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FBI Accidentally Unmasks Saudi Link to 9/11 Hijackers | The American Conservative

Posted by M. C. on May 14, 2020

Right. Nearly 20 years after the fact, the American public does not know how much evidence exists to connect the Saudi government with the crime—but it is not for a lack of trying. The last two decades have been a painstaking exercise in discovery, with three administrations and a mostly compliant Congress enforcing legal roadblocks all the way. Isikoff’s reporting is a brilliant reminder of that.

Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah, according to Isikoff, is “a mid-level Saudi Foreign Ministry official who was assigned to the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., in 1999 and 2000. His duties apparently included overseeing the activities of Ministry of Islamic Affairs employees at Saudi-funded mosques and Islamic centers within the United States.”

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/state-of-the-union/fbi-accidentally-unmasks-saudi-link-to-9-11-hijackers/

Home/The State of the Union/FBI Accidentally Unmasks Saudi Link to 9/11 Hijackers

FBI Accidentally Unmasks Saudi Link to 9/11 Hijackers

Trump carries on the obstruction, as victims’ families fight tooth and nail to expose the Kingdom’s complicity.

Saudi nationals accused of hijacking planes in the September 11, 2001 attacks.

May 13, 2020

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

It has been so long that we forget why Americans are so mistrustful of Saudi Arabia and its despotic monarchy. It’s not about oil, or their human rights, or even the dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi (though that all undoubtedly plays a part).

It’s their long assumed role in the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

Fantastically, that was brought all back to seering clarity yesterday when Yahoo News reported that the FBI had mistakenly unmasked the name of a Saudi embassy official who has been long linked with the hijackers on 9/11. The name has since been “re-masked” so to speak, but not before the press seized upon it and reminded Americans how close the Kingdom of Saud was to the worst terrorist attack on American soil in our history.

According to reporter Michael Isikoff, who broke the story, at Yahoo:

The disclosure came in a new declaration filed in federal court by a senior FBI official in response to a lawsuit brought by families of 9/11 victims that accuses the Saudi government of complicity in the terrorist attacks.

The declaration was filed last month but unsealed late last week. According to a spokesman for the 9/11 victims’ families, it represents a major breakthrough in the long-running case, providing for the first time an apparent confirmation that FBI agents investigating the attacks believed they had uncovered a link between the hijackers and the Saudi Embassy in Washington.

Not surprisingly, the filing in question was part of an attempt to keep the Saudi officials name and “all related documents” secret. From Isikoff:

Ironically, the declaration identifying the Saudi official in question was intended to support recent filings by Attorney General William Barr and acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell barring the public release of the Saudi official’s name and all related documents, concluding they are “state secrets” that, if disclosed, could cause “significant harm to the national security.”

Right. Nearly 20 years after the fact, the American public does not know how much evidence exists to connect the Saudi government with the crime—but it is not for a lack of trying. The last two decades have been a painstaking exercise in discovery, with three administrations and a mostly compliant Congress enforcing legal roadblocks all the way. Isikoff’s reporting is a brilliant reminder of that.

We know that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals and that Saudi Arabia had been aggressively promoting its extremist brand of  Islam throughout the world for decades, including establishing Wahabbist mosques and distributing religious textbooks here in the U.S. We know those teachings informed the Al Qaeda terrorist organization that plotted and executed the 9/11 attacks.

Washington has been accused of covering up for the House of Saud from the very beginning. Every administration—Bush, Obama and now Trump—has attempted to thwart the lawsuits by the 9/11 families to out the Saudi connection and retain restitution for victims of the nearly 3,000 killed.

Court after court has said the lawsuits can go forward. Saudi Arabia has spent millions of dollars in trying to influence Congress, even using our own veterans in a foolhardy lobbying campaign to stop the cases from moving forward. They have been unable, so far, to overturn a 2016 law (JASTA) that made it easier to file terrorism suits against other countries in U.S. courts.

The kingdom has long denied that any official has been directly connected to the attacks. The families have centered their case, so far, on Fahad al Thumairy, an imam at the King Fahad Mosque in Culver City, California, and Omar al Bayoumi, said to be a Saudi intelligence officer. They say the two were helping the hijackers acclimate here in the U.S. before the attacks.

This is where Isakoff’s findings come into play:

A redacted copy of a three-and-a-half page October 2012 FBI “update” about the investigation stated that FBI agents had uncovered “evidence” that Thumairy and Bayoumi had been “tasked” to assist the hijackers by yet another individual whose name was blacked out, prompting lawyers for the families to refer to this person as “the third man” in what they argue is a Saudi-orchestrated conspiracy.

That third man’s name has been meticulously redacted in every reference, except for the mistake found by Isikoff, where he was named as “Jarrah.”

Mussaed Ahmed al-Jarrah, according to Isikoff, is “a mid-level Saudi Foreign Ministry official who was assigned to the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., in 1999 and 2000. His duties apparently included overseeing the activities of Ministry of Islamic Affairs employees at Saudi-funded mosques and Islamic centers within the United States.”

Jarrah “was responsible for the placement of Ministry of Islamic Affairs employees known as guides and propagators posted to the United States, including Fahad Al Thumairy,” according to Catherine Hunt, a former FBI agent based in Los Angeles who has been assisting the families in the case and issued this information in a court declaration.

All of the information regarding Jarrah has been sealed and classified as “state secrets.” While Trump has told the 9/11 families he would help them, even calling James Comey and Robert Mueller, “scum” for helping to obstruct their ability to get information that would bolster their case, it is clear that Trump’s own people—Barr and Grennell—are taking on that role for his White House. The question is, how long will this go on and will Trump’s recent cooling towards the Kingdom provide the some opening for the 9/11 families, and the American people, to finally get the truth?

Be seeing you

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Racial Revenge? – Taki’s Magazine

Posted by M. C. on May 14, 2020

Since he doesn’t read much, Trump tends to avoid the bizarre intellectual dead ends that verbalists get themselves wedged into. For instance, Hillary Clinton invited the would-be Ferguson cop killer’s mom onto the stage at the Democratic National Convention: an insanely self-defeating ploy, but one that seemed like common sense to Establishment figures such as Hillary who had been reading (and, worse, believing) The New York Times throughout the Great Awokening.

But controlling the media means that you also don’t learn from your mistakes.

https://www.takimag.com/article/racial-revenge/

Steve Sailer

Last Friday, the day after two whites in Georgia were arrested in the vastly publicized killing of the black jogger/prowler Ahmaud Arbery, a young black gunman murdered two octogenarian whites, Paul and Lidia Marino, while they were visiting their son’s grave at a veterans’ cemetery in Delaware. After a six-hour firefight with the police, the shooter, a 29-year-old black man, was dead—whether at police hands or his own remains unknown.

In contrast to Arbery’s killing, this second interracial killing case has gotten virtually zero national media attention through Tuesday morning, even though it’s fairly spectacular in scale and quite curious in motive. For example, an eyewitness speculated that the killer appeared to have brought extra ammunition for his planned shoot-out to the death with the police.

The cops don’t have an explanation for the killer’s actions yet. It wasn’t a robbery. It doesn’t sound like a contract killing. (I can’t rule that out, but I did check if the victims, a retired lithographer and a housewife, were close relatives of any mafioso of the same surname, but found zero connections.) It could be some kind of personal beef, but nobody has found a connection between the killer and the killed at this point.

No confession note, social media, or interviews with the shooter’s family have yet emerged to explain his motivations. Although, to be frank, the press doesn’t seem to be all that motivated to get to the bottom of this seemingly random slaughter. There isn’t even much talk about what kind of weapon the killer used, in contrast to the gun porn after similar mass shootings.

Imagine that the circumstances were reversed and if on Friday a young white man had hunted down an elderly black couple visiting their son’s grave at a veterans’ cemetery.

“What happens when it’s The Megaphone itself that may have egged on the killer?”

The national media would be in full cry over this racist atrocity. President Trump would attend the funeral. The prestige press would demand that whatever web sources of information and opinion the gunman had followed should be, First Amendment or not, permanently exterminated.

But what happens when it’s The Megaphone itself that may have egged on the killer? For example, a search of the New York Times archives finds 104 articles mentioning the name of Ahmaud Arbery so far just in the month of May. That’s even more saturation coverage than the Times normally devotes to late-breaking developments in the Emmett Till case.

The possibility that the cemetery killer was inspired to shoot some random whites by the enormous media hoopla over the still-ambiguous death of Arbery is not something that the prestige press is rushing to look into. We are never supposed to consider whether The Establishment getting all hyped up over the shooting of blacks by whites (or by nonwhites in the case of Trayvon Martin and Philando Castile) might inspire other blacks to shoot whites.

In contrast, the shooting by a homely white in Georgia of handsome young black criminal Ahmaud Arbery immediately after Arbery chased him down and punched him in the head while grappling for his gun has been promoted into an enormous story by the prestige press, because, after all, when has Black Twitter ever led the media astray? If you can’t trust Black Twitter for a disinterested, objective evaluation of a complex, fast-happening event, who can you trust?

I mean besides in the Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray cases… Sure, the media falling mindlessly for the various Black Lives Matter fiascos was central to the national homicide rate leaping a record 24.8% from 2014 to 2016 and perhaps getting Trump elected president. But it’s racist to know those facts.

It turns out that there is much security video of Arbery, who was arrested for bringing a gun to a high school basketball game and for stealing a TV from Walmart, engaged in what looks like casing the joint for a burglary.

But the subsequent Delaware shooting is of no interest to the press. The concept that some blacks might take seriously press incitements about how they should hate whites simply doesn’t exist. The text string “Black Lives Matter terrorism” has almost never appeared in the news media, even though there have been multiple high-profile assassinations carried out by BLM supporters.

For example, after the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island in 2014, a Black Lives Matter advocate murdered two NYPD officers in retribution for the deaths of Garner and Michael Brown of Ferguson, as the killer explained on Instagram.

The most lurid Black Lives Matter terrorist attack occurred on July 8, 2016, soon after President Obama’s speech from Poland denouncing police bias against blacks following the shootings of Castile and Alton Sterling. Obama cited numerous tendentious statistics to encourage blacks to feel that their problems are the fault of white people, the way Obama always blamed his speeding tickets on racist cops. The ex-president, who is not really a math person, summed up:

So that if you add it all up, the African-American and Hispanic population, who make up only 30 percent of the general population, make up more than half of the incarcerated population.

Now, these are facts.

Sure, but what fraction of crimes do they commit? The Obama Administration’s own Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in 2011 that from 1980 to 2008, blacks alone made up 52 percent of homicide offenders, despite being only about 13 percent of the population.

Not surprisingly, a Black Lives Matter enthusiast soon shot fourteen cops in Dallas, murdering five. A week later, three more cops were slain in Baton Rouge.

This may have been a key turning point in the history of the last decade because it helped propel Donald Trump into the White House by demonstrating that the Democrats were encouraging cop killers.

Since he doesn’t read much, Trump tends to avoid the bizarre intellectual dead ends that verbalists get themselves wedged into. For instance, Hillary Clinton invited the would-be Ferguson cop killer’s mom onto the stage at the Democratic National Convention: an insanely self-defeating ploy, but one that seemed like common sense to Establishment figures such as Hillary who had been reading (and, worse, believing) The New York Times throughout the Great Awokening.

If your Party controls the media, you can have all these unfortunate events memory-holed, so that you never get confronted with tiresome questions about just how much blood you have on your hands in the murders of elders visiting their son’s grave.

But controlling the media means that you also don’t learn from your mistakes.

Be seeing you

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Lost In Space – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on May 14, 2020

After more than decade in ‘aerospace’ the only thing I found what the term ‘classified’ meant is to hide the real cost from the taxpayer.
In 1995 I had a tour of the Lockheed factory where the F-22 was being
built. I joked to the engineer that ‘milling it out of gold bricks could
not have been more expensive’. His response was immediate: “No, that
would be much cheaper.”

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/05/george-giles/lost-in-space-2/

By

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has been a non-stop hype machine since its earliest days. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957 American leaders panicked. If the Commies could launch a beeper the size of a basketball into orbit then thermonuclear weapons the size of a greyhound bus to the U.S. mainland could not be far behind. It seemed that American rockets of the day exploded upon launch or shortly thereafter. A “missile gap” was created overnight wherein the Soviets were vastly ahead of the United States and our annihilation would soon follow. NASA was created to address this issue and suck money from taxpayers exhausted by two decades of war and unwilling to give more money to the War Department, the Defense Department’s honest name. Sixty years later encouraged by President Trump and the silly notion of national prestige there is serious talk on all the obedient media outlets, and the massive funding needed, so we can return to the moon, go to Mars and I guess run around festering in space with silly notions of evening news mentality of democracy. The lie that created NASA continues to this day and it is looking to get a lot more expensive for absolutely no benefit of mankind.

I spent several years working for a NASA prime contractor on the Space Transportation System (Space Shuttle) including a year at Cape Canaveral – Kennedy Space Center. Years earlier I had worked as a contractor on the Trident D-5 missile. I spent the better part of a decade as a Lead Engineer and Program Manager in the aerospace/defense sector so I have some level of experience in these things. As was my habit I went to the library studied as much as I could on space technology as soon as I got the job. I found it fascinating as it was the reification of my childhood dream of being an ‘astronaut’. So in a sense I am a rocket scientist, NASA spent millions on my ideas, but all I learned was sad, evil and depressing.

The ‘Camelot’ Administration of JFK could not announce a vast new multi-billion dollar program to build a fleet of rockets designed specifically to put a thermonuclear weapon the size of a small automobile in downtown Moscow (we were always ahead in miniaturizing these weapons of mass destruction, now one fits in a suitcase and is more powerful than the one that levelled Hiroshima) with the cross hairs of the target certainly being Red Square and the Kremlin itself. Instead NASA would put a man on the moon by 1969 when it was announced in 1961. The massive Saturn V could put 300,000 pounds of payload into a Low Earth Orbit which is more than necessary to put payload anywhere on the Earth. The world watched breathlessly as NASA astronauts walked on the moon. The miracle was that they all got back alive because there were so many single points of failure on the Lunar Lander that the just pushed buttons and held their breath. I won’t waste space listing them all but you can probably imagine: ‘start the engine, go engine, click, silence, go engine click silence. Houston we have a BIG problem’.

Along the way NASA designed and built the Redstone, Atlas and Delta rockets all very capable of delivering nuclear warheads. The transfer of the necessary technologies of propulsion, guidance, payload and re-entry to the military were not advertised, deemed national secrets and highly classified. After more than decade in ‘aerospace’ the only thing I found what the term ‘classified’ meant is to hide the real cost from the taxpayer. In 1995 I had a tour of the Lockheed factory where the F-22 was being built. I joked to the engineer that ‘milling it out of gold bricks could not have been more expensive’. His response was immediate: “No, that would be much cheaper.”

The Space Shuttle program was a disaster as it failed to reach any of the initial stated goals during its operational lifetime, so over the years NASA just changed the goals and then just stopped talking about them altogether. Two of the shuttles disintegrated spectacularly killing all the astronauts on-board.  I knew a Space Shuttle Main Engine Reliability Engineer who assured me that the whole thing was safe failure would be in the parts per million. Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman who found why the first shuttle exploded said his calculation was about 1 in a 100 would fail catastrophically. The real number was very close 2 in 255. I go with Feynman.

The original design of the ‘Space Station’, that I read design documents for was incredibly complicated and it called for almost 20,000 hours of ‘space walking’ for assembly at a time when the total accumulated to date by NASA was 200 hours. Space suits cost more than $1 million apiece and they leak but slow enough so the work can get done before they get back in the nice cozy Space RV. Astronauts working on satellites in the weightless vacuum of space found even the simplest manual tasks to be daunting. Newton’s third law action produces reaction in the opposite direction so turning a wrench on a bolt turned the astronaut! This will not work, so like typical bureaucrats they stopped talking about it, and came up with an old design, then pawned it off as new. Skylab was an empty upper stage of a multi-stage liquid fueled rocket. It made for a ‘space fort’. The current International Space Station is just a bunch of these tubes stuck together. This does not look at all like they giant rotating wheels producing artificial gravity that we have all seen in science fiction movies of the last 70 years. If we spent the entire gross domestic product of the entire world for a decade we could not build one of those. Physics says no, again I have to quote Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman ‘nature cannot be fooled’, even if a gullible Congress can. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Best 5 Minutes on the Internet – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on May 14, 2020

The face of the Covid response, if not the true power behind it, is of
course Tony Fauci. His decades burrowed into the federal bureaucracy has
given him a scientific power base using influence, money and bullying
to control the public health response to infectious disease. The putrid
undergrowth of his career as described by Judy Mikovits and others makes him the J. Edgar Hoover of public health.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/05/ira-katz/the-best-5-minutes-on-the-internet/

By

The Covid debate about the lockdown is often posed as a choice between the economy (wealth, money) and lives. There are many with whom I agree with that turn this debate into lives versus lives, as the health cost of the lockdown is already enormous for many reasons. For example, in the short term the mental health of people in isolation will deteriorate potentially leading to suicide. All other healthcare is being ignored. An old student of mine who runs an emergency unit in a hospital told me the patient load is about 5% of normal. Were all of those strokes and heart attacks fake?

In the medium term, a country racked by an economic depression will not have the same healthcare system as a prosperous one. As Robert Wenzel reports, the rising food costs will really hurt social security recipients.  Stopping production across the country while creating trillions in new dollars is a recipe for economic disaster that has never been witnessed in the United States.

But let’s consider in the long term a different aspect to this Covid response that has nothing to do with data or modelling. That is the unprecedented restrictions on the population. The rule of law, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship, the freedom to work and use property (closing of businesses) have devastated the last vestiges of our constitutional order. If we understand the ratchet effect as developed by Robert Higgs, the freedom lost in this debacle will never be fully recovered short of a revolution. From September 11th we still have the Patriot Act, the TSA, and forever wars. Now the choice between lives and freedom is often put forward by our fearless leaders in Washington who fight behind computer screens. They gladly sacrifice thousands of soldiers and millions in civilian collateral damage as a necessary cost for our freedom. What is coming in forced vaccination and tracking of the population is truly frightening. And yet now, most people meekly accept this legal and moral travesty to protect lives.

The face of the Covid response, if not the true power behind it, is of course Tony Fauci. His decades burrowed into the federal bureaucracy has given him a scientific power base using influence, money and bullying to control the public health response to infectious disease. The putrid undergrowth of his career as described by Judy Mikovits and others makes him the J. Edgar Hoover of public health. His insistence on vaccine, vaccine, vaccine as the only viable response to Covid, as Ron Paul and Daniel McAdams described in his Senate testimony, could be a turning point because it is so ridiculous. He says we must wait at least another year to restart normal life. Imagine a whole year of school missed over the whole country. Will Tony isolate seniors for a whole year with no visitors. You might as well shoot them now. People must recognize that this is madness.

From a philosophical point of view, this Covid response places one aspect of health as the highest priority (a false idol) above all else. Afterall, the churches (and all other religious gatherings) are closed. This point was made in a wonderful way in a discussion that I think is the best 5 minutes I have seen on the internet in a long time. There is a little corner of the internet that I came to know through Jordan Peterson that is an in-depth discussion of the Meaning Crisis (see my description here). Now I want to mention again the YouTube channel A Quality Existence created by Sevilla King, who delves into the philosophy and literature of Robert Pirsig (e.g., Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). She recently posted a discussion with Christopher Mastropietro. He works with John Vervaeke, a professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Toronto, who has created a project called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Mastropietro is a young man who speaks spontaneously in beautiful poetic phrases about philosophy. King as well has a soothing mellifluous voice (she is a practicing therapist). Together they discuss among other things the Covid situation. They make the point that life always consists of risk-benefit tradeoffs. A proper balance is essential. Starting about minute 49 Mastropietro illustrates this point with the example of smoking. Can you imagine the beauty of smoking! I have never inhaled myself, though I often thought of taking up the habit as solidarity to the truly oppressed class called smokers.

I recommend watching the whole conversation, but you must see the 5 minutes about smoking starting at about 49:00. It is wonderful.

Be seeing you

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A Nation of Sheep – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on May 14, 2020

For a few weeks now, I thought the most extreme of these governors
has been Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey, who publicly admitted that he
didn’t think or care about the Bill of Rights, even though he took an
oath to uphold it. Yet, Gov. Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania has surpassed him.

When Wolf learned that some Pennsylvania county sheriffs would not
use force to enforce his non-law edicts, and some public accommodations
would open their doors — consistent with public safety but in defiance
of his non-law edicts — he threatened to withhold state aid from all who
live in those counties and to close the liquor stores that, by his
non-law edicts, remain open. This is straight out of 1930s Germany —
punish the community because of the resistance of a few. In Wolf’s
Pennsylvania, the people work for the government.

Does the government really work for us, or are we afraid of it?

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/05/andrew-p-napolitano/a-nation-of-sheep-2/

By

“When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty.” — Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

To Thomas Jefferson, the fulcrum between the people and the government they have elected was fear. He argued succinctly that the government would only respect liberty if it feared losing power. Today, the relationship between people and government is power. Does the government have the power to tell us how to make personal choices, or do we have the power to tell the government to take a hike?

Stated differently, does the government work for us or do we work for the government?

Jefferson’s answer to that question in 1801, the year he became president, was that the government worked for us. Today, unfortunately, this same question has two answers — a functional one and a formal one. One would stumble answering this question if one looked only at how some state governors are treating the people for whom they claim to be working. One needs to look as well at the nature of government in a free society.

Six months ago, no one could have imagined where we are in America today. Then, if anyone had suggested that the governors of all 50 states, in varying degrees of severity, would be using police to interfere with personal choices — choices that we and our forbearers have all made without giving a second thought to the preferences of the government — no one would have believed it.

Think for a moment of how you would have reacted to any pre-COVID-19 idea that the police in America — using not the force of opinion but the force of arms — would prevent you from going out of your home, operating your business, jogging in a park, patronizing a restaurant or clothing store, buying a garden hose, going to Mass or church or temple or mosque or even joining a small public gathering of folks who want to protest these prohibitions.

Where did these prohibitions come from? They have come from the ever-changing edicts of governors and mayors, who rely on the ever-changing evaluations of medical data from an ever-changing cast of scientific experts. They are the pronouncements of politicians who have forgotten that they are elected to enforce laws, not to write them, and to be the servants of the people, not their masters.

Why do Americans accept this? We are a nation born in a bloody revolution against a king. The founders of America made the profound and indisputable choice of establishing a government dedicated to the cacophony of liberty over the illusion of safety.

They embedded that choice in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The former states, unequivocally, that no government is legitimate without the consent of the governed and that government’s principal duty is to secure our rights. The latter — which expressly protects the right to make personal choices — is the supreme law of the land, and thus all governmental acts are subordinate to it.

We have fought wars against tyrants who wanted to tell us how to live. Today, we have elected our masters who are doing just that.

Americans seem to accept the restrictions on our rights to speech, religion, travel and commercial activities simply because the origin of those restrictions is a popularly elected person. But even an elected government can be tyrannical. Should you bow to these restrictions merely because their authors were elected and they have persuaded your neighbors that the prohibitions are for their own good — the Declaration and the Constitution be damned?

Stated differently, the governments that have interfered with our well-established rights to go about our daily lives as we see fit — taking chances whenever we cross the street, drink a glass of water, bite into food, sit next to a stranger on a train or at a baseball game, or go through a green light in our vehicles — have failed their first obligation, which is to safeguard our freedoms to take those chances.

Instead of safeguarding our freedoms — our natural rights to make personal choices — the governors and their police enforcers have treated us as if we work for them.

Does the government work for us or do we work for the government? Formally, it works for us. We elect officials because we trust their judgment. We authorize those officials to protect our rights, and we prohibit them from interfering with our personal choices.

For a few weeks now, I thought the most extreme of these governors has been Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey, who publicly admitted that he didn’t think or care about the Bill of Rights, even though he took an oath to uphold it. Yet, Gov. Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania has surpassed him.

When Wolf learned that some Pennsylvania county sheriffs would not use force to enforce his non-law edicts, and some public accommodations would open their doors — consistent with public safety but in defiance of his non-law edicts — he threatened to withhold state aid from all who live in those counties and to close the liquor stores that, by his non-law edicts, remain open. This is straight out of 1930s Germany — punish the community because of the resistance of a few. In Wolf’s Pennsylvania, the people work for the government.

My colleagues at The Wall Street Journal have unearthed the facts that more Americans die annually from heart disease, cancer, accidents and non-COVID-19 respiratory failure than die annually (annualized) from this coronavirus. Every death diminishes me. So does every suppression of liberty. So does every denial of the right to make choices and take risks.

Does the government really work for us, or are we afraid of it?

Be seeing you

 

 

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Antibody Testing: Proves We’ve Been Had!

Posted by M. C. on May 14, 2020

https://townhall.com/columnists/kevinmccullough/2020/04/23/antibody-testing-proves-weve-been-had-n2567516

Kevin McCullough
Kevin McCullough

There is simply no other way to state this.

Nearly everything we’ve been told about models, rates of infection, deaths, and recoveries was inaccurate.

I’m not here to argue that it was malfeasance or ignorance — both are unacceptable. But the one thing that Governor Andrew Cuomo’s stunning announcement made clear on Thursday is that there are some pretty shocking — and what should be — reassuring truths.

Cuomo announced that antibody testing in New York state, which only began four days previous, was already demonstrating that at minimum 13.9% of New Yorkers, had COVID-19 late stage antibodies.

The implication of this is a shockwave to the system.

With a population of 19,540,500 the findings point out that over 2,500,000 New Yorkers had the virus and have recovered. Keep in mind that as of this writing that only 263,000 New Yorkers have currently confirmed cases. Also as of this writing New York has reported 19,543 fatalities.

We’ve been told that the true death rate is 7.4% in New York. We were told there would be hundreds of thousands dead. We were told that this was worse than the flu, which has still recorded more deaths to date in this past flu season—even though the CDC instructed medical personnel to start counting influenza, heart disease, pulmonary, respiratory, drug overdose, and possibly even car crash deaths as COVID-19 deaths.

We were told that we had to upend an economy, go into solitary confinement, and divorce ourselves from normal life because this would rage beyond any previous pandemic. We were told that this virus with 846,000 current confirmed cases was worse than the H1N1 that broke out on Obama’s watch that infected 60,000,000 people. (We were conveniently not told that Obama had authorized $3.7 million U.S. tax dollars to be used at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to utilize corona viruses in bats in 2015 — but that’s yet another deception of omission.)

But none of these “truths” turned out to be so.

The death rate in New York State isn’t 7.4%, it is actually .75%. The recently ended influenza season numbers from the CDC indicate possibly 56,000,000 cases of flu, 740,000 hospitalizations, and 62,000 deaths. Under the current count from the Johns Hopkins Dashboard in this five month stretch CoVid19 has racked up 845,959 confirmed cases, 122,000 hospitalizations and 46,972 deaths.

A couple of other observations are extremely relevant. To begin with the flu — which has no vaccine but rather a randomized version of a shot designed to help develop antibodies to fight the version of the flu that “smart people” *think* will be the primary version that particular year — has remedies that physicians prescribe in primary care on an as needed basis. So we’re not accustomed to thinking that the flu is this deadly killer that all of life must be shut down to prevent. CoVid19 had no known treatments at the beginning of the breakout, and for political reasons—and possibly financially incentivized ones to boot—the most effective treatment for CoVid19 became a political football. Even the supposed “negative” trials that were reported on this past weekend, had cherry picked subjects that were mostly late stage victims of the virus. As Dr. Vladimir Zelenko pointed out on my show this week, doing so created the negative outcomes “purposefully & by design.” When used under a physician’s care, in the primary care basis, and early on after testing or onset of symptoms, the hydroxycholoroquine, azithromycin, & zinc cocktail reduced the rates of deaths and long term infectious stages. Zelenko’s numbers to date: 1,450 patients treated, two deaths, four ventilator cases (all fully recovered,) and all others recovered. Zelenko and other physicians using the treatment are releasing the world’s largest Meta-study to date within the next few days that will examine more than 2,000 confirmed cases.

The antibody numbers from Cuomo also scream one other harsh reality. The virus was in America long before January.

No thanks to the Communist Chinese Party — who bear the sole responsibility for every American who died from CoVid19 — the infection made its way to American sooner than we had believed. With three flights a day from Wuhan to New York’s John F. Kennedy airport alone the virus was being imported faster than understood.

Since going into national lockdown we’ve also failed one other key component of recovery from this virus—herd immunity. We’ve developed not nearly enough of it. For if 2.5 million New Yorkers were able to fight it off without any treatment at all—unaware they even had it—how much more immunity did we miss out on creating by simply sheltering everyone in place?

We are well on our way to a vaccine. We’ve also got a $12 treatment with the hydroxychloroquine cocktail that has smashed Brazil’s fatality rate by 95%.

Most importantly we’ve got millions upon millions of Americans who have been exposed to CoVid19 and who now have the late stage antibodies that demonstrate immunity.

It is time to acknowledge these facts, draw the necessary conclusions they lead us to, make changes for the benefit of the American people (for once), and end this nightmare.

Thank you Governor Cuomo for acknowledging it, now let’s go!

Be seeing you

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Why Has There Been So Little Consumer Price Inflation? | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on May 13, 2020

But it is not true that price inflation is generally low. It simply happens outside of the official numbers, and most people feel it.

https://mises.org/wire/why-has-there-been-so-little-consumer-price-inflation?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=bf2c8fe661-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-bf2c8fe661-228343965

Every once in a while economists want to go out on a limb with their models and publicly make forecasts on what the future rate of price inflation will be. The current COVID-19 lockdown is no exception. Many economists have warned us of potentially very high rates of price inflation, because monetary stimulus on a massive scale meets a negative supply shock. Others are afraid that the monetary and fiscal stimuli won’t be strong enough to compensate for the drop in private spending, resulting in a deflationary spiral. More often than not, both parties are wrong.

It seems important to ask what it is that they try to forecast and how closely connected it is to monetary policy interventions. When we look at the consumer price inflation rates in the eurozone, there really has not been much going on over the past decades, despite a rather activist monetary policy. Since 1999, the average annual inflation rate, measured by the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP), has been about 1.65 percent. The rate for any one year never went above 3.2 percent—the value reached in 2008—and was negative only once, in 2015, at –0.6 percent. So, all in all that’s a fairly narrow band, and the average aligns rather nicely with the Eropean Central Bank’s (ECB) stated target, although some economists would like to see it even closer to 2 percent.

Figure 1: Year-on-Year Percentage Change from January of the Previous Year to January of the Respective Year

M2 and Real GDP Gap
Sources: ECB, IMF. The explanatory gap is defined as the growth rate of M1 minus the growth rates of the HICP and real GDP.

In contrast, the eurozone’s M1 monetary aggregate has grown at an average annual rate of 7.59 percent over the same period (1999–2020), which means that it has much more than quadrupled, whereas consumer prices have only grown by a bit more than 40 percent. One would not expect all of the monetary expansion to translate into proportional price inflation, but the observed gap is surprisingly large and persistent. Real economic growth according to official numbers hardly fills it. Real GDP has grown by merely 32 percent since 1999, or by an average annual rate of 1.35 percent. A back-of-the-envelope calculation by which we subtract both the average real growth rate and the average rate of consumer price inflation from the average growth rate of the money stock M1 leaves us with an explanatory gap of about 4.6 percent per year. Where does the money go if it is not absorbed by higher unit prices for consumer goods or a larger real output?

Well, there are essentially two possible explanations. First, there may have been increases in the reservation demand for money. Put differently, there may have been a substantial decrease in the velocity of money. Indeed, if one believes that the quantity equation—PY = MV, where P is the HICP, Y is real GDP, and M is the money stock M1—accurately relates the empirical magnitudes considered, then yes, velocity (V) must have taken up the slack. But since velocity here is merely residual, it explains the entire gap simply by definition, which is to say that it does not explain anything at all. There surely are changes in the reservation demand for money, but should they be so persistently positive every year? And why should they be so high (see Figure 1)?

The second possibility is that inflationary pressures actually materialize outside of consumer goods industries, most notably in the markets for long-term assets, such as stocks and real estate. This would imply that the HICP inflation measure grossly underestimates the general rate of price inflation. The surge of asset price inflation over the past decades has been widely documented, and this clearly matters to the average household. When asset prices rise it becomes harder to attain any given level of real wealth if you are not there already.

Figure 2: HICP Inflation Rates and the Median Inflation Perceptions in the Euro Area since 2004

Inflation Perceptions HICP
Source: Business and consumer survey database, European Commission.

The answer lies most likely in some combination of these two causes and some other factors. But the second cause—inflationary pressures outside of consumer goods industries—seems to be the more important one. It is especially important if we want to evaluate how well average citizens are actually doing. And it turns out that if we listen to what they have to say, we find a rather interesting empirical result.

Since 2004, the European Commission has published survey data on inflation perceptions. Figure 2 shows how those perceptions compare to the HICP inflation measure from 2004–19, the period for which data on inflation perceptions is available. The geometric average of the median perceived inflation rate over this time was 6.57 percent. Over the same period, the measured HICP inflation rate was 1.57 percent. So, on average, median perceived inflation has been 5 percentage points higher than the official rate of consumer price inflation. The average explanatory gap as defined above has been 4.8 percentage points, which is remarkably close to what the median respondent in the survey perceives to be the difference between actual and measured inflation (5 percentage points). The difference between perceptions and official numbers fills the gap quite nicely.

Now, it is very likely that perceptions are upward biased,1 but it is hard to believe that they completely miss the mark. The overall inflationary pressure does not seem to be covered by the official HICP numbers. In fact, the latter tend to be rigid relative to asset prices. This, among other things, has given monetary policymakers comfortable wiggle room for engaging in ever more expansionary measures without failing to remain below the 2 percent target. But it is not true that price inflation is generally low. It simply happens outside of the official numbers, and most people feel it.

Be seeing you

Lies

 

 

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Tomgram: Erik Edstrom, The Betrayal of the American Soldier | TomDispatch

Posted by M. C. on May 13, 2020

It worked like this: we, the infantry, secured a road in Kandahar
Province, allowing logistics convoys to resupply the infantry, so that
we could secure the road, so that the logistics convoys could resupply
us, ad nauseam and in perpetuity. Such a system was mockingly derided by my troops as a “self-licking ice cream cone.”

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176700/tomgram%3A_erik_edstrom%2C_the_betrayal_of_the_american_soldier/#more

By Erik Edstrom

“Every day is a copy of a copy of a copy.” That meme, from the moment when Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club offers a 1,000-yard stare at an office copy machine, captures this moment perfectly — at least for those of us removed from the front lines of the Covid-19 crisis. Isolated inside a Boston apartment, I typically sought new ways to shake the snow globe, to see the same bubble — the same stuff — differently.

Quarantine has entered a new season. The month of May has brought daffodils and barbeque grills. Memorial Day is just around the corner. And every Friday at 7:00 PM, residents in my neighborhood hang out of their windows to bang pots and cheer until they get tired (usually, about two minutes later). It’s a nice gesture to healthcare workers, a contemporary doff of the cap, but does it change anything? Perhaps it’s just another permutation of that old American truism: if you’re getting thanked for your service, you’re in a job where you’re getting shafted.

The war against President Trump’s “invisible enemy” spasms on and we’re regularly reminded that healthcare workers, dangerously ill-equipped, must beg for personal protective equipment. But this Memorial Day, the 18th during America’s War on Terror, our national focus is likely to shift, even if only momentarily, to the soldiers who are still fighting and dying in a self-perpetuating war, now under pandemic conditions.

Reflecting on my own time as a soldier deployed to combat in Afghanistan, I hope that Covid-19 causes us to redefine what “patriotism” and “national security” really should mean. My suggestion: If you want to honor soldiers this Memorial Day, start by questioning the U.S. military.

With this on my mind, and all alone in that apartment, I knew exactly where to look for inspiration.

The Journal

Just before deploying to Kandahar, Afghanistan, in May, 2009, I bought a journal. It was brown, faux-leather, and fit in the hip pocket of Army combat trousers. It wasn’t particularly nice — just something you might pick up at Office Max.

Nonetheless, my soldiers ribbed me for it. “Dear diary,” they snickered.

“No, no, this is a war journal,” I would reply, imagining such a distinction as sufficiently manly to overcome whatever stigma they had when it came to this self-appointed diarist.

At first, journaling was a distraction. I captured images of my platoon, a lovable assemblage of misfits and Marlboro men. But soon, that journal acquired a more macabre tone, its lines filling with stories of roadside bombs, shootouts, amputated limbs, and funerals playing out in a page-by-page street fight of scribbles and scratch-outs.

On a humdrum route-clearance patrol on our fourth day in-country, before the unit of soldiers we were replacing even had a chance to depart, my squad leader’s vehicle was catastrophically destroyed by a roadside bomb. We loaded four broken, bloody, ketamine’d soldiers onto an Air MEDEVAC helicopter en route to urgent care at Kandahar Airfield. (At this rate, I realized, my platoon of 28 would be wiped out within a month.)

I reassured the soldier who was most coherent that he was “going to be okay.” Truth was: I didn’t know. And what did “okay” in battlefield injury-speak even mean? A quadruple amputee with a pulse? Years of horrific facial reconstruction surgeries? Or maybe, with luck, merely a traumatic brain injury or a single leg amputation below the knee, which my wounded friends from Walter Reed Hospital called “a paper cut.”

For this soldier, okay turned out to mean broken bones and lacerations bad enough to send him home, but not bad enough to keep him there. He was stitched-up and sent back to war five months later. When he finally returned to America, in Oregon, he murdered and dismembered someone he didn’t even know in a bathtub. Then he stole the dead man’s car to rob a bank. He’s currently serving life in prison.

But such stories, however raw and urgent they felt, were small. We were, after all, just one platoon in a big, ugly mess of a war, committing acts of political violence against people we didn’t know for reasons we didn’t fully understand.

Although I was told that I’d be “fighting terrorism” in Afghanistan, most of the people our unit was killing turned out to be teenagers or angry farmers with legitimate grievances, people tired of America’s never-ending occupation of their land, tired of our country’s contemptuous devaluation of Afghan lives. And frankly, when I searched my own soul, I couldn’t blame them for fighting back. Had I been in their shoes, I would have done the same.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the U.S. military did not encourage me to think too much or too deeply about the morality of the war I was fighting. A popular military aphorism was: “stay in your lane.” And so I jotted down my real thoughts in private and continued with the “mission,” whatever that was, since there appeared to be no coherent plan or strategy, something fully substantiated when, late last year, the Washington Post released “the Afghanistan Papers,” secret and frank interviews by the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan with top U.S. commanders and officials.

“Operation Highway Babysitter”

That brown journal of mine lived through a lot and, at the end of my deployment, it earned a just retirement at the bottom of a cardboard box — until recently, when, in the midst of self-isolation in the Covid-19 moment, I excavated it from its resting place and brought it into the light of day as if it were so many dinosaur bones.

The cover was a wreck, the pages, earth-stained and dog-eared. Nonetheless, my chicken-scratched entries were enough to reconstruct old, long-buried memories. Those pages cast into relief how far I’ve come. Physically, I’m 6,632 miles away. Temporally, I’m a decade older. But morally, I’m a completely different person.

The first two — distance and time — don’t add up to much. I’ve returned home. I’ve gotten older. But what about the third? Why do I look back on my role in that still never-ending war not as a hero or as a well-intentioned participant, but as a perpetrator? And why, now, do I feel like I was a genuine sucker?

In a sense, I already knew the answers to those questions, but I wanted to revisit the journey I’d taken by flipping those pages past coffee-ring stains and even dried blood. And here’s what I found: I crossed my moral threshold on a dusty road, a glum bit of terrain I watched over for 15 hours straight. The mission’s apt nickname, scrawled in that journal, was “Operation Highway Babysitter.”

It worked like this: we, the infantry, secured a road in Kandahar Province, allowing logistics convoys to resupply the infantry, so that we could secure the road, so that the logistics convoys could resupply us, ad nauseam and in perpetuity. Such a system was mockingly derided by my troops as a “self-licking ice cream cone.”

Despite the effort we put into stopping IED — that is, roadside bomb — emplacement, we neither stopped them, nor created anything that might have passed for “progress.” The problem with IEDs was simple enough: we could watch some of the roads all of the time or all of the roads some of the time, but never all of the roads all of the time. Wherever we couldn’t patrol was precisely where the next one would be emplaced.

Quickly enough, we saw the futility of it all, yet what alternative did we have? We belonged to the Army and so were destined to spend our Afghan tour of duty playing human minesweepers.

Ox, my platoon sergeant, internalized his frustration. During Operation Highway Babysitter, he cut a striking image of Oscar the Grouch, with a fat dip of chewing tobacco puckering his cheek. Just above that egg-sized wad was a small scar from a bullet fragment that had skipped off an Iraqi pavement during the 2003 invasion of that country. One could say that Ox carried the war with him in the most literal sense.

And if we weren’t getting blown up by insurgents, we were getting shot by the Afghan National Police. No kidding. One hot afternoon, an Afghan policeman, visibly high, shot my team leader, Brody, from six feet away with a machine gun. The 7.62 mm bullet hit him in the torso, a spot not covered by body armor. It was a negligent discharge and Brody lived, but my whole platoon wanted to murder that policeman. We didn’t, which seemed rather commendable.

Even as we became increasingly disillusioned, we remained soldiers, trained to execute, however ludicrous the task. If we had to stay in our lane, though, at least we wanted the satisfaction of fighting our enemy face-to-face. It’s hard to explain if you haven’t been there, but the desire to fight hadn’t left us and, as it turned out, we got our chance on Halloween 2009 — a day caught vividly in that brown journal of mine.

The Sound of Revenge

A couple of hours into highway babysitting that day, our stakeout was interrupted by the sound of gunfire. We buttoned up the trucks and set out for danger. When we arrived, the shooting had stopped. All we saw were a few men — maybe farmers, maybe insurgents — in a large grape field. It was hard to make out what they were doing, but there were no weapons to be seen.

Armed only with speculation, there were no grounds (under the rules of engagement we lived by) to shoot them, so our G.I. Joe energy began to melt away and we were distinctly disappointed.

I concede that it’s a strange emotion to actually want to kill someone, knowing there will be no repercussions for doing so — except possibly praise and maybe even medals if you’re successful…

The rest here

Be seeing you

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Now Is the Time for All Good Parents To Come to the Aid of Their Children – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on May 13, 2020

Happy schooling! You all can do it. Just pause, think, and plan a bit.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/05/linda-schrock-taylor/now-is-the-time-for-all-good-parents-to-come-to-the-aid-of-their-children/

By

Now that parents with school age children are homeschooling–whether they want to or not—I would like to offer some ideas towards teaching important educational skills at home.  There is so much that parents can accomplish while families are in these unique “lock down” situations.

You all are very lucky.  I hope that you understand that.  You may never again have such an opportunity to teach your own children; to influence your children.  You may never again have these chances to correct mistakes the schools have made; to fill any gaps that schools have left.

Recently, a young mother expressed her pleasure at having this time with her children.  “I absolutely LOVE my time teaching my children.  This week, we cleaned up their problems with telling time, and with making change.”    Right!  This is a time when you can focus on things that your children are missing in school.

Multiplication:  Your child may be like thousands of others who are taught to “memorize the multiplication facts” without having been taught the rationale and thinking processes behind multiplication.  Such narrow instruction limits the flexibility of the brain for future problem solving.  Here are things that I do when I teach, or remediate, multiplication skills:

1)  Cut the cover off an empty carton of eggs.  Instantly you have a great tool with which to teach multiplication up through “twelve-sies”.  Add a pile of dry beans, or buttons, or whatever small things you have.  A really fun aspect of this type of teaching is that school children of all ages can be part of learning the concept of multiplication.

Present a problem: 2 x 4 =__.    Be theatrical as you place 4 beans in one cup; then 4 beans in another cup.  Ask “How many times did I put beans in a cup?  2 times.  How many beans did I put in each cup?  4.  So 4 beans in each of 2 cups is how many beans?  Count them.  8.  Let’s write the problem:  2 x 4 = 8.  Have each child do as many multiplication problems –thinking and counting the cups and beans– as needed for full comprehension.  Let children use the cups and beans until they no longer need to use the cups and beans.

2) After the children understand the concept and logic of multiplication, have them work on memorizing the “facts”.  Allow them to use the egg carton if they need it.

3)  Once a child has worked his or her way to and through 12 x _?_, have the child make their own multiplication chart for reference until all facts have been memorized.

4)  If a child is finding it difficult to memorize, add singsong or rhythm activities.  You can even have a child move or dance.  Have practice sessions which use all senses to practice the facts:  hearing, speech, movement, touch.  When I taught at a de facto segregated school in Alabama, I had the children speak and dance while adding extra stress to each answer:  “4 x 5 is 20. Uh!  4 x 6 is 24. Oh!” and other similar noises, utterances, or rhythms.

Common Sense and Cause and Effect:   My father used to describe some children and adults as being “unable to think their way out of a paper bag.”  This would apply to individuals of all ages who have never been taught to think!

1)  Always be ready to ask questions which will get children thinking about reasons.  These are discussions which can even be done during times like car trips or waits at a doctor’s office.  Some examples:

Why do we use salt and pepper?
Why do we cut the grass?
Why does a car have windshield wipers?
Why do we need traffic signals?
Why do we put groceries in a sack?
Why do we measure things?
Why do nurses wear uniforms?
Why do children have recess?
Why do we take vacations?
Why do streets have names?

2)  Negative questions:

Why don’t your fingernails bleed when mom cuts them?
Why don’t we carry water in a basket?
Why doesn’t a doll need new shoes as often as you do?
Why can’t we pound a pin with a hammer?
Why don’t pajamas have more pockets than blue jeans?
Why wouldn’t you play catch with an egg?
Why don’t we see smoke coming from a chimney in the summertime?
Why can’t we use a calendar that is a year old?

3)  Cause and effect; Predicting

What will happen in you leave the door open in the wintertime?
What will happen if you wear a pair of pants that are too big?
What will happen if you plant flower seeds then never water them? What will happen if you make lemonade without sugar?
What will happen if your dog fights with a skunk?
What will happen if you leave the milk out on the counter all day?
What will happen if you pick up the wrong lunchbox at school?
What will happen if all the water dries up in a river?
What will happen if you put a wet glass on a wooden table?
What will happen if you stay outside all day in the hot sun?

4)  Learning to explain something in a sequence is important:

Tell me how to get a ball off the roof.
Tell me how to decorate a Christmas tree.
Tell me how to wrap a gift.
Tell me how to clean your room.
Tell me how to get ready for bed.
Tell me how to make a grilled cheese sandwich.
Tell me how to find a word in the dictionary.
Tell me how your day at school is organized.
Tell me how to make a pizza.
Tell me how to save a person from drowning.

All too often adults believe that children automatically develop common sense; instinctively anticipate what effect follows which action; understand the meaning behind all the words that we use: understand the use for supposedly simple things.  A junior high student once “confessed” that although he saw the word “bleach” on jugs in his home, he really had no idea why it was used.  Do not assume that your children know simply because you do.  Check knowledge.  One of my school teachers used to write this on the board:  “to ass/u/me”   He explained that “to assume makes an ass out of you and me.”

Reading, Writing, Spelling:  My mother, who taught special education until she was 73 years old, strongly believed that “The only children who learn to read in today’s schools—learn in spite of the teaching and curriculum.”  I have to agree with her.

1)  Unless your child is attending a private school which teaches methodical phonics, which includes both the Simple and the Advanced phonograms for the Code in which English is written, you are probably noticing weakness in the child’s reading skills.

Order a set of Phonogram cards from http://www.spalding.org and help your child get those memorized to automaticity.  The directions are on different colored cards in the front of the pack.  If a phonogram refers to more than one sound, it will be important that the child memorize all of the sounds in the order on the back of the card.  Example:  “ea” represents three sounds:  /ee/, /short e/, /long a/    (ee, e, ay)    Such learning trains the brain to instantly analyze a new word with that spelling.  If the brain sees the word ‘break’ it will think through the options like so:  “ ‘breek’  (no!), ‘breck’ (no!), ‘brake’.  Oh! ‘break’ with long a.”

2)  All children (and new readers of any age) need to read aloud until they do not need to read aloud any longer.  When we are learning to read, our attempt at finding meaning in a word is usually a 5-step process:  See the word “picnic”.  Voice the word “picnic”; Hear ourselves saying the word “picnic”.  Recognize that we have heard the word “picnic” before and actually do know the word.  Think “picnic” then proceed to the next word.     When we read out loud our brains learn to skip the three middle steps:  See the word “picnic.” Think “picnic.”    Proceed reading.

3)  It is more important to teach Spelling than it is to teach Reading.  When children learn to spell the phonograms, they are learning the rules and order in which words are usually put together.  The better they learn that process, the better readers they all will become; the better they will be able to approach a spelling word using logic.

4)  Read Aloud to Your Children!  Mom also said that, “The children who are read to become the readers; the children who are not read to become the non-readers.”  I asked her about the many people I knew who read well but had not been read to as children.  She explained,  “Yes, they may have learned to read BUT do they choose ‘reading’ as a way to entertain themselves?  Not often.  Children who are read to develop the ability to create mental pictures of what they hear and become good readers who will become lifelong readers.”  Too right!

For great ideas on what to read to your children at different ages, check out or purchase the book, The Read-Aloud Handbook,    by Jim Trelease.

For help in teaching yourselves the phonograms and rules of phonics, you can find it all in my book, Read Better! For Adults and Teens.

Happy schooling!  You all can do it.  Just pause, think, and plan a bit.

Be seeing you

 

 

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Cash is Trash, Especially for the Post-COVID World — Strategic Culture

Posted by M. C. on May 13, 2020

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/05/06/cash-is-trash-especially-for-the-post-covid-world/

 Tom Luongo

There’s been a concerted effort recently among the oligarchs I like to call The Davos Crowd to demonize cash. From hedge fund manager Ray Dalio pronouncing ‘Cash is trash’ earlier this year to the fear-mongering surrounding COVID-19 making people fearful of dealing in cash because it might be tainted the anti-cash rhetoric has been amped up to eleven.

And it’s been no secret that the elite of the world want us to stop transacting in cash because it is something they can’t track. Sweden has flirted with the cashless society while the European Union did away with large denomination bills the same way the U.S. has been phasing them out.

A few years ago, India created a huge stir removing the 500 and 1000 rupee note from circulation. All of these moves have been, nominally, in service of stamping out corruption. They are sold to the public as a way to punish criminals and money launderers.

But the reality is that the push for removing cash from society is to put all of our financial dealings in databases which gives authorities a record of everything you do. As governments around the world become increasingly bankrupt they naturally look for ways to improve tax compliance as well as create profiles of anyone they deem a threat to their continued existence.

That’s the real reason for why ‘cash is trash’ to authorities. And the moves towards digital only versions of national currencies is an extension of the power grab currently underway as a response to the crisis of COVID-19.

But, more than that, the reason for this demonization of cash has as much to do with the understanding that the current global financial system is broken and will need a global coordinated bailout.

The easiest way to effect that is to be able to create digital money at the stroke of a keyboard.

The crisis of 2008 was bigger than the Federal Reserve. To survive it required the coordinated effort of all the major central banks along with support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

So, color me not shocked when I see this report from Sputnik that the head of the Shanghai Gold Exchange publicly make the case in favor of a transnational digital currency to replace the U.S. dollar as the world’s trade settlement currency.

According to Wang Zhenying, quoted by Reuters, the dollar, as a weapon of US pressure and a source of vulnerability for other countries, can no longer be the standard global currency. He admits that gold is also not an ideal means of exchange, as its quantity is limited and it cannot meet the needs of growing international trade. Therefore, a supranational currency for settlements independent of any country is needed.

This idea is not something new and was already promoted by China during the last financial crisis of 2008-2009. Then Chinese central bank chief Zhou Xiaochuan proposed to reform the system of international settlements through special drawing rights (SDR).

Author and commentator Jim Rickards has been making this point for more than a decade. He’s talked openly in his previous books The Death of Money and Currency Wars about the plans for the IMF to assume the role as the world’s central bank because the crisis in process will be greater than all the central banks.

I agree with Jim on this and have for years. The world’s elite have discussed these things openly. They’ve written white papers on this.

But what is interesting now is that Mr. Wang is modifying this idea slightly, talking in terms of a hard currency of some form to replace the U.S. dollar. But, look at his argument closely and you’ll see the bait and switch for while he doesn’t believe we’ll get consensus on using IMF Special Drawing Rights (SDR) as a way to settle accounts he doesn’t believe gold is viable either.

So what will it be, then?

Countries, like China, are already working on digital versions of their national currencies. The U.S. Congress tried to slip this language into the recently-passed first CARES Act authorizing trillions in bailouts and stimulus money.

Russia has been working on a digital as well as a cryptocurrency version of the ruble. The EU desperately wants member states to agree to debt mutualization and fiscal integration under the auspice of the European Central Bank to create digital only euros and end physical euros once and for all.

Gold ownership in Germany is now highly suspect with the German government openly tracking all gold sales greater than 1000 euros, less than one ounce.

Financial privacy is, effectively, already a thing of the past. Even the cryptocurrency markets in the so-called first world have to be AML (Anti-Money Laundering) and KYC (Know Your Customer) compliant to get the ability to operate with the existing financial infrastructure.

The push for the end of cash is a real thing. It’s a dangerous and worrying trend because it assumes all taxes and fees demanded by governments are legitimate. It assumes that if you want to remain private you are a money launderer and a cheat.

And what’s most worrying is that opposition to U.S. hegemonic behavior, weaponizing the dollar the way the Trump administration has, will be used as the rallying cry for an even worse system of social and financial control.

I’m all for the multi-polar world but we don’t need a global trade settlement currency as administered by governments. Do you really think that any other country wouldn’t eventually come to look like the U.S. after nearly a century of dominating the world’s financial landscape?

If you do then I assert you are either terminally naïve or a shill.

That’s what this story is really all about. The Davos Crowd never sets up a dynamic like this which leaves people with anything other than a Hobson’s Choice. You can either suffer under the tyranny of the U.S.’s rapacious banking oligarchy or you can choose an equally bad one administered as a global one.

But that isn’t the only choice. Mr. Wang isn’t wrong that something new is needed but it needs to be a real hard currency based on antecedent value, not birthed out of thin air or backed by future labor (debt).

The dollar reserve standard is in the process of dying. The great financialization of the world and the multiple levels of credit bubbles its engendered are bursting. People are open to alternatives. And in the great game of global capital a country only has to be slightly better than the current dominant player to attract the lion’s share once the outflows begin.

China is positioning itself to be a bigger player here but the IMF, governed and controlled by the U.S., is not the solution. That’s a ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’ scenario.

Right now gold is seeing a strong bid the world over and Bitcoin is rising into the halving of its reward pool which occurs every four years. There has never been a better opportunity for people to reject the pronouncements and solutions of the very people who have so thoroughly destroyed our ability to assess risk and value.

And it will be the discipline of cash tied to real assets, birthed from human toil but free from human manipulation that will return sanity to our markets and local economies. That’s what a hard currency is. That’s what Mr. Wang administers at the SGE and that’s what needs to come back.

 

Be seeing you

 

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