#COVID-19 deception

[books-by-gauss]

Amazing! The Whitehouse is Free to Distort Truth

James F. Gauss, Ph.D. June 27, 2024 Perhaps George Orwell was 40 years premature with his “Big Brother” novel, 1984, first published in June 1949.  He depicted a totalitarian government that controlled every aspect of the lives of its citizens. Enter 2024 and the tyrannical Biden Administration. Yes, we’ve been heading this way for some time and there have been many contributors, including the…

[kesarijournal]

The Unholy Matrimony of Medicine and Money: A Tale of Unprecedented Betrayal

Based on the Tweet by James Thorp MD https://twitter.com/jathorpmfm/status/1677001591407116296?t=goVxB1OwH69IqgqHIISi4w&s=19 Dr Drew, Dr Kelly Victory & Dr James Thorp Ladies and Gentlemen, gather around, for I am about to regale you with a tale of such audacious corruption and ethical violation that it would make Machiavelli blush. A tale so steeped in irony that even Alanis Morissette would…

[halorvic]

The danger is clear and present: COVID isn’t merely a respiratory illness; it’s a multi-dimensional threat impacting brain function, attacking almost all of the body’s organs, producing elevated risks of all kinds, and weakening our ability to fight off other diseases. Reinfections are thought to produce cumulative risks, and Long COVID is on the rise. Unfortunately, Long COVID is now being considered a long-term chronic illness — something many people will never fully recover from. Dr. Phillip Alvelda, a former program manager in DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office that pioneered the synthetic biology industry and the development of mRNA vaccine technology, is the founder of Medio Labs, a COVID diagnostic testing company. He has stepped forward as a strong critic of government COVID management, accusing health agencies of inadequacy and even deception. Alvelda is pushing for accountability and immediate action to tackle Long COVID and fend off future pandemics with stronger public health strategies. Contrary to public belief, he warns, COVID is not like the flu. New variants evolve much faster, making annual shots inadequate. He believes that if things continue as they are, with new COVID variants emerging and reinfections happening rapidly, the majority of Americans may eventually grapple with some form of Long COVID. Let’s repeat that: At the current rate of infection, most Americans may get Long COVID.

[...]

LP: A recent JAMA study found that US adults with Long COVID are more prone to depression and anxiety – and they’re struggling to afford treatment. Given the virus’s impact on the brain, I guess the link to mental health issues isn’t surprising. PA: There are all kinds of weird things going on that could be related to COVID’s cognitive effects. I’ll give you an example. We’ve noticed since the start of the pandemic that accidents are increasing. A report published by TRIP, a transportation research nonprofit, found that traffic fatalities in California increased by 22% from 2019 to 2022. They also found the likelihood of being killed in a traffic crash increased by 28% over that period. Other data, like studies from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, came to similar conclusions, reporting that traffic fatalities hit a 16-year high across the country in 2021. The TRIP report also looked at traffic fatalities on a national level and found that traffic fatalities increased by 19%. LP: What role might COVID play? PA: Research points to the various ways COVID attacks the brain. Some people who have been infected have suffered motor control damage, and that could be a factor in car crashes. News is beginning to emerge about other ways COVID impacts driving. For example, in Ireland, a driver’s COVID-related brain fog was linked to a crash that killed an elderly couple. Damage from COVID could be affecting people who are flying our planes, too. We’ve had pilots that had to quit because they couldn’t control the airplanes anymore. We know that medical events among U.S. military pilots were shown to have risen over 1,700% from 2019 to 2022, which the Pentagon attributes to the virus.

[...]

LP: You’ve criticized the track record of the CDC and the WHO – particularly their stubborn denial that COVID is airborne. PA: They knew the dangers of airborne transmission but refused to admit it for too long. They were warned repeatedly by scientists who studied aerosols. They instituted protections for themselves and for their kids against airborne transmission, but they didn’t tell the rest of us to do that.

[...]

LP: How would you grade Biden on how he’s handled the pandemic? PA: I’d give him an F. In some ways, he fails worse than Trump because more people have actually died from COVID on his watch than on Trump’s, though blame has to be shared with Republican governors and legislators who picked ideological fights opposing things like responsible masking, testing, vaccination, and ventilation improvements for partisan reasons. Biden’s administration has continued to promote the false idea that the vaccine is all that is needed, perpetuating the notion that the pandemic is over and you don’t need to do anything about it. Biden stopped the funding for surveillance and he stopped the funding for renewing vaccine advancement research. Trump allowed 400,000 people to die unnecessarily. The Biden administration policies have allowed more than 800,000 to 900,000 and counting.

[...]

LP: The situation with bird flu is certainly getting more concerning with the CDC confirming that a third person in the U.S. has tested positive after being exposed to infected cows. PA: Unfortunately, we’re repeating many of the same mistakes because we now know that the bird flu has made the jump to several species. The most important one now, of course, is the dairy cows. The dairy farmers have been refusing to let the government come in and inspect and test the cows. A team from Ohio State tested milk from a supermarket and found that 50% of the milk they tested was positive for bird flu viral particles.

[...]

PA: There’s a serious risk now in allowing the virus to freely evolve within the cow population. Each cow acts as a breeding ground for countless genetic mutations, potentially leading to strains capable of jumping to other species. If any of those countless genetic experiments within each cow prove successful in developing a strain transmissible to humans, we could face another pandemic – only this one could have a 58% death rate. Did you see the movie “Contagion?” It was remarkably accurate in its apocalyptic nature. And that virus only had a 20% death rate. If the bird flu makes the jump to human-to-human transition with even half of its current lethality, that would be disastrous.

[sansculottides]

𝗛𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗨𝗦 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗜𝘁𝘀 𝗖𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘁 𝗙𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀

On June 14, 2024, international news agency Reuters exposed a secret disinformation campaign by the US Department of State meant to discredit Chinese-manufactured COVID-19 vaccines amongst Filipinos. The US anti-vax fake news campaign ran from 2020 to 2021, and involved the use of dummy social media accounts posting false and unscientific information about the efficacy of Chinese vaccines, as well as weaponizing pervasive racist conspiracy theories that the COVID-19 pandemic was created and spread by the Chinese government.

We demand an immediate investigation by the Philippine government on the matter, and for decisive action to be taken by the government to hold the US accountable for its deception campaign against the Filipino people. The Reuters exposé has uncovered a clear national security threat to the Filipino people. The US carried out its fake news campaign at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic was ravaging the Filipino people, and worsened already widespread anti-vaccination beliefs amongst the public.

We are appalled by the glaring lack of Philippine media coverage on the Reuters exposé. An international scandal has just been uncovered. How can truth be spoken to power, and how can political action be taken by citizens, if the media does not play its part? Silence is silence, whether due to the threat of repression or the suffocating consensus by media capitalists that unsavory things be left unsaid. We call on all media workers, whether working at mainstream media organizations, independent media, social media, or campus media, to take the lead themselves and focus public attention on this issue.

The year-long campaign clearly demonstrates the untrustworthiness of the US as a strategic diplomatic and military partner of the Philippines and of all Global South countries. The campaign was initiated by the Trump administration and was first focused on the Philippines. Later on, the project was expanded further into Central Asia and the Middle East. It took the Biden administration three full months to end the globalized and state-sponsored mass disinformation project.

This issue is not just a problem of specific administrations. The year-long campaign should remind the workers and the masses of the Philippines and the world that the US remains the world’s foremost imperialist power. Its overriding foreign policy concern is the maintenance of its dominant global military and economic position, and its means are deception and force.

The US’ covert effort to corrupt public discourse in the Philippines should prompt the Marcos administration to question the intentions of its close diplomatic and military ally. The disinformation campaign was motivated primarily by the US’ geopolitical rivalry with China, which has, since the former’s Pivot to Asia in 2012, increasingly taken on a more militarized and antagonistic form. US military and intelligence agencies are manufacturing consent in the Philippines to win the hearts and minds of the Filipino masses in its effort to overpower China through military means. This is its real goal, and not to aid the Filipino people to address Chinese maritime aggression.

The US has no legitimacy to pose as a champion of international laws and norms and as a partner to secure the Philippines’ national sovereignty. It conducted its campaign to serve its own geopolitical interests with no regard for the immense need of the Philippines to vaccinate its citizens against the pandemic. Once again, Washington D.C. has Filipino blood on its hands.

US interference in Philippine public life cannot be left without consequences. Philippine foreign policy should pivot away from its longstanding reliance on the US and towards ASEAN, and away from addressing Chinese aggression through militarized means and towards regional multilateral diplomacy. 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙥𝙚𝙖𝙘𝙚 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙨𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙚𝙞𝙜𝙣𝙩𝙮 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙋𝙝𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙥𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙨 𝙘𝙖𝙣 𝙤𝙣𝙡𝙮 𝙗𝙚 𝙜𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙖𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙚𝙙 𝙗𝙮 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙁𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙤 𝙢𝙖𝙨𝙨𝙚𝙨. 𝙄𝙢𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙨 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙣𝙤 𝙛𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙨!

📷 AP

Reposted from SPARK - Samahan ng Progresibong Kabataan (Union of Progressive Youth), a socialist youth organization in the Philippines.

[darkmaga-retard]

A reader asked me recently what can be done on the legal front against Pfizer and Moderna regarding their genocidal shots that were deceptively marketed as “vaccines” even though they are gene therapies.

First, any meaningful action by the government, the only entity with the power to make them pay, would require an executive branch that respects the rule of law and works on behalf of its people — which obviously doesn’t exist and certainly won’t for as long as the Democrats hold power.

Second, any meaningful action by the government or private entities requires a judiciary that’s also honest and beholden to the rule of law, which would allow fraud lawsuits to proceed unmolested.

If those prerequisites are met, the crux of the matter becomes proving whether Pfizer lied in its clinical trials to push the shots through the emergency use authorization (EUA) process — which it certainly did.

Such lawsuits exist, but they have not met with success so far, one having been summarily dismissed by a federal court before any litigation could occur.

Via Children’s Health Defense (emphasis added):

“For the second time, a federal court in Texas has dismissed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging Pfizer and two of its contractors manipulated data and committed other acts of fraud during clinical trials for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in 2020. In his Aug. 9 ruling, District Judge Michael J. Truncale sided with the U.S. government, ruling the government had demonstrated “good cause” to intervene and dismiss the case. He wrote: “The Government’s desire to dismiss the case — because of its doubt as to the case’s merits, differing assessment of the Pfizer vaccine data, desire to avoid discovery and litigation obligations, and belief that it should not have to expend resources in a case that is contrary to its public health policy — constitutes good cause to intervene.”… According to the lawsuit, the three companies “deliberately withheld crucial information from the United States that calls the safety and efficacy of their vaccine into question,” thus defrauding the federal government, which purchased the vaccines. The FCA allows the government or a party suing on its behalf to attempt to recover money for false claims made by parties to secure payment from the government.”

          Related: Pfizer Whistleblower Exposes Vaxx Trial Fraud

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Grace Hills at Kansas Reflector:

TOPEKA — Attorney General Kris Kobach filed a civil lawsuit Monday against pharmaceutical company Pfizer, alleging that “Pfizer misled the public that it had a ‘safe and effective’ COVID-19 vaccine,” violating the state’s Consumer Protection Act.  The state seeks “civil monetary penalties, damages, and injunctive relief from misleading and deceptive statements made in marketing its COVID-19 vaccine,” Kobach said.  In the complaint, Kobach alleges that Pfizer willfully concealed, suppressed and omitted material facts relating to the COVID-19 vaccine, the “most egregious” ones regarding safety of the vaccine for pregnant people, in regard to heart conditions, its effectiveness against variants and its ability to stop transmission. 

“Pfizer marketed its vaccine as safe for pregnant women,” Kobach said. “However, in February of 2021 (they) possessed reports of 458 pregnant women who received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy. More than half of the pregnant women reported an adverse event, and more than 10% reported a miscarriage.”  The percentage of “adverse events” — which is a term that means any negative reaction — was higher in pregnant women than the general population by roughly 17 percent, according to a study published in the journal Medicine in February 2022.  An earlier study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April 2021 offered preliminary findings that did not show any significant safety concerns among pregnant individuals who received the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, indicating that observed miscarriages were not unusual and likely not a direct result of the vaccine. 

Kobach says that Pfizer marketed the vaccine as safe in terms of heart conditions such as myocarditis and pericarditis. He referenced a question Albert Bourla, Pfizer CEO was asked in January 2023 of if the vaccine caused severe myocarditis, to which Bourla responded “we have not seen a single signal, although we have distributed billions of doses.”  “However, as Pfizer knew, the United States Government, the United States Military foreign governments and others have found that Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine caused myocarditis and pericarditis,” Kobach said. According to the CDC, cases of myocarditis and pericarditis caused by the COVID-19 vaccine are rare, and most patients experienced resolution of symptoms by hospital discharge. 

Kobach says Pfizer marketed its vaccine as effective against COVID-19 variants, “even though data available at the time showed Pfizer’s vaccine was effective less than half the time.” His final allegation in the complaint was that the company falsely marketed the vaccine as preventing transmission. 

Kansas AG Kris Kobach (R) files politically-motivated lawsuit against Pfizer and their COVID vaccine to score brownie points with anti-vaxxer extremists.

[submalevolentgrace]

"More than a decade ago, investment experts James Altucher and Douglas Sease wrote a book for the Wall Street Journal called Investing in the Apocalypse. They argued that the end of the world is a profitable opportunity for those who know how to “fade the fear”, as everyone else panics. They maintained that when disaster strikes, investors should approach it with the rationale that “no matter how bad things seem, they really aren’t that bad”.

Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, they advised investing in big pharmaceutical companies as a strategy to reap dividends from global pandemics. They also encouraged putting money into renewable energy systems while ramping up oil production.

Today, it seems many have followed Althucher and Sease’s advice. Under the guise of taking action on the pandemic, billions of dollars have been poured into big pharma, instead of public health and policies aimed at preventing another global outbreak. The supposed energy transition that has been undertaken has seen renewable energy production expanded, but there has been no indication that oil and gas are being substituted and ultimately phased out.

What is worse, governments and corporations have teamed up to turn the apocalypse into a money-making opportunity. They have rushed to put forward false solutions to the climate crisis: from the push to replace fuel-engine vehicles with electric ones, to so-called climate-smart agriculture, to protected areas for nature conservation and massive tree planting projects for carbon offsets.

All this trickery is called “greening” and it is designed to profit off of climate fears, not stop climate change. While guaranteeing high returns, this deception is tantamount to the genocide of the hundreds of millions of people who will perish from the effects of climate change within the next century because things are that bad."

[theculturedmarxist]

Posted onOctober 6, 2023 by Yves Smith

Yves here. One small quibble in this otherwise instructive piece is Rob Urie’s use of the word Left. By this he seems to mean liberals, particularly the professional-managerial class sort, while we here use left to mean advocacy of better material conditions for labor and the lower income.

By Rob Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack

At present, it is difficult to see how US politics get sorted in a way that avoids calamity. The Biden administration’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine appears to have been lost on the battlefield. In the midst of the Disney-on-meth-and-cough-syrup ‘pageantry’ of American elections, truth about the US-provoked catastrophe is unlikely to emerge, leaving most Americans wildly detached from the genocidal foreign policy being carried out in their names. Meanwhile, the administration’s Covid-19 ‘response’ has assured that a significant proportion of the population is being permanently disabled by long Covid.

From history, the US war in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia was understood to be ‘unwinnable’ (link below) by the political leadership of the US by the mid-1960s. However, no US president was willing to ‘lose’ Vietnam because of feared domestic political repercussions, leading them to implement profoundly destructive policies to crush domestic opposition to the war while multiple millions of Vietnamese nationalists were slaughtered. The war left three and one-half million Vietnamese dead and the land poisoned with Agent Orange. It finally ended in 1975.

With the military draft in place for most of that war, America’s ruling class was at least in theory at risk of being sent to fight and die in Vietnam. This led to a bourgeois revolt whereby the so-called educated classes turned against a war that was being overwhelmingly fought by working class kids. The bourgeois that joined the military were given leadership positions which many used to launch careers when their tours were up. However, because of bourgeois resistance to the draft, which sometimes bled through to the war, the draft was ended, leaving behind wars that are  consequence-free for most Americans.

This removal of consequences led the class that opposed the US war in Vietnam to be the primary supporters of the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Bourgeois class interest in 1967 was to oppose the Vietnam War because of the risk of being drafted. The bourgeois class interest in 2023 is to support the US proxy war in Ukraine because it is benefitting from it, at least in the near term. Tellingly, the articles in the bourgeois press about the causes of the war leave out all of the (true and relatively unambiguous) history cited by Russia to have motivated the conflict. Use of selective history is a form of deception.

On the Covid pandemic front, Lambert Strether from nakedcapitalism.com has done yeoman’s work keeping an analytical eye on it. The pandemic is politically relevant for more than just the misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation that has been disseminated by the Biden administration and the CDC about it. While Americans have been told that the pandemic is over, missing is that long-Covid is debilitating by degree, with a very real risk that ten to fifteen million Americans have been permanently disabled by it, most of them while Joe Biden has been in office (125 million infected X 10% long Covid rate = twelve and one-half million disabled).

This combination of the American proxy war in Ukraine and the domestic response to the Covid-19 pandemic was chosen because it illustrates the radical detachment of American governance from the political will and needs of the people. While the view here is that the permanent government in the US will prevail until it doesn’t, the question of how the US will extricate itself from Ukraine must be answered. And while the focus of this piece is on domestic politics, what of the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers who have been slaughtered to date? If you imagine that the Russians are responsible for these deaths, you haven’t been listening to the American political leadership exhibiting its glee at convincing Ukrainians to die for it.

While the bourgeois/Left press has focused on irreconcilable political and cultural differences in the polity— as if it had nothing to do with stoking these differences, the facts suggest a singular, if dynamic, political economy that has crafted a citizen-free set of policies intended to perpetually increase the power of the few over the many. Via technology, capital has shifted from using psychological coercion to sell its wares to using state power to force consumption. With a stunning lack of political foresight, the US has created commercial dependencies— e.g. the insurance industry bears no natural relation to healthcare, that leave ‘us’ beholden to corporate power.

One of the charges against Donald Trump (disclosure: I have never voted for a Republican) was that he ‘interrupted’ US foreign policy by challenging the foreign policy establishment to explain itself. Were Trump to be re-elected with the war in Ukraine still underway, the bet here is that he will bend to the will of the three-letter agencies. But what if he doesn’t? According to the fascist Left in the US, and despite four years of evidence to the contrary, Trump would be seeking an alliance with Vladimir Putin. If such an alliance ended the war, why would this be a bad thing?

This brings ‘us’ to the problem for the American foreign policy establishment that would arise if Trump (or whomever) negotiates a peace with Russia that sees the Russians withdraw from the parts of Ukraine that haven’t been permanently annexed. Were the Russians to fail to march on Europe, the American claim that the Russians are imperial competitors would be revealed to be the paranoid fantasy of a declining empire. In fact, the Russians have negotiated two settlements (see here, here) with Ukraine that the Biden administration stepped in to destroy. These were 450,000 or so dead Ukrainian soldiers before Biden claimed that Russia would ‘never negotiate.’

Readers are free to disagree with the particulars of this analysis. What isn’t in dispute is a startling disconnect between bourgeois assessments of the political and economic states of the US and those of vast majorities of the citizens. According to a new poll from the Pew Research Center, only four percent (4%) of Americans believe that the American political system is working. Four percent. In 2023. The reason why the year is important is because the elevation of Joe Biden was the response-from-power that was supposed to right the ship-of-state.

With the wisdom of hindsight, the full-throated (and batshit crazy) response of officialdom to the election of Donald Trump emerged over irritation that electoral politics was interfering with the policies of the permanent government. Neocon-neoliberal warmongers are now called ‘liberal imperialists’ because they espouse woke principles as they bomb the peoples of ‘competing’ nations into tiny pieces. However, as the results of the Pew poll suggest, the public has lost political interest in policies that benefit oligarchs and corporate executives alone. This result pits the institutions of the Federal government against the political will of the American people.

This latter point is important to understand. Russiagate was the American foreign policy establishment’s response to ‘interference’ from the duly elected president of the United States. Mr. Trump and the half of voters who voted for him likely believed that the President, in consultation with Congress, determines American foreign policy. Well, Russiagate was a case of the CIA, FBI, and the NSA disrespectfully disagreeing that the President has any say in US foreign policy unless it supports the CIA’s position. Biden has been a craven tool of the CIA for most of his time in Congress.

This latter point is important to understand. If elections don’t result in a transfer of power due to interference from the permanent state, the form of American governance is authoritarian. Via the convergence of corporate with permanent state institutions, the US already has fascistic form. Through the ascendance of this permanent government that is unanswerable to the polity as it unilaterally launches imperial wars, the US moves to full-blown fascism. If you want to see American fascist atrocities, look at the consequences of US foreign policy since capital has been placed in a position to control the American state.

In prospective terms, sixty-three percent— approximately two-thirds of the Americans asked, have little to no confidence in the form of the US political system. For those with memories— I’ll leave it at that low threshold for the moment, Democrats and the fascist Left in the US have claimed for the last seven years that the problem is ‘Republicans.’  One problem with this claim is that US foreign policy, a/k/a forever wars, are a bipartisan affair misleadingly put forward as the product of whichever party is in power when wars are started. For instance, Bill Clinton’s ‘Iraq Liberation Act’ established George W. Bush’s subsequent war against Iraq as official US policy.

Graph: corporate profits (blue line) cycled around wages and salaries (red line) from the end of WWII to about 2000, when financialization took over the American economy. Basic political logic would have led Barack Obama to return this relationship to its historical range had neoliberal ideology not consumed the American Left. As history has it, Mr. Obama’s Wall Street bailouts returned control of the US economy to the same people that crashed it. And in fact, these ‘profits’ represent the transfer of political control to the rich. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.

The graph above of wages and salaries of American workers versus corporate profits is relevant in several ways. In the first, the period prior to 2000 saw a well-behaved mean-reverting process around a rolling mean. From 2000 forward a break occurred by which capital took ever-larger proportions of corporate revenues for itself. The claim in 2020 was that ‘lunch-bucket Joe’ (Biden) would reverse this trend with labor-friendly policies. In fact, Biden instantly reneged on his promise to raise the minimum wage. While pandemic funding muddies the picture, corporate profits exploded under Biden as wages and salaries went nowhere.

What this leaves is an epoch in which corporations have ‘partnered’ with the Federal government to raise corporate profits while excluding labor from its historic share. This epoch started around the mid-1990s and accelerated through the Biden years. Claims of a return to ‘normalcy’ through the election of Biden refer to the power of the Biden administration to silence its critics. My Google searches now return 1/10,000th of the relevant results that they did a quarter of a century ago. Actual history has been systematically replaced with propaganda that would embarrass the ‘running dog lackeys’ propagandists attributed by the CIA to Chinese Maoists of the 1960s.

Graph: the question of why Joe Biden finds China’s economic policies objectionable in 2023 leads back to Mr. Biden’s support for China entering the WTO in 2000. Mr. Biden and his neoliberal colleagues were true believers in the fantasy that capitalism works as neoliberal economists claim that it does. Were that the case, they (US officials) would be singing Kumbaya with Chinese officials instead of tossing poorly considered, anti-historical, threats of imminent war at them. The original sin was siding with oligarchs to end manufacturing in the US. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.

The point: politicians and pundits looking for reasons why Americans are angry regarding ‘our’ political system need to leave their chairs every few decades and take a look around. The graph of corporate profits illustrates 1) the post-Great Recession surge in corporate profitability that has accelerated since Joe Biden entered office, 2) the epochal nature of this acceleration, and 3) labor has not benefited at all. Most likely, American capitalism has entered a terminal stage, call it the Louis XVI stage, where a remote and ghettoized ruling class misrules until it is no longer permitted to do so. In this respect, expect the Left in the US to act as a reactionary force in support of official power, as it has for the last seven years.

In class terms, the urban bourgeois support power because it pays their salaries. Corporations, NGOs, and so-called non-profits are concentrated in cities because Federal support has favored urban-based industries in recent decades. In other words, cities are where the paychecks are since the US was deindustrialized 1975 – 2023. ‘Woke’ is neoliberal framing of the path to ‘just’ capitalism. ‘Just’ capitalism is political economy where a few people control everything and tell the rest of us what to do for 40 – 60 hours per week for a preponderance of our lives.

Younger readers likely don’t know that this theory of how to accomplish social justice has a long, ignoble, history in the US. Federal Affirmative Action laws were in effect until the planned demolition of the industrial economy was completed. Industrialization had led the Great Migration of Southern Blacks to Northern factories. Deindustrialization was an oligarch-led undertaking to break the back of organized labor, with the added benefit of leaving US negotiators to negate labor and environmental regulations through the creation of international adjudicating bodies peopled by corporate representatives.

Erased from memory is that Black industrial workers sounded a lot like the supporters of Donald Trump in the 1980s and 1990s as deindustrialization was underway because they had been placed in direct competition with recent immigrants and foreign workers. Through financialization, Black access to credit led to a credit-based economy, and with it, the predatory loans that left utter devastation behind when Wall Street imploded around 2008. Given the known results of the Great Migration when NAFTA was being negotiated, how could deindustrialization that disproportionately impacted Blacks not be considered racist?

In fact, there is little evidence that race was considered when NAFTA was being negotiated. Here, from the Clintonite faction of the fascist Left, is a document that explains the relation of race to trade policy while claiming that the Republican version is racist while the Democrats’ version isn’t. With due respect, this type of self-serving parsing is intended to place blame on ‘Republicans’ so as to avoid blame being attached to the system of political economy that made the Democrats’ trade policies racist under their own terms of discourse.

The ’lesson’ here is that too-clever-by-half political party efforts to blame what ails us on the other party have lost some of their potency through the political incapacity of either party to legislate in the public interest. This formulation is a little messy because neoliberalism is the theory / ethos that what benefits capital and the rich benefits us all. This is the ideological path by which open graft has come to represent the ‘American system.’ It is also how a stealth class war was rendered visible. If legislators perceive the interests of business to reside in the executive suites, that is where they apply their energy. Labor, in this view, is a detraction from business interests.

Graph: as planned deindustrialization took root in the US, the loss of higher paying manufacturing jobs devastated Black communities. Following China’s entry into the WTO in 2000, this trend accelerated, tying the lots of Black communities to those of working-class White communities. This puts a lie to the received wisdom from officialdom that ‘economic anxiety’ was a White, working-class malady. And in fact, readers are invited to describe bank robbery at gunpoint as ‘economic anxiety’ on the part of bankers. That banks are protected by law from robbery while American labor isn’t illustrates ruling class control of ‘our’ discourse. Source: axios.com.

Democrats interested in why so-called ‘minority’ voters are fleeing their party, at least until the DNC works with the CIA to frighten them back into the fold, may wish to consider the aggregate class position of American Blacks. Through the Great Migration, Southern Blacks found employment in Northern factories until planned deindustrialization was implemented 1980 – 2023. This shifted them from being landless, or modestly landed, peasants to solidly working class. In the graph of corporate profits above, American Blacks on average find themselves without a benefit from surging corporate profits.

Woke fantasies and seven dollars might buy someone a cup of coffee. But the surge in corporate profits— while labor sees none of it, illustrates the challenge. As long as race is in the aggregate a class relation, woke solutions from authoritarian liberals will be racist. Consider: Joe Biden has been sold as the second coming of Dr. Martin Luther King. What has he wrought? A surge in corporate profits, creation of a permanently disabled class from long Covid, and a proxy war against nuclear armed Russia. I fail to see the social justice of any of this.

The Pew poll referenced above should be ringing alarm bells in official circles. And while it would be a mistake to underestimate the capacity of liberal institutions with unlimited resources to shift the political trajectory back toward liberal/ Left fascism, the powers-that-be have lit fires that they now have no idea how to put out. If you are blessed with ignorance of how cra-cra these powers have been through history, spend a little time reading about American General Curtis LeMay.

Unlike the dim cowards currently advising Joe Biden, LeMay put his own life at risk on many occasions. And, like Biden, LeMay had a nationalist / racist hatred of the Russians. Unlike Biden, LeMay had a plan. That plan was to launch an unprovoked nuclear attack against Russia and China that, through nuclear winter, would have killed 99% of the human population of the planet. I guarantee that Vladimir Putin knows this history as certainly as I know that the Americans ‘advising’ Joe Biden don’t.

[books-by-gauss]

Books by Gauss Price Changes

Visit booksbygauss.com for more details on some great books.

[kesarijournal]

The Unholy Matrimony of Medicine and Money: A Tale of Unprecedented Betrayal

Based on the Tweet by James Thorp MD https://twitter.com/jathorpmfm/status/1677001591407116296?t=goVxB1OwH69IqgqHIISi4w&s=19 Dr Drew, Dr Kelly Victory & Dr James Thorp Ladies and Gentlemen, gather around, for I am about to regale you with a tale of such audacious corruption and ethical violation that it would make Machiavelli blush. A tale so steeped in irony that even Alanis Morissette would…

[eatpeesweetpea]

REVIEW: My 2nd case of COVID-19

TW: mild self destructive behavior, mentions of ED, the state of California

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"[COVID-19] is the Vipassana retreat of viruses..."

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Following north of two years after its debut, my immune system has encountered its sophomore case of COVID-19. Because I am up to date on my vaccines and boosters as of the time of writing, this is an impressive context for COVID-19's return.

It began as a slight and deceptive, "something's stuck in my throat" sort of feeling at the end of a five day road trip through the California. (Let this serve as foreshadowing to how I will review the state of California.) I had choked on a ramen noodle earlier in the day, so I thought nothing of it. The accompanying "off" body feeling that gradually intensified into the evening made the final leg of the drive somewhat uncomfortable. But overall, an underwhelming opener.

COVID-19 really picked up the following morning. Since my girlfriend is a furnace, she can attest that I sleep slight: one blanket, one pillow, soldier, grumpy. No cuddles. I woke up roughly two hours earlier than usual attempting to sell my music in order to exit the freeway on a motorcycle. In my delirium, I whined and snuggled up. I was shivering under two blankets in a sweater, and clammy. My yucky throat feeling had evolved into an icky dry cough that sometimes produced a satisfying wad of phlegm. I was too lazy to get up and get socks to thaw my icy toes.

Post 600 mg ibuprofen, I had reclaimed some vitality and managed to drag my sorry ass home. I dilly dallied unproductively around my room for most of the day, feeling somewhat paranoid about brain fog, long COVID, some weird swelling above my hips, etc. Come nighttime and my fever had crept back up to a surprising 102.9° F. I slumped at the dining room table and spooned hot chicken soup into my hanging mouth. There is something very fascinating and rewarding about these sorry, altered states of consciousness, and I pondered that for a few minutes before redosing. I went to bed shortly after and passed out.

I mostly slept through the night, only beginning to stir prematurely towards morning. I half-awoke very unpleasantly drenched in sweat and flipped the blankets around a couple times to evenly distribute the spoilage. Once I fully woke up, I recorded my temp at a cool 97.2° F. In fact, the rest of the day went swimmingly. I completed some chores, did some painting, and cooked for myself with minimal medication and nursing only a somewhat irritating cough. My throat was more itchy than sore. As for the body feel, I think I could have successfully ran a quarter-marathon given a sufficiently motivated bear or pack of wolves.

Overall, I have mixed feelings on COVID-19. Within the context of its contemporaries, COVID-19 did no more harm than a moderate flu, and I much prefer its dry, manageable cough to the agony of strep throat. The body load and fatigue of COVID-19 was notably brutal on its first day, but backed off much more quickly than any other condition of its caliber. The true scale-tippers here are the social effects of COVID-19; this is the only sickness where you are expected to inform all of your previous company of the potential that you got them sick. Not fun. This is also the only common illness where you can't get away with re-entering society right about when you feel better. The strict code of courtesy around COVID-19 is good and ethical, but knocks it down a couple points by the standards of my review.

That's not to say there are only negatives. On the other side of the coin, I have appreciated the impetus to refocus on art and personal reflection. I've made my maiden voyage through more albums in the last two days than the last two months. I made my first Tumblr post. As someone who is typically noncommittal about disordered eating, I considered the mild reduction in appetite a plus. And further on the topic of self-destructive glee, anybody who claims they don't want to see just how high they can get their temperature before they get scared is full of shit. Number go up funny dopamine -- so I appreciated the astounding effort on fever here.

If you are looking for a new sickness to contract and have a light ten days ahead, keep COVID-19 on your radar. It is the Vipassana retreat of viruses: painful, isolating, meditative, and occasionally gross. Tolerable. Just don't feel tempted to share the love.

6/10

[perisahin]

pinterest. / connections. / navigation.

PERI SELIN ŞAHIN, the TWENTY-EIGHT year old is said to remind people of a SIREN'S SONG OF DECEPTIVE CALM BEFORE THE STORM & USING DIFFERENT ALIASES FOR A MOMENT'S ESCAPE. they are known to be ENCHANTING and SHORT-TEMPERED which makes sense when you think about how they are a ŞAHIN who DOES join in on the family’s extra activities.

𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙨.

faceclaim:  hande ercel full name:  peri selin şahin goes by:�� peri selin, peri, ri age & dob: twenty-eight, july 2 hometown:  manhattan, new york current location:  manhattan, new york orientation: bisexual, heteroromantic education: bachelor's of arts; hospitality, tourism & management ( major ) business administration ( minor ) from columbia unviersity. living arrangement: penthouse suite at manhattan suites languages: english ( native ) | turkish ( fluent ) | arabic ( fluent )

𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮.

+ enchanting, family oriented, quick-witted, loyal, poised  - short-tempered, pretentious, cynical, cold, deceptive equal parts captivating and unpredictable, peri selin's memories are filled with grandiose events and whispered family secrets that have shaped her into who she is today. behind her disarming, doe-eyed exterior and luxurious facade lies a volatile temper, a sharp contrast to her outward poise.

𝙗𝙞𝙤𝙜𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙝𝙮.

tw: parental death, covid-19

money flows just as freely as secrets within the şahin family. growing up in a close-knit, muhacir household with seemingly unlimited resources; peri never wanted for anything, blurring the line between wants and needs early on. perhaps that’s why textbooks held little interest when compared to the excitement of social sports. navigating the the high school hierarchy felt like just another childhood game, only hornier and with higher stakes.  hefty tuitions are met with shitty marks, but peri could never do wrong in her parents’ eyes. maybe it’s the striking resemblance to her mother, or maybe it’s the sweet smile and well-timed compliments that help her weave her way into getting anything she wanted, escaping criticism unscathed. at twelve, peri found out the truth about her family's business when she overheard a heated conversation: her parents ordering a hit on an auditor. when she questions them about it, she learns a lesson that sticks with her-- protect the family at all costs, instilling a cold and slightly cynical nature within a young peri. as she nears college graduation, the expectation of joining her family’s business starts to loom. while she likes the lifestyle it brings, the thought of getting her hands dirty in the day-to-day operations doesn’t appeal to her. thus, she moves to dubai under the guise of pursuing overseas contracts to expand her family’s line of hotels. the well-crafted lie distances her from the business, while still allowing her to enjoy the financial benefits that came with it. five years later, the sudden loss of her mother during the pandemic shattered the carefree life she created for herself. grief brings her back to manhattan, returning to a world she thought she successfully dodged. now, determined to support her family, peri has solidified her spot within the empire by securing city contracts that directly benefit the five families through her very public and totally authentic relationship with a politician who is infatuated with her. 

𝙏𝙇𝘿𝙍:

peri grew up in the şahin household where money and secrets flowed freely. school was never “her thing,” but her resemblance to her mother in both charm and looks helped opened doors. at twelve, she learned of her family’s illegal dealings but accepted it as normal. uninterested in getting her hands dirty but still drawn to the lifestyle it afforded, she moved to dubai after graduation with no intention of returning. however, after her mother’s death, she came back to manhattan, driven to support her family. now, she navigates the family business, securing contracts and leveraging her relationship with her fiancé, a well-known politician.

𝙝𝙚𝙖𝙙𝙘𝙖𝙣𝙤𝙣𝙨:

when she moved back to manhattan, she moved into one of the penthouse suites of her family's hotel and loves it. it's nice to be waited on hand and foot.

peri lives somewhat of a double life. she enjoys going out using a different name and disgusing herself so that she can behave however tf she wants.

she is in a high-profile relationship with a well-known politician. it's not out of the ordinary to see her on different blogs or page 6 of the nyt.

officially, her occupation is event planner.

peri has three dogs ( though her assistant does most of the caring for them. )

[darkmaga-retard]

In economics, the term “opportunity cost” is used to refer to any potential benefits that are lost because of a decision to do one thing instead of another.

For example, if you spend $20 each month for a subscription to the New York Times, that’s twenty bucks you will no longer have available on a monthly recurring basis to instead support independent journalism that debunks the lies and deceptions propagated by the mainstream media. 😁

The French economist Frédéric Bastiat provided a famous illustration of the importance of considering opportunity costs in his 1850 essay What is Seen and What is Not Seen, in which he provided the example of a shopkeeper whose window is broken, and who therefore must pay a glazier to fix his window. According to the mainstream economists of Bastiat’s day, that property destruction represented economic growth because “Look! A new job was created!”

Bastiat explained why this conclusion was a non sequitur fallacy: had the shopkeeper’s window not been broken, he could have otherwise spent the money required to fix the window on something else. The job created because of the window destruction does not represent economic growth. Instead, it represents an economic loss because, if the window had never been broken, the shopkeeper would have had both his window and the money that he could have otherwise spent more productively.

If you think the argument Bastiat was countering is ridiculous and has no relevance for today’s world, recognize that it’s the same fallacy inherent to such still-popular myths as that the government’s spending on World War II ended the Great Depression.

[lasseling]

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach sues Pfizer over marketing of COVID-19 vaccine

The state seeks “civil monetary penalties, damages, and injunctive relief from misleading and deceptive statements made in marketing its COVID-19 vaccine,” Kobach said.