2020’s Two Most Boneheaded Decisions, by Bill Bonner.

First shut the economy. Then revive it with fake money…

The “rich” working remotely … the poor barely working at all.

The “rich” in their suburbs, vacation homes, and Zoom Towns … the poor struggling to pay their rent or mortgage..

The “rich” enjoying their stock market gains … the poor waiting for their next check from the government.

The rich, fat, and sassy, ready to send in their ballots … the poor picking up rocks, ready for a revolution. ….

Like Sweden, now that the virus has cut through the Empire State, the number of new Covid-related deaths has dropped to the floor. In New York restaurants today, you are more likely to die by choking on a piece of meat than from catching the coronavirus.

But the politicos/world improvers have found a new way to manipulate and control the masses. We doubt they’ll give it up easily.

In airports, travelers still submit to screening and pat downs – 19 years to the day after the 9/11 attack. Now, to enter a restaurant in Manhattan, they will have their temperature taken. Will restaurant owners still be checking diners’ temperatures in 2039?

And don’t expect a “deus ex vaccine” to suddenly return things to normal. No vaccine for a coronavirus has ever been proven effective. And even if one is eventually developed, it won’t be widely employed any time soon.

Meanwhile, people are getting used to a new economy — one where they depend more heavily than ever before on the government…not just to tell them what to do, but to give them money.

That is what marks a big step down in America’s descent. The Federal Reserve can support Wall Street; the “benefit” is immediate and unmistakable. The harm, on the other hand, is long-term and almost invisible.

As we’ve seen over and over, the fake money raises asset prices and makes investors happy. It also shifts their attention from long-term, productive investment — new factories, new products, new employees — to short-term money-hustles.

Share buybacks, mergers and acquisitions, and borrowing money to fund bonuses and dividends — all provide quick gains for investors, but no real benefit to the economy. …

And now, the feds are giving the same scammy treatment to Main Street that they’ve been giving to Wall Street for decades.

But what happens when you give money to the 90% of people who don’t own stocks? What do you get? Do you make them all richer? Richer than whom?

Ah … there’s the flimflam. Counterfeit money never adds to a nation’s wealth; it merely moves it around.

The investor is “richer” when he can cash in his stocks and buy more goods and services in the Main Street economy. He’s “richer” than the 90% without financial assets.

But who will the 90% be richer than? From whom will they buy real goods and services? Only themselves.

The printing press is never the answer in the long term, but it’s working hard now. Inflation coming. Got gold?

The American Narrative is Being Re-Written: Now Anti-White. By Daniel Goska.

Hate these people?

I wended my way up the Walgreens greeting card aisle. I stopped dead in my tracks. A card featured a cartoon image of a white man with a mullet haircut. This cartoon character wore a baseball or seed cap and a sleeveless t-shirt …

Over the sleeveless t-shirt, the character on the card was wearing a red plaid shirt with cut-off sleeves. Red plaid is associated with men who work outdoors and require warm, sturdy clothing. This is a shirt you could wear while working as a janitor, a plumber, a mechanic, or a landscaper. Even such relatively low status jobs as golf caddy or busboy would not allow this shirt. Behind the man is his home, and, if you are paying attention, you know exactly what his home is. It’s a trailer, one of the declassee models that would not be allowed into the better campgrounds. …

His mouth is open. He has one tooth. His chin is weak. He has no neck. Necklessness is a quality associated with sub-humans. …

Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. collects race antiques. Such collectors are on the prowl for any product, no matter how obscure, that depicts African Americans in a stereotypical way. They cite the lawn jockey or the four-piece kitchen canister set shaped like a plump black woman in “Mammy” attire, and declare, “See? America is systemically racist.”

I’m throwing the gauntlet down. Tell me that “toothless white trash” images are any less contemptuous, hostile, and repugnant, any less saturated with the superior’s hatred for the inferior, than any given image of a Mammy sugar canister. Be sure to switch off safe search so you can see the hideous porn. Sights that, once seen, can’t be unseen. And then there are the captions, like “Donald Trump supporters are all toothless, inbred, white trash.”

Hollywood will only produce PC material nowadays — it’s official:

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has established “new representation and inclusion standards.” At least one lead or significant supporting character must be “Asian Hispanic/Latinx, Black/African American, Indigenous/Native American/Alaskan Native, Middle Eastern/North African, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.”

Moulding social status:

What we are allowed to laugh at, be it Hallmark cards or Hollywood films, informs us where society draws its lines, and what groups it puts on what side of what lines.

If the greeting cards on the shelf at Walgreens were as diverse as the Academy’s standards, if there were also cards milking laughs from stereotypes of caricatures of people who are “Asian Hispanic/Latinx, Black/African American, Indigenous/Native American/Alaskan Native, Middle Eastern/North African, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander,” there would be no red flag. But there are no such cards, and redneck Hallmarkcards, beloved of many consumers, communicate who exactly occupies the lowest rung in woke America’s caste system. …

Fifty years ago, Alan Dundes of the University of California at Berkeley mapped the race morality of the white liberal. Dundes asked why Polak jokes became so popular in the 1970s. They were suddenly everywhere, from a paperback collection in bookstores to the Johnny Carson show. “Lower-class whites are not militant and do not constitute a threat to middle-class white America … with the Polack [joke] cycle, it is the lower class, not Negroes, which provides the outlet for aggression and means of feeling superior.”

Dundes’ research indicates that after the Civil Rights movement, it suddenly became uncouth for America’s best and brightest to establish their superiority over a black shoeshine man or restroom attendant. It was necessary to find another, easier target.

Polak jokes are not as popular as they once were, but Larry Wilde’s “Official Polish Joke Book” is still available at Amazon, even though Amazon regularly cancels “offensive” items. Hallmark’s redneck cards are cousins to the Polak joke. Both feature crude, disgusting, poor white people, people the left can safely mock and feel superior to. …

The targets of the left are who ever stands in the way of more socialism and good government jobs for the comrades:

[The redneck Hallmark card and various other cultural products] are all bright, red lines. They tell us: “You must say this. You must not say that. You must respect black people’s pain. You must always attribute that pain to white malice. You must never so much as imply that black people’s own choices play any role in their fate. You must not respect white people’s poverty. You must assume that they are poor because they are inferior. And when it comes to Christians, it’s open season. Those who violate these rules will be severely punished.”

Leftists insist that one fact proves that America is “systemically racist.” The average African American household has less wealth than the average white household. This is true, and it is also true that there is a higher percentage of poverty among blacks than among whites.

Here’s a number that is so radioactive that they never mention it: there are almost twice as many whites living in poverty as blacks. That simple fact throws a monkey wrench at Robin Di Angelo and BLM and every shrill, woke pontificator on social media. As long as we can diagnose the problem thus — “America is racist, all whites enjoy privilege, whites must publicly submit to a Maoist struggle session, and every film must have a black lead” — Robin Di Angelo is a hero.

Are you white? Do you want to avoid the stigma of being a racist in a “systemically racist” country? Announce on social media that you are ashamed, and you have white privilege. You have just bought yourself a pass from stigmatization, at very low cost.

When we switch the focus to poverty, and include focus on poor whites as well as poor blacks, the edifice of woke virtue begins to tremble like a Jell-O mold during an earthquake. With poverty, anybody’s poverty, as the focus, rich liberals cannot acquire a pass from stigmatization so easily. Saying “I’m so ashamed! This country is so racist! I am so privileged!” doesn’t feed anybody. A focus on poverty, rather than skin color, robs leftists of their favorite hated other, the redneck, the Polak, the white trash who refuses to play the white privilege game. …

Scholar Richard Kahlenberg has been publishing factually supported, cool-headed arguments for class-, not race-based affirmative action for years. The idea never seems to get anywhere, and race-based affirmative action continues to contribute to the under-representation of poor whites and Asians on elite college campuses.

When we switch from skin color being the problem to poverty – any American’s poverty – the solutions become a little more scary for millionaires like DiAngelo. …

Hero?

LeBron James, as long as we focus on skin color alone, is a hero fighting “the man.” When we switch lenses, and focus on economics, LeBron James is a multimillionaire, as are many of his peers. According to Forbes, the NBA’s top ten players earn more than half a billion dollars a year. If you talk about skin color alone, LeBron James is a rebel, a crusader of righteousness.

If you turn your focus to the bottom line, LeBron James is just another greedy, selfish, privileged elitist looking, inevitably, down on the rest of us, who could never dream of occupying his throne. We, black and white, struggle to pay medical bills, to please bosses who balance axes over our heads; we lose sleep over sick kids and bad teeth and leaky rooves. …

When poor whites attempt to speak, to enrich national dialogues, we aren’t just silenced and marginalized, we are humiliated and demonized. This humiliation and demonization is supported by cultural products as diverse as Hallmark cards, university departments, and social media posts. …

Those of us old enough to remember 9/11 remember a rather miraculous 9/12. Suddenly skin color didn’t matter. We were all Americans, and we were deeply invested in each other’s wellbeing. Today we need respectful dialogue that includes poor whites. That dialogue, that will get to the root problems of poverty and culture, will elevate all Americans, in a united country where identity as Americans finally, as per the dream of Dr. King, supersedes skin color.

Over the last forty years, the left did an about face. Gotta keep up with the trends.

‘Villain’ Julian Assange versus ‘Intrepid’ Bob Woodward, by Lee Camp. Assange is currently on trial in the UK, in a glass container in the courtroom as though he is a mortal danger to those present.

Right now, one journalist, Julian Assange, is on trial while being held in a maximum security prison in London.

Julian Assange on trial in a glass cage

Another journalist, Bob Woodward, is in a very different situation. The liberal Establishment is preparing to chisel his likeness out of a small boulder and display it next to the Lincoln Memorial. They love him because he got President Donald Trump to do interviews wherein Trump, as always, sounds like a lying buffoon. …

But this is nothing new. Every time Bob Woodward puts out a book, the mainstream media fan-girls all over him. Myriad kings and queens of televised logorrhea describe him as a “veteran reporter,” a “famed reporter,” or “synonymous with investigative journalism!”

Bob Woodward was played by Robert Redford

So what’s the difference between liberal-hero journalist Bob Woodward and dastardly evil villain cannibal-pedophile Julian Assange (who Hillary Clinton famously said we should drone bomb)?

The first difference:

Well, Julian is on trial for obtaining and disclosing classified information from the U.S. government.

Liberal superhero Bob Woodward … actually said in his own online journalism class — “I have rarely found a significant story where there isn’t a document. …Often you can’t get it because it’s classified but… it’s there, and if you can get somebody to assist you, it will indeed help you with your story. …The hardest documents [to get] are intelligence documents. …And I’ve had them and printed them.”

Hmm, so the icon of investigative journalism actually brags about printing classified information. Well, maybe the difference between Assange (currently being fed to the lions) and Woodward (currently being lionized) is that Assange supposedly pressured people into giving him classified information whereas Woodward would never do that. For Bob the information just arrives at his door unsolicited.

…Oh, wait a second. On video Woodward recently said, “Documents rarely just arrive in the mail out of the blue. …You have to go to human beings and say, ‘Will you give it to me?’ You say, ‘Come on, let’s talk. Let’s, uh, not be chickenshit about this.’”

Soooo, the guy that has the entire mainstream media licking his shoes has been involved in obtaining and publishing classified information, and in fact pressuring sources into supplying him those documents? Wow.

Bob Woodward and Julian Assange are exactly the same except Assange has actually not been proven to have pressured sources into giving him documents.

The more important differences:

Nothing WikiLeaks has ever published has been proven false. Not one sentence.

Whereas, the outlets Woodward works with like The Washington Post and The New York Times publish false information all the time. …

Julian Assange actually stood up to the U.S. and U.K. empires by publishing their war crimes. Woodward hasn’t really done that since President Richard Nixon was in office. Most big-time American journalists back down to the State Department when push comes to shove. Those who don’t — like Seymour Hersh, Robert Scheer, Chris Hedges and a few others — are never allowed in the pages of the mainstream media again.

The next time you see a mainstream media talking-head fawn over Bob Woodward, just remember that if they had any backbone, any moral core, they would be fawning over Julian Assange instead.

Assange is another Australian who made it big then got killed in the US, or will be soon. Phar Lap is another.

Domestic Terrorism in the USA is on the Up and Up, in Cahoots with CNN. By Tucker Carlson, who tells it well (if they close down this video, search for the full episode of 23 Sep on YouTube).

After that went to air, two police officers were almost killed by that mob.

A nasty revolution is brewing, with a massive change of power possible in the world’s leading country, and the one Australia depends on for its security. But because it suits the left, our mainstream media is scarcely mentioning it.

The Psychological War, by the Z-Man.

A good current example is the Breonna Taylor issue in Louisville. For the longest time, the mass media has claimed that cops murdered her for no reason. They executed a “no-knock warrant” and just opened fire, killing her in the process. This led to riots in Louisville and contributed to the summer of mayhem.

It turns out that none of that was true and the Breonna Taylor story was a complete lie. The only thing true about it was the names of the people involved.

This is a familiar pattern in these cases. First, we get the incident, which often goes unnoticed by the mass media. Then sometime later the story bursts on the scene with an official narrative and a media kit, which always includes images of the victim from when they were young. In an instant, every hair-hat in the media is chanting the same lines over top the same canned video. A mob is then ginned up wherever it happened and the authorities then rush to jail some white guy.

Go back to the Trayvon Martin story and you see the same operation. First there was the well-orchestrated media campaign. Then we got protests followed by famous blacks showing solidarity by wearing hoodies. The famous blacks are heralded by the media for their courage. Then we learned that Trayvon Martin was not a boy, but a man who was bashing the head of George Zimmerman against the curb. The whole thing was a carefully choreographed propaganda campaign.

The thing about patterns is they usually indicate some common agent upstream from the observable pattern. In this case, it is becoming clear that a well-financed group is working in the shadows to create these incidents. Before the grand jury announcement in the Breonna Taylor case, someone shot video of a U-Haul truck full of riot accessories being unloaded in Louisville. The renter was easily identified by the identification numbers on the side of the truck. …

See the U-Haul Truck with riot supplies being unloaded at 7:30 in this video. Two cops were killed in that riot.

It is increasingly clear that well-financed agitators are creating the incidents. They prepare the media kits, organize the mobs and then supply them with riot equipment. Then they use the media coverage, which is all based on the media kits, to rope in support from famous rich people. …

There are two important take-a-ways from this bit of reality. One is the people behind this stuff are playing a long game. It takes years to build out the infrastructure to orchestrate something like this. …

The second take-a-way is that the authorities are either compromised and unwilling to dig into these networks or incapable of doing it. The top of the country’s domestic intelligence pyramid is obsessed with right-wing extremism, a thing that is about as real as leprechauns riding unicorns. …

The FBI cannot find the culprit, but there’s her picture above:

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the fact that internet sleuths are better at finding and identifying radicals caught on video than the police and FBI is important. This tubby woman behind the U-Haul truck caper is a great example. …

Where we find ourselves now is in a world where well-organized and financed domestic terror groups are operating with impunity in major cities. The government at all levels is either unable or unwilling to confront it. … If the people in charge wanted to put an end to the unrest, they could do so tomorrow. …

What has happened this year is right out of the handbook on psychological warfare. There are the hundreds of little lies seeded in the popular culture, which in turn make the big lies more plausible, but more outrageous when they are discovered. The point of these operations is to destroy social trust and trust in the ruling class. Someone or a collection of someones is waging a psychological warfare and our rulers don’t see it.

If you go and read from the left’s echo chamber (I make a point of reading the Huffington Post and the Sydney Morning Herald every day, and watch the ABC Nightly News), you have no hint of this. Only news that helps the left or is too well-known to be omitted is mentioned, so those on the left simply do not have the information at hand to assess the situation. Clueless. And you cannot tell them a wide range of facts, because they are certain that if those facts were relevant then their “news” would have told them — so they just can’t be true!

FBI Finds Ballots in Pennsylvania in the Trash. They Were All Votes for Trump. By Katie Pavlich.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has found a number of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania discarded in the trash. They were ballots cast for President Donald Trump.

“On Monday, September 21, 2020, at the request of Luzerne County District Attorney Stefanie Salavantis, the Office of the United States Attorney along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Scranton Resident Office, began an inquiry into reports of potential issues with a small number of mail-in ballots at the Luzerne County Board of Elections,” the Department of Justice released in a statement. “Since Monday, FBI personnel working together with the Pennsylvania State Police have conducted numerous interviews and recovered and reviewed certain physical evidence. Election officials in Luzerne County have been cooperative. At this point we can confirm that a small number of military ballots were discarded. Investigators have recovered nine ballots at this time. Some of those ballots can be attributed to specific voters and some cannot. All nine ballots were cast for presidential candidate Donald Trump.”

So it begins.

hat-tip Charles

‘We were shocked’: RAND study uncovers massive income shift to the top 1%. By Rick Wartzman.

Just how far has the working class been left behind by the winner-take-all economy? A new analysis by the RAND Corporation examines what rising inequality has cost Americans in lost income—and the results are stunning.

A full-time worker whose taxable income is at the median—with half the population making more and half making less—now pulls in about $50,000 a year. Yet had the fruits of the nation’s economic output been shared over the past 45 years as broadly as they were from the end of World War II until the early 1970s, that worker would instead be making $92,000 to $102,000. (The exact figures vary slightly depending on how inflation is calculated.)

“We were shocked by the numbers,” says Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist who came up with the idea for the research along with David Rolf, founder of Local 775 of the Service Employees International Union and president of the Fair Work Center in Seattle. “It explains almost everything. It explains why people are so pissed off. It explains why they are so economically precarious.” …

The RAND data also makes clear who the winners from inequality are: those in the top 1%. …

RAND crunched the data in all sorts of ways, and the basic pattern held true for part-time workers, entire families, men and women, Blacks and whites, urban dwellers and rural residents, and those with high school degrees and those with college diplomas.

UK Labor lost Brexit, then reversed course away from extreme leftism. By Maurice Glasman.

Brexit was the fault-line that destroyed the Left and created a one-nation Conservatism that would push Labour back to its progressive comfort zone in the big cities, sealing it off from the small towns and working class heartlands forever. …

[The Tories] didn’t notice when [Labor leader Keith Starmer, the man in the mask sitting alone on the frontbench opposite,] said that the issue of Brexit had been resolved and Labour supported leaving the EU by the end of the year.

• The biggest issue in British politics had dissolved into a previous era and the Covid response was centre stage.
• They didn’t notice when Rebecca Long-Bailey was sacked and all links with the Corbyn camp were severed.
• They didn’t notice the hundreds of letters of suspension that went out to people who had said strange things about Jews.
• They didn’t notice that he was writing articles on VE day in the Telegraph, on Memorial Sunday in the Mail and whenever he liked in the Sun — an act considered treachery by Labour leaders for more than a decade.
• They didn’t notice that he was tapping into a form of modest Labour patriotism that once had deep roots in the Party, and still does in the country. …

Tuesday’s speech was the first time that Starmer could speak directly to the nation about who he was and what he stood for. Labour is under no pressure to develop a manifesto, it needed a general direction of travel, a sense of mission and of vision. A sense of the temper of the man who was leading it. And he seized the opportunity to express the ethics of a profoundly conservative person in a way that no member of the Conservative front bench possibly could.

His credo was that “the greatest contribution we can make is to care for one another”. This puts relationships at the centre of it, and to emphasise that, he followed it up with the wish to live in “a country in which we put family first”. He actually used the word joy and family in the same sentence — I can’t remember any other Labour leader doing so. He spoke about Grandparents, and sacrifice, care workers, cleaners, shop workers, life savers.

He spoke about trust being lost and concentrating on security, jobs and community. He concluded with the thought that “the conservatives don’t conserve very much”. Which has the virtue of truth.

He did talk of a plan. It was related to the economy and skills. He spoke about a partnership between businesses and trade unions in a clean economy that “didn’t force people to move hundreds of miles to find a decent job”. The idea of regional economic renewal based upon a partnership between business, workers and the state was precisely the ‘plan’ the Government was elected on. Starmer’s stress on the “everyday economy” gives a clue to its future development.

Who would have predicted this reversal of Labor’s direction while Corbyn was still leading?

If the US left lose the US election decisively, and acknowledge it, perhaps they too will abandon their extremist edge and move back towards where most of us are.

“I Was Never An ‘Evil Monster’ Until You Decided That I Was…” Internet meme.

 

I never cared if you were ‘gay’ until you started shoving it in my face, and the faces of my children.

I never cared what color you were, until you started blaming my race for your problems.

I never cared about your political affiliation until you started to condemn me for mine.

I never cared where you were born until you wanted to erase my history and blame my ancestors for your current problems.

I never cared if you were well-off or poor, until you said you were discriminated against, when I was promoted because I worked harder.

I never cared if your beliefs were different from mine, until you said my beliefs were wrong.

NOW I CARE!

My patience and tolerance are gone.

I’m not alone in feeling this way, there are millions of us who do and we have had enough!”

What It’s Like Living in California Now, by AwakenWithJP. This is pretty good, in a bitter-sweet way:

Mankind, beginning with England in 1750, only recently escaped Malthusian conditions. For eons, the number of humans grew to match the food supply, and further population growth was limited by starvation. This kept living standards low. There were only minor variations in living standards in the ten thousand years before 1750, as measured in calories or the time required to obtain those calories.

But then the modern miracle occurred, as technological development powered by WEIRD European people outran population growth. For the first time in human history, there was plenty to eat and mass obesity become a problem. One group had cracked the problem, and shared it with everyone.

But since 1970 technological progress has noticeably slowed, social policies encourage smarter women to have fewer kids (“idiocracy”), living standards have been declining slightly in the West, and some parts of the global population continue to grow fast. The group that cracked the problem is increasingly reviled.

 

Black lives matter

 

It is by no means inevitable that humanity will return to Malthusian conditions, and given our current knowledge and technology it seems far fetched.

But still, you have to wonder at times. California is in most ways the most advanced society on the planet. If mankind were on a path leading back to Malthusian poverty after a brief few centuries of flowering, what would it look like? What would be the early signs? They would look a lot like the video above.