"Many spiral galaxies have bars across their centers. Even our own Milky Way Galaxy is thought to have a modest central bar. Prominently barred spiral galaxy NGC 1672, featured here, was captured in spectacular detail in an image taken by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. Visible are dark filamentary dust lanes, young clusters of bright blue stars, red emission nebulas of glowing hydrogen gas, a long bright bar of stars across the center, and a bright active nucleus that likely houses a supermassive black hole.
Light takes about 60 million years to reach us from NGC 1672, which spans about 75,000 light years across. NGC 1672, which appears toward the constellation of the Dolphinfish (Dorado), has been studied to find out how a spiral bar contributes to star formation in a galaxy's central regions."
"Someone once told me that time is a predator that stalked us all our lives. But I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey, that reminds us to cherish every moment because they'll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we live it. After all, Number One, we're only mortal."
"Do you believe," said Candide, "that men have always massacred each other as they do today, that they have always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites, and fools? "
"Do you believe," said Martin, "that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they have found them?"
"I guess we had to find out the hard way that Afghanistan is not like Nebraska. Let others be cruel about it (and there’s plenty of that right now, elsewhere).
The last ostensible hegemon who tried occupying the place before us was the Soviet Union, which discovered painfully that Afghanistan was not much like its Kemerovo Oblast, either, and shortly after it withdrew its troops in 1989, the Soviet Union commenced to collapse - which prompts one to wonder: How much is the USA of 2021 like the Soviet Union of those years? There are clearly differences, and it would be silly to pretend otherwise. But there are also similarities.
We’ve become an ossified, administrative nomenklatura of Deep State flunkies as the Soviets were, and lately we’re just as lawless as they used to be, constitution-wise - e.g., the abolition of property rights via the CDC’s rent moratorium… the prolonged jailing in solitary confinement of January 6 political prisoners… the introduction of internal “passports.”
Economically, the Soviets were running on fumes. The U.S. may not be on fumes just yet, but the tank is getting pretty darn low. And our dominant party leadership has aged into an embarrassing gerontocracy, rule by the geriatrics. Is it our turn to collapse?
Rough Days Ahead: Kind of looks like it. The days ahead are liable to be a rough ride. Surely China has taken the measure of our Woke military and is weighing the seizure of Taiwan in our moment of weakness. No more computer chips for you, Uncle Sam! Do we come to Taiwan’s defense with guns blazing, or perhaps nukes? And what if that doesn’t work out so well?
I’ll tell you what: a major geopolitical reordering of things, leaving us… where? Unable to enforce our will around the world as has been the case for eighty years. Floundering. Friendless. Broke. Broken. But Woke!
Of course, the domestic situation in our land has not been so fraught and overwrought since 1861. Everything is politicized, which is to say: used as a club to beat-up adversaries and, let’s face it, mostly in the sense of Left against Right. This is especially true for the Covid-19 soap opera, which more and more pits the sanctimoniously vaccinated “progressives” against the recalcitrant conservative no-vax free-choicers - that is, coercive government trying to force supposedly free citizens to accept a pretty dubious experimental medical treatment.
Not for nothing, but since when did the American Left become so pro-tyranny, and how’d that even happen?
What Ever Happened to Questioning Authority? I have friends and relatives - you may, too - who knocked themselves out in the 1960s protesting against the war, the government, the FBI, and the CIA… who fought in the streets for free speech and raged against official propaganda. “Question authority,” they’d say - but today they can’t get enough of coercing, punishing, brain-washing, and cancelling their fellow citizens.
Maybe because they are the authority now? Let’s face it, every major institution of society, from the media to the entertainment industry, to corporations, to education, to government bureaucracies, has been captured by the political Left. They’re going so far now as to engineer their vicious narrative to brand their opponents as “domestic terrorists.” Think that’s going to work? I doubt it.
And the fall of Afghanistan is sure to spark a resentful reaction among the many ex-soldiers who paid a heavy price pulling tours of duty in that hapless venture over twenty years. There’s a lot of them out there in Red America, and they were already angry about the pernicious nonsense being jammed down their throats by the minions of Wokesterism:
The race-and-gender hustles, the off-the-charts rise of violent crime, the wide-open border, the off-shoring of jobs, the Covid lockdowns and wrecking of small business, the MMT experiment launching inflation, and the new politicization of the armed forces they served and suffered in.
They’ve laid rather low through years of this, just watching the scene in wonder and nausea, but you may see them turn more active now. And consider, they’ve been well-trained in weaponry and tactics.
Scandalous Revelations Ahead? Unsettling discoveries are in the offing going forward. The Wall Street Journal lately detected signs of life in the John Durham investigation, reporting that matters have gone to a grand jury. That means crimes are being prosecuted. We may soon become reacquainted with names that almost slipped down the memory-hole - the likes of Bruce Ohr, Glenn Simpson, Andrew McCabe, Rod Rosenstein, Pete Strzok… who else…?
This may also lead to a catastrophic discrediting of the mainstream news media - who were fully in on the RussiaGate con - to the degree that some companies end up utterly wrecked and with many careers washed up.
Hard information about what actually went down in the 2020 election is also coming out, and not necessarily to the credit of the ruling regime that supposedly triumphed in that contest. Some of that info may concern the issue of China’s involvement in our affairs, and beyond mere election meddling to the wholesale buying-off of the U.S. political class. The pathetic thing is we already know several very prominent figures on-the-take from China, including Eric Swalwell, Dianne Feinstein, and most conspicuously, Hunter Biden (and family), but the ranks of the known-to-be bought-off could swell dramatically. We’ll see.
Sometimes Years Happen in Weeks: Finally, there’s the fate of President “Joe Biden.” As Kabul fell, he remained in his Camp David gopher hole. Observers conjecture that he’s had a few “bad days” lately, meaning he is not presentable. Not to be overly dramatic, but it could potentially be curtains for Ol’ Joe… resignation-time. Never before has a U.S. president faced such a daunting loss of legitimacy, and hardly just on account of Afghanistan. And then consider who’s next-in-line for that position. (Did you shudder?)
Sometimes, Vlad Lenin observed, events take decades, and sometimes years happen in weeks. This looks like one of those times for the USA. Heads will soon be spinning like the little girl’s in The Exorcist, releasing a pea-soup spewage of shocking revelation. The old narratives will fall apart before our eyes. Minds will have to get right. Prepare for a whole lot of strange days rolling out."
“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.”
"Casey Daily Dispatch: Doug, I came across a pretty alarming article that says China is now using millions of Zimbabwean citizens to improve facial recognition accuracy. What are your thoughts on this? Is this just China’s latest step in trying to gain world supremacy?
Doug Casey, founder, Casey Research: Well, I’ve said for years that China is in the process of taking over Africa. In fact, that was a subtheme in my first novel Speculator, about the gold mining industry and bush war in Africa. Some years ago, a Chinese high government official said that their plan was to move 300 million people from China to Africa. That’s an incredible number of people; the Chinese think big. But it wasn’t really picked up anywhere in the press. Over the years, every time I go back to Africa I see more Chinese, and when they’re working on an industrial or a mining project, they’re all dressed in the same color jumpsuits. Almost like the Chinese in Goldfinger, if you remember.
From a long-term point of view, China is taking over Africa. It’s a very intelligent plan – and an unspoken part of their “One Belt, One Road” program. They loan money to one African government to build a port, a railroad, and an airport, or what have you. The Africans can almost never pay those loans back, so the Chinese – as part of the deal – take over the facility and staff it with their own people. This is actually going on today. If the African leaders don’t like it – unlikely since they’ve pocketed millions under the table for facilitating the deal – they will likely find their lives are in danger. If that doesn’t work, the country may have a visit from the Red Army.
Dispatch: What are your thoughts on facial recognition in general? Is this a good thing or a bad thing that China’s doing?
Doug: It’s not just China. It’s everywhere. As you probably heard, in several major U.S. airports, the U.S. government – in cooperation with the airlines – is doing facial scans on people. As a replacement for boarding passes.
This isn’t just happening in China and the U.S. – but everywhere. And simultaneously, all over the world, hundreds of millions of unobtrusive cameras are in place to watch everybody all the time. On street corners, in restaurants, in airports, absolutely everywhere. It’s not just the occasional photo snapshot triggered by a radar gun pointed at your car. That’s bad enough. Unobtrusive cameras are monitoring faces all the time. And it’s not just faces, it’s your gait – the way you walk – and other indicators.
We live in a world that Ira Levin, the famous science fiction writer, drew in his novel "This Perfect Day." He had governments requiring everybody, when they passed by an electronic monitor, to run their hand over it, so a chip in their hand could be read. But today’s technology is much more sophisticated and devastating. Because your presence is recorded automatically, whether you know it or not. It’s actually much more dystopian than what Levin projected in his book.
Now, although the average human doesn’t appear to mind it, I don’t like the idea of Big Brother monitoring everyone. I’m a believer in privacy. Incidentally – just as a tangent – I find it interesting that we no longer use the word “secrecy” – as in bank secrecy for instance. It’s become a very non-PC word. You’re not supposed to be secret about anything. In fact, you can’t even be “private” anymore.
Everything is now supposed to be an open book, as if you’re living in a primitive village. In pre-industrial times, pre-capitalist times, there was no privacy; walls were paper thin, and everybody could see and hear exactly what you were doing. If you were private, your neighbors and rulers assumed you were up to no good. The world seems to be reverting to primitive global village status. The trend is quite retrogressive… and anti-personal freedom.
On the bright side, ubiquitous surveillance might reduce some forms of crime. If people know that they may be watched or overheard anywhere, they may be more prone to stay legal. On the other hand, criminals are noted for their inability to foresee the consequences of their actions; perhaps the result won’t be less crime, just a higher conviction rate. The general population will probably like more surveillance. Even if it means being treated more like domestic animals. Safety first, after all.
Dispatch: I agree. And while some of these technological advances are great for our future, people seem to be forgetting the downside that comes with it…
Doug: The problem is that technology is always a double-edged sword. Whenever a new technology is developed, it’s always the rulers, the state, and the elite who get it first and use it to lord over the common people. Eventually, however, it filters down and the tables are turned. In the long run it’s liberating for the common man. It always has been.
Take the discovery of gunpowder, a huge positive for the freedom of the average guy. Why? Because now a peasant with a gun could take down an armored knight, something which was previously hard to impossible. Gunpowder was a liberator – although at first the rulers monopolized it, and it actually increased their control. The printing press was another huge liberator, because it made knowledge available to everybody, not just the priests and other elite who wanted to keep it to themselves.
In my third novel, "Assassin", I deal with exactly this. How a whole suite of technologies today is being used to oppress, but will very quickly turn the tables on the state and the ruling class. Incidentally, I hate to use a term like “the ruling class”… It sounds so Marxist, and I’m very anti-Marxist. Still, it’s an accurate description of what’s going on and who these people are.
Dispatch: Is being tracked by the government completely unavoidable? What should people do… ditch their cell phones?
Doug: I have an iPhone 7, but the only time I even keep it charged is when I’m traveling – pay phones no longer exist. Or if I’m at a conference where I need to constantly keep updated on appointments. The cell phone is a very useful tool, but it’s a mistake to allow any tool to become a central figure in your life. If you look around you on a street, everybody is on their electronic device. Many people are umbilically attached to these things, like dogs on a leash.
Dispatch: Yeah, I saw a man walk right into another man the other day out on the sidewalk here. He was completely distracted. Head down, glued to the screen…
Doug: Yes. Even at dinner tables… People will sit, have dinner together, and they won’t talk to each other. They’ll be on their little devices. It’s not only impolite – which they don’t seem to realize – but it’s destructive of relationships. It says: “You’re less important than some random person out in the ether.” The things are especially dysfunctional for kids – that’s a whole other subject. It can be argued that these electronic devices are very dangerous in many ways. Not just from the point of view of the State always knowing where you are and being able to track you should they wish to. They’re destructive of people’s basic psyches.
I don’t, however, mean to sound negative on cell phones in principle. Their advantages hugely outweigh their risks. We’re just going through the teething stages of this evolution, as we once did with gunpowder and the printing press, and for that matter the computer itself. When only governments and the elite have a technology, it’s very dangerous. Once a technology is democratized, once everybody has it, it’s liberating. The cell phone allows any one of the seven billion people on the planet to communicate directly, quickly, and cheaply with anyone else. That’s fantastic.
But there are problems. One of them is becoming evident in China, Sweden, and a number of other places. People no longer use cash. They pay for things using their cell phones. And people think, “Well, this is very convenient.” Yeah, maybe it’s convenient, but it’s also very dangerous because the next step is the disappearance of physical cash – dollar bills, in other words. If everything is electronic, the Authorities will know about absolutely everything you do, everything you buy, everything you sell, and everything that you own. Privacy – forget about secrecy – will be dead.
From there the dollar itself can be replaced with a Fedcoin, a cryptocurrency issued by the government. But why stop there? God forbid you should lose your phone. The next step will be to implant a permanent chip in your body, perhaps at birth. The prospect of being part of the Matrix, or the Borg, isn’t appealing. I presume that hacks will be developed to subvert this trend. But the kind of people who like to control others will be driving it forward as hard as they can.
The bottom line is that your convenient cell phone presents huge dangers from the point of view of personal freedom. It’s something to be aware of. And the Chinese are definitely at the leading edge of all these things.
Dispatch: Intimidating stuff… Thanks for talking with us today, Doug.
"If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - what would you tell him to do?"
"I... don't know. What could he do? What would you tell him?"
"To shrug."
- Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged "
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"Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard - the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money - the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law - men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims - then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.
Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors- when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed."
"Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any break of morality."
- Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"
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Freely download online "Atlas Shrugged", by Ayn Rand, here:
Crisis And Port Congestion Goes From Bad To Worse"
by Epic Economist
Freight rates have quadrupled since lockdowns started to be implemented all over the world at the beginning of the health crisis in March 2020. That has pushed retail prices to unprecedented levels, affecting businesses that were facing mass shutdowns and store closures, and consumers who were struggling with income losses and higher prices. A series of determinants, such as an extraordinary rise in consumer demand, a historic shortage of containers, port congestion, and a decreased number of ships and dock workers, have all contributed to the worsening of the shipping crisis on almost all trade routes. Now, a new virus outbreak in Asian countries - particularly in India and China - is also compounding concerns on global trade. Given that over 85 percent of the goods trade is transported by sea, soaring freight rates are sending the price of everything to sky-highs, from toys to building materials to furniture to auto parts and components of all types of goods, and even food, including tea and coffee, adding even more pressure on rising inflation.
Port congestion is one of the main issues disrupting supply chains right now. It has been limiting the number of containers each port can efficiently accommodate. At the same time, demand for shipping is largely outpacing the available space in each container. That imbalance pushes prices so high that many companies lose out because they just can't afford to pay them. In some ports, congestion is so severe when new ships arrive, they're unable to dock. That is what is currently happening at Washington State ports in Tacoma and Seattle. At this moment, about 350 containerships that are carrying almost 2.4 million 20ft boxes are waiting off ports around the world, according to VesselsValue. And recent data released by Clarksons Platou Securities shows that congestion is getting worse, hitting 4.6 percent of the global fleet, up from 3.5 percent last month.
The congestion is stretching all across the Pacific Ocean to Long Beach port in Los Angeles, where at least 30 ships are still waiting to get into port to offload, Bloomberg’s data shows. “The container backlog is adding weeks of delay for major export trades from Asia. The situation has become so extreme that one carrier company exposed that it is now costing $32,000 to ship a group of standard containers from Shanghai to Los Angeles, Craig Grossgart, senior vice president at SEKO Logistics, said during a recent briefing. Updated data shows that the median Asia-U.S. West Coast rates are at $19,620, six times higher than a year ago, and the median price for shipping to the U.S. East Coast quadrupled to $22,345 per forty-foot equivalent unit.
The latest data from Sea-Intelligence indicates that the median time it takes for a container to get from a vessel onto a train at the docks is 18 days in Seattle, two weeks in Oakland, and more than a week at the Port of Savannah. At this point, the ocean delays have absorbed about 25% of all trans-Pacific capacity, while demand has jumped by a staggering 25%. Transit times, however, rose to the highest levels on record. From Shanghai to Chicago, transit times via the port of Los Angeles/Long Beach have more than doubled to 73 days from 35 days. In essence, this means that it is now taking 146 days for a container to return to its point of origin, which has been effectively reducing container capacity by 50 percent.
On one hand, shippers of high-value goods whose value is time-sensitive, such as electronics and fashion, are willing and able to pay premium prices to send inventory overseas, while on the other hand, several companies had to pull back their orders because of the soaring freight rates are erasing their profit margins. According to Xenata CEO and co-founder Peter Berglund, customers are now paying $300 million a year just for freight transportation. If big businesses are facing massive losses provoked by shortages, for smaller companies the situation puts them at risk of bankruptcy. “This is the single biggest threat the economy faces at the moment. And it is only just starting to bite,” noted Philip Edge, the chief executive of Edge Worldwide Logistics. “Imagine if oil went up from $20 per barrel to $200 per barrel, then that would be tantamount to what’s happening now," he added. There are certainly not any quick fixes to the problem. As things go bad to worse in global supply chains and more turbulence is emerging all around the globe, consumers must start making some difficult choices too: either they prepare in advance for the chaos that is approaching or they will have to face astronomical price increases in the coming months."
"Sprawling emission nebulae IC 1396 and Sh2-129 mix glowing interstellar gas and dark dust clouds in this 10 degree wide field of view toward the northern constellation Cepheus the King. Energized by its bluish central star IC 1396 (left) is hundreds of light-years across and some 3,000 light-years distant.
The nebula's intriguing dark shapes include a winding dark cloud popularly known as the Elephant's Trunk below and right of center. Tens of light-years long, it holds the raw raw material for star formation and is known to hide protostars within. Located a similar distance from planet Earth, the bright knots and swept back ridges of emission of Sh2-129 on the right suggest its popular name, the Flying Bat Nebula. Within the Flying Bat, the most recently recognized addition to this royal cosmic zoo is the faint bluish emission from Ou4, the Giant Squid nebula."
"I am back in San Diego, CA. I just returned to the Gaslamp District. The restaurant industry is completely decimated right now. There are huge supply chain problems and inflation on every single aspect of the restaurant. And the worst part is they can’t get a good staff."
"The Afghan army wasn’t real. The Afghan Civil Authority was never real. They never collected taxes. There were no courts outside of police robbing people. None of it ever existed... it was just a big jobs program funded by American money, and the moment it looked like the money would go away, everyone went home."
– Former U.S. soldier Graham Platner, interviewed by "The Jerusalem Post"
POITOU, FRANCE – "What a jolly, schadenfreudian week. The American elite have had their noses rubbed in their most precious delusions and pretensions. They spent $2.2 trillion, equal to $55,000 for every person in the nation, building a modern, democratic Afghanistan (and coincidentally, enriching themselves). And now, instead of receiving polite “thank you” notes, they are chased from the country in appalling scenes of disorganization and incompetence.
And this was not just the “military-industrial complex” that president Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against. If this was a “ship of fools,” the universities, think-tanks, media, liberals, conservatives… Republicans as well as Democrats… do-gooders and world improvers – all were in the first-class cabins.
They imagined that they were bringing the indisputable virtues of the American way of life – with its unlimited fake-dollar spending, Prozac, and transgender bathrooms – to the ancient lands south of the Hindu Kush. And it was all a fraud, marked by lies and deceit over 20 years.
Meanwhile, the rest of the nation begins to wonder. If the elite could be so wrong for so long about that... What else are they wrong about? And when will the next appalling collapse occur?
Infallible Dr. Fauci: But today, we give up on earnest analysis and turn to reckless sarcasm. If only the infallible Dr. Anthony Fauci had directed the withdrawal, rather than the Pentagon’s maladroit crisis managers. Yes… Dr. Fauci is someone we can trust. A man of science and facts. He’s a public servant you can trust to give you the low-down… to tell it to you straight. Except, of course, when he’s lying.
In December 2020, he famously admitted that he fibbed about herd immunity. The New York Times reported at the time: “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent,” he said. “Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”
Earlier, he admitted to a “noble” lie – telling the public it didn’t need to wear face masks in March 2020 because (he claimed later) he was afraid the face masks would disappear from the shelves, leaving health professionals without them. Emails from Fauci allegedly show that while telling the public that face masks didn’t matter, privately, he was telling others to put them on. And the only hard evidence we have (comparative death rates) suggests (nothing can be proven) that mask mandates didn’t make much difference anyway.
Kaboom and Kabul: So, is the COVID-19 response – the shutdowns, masks, vaccines – America’s next Afghanistan? Or how about the whole “green” agenda? Are the experts wrong about global warming? Are the elite telling “noble” lies to bend the public in its direction?
We don’t know. Our beat is money. What we do know is that America’s economic elite are at least as malign… and at least as dumb… as its warmongers. And like those responsible for Afghanistan, they are wrong about almost everything…The fake stimulus… the fake money… the fake interest rates… the fake growth and fake Wall Street stock prices… the fake 2% inflation target – the whole fake shebang, in other words. And when their errors and lies are finally revealed… it will be a far more disgraceful and painful mess than the debacle in Afghanistan.
In the stock market alone, the loss is likely to be nearly 10 times the loss in the Afghan adventure. The loss to the economy – in the coming scenes of crash and inflation – will be many times that amount. And if the chaos leads to a political/social breakdown, as often happens when the public realizes it has been betrayed… well… prepare for Kaboom… and Kabul!
Antediluvian Beasts: Yes, Afghanistan is now in the hands of brutish, religious fanatics, well-supplied with U.S. arms and materiel. This week, we saw the photos… a whole bunch of gun-toting, night-shirt-wearing ruffians in the Presidential Palace in Kabul… and not a one with a face mask! Unbelievable… don’t they know they might be spreading the dreaded disease?
And there are other shocking photos, too – of them driving all over the countryside in their Toyota trucks… and filling the air with CO2. Don’t they know about global warming? Don’t they know that they need to switch to electric vehicles?
But wait… there’s more… yes, a revelation so outrageous… so barbaric… we can hardly believe it. Sit down, Dear Reader. Are you ready for this? The Taliban are NOT feminists! They think there are two types of human – men and women – and that they are meant to play different roles. Heaven forfend… What kind of antediluvian beasts are these? Do they have tails? Do they walk upright?
Stern Warning: The Biden Administration has surrendered to them. But at least one member of Congress is holding onto her gun. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a stern warning: "The Taliban must know that the world is watching its actions. We are deeply concerned about reports regarding the Taliban's brutal treatment of all Afghans, especially women and girls.
As we strive to assist women, we must recognize that their voices are important, and all must listen to them for solutions, respectful of their culture. There is bipartisan support to assist the women and girls of Afghanistan. One of the successes of U.S.-NATO cooperation in Afghanistan was the progress made by women and girls. We must all continue to work together to ensure that is not eroded."
So, you see… It was worth it after all. Progress was made. (Ms. Pelosi neglected to say that approximately 25,000 girls and women were killed in the war, by our estimates.) And now… watch out, you Talibanos. If one of you so much as lays a hand on a bare shoulder… or pinches a single derrière…Well… you’ll have the U.S. Army to reckon with!"
“Joe Biden” will interrupt his moveable vacation - for now, back in Wilmington, DE - to speak to the nation early this (Friday) afternoon. Will he dig himself deeper into the hole that the Taliban tossed him in, or just throw in the towel on running the executive branch of the government (if that’s what he’s been doing)?
Let’s face it: “Joe B’s” actual doings in the White House these seven months are as mysterious as last week’s blitzkrieg through Afghanistan by the Taliban. What does Ol’ White Joe actually do all day after his managers “call a lid” on his official duties at 8:30 in the morning? Gab with Hunter about family business on a secure phone? Watch Joy Behar and her gang on TV? We-the-people are unaware that the “president” has any hobbies or avocations. Golf? Apparently not. Stamps? Please! Or does he just sit in a comfortable chair on the second-floor casting what is left of his mind back on those dear dead days of his fabled Scranton boyhood?
Can you really imagine Kamala Harris in the Oval Office? I doubt Kamala herself can. Anyway, someone up and dispatched her off to Singapore and Vietnam this week, as if on-cue (get her outa town, pronto…things will be a little hairy around here). Presumably she will return to the USA in the fullness of time, without any untoward accidents involving Air Force Two. But what if the veep, for reasons of her own (say, “nerves”), throws in a towel, too? Who else happens to be constitutionally in-line for Commander-in-Chief in case the whole 2020 ticket bows out? Why, the Speaker of the House, of course, Ms. Nancy Pelosi, the world’s leading model of outfit-matching face-masks. What a career-capper that will be! Better stock up the White House freezer with Jeni’s-brand mango-cheesecake swirl gourmet ice-cream and gird your loins for a fusillade of executive orders making outlaws of everyone living between the Falls of the Potomac and the Embarcadero.
The news media may wonder whether Afghanistan is heading back into twelfth century, but many of us here are wondering whether this country will remain in the twenty-first. The cable TV channels crackle with existential angst. The USA seems to have made itself the chump of chump nations. We are so easily faked-out! Our gazillion-dollar military and Intel Community got owned by savages in sandals, for Gawdsake! Ten-thousand Americans (or more!) sit stranded in Kabul while Pashtun horsemen joyride above the city in purloined Blackhawk helicopters! We abandon our allies and obligations! We are not to be trusted (even by ourselves). What is to be done?
Nobody knows, or if they do, they’re not telling. One senses a descent into a season of extraordinary national disorder. One hears whispers of an alt.military Trump-leaning cabal lurking at the margins, waiting to seize power. What else is there? Appeal to Pakistan to call off their dogs? Because, after all, it was Pakistan who virtually created the Taliban, and who planted Osama Bin Laden in Kandahar, and then harbored him in Abbottabad after the Yanks arrived next door in 2001 to root him out of some mythical cave (and failed to, having sub-contracted the actual job to the Pashtun mounties, an outfit with certain motivational problems).
Jimmy Carter was undone by a mere fifty-two hostages in Iran, 1979, but this fiasco is orders of magnitude greater. The Taliban could easily put an end to the whole question of extracting the thousands of Americans stuck in Af-stan just by firing a few RPG rounds onto the runway of Hamid Karzai International Airport. After that, would they go about the grisly business of beheading any Afghani who so much as took a stick of gum from an American?
“Graveyard of Empires,” indeed. Rome waited a few centuries to collapse but America seems to be demonstrating we can git’er done in just a couple of years. And, beyond these questions of global hegemony, there is the matter of what happens here in the so-called Homeland. The Covid-19 vaccine-and-masking hysteria is coming to a head. The school boards are getting an earful about race-based everything in the curriculum. Certain state governors and mayors seem determined to destroy what remains of small business. A mutiny is brewing against Bill de Blasio’s new semi-lockdown in New York City. Gavin Newsome is about to be tossed into the North Pacific Gyre. Any moment, the Arizona election audit will issue a preliminary report, said to be shocking. Financial markets are in the wobble-zone. Supply lines are down for many parts of things needed to run daily life in this land. And millions are wondering anxiously now: what really are the latent effects of those jabs?
Things are shaking loose all over the place. As Bob Dylan once said, the order is rapidly fading (and he’s even older than “Joe Biden.”) Everyone I know has got the heebie-jeebies. Nobody is at the controls of this outfit as we sail into the fog."
"What Is America Going To Look Like If This Continues?"
by Michael Snyder
"You can’t have a civilization without civility. We may possess technology that is more advanced than any previous generation of Americans has had, but when it comes to how we treat one another and how we conduct ourselves, we are the worst generation in U.S. history by a very wide margin. We have truly become a “Hollywood culture”, and I don’t mean that in a good way. The average American spends 238 minutes a day watching television, and it is inevitable that putting so much garbage into our minds is going to result in garbage coming out. Most Americans learn how to express themselves by emulating what they see on their screens, and so now we have tens of millions of extremely crude people running around all over the place.
If you spend any time in public at all, you know exactly what I am talking about. Most Americans dress like slobs, act like pigs and endlessly spew profanity wherever they go. This is something that Mark H. Creech discussed in an article that he published this week: "While at the grocery store this week, a woman was ahead of me in the checkout line using the word, “Mother F&*#@%.” To the left of me, in another line, was a different woman on her cell phone. I could overhear her saying to someone, “F&$#” this, and “F*#@” that. I felt that I was drowning in a cesspool of profanity.
Recently, my wife said she was in the checkout line at Walmart, and a man was using such language without any inhibitions. Not being the kind of person to hold back, Kim said to him, “Sir, would you please not use that language? There are children present.” To which the man defiantly replied, “No!” His companion then backhanded him on the arm and said to, “Cut it out.” That was the end of it."
Sadly, it has gotten to a point where even our national leaders are not afraid to use profanity. Earlier this week, it was being reported that Kamala Harris used profanity while engaged in a heated discussion about the crisis in Afghanistan: "Vice President Kamala Harris reportedly refused to stand alongside Joe Biden as he addressed the nation on the Afghanistan chaos, allegedly saying “you will not pin this shit on me” despite her massive role in Biden’s US troop withdrawal decision.
Before Biden gave an 18 minute speech to justify his decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan as the Taliban took over the country, Kamala Harris reportedly refused to stand alongside him as he spoke. “You will not pin this shit on me,” Harris reportedly said. However in April, Harris had bragged that she played a key role in Biden’s decision to withdraw, as was reported by Politico. She even confirmed that she was the last person in the room with the President during the major discussion regarding his decision to pull out US troops by September 11."
And profane language that Joe Biden once used about Afghanistan received renewed attention this week because of the drama unfolding in Kabul: "According to Holbrooke, when Biden was asked about America’s obligation to maintain their presence in Afghanistan to protect vulnerable civilians, he scornfully replied by referencing the US exit from southeast Asia in 1973. ‘**** that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.’"
Of course foul language is not just limited to one side of the aisle. Our leaders like to consider themselves the pinnacle of civilization, and they have often criticized the Taliban for tearing down historical statues and forcing women to wear masks. But over the past year, far more statues have been torn down inside the United States than the Taliban ever dreamed of tearing down, and at this point we are forcing everyone to wear masks.
Critics say that the Taliban does not allow freedom of speech, but when Taliban officials were asked about this they simply pointed out that Facebook is even worse when it comes to freedom of speech. And they are right.
Critics say that the Taliban treats women horribly, and that is certainly true. But women are treated shamefully in our nation too. Here is one example: "A creep groped a woman on a Brooklyn street this week - and then pummeled her when she tried to fight back, disturbing new video shows. The 26-year-old woman was walking at the corner of South 4th Street and Havemeyer Street in Williamsburg around 2:15 a.m. Saturday when a stranger approached from behind and grabbed her buttocks, video released by cops early Tuesday shows. When the woman attempted to slap the suspect, he socked her in the face multiple times, the clip shows."
And here is another example: "The woman and her boyfriend were on their way to the Chicago Transit Authority Red Line subway at State Street and Jackson Boulevard Saturday night. They were waiting for the elevator at ground level to go down to the platform. But they never made it. Instead, trouble found them, surrounded them, and attacked them. They were viciously assaulted by a large gang of teens, and the woman was pummeled so badly that she actually needs plastic surgery… “I need plastic surgery, because the bones are broke, and still bleeding inside,” the woman said." The scars and bruising are concealed behind the shades the woman now wears over her eyes. But the pain is deeper.
Murder rates were way up all over the country last year, and they are way up again all over the country this year. We have become a brutal, violent, blood-soaked country, and that is because we have a brutal, violent, blood-soaked culture. At one time the U.S. could lecture the rest of the world about morality because we lived in a civilized society. But now we have lost whatever moral high ground we once possessed, and at this point we need the rest of the world to lecture us.
So what is going to happen as the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted on a daily basis continues to steadily disappear? I am deeply, deeply concerned about our future, and this is a theme that I explored in my new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse”. We are in a highly advanced state of social decay, and it is getting worse with each passing year.
In recent days, I have heard so much criticism of the Taliban’s culture, and many of those criticisms are right on target. But our culture is detestable too, and it has become that way because of the choices that we have made as a society."
Stunning Meditation on Walking into the Questions of Our Becoming”
by Maria Popova
“The role of the artist, James Baldwin believed, is “to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.” This, too, is the role of the forest, it occurs to me as I walk the ferned, mossed woods daily to lose my self and find myself between the trees; to “live the questions,” in Rilke’s lovely phrase – to let the rustling of the leaves beckon forth the stirrings and murmurings on the edge of the psyche, which we so often brush away in order to go on being the smaller version of ourselves we have grown accustomed to being out of the unfaced fear that the grandeur of life, the grandeur of our own untrammeled nature, might require of us more than we are ready to give.
Those disquieting, transformative stirrings are what the poet and philosopher David Whyte explores with surefooted subtlety in his poem “Sometimes,” found in his altogether life-enlarging collection “Everything Is Waiting for You” (public library) and read here by the poet himself as part of a wonderful short course of poem-driven practices for neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris’s “Waking Up” meditation toolkit (which I can’t recommend enough and which operates under an inspired, honorable model of granting free subscriptions to those who need this invaluable mental health aid but don’t have the means).
"Dr. Charles Hoffe, a family physician from Lytton, British Columbia, wrote to Dr. Bonnie Henry, B.C. provincial health officer, in April 2021 with serious concerns about COVID-19 vaccines. One of his patients died after the shot, and six others had adverse effects. While their small town had no cases of COVID-19, Hoffe said the vaccine was causing serious damage and he believed “this vaccine is quite clearly more dangerous than COVID-19.”
Hoffe was quickly accused of causing “vaccine hesitancy” and local health authorities threatened to report him to the licensing body, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia. He was also told by government health authorities that he could not say anything negative about the COVID-19 vaccine, but the issues Hoffe was seeing compelled him to speak out anyway.
Blood Clot Formation With mRNA Vaccines ‘Inevitable’: In each dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine are 40 trillion mRNA - or messenger RNA - molecules. Each mRNA “package” is designed to be absorbed into your cell, but only 25% stay in your arm at the site of the injection. The other 75%, Hoffe says, are collected by your lymphatic system and fed into your circulation. The cells where mRNA is absorbed are those around your blood vessels - the capillary network, which are the tiniest blood vessels in your body.
When the mRNA is absorbed into your vascular endothelium - the inner lining of your capillaries - the “packages” open and genes are released. Each gene can produce many COVID-19 spike proteins, and your body gets to work manufacturing these spike proteins, numbering in the trillions.
Your body recognizes the spike protein as foreign, so it begins to manufacture antibodies to protect you against COVID-19, or so the theory goes. But there’s a problem. In a coronavirus, the spike protein becomes part of the viral capsule, Hoffe says, but when you get the vaccine, “it’s not in a virus, it’s in your cells.” The spike protein, in turn, can lead to the development of blood clots: “So it therefore becomes part of the cell wall of your vascular endothelium, which means that these cells, which line your blood vessels, which are supposed to be smooth so that your blood flows smoothly, now have these little spiky bits sticking out.
So it is absolutely inevitable that blood clots will form, because your blood platelets circulate around in your vessels and the purpose of blood platelets is to detect a damaged vessel and block that damage when it starts bleeding. So when a platelet comes through a capillary and suddenly hits all these covid spikes that are jutting into the inside vessel, blood clots will form to block that vessel. That’s how platelets work.”
62% of Recently Vaccinated Patients Have Evidence of Clotting: Hoffe spoke with Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, a retired professor, microbiologist and infectious disease and immunology specialist who, along with several other doctors and scientists, formed Doctors for COVID Ethics. Bhakdi has also warned that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein binds to the ACE2 receptor on platelets. The subsequent activation of the platelets can lead to disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC), i.e., a pathological overstimulation of your coagulation system that can result in abnormal, and life threatening, blood clotting, as well as thrombocytopenia (low platelet count) and hemorrhaging.
While some of the blood clots you may have heard about associated with the COVID-19 vaccines are the large variety that show up on MRIs and CT scans, Hoffe states that the variety he’s referring to are microscopic and scattered throughout the capillary network, so they won’t show up on any scan. The only way to find out if this predictable mechanism of clotting is happening is with a test called D-dimer. D-dimer is a protein fragment produced by the body when a blood clot dissolves. It’s typically undetectable or present only at very low levels, buts its level may significantly rise when the body is forming and breaking down blood clots.
According to Bhakdi, “Now a number of German doctors have been measuring the D-dimers in the blood of patients before vaccination and days after vaccinations and with respect to the symptoms they have just found out that triggering of clot formation is a very common event with all vaccines.”
Hoffe has been conducting the D-dimer test on his patients within four to seven days of them receiving a COVID-19 vaccine and found that 62% have evidence of clotting. While he’s still trying to accumulate more information, he said: “It means that these blood clots are not rare. The majority of people are getting blood clots and they have no idea that they even have them. The most alarming thing about this is that there are some parts of your body, like your heart and your brain and your spinal cord and your lungs, which cannot regenerate. When those tissues are damaged by blocked vessels, they are permanently damaged.”
‘The Worst Is Yet to Come’: As Bhakdi explained, post-vaccination it’s possible to end up with so many blood clots throughout your vascular system that your coagulation system is exhausted, resulting in bleeding (hemorrhaging). Hoffe now has patients who get out of breath much more easily than they used to because “they’ve clogged up thousands of tiny capillaries in their lungs.” This is only the first problem, as it can lead to more significant, permanent damage. Hoffe noted: “The terrifying thing about this is not just that these people are short of breath and can’t do what they used to be able to do. Once you block off a significant number of blood vessels to your lungs, your heart is now pumping against a much greater resistance to try to get the blood through your lungs.”
The end result can be pulmonary artery hypertension, which is basically high blood pressure in your lungs, because the blood can’t get through due to the many vessels that are blocked. “People with this usually die of right-sided heart failure within three years,” Hoffe said. “So the huge concern about this mechanism of injury is that these shots are causing permanent damage and the worst is yet to come.”
As he noted, while some tissues, like your liver and kidneys, can regenerate, others, like your heart, cannot. An increased risk of myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, has already been seen among young males who receive an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. “They have permanently damaged hearts,” Hoffe explained, adding: “It doesn’t matter how mild it is, they will not be able to do what they used to do because heart muscle doesn’t regenerate. The long-term outlook is very grim, and with each successive shot, it will add more damage. The damage is cumulative because you’re progressively getting more damaged capillaries.”
Because of the risk of the formation of blood clots in your vessels, Bhakdi went so far as to say that giving the COVID-19 vaccine to children is a crime: “Do not give it to children because they have absolutely no possibility to defend themselves; if you give it to your child you are committing a crime.”
Spike Protein Damages Human Cells: The key causative agent causing damage from COVID-19 vaccines appears to be the spike protein. Scientists from the University of California San Diego created a pseudo virus, or cell surrounded by the spike proteins that did not contain a virus. Using an animal model, the researchers administered the pseudo virus into the lungs and found the virus was not necessary to create damage. Instead, the spike protein was enough to cause inflammation, damage to vascular endothelial cells and inhibited mitochondrial function.
Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of the mRNA and DNA vaccine core platform technology, has also spoken out about the dangers of the spike protein used in COVID-19 vaccines. In its native form in SARS-CoV-2, the spike protein is responsible for the pathologies of the viral infection, and in its wild form it’s known to open the blood-brain barrier, cause cell damage (cytotoxicity) and, Malone said, “is active in manipulating the biology of the cells that coat the inside of your blood vessels - vascular endothelial cells, in part through its interaction with ACE2, which controls contraction in the blood vessels, blood pressure and other things.” Bhakdi also described this as “a disastrous situation” paving the way for clotting. “This is a disastrous situation, because the spike protein itself is now sitting on the surface of the cells, facing the bloodstream. It is known that these spike proteins, the moment they touch platelets, they active them [the platelets], and that sets the whole clotting system going.
The second thing that should happen, according to theory, is that the waste products of this protein that are produced in the cell, are put in front of the ‘door’ of the cell, and is presented to the immune system. The immune system, especially the lymphocytes, recognize these and will attack the cells, because they don’t want them to make viruses or viral parts. And the viral parts are now being made in locations where viral parts would never, ever reach [naturally], like the vessel wall in your brain.
If that ‘tapestry’ of the wall [i.e., the lining of the blood vessel] is then destroyed, then that is the signal for the clotting system to [activate], and create a blood clot. And this happens with all of these vaccines because the gene [the instruction to make spike protein] is being introduced to the vessel wall.”
Physicians Forbidden From Countering Narrative: Equally as disturbing as the potential harm caused by experimental mRNA vaccines is the censorship going along with it, such that the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO), which regulates the practice of medicine in Ontario, issued a statement prohibiting physicians from making comments or providing advice that goes against the official narrative - basically anything “anti-vaccine, anti-masking, anti-distancing and anti-lockdown.”
The statement was released, according to CPSO, because physicians, in isolated incidents, have been spreading blatant misinformation via social media, which is undermining “public health measures meant to protect all of us.” But if a physician is unable to speak freely, the independent relationship between doctor and patient ceases to exist, and so does the doctor’s ability to act in the best interest of the patient.
Hoffe certainly experienced this but is still speaking out, putting his patients first and trying to get the word out that, he believes the COVID-19 vaccination program should be stopped until the causes of the many injuries and deaths are understood. The tragic question is, how many others with similar concerns have been intimidated into remaining silent?"
"Perspectives on the Pandemic: 'Blood Clots and Beyond'"
by Journeyman Pictures
"In February, 2021, Professor Sucharit Bhakdi, M.D. and a number of his colleagues warned the European Medicines Agency about the potential danger of blood clots and cerebral vein thrombosis in millions of people receiving experimental gene-based injections. Since then, two of the four injections have been suspended or recalled in Europe and the United States for just that reason. In this episode of Perspectives, Professor Bhakdi explains the science behind the problem, why it is not just limited to the products already suspended, and why in the long term we may be creating dangerously overactive immune systems in billions of unwitting subjects."
