[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
The one thing the layman can trust is he can’t trust the experts. Because they don’t trust him.
Experts, if they aren’t fake or paid shills, come with a particular professional bias as well as the general contemporary bias by which Western elites are alienated from the common man.
There’s a pattern crises follow now: campaigns of misinformation, opportunistic looting by financial actors, the consolidation of power in the hands of the people who as often as not are responsible, and ending with society’s energies diverted to a cause with little or no relationship to the original crisis. A cause to which the people themselves may have no relationship or interest—the 2003 Iraq War is a stark model.
The first significant action taken in the current crisis (as opposed to significant inaction) was a campaign of misinformation. Faced with the very real prospect of a run on medical-quality face masks the experts lied to us about their effectiveness.
It’s not their fault, you might say; fault the outsourcing of the manufacture of basic medical equipment. But that misinformation campaign about masks was nestled like a Russian doll in a greater misinformation (or just mis-informed) campaign—that our hospitals would be overwhelmed with corona virus patients.
How many lives were lost to this? How much time was lost? Might we have avoided the shutdown and the coming economic depression if we had a system capable of honest action in the public interest?
Squint through the snowstorm of information and look into the heart, such as it is, of the elitist: aside from his objective appraisal of the current crisis (leaving aside his atrophied capacity for objectivity in the Current Year) what about the shutdown appeals to him, emotionally? He sees it as a crude device for a crude people—us. Faced with the prospect of formulating a set of rules for going about life and business or just telling the dumb bastards (us) to stay home, they opted, of course, for the latter.
They want you to “shelter in place” because they don’t trust you to carry out basic instructions.
Common to all crises now is the absence of accountability. Let’s not expect it. But it’s becoming increasingly suggestive the still-touted strategy of shutting down is misguided and may even be counter productive.
...numerous epidemiological studies have shown that infection rates for C19 are higher when people are exposed to it for prolonged periods in confined spaces. Locking people up in their homes is probably the worst thing you could do if you wanted to reduce the infections and the duration of the outbreak.
This is well known to the World Health Organisation. In their joint study with Chinese authorities, published in February, the WHO stated that airborne spread wasn’t reported for C19 and was not considered to be a method of transmission.
They found that most infections occurred within families where the chance of infection was as high as 20%. However, the chance of infection in the community was estimated to be between 1-5%
The elite’s reaction to the crisis was delayed and dishonest; so will be any reaction to the present strategy failing—recognition of which censorship will delay as long as it can. The media can be expected now to portray the inevitable waning of the pandemic as a vindication of the shutdown. This too will delay any abandonment of the strategy.
But for other reasons they are in no hurry. The shutdown hurts the little people, for whom it is crafted. It’s like a flood threatening to leave only the commanding heights above water.
The shutdown strategy retains the support of the experts, so the typical bugman can enjoy the disparate impact it has on the middle and working classes without feeling guilty. Indeed, he unthinkingly plugs it directly into his psychological matrix of understanding: it is a case of us dummies ignoring “science” and valuing “jobs” over “lives”.
That it accelerates the dis-empowering of certain people is inevitable, he might say (not that anyone is asking) like globalization and white decline.
Whatever the case, if wealth and cultural status are to remain wildly uneven in the favor of those in charge, the shutdown will have to be uniform across the country.
Why, you might ask, would Bakersfield, with its dearth of cases, have to observe the same drastic measures as Manhattan, and go down the drain of economic decline?
Because if New York, with its vast importance to the status quo we call Globo Homo, is to be shut down for months (because it’s acquired a nasty virus, as a result of being the center of Globo Homo) then by God so must the rest of the nation. We can’t have people and business, the very power, of New York migrating out to the hinterlands! Therefore a crude strategy must become cruder still.
Meanwhile some people are doing extremely well in the current atmosphere. The Daily Mail:
American billionaires are enjoying multi-million dollar increases to their net worth as the country’s unemployment levels rise to record highs amid the coronavirus lockdowns
Eight ‘pandemic profiteers’ have seen their net worth surge by over $1billion each since the start of the global pandemic.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, 56, has added $25billion to his own wealth since January 1, 2020, as the company’s staff protest their poor working conditions and he makes a return to the company’s day-to-day running.
According to a report from the Institute for Policy Studies, American billionaires added $282billion – nearly a ten percent increase – to their combined wealth between March 18 and April 10, as the U.S. unemployment rate approached 15 percent.
Bring Back Oliver Cromwell - Vic Sarson
I support tougher prison sentences but what is a seriously long sentence in these times where a liberal elite controls the judiciary, the media, education, the civil service and nearly all politicians are signed up to it?
The application of capital punishment certainly needed reviewing but its outright abolition not only demoted the crime of murder but of all violent crime. Now, vicious, violent criminals are treated with greater leniency than someone who has not paid a TV licence.
A recent article in the Daily Mail showed the photographs of six such thugs that had walked out of court smiling having been given non-custodial sentences for vicious random attacks against members of the public. They were separate individuals unknown to each other in British courts in different towns. Another item on another date showed the photograph of an elderly woman who had suffered blows to the head with an axe that were so severe as to expose her skull. The robber had attacked her in broad daylight when she was out shopping. He too walked free from court.
Anyone, it seems, can be a magistrate and the liberals have got it sewn up: the interviewers are liberals and ensure that only liberals are appointed. Judges these days are, in the main, little better.
They discuss Tommy Robinson, viz., his disingenuous activities as controlled opposition.
Collett was prompted to this critique having been criticized, ridiculed and denounced explicitly by Tommy Robinson (including being publicly and harshly criticized by Robinson on the day of Collett’s daughter’s birth; and subsequently by Robinson in the video shown below, as one who didn’t but should be having babies; while in fact Collett is fathering).
Laura Towler weighs-in against Tommy Robinson, as well, addressed by him in the same diatribe as “some bird” who should be having sex and making babies rather than merely hating fecund migrants - particularly the Muslims, who Tommy Robinson’s controlled opposition wants to focus on, with minimal criticism of other non English migrants, and no criticism of Jewish peoples.
During the ‘16 campaign, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch hired former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele to investigate Trump’s involvement with Russia. Their new book is Crime in Progress.
TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. After Donald Trump was elected but before he was inaugurated, BuzzFeed published a leaked document that became known as the Steele dossier - a series of memos written by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele suggesting Russia had been cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump and that, according to several sources, Russia had compromising information that could be used to blackmail Trump.
This dossier had been commissioned by Fusion GPS, a private research company providing research for law firms and corporations as well as opposition research for political candidates. Fusion was first hired to investigate Trump during the primary by the Republican news site The Washington Free Beacon. After Trump won the primary, the law firm representing Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee started funding Fusion’s research into Trump.
My guests are the founders of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch. They’re former Wall Street Journal reporters. Some of the Russians who surfaced in the Trump investigation were people Simpson and Fritsch had reported on at The Wall Street Journal while investigating Russian corruption and organized crime. Simpson and Fritsch have written a new book called “Crime In Progress” about their investigation into Trump, its impact and Republican attempts to discredit Fusion GPS and the Steele dossier.
Glenn Simpson, Peter Fritsch, welcome to FRESH AIR. What were some of the findings in your report and in the Steele dossier that you consider to be the most important early warnings of Donald Trump’s ties to Russia?
PETER FRITSCH: The truth is Chris Steele came into this project about nine months in. We started looking at Donald Trump and his relationship to Russia as part of a much broader project, which was looking at Donald Trump’s business career. As has been reported, we first started working for Republicans. About nine months in, we started working with Chris Steele. Now, we saw a lot in the early going that caused us to have concerns about Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia.
First, we saw his relationship with Felix Sater. Felix Sater is a Russian emigre to the U.S. who was working with Donald Trump and, importantly, worked with him in the FL-Group, which developed, among other properties, the Trump Soho. You know, this is an individual who was - went to prison for slicing someone’s face open with a margarita glass, who then was convicted of stock fraud - this is all in the ‘90s. So that caught our attention, to see him with a business card - occupying an office in Trump Tower and carrying a business card with Donald Trump’s company name on it.
Then, we found a number of properties inside Trump Tower itself that were occupied by convicted and alleged organized crime figures from Russia. You know, we also just saw a pattern of investments coming into Donald Trump’s properties, and to Donald Trump personally. The other sort of interesting data point in the early going was the transaction in Palm Beach involving a Russian oligarch by the name of Dmitry Rybolovlev - pardon my pronunciation. He is a potash magnate - it’s a fertilizer - sort of king of Russia. He bought Donald Trump’s mansion in the mid-2000s for about $95 million when it was on the market for $45 million. That was a really suspicious transaction to us. So anyway, the sum of that and just the sum of our research regarding his business led us to want to know more about Russia, which is how we started working with Christopher Steele.
Our Russia dossier wasn’t dodgy. Donald Trump is compromised. Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch. Photo by STEPHEN VOSS
Dennis Dale “Unteathered”
