"Struggle Session"

"Struggle Session"

by Jim Kunstler

"Syllogism: Dr. Tony Fauci says he is The Science… Dr. Tony Fauci lied to the nation early and often about his relationship with the Wuhan lab and his role in the development of the Covid-19 virus… therefore, The Science is a liar! Say what…? Yet another revered institution bites the dust! At this rate, will America ever be able to get its mind right?

Let’s face it: the government has done everything wrong around the Covid-19 episode from the start, and continues to this day. For a whole year since the outbreak, The Science (Dr. Fauci) managed to evade and bury the fact that he helped fund the gain-of-function (GOF) research of a bio-weapon for China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The Science (Dr. Fauci) hid the fact that Dr. Fauci knew as early as 2012 that an Asian bat virus was in GOF development. In October, 2014, the Obama regime declared an official pause on funding for GOF research on influenza, MERS, and SARS viruses (though the Pentagon secretly kept funneling money into it). The Science (Dr. Fauci) got the official pause lifted on January 7, 2017, eleven days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, unbeknownst to Mr. Trump. Development of the enhanced SARS Covid-19 variant disease continued.

In February, 2020, The Science (Dr. Fauci) said stringent travel restrictions imposed on inbound flights from China were irrelevant because “you can’t keep out the entire world.” In May 2021, The New York Times reported: 430,000 people had traveled from China to the US since the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020. Nearly 40,000 arrived in the two months even after Mr. Trump issued travel restrictions. Say what, plus huh…? How’d that happen? Not to mention the flights of Chinese nationals all over the rest of the world. Kind of seems like a “super-spreader” operation, don’t you think? Where was The Science on that? (We know where “Joe Biden” was on it — he said travel restrictions were “racist.”)

So, Covid-19 gets traction in the USA around January, 2020. The Science (Dr. Fauci) tells the people not to wear masks. Then The Science (Dr. Fauci) changes its mind and insists that people wear masks… then double masks. The Science (Dr. Fauci) promotes lockdowns of social and business activities. America obeys. Millions of businesses shut down, go bust. Millions of incomes are lost. Great chains of mortgages, rents, loans and financial obligations are suspended (but creditors are hung out to dry). Marriages collapse under the strain. Households dissolve. The US economy rots.

The Science (Dr. Fauci) makes the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test standard for diagnosing Covid-19, but calibrates the cycle threshold, either stupidly or on purpose, in such a way that it produces tons of false positives. The government gives higher cash subsidies to hospitals based on Covid-19 deaths, so that even motorcycle fatalities are declared Covid-19 deaths if the patient’s body tests positive on its way to the morgue. Was this a Covid-19 pandemic or a PCR pandemic?

After Mr. Trump says he’s learned that the old reliable anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine can help with treatment of the virus, The Science (Dr. Fauci) tells America that it’s not so and to ignore the president. Months later, news comes out that the common old, reliable, antiparasitic drug Ivermectin can effectively treat Covid-19 along with vitamin-D and zinc, and even works as a prophylactic against it (and also that, by the way, hydroxychloroquine does help in early treatment). The Science (Dr. Fauci) tells America to ignore that, too, and instead wait for vaccines in development.

In late 2020, big pharma companies start releasing mRNA compounds they call “vaccines.” They are not egg-zackly vaccines in the standard sense of what vaccines have been since the British doctor Edward Jenner first inoculated humans for smallpox in 1796 using a weaker cowpox live virus. The Covid-19 “vaccines” are miracles of genetic engineering. They deliver instructions via a lipid nano-particle for the body to manufacture spike proteins of the kind that form the corona of Covid-19, which, in turn prompts the immune system to fight the virus. Sweet!

Except they have not gone through the years-long trials usually required by the FDA. By spring of 2021, evidence emerges that the spike protein may have some toxic properties of its own. Uh-oh. It seems to interfere with women’s reproductive functions; it attacks the epithelial lining of blood vessels; it appears to induce blood clotting that can lead to strokes and infarction; it can produce neurological disorders; it gets into other organs and messes with them…. Yikes!

Ordinarily, vaccines that produce a very few cases of dangerous side-effects are held back from distribution. But under the emergency declaration for Covid-19, the mRNA “vaccines” are proffered even more aggressively. Through May, 2021, The Science (Dr. Fauci) presses to “vaccinate” as many Americans as can possibly be rounded up, including people who have recovered from Covid-19 and have developed their own natural antibodies. Lately, The Science (Dr. Fauci) has militated for children and teenagers to get “vaccinated.”

Only, now it turns out that scores of “vaccinated” young people are showing up with inflammation of the heart muscle (myocarditis), otherwise extremely rare in that demographic. Say what, plus huh, plus WTF?

Does it not seem as if The Science (Dr. Fauci) has lurched from one blunder to the next, while also withholding the truth from the public, lying about the origin of the disease, and its (his) role in the development of the “vaccines,” and now rather desperately, it seems, trying to cover its (his) ass?

What does “Joe Biden” & Co. do about The Science (Dr. Fauci) now? More and more, it (he) looks like an albatross the size of Rodan the Flying Reptile around Mr. B’s withered neck. But if they throw it (him) to the wolves, they can no longer use Mr. Trump as the whipping boy for all the damage wreaked by Covid-19 and the government’s response to it (not to mention its role in creating the goshdarn thing.)

I guess we’ll have to stand by on all that. For the moment, “Joe Biden” is overseas, dazzling the leaders of foreign lands with his charm and perspicacity. I wonder if he’s heard the new caution from the CDC that people who have been “vaccinated” should not fly in airplanes for more than four hours at a time due to the possibility of developing harmful blood clots (deep vein thrombosis) at altitude. “Joe Biden” suffered a cranial aneurysm, 1988, requiring a 13-hour brain surgery. “Joe Biden” has been vaccinated. Just sayin’."

- https://kunstler.com/

"Inflation Is Starting To Get Really Crazy – And It Is Worse Than You Think"

"Inflation Is Starting To Get Really Crazy – 

And It Is Worse Than You Think"

by Michael Snyder

"Inflation is making headlines all over the country, but the mainstream media is not being honest about the true severity of the crisis. We are being told that the official rate of inflation is still in single digits, but what we aren’t being told is that the way inflation is calculated has changed dramatically over the years. In fact, according to Forbes “the government has changed the way it calculates inflation more than 20 times” over the past 30 years. The rate of inflation directly affects so many other things in our system, and the government would like to keep that number as low as possible. So they tinkered and tinkered with the formula until they got it just where they wanted it.

But even with the highly modified formula that they are now using, the rate of inflation still rose at the fastest pace in almost 13 years last month… "The consumer price index, which represents a basket including food, energy, groceries, housing costs and sales across a spectrum of goods, rose 5% from a year earlier. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been expecting a gain of 4.7%. The reading represented the biggest CPI gain since the 5.3% increase in August 2008, just before the financial crisis sent the U.S. spiraling into the worst recession since the Great Depression."

We all remember what happened in the months following August 2008. Hopefully we will not have a repeat of that. Of course the truth is that consumer prices are not just rising at a 5 percent rate in the United States right now. According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if the rate of inflation was still calculated the way that it was back in 1990, it would be above 8 percent right now. And if the rate of inflation was still calculated the way that it was back in 1980, it would currently be sitting at about 13 percent. But 5 percent inflation sure sounds a whole lot better than 13 percent, doesn’t it?

One thing that I am keeping a very close eye on is food inflation. Earlier today, I came across a story from one CBS affiliate in which they used the term “sticker shock” to describe what consumers are now experiencing at the grocery store… "You may have noticed a significant jump in prices at the grocery store. More and more grocery shoppers are experiencing sticker shock every day. The price of food - especially meat, fruit and vegetables - is going up."

If prices were increasing at just a 5 percent annual rate, that wouldn’t be a big deal. Sadly, the reality is much worse than that, and that is especially true for meat prices. According to one deli owner, the true rate of inflation for meat prices is “probably closer” to 20 or 30 percent… "Jeff Cohen, a deli owner and meat wholesaler, said those factors are making the price of meat out of control. “They said on national news it’s 10 percent. But that’s not true. it’s probably closer 20, 30 percent,” Cohen said."

We will continue to get a lot of happy talk from the Biden administration and from the Federal Reserve, but this is becoming a real national crisis. When CBS News interviewed one shopper in Maryland, she said that she is now spending about twice as much on groceries as she did before… "Abby Walter said she started noticing her grocery bill creeping up earlier this year. Prior to January, the Maryland resident had typically spent about $75 a week on groceries. Now her bill is averaging about $150 or even more."

I still remember when I could get an entire shopping cart of food for just 25 dollars. Now if I can get an entire cart of food for less than 200 dollars, I consider that to be a monumental achievement. I try really hard to take advantage of sales and make every dollar stretch as far as I can. But these days some of the sale prices are higher than the old regular prices.

As global commodity prices have exploded higher in recent months, companies have been forced to pass those increases along to consumers, but they are attempting to use language that will not cause widespread alarm… "If you ask Pampers maker Procter & Gamble Co., it’s not raising prices, it’s “taking pricing.” Rival Unilever, known for Dove soap and Axe body spray, says it’s been “very active with pricing.” The prize for creativity - so far at least - has been home-improvement retailer Lowe’s Cos., whose finance chief told investors Wednesday that it was “elevating our pricing ecosystem.”

What in the world is a “pricing ecosystem”? I would love to have a representative from Lowe’s define that for me. Executives from General Mills are also using language that borders on the absurd… "Then there’s cereal maker General Mills Inc., whose jargon includes arcane phrases like “strategic revenue management” and “holistic margin management,” which is not language you’d ever find on the back of a box of Lucky Charms. The company uses those terms so often, in fact, that its CEO now just refers to them by the acronyms SRM and HMM."

Why can’t they just say that they are “raising prices”? These days, I cringe whenever I go down the cereal aisle. It is hard for me to believe that cereal prices are so high now, but I know that they will eventually get a whole lot higher.

We have way too many dollars chasing way too few goods and services, and instead of taking emergency measures to get inflation under control our leaders seem intent on making things even worse. The Biden administration wanted to spend 2 trillion dollars on infrastructure, but a group of U.S. Senators is currently working on a “compromise deal” that would only provide 1.2 trillion dollars in new infrastructure spending. This is on top of the trillions upon trillions of dollars that we have already borrowed and spent during this crisis.

We can’t do this anymore. It is complete and utter insanity. But our politicians in Washington don’t seem to care. They are going to continue to borrow and spend giant mountains of money that we do not have, and the Federal Reserve is going to continue to shovel enormous gobs of cash into the financial system. So more inflation is on the way, and the standard of living for most Americans is going to continue to go down."

- http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

Musical Interlude: Afshin, "Prayer of Change"

Full screen recommended.

Afshin, "Prayer of Change"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Massive stars, abrasive winds, mountains of dust, and energetic light sculpt one of the largest and most picturesque regions of star formation in the Local Group of Galaxies. Known as N11, the region is visible on the upper right of many images of its home galaxy, the Milky Way neighbor known as the Large Magellanic Clouds (LMC).

The above image was taken for scientific purposes by the Hubble Space Telescope and reprocessed for artistry by an amateur to win the Hubble's Hidden Treasures competition. Although the section imaged above is known as NGC 1763, the entire N11 emission nebula is second in LMC size only to 30 Doradus. Studying the stars in N11 has shown that it actually houses three successive generations of star formation. Compact globules of dark dust housing emerging young stars are also visible around the image.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130211.html

“What Are The Facts?"

“What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the un-guessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!”

- Robert A. Heinlein

And always remember...

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,

however improbable, must be the truth."

- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "Sherlock Holmes"

“The Greatest Depression Is Accelerating; Wages Collapse; Inflation Rages; Household Debt Surges”

Jeremiah Babe, PM 6/10/21: 

“The Greatest Depression Is Accelerating; Wages Collapse; 

Inflation Rages; Household Debt Surges”

Gerald Celente, PM 6/10/21: "High Tax Rates For We The People, Billionaires Pay Peanuts"

Gerald Celente, PM 6/10/21:

"High Tax Rates For We The People, Billionaires Pay Peanuts"

"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over hype and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What’s Next in the increasingly turbulent times ahead."

- https://trendsresearch.com/

The Daily "Near You?"

Wichita Falls, Texas, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

Free Download: Albert Einstein, "The World As I See It"

"The World As I See It":

Albert Einstein's Thoughts on the Meaning of Life”

by Paul Ratner

“Albert Einstein was one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers, influencing scientific thought immeasurably. He was also not shy about sharing his wisdom about other topics, writing essays, articles, letters, giving interviews and speeches. His opinions on social and intellectual issues that do not come from the world of physics give an insight into the spiritual and moral vision of the scientist, offering much to take to heart.

The collection of essays and ideas “The World As I See It”* gathers Einstein’s thoughts from before 1935, when he was as the preface says “at the height of his scientific powers but not yet known as the sage of the atomic age”.

In the book, Einstein comes back to the question of the purpose of life on several occasions. In one passage, he links it to a sense of religiosity. “What is the meaning of human life, or, for that matter, of the life of any creature? To know an answer to this question means to be religious. You ask: Does it many any sense, then, to pose this question? I answer: The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life,” wrote Einstein.

Was Einstein himself religious? Raised by secular Jewish parents, he had complex and evolving spiritual thoughts. He generally seemed to be open to the possibility of the scientific impulse and religious thoughts coexisting. "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind," said Einstein in his 1954 essay on science and religion.

Some (including the scientist himself) have called Einstein’s spiritual views as pantheism, largely influenced by the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Pantheists see God as existing but abstract, equating all of reality with divinity. They also reject a specific personal God or a god that is somehow endowed with human attributes.

Himself a famous atheist, Richard Dawkins calls Einstein's pantheism a “sexed-up atheism,” but other scholars point to the fact that Einstein did seem to believe in a supernatural intelligence that’s beyond the physical world. He referred to it in his writings as “a superior spirit,” “a superior mind” and a “spirit vastly superior to men”. Einstein was possibly a deist, although he was quite familiar with various religious teachings, including a strong knowledge of Jewish religious texts.

In another passage from 1934, Einstein talks about the value of a human being, reflecting a Buddhist-like approach: “The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.”

This theme of liberating the self is also echoed by Einstein later in life, in a 1950 letter to console a grieving father Robert S. Marcus: “A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.”

In case you are wondering whether Einstein saw value in material pursuits, here’s him talking about accumulating wealth in 1934, as part of the “The World As I See It”: “I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause. The example of great and pure characters is the only thing that can lead us to noble thoughts and deeds. Money only appeals to selfishness and irresistibly invites abuse. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus or Gandhi armed with the money-bags of Carnegie?”

- http://bigthink.com/

○

Freely download "The World As I See It", by Albert Einstein, here:

- https://www.colonialtours.com/

"Hang In There..."

“Using time, pressure and patience, the universe gradually changes caterpillars into butterflies, sand into pearls, and coal into diamonds. You’re being worked on too, so hang in there. Just because something isn’t apparent right now, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. It’s not until the end do you realize, sometimes your biggest blessings were disguised by pain and suffering. They were not placed there to break you, but to make you.”

- “The Angel Affect”

“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly.”

- Richard Bach

"Ranchers Sell Off Cattle And Farmers Idle Hundreds Of Thousands Of Acres As America’s Drought Emergency Escalates"

"Ranchers Sell Off Cattle And Farmers Idle Hundreds 

Of Thousands Of Acres As America’s Drought Emergency Escalates"

by Michael Snyder

"In my entire lifetime, this is the worst that drought conditions have ever been in the western half of the country. During the past 20 years, the amount of territory in the West considered to be suffering from exceptional drought has never gone higher than 11 percent until now. Today, that number is sitting at 27 percent. The term “mega-drought” is being thrown around a lot these days to describe what is happening, but this isn’t just a drought. This is a true national emergency, and it is really starting to affect our food supply.

Just look at what is happening up in North Dakota. The vast majority of the state is either in the worst level of drought or the second worst level of drought, and ranchers are auctioning off their cattle by the thousands… “Normally this time of the year, we’re probably looking at 400-600 head and a lot of times would be every other week,” said former auctioneer Ron Torgerson. On Sunday and Monday, more than 4,200 head of cattle were sold at Rugby Livestock and Auction. Needless to say, ranchers in North Dakota don’t want to get rid of their cattle, but the drought has pushed prices for hay and corn so high that many of them simply have no choice.

One of those that has already been forced to sell a large number of cattle is rancher David Bohl… "As the drought continues, the price of hay and corn has gone way up. It’s more expensive for ranchers to try and supplement feed than it is to sell the cattle. Bohl has already sold 200 of his head in the last month. “Everybody is in the same situation, they’re going to have to sell probably 25 to 50% of them because there’s nowhere to go with them we just got no food to feed them,” Bohl said."

As cattle herds shrink all over the western half of the country, this is going to push beef prices significantly higher than they are right now. And in many areas, they are already at ridiculous levels.

Meanwhile, the drought continues to push the water level in Lake Mead into the danger zone. According to CBS News, Lake Mead will soon hit the “lowest level ever recorded”… "For more than eight decades, the iconic Hoover Dam has relied on water from Nevada’s Lake Mead to cover up its backside. But now, at age 85, it finds itself uncomfortably exposed. Much of the water the dam is supposed to be holding back is gone. “This is like a different world,” said Pat Mulroy, the former head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. She told CBS News senior national and environmental correspondent Ben Tracy that Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, is on track to soon hit its lowest level ever recorded.

Since the year 2000, the water level in Lake Mead has declined by a whopping 30 feet, and it is currently at just 37 percent of capacity. The dam’s hydropower output has already been reduced by about 25 percent, and once the water level gets low enough it will stop producing electricity completely.

In addition, many farmers that rely on water from Lake Mead are facing a very uncertain future at this point… "For the first time ever, the federal government is expected to declare a water shortage on the lower Colorado River later this summer. That will force automatic cuts to the water supply for Nevada and Arizona starting in 2022. Homeowners have higher priority and, at first, won’t feel the pain as badly as farmers.

Dan Thelander is a second-generation family farmer in Arizona’s Pinal County. The water to grow his corn and alfalfa fields comes from Lake Mead. “If we don’t have irrigation water, we can’t farm,” he said. “So, next year we are going to get about 25% less water, means we’re going to have to fallow or not plant 25% of our land.” Unless something changes, Thelander and other farmers in the region could potentially have all water cut off in 2023. That is just two years away.

Of course there are many farmers in California that have already been informed that they will not be getting any water allocated to them at all here in 2021. It is being projected that farmers in the state will not grow anything on 500,000 acres this year, and that is really bad news because California grows more than a third of our vegetables and two-thirds of our fruits and nuts…

Along with wildfire risks, short water supply is putting immense pressure on the state’s agricultural industry, which grows over a third of the country’s vegetables and supplies two-thirds of the fruits and nuts in the US. Already farmers are culling crops and fallowing fields in anticipation of water shortages. Karen Ross, California’s food and agriculture secretary, told the California Chamber of Commerce that she expected 500,000 acres would have to sit idle this year.

So what are we going to do if this mega-drought persists several more years and agricultural production in California is dramatically reduced for an extended period of time? I am sure that some wise guy will post a comment after this article about importing more fruits and vegetables from South America, but South America is experiencing a historic drought too. In fact, at this moment Brazil is experiencing the “worst drought in nearly a century”, and scientists are anticipating that it will not end any time soon.

Needless to say, the droughts that we are witnessing are setting the stage for many of the things that I have been warning about, and the future of agricultural production in the western hemisphere is looking quite bleak for the foreseeable future. In the short-term, this crisis is going to result in substantially higher prices at the grocery store. I know that grocery prices have already risen to painful levels, but the truth is that food prices will never be as low as they are right now. So I am encouraging everyone to stock up while they still can.

As I have said so many times, we really struggle to feed everyone in the world during the best of years, and 2021 is definitely not one of the best of years. Global food supplies are getting tighter and tighter, and this definitely has enormous implications for our future."

- http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

"How It Really Is"

 

Gregory Mannarino, AM 6/10/21: "CRASH: Economy In a Tailspin; Wages Falling; Prices Surging At Fastest Pace On Record"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 6/10/21:

"CRASH: Economy In a Tailspin; Wages Falling;

 Prices Surging At Fastest Pace On Record" 

- https://traderschoice.net/

"Hell to Pay"; "How Fanatics Took Over the World"

"Hell to Pay"

by Jeffrey Tucker

Editor’s note: Dr. Fauci’s private emails were recently leaked to the media. They revealed some interesting information. Today, old Daily Reckoning hand Jeffrey Tucker shows you how Fauci badly botched the lockdowns and why history will not be kind to him.

"I’m sure by now you’ve heard all about Dr. Fauci’s leaked emails. They were highly revealing, and his reputation will likely never recover. Today, I will break it all down. On March 2, 2020, with lockdowns still two weeks away, Dr. Fauci received an email from Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson. He asked the following: “Is the overall strategy of social distancing just to keep the percentage of Americans who get the disease low until a vaccine is available? This seems much harder to do in a free society. Does this mean closing schools? Public transport? Do states and localities make such decisions?”

Harder to do in a free society - indeed! It should have been unthinkable. Fauci’s answer is remarkable, and most of his answer ended up in the column Gerson was writing at the time. He confirmed his lockdown plans but also gave a rationale for them. It wasn’t about the need to flatten the curve to preserve hospital capacity. That was propaganda - a lie fed to the American people to convince them to go along. It wasn’t about waiting for a vaccine either. Fauci did not even believe that a vaccine was necessary. He said so.

What Fauci revealed in his response was his actual thinking on why we need lockdowns. He was convinced that if people stopped socializing, the virus would essentially get bored because it could not find a host. How long was this supposed to take? A month? A year? Ten years? He doesn’t say.

He was trying out a nutty idea here and just wanted to see how it worked. Here is what Fauci wrote on this day. “Social distancing is not really geared to wait for a vaccine. The major point is to prevent easy spread of infections in schools (closing them), crowded events such as theaters, stadiums (cancel events), work places (do teleworking where possible… The goal of social distancing is to prevent a single person who is infected to readily spread to several others, which is facilitated by close contact in crowds. Close proximity of people will keep the R0 higher than 1 and even as high as 2 to 3. If we can get the R0 to less than 1, the epidemic will gradually decline and stop on its own without a vaccine.”

Is his theory correct: that you can drive down the infection rate to 0 by keeping people apart and thereby cause the virus to “decline and stop?” I’ve spoken to many experts about this idea for the better part of a year, and they all say absolutely not. Attempting to game the rate of infection (which is impossible to measure in real life with any precision) and thereby affect the fate of a virus is a bit like imposing price controls to influence inflation without stopping the printing presses.

Let’s just say that a powerful government can manage to achieve some weird reality in which there are no crowds, no gatherings, no travel, and no one standing closer to anyone else than six feet. Only in the fantasy world of computer gaming does such a thing work. In the real world, viruses will certainly outsmart a central planner.

Even if it did work, which it could not, the transmission would start again once people start gathering. You will have rolling snap lockdowns forever - which is rather like what we see in Australia today. Once a virus is here, it is not going anywhere until population immunity takes hold and protects people from becoming sick. This point exists in first-year medical textbooks (and in 9th-grade biology class), but somehow Fauci managed to replace this time-tested wisdom with a new theory concocted by himself and his friends.

Fauci’s career and reputation will not likely survive this email dump. My friends in the know have been telling me for many months now that Fauci will be sacrificed by the establishment. The lockdowns were so grim, so unAmerican, so contrary to science, and also completely failed - not only in the U.S. but all over the world - that someone’s head needs to be on a platter. It looks like they were right: it will be Fauci.

As a sign of the times, Amazon and Barnes & Noble recently pulled Fauci’s book "Expect the Unexpected: Ten Lessons on Truth, Service, and the Way Forward" from their websites. His full discrediting is happening in real time. The man who all major media and large corporations fawned over for the better part of 15 months seems destined to go down in disgrace.

Nor will this be the end of it. Prepare yourself for many years of this. The lockdowners themselves certainly are, as one can tell by their near silence for the last two months. The winds have changed dramatically. That’s good for the cause of human freedom. Prepare yourself for many years ahead of astonishing revelations and for a full discrediting of everyone and everything that cooperated in this calamity without modern precedent. Below, I name additional names and show you how this handful of fanatics took over the world. Most definitely, read on."

"How Fanatics Took Over the World"

by Jeffrey Tucker

"Early in the pandemic, I had been furiously writing articles about lockdowns. My phone rang with a call from a man named Dr. Rajeev Venkayya. He is the head of a vaccine company but introduced himself as former head of pandemic policy for the Gates Foundation. Now I was listening.

I did not know it then, but I’ve since learned from Michael Lewis’s (mostly terrible) book "The Premonition" that Venkayya was, in fact, the founding father of lockdowns. While working for George W. Bush’s White House in 2005, he headed a bioterrorism study group. From his perch of influence - serving an apocalyptic president - he was the driving force for a dramatic change in U.S. policy during pandemics. He literally unleashed hell.

That was 15 years ago. At the time, I wrote about the changes I was witnessing, worrying that new White House guidelines (never voted on by Congress) allowed the government to put Americans in quarantine while closing their schools, businesses, and churches shuttered, all in the name of disease containment. I never believed it would happen in real life; surely there would be public revolt. Little did I know, we were in for a wild ride…

The Man Who Lit the Match: Last year, Venkayya and I had a 30-minute conversation; actually, it was mostly an argument. He was convinced that lockdown was the only way to deal with a virus. I countered that it was wrecking rights, destroying businesses, and disturbing public health. He said it was our only choice because we had to wait for a vaccine. I spoke about natural immunity, which he called brutal. So on it went.

The more interesting question I had at the time was why this certified Big Shot was wasting his time trying to convince a poor scribbler like me. What possible reason could there be? The answer, I now realized, is that from February to April 2020, I was one of the few people (along with a team of researchers) who openly and aggressively opposed what was happening. There was a hint of insecurity and even fear in Venkayya’s voice. He saw the awesome thing he had unleashed all over the world and was anxious to tamp down any hint of opposition. He was trying to silence me. He and others were determined to crush all dissent.

This is how it has been for the better part of the last 15 months, with social media and YouTube deleting videos that dissent from lockdowns. It’s been censorship from the beginning. For all the problems with Lewis’s book, and there are plenty, he gets this whole backstory right. Bush came to his bioterrorism people and demanded some huge plan to deal with some imagined calamity. When Bush saw the conventional plan - make a threat assessment, distribute therapeutics, work toward a vaccine - he was furious. “This is bulls**t,” the president yelled. “We need a whole-of-society plan. What are you going to do about foreign borders? And travel? And commerce?”

Hey, if the president wants a plan, he’ll get a plan. “We want to use all instruments of national power to confront this threat,” Venkayya reports having told colleagues. “We were going to invent pandemic planning.” This was October 2005, the birth of the lockdown idea.

Dr. Venkayya began to fish around for people who could come up with the domestic equivalent of Operation Desert Storm to deal with a new virus. He found no serious epidemiologists to help. They were too smart to buy into it. He eventually bumped into the real lockdown innovator working at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.

Cranks, Computers, and Cooties:  His name was Robert Glass, a computer scientist with no medical training, much less knowledge, about viruses. Glass, in turn, was inspired by a science fair project that his 14-year-old daughter was working on. She theorized (like the cooties game from grade school) that if school kids could space themselves out more or even not be at school at all, they would stop making each other sick. Glass ran with the idea and banged out a model of disease control based on stay-at-home orders, travel restrictions, business closures, and forced human separation.

Crazy right? No one in public health agreed with him but like any classic crank, this convinced Glass even more. I asked myself, “Why didn’t these epidemiologists figure it out?" They didn’t figure it out because they didn’t have tools that were focused on the problem. They had tools to understand the movement of infectious diseases without the purpose of trying to stop them.

Genius, right? Glass imagined himself to be smarter than 100 years of experience in public health. One guy with a fancy computer would solve everything! Well, he managed to convince some people, including another person hanging around the White House named Carter Mecher, who became Glass’s apostle. Please consider the following quotation from Dr. Mecher in Lewis’s book: “If you got everyone and locked each of them in their own room and didn’t let them talk to anyone, you would not have any disease.”

At last, an intellectual has a plan to abolish disease - and human life as we know it too! As preposterous and terrifying as this is - a whole society not only in jail but solitary confinement - it sums up the whole of Mecher’s view of disease. It’s also completely wrong. Pathogens are part of our world; they are generated by human contact. We pass them onto each other as the price for civilization, but we also evolved immune systems to deal with them. That’s 9th-grade biology, but Mecher didn’t have a clue.

Fanatics Win the Day: Jump forward to March 12, 2020. Who exercised the major influence over the decision to close schools, even though it was known at that time that SARS-CoV-2 posed almost risk to people under the age of 20? There was even evidence that they did not spread COVID-19 to adults in any serious way. Didn’t matter. Mecher’s models - developed with Glass and others - kept spitting out a conclusion that shutting down schools would drop virus transmission by 80%. I’ve read his memos from this period - some of them still not public - and what you observe is not science but ideological fanaticism in play.

Based on the timestamp and length of the emails, he was clearly not sleeping much. Essentially he was Lenin on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution. How did he get his way? There were three key elements: public fear, media and expert acquiescence, and the baked-in reality that school closures had been part of “pandemic planning” for the better part of 15 years. Essentially, the lockdowners, over the course of 15 years, had worn out the opposition. Lavish funding, attrition of wisdom within public health, and ideological fanaticism prevailed.

Figuring out how our expectations for normal life were so violently foiled, how our happy lives were brutally crushed, will consume serious intellectuals for many years. But at least we now have a first draft of history. As with almost every revolution in history, a small minority of crazy people with a cause prevailed over the humane rationality of multitudes. When people catch on, the fires of vengeance will burn very hot. The task now is to rebuild a civilized life that is no longer so fragile as to allow insane people to lay waste to all that humanity has worked so hard to build."

- dailyreckoning.com

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Related:

"Dr. Fauci's Preposterous Lie: 

'Attacks On Me Are Attacks On Science'"

"Hydroxychloroquine & Azithromycin Boosted Survival

 Of Ventilated COVID-19 Patients By 200%: New Study Confirms"

"Everyone Vaccinated For Covid Will DIE, Warns French Virologist"

"Was the Whole Pandemic About the Vaccine?"

Musical Interlude: 2002, "Gathering the Clouds"

2002, "Gathering the Clouds"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“The constellation of Orion is much more than three stars in a row. It is a direction in space that is rich with impressive nebulas. To better appreciate this well-known swath of sky, an extremely long exposure was taken over many clear nights in 2013 and 2014. After 212 hours of camera time and an additional year of processing, the featured 1400-exposure collage spanning over 40 times the angular diameter of the Moon emerged.

Of the many interesting details that have become visible, one that particularly draws the eye is Barnard’s Loop, the bright red circular filament arcing down from the middle. The Rosette Nebula is not the giant red nebula near the top of the image- that is a larger but lesser known nebula known as Lambda Orionis. The Rosette Nebula is visible, though: it is the red and white nebula on the upper left. The bright orange star just above the frame center is Betelgeuse, while the bright blue star on the lower right is Rigel. Other famous nebulas visible include the Witch Head Nebula, the Flame Nebula, the Fox Fur Nebula, and, if you know just where to look, the comparatively small Horsehead Nebula. About those famous three stars that cross the belt of Orion the Hunter- in this busy frame they can be hard to locate, but a discerning eye will find them just below and to the right of the image.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap151123.html

Chet Raymo, “The Ring of Truth”

“The Ring of Truth”

by Chet Raymo

“In Salley Vickers’ novel, “Where Three Roads Meet,” the shade of Tiresias, the blind seer of the Oedipus myth, visits Sigmund Freud in London during the psychoanalyst’s final terrible illness. In a series of conversations, Tiresias retells the story of Oedipus- he who was fated to kill his father and sleep with his mother – a story at the heart of Freud’s own theory of the human psyche. At one point in the conversations, as Tiresias and Freud discuss the extent to which our lives are fated, the question of immortality arises. Freud says of Oedipus that “he made his story into an immortal one, so far as any story is.” And Tiresias replies, “But, Dr. Freud, stories are all we humans have to make us immortal.”

Oedipus lives on, whether he lived or not in actuality. Sophocles lives in our consciousness as vigorously as ever he did in life. They live because their stories touch something resonant and unchanging in human nature. Vickers suggests that what makes the Oedipal story immortal is not any necessary tendency of humans to act out the Oedipal myth, a la Freud, but rather Oedipus’s rage to know the truth- or become conscious of a truth he has known all along and suppressed – even though the truth will be his undoing.

The poet Muriel Rukesyser got it exactly right when she said: “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” Even atoms are stories we tell about the world, having first paid close attention to how the world works. The plays of Sophocles and the other Greek dramatists live on not because their authors were immortal, but because nature endures and their stories tell us something that rings true about enduring nature. And, like Oedipus, we have a rage to know, even if knowledge will unseat some of our more comfortable illusions.”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

"In The Long Run..."

“In the long run my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their minds which, either because of its being their own or because of their having received it from some person who has their entire confidence, impresses them so deeply that one finds it impossible ever to get it out of their heads. Such arguments in support of their fixed idea… gain their instant acceptance and applause. On the other hand whatever is brought forward against it, however ingenious and conclusive, they receive with disdain or with hot rage – if indeed it does not make them ill. Beside themselves with passion, some of them would not be backward even about scheming to suppress and silence their adversaries. I have had some experience of this myself. No good can come of dealing with such people, especially to the extent that their company may be not only unpleasant but dangerous.”

- Galileo Galilei,

“Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems,” (1632)

"Deutsche Bank Goes Apocalyptic: Inflation Is Exploding And Lead To An Economic Collapse! Be Ready!"

Full screen recommended.

"Deutsche Bank Goes Apocalyptic: 

Inflation Is Exploding And Lead To An Economic Collapse! Be Ready!"

by Epic Economist, PM 6/9/21

"Everyone seems to be extremely worried about the crushing levels of inflation that have exploded around the world over the past year. But in a recent must-read report, written by Deutsche Bank's global head of research David Folkerts-Landau, and co-authored by Peter Hooper and Jim Reid, the experts have shared an apocalyptic forecast and explained why the worst is yet to come. The report titled "Inflation: The defining macro story of this decade" highlights how the US has seen the biggest shift in macro policies in nearly 40 years. The extraordinary spending policies are expanding the cracks of our economic system, which is now at risk to fall apart completely. "The effects of this shift are being compounded by political turmoil in the US and deeply worrying geopolitical risks," they wrote, revealing that “in turn, we are concerned that it will bring about uncomfortable levels of inflation".

In a very short time span, these unconventional policies were put into place to allegedly prevent the economy from sliding into a devastating depression, but these measures had very little success in actually boosting growth. The Deutsche Bank researchers argued that although a tighter social safety net is needed for the economic growth of our population and our country, the administration's efforts to actually achieve a more balanced distribution of economic and political power between the corporate sector, labor, and the consumer seem quite ineffective because even though the government is seemingly moving towards different priorities, central bankers must prioritize inflation.

In a few short months, the U.S. national debt soared to levels unimaginable a decade ago, largely surpassing red-line levels of 100% of GDP. But up until now, it appears that policymakers are not seriously concerned about debt sustainability in the long run, and how it will affect investors, governments, or international institutions. The same goes for inflation, as the majority of central bankers and economists keep insisting that any rise in prices away from the historically low levels of the past decade will be "transitory", relying on the assumption that baseline effects, one-offs, and structural forces will continue to suppress prices.

As the United States moves towards looser positions regarding inflation levels, and the entire world follows the same path, we are about to witness the most significant shift in global macro policy of the past 40 years. And that's incredibly concerning since at this point fiscal injections are already off the charts. "Never before have we seen such coordinated expansionary fiscal and monetary policy. This will continue as output moves above potential. This is why this time is different for inflation. Even if some of the transitory inflation ebbs away, we believe price growth will regain significant momentum as the economy overheats in 2022. Yet we worry that in its new inflation averaging framework, the Fed will be too slow to damp the rising inflation pressures effectively," the experts warned.

As a result of the Fed's delay in assessing the tricky effects of inflation, Deutsche Bank forecasts that there will be huge disruptions of economic and financial activity in the coming months, and this will trigger "a significant recession and set off a chain of financial distress around the world". The bank's apocalyptic projection takes into consideration historical data that proves the Fed was not successful in achieving a 'soft landing' when introducing a monetary tightening when inflation has been above 4%. That's why the researchers emphasized that "policymakers are about to enter a far more difficult world than they have seen for several decades."

In conclusion, Folkerts-Landau, Hooper, and Reid exposed they worry runaway inflation will make a comeback. The last time our economy was threatened by such painful levels of inflation was in the 70s - a period marked by severe shortages, high unemployment levels, and soaring prices. Even though pursuing social goals is a form of strengthening the economic foundations of any economy, but doing so by "neglecting inflation leaves global economies sitting on a time bomb," the experts concluded.

In short, this means that this new shift in macro policy is actually having the opposite effect when it comes to supporting social goals. Unfortunately, when we hit the stage of unsustainable inflation levels, central banks will become so overwhelmed with the imbalances of their policies that policymakers will have to suspend all social programs that actually provide a safety net for those in need. They won't be able to come to bail us out. We will witness a calamitous uptick in poverty and unemployment rates, as well as even more severe shortages, and even higher price increases. Americans are about to face the most challenging years in history. And the collapse has just begun."

- https://www.epiceconomist.com​

"Real Estate is Going to the Dogs - Get Ready Now"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, IAllegedly,

"Real Estate is Going to the Dogs - Get Ready Now"