is a remarkable scene.
Yes, Dear Reader… you’ve probably caught on to our amor fati (love of fate) view of things. Nature has her patterns, her cycles, her birth announcements and eulogies… her buds and her dead leaves… And over the year, even the stars move.
Great empires must stick to the script, too. In our view, America’s time to take her bow was at the end of the 20th century. The American Empire should have been gracefully dismantled… with America re-entering the community of civilized nations. Instead, Mother Nature, with her magnificent sense of mischief, gave her the leaders she needed to make a fool of herself.
George W. Bush with his airhead “War Against Terror”… Barack Obama with his unaffordable medical care plan… Donald J. Trump with his trade wars… assassinations… tax cuts… and the biggest spending increases – and deficits – in history.
Downward Slide: But wait… What would you have to do to keep the empire on its downward track? Keep the foreign wars going – with a total empire spending bill of more than $1 trillion per year… Keep the gravy train rolling at home, too – bailouts, giveaways, “stimulus”… and add (if you’re able) fuller medical care coverage…Continue spending more than you collect in taxes… And keep printing fake money to pay for it all.
The Congressional Budget Office says we’re already headed for $100 trillion in deficits – it’s baked in the cake – over the next 30 years. What kind of a moronic leader would want to add to that? What kind of a fool would Americans elect to guide them into their final disaster? What does history need to carry on the work of Bush, Obama, and Trump?
Lifelong Deep Stater: You already have the answer: Joseph Biden! He’s been a Swamp critter… and card-carrying member of the Deep State… for nearly half a century, having signed on to every piece of crackpot legislation to come along. And soon, he’s bringing a whole team of some of Washington’s worst sleazeballs, hacks, has-beens, never-weres, and should-never-bes back into the White House. Let’s look at them more closely – tomorrow."
Gregory Mannarino, "New Record High For Stocks In The Middle Of A Full Blown Currency/Debt Crisis"
Gregory Mannarino,
"New Record High For Stocks In The Middle
Of A Full Blown Currency/Debt Crisis"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"The most distant object easily visible to the eye is M31, the great Andromeda Galaxy some two and a half million light-years away. But without a telescope, even this immense spiral galaxy - spanning over 200,000 light years - appears as a faint, nebulous cloud in the constellation Andromeda. In contrast, details of a bright yellow nucleus and dark winding dust lanes, are revealed in this digital telescopic image.
Narrow band image data recording emission from hydrogen atoms, shows off the reddish star-forming regions dotting gorgeous blue spiral arms and young star clusters. While even casual skygazers are now inspired by the knowledge that there are many distant galaxies like M31, astronomers seriously debated this fundamental concept in the 20th century. Were these "spiral nebulae" simply outlying components of our own Milky Way Galaxy or were they instead "island universes" - distant systems of stars comparable to the Milky Way itself? This question was central to the famous Shapley-Curtis debate of 1920, which was later resolved by observations of M31 in favor of Andromeda, island universe.”
- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100109.html
Chet Raymo, “Try To Remember…”
“Try To Remember…”
by Chet Raymo
“In a sleepless hour of the night, I was trying to remember the last name of a person I have known well for more than forty years. When my spouse stirred in her sleep, I asked her. She couldn't remember either. One again I started mentally through the alphabet. "I think it starts with B," I said. Ten minutes later she rolled over and said, "The next letter is R." Bingo! The name popped into my head. Or I should say, "popped out of my head." Because it was in there somewhere, recorded in a tangle of neurons as materially as if it were written on a piece of paper.
There was a time, back when I was a young man, when some scientists thought memory might be molecular - stored as proteins or RNA molecules that have somehow been modified by experience. The molecule theory of memory rested on experiments with worms (I remember the cover illustration on Scientific American). The worms were taught to navigate a simple maze. Then they were ground up and fed to untrained worms, which seemed to navigate the maze without training. Only molecules, it was thought, could have survived the transfer. Those experiments have been discredited. Scientists now overwhelmingly believe that memories are stored as webs of connections between spider-shaped brain cells called neurons. Each neuron is connected through electrochemical connections to thousands of others. According to the current view, experience fine-tunes the connections, strengthening some, weakening others, creating a different "trace" of interconnected cells for each memory.
But truth be told, memory is still deeply mysterious. How exactly are a lifetime of memories stored and retrieved at will? We know how it works for computers, but how for the human brain? What is self-consciousness? What are dreams? This is the primary scientific agenda for the 21st century. In the middle of the night I go fishing, in that sea of potentiated synapses that are the human soul, for a name that becomes ever more difficult to extract as I get older. I troll the alphabet: A, B, C, D… The name is in there, along with a face and more that forty years of interactions. The Nobel Prizes are waiting.”
- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/
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Graphic: Salvador Dali, "The Persistence of Memory"
"Only Barbarians..."
“Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from,
how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going,
whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not.”
- Isaiah Berlin
"When the Sky Is No More Than Remembered Light: Mark Strand Reads His Poignant Poem 'The End'”
"When the Sky Is No More Than Remembered Light:
Mark Strand Reads His Poignant Poem 'The End'”
“Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing,
when the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.”
- by Maria Popova
“It’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention,” the Pulitzer-winning poet Mark Strand (April 11, 1934–November 29, 2014) observed in contemplating the artist’s task to bear witness to the universe. And yet this universe in which we live is predicated on impermanence, and the lucky accident of our existence is crowned with the certitude of its end from the start. Why, then, are we always so shocked by the finitude of all we hold dear and, above all, by our own mortality? Few are those who can say with sincerity, like Rilke did an exquisite 1923 letter, that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.” Instead, we spend our lives shuddering at any reminder of our inevitable end, unsalved by the miracle of having lived at all.
Montaigne articulated the central paradox of being perfectly in 16th-century meditation on death and the art of living: “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.” Still, lament we do, and some of our greatest art gives voice to that lamentation.
That paradox is what Strand explores with transcendent courage and curiosity in his poem “The End,” found in his "Collected Poems" (public library) - the trove of truth and beauty that gave us Strand’s love letter to dreams.
In this hauntingly beautiful recording, courtesy of The New York Public Library, an aged Strand reads his poignant poem shortly before he repaid his own debt to mortality:
"The End"
by Mark Strand
"Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.
When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky
Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end."
Complement with the lyrical "Duck, Death and the Tulip", Marcus Aurelius on mortality and the key to living fully, and the great Zen master Seung Sahn Soen-sa’s explanation of death and the life-force to a child, then revisit Strand’s celebration of clouds and everything they mean."
"Not Sorry..."
"Who is more responsible than a gull who finds and follows meaning, a higher purpose for life? For a thousand years we have scrabbled after fish heads, but now we have a reason to live - to learn, to discover, to be free! How much more there is now to living! Instead of our drab slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there’s reason to life! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly!"
"What he had once hoped for the Flock, he now gained for himself alone;
he learned to fly, and was not sorry for the price that he had paid...”
- Richard Bach,
“Jonathan Livingston Seagull”
"Strange 'Coincidences' That Should Deeply Bother Everyone Trying To Put The Puzzle Pieces Together"
"Strange 'Coincidences' That Should Deeply Bother
Everyone Trying To Put The Puzzle Pieces Together"
by Michael Snyder
"Whether you are a Republican, a Democrat or someone that doesn’t identify with either major party, you should care deeply about the integrity of our elections. Because if we don’t have elections that are free and fair, our system of government simply will not work. If we come out of the 2020 elections with about half the country believing that the race for president was rigged, that is a major problem. Once faith in our elections is gone, it will be nearly impossible to restore, and that is why it is absolutely imperative that we try to figure out how this election went so haywire.
In recent days, I have seen so many people point out some of the numbers from the election that should be deeply bothering all of us. In this article, I am going to try to summarize some of the most important points.
In 2012, Barack Obama cruised to re-election even though he received 3.5 million less votes than he got in 2008.
In 2020, President Trump was supposedly soundly defeated even though he received 11 million more votes than he did in 2016.
They are telling us that Trump was defeated because of a historic turnout by Biden voters. But the number of counties that Biden actually won was a record low for a “winning candidate” by a very wide margin. It is being reported that Trump won 83 percent of all U.S. counties, and Biden only won 17 percent: We are told that Biden won more votes nationally than any presidential candidate in history. But he won a record low of 17 percent of counties; he only won 524 counties, as opposed to the 873 counties Obama won in 2008. Yet, Biden somehow outdid Obama in total votes.
How in the world can you win the presidency by losing more than 80 percent of the counties in the entire country? Yes, I understand that the major population centers are where the votes are. But when Obama won his two elections, at least he was victorious in more than 20 percent of all U.S. counties both times: "Former President Obama ushered in the previous low in 2012, winning re-election with just 689 counties, or 22 percent – breaking his own record set in 2008, where he won with 875 counties, or 28 percent.
Biden underperformed Obama almost everywhere except in the urban population centers that were absolutely critical to Biden’s victory. In those urban population centers, Biden supposedly piled up obscene vote totals that are very difficult to believe.
And it just so happens that those heavily blue urban population centers all seemed to stop counting votes at about the same time on the night of the election. All of a sudden, voting came to a standstill in Milwaukee, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Atlanta. As many have pointed out, if you stop and wait to see how all of the other areas of your state have voted, you can figure out exactly how many votes you need to put your candidate over the top.
When counting finally resumed, there were four massive vote dumps in the middle of the night which proved decisive in some of the most critical swing states:
1. An update in Michigan listed as of 6:31AM Eastern Time on November 4th, 2020, which shows 141,258 votes for Joe Biden and 5,968 votes for Donald Trump
2. An update in Wisconsin listed as 3:42AM Central Time on November 4th, 2020, which shows 143,379 votes for Joe Biden and 25,163 votes for Donald Trump
3. A vote update in Georgia listed at 1:34AM Eastern Time on November 4th, 2020, which shows 136,155 votes for Joe Biden and 29,115 votes for Donald Trump
4. An update in Michigan listed as of 3:50 AM Eastern Time on November 4th, 2020, which shows 54,497 votes for Joe Biden and 4,718 votes for Donald Trump
In the end, Biden won Wisconsin by less than one percent, he won Pennsylvania by just over one percent, he won Georgia by less than one percent and he won Arizona by less than one percent. If you reverse the results in those four states, President Trump would be the winner of the race.
The voting behavior in the key midwestern states was particularly suspicious. The following comes from Patrick Basham: "Midwestern states Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin always swing in the same direction as Ohio and Iowa, their regional peers. Ohio likewise swings with Florida. Current tallies show that, outside of a few cities, the Rust Belt swung in Trump’s direction. Yet, Biden leads in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin because of an apparent avalanche of black votes in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee. Biden’s ‘winning’ margin was derived almost entirely from such voters in these cities, as coincidentally his black vote spiked only in exactly the locations necessary to secure victory. He did not receive comparable levels of support among comparable demographic groups in comparable states, which is highly unusual for the presidential victor."
There are countless people that have been looking into how vote totals in the most critical swing states may have been manipulated, but the big tech companies have been doing their best to keep such information from spreading widely.
In fact, it is being reported that Facebook applied an “emergency change” to its news feed algorithm right after the election: "In the aftermath of the contentious presidential election, Facebook reportedly made an “emergency change” to its algorithm, which resulted in the suppression of content from “hyperpartisan” outlets. Employees at Facebook are now asking if the “nicer news feed” can stay in place long term, according to a Tuesday report from The New York Times." This “nicer news feed” greatly favors mainstream news outlets such as CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times.
The big tech companies are absolutely determined to shape how we think, and the power that they now possess is colossal. They will determine what “truth” is allowed to be told in the years ahead, and they will continue to push our culture down a dystopian path that only leads to complete oblivion.
This election was a major turning point, and those that directed events behind the scenes are on the verge of totally getting away with it. But this isn’t just a loss for the Republican Party. This is a loss for all Americans, because our entire system of government is crumbling right in front of our eyes."
"LA County Supervisor Eats At Restaurant Hours After Voting To Ban Outdoor Dining"
"LA County Supervisor Eats At Restaurant
Hours After Voting To Ban Outdoor Dining"
by Andrea Widburg
"In the early days of television, Sheila Kuehl had a role in a now forgotten show, "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis", which ended in 1963. She then became a leftist, a lawyer, and a politician. Despite the long interval between her Hollywood years and today, Kuehl still clings to that lampooned Hollywood notion about stars versus "the little people." How else can one explain that, after railing against restaurants and voting to shut them down, Kuehl promptly went to a nice restaurant for dinner?
During the lockdown, politicians continued to draw their taxpayer-funded paychecks and telecommute from the comfort of their homes. Meanwhile, they targeted small businesses that depend on dealings with the public. More than any other business, restaurants were in Democrat politicians' crosshairs.
As of mid-September, more than 100,000 restaurants had closed across America. In the two months since then, it's certain that several thousand more have closed. The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, runs a regular column identifying restaurants that are gone.
Every closed restaurant represents several people's lives going down the drain. The owner who sank all of his money in the restaurant, the employees who worked there, the suppliers who were dependent on its custom, and the surrounding stores who counted on the foot traffic it brought — all of it's gone. And I might add, there's no reason to believe that these horrific losses made a damned bit of difference to the course of a virus that is relentlessly working its way through the population.
While the people have suffered, the politicians imposing this suffering, like European royalty of old, have flaunted their special status.
Denver's mayor, Michael Hancock, flew to his family within 30 minutes of telling Denver citizens to stay home for Thanksgiving.
Andrew Cuomo, having reinstated the lockdown across New York, boasted about his family coming home for Thanksgiving.
Illinois's Governor J.B. Pritzker, another Democrat millionaire, was happy to see his family travel during the height of the spring lockdown.
Pennsylvania's health secretary, "Rachel" Levine, who leftists pretend is not a mentally ill man telling people he's a woman, forced sick people into nursing homes in May, even as he secretly removed his own mother. Levine, incidentally, is being floated as a possible surgeon general. That's just what America needs: a hypocritical, self-entitled, mentally ill surgeon general.
And in California, Governor Gavin Newsom started by making headlines for imposing ridiculously stringent lockdown rules on people's Thanksgiving celebrations, including requiring outdoor dining only, suggesting masks throughout the meal, giving people limited permission to use the bathroom, and cracking down on singing.
Then, just before Thanksgiving, photos emerged of Newsom and his wife having an indoor dinner with a large crowd of lobbyists at the über-expensive French Laundry in Napa Valley. None of the guests was masked. Afterward, Newsom gave a fake apology because Democrats are so certain that they've achieved perpetual power that they don't even bother anymore to go through the motions of political humility.
The latest politician who can't be bothered with the rules she imposes on little people is former Hollywood actress Sheila Kuehl: the Los Angeles County Supervisor, a Democrat, ate outdoors at Il Forno Trattoria in Santa Monica, just hours after casting the deciding vote to ban all outdoor dining in the county last week.
"You can watch my 7pm live report on this in the link above. Tonight at 10pm I'll have a full story about this, including reaction from local restaurant owners, and fellow L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn, who did not support the decision to ban outdoor dining." @FOXLA
- Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) December 1, 2020
Kuehl said during a recent Board of Supervisors meeting that outdoor dining is “a most dangerous situation,” saying she felt there was a risk of transmission of the virus from unmasked customers to their masked waiters and waitresses. “This is a serious health emergency and we must take it seriously,” Kuehl said. “The servers are not protected from us, and they’re not protected from their other tables that they’re serving at that particular time, plus all the hours in which they’re working.”
According to Kuehl, she ate there one last time before she destroyed it. Okay, I made up the part about destroying it, but her spokesperson said the meal was a fond farewell. “She did dine al fresco at Il Forno on the very last day it was permissible,” a spokesperson for Kuehl told Fox 11 after the broadcaster received tips about what happened. “She loves Il Forno, has been saddened to see it, like so many restaurants, suffer from a decline in revenue. She ate there, taking appropriate precautions, and sadly will not dine there again until our Public Health Orders permit.” But what about Kuehl's claim that such dining was "a most dangerous situation"? Apparently, it's dangerous only for the little people.
These people are disgusting. I used to think voters were fools who kept voting them in. I now suspect that voters were naïve and credulous for believing that elections are fair. In California, at least, a lot of people probably got into office "the Dominion way." We need to clean up elections and throw these people to the curb."
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Related:
DEC 1, 2020 12:10 PM: "New Lockdowns And More Rigidity Are Disastrous For US Jobs"
"China: A Cold Shower"
"China: A Cold Shower"
by Fred Reed
"In a sort of distributed Ouija board enterprise, intellectuals these days predict the likely evolution of relations between China and America. These authorities do not wallow in consistency. China will take over the world. Alternatively, China will collapse because of a surfeit of men, because the different linguistic regions will become independent, because their debt bubble will explode, because the Chinese can’t “innovate,” and because the population is aging and there won’t be enough workers. And of course, the American military will remain regnant over the planet and nearby galactic space. The US will always stay ahead. Or it won’t. This seems to cover the basses.
Well, maybe. But if you watch what the Chinese are actually doing, you may get the impression that China is largely ignoring the American military and letting the US spend itself to death while Beijing focuses on commerce, business, R-and-D, commerce, the economy, education, technology, and more commerce. You might additionally get the idea that China is a confident, well-governed, energetic people on a roll and doing quite well in the inventive department. The snippets below may support this impression of technical and economic vitality."
A "must read", please view this excellent, complete article here:
"2021 is Already Optimized for Failure"
Flown like this the flag means "in dire distress".
"2021 is Already Optimized for Failure"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"I often discuss optimization here because it offers an insightful window into how systems become fragile and break down. When we optimize something, we're aiming to get the most bang for our buck: maximize our efficiency, profit, productivity, etc., while minimizing our costs.
To maximize our goal, whatever it is - profits, power, whatever - we strip away redundancy and buffers because these add costs and don't boost our desired output. They create resilience, i.e. the ability to survive disruptions, but the logic of optimization is relentless: get rid of all extraneous costs, because resilience doesn't boost the bottom line. This trade-off--trading resilience for optimization - looks brilliant when everything goes according to plan. But when events veer outside the narrow parameters of the optimized system, the system breaks down: supply chains break, safety procedures fail, and so on.
Even more consequentially, optimization strips away anti-fragility, Nassim Taleb's term for the ability to not just survive disruptions but emerge stronger and more adaptable. What happens when inflexible, sclerotic systems optimized to benefit self-serving insiders encounter chaotic turbulence or conditions outside the expected parameters? They collapse because the system is optimized for failure. Put another way: when a system is optimized to benefit insiders at the expense of resilience and anti-fragility, it is effectively optimized to fail because life is not programmable to a steady-state, predictable stability.
2021 is already optimized for failure in key ways:
1. The mRNA vaccines have not been properly tested to answer essential questions such as: can a vaccinated individual retain enough of the virus to infect an unvaccinated individual? As I explained before, the only way to really test a viral vaccine is to put the vaccinated volunteers in a controlled setting saturated with the virus for many hours. If none of the volunteers have any virus in their post-exposure serological tests, then the vaccine works. If the volunteers still have the virus but didn't become severely ill, this doesn't mean they can't infect others.
One of the problems is the goal of the Covid vaccine trials wasn't to determine if the virus was eliminated by the volunteers' immune system; the goal of the trials was to determine whether the vaccinated individuals became severely ill with Covid or not - with "severely ill" being conveniently left undefined. Individuals who'd already had Covid and who took the vaccine were not tested separately for safety and after-effects, so this remains an unknown.
The unanswered questions about the vaccines' real-world results will be answered in due time, but not in the lab; they'll be answered in a public-health "experiment" without precedent. If you wanted to design a testing process that was optimized for failure, you'd end up with this haphazard, hurried process careening toward approval. The trials and testing of the Covid vaccines are not equivalent to those applied to previous generations of vaccines.
The bigger the claims and the harder the sell, the greater the number of red flags raised. If a product works as wonderfully as advertised, it will sell itself. If "consumers" have to be coerced into buying the product, that speaks volumes - whether we're free to discuss it or not.
2. The fiscal-monetary "solution" being readied for 2021 - print/borrow as many trillions as needed to prop up zombie corporations and obsolete institutions - is optimized for failure. The unstated goal here is to save everything that's been rigged to benefit self-serving insiders and never mind the consequences: we've "proven" we can print infinite trillions with no ill effects.
This appears to be true until diminishing returns hit the wall and linear dynamics suddenly spin into non-linear semi-chaos. At that point, all the levers that we reckoned were god-like in their stability and power - the Treasury selling bonds which the Federal Reserve then buys, and all the other financial tricks and manipulations - no longer work as expected.
3. The sacrosanct "solutions" that we worship as secular gods - central bank-dominated "markets" and the machinery of politics - are both optimized for failure. The "market" and politics have both incentivized extremes of indebtedness, leverage, corruption, fraud and waste, all under the happy belief that the banquet of consequences will never be served. Alas, the tables are groaning with consequences that have been piling up for 12 long years of excess speculation, manipulation and happy-talk PR.
The policies of the past 20 years boil down to this: if we keep blowing ever-larger private-sector asset bubbles, rewarding the few who own most of these assets, this "wealth" will magically restore our economic health. This is of course completely delusional: by concentrating wealth in the hands of the few, the policies have also concentrated political power in these same hands.
Ours is a system perfected for extremes of inequality and corruption. If you set out to design a social-political-economic system that was supremely optimized for failure, you'd end up with America's status quo. Today's financiers are like French nobles being led off in chains discussing their next glorious party, oblivious to the end-game just ahead. The political class are like the elites haggling over games in Rome's Forum in 475 AD, months before what was left of the empire collapsed in a heap.
4. America's social cohesion has been lost, leaving only empty platitudes, suppression and coercion. "We're all in this together" shouts the captain of the galley as those chained to the oars are flogged to keep a thoroughly corrupt and illusory "growth" alive. With civic virtue lost to the moral corruption of maximizing private gain by any means available, the foundations of society have crumbled, as I explained in "Moral Decay Leads to Collapse."
One sure way to identify a system optimized for failure is if all the insiders are absolutely confident the system is optimized for my success regardless of how many policies serve the infinite greed of insiders and how many red warning flags are ignored."
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"In dire distress"... Folks, to use the slang, "You ain't seen nuthin' yet."
We will...
"There Is Always The Hope..."
“What happens to people living in a society where everyone in power is lying, stealing, cheating and killing, and in our hearts we all know this, but the consequences of facing all these lies are so monstrous, we keep on hoping that maybe the corporate government administration and media are on the level with us this time. Americans remind me of survivors of domestic abuse. This is always the hope that this is the very, very, very last time one’s ribs get re-broken again.”
- Inga Muscio
"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 12/1/20"
"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 12/1/20"
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by David Leonhardt
• Moderna says its coronavirus vaccine is more than 94 percent effective, and the company has asked the F.D.A. to authorize it. If all goes smoothly, the drug could begin reaching Americans by Dec. 21.
• “The long darkness before dawn”: Donald McNeil, a Times reporter who covers infectious diseases, examines the grim months ahead, when virus deaths will almost certainly surge before vaccines are widely available.
• After weeks of lockdown, new cases in England have fallen by 33 percent. The policy is set to end tomorrow, though some regions will keep tight restrictions.
• Dr. Scott Atlas, a White House coronavirus adviser who espoused disputed theories, resigned. His term was about to expire this week.
• “Teachers are not OK right now,” one educator told The Times. The whiplash of closings and reopenings and the stresses of remote learning have driven many in the profession to exhaustion.
Dec. 1, 2020 12:03 AM ET:
The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 63,269,300
people, according to official counts, including 13,615,100 Americans.
At least 1,467,500 have died.
Dec. 1, 2020 12:03 AM ET:
Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count○
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"Market Fantasy Updates 12/1/20"
"Market Fantasy Updates 12/1/20"
Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
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"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
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Gregory Mannarino, AM 12/1/20:
"Important Updates:
Stocks, Gold, Silver, Bitcoin, Crude, Dollar, Debt"
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Updated live.
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Daily Update (Nov. 30th to Dec 1st)
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Insanity...
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And now... The End Game...
Free Download: Viktor Frankl, "Man's Search for Meaning"
"Man's Search for Meaning"
by Viktor Frankl
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”
"Some details of a particular man's inner greatness may have come to one's mind, like the story of a young woman whose death I witnessed in a concentration camp. It is a simple story. There is little to tell and it may sound as if I had invented it; but to me it seems like a poem.
This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. 'I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,' she told me. 'In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.' Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, 'This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.' Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. 'I often talk to this tree,' she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. 'Yes.' What did it say to her? She answered, 'It said to me, "I am here - I am here - I am life, eternal life."
Freely download "Man's Search for Meaning", by Viktor Frankl, here:
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