Tuesday, February 15, 2022

Wendell Berry, “A Warning To My Readers”

“A Warning To My Readers”

“Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.”

- Wendell Berry

"How It Really Is"

And how about you, Good Citizen?

"The Vaccine Death Report"

"The Vaccine Death Report"
by David John Sorenson and Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, MD

"Purpose: The purpose of this report is to document how all over the world millions of people have died, and hundreds of millions of serious adverse events have occurred, after injections with the experimental mRNA gene therapy. We also reveal the real risk of an unprecedented genocide.

Facts: We aim to only present scientific facts and stay away from unfounded claims. The data is clear and verifiable. Over one hundred references can be found for all presented information, which is provided as a starting point for further investigation.

Complicity: The data suggests that we may currently be witnessing the greatest organized mass murder in the history of our world. The severity of this situation compels us to ask this critical question: will we rise to the defense of billions of innocent people? Or will we permit personal profit over justice, and be complicit? Networks of lawyers all over the world are preparing class-action lawsuits to prosecute all who are serving this criminal agenda. To all who have been complicit so far, we say: There is still time to turn and choose the side of truth. Please make the right choice."
Freely download "The Vaccine Death Report" here:
WHY?!
Without comment I present this video by Greg Hunter
 for your consideration, and strongly urge you to view it:

"Unthinkable Thoughts"

"Unthinkable Thoughts"
by Josh Mitteldorf

"This is not what I enjoy writing about, but as I find dark thoughts creeping into my consciousness, perhaps it is better to put them on paper with supporting logic and invite my readers to help me clarify the reasoning and, perhaps, to point a way out of the darkness.

Already in January, 2020, two ideas about COVID were emerging. One is that there were people and institutions who seemed to have anticipated the event, and were planning for it for a long time. Gates, Fauci, the World Economic Forum, and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine were among the prescient. (I credit the (now deleted) videos of Spiro Skouras.) Second was the genetic evidence suggesting that COVID had a laboratory origin. Funders of the scientific establishment have lost their bid to ridicule this idea, and it has now leaked into the mainstream, where it is fused with the classical yellow peril propaganda: “China did it!” I have cited evidence that America is likely equally culpable.

The confluence of these two themes suggests the dark logic that I take for my topic today: Those who knew in advance, not only that there would be a pandemic but that it would be a Coronavirus, were actually responsible for engineering this pandemic.

Immediately, I think: How could people capable of such sociopathic enormities be occupying the most powerful circles of the world’s elite? And what would be their motivation? I don’t have answers to these questions, and I will leave speculation to others. But there’s one attractive answer that I find less compelling: that it’s a money-maker for the large and criminal pharmaceutical industry. The new mRNA vaccines are already the most profitable drugs in history, but I think that shutdown of world economies, assassinations of world leaders, deep corruption of science, and full-spectrum control of the mainstream narrative imply a larger power base than can plausibly be commanded by the pharma industry.

Instead, I’ll try to follow the scientific and medical implications of the hypothesis that COVID is a bioweapon.

The Spike Protein: The spike protein is the part of the virus structure that interfaces with the host cell. SARS 1 and SARS 2 viruses both have spike proteins that bind to a human cell receptor called ACE-2, common in lung cells but also present in other parts of the body. Binding to the cell’s ACE-2 receptor is like the wolf knocking at the door of Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. “Hello, grandmama. I’m your granddaughter. Please let me in.” The virus is a wolf wearing a red cape and hood, pretends to be an ACE-2 enzyme molecule seeking entrance to the cell.

In order to enter the cell, the virus must break off from the spike protein and leave it at the doorstep, so to speak. This is an important and difficult step, as it turns out. Unique to the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a trick for making the separation. Just at the edge of the protein is a furin cleavage site. Furin is an enzyme that snips protein molecules, and it is common in our bodies, with legitimate metabolic uses. A furin cleavage site is a string of 4 particular amino acids that calls to furin, “hey — come over here. I’m a protein that needs snipping.”

The most compelling evidence for a laboratory origin of COVID is that coronaviruses don’t have furin cleavage sites, and until last year, this trick has never evolved naturally.
Click image for larger size.

How we think about natural disease: The classical understanding of a viral or bacterial disease is this: A parasite is an organism that uses the host’s resources for its own reproduction. It is evolved to reproduce efficiently. If it has co-evolved with the host, it may be evolved to spare the host’s health, or even to promote it, because this is the optimal long-term strategy for any predator or parasite. But newly-emerged parasites can do well for awhile even if they disable or kill their hosts, and this is the kind of disease that is most damaging to us. The damage is done because the (young) virus’s strategy is to reproduce rapidly and disperse itself into the environment where it can find new hosts. The virus has no interest in harming the host, and was not evolved to this end, but this is a side-effect of commandeering the body’s resources for its own reproduction.

How engineered diseases can be different: A bioweapon virus is designed to cause a certain kind of harm. 

* What kind of harm? It depends on the projected use for the weapon.
* Doesn’t the virus have to reproduce? Probably, for most weapon applications; but a bioweapon is not necessarily designed for rapid reproduction. A bioweapon can be designed as a “sleeper” to remain dormant for months or years, or to cause incremental disability over a long period.

If COVID had evolved naturally, we would expect that its spike protein would be adapted to mate well with the human ACE-2 receptor. There’s no reason to suspect it being otherwise biologically active. But if COVID is engineered, it may be that the spike protein itself has been designed to make us sick.

One reason this is significant is that the vaccines have all been designed around the spike protein, assuming that the spike protein were metabolically neutral. If the virus had been naturally evolved, this is a reasonable assumption. But if it came from a laboratory (whether it leaked or was deliberately released) the spike protein might be actually be the agent of damage. There are several reasons to suspect that this is the case.

The Spike Protein as an Active Pathogen: Back in February, 2020, this article noted that the spike protein was not perfectly optimized to bind to human ACE-2 and put this forward as an proof that “SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus.” But if someone were designing the virus to cause harm, the spike protein would be a convenient locus for the damage vector, so the spike might have been designed with twin purposes in mind, binding and toxicity. The spike protein appears in many copies around the “crown” of the coronavirus. Since each copy has a furin cleavage site at its base, many spike proteins will break off into the bloodstream. We now have several reports and hypotheses concerning the spike protein as an active agent of damage. The spike protein is suspected of causing blood clots, of inducing long-lasting neurological damage, and of causing infertility. Many anecdotes describe injuries to un-vaccinated people who have been in close proximity to vaccinated, prompting speculation about “shedding” the spike protein.

“Individuals with COVID-19 experience a vast number of neurological symptoms, such as headaches, ataxia, impaired consciousness, hallucinations, stroke and cerebral hemorrhage. But autopsy studies have yet to find clear evidence of destructive viral invasion into patients’ brains, pushing researchers to consider alternative explanations of how SARS-CoV-2 causes neurological symptoms….

If not viral infection, what else could be causing injury to distant organs associated with COVID-19? The most likely culprit that has been identified is the COVID-19 spike protein released from the outer shell of the virus into circulation. Research cited below* has documented that the viral spike protein is able to initiate a cascade of events that triggers damage to distant organs in COVID-19 patients.

Worryingly, several studies have found that the spike proteins alone have the capacity to cause widespread injury throughout the body, without any evidence of virus. What makes this finding so disturbing is that the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines manufactured by Moderna and Pfizer and currently being administered throughout the U.S. program our cells to manufacture this same coronavirus spike protein as a way to trigger our bodies to produce antibodies to the virus.” [Global Research article, Feb 2021]

Note: the Astra-Zeneca and J&J vaccines are also based on the spike protein, and cause the spike protein to be created in the vaccinated person.

* “Research cited below” refers to this study in Nature which reports that the spike protein, injected into mice, crosses into the brain, where it causes neurological damage.

Bigger news came just this week from a study in which researchers from California’s Salk Institute collaborated with Chinese virologists. They have found that the bare spike protein without the virus (injected in mice) can cause damaged arteries of the kind that lead to heart disease and strokes in humans. The original paper was published in Circulation Research, and the Salk Institute issued a news report describing the research.

One of the most credible dangers of the spike protein involves fertility. None of the vaccines were tested in pregnant women, and yet many government and other authorities are recommending it as safe for pregnant women. VAERS has reported 174 miscarriages to date after COVID vaccination. VAERS is notoriously underreported. I find the anecdotes less concerning than the fact that no one is taking this seriously, and research is being actively discouraged in the best-respected science journals.

There is a credible mechanism, in that the spike protein is partially homologous to syncytin. Syncytin, in fact, was originally a retroviral protein, inserted into the mammalian genome many aeons ago, and evolved over the ages to play an essential role in reproduction, binding the placenta to the fetus. An immune response that attacks syncytin might be expected to be impose a danger of spontaneous abortion. In any ordinary times, this would be a subject that medical researchers would jump on, with animal tests and field surveys to assess the danger. But these are no ordinary times, and the risk is being dismissed on theoretical grounds without investigation. This is especially suspicious in the context of history: a Gates Foundation vaccination program in 1995 was allegedly promoted to young women, causing infertility. (Yes, I know there are many fact-checkers eager to “debunk” this story, but I don’t find them convincing, and some of these fact-checkers are compromised by Gates funding.)

Even doing what the spike protein is supposed to do — tying up ACE2 — can be a problem for our lungs and arteries, which are routinely protected by ACE2.

The most dangerous possibility, suspected but not verified, is that the spike protein causes a prion cascade. Prions are paradoxical pathogens, in that they are misfolded proteins that cause misfolded proteins. Their evolutionary etiology is utterly mysterious, so much so that it took Stanley Prusiner a decade after describing the biology of prions before the scientific community would take prion biochemistry seriously. But prions make potent bioweapons, which laboratories can design outside of natural evolutionary dynamics. The possibility of prion-like structures in the spike protein was noted very early in the pandemic based on a computational study. This recent review combines theoretical, laboratory, and observational evidence to make a case for caution. Once again, I find it disturbing that this possibility is being dismissed on theoretical grounds rather than investigated in the lab and the field.

Where did the idea come from that all vaccines are automatically safe? Why do so many journalists dismiss the suggestion that vaccines should be placebo-tested individually, like all other drugs? Why has it become routine to ridicule and denigrate scientists who ask questions about vaccine safety as politically-motivated luddites, or “anti-vaxxers”? How did we get to a situation where the “precautionary principle” means pressuring young people who are at almost no risk for serious COVID to accept a vaccine which has not been fully tested or approved? I don’t have answers, but I do know who benefits from this culture.

Putting together all the evidence:
• Knowledge beforehand.
• Suppression of treatments and cures.
• Toxicity of the spike protein which, if it had been made by nature, should have been benign.
• Inclusion of the toxic spike protein in the vaccines that are supposed to protect us.
• Heavy promotion of these scantily-tested vaccines and
• Censorship of scientists and doctors who question the vaccines’ safety.

Putting together all this evidence, it is difficult to escape the inference that powerful people and organizations have engineered this pandemic with deadly intent."
Related, Must Read! 
"Everyone Vaccinated For Covid Will DIE, Warns French Virologist"

"There is no chance of long-term survival for anyone who received a Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) injection, according to leading French virologist Luc Montagnier. Everyone who is getting jabbed for the Chinese Virus will die, he reportedly stated during a recent interview, which you can watch at Brighteon.com. “There is no hope and no possible treatment for those who have already been vaccinated,” Montagnier stated plainly during the segment. “We must be prepared to cremate the bodies.” After studying at length the ingredients contained in the injections and what they do, Montagnier came to the conclusion that every single person who gets the shot will eventually die from antibody-dependent enhancement, or ADE. “That is all that can be said,” he added."
Full article here:
"The prestigious Salk Institute, founded by vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk, has authored and published a bombshell scientific article revealing that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is what’s actually causing vascular damage in covid patients and covid vaccine recipients, promoting the strokes, heart attacks, migraines, blood clots and other harmful reactions that have already killed thousands of Americans (source: VAERS.hhs.gov)."

Critically, all four covid vaccine brands currently in widespread use either inject patients with the spike protein or, via mRNA technology, instruct the patient’s own body to manufacture spike proteins and release them into their own blood. This floods the patient’s body with the very spike protein that the Salk Institute has now identified as the smoking gun cause of vascular damage and related events (such as blood clots, which are killing many people who take the vaccines). "Put simply, it means the vaccines were designed to contain the very element that’s killing people."
Full article:
Excerpt: “Executives are having their HR staff and their managers, superintendents, floormen, etc., go through and look at the staff that have received the vaccines, and they’re planning on having to replace them all within the next three years. What does that say to you?” The woman does not name herself, but does claim that she runs a company that works in succession planning. We are taking her word for it, but it does resonate with what French virologist and Nobel Laureate Luc Montagnier recently admitted about what will happen to jabbed people within the next few years. View Brighteon video in article.

“It’s got some of these guys literally in tears as they’re going through the company and literally checking off all of these individuals who have taken the vaccine, knowing that most likely within the next three years they’re going to have to replace that person,” the woman adds. “This is a really big thing in the industry that I’m in. These massive gas and oil companies are looking to have to replace thousands of personnel.”

"What Vaccine Recipients Can Expect Long-Term" (Excerpt)

"What Vaccine Recipients Can Expect Long-Term" (Excerpt)
by Dr. Joseph Mercola

"Story At-A-Glance: For years, Big Pharma has had its eye on mRNA gene transfer technology. In 2019, a Milken Institute panel specifically discussed how they might achieve the transition from conventional vaccine development to novel mRNA technology

A year into the rollout of the COVID jabs, we’re realizing just how lacking scientists’ understanding of these shots is. Or worse, they do understand, and don’t care about the damage they cause

The COVID shots do not contain the identical mRNA found in the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The mRNA has been genetically manipulated in a process called “codon optimization,” and this process is KNOWN to create completely unforeseen side effects

Codon optimization can result in protein misfolding, which in turn has been linked to lethal conditions such as neurodegenerative diseases and heart failure

Pfizer appears to have been the most aggressive in their codon optimization. In its Risk Management Plan submitted to the FDA, Pfizer admits that the codon optimization they did resulted in elevated gamma-glutamyl transferase (GGT), which is an early marker of heart failure
...
Summary: So, to summarize as concisely as I can, Pfizer, Moderna and Janssen all modified the genetic code of their RNA to ensure that the resulting spike protein that your body makes would be more stable, and to bypass protective mechanisms in the cells that prevent viral replication. Without this change, your immune system would simply destroy the mRNA before your cells could start producing spike protein. The problem is that this codon optimization, this genetic rewriting, causes translation errors when your ribosomes - the “machinery” inside your cells that synthesize proteins - process the code.

These translation errors can result in misfolded and malfunctioning proteins. We already know that some protein misfolding is implicated in neurodegenerative diseases and sudden heart failure. But we really have no idea what the misfolded proteins created by the COVID jabs might do. The consequences may be identical to other protein misfolding, or they might result in entirely novel conditions.

To learn more, be sure to listen to the “Planet Lockdown” interview with Alexandra Henrion-Caude, Ph.D., a geneticist and researcher at the French Institute of Health, featured at the top of this article. She explains what RNA is, the theory of how the COVID jabs are supposed to work, and some of the main concerns surrounding their use.

She points out that, if you wanted to create a vaccine, you would not target the part of the virus that is most prone to mutation (the spike protein). One would select a part of the virus that is less likely to mutate. By targeting the spike protein, they set themselves up to produce multiple vaccines to keep up with mutations, so choosing the spike protein might well have been a financial decision.

Moreover, by selecting the spike protein as the target, they chose to program your body to produce the most toxic portion of the virus. We know that the spike protein alone is pathogenic - producing blood clots and abnormal bleeding, for example - even without the rest of the virus. Clotting and/or hemorrhaging is due to the fact that your immune system will attack and destroy the cells inside your vascular system that produce spike protein."
Please view this complete article, with videos, here:

"Trudeau Has Declared Canada A Dictatorship"

Full screen recommended.
Tucker Carlson, PM 2/14/22:
"Trudeau Has Declared Canada A Dictatorship"
"‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ host says Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s 
response to trucker protests is a ‘defining moment’ for history."

Monday, February 14, 2022

"30 Signs That Show The Middle Class Is Dying Right In Front Of Our Eyes"

Full screen recommended.
"30 Signs That Show The Middle Class 
Is Dying Right In Front Of Our Eyes"
by Epic Economist

"The once strong and vibrant U.S. middle-class continues to shrink at a very brisk pace. Millions of Americans are falling down the middle-class ladder as the cost of living rises and incomes steadily drop. The decline of the American middle-class has greatly accelerated over the past decade, and conditions have been particularly detrimental over the past two years.

As more and more of our production is outsourced to foreign countries, the declining number of manufacturing jobs has kept a sizable portion of the U.S. population from entering the middle class. Meanwhile, the rate of inflation is still surging, but wages aren’t keeping up. To make things worse, an overwhelming amount of debt is choking the life out of more than half of American households.

As the price of housing, energy, and daily necessities skyrockets, with each passing day, more Americans are pushed out of their comfortable middle-class lives and into poverty. The number of middle-class jobs continues to go down at a staggering pace, and significantly fewer people can afford to buy a home in middle-class neighborhoods.

In contrast, the number of people that are forced to turn to the government for financial assistance continues to go up. In essence, as increasingly more workers can’t afford to make ends meet, America is getting poorer as a nation. When the cost of basic necessities rises much faster than incomes do, that means our overall wealth is getting smaller. At the same time, a larger share of wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated at the very top of the income scale. This is not how capitalism is supposed to work, and it is not healthy for America.

Currently, there are 262 million working-age people in America, but only about 161 million of them are working, marking a participation rate of just 61.1 percent. The numbers we’re about to report expose why the U.S. middle-class is disappearing right in front of our eyes. According to Forbes, approximately 42.5 million Americans or 13.4% of the U.S. population live below the poverty line. And since 2020, at least 131 million experienced some level of financial insecurity. Since 2021, workers' wages rose on average by 4.2%. On the other hand, inflation has soared 7.5%, which means that workers' earnings have actually eroded by 3.3% over the past 12 months. In 1970, consumer debt in the United States was standing at $430 billion. Today, it stands at $15.6 trillion, an absolute record-high.

Sadly, these numbers could go on and on. There are many other statistics that reveal the rapid decay of the U.S. middle class. The U.S. economy has been dramatically declining over the past few years, and economists say that trend has just begun. There’s a perfect storm of events threatening to spell much more trouble in 2022, as our politicians and policymakers scramble to fight against inflation and spark chaos on financial markets.

At the end of the day, the ones who are going to get hurt the most are the bottom 90 percent of the population, with many more of us falling into poverty, facing financial and food insecurity at a time the price of everything spirals out of control. We’re now on the path to another major financial crisis, but most people still don’t know the amount of pain that awaits us.

The truth is that our economy will slowly choke and die as the number of middle-class Americans needed to support it continues to decrease. Unfortunately, that’s to say that where we are now is as good as it gets. It’s all downhill from here. We should all start planning what to do to make it through the collapse that is ahead."

"Home Builders Will Crash; Markets Struggle Without FED Help; Housing Market"

Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, PM 2/14/22:
"Home Builders Will Crash; 
Markets Struggle Without FED Help; Housing Market"

"The Care and Feeding of Rabble: Democracy Its Own Self"

"The Care and Feeding of Rabble: 
Democracy Its Own Self"
by Fred Reed

"Listening to Biden prattling about democracy, democracy, democracy, and how we must save American democracy from swarming threats to democracy, with the insistence and urgency of a starveling aluminum-siding salesman, I am filled with wonder. Convincing people that they live in a democracy is a lot of work, like pumping air into an inner tube with a leak. America is no more a democracy than it is a potted plant.

Functional Illiteracy at Fourteen Percent in America: Department of Education: Functional illiterates cannot fill out a job application, manage a checkbook, read a simple story in a newspaper, or use the social media. Those who can’t read don’t, and another large number who can barely read don’t either. At a low estimate they must amount to a quarter of the population. They vote. Democracy is best suited to towns of a few hundred people who, however dim of wit in many cases, may understand such questions as should we build a new school which will cost me so many dollars in higher taxes. Even here the more crafty and avaricious will likely prevail.

Shocking Facts: 23 Statistics on Illiteracy in America: A problem in democracies - “democracies” - is of course that the dim, the inattentive, and those who are both dim and inattentive, will always outnumber the bright and informed. However, the syndrome worsens as the domain upon which the electorate is to make judgement expands from town to state to country to world. The number of unintelligent is constant. The number who are insufficiently attentive rises with the complexity of things needing attention. A cardiac surgeon is no fool, but has work, medical literature he needs to read, family, and a hobby or two. Little time is left to worry about semiconductor sanctions against China or Washington’s desire for Russia to invade the Ukraine.

Americans Know Literally Nothing About the Constitution“Take your pick from this bouillabaisse of ignorance:

* More than one in three people (37%) could not name a single right protected by the First Amendment. THE FIRST AMENDMENT.
* Only one in four (26%) can name all three branches of the government. (In 2011, 38% could name all three branches.)
* One in three (33%) can't name any branch of government.“

People so innocent of political grasp can have only the most vaporous notions of pressing political questions. They are either fools with minds best suited for working as gardeners or so little engaged with the surrounding society as to achieve the effect of being fools while still able to find their way home at night. Still others are not unintelligent but not interested. None of these should vote.

One in Four Americans Thinks the Sun Revolves Around The Earth“A quarter of Americans surveyed could not correctly answer that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, according to a report out Friday from the National Science Foundation.”

This is so astonishing that one might suspect it of coming from some crackpot blogger with no girlfriend living in his parents’ basement. But no. The National Science Foundation is about as respectable as they come. A quarter of the population are at the level of an undiscovered tribe living in the rain forests of the Amazon Basin and eating grubs fished from rotting logs. Little prospect exists that people in such darkness know much of anything else. Yet we encourage them to vote.

Several Baltimore Schools Report No Students Proficient in Reading, Math“Six Baltimore City schools - five high schools and one middle school - were found to have not a single student who scored proficient in math or reading in 2016, Fox News reports.” Others schools had only a handful of literate students. Math results were as grim. These “students “will be around for another fifty years if they are not shot, virtually unemployable. Yet they can vote. The schools mentioned are all black, and similar figures would come out of similarly black schools in many other cities. What does this say about “democracy “in America?

Gallup: Forty-six Percent of Americans Believe in Creationism: The distribution of intelligence being symmetric, half of the population are below average. A man with an IQ of 90 is not actually stupid, doesn’t mumble or bump into things, and can successfully raise a family and drive a truck. Yet he is unlikely to grasp the foreign policy of the United States or, really, to have heard of it. If he has any knowledge at all of public affairs, it will be at the level of The Russians are bad, wherever exactly Russia is, so we need to spend more on Our Boys in Uniform.

A lot of people get their news from television, the medium of the illiterate and semiliterate. Obviously, not everybody who watches television is illiterate, but everybody who is illiterate watches television. Many don’t watch the news at all, it being complicated and mysterious and talking about the inexplicable and unknown, such as Kazakhstan and Nordstream Two. The consequence is that if MSNBC and CNN say over and over that the Chinese are doing something terrible, most will believe it. Judging by the intellectual level of much of television, a sentence with a dependent clause will exceed the capacities of many. They vote.

Lincoln famously said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” You don’t have to. Being a politician, he didn’t add that you can fool enough of the people enough of the time, and that is enough. This is the basis of American democracy.

77% Of Students At One Baltimore High School Read at Elementary, Kindergarten Level: ”In reading, 628 Patterson High School students took the test. Out of those students, 484 of them, or 77%, tested at an elementary school reading level. That includes 71 high school students who were reading at a kindergarten level and 88 students reading at a first-grade level. Another 45 are reading at a second-grade level. Just 12 students tested at Patterson High School, were reading at grade level, which comes out to just 1.9%.”

Democracy? A democracy of fools is no democracy. It allows the very smart, concentrated in New York and Washington, the governing suites of major corporations and, nowadays, the distributed wunderkind of the tech firms, to run the country from behind the scenes. Whether intended or not, the drive to lower the voting age and enfranchise the ghetto populations serve only to further diminish the pitiable competence of the electorate and allow the elites to keep these untermenschen out of the hair of their betters.

Pelosi says she backs lowering voting age to 16: "I myself have always been for lowering the voting age to 16," Pelosi said. "I think it's really important to capture kids when they're in high school, when they're interested in all of this, when they're learning about government, to be able to vote." The less bright, less informed, and less experienced of life are easier to mold and manipulate. Who could be better than children?

If America wanted a functional democracy, which it doesn’t, it would, first, raise the voting age to 25 or 30. The idea that adolescents of eighteen with no experience of life beyond libidinous frat parties, much less sixteen-year-olds, can vote intelligently is silly. (Not that I have anything against libidinous frat parties. They just aren’t qualification for voting) This would require a recognition that voting should be a privilege, not an entitlement and that government should be done by people able to do it.

Second, a demanding version of the old literacy test would serve wonderfully. This should demonstrate at a minimum a reading fluency of political ideas express in standard English. A reasonable grasp of world geography and American government might profitably be required. Perhaps a measured IQ of 120 or better should be in the mix. This would make the bamboozlement and competitive shooing of the puzzled much, much harder, which is why it will never fly with the elites who find an electorate of the easily led congenial. These measures would also screen out various minorities disproportionately. They would also ignite the resentment against the bright and cultivated that forms the bedrock of American society.

Comprehensive ignorance extends to groups many of whom are presumably well educated. Consider the following: Poll: 44% of liberals say more than 1k unarmed black Americans killed by police in 2019“According to the Washington Post database, regarded by Nature magazine as the "most complete database," 13 unarmed black men were fatally shot by police in 2019. According to a second database called "Mapping Police Violence", compiled by data scientists and activists, 27 unarmed black men were killed by police (by any means) in 2019."

This shows that forty-four percent of liberals are incompetent to vote. If the misestimate is reduced to five hundred, many more believe it. Similar numbers could probably be compiled for conservatives on other questions, conspiracy theories being promising candidates.

Race is the most dangerous, destructive, and intractable problem facing America, yet these people are too stupid, lazy, inattentive, emotional, or worm-eaten by ideology to have even a faint grasp of what is happening. But they vote. If liberals, a category including academia, the media, and a great many of the highly educated believe such wildly erroneous numbers, it is likely that blacks, a group in large part poorly educated, believe these things at a higher rate. Do you suppose convincing them that they are being slaughtered en masse improves race relations?

The very bright will always rule, though not always obviously. An IQ of 140 is said to be entry level for Wall Street. This excludes well over ninety-nine percent of the population. Mike Pompeo, while a wretched human being, was first in class at West Point and editor of the Harvard Law Review, Hillary a National Merit Finalist, putting her in the upper .5 percent of test-takers in Illinois. Bill was a Rhodes scholar.

Intellectual mediocrities will often be in prominent positions, Joe and Kamala being examples, in Congress and the White House, these being storefronts for the very smart. The brains, and the power, are in the shadows. But, methinks, a genuinely bright electorate would be less likely to anoint freaks and rogues.

Interesting question: What would be the effect of requiring an IQ of 130, the cutoff for Mensa, to vote? The idea will arouse shrieks from an American public famously resentful of excellence except in football. (I am reminded of a fellow fourteen-year-old in Athens, Alabama who, seeing me reading a book on biology, said angrily, “You ain’t no gooder’n me.”) A test for voting of course runs against the current policy of enfranchising the mentally lame and halt. Would the upper two percent of the population do a better job of electing leaders? They would certainly be much more difficult to con.

I will now go to the American Legion in Chapala, which makes really good huevos rancheros, which I will accompany with a double bourban and pretend that things aren’t as they are. Sometimes, it works."

"If We Have No Idea..."

“If we have no idea what we believe in, we’ll go along with anything. Truth takes courage. Courage to stand up for what we believe in. Not necessarily in a confrontational way, but in a gentle yet firm way. Like an oak tree, able to sway gently in the wind, but strongly rooted to the ground.”
- A.C. Ping

"Who Will Blink First?"

"Who Will Blink First?"
by Jim Rickards

"You’re certainly familiar with the Freedom Convoy in Canada by now. About a month ago, the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, imposed another vax requirement on Canadian and U.S. truckers entering Canada. This was a mandatory vax requirement. Those who did not have the vax had to quarantine for two weeks on arrival in Canada. Many truckers live from job to job and are highly opportunistic when it comes to bidding on jobs. They self-organize in terms of destinations and the ability to pick up and drop off multiple loads in one trip. Any sort of quarantine effectively puts them out of business, so the truckers had every reason to oppose the mandates. Their livelihoods are at stake.

In early February a trucker convoy took shape. Truckers arrived from all destinations and converged on Ottawa, the capital of Canada. One particular convoy stretched for 45 miles and included thousands of trucks. Then, smaller groups of 100 trucks or so have paralyzed downtown Ottawa and closed the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. That’s the most heavily traveled border crossing between the U.S. and Canada. About 30% of all commerce between the two major economies crosses that bridge.

Trudeau Looks to Invoke “Emergencies Act”: Yesterday, police cleared protesters from the Ambassador Bridge. Over two dozen people were peacefully arrested, and a number of trucks were towed away. Now Justin Trudeau is threatening to invoke Canada’s “Emergencies Act” to crack down on protesters. The act would confer sweeping powers on the federal government to restore public order, though only temporarily. It could involve the banning of public assemblies and restricting travel.

How far is Trudeau willing to go? Will the truckers give in? Who will blink first? We’ll see. But the Canadian Parliament must first approve the resolution before it can go forward. Incidentally, Trudeau isn’t opposed to all public protests. He sanctioned the BLM protests in the summer of 2020 and even took part in them. But when workers resist the forceful imposition of experimental gene therapies that don’t stop people from spreading or acquiring the virus, and the ridiculous policies that threaten their livelihoods needlessly, Trudeau draws the line.

You would think that someone who was triply vaxxed and still got COVID anyway would see the absurdity of his position. But evidently he doesn’t.

More About Control Than Science: Now similar blockages are emerging at other key border crossings. Trucker-type protests are breaking out all over the world including in Paris, Sydney, Amsterdam and possibly soon in the United States. It’s a crisis for the ruling-class elites who seem far more concerned about control than “the science.”

The real science says that lockdowns don’t work and that the experimental vaccines have negligible overall effect, especially against the Omicron variant. There’s evidence that the vaccines may actually have negative effectiveness, as the fully vaxxed appear more likely to acquire Omicron than the unvaxxed.

The U.S. trucker convoy for freedom is planning to rendezvous in Coachella Valley in California near Palm Springs on March 5 and drive across the country to Washington, D.C. No doubt other convoys will emerge from other parts of the U.S. to join the main convoy in Washington.

The Downside to Trucker Protests: The Biden administration may try blocking access to the capital before the truckers make it that far, but that will just create massive traffic jams all over the region. Here’s what you need to understand: While these protests make for colorful news footage, and you may fully support them, most investors may not realize how much damage is being done to global supply chains.

The supply chain crisis was well underway before the trucker protests, but the protests will make matters much worse. Under the USMCA (successor to NAFTA), the North American auto industry is distributed among manufacturing plants in Mexico, the U.S. and Canada. Those plants depend on each other for just-in-time delivery of parts and chassis to keep the assembly lines moving.

Trucker protests throw a monkey wrench into that industry, both because the protesting truckers are not available to move shipments and other truckers can’t get past the blockades. We’re already seeing weak growth in the first quarter of 2022, according to the best estimates. Strong protests will make for even weaker growth in the months ahead.

There’s a simple solution to all this, which is to end the mandates on vaccines and masks, and end other pointless pandemic policies. Politicians are too dumb to do that. We’ll all pay the price for their stupidity in the form of weaker growth and declining stock markets. Oh, yeah, and then there’s the inflation we have to deal with…

Highest Inflation in 40 Years: Inflation in the U.S. hit a 40-year high of 7.5% in January. That comes on top of another 40-year high of 7.0% the month before. Jay Powell’s vision of “transitory” inflation is now in shreds. It’s clear that the high inflation we are experiencing now is partly due to the 2021 package of $1.9 trillion in giveaways. If the economy is running close to short-term capacity in terms of labor markets and manufacturing ability and you throw $1.9 trillion at it, inflation is the predictable result.

The 7.5% inflation rate is an overall average calculated by the government based on about 29 main categories of goods, and thousands of individual items inside those categories. When you look past the average to particular goods, what you see is that the prices of things people buy most often such as meat, eggs, bread, poultry and gasoline are going up at an even faster rate, sometimes 10%, 20% or even 40% (these price hikes are offset by lower prices for tuition, health care and air travel that people consume far less frequently).

This kind of inflation poses an acute dilemma for the Fed. On the one hand, the Fed must tighten monetary policy in order to snuff out inflation. On the other hand, if the Fed tightens more than slightly, there’s a danger they will throw the economy into a recession. Unfortunately, a recession is exactly what will be required to beat this kind of inflation.

The Fed Is No Goldilocks: The Fed is trying to finesse the situation with a Goldilocks approach of not too tight, not too loose, but just right. They will fail at this. The stock market gets a vote. As the Fed tightens and the economy slows, the market will begin a steep decline in anticipation of a recession. The Fed doesn’t care much about the decline, but they do care if the decline becomes “disorderly.”

That’s hard to define, but drops of 3% or more for three–five days in a week over multiple weeks (similar to what happened in March 2020) definitely meets the definition. That’s coming. At that point, the Fed will throw in the towel and stop cutting rates. Then the inflation will return. So here are your options (and the Fed’s): more inflation, a stock market crash or recession.

Investors are certain to have at least one, maybe two, of these outcomes in the year ahead. The odds certainly increase with the ongoing supply chain disruptions, even if the trucker protests end tomorrow. But given the Fed’s consistent incompetence, we may get all three: more inflation, a stock market crash and recession."
2/14/22: Canada's Trudeau Invokes Emergency 
Powers As Demonstrations Persist"
"The government of Canada declared an emergency Monday, targeting demonstrators who have tied up the capital city of Ottawa and critical border crossings. After weeks of obstruction, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked emergency powers to halt the anti-vaccine protests. John Yang reports."

Gregory Mannarino, "The Fed. Is Again Playing Their Twisted Game, Learn To Recognize It"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 2/14/22:
"The Fed. Is Again Playing Their Twisted Game, 
Learn To Recognize It"

"Catastrophic Stock Market Crash Is On Us NOW"

Full screen recommended.
"Catastrophic Stock Market Crash Is On Us NOW"
by The Atlantis Report

"Dan Ferris warns investors of a catastrophic stock market crash. According to his prediction a 60% crash is imminent, that will be followed by a bear market. Dan Ferris is the editor of Extreme Value and the host of the Stansberry Investor Hour podcast. He is also one of those expert who predicted the coming financial crisis back in 2008."

Musical Interlude: Live, "Overcome"

 

Full screen recommended.
Live, "Overcome"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"A gorgeous spiral galaxy some 100 million light-years distant, NGC 1309 lies on the banks of the constellation of the River (Eridanus). NGC 1309 spans about 30,000 light-years, making it about one third the size of our larger Milky Way galaxy. Bluish clusters of young stars and dust lanes are seen to trace out NGC 1309's spiral arms as they wind around an older yellowish star population at its core.
Not just another pretty face-on spiral galaxy, observations of NGC 1309's recent supernova and Cepheid variable stars contribute to the calibration of the expansion of the Universe. Still, after you get over this beautiful galaxy's grand design, check out the array of more distant background galaxies also recorded in this sharp, reprocessed, Hubble Space Telescope view.”

"Life..."

"Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit."
- A.W. and J.C. Hare,

"The $64 Trillion Question"

"The $64 Trillion Question"
by Bill Bonner

"The heart is devious above all else;
It is perverse…
Who can understand it?
I the Lord test the mind
And search the heart
To give to all according to their ways,
According to the fruit of their doings.
~ Jeremiah, 17:9

Youghal, Ireland - “Science advances one funeral at a time,” said Max Planck, who meant that a heart had to come to a dead stop before new data could be properly appreciated and new paradigms accepted. It is the mind that moves science ahead. But it is the heart that rules scientists and everybody else. ‘Over my dead body,’ says the scientist, his heels dug deep into ‘the science’ he helped to discover. ‘Okay,’ sayeth the Lord, ‘that’ll work.’

At least in science and technology death leads to an accumulation of knowledge. In the rest of life, knowledge comes and goes, as if we’re all reincarnated, doomed to repeat the failed experiments of the past. All lovers rehearse scenes of Antony and Cleopatra. All politicians relive the challenges of Abraham Lincoln and Pontius Pilate. And all central bankers eventually channel William McChesney Martin or Gideon Gono. Lessons are learned… forgotten... and then re-learned again.

A Brand New Spanking: And so today’s inflation readings must be coming as a shock to the 1,000 or so Ph.D. economists at the Fed. ‘How about that,’ they must be saying to each other. ‘Printing money really does cause inflation.’ They’ve added $8 trillion in brand, spanking new money over the last 20 years. And their absurdly low interest rates created an unprecedented debt bubble, with $64 trillion added since 1999.

So, what do you know? Inflation! And now, practically every news item covering the inflation numbers leads with the same idea – that the Fed made an old error and now is under pressure to make a new one. The Hill: “Why the Fed overstimulated the economy.” CNBC asked Mohammed El-Erian what he thought: “…they didn't take the foot off the accelerator early enough.”

And here’s the Financial Times: "The US consumer price index rose 7.5 per cent last month compared with January last year, its fastest annual pace since 1982, heaping pressure on the Federal Reserve to act more aggressively to tame inflation."

And yes… the Fed is bound to act. Its credibility is at stake. And yes… it will act boldly. Here’s MarketWatch: "A firestorm of hawkish Fed speculation erupts following strong US inflation reading. Fed watchers are talking seriously about an “emergency” interest rate hike before the Fed’s next formal meeting on March 16."

Markets Insider: "After the inflation reading, St. Louis Fed President James Bullard, a voting member of the Fed's rate-setting committee, said he's become "dramatically" more hawkish. He now wants a rate increase of 100 basis points - a full percentage point - by July." Wow… a whole percentage point! Let’s see, that will leave the Fed Funds at MINUS 6.4%. Wow.

Paragons of Prudence: Our bet is that Fed economists are about to relearn another lesson – last rehearsed 50 years ago. In the early ‘70s, inflation rates were rising. Then falling. And then rising again. In 1970, prices were already going up at a 6% rate. Then, inflation dropped to just 3% in 1973. Back up to over 11% in 1976, the rate then again fell – but only to about 5% – before heading up again. Prices were rising at a 13% clip by 1980.

Arthur Burns is frequently criticized for letting the ‘70s inflation get out of hand. But compared to his present-day successors, he was a paragon of central bank prudence. His timing might have been off, but the idea was right. When inflation was 6%, his Fed Funds rate rose to 10%... then, the Fed’s key rate went over 12%. Overall, the bank lent to its members at a rate that was generally positive – by about 3%.

Paul Volcker took over in 1978. He dilly-dallied for a couple years, and then got serious. Trading punches with inflation didn’t work. He needed to deliver a knockout blow. He put the key rate at nearly 20% – 7 full percentage points over rising prices… and the monster was soon flat on its back.

A 1,000-Point Uppercut? Today, the Fed is already on the ropes. First, it told the world that it wouldn’t have to raise rates until 2024. Here it is, the beginning of 2022 and it is already conceding that it will have to do something now. Then, when inflation began to make the headlines, the Fed reassured the nation that it was only ‘transitory.’ There would be no reason to react to the higher prices, it said, because they were simply a little blowback from the COVID shutdowns and stimmie checks. Wrong again.

And now the Fed is concerned about protecting its ‘credibility,’ perhaps with a full 100 basis point (1 percentage point) increase. And yet, the lesson of the Volcker era was that a 100-basis point jab would do nothing; from today’s ultra-low rate, below 1%, it will take an increase of at least 1,000-basis points. Does the Fed still pack that kind of punch?

The most amazing thing to us is that it still has any credibility to protect. It plainly doesn’t know what it is doing. But is the Fed really as incompetent as it appears? Tune in tomorrow; we’ll take a look."
Related:

"How Our Politicians Used the Pandemic to Line Their Own Pockets"

“Why Not Despair?”

“Why Not Despair?”

“To view our times as decadent and dangerous, to mistrust the government, to imagine that those in power as not concerned with our best interests is not paranoid but perceptive; to be depressed, angry or confused about such things is not delusional but a sign of consciousness. Yet our culture suggests otherwise. But if all this is true, then why not despair? The simple answer is this: despair is the suicide of imagination. Whatever reality presses upon us, there still remains the possibility of imagining something better, and in this dream remains the frontier of our humanity and its possibilities To despair is to voluntarily close a door that has not yet shut. The task is to bear knowledge without it destroying ourselves, to challenge the wrong without ending up on its casualty list. “You don’t have to change the world,” the writer Colman McCarthy has argued. “Just keep the world from changing you.”

Oddly, those who instinctively understand this best are often those who seem to have the least reason to do so – survivors of abuse, oppression, and isolation who somehow discover not so much how to beat the odds, but how to wriggle around them. They have, without formal instruction, learned two of the most fundamental lessons of psychiatry, philosophy, and religion:

You are not responsible for that into which you were born.
You are responsible for doing something about it.

These individuals move through life like a skilled mariner in a storm rather than as a victim at a sacrifice. Relatively unburdened by pointless and debilitating guilt about the past, uninterested in the endless regurgitation of the unalterable, they free themselves to concentrate upon the present and the future. They face the gale as a sturdy combatant rather than as cowering supplicant.”
- Sam Smith
"Ain't no man can avoid being born average, 
but there ain't no man got to be common."
- Satchel Paige