| [Editor’s Note: As part of our solution oriented approach to taking your power back, yesterday we started running a short series of articles from Simon Black. He’s the Founder of SovereignMan.com which specializes in crafting a Plan B to protect your freedom and wealth. Enjoy!] |
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January 29, 2021Bahia Beach, Puerto Rico It was the summer of 2004. I remember hearing on TV that the Libertarian Party’s national convention was starting in Atlanta. I immediately hopped in the car, hoping to find some sympathetic minds. And at the convention I did meet some wonderful, freedom-minded people. But the event was an unproductive circus, something like a cross between a high school pep rally and a Star Trek convention. People in costume ran up and down the aisles chanting for their favorite candidate and getting into impromptu debates about the Constitution and Ayn Rand. As nice and intelligent as everyone was, it felt like a giant freedom pity party. I didn’t just want to complain. I wanted to fix it. I wanted to do something about it. And solutions were sorely lacking. So I started educating myself more. I dove into the federal balance sheet. I learned about the petrodollar and the debt. That led me to discovering the complete scam of central banking, fiat currency, and the fractional reserve system. I realized that the political and banking elite have given us war, instability, and epic financial crises. They’ve turned Western civilization into a giant police state. And they’ve managed to brainwash the great masses so effectively that the people are crying out for more. They rigged the system. I wanted out of the system. So after this emotional, gut-wrenching awakening, I spent years traveling to more than 100 countries looking for freedom and opportunity. Eventually I learned that education, prudent planning, and global thinking can rebuild much of our stolen liberty. Yes, things are crazy. Freedom is in decline. Governments are bankrupt. Central banks are borderline insolvent. The financial system is in precarious condition barely held together by a patchwork of negative interest rates, currency manipulation, and misguided confidence. We award our most esteemed prizes for intellectual achievement to phony scientists who tell us to spend our way into prosperity and borrow our way out of debt. We give absolute power to control the money supply (and hence manipulate the price of nearly everything) to unelected bureaucrats who have a track record of failure. Yet, we call ourselves ‘free’. It’s complete madness. And it gets crazier with each passing month. Take an honest look at your life… Do you feel free right now? Many of you would probably say ‘no’ due to the crazy lockdowns that are happening around the world. Nothing is more important than your freedom, and tomorrow I’m going to share with you how you can protect it. To your freedom and prosperity, |
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| Simon BlackFounder, SovereignMan.com |
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Are You Really Free?
Posted by M. C. on January 29, 2021
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Libertarian Party, Vaccine Police State | Leave a Comment »
NFL QB Aaron Rodgers: We can’t rely on government to help small businesses
Posted by M. C. on January 29, 2021
NFL Quarterback Aaron Rodgers sums it up perfectly: we can’t rely on government to help small businesses. People helping people is the way to go. Dennis Prager puts it another way: “The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.” Every society in history has shown us that, as government grows, human freedom and happiness shrinks. Can we get back to the principles of liberty and individual responsibility?
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Aaron Rodgers, small business | Leave a Comment »
Are you in control of your own destiny… or is someone else?
Posted by M. C. on January 29, 2021
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[Editor’s Note: As part of our solution oriented approach to taking your power back, we’ll be running a short series of articles from Simon Black. He’s the Founder of SovereignMan.com which specializes in crafting a Plan B to protect your freedom and wealth. You will probably recognize the name and writing style, as we routinely republish his articles on The Daily Bell. Enjoy!] January 28, 2021Bahia Beach, Puerto Rico I clearly remember the moment when General Colin Powell, then US Secretary of State and the most credible person in George W. Bush’s cabinet made the case for war in Iraq. It was February 5, 2003. I was a young military intelligence officer at the time, watching from a makeshift army base in Kuwait not far from the Iraq border. Back then I was a true believer, trusting that the government was a force for good, “making the world safe for democracy. . .” But that night, it all changed for me. Powell told the world unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, an assertion that history has proven categorically wrong. Back then, within the intelligence community, many people already knew the appalling truth. So when General Powell spoke to the world, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. That night it became clear to me that the government was lying, and that the whole case for war was being fabricated. It was crushing, like finding out everything I’d been told throughout my life was total bullshit. So for the first time, I broke out of the spell and began questioning. Everything. I started learning about the extraordinary political power of the military industrial complex that President Eisenhower had warned about decades earlier. (Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the European theater during World War II, was no pacifist. So for him to warn about unchecked power and ambition in that arena was significant.) My reading led me to the fraudulent “reasons” for many previous wars… going as far back as the Mexican War in 1845, one deeply criticized by Abraham Lincoln himself. That led me to the Constitution, to which all military officers swear an oath to support and defend… … and it surely didn’t seem like we were supporting or defending the Constitution by waging an ill-conceived, illegal war. I couldn’t talk to my professional colleagues. Everyone was so gung-ho, I felt like an outcast. When I returned home, instead of relief, I felt alarmed.. While I was away the country had noticeably turned into a police state. Yet people seemed oblivious to the change, drinking in the propaganda like a spiked punch bowl. All the loud, bombastic nonsense and pledges of allegiance were merely illusions masking modern day serfdom. The media was spoon-feeding an official narrative to the public. Dissent from that official narrative, even questioning the war at all, branded you a conspiracy theorist. You were “harming” America with your desire for facts and answers and truth. Sound familiar? Never has it been more important to question everything. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s continuation of this story to learn how you can regain your freedom… To your freedom and prosperity,  Simon Black Founder, SovereignMan.com |
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: destiny, General Colin Powell | Leave a Comment »
Biden issues executive order to abolish women’s sports – Welcome to Daily Liberty News
Posted by M. C. on January 29, 2021
This isn’t unusual. The Matildas, the Australian women’s national team, lost 7-0 to the Newcastle FC youth team. Yep, the boys again.
https://dailylibertynews.com/biden-issues-executive-order-to-abolish-womens-sports/
By Tim Worstall, special to Daily Liberty News
Biden issues executive order to abolish women’s sports
By Tim Worstall, special to Daily Liberty News
Well, that was quick, Sleepy Joe’s first major error came the afternoon of the inauguration.
Of course, the leftists are claiming it as a victory for justice, righteousness and good but it’s still a mistake.
Joe’s made it illegal to discriminate against trans folks in sports. Or, the other way of saying the same thing, he’s abolished women’s sports.
Before you change something you’ve got to know why it was like that in the first place.
There’s an old logical idea called Chesterton’s Fence. You might see a fence out there in the wilds and think, hmm, no reason for this. We’ll tear it down.
But to know that there is no reason you’ve got to work out why was the fence put there in the first place?
Hey, maybe those Canadians do invade once a century? Or the cicadas rise up once every 17 years. Only if you can know the reason for the building of the thing can you conclude that it no longer works.
So, why do we have rules about women’s sport? Because without them there would be no women’s sports.
Flo-Jo, Florence Joyner Griffiths, still holds the 100 meters world record for women. A time of 10.49 in 1988. Sure, she died 10 years later some say as a result of all the steroids she’d taken to make that time.
Quaron Adams just did the 100 metres in 10.49 in a track meet. For high schools. He’s a freshman.
The all time drug fuelled world record for women is what 14 year old boys do in state track meets.
The US National Women’s Soccer Team is world conquering. Four World Cups and four Olympic gold medals. They lost to the FC Dallas under 15s boys team. 5-2 was the score which in soccer is a wide margin, that’s a beating.
The US team receiving their champion medals in 2019. Image credit: Howcheng.
This isn’t unusual. The Matildas, the Australian women’s national team, lost 7-0 to the Newcastle FC youth team. Yep, the boys again.
This is why we have that division of sports into male and female versions. It’s not what is in the head, nor the social construct of gender. Just going through male puberty produces greater speed and more muscle mass.
OK, sure, we’ve all met noodle-armed soy-boys who struggle to raise a fuzzy beard because they’ve ordered too many soy lattes at Starbucks. But on average and across those who play sports — men will beat women and the elite men will always beat the elite women.
So, we cut the game in half – women play women, men do men. Because that’s the only way we’re going to see women on that winner’s podium.
What now happens when we insist the trans can play sports with their opposite gender (let’s be honest here)?
If it’s trans men playing football they’re gonna get smeared. But that’s their lookout, the problem is only to themselves. But once trans women play biological women we have that problem.
The problem of why we have women’s sports in the first place. Those genetics, that testosterone, don’t play nice.
Economists like to talk about different types of discrimination. Taste where it’s “I ain’t hiring no women!” and rational discrimination “I’ll look among the men for that 300 pound linebacker I need”.
Or as PJ O’Rourke put it, men and women differ in interesting ways which are important when making babies and not when trading bonds or making dinner.
The trick is to work out which is the making babies rational discrimination — and not the doing dinner one.
After all, why or how trans doesn’t matter.
Well, OK, it matters to those folks but not as a moral issue. Their lives, they get to live them. All anyone can ask of liberty is that we all get to do just that.
The limit on this freedom is when what I do stops someone else from having that same liberty.
At that point there sure do have to be limits on what I can do.
That is, at times, we must discriminate.
Sometimes about race, we go looking for sickle cell anaemia among people with West African ancestors, Tay Sachs among European Jews and cystic fibrosis among Western Europeans.
That’s just where those things are likely to happen so that’s where we look.
Sometimes about gender, we test biological women for cervical cancer and men for prostate.
We don’t test or discriminate on either of those grounds about bond trading or dinner making and we shouldn’t.
The same is true of trans.
Near all of the time we should not select or differentiate on this basis of gender but sometimes not only should we, we must. Because parts of the world just won’t work if we don’t, that’s why.
As Flo-Jo and Quaron prove we’ve got to discriminate between – not against, but between – those who have been through male puberty and those who have not in sports.
Otherwise we’re just not going to have women’s sports.
So, what is it that Sleepy Joe did on returning from swearing on that big, thick, Bible? Made his first major error. Because he did this the wrong way around.
The Executive Order is to make it illegal to discriminate between trans and biological gender in school and college sports. But it leaves open all those other areas of life where we shouldn’t discriminate.
Yep, the progressives’ big move on the vital issue of the day gets it the wrong way around.
They make it illegal to discriminate where we must and fail to stop it where we shouldn’t.
Sorta shows us what’s wrong with progressive politics, doesn’t it? That every mainstream journalist in the country is applauding it shows us what’s wrong there.
When the liberals do decide to do something they do exactly the wrong thing. We have to discriminate in women’s sports so that there is actually a thing called women’s sports.
Federal law now makes what we must do illegal.
It’s not gonna be a fun four year ride, is it?
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: executive order, Matildas, Progressives, transgender, women’s sports | Leave a Comment »
MoA – More Cyber Crimes, Attributed To Russia, Are Shown To Have Come From Elsewhere
Posted by M. C. on January 29, 2021
It is far more likely, as Whitney Webb finds, that Israel was behind it:
Earlier today police in Europe took down the Emotet bot-network:
First discovered as a fairly run-of-the-mill banking trojan back in 2014, Emotet evolved over the years into one of the most professional and resilient cyber crime services in the world, and became a “go-to” solution for cyber criminals.
Its infrastructure acted as a mechanism to gain access to target systems, which was done via an automated spam email process that delivered Emotet malware to its victims via malicious attachments, often shipping notices, invoices and, since last spring, Covid-19 information or offers. If opened, victims would be promoted to enable macros that allowed malicious code to run and instal Emotet.
This done, Emotet’s operators then sold access on to other cyber criminal groups as a means to infiltrate their victims, steal data, and drop malware and ransomware. The operators of TrickBot and Ryuk were among the many users of Emotet.
Up to a quarter of all recent run of the mill cyber-crime was done through the Emotet network. Closing it down is a great success.
Wikipedia falsely claimed that Emotet was based in Russia:
Emotet is a malware strain and a cybercrime operation based in Russia.[1] The malware, also known as Geodo and Mealybug, was first detected in 2014[2] and remains active, deemed one of the most prevalent threats of 2019.[3]
However the Hindu report linked as source to the Russia claim under [1] only says:
The malware is said to be operated from Russia, and its operator is nicknamed Ivan by cyber security researchers.
“Is said to be operated from Russia” is quite a weak formulation and should not be used as source for attribution claims. It is also definitely false.
The operating center of Emotet was found in the Ukraine. Today the Ukrainian national police took control of it during a raid (video). The police found dozens of computers, some hundred hard drives, about 50 kilogram of gold bars (current price ~$60,000/kg) and large amounts of money in multiple currencies.
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Since the 2016 publishing of internal emails of the DNC and the Clinton campaign attribution of computer intrusions to Russia has become a standard propaganda feature. But in no case was there shown evidence which proved that Russia was responsible for a hack.
The recently discovered deep intrusion into U.S. companies and government networks used a manipulated version of the SolarWinds Orion network management software. The Washington borg immediately attributed the hack to Russia. Then President Trump attributed it to China. But none of those claims were backed up by facts or known evidence.
The hack was extremely complex, well managed and resourced, and likely required insider knowledge. To this IT professional it ‘felt’ neither Russian nor Chinese. It is far more likely, as Whitney Webb finds, that Israel was behind it:
The implanted code used to execute the hack was directly injected into the source code of SolarWinds Orion. Then, the modified and bugged version of the software was “compiled, signed and delivered through the existing software patch release management system,” per reports. This has led US investigators and observers to conclude that the perpetrators had direct access to SolarWinds code as they had “a high degree of familiarity with the software.” While the way the attackers gained access to Orion’s code base has yet to be determined, one possibility being pursued by investigators is that the attackers were working with employee(s) of a SolarWinds contractor or subsidiary.
…
Though some contractors and subsidiaries of SolarWinds are now being investigated, one that has yet to be investigated, but should be, is Samanage. Samanage, acquired by SolarWinds in 2019, not only gained automatic access to Orion just as the malicious code was first inserted, but it has deep ties to Israeli intelligence and a web of venture-capital firms associated with numerous Israeli espionage scandals that have targeted the US government.
…
Samanage offers what it describes as “an IT Service Desk solution.” It was acquired by SolarWinds so Samanage’s products could be added to SolarWinds’ IT Operations Management portfolio. Though US reporting and SolarWinds press releases state that Samanage is based in Cary, North Carolina, implying that it is an American company, Samanage is actually an Israeli firm. It was founded in 2007 by Doron Gordon, who previously worked for several years at MAMRAM, the Israeli military’s central computing unit.
…
Several months after the acquisition was announced, in November 2019, Samanage, renamed SolarWinds Service Desk, became listed as a standard feature of SolarWinds Orion software, whereas the integration of Samanage and Orion had previously been optional since the acquisition’s announcement in April of that year. This means that complete integration was likely made standard in either October or November. It has since been reported that the perpetrators of the recent hack gained access to the networks of US federal agencies and major corporations at around the same time. Samanage’s automatic integration into Orion was a major modification made to the now-compromised software during that period.
The U.S. National Security Agency has ways and means to find out who was behind the SolarWinds hack. But if Israel is the real culprit no one will be allowed to say so publicly. Some high ranging U.-S. general or official will fly to Israel and read his counterpart the riot act. Israel will ignore it just as it has done every time when it was caught spying on the U.S. government.
With more then half of Washington’s politicians in its pockets it has no reason to fear any consequences.
Posted by b
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Cyber Crimes, Emotet, Israel, Russia, Samanage, SolarWinds | Leave a Comment »
In America Truth Is the Hardest Thing to Find – PaulCraigRoberts.org
Posted by M. C. on January 29, 2021
Of course, it is part of the China demonization to blame it on China. The facts seem to be different and unsupportive of the narrative. There is abundant evidence that Dr. Fauci of the National Institutes of Health funded gain-of-function research of the Coronavirus at the Wuhan laboratory in China This is not conspiracy theory. This is data of record.
Research on making viruses more infectious borders on biowarfare, an illegal enterprise. In order to avoid violating the biowarfare convention, did Fauci shift the research to China? Did the virus escape the Wuhan lab or was the US financing of the research in China a set-up so that when the virus was released in order to gain more control over populations China would take the blame? Whenever there are no proper investigations, conspiracy theories emerge.
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2021/01/28/in-america-truth-is-the-hardest-thing-to-find/
Paul Craig Roberts
The FBI and a grandstanding acting US attorney, Michael Sherwin, are after Trump supporters. The FBI has arrested 150 people for their alleged role in the alleged “Capitol riot.” The fact that there was no Capitol riot doesn’t matter. No facts matter. This is a shut-down-all-opposition-to-The Establishment operation. Sherwin is doing his best to concoct a “conspiracy” case against the arrested, as those arrested are not guilty of anything real. No one broke into the Capitol. A few were allowed in by the Capitol police. Videos show the police opening the doors, people entering in single file, walking around, and exiting. One video shows a black police officer provoking people up the stairs where a few did selfies sitting in Nancy Pelosi’s chair. That was the extent of the “storming of the capitol.” But law enforcement (sic) officials say their investigation of the Trump conspirators is one of the most expansive in the FBI’s history, comparable to the Oklahoma City bombing and the Boston Marathon bombing, two suspected false flag operations.
Videos also show that Antifa personnel and a CNN journalist were among those the police let into the Capitol. They are celebrating that they had succeeded in getting some Trumpers inside and videotaping it as evidence that the Capitol was stormed. I posted these videos or links to them previously.
In other words, nothing happened at the Capitol except a black police officer for unknown reasons shot and killed a woman who was a veteran and who was not threatening the black policeman. The other four reported deaths seem unrelated to the alleged “deadly violent assault on the Capitol.” Three of the four, a woman and two men, died from “medical energencies.” In a crowd as large as the Trump supporters, three natural deaths from heart attacks, especially as many protestors of the stolen election were from older generations, would not be unusual. I have seen no report connecting the reported deaths to being trampled in a riot or hit with tear gas canisters, bricks, or other objects associated with a riot. One policeman is reported to have been hit in the head with a fire extinguisher, but details have been spotty. Of course, details do not matter to the presstitutes, and the narrative can survive without them.
The presstitutes present the reported deaths as if they are victims of Trumpers urged on by Trump. But the alleged riot occurred before Trump finished his speech, which was delivered some distance away from the Capitol. This raises questions about who the people at the Capitol were. If they were Trumpers, you would think they would be at Trump’s speech.
As for the alleged pipe bombs, if they exist and are not another invention to enhance the story against Trumpers, why the assumption that those Americans rallying for Trump placed them? How would they have gained access to DNC and RNC offices. If any pipe bombs, real or fake, existed, how do we know that Antifa or the FBI didn’t place them as enhancements to the narrative?
We cannot know what really happened, because the narrative is fixed as a weapon against Trump and his voters.
Shift gears now. Do you remember the violent riots, billion dollar looting and destruction of business districts in Minneapolis, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, New York and many other cities? Clearly these violent riots were an organized conspiracy. There is no FBI and US Attorney investigation of these real riots, real destruction, and real murders. This wasn’t a make-believe “Trump insurrection.” It was real. And there is no FBI investigation. No US attorney putting together a conspiracy charge.
What else do you need to know? The FBI is after ordinary, good, decent, Americans who can be accused of anything and the presstitutes will report it as fact. The FBI has no interest in real riots, real property damage, real murder. The FBI and the acting US attorney Sherwin are not bringing charges against Antifa and Black Lives Matter. They are bringing charges against Trump Americans and against the Proud Boys.
Reuters reports that Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys and clearly not a white supremacist, is an undercover police informer. This might or might not be true. There is no doubt that the Proud Boys are infiltrated by police agencies. We can’t even know that the organization wasn’t formed by FBI undercover agents. On the other hand, Tarrio might simply be being set-up by the FBI so that he is removed from the leadership. As the Proud Boys are demonized by the pressitutes and Democrats as “an extremist organization,” having a Hispanic at the head doesn’t fit The Establishment Narrative. The Establishment needs to have Tarrio removed and a white male put in his place. As all white people are “systemic racists,” once the Proud Boys are led by a white male, it is transformed into an “extremist white supremacist organization” and is guilty of everything by definition.
Shift gears to Covid. The entire world is involved in lockdowns, mandatory wearing of ineffective masks, rushed vaccination with an untested vaccine. The PCR Covid test has been disavowed by its creator as a misleading test for Covid. All deaths from other causes are reported as Covid deaths. Masses of people have lost their jobs from lockdowns and cannot service their debt. Seasonal flu cases are no longer reported and are conflated with Covid cases. In all of this confusion, the question of where did Covid come from has gone unexamined.
Of course, it is part of the China demonization to blame it on China. The facts seem to be different and unsupportive of the narrative. There is abundant evidence that Dr. Fauci of the National Institutes of Health funded gain-of-function research of the Coronavirus at the Wuhan laboratory in China This is not conspiracy theory. This is data of record.
Gain-of-function research has to do with making a virus easier to spread. Why was this research being done? The Establishment’s answer is that the research is necessary in order to gain scientific insight into how to prepare for a deadly pandemic. First you create a highly infectious pathogen and then you seek knowledge of how to devise a vaccine that protects against it.
Research on making viruses more infectious borders on biowarfare, an illegal enterprise. In order to avoid violating the biowarfare convention, did Fauci shift the research to China? Did the virus escape the Wuhan lab or was the US financing of the research in China a set-up so that when the virus was released in order to gain more control over populations China would take the blame? Whenever there are no proper investigations, conspiracy theories emerge.
All of this might sound far-fetched, and I agree. But we are surrounded by conspiracy theories. Which are false and which are true? We have the 9/11 conspiracy that a man hiding in a cave in Afghanistan destroyed the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon. The conspiracy against Saddam Hussein of “weapons of mass destruction.” The conspiracy against Assad of “Assad’s use of chemical weapons.” The conspiracy against Russia of “Russian invasions” and “interfering in US elections.” We have the “Russiagate” conspiracy against Trump. And now the “violent storming of the Capitol” conspiracy.
The reason that democracies fail is that disinformation causes deadly attacks on democracy and civil liberty to go unrecognized by the people.
What does it take to get people to demand that their government give equal investigation to real Antifa and BLM riots as to a pretend “storming of the Capitol” by Trump supporters disturbed by what they regard as a stolen election?
What does it take to get people to demand to know why the US National Institutes of Health financed the research that made Covid infectious and easy to spread?
Why don’t we know how Covid came to be?
Isn’t it a conspiracy that the media speak with one voice–the voice of The Establishment? Why are explanations controlled and alternative explanations censored? Clearly, this is conspiracy.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Antifa, Biowarfare, CNN, conspiracy, FBI, Gain-of-function, Proud Boys, truth | Leave a Comment »
Erie Times E-Edition Article-How to end threat of future pandemics in America by 2030
Posted by M. C. on January 29, 2021
Notice how the article never mentions specifics on how this will be done except that Ridge and Lieberman want ALOT more of YOUR money.
Tom Ridge-the guy that bought a teachers union, started the DHS that took reading your email, following your internet searches and listening to your phones to a higher level. Remember when having a Bob Barr bumper sticker could tag you as an “extremist”?
Do you really want him developing new ways to: control your life, your choices and stick stuff in your arm?
https://erietimes-pa-app.newsmemory.com/?publink=03454c698
America has a proud history of taking on grand technological challenges in times of need. The Manhattan Project to split the atom. The Interstate Highway System to connect the entire nation, and the Apollo Program to go to the moon. They share similarities in scale, ambition and necessity, and demonstrate our ability to engage in large-scale projects using cutting-edge technology to meet national needs.
America’s Apollo Program succeeded in its first moonshot less than a decade after President John Kennedy challenged the country to make it happen.
The audacity of that goal inspires us to issue a similar challenge: To end the threat of debilitating and deadly pandemics.
The Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, which we have co-chaired for the past six years, has re-released a report called ‘The Apollo Program for Biodefense: Winning the Race Against Biological Threats.’ If the U.S. government acts now, our recommendations could effectively end the era of pandemic threats before the next decade begins and eliminate U.S. vulnerabilities to biological attacks.
The COVID-19 pandemic has killed more than 2.1 million people around the world, ravaged health systems and devastated economies. It also has exposed destabilizing divisions within and among countries and revealed domestic and global weaknesses in biodefense.
Catastrophic infectious disease outbreaks occur regularly throughout history and experts agree that they will occur with greater frequency because of modern travel and international commerce. We spend billions preparing for other threats to American lives, such as war, but little to prevent infectious diseases, which tragically kill more people. Spending on biological risk reduction would be far less than the significant cost of continuing to let future pandemics harm our people and weaken our nation again.
We warned in 2015 that the U.S. was inadequately prepared for biological threats in our baseline report, ‘A National Blueprint for Biodefense: Leadership and Major Reform Needed to Optimize Efforts.’ More than five years later, COVID-19 has validated our original findings. The pandemic exposed tremendous national vulnerabilities and weaknesses in America’s ability to defend itself against, and respond to, biological threats.
But we have seen that new technologies hold great promise. Within weeks of recognizing the existence of the novel coronavirus, scientists mapped its entire genome and developed and produced vaccines faster than ever before. They accomplished these previously unimaginable feats because of forward-looking programs such as the Human Genome Project.
But we desperately need new strategies, countermeasures and defenses. Through an Apollo Program for Biodefense, we can make invisible biological enemies visible and take pandemic threats off the table by 2030. The Apollo Program for Biodefense could achieve multiple groundbreaking technological goals in support of a single, overarching mission: to gain technological superiority over biological threats. We envision a time when people look back and wonder how we ever let infectious diseases wreak such havoc on society and how we tolerated seasonal influenza, let alone COVID-19 and biological attacks.
To achieve the results sought by The Apollo Program for Biodefense, the commission urges the Biden administration and Congress to include funds for this program as part of a unified biodefense budget and in the President’s Budget Request; appropriate long-term, multi-year funding for the program; and fully implement the remaining recommendations we laid out in our 2015 National Blueprint for Biodefense.
With ambitious technological goals in mind, the commission’s recommended program could deploy medical countermeasures within days or even in advance of a biological event, detect a novel biological threat at the first human cluster, and enable the public to gather in spaces built to prevent pathogen transmission.
Now is the time to advance technological solutions to the horrific problems COVID-19 has caused. When the original Apollo Program began, much of the know-how needed to get to the Moon did not exist. By contrast, today we have many of the scientific capabilities we need to achieve the mission of The Apollo Program for Biodefense. Now we must bring them together to achieve our next great national goal – freedom from fear of infectious disease.
Former U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge, the first U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, co-chair the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Commission on Biodefense, future pandemics, Joe Lieberman, Tom Ridge | Leave a Comment »
Clown World Finance | Mises Institute
Posted by M. C. on January 29, 2021
In a sane market, where market fundamentals actually determine prices, this would not have happened. Short selling would simply be a way of quickly and efficiently determining the market price of stocks, and there would be no special profit to be had from this practice, beyond the arbitrage gain (in the case that the short sellers were correct). Similarly, investors angry at the short sellers could not have driven stock prices sky-high in defiance of reality. Both practices are only possible in a market flooded with ever-increasing amounts of new money freshly printed by the Federal Reserve.
https://mises.org/power-market/clown-world-finance
The recent blowup of GameStop shares has revealed, if anyone was still doubting, that the center of clown world is not Washington, DC, nor Silicon Valley—but Wall Street. To be clear, this is not meant to refer to the gallant band of redditors from r/wallstreetbets—those few, those happy few, that band of brothers who, as of this writing, may very well be poised to force several hedge funds into bankruptcy. Rather, the clowns are those hedge funds and all those other institutional investors who have been propped up by central bank intervention for decades while congratulating themselves that their seven-figure earnings were all due to their own financial brilliance.
What Happened?
The story of what happened (so far) is briefly told. It was revealed that GameStop was one of the most shorted shares in Wall Street, with the fund Melvin Capital taking the lead in shorting it. While this may or may not be a sound position based on market fundamentals—I have not investigated and think it’s a mug’s game to waste time on fundamentals these days—people did not take kindly to the revelation. Specifically, redditors at the subreddit Wallstreetbets saw that the short sellers were vulnerable, and they organized a campaign to drive them into the ground. Suddenly, retail investors flooded the market, bought up shares and drove GameStop shares, which had been trading below $20, into the stratosphere, topping $365 Wednesday morning (January 27). Melvin Capital suffered huge losses, up to 30 percent, and had to be saved by an infusion of $2.75 billion Tuesday afternoon.
That’s Not the Whole Story, Though…
In a sane market, where market fundamentals actually determine prices, this would not have happened. Short selling would simply be a way of quickly and efficiently determining the market price of stocks, and there would be no special profit to be had from this practice, beyond the arbitrage gain (in the case that the short sellers were correct). Similarly, investors angry at the short sellers could not have driven stock prices sky-high in defiance of reality. Both practices are only possible in a market flooded with ever-increasing amounts of new money freshly printed by the Federal Reserve.
For decades the central banks of the world—chief among them the US Federal Reserve—have had really only one mission: interest rates cannot ever be allowed to rise and everything must be done to prevent even the mildest of corrections in financial markets. They were able to get away with it clandestinely, so to speak—who now remembers the good ol’ days of the Greenspan put?—but after the financial crisis of ‘08 they had to come out into the open. Interest rates were forced lower and lower and markets were flooded with a tsunami of credit. Stocks and bonds responded, as could be expected, by reaching new all-time highs year after year. Of course, there were always economists ready with ever more whacky theories as to why this bare-faced inflationism was really sound policy dictated by the science of modern economics, but the result for anyone to see is financial markets that are completely divorced from reality and whose only purpose seems to be securing cheap funding for the US government and enormous earnings for the financial elites.
Then, of course, came corona, and the government, in its wisdom, chose to destroy the economy. To placate the plebs they offered them a few handouts—first $1,200, then $600—all financed by that incredible machine, the central bank printing press. According to Keynesian orthodoxy, this should have stimulated the economy to no end, ensuring a rapid recovery. Unfortunately, since most of the world was shut down, there were precious few opportunities for people to actually spend their money, and since the man in the street is wiser than most government-employed economists, he probably understood that an unprecedented shutdown of all society is not the best time to engage in a bonanza of consumer spending. So, he saved and invested his money, which thanks to the advances in modern technology he could now do directly, without going through savings banks or brokers.
Yet inflation is still inflation, even if it does not show up in government statistics, and the infusion of such an ocean of liquidity naturally drove stocks, bonds, bitcoin, and now GameStop sky-high. The beneficiaries this time were not the banks or Wall Street investors, however, but the many retail investors who now ganged up on Melvin Capital and the other “sharks” of Wall Street. It is all animal spirits, or rather, it is driven by the desire of those who feel themselves shortchanged to see the high lords of finance come crashing down. This latest round of inflation gave them the means to bring about just that.
Is This the End?
It’s impossible to tell what will happen next. Maybe the flood of liquidity is spent and Wall Street will weather the storm; maybe the Fed will again step in with new credit lines to save them, which seems most likely—again, the prime directive of the Fed has always been to save the big shots in finance. It is possible that financial markets are now so broken, central bank officials so worried about the effects of their money printing, that nothing will be done and we are now seeing the beginning of the end of the Big Bubble of 1980–2020. However, if recent history and mainstream economic orthodoxy are any guide, the Fed will stop at literally nothing to “save” the markets.
As Zero Hedge remarked on Twitter, “What is remarkable is how many people are “surprised” by what is going on in the “market” You throw $20 trillion stimulus at it, you nationalize the bond market, you break all links between price and fundamentals…what do you think happens.” Indeed. It would be wholly fitting in clown world, however, if the Great Stock Market Crash of 2021 were begun by day-trading teenagers, flush with helicopter money (thanks, Uncle Milty!) and with nothing else to do, forming a mob on reddit in order to break a hedge fund.
Be seeing you
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Central Banks, GameStop, Interest rates, Melvin Capital, short sell, US Federal Reserve | Leave a Comment »
