PLEASE NOTE: The video thumbnail may say that the stream is unavailable; however, when you click on it, it will play the stream. Youtube has been engaging in shennanigans with the streams covering the trial today.
Monday, November 15, 2021
How to Waltz Around the Leftist Two-Step
Show the activists and journalists that you have the goods, you’ve scouted the field, and you will let none of their prevarications pass any longer.
People old enough to remember the academic culture wars of the late 1980s and early ’90s have a special insight into this year’s controversy over critical race theory. I don’t mean insight into the identity politics of the old days and into the identity politics of 2021, though the basic features are the same whether we are talking about the English syllabus in college in 1989 or the equity lesson in elementary school this fall. I mean, instead, the particular way in which liberals have handled the backlash once the trends in the higher education seminar of yore and in the 6th grade classroom of today have been made public.
Here’s what happened back then. In the 1970s and ’80s, a new political awareness crept into humanities teaching and research at elite universities, casting the old humanist ideals of beauty and genius and greatness as spurious myths, as socially constructed notions having a political purpose. We were told that they are not natural, neutral, or objective. No, they are Eurocentric, patriarchal, even theological (in that they presumed a transhistorical, universal character for select masterpieces). Shakespeare, Milton, Bernini, et al., were not on the syllabus because they were talents superior to all others. No, they were only there because the people in control were institutionalizing their biases. This whole canon thing, the revisionists insisted, was a fake. As Edward Said put it in “Secular Criticism,” “The realities of power and authority . . . are realities that make texts possible,” and any criticism that skirts the power and authority that put Shakespeare on the syllabus and not someone else is a dodge.
They could diversify, then. That’s what the skepticism enabled them to do. They could drop requirements in Western civilization. They needn’t force every student through a “great books” sequence. The “classics” are just one possibility among many others. That was the policy outcome at one tier-one campus after another.
When Bill Bennett, Roger Kimball, Allan Bloom, and a few other conservative critics pointed out what was going on, however, liberals in the academy didn’t stand up and proudly avow, “Darn right we’ve opened up the canon—and it’s a very good thing that this worship of Dead White Males is over!” Instead, they went for the Chicken Little defense, for instance, calling political correctness in academia an outright fabrication.
If the humanities were now giving women and minorities a little more attention, they argued, that hardly called for fret and indignation. “These silly conservatives with their sky-is-falling lament,” they said, “either don’t know what they’re talking about or they’re simply lying. We still teach Shakespeare and all the other major figures. All we’ve done is open the syllabus to other voices. Stop whining.”
I recall hearing those putdowns all the time. My colleagues regarded the conservatives as know-nothings and envious wannabes, and they took a smug satisfaction in their insider status. After all, they were the ones in charge, and Lynne Cheney would never join them. Why should professors grant Dinesh D’Souza a hearing, though his 1991 book Illiberal Education ran up big sales numbers? The man doesn’t even have a Ph.D.! And a guy like Bennett is obviously a political hack, a fellow unsuited to the disinterested deliberations of the conference event.
The condescension was thick. It made the professors feel better. A few conservatives wrote famous books, yes—but they had tenure! The director of a well-known press that had published a lot of the transgressive theory dismantling the tradition during those years told me much later that he and others would get together and read pages from Kimball’s Tenured Radicals and other conservative critiques and laugh at how the authors misconstrued the theories they disliked. He remembered those sessions fondly.
At the time, though I was a solid liberal Democrat, the treatment struck me as outright double-dealing. On one hand, the anti-tradition canon-busters were admired everywhere as radical voices, challenging and contestatory, pounding the old foundations with the fervor of Marat. They were outspoken about it—radical was an honorific term. Adding a little Toni Morison and Aphra Behn here and there wasn’t enough for them, not nearly. They were out to undermine the very notion of canonicity itself, the whole shebang.
And yet, when their disintegrating actions became public knowledge, when The Closing of the American Mind became a phenomenal best-seller, the profs had a different thing to say. They came back with reassuring tones, telling the public that conservative charges were way exaggerated, that not much had changed, Dickens was still Dickens, so relax. This conservative alarm is a bunch of twaddle.
Sound familiar? That’s how the CRT crowd have defended their poisonous instruction. They say, first, that critical race theory doesn’t have nearly the reach that Christopher Rufo and others say it has. It is “a bogeyman cooked up by the GOP,” a “cartoonish” smear. Terry McAuliffe claimed that it doesn’t even exist in Virginia’s schools, that it’s just a “dog whistle.” Along with that, the defenders present critical race theory as something that isn’t radical at all, a rather benign effort to teach children about race relations in America. Vox casts it as a form of objective analysis that finds embedded racism in laws and institutions. An NPR story defines it as “an academic pursuit examining how race intersects with history.” What’s wrong with that?
Critical race theory, in other words, is an historiographical reform, a more accurate rendition of the past. Nothing radical, nothing tribal, only a fuller, more factual history of our country. And, also, a quite common adjustment in curriculum. Such things happen all the time. There is nothing unusual or sweeping about this one.
Call it damage control, a PR scheme. When public outcry reaches the decibelswe’ve seen in Virginia and elsewhere, the activists and educators realize they have to work on their messaging. They must screen their machinations, cloak their radicalism, lower their volume. We know that leftist “progress” is generally unpopular in our country, which forces progressives to manufacture propaganda for public consumption. Party lines are ginned up for congenial politicians, business leaders, and journalists. We end up with two battle fronts: one, the intellectual and pedagogical debate over CRT itself, its concepts and practices; and two, the competition to shape its image to outsiders and laymen. The first is a disciplinary contest, the second a public one.
Conservatives, then, face a double burden. They must explode the conceptual underpinnings of CRT, its internal structure and the methods of its use in schools. Also, they must counter fabrications about it, to prevent activists and their media allies from giving a false picture of it to the American people.
The memories of the Canon Wars of the ’80s and early ’90s show that this war with two theatres has plagued conservatives for a long time. In this case, given Glenn Youngkin’s victory, we see that the apologies and denials and euphemisms didn’t work. We may even have cause to hope that many people outside the conservative core now realize the dishonest apologetics that kick in when public opinion turns against a progressive assault on a longstanding institution. Because of its thorough takeover of the educational and cultural realms over the last 60 years, progressivism has backers and votaries throughout the media who are ever ready to peddle the distortions of the Left and to soften its radicalism until public acceptance is achieved. Is this two-step now exposed?
Do not trust the advocates and do not believe their reportage. They are partisans, and they have proven themselves such. Rufo was able to overcome them because he had obtained actual CRT materials that could not be explained away. Parents couldn’t be dissuaded from their outrage because they heard things directly from their kids. The contrast between the facts on the ground and the denials of Nicolle Wallace and others was ludicrous.
The lesson for conservatives is this: when you enter a public debate, carry with you evidence that cannot be misused. Get your facts and statistics, records, and documents in order, and show the leftist activists and journalists that you have the goods, you’ve scouted the field, and you will let none of their prevarications pass any longer.
X22, Red Pill news, and more-Nov 15
Why The Left Always Projects - VDH
The slurs and smears levelled by the elites are all the more toxic because they have always known these sins firsthand as their own.
The Left is addicted to projection—the psycho-political syndrome of attributing all of one’s own sins to one’s opponents. The woke apparently do this out of some Freudian effort to square the circle of their own guilt or sense of privilege, by fobbing off their own fearful realities onto others. It is the atheist version of confession or medieval penance. In addition, in the spirit of “always being on the offense,” wokists know that those who slander do so most successfully when they lodge exactly those charges most familiar and applicable to themselves.
The Privileged Damn Privilege
Take for example, the worn-out charge of “privilege,” as in the phrase “check your privilege.” This trope originates exclusively from the Left. Purportedly, it signifies a rigged system in which white males have gained, unfairly and undeservedly, “privilege” to exercise cultural, economic, political, and social control over the “other”—occasionally defined as women, more often “people of color,” and most frequently African Americans.
How odd, given that by any indicator the political Left is the party of wealth and privilege. The wealthiest ZIP codes are found in blue states such as California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York. Twenty-six of the 27 wealthiest congressional districts, gauged by per capita incomes, are represented by liberal Democrats.
Registered Democrats on average have higher incomes than their Republican counterparts. Democratic presidential candidates have vastly outspent Republicans over the last 20 years. Note that the old liberal saw about “dark money” has steadily disappeared from the left-wing lexicon (nothing is darker than Mark Zuckerberg’s infusions of cash to warp particular voting precincts). Likewise, in the once trendy academic trifecta of “race, class, and gender,” class” has been dropped quietly.
The most elite and wealthy institutions in America are predominantly liberal bastions: Silicon Valley, entertainment, universities, professional sports, Wall Street, the mainstream media, and foundations. Most “people of color,” who are the loudest about focusing on the evils of privilege and lack of equity, are themselves multimillionaires or multibillionaires, such as the Obamas, Oprah Winfrey, LeBron James, Jay-Z, or Meghan Markle.
Accusing an entire group—white people, or conservatives, or Trump supporters—of being privileged deflects the apparent shame of elitism away from oneself on the cheap. After all, accusing some part-time lecturer or Trump deplorable of “white privilege” is a lot easier, both psychologically and materially, than giving up a nanny, trading in the gas-guzzling big Mercedes, or just saying no to private jets.
The elite accuser knows especially how to level such charges given his own intimacy with what wealth, power, and influence bring. Worse still, the projectionist feels he is making the greatest sacrifice of all by his empty confessions—even as he is a beneficiary of the rigged system that he demands be ended.
When Barack Obama flies to Glasgow to lecture the western world’s climate-wrecking middle class that it is going to have to be content with less—while acknowledging that his own wealth and privilege mean he will suffer less than others—one wonders why Obama simply does not, right now pledge to live in just one mansion rather than two?
After all, if Obama urges the middle to class to cut back on energy use and to forfeit lifestyle privileges, why wouldn’t Obama himself set the moral example, given his huge carbon footprint. Why would he be so cynical to warn the world that our shores will soon be inundated shortly after he himself bought a shoreline estate?
The answer, of course, is that by constantly projecting their covetousness onto others, the woke feel that they can enjoy their own privileges with diminished guilt, claim the psychological higher moral ground, and, as performance artists, show they suffer on our behalf as “traitors to their class.”
The Colluders Invent Collusion
“Collusion” is also a good example of the absurdities of leftist projection. Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment simply concocted the charge that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was colluding with the Russians, based on rumors and lies collected by an incompetent and long-retired British left-wing spook, a couple of Clinton cronies at home and abroad, a washed-up Wall Street Journal reporter, and various Hillary functionaries seeded among beltway bureaucracies, media megaphones, and law firms.
Remember, it was Team Hillary, after the 2016 election, that rounded up celebrities to cut commercials urging the electors not to honor their states’ popular votes. Then we went to the surrogate Jill Stein’s lawsuits challenging voting machine counting. And finally, during the transition and Trump presidency, Hillary bragged of the new maquis “Resistance” that spread her fake Steele-Clinton dossier throughout the State Department, FBI, CIA, and Justice Department. There is a slight chance that John Durham may eventually work his way up to this largely illegal effort—from Hillary’s minions to those in her inner circle.
As far as the charge of Russian collusion itself, both the Left and Hillary, Inc. always knew that in comparison to their own Clinton and Obama years (e.g., the red plastic reset button, the prohibition of offensive weapons sales to Ukraine, the anti-drilling agenda in the United States, the snoring while Putin gobbled up Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and the “tell Vladimir to wait till after the election” hot mic Obama moment), the Left had for years insidiously appeased Putin.
In contrast, Trump’s reversal of the reset (such as selling offensive weaponry to Ukraine, the push to produce more gas and oil, beefing up U.S. and NATO military preparedness, killing Russian mercenaries in Syria, and pulling out of a missile treaty with Russia) reestablished deterrence against Russia that Obama’s administration frittered away. How strange, then, that Trump, the supposed Russian “asset,” increased deterrence against Russian aggression, while the promulgators of the collusion charge deliberately weakened the United States in relation to Russia.
Yet with the recent indictments from Durham, collated with the Mueller report bust, the House Intelligence Committee majority report, and the inspector general’s internal audit, most are beginning to concede that Hillary Clinton cooked up the idea of sabotaging a rival presidential campaign by enlisting the aid of Russians, or at least those familiar with Russia in partnership with her own team.
She sought to hide both the funding and expenditures of this effort to plant lies throughout the U.S. government—with the aid of the FBI and likely Obama appointees in the Justice Department, CIA, and State Department—by the firewalls of the DNC, the Perkins Coie law firm, and Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS front.
So, in the end, we are left with the post-2016 Hillary Clinton loudly yelling “rigged!” and “collusion!” even as she had first sought to rig the election by smearing her opponent with Russian dirt, and then explaining away her own self-created defeat by fueling further the “collusion” hoax.
No political figure in modern memory has done more damage to the political process than Hillary Clinton and her unethical and illegal effort to sabotage a rival campaign and then manufacture a hoax both to mask her own culpability and to sabotage an American presidency.
In sum, Hillary Clinton already proved herself master projectionist when she fobbed off the Uranium One and the Clinton Foundation escapades onto others, but the Russian collusion hoax remains her greatest masterpiece of deceit.
Election Denialists Scream Denialist
Then we come to the projections of “undermining the integrity of elections” and “subverting democracy.”
Donald Trump complained and is still complaining about the 2020 election. To the degree that anything was “rigged” or can be proven to have been “rigged,” an entirely alterable election likely cannot be tied to Election Day per se. The real anomalies occurred in spring 2020, when activists, often with help from left-wing billionaires, funded lawsuits that persuaded local magistrates and bureaucrats to overturn balloting procedures established by their state legislatures. And then under the cloak of the COVID-19 lockdown, 102 million ballots were not cast on Election Day—over twice the 2016 absentee and early-voting numbers. Even as the number of ballots to be counted radically soared, the rejection rate mysteriously dropped.
So, the more the Left trashed Trump’s insistence of voter irregularities, the more we forget that casting doubt on election integrity has long been a staple of Democratic losers.
Hillary Clinton repeatedly claimed that Donald Trump did not win the 2016 election, and that in essence over half the country should have no confidence in the nation’s election integrity. Three years later she was still calling Trump “an illegitimate president”—based on nothing more than the very Russian collusion hoax that she had birthed and paid for, while using her vast network to destroy a presidency and erode confidence in the 2016 Electoral College vote count. She urged Joe Biden not to concede the 2020 election “under any circumstances”.
“Selected not elected” was long a left-wing mantra leveled at George W. Bush as the “illegitimate” president who “stole” the 2000 election in “hanging chad” Florida. Al Gore was shamed into publicly accepting the verdict only to go on a lifelong public jihad whining about how he was robbed, an obsession that eventually drove him in some sense quite mad and resulted in his current diminished state.
Even after the undisputed 2004 election, the Democratic minority in the House still forced Congress to hold hearings on the supposedly rigged election and “illegitimate” Ohio electors—the first such challenge since 1877.
There is no need to say much about the strange career of the denialist Stacey Abrams, who has spent the better part of three years playing shadow governor of Georgia. She has never fully accepted the results of her not-even-close 2018 loss by some 50,000 votes. And yet screaming voter fraud made Abrams a folk hero among progressives to the point that they asked her to deliver the State of the Union response in 2019.
Racists Cry Racism
Racism is the latest left-wing projectionist tic. White liberal elites, who live mostly privileged and segregated lives, are obsessed with calling their opponents racists, elite blacks, on the other hand, focus on conservatives—e.g., Winsome Sears, Larry Elder, Tim Scott, Clarence Thomas—for special racial vituperation. So, in the Left’s lexicon of racist smears, Virginia Lieutenant Governor-elect Sears becomes a mere black mouth spouting white-scripted supremacy, talk-show host Larry Elder is rendered the “black face of white supremacy,” and Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) is reduced to an Uncle Tom.
Projection is an innate human trait. Perhaps it is hard wired as a survival mechanism into the human brain, dating back to our Neanderthal predecessors. But in the early 21st century, projection has been honed and refined as a special trademark of the Left, largely because of the growing contradictions, paradoxes, and hypocrisies that are inherent in the postmodern woke movement.
Progressives and the Democratic Party in general once professed empathy and solidarity with the lunch-bucket crowd. But through globalization, the Left got rich—and all the richer because the professional and credentialed classes in the media, law, finance, academia, investment, entertainment, and sports found 8 billion consumers for their wares. Unfortunately, that wealth didn’t reach the muscular classes and the ancient trades of earthier production in assembly, manufacturing, farming, mining, timber, and construction, which faced new competition abroad through offshoring, outsourcing, and relocation.
We can see the radical changes in the Democrats’ utter abandonment of the white working classes in the red state interior. In their place grew a romantic leftist infatuation with billionaires who can make things happen with big money, bypassing old-time penny-ante fund-raising. That’s why the Left loves and has enlisted the likes of Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Tom Steyer, and Mark Zuckerberg along with the Google, Apple, and Twitter fortunes. They find it cute that their own capitalists are using their capitalist-created fortunes to push anti-capitalist and left-wing cultural agendas.
In the ancient days, what Mark Zuckerberg did in the 2020 election (channel over $400 million to appropriate the duties of state polling officers in key swing precincts) or the vast left-wing effort of the rich to warp the election—as boasted about in a now-infamous Time essay by a preening Molly Ball—would have created screaming headlines of “dark money.”
The Mind of the Projectionist
In sum, the Left got woke because it largely got rich.
Wokism is now an elite scramble for the best seats on the cruise ship’s top deck—who gets into Harvard, whether the new diversity, equity, and inclusion provost is higher or lower than the dean on the academic totem pole, which anchor grabs the prime-time slot, and whether the white hard-Left actress or a “diverse” rival wins the coveted superheroine role in the latest Hollywood schlock comic book film.
Yet when wokeness trickles down finally to the middle classes, it is often seen as nonsensical. As outsiders, those without privilege see that real wokeness is racist, segregationist, careerist, and narcissistic—the guilty accusing the innocent of their own perceived guilt. The woke blame the steerage class below them for their own perceived sins of privilege—slurs and smears levelled all the more toxically because their promulgators have always known them firsthand as their own.
The media’s epic fail
A reckoning is hitting news organizations for years-old coverage of the 2017 Steele dossier, after the document's primary source was charged with lying to the FBI.
Why it matters: It's one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history, and the media's response to its own mistakes has so far been tepid.
Outsized coverage of the unvetted document drove a media frenzy at the start of Donald Trump's presidency that helped drive a narrative of collusion between former President Trump and Russia.
- It also helped drive an even bigger wedge between former President Trump and the press at the very beginning of his presidency.
Driving the news: In wake of the key source's arrest and further reporting on the situation, The Washington Post on Friday corrected and removed large portions of two articles.
- To The Post's credit, its media critic, Erik Wemple, has written at length about the mistakes made by The Post and other media outlets in their coverage of the dossier.
BuzzFeed News, which made waves in 2017 by publishing the entire dossier, says it has no plans to take the document down. It's still online, accompanied by a note that says “The allegations are unverified, and the report contains errors.”
- Ben Smith, who was BuzzFeed's editor-in-chief at the time and is now a media columnist at The New York Times, told Axios, “My view on the logic of publishing hasn't changed."
- BuzzFeed defended the decision in a 2018 lawsuit by arguing that because the FBI opened an investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, the dossier itself was newsworthy, whatever the merits of its contents turned out to be. It won that case.
Other outlets that gave the document outsized coverage have so far been less forthcoming.
- CNN and MSNBC did not respond to requests for comment about whether they planned to revisit or correct any of their coverage around the dossier
- Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn began reporting about the dossier prior to the 2016 election. Asked by Wemple whether he planned to correct the record, Corn said," My priority has been to deal with the much larger topic of Russia’s undisputed attack and Trump’s undisputed collaboration with Moscow’s cover-up."
- Corn did not respond to a request to speak on the record with Axios.
- The Wall Street Journal told Axios, "We’re aware of the serious questions raised by the allegations and continue to report and to follow the investigation closely."
- Axios was among the outlets that did not publish the dossier or original reporting based on its contents.
What to watch: The Steele screwup will undoubtedly cause an even bigger rift in trust between Democrats and Republicans.
Dreams of the Underlings
When will we “underlings” stand up to the corporate giants
and act like Americans again?
“We are here to help you hate your country’s past as much as we hate ours.”
So I imagine an emissary from the European Union saying, or a common sort of American public school teacher, or a representative from Facebook, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Disney, or some other multinational corporation, with a prelate of my own church, the Roman Catholic, smiling nearby, while the vanguard of social dissolution and family breakdown swing censers burning paper dollars and francs and lire and zloty in all the colors of the rainbow.
Of course it is only a dream, a bad dream. At the end of the world, said the man whom my church believes to be God incarnate, all things hidden will come to light. Forget plague and famine and war. That is enough to make the hair stand on end and the flesh to break out in a cold sweat. Imagine having to tell the truth.
What is the truth about my country? It weighs heavy upon my heart. When I was a boy, I wanted all the world to be more like America, not in their folkways and their daily lives, but in their love of liberty, and in that free and cheerful generosity that used to mark the American as young—sometimes naively so—wherever he went. When I was a very young man traveling alone through Italy, though all my forebears were Italian and I was as dark-haired and dark-skinned as anyone, something about me, the way I walked, the way I held my head, marked me as American—as someone with somewhere to go. That is what an older American tourist told me as he pulled up in his car behind me in Assisi to ask for directions. “You walk like an American,” he said.
Even at the time, I doubted that that was an entirely good thing. But does it mark the American now? I loved my country’s past, though it was shaded with great sins, as any nation’s past is going to be; as any person’s forebears are going to be; as any one living person is. But what would it mean, right now, for Italy or Ireland or Poland or Russia, to name the nations whose sons and daughters peopled the Pennsylvania town where I grew up, to be more like America?
Again, when I was a boy, I pored over the encyclopedia, and I loved to see the United States at the head of this or that field of manufacture or farming or mining; America was the great supplier of goods to the world. But what now is our greatest export? I don’t know. Maybe it is pornography. Most likely it is debt. Morally, what is it? Social dissolution and family breakdown? Americans did not invent those. Europe has long been farther along in that regard, with its collapsing birth rates. But where, right now, does the energy for the dissolution come from?
It is not natural to hate your nation’s past. It is natural to cherish it, as it is natural to keep mementos of your grandparents who have passed away, and to tell stories about them, forgiving them their sins, and praising their virtues. The Irish should be more Irish, not less; Italians should be more Italian, not less. What kind of inhuman thing could want otherwise—could want an indiscriminate global grayness to cover the world, so that in the end the only thing to tell Ireland from Italy might be the color of the beer on March 17?
The answer is ready to hand. Those who want it are those who profit materially by it, gaining in wealth or power. Think of the small canton of Appenzell, in Switzerland, as bearing an analogous relationship to the Swiss nation, to the European Union (whereof Switzerland, to her credit, is not a member), to Europe, and to the world, as a small business bears to large businesses in the same line, and to business conglomerates, and to the multinational corporations that owe no duty to any state and that are far more influential and powerful than any mere Congress could ever be, even if Congress were not largely their lackey and tool. Brussels wants no more that Appenzell should be Appenzell than Disney wants people to make their own entertainment, to put on their own plays, as people used to do, and no more than the NFL and the television networks that pull its strings want people to organize their own football leagues, as people used to do.
The small will not resist if they are persuaded either that there is something irredeemably wrong with them, or that they are helpless before the great. Thus it is essential that they despise the great natural armories of resistance and independence.
One of these is genuine patriotism, the love of your nation and her ways, not because they are perfect, not because they are the best in the world, if that can make any sense at all, but because they are yours, and you owe them a debt you cannot repay.
Another is genuine religious faith, a strong and abiding sense of the sacred, that can rise against the pharaohs and despots, and say, “These grounds are holy. Beyond these grounds you may be powerful. Here you are less than the dust.”
Another is the family—the natural family, father, mother, children, and all those kin that dwell in its sacred precincts, united in faith and loyalty and far-seeing care for their common good.
And I imagine family fathers standing up to say, “We do not need you, Google,” or Congress, or Hollywood, or Archer Daniels Midland, or the National Education Association, as the case may be. “We love our families and our land, and our history, but we do not love you. You are giants. We know it. You are as stupid and fumbling as giants, and wherever your foot lands, it destroys. Get lost.”
An essentially American dream of liberty, sure. Can’t an underling dream?
CDC Admits It Has No Evidence Of Recovered COVID Patients Spreading The Virus
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has admitted it has no record of an unvaccinated person spreading COVID after having previously recovered from the virus.
The admission from the government agency came in response to a September Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from a New York attorney, who asked the CDC to provide “documents reflecting any documented case of an individual who (1) never received a COVID-19 vaccine; (2) was infected with COVID-19 once, recovered, and then later became infected again; and (3) transmitted SARS-CoV-2 to another person when reinfected.”
In its response, the CDC said that a search of its records “failed to reveal any documents” pertaining to the attorney’s request.
“The CDC Emergency Operations Center (EOC) conveyed that this information is not collected,” the agency added.
The bombshell revelation comes on the heels of a wave of scientific data that has shown natural immunity to be extremely robust at preventing coronavirus reinfection. Studies from the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Emory University, the Cleveland Clinic, and others have found natural immunity to be incredibly strong months and even a year after infection.
Moreover, a preprint study conducted by researchers from Maccabi Healthcare and Tel Aviv University in Israel, which has not been peer-reviewed but has been shown to use more accurate methodology than a similar CDC study, found that people with natural immunity to COVID-19 could be 13 times less likely to contract the respiratory virus than those who were solely jabbed with the Pfizer-BioNTech shot.
“Natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity,” the study concluded. “Individuals who were both previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 and given a single dose of the vaccine gained additional protection against the Delta variant.”
Head of Minneapolis Federal Reserve Says Inflation Will Get Worse and Prices Will Never Come Down
Neel Kashkari is head of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve. If you know the financial lingo, you can see the dire forecast behind the opaque language. In plain-speak, Kashari is saying when it comes to prices and inflation, “we’re screwed“…
In this interview with CBS talking head Margaret Brennan, Kashkari admits inflation is still going up, and it will get worse. Keep in mind, the lingo of the inflation conversation is discussing “percentages of change.” Kashkari claims the percentages of change will start to slow in a few years, but the prices will never return to their former level.
The percentage of inflationary change (this year vs last year) will continue going up, as prices continue to skyrocket over almost every sector. CTH points out this issue, because as the Fed continues printing current money, the value of future money drops and the price of goods continues to climb. The fast-turn goods rise in price quickest (now recorded at 6.2%), and the inflation on slow-turn durable goods lags but hits even harder.
Current real inflation inside the ‘total’ economy, the cumulative snowball that is coming down the mountain, is over 20% and still growing. This situation puts the forecast prices of 2022 goods at an alarming level. WATCH:
The fed has no tools to slow the rate of current inflation, as interest rates are disconnected {Revisit The New Dimension in Modern Economics} from the cost of goods produced. The only thing the Fed can do is to stop purchasing debt (Quantitative Easing), stop purchasing our own bonds, at a slower rate.
Despite being a progressive himself, even Neel Kashkari is telling congress to stop spending money.
Maybe you don’t have kids at home, maybe you don’t pack lunches or care what the cost of a pound of bologna will be, maybe you are retired and the stove hasn’t been operated all year as you prefer to dine out…. but I can assure you, to a demonstrable certainty, that almost all middle class working Americans will be making decisions on what food products they can afford. Head lettuce at $4 to $5 each, eggs at $3/doz, milk around $6/gal, butter around $8/lb, and citrus so expensive getting an orange in your Christmas stocking will be a trend again in 2022.
The background conversations in the raw material, processing, manufacturing, wholesaling and food contract networks are enough to make you lose sleep.
[…] Tyson sent a letter to at least two regional distributors last month in which it said that prices on Ball Park, Hillshire Farm, Jimmy Dean, State Fair and all deli meats will increase by a range of 5% to 10.2% beginning Jan. 2 for “all retail customers.” … “We continue to face accelerating levels of extraordinary inflation,” Tyson said in the letter. “The sustained duration and significant impact of the inflation necessitates additional pricing action.” (link)
The traditional net terms at 30, 60 or 90 days are right now a hot topic, as producers and suppliers in the food supply chain can no longer commit to contractual prices for future goods delivered. The upstream price increases are so large, the downstream suppliers will not contract on fixed prices, EVEN for the big box retailers.
Only those who know the scale of Walmart buying office pressure and dominance can appropriately contextualize a current WM supplier telling the behemoth to “go spit” if they don’t like the fact that price guarantees are no longer part of the equation. Yeah, it is THAT bad.
We are only a few months away from seeing massive inflation that will fundamentally change the way everyone looks at food shopping, or highly consumable purchases, and what the middle class formerly considered to be “luxury” purchases. Inflation, in the background, is going to come through the supply chain like a thundershock…. and it’s not just food.
This recent insider comment caused me to do some digging, and this is 100% accurate:
“I am an executive in the detergent chemical industry that supplies all of the major pharmaceutical companies, and am in charge of pricing and purchasing of large quantities of raw materials – both commodities, and surfactants, which are the main ingredients in detergents. Here is a brief overview of the situation.
Commodities, such as sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), sodium carbonate (soda ash), and other basic additives that adjust pH, thickness, anti-redeposition, rinseability, and other properties are up around 10-15% on a raw material cost basis from February. Not a single material is unaffected.
Citric acid is up nearly 40-50% when it can be found, at minimum. There is a nationwide allocation, which means that they give material to whom they feel like. One of the major domestic manufacturers of these materials shut down production of citric acids and other acidulants due to maintenance. Many companies in my industry are paying nearly 300% (not a typo – three hundred percent) increases on citric acid.
Domestic primary surfactants, which are made by a handful of companies such as Stepan Company, Solvay, Huntsman, and many more, are up 15-20%, due mainly to oil cost, transportation, etc.
Domestic specialty surfactants, specifically of a class called ethoxylated surfactants, are nearly gone. Not hard to get, not difficult to find – gone. In February, the ice storm took out piping and power lines along the entire gulf coast. The two towns that got hit hardest were Houston, TX, and a little town called St. Charles, LA. St. Charles is where all ethoxylation takes place in the USA for everyone from Dow to Sasol to BASF, and is the key process to make these specialty ethoxylated surfactants. Then, after 4 months of shutdowns, just when everything was getting back into swing, Hurricane Ida wrecked everything all over again.
Dow, one of the largest companies in the world, only restarted production at their facility there in early October.
The crisis of transportation and at the ports is only adding to this crisis of manufacturing in the chemical industry. News to everyone? It was never covered, not even once, on the news.
If truckers are going to be forced to be vaccinated come January, there will be even less trucks than there are now.
The wheels of the world are being purposefully and deliberately ground to a halt. We’d be better off with the mafia back in control of the ports worldwide.
This is going to get so much worse before it gets any better, and the administration in office is doing everything in their power to make sure it is as bad as possible.” (link)
And this on “Industrial Price Increases“:
Kamala Harris is worried about feeding children of the world, while we are literally weeks away from millions of working class, non-subsidized Americans being worried about feeding their own kids. Infuriating is an understatement.
Please prepare yourselves and your families accordingly. The proactive window to prepare for what’s coming in the short term is approximately 60 days from today; and then spending options begin to diminish quickly.
Yes, the rate of price increase may indeed level off. However, we will not see prices dropping or returning to their prior position even after this is over. The price of goods is climbing, will continue to climb and will eventually reach a point that they stop climbing – if policies change and/or the 2022 mid term election gets rid of the communists who are spending the money; but those prices are not going to come back down, ever.
A current loaf of bread, widget or (fill_in_the_blank) at $4.69 will climb to near $6.00 in 2022, and that will be the new normal price of that widget, bread or item from that moment into the future. If you accept that behind you is a massive price increase about to hit on almost everything you purchase, anything you can do now to offset the impact to your household budget when the full weight of these price increases hit is going to be well worth doing.
This is all being done by design.