A Redditor has revealed a Google maps image that shows a Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit stealth bomber mid-flight over farm fields in the US Midwest. The image was recently published on Reddit and had more than 111 thousand upvotes.
Thousands of Redditors commented on the image. Some said the $2 billion price tag per bomber is outrages considering it can’t hide from Google Earth. The three-decade-old bomber maintains an impressive lethal record. We were able to pinpoint where the bomber was caught on satellite footage near Whiteman Air Force Base (current home of the B-2 fleet). Here’s what some Redditors had to say about the B-2 in action.
“More like a photo bomber,” said user RandyGareth.ZebrasFuckedMyWife said, “Not so stealthy now, are ya?” “That stealth tech is overrated. I can totally see it,” another user said.
Netizens and air observers should be on the lookout for the B-21 Raider, a new long-range stealth bomber that is expected to debut in early 2022 and replace the B-2. If you want to review the B-2 on Google Earth, enter coordinates 39 01 18.5N 93 35 40.5W.
Exclusive! Senator Rand Paul joins the Liberty Report to discuss the massive errors – driven by arrogance – committed by White House coronavirus advisor Anthony Fauci. Dr. Fauci’s insistence on ignoring natural immunity and his refusal to consider therapeutics have cost thousands and thousands of lives! And here’s a bombshell you’ll only here in today’s Liberty Report: Sen. Paul’s shocking explanation of why the coming mid-term elections will be Fauci’s worst nightmare!
I despise COVID fist bumps as a substitute for handshakes and hugs. I always try to turn them into something normal. But, I actually saw a good one on Christmas Eve. For well over a year, network TV has been doing the politically correct thing. Talk show hosts sit far apart from guests or communicate via in-studio TV monitors. There is nothing approaching physical contact. Drew Carey on the Price is Right has been forced to comply with the nonsense even though his personal beliefs don’t line up with it. When he burst into prominence as a young comedian on the Johnny Carson Show, it was clear that the tough buzz-cut former Marine sergeant on stage didn’t possess the trendy personal politics that are expected of the Hollywood elite. He is a self-proclaimed libertarian and was a proud Ron Paul supporter and donor during Doctor Paul’s presidential campaign. He opposed Bush’s Iraq War and understands economics and price signals saying, “I believe the answers to all the problems we face as a society won’t come from Washington. They will come from us. So the way we decide to live our lives and our decisions about what we buy or don’t buy are much more important than who we vote for.”
I occasionally watch the Price is Right and I have been saddened that Drew Carey was forced for months to say “Wear a mask” in his closing statement in addition to the Bob Barker legacy, “Get your pets spayed or neutered.” A while back, Carey ditched “Wear a mask” and went back to just the traditional Barker “spayed or neutered” closing. It felt like some progress, but there was still no touching, hugging, or hand-shaking allowed between the stage crew (Drew and the models) and the contestants. The studio was rearranged to accommodate a much smaller crowd seated in little family / friend pods spaced apart from each other. Drew was required to dutifully point out a mark on stage where the squealing contestants were required to stop and plant their feet away from Drew. Previously, the Price is Right was known for massive physical displays of affection when contestants rushed on stage with contestants hugging Drew, lifting Drew off his feet, carrying him around, jumping on his back, kissing him, and of course shaking hands. Models would join in on the hugging and physical displays of affection especially when contestants won big prizes. But, that was the old days.
But, then something amazing happened on the Christmas Eve episode. A contestant was able to make it to the top tier of a very hard pricing game called “Pay the Rent,” thereby winning a whopping $100,000. Confetti fell from the ceiling and the audience, the crew, and the contestant went wild. During the whole COVID era, Drew has kept himself in check and has avoided all contact with contestants. But, this was the right moment. Drew and the contestant approached each other and did a glorious fist bump, one of the few I have approved of. I know that Drew has been looking for opportunities to shed the nonsense that has been imposed on him and this was a good start even though he will likely endure scoldings from network executives. Drew has enough prominence to be able to fight the monsters somewhat with a dose of reality. I was surprised that this prohibited touching wasn’t edited out since it was at the end of the segment. It is too bad that we have to be happy with small things like this. The ratchet effect of tyranny conditions us to accept a little bit of reclaimed freedom as significant. Oh well, it wasn’t much, but I thank you Drew Carey for being one of the few principled people in mainstream media that has dared to have a brain and speak some truth during your career and take some actions to advance individuals over Leviathan even at personal risk to your own career. Merry Christmas and a Happy Glorious New Year to you Drew and to all LRC readers!
David Hathaway [send him mail] is a rancher and homeschooling father of nine children. He is currently a candidate for Sheriff in Santa Cruz County, Arizona. He maintains the website charityendureth.com and HathawayForSheriff.com.
Whites can’t learn from qualified blacks on campus? Preposterous. Blacks can’t learn from competent whites at university? Equally silly. I, a white man, have learned more from Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams on the subject of racial and sexual discrimination than from any other two scholars. I am pleased and proud that several of my black students are making their way into academic professions. I hold a brown belt in karate. My teachers were the students or Asians. My best instructor is Iranian. I’m Jewish.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) amounts to the complaint that there are too many white males on the faculty and the demand that this be radically changed, forthwith. It would appear, at least to the grievants, that females, “people of color” (“colored people” is no longer allowed to be said at university, despite the continued existence of the National Association of Colored People), and members of the LGBT community cannot really learn from straight white male professors. Students with these characteristics, it turns out, need role models in the professoriate from their own demographics if they are to prosper in higher education. Numerous academic job notifications now routinely require adherence to DEI sensibilities.
I don’t want to criticize the students responsible for these complaints. They are young kids, and, presumably, don’t yet know any better. If anyone is to blame for this new campus initiative, it is their teachers (many of whom are woke white males).
The main charge in one particularcase is that the student body is less than 40% white male, while professors of the same ilk constitute about 75% of the faculty. Out of a board of trustees of roughly three dozen, almost two dozen are white men. The conclusion would appear to be that there should be something akin to proportional representation. The present situation is rejected as “shocking,” “bizarre.” As a result, students, all of them, are subjected to a “white centric” education where “whiteness” predominates.
There is more wrong here than you can shake a stick at. First of all, there is no such thing as white math, or black logic, or Asian economics, or male physics, or female chemistry, or homosexual astronomy, or heterosexual philosophy. This may or may not apply to grievance studies (black studies, gay studies, feminist studies), but if it doesn’t, then these are not worthy subjects to be studied at an institution of advanced learning. There are not many truths each for a separate category of human beings. There is only one. Get used to it.
Second, proportionality. Many people expect that absent racial, sexual, and other types of discrimination, all groups would be equally represented in all aspects of the labor market. But as the insightful work of ThomasSowell has demonstrated, this is simply not the case. The National Basketball Association comprises about 75% blacks, who make up only some 13% of the overall population. Players in the National Football League are roughly 70% black. Is this due to the fact that the NFL and the NBA discriminate against whites and Asians? Of course not. These sports leagues will sign up anyone, even people with chartreuse-colored skin and covered with pink and blue polka dots, provided, only, that they are world-class athletes with the requisite skills. Should we, in any case, kick out of the NFL and the NBA as many splendid black athletes as needed so as to attain proportional racial representation? That would solve one “problem,” but then many college teams would likely be able to beat these professionals unless, of course, we employed the same procedure for them. And so on down the line.
From the EPA to the FDA, the massive influence of corporations on the agencies tasked with regulating them has proven to be a deadly experiment in American-Style Fascism.
When the airline industry has a disaster, it goes under review by the National Transportation Safety Board. When corporations dump a toxic brew of chemicals into ground surface waters, they are supposed to answer to the EPA. When drug companies’ products – drugs and vaccines – cause more health problems than they prevent or cure, they are supposed to be subject to recall by the FDA.
When regulatory agencies become dominated by the corporations they are supposed to control, that agency has been captured by the industry. The public interest becomes a lower priority than the bidding of the will of the industry, and the industry flourishes – most of the time at the cost of human health.
Examples exist from agencies tasked with regulating finances, the airline industry, the chemical industry, the petroleum industry, the defense industry, and, of course, the pharmaceutical industry. Those who understand the specific details of regulatory capture eventually develop the position that a captured agency is worse than no agency at all, because via their influence, corporations can begin to wield the administrative power of the executive branch of government, which is more efficient and less expensive than buying political influence.
Both of the major political parties in the US are guilty of allowing the foxes to run the henhouse; wholescale change in policy at the EPA occurs every time the White House changes hands. Trump’s two EPA Chiefs, Scott Pruitt and Andrew Wheeler were stellar examples. Pruitt was a lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry (which produces thousands of chemicals), and Wheeler, well, just click the link on his name.
The combined effect of Pruitt’s and Wheeler’s rollbacks on EPA policy enforcement and moves to allow polluting industries to regulate themselves were black and white examples of changes in policy against the evidence provided by Science.
A further consequence of this has been what I call the politicization of fact, examples of which we have seen with environmental toxins, safe food, and vaccine safety. This requires the willful dismissal of the importance of the search for truth, which comes with an abject disregard for rational inquiry, empiricism and the balanced view of Science, and is intolerable to any card-carrying Scientist.
Examples of specific mechanisms (and symptoms) of regulatory capture include:
The Blind Eye – Failure to investigate or levy penalties for violations.
Golden Parachute – High-paid jobs for regulators following success in weakening regulatory power while in office. Examples include former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb, and former CDC Director Julie Gerberding, both of whom are high-paid executives (Gottlieb, Pfizer; Gerberding, Merck). Gottlieb has continued to appear on national mainstream news outlets during COVID-19, wielding carry-over authority via the title “Former FDA Commissioner.”
The Revolving Door – Placing former corporate leaders in positions of regulatory authority, often Directorships (Biden’s current nominee for FDA Chief, Robert Califf, was, according to Wikipedia, “a paid consultant for Merck Sharp & Dohme, Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, and Eli Lilly per ProPublica from 2009 to 2013). The largest consulting payment was $87,500 by Johnson & Johnson in 2012, and ‘most of funds for travel or consulting under $5,000,’ which has been called ‘minimal for a physician of his stature.’ From 2013-2014 he was paid a total of $52,796, the highest amount was $6,450 from Merck Sharp & Dohme, followed by Amgen, F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Daiichi Sankyo, Sanofi-Aventis, Bristol-Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca. He was the Director of Portola Pharmaceuticals, Inc. from July 2012 to January 26, 2015. An advisor of Proventys, Inc., Chairman of the medical advisory board of Regado Biosciences, Inc. and has been a member of the medical advisory board since June 2, 2009, and a member of the clinical advisory board of Corgentech Inc. Forbes wrote that his close ties to the drug industry were the reason for him not being nominated for the FDA Commissioner position in 2009.”
Facilitation of Opportunity – An example from oil and gas drilling occurred when the US Minerals Management Service (MMS) agency, which supervised offshore oil drilling, facilitated new projects for the private sector and mismanaged penalties for the BP Oil Spill (DOL Report on the Wayback Machine; the original link is a 404).
Rent-Seeking – When individual companies try to get a larger slice of a market’s total wealth without creating any additional wealth for that market. Pfizer recently met with the Biden administration directly, avoiding having to go through FDA’s regulatory process on COVID-19 vaccine boosters, a move that led to the resignation of two top FDA officials, who are now writing op-eds.
Ignoring Science – Cherry-picking studies that support a policy position, but ignoring sometimes thousands of studies that fail to support a favored policy. The most recent example is the dismissal of the evidence in support of early use of Ivermectin, for which over 1,400 studies show benefit.
Controlling the Narrative – Given their national standing, agency leadership often have the ability to misdirect the public’s focus from an issue of real concern to one that is either of not real concern, or to an issue that is so politicized that no progress in meaningful discourse can be achieved. A good example of this is the substitution of concern over chemicals to climate change. By far, most of the toxic chemicals of concern in our air, food and water are by-products of the petroleum industry – yet they receive little attention by the press compared to “climate change”. Another example is the substitution of the issue of vaccine safety to efficacy; the justification of the risk based on the perceived benefits thwarts inquiries into why vaccines have not been made safer after decades of accumulated evidence of their risk of harm.
Self-Regulation (turning regulatory responsibility over to industry) – One example is the National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) allowing self-certification by airlines, NYTimes); another is that CDC and FDA used and considered non-peer-reviewed press releases from vaccine makers like Moderna and Pfizer on the safety & efficacy of their COVID-19 vaccine products. Early releases by both Moderna and Pfizer failed to carry the required “Forward-Looking Statements,” and yet SEC has not investigated, also providing an example of failure to investigate.
Agency Weakening – By reducing its budget, demoralizing people in key positions and failing to fill positions vacated by retirement and resignations, industry agents can reduce the effectiveness of the regulatory agencies they operate.
Federal “Non-Profits” and Funded Applications – The CDC Foundation receives over $25M per year from vaccine makers, and the FDA receives most of their funding from application fees for drug reviews.
We have previously warned about a whopping food crisis and supply problems in the fertilizer market. Well, now is worse because that was BEFORE we had the natural gas crisis. Why is that important?
Natural gas is THE critical input into making fertilizer. Urea is essentially ammonia in solid state, the process of which entails reacting ammonia with CO2. And we all now know — thanks to the climate nazis — that CO2 is currently the devil. The problem of course is that with no natural gas there is no urea, and with no urea there is no fertilizer. And with no fertilizer… well, we will eat each other.
Here are the spot urea prices.
Something else that we had noted some time back (in Korea) but which now seems like a larger problem.
Here is an article about an Australian farmer who warns the urea supply crisis could halt normal life within weeks.
Here’s what he says:
‘Not only will we not be able to grow cattle and we will not be able to grow food and we will not be able to grow grain or anything like that, but even if we could, we can’t move it, because we can’t turn a wheel in a truck because we have no Adblue,’ [AdBlue is needed for diesel vehicles — half of all trucks on Australian roads run on diesel
As of February we might not have a truck on the road in Australia, we might not have a train on the tracks.
‘So quite literally the whole country comes to a standstill as of February.’
The farmer then, goes on to say:
‘Go and have a look in your cupboard and go and have a look in your fridge and I guarantee just about every single item there, at some point, urea has been used to produce that item, whether it’s a steak or a salad or a can of baked beans.
Moving to Europe, we have a full blown energy crisis unfolding there, made worse by increasingly more destructive policies by the pointy shoes (let’s produce more solar and wind when it’s proven to be both inadequate and massively costly) and a supply chain crisis.
Take a look at European energy prices.
So here we’re now witnessing the beginnings of what promises to be a storm. Think cold and hungry and you’ve got the right picture.
That electricity comes largely from natural gas, and that natural gas comes from those peaky Russkies.
Europe’s benchmark natural gas price rose above 100 euros, or $190 per barrel of oil equivalent, ahead of a series of auctions for pipeline capacity that are seen as a test of Russia’s willingness to ease a supply crunch.
The day-ahead auctions for space on Ukrainian pipelines and capacity at Germany’s Mallnow compressor station will provide a strong signal for how serious Russia is about increasing flows to the west. While the region’s biggest supplier has said it aims to keep refilling European storage sites until the end of December, it hasn’t used short-term auctions to ship more fuel.
So right now we have this situation which is going to make your head spin.
The proper end of debate is not the glorification of whoever “wins” the argument but the ascertainment of the truth or, at the very least, the elimination from contention of a false or misguided belief. Censorship makes this impossible to do,
Virtue signaling—the practice of highlighting what one takes to be one’s own moral superiority, often by loudly denouncing the character and comportment, including the speech, of other people—has become a dominant mode of rhetoric throughout social media and network television. Virtue theory, in contrast, is a teleological approach to normative morality concerned with how actions affect one’s soul or character. Historians of philosophy usually trace virtue theory to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the first extant articulation of ideas such as that habits build character, and virtues represent “the golden mean” along a continuum of two vicious extremes. Courage, for example, lies between the two extremes of cowardice and recklessness, according to Aristotle.
It seems unlikely that many of the people who engage in virtue signaling have any genuine interest in the state of anybody’s soul. Certainly shrieking in outrage is unlikely to change anyone’s comportment, much less their beliefs, yet many people persist in the practice anyway, in part because it is both contagious and addictive. The structure of Twitter, in particular, makes it easy to react in a knee-jerk way to short proclamations with which one disagrees. It is in fact very difficult, if not impossible, to carry out reason-based debates in the allotted 280 letter spaces of a Tweet. It furthermore requires a degree of discipline to refrain from shrieking back at shrieking trolls on Twitter, even while knowing that many of them may well be bots—or unreasonable facsimiles…
Having visited in 2021 several different U.S. cities, including Boston, Denver, Seattle, Salt Lake City, and Austin, where prominently displayed lawn signs profess the “enlightened” beliefs of the people residing there, I have been puzzling over the strange new phenomenon of essentially advertising one’s own “virtue.” I presume that what is being asserted is moral rather than epistemological superiority, because most of the proclamations on these signs do not contain much in the way of propositional content. “Love is love” is tautological, but “Black lives matter” and “Science is real” also do not represent any sort of cognitive breakthrough. For that reason, whenever I spot one of these signs, I find myself wondering how many people there are who really do believe the literal antitheses of the statements displayed. It would seem that anyone who believes that “Human lives matter” is committed to believing that “Black lives matter,” so there seems to be a hidden insinuation in these pronouncements that people who do not overtly profess such beliefs do not in fact agree and therefore constitute some sort of affront to good people everywhere, by despicably denying the humanity of black people and the deliverances of the scientific enterprise, among other things.
Yet it has become abundantly clear that the disagreements at issue are not really about the simple statements, per se. Instead, the banal expressions appear to be code for far more substantial and controversial positions, such as that “George Floyd was a hero,” and “Climate change is the most pressing problem facing us today.” In this way, nailing a sign in one’s front yard is a performative way of broadcasting that one belongs to the right club, and may explain the preponderance of such signs in some neighborhoods, where a veritable “war of the signs” is underway. (On one street in Somerville, Massachusetts, I saw “Black Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” placards displayed before adjacent homes.) Anecdotally, I can report that “Black Lives Matter” signs are far more common than “Blue Lives Matter” signs, so it seems that the inhabitants of some left-leaning neighborhoods may feel that by failing to post one of the rainbow signs professing the beliefs of the inhabitants of the house, they may be taken implicitly to ally themselves with the ideological enemy, deplorable Trump supporters and the like.
Alas, in the age of social media, many people appear to labor under the delusion that it suffices to have a “right-minded” opinion in order to be morally superior. This tendency was dialed up significantly during the Trump years, when the stark reality of what can only be termed tribalism became impossible to deny. “You’re either with us, or you’re against us,” serves politicians well during the build up to every war, but now it has infected civil society, to the point where many people reflexively revile anyone who disagrees with them on either Trump or the COVID-19 shots, facilely concluding that they must be not just idiots but also morally depraved.
Millions of Trump haters appear to believe not only that Trump is worthy of their abject abhorrence, but also that they are superior to Trump supporters, who have somehow failed to recognize the former president’s abhorrent character. Shockingly, they lament, millions of poor benighted souls verily celebrate the man as their savior! These polarized attitudes toward Trump are based on beliefs about what he does and why—about which there is considerable disagreement. Mindless worship of a political leader may be wrongheaded, but is it vicious?
To take another example, millions of people have put Dr. Anthony Fauci on a pedestal as their savior from the scourge of COVID-19. Interestingly enough, there seems to be a good deal of overlap between Trump haters and Fauci worshipers, which strongly suggests that the etiology of afflictions such as TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) and COVID Hysteria are traceable to CNN, MSNBC, and the like. Indeed, at this point in history, the most reliable determinant of whether any given person hates Trump and adores Fauci would seem to be not their education, social or economic status, or state of residence, but whether they watch television, and, if so, whether they spend their time at CNN or Fox News channel.
Of course, we often arrive at our beliefs through entirely random and arbitrary processes. We may be absolutely convinced that we are right—Murder is wrong!—but do we deserve any moral credit for having arrived at such a view? I suspect that it is this confusion which leads some people to despise critics. They mistakenly believe that a critic is asserting moral authority, when in fact he or she is making only an epistemological—or, at the most basic level, a logical—objection to what appears to be a manifest falsehood or contradiction. Calling George W. Bush and Tony Blair “war criminals” is to condemn them, but it is also to assert what the speaker takes to be a fact, for if the 2003 war on Iraq was a violation of international law, then its perpetrators were war criminals, and all of those killed in the conflict were victims, whether directly or indirectly, of premeditated, intentional homicide, better known as murder.
Moral rhetoric is intrinsically complicated, because we all have limited perspectives, and it would seem that one person’s incisive critic is another person’s shrieking troll. Being of a naturally critical bent and inclined to sit down and write when questions pop up in my mind, I can attest that some people do consider just about any form of criticism to be an obnoxious, insolent, and self-indulgent form of “virtue signaling.” They may appreciate intelligence in an abstract way, but when it comes after their cherished beliefs, that’s a completely different story.
Witness the plight of Socrates, the case of Julian Assange, or any of the countless other, unnamed, dissidents destroyed by their governments over the course of history. How dare you suggest that there may be weaknesses and contradictions in my views! Who are you to find fault with my opinions and beliefs? These sorts of reactions—typically angry—to attempts to highlight problems with fervently held dogmas have led me to reflect upon the question whether there is any significant distinction to be drawn between, say, screaming that someone is selfish for declining a “vaccine” which is purported not to stop transmission and infection but to moderate symptoms, and pointing out that voluntary obesity has contributed to hospital resource shortages throughout the Coronapocalypse because an estimated 78% of the people who die of COVID-19 are in fact obese.
At the same time that name-calling has become the rule not the exception in responding to anyone who happens to disagree, not only on social media, but also throughout the propagandized mainstream outlets which were formerly homes to journalism, one also occasionally encounters gentle exhortations to “Be Kind.” Only this morning, on a brisk walk on this cold and crisp winter day in Utah, I spotted an SUV with a license plate reading “B Kind.” (I immediately inferred that “Be Kind” had already been nabbed by another, even more enlightened thinker.) Even more so than the yard signs, the exhortation to “Be Kind” may in fact embody a contradiction of sorts, suggesting, as it seems to, that those who see the license plate are going to be mean unless they are told to do the opposite. The form of speech, after all, is an imperative, an order, a command. But is it really “kind” to order people around, or to suggest that, left to their own devices, they would naturally be mean?
The “Be Kind” trend may have been popularized in part by talk show host Ellen Degeneris, around the time when she was explaining her friendship with war criminal George W. Bush. (Oh—was that mean?)
Laurie Calhoun is the author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, You Can Leave, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique.
The only real patriotic duty under these circumstances, of course, is to adopt the words of the other Joe from West Virginia and utter a loud “I’m a no!” when it comes to Biden’s mandates.
Authored by David Stockman via The Brownstone Institute,Rough Rider Teddy must be rolling in his grave as he looks down upon these poseurs gathered in the Roosevelt room. For crying out loud, every one of them is double vaxxed and totally boosted. And they have issued orders to force the same upon more than 130 million of their countrymen—allegedly to prevent the latter from becoming walking vectors of disease and killers of their neighbors.
Yet if the Vaxx is actually a spread stopper, why do they sit there in their masks? What’s the need to protect Biden from Fauci when the sainted doctor is armed to the teeth with vaxxed-in antibodies? And why is Biden festooned with the medical equivalent of Depends when he’s already got the accident-prevention protection of the Vaxx?Or does he? That is to say, if it doesn’t work to stop the spread, the benefit is only private and not public and hence there is no earthly reason for mandating it against the will of millions of citizens who fear that the risks outweigh the benefits. And if it does stop the spread—despite the manifest evidence to the contrary—-why all the face mask virtue signalling on live TV?In short, this “photo op” is worth a thousand words. It’s a live action illustration of what’s been wrong since the beginning in March 2020. Namely, the predicate that one-size-fits all social control mechanisms—lockdowns, closures, distancing, masking, vaxxing—must be preemptively and harshly employed by arms of the state in order to stop the spread of an aerosolized airborne virus which cannot be seen and cannot be stopped.Indeed, the latest argument for mandatory vaxxing—-that it prevents not transmission and infection but just a serious course of the disease—makes the picture patently absurd. What are these cats afraid of then?The real contagion at loose in the world—especially among the western nations which noisily congratulate themselves as model liberal democracies to be emulated by the more benighted nations inhabiting the purported darker corners of the planet—is a virulent outbreak of statist authoritarianism. That is, a definitely not Black Plague virus of the type that has challenged mankind o’er the ages has become a universal excuse for the wholesale cancellation of civil liberties and property rights like never before—even in times of world war.Take the pathetic case of the United Kingdom. It is governed by a Conservative Party that’s traitorous to the cause of liberty and led by an unkempt Donald Trump wanna be who has assaulted the essence of liberal democracy to such a sweeping extent that his most authoritarian predecessors (i.e. Winston Churchill, among others) scarcely dreamed of it and the Donald himself couldn’t hold a candle to it.BoJo, in fact, is right now hauling out all the tools of public health authoritarianism in response to what amounts to a run-of-the-mill winter flu among the British population.And that latter proposition is not debatable. Not when you compare the peak January data, when virtually no one was vaccinated compared to 80% of adult Brits today, with the 7-day rolling averages through last week. Thus,
The case rate last week was 1,138 per million or 30% higherthan the 875 per million recorded at the January 2021 peaks, but–The death rate last week of 1.64per million was down by a god-is-apparently-smiling 91% compared to the 18.21 rate at the January 2021 peak.
Of course, peek under the covers and what you have is the same old, same old. Not only is the Omicron variant far more transmissible and massively less lethal than earlier variants–for the inherent reasons that sensible virologists and epidemiologists have explained ad infinitum—but the propaganda contagion of the state’s Virus Patrol appears to be even more virulent.That is to say, as the government, the BBC, the Guardian and their mass media ilk have stirred the fear pot one more time, the UK testing rate has also skyrocketed and is now well more than double the rate of last January at the previous winter season peak. Thus:Alas, the public health machinery has so effectively stirred the fear quotient among the populace that the positivity rate has fallen dramatically. Compared to a 10.8% rate in January 2021, the current rate is just 6.0%.Obviously, what is happening is that more and more asymptomatic and completely healthy well people are getting tested in response to the drumbeat, which testing surge has generated the predictable wave of new “cases” and new measures of propaganda and control from the Virus Patrol.
Doug Casey: I’m bearish, especially for the near term since actual Jacobins are in charge in Washington.
How can the markets be healthy when what passes for a ruling class in the West actually hate themselves and middle class is collapsing economically and psychologically?
International Man: Communist and socialist ideas are growing in popularity among the millennial and Gen Z generations. In fact, the majority of young people dislike capitalism and favor a more socialist or even a communist economic system.
This is evidenced by the rise of politicians like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC) and The Squad.
What’s your take on this?
Doug Casey: The youth are being corrupted, and it’s more serious than ever. Although I say that a bit tongue-in-cheek since people have probably thought the youth were becoming degenerate since about day one.
For instance, one of the two charges against Socrates when he was executed in Ancient Greece was corrupting the youth. Older people always think the youth are foolish, ignorant, lazy, crazy and generally taking the world to hell in a handbasket. And, of course, many of their charges are, and always have been, true.
But as kids get older, they generally get wiser, more knowledgeable, harder-working, and more prudent—nothing new here. The world has survived roughly 250 new generations since civilization began in Sumer 5,000 years ago. And it will likely survive this one too.
That’s the bright side. And, as you know, I always look on the bright side. But, on the other hand, the American university system has been totally captured by Cultural Marxists, socialists, statists, collectivists, promoters of identity politics, and people of that ilk. These people hate Western Civilization and its values and are actively trying to destroy them. My view is that this challenge is perhaps the most serious we’ve ever encountered, and the dangers are greatly amplified by advancing technology.
International Man: What role are Western universities playing? How is this shaping current and future generations?
Doug Casey: Universities have been totally transformed in many ways over the past century, and it’s been for the worst in every instance. When the average 18-year-old goes to college, he knows very little about how the world works in general. He’s got vague ideas he picked up mostly from TV, movies, and people who got a job teaching high school. They know basically nothing about economics, government, or history. Worse, what they think they know is mostly wrong.
That makes them easy prey for professors with totally bent views to indoctrinate them.
by Tyler Durden
Thousands of Redditors commented on the image. Some said the $2 billion price tag per bomber is outrages considering it can’t hide from Google Earth. The three-decade-old bomber maintains an impressive lethal record. We were able to pinpoint where the bomber was caught on satellite footage near Whiteman Air Force Base (current home of the B-2 fleet). 
Here’s what some Redditors had to say about the B-2 in action.
