I listened to this on iHeart Radio.
Monday, May 31, 2021
Here’s the Truth About the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (A Comprehensive History)
This $8 Trillion Coronavirus Mistake Could Kill 100%, w Stephen Fry.
The first three minutes talk about the danger of lab experiments on viruses. Then the video talks about other ways humans could destroy themselves.
Sunday, May 30, 2021
Friday, May 28, 2021
Tucker makes big announcement about Rush Limbaugh's successors
Since the passing of Rush Limbaugh, his show has remained on the air using a combination of guest hosts and classic clips by Rush. Because of this, I have only taken a minor interest in the show. I have been waiting for the show to move on since I find Ben Shaprio far more interesting than a dead talk show host. I have my doubts about his newly announced successors because nobody can really replace Rush Limbaugh.
Thursday, May 27, 2021
Indiana number of new cases
In six months, we have gone statewide from thousands of new cases per day to hundreds.
Wednesday, May 26, 2021
CRYPTO CRASH. I'M DONE (as a millionaire)
The first seven minutes give a pretty good reason why as to why cryptocurrency might be a bad idea. The rest is just technical analysis.
Bitcoin has no value other than the willingness of other people to buy it or accept it as payment. This is called the "bigger fool" theory, where you hope that there is a bigger fool than you out there.
I could have bought bitcoin at $5, $50, and $5,000. I could have made a fortune. During an inflationary period, some assets will increase in value. Someday Bitcoin could be worth a million dollars. However, the moment that people decide that they don't want it, it could lose all its value. Likewise, the government could regulate it out of existence.
Monday, May 24, 2021
NASA traces source of mysterious fast radio bursts sending signals to Earth - CBS News
Don't panic, but mysterious sources have been sending radio signals to Earth for years. Now, scientists have tracked down some of their origins — and they were surprised by what they found.
And no, it's still not aliens.
And no, it's still not aliens.
Wuhan Lab
The State Department acknowledged in January 2021 the "United States government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019." It found that they'd experienced symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 "and common seasonal illness."
But, the Wall Street Journal on Sunday, citing a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report, went further and said these workers required hospital care. The report said it was not entirely unusual for people in China to visit hospitals instead of primary care physicians, but the report could lend weight to the theory that the coronavirus leaked from a laboratory.
The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?
"We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin," a group of virologists and others wrote in the Lancet on February 19, 2020, when it was really far too soon for anyone to be sure what had happened. Scientists "overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife," they said, with a stirring rallying call for readers to stand with Chinese colleagues on the frontline of fighting the disease.
Contrary to the letter writers' assertion, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab invoked accident, not conspiracy. It surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of hand. A defining mark of good scientists is that they go to great pains to distinguish between what they know and what they don't know. By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: They were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true.
It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Daszak's organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet's readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, "We declare no competing interests."
...
A second statement that had enormous influence in shaping public attitudes was a letter (in other words an opinion piece, not a scientific article) published on 17 March 2020 in the journal Nature Medicine. Its authors were a group of virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," the five virologists declared in the second paragraph of their letter.
Unfortunately, this was another case of poor science, in the sense defined above. True, some older methods of cutting and pasting viral genomes retain tell-tale signs of manipulation. But newer methods, called "no-see-um" or "seamless" approaches, leave no defining marks.
...
First, they say that the spike protein of SARS2 binds very well to its target, the human ACE2 receptor, but does so in a different way from that which physical calculations suggest would be the best fit. Therefore the virus must have arisen by natural selection, not manipulation.
If this argument seems hard to grasp, it's because it's so strained. The authors' basic assumption, not spelt out, is that anyone trying to make a bat virus bind to human cells could do so in only one way.
...
Shi returned to her lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and resumed the work she had started on genetically engineering coronaviruses to attack human cells. How can we be so sure?
Because, by a strange twist in the story, her work was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). And grant proposals that funded her work, which are a matter of public record, specify exactly what she planned to do with the money.
The grants were assigned to the prime contractor, Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, who subcontracted them to Shi. Here are extracts from the grants for fiscal years 2018 and 2019. ("CoV" stands for coronavirus and "S protein" refers to the virus's spike protein.)
"Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice."
"We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential."
What this means, in non-technical language, is that Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. Her plan was to take genes that coded for spike proteins possessing a variety of measured affinities for human cells, ranging from high to low. She would insert these spike genes one by one into the backbone of a number of viral genomes ("reverse genetics" and "infectious clone technology"), creating a series of chimeric viruses. These chimeric viruses would then be tested for their ability to attack human cell cultures ("in vitro") and humanized mice ("in vivo"). And this information would help predict the likelihood of "spillover," the jump of a coronavirus from bats to people.
The methodical approach was designed to find the best combination of coronavirus backbone and spike protein for infecting human cells. The approach could have generated SARS2-like viruses, and indeed may have created the SARS2 virus itself with the right combination of virus backbone and spike protein.
It cannot yet be stated that Shi did or did not generate SARS2 in her lab because her records have been sealed, but it seems she was certainly on the right track to have done so.
...
On December 9, 2019, before the outbreak of the pandemic became generally known, Daszak gave an interview in which he talked in glowing terms of how researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been reprogramming the spike protein and generating chimeric coronaviruses capable of infecting humanized mice.
"And we have now found, you know, after 6 or 7 years of doing this, over 100 new SARS-related coronaviruses, very close to SARS," Daszak says around minute 28 of the interview. "Some of them get into human cells in the lab, some of them can cause SARS disease in humanized mice models and are untreatable with therapeutic monoclonals and you can't vaccinate against them with a vaccine. So, these are a clear and present danger…."
...
the long history of viruses escaping from even the best run laboratories. The smallpox virus escaped three times from labs in England in the 1960's and 1970's, causing 80 cases and 3 deaths. Dangerous viruses have leaked out of labs almost every year since. Coming to more recent times, the SARS1 virus has proved a true escape artist, leaking from laboratories in Singapore, Taiwan, and no less than four times from the Chinese National Institute of Virology in Beijing.
One reason for SARS1 being so hard to handle is that there were no vaccines available to protect laboratory workers. As Daszak mentioned in the December 19 interview quoted above, the Wuhan researchers too had been unable to develop vaccines against the coronaviruses they had designed to infect human cells.
...
Where we are so far. Neither the natural emergence nor the lab escape hypothesis can yet be ruled out. There is still no direct evidence for either. So no definitive conclusion can be reached.
That said, the available evidence leans more strongly in one direction than the other. Readers will form their own opinion. But it seems to me that proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence.
...
Proponents of natural emergence have a rather harder story to tell. The plausibility of their case rests on a single surmise, the expected parallel between the emergence of SARS2 and that of SARS1 and MERS. But none of the evidence expected in support of such a parallel history has yet emerged. No one has found the bat population that was the source of SARS2, if indeed it ever infected bats. No intermediate host has presented itself, despite an intensive search by Chinese authorities that included the testing of 80,000 animals. There is no evidence of the virus making multiple independent jumps from its intermediate host to people, as both the SARS1 and MERS viruses did. There is no evidence from hospital surveillance records of the epidemic gathering strength in the population as the virus evolved.
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/
Contrary to the letter writers' assertion, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab invoked accident, not conspiracy. It surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of hand. A defining mark of good scientists is that they go to great pains to distinguish between what they know and what they don't know. By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: They were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true.
It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Daszak's organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet's readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, "We declare no competing interests."
...
A second statement that had enormous influence in shaping public attitudes was a letter (in other words an opinion piece, not a scientific article) published on 17 March 2020 in the journal Nature Medicine. Its authors were a group of virologists led by Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute. "Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," the five virologists declared in the second paragraph of their letter.
Unfortunately, this was another case of poor science, in the sense defined above. True, some older methods of cutting and pasting viral genomes retain tell-tale signs of manipulation. But newer methods, called "no-see-um" or "seamless" approaches, leave no defining marks.
...
First, they say that the spike protein of SARS2 binds very well to its target, the human ACE2 receptor, but does so in a different way from that which physical calculations suggest would be the best fit. Therefore the virus must have arisen by natural selection, not manipulation.
If this argument seems hard to grasp, it's because it's so strained. The authors' basic assumption, not spelt out, is that anyone trying to make a bat virus bind to human cells could do so in only one way.
...
Shi returned to her lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and resumed the work she had started on genetically engineering coronaviruses to attack human cells. How can we be so sure?
Because, by a strange twist in the story, her work was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). And grant proposals that funded her work, which are a matter of public record, specify exactly what she planned to do with the money.
The grants were assigned to the prime contractor, Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, who subcontracted them to Shi. Here are extracts from the grants for fiscal years 2018 and 2019. ("CoV" stands for coronavirus and "S protein" refers to the virus's spike protein.)
"Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice."
"We will use S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding to test the hypothesis that % divergence thresholds in S protein sequences predict spillover potential."
What this means, in non-technical language, is that Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. Her plan was to take genes that coded for spike proteins possessing a variety of measured affinities for human cells, ranging from high to low. She would insert these spike genes one by one into the backbone of a number of viral genomes ("reverse genetics" and "infectious clone technology"), creating a series of chimeric viruses. These chimeric viruses would then be tested for their ability to attack human cell cultures ("in vitro") and humanized mice ("in vivo"). And this information would help predict the likelihood of "spillover," the jump of a coronavirus from bats to people.
The methodical approach was designed to find the best combination of coronavirus backbone and spike protein for infecting human cells. The approach could have generated SARS2-like viruses, and indeed may have created the SARS2 virus itself with the right combination of virus backbone and spike protein.
It cannot yet be stated that Shi did or did not generate SARS2 in her lab because her records have been sealed, but it seems she was certainly on the right track to have done so.
...
On December 9, 2019, before the outbreak of the pandemic became generally known, Daszak gave an interview in which he talked in glowing terms of how researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been reprogramming the spike protein and generating chimeric coronaviruses capable of infecting humanized mice.
"And we have now found, you know, after 6 or 7 years of doing this, over 100 new SARS-related coronaviruses, very close to SARS," Daszak says around minute 28 of the interview. "Some of them get into human cells in the lab, some of them can cause SARS disease in humanized mice models and are untreatable with therapeutic monoclonals and you can't vaccinate against them with a vaccine. So, these are a clear and present danger…."
...
the long history of viruses escaping from even the best run laboratories. The smallpox virus escaped three times from labs in England in the 1960's and 1970's, causing 80 cases and 3 deaths. Dangerous viruses have leaked out of labs almost every year since. Coming to more recent times, the SARS1 virus has proved a true escape artist, leaking from laboratories in Singapore, Taiwan, and no less than four times from the Chinese National Institute of Virology in Beijing.
One reason for SARS1 being so hard to handle is that there were no vaccines available to protect laboratory workers. As Daszak mentioned in the December 19 interview quoted above, the Wuhan researchers too had been unable to develop vaccines against the coronaviruses they had designed to infect human cells.
...
Where we are so far. Neither the natural emergence nor the lab escape hypothesis can yet be ruled out. There is still no direct evidence for either. So no definitive conclusion can be reached.
That said, the available evidence leans more strongly in one direction than the other. Readers will form their own opinion. But it seems to me that proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence.
...
Proponents of natural emergence have a rather harder story to tell. The plausibility of their case rests on a single surmise, the expected parallel between the emergence of SARS2 and that of SARS1 and MERS. But none of the evidence expected in support of such a parallel history has yet emerged. No one has found the bat population that was the source of SARS2, if indeed it ever infected bats. No intermediate host has presented itself, despite an intensive search by Chinese authorities that included the testing of 80,000 animals. There is no evidence of the virus making multiple independent jumps from its intermediate host to people, as both the SARS1 and MERS viruses did. There is no evidence from hospital surveillance records of the epidemic gathering strength in the population as the virus evolved.
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/
Sunday, May 23, 2021
David Horowitz | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 115
This is an hour long and well worth listening to all of it, but you can get the gist of it in 20 minutes.
Saturday, May 22, 2021
Is 2022 Our Last Chance to Save America? | Victor Davis Hanson | The Glenn Beck Podcast
I'm not a fan of Glenn Beck because he tends to be conspiratorial, but he seems to have moderated lately. His guest Victor Davis Hanson is always good to listen to, and he does a fantastic job here.
Friday, May 21, 2021
Why Socialism Always Expand its Oppression | Prof. Leszek Balcerowicz
This takes some patience but I think that it is good.
Fwd: Crazy Geraldo segment on Israel
This morning he was a guest on the Brian Kilmead show where he mostly blamed Israel. This disappoints me.
Chinese studying Battle of Midway
Today, on the other side of the Pacific, the Midway battle seems to have become a rather hot study topic in contemporary Chinese naval circles. Maybe this is not particularly surprising given that Beijing has just launched its second aircraft carrier and is thought to be hard at work on the third. A long article in the Chinese naval magazine Modern Ships [现代舰船] published by the enormous ship-building conglomerate CSIC, is especially interesting. The focus of the piece, entitled "The Road to Midway Island" [通向中途岛之路] does not take up the tactics, the technologies, nor the heroism involved, but undertakes a strictly disciplined examination of the planning choices made by the Japanese military leadership during the spring of 1942. Thus, among the ingredients that produced the miracle at Midway, this Chinese analysis is focused on "strategic acumen," or lack thereof, and how Tokyo squandered such a militarily favorable position so quickly.
The analysis begins by making the point that Tokyo's rapid conquest of all of Southeast Asia had come at a startlingly low cost. Victory had come so easily [赢得这些胜利是如此地轻而易举] and the obvious natural question was "What next?" [下一步 . . . 怎么半]. In March 1942, the Japanese Navy was said to be examining two vectors of attack: either south to Australia or north to the Aleutians. The Japanese Navy's chief planner and mastermind of the Pearl Harbor attack, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, has apparently also ordered an investigation of the feasibility for an invasion of Hawaii. Curiously, the Japanese Navy set off at that time on another project altogether deep in the Indian Ocean: Ceylon [锡兰] or Sri Lanka. As this analysis outlines, Tokyo's goals in the Indian Ocean were not completely far-fetched. The Japanese Navy's surge toward India was intended to menace Britain, perhaps even encouraging the people of the Raj to rise up against their colonial masters, while simultaneously impressing Germany and presenting the real possibility of the Axis powers jointly carving up the oil-rich Persian Gulf. The invasion of Australia was never seriously contemplated in Tokyo, according to this analysis, since such a campaign was evaluated to require at least two hundred thousand troops, as well as a third of Japan's sparse shipping resources. The Chinese author notes that the Japanese Army had no interest in supporting the Japanese Navy with various operation around the Asia-Pacific region, because Tokyo's ground forces remained obsessed with campaigns on the Asian mainland with their sites fixated, in particular, on the conquest of Siberia [西伯利亚]. While the Japanese Navy recognized that an invasion of Hawaii would eliminate America's most important strong point in the Pacific and greatly hinder its opportunities to strike at Japan, this author emphasizes the problems posed by the "passive . . . uncooperative attitude" [消极 . . . 不合作态度] of the Japanese Army that was unwilling to play a "supporting role" [当配角].
China Keeps Studying One World War II Battle For a Sinister Reason | RealClearDefense
Wednesday, May 19, 2021
Monday, May 17, 2021
"He's Your Uncle! Not Your Dad..." By Walter Brennan
Presented for your consideration for historical purposes, a 1960s speech by Walter Brennan. I liked Walter Brennan as an actor, who appeared in many movies like Rio Bravo, and the TV series, "The Real McCoy's."
Walter Brennan was a member of the John Birch Society and believed in communist conspiracies. He sounds like conspiracy theorists today, but he also makes points about big government and socialism that seem just as applicable to our time. The speech was given to a receptive audience of John Birch Society members.
The speech was made into a record for political purposes. On the website it is divided into four parts starting with the link "Side one Pt. 1." Part 3 starts to get a little conspiratorial.
The applause in the recording sounds canned making it come off as very artificial. However, it can be difficult to record real applause unless you use multiple microphones.
Walter Brennan is a curiosity, because people praised him for being one of the best character actors in Hollywood, while others also criticized him for his extreme conservatism and intense anti-communism. He tended to think that people who might not have been communists were communists, like John Wayne and Martin Luther King. In reality, Doctor King rejected pure communism but instead advocated for "Democratic Socialism."
Walter Brennan was so convinced that Martin Luther King was a communist that he expressed delight over Doctor King's murder. This caused many to label Walter Brennan "the most evil man in Hollywood" and a racist. Although I understand his anti-communism and his anti-socialism, his reaction to the murder of Doctor King is just unforgivable.
I also found this just as a curiosity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDYsw4t2rAI
Sunday, May 16, 2021
DEBUNKED: Transgender Ideology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYF00xTGS7o
I ask myself, what if I identified as a woman? (I don't.) I would want to use whatever means available to me to become more like a woman, and I would want others to respect me as a person even if they didn't understand my life choices.
However, the desire to be something is not the same as being something. No matter what extreme measures I might take, I will never be able to bear children. We could argue about what constitutes womanhood. Women who are barren are no less female, but natural biology created me a certain way. If I were to mutilate myself so badly that I resembled a dog, that would not make me a dog.
I understand the difference between desire and reality. I desire to be a chess master, but I am not likely to become one. I desire to lift weights, but my damaged shoulder makes this a questionable idea. I desire better vision, but my bad left eye is unfixable.
Although I would hope for respect, I would not demand that people pretend that I am something that I am not, nor would I demand that people lie about it just to protect my feelings.
If my unachievable desire was so compelling that it interfered with my happiness and my ability to function in life, then I would not rule out the possibility that I might have a form of mental illness. The logical thing to do under these circumstances is to seek help.
Saturday, May 15, 2021
Conspiracy theories
I keep getting messages from my friends that I can only describe as "paranoid delusions." The latest is from my friend who claims that Freemasonry is a Lucifer worshiping cult that wants to destroy mankind.
The problem as I see it is that there are substantial numbers of people, more than I ever expected, who believe in conspiracy theories. This seems to have been made worse by the pandemic. The conspiracy theorists are almost always anti-vaxxers.
Maybe it is human nature to need an enemy. If people don't have somebody to hate, then they will make one up.
Friday, May 14, 2021
Your Idiot Rulers Finally Say The Masks Can Come Off
I like this. He spends 35 minutes talking about the CDC change in the mask mandate.
IMHO, given the severity of events over the last 14 months, no matter what people did it would be controversial.
Thursday, May 13, 2021
1 out of 500
Where do we stand compared to a year ago? We were looking at a death rate of about 6% compared to about 1.8% now. But the incredible number of cases means that 1/10 Americans have had an active case that we know of, with almost 1 out of every 500 Americans dying from the disease.
Wednesday, May 12, 2021
Keystone
In other news: Jennifer Granholm, during a press conference yesterday about the hack of the Colonial Pipeline, said, "We have doubled down on ensuring that there's an ability to truck oil in — gas in. But it's — the pipe is the best way to go. And so that's why, hopefully, this company, Colonial, will, in fact, be able to restore operations by the end of the week as they have said."
Oh, pipe is the best way to go, huh? Safer, more secure, more efficient, less risk of accidents? Then maybe this administration shouldn't be canceling pipeline projects!
Joe Biden Is Getting It Wrong Across The Board | National Review
Rand Paul Goes Full SAVAGE Against Fauci AGAIN in Senate Hearing
Just based on the video, the difference of opinion seems to be over definitions. According to Rand Paul in the video, we reportedly funded "gain of function" research in the U.S., and one of the researchers collaborated with the Wuhan Virology lab.
I have been disappointed in some of the behavior in these videos. It seems like Senators or Congresspersons will use the witnesses as punching bags and it has nothing to do with finding out information.
Tuesday, May 11, 2021
Monday, May 10, 2021
AP memo says it all
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Larry
In March, the Associated Press distributed a memo advising reporters to "avoid" or "use caution" when using the word crisis. "One very real possibility is this strategy works," the person added. "They may get criticism in think pieces about it, but at his hundred-day mark, Biden is the most liberal president we've had — and the public thinks he's a moderate. That's a winning strategy to me. They're willing to accept that you're gonna write this piece as long as they know that swing voters in Colorado aren't gonna read it."
The true cost of imaginary money
That monologue was broadcast in the same week Joe Biden promoted the third of his gargantuan spending programs, bringing his first 100 days' total discretionary spending proposals to $6 trillion. (Context: total US GDP is $21 trillion.) This lavish largesse would be slathered atop the annual (and growing) nondiscretionary budget of nearly $5 trillion, against $3.5 trillion in tax revenue. Let's tweak Maher's routine, then:
'I fully understand that our financial system isn't perfect, but at least, or so I've imagined, it's real. But the American dollar increasingly resembles Easter bunny cartoon cash. I've read articles about Modern Monetary Theory. I've had it explained to me. I still don't get it, and neither do you.
'Dollars are now made up out of thin air and comparable with Monopoly money. We thought we knew that money had to originate from and be generated by something real, somewhere. Modern Monetary Theory says, "No, it doesn't"… Or as another analyst put it, "Quantitative easing is an open Ponzi scheme". The Federal Reserve is like having an imaginary best friend who's also a banker.
'Our problem here is at root not economic but psychological. People who have been raised in a virtual world are starting to believe they can really live in it. Much of warfare is a video game now; why not base our economy the same way? The conjuring of "borrowed" money from ether, only to have that debt swallowed by a central bank and disappear, is literally a game.
'Do I need to spell this out? There is something inherently not credible about the Fed creating not just hundreds of billions, but trillions in wealth, with nothing ever actually being accomplished, and no actual product made or service rendered. It's like Tinkerbell's light. Its power source is based solely on enough infantilized citizens believing in it.'
Somehow that monologue isn't as funny in the second version.
While Maher decries the electricity squandered on crypto 'mining', at least the color of the Fed's money is genuinely green. Tap a few keys, and voilà: trillions from pennies on the energy bill. So in the past year, the Fed effortlessly increased the world's supply of dollars by 26 percent and is on track for a similar surge in 2021. But is drastic monetary expansion truly without cost?
I've made Maher's Tinkerbell analogy myself, but to explain how traditional currency functions. I noted in an essay accompanying my novel The Mandibles, about America's 2029 economic apocalypse: 'Currency is a belief system. It maintains its value the way Tinkerbell is kept aloft by children believing in fairies in Peter Pan.'
In the novel, a fictional economics professor pontificates: 'Money is emotional. Because all value is subjective, money is worth what people feel it's worth. They accept it in exchange for goods and services because they have faith in it. Economics is closer to religion than science. Without millions of individual citizens believing in a currency, money is colored paper. Likewise, creditors have to believe that if they extend a loan to the US government they'll get their money back or they don't make the loan in the first place. So confidence isn't a side issue. It's the only issue.'
My confidence is going wobbly. Biden commands trillions the way previous presidents have commanded billions, while the public is so dazzled by zeros that they don't know the difference.
I've my quibbles with the particulars. Spending in inconceivable quantity courts waste and fraud. Biden's American Families Plan casts so many freebies upon the waters as to constitute a de facto universal basic income, and government dependency doesn't seem characteristic of a good life. Pandemic-relief unemployment supplements (which many Democrats would make permanent) are so generous that small businesses can't find employees willing to work even for two to three times the minimum wage. Biden is effectively reversing Clinton-era welfare reforms, which moved so many poor Americans from state benefits to self-respecting employment. Financing all these goodies by hiking corporate taxes is popular, but only because few people realize that every-one pays corporate taxes through lower pension-fund returns, job losses from corporate flight, lower wages and higher prices.
But it's the bigger picture that unnerves me. Zero interest rates have installed an accelerating debt loop. Governments, companies and individuals borrow because money is free. Central banks won't raise interest rates, lest the cost of servicing all this burgeoning debt bankrupt the debtors. Governments, companies and individuals borrow still more because money is free. The Federal Reserve has already announced it won't raise interest rates even if inflation climbs, while refusing to cite what level inflation would have to hit before reconsidering. I've plotted this story before. It doesn't end well.
Sunday, May 9, 2021
Saturday, May 8, 2021
Friday, May 7, 2021
Happy Birthing Person’s Day!
I highly recommend the first 30 minutes. Here Ben Shapiro nails it once again as he talks about the left distorts language as a form of propaganda, calling women "Birthing Persons". He elaborates further by talking about the importance of the nuclear family and how certain religions promote having children.
Thursday, May 6, 2021
Fwd: J&J blood clot in Utah
The first case of a rare blood-clotting condition thought to be linked to the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine has been diagnosed in Utah.
A male patient was recently diagnosed with vaccine-induced Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia, also known as VITT, at the University of Utah Hospital, U. health officials said in a Wednesday news release.
The patient, who is under the age of 50, was treated and is now recovering at home, according to Dr. Yazan Abou-Ismail, an assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Hematology at the University of Utah.
"He continues to do well and feel well," Abou-Ismail said at a Wednesday news conference about the case.
The blood clot condition led to a nationwide pause on administration of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine last month after six cases were reported among over 6 million people who received the vaccine. The pause was lifted on April 23 after federal regulators determined the vaccine's continued use is safe.
Wednesday, May 5, 2021
Fwd: Tell me how you really feel...
I couldn't disagree more.
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Larry
From: Larry
In that way, "Is America a racist country?" is the political equivalent of being asked in court when you stopped beating your wife.
The most important problem with "Is America a racist country?" is that the question itself is based on a malicious and grossly incorrect set of assumptions. Racism is not an opinion. It is a fact. Moreover, the fact that America is a racist society, and that racism and white supremacy negatively impact the life chances of Black and brown people, is one of the most overdetermined and repeated findings of social scientists and other experts.
One can reasonably discuss the dimensions and varieties of racism in America, and how it contours and structures American society to the benefit of white people and the disadvantage of black and brown people. One can also reasonably discuss questions of data and discover new insights from history. One can have a productive discussion about whether and how America can be redeemed from its racist origins.
But the fact and reality of racism and other systems of privilege is that such systems of power give unearned advantages to those individuals and groups defined as being "white," as compared to nonwhites. That is a settled question.
Who is the audience for the public ritual of asking and answering this question?
Today's Republican Party is a white supremacist organization. When Tim Scott, Donald Trump, Lindsey Graham, Ron DeSantis and other prominent Jim Crow Republicans and Trumpists offer their thoughts about racism in America, they are speaking almost exclusively to racially resentful or outright racist white people — because those people are the foundation of the contemporary Republican Party and the Trump movement.
How not to talk about American racism: Tim Scott lures Democrats into a trap | Salon.com
Tuesday, May 4, 2021
President Biden has proposed spending trillions, but does it have a chance in passing?
President Biden's proposals have been met with near-universal hostility by Republicans, who remain concerned about spending so much money so quickly.
Democrats and progressives remain pleased with the proposal for the most part. A number of moderate Democrats will ultimately decide whether or not these plans pass, however.
Democrats could pass this on their own, but it would require every single Democratic senator to support the measures.
If any Democrat in the Senate says no, it would then require some Republicans to get on board.
Already some moderates, like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), has expressed being "uncomfortable" with so much spending.
Negotiations will continue over the proposals for the next several weeks.
A final vote is likely still months away.
Democrats and progressives remain pleased with the proposal for the most part. A number of moderate Democrats will ultimately decide whether or not these plans pass, however.
Democrats could pass this on their own, but it would require every single Democratic senator to support the measures.
If any Democrat in the Senate says no, it would then require some Republicans to get on board.
Already some moderates, like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), has expressed being "uncomfortable" with so much spending.
Negotiations will continue over the proposals for the next several weeks.
A final vote is likely still months away.
Spending like there is no tomorrow
A hundred million Americans have been vaccinated. The problem no longer is producing and distributing enough vaccines for the public but finding enough people who want to get them.
Whereas FDR confronted a 25 percent unemployment rate during the Great Depression, Joe Biden inherited an economy on the verge of takeoff.
GDP grew by 1.6 percent in the first quarter, or at a 6.4 annual rate. Some projections have GDP this year growing at the fastest clip since 1951. Consumer spending is expected to be the highest on record.
Biden has no excuse for his massive spending because the crisis is over (nypost.com)
Sunday, May 2, 2021
Commenter compares to the handmaids tale
From: Larry
Just finished watching a few episodes of "A Handmaids Tale". Frightening the similarities between it and the Democrats today. I could see AOC as the head of the "utopian society" in the show which is all about complete government control, totalitarianism, taking away the rights and freedoms of the people. Just like today with the cancel culture, political correctness and if you believe "all" lives matter, you lose your job or worse. Very, very scary parallels if any of you have watched this series. Vote the Dems out of power in both the House and the Senate! Stop the insanity.
Saturday, May 1, 2021
Violence from the extreme left.
Personally, I think that the election of Barack Obama emboldened the extreme left to want their full agenda now, and anything less than that is not acceptable. Gone are the days where they would have to couch their positions in more reasonable-sounding terms. Add to this the election of Donald Trump being a major setback to their extreme goals, they went full-on vicious until they got rid of this impediment.
Joe Biden seems to correctly read the political direction of his party. He has proposed an additional 6 trillion spending over the normal 4.5 trillion dollar budget. Never mind the fact that the government only takes in about 3 to 3.5 trillion in taxes.
Let's say that Joe Biden gets everything he has asked for. Then what? Are the people on the extreme left going to be satisfied with that? Will they say that we have spent way too much money and just for the sake of fiscal responsibility we need to cut back? No, they will say that this is only the downpayment.
Census result modified by white house?
More than a dozen House Republicans Friday are questioning Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo on whether there "was any political interference" in the final census numbers used to decide how many House members each state will get for the coming decade.
"The apportionment population results released by the Census Bureau are strikingly different from the population evaluation estimates released just months ago on December 22, 2020," the GOP members wrote. "Remarkably, the differences benefit traditionally blue states – which gained population compared to the estimates – over red states which tended to lose population compared to the estimates."
The GOP group asks Raimondo for a trove of documents, including communications between the Census Bureau and the White House, and whether the counting of illegal aliens in the congressional apportionment may have had an effect on the final result
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