Oct 262020
 


Henri Matisse Nu Blue IV 1952

 

America’s Class War Disguised As Race War May Cause A Civil War (Feierstein)
Will Anyone From The Left Realize Why Trump Won — Again? (MacKinnon)
Suppression Is A Bigger Scandal Than The Actual Hunter Biden Story (Taibbi)
Trump’s Post-Election Execution List (Axios)
Yes, Virginia, the Trump Administration Does Have a China Strategy (Paskal)
The Mother of All Stock Market Bubbles (Lendman)
NYC Hotel Occupancy Rate Crashes Toward 10% As Permanent Closures Loom (ZH)
Greece Insists On Turkish Arms Embargo (K.)
Soil Fungi Act Like A Support Network For Trees (Folio)

 

 

“The US just had its worst day of COVID cases ever—83k—and we’re somehow still lower than the trailing European average.

Adjusted for population, Belgium and the Czech Republic are averaging 300,000 cases/day for the last week.”

 

 

Biden stops campaigning 9 days before election

 

 

Leaflet left on chair of every member of the press boarding Airforce One yesterday.

 

 

“This is the biggest political corruption scandal of our lifetime.”

America’s Class War Disguised As Race War May Cause A Civil War (Feierstein)

In the United States, a class war has been amplified by a biased media and social media. Silicon Valley uses algorithms to move forward politically driven narratives and financial interests designed to polarize and sow seeds of discord that increase tribalism across the nation. US intelligence operatives and the media have joined forces with the Democratic Party to deploy psychological operations, disinformation, and propaganda campaigns, the likes of which have never been used before against the American people, in an attempt to influence the outcome of the November presidential election.

Facebook and Twitter censored a factual New York Post article based on evidence that was legally obtained from the laptop of his son, Hunter Biden, about a decades-long corruption and influence-peddling scandal that then Vice President Joe Biden perpetrated. The Biden family made tens of millions of dollars from Hunter Biden’s corrupt business deals in Ukraine and China. US VP Joe Biden threatened to withhold one billion dollars in aid from Ukraine until they fired a prosecutor named Victor Shokin. Shokin was investigating Burisma holdings. Burisma Holdings is the Ukrainian energy firm that hired Hunter Biden. Hunter had no experience in energy markets or Ukraine, and Burisma paid Hunter $50,000 per month. Joe Biden’s threat worked, Shokin was fired, the Burisma holdings investigation ended, Ukraine received its billion dollars, and Hunter pocketed the cash.

Joe Biden disappears for days at a time, refuses to answer reporters’ questions or discuss if, as President, Biden intends to end the filibuster, pack the Supreme Court with liberal judges, add four US Senators (DC and Puerto Rico), and end the electoral college. The people and the media must demand that Joe Biden immediately: outline his policy intentions and address every issue and allegation found within the emails, photos, and videos found on his son’s computer—well, over a week of silence is unacceptable. Facebook and Twitter’s censorship of this blatant corruption and the media’s journalistic malpractice are crimes against democracy. This is the biggest political corruption scandal of our lifetime.

Read more …

“The sense of devastation and despair this has created is like nothing I have ever experienced. They have stripped us of everything that gave us joy. Every social outlet, every relief, has been made illegal.”

Will Anyone From The Left Realize Why Trump Won — Again? (MacKinnon)

Weeks before the 2016 election, I sent an email to several media and political personalities predicting that Donald Trump would win Pennsylvania and get 306 electoral votes. I’m not a professional pollster, but I did work on three winning presidential campaigns, and I simply tried to block out the noise from supporters of both the Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns. I pulled up the 2012 electoral map to see which states Mitt Romney won and then, factoring in the latest data and political miscalculations, made an educated guess for 2016. Using that same system, I have come up with a prediction for 2020: an absolute floor of 278 electoral votes for Trump, with a real chance that he’ll win more than 310 electoral votes.

That may upset Joe Biden’s supporters and the Trump haters, but hopefully some of those who oppose Trump will ask themselves if this is a possibility and, if so, why it would happen — again. It is not an exaggeration to state that much of the mainstream media, academia, entertainment, medicine and science, Big Tech, the “deep state,” the Never Trumpers, the Democratic Party, and other entrenched establishment elites have joined forces to defeat Trump. Of course, they have a right to oppose the president on any grounds. But they should stop to consider what they themselves might represent to many Americans who struggle to pay bills, feed their children and, in some cases, simply survive.

To those Americans, those who adamantly oppose the president — Democrats or Republicans — look like the power center that has ruled over them for decades and made their lives miserable. These elites typically preach, “Do as I say, not as I do.” They’re rarely subject to the rules and dictates that they hand down. They have an “inside track” because they hold the keys to a club that’s off limits to the average American. For anyone who can do the math, the main answer to why Trump won in 2016 — and why I believe he will win again on Nov. 3 — should be blindingly obvious: Trump went out of his way to expose those elites to the American people as the very problem making their lives exponentially worse. He convinced enough voters that he is not one of those “ivory tower elites” and can’t be bought by their special interests.

[..] With the coronavirus pandemic, this year has been surreal — and painful — in so many ways for most Americans. There’s no question those issues will play a key role in the election. The virus has touched everyone, and its economic effects have been especially devastating to the working class. Trump, now a COVID-19 survivor, has made it clear that, in general, he opposes perpetual lockdowns to deal with the virus. After the government of Ireland issued a truly punishing new lockdown in that country, one person summed up the collective hopelessness in a tweet: “The sense of devastation and despair this has created is like nothing I have ever experienced. They have stripped us of everything that gave us joy. Every social outlet, every relief, has been made illegal.”

Read more …

“The suppression story is almost certainly a bigger scandal than the Hunter Biden affair itself, but it’s all become part of the same picture.”

Suppression Is A Bigger Scandal Than The Actual Hunter Biden Story (Taibbi)

As has been hinted at by several prominent journalists, controversies erupted within newsrooms across New York and Washington in the last week. Editors have been telling charges that any effort to determine whether or not the Biden laptop material is true, or to ask the Biden campaign to confirm or deny the story, will either not be allowed or put through heightened fact-checking procedures. On the other hand, if you want to assert without any evidence at all that the New York Post story is Russian interference, you can essentially go straight into print.

Many people on the liberal side of the political aisle don’t have a problem with this, focused as they are on the upcoming Trump-Biden election. But this same press corps might be weeks away from assuming responsibility for challenging a Biden administration. If they’ve already calculated once that a true story may be buried for political reasons because the other “side” is worse, they will surely make that same calculation again. What happens a month from now when an ambitious Republican like Tom Cotton leaks a document damaging to a President-Elect Biden? Or two years from now, if in the weeks before midterm elections, we get bad economic news, or a Biden/Harris administration foreign policy initiative takes a turn for the worse? Are we sure those stories will be run?

The Republican version of Burisma story – essentially, that former General Prosecutor Viktor Shokin was Elliott Ness, and Joe Biden intervened to fire him specifically to aid his son’s company – is also not supported by evidence. What Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his cohorts have done to date is take a few unreported or under-reported facts and leap straight to a maximalist interpretation of corruption on Joe Biden’s part. This isn’t right, but the room to make that argument has been created by the ongoing squelching of information coming from Ukraine. The suppression story is almost certainly a bigger scandal than the Hunter Biden affair itself, but it’s all become part of the same picture.

Bobulinski mail to Jim Biden:

Read more …

Nice headline, Axios! Execution. Big word.

Trump’s Post-Election Execution List (Axios)

If President Trump wins re-election, he’ll move to immediately fire FBI Director Christopher Wray and also expects to replace CIA Director Gina Haspel and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, two people who’ve discussed these officials’ fates with the president tell Axios. The list of planned replacements is much longer, but these are Trump’s priorities, starting with Wray. Wray and Haspel are despised and distrusted almost universally in Trump’s inner circle. He would have fired both already, one official said, if not for the political headaches of acting before Nov. 3. A win, no matter the margin, will embolden Trump to ax anyone he sees as constraining him from enacting desired policies or going after perceived enemies.

Trump last week signed an executive order that set off alarm bells as a means to politicize the civil service. An administration official said the order “is a really big deal” that would make it easier for presidents to get rid of career government officials. There could be shake-ups across other departments. The president has never been impressed with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, for example. But that doesn’t carry the urgency of replacing Wray or Haspel. The nature of top intelligence and law enforcement posts has traditionally carried an expectation for a higher degree of independence and separation from politics. While Trump has also privately vented about Attorney General Bill Barr, he hasn’t made any formal plans to replace him, an official said.

Trump is furious that Barr isn’t releasing before the election what Trump hoped would be a bombshell report by U.S. Attorney John Durham on the Obama administration’s handling of the Trump-Russia investigation. Durham’s investigation has yet to produce any high-profile indictments of Obama-era officials as Trump had hoped. “The attorney general wants to finish the work that he’s been involved in since day one,” a senior administration official told Axios. “The view of Haspel in the West Wing is that she still sees her job as manipulating people and outcomes, the way she must have when she was working assets in the field,” one source with direct knowledge of the internal conversations told Axios. “It’s bred a lot of suspicion of her motives.”

Trump is also increasingly frustrated with Haspel for opposing the declassification of documents that would help the Justice Department’s Durham report. A source familiar with conversations at the CIA says, “Since the beginning of DNI’s push to declassify documents, and how strongly she feels about protecting sources connected to those materials, there have been rumblings around the agency that the director plans to depart the CIA regardless of who wins the election.” As for Wray,[..] Trump is angry his second FBI chief didn’t launch a formal investigation into Hunter Biden’s foreign business connections — and didn’t purge more officials Trump believes abused power to investigate his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia.

Read more …

Comprehensive National Power (CNP).

Yes, Virginia, the Trump Administration Does Have a China Strategy (Paskal)

On October 26, a week before the U.S. presidential election, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper will begin two days of high-level talks in Delhi. In person. That shouldn’t be a surprise. If one puts politics aside, and connects the many and varied dots, one can see that the U.S. administration has a clear China strategy that is well thought out, multifaceted, and based on a deep understanding of China. It even has a name. But before getting to the administration’s strategy, we need to understand what it is designed to counter — China’s concept of Comprehensive National Power (CNP). Comprehensive National Power is a dominant framework in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) view of the world. CCP think tanks and organizations use it to shape policies and gauge success.

The premise is that a nation’s Comprehensive National Power can be given a numerical value based on a specific but exceptionally wide range of factors, from military strength, to soft power, to access to natural resources, to advances in research and development, and much more. Retired U.S. Coast Guard Captain Bernard Moreland — whose last posting was as U.S. Coast Guard liaison to Beijing — explains: “One of the important things to understand about CNP is that it is an objective metric. Beijing constantly calculates and recalculates China’s CNP relative to other nations the same way many of us watch our 401(k) grow. For us in the West, concepts like ‘national power’ are subjective vague concepts. The [Chinese Communist Party is] obsessed with engineering and calculating everything and believe that all issues can be reduced to numbers and algorithms. This is what they mean when they euphemistically refer to ‘scientific approaches.’”

The result is that any possible tactic – legal or otherwise – is considered fair game in serving the CCP’s goal of increasing China’s Comprehensive National Power. That includes using proxies and diversions to make counteractions more difficult. In an October 21 article for Foreign Affairs, U.S. National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien detailed some of the many ways Beijing is trying to advance its CNP. They include intellectual property theft, co-opting international organization, using fishing boats for military action, hostage diplomacy, coercive economic policies, use and intimidation of Chinese nationals overseas to advance China’s interests, infiltrating and corrupting foreign education systems, debt traps, bribery, blurring the lines between state, commercial and military activities, and more. Much, much more.

Read more …

“Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—four companies—have a combined market cap (over $6 trillion) that is greater than the GDP of every country in the world, minus the US and China.”

The Mother of All Stock Market Bubbles (Lendman)

Never before in US equity market history was there as great a disconnect between economic reality and equity prices as now. At a time of economic collapse and likely protracted US Depression, market valuations are at or near all-time highs. David Stockman explained some of the extremes in a period he called “outright fiscal insanity.” Count the ways: “Amazon, a company that didn’t exist pre-1994 is “43% of the S&P 500 consumer discretionary index.” “Nearly two-thirds of the market is underperforming so far this year.” “Year-to-date, only one in three stocks is actually in the green.” “One in five stocks is down 50% or more from its all-time high.” “The five largest stocks in the S&P 500 have a combined market cap that equals that of the ‘smallest’ 389 stocks.”

“Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—four companies—have a combined market cap (over $6 trillion) that is greater than the GDP of every country in the world, minus the US and China.” “Tesla, having surpassed Walmart (with one-twentieth of the revenue!), has become the ninth-largest stock in the US.” All of the above give new meaning to the term surreal. If a Hollywood script writer presented the above scenario to a producer for filming, it would either be accepted as science fiction or rejected outright as too unrealistic. Who’d believe it? Under these conditions, it’s impossible to invest wisely because markets are dominated by speculative excess — riverboat gambling replacing what sound investing used to be.

No matter which right wing of the US one-party state wins control of the White House and/or Congress, nothing will change — things more likely to worsen until an inevitable day of reckoning arrives. Stockman asked: “How could the S&P 500 be trading at its highest multiple in 70 years when the growth rate of corporate earnings has been sinking for more than two decades?” “The recent S&P index value implies a PE multiple of 36.8X—a place the S&P 500 has never been before.” “The forward PE is now above the record high reached during the dot-com madness at the” end of the 1990s. In calendar year 2020, corporate earnings crashed. They’re “23% (below) their 2019 peak.” Yet market valuations are at levels that suggest double-digit earnings growth ahead — despite evidence indicating protracted economic Depression, mass unemployment, along with reduced business and consumer spending.

Read more …

Everyone’s still waiting for tourism to rise again.

NYC Hotel Occupancy Rate Crashes Toward 10% As Permanent Closures Loom (ZH)

Prices at New York City hotels have plunged as the hospitality industry continues to try and grapple with the effects of the global pandemic. Some hotels, like the Midtown Hilton, have remained closed since March. Others, like the Pierre, are operating in limited capacity. Those that are open for business have slashed prices by more than 60%, according to a new writeup by AlJazeera. Despite October usually being a fruitful month for tourism in NYC, coronavirus has forced the cancellation of staple events like the NYC Marathon and Fashion Week. And while the industry has definitely recovered since March, it still has a long way to go. 200 of New York’s roughly 700 hotels remain closed, the article notes.

Lukas Hartwich, an analyst at real estate research firm Green Street, said: “Next year is going to be far worse than any year we’ve ever had except this one. It’s going to be 2022 before we get back to where we were during the worst part of the last recession.” Occupancy rates in NYC stand under 40% right now, with the average daily room price at $135. Those figures, last October, stood at 92% and $336. Industry locals say the 2020 figure may even be inflated, as many hotels stopped reporting data for the time being. Vijay Dandapani, chief executive officer of the Hotel Association of New York City, said: “The true hotel occupancy is less than 10%. Hotels have theoretically been able to be open, but in many cases it’s pointless.”

In addition to risk-adverse travelers, corporate travel has also diminished, acting as a major headwind for the industry. Executives in the industry predict that up to 20% of the city’s hotels could wind up permanently closed. Those that have stayed open, like the Pierre, are offering limited services. For example, at the Pierre, room service stops after breakfast and the concierge clocks out at 5PM now.

Read more …

Good luck taking on the arms industry.

Greece Insists On Turkish Arms Embargo (K.)

With Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan making clear his plans to continue exploratory activities within Greece’s continental shelf over the next two months, Athens is pressing its case for an arms embargo against Turkey. Reacting to Ankara’s operational escalation in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, Athens is determined to stress that it is unacceptable for European Union countries to continue exporting arms to Turkey while it threatens a member-state. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has insisted already on the need for an arms embargo on Turkey by Greece’s EU partners, and also raised the issue in person with German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas. The case was also made by Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias in a letter to his counterparts in Germany, Italy and Spain.


The most serious aspect of the assistance provided by many of Greece’s European partners to Turkey is not only the equipment but, more importantly, the know-how that has enabled Ankara to rapidly develop and expand its domestic defense industry, including in the field of unmanned aerial vehicles. Mitsotakis has made special reference to the know-how provided by Berlin to Ankara for the German-designed Type 214 submarine and for the anaerobic propulsion (AIP) systems. There is similar cooperation between Berlin and Ankara in the production of the integrated program of Leopard tank (2A4). Berlin also provides significant technological assistance in the production of the Korkut medium-range anti-aircraft system (Rheinmetall type), as well as PorSav missiles.

Read more …

One day, when it’s too late, we’ll acknowledge that it’s all one system of interconnected and co-dependent entities.

Soil Fungi Act Like A Support Network For Trees (Folio)

Being highly connected to a strong social network has its benefits. Now a new University of Alberta study is showing the same goes for trees, thanks to their underground neighbours. The study, published in the Journal of Ecology, is the first to show that the growth of adult trees is linked to their participation in fungal networks living in the forest soil.Though past research has focused on seedlings, these findings give new insight into the value of fungal networks to older trees—which are more environmentally beneficial for functions like capturing carbon and stabilizing soil erosion. “Large trees make up the bulk of the forest, so they drive what the forest is doing,” said researcher Joseph Birch, who led the study for his PhD thesis in the Faculty of Agricultural, Life & Environmental Sciences.

When they colonize the roots of a tree, fungal networks act as a sort of highway, allowing water, nutrients and even the compounds that send defence signals against insect attacks to flow back and forth among the trees. The network also helps nutrients flow to resource-limited trees “like family units that support one another in times of stress,” Birch noted. Cores taken from 350 Douglas firs in British Columbia showed that annual tree ring growth was related to the extent of fungal connections a tree had with other trees. “They had much higher growth than trees that had only a few connections.” The research also showed that trees with more connections to many unique fungi had much greater growth than those with only one or two connections.

“We found that the more connected an adult tree is, the more it has significant growth advantages, which means the network could really influence large-scale important interactions in the forest, like carbon storage. If you have this network that is helping trees grow faster, that helps sequester more carbon year after year.”

Read more …

 

 

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Home Forums Debt Rattle October 26 2020

Viewing 25 posts - 1 through 25 (of 25 total)
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  • #64843

    Henri Matisse Nu Blue IV 1952   • America’s Class War Disguised As Race War May Cause A Civil War (Feierstein) • Will Anyone From The Left Realiz
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle October 26 2020]

    #64845
    teri
    Participant

    So Trump is really mad at some of the people in the government. He is going to fire their asses right after the election. And he seriously means it this time.

    They are, in fact, awful at their jobs – Haspel, Barr, Wray, Devos – and are actively harming the public weal and ought to go. Now tell me again how they got into their positions in the first place.

    #64846
    oxymoron
    Participant

    This year I have been implementing a climate adapted mixed use forest on a few acres here in Central Victoria. Bunya, Stone Pine, Holm, English and Algerian Oak, Carob, Tagasaste, Acacia Dealbata, Jubea Chilensis etc. There was no top soil – it is post gold rush country where all the trees were removed and top soil washed away downstream to look for the alluvial gold deposits (Castlemaine is the siite of the (once) richest alluvial gold field in world). It’s just clay and slate. Really.
    The point is I went foraging and collected a huge diversity of locally found mushrooms for their spores and threw them everywhere, was kinda fun – and then applied 30 cubic metres of hardwood chips as mulch. Then we received this wonderful La Nina year of well above average rainfall and those baby trees are just loving it.
    The last article you posted really lifted my spirits and validated my extra work. Thank you so much – I want that little forest to be around for hundreds of years.

    #64847
    Dr. D
    Participant

    Wow, Testing = Cases. Who knew? And no deaths. They keep being flatter than flat.

    Remember “Flatten the curve”? And now that it’s flat? “To Infinity! And beyond!!!”

    “Leaflet left on chair of every member of the press”

    Yes, but it’s math, so they can’t understand it. Like garlic and holy water. They’re “Arabic” numbers, you racist.

    “People living under new lockdown rules in Wales have been prevented from buying so-called “non-essential” items, which are being covered with plastic sheeting at supermarkets.” That includes Crisps. Because, only broccoli? Bloombergs says no 40-ounce. You have to buy 3 16-ouncers and toss the bottles. That’s common sense.

    Definition of Forced Austerity. Exclusively on the poor. And wealth transfer to billionaire insiders: you can buy all these items and more in any quantity you like on Amazon.

    Small business: dead. Middle Class: dead. Billionaires: richer and more monopolistic, voracious, and censorious than ever. Don’t try to stop them though: if you do, you’re Hitler! Their roving black-clad army will punch in your teeth in San Francisco. Even if you’re black and they’re white. That’s tolerance! Hitler ate crisps too! That makes you Hitler. I rest my case.
    But it’s not all the mustache-man. No. It’s also the OTHER mustache-man, the one who said, “It’s not who votes that counts. It’s who counts the votes.” PA, key swing state with massive Electors rules that “No signature, no postmark: looks good to me!” after half their election officials quit over such nonsense. So literally everyone in China could mail in a ballot and be legally accepted. Or the residents of all the other states. What? That’s crazy? Well 300 counties have more voters registered than legal residents, so you tell ME what’s going on. And this is not new. Remember Jill Stein recounting Detroit and finding 110% of all citizens had voted? About 101% for Democrats? Then how that story and the recount immediately vanished and nothing was investigated? Good times, good times.

    Like I said, when your whole society is comprised of violent, psychopathic liars, no one can save you from yourself. You get what you deserve.

    What’s that, Agent Smith? “Two of these too big to fail banks recently paid fines in the billions of dollars, yet no one went to prison or even faced criminal charges. This highlights the systemic problem with concentrating capital and power in the hands of the few: too big to fail means corporate wrongdoers have a permanent get out of jail free card while the small-fry white-collar criminal will get a fiver (five-year prison sentence) for skimming a tiny fraction of the billions routinely pillaged by the too big to fail banks.

    The net result is a two-tier judicial / law enforcement system: the too big to fail “essential” companies get a free hand and the citizenry get whatever “justice” they can afford, i.e. very little.” https://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct20/fragile10-20.html

    Or here “They have an “inside track” because they hold the keys to a club that’s off limits to the average American.” You get “All the Justice money can buy.”

    So Amazon can sell billions because they are billionaires who can buy justice, but Omar’s Bodega gets the kind of plastic sheeting they reserve for mafia murders? Tell me again how we should continue lockdowns until 100% of all business has vanished, the middle class is living on the street, and there are only two government-paid and government-protected monopolies left. Because that happens under just this Democratic Socialism, 100% of the time. Killing 100M in no time, just as predicted.

    “Quality has been stripped out as well. When markets become captive to cartels and monopolies, customers have to take what’s available: if it’s poor quality goods and services, tough luck, pal, there are no alternatives. There are only one or two service providers, healthcare insurers, etc., and they all provide the same minimal level of quality and service.”

    Socialism: government protected, government run monopolies. No competition. You get bad shoes or no shoes: your choice. But I hear their bread is so great they’ll wait in line all day! …So long as you’re not a Ukrainian farmer. Then you get bullet to head.

    Here’s an idea: Leave me alone.

    ““You’ll own nothing” — And “you’ll be happy about it.” –Klaus Schwab, EU.

    Klaus? I think that’s total and universal Socialism. Worldwide. Thanks for telling us you plan on stealing EVERYTHING, and like all other Socialists in world history, murder millions. Maybe billions. You could up the ante and win a place in history, with your Pale Horse, Chloros, the Green Rider. It’s not part of the Four Horseman because it can’t keep up with mass-murder of War Horse and the Pandemic Horse. It can and will.

    “The sense of devastation and despair this has created is like nothing I have ever experienced. They have stripped us of everything that gave us joy. Every social outlet, every relief, has been made illegal.”

    Here we are, as predicted since 1947: “A boot stomping on the face of man, forever.” The stomping is its own reward.

    “the movie Mr. Jones… exposes the TRUE STORY of how the New York Times tried to support Communism in the United States back then, with their top journalist, Walter Duranty (1884-1957), who was their main man in Moscow. The New York Times promoted him to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for that reporting on how Communism was Utopia and our future. When Gareth Jones (1905-1935) in March 1933 reported this was all a lie, the truth finally began to appear.

    It took the New York Times until 1990 to admit to that their reporting which covered up the truth about Stalin and the massive starvation … The New York Times covered up the more than 7 million people who died of starvation in the Ukraine famine. The New York Times wrote that their reporting on the Russian Revolution constituted “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.” They never revoked his Pulitzer Prize.”

    Just like now. RussiaRussiaRussia. Pulitzer Secured! Irony being, Pulitzer would heartily approve of such war-mongering lies. They were his personal specialty.

    Speaking of, I don’t make enough fun of Dum-dum, since they constantly report lies about him instead of truth. But here for almost a year they could have impeached him on yesterday’s list of offenses, COVID violating the 1st, 4th, 5th, and 10th Amendments – that is, the Bill of human Rights, the first law in the Federal Register, as well as trampling Sec1 of unilaterally suspending private contracts. Add to that the recent trollop about how “Iran is interfering with our elections”, as Cait Johnstone said – and you can read this for yourself – perhaps as many as TWENTY emails were sent! From servers in Singapore, etc. That changed no votes, since voting is private. Twenty whole votes! Oh noes. Clearly they rest assured that Americans are as bad at voting math as they are at COVID math – and they are totally 112% correct. 20 ÷ 330M = 0.000006% voter fraud. Shut it down Mr. President! Attack Iran now!!!

    Do I hear people attacking, defunding, suspending government, impeaching, for such brazen war-mongering lies? At the behest of a small eastern Mediterranean nation whose election-tampering in U.S. Congress is both extensively recorded and legendary? Nope. We MUST attack Iran and Russia on the basis of evidence no one can see except the warmongers themselves and their corporate mouthpieces.

    How about Assange? Is stopping 1A on FOREIGN citizens who have no personal or business jurisdiction in the U.S. what you might call “executive overreach”? I think such Caligula-like madness is clearly deserving of defunding or immediate removal.

    Other lies? Anything about the economy. It’s still frozen. Better than I imagined possible, I concede wrong on that. But this V-recovery is a lie, even if it is recovering as Red states reopen. The market is the biggest lie ever to exist on planet earth, that goes with the lie that there are free markets anywhere. Oh and that’s also in violation of 10A, where there is no mention of running the economy in the Constitution and is therefore expressly prohibited to them. Like Health Care. And Education. And…well, read all the words in Webster’s dictionary, because except for “Post Office”. nearly all the words in there refer to what they are expressly not allowed to do.

    IMPEACH! Oh and defund the military, don’t voluntarily add multi-billions to the secret state. Which is run by Hitler. Lookin’ at you Dems.

    If President Trump wins re-election, he’ll move to immediately fire FBI Director Christopher Wray and also expects to replace CIA Director Gina Haspel and Defense Secretary Mark Esper,”

    And as he already said, Bill Barr, and perhaps replace with Meadows. Thanks Barr! Having Deep Staters like you do the work of rounding up yourselves is its own reward. Like Bolton. When they salted him with fake intel and banished him to outer Mongolia. Remains to be seen tho.

    “Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—four companies—have a combined market cap (over $6 trillion) that is greater than the GDP of every country in the world…and is the mother of all stock bubbles.” Remember Musk’s Suddenly-I’m-a-convertible-then-explode-into-fire is worth more than VW, GM, Ford, and Honda combined. They make fewer cars than Porsche.

    “NYC Hotel Occupancy Rate Crashes Toward 10% As Permanent Closures Loom (ZH)

    Can’t stop won’t stop until all middle-owners are beaten out and all NY is bought up by multi-billionaires like China and BlackRock. You know, like B-Movie “RoboCop.”

    On positive note: topsoil disappearing into the sea. Yes, because everybody’s in their basement complaining about the environment on PCs powered by coal, eating a 3,000-mile-ceasar-salad. Good practices can CREATE 1” of topsoil/year. …But complaining the GOVERNMENT isn’t doing anything while I sit in my basement not doing anything is much easier. True Virtue.

    #64848
    sumac.carol
    Participant

    Way to go Oxymoron! The original research on hardwood chips and their ability to create fungally-dominant soil (helpful to support the creation of those underground communication networks between trees, supporting tree health) was done at Laval University in Quebec.
    Yesterday I finished up my final orchard spray of the season (neem oil, compost tea, effective microbes, liquid fish) — kind of like a natural vaccine for trees to induce systemic resistance to disease.
    Connecting this to covid– all the hand – wringing about when a vaccine will come along, but no talk by our political leadership about how to feed each individual person’s natural immune response (things like don’t kill your intestinal flora by eating antibiotic-laced meat, get your vitamin D, eat fermented foods to build up your intestinal flora which account for at least 70 percent of the body’s entire immune response, eat healthy nutrient dense food so that the body is capable of mounting a response to pathogens).

    #64849
    morongobill
    Participant

    The man who planted the forest. What a legacy.

    #64850
    zerosum
    Participant

    From late yesterday
    @ Boogaloo

    https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2020/10/119_298250.html

    From the koreantimes
    1. monitoring any possible links between vaccines and deaths, given that a total of 1,231 people had reported side effects as of Sunday after getting the shots this year.
    ( What about a link with side effects other than death)
    2. an effort to prevent the potential “twindemic” of COVID-19 and flu during winter

    ( Has there ever been negative effects with the accumulated different yearly vaccines?)
    3. Considering that flu vaccines cause antibodies to develop in the body about two weeks after vaccination
    (Why would the human body make C19 antibodies faster???)
    ( Explain why C19 can travel around the world, care homes for the seniors, faster than a plane)
    I tried, unsuccessful, to go to Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) and look at their data to see if they had answers for my questions. I found the best info from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_South_Korea

    ——
    @ Dr. D
    You are confusing me.
    Who is going to be making things worst? Who is going to make things better?
    1. The capitalist or the socialist?
    2. Having a gov. or no gov.?
    3. Having a change or no change?
    4. Having C19 or not having C19
    5. Getting news or not getting news
    6. Voting or not voting?

    #64851
    Geppetto
    Participant

    “Soil fungi act like a support network for trees, study shows
    U of A research is first to show that growth rate of adult trees is linked to fungal networks colonizing their roots.”

    It’s hard to believe that these guys have the balls to say they are first? WTF? The guy that told this to me 50 years ago and learned it from the women that told him 50 years before that are turning over in their graves…we’ll maybe not ….because if in fact they were buried in the ground without being embalmed or cremated their little constituent components are probably already part of a tree!

    Duh! Did they not watch Avatar?…..or ever hear, “pushing up daisies”…? But yea they are doing a *study*……

    #64852
    John Day
    Participant

    Right On, Oxymoron!
    Really doing the work and comprehending the processes of complex living systems, a Steward of Life…grove
    Later this morning I’ll tack on a photo of my late-middle-aged body broadforking the clay soil for the banana grove, towards which end V. Arnold has given helpful advice (Nem Wa cooking bananas; Lady Finger bananas)
    Another good rant , Dr.D., but is there another layer of life-organization at work, like those mycorrhizal networks? It’s an important systems analysis question.

    #64853
    Geppetto
    Participant

    John Day,

    You probably read this but just in case:

    Masanobu Fukuoka ” The One Straw Revolution”. 1975

    #64854
    John Day
    Participant

    How do living ecosystems on Earth organize? We know a lot of details, and we get hints that the mycorrhizal fungal networks connecting the roots of forest trees are a living communications and resource sharing network.
      We may personally know the experience of serendipity, and of synchronicity in our lives, but the alternative hypothesis, that it was just chance, can’t be disproven to others.   I believe that I can know a level of “transpersonal” connection to life and “universal mind”, but I don’t think I can convince you in writing, nor should you be convinced by the related experiences of another. (You might be spurred to consideration and to self-investigation.)
     There is no “objectivity”. Objectivity is a useful construct, but it’s just a construct. Observing “reality” forms it. It’s not formed without observation. All observations influence the process they observe, and its outcomes. In a mundane way, all information has a cost, and is shaped by the priorities and mechanisms of its funding.
      What is the cost of a mycorrhizal network, and how is it paid? “Root fungi” form extended organisms, connecting tree roots near and far, of similar and dissimiar types. The roots give out nutrients that feed the fungal network, and the network provides information, such as the approach of bark-beetles, so that a tree might prepare noxious chemicals within itself to deter them. We can get our conceptual heads around this, and see how the investment in this symbiotic relationship benefits all the participating life forms.
      What we observe lately, in the workings of human political economy, is the promise to engage symbiotically, while the fungal network actually completely digests the smaller trees and bushes in  the forest. This can be good for the fungal network, until it is catastrophic.
      We are “shrubberies” in this model, maybe toadstools.
      We are not so connected by pheromones as ants, bees and wasps are, but are we connected through a neural network of mind? Are we bioreceivers with smartphone minds? Just askin’
    Ever know something and act upon it, then realize you had no particular way to know it? Maybe not.
    Ever know something before it happened? “Deja vu”; is it just a feeling, always?
      Bear with me, if you would, in considering how things might play out if living systems work in coordination to advance the complexity and abundance of contributing life forms over the long term.
      We are a species that coordinates actions in space and time, through symbolic modeling and communication, even across centuries. We are highly social, highly cooperative. We are currently the ultimate apex predator, shaping all of the global ecosystems, and knitting them together.
      Yeah, and currently sterilizing them through fire and fossil fuels, mined minerals, and fossil water.
    This is a passing phase. We can model that. We see that the models all say that we can pull up coal, oil, natural gas, water and ores until the fuels run too low the keep the complex mining economy intact and operational. Then that will stop, and it will be hard to do it at all, because we got all of the easy stuff first, and the machines to get the deeper, lower quality stuff, are now broken.
      What if that’s not “bad”? Might this serve the complexity of planetary living systems? We are brining up carbon and water to the surface, where life thrives. Life needs carbon and water. There was no other particular way that stuff was going to get into living ecosystems. We might do as much of that job as we can ever do pretty soon, since we’ve built up such vast machinery at this point.
      Maybe this is that old argument that, “we live in the best of all possible worlds”.
      Do we have any agency? I feel like I have agency, but I feel differently about it than “I” did 30 years ago, and that was different from 40 years ago, and so on. I feel a tremendously broader agency and responsibility to and stewardship towards planetary life than I did before. I sure felt responsible to nurture and protect my kids, but that is now very broadly generalized. It’s not diffused, but broadly generalized. Solving problems at each level of life-organization is wickedly booting me up to broader responsibility, which I never sought. I wanted local solutions, weather the storm in a lifeboat, but I kept getting whacked by the broader picture, the inter-relatedness of it all.
      i didn’t mean to sign up for this, but here i seem to be, growing 3 vegetable gardens, expanding every winter, testing and treating people for what sickens their bodies and minds, riding a bike, being a husband, father and grandfather, caring, asking for guidance…
      So, I ask, “What is the body-politic?”
      One of the first things we learn when studying our minds is that there are all these secret decision and perception pathways, that actually make us want stuff and do stuff, and the/wey are not what we thought, “friends” and “enemies”. Those are archetypes, a secret pattern language in our brains and bodies.
      Carl Jung got to this point of inherent human neural patterns, to which we fit our lives and experiences, and the broad similarity of these patterns in human organisms. He saw the implied resonances of common worldview, common experiences, cooperative benefits for survival, and the variability within those patterns.
      We have come to the apogee of species success. Here we stand, ready to make ourselves extinct all at once, through this vast miracle of cooperative endeavor. We are aided, this time, by the windfall inheritance of vast fossil fuel energy. Is this completely different? We have, as smaller groups (though still vast, sometimes) faced this impasse of final success before, again and again, sometimes surviving to rebuild.
      Do we have any species failsafes? Can we postulate something on the fly, which might already exist, to save us from our ultimate success?
      I ask a pretty feeble question. It’s the question I inherently face. So do we all. I am my own probe into the nature of reality, and this will probably go better if there is a mycelium of benevolent living consciousness to direct me to beneficial roles I might play for the whole super-organism.
      I am stuck with the assumption that any such broad consciousness, into which I may integrate somewhat, and from which I may take guidance, has been around so long that it intends to keep being around.
      That’s as far as postulates seem to take me. What does that mean for our current moment in politics, if anything? What should we best do today?
      How should we cooperate for the common good, when most of the channels of communication and control seem to be controlled by a parasitic class, which forms an amplified microcosm of the very same questions I ask myself in your presence today?

    #64855
    John Day
    Participant

    @Geppetto: I wanted to use One Straw Revolution as a cookbook, but it wasn’t.
    There’s really no cookbook, just examples of process.
    Man, what a lot of work!

    #64856
    Geppetto
    Participant

    John Day.

    Really good stuff! Those are all the right questions because they are the questions about what to DO. For me I suppose simply; do I *feel* like I am a part of everything or separate from everything? I know I feel better when I feel I’m part( of the wonder filled world not that other one we beat on here) …but yeah… the urge to agency thing tends to get away.

    Thanks you! Appreciate the thought and *work* on that too!

    #64859

    Very happy that the fungi piece got the conversation going. And of course I have to add this animation from my old Québec stomping grounds, which you can’t miss if you’ve ever planted even just one tree, or even if you haven’t.

    The Man Who Planted Trees

    #64860
    zerosum
    Participant

    We are a bag full ….
    ” …. if there is

      a mycelium

    of benevolent living consciousness to direct me to beneficial roles I might play for the whole

      super-organism

    .”
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycelium

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism

    Some scientists have suggested that individual human beings can be thought of as “superorganisms”;[10] as a typical human digestive system contains 1013 to 1014 microorganisms whose collective genome, the microbiome studied by the Human Microbiome Project, contains at least 100 times as many genes as the human genome itself.[11][12] Salvucci wrote that superorganism is another level of integration that it is observed in nature. These levels include the genomic, the organismal and the ecological levels. The genomic structure of organism reveals the fundamental role of integration and gene shuffling along evolution

    Superorganisms are important in cybernetics, particularly biocybernetics. They are capable of the so-called “distributed intelligence”, which is a system composed of individual agents that have limited intelligence and information.[22] These are able to pool resources so that they are able to complete goals that are beyond reach of the individuals on their own.[22] Existence of such behavior in organisms has many implications for military and management applications, and is being actively researched.[22]

    Superorganisms are also considered dependent upon cybernetic governance and processes.[23] This is based on the idea that a biological system – in order to be effective – needs a sub-system of cybernetic communications and control.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life

    The tree of life is a fundamental widespread (mytheme) or archetype in many of the world’s mythologies, religious and philosophical traditions. It is closely related to the concept of the sacred tree.[1]

    The tree of knowledge, connecting to heaven and the underworld, and the tree of life, connecting all forms of creation, are both forms of the world tree or cosmic tree,[2] and are portrayed in various religions and philosophies as the same tree.[3]

    #64861
    straightwalker
    Participant

    @John Day
    I second geppetto.
    You have to answer these questions to your own satisfaction (relief), of course, but there are clues.
    Many of Jung’s patients were older. He said that most of their difficulties were, in the last analysis, religious (in “Memories, Dreams, & Reflections”?). Feynman’s quote, a couple of days ago, gets at it in his funny faux flippant way: “No one ever figured out what life’s all about. And it doesn’t matter anyway.”
    The willfulness, that enables us to get things done, can also interfere with accepting our unknowable place in the unknowable. I have lots of trouble with that. But to trust that one has a place is quite wonderful.

    #64862
    John Day
    Participant

    Blog’s up, and there is a picture of me very slowly broadforking what will be a banana grove next month(ish). I am “misusing” the broadfork to invert the top 6-8 inches of dense clay soil. leaving it broken open, for me to amend the expanded shale, which holds air and water. I’ll then plant the banana plants that I have in pots on the back patio in Austin. Anyway, it is so much more work than I recall, but I face the same thing every time.
    Why can’t I remember how hard and slow it is? Is it like forgetting the pain of childbirth or something?
    https://www.johndayblog.com/2020/10/the-body-politic.html

    #64863
    John Day
    Participant

    https://www.johndayblog.com/2020/10/the-body-politic.html
    Charles Hugh Smith:
    ​ ​What few seem to realize is all the supposedly rock-solid permanent foundations of life are nothing more than fragile social constructs based on trust and legitimacy. Once trust and legitimacy have been lost, these constructs melt into the sands of time.
    ​ ​A great many things we take for granted are fragile constructs that could unravel with surprising speed: law enforcement, the courts, elections, the value of our currency– these are all social constructs. Once legitimacy is lost, people abandon these constructs and they melt away.
    ​ ​It’s clear to anyone who isn’t indulging in magical nostalgia that trust in institutions is in a steep decline as the legitimacy of these institutions, public and private, have been eroded by incompetence, corruption, dysfunction and the rapacious self-interest of insiders.
    ​ ​What we’ve gotten very good at is masking the rot and fragility. Masking the rot and fragility is not the same thing as strength or permanence. The nation is about to discover the difference in the years ahead.
    https://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct20/fragile10-20.html

    ​The Federal Reserve System has a plan to save us from the long term side effects of the Federal Reserve System, which have impoverished society as a whole, while multiplying the wealth and power of those who are members of the system, and share it’s benefits.
    The Fed will create digital money, and give it to you, and track every transax=ction, and it can take money or participants out of this system at any time, as well as putting them into the system. It will require a vast, global communications and confirmation network to function.
    What could go wrong? For whom?​ Under what circumstances? What might be the next fix, if any?
    https://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct20/fed-tyranny10-20.html

    Jonathan Cook: Capitalism is double-billing us: we pay from our wallets only for our future to be stolen from us
    ​ ​Here is a word that risks deterring you from reading on much further, even though it may hold the key to understanding why we are in such a terrible political, economic and social mess. That word is “externalities”.
    ​ ​It sounds like a piece of economic jargon. It is a piece of economic jargon. But it is also the foundation stone on which the west’s current economic and ideological system has been built. Focusing on how externalities work and how they have come to dominate every sphere of our lives is to understand how we are destroying our planet…

    Capitalism is double-billing us: we pay from our wallets only for our future to be stolen from us

    #64864
    Geppetto
    Participant

    @straightwalker wrote:

    “The willfulness, that enables us to get things done, can also interfere with accepting our unknowable place in the unknowable. I have lots of trouble with that.”

    Include me in that buddy!

    Fristen’s Free Energy principle:

    #64866
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    What an absolutely fantastic commentariat today; well done all of you…
    🙂

    #64867
    ₿oogaloo
    Participant

    @zerosum

    I am not sure I understood the questions. This article has more information, including a breakdown of the cases: http://www.monews.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=214756 (but you will need to run it through a translator)

    For perspective, 14 million people have received the influenza vaccine in Korea so far this year.

    So far, ZERO actual cases of influenza this season according to the weekly influenza reports on the KDCA (fka KCDC) website:
    https://www.cdc.go.kr/board/board.es?mid=a30504000000&bid=0033

    With everyone being so careful this year, I predict that this flu season will be a nothingburger here.

    #64869
    zerosum
    Participant

    Got it! No problems.
    http://www.monews.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=214756
    Professor Chung said, “Our country currently supplies a total of 12 kinds of influenza vaccines as part of the national vaccination project, and these cases of deaths are not limited to specific products or regions, and the hasty estimation of the correlation between vaccination and post-vaccination deaths implies a logical flaw.”

    #64871
    zerosum
    Participant

    Here is what my bad crystal ball sees.

    Pole say, “Biden sweeps.”

    What if Trump believes that there will be a “Biden sweeps”?
    What will Trump do until he has to leave the building?

    Trump has a temper, holds grudges, does payback for perceived insults.

    Therefore, I expect that Trump will
    1. Try to put a lock on all the changes that he has made.
    2. Leave obstacles on the road for Biden.
    3. Approve more spending than what the people/economy can absorb.
    4. Do a 4yr. and $48 million inquest, impeachment on Biden, called “China-China-China
    5. leave the piggy bank empty

    #64872
    John Day
    Participant

    Yes, V.Arnold, I agree that this is a good day for us, here. Thanks everybody.
    John-maximizing-evidence-of-John’s-separate-existence-as-his-brain-inverse-models-the-world-it-separates-from

    #64873
    Doc Robinson
    Participant

    John Day’s stream of consciousness flows toward the ocean of inseparable waves where surfers come and go as part of the unfolding.

    May you surf every wave you can, every day you can.

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