MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘Old Normal’

Meet the New Normal, Same as the Old Normal: You Are Still the Enemy Within

Posted by M. C. on September 9, 2023

“We are currently seeing another ideological shift:

individual rights and freedoms are said to undermine the wider needs of society and the planet – in a stark turnaround – personal freedom is now said to pose a threat to national security, public health or the climate.“

“The recent online article ‘How the Government Weaponizes Surveillance to Silence Its Critics‘ notes that, on any given day, the average person in the US is monitored, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways.“

https://www.globalresearch.ca/meet-new-normal-still-enemy-within/5831748

By Colin Todhunter

Global Research

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***

Today, we are witnessing the nudging (manipulation) of the population to accept a ‘new normal’ based on a climate emergency narrative, restrictions on movement and travel, programmable digital money, ‘pandemic preparedness’ courtesy of the World Health Organization’s tyrannical pandemic treaty, unaccountable AI and synthetic ‘food’.

Whether it involves a ‘food transition’, an ‘energy transition’, 15-minute cities or some other benign-sounding term, all this is to be determined by a supranational ‘stakeholder’ elite with ordinary people sidelined in the process. An undemocratic agenda designed to place restrictions on individual liberty, marking a dramatic shift towards authoritarianism.

In the 1980s, to help legitimise the deregulation-privatisation neoliberal globalisation agenda, government and media instigated an ideological onslaught, driving home the primacy of ‘free enterprise’, individual rights and responsibility and emphasising a shift away from the role of the state, trade unions and the collective in society.

We are currently seeing another ideological shift:

individual rights and freedoms are said to undermine the wider needs of society and the planet – in a stark turnaround – personal freedom is now said to pose a threat to national security, public health or the climate.

As in the 1980s, this messaging is being driven by an economic impulse. This time, the collapsing neoliberal project.

In the UK, poverty is increasing in two-thirds of communities, food banks are now a necessary part of life for millions of people and living standards are plummeting. Indeed, the poorest families are enduring a ‘frightening’ collapse in living standards, resulting in life-changing and life-limiting poverty).

In the US, around 30 million low-income people are on the edge of a ‘hunger cliff’ as a portion of their federal food assistance is taken away.

In 2021, it was estimated that one in eight children were going hungry in the US. Small businesses are filing for bankruptcy in the US at a record rate.

The Bank of England’s chief economist, Huw Pill, says that people should ‘accept’ being poorer. This is similar to the response of Rob Kapito, co-founder of the world’s biggest asset management firm, BlackRock. In 2022, the unimaginably rich and entitled Kapito said that a “very entitled” generation of (ordinary working) people who have never had to sacrifice would soon have to face shortages for the first time in their lives.

While business as usual prevails in Kapito’s world of privilege and that of major arms, energy, pharmaceuticals and food companies, whose megarich owners continue to rake in massive profits, Kapito and Pill tell ordinary people to get used to poverty and the ‘new normal’ as if we are ‘all in it together’ – billionaires and working class alike. They conveniently use COVID and the situation in Ukraine as cover for the collapsing neoliberalism.

But this is part of the hegemonic agenda that seeks to ensure that the establishment’s world view is the accepted cultural norm. And anyone who challenges this world view – whether it involves, for instance, questioning climate alarmism, the ‘new normal’, the nature of the economic crisis, the mainstream COVID narrative or the official stance on Ukraine and Russia – is regarded as a spreader of misinformation and the ‘enemy within’.

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CDC To America: ‘Cancel Traditional Thanksgiving!’

Posted by M. C. on October 5, 2020

The Centers for Disease Control have released a “helpful” set of guidelines for upcoming holidays. Celebrating Halloween or Thanksgiving as we did in the “old normal” is out of the question. Consider a “virtual” Thanksgiving, they recommend. Also today, CNN tells us there is NO RETURN to normal, and if you want to return you may be mentally ill. Also – Why is CIA Director Haspel blocking declassification of documents critical to understanding “Russiagate”? Also, as discussed on today’s program, get your copy of Dr. Paul’s BRAND NEW mini-book, “The End of Unearned Opulence” with a $50 donation to the Ron Paul Institute. For a $100 donation, Dr. Paul will hand-sign it. This is a LIMITED TIME offer!

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[Essay] The Old Normal, by Andrew J. Bacevich | Harper’s Magazine

Posted by M. C. on July 8, 2020

For the United States today, the problem turns out to be similar to the one that beset the nation during the period leading up to World War II: not isolationism but overstretch, compounded by indolence. The present-day disparities between our aspirations, commitments, and capacities to act are enormous.

The core questions, submerged today as they were on the eve of U.S. entry into World War II, are these: What does freedom require? How much will it cost? And who will pay?

https://harpers.org/archive/2020/03/the-old-normal-united-states-addiction-to-war-andrew-bacevich/

Why we can’t beat our addiction to war

By

Addressing the graduating cadets at West Point in May 1942, General George C. Marshall, then the Army chief of staff, reduced the nation’s purpose in the global war it had recently joined to a single emphatic sentence. “We are determined,” he remarked, “that before the sun sets on this terrible struggle, our flag will be recognized throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of overwhelming force on the other.”

At the time Marshall spoke, mere months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. forces had sustained a string of painful setbacks and had yet to win a major battle. Eventual victory over Japan and Germany seemed anything but assured. Yet Marshall was already looking beyond the immediate challenges to define what that victory, when ultimately— and, in his view, inevitably—achieved, was going to signify.

This second world war of the twentieth century, Marshall understood, was going to be immense and immensely destructive. But if vast in scope, it would be limited in duration. The sun would set; the war would end. Today no such expectation exists. Marshall’s successors have come to view armed conflict as an open-ended proposition. The alarming turn in U.S.–Iranian relations is another reminder that war has become normal for the United States.

The address at West Point was not some frothy stump speech by a hack politician. Marshall was a deliberate man who chose his words carefully. His intent was to make a specific point: the United States was fighting not to restore peace—a word notably absent from his remarks—nor merely to eliminate an isolated threat. The overarching American aim was preeminence, both ideological and military: as a consequence of the ongoing war, America was henceforth to represent freedom and power—not in any particular region or hemisphere but throughout the world. Here, conveyed with crisp military candor, was an authoritative reframing of the nation’s strategic ambitions.1

Marshall’s statement captured the essence of what was to remain America’s purpose for decades to come, until the presidential election of 2016 signaled its rejection. That year an eminently qualified candidate who embodied a notably bellicose variant of the Marshall tradition lost to an opponent who openly mocked that tradition while possessing no qualifications for high office whatsoever.

Determined to treat Donald Trump as an unfortunate but correctable aberration, the foreign-policy establishment remains intent on salvaging the tradition that Marshall inaugurated back in 1942. The effort is misguided and will likely prove futile. For anyone concerned about American statecraft in recent years, the more pressing questions are these: first, whether an establishment deeply imbued with Marshall’s maxim can even acknowledge the magnitude of the repudiation it sustained at the hands of Trump and those who voted him into office (a repudiation that is not lessened by Trump’s failure to meet his promises to those voters); and second, whether this establishment can muster the imagination to devise an alternative tradition better suited to existing conditions while commanding the support of the American people. On neither score does the outlook appear promising.

General George C. Marshall at the headquarters of the War Department, 1943 © Bettmann/Getty Images

General Marshall delivered his remarks at West Point in a singular context. Marshall gingerly referred to a “nationwide debate” that was complicating his efforts to raise what he called “a great citizen-army.” The debate was the controversy over whether the United States should intervene in the ongoing European war. To proponents of intervention, the issue at hand during the period of 1939 to 1941 was the need to confront the evil of Nazism. Opponents of intervention argued in the terms of a quite different question: whether or not to resume an expansionist project dating from the founding of the Republic. This dispute and its apparent resolution, misunderstood and misconstrued at the time, have been sources of confusion ever since.

Even today, most Americans are only dimly aware of the scope—one might even say the grandeur—of our expansionist project, which stands alongside racial oppression as an abiding theme of the American story. As far back as the 1780s, the Northwest Ordinances, which created the mechanism to incorporate the present-day Midwest into the Union, had made it clear that the United States had no intention of confining its reach to the territory encompassed within the boundaries of the original thirteen states. And while nineteenth-century presidents did not adhere to a consistent grand plan, they did pursue a de facto strategy of opportunistic expansion. Although the United States encountered resistance during the course of this remarkable ascent, virtually all of it was defeated. With the notable exception of the failed attempt to annex Canada during the War of 1812, expansionist efforts succeeded spectacularly and at a remarkably modest cost to the nation. By midcentury, the United States stretched from sea to shining sea.

Generations of Americans chose to enshrine this story of westward expansion as a heroic tale of advancing liberty, democracy, and civilization. Although that story certainly did include heroism, it also featured brute force, crafty maneuvering, and a knack for striking a bargain when the occasion presented itself.

In the popular imagination, the narrative of “how the West was won” to which I was introduced as a youngster has today lost much of its moral luster. Yet the country’s belated pangs of conscience have not induced any inclination to reapportion the spoils. While the idea of offering reparations to the offspring of former slaves may receive polite attention, no one proposes returning Florida to Spain, Tennessee and Georgia to the Cherokees, or California to Mexico. Properties seized, finagled, extorted, or paid for with cold, hard cash remain American in perpetuity.

Battlefield memorial for a dead U.S. soldier, Normandy, France, 1944 (detail)

Back in 1899, the naturalist, historian, politician, sometime soldier, and future president Theodore Roosevelt neatly summarized the events of the century then drawing to a close: “Of course our whole national history has been one of expansion.” When T.R. uttered this truth, a fresh round of expansionism was under way, this time reaching beyond the fastness of North America into the surrounding seas and oceans. The United States was joining with Europeans in a profit-motivated intercontinental imperialism.

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Of Two Minds – Forget the V, W or L Recovery: Focus on N-P-B

Posted by M. C. on June 30, 2020

The only realistic Plan B is a fundamental, permanent re-ordering of the cost structure of the entire U.S. economy. Call it DeGrowth, or creative destruction, or disruption if you prefer, but whatever name we use, the reality will be extraordinarily disruptive, uncertain, risky and unpredictable.

https://oftwominds.cloudhostedresources.com/?ref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lewrockwell.com%2F2020%2F06%2Fcharles-hugh-smith%2Fforget-the-v-w-or-l-recovery-focus-on-n-p-b%2F&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.oftwominds.com%2Fblogjune20%2Fno-planB6-20.html

Charles Hugh Smith

The only realistic Plan B is a fundamental, permanent re-ordering of the cost structure of the entire U.S. economy.

The fantasy of a V-shaped recovery has evaporated, and expectations for a W or L-shaped recovery are increasingly untenable. So forget V, W and L; the letters that will shape the future are N, P, B: there is No Plan B .

All the hopes for a recovery were based on a quick return to the economy that existed in late 2019. All the bailouts and stimulus programs were based on this single goal: a quick return to The Old Normal . This was Plan A.

For all the reasons that have been laid out here over the past six months, The Old Normal is gone for good. The Old Normal economy was too precarious, too brittle and too fragile to survive the toppling of any domino, as the only Plan A “solution” was to push destabilizing extremes to new extremes , i.e. doing more of what failed spectacularly and increasing the fragility of precariously fragile systems .

A short list of what’s been irreversibly destabilized due to a systemic collapse in demand, exponential rise in risk and uncertainty, dependence on over-indebtedness, imploding global supply chains, structural decline in income and employment and the rapid emergence of new business models that obsolete high-cost, inefficient, sclerotic, bureaucratic monopolies include:

1. Healthcare

2. Higher education

3. Commercial real estate

4. Tourism

5. Restaurants / live entertainment

6. Business travel / conferences

7. Office parks, commutes, urban work forces, etc.

8. High-cost urban lifestyles

We could also include entire sectors that have yet to recognize the tsunami that’s about to wash away their Old Normal: marketing, finance, local governance, etc.

The problem is there’s no Plan B for anything in the U.S. economy. There is only Plan A, a return to 2019 / The Old Normal . If that’s no longer possible, there is literally nothing left on the policy / response plate.

What nobody dares even ask is: what businesses and industries will still be financially viable running at 50% capacity? How many cafes, restaurants, resorts, airlines, etc. will turn a profit operating at 50% capacity? How many can not just survive half of the seats being empty, but turn a profit?

The short answer is very few, because the operating costs of most businesses are unbearably high. The likely survivors are those enterprises with low fixed costs and low operating costs– enterprises that own their facilities in locales with low property taxes, and enterprises that can be run by the owners without employees.

How many enterprises have these kinds of barebones cost structures? Very few.

For most enterprises, the only way they can lower their costs to a level that enables their survival is to cut costs by half: cut rent, mortgages, debt service, property taxes, fees, utilities, insurance, etc. by half.

That would mean everyone down the line would have to survive on half of their previous revenues: landlords, banks, local municipalities, service providers, and so on.

How many of these institutions and enterprises could survive on 50% of their previous revenues?

The only realistic Plan B is a fundamental, permanent re-ordering of the cost structure of the entire U.S. economy. Call it DeGrowth, or creative destruction, or disruption if you prefer, but whatever name we use, the reality will be extraordinarily disruptive, uncertain, risky and unpredictable.

As many of us has explained over the years, unstable, brittle, fragile systems characterized by soaring inequality, pay-to-play political corruption and dependence on debt, leverage and speculative bubbles were unsustainable.

Plan B can be a chaotic mess of denial and failed half-measures that only make all the problems worse, or it can be a positive transformation that results in a society that does more with less. The choice is ours.

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Do You Really Think Masks And Forced Isolation Are Going To Go Away? It Is Time To Stop The Mask Madness And Embrace The Old Normal

Posted by M. C. on May 20, 2020

A thought I had when the lockdown started was will the lockdown stop the annual flu pandemic?

Along with advice on keeping your immune system in peak condition the thing we don’t see in the news is flu data.

If masks and the prison lockdown were stopping flu, as one may expect, big medicine would be shouting it from the rooftops. Not happening.

The CDC stopped publishing weekly flu data early this year but what data there is looks typical. The lockdown and masks apparently did nothing to dampen influenza as one might expect.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-estimates.htm

But

“CDC does not know the exact number of people who have been sick and affected by influenza because influenza is not a reportable disease in most areas of the U.S. However, CDC has estimated the burden of flu since 2010 using a mathematical model that is based on data collected through the U.S. Influenza Surveillance System, a network that covers approximately 8.5% of the U.S. population (~27 million people).”

So, the annual pandemic that kills many tens of thousands just in the US every year is not a reportable illness. The CDC uses a “model”. Perhaps the same one that predicted millions of US COVID deaths?

Those that follow the money think that COVID death numbers are being jacked up because it is a money maker. $39K of government COVID cash for each person put on a ventilator last I read. About a tenth of that for each positive test.

As has been reported in COVID hotspot Italy any death may be classified as a COVID death. Goodness knows Italy needs as much free stuff from the EU as it can get.

In the US:

Here’s Illinois’ Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike saying people are listed as a coronavirus death even if they died of alternative causes. “Even if you died of a clear alternate cause but you had COVID at the same time it’s still listed as a COVID death.”

“Even if you died of a clear alternate cause but you had COVID at the same time it’s still listed as a COVID death.”

Illinois’ Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike says people are listed as a coronavirus death even if they died of alternative causes. pic.twitter.com/mtButgXHn2

— MRCTV.org (@mrctv) April 25, 2020

https://www.redstate.com/nick-arama/2020/04/25/watch-illinois-explains-what-qualifies-as-a-covid-death/

If Illinois admits this, it is likely happening in less forthcoming environments. Say, New York.

A major share of the COVID deaths are nursing home patients. COVID infected patients were forced to remain or be returned to their nursing homes in hotspot New York (in PA too).

https://nypost.com/2020/04/24/new-york-nursing-home-denied-requests-to-send-covid-19-patients-to-usns-comfort/

https://www.breitbart.com/health/2020/04/26/andrew-cuomo-under-fire-for-directive-requiring-nursing-homes-to-accept-coronavirus-patients/

Government making a bad situation worse. The same government that is demanding you live their definition of a COVID life.

The bottom line is health agency COVID data is questionable if not false. I believe COVID is likely the equivalent of a bad flu season.

In any flu season the vaccine is only about 25% effective and its been 100 years since the Spanish Flu. If COVID mutates will we have to wait another 100 years for a 25% effective vaccine?

Vaccine hype masters hope so. They are the Al Gore$ of medicine.

Masks, mandatory vaccine, vaccine digital ID, vaccine passport, contact tracking, virus patents and surveillance, they are necessary because:

Coronavirus is a money maker and a grand exercise in social engineering, fear mongering and control.

The new normal is wearing a mask, no handshakes and social distancing for…ever.  Too many willingly throw away their liberty. They believe what government tells them. Government is their blanky. They will happily stand in line to become part of a government medical experiment.

Do you really think mandatory masks and forced isolation are going to go away? You are a dreamer.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8315479/LA-Mayor-attempts-play-lockdown-extension-August.html

There is no cure for flu. Think of that when you hear the control people say no…fill in the blank…until there is a COVID cure.

Do what is best for your situation. Do what YOU think it takes to stay healthy. But do not undermine those that:

Throw off the government’s symbol of subservience and control that is a mask. Do not want to be medical experiment for profit. Want their old normal.

The state will not make it easy, but we have to try.

tattoo

Will This Be Your Vaccine Tattoo?

                    

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