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The Seven-Step Path from Pandemic to Totalitarianism – OffGuardian

Posted by M. C. on July 30, 2020

https://off-guardian.org/2020/04/23/the-seven-step-path-from-pandemic-to-totalitarianism/

There are just seven steps from pandemic declaration to permanent totalitarianism – and many jurisdictions are about to start Step 5

Rosemary Frei

As if it was planned in advance, billions of people around the globe are being forced step by rapid step into a radically different way of life, one that involves far less personal, physical and financial freedom and agency.

Here is the template for rolling this out.

Step 1

A new virus starts to spread around the world. The World Health Organization (WHO) declares a pandemic.

International agencies, public-health officials, politicians, media and other influential voices fan fear by focusing almost exclusively on the contagiousness of the virus and the rising numbers of cases, and by characterizing the virus as extremely dangerous.

Within a few days governments at national and local levels also declare states of emergency. At lightning speed they impose lock-down measures that confine most people to their homes – starting with closing schools – and shut down much of the global economy. World markets implode.

The stunned, fearful and credulous public – convinced over the previous few years that their bodies do not have the natural ability to react to pathogens by producing antibodies that confer long-lasting immunity – largely complies willingly.

The first weekly virtual class on local emergency and crisis responses to COVID19 is held for mayors and other city officials around the world. Coordinated by a handful of American organizations in the academic, medical, financial, political and transportation spheres, the classes feature guests ranging from Barack Obama to Bill Gates.

Step 2

National, state/provincial and municipal leaders, as well as public-health officials, start daily press briefings. They use them to pump out frightening statistics and modelling asserting the virus has the potential to kill many millions.

Most of this information is hard to decipher and sheds little real light on the natural course of the virus’s spread through each geographic area.

Officials and media downplay or distort inconveniently low death tolls from the virus and instead focus on alarming statistics produced by compliant academics, social-media influencers and high-profile organizations.

The main message is that this is a war and many lives are at stake unless virtually everybody stays at home. Mainstream media amplify the trope that the world is at the mercy of the virus.

Simultaneously, central banks and governments hand out massive amounts of cash largely to benefit the big banks. And they bring in giant private-sector financial firms to manage the process despite these global companies’ very poor track record in the 2008-2009 crash. Governments also rapidly start to create trillions of pounds’ worth of programs that include compensating businesses and workers for their shutdown-related losses.

Step 3

There is a concerted effort by all levels of government and public health to very rapidly ramp up testing for viral RNA, along with production of personal protective equipment.

They push aside the need for regulation, including quality standards and independent verification of tests’ rates of accuracy, by insisting that fast approval and roll-out are imperative for saving lives.

Models are released that predict snowballing of numbers of cases, hospitalizations and deaths even under best-case scenarios.

At about the same time, public-health officials significantly loosen the criteria for viral infections, outbreaks and deaths, particularly in the oldest members of society. That increases the numbers of cases and deaths ascribed to the new pathogen.

The media continue to clamour for more testing and for severe punishment of people who aren’t completely compliant with the lock-down measures.

As a result, there’s little backlash as police and military with sweeping new powers enforce these measures and give stiff penalties or even jail terms to those who disobey orders. States also monitor with impunity massive numbers of people’s movements via their cellphones.

Vast human resources are focused on tracking down people who have had contact with a virus-positive individual and confining them to their homes. Thus the portion of the public exposed to the virus remains relatively small.

It also contributes to social isolation. Among many effects, this enables those in control to even further erase individual and collective choices, voices and power.

Step 4

When the numbers of cases and deaths start to plateau, local officials claim it’s too early to tell whether the virus has finished passing through their population and therefore, restrictive measures must continue.

An alternative narrative is that if such measures aren’t kept in place there will be a resurgence of cases and deaths. Yet another is that the continuing climb in elderly persons’ deaths means all bets are off for the time being.

They admit that initial models incorrectly predicted there would be a tsunami of cases, ICU admissions and deaths. However, they assert more time is needed before it can be determined whether it’s safe to loosen some of the restrictions and let children return to school or adults go back to work.

Officials do not try to calculate the overall skyrocketing cost to their populations and economies of the shut-downs and other measures against, nor do they discuss what cost level may be too high.

They and powerful media organizations also push for the massive virus-testing over-capacity to be used to surveil the general population for viral RNA in their bodies. At the same time, the roll-out begins of widespread blood testing for antibodies to the virus.

Meanwhile, new data are published showing the virus has a high capacity to mutate. Scientists and officials interpret this as meaning a larger medical arsenal will be needed to combat it.

Step 5

About two or three weeks later, the dramatic increase in testing for viral RNA produces the desired goal of a significant upsurge in the number of people found positive for the virus.

Public-health officials add jet fuel to the surge by adding to their case and death tallies the large number of people who are only suspected – and not lab-test-confirmed – to have had an infection. Politicians and public-health officials tell the populace this means they cannot return to their jobs or other activities outside the home for the time being.

Governments work with public-health agencies, academics, industry, the WHO and other organizations to start to design and implement immunity-passport systems for using the results of the widespread antibody testing to determine who can be released from the lock-downs. This is one of many goals of the seven steps.

Meanwhile, government leaders continue to highlight the importance of vaccines for besting the virus.

Step 6

Large-scale human testing of many different types of antivirals and vaccines begins, thanks to a concerted push from the WHO, Bill Gates and his collaborators, pharmaceutical and biotech companies, governments and universities.

Large swaths of the population don’t have the antibodies to the virus because they’ve been kept from being exposed to it; they eagerly accept these medications even though they’ve been rushed to market with inadequate safety testing. They believe these medical products offer the only hope for escaping the virus’s clutches.

Step 7

Soon the new virus starts another cycle around the globe – just as influenza and other viruses have every year for millennia. Officials again fan the flames of fear by positing the potential for millions of deaths among people not yet protected from the virus.

They rapidly roll out virus and antibody testing again, while companies sell billions more doses of antivirals and booster vaccines.

Governments simultaneously cede control of all remaining public assets to global companies. This is because local and national governments’ tax bases were decimated during Step 1 and they’re virtually bankrupt from their unprecedented spending in the war against the virus in the other steps.

The overall result is complete medicalization of the response to the virus, which on a population level is no more harmful than influenza.

This is coupled with the creation of permanent totalitarianism controlled by global companies and a 24/7 invasive-surveillance police state supported by widespread blossoming of ‘smart’ technology.

The key players repeat the cycle of hysteria and massive administration of antivirals and booster shots every few months.

And they implement a variation of steps 1 to 7 when another new pathogen appears on the planet.

Sounds far-fetched? Unfortunately, it’s not.

With the arrival of COVID19 many countries quickly completed Steps 1, 2 and 3.

Step 4 is well under way in a large number of jurisdictions.

Step 5 is on track to start in early May.

Rosemary Frei has an MSc in molecular biology from a faculty of medicine and was a freelance medical writer and journalist for 22 years. She is now an independent investigative journalist in Toronto, Ontario. You can find her earlier article on the novel coronavirus for Off-Guardian here, watch and listen to an interview she gave on COVID19 and follow her on Twitter.

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Election Interference: Google Purges Breitbart from Search Results

Posted by M. C. on July 29, 2020

Tell me again why you aren’t using Firefox, Brave, DuckDuckGo, Startpage

Google Just Killed All Search Traffic to Breitbart for Joe Biden and Joe Biden-Related Searches

Google has stated its intention clearly: to make sure the 2016 election of President Trump was a “blip” in history. Sure enough, with less than five months before the election, Google is manipulating election-related search results.

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/07/28/election-interference-google-purges-breitbart-from-search-results/

by Allum Bokhari

A few days after the 2016 election, at an internal meeting later leaked to Breitbart News, top Google executives, including Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, and Kent Walker, lamented President Trump’s victory, comparing Trump voters to “extremists” and discussing their desire to make Trump’s election and the populist movement a “blip” in history.

True to their word, four years later, Google is deliberately working to interfere with the reelection of Trump in 2020.

There are several ways in which Google is interfering in the 2020 election, but this article will focus primarily on one of them: political search bias.

Google Has Been Purging Breitbart Content from Search Results Since the 2016 Election

Search visibility is a key industry measure of how findable a publisher’s content is in Google search. New data shows that Google has suppressed Breitbart’s search visibility by 99.7 percent since 2016.

On April 4, 2016, Breitbart ranked in the top ten search positions (i.e., on the first page of Google search results) for 355 key search terms; but now, as of July 20, 2020, Breitbart ranks in the top ten search positions for only one search term. And, on April 4, 2016, Breitbart ranked in the top 100 search positions for 16,820 key search terms; but now, as of July 20, 2020, Breitbart ranks in the top ten search positions for only 55 search terms.

Moreover, organic Google search traffic to Breitbart (measured by unique visitors) is down 63 percent when comparing the first half of 2016 with the first half of 2020.

The following chart shows the visibility of Breitbart content in the Google search engine since 2011. It shows that Google has nearly eliminated Breitbart content from its search results.

The SISTRIX Visibility Index ranks a website’s visibility in Google by looking at its ranking in a million search terms. 

A close-up of the visibility decline following Google’s May 2020 core update.

This foregoing graph also shows three major drops in Breitbart’s search visibility (these drops are highlighted by the bright red lines). The first drop took place shortly after (and inferentially in response to) the 2016 election. The second took place in July of 2019. The third took place in May of this year, after which (1) unless a user types “Breitbart” into the search bar (and even then), they are highly unlikely to get any Breitbart content search results, and (2) Breitbart search results for “Joe Biden” and other Biden-related search terms have gone to zero. Even if you specifically search for Breitbart News headlines, you are unlikely to find them in Google search.

Google Just Killed All Search Traffic to Breitbart for Joe Biden and Joe Biden-Related Searches

After Google’s May core search update on or about May 5, 2020, Google search impressions and search traffic to Breitbart for “Joe Biden” and other Biden-related search terms has gone to zero. Zero. The following graph clearly illustrates the foregoing.

On May 1, Google searches for “Joe Biden” generated approximately 30,000 impressions (views, used as a metric for advertisers) for Breitbart links. After May 5, both impressions and clicks went to zero. 

Breitbart News spoke to an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) expert, a 25-year industry veteran, whose job consists of analyzing traffic data from Google’s own website performance portal, Google Search Console.

The expert, who wished to remain anonymous, said he had never seen anything like this graph — and that it indicates highly probable manipulation on the part of Google.

“I’ve never experienced such a wholesale removal of rank and visibility on specific concepts on a site as I have seen being applied to Breitbart,” said the expert. “Removal is the key, not dropping in rank, which would be an organic devaluing. These ranks are just simply gone, overnight, while other topics have been untouched.”

“The sheer fact that there are thousands of pages of Breitbart content that reference Biden that were ranking before May 6, that now have no rank or impressions on search is a sign of manipulation, not algorithmic devaluing.”

 

A longer view: Google search traffic to Breitbart News from the search term “Joe Biden” from July 2019 to the present. A regular heartbeat followed by a flatline as the election grows closer.

The Percentage of Traffic to Breitbart from Google Search (9%) Is Just a Fraction of the Average Publisher’s (30-50%); Expert Believes Breitbart Being Blacklisted

Dr. Robert Epstein, a psychologist and former Hillary Clinton supporter who has spent the last half-decade studying the effects of search engine bias on voters, said he believes Breitbart News is currently on one of Google’s blacklists, a topic on which he has written extensively.

“For news websites large and small, Google — in combination with its YouTube offshoot — typically drives between 30 and 50 percent of the traffic to those sites,” Dr. Epstein told Breitbart News via email. “For the New York Times, the percentage is currently 39.3%. At the moment, Google is responsible for just 9 percent of Breitbart’s traffic, and YouTube is sending a negligible amount, if any.  Given the size of Breitbart’s audience, this suggests to me that Breitbart is listed on one or more of Google’s blacklists.”

“Those are the lists that Google denies having — even under oath in Congressional hearings — even though two of those blacklists were leaked from the company last year by whistleblower Zach Vorhies.”

“How many blacklists they actually maintain is unknown, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s a hundred or more,” continued Epstein.

Dr. Epstein recently told Breitbart News’s Alex Marlow that Google is likely to shift ten percent of voters away from Trump to fulfill its executives’ stated goal of avoiding a repeat of 2016.

The psychologist has previously explained how Google’s search bias can affect undecided voters by offering them selective information about political candidates. This is because voters are not inclined to suspect search results of bias in the same way that they might suspect a CNN or New York Times report to be biased.

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year, Epstein warned lawmakers that big tech could influence an extraordinary number of voters without any trace.

“In 2020 — if all these [big tech] companies are supporting the same candidate — there are 15 million votes on the line that can be shifted without people’s knowledge, and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace.”

In a comment to Breitbart News, a Google spokeswoman denied allegations of political bias.

“There is no validity whatsoever to these allegations of political bias,” said the spokeswoman. “Our systems do not take political ideology into account, and we go to extraordinary lengths to build our products for everyone in an apolitical way. Anyone can easily cherry-pick a range of conservative, progressive or non-political sites that have seen traffic changes over time. The improvements we make to Search undergo a rigorous testing process and are done to provide helpful information for the billions of queries we get every day.”

Google Search Rankings Suggest More Wholesale Suppression of Conservative Publishers

Breitbart News isn’t the only conservative news site that has an unusually low position in Google’s search rankings. Alexa data shows that the percentage of traffic to conservative websites that come from Google is far lower than that of corporate media sites.

Percentages of website traffic from Google, via Alexa web rankings. Red = media sources with conservative or libertarian-leaning editorial stances. Data is a six-month average as of July 7, 2020.

Eight of the ten lowest-ranked sites (Breitbart News, Fox News, The Daily Caller, The Blaze, Reason, The Federalist, The Daily Wire, the Washington Examiner) in the chart above are conservative.

Meanwhile, all ten of the top-ranked sites, with the arguable exception of heavy.com, are from the corporate, liberal-leaning, or leftist media. Far-left Vox.com is placed third.

The highest-ranking conservative-leaning news publishers — the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the British Daily Mail are all newspapers and part of the media establishment and are relatively centrist. Yet even they are far behind leftist outlets like Vox and the Guardian in Google traffic. The top online-only conservative outlets — Breitbart News, The Daily Caller, and The Blaze — are all near the bottom.

Last week, several conservatives on social media recently noticed that their articles were not appearing at all in Google search. Breitbart News was similarly affected. Google claimed to have investigated the issue, which the company has attributed to an error, and conservative journalists and websites have reported their search results returning. What last week’s incident shows is Google’s incredible power to control what people do and do not see with the flick of a switch.

But the data in this article shows that Google’s manipulation of search results, and its systematic undermining of conservative media, has been far more long-running and pervasive than this one incident.

Takeaways

Google has stated its intention clearly: to make sure the 2016 election of President Trump was a “blip” in history. Sure enough, with less than five months before the election, Google is manipulating election-related search results. The scope and audacity (and hubris) make any alleged foreign interference in the 2016 election pale by comparison. And, it will surely warrant an even greater post-election congressional scrutiny. It will greatly strengthen the contention of Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and of Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Kelly Loeffler (R-GA), that search result manipulation ought to be a major subject of the Department of Justice’s antitrust investigation into Google. Not surprisingly, when recently asked about political search bias, Vice President Pence told Breitbart News that “we’re going to watch it closely.”

Are you an insider at Google, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or any other company who wants to confidentially blow the whistle on wrongdoing or political bias? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at allumbokhari@protonmail.com. 

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. His book #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election is out in September. 

 

 

 

 

 

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Nancy Pelosi and Liz Cheney Unite Against Putting America First | The American Conservative

Posted by M. C. on July 29, 2020

This episode captures why the Washington establishment loathes President Trump. Hint: it has nothing to do with the smears accusing him of racism or Russian sympathies.

Trump is the only president to challenge the internationalist interventionist orthodoxy that’s ruled Washington unquestioned for the last 70 years.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/nancy-pelosi-and-liz-cheney-unite-against-america-first-foreign-policy/

Ending wars is the one truly heretical act in Washington.

WASHINGTON, DC – JULY 21: U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) speaks during a news conference with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and other Republican members of the House of Representatives at the Capitol on July 21, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

After President Trump stated his desire to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, Germany and South Korea, the bipartisan war party sprang into action.

Veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress approved a defense appropriations bill that authorizes $740 billion in military spending. Along with all the other dubious and downright awful provisions, the House’s version of the bill has included a measure designed to thwart the president from bringing troops home. House Democrats worked with Liz Cheney (R-WY) on an amendment putting several conditions on the administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, requiring the White House to certify at several stages that further reductions wouldn’t jeopardize counterterrorism or national security.

This episode captures why the Washington establishment loathes President Trump. Hint: it has nothing to do with the smears accusing him of racism or Russian sympathies.

Trump is the only president to challenge the internationalist interventionist orthodoxy that’s ruled Washington unquestioned for the last 70 years.

Let’s go back to 1949, to the creation of NATO and the initial deployment of troops to Europe.

Joe Stalin and world communism was on the march, we were told. Russia controlled half of Europe and would take the rest—along with Korea—unless we acted. President Truman demanded American boys be ready to fight Russia in Germany, Japan, Greece, Turkey, Korea, wherever.

But even in that climate of crisis, support for permanent war was not unanimous.

Senator William “Wild Bill” Langer (R-North Dakota), one of the eleven Republicans in opposition (along with just two Democrats) called NATO “a barren military alliance directed to plunge us deeply into the economic, military and political affairs of the other nations of Europe.”

We’re still plunging new depths, ever seeking new frontiers and new missions for the barren alliance.

When President Trump declared before the immobile faces of Mt. Rushmore, “A nation must care for its own citizens first. We must take care of America first,” he was channeling that original America Firster, Joe Kennedy.

The man who would father three senators and a president offered this advice in 1950 (none of his children took it): America needs “to get out of Korea” and “apply the same principle to Europe.” We must “conserve American lives for American ends, not waste them in the freezing hills of Korea or the battle-scarred plains of Western Germany.”

Or in the mountains of Afghanistan or the deserts of the Middle East.

When you hear President Trump ask NATO countries to up their defense spending, compare that to the words of Joe Kennedy: “We cannot sacrifice ourselves to save those who do not wish to save themselves.”

Nancy Pelosi and her ilk call Trump a Russian asset for daring to put the interests of this country before empire.  Nothing new there.  Today’s Russia-baiters are cut from the same cloth as an earlier generation of liberals.

In 1951, The Nation magazine accused “Herbert Hoover and a good portion of the Republican Party” of being captured by Moscow—that portion opposed to NATO, because Hoover doubted the effectiveness of deploying ground troops against the communist nations.

The New Republic seconded the motion: refusing to commit American troops to NATO “may lead Stalin to attack Western Europe” and keep advancing until his minions “would bring out in triumph the first Communist edition of the Chicago Tribune.” Mitt Romney and his fellow impeachment travelers remain convinced we must fight the Russians over there so we don’t have to fight them over here!

Back then, the bipartisan war party insisted the president could send troops abroad without asking Congress. Now when President Trump wants to bring them home, Congress claims it has the authority to stop him. Whatever it takes to keep the war machine properly greased.

Until Trump, George McGovern was the only candidate of a major party to call for drawing down troops in Europe and Korea. The sentiment in McGovern’s 1972 acceptance speech is pure America First: “This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to rebuilding our own nation.”

The establishment has hated McGovern ever since for the same reason they hate President Trump.

The America First program would dismantle the imperial project that brought us NATO and has kept us on permanent war footing until today.

The foreign policy sachems built a “post-war rules based international order” on the premise the United States can and must remake the world. They stationed our troops abroad and launched wars with no end. They merged the American economy with that of the rest of the world, destroying America’s industries, high wage scales and standard of living in the process. They constructed a permanent national security state with unchecked powers to pursue anyone including the president.

The precious “rules based international order” is empire by another name. To those who support it—Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, neoconservative, academics, lobbyists and pundits—it is the One True Faith.

Anyone who opposes it is anathema. Even the elected President of the United States.

about the author

Curtis Ellis is Policy Director with America First Policies. He was a senior policy advisor on the 2016 Trump campaign and Presidential Transition Team and served as special advisor to the Secretary of Labor in  the Trump administration.

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The Insane Leading the Blind – Kunstler

Posted by M. C. on July 29, 2020

The world has gone broke before — the Dark Ages, the Plague Years, the Thirty Years’ War, the Great Depression — but never broke like this, or this badly, or had so many people in it who were going to suffer from being broke. The Antifas on the streets of Portland, Seattle, and elsewhere probably don’t have collateralized loan obligations and other financial esoterica on their minds, but these things lurk somewhere in the collective subconscious behind the nihilism they’ve fallen into these brutal dog days of summer as the insane lead the blind.

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-insane-leading-the-blind/

James Howard Kunstler

On our way to becoming a nation of hobos, the Democratic Party’s Antifa shock troops brought out the lethal weapons this weekend, hoping to provoke a Kent State 2.0 type bloodbath that would clinch the election for the mummified remains of Joe Biden, currently reposing in his basement sepulcher. How’d that work out?

In Louisville, Saturday, just after lunchtime, the self-styled Not Fucking Around Coalition (NFAC) was mustering for action and “inspecting firearms” (according to NFAC comandante Grand Master Jay) when one of said weapons accidently discharged and mowed down three NFAC warriors — nicely demonstrating the hazards of fucking around with loaded weapons.

In Austin Saturday night, one feckless BLM mob marcher name of Garrett Foster brought his AK-47 to the street party. When he pointed it at a motorist trapped by the crowd, he got blown away to that great struggle session in the sky, the surprise of his life, I’m sure.

In Portland, OR, police found a bag of loaded rifle magazines and Molotov cocktails in the nearby park that serves as the rioters’ marshaling yard. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler did not attend the evening’s frolics at the sore beset federal courthouse, having successfully subjected himself to ritual humiliation himself a few nights earlier. After midnight Sunday, police declared the Antifa actions “a riot” and made a few arrests.

Up Seattle way, a federal judge struck down the city council’s order against police using tear gas and pepper spray on rioters just in time for another weekend of rioting. SPD Chief Carmen Best declared, “In the spirit of offering trust and full transparency, I want to advise you that SPD officers will be carrying pepper spray and blast balls today, as would be typical for events that carry potential to include violence.” Hours later, after Antifas smashed the windows of ground-floor businesses, set fire to a construction site, and trashed the SPD’s East Precinct building, pepper spray and blast balls were deployed and forty-five of the mob were arrested (on rioting, assault, and other charges), while twenty-one SPD officers were injured.

Down in LA, Antifas broke into the federal Bureau of Prisons Detention Center. In Richmond, VA, rioters set fire to a city dump truck used as a barrier to protect a police station.

So it goes in the insurrection summer of 2020. The nation’s attention is averted from the real action taking place as the economy continues to implode and the US dollar slides on the Forex market — meaning that not only is business failing everywhere, and livelihoods extinguished, but the medium-of-exchange that represents all transactions by any remaining business is accelerating its decline toward the target value: zero. This is unfortunately what comes of the fiscal profligacy prompted by the corona virus crisis, with the Senate poised to introduce another $1 trillion in an emergency assistance spending bill that would reimburse 70 percent of unemployed workers’ lost wages. Over on the House side, Speaker Nancy Pelosi upped the ante to $3 trillion in emergency spending, designed to crater the dollar even faster and, theoretically, assure a Democratic Party victory on November 3 (to govern the smoldering cinder that will be left of the USA).

The counterforce to that lethal inflation is the choking off of capital flows from the tens of millions of mortgages, car loans, and myriad other obligations that can’t possibly be paid in August, September, and October. These tributaries flow into the larger rivers of capital, and when they dry up the entire global banking order may keel over, with those fabled financial weapons of mass destruction, the derivatives, triggering an orgy of counterparty insolvency. When capital stops flowing, you see, money doesn’t just sit there, it vanishes. The question is: can it disappear faster than fiscal policy-gone-wild can summon fresh money into existence? I guess we’ll find out.

The world has gone broke before — the Dark Ages, the Plague Years, the Thirty Years’ War, the Great Depression — but never broke like this, or this badly, or had so many people in it who were going to suffer from being broke. The Antifas on the streets of Portland, Seattle, and elsewhere probably don’t have collateralized loan obligations and other financial esoterica on their minds, but these things lurk somewhere in the collective subconscious behind the nihilism they’ve fallen into these brutal dog days of summer as the insane lead the blind.

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Rise of the Crypto-Caucasians – Taki’s Magazine

Posted by M. C. on July 29, 2020

Still, manufacturing “crypto-Caucasians” is only a short-term solution. Long-term, white low-budget (non-Hollywood) filmmakers must realize two things: First, the blacklist is going to dump a shitload of white talent in their lap, skilled professionals shut out of the big leagues.

https://www.takimag.com/article/rise-of-the-crypto-caucasians/

David Cole

There’s an old saying I just coined: “You can ignore the race war, but the race war won’t ignore you.” No matter how insulated you think you are, the people in this country who are dead-set on making everything about race will eventually reach your doorstep.

Hollywood, that most leftist of leftist towns where every white wears a BLM pin and conservative thought has long been banished, just learned the hard way that the race war awards no points for wokeness. Whites gotta go. And that includes woke whites. Because race wars aren’t about ideology but, well, race (as should be obvious from the name).

“Actors, writers and producers warn of ‘reverse racism’ in the film industry which has created a ‘toxic’ climate for anyone who is a white, middle-age man.” So said the headline in last week’s Daily Mail (because no local paper would dare touch the story). Yep—it’s official: If yer white, get outta site! (I also would’ve accepted “If yer white, yer presence is a blight” and “If yer white, to yer career say g’night”).

A revolution is under way. White actors are being fired. Edicts from studio bosses make it clear that only minorities—racial and sexual—can be given jobs. A new wave of what has been termed by some as anti-white prejudice is causing writers, directors and producers to fear they will never work again. One described the current atmosphere as “more toxic than Chernobyl,” with leading actors afraid to speak out amid concern they will be labeled racist. Dozens of producers, writers and actors have spoken to ‘The Mail’ on Sunday about the wave of “reverse racism” pulsing through the industry.

I know one of those people, and I can confirm that the paper is accurately reporting this story.

For whites, “their careers are pretty much over,” said one of the execs. Adding insult to injury, certain skilled whites are being asked to continue working behind the scenes as advisers—unpaid and uncredited—so that all those new nonwhite hires can appear more capable than they actually are.

The antiwhite blacklist is being carried out in the name of the “BIPOC” coalition: “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.” As The New York Times explained last month, the term “BIPOC” is used primarily to pacify blacks, many of whom dislike the more generalized “people of color” label, because they feel it doesn’t give blacks an “individual identity” separate from Latinos, Injuns, and Asians. BIPOC makes clear that this is a coalition of BLACKS (first) and POCs (second).

There’s simmering rivalry in the acronym. Remember that; it’ll prove relevant. But first, the tale of the cancellation that wasn’t.

“Hispanics give Hollywood an easy out. Producers can cast women who are essentially white while still adhering to their pledge to only hire from the BIPOC pool.”

Lesly Kahn is one of the most influential and respected acting coaches in the business. She draws a lot of water in this town, and she never gives impractical advice. In leaked 2018 audio from one of Kahn’s classes, the esteemed teacher told a Jewish actress who had ambiguously “ethnic” features that she should pretend to be Latina for the sake of getting work. Kahn told the young student to change her name to “Rosa Ramirez” and go all ¡ay Chihuahua! at auditions:

The Latin could actually get you interviews for representation. Just the fact that your name is Rosa Ramirez is gonna get you a meeting…. So you might try it…. Go to the headshot shop and tell them you’re Latin. Wear something fucking red. Wear some fucking sparkly earrings. Just fucking come up with the most Latin name you can come up with…. Aren’t we allowed to change our names to whatever we want to change our names to? Make sure before you change it to Rosa Ramirez that there isn’t already a Rosa Ramirez in SAG, and if there is, we try a slightly different name.

Funny enough, there’s historical precedent for what Kahn suggested. There were so many popular “Latin” leading men and women in Hollywood’s early days, several non-Hispanic actors rose to great prominence by pretending to be spicy frijoles (for example, New York-born Jew Jacob Krantz, who found cinematic fame as “Latin lover” Ricardo Cortez).

So Kahn’s advice is time-tested…and very, very “problematic” in today’s climate. Yet if you haven’t heard about this controversy, there’s a reason. Although it made the trade papers for a few days, Kahn quickly “settled” with BIPOC groups by pledging to fund a special “Latino scholarship” for actors who meet the “one drop” rule, and the matter was quickly forgotten. Kahn is still one of the industry’s most successful and respected coaches, and no one, anywhere, utters as much as one word about the “racist” scandal she escaped unscathed.

Odd, isn’t it? People have been canceled over so much less. Why’d Kahn get let off the hook? The reason our benevolent BIPOC overlords let this one go is that they were petrified the publicity might popularize Kahn’s strategy. Better to reach a quick settlement and hush the whole thing up. It takes a lot to get BIPOCs to forgo vengeance. Most of them attack whites specifically for the joy that cancellation brings. But in Kahn’s case, the race warriors wanted those headlines gone.

Because her “fake Latina” scheme is like the deadly toxin from Three the Hard Way—a targeted danger to the “B” in BIPOC.

Black Americans are in a bind. Their suicidal support of open borders has made Hispanics the superpowerful Democrat voting bloc of the future. It’s no coincidence that the same Hispanics who’ve taken so many black jobs demand to be part of any black scheme to take jobs from whites. And blacks are in no position to say no to such a powerful demographic.

The problem is, “Hispanic” can be many things, including white. When blacks are forced to do the “BIPOC” dance, they’re entering into a coalition with people who can be and often are as white as, say, Cameron Diaz, Lynda Carter, and Raquel Welch. In other words, Hispanics can represent exactly that “Western standard of beauty” that blacks so despise and that the foreign filmgoer market craves. Hollywood bosses might be willing to bend to black extortion when it comes to firing whites from behind-the-scenes positions; they might be cool with only hiring directors who look like Jordan Peele. But they see genuine dollar losses when faced with the prospect of not hiring attractive white actresses.

Hispanics give Hollywood an easy out. Producers can cast women who are essentially white while still adhering to their pledge to only hire from the BIPOC pool. This is not a new problem; previous black attempts to team up with Hispanics in the fight to racially remake Hollywood have turned sour fast. Back in 2000, when a BIPOC coalition formed with the goal of strong-arming the TV networks into hiring more actors of color, the NAACP double-crossed its Hispanic partners behind their backs to forge a separate deal with the networks that favored only blacks, much to the chagrin of the “browns.”

That betrayal single-handedly tanked the 2000 BIPOC coalition.

In 2004, Angharad Valdivia, a professor of gender, media, and Latino studies at the University of Illinois, outlined the controversy in a paper titled “Latinas as Radical Hybrid”:

Latina actresses can play a broad range of characters, including black, white, and everything in between, thus providing casting directors with an easy way to foreground the few famous Latinas out there who by virtue of ambiguity can slip into these roles. This presents both an employment opportunity as well as the possibility of seeing more people of color on the screen and in print. However the second effect is that hybrid Latinas and ethnic ambiguity also provide mainstream culture with a chance to displace and replace blackness. Blackness once more gets pushed to the margin.

So this is an old issue, and one that frightens blacks worse than an open-water relay. Like most of current-day black America’s preoccupations, the goal isn’t just to be pro-black but antiwhite. Hispanics are “backdoor whites,” but there’s no way that blacks can keep them off the BIPOC team. In 2000 they could, but not now; not with twenty years of demographic change and pro-Hispanic Democrat pandering. In 2000, blacks could sell out their “partners.” Today? Blacks couldn’t win that fight.

So, blacks are nervous. As it is, enough black Americans have been in prison to know that Mexicans and whites have a habit of forming alliances if forced. Alienating Hispanics is bad strategy for blacks, especially as the politicians they robotically keep voting for continue to bring millions of them in.

The very last thing that blacks want “amplified” is that there are influential people like Lesly Kahn encouraging a deliberate blurring of the lines between “white Hispanic” and “white white.” Which is exactly why I’m recommending that very strategy to white actors. It’s a great way to keep working: Just change your name from Henderson to Hernandez, and talk about your dear old abuela from Jalisco. But even better, it’s a way to fuck with BLM, which is always its own reward. The goal would be to build up enough paranoia in blacks (who skew paranoid anyway) that they’d begin to view with suspicion every new “Hispanic” actresses allowed in by the BIPOC mafia. Make blacks demand that Hispanics “prove” their ethnicity. That’ll lead to discord and fracturing and maybe sink this coalition like the last one.

Still, manufacturing “crypto-Caucasians” is only a short-term solution. Long-term, white low-budget (non-Hollywood) filmmakers must realize two things: First, the blacklist is going to dump a shitload of white talent in their lap, skilled professionals shut out of the big leagues. And second, white beauty sells. It’s a commodity, and a sought-after one that’s often exploited by other racial and ethnic groups (and I say that as a member of one of those groups). Pretty girls are the great equalizer. Low-budget films can’t compete with the blockbusters in terms of special effects, car chases, interplanetary battles, or epic historical re-creations. But they can compete on absolutely equal ground when it comes to attractive actresses. I come from the world of low-budget film production, and that’s a basic fact. Pretty girls sell tickets better than car chases do.

In a previous column, I mocked entertainment-industry conservatives for their fetish of trying to create a “new Hollywood.” That’s a pipe dream and it always will be. But lots of individual filmmakers will learn to make some fine lemonade from the blacklist’s bitter fruit. Young men scrolling through Netflix on a Friday night are gonna get damn tired of movies starring women who look like Leslie Jones. Filmmakers who are willing to use white actresses as leads will be able to drain viewers from the BLM-approved mainstream crap.

If moviemakers who work outside the system play it smart, they can steal some valuable market share, as Hollywood gradually becomes yet another piece of pricey real estate burned to cinders by the irrational, pernicious, hate-filled extremists of BLM.

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Why are there so few female CEOs? It’s for the same reason there are so few women on death row — RT Op-ed

Posted by M. C. on July 29, 2020

At the other end of the normal curve, women are also almost as scarce as hen’s teeth. There are virtually no females who are homeless, or are in jail, or are on death row, or are in mental institutions, or who die as a result of committing violent crimes. Men dominate this tail of the distribution, as they do the other. Females are God’s, or nature’s, insurance policy.

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/490258-female-ceo-death-row/

Despite all the efforts of equalization, women in high-ranking corporate positions are still exceedingly rare. But they are almost as rare in the dredges of society – and the reasons for both run deeper than sexism.

It is more than passing curious that at a time when women constitute roughly half the workforce, and are in the actual majority in terms of earning college degrees, there are still so few female CEOs. The distaff side accounts for CEOs in only 167 out of 3,000 large companies, which translates into a rather modest 5.5 percent of the total.

Various explanations have been put forth to account for this fact. Women do a disproportionate share of household tasks, such as cooking, cleaning, childcare, shopping. This accounts for some of the gap, but not all of it. Females are less ambitious; they do not as readily seek promotions as do males.

 

Why not? They are more attached to home and hearth, and realize that the higher up you go in the work hierarchy, the more on the job responsibility there is, which will detract from their family obligations. This, too accounts for their greater reluctance to seek greener pastures in more lucrative employment elsewhere; the wife is more likely to be the trailing spouse, who has to accept whatever is available in another city or state, than her husband.

Recently, a new elucidation has been added to these more traditional accounts. It is that men are more likely to occupy positions that feed into CEO jobs than women. For example, more males than females take on line roles which are directly responsible for profits and losses, such as heading up a division of a large firm. In contrast, women specialize in areas that do not as readily account for the bottom line, such as heading up human resources, the legal team, or administration.

This phenomenon, too, could possibly explain part of the divergence in CEO representation, but is unlikely, even along with the other accounts, to do the entire job. One difficulty with it is that one can easily push back, and ask why this divergence occurs in the first place?

The preceding is all politically correct; or, at least, not too politically incorrect. Blatant facts are blatant facts, and it is difficult to hurl the charge of sexism at social scientists supporting these explanations.

Dare we consider an explanation that does not pass muster in this regard? We must, if we really want to unearth the cause of this situation. Here we go.

CEOs, along with presidents and prime ministers of countries, chess grandmasters, Nobel Prize winners in STEM pursuits such as physics, medicine, chemistry, economics, the Fields Medal in math, occupy the extreme right tail of the normal distribution of intelligence. But, due to the fact that the standard deviation of men is much larger than that of women, there simply are very, very few of the latter to be found at three or four standard deviations above the mean. Larry Summers lost his job as president of Harvard for merely musing about this, but if we want to fully understand the CEO divergence (along with all these other glass ceilings) we cannot ignore it.

According to one study, the standard deviation of boys’ IQ was around 15 and for girls, around 14. This translates to roughly double the amount of the former with scores about 130, and a whopping six times greater than 160, where CEOs, and other highly accomplished people tend to roam.

At the other end of the normal curve, women are also almost as scarce as hen’s teeth. There are virtually no females who are homeless, or are in jail, or are on death row, or are in mental institutions, or who die as a result of committing violent crimes. Men dominate this tail of the distribution, as they do the other. Females are God’s, or nature’s, insurance policy. They are to a greater degree clumped into the middle. Males are God’s, or nature’s, crap shoot. When they are brilliant, they are very, very gifted. When they are not, they veer to a relatively stupendous degree in the opposite direction.

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Is Racism Responsible for Today’s Black Problems? – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on July 29, 2020

As Thomas Sowell reported: “Going back a hundred years, when blacks were just one generation out of slavery, we find that census data of that era showed that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults. This fact remained true in every census from 1890 to 1940.”

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/07/walter-e-williams/is-racism-responsible-for-todays-black-problems/

By

I doubt whether any American would defend the police treatment of George Floyd that led to his death. But many Americans are supporting some of the responses to Floyd’s death — rioting, looting, wanton property destruction, assaults on police and other kinds of mayhem by both whites and blacks.

The pretense is that police conduct stands as the root of black problems. According to the NAACP, from 1882-1968, there were 3,446 black people lynched at the hands of whites. Today, being murdered by whites or policemen should be the least of black worries. In recent times, there is an average of 9,252 black-on-black murders every year. Over the past 35 years, that translates into nearly 324,000 blacks murdered at the hands of other blacks. Only a tiny percentage of blacks are killed by police. For example, in Chicago this year, there were 414 homicides, with a total of 2,078 people shot. So far in 2020, three people have been killed by police and four were shot. Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald reports that “a police officer is 181/2 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.” Crime is a major problem for many black communities, but how much of it can be attributed to causes such as institutional racism, systemic racism and white privilege?

The most devastating problem is the very weak black family structure. Less than a third of black children live in two-parent households and illegitimacy stands at 75%. The “legacy of slavery” is often blamed. Such an explanation turns out to be sheer nonsense when one examines black history. Even during slavery, where marriage was forbidden, most black children lived in biological two-parent families. Professor Herbert G. Gutman’s research in “The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom 1750-1925” found that in three-fourths of 19th-century slave families, all the children had the same mother and father. In New York City, in 1925, 85% of black households were two-parent. In fact, “Five in six children under the age of six lived with both parents.” During slavery and as late as 1920, a black teenage girl raising a child without a man present was a rarity.

An 1880 study of family structure in Philadelphia shows that three-quarters of all black families were nuclear families. There were only slight differences in family structure between racial groups. The percentages of nuclear families were: black (75.2%), Irish (82.2%), German (84.5%) and native white Americans (73.1%). Only one-quarter of black families were female-headed. Female-headed families among Irish, German and native white Americans averaged 11%. According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, only 11% of black children and 3% of white children were born to unwed mothers. As Thomas Sowell reported: “Going back a hundred years, when blacks were just one generation out of slavery, we find that census data of that era showed that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults. This fact remained true in every census from 1890 to 1940.”

The absence of a father in the home predisposes children, especially boys, to academic failure, criminal behavior and economic hardship, not to mention an intergenerational repeating of handicaps. If today’s weak family structure is a legacy of slavery, then the people who make such a claim must tell us how it has managed to skip nearly five generations to have an effect.

There are problems such as grossly poor education, economic stagnation and poverty that impact the black community heavily. I would like someone to explain how tearing down statues of Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson and Confederate generals help the black cause. Destruction of symbols of American history might help relieve the frustrations of all those white college students and their professors frustrated by the 2016 election of President Donald Trump. Problems that black people face give white leftists cover for their anti-American agenda.

 

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From Sweden To Uruguay The Evidence Is Clear: Lockdown ‘Cure’ Worse Than The Disease

Posted by M. C. on July 28, 2020

IMF forces recipients to adapt disasterous Italian lockdown method.

Fauci on vaccine safety – don’t worry, be happy

Texas COVID (listen up PA) reported death reports lag actual death dates and make data look worse than reality.

 

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Our Foreign Policy Nightmare: Vice President Susan Rice | The American Conservative

Posted by M. C. on July 28, 2020

…investigative journalist Gareth Porter, in an interview with The American Conservative. Porter pointed to Rice’s influence on the Obama administration decision to bomb Libya and Syria, as well as her push for escalation in Afghanistan and her support of aid to the Syrian rebels. “In each case I would argue she was coming out either against Obama’s clear-cut instincts or preferences in White House meetings or in a situation where he was hesitant,” and that she was part of the pressure he received from “a coalition of hawks” in the administration.

Biden is the place holder for the next real progressive/war party choice. Will the VP candidate be Goldman Sachs real presidential choice?

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/our-foreign-policy-nightmare-vice-president-susan-rice/

Libya, Syria, Afghanistan—Rice was at the table for every Obama debacle. And she has no solid positions of her own.

US President Barack Obama, US Secretary of State John Kerry, and White House National Security Advisor Susan Rice during a NATO summit on July 8, 2016 in Warsaw, Poland. (WOJTEK RADWANSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

Susan Rice, former national security advisor to President Obama, is reportedly under consideration for the vice presidential slot in presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s administration. Biden is currently considering four black women to be his vice president, among them Sen. Kamala Harris of California, Rep. Val Demings of Florida, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, Rep. Karen Bass of California, and Rice.

Biden said he will make his final decision in early August ahead of the Democratic National Convention which will take place in Milwaukee from Aug. 17 to 20.

All the women Biden is considering have had “some exposure to foreign policy and national defense issues,” Biden has said, and he wants someone who can serve as president at a “moment’s notice” and with whom he is “simpatico.”

Rice, whose office was next door to Biden’s during Obama’s second term, checks all those boxes.

“The most important attribute that I have is almost two decades of experience in senior ranks of the executive branch,” Rice told the Washington Post.

While VP contender Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) has been accused of planting negative stories about potential rivals in the media, Rice has been keeping her name in the news by writing regular op-eds in the New York Times and appearing on a spate of TV shows.

In The New York Times, Rice wrote that Trump “is utterly derelict in his duties, presiding over a dangerously dysfunctional national security process that is putting our country and those who wear its uniform at great risk. At worst, the White House is being run by liars and wimps catering to a tyrannical president who is actively advancing our arch adversary’s nefarious interests.”

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Rice accused Trump of “doing nothing” about Russian bounties on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. On the “Daily Show with Trevor Noah,” she trashed Trump’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The Obama administration gave the Trump administration a playbook for a possible pandemic, Rice said, and she personally participated in a tabletop exercise with the incoming Trump cabinet where they discussed the possibility of “a novel SARS-like virus emerging from China,” said Rice.

All that preparation, she said, “seemed to be for naught, because a couple of years into office, President Trump dismantled the office that I set up on global health security; they trashed that playbook or stuck it in some drawer, some shelf and never pulled it out. For two months, January, February and part of March, [Trump] really denied the reality of this virus, equated it to the seasonal flu … and by that time, it was already well-embedded in our country.”

Whether it’s due to her strengths as a potential VP candidate or her criticism, Rice’s reappearance on the national stage earned the Trump administration’s ire, and senior Trump officials have returned fire. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slammed Rice on Fox News for what he called her “history of going on Sunday shows and lying;” this week, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Rice had issued a “stand down” order on Russian cyber attacks and did nothing to combat Russian election meddling.

Rice may be about to reprise her role as “the right’s favorite chew toy,” as one commentator dubbed her back in 2012.

Following the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, Rice appeared on the Sunday morning talk shows and recited CIA talking points. Those points, which were based on intelligence assessments at the time, turned out to be incomplete and misleading, and Rice was accused of being “incompetent,” “untrustworthy,” and soft-pedaling terrorism. She has also been criticized for her decision to unmask the identities of senior Trump officials, which President Trump called a crime.

Rice, who was Obama’s national security advisor at the time, told House investigators that she asked for the unmasking in order to understand why the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates was in New York late in 2016. Her explanation satisfied influential Republicans on the House committee that investigated.

“I didn’t hear anything to believe that she did anything illegal,” Florida Republican Rep. Tom Rooney told CNN of Rice’s testimony, which is classified.

Although it was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, not Rice, who played the lead role in the decisions that led to the Benghazi attacks, Rice has been widely panned in conservative media as responsible for the embassy attack. A Biden selection would give Republicans an opportunity to resurrect Rice as their bogey-woman. But with Democrat voters, there’s a possibility those attacks could backfire, and the left could spin them as Fox News baselessly attacking a blameless black woman.

Whether Rice is chosen as Biden’s vice presidential pick or not, she will likely have a great deal of influence within a Biden administration, particularly on foreign policy. She had a seat at the table during some of the Obama administration’s most momentous decisions. She was Obama’s ambassador to the UN during his first term; during his second, she served as national security adviser. What, if any, lessons did she learn?

What would U.S. foreign policy look like with Biden and Rice working in the West Wing again?

“Even if she is not chosen as Biden’s VP, Rice would be in line for Secretary of State, or another position of that elevated nature. I’m aghast at the thought of her becoming president, because she’s such a hawk,” said historian and investigative journalist Gareth Porter, in an interview with The American Conservative. Porter pointed to Rice’s influence on the Obama administration decision to bomb Libya and Syria, as well as her push for escalation in Afghanistan and her support of aid to the Syrian rebels. “In each case I would argue she was coming out either against Obama’s clear-cut instincts or preferences in White House meetings or in a situation where he was hesitant,” and that she was part of the pressure he received from “a coalition of hawks” in the administration.

Obama ultimately overruled Rice on Syria, a decision that she says was the right call.

Here’s how she describes it:

“Ultimately, we would fail to garner the necessary support for a congressional authorization to use force. Republicans and Democrats had acted precisely as I predicted. Ironically, it turns out, I was right about the politics; but President Obama was right about the policy. Without the use of force, we ultimately achieved a better outcome than I had imagined.”

It is difficult to imagine a situation worse than Syria, where nearly half a million have died in a civil war that has been ongoing since 2011.

This incident is illustrative; has Rice learned from her mistakes?

Her nearly 500 page memoir Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For, published in 2019, meticulously documents a great deal. Rice is careful to thank nearly everyone she ever worked with, including the White House chef!

Unfortunately, she studiously avoids drawing overarching policy conclusions. Rice, a Stanford graduate and Rhodes scholar with a Ph.D. in international relations, is simply too smart to jeopardize her future Washington career ambitions by offending or criticizing anyone she might have to work with again. Her book is, therefore, a typical one by someone hoping for a position in a future president’s administration.

“Susan Rice is right in the middle of the road, when you think about foreign policy hands in DC,” said John Glaser, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, in an interview with The American Conservative. “She has a lot of high level experience in foreign policy, but I’ve never been able to detect a way she stands out as a unique thinker, in that she had something to say about the way she’d prefer the U.S. to go. She says things that are plastic, packaged to be right in the center of the foreign policy consensus in D.C. That’s how I see her: run of the mill, not an extraordinary pick … If she were VP, our foreign policy would not be different than what we’ve seen the past 30 years.”

Given that Biden is campaigning on a “return to normalcy,” the foreign policy of the last 30 years isn’t necessarily something that Biden views negatively.

A Biden-Rice presidency would seek a return to the Paris climate accords, the JCPOA Iran deal negotiated during Obama’s second term, and would expand and strengthen NATO. They would likely avoid engaging in any new ground wars like Libya or Syria. Biden and Rice would be more hawkish on Russia, and if Rice’s latest op-eds are any measure, they would likely be more assertive with China as well.

“But, I worry that at the end of a Biden administration, we will still be arguing about getting out of Afghanistan, and (about) stopping the bombing of places like Iraq,” Glaser said.

about the author

Barbara Boland is TAC’s foreign policy and national security reporter. Previously, she worked as an editor for the Washington Examiner and for CNS News. She is the author of Patton Uncovered, a book about General George Patton in World War II, and her work has appeared on Fox News, The Hill,  UK Spectator, and elsewhere. Boland is a graduate from Immaculata University in Pennsylvania.  Follow her on Twitter @BBatDC.

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The Big Skedaddle – Doug Casey’s International Man

Posted by M. C. on July 28, 2020

One hundred years later, however, the empire phase of the US has played out as empires always have historically.

The US is invading overseas countries at a cost that’s beyond its ability to pay for the maintenance of those conquered territories. Like Rome of old, the continued conquest has created an unpayable level of debt that even dramatically increasing taxation cannot cover.

And like Rome, ever-increasing entitlements are being offered in order to appease the increasingly taxed populace.

https://internationalman.com/articles/the-big-skedaddle/

by Jeff Thomas

In the early twentieth century, there was an exodus out of Europe.

George, my paternal grandfather, looked around England, where the family had been since the eleventh century, and decided that a national fdecline had begun.

Although England was still very much an empire, it had fallen into the decline that ancient Rome had experienced before it. Where it had once expanded its possessions and profited from them, it was now spending millions of pounds maintaining them. The less profitable colonies were becoming a liability and the more profitable ones were breaking away.

In addition, the British class structure was beginning to break down. The ruling class were becoming lazy and unproductive and, increasingly, were bleeding the lower classes in order to continually expand their own idle privilege.

Worse, Britain had fallen into a seemingly never-ending series of wars. Wars have always impoverished countries, creating the necessity of increased taxation. And in the early twentieth century, all of Europe was spoiling for a war that was to become the “Great War.”

Historically, these conditions always have led to decline in a nation or empire, leaving the new generation of adults with a worse future than their antecedents had had.

Greater Opportunity Elsewhere

And so, after careful consideration, George came to the conclusion that, as a young, educated gentleman of twenty-four, he would take his new wife off to the “New World.”

His purpose was to leave the decaying empire to pursue greater opportunity elsewhere.

Meanwhile, my maternal grandfather, Michael, had also joined the Big Skedaddle. His family were from the UK, although he was then living in Russia.

But Russia was also displaying the telltale signs of the fall of Rome.

Under the czar (the Russian translation of the Roman title “caesar”), the ruling class were becoming lazy and unproductive and, increasingly, were bleeding the lower classes in order to continually expand their own idle privilege.

Worse, Russia had pursued wars with the Turks, the Chinese and the Japanese. It had all become too much for the average Russian peasant to tolerate, and in 1917, revolution had broken out.

Although the majority of Russians had great hope for positive change after the revolution, it soon became obvious that the new communist government was far more repressive than the czar had been. Along with the pre-existing poverty came an unprecedented loss of basic freedoms.

Greater Freedom Elsewhere

And so, after careful consideration, Michael came to the conclusion that he should take himself off to the “New World.”

His purpose was to leave the decaying empire to pursue greater freedom elsewhere.

Both of the men above were part of a major exodus from Europe – the Big Skedaddle – people travelling on steam ships, understanding that they were unlikely ever to return. One sought opportunity; the other sought freedom. Each found what he was seeking in the “New World.”

And at this point in the two tales, we perceive a happy ending. They each found a home in a former British colony where there was greater opportunity and freedom.

But, in fact, it’s not an ending at all. In all such tales, life is ongoing. Further generations are born, and in time, the same countries that had been so attractive eventually deteriorate, and always for the very same reasons.

The rise of empires is inevitable. Always, there will be one country whose people are more productive than another’s and that country will prosper and expand. But at some point, its leaders may see the opportunity to turn it into an empire, to expand not only the prosperity, but their own power.

And inevitably, continued conquest and its costs, coupled with increased taxation and oppression of the home population, followed eventually by unpayable debt, send each empire into decline.

Case in point: In the early twentieth century, the US was the prime destination for those exiting the declining empires of Europe. It was rich in resources, was undeveloped, had minimal governmental regulation and, importantly, had virtually no welfare state. All citizens understood that their prosperity was directly linked to their own work ethic.

It began as a nation of productive people. And in 1900, it was at a peak of prosperity that attracted millions to its shores and had just begun its gambit into empire.

One hundred years later, however, the empire phase of the US has played out as empires always have historically.

The US is invading overseas countries at a cost that’s beyond its ability to pay for the maintenance of those conquered territories. Like Rome of old, the continued conquest has created an unpayable level of debt that even dramatically increasing taxation cannot cover.

And like Rome, ever-increasing entitlements are being offered in order to appease the increasingly taxed populace.

Of course, as in all empires, the decline takes time to unfold. Although an exodus has begun, those exiting have, for the most part, done so quietly. And this fact has been further obscured by the attention given to the flood of immigrants into the US.

Unfortunately, the immigrants are not like the immigrants of a century ago. Around 1900, we saw those like George seeking the opportunity to create prosperity for themselves. And we saw those like Michael, seeking freedom and self-determination.

But the present flood of US immigrants are parasitical, seeking government handouts, whilst those exiting the US are primarily those who have been productive and now have something to lose by remaining.

The next wave out of the US – those who create the real exodus – will be the Georges and Michaels, those who have created wealth and seek the freedom to retain it.

This present, smaller wave is the more important one, as they’re quietly leaving, taking their wealth with them. To American eyes, they’re invisible, but to those of us outside the US, they’re becoming more visible every day, as we see their arrivals increasing in number.

The outside world welcomes them, as they’re investing in the recipient countries, creating opportunity.

The Big Skedaddle from the US Empire is therefore only in its initial stage. The very visible stage, similar to the image above, is yet to come, but very much on the horizon.

Editor’s Note: The truth is, we’re on the cusp of a economic crisis that could eclipse anything we’ve seen before. And most people won’t be prepared for what’s coming. That’s exactly why bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released a free report with all the details on how to survive an economic collapse. Click here to download the PDF now.

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