It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
– Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 2005
While truth-tellers Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning sit inside jail cells and Edward Snowden lives in exile in Russia, the American people hole up in an illusionary dwelling constructed to reduce them to children afraid of the truth. Or is it the dark?
This is not new; it has been so for a very long time, but it has become a more sophisticated haunted doll’s house, an electronic one with many bells and whistles and images that move faster than the eye can see. We now inhabit a digital technological nightmare controlled by government and corporate forces intent on dominating every aspect of people’s lives.
This is true despite the valiant efforts of dissidents to use the technology for human liberation. The old wooden doll houses, where you needed small fingers to rearrange the furniture, now only need thumbs that can click you into your cell’s fantasy world. So many dwell there in the fabricated reality otherwise known as propaganda. The result is mass hallucination.
In a 1969 interview, Jim Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans and the only person to ever bring to trial a case involving the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, said that as a result of the CIA’s murderous coup d’état on behalf of the military-industrial-financial-media-intelligence complex that rules the country to this day, the American people have been subjected to a fabricated reality that has rendered them a nation of passive Eichmanns, who sit in their living rooms, popping pills and watching television as their country’s military machine mows down people by the millions and the announcers tell them all the things they should be afraid of, such as bacteria on cutting boards and Russian spies infiltrating their hair salons.
Garrison said:
The creation of such inanities as acceptable reality and unacceptable reality is necessary for the self-preservation of the super-state against its greatest danger: understanding on the part of the people as to what is really happening.
All factors which contribute to its burgeoning power are exaggerated.
All factors which might reveal its corrosive effect on the nation are concealed.
The result is to place the populace in the position of persons living in a house whose windows no longer reveal the outside but on which murals have been painted.
Some of the murals are frightening and have the effect of reminding the occupants of the outside menaces against which the paternal war machine is protecting them. Other murals are pleasant to remind them how nice things are inside the house.
But to live like this is to live in a doll’s house. If life has one lesson to teach us, it is that to live in illusion is ultimately disastrous.
In the doll’s house into which America gradually has been converted, a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.
Fifty years have disappeared behind us since the eloquent and courageous Garrison (read On the Trail of the Assassins) metaphorically voiced the truth, despite the CIA’s persistent efforts to paint him as an unhinged lunatic through its media mouthpieces.
These days they would probably just lock him up or send him fleeing across borders, as with Assange, Manning, and Snowden.
It is stunning to take a cue from his comment regarding the JFK assassination, when he suggested that one reverse the lone assassin scenario and place it in the U.S.S.R.
No American could possibly believe a tale that a former Russian soldier, trained in English and having served at a top Soviet secret military base, who had defected to the U.S. and then returned home with the help of the K.G.B., could kill the Russian Premier with a defective and shoddy rifle and then be shot to death in police headquarters in Moscow by a K.G.B. connected hit man so there would be no trial and the K.G.B. would go scot-free.
That would be a howler! So too, of course, are the Warren Commission’s fictions about Oswald.
SNOWDEN, ASSANGE, AND MANNING
If we then update this mental exercise and imagine that Snowden, Assange, and Manning were all Russian, and that they released information about Russian war crimes, political corruption, and a system of total electronic surveillance of the Russian population, and were then jailed or sent fleeing into exile as a result, who in the U.S., liberal, libertarian or conservative, would possibly believe the Russian government’s accusations that these three were criminals.
Nevertheless, Barack Obama, the transparency president, made sure to treat them as such, all the while parading as a “liberal” concerned for freedom of speech and the First Amendment. He made sure that Snowden and Manning were charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, and that Assange was corralled via false Swedish sex charges so he had to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London (a form of jail).
He brought Espionage Act prosecutions against eight people, more than all former presidents combined. He hypocritically pardoned Manning on his way out the door as if this would polish his deluded liberal legacy after making her suffer terribly through seven years of imprisonment.
He set the stage for Trump to re-jail Manning to try to get this most courageous woman to testify against Assange, which she will not do, and for the collaborationist British government to jail Assange in preparation for his extradition to the United States and a show trial. As for Snowden, he has been relegated to invisibility, good for news headlines once and for a movie, but now gone and forgotten.
Obama and Trump, arch political “enemies,” have made sure that those who reveal the sordid acts of the American murderous state are cruelly punished and silenced.
This is how the system works, and for most Americans, it is not happening. It doesn’t matter. They don’t care, just as they don’t care that Obama backed the 2009 coup d’état in Honduras that has resulted in so many deaths at the hands of U.S trained killers, and then Trump ranted about all these “non-white” people fleeing to the U.S. to escape a hell created by the U.S., as it has been doing throughout Latin America for so long.
Who does care about the truth? Has anyone even noticed how the corporate media has disappeared the “news” of all those desperate people clamouring to enter the U.S.A. from Mexico? One day they were there and in the headlines; the next day, gone. It’s called news.
THE SLEEPWALKERS
But even though a majority of Americans have never believed the government’s explanation for JFK’s murder, they nevertheless have insouciantly gone to sleep for half a century in the doll’s house of illusions as the killing and the lies of their own government have increased over the years and any semblance of a democratic and peaceful America has gone extinct.
The fates of courageous whistle-blowers Assange, Manning, and Snowden don’t concern them. The fates of Hondurans don’t concern them. The fates of Syrians don’t concern them. The fates of Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis, Palestinians don’t concern them. The fates of America’s victims all around the world don’t concern them. Indifference reigns.
Obviously, if you are reading this, you are not one of the sleepwalkers and are awake to the parade of endless lies and illusions and do care. But you are in a minority.
That is not the case for most Americans. When approximately 129 million people cast their votes for Donald Trump and HilIary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, you know idiocy reigns and nothing has been learned. Ditto for the votes for Obama, Bush, Clinton, et al. You can keep counting back. It is an ugly fact and sad to say.
Such a repetition compulsion is a sign of a deep sickness, and it will no doubt be repeated in the 2020 election. The systemic illusion must be preserved at all costs and the warfare state supported in its killing. It is the American way.
It is true that average Americans have not built the doll’s house; that is the handiwork of the vast interconnected and far-reaching propaganda arms of the U.S. government and their media accomplices. But that does not render them innocent for accepting decades of fabricated reality for so-called peace of mind by believing that a totally corrupt system works.
The will to believe is very powerful, as is the propaganda.
The lesson that Garrison spoke of has been lost on far too many people, even on those who occasionally leave the doll house for a walk, but who only go slightly down the path for fear of seeing too much reality and connecting too many dots. There is plain ignorance, then there is culpable ignorance, to which I shall return.
DENYING EXISTENTIAL FREEDOM
One of the first things an authoritarian governing elite must do is to convince people that they are not free. This has been going on for at least forty years, ever since the Church Committee’s revelations about the CIA in the mid-seventies, including its mind-control program, MKULTRA. Everyone was appalled at the epiphany, so a different tactic was added.
Say those programs have been ended when in fact they were continued under other even deeper secret programs, and just have “experts” – social, psychological, and biological “scientists” – repeat ad infinitum that there is no longer any mind control since we now know there is no mind; it is an illusion, and it all comes down to the brain.
Biology is destiny, except in culturally diversionary ways in which freedom to choose is extolled – e.g. the latest fashions, gender identity, the best hairstyle, etc. Create and lavishly fund programs for the study of the brain, while supporting and promoting a vast expansion of pharmaceutical drugs to control people.
Do this in the name of helping people with their emotional and behavioral problems that are rooted in their biology and are beyond their control. And create criteria to convince people that they are sick and that their distress has nothing to do with the coup d’état that has rendered them “citizens” of a police state.
We have been interminably told that our lives revolve around our brains (our bodies) and that the answers to our problems lie with more brain research, drugs, genetic testing, etc. It is not coincidental that the U. S. government declared the 1990s the decade of brain research, followed up with 2000-2010 as the decade of the behavior project, and our present decade being devoted to mapping the brain and artificial intelligence, organized by the Office of Science and Technology Project and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). How convenient! George H. W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, Trump — what a difference! But this is science and the welfare of the world. Science for idiots.
Drip by drip, here and there, in the pattern of the best propaganda, as the French sociologist Jacques Ellul says – “for propaganda is not the touch of the magic wand. It is based on slow, constant impregnation. It creates conviction and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition” – articles, books, media reports have reiterated that people are “determined” by biological, genetic, social, and psychological forces over which they have no control.
To assert that people are free in the Sartrean sense (en soir, condemned to freedom, or free will) has come to be seen as the belief of a delusional fool living in the past, a bad philosopher, an anti-scientist, a poorly informed religionist, one nostalgic for existential cafes, Gauloises, and black berets.
One who doesn’t grasp the truth since he doesn’t read the New York Times or watch CBS television. One who believes in nutty conspiracy theories.
The conventional propaganda – I almost said wisdom – created through decades-long media and academic repetition, is that we are not free.
Let me repeat: we are not free. We are not free.
Investigator reporter John Rappoport has consistently exposed the propaganda involved in the creation and expansion of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) with its pseudo-scientific falsehoods and collusion between psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry. As he correctly notes, the CIA’s MKULTRA mind-control program has morphed into modern psychiatry, both with the same objectives of disabling and controlling people by convincing them that they are not free and are in need of a chemical brain bath.
RFK assassin, RFK assassin, RFK assassin … all the media said the same thing, which they have been doing for fifty-two years. Their persistency endures despite all the facts that refute their disinformation and show that Senator Kennedy, who was on his way to becoming president, was murdered, like his brother John, by forces of the national security state.
SARTRE AND BAD FAITH
Lying and dissembling are ubiquitous. Being deceived by the media liars is mirrored in people’s personal lives.
People lie and want to be deceived. They choose to play dumb, to avoid a confrontation with truth. They want to be nice (Latin, nescire, not to know, to be ignorant) and to be liked. They want to tuck themselves into a safe social and cultural framework where they imagine they will be safe. They like the doll’s house. They choose to live in what Jean Paul Sartre called bad faith (mauvaise foi).
In bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth. But with this ‘lie’ to myself, the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived.
Such bad faith allows people to fabricate a second act of bad faith: that they are not responsible for their ignorance of the truths behind the government’s and corporate media’s lies and propaganda, even as the shades of the prison house ominously close around us and the world edges toward global death that could arrive in an instant with nuclear war or limp along for years of increasing suffering.
Those of us who write about the U.S. led demented wars and provocations around the world and the complementary death of democracy at home are constantly flabbergasted and discouraged by the willed ignorance of so many Americans.
For while the mainstream media does the bidding of the power elite, there is ample alternative news and analyses available on the internet from fine journalists and writers committed to truth, not propaganda. There is actually far too much truth available, which poses another problem.
But it doesn’t take a genius to learn how to research important issues and to learn how to distinguish between bogus and genuine information. It takes a bit of effort, and, more importantly, the desire to compare multiple, opposing viewpoints and untangle the webs the Web weaves.
We are awash in information (and disinformation) and both good and bad reporting, but it is still available to the caring inquirer.
The problem is the will to know. But why? Why the refusal to investigate and question; why the indifference? Stupidity? Okay, there is that. Ignorance? That too. Willful ignorance, ditto. Laziness, indeed. Careerism and ideology? For certain.
Upton Sinclair put it mildly when he said,“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not understanding it.” Difficult? No, it’s almost impossible.
But then there are many very intelligent people who have nothing to lose and yet adamantly refuse to entertain alternative possibilities to the reigning orthodoxies that have them in their grip.
As do many others, I know many such people who will yes me to death and then never fully research issues. They will remain in limbo or else wink to themselves that what may be true couldn’t be true. They close down.
This is a great dilemma and frustration faced by those who seek to convince people to take an active part in understanding what is really going on in the world today, especially as the United States wages war across the globe, threatens Russia, China, and Iran, among many others, and expands and modernizes its nuclear weapons capabilities.
As for Assange, Manning, and Snowden, their plight matters not a whit.
In fact, they have been rendered invisible inside the doll’s house, except as the murals on the windows flashback their images as threats to the occupants, Russian monsters out to eat them up.
As the great poet Constantine Cavafy wrote long ago in his poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” and they never come: “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.”
Then again, for people like U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, who knows the Russian barbarians have and will come again, life must be terrifying as he tries so manfully to bar the gates. The Russians have been the American solution in this fairy tale for so long that it’s hard for many Americans to believe another story.
THE TWO-HEADED MONSTER
On the one hand, there is the massive propaganda apparatus operated by American intelligence agencies in conjunction with their media partners.
On the other, there is the human predilection for untruth and illusions, the sad need to be comforted and to submit to greater “authority,” gratefully to accept the myths proffered by one’s masters. This tendency applies not just to the common people, but even more so to the intellectual classes, who act as though they are immune.
Erich Fromm, writing about Germans and Hitler, but by extension people everywhere, termed this the need to “escape from freedom,” since freedom conjures up fears of vertiginous aloneness and the need to decide, which in turn evokes the fear of death. There are also many kinds of little deaths that precede the final one: social, career, money, familiar, etc., that are used to keep people in the doll’s house.
Fifty years ago, the CIA coined the term “conspiracy theory” as a weapon to be used to dismiss the truths expressed by critics of its murder of President Kennedy, and those of Malcolm X, MLK, and RFK. All the media echoed the CIA line.
While they still use the term to dismiss and denounce, their control of the mainstream media is so complete today that every evil government action is immediately seconded, whether it be the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001, the wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iran, etc., the coups disguised as color revolutions in Ukraine, Venezuela, Bolivia, Hong Kong, the downing of the Malaysian jetliner there, drone murders, the Iranian “threat,” the looting of the American people by the elites, alleged sarin gas attacks in Syria, the anti-Russia bashing and the Russia-gate farce, the “criminals” Assange, Manning, Snowden – everything.
The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Fox News, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, etc. – all are stenographers for the deep state.
So much of the ongoing propaganda travels under the banner of “the war on terror,” which is, of course, an outgrowth of the attacks of September 11, 2001, appropriately named and constantly reinforced as 9/11 in a wonderful example of linguistic mind-control: a constant emergency reminder to engender anxiety, depression, panic, and confusion, four of the symptoms that lead the DSM “experts” and their followers to diagnose and drug individuals.
The term 9/11 was first used in the New York Times on September 12, 2001 by Bill Keller, the future Times’ editor and Iraq war cheerleader. Just a fortuitous coincidence, of course.
JACQUES ELLUL ON PROPAGANDA
Jacques Ellul has argued convincingly that modern propaganda in a technological mass society is more complicated than the state and media lying and deceiving the population.
He argues that propaganda meets certain needs of modern people and therefore the process of deceit is reciprocal. The modern person feels lost, powerless, and empty.
Ellul says, “He realizes that he depends on decisions over which he has no control, and that realization drives him to despair.” But he can’t live in despair; desires that life be meaningful; and wants to feel he lives in a world that makes sense.
He wants to participate and have opinions that suggest he grasps the flow of events. He doesn’t so much want information, but value judgments and preconceived positions that provide him with a framework for living. Ellul wrote the following in 1965 in his classic book Propaganda:
The majority prefers expressing stupidities to not expressing any opinion: this gives them the feeling of participation. For they need simple thoughts, elementary explanations, a ‘key’ that will permit them to take a position, and even readymade opinions….The man who keeps himself informed needs a framework….the more complicated the problems are, the more simple the explanations must be; the more fragmented the canvas, the simpler the pattern; the more difficult the question, the more all-embracing the solution; the more menacing the reduction of his own worth, the greater the need for boosting his ego. All this propaganda – and only propaganda – can give him.
Another way of saying this is that people want to be provided with myths to direct them to the “truth.” But such so-called truth has been preconceived within the overarching myth provided by propaganda, and while it satisfies people’s emotional need for coherence, it also allows them to think of themselves as free individuals arriving at their own conclusions, which is a basic function of good propaganda.
In today’s mass technological society, it is essential that people be convinced that they are free-thinking individuals acting in good faith. Then they can feel good about themselves as they lie and act in bad faith.
CULPABLE IGNORANCE
It is widely accepted that political leaders and the mass media lie and dissemble regularly, which, of course, they do. That is their job in an oligarchy. Today we are subjected to almost total, unrelenting media and government propaganda.
Depending on their political leanings, people direct their anger toward politicians of parties they oppose and media they believe slant their coverage to favor the opposition.
Trump is a liar. No, Obama is a liar. And Hillary Clinton. No, Fox News. Ridiculous! – it’s CNN or NBC.
And so on and so forth in this theater of the absurd that plays out within a megaplex of mainstream media propaganda, where there are many shows but one producer, whose overall aim is to engineer the consent of all who enter, while setting the different audiences against each other. It is a very successful charade that evokes name-calling from all quarters.
In other words, for many people their opponents lie, as do other people, but not them. This is as true in personal as well as public life. Here the personal and the political converge, despite protestations to the contrary. Dedication to truth is very rare.
But there is another issue with propaganda that complicates the picture further. People of varying political persuasions can agree that propaganda is widespread. Many people on the left, and some on the right, would agree with Lisa Pease’s statement in her book on the RFK assassination, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, that “the way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time.”
That is also what Garrison thought when he spoke of the doll’s house.
If that is so, then today’s propaganda is anchored in the events of the 1960s, specifically the infamous government assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, and RFK, the truth of which the CIA has worked so hard to conceal. In the fifty or so years since, a vast amount of new information has made it explicitly clear that these murders were carried out by elements within the U.S. government, and were done so to silence the voices of four charismatic leaders who were opposed to the American war machine and the continuation of the Cold War.
To turn away from this truth and to ignore its implications can only be described as an act of bad faith and culpable ignorance, or worse. But that is exactly what many prominent leftists have done. Then to compound the problem, they have done the same with the attacks of September 11, 2001.
One cannot help thinking of what the CIA official Cord Meyer called these people in the 1950s: “the compatible left.” He felt that effective CIA propaganda, beside the need for fascist-minded types such as Allen Dulles and James Jesus Angleton, depended on “courting” leftists and liberal into its orbit. For so many of the compatible left, those making a lot of money posing as opponents of the ruling elites but often taking the money of the super-rich, the JFK assassination and the truth of September 11, 2001 are inconsequential, never to be broached, as if they never happened, except as the authorities say they did. By ignoring these most in-your-face events with their eyes wide shut, a coterie of influential leftists has done the work of Orwell’s crime-stop and has effectively succeeded in situating current events in an ahistorical and therefore misleading context that abets U.S. propaganda. They truncate the full story to present a narrative that distorts the truth.
Without drawing a bold line connecting the dots from November 22, 1963 up to the present, a critique of the murderous forces ruling the United States is impossible.
Among the most notable of such failures are Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Howard Zinn, and Chris Hedges, men idolized by many liberals and leftists. And there are many others who have been deeply influenced by Chomsky, Cockburn, and Zinn and follow in their footsteps.
Their motivations remain a mystery, but there is no doubt their refusals have contributed to the increased power of those who control the doll’s house. To know better and do as they have is surely culpable ignorance.
FROM BAD TO WORSE
Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks, increased or decreased in the past half century? Who is winning the battle, the people or the ruling elites?
The answer is obvious.
It matters not at all whether the president has been Trump or Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, Barack Obama or George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter.
The power of the national security state has grown under them all and everyone is left to moan and groan and wonder why. All the while the doll’s house has become more and more sophisticated and powerful with the growth of electronic media and cell phone usage.
The new Cold War now being waged against Russia and China is a bi-partisan affair, as is the confidence game played by the secret government intended to create a fractured consciousness in the population.
This fragmentation of consciousness prevents people from grasping the present from within because so many suffer from digital dementia as their attention hops from input to output in a never-ending flow of mediated, disembodied data.
Trump and his followers on one side of the coin; liberal Democrats on the other. The latter, whose bibles are the New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, Democracy Now, The Guardian, etc. – can only see propaganda when they can attribute it to Trump or the Russians. The former see everything as a liberal conspiracy to take down Trump.
The liberals have embraced a new McCarthyism and allied themselves with the deep-state forces that they were once allegedly appalled by, including Republicans. Their embrace of the formerly despised war-monger John Bolton in the impeachment trial of Trump is a laughable case in point, if it weren’t so depraved and slimy.
It surely isn’t the bloodthirsty policies of the Trump administration or his bloviating personality, for these liberals allied themselves with Obama’s anti-Russian rhetoric, his support for the U.S. orchestrated neo-fascist Ukrainian coup, his destruction of Libya, his wars of aggression across the Middle East, his war on terror, his trillion-dollar nuclear weapons modernization, his enjoyment of drone killing, his support for the coup in Honduras, his embrace of the CIA and his CIA Director John Brennan, his prosecution of whistle-blowers, etc.
The same media that served the CIA so admirably over the decades became the liberals’ paragons of truth. It’s enough to make your head spin, which is the point.
Spin left, spin right, spin all around, because we have possessed your mind in this spectacular image game where seeming antinomies are the constancy of the same through difference, all the presidents coined by the same manufacturer who knows that coin-flipping serves to entertain the audience eager for hope and change.
This is how the political system works to prevent change. It is why little has changed for the better over half a century and the American empire has expanded.
While it may be true that there are signs that this American hegemony is coming to an end (I am not convinced), I would not underestimate the power of the U.S. propaganda apparatus to keep people docile and deluded in the doll’s house, despite the valiant efforts of independent truth-tellers.
How, for example, is it possible for so many people to see such a stark difference between the despicable Trump and the pleasant Obama? They are both puppets dancing to their masters’ tunes – the same masters.
As Glen Ford, of Black Agenda Report, says in the first sentence of his forward, “Barack Obama may go down in presidential history as the most effective-and deceptive-imperialist of them all.” Read the book if you want all the details. They form an overwhelming indictment of the con artist and war criminal that is irrefutable.
But will those who worship at the altar of Barack Obama read it? Of course not.
Just as those deluded ones who voted for the reality television flim-flam man Trump will ignore all the accumulating evidence that they’ve been had and are living under a president who is Obama’s disguised doppelganger, carrying out the orders of his national security state bosses. This, too, is well documented, and no doubt another writer will arise in the years to come to put it between a book’s covers.
Yet even Jeremy Kuzmarov fails to see the link between the JFK assassination and Obama’s shilling for the warfare state. His few references to Kennedy are all negative, suggesting he either is unaware of what Kennedy was doing in the last year of his life and why he was murdered by the CIA, or something else. He seems to follow Noam Chomsky, a Kennedy hater, in this regard.
I point out this slight flaw in an excellent book because it is symptomatic of certain people on the left who refuse to complete the circle.
If, as Kuzmarov, argues, Obama was CIA from the start and that explains his extraordinarily close relationship with the CIA’s John Brennan, an architect, among many things, of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, and that Obama told CIA Director Panetta that the CIA would “get everything it wanted,” and the CIA killed JFK, well, something’s amiss, an enormous gap in the analysis of our current condition.
The doll’s house is a mind game of extraordinary proportions, orchestrated by the perverted power elites that run the show and ably abetted by their partners in the corporate mass media, even some in the alternative press who mean well but are confused, or are disinformation agents in the business of sowing confusion together with their mainstream Operation Mockingbird partners. It is a spectacle of open secrecy, in which the CIA has effectively suckered everyone into a game of to-and-fro in which only they win.
Our only hope for change is to try and educate as many people as possible about the linkages between events that started with the CIA coup d’état in Dallas on November 22, 1963, continued through the killings of Malcolm X, MLK, RFK and on through so much else up to September 11, 2001, and have brought us to the deeply depressing situation we now find ourselves in where truthtellers like Julian Assange, Chelsey Manning, and Edward Snowden are criminalized, while the real perpetrators of terrible evils roam free.
Yes, we must educate but also agitate for the release of this courageous trio. Their freedom is ours; their imprisonment is ours, whether we know it or not. The walls are closing in.
Lisa Pease is so right: “The way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time, and too few recognize this. We can’t fix a problem we can’t even acknowledge exists.”
If we don’t follow her advice, we will be toyed with like dolls for a long time to come. There will be no one else to blame.
Meanwhile In Brazil… Scientists Discover ‘Puzzling’ Virus Of Unknown Origins Without Recognizable Genes
The findings of a new virus by Brazilian researchers have ‘puzzled’ the scientific community, consisting of unrecognizable genes, a new study revealed, published in bioRxiv.
The “mysterious” virus was discovered in amoebas in an artificial lake in Brazil has been considered the world’s smallest lifeforms, because none can survive and reproduce without a host, some scientists have questioned whether they should even be considered living creatures.
Researcher, Jônatas Abrahão, a virologist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, called the new virus “yaravirus,” a character from Brazilian mythology that means “mother of all waters.”
When Abrahão and his team sequenced the new virus genome, they discovered that 90% of the DNA sequence was from unknown origins.
Elodie Ghedin of New York University, who sequences viruses in sewage, said the finding of yaravirus isn’t surprising.
Ghedin said 95% of viruses in sewage have “no matches to reference genomes [in databases],” adding that, in Abrahão’s case, new viruses are found all the time.
Researchers were unclear about the impact of the new virus on human health. Future tests could include making those connections. The approach “is an important tool to learn the distribution of hundreds or thousands of viral genomes,” Abrahão said.
Curtis Suttle, an environmental virologist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, said that some viruses that are found within humans keep us healthy, and others are essential for keeping ecosystems humming smoothly. “We could not survive without [them],” Suttle said. “There are enormous benefits to the discovery and characterization of viruses.”
The recent finding by Abrahão and his team shows just how much modern science lacks in their characterization of viruses found on Earth.
This is currently the case in Nigeria, where the government has warned about a “strange epidemic” of a mystery virus that has claimed the life of 15 people in less than one week.
The outbreak of coronavirus in China and across the world has also shown just how underprepared governments and the scientific community are to emerging infectious diseases.
The ACLU has released an important white paper on airport facial recognition by ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley. Citing some of our previous reporting and analysis, the ACLU white paper focuses, appropriately, not so much on the details of current use of facial recognition at airports, but on where governments and the aviation industry — who share a an explicitly-recognized interest in common use of facial recognition — say it will lead if we don’t stop them.
TSA Biometrics Roadmap, September 2018. Note that face ID will be used for all air travelers and that all use of physical ID credentials is “phasing out” in favor of facial recognition and digital tokens on mobile devices.
Driving the dystopian trend called out in the ACLU white paper is the malign convergence of interest between governments that want to use facial recognition and other techniques of compelled and automated identification for surveillance and control of travelers’ movements, and airlines, airports, and other businesses that want to share use of the same identification systems and data for business process automation and commercial tracking and profiling of travel customers.
CBP officials argue that this program doesn’t involve mass surveillance. But CBP’s program still involves the mass collection of photographs of the general public….
The biggest harm from this program, however, is likely to come from the investment that it represents, the precedent it sets, and the path it puts us on as a society.
And where that path leads is a nightmare. It hardly takes a paranoid flight of fancy to foresee this program morphing into something far more comprehensive and dystopian — a world where face recognition is used throughout our public spaces to scrutinize our identity, record our movements, and create a world where everyone is constantly watched….
DHS and the aviation industry as a whole have a sweeping vision of expanded use of face recognition in the air travel context, and the government itself has already laid out — and begun following — a very specific, clear, and well-defined pathway for how the current program leads to a much broader implementations of face surveillance at the airport. And from there, it will be poised to expand far beyond the airport.
Here is what that pathway looks like:…
Once face recognition becomes entrenched at TSA checkpoints, there will be enormous pressure to turn those checkpoints into broader law enforcement checkpoints where people are subject to watchlist, criminal, and immigration checks. The TSA is not a law enforcement agency, and its checkpoints are not general law enforcement stops. The TSA’s authority to search people without a warrant is strictly confined to what is necessary to protect aircraft safety; TSA agents can’t conduct general criminal investigations when they find things suspicious….
CBP, however, does consider itself a law enforcement agency. The agency already partners with TSA in creating and applying flawed watch lists and algorithmic risk assessments of passengers based on biographical data (and secretive criteria), but CBP said in 2018 that it planned to also start running some passenger photos through the government’s IDENT biometric watchlist, which, according to DHS, includes “known or suspected terrorists, criminals, and immigration violators.” Among other things that raises the prospect that the TSA checkpoints will be turned into something new: a place where arrests of wanted people… routinely takes place….
Expanding government face recognition dovetails with airline face recognition… The airlines have a crucial role in the government’s face recognition vision. CBP is trying to create an infrastructure that the United States (unlike some other countries) has never had: border checkpoints for those exiting the country. But supporters of this system apparently don’t want it badly enough to actually pay for the government system they think we should have. Instead, they’re trying to do it on the cheap … by prodding the airlines to supply the equipment and manpower to actually run the system. And that, in turn, is implicitly based on CBP’s understanding that the airlines are embracing biometrics for their own purposes.
And the airlines are certainly interested in doing so. With over 2 million people a day flying domestically, these companies run what is essentially a giant factory for the movement of people, and are always looking for ways to improve their “industrial process.” Delta Airlines, for example, is already cooperating with CBP to experiment with face recognition for self-service check-in and bag check. Flyers presents themselves at the relevant kiosk where their photos are taken and sent to CBP’s cloud photo service. “CBP is excited at the possibility of biometric matching from curb to gate,” the agency proclaims in materials directed at its airline “partners.” “Airlines and airport authorities have an extraordinary opportunity to influence the future of secure air travel by co-developing processes that meet business, traveler and security needs.”
We’ve been down this road before. The TSA’s “Secure Flight” program, first implemented in 2009, forces passengers to hand over personal data to the airlines (their full name, gender, and date of birth) but lets the airlines do whatever they want with that information, providing a valuable data windfall for those companies. One question is whether we’ll see the same thing happen with traveler mug shots. CBP currently says the airlines won’t be permitted to keep the photographs those airlines take with their own equipment, but not that’s written in any law or regulation and it’s far from clear if and how that will be rigorously enforced….
Airport bag searches were new in American life when they were first introduced in response to a wave of hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, they have expanded throughout American life to many office buildings, schools, museums, sports stadiums, and even some gatherings in public spaces such as fireworks on the National Mall. Unfortunately there are too many reasons to think that face recognition, if it becomes accepted at airports, will follow this existing path toward the “airportization of American life.”
CBP’s TVS program is the first government face recognition checkpoint in American history. If America decides to allow its deployment to continue, where will things go from there? We don’t have to wonder because the government has already told us much of the story. This kind of mission creep is one reason why it is important to raise awareness over, ask sharp questions about, and ultimately oppose the CBP program
Massive Auto Inventory Begins To Stockpile As Coronavirus Zaps An Already Anemic Chinese Car Market
Things couldn’t possibly be looking any worse for the Chinese auto industry.
Even before the coronavirus scare, the industry had already been mired in a steep recession that we have been covering at length for nearly the last two years. To make matters worse, that recession was predicted to continue for a third straight year, through 2020, with sales forecasted to fall yet again. And this was before the coronavirus…
Now, with the entire country locked down due to the coronavirus, things look as though they could be much worse for China’s auto industry. And that, in turn, could very easily pull down the auto industry globally.
Last month, inventory of unsold cars in China rose by 6.5%, according to Bloomberg. Average inventory levels were at 62.7% for January, according to the China Automobile Dealer Association. These numbers are far above the standard 50% level that is considered normal in the industry.
And the forecast for the immediate future, let alone the rest of the year, looks pessimistic. Dealers are expecting sales in February to be less than half of those a year ago. In fact, Bloomberg notes that 70% of dealers polled by the CADA said they had seen “almost no customers” since the end of January.
This follows China’s Miao Wei, Minister of Industry and Information Technology, saying in mid-January (prior to the coronavirus outbreak becoming severe) that the industry still faces “big downward pressure”.
At the time, he predicted sales of just 25 million units for the year. We obviously think that this number could wind up being materially lower.
Recall, sales for 2019 totaled 25.769 million units. Sales of just 25 million units – an optimistic prediction in our eyes – would mark a third straight year of declines for the world’s largest auto market regardless.
The MIIT also said at the time that it would further study and review its NEV vehicle subsidies. Recall, Beijing backing away from these subsidies caused NEV sales to taper off toward the end of 2019, sullying what was an otherwise consistent silver lining for the country, even amidst the overall recession in autos.
With no signs of the country recovering from its ongoing epidemic, there doesn’t seem to be any silver linings left.
We noted in December that NEV sales plunged 42% in November after Beijing backed away. The government is ostensibly dedicating all of its efforts to deal with the country’s ongoing outbreak, and so Beijing has not revisited its comments about EVs yet, and we are already halfway through Q1 2020.
China did say, however, it is going to “maintain support” for NEVs, without getting into too much detail. Miao also said he’s confident that the country will ensure “stable industrial production in 2020” while phasing out “zombie firms”.
There may have been some spooky foreshadowing in those words from mid-January, as almost every business in the locked down major cities of China now looks like a “zombie firm”.
As we noted several weeks ago, passenger car vehicle sales in China fell to end 2019, plunging 3.6% to 2.17 million units, according to the China Passenger Car Association.
It marked the 18th drop in the past 19 months for the country. For the full year 2019, sales in China declined 7.5%, marking the country’s second straight annual decline.
“We cannot risk dividing Americans’ future further, saying that you must either be for a revolution or you must be for the status quo,” Buttigieg said.
“Let’s make room for everybody in this movement.”
This is a talking point that the tightly scripted and focus group-tested Buttigieg has been repeatedlyregurgitatingall month, so it’s worth taking a look at.
Pete is just the latest model in a long line of CIA-funded counterrevolutions pic.twitter.com/PBAbIIzoxP
Claiming that it isn’t necessary to choose between revolution and the status quo is claiming that you can change the status quo without any kind of revolution. You are saying that the establishment which has created and reinforced the status quo can now suddenly, for some strange and mysterious reason, be counted upon to change it. That the status quo will change the status quo.
Anyone who has paid attention to US politics for more than a few years already knows that this is objectively false. From administration to administration, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office or who controls the House or the Senate, the status quo has been adamantly enforced along a rigid trajectory toward ever-increasing military expansionism, exploitative neoliberal economic policies, income and wealth inequality, police militarization, mass-scale imprisonment, Orwellian surveillance programs and increasing restrictions on journalism and free speech.
Change is not going to come from those institutions, it’s going to come from the people using the power of their numbers to force important changes that those institutions do not want to make. And Pete Buttigieg knows this. And so do the spooks and oligarchs who are backing him.
Progressives already got suckered into forfeiting their revolutionary spirit in exchange for flowery prose and empty rhetoric the last time they elected Pete Buttigieg for president, back when Pete Buttigieg was named Barack Obama. It was literally the exact same script they’re trying to recycle with Puppet Pete: a plucky young underdog with a knack for sparkly verbiage overcomes the frontrunner in Iowa in a stunning upset, then rides the momentum from that initial victory on to the Democratic nomination.
That’s what not choosing between revolution and the status quo looks like. It looks like continuing the status quo.
Which is why it’s so dumb when Buttigieg says “Let’s make room for everybody in this movement.” Movement? What movement? You don’t get to call it a “movement” when its entire agenda is to prevent any movement. Use a different word. “Let’s make room for everybody in this inertia,” or “Let’s make room for everybody in this stasis” or something.
Things that are more real than Pete Buttigieg:
– Milli Vanilli
– aspartame
– astroturf
– boobs in LA
– smiles at a Martha’s Vineyard cocktail party
– the Gulf of Tonkin incident
– Bryan Williams’ helicopter crash
– Joy Reid’s time travelling hackers
– Epstein’s suicide
As I’ve said many times before, I’m interested in this presidential election not because I am under the delusion that presidential elections tend to change things, but because the attempts to manipulate it, and the public’s response to those manipulations, could shake something loose that actually might. If enough people in the world’s most powerful nation wake up to the fact that they don’t have the kind of political system they were taught about in school, if they realize that everything they’ve been told about how their government operates is a lie, if they realize their lives have been made so unnecessarily difficult by a ruling oligarchic class with a vested interest in keeping them impoverished and distracted, well, then we’re looking at an actual transformative force.
Then we’re looking at the possibility of a real revolution. Not a violent revolution; those always result in a continuation of the same ills under a different system, and there’s nothing revolutionary about that.
I’m talking about a real revolution. One where people begin to open their eyes to the reality that their entire understanding of what’s going on in the world has been the result of mass psychological manipulation throughout their entire lives at the hands of the school system, the billionaire-controlled news media, and the political establishment. One where people open their eyes so wide to the power of narrative control that they become impossible to propagandize. One where people begin weaving their own narratives. Their own understandings of the world. Built not for the benefit of the powerful, but for the benefit of the people.
We’re seeing a lot of movement already in 2020, and it’s just getting started. I see the potential for a lot of light to reach a lot of new areas between the cracks which open up in that movement. And I see the guardians of the status quo having a harder and harder time maintaining the state of stasis. Their increasingly ham-fisted manipulations, such as installing a jarringly phony puppet like Pete Buttigieg, say a lot about their desperation.
Find ways of forcing them to overextend themselves and overplay their hand. Let’s show everyone what they’re hiding behind the puppet theater.
The virus that has spread through much of China has yet to be confirmed in Africa, but global health authorities are increasingly worried about the threat to the continent where an estimated 1 million Chinese now live, as some health workers on the ground warn they are not ready to handle an outbreak.
As we detailed previously, if travel bans to and from the infected parts of China turn out to have been justified then one country in particular may be worth watching, Ethiopia. Ethiopia’s Bole International airport is the main African gateway to and from China. On average 1500 passengers per day arrive from China every day. Ethiopia scans them all for symptoms which essentially means taking their temperature.
Many of those passengers then fly on to other parts of Africa where Chinese companies are doing business. These are 2018 figures courtesy of Brookings.
Unfortunately, as AP reports, it does not appear so… at least yet. Countries are racing to take precautions as hundreds of travelers arrive from China every day. Safeguards include stronger surveillance at ports of entry and improved quarantine and testing measures across Africa, home to 1.2 billion people and some of the world’s weakest systems for detecting and treating disease.
But the effort has been complicated by a critical shortage of testing kits and numerous illnesses that display symptoms similar to the flu-like virus.
“The problem is, even if it’s mild, it can paralyze the whole community,” said Dr. Michel Yao, emergency operations manager in Africa for the World Health Organization.
Those growing worried include employees at the Sino-Zambia Friendship Hospital in the mining city of Kitwe in northern Zambia, near the Congo border. Chinese companies operate mines on the outskirts of the city of more than half a million people. One company is headquartered in Wuhan, the city at the center of the virus outbreak. Hundreds of workers traveled between Zambia and China in recent weeks.
“We’re definitely not prepared. If we had a couple of cases, it would spread very quickly,” physiotherapist Fundi Sinkala said.
“We’re doing the best we can with what resources we have.”
The Sino-Zambia Friendship Hospital, or Sinozam, a low-slung facility near the city’s train station, has taken some precautions, including checking patient temperatures with infrared thermometers and establishing isolation areas.
Without testing, officials are “just relying on the symptoms” and whether they persist.
“But from what we are learning right now, some people show hardly any symptoms at all,” physiotherapist Fundi Sinkala said, calling that the hospital’s biggest worry.
Chinese embassies in Zambia and elsewhere in Africa have been unusually outspoken, giving news conferences and television interviews to discuss their response to the outbreak. Embassies require arriving Chinese citizens to declare where they have been in China. They also urge citizens to voluntarily isolate themselves for 14 days.
“We are now practicing hygiene, even in the mines,” said the Kitwe-based president of the Mine Workers Union of Zambia, Joseph Chewe.
“Any report of a person with coronavirus here will be very disastrous.”
The WHO says countries are obligated to inform it of any confirmed cases and are requested to report suspected cases as well. The WHO chief has publicly urged countries to share information. So far, African countries appear to be complying, a WHO adviser on health security, Dr. Ambrose Talisuna, told reporters.
A TV show in South Korea reunited a mother with her deceased 7-year-old daughter via a virtual reality recreation in what some observers thought was a dystopian and exploitative move.
A clip from the show Meeting You features the mother, wearing a VR headset and touch-sensitive gloves, walking around a green screen set and interacting with a 3D representation of her daughter.
The two are able to engage in a limited form of conversation as the mother caresses the representation of her daughter while crying.
The situation is similar in some ways to a plot from the popular dystopian TV series Black Mirror.
In an episode entitled Be Right Back, a young woman’s boyfriend is killed in a car accident and she decides to replace him with an android clone by having her boyfriend’s AI personality downloaded into the robot’s body.
While this woman’s VR interaction with a graphical representation of her dead daughter is a long way off that, it’s almost as creepy.
As Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett points out, no one would have an issue with it if the interaction helped the mother get over her grief, but the fact that the whole thing is being broadcast for the consumption of TV viewers makes it somewhat suspect.
“Having some code pretend to be a living thing that she loved might only add to the trauma. Only time, and research, will tell,” comments Plunkett, adding, “Whatever the long-term moral and ethical questions are that we’re going to have to face, this is extremely fucked up.”
* * *
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China’s Smartphone Sales And Production To Crater Amid Supply Chain Shock
One major threat to the recovery in global growth this year is the coronavirus outbreak that is centered around Greater China.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has now labeled the deadly virus a global health emergency as more than 902 people have died, surpassing all of SARS (813) in just three weeks.
Global confirmed cases hit 40,544 in China and 382 offshore on Sunday. The WHO Director-General warned: “we may only be seeing the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to the outbreak.
The virus poses a significant economic risk to the Chinese economy amid 400 million people quarantined, dozens of cities on lockdown, shuttered manufacturing hubs, and a collapse in retail and tourism. We’ve also noted that complex supply chains in and out of China have been severed, which will lead to an economic shock felt around the world in the coming weeks and or months.
One significant disruption that is becoming all too obvious at the moment, which Qualcomm warned last week, is that coronavirus has disrupted the smartphone industry.
A new report, according to Reuters, details China’s smartphone sales could plunge upwards of 50% in 1Q, as retail phone stores and production of semiconductors/smartphones remain closed.
“Vendors’ planned product launches will be canceled or delayed, given that large public events are not allowed in China,” research firm Canalys said in a note.
“It will take time for vendors to change their product launch roadmaps in China, which is likely to dampen 5G shipments.”
While Canalys expects China’s smartphone shipments to halve this quarter, International Data Corporation (IDC) expects shipments to drop by about 30% for the period.
TrendForce Corp. said Apple could see a 10% decline in iPhone sales in 1Q, from 45.5 million to about 41 million units.
TrendForce slashed its 1Q global smartphone production forecast -12% Y/Y, due to factory closings across Greater China. It warned global smartphone production in 1Q would be around 275 million units, a 5-year low in production.
We’ve noted, in the last several weeks, that if factories cannot resume production early this week and have full production by the end of the month, shortages would develop and hit the largest brands in the world, such as Apple iPhone and AirPods.
The one sector with the most exposure to Greater China and Asia Pacific is also the sector that has outperformed the most in recent months: Tech.
Ample Fed liquidity has made Wall Street blind as a bat when it comes to recognizing the unraveling of complex supply chains in Asia, and the slowdown in global growth.
The V-shape recovery in global growth could be more like a U-shape or continuation to the downside for 1H20 – as it appears, coronavirus will stick around for the immediate future.
The outrage over the Iowa caucus scandal has continued to burn white hot as more and more establishment manipulations against the Bernie Sanders campaign come into view.
At the beginning of a CNN town hall with Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg last night, immediately following the network’s town hall with Sanders, the event’s host Chris Cuomo announced that 100 percent of the caucus results were now in and the former South Bend mayor had narrowly won the contest. These results had been announced by the Iowa Democratic Party moments before Buttigieg’s town hall appearance.
Think about the level of coordination it takes to try to pull off such a brazen fraudulent move. It takes the Iowa Dem Party, the DNC and CNN. All working in cahoots.
So we’re way ahead of schedule in terms of emotional intensity tied to this presidential primary race, and possibly at a more heated point after the very first 2020 primary contest than at any point in the 2016 race between Sanders and Clinton. And it’s only going to get crazier from here.
And that’s just looking at the US Democratic presidential primary. Later this month we’ve got the beginning of Julian Assange’s extradition trial, we’ve got the OPCW narrative managing its own scandal by smearing the whistleblowers who revealed that the US, UK and France almost certainly bombed Syria in 2018 under false pretenses, we’ve got continuing revelations that pretty much everything the Trump administration told the world to justify the assassination of Qassem Soleimani was a lie, we’ve got an escalating new cold war between the US and Russia, increasing establishment attempts to censor the internet, an increasing propaganda war against China, the general militaristic belligerence of the US-centralized empire, and God knows what else.
As I said back in November, things are going to get weirder and weirder throughout the foreseeable future. We’re coming to a point in history where the only reliable pattern is the disintegration of patterns, and 2020 has come storming out of its corner swinging for the fences working to establish this pattern with extreme aggression. We’re not going to hit a point of stability or normality this year, we’re going to see things get crazier and crazier and crazier. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I know it’s going to be nuts.
Things Are Only Going To Get Weirder
“I often hear people in my line of work saying ‘Man, we’re going to look back on all this crazy shit and think about how absolutely weird it was!’
No we won’t. Because it’s only going to get weirder.”https://t.co/z5ivGMEMoY
In such an environment, it’s going to be absolutely essential to take exceptional care of your psychological health if you want to remain engaged with what’s going on in the world in a positive way.
And I do mean exceptional. Whatever you’re doing now, do more. Start cultivating new habits to keep yourself lucid and serene, and start now before things get super crazy. Work out your issues with your family and with yourself. Remember to move your body in ways that feel good to you. Carve out some time out each day for just being quiet with yourself. Notice the beauty around you. Give cuddles, get cuddles. Take a shower and sing your heart out. Feel your feet on the floor, nestle your bum into your chair and listen to yourself breath like it’s a song on the radio. Yawn. Belch. Stretch. Roar. Put on some loud music and rock out. Whatever you know works for you to get you out of your head and back in to your body, remember to do it, and remember to do it regularly. Make it habitual.
Be proactive with this rather than reactive; if you wait until you have to react to things going ass-side up later on it’s going to feel like you’re fighting to get your head above water. If you do it now you’ll have the mental space needed to navigate tumultuous waters.
This is what will be necessary if you want to engage with the increasingly frenetic narrative matrix in the future. The only alternative will be to disengage completely and throw your attention into escapism, or at least away from politics and news. And if you don’t make the cultivation of mental well-being your first and foremost priority you will be forced, in a very unpleasant way, to disengage anyhow.
And honestly this is something all activist types should be doing anyway. Believing you can help the world without doing serious inner work is like believing you can clean the house while covered in raw sewage. You can always spot the political activists who engage without doing any inner work by the chaotic, unskillful and frequently counterproductive form their actions take. They can’t see clearly enough to operate efficaciously, because their vision is clouded with unresolved suffering and conflict. Get in the shower and wash the yuck off yourself before trying to clean the house.
Some of my readers want a Sanders insurgency in the Democratic Party, some support third parties or independents, while others eschew electoral politics altogether and endorse other approaches to pushing for real change. But in my experience you all care deeply about the world, regardless of your preferred path toward doing so, and that’s going to take a heavy toll as all manner of things unravel over the next year if you don’t have the psychological spaciousness to navigate it lucidly.
Above all, be gentle with yourself. We got a ways ahead of us, and we need you fresh and feeling good. You won’t be able to help wake the world up if you let the chaos and confusion drag you down. Know when to take a break from the information stream and all the babbling narratives trying to twist your perception of it. Use your tools to distance yourself from the narratives so that you can perceive them objectively. Ground yourself, find your center, then, when you’re ready, wade back in.
No matter how chaotic things get, your ability to navigate that chaos skillfully needs to be your first and foremost priority. Put your mental well-being first, and everything else will fall into place.
Be the peace and harmony you want to see in the world.
Officials confirmed that Trump and national security adviser Robert O’Brien have cut 70 positions inherited from former President Barack Obama, who had fattened the staff to 200.
Many were loaners from other agencies and have been sent back. Others left government work.
Trump was notably impeached by the House and acquitted by the Senate after a NSC ‘whistleblower’ on loan from the CIA lodged a complaint after approaching the office of House Intel Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA), who guided him to a Democratic operative attorney (who loves going to Disneyland alone and once bragged about getting security clearances for ‘guys with child porn issues‘).
We digress.
Last week, anti-Trump impeachment witness Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and his twin brother Yevgeny were fired from the NSC and escorted out of the White House by security. While critics have called the move beyond the pale, President Trump noted Alexander Vindman’s ‘horrendous report’ given to him by his supervisor.
….was given a horrendous report by his superior, the man he reported to, who publicly stated that Vindman had problems with judgement, adhering to the chain of command and leaking information. In other words, “OUT”.
“This month, we will complete the right-sizing goal Ambassador O’Brien outlined in October, and in fact, may exceed that target by drawing down even more positions,” said NSC senior director for senior communications John Ullyot, in a statement to Secrets.
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsAlexander Vindman was reassigned to the Department of the Army, and will attend the US Army War College in Carlisle. No word on his twin.
Gold no longer serves as an official money in the modern financial system, yet it is still considered an important asset due to its established diversification and store of value properties. But what framework(s) should we use to understand the role that gold should play in investment processes and policies? In Part I of this series, I present one useful framework which implies that gold is significantly ‘under-owned’ and, consequently, undervalued at present.
Most investors are familiar with the ancient use of gold and silver as money, and that gold still provided the monetary base for economies well into the 20th century. Indeed, less than a century ago, in the aftermath of WWI and associated large currency devaluations and hyperinflations in Europe, there were several international conferences held to try and strengthen gold’s role as a source of monetary and economic stability. 75 years ago the famous Bretton-Woods conference was held, formally re-establishing gold’s role at the centre of the international monetary system.
For investors of that time, gold held a central role in investment processes. It was the bedrock collateral of the financial system – the ‘risk-free’ asset – and the benchmark for measuring investment performance. Gold was also an instrument that the central banks of the day could use to help contain financial crises. In the event of a run on deposits or an interbank collateral squeeze, central banks could lend out their reserves (normally at penalty rates of interest) in order to buy time for the system to restructure and reorganise. For example, gold lending was one of the actions taken by JP Morgan to help contain the US Banking Panic of 1907. This provided a model for how the Federal Reserve was subsequently designed to act as a lender of last resort.
The last international conference to determine the role that gold should play in the global financial system was held in December 1971 at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC. Following President Nixon’s infamous ‘closing of the gold window’ in August that year, this conference was a last-ditch attempt to salvage what was left of the Bretton-Woods arrangements that were credited with having provided a stable monetary foundation for the rebuilding of Europe and Japan and the widespread prosperity following WWII.
The result of the negotiations was that the US agreed to devalue the dollar by 8% vs gold; major trading partners would revalue versus the dollar by 8-16%; and currencies would fluctuate in narrow bands of 2.25% versus the dollar thereafter. The hope was that this would rebalance global trade and capital flows, thereby removing the previous balance-of-payments pressure draining the US gold stock. This hope was in vain, however. The US continued to run growing balance-of-payments deficits and by 1973 the agreement was abandoned, currencies went into free-float versus one another, and, as it happened, into freefall versus gold for the remainder of that decade.
The Role of Gold Today
Most central banks hold a portion of their reserves in the form of physical gold. Subsequent to the global financial crisis of 2008-9, central banks have been accumulating gold at a historically elevated pace. As seen in the chart below, purchases reached a record high in 2019.
Chart 1: Central Bank Purchases of Gold Increased in 2019
Source: Metals Focus, Refinitiv GFMS, World Gold Council
Private investors have also been accumulating gold. While Asian investors tend to acquire physical gold, those in the West commonly do so through ETFs – a proxy for overall Western investment demand, which was also particularly strong in 2019.
Chart 2: Holdings in Global Gold-backed ETFs Reached a New Record in September
Source: Bloomberg, Company Filings, ICE Benchmark Administration, Shanghai Gold Exchange, World Gold Council
A Modern Investment Framework
Although the evidence shows gold holdings increasing, my discussions with investors often centre around the lack of a robust valuation framework and gold integration into their asset-allocation processes. I provide more than one such framework, yet I always begin with an explanation not only of what gold is, but also of what it is not.
If gold is no longer official money, what exactly is it? After all, gold, an inert metal, has not changed over the past century. There remains widespread demand for gold both as jewellery and as a safe-haven asset. It is easy to understand why gold is, in fact, the safest of safe-haven assets: it carries no credit or counterparty risk, it cannot be arbitrarily devalued by governments the way their currencies can, and it requires no government to give it value with legal tender or any other official status. As such, gold can be considered both a universal, global, liquid alternative to fiat currency as a store of value. It is also an ‘anti-asset’ that, unlike all financial assets, cannot be defaulted on, restructured, repudiated, or simply rendered worthless by government action.
As such, one way in which to consider gold’s value for investors is as a form of insurance against the various risks to fiat currencies and financial assets. The concept of insurance is intuitive, and we all pay for it in one form or another. With gold, insurance is not intrinsically productive. It doesn’t provide a yield or other ex-ante return. Indeed, it ‘carries negatively’ in the form of premiums paid, just as gold normally carries negatively by not paying any interest yet incurring costs for secure storage and the insurance thereon.
The ultimate providers of insurance against risk are either governments themselves or reinsurance companies. By owning gold, investors are ‘insuring’ their financial portfolios against default and devaluation. By corollary, they are also insuring them against financial crises – a common cause of both, and one that occurs with some regularity throughout history.
How, then, are we to consider how much ‘insurance’ investors should normally hold in the form of gold? One way is to use history as a guide and to derive the ex-post optimal weighting for gold in a simple portfolio of financial assets, stocks, and bonds. Taking the longest available robust historical dataset for total returns for stocks and bonds over the past century, and solving for the gold weighting that pushes the efficient frontier out to the portfolio maximum, the answer comes out at about 15%.
Focusing on the modern financial world however (that is, the one since 1971 in which gold is no longer the basis of the international monetary system), the ideal gold weighting climbs to around 20%.
It should be stressed that these weightings are derived entirely from passive, ex-post, efficient frontier calculations using public datasets stretching back a century. Were you to take an actual ‘view’ on the future ex-ante returns, volatilities, and correlations of stocks, bonds, and gold, the derived weightings of the efficient portfolio would be different. For this exercise, we simply run the numbers as they are with no ‘view’ at all.
When I show investors the results of this analysis the initial reaction is frequently one of shock. It is the rare investor who allocates 15% of more of their portfolio to gold. But the numbers don’t lie. Indeed, they reveal some normalcy bias. When you look more closely at the data, what you see are consistently higher returns provided by a portfolio of stocks and bonds alone: the conventional wisdom. Yet there are rare periods in which stocks decline so sharply that the positive performance of bonds doesn’t compensate and, rarer still, when both stocks and bonds decline in value. So unless you were able to predict such periods in advance, you would have wanted to hold ‘insurance’ against them with a portfolio gold weighting on the order of magnitude derived above.
A Valuation Methodology for Gold’s Insurance Properties
Now let’s go one step further and consider what the implications are for the valuation of gold. Available data show that gold holdings comprise no more than 1-2% of investor portfolios. Stocks, bonds, and other assets comprise the other 98%. But unlike financial assets, which can be issued theoretically ad infinitum, the supply of gold is essentially fixed, growing at about 1% per year, much of which is absorbed into jewellery production. Therefore, the only realistic way for portfolios to shift towards the efficient frontier derived above is for the price of gold to rise versus that of financial assets generally.
Chart 3: Gold Percentage of Global Financial Assets
If, over time, investors were to gravitate towards the historically optimal portfolio weightings derived above, holding the value of financial assets constant, gold would have to increase in value by a tenfold order of magnitude to around $15,000. Were the market capitalisation of financial assets to increase as well, say as the result of generally expansionary monetary policies, the rise in the gold price would need to be commensurately higher.
One can visualise this adjustment by assuming that the supply of gold is an essentially constant, vertical line, with demand for gold as financial portfolio insurance having some slope. As the quantity of gold ‘insurance’ demanded increases, the gold demand function shifts to the right, thereby driving the price higher.
Supply of Gold is Inelastic, While Demand Can Fluctuate
Chart 4: Supply of Gold is Inelastic, While Demand Can Fluctuate
It is spurious to try and get more precise, but this gives us an order of magnitude for the price of gold that would correspond to the historically derived, implied value of gold’s ‘insurance’ properties. Yes, this is a big figure, but it is worth keeping in mind that tenfold increases in the price of gold over multiple-year periods are hardly unprecedented. Indeed, the price of gold would rise by even more than tenfold in the 1970s, and by about fivefold in the lead-up to and aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis.
Alternatively, stocks and bonds could collectively decline in value by some 80% versus gold, presumably driven by stocks falling significantly more than bonds. But given the policy regime in effect today, that would be highly unlikely. Central banks and/or fiscal authorities would almost certainly act to prevent such a huge selloff with expansionary policies. And as observed in 2009-11 and other such periods, these policies would give upward momentum to the price of gold. I consider $15,000 gold and flat stocks+bonds to be a more realistic scenario than $1,500 gold and the SPX back under 2,000. Most realistic of all could be that bonds remain stable, stocks continue to at least keep pace with inflation, and gold outperforms over time.
As this gold framework is based on the concept of gold as the ultimate form of financial portfolio insurance, the factors impacting investor confidence are critical. As investors become increasingly concerned about the stability of the financial system, as they did during the mid-2000s, they will demand more ‘insurance’, driving the price of gold higher. As they become more complacent, the opposite should be the case.
While hindsight is always 20/20, we can see this pattern clearly in the historical data. Looking forward, investors need to consider what specific factors are likely to impact investor confidence in the future. However, from the current starting point, an ‘insurance’-based valuation framework for gold would be strongly biased towards a relative outperformance of gold.
In Part II of this series I will present a fundamental fair-value approach to modelling the price of gold, with reference to specific economic variables. As a more practical trading tool this will complement the generic ‘insurance’ framework presented here.
Chinese Firms Ask For Billions In Loans Amid Virus Outbreak
In response to the economic paralysis brought about by the coronavirus, Chinese banks are offering billions of dollars in loans to Chinese companies, according to two banking sources via Reuters.
About 300 Chinese firms, including top food delivery company Meituan Dianping and smartphone maker Xiaomi, have requested upwards 57.2 billion yuan ($8.2 billion) in loans to prevent a hard landing as China’s economy grinds to a halt.
The sources said the firms seeking loans are either the hardest hit or have an active role in the control of the virus outbreak.
Evercore ISI Chairman Ed Hyman warned last week that China’s GDP growth could post “zero for the first quarter … China is really slowing and that’s worrying people for sure.”
“We are so solid,” Hyman said. “It’s not the virus, it’s the trade that matters. People are not going out. They are not shopping, and that’s what’s hurting particularly China.”
Extended factory closings and supply chain disruptions have forced many companies to request loans for “fast-track approvals and preferential rates,” the sources said.
The sources reviewed several lists of companies that Chinese banks will be distributing loans to. They said no official data is showing total loans requested.
The list includes pharmaceutical firms and restaurants, who’ve requested help from banking authorities.
“Banks will have the final say on lending decisions,” one of the sources said. “The interest rates are likely to be on par with those offered to banks’ top clients.”
The list included Xiaomi, which requested 5 billion yuan ($716.24 million) in loans to convert several production lines into mask and medical equipment making.
Meituan Dianping has asked for 4 billion yuan ($572.99 million) to finance free food and delivery to first responders and other government workers helping to contain the outbreak in Wuhan.
Didi Chuxing, “severely impacted by the virus outbreak,” is requesting 50 million yuan ($7.16 million).
Beijing-based internet security company Qihoo 360 has asked for 1 billion yuan ($143.25 million) to purchase and distribute medical-related products. The internet company will also fund new programs that will build apps for virus tracking.
Facial recognition startup Megvii asked for 100 million yuan ($14.32 million) to develop AI technology that would be used in china’s surveillance network to monitor if people are wearing masks.
We’ve noted that the People’s Bank of China pumped $243 billion into financial markets to prevent a market crash. On Monday, Feb. 03, China’s equity market shed $393 billion of its value.
When a crisis emerges, China has always thrown money at the problem to “cushion” the side effects and create a soft landing. But this time is different, and excessive monetary policy, which failed to turn up the second-largest economy late last year, is now flooding the system with even more loans for businesses. If it’s a ploy by Beijing to spark new credit creation, it’s likely temporary, as a hard landing could be nearing.
After three long years of brutal oppression under Donald Trump’s Russia-backed Nazi Reich, it turns out the only Democratic candidate with a chance of unseating him in November and rescuing the world from the Putin-Nazis is a 78-year-old bloodthirsty Commie with a Khmer Rouge-like army of kill-crazy followers.
Yes, I’m afraid the rumors are true. Apparently, elements of Jeremy Corbyn’s recently-disbanded Nazi Death Cult have regrouped in the United States, formed an alliance with Bernie Sanders fanatics, and together this Mega-Commie Kill Swarm is roaming the Internet with complete impunity, sadistically mass-murdering Sanders critics and defenseless differently-abled persons with vulgar language and vicious poo-memes.
The corporate media are doing their best to alert Americans to the imminent threat. CNN broadcast a special report explaining how Sanders’ “army of supporters” are “bullying” and “frightening” his critics into silence. An “outspoken Elizabeth Warren supporter whose daughter with Downs syndrome is recovering from cancer” was verbally-abused to within an inch of her life. An “activist dying of ALS” was instructed to go “f___” himself. The Working Families Party was subjected to a series of inappropriate adjectives. The Party’s leader, an African American and a personal friend of Bernie Sanders, was taunted with a racist Tweet, which Sanders took to Twitter and condemned, but by that time it was much too late. His Commie Kill Swarm was beyond his control; they started tweeting memes comparing Elizabeth Warren to a snake and Pete Buttigieg to a rat, and otherwise terrorizing the American public.
Senior Investigative Correspondent Drew Griffin spoke to several other “victims” of Sanders’ Commie Kill Swarm’s tweets who are recovering from their Internet traumas in undisclosed secure locations and so insisted on remaining anonymous. According to Griffin, these emotionally-traumatized victims are so emotionally traumatized by what they experienced on the Internet that they wouldn’t even let him describe the traumatic “circumstances” surrounding their “attacks.”
And the proof of Sanders’ Commie Kill Swarm’s atrocities isn’t just anecdotal. No, Griffin also spoke to Ben Decker, “CEO” of something called “Memetica” (which appears to be Ben’s Twitter account), whose “Facebook analysis” conclusively proves that Sanders has a lot of online supporters, more than all the other candidates, which creates “the potential for greater harm.” This type of online “bullying-at-scale,” according to Ben, is just … well, “crazy.”
Of course, CNN is not the only corporate media outlet on the case. In the days leading up to the Iowa caucuses (which Sanders would go on to attempt to steal from Buttigieg by winning thousands more votes), a spate of dire warnings were issued. According to The Washington Post, “Sanders supporters have weaponized Facebook” and are terrorizing people with “angry memes.” The New York Times reported that “Bernie Sanders and His Internet Army have forced progressives who refuse to back him into hiring private security details to protect them from “death threats” and off-color jokes. Daily Beast warned of “Toxic Bernie Bros.” NBC likened them to MAGA supporters, who everyone knows are Russia-loving Nazis. SNL writers went even further, painting Sanders as the darling of 4chan … and these are just a few examples.
But by far the most bombastic display of unbridled Sanders-Commie-Kill-Swarm-Panic was MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who totally lost it after the last debate and started sputtering about “socialists” staging public mass-executions in Central Park. Matthews is apparently firmly convinced that Sanders, if he wins the election, plans to dress up like Fidel Castro, march Matthews and his cronies out onto the Great Lawn, and go full-bore Daenerys Targaryen on them. He sat there, trembling, on national television, eyes afire with paranoia, jabbering about the godless “Reds” like a scene from Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove that got cut because it was too over-the-top.
Seriously, though, I doubt he has much to worry about. Regardless of who wins the election this year, the supranational corporatocracy that essentially owns the U.S. government is not about to let Bernie Sanders implement the same basic social programs that most capitalist countries throughout world have provided to their people for decades. Jesus, just imagine the freedomless horror if Americans could go to university, and, you know, maybe raise a child or two, without spending the rest of their lives in debt! Think of the suffering that would inflict on the banks, and insurance companies, and military contractors, not to mention the pharmaceutical industry. God help America, should it go down that road! The next thing you know there’d be high-speed trains, subsidized art, and un-chlorinated chicken … there’s no telling where the nightmare would end.
Look, I don’t normally get invested in the quadrennial Simulation of Democracy, but I’m kind of pulling for Bernie this time. I don’t believe he has a chance, but if he somehow managed to outfox the Democrats and win the nomination this summer, it would be fun to watch as the corporate media and the rest of the neoliberal Resistance react to a Sanders vs. Trump election.
Not that either Sanders or Trump, the men themselves, are a threat to the empire (as we have witnessed over the course of the last three years). But we’re in the middle of a War on Populism, which the global corporatocracy needs to win if it is going to continue to relentlessly destabilize, privatize, and restructure everything, as it has been doing since the end of the Cold War. Sanders and Trump are just symbols, of course, lightning rods for “populist” anger … but they are symbols the empire needs to destroy in order to reestablish “normality.”
The neoliberal Resistance’s ham-fisted efforts to prevent a Bernie Sanders nomination are desperate attempts to avoid a scenario where they are forced to ensure Donald Trump’s reelection, which, make no mistake, they will do if they have to. (Jonathan Chait has already whipped up some boilerplate to be used in that effort.) They did it to Corbyn, and they will do it to Sanders, but it is likely to get extremely awkward, pretending to reluctantly support him (because the alternative will be a man they’ve spent the last three years accusing of being a Russian spy and literally Hitler) while simultaneously painting him as a genocidal commie terrorist whose supporters are a bunch of white supremacist, billionaire-butchering neo-Maoists.
Thus the “Sanders Swarm” hysteria, and the Iowa caucuses “technical difficulties,” and whatever other propaganda and dirty tricks the Resistance has planned to prevent a Sanders nomination, so they can lose to Trump with a non-populist candidate and play “Resistance” for another four years.
So, unless you relish the thought of that, or the thought of watching a humiliated Bernie obsequiously shuffle around the country campaigning for Buttigieg, like he did for Clinton, please do what you can to get him nominated, so we can enjoy a Pol Pot vs. Hitler election.
Do it for purely entertainment purposes. It is mostly just a show, after all.
* * *
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volume I of his Consent Factory Essays is published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.
Larry Doyle and John Moynihan informed those observing that they filed a formal Whistleblower Submission replete with a hundred-plus formal exhibits in excess of 6,000 pages of evidence with the Internal Revenue Service on the Clinton Foundation in August 2017. They further testified that they had submitted the same materials to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and selected US Attorneys in the Department of Justice as well and that their documents included:
reviews of the foundation’s tax returns and those of the foundation’s donors
reviews including audits of the foundation’s programs and operations, foreign and domestic
email exchanges between foundation executives and foreign government officials
contracts with foreign governments and engagements with other public and private entities
reviews of partnerships with an array of private companies, private universities, and other 501c3 public charities
interviews with both current and former senior Clinton Foundation officials
reviews of state registration materials
documents covering the foundation’s own internal reviews
During the hearing, Doyle and Moynihan highlighted that they believe the evidence they presented in their submission provided probable cause that the Clinton Foundation violated IRS codes relating to the Organization and Operational Tests for a 501c3 public charity with specific details addressing Misrepresentations and Misuse of Donated Public Funds. On top of that, they also addressed their probable cause assertion that the Clinton Foundation acted as an agent in violation of IRS code and the Foreign Agent Registration Act. These whistleblowers also highlighted that private foundations, including the Gates Foundation, that have donated to the Clinton Foundation are themselves subject to taxation based on IRS codes relating to Donors’ Responsibilities. Ultimately, Doyle and Moynihan maintained that the Clinton Foundation could be subject to paying tax on anywhere from $400mm to potentially as much as $2.5 billion of revenue.
During that hearing, Moynihan specifically emphasized that their submission was “a tax claim”. Moynihan also informed those on the committee that depending on how the IRS ruled that the two whistleblowers would have other causes of action that they could and would pursue including filing an appeal to the US Tax Court if in fact they received a Final Denial from the IRS.
Well, it appears that these two ‘financial bounty hunter’ whistleblowers have done just that. How is that appeal playing out? It looks like over the course of the last few months Doyle and Moynihan have been in the midst of an extensive array of motions and responses, many filed under seal, going back and forth with IRS Counsel in the course of their having their day in the US Tax Court v the Internal Revenue Service. Those interested in the case can track it via this US Tax Court site:
Authoritarianism has made this outbreak worse, not better. The state’s strength in controlling information and suppressing dissent is a weakness in fighting disease…
Nature is unpredictable and sometimes vengeful. Different societies and political systems have different ways of managing it.
Viruses and epidemics can occur in any country. But they have become more dangerous and challenging in modern times as globalisation means they spread faster and farther than ever.
Thus the coronavirus, thought to have originated in the mainland Chinese city of Wuhan, is spreading across the world.
As it does so, it tests not only China’s health infrastructure and management. The course of the epidemic and the government’s responses raise profound questions about the capacity and dynamism of China’s system of one-party rule.
For sure, China’s leadership is now doing everything to contain the virus, just as they had done in fights against natural disasters such as the Sichuan Earthquake in 2008. In fact, China’s command-and-control systems might prove more efficient than anything the free democracies could manage when it comes to mobilising resources.
Beijing won international plaudits for the massive scale of its mobilisation and dramatic measures against the coronavirus. The government has built several temporary hospitals from scratch in just a few weeks, locked down tens of millions of people in quarantine in more than two dozen cities, banned tens of millions more from travelling across the nation and so on.
But the saga has also, once again, exposed the inherent contradictions and flaws in its self-acclaimed political system.
China missed the best opportunity to contain the spread of the virus because officials at first delayed – or possibly covered up – the release of information and were slow in taking precautionary actions. The first patient who experienced symptoms was found on December 1, 2019, suggesting the origin of the disease was even earlier. And there has been some evidence of human-to-human transmissions since late December, with more emerging in early January when several medical workers were infected.
These vital bits of information were not released to the public in time. Nor was any decisive action taken between early December and January 23, the day Beijing told the world about the severity of the epidemic and declared war on it just two days before the Lunar New Year on January 25. Lives continued as normal in Wuhan in the week before then. On January 18, the Wuhan government hosted a banquet attended by more than 40,000 families in a bid to set a Guinness world record. On January 20, the municipal government said it was distributing 200,000 free tickets to residents for festive new year activities.
Videos show few people wearing face masks in Wuhan before mid-January. Compare that to Hong Kong, where since early January the government has been updating people on the situation daily and holding frequent news briefings.
In terms of human-to-human transmissions, the alarm wasn’t raised until the prominent epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan spoke out on January 20 – nearly 50 days after the first patient was found and three weeks after it was established that human-to-human infections were taking place.
Instead of acting against the virus, the government focused on controlling the information. In an effort to underscore the Communist Party’s determination to crack down on unsanctioned information, the broadcaster CCTV reported on January 2 that Wuhan police had interrogated and warned eight whistle-blowers, frontline doctors, for “rumourmongering” about the epidemic. It seemed all too familiar to 2003, when military doctor Jiang Yanyong defied government rules and risked his own life to break the news about the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) to the international media.
China’s censorship of news has made the country fertile ground for rumours, as people do not trust official information. Indeed, there are numerous cases in which officials have downplayed or covered up large-scale disasters, from Sars to the contamination of the Songhua River in 2005, the milk powder scandal of 2008 and the Wenzhou train crash of 2011.
The official rhetoric before Zhong’s revelation was, at least, consistent: the disease was controllable and preventable; there was no evidence that the virus could be transmitted between human beings. There is no doubt that the delay in the release of information led to a delay in precautionary actions, both by the public and the government. Both the government and the public are obviously unprepared for the outbreak, as evidenced by the mess in hospitals and major shortages of testing kits, masks, protective gear and other materials.
Yet the fight against this epidemic is like a race between the virus and human beings. The faster will be the winner, the slower the loser. Party officials usually put social control ahead of fighting natural disasters, often playing down the severity of instances. In a leaked internal circular, the public health ministry says there are three principles in dealing with epidemics. They are, in order: “politics, safety and science”.
Under the party’s draconian censorship system, any information about epidemics is a top state secret. So much was admitted by Wuhan mayor Zhou Xianwang. He told CCTV he had delayed the disclosure of information as internal rules barred him from doing so without permission.
Until now, any unsanctioned information about the epidemic or negative opinion about the government’s handling of it on social media will have been deleted by party censors. Posters of such material face severe punishment, even jail.
The irony is that the party’s strength in controlling information and suppressing dissent is also its weakness in fighting epidemics. This contradiction has become more acute in the 17 years since Sars, as the country has become more authoritarian after President Xi Jinping came to power in 2012.
The coronavirus is a vivid and tragic example of how China’s one-party rule not only impedes the public’s response to epidemics, but also helps turn problems from localised health scares into catastrophes on a nationwide and even worldwide scale.
Nobel economist Amartya Kumar Sen once concluded that the free flow of information and transparency were the best weapons in the battle against the spread of epidemics. China lacks both. China’s leadership should have learned lessons from Sars. Beijing’s sweeping anti-contagion measures have come too late. Early on, its political institutions allowed the virus to fester freely, repeating the tragedy of Sars. That means what we are witnessing is not simply a public health problem. It is one of the most severe sociopolitical crises the party has faced and it threatens to undermine its absolute grip on power.
Mother nature has not been merciful to humans during this crisis. And China’s authoritarianism is making it only more vulnerable to nature’s wrath.
Prosecutors Recommend 7-9 Year Prison Sentence For Roger Stone
The prosecutors who successfully convicted Republican strategist and decades-old Trump pal Roger Stone on charges of witness tampering and lying to Congress are now lobbying the judge presiding over his Feb. 20 sentencing to give Stone seven to nine years in prison.
In the sentencing memo, the prosecutors make clear that they’re recommending such a hefty sentence for relatively benign charges because of Stone’s insistence on speaking out in his defense (though he didn’t testify at his trial in November). Specifically, the lawyers cited Stone’s expressed “contempt” for the legal system.
Writing in the Daily Caller, former Rep. Bob Barr (no relation to the AG) defended Stone, and reminded the world that he remains silenced under a federal court gag order that prevents him from publicly saying anything about the conviction last November. The former Republican strategist and early Trump booster is awaiting sentencing for up to 20 years on Feb. 20. The sentencing has been called the last “loose end remaining from the Mueller investigation.”
Barr added that it’s also the last travesty of the Mueller probe.
One more thing: Stone was never charged with any real crimes. Essentially, he was charged with lying to Congress during a voluntary appearance in 2017, and another bullshit charge of witness tampering (the individual ended up testifying against him anyway).
Here’s a summary of the circumstances surrounding Stone’s charges from the AP:
Prosecutors alleged Stone lied to Congress about his conversations about WikiLeaks with New York radio host and comedian Randy Credico – who scored an interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2016, when he was avoiding prosecution by sheltering in the Ecuadoran embassy in London – and conservative writer and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi.
During the 2016 campaign, Stone had mentioned in interviews and public appearances that he was in contact with Assange through a trusted intermediary and hinted at inside knowledge of WikiLeaks’ plans. But he started pressing Credico to broker a contact, and Credico testified that he told Stone to work through his own intermediary.
Earlier testimony revealed that Stone, while appearing before the House Intelligence Committee, named Credico as his intermediary to Assange and pressured Credico not to contradict him.
After Credico was contacted by Congress, he reached out to Stone, who told him he should “stonewall it” and “plead the fifth,” he testified.
Credico also testified during Stone’s trial that Stone repeatedly told him to “do a ‘Frank Pentangeli,’” a reference to a character in “The Godfather: Part II” who lies before Congress.
Prosecutors said Stone had also threatened Credico’s therapy dog, Bianca, saying he was “going to take that dog away from you.”
In the memo, prosecutors claimed that Stone displayed “contempt for the rule of law” after his indictment. Stone was the sixth Trump associate or employee to be convicted in the probe.
DOJ’s Roger Stone sentencing memo suggests 7 to 9 years in prison is just: ‘When his crimes were revealed by the indictment in this case, he displayed contempt for this Court and the rule of law’ https://t.co/FNjnjbNiwOpic.twitter.com/kx985WgtuU
Over time, continual bad news will discourage any civilian population, and Americans had the lowest tolerance on the planet for bad news.
Karl Marlantes, “Matterhorn” (2009)
Have you read Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes? You should. It’s not just the best novel I’ve ever read about the Vietnam War, but it’s also one of my irreplaceable sources of inspiration for understanding The Maw – that unlimited gluttony of the violent State to chomp on our bones and suck out our minds … and the oddly not-so-rare instances of individual human bravery to persevere regardless.
I would bet my life that there are thousands of instances of individual human bravery persevering against The Maw happening right now … in Wuhan … in Wenzhou … in dozens of other quarantined cities throughout China.
What was my first experience with The Maw? It was as a seven-year-old boy watching the nightly news on our little black-and-white set, where every night … EVERY NIGHT … we were told exactly how many American and South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese soldiers had been killed that day.
The American numbers were accurate, I guess, and the South Vietnamese numbers were probably in the right ballpark. But the North Vietnamese numbers of wounded and killed? Pure fiction.
The daily body count of killed and wounded North Vietnamese soldiers was, in Epsilon Theory-speak, a cartoon – an abstraction of an abstraction in service to the creation of Common Knowledge.
Hey, everyone knows that everyone knows that we’re winning the war in Vietnam. Didn’t you see the body count numbers on CBS last night?
Once you start looking for cartoons, you will see them everywhere.
And yes, we write a lot about cartoons. You can read more here, here, here, here, hereand here. For starters.
But this is the kicker.
Because it was so important to maintain the fiction that we were Winning the War ™, and that fiction required metrics like a body count of North Vietnamese that was always a multiple of the South Vietnamese casualties and always a factor of the American casualties, American war-fighting policy was soon driven by the narrative requirement to find and count the “right number” of North Vietnamese casualties!
The point of this quadratic regression on Chinese infection and death numbers as reported by the World Health Organization from the first official announcement through February 4 was the publication of this projection.
Sure enough, the WHO announcements since this prediction was published have been eerily close.
2/5 — 24,363 cases — 491 fatalities
2/6 — 28,060 cases — 564 fatalities
2/7 — 31,211 cases — 637 fatalities
2/8 — 34,598 cases — 723 fatalities
2/9 — 37,251 cases — 812 fatalities
2/10 — 40,171 cases — 908 fatalities
Crazy, right? The deaths being reported out of China are particularly accurate to the model, while the reported cases are leveling off (which is what you’d expect from a politically adjusted epidemic model over time … at some point you have to show a rate-of-change improvement from your epidemic control measures).
But wait, there’s more.
The really damning part of Antimonic’s modeling of the reported data with a quadratic formula is that this should be impossible. This is not how epidemics work.
All epidemics take the form of an exponential function, not a quadratic function.
All epidemics – before they are brought under control – take the form of a green line, an exponential function of some sort. It is impossible for them to take the form of a blue line, a quadratic formula of some sort. This is what the R-0 metric of basic reproduction rate means, and if – as the WHO has been telling us from the outset – the nCov2019 R-0 is >2, then the propagation rate must be described by a pretty steep exponential curve. As the kids would say, it’s just math.
Now I don’t want to get into the weeds as to whether it’s possible to model this specific data set with an exponential function (it probably is), and we’ll never have access to the detail of data we’d need to be certain about all this. And to be clear, at some point the original exponential spread of a disease becomes “sub-exponential” as containment and treatment measures kick in.
But I’ll say this … it’s pretty suspicious that a quadratic expression fits the reported data so very, very closely. In fact, I simply can’t imagine any real-world exponentially-propagating virus combined with real-world containment and treatment regimes that would fit a simple quadratic expression so beautifully.
I believe that the Chinese government is massively under-reporting infection data in the pandemic regions of Hubei and Zhejiang provinces.
Just like the American government massively over-reported North Vietnamese casualty data in the Vietnam War.
It’s not only that I believe the numbers coming out of China are largely made up.
More importantly, I also believe that Chinese epidemic-fighting policy – just like American war-fighting policy in the Vietnam War – is now being driven by the narrative requirement to find and count the “right number” of coronavirus casualties.
From a narrative perspective, China is fighting this war against nCov2019 exactly like the US fought its war against North Vietnam.
It’s what the Best and the Brightest always do … they convince themselves that the people can’t handle the truth, particularly if the truth ain’t such good news. They convince themselves that they can buy enough time to win the real-world war by designing and employing a carefully constructed “communication strategy” to win the narrative-world war.
That strategy proved to be a social and political disaster for the United States, as the cartoon tail (gotta get more NV casualties for Cronkite to report) ended up wagging the policy dog (send out more counterproductive search-and-destroy missions).
I think exactly the same thing is happening in China.
And I think the social and political repercussions will be exactly as disastrous.
The Diamond Princess, the cruise ship that has been quarantined off the coast of Yokohama, Japan for a week now, saw a jump in a total number of confirmed coronavirus infections climb to 136.
A growing sense of paranoia among the 3,600 people stuck on board the ship has been increasing since late last week as confirmed cases soar.
But for one Australian couple, they’re sitting back and relaxing, enjoying bottles of cheap wine to numb the fears of an infectious disease taking over the ship, reported The Courier-Mail.
Last Thursday, Jan and Dave Binskin allegedly ordered several cases of wine, not from the ship’s bar, but a drone.
The couple said they contacted a wine club that arranged the drone delivery.
Jan and Dave Binskin wrote, “Naked Wine Club your incredible just got the First Drop Thank God For Drones the Japanese Coast Guard did not know what the F*ck was going on 🍷🍷🍷🍷🍷👌👌👌👌.”
They wrote: “Happy hour drone wine 🍷, even have a wine filter, day three going troppo 😜😜😜😜😜.”
Another post allegedly shows Dave Binskin enjoying the wine in the cabin on Friday.
The couple posts a selfie of them on the deck of the ship after five days of quarantine.
On Sunday, the couple posted two more bottles of wine that they supposedly had delivered via drone.
There was no confirmation by authorities if a drone was spotted airdropping wine aboard the ship.
Over the last several decades, have we ever seen a year start as strangely as 2020 has? Global weather patterns have gone completely nuts, large earthquakes are popping off like firecrackers, it looks like the plague of locusts in Africa could soon develop into the worst in modern history, and a massive plague of bats is severely terrorizing parts of Australia. On top of all that, African Swine Fever is wiping out millions upon millions of pigs around the globe, the H1N1 Swine Flu is killing people in Taiwan, there have been H5N1 Bird Flu outbreaks in China and in India, and the H5N8 Bird Flu has made an appearance at a poultry facility in Saudi Arabia. Of course the coronavirus outbreak which is causing people to literally drop dead in the streets in China is making more headlines than anything that I have mentioned so far, and it could potentially turn into a horrifying global pandemic that kills millions of people.
But other than that, it has been a rather calm beginning to the year, eh?
I have been repeatedly warning that the time of “the perfect storm” is upon us, and many others have also been using this terminology to describe what we are now facing.
Basically, we have entered a period of time when we will be dealing with one terrible crisis after another, and all of these challenges will collectively create a horrific nightmare that will just continue to intensify as time rolls along.
Surprisingly, even the mainstream media is now starting to talk about a coming “perfect storm”, although they have a bit of a different spin on it. The following comes from a Guardian article entitled “Humanity under threat from perfect storm of crises – study”…
The world is facing a series of interlinked emergencies that are threatening the existence of humans, because the sum of the effects of the crises is much greater than their individual impacts, according to a new global study.
Climate breakdown and extreme weather, species loss, water scarcity and a food production crisis are all serious in themselves, but the combination of all five together is amplifying the risks of each, creating a perfect storm that threatens to engulf humanity unless swift action is taken.
Of course the mainstream media would like to blame just about every crisis that humanity is facing on “man-made climate change”.
In essence, they would have us believe that humanity’s “carbon footprint” is way too large and that if we would just do everything that the socialists are telling us to do that everything will go back to normal.
To much of the population, their arguments can seem rather compelling at times, because without a doubt the weather is going nuts.
THE PUBLIC has been advised to stay indoors today as Storm Ciara is expected to batter Britain with 90mph winds and heavy rain.
The 1,000 mile-wide storm, the strongest to sweep across the country for seven years, will bring travel chaos and the advice is: only travel if absolutely necessary.
And “climate change” is also being blamed for the absolutely crazy locust plague that is devastating parts of the Middle East and eastern Africa right now. Approximately 360 billion locusts are eating everything that they can find, and UN officials continue to claim that the number of locusts could actually get “500 times” larger by the time June arrives…
With more rains expected in the region in the coming weeks, the number of locusts if unchecked could grow by up to 500 times by June, when drier weather is expected.
Meanwhile, the crust of our planet is literally shaking like a leaf.
Are we supposed to blame “climate change” for this too?
Over the past week, the Ring of Fire has been hit by big earthquakes day after day…
EARTHQUAKES today hammered the Ring of Fire in the Pacific, as officials detected more than 50 tremors throughout the region. One of the biggest was a magnitude 6.2 earthquake in Indonesia.
Earthquakes have consistently rocked the Ring of Fire this week, with an average of 50 in the region every day, most in a middling magnitude of two or more. Some have grazed higher levels, however, with the largest pushing magnitude 6.
But right now people are more concerned about the coronavirus outbreak in China than anything else.
According to the latest official numbers coming out of China, there are now more than 40,000 confirmed cases and more than 900 confirmed deaths.
Of course there is an enormous amount of skepticism about the validity of those numbers. In fact, one exiled Chinese billionaire believes that the true death toll could be more than 50 times higher…
Exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui recently revealed leaks from Wuhan crematoriums. He claims based on the number of bodies their furnaces are burning, the death toll could be as high as 50,000. Wengui made the bombshell allegations in an interview with former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon.
I wish that Chinese officials would just be straight with us, but one thing that is becoming exceedingly clear is that this virus passes from person to person very, very easily. In fact, nine members of one family in Hong Kong all got infected “after sharing a hotpot and barbecue meal”…
Concerns about the way the virus spreads are likely to surge following a report that nine members of the same Hong Kong family have been infected with the deadly new coronavirus after sharing a hotpot and barbecue meal. A hotpot – also known as a steamboat – is a bubbling cauldron of stock shared communally, to which diners add ingredients.
It wasn’t immediately clear if the food was contaminated with the virus, or if one of those present for dinner was a carrier.
Let us hope that the containment measures being taken in China and elsewhere will help, but at this point the number of cases just continues to escalate.
Unfortunately, what we have witnessed so far is just the beginning.
We are only in the leading edge of “the perfect storm”, and the great challenges that are still ahead of us will shake everyone to the core.
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