by Credit Repair News, Sebastian Pulvera on Saturday 15 May 2021 02:00 AM UTC-05 | United States Credit Report Repair News. Top Stories to help consumers fix bad credit, gain higher credit score, remove bankruptcy, free annual Equifax, TransUnion, Experian credit report. Free Credit Repair Counseling | (888) 502-1260 | | | Friday 14 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 Woman In Colombia Opens Her Own Home-Based "Respiratory Hospital" For COVID-19 Infection, Uses Nebulized Hydrogen Peroxide Therapy To Resolve Symptoms Within 30 Minutes.
All Patients Were Considered Cured, Visiting Doctor Reports. Become part of the solution, not the problem. Do what this woman in Colombia did and save the lives of her loved ones and neighbors too! Read Dr. Tom Levy's abridged account below: On a recent trip to Colombia in South America, I visited my wife's friend who previously had been instructed how to use nebulization to fight respiratory infections a year earlier. Over the course of this past year, she treated 20 different individuals with COVID infection. Most of these individuals were already significantly ill with their infections when they first came to her. Seven of the 20 cases had decided to be tested for COVID, and all of them tested positive. The rest had not taken a test, yet they had similar clinical profiles, and they could reliably be assumed to be dealing with COVID infections in the setting of a pandemic. Of particular note is that some of the patients had such advanced infections that severe respiratory difficulty was apparent. In a similar setting in the United States early in 2020, all of the patients having such severe shortness of breath would have been promptly intubated and given mechanically-assisted ventilation on respirator machines. All of the patients reported significant improvement after the completion of the first 30 minutes of nebulization, including near-immediate improvement in the ease of breathing by those who had the most advanced infections. Some noted nasal and throat irritation with increased mucus production, but all declined the option to dilute the 3% solution as they expressed the desire to resolve their infections as rapidly as possible. After the first two days of nebulization (6 treatments for a total of 180 minutes) all patients felt much better, well on the path to complete resolution of their viral symptoms. At that time some opted to take a 50% dilution (1.5% HP) for the remaining 9 treatments over the last three days. At the end of 5 days, all 20 patients appeared to have achieved complete clinical cures. Read the entire story and the protocol used for this very safe and effective therapy at the Orthomolecular News website. Obtain a copy of Dr. Levy's new book RAPID VIRUS RECOVERY, available as a free download now. Please note, there is negative talk about hydrogen peroxide nebulization online which is completely fallacious. Hydrogen peroxide is naturally made by the human body to fight infections. Vitamin C actually activates hydrogen peroxide in the body to selectively kill off pathogens and doesn't harm healthy cells. Hydrogen peroxide, molecularly described as H2O2, becomes H2O, harmless water in the body. The post Woman In Colombia, South America, Starts Her Own Home-Based Respiratory 'Hospital' Using Nebulized Hydrogen Peroxide With 100% Cure Rate appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Friday 14 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 International Man: In a recent interview, we discussed the battle for monetary supremacy between fiat, bitcoin, and gold—but in the geopolitical sense, the country with the "best" money ultimately imposes its dominance on others. Today, the US dollar is still the global reserve currency, but the US fiscal and monetary policy now resembles the destructive money printing of every other country. What does this mean for the US and its financial chokehold on the rest of the world? Nick Giambruno: First, I think it's important to clarify something. You often hear the media, politicians, and financial analysts toss around the word trillion without appreciating what it really means. A trillion is an enormous, almost incomprehensible number. The human mind has trouble wrapping itself around something so big. So let me try to put it into perspective. One million seconds ago was about 11 days ago. One billion seconds ago was 1989. One trillion seconds ago was 30,000 BC. So that's how big a trillion is. When politicians carelessly spend and print money in the trillions, you know you're in dangerous territory. That's precisely what is happening in the US right now. After the onset of the COVID hysteria, the US government adopted a policy of printing money to finance growing multi-trillion-dollar deficits forever. This is what Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is all about, and it's already here. Likewise, the COVID stimulus checks are the beginnings of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). There is no way any politician will ever be able to roll them back, much less stop them entirely. Who is going to beat Santa Claus in an election? By embracing MMT and a UBI, the US has embarked on the most dangerous economic experiment since communism. Eventually, all this spending financed by money printing will destroy the currency. This is precisely the same problem that has trapped Argentina in a perpetual cycle of hyperinflation and economic collapse. And even then, it's politically impossible to get rid of the freebies, so the process starts up again. Here's the bottom line. With MMT and a UBI, the US has gone beyond the monetary point of no return. That's why individuals, companies, and foreign governments will inevitably look to alternatives to the US dollar and financial system. As they do, a large part of the US government's geopolitical leverage will evaporate. International Man: Countries like Russia and China are accumulating more gold than ever before. What does this signal about the trust in the US dollar and other fiat currencies? Nick Giambruno: Let's define fiat currency. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "inconvertible paper money made legal tender by a government decree." Here's a helpful way to think of it. Think of nation-states as casinos and fiat currencies as the casino chips. The US has the biggest casino in the world. They get to tax anyone in their casino by creating more chips and diluting their value. They get to set the rules at the tables, decide on who can enter and who is forbidden. As long as people use the US casino, it gives the US government enormous power. The Russians, Chinese, and many others are increasingly aware that the US casino is becoming more rigged. So they're taking their chips and cashing out for real money—gold. International Man: Tech entrepreneur and American venture capitalist Peter Theil recently made a public statement about the threat of China to the US dollar. He said: "I do wonder whether, at this point, Bitcoin should also be thought of in part as a Chinese financial weapon against the US. It threatens fiat money, but it especially threatens the US dollar.If China's long Bitcoin, perhaps from a geopolitical perspective, the US should be asking some tougher questions about exactly how that works." What's your view on this? Nick Giambruno: Thiel's take isn't 100% correct. Bitcoin isn't specifically a Chinese financial weapon. It's open-source software and a hard money monetary system that nobody controls and anyone in the world can use, including US adversaries. Nonetheless, Thiel hit on an important point. Bitcoin has become a geopolitical competition, implying that the US better get in the game or watch China and other rivals develop a strategic edge in the future of money. International Man: China is the world leader in Bitcoin mining and is also responsible for producing a lot of the computer equipment needed to mine Bitcoin. What advantages does that give them in the battle for geopolitical monetary supremacy? Also, if such a large portion of Bitcoin is mined in China, does this pose a real threat to Bitcoin and its decentralized nature? Nick Giambruno: China isn't as dominant as it might seem. In most cases, to get in the business of being a Bitcoin miner, you have to join a mining pool, a collection of other miners that collectively contribute computing power. A lot of mining pools are indeed in China. But the actual mining machines contributing to those pools are not necessarily in China and could switch to other pools outside of China if they chose. Further, it's crucial to understand that miners do not control Bitcoin. A globally decentralized network of over 10,000 full nodes—computers running the Bitcoin blockchain—ultimately control Bitcoin. Miners must be honest and follow the Bitcoin protocol, which is enforced by the full nodes. If they don't, they will do nothing but waste money and eventually bankrupt themselves. Bitcoin proponent Saifedean Ammous said it best: "Miners are Bitcoin's slaves, not masters." What Saifedean means is that the miners need to satisfy the Bitcoin network—not the other way around. If they don't, they will have spent a lot of money on electricity and hardware for nothing. It's a brilliant system of incentives. The "blocksize wars," which culminated in 2017, dramatically illustrated this dynamic. That's when an overwhelming majority of the Bitcoin miners—and other prominent insiders and large companies—tried to get together and change Bitcoin. It was an abysmal and embarrassing failure for them because, even though they represented the vast majority of the Bitcoin miners, the network successfully rejected their efforts. So, as it relates to the question, the issue is not about control or changing the Bitcoin network—that is practically impossible, even for large nation-states like Russia, China, and the US. The issue here is who is engaging in mining to generate the hardest money known to man. So, is the US just going to sit back and let its rivals accumulate Bitcoin and become rich and powerful by dominating the future of money? I don't think so. At some point soon, the US government will realize that it needs to provide a competitive environment for Bitcoin mining, or it will get left behind as an unstoppable and superior form of money continues to take over the world. Reprinted with permission from International Man. The post The US, China, and the Geopolitical Battle for Monetary Dominance appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Friday 14 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 Perhaps Arizona can adopt California's new minority-friendly math curriculum before the election audit ordered by the Arizona State Senate is completed in a month or two. Under that new system of math, or maff, two plus two doesn't equal four, it equals more, five plus five equals a lot more, and 1,672,143 minus X equals don't-bother-me-with-your-racist-numbers. It'll take some kind of math or maff to unravel the mystery of Arizona's 2020 election results, and the people who run Maricopa County — that is, Phoenix and its suburban asteroid belt, or about 60 percent of the AZ population — don't want that mystery solved. So, they are not responding to a court-ordered subpoena to produce the evidence, namely, the vote tabulation files from their Dominion Systems voting machines, the county's server routers, or the chain-of-custody records of the precinct batches of paper ballots. The county's servers indicate that the folder containing the database of election results was deleted sometime after the election, so the county has no record of the vote. Hmmmm…. By a previous subpoena, the state Senate took possession of 2.1 million ballots and nearly 400 Dominion election machines and turned them over to the company, Cyber Ninjas, hired to do the audit. Problem was, the county didn't hand over the passwords to the Dominion machines. Officials claim they never had the passwords, which suggests that the County Board of Elections never had control over their own elections, for which they are legally responsible. A curious situation, because the county says it conducted a previous examination of its voting machines weeks after the election. How'd they do that without the Dominion passwords? Maybe the data was not stored on the Dominion machines but booted onto external hard drives, which would be against the rules. Or maybe the Dominion machines were connected to the Internet and information was booted into the Dominion machines from somewhere else on Planet Earth. That would be very very against the rules. If that was so, the log files on the machines would show time-stamps and where the outside information originated. Would that be enough for the State Senate to de-certify the Arizona election results? Or Prompt audits in other states where the outcome is still contested: Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin? An awful lot of interested parties don't want a complete examination of the 2020 Arizona vote to go forward, including now the US Department of Justice, which sent a letter from its Civil Rights Division to state Senate President Karen Fann threatening legal action against canvassers directed to ascertain whether voters actually lived at the addresses recorded on their mail-in ballots. The DOJ asserts that this would be threatening and coercive to voters — if they could even be found at these addresses. That was a week ago. So far, the auditors have not sent canvassers out and the DOJ hasn't moved. However, the DOJ is beefing up its home office defenses by appointing one Susan Hennessey to its National Security Division and one Lisa Monaco as Deputy Attorney General, assigned to run the little twerp in the corner office, Merrick Garland. Do they sense something coming at them… some possibly lethal threat that must be met with a rabid counterattack? Hennessey was general counsel of the Lawfare Institute, the gang of attorneys who coordinated with the DOJ, FBI, and The New York Times in the RussiaGate campaign, the subsequent Mueller Investigation, and the shenanigans surrounding "whistleblower" Eric Ciaramella and IC Insepector General Michael Atkinson in the first Trump impeachment. Lisa Monaco was special counsel to Robert Mueller when he was FBI Director and previously head of the DOJ national Security Division. Earlier, she was on the DOJ task force that was cited for prosecutorial misconduct in the Enron case. She's the kind of lawyer Shakespeare was talking about in Henry VI, Part 2, Act IV. Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr is reportedly ramping up an indictment of Donald Trump on financial fraud charges. He's been dicking around on this for years. Do you wonder why he picked this moment to move? Pinning a felony conviction charge on the former president would be just the ticket for negating any undesirable outcome of the Maricopa County election audit, and any other formal inquiries in other states over the 2020 election. They don't call it lawfare for nothing. The problem with that is ultimately you may be using the law to disable and defeat itself. You could say that that these smoothies have just about succeeded in doing that. We are a country so far down the path to self-destruction, that the truth has been declared an enemy of the people. Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com. The post Circling the Wagons appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Friday 14 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 Note: I wrote and published this piece of fiction a year ago. It was the story of an isolated group of people living on a small island. They were essentially a control group: free of all COVID restrictions and medical measures. In real life, you'd think the public health experts in charge of monitoring the "pandemic" would have assembled their own control group. After all, since these experts were willing to test, trace, treat, and lock down a significant portion of the planet, shouldn't they have observed what would happen to a population they left completely alone? Shouldn't they have tested "the other side" of their hypothesis? "We need to see what happens to, say, a thousand people who might contract COVID-19, if we don't test or treat them, if we don't tell them to wear masks or distance. This would be a group who live together in one location, who interact with each other…" But no, this was never done. In fact, there were, and are, many places around the world where people are still living free of COVID measures. Public health agencies don't report convincingly on their health status. Why not? Obviously, because if such a group, or several groups, remained healthy, the whole mad notion of the pandemic would begin to collapse like a house of cards. Hence, this piece:
Coronavirus and Island X-24 There was a small island. Amazingly, it had never been claimed by any country. It just sat there. It was inconsequential. Geographers were irritated that it had no name. In 1998, they named it X-24. 123 families lived there. They had emigrated from 14 countries. During the 2020 onset of the trouble in China, 19 citizens escaped the lockdown in Wuhan and found their way to the island in a small makeshift boat, which broke into pieces near shore. The resident families rescued them, welcomed them without fanfare, and offered them housing in huts on the north side of the island. People on the island practiced agriculture on their tiny farms, and they raised chickens and ate eggs. There was no government. The families met once a month to discuss any issues that might have arisen since their last meeting. They did not vote. They used common sense. They were sensible people. They had no ideology. They had no phones, no computers, no electricity. One of the newly arrived Chinese women explained, at a meeting, the coronavirus, the epidemic, the lockdown, the testing. She asked whether anyone was concerned that her people might have brought the virus with them. The people of the island looked around at each other and shrugged. They didn't seem interested. Three weeks later, an article appeared in the mainland Chinese press about X-24 and the 19 escaped Wuhan residents. It was picked up by a wire service and then republished by a number of outlets around the world. It did not become a big story. However, a boat soon arrived at the island. A Chinese official and an American public health officer from the CDC stepped off. Several conversations ensued. The two bureaucrats were concerned that the virus might have come to X-24. The residents said they didn't travel, and they didn't even fish. Why not? No one had an answer. The bureaucrats took samples of rainwater from a backyard container. They took a look at all the X-24 residents and saw they were healthy. They took throat swabs from the new 19 Chinese residents. There was a bit of tension when the Chinese official told these Wuhan escapees they were living illegally on the island and should return home. The Chinese residents said they wouldn't, but they had no intention of causing trouble. The visitors left. A week later, at a meeting in government offices in Wuhan, CDC and Chinese scientists told a deputy mayor of the city that nine immigrants on X-24 had tested positive for the coronavirus. A call was immediately made to the public health and safety office of the national government, and the news was reported. Two hours later, a message came back: leave the people on X-24 alone for now. The government in Beijing took up the X-24 issue in several committees. A decision was made. Drones would do high flyovers and surveil the island. No one would be permitted to leave it. Three months later, with the world in lockdown, a small elite government committee met in Beijing. The news: all the residents of X-24 were going about their daily business. No sick people were observed, even among the elderly. No one had tried to leave the island. No one was practicing social distancing. People met and mingled as usual. A CDC/WHO message was read: It expressed concern about X-24. People who were positive for the virus couldn't be allowed to live outside the limits of control. Something needed to be done. Three weeks later, X-24 residents observed a group of armed boats approaching. Maneuvers were executed, and the craft made a ring around the island. They sat about 20 miles offshore. They stayed there. This operation was noticed by the press. The X-24 story made a brief limited comeback. INFECTED PEOPLE LIVING ON AN ISLAND. QUARANTINE FORCED. A few reporters tried to get information on the condition of the X-24 residents. They couldn't. CDC meetings took place. The gist was: These people remain healthy. There is no sign of trouble. No disease. No illness. "What happens if THIS becomes a story?" The issue was kicked up to the Chinese and American military. Very private meetings took place. "We could launch a drone missile attack and wipe them out." "We could send in a kill-team." "How about a massive fire? Drop a few incendiaries." "Spray them with nasty chemicals. They'll have a hell of time trying to breathe, they'll foam at the mouth and die." But in the end, the military held back. A message from a carefully guarded private source came down the line: "Leave them alone. Remove the stupid ships. Observe from drones. Do not attack. They rate as experimental subjects. They constitute a control group. By CDC projections, at least a few of them should become ill. So far, that's not the case." …A year later, on X-24, the Chinese woman, who had originally told the island residents about the coronavirus, wrote in the diary she had been keeping, "The mainland madness is just a faint memory. My mother here is 93. She is reasonably healthy. A few people get sick, as a matter of course, and then they get well. Nothing unusual. There were two deaths last year. A French woman and an American man. They were both in their 80s. I helped their families make them comfortable at the end. I saw no sudden illness of the lungs. I liked all these island people from the start. I feel close to them now." Old habits die hard. She looked around her small cabin, as if some government authority might be present. She walked to the pile of stones arranged in the corner, where a low fire was burning. It occurred to her there was no reason to continue her diary. She bent down and placed it in the flames and watched it for a minute. The past was past. Nothing untoward had happened on the island. Back at the CDC, a private analysis was carried out. Nine mitigating factors were listed to explain why no one on the island had fallen ill from the virus. The conclusion was the island was not a proper representation of the real world. The analysis was sent up the line to the guarded source who had ordered the ring of ships to back off. He read the CDC analysis. He sent back a message. "I wasn't asking you to cover your ass or justify your role in this fiasco. Your so-called mitigating factors are a crock. Apparently, you're unable to be honest. So let me send you my analysis. The people on X-24 didn't get sick because they didn't get sick. Remove promoted fear, diagnostic tests, treatment with toxic drugs, and other damage falsely labeled as COVID, and you have nothing. I see why you were disturbed about the story of X-24. But then, accounting for healthy people who stay healthy has never been your strong suit, has it? You've gone too far. I should set my hounds loose on you." A colleague of his walked into the sauna, picked up a pitcher of cold water and poured it on the rocks. Steam rose and the rocks hissed. Wrapped in white sheets, the two men sat side by side. "Did you tear them a new one?" "I gave them something to think about. These people are incorrigible. They really are." "When our friends arrive tonight, we'll discuss the situation." "Yes. Recess is over. The bureaucrats interrupted business. Products must flow. Money must flow. They don't understand we're the engine of the world, for better or worse." "We'll school these little bureaucrats. They parade around thinking they're princes. They're going to pay." The steam spread. The men were invisible.
That was the story I wrote a year ago. Unfortunately, the "little bureaucrats" and the men behind them haven't paid. The real-life versions of the big-time businessmen in my story (in the sauna) haven't made a move to stop the economic ruination. Why? Because they don't have the courage. And they prefer to gather at the government money-trough with their hands out. But free people are out in the streets in larger numbers. They see each other. They know what freedom is and isn't. Reprinted with permission from Jon Rappoport's blog. The post Coronavirus and Island X-24 appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Friday 14 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 Shop all books by Pat Buchanan On taking the oath of office, Jan. 20, Joe Biden may not have realized it, but history had dealt him a pair of aces. The COVID-19 pandemic had reached its apex, infecting a quarter of a million Americans every day. Yet, due to the discovery and distribution of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the incidence of infections had crested and was about to turn sharply down. By May, the infection rate had fallen 80%, as had the death toll. Thanks to the Operation Warp Speed program driven by President Donald Trump, the country made amazing strides in Biden’s first 100 days toward solving the major crises he inherited: the worst pandemic since the Spanish flu of 1918-1919 and the economic crash it had engendered. But Biden’s pace car has hit the wall. Where economists had predicted employment gains of a million new jobs in April, the jolting figure came in at about a fourth of that number. One explanation: The $300-a-week in bonus unemployment checks the Biden recovery plan provides may have been a sufficient inducement for workers to stay home until their benefits ran out. Workers might reasonably ask: Why go back to work when we can take the summer off, with full unemployment, plus $300 a week? After the crushing jobs report came the inflation figure from April. Consumer prices had risen 4.2%, the highest rate in a dozen years. April’s combination of inflation and near-stagnant job growth recalls the “stagflation” of the Jimmy Carter years, which led to the Democratic rout of 1980 at the hands of Ronald Reagan. And while we may not be suffering from stagflation just yet, the present symptoms in the U.S. economy are certainly consistent with it. The bad news from the inflation front also sent the Dow and other markets plunging and raised fears of future Fed intervention to raise interest rates to choke off the inflation. Moreover, rising prices, driven in part by our historic federal deficits, stiffened the spines of Republicans in their resistance to Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure and jobs program, his $1.8 trillion in added domestic spending and his $4 trillion in taxes to pay for it all. Sen. Mitch McConnell came out of Wednesday’s White House meeting with Biden to say that any tampering with the Trump tax cuts crosses a “red line” for him and Senate Republicans. The odds on Biden getting any of his taxes has just fallen dramatically. And he may be forced to come down closer to the GOP proposal if he hopes to get any of his infrastructure package through. At present, Biden does not have a single sure Republican vote for his spending proposals — and even some Democrats in the evenly divided Senate oppose his plans for social spending and higher taxes. Added to this economic news was a stunning ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, which feeds fuel to states from Texas to New Jersey. Within days, the shutdown of the pipeline had induced panic buying of gas at the pumps, resulting in a sweeping closure of gas stations from Delaware to the Gulf Coast. As alarming as the ransomware attack was, more alarming is what it portends if cybercriminals abroad can, with the flick of a switch, inflict such instant damage on the U.S. economy. If cybercriminals can pull this off, what cannot our adversaries, with their sophisticated and superior weapons of cyberwarfare, not do to the United States? But that was not the end of the bad news for Biden this week. A shooting war erupted between Hamas and Israel after a dispute over ownership of homes in East Jerusalem led to clashes between Arab protesters and Israeli police at the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. The clashes brought barrages of over 1,000 rockets directed at Israeli towns and cities including Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The Ben Gurion International Airport was forced to shut down. Those who believed Trump’s Abraham Accords, where Israel was recognized by the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco, had ensured a more tranquil future suddenly seemed to have been as wrong as previous generations of optimists.  Today, even inside Israel, Arabs and Jews, both Israeli citizens, are battling in the streets.
Meanwhile, in Kabul, three bombs outside a high school killed 50 people and wounded scores more, many of them teenage girls — a portent of what may be coming when the Americans and allied troops are gone from the country by the 20th anniversary of 9/11. But the defining crisis of the Biden presidency may be the crisis on America’s southern border, where another 170,000 illegal immigrants entered the country in April after an equally high number in March. That is an annual rate of 2 million people walking into our country uninvited, the advance guard of a Third World invasion that will change the character and composition of the United States. The America we grew up in is disappearing — without our consent. The post Are the Halcyon Days Over for Joe Biden? appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Friday 14 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 What Happened: News of fully vaccinated individuals testing positive for COVID seem to be making headlines everywhere. For example, six people who tested positive in a Sydney hotel quarantine had already been fully vaccinated. According to data from NSW Health's weekly COVID-19 surveillance report, between April 10 and May 1, six people in quarantine who reported being fully vaccinated were among the 150 overseas cases recorded. One had received a one-shot vaccine, such as Johnson & Johnson, and the remaining cases had received both doses of a two-shot vaccine, such as Pfizer, AstraZeneca or Moderna. University of Sydney epidemiologist Dr. Fiona Stanaway said, given no COVID-19 vaccine is 100 percent effective, it was to be expected that some people who have been vaccinated test positive. The New York Yankees recently announced that they had two coaches and one support staff member test positive for COVID despite all of them being fully vaccinated. In Seychelles, East Africa, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that on Tuesday it was reviewing coronavirus data in the region after the health ministry said more than a third of people who tested positive for COVID-19 in the past week had been fully vaccinated. These are a few of many examples, but it shouldn't come as a surprise as people have been warned throughout the pandemic that the full dosage of COVID vaccines will not be 100 percent effective. Canada's Chief Public Health officer Teresa Tam, for example, recently reminded Canadians on Saturday that even those who are fully vaccinated are susceptible to COVID. She did say, however, that the risk of asymptomatic transmission is far lower for anyone who is fully vaccinated, but how much lower? What about asymptomatic individuals who are not vaccinated? According to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University's School of Medicine, The scientific evidence now strongly suggests that COVID-19 infected individuals who are asymptomatic are more than an order of magnitude less likely to spread the disease to even close contacts than symptomatic COVID-19 patients. A meta-analysis of 54 studies from around the world found that within households – where none of the safeguards that restaurants are required to apply are typically applied – symptomatic patients passed on the disease to household members in 18 percent of instances, while asymptomatic patients passed on the disease to household members in 0.7 per cent of instances. A separate, smaller meta-analysis similarly found that asymptomatic patients are much less likely to infect others than symptomatic patients. Asymptomatic individuals are an order of magnitude less likely to infect others than symptomatic individuals, even in intimate settings such as people living in the same household where people are much less likely to follow social distancing and masking practices that they follow outside the household. Spread of the disease in less intimate settings by asymptomatic individuals – including religious services, in-person restaurant visits, gyms, and other public settings – are likely to be even less likely than in the household. (source)
Something to think about. It's hard to say. In the United States, for example, the CDC makes it quite clear that "there will be a small percentage of people who are fully vaccinated who still get sick, are hospitalized, or die from COVID-19" and that "symptomatic breakthrough cases will occur, even though the vaccines are working as expected. Asymptomatic infections among vaccinated people also will occur." But the concern here is the fact that the CDC recently announced the following, As previously announced, CDC is transitioning to reporting only patients with COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough infection that were hospitalized or died to help maximize the quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance. That change in reporting will begin on May 14, 2021. In preparation for that transition, the number of reported breakthrough cases will not be updated on May 7, 2021.
This means that people who get infected with COVID after being vaccinated will not be reported unless they are hospitalized or died. It begs the question, how can any appropriate data in the United States, for example, be collected regarding the effectiveness of the vaccine if those who test positive and have had the vaccine are not being reported? It is a bit confusing, because the CDC is requiring that clinical specimens for sequencing should have an RT-PCR Ct value ≤28 when conducting tests for vaccinated individuals. "Ct" refers to cycle threshold. A common occurrence when using this test is a Ct value greater than 35, which makes the probability of "false positives" quite high. Why are they all of a sudden specifying a Ct value for vaccinated individuals? You can read more about that, in depth, here. Why This Is Important: Prior to the rollout of these vaccines, the vaccine manufacturers claimed to have observed a 95 percent success rate. Dr. Peter Doshi, an associate editor at the British Medical Journal, published a paper titled "Pfizer and Moderna's "95% effective" vaccines—let's be cautious and first see the full data." Even today, there is still not enough data to tell how effective the vaccine is. A paper recently published by Dr. Ronald B. Brown, School of Public Health and Health Systems, University of Waterloo, outlines how Pfizer and Moderna did not report absolute risk reduction numbers, and only reported relative risk reduction numbers. Unreported absolute risk reduction measures of 0.7% and 1.1% for the Pfzier/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, respectively, are very much lower than the reported relative risk reduction measures. Reporting absolute risk reduction measures is essential to prevent outcome reporting bias in evaluation of COVID-19 vaccine efficacy.
Brown's paper also cites Doshi's paper which makes the same point, "As was also noted in the BMJ Opinion, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna reported the relative risk reduction of their vaccines, but the manufacturers did not report a corresponding absolute risk reduction, which appears to be less than 1%." Absolute risk reduction (ARR) – also called risk difference (RD) – is the most useful way of presenting research results to help your decision-making, so why wouldn't it be reported? (source) Omitting absolute risk reduction findings in public health and clinical reports of vaccine efficacy is an example of outcome reporting bias. which ignores unfavorable outcomes and misleads the public's impression and scientific understanding of a treatment efficacy and benefits…Such examples of outcome reporting bias mislead and distort the public's interpretation of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine efficacy and violate the ethical and legal obligations of informed consent." – Brown
Furthermore, there are a variety of other factors that may be responsible for a drop in cases that we are likely to see in combination with the rollout of these vaccines. One of those factors is previous infection, as there is evidence suggesting that previous infection is more efficient than the vaccine when it comes to creating immunity. I'm not aware of any vaccine out there which will ever give you more immunity than if you're naturally recovered from the illness itself…If you've naturally recovered from it, my understanding as a doctor level scientist is that those antibodies will always be better then a vaccine, and if you know any differently, please let me know. – Dr. Suneel Dhand, an internal medicine physician based in the United States
Vaccine expert and Harvard professor of medicine Dr. Martin Kulldorff recently tweeted that, "After having protected themselves while working class were exposed to the virus, the vaccinated Zoomers now want Vaccine Passports where immunity from prior infection does not count, despite stronger evidence for protection. One more assault on working people." There are multiple studies hinting at the point the professor makes, that those who have been infected with covid may have immunity for years, and possibly even decades. For example, according to a new study authored by respected scientists at leading labs, individuals who recovered from the coronavirus developed "robust" levels of B cells and T cells (necessary for fighting off the virus) and "these cells may persist in the body for a very, very long time." With all of this said, there is also evidence suggesting that the vaccines are indeed working. 22 renowned scientists published an article titled "The vaccine worked, we can safely lift lockdown." It was pertaining to the United Kingdom. Many of these scientists have also been quite vocal about their belief that not everybody needs to be vaccinated, and the fact that this is indeed the message we are being bombarded with is suspicious given the fact that this messaging does not, as one of the Professors, Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University explains, does not align with the science. All this is expressed by her, and others, while maintaining their belief that the vaccine can be used as a great tool for focused protection, on those who are vulnerable and who need it the most. In the article, they explain, It is time to recognize that, in our substantially vaccinated population, Covid-19 will take its place among the 30 or so respiratory viral diseases with which humans have historically co-existed. This has been explicitly accepted in a number of recent statements by the Chief Medical Officer. For most vaccinated and other low-risk people, Covid-19 is now a mild endemic infection, likely to recur in seasonal waves which renew immunity without significantly stressing the NHS. Covid-19 no longer requires exceptional measures of control in everyday life, especially where there have been no evaluations and little credible evidence of benefit. Measures to reduce or discourage social interaction are extremely damaging to the mental health of citizens; to the education of children and young people; to people with disabilities; to new entrants to the workforce; and to the spontaneous personal connections from which innovation and enterprise emerge. The DfE recommendations on face covering and social distancing in schools should never have been extended beyond Easter and should cease no later than 17 May. Mandatory face coverings, physical distancing and mass community testing should cease no later than 21 June along with other controls and impositions. All consideration of immunity documentation should cease.
The Takeaway: Regardless of how effective the vaccine is at preventing the spread of COVID, and more, there are a number of valid scientific reasons why freedom of choice and informed consent should always remain. A number of "pro-vaccine" scientists who believe and point to the idea that these vaccines are indeed working are also pointing out that they believe mandatory vaccines for travel, employment, and school are unscientific and unethical. If this vaccine was completely safe and effective, travel mandates, for example wouldn't be needed, everybody would be rushing to get one. Do we really want to give governments the power to implement health mandates when it goes against the will of so many people, doctors, and scientists? Is it not enough to simply promote and recommend people receive the vaccine instead of using measures to coerce the entire population to do so? Why are certain viewpoints, opinions, research and evidence of so many experts in the field being completely ignored and in some cases ridiculed if they oppose the common narrative we receive from governments and mainstream media? Reprinted with permission from Collective Evolution. The post Fully Vaccinated Individuals Are Testing Positive For the Coronavirus: More Examples Emerge appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Friday 14 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 Upon recounting my bout with COVID to an acquaintance, I was asked if I knew where I might have picked up the virus. When I mentioned my hunch about the source, my acquaintance gasped, then inferred that I and those I caught it from must not have been wearing masks since the virus had spread. "No," I responded, much to her surprise, "we were wearing masks." Such a comment demonstrates the great confidence which many have placed in measures such as lockdowns and mask mandates in recent months. "Science confirms that these measures work!" many exclaim, arguing that those who question masks or other allegedly helpful restrictions are anti-science. Yet new research from several MIT academics casts some doubt on the anti-science nature of COVID skeptics. In their paper, "Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online," the academics show some curious cognitive dissonance, making anti-mask proponents out to be clever propagandists who create easily understandable charts and graphs to sway the public away from the authoritative opinions of experts. At the same time the academics admit, almost in a puzzled fashion, that these "anti-maskers" do their investigations in a very scientific manner. "Indeed," the paper claims, "anti-maskers often reveal themselves to be more sophisticated in their understanding of how scientific knowledge is socially constructed than their ideological adversaries, who espouse naive realism about the 'objective' truth of public health data." The MIT academics go on to admit that those opposed to masks are not afraid to get down and dirty in looking at statistics, nor are they afraid to increasingly question the media and government authorities, a trait MIT researchers call "a weaponization of critical thinking." Even more surprising is the revelation that anti-maskers' "approach to the pandemic is grounded in a more scientific rigor, not less." People can bicker all day long about which side is right on this issue, but in this instance, these straightforward, honest comments from the MIT researchers should give us pause. They are clearly opposed to the ideas of the anti-maskers, yet they can't help but begrudgingly respect the scientific methods of their opponents. Read the Whole Article The post MIT Researchers Admit Anti-Maskers Are More Scientifically Rigorous appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Friday 14 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 Ephesians 6: 12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. It is growing ever more evident that this is the battle confronting us today, or maybe it is only that I am growing more aware of it. The last year, certainly, between the reaction to a virus and the reaction to the mobs and the (let’s call these) irregularities in the election, has made this overwhelmingly clear. It is also clear that these principalities and powers are not limited to some sort of invisible spirits, but inhabit real flesh-and-blood humans. This, of course, we have seen often in history. But it was always "those guys," in the communist or fascist countries, in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, or the leaders of the so-called "Axis of Evil." Never the leaders of the so-called free world. I have been thinking about the reaction to events of the last year by many Christian leaders. A few have been quite courageous – a recent example is the very strong Canadian Pastor Artur Pawlowski; there are others. Some churches have quietly remained open, with few, if any, restrictions placed on those who wish to worship. These examples appear to be found primarily, if not solely, in churches unaffiliated or very loosely affiliated with a larger institution. Most have followed, lock-step, with whatever the local, state, or federal authorities allow. Remember, this included cancelling Holy Week last year. Had these institutions stood on their faith and calling, the story of 2020 and 2021 would have been quite different. Instead, they cowed under the call of these principalities and powers, the rulers of darkness of this world. —————————————– "But, according to Romans 13, we must obey those in authority." The damage done to both Christians and to freedom by accepting this monstrous understanding of the text is significant. Understanding that "higher powers," or "superior powers," inherently means government is a road certain to lead to both physical and spiritual death. 1 John 4: 1 Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. I will not further develop my thoughts in this post. I have done so several times before, most recently here. —————————————– Ephesians 5: 6 Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. 7 Therefore do not be partakers with them There are numerous passages in the Bible about seeking wisdom and truth. I think these two verses speak best within the context of this post. Much of the world, Christians included, has been consumed by a spirit of fear – and a fear not based on wisdom and truth, but based on propaganda and brainwashing; empty words. —————————————– Romans 8: 5 For those who are according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who are according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. 6 For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace, 7 because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so, 8 and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. The last year has demonstrated that the highest value most people hold, including the vast majority of Christian leaders, is to avoid death – once wisdom and truth are thrown out of the window, and the total ignorance of society in science and reasoning is taken as a given. Avoiding death has also taken over as the highest value in many churches – certainly higher than coming together to worship on any random Sunday, but even so high as to keep the doors closed on Easter week. Church leaders and many of their parishioners have set their minds on things of the flesh, especially inexcusable when considering the total ignorance and gullibility when it comes to the reason for their fear of death. —————————————– Colossians 3: 1 Therefore if you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth. 3 For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. By placing the avoidance of death as the highest value, many Christians have not been seeking the things above in the last year; perhaps this is just a continuation of not seeking things above for many years. They have been focused on the things that are on earth. Not having died to the world, they have not been raised up with Christ. With no evidence in support of the claim of the high risk of death, and significant evidence in contradiction, many Christians have turned away from God and turned toward man and flesh. —————————————– We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful. So writes C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man. The chests have been so hollowed out that the fear of death overrules all other values. But we all die, eventually. Is it any wonder that, without any higher value, Western man is living through a meaning crisis? —————————————– Why am I so pointed about my criticism of Christian churches and their leaders, and not also on the leaders of other institutions: universities, media, government, etc.? cosmic dwarf May 11, 2021 at 7:10 AM Strickland’s book really paints the picture of a wholly different Christianity, one where even the highest leaders are willing to risk seriously annoying the secular powers. “Heroic” indeed. These days only the small fish will do anything like that. To be fair, that’s hardly unique to the Church. What powerful institution in the West today isn’t a sclerotic bureaucracy bent on justifying its own existence and scared to death of rocking the boat? The globalist NGOs and their backers, I suppose? I replied in the comments, but here I will expand on this. I agree completely with cosmic's comments. The state has usurped and corrupted the authority of all meaningful intermediating institutions, all for the benefit of increasing the stranglehold of state power. On this point, there is nothing unique regarding the subservience of most church leaders. But the most disappointing institution in the debacle that we have been living in for more than a year is the church. It is the church that has the unique calling to live according to the Spirit and not the flesh; it is the church that has the certain truth of life and peace; it is the church that has the knowledge that death has been conquered; it is the church best equipped to give men chests. It is the only institution in the history of the West that ever played an effective role in keeping the king in check. Most importantly, it is the only institution that answers "love" as the last answer to the last “why” in the string of questions of why we take action. It is the only institution built on Christ, who offered the perfect example of this virtue put into action. So, it should be held most accountable. To explain why this is so would take several posts. Here they are: – One Answer to An Important Social / Political / Economic Question of Our Time – Free Market Capitalism as the Highest Value (Part Two) – The Way Out and the Way To (Part Three) – Virtuous Governance And this is why I lay the most blame on Christian leaders. They were given the authority to speak truth to power; they were given the one means by which this could be done firmly and without exception; they were given the keys to the only truth that has ever prevailed against evil. And they cast all of it aside, teaching, by word and deed, that avoiding death is the highest value man should hold. Conclusion Revelation 3: 1 "To the angel of the church in Sardis write: He who has the seven Spirits of God and the seven stars, says this: 'I know your deeds, that you have a name that you are alive, but you are dead. 2 Wake up, and strengthen the things that remain, which were about to die; for I have not found your deeds completed in the sight of My God. 3 So remember what you have received and heard; and keep it, and repent. Therefore if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come to you. It is clear that the hour has come for the church in the West. Fortunately, some will hold to a way out: 4 But you have a few people in Sardis who have not soiled their garments; and they will walk with Me in white, for they are worthy. Reprinted with permission from Bionic Mosquito. The post According to the Flesh appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Friday 14 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 "Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."—Hermann Goering, Nazi leader
With all that is crashing down upon us, from government-manipulated crises to the blowback arising from a society that has repeatedly prized technological expedience and mass-marketed values over self-ownership and individual sovereignty, those coming of age today are facing some of the greatest threats to freedom the world has ever witnessed. It's downright frightening. Young people will find themselves overtaxed, burdened with excessive college debt, and struggling to find worthwhile employment in a debt-ridden economy on the brink of implosion. Their privacy will be eviscerated by the surveillance state. They will be threatened, intimidated and beaten by militarized police. They will be the subjects of a military empire constantly waging war against shadowy enemies and government agents armed to the teeth ready and able to lock down the country at a moment's notice. As such, they will find themselves forced to march in lockstep with a government that no longer exists to serve the people but which demands that "we the people" be obedient slaves or suffer the consequences. It's a dismal prospect, isn't it? Unfortunately, we failed to guard against such a future. Worse, we who should have known better neglected to maintain our freedoms or provide our young people with the tools necessary to resist oppression and survive, let alone succeed, in the impersonal jungle that is modern America. We brought them into homes fractured by divorce, distracted by mindless entertainment, and obsessed with the pursuit of materialism. We institutionalized them in daycares and afterschool programs, substituting time with teachers and childcare workers for parental involvement. We turned them into test-takers instead of thinkers and automatons instead of activists. We allowed them to languish in schools which not only look like prisons but function like prisons, as well—where conformity is the rule and freedom is the exception. We made them easy prey for our corporate overlords, while instilling in them the values of a celebrity-obsessed, technology-driven culture devoid of any true spirituality. And we taught them to believe that the pursuit of their own personal happiness trumped all other virtues, including any empathy whatsoever for their fellow human beings. We have allowed them to be manipulated by a corporate culture that simply wants money and control. However, as Aldous Huxley warned: "The victim of mind-manipulation does not know he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible and he believes himself to be free." No, we haven't done this generation any favors. Based on the current political climate, things could very well get much worse before they ever take a turn for the better. Here are a few pieces of advice that will hopefully help those coming of age today survive the perils of the journey that awaits: Be a thinking individual. For all of its claims to champion the individual, American culture advocates a stark conformity which, as John F. Kennedy warned, is "the jailer of freedom, and the enemy of growth." Worry less about fitting in with the rest of the world and instead, as Henry David Thoreau urged, become "a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought." Learn your rights. We're losing our freedoms for one simple reason: most of us don't know anything about our freedoms. At a minimum, anyone who has graduated from high school, let alone college, should know the Bill of Rights backwards and forwards. However, the average young person, let alone citizen, has very little knowledge of their rights for the simple reason that the educational system no longer teaches them and spends little time on the rights of the people. So grab a copy of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and study them at home. And when the time comes, stand up for your rights before it's too late. Speak truth to power. Don't be naive about those in positions of authority. As James Madison, who wrote our Bill of Rights, observed, "All men having power ought to be distrusted." We must learn the lessons of history. People in power, more often than not, abuse that power. To maintain our freedoms, this will mean challenging government officials whenever they exceed the bounds of their office. Resist all things that numb you. Don't measure your worth by what you own or earn. Likewise, don't become mindless consumers unaware of the world around you. Resist all things that numb you, put you to sleep or help you "cope" with so-called "reality." Those who establish the rules and laws that govern society's actions desire compliant subjects. However, as George Orwell warned, "Until they become conscious, they will never rebel, and until after they rebelled, they cannot become conscious." It is these conscious individuals who change the world for the better. Don't let technology turn you into zombies. Technology anesthetizes us to the all-too-real tragedies that surround us. Techno-gadgets are merely distractions from what's really going on in America and around the world. As a result, we've begun mimicking the inhuman technology that surrounds us and we have lost our humanness. We've become sleepwalkers. If you're going to make a difference in the world, you're going to have to pull the earbuds out, turn off the cell phones and spend much less time viewing screens. Then, maybe you'll see the world for what it really is. Help others. We all have a calling in life. And I believe it boils down to one thing: You are here on this planet to help other people. In fact, none of us can exist very long without help from others. If we're going to see any positive change for freedom, then we must change our view of what it means to be human and regain a sense of what it means to love and help one another. That will mean gaining the courage to stand up for the oppressed. Give voice to moral outrage. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter." There is no shortage of issues on which to take a stand. For instance, on any given night, over half a million people in the U.S. are homeless, and half of them are elderly. There are 46 million Americans living at or below the poverty line, and 16 million children living in households without adequate access to food. Congress creates, on average, more than 50 new criminal laws each year. With more than 2 million Americans in prison, and close to 7 million adults in correctional care, the United States has the largest prison population in the world. At least 2.7 million children in the United States have at least one parent in prison. At least 400 to 500 innocent people are killed by police officers every year. Americans are now eight times more likely to die in a police confrontation than they are to be killed by a terrorist. On an average day in America, over 100 Americans have their homes raided by SWAT teams. It costs the American taxpayer $52.6 billion every year to be spied on by the government intelligence agencies tasked with surveillance, data collection, counterintelligence and covert activities. All the while, since 9/11, the U.S. has spent more than $1.6 trillion to wage wars abroad and police the rest of the world. This is an egregious affront to anyone who believes in freedom. Cultivate spirituality, reject materialism and put people first. When the things that matter most have been subordinated to materialism, we have lost our moral compass. We must change our values to reflect something more meaningful than technology, materialism and politics. Standing at the pulpit of the Riverside Church in New York City in April 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. urged his listeners: [W]e as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motive and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
Pitch in and do your part to make the world a better place. Don't rely on someone else to do the heavy lifting for you. Don't wait around for someone else to fix what ails you, your community or nation. As Gandhi urged: "Be the change you wish to see in the world." Say no to war. Addressing the graduates at Binghampton Central High School in 1968, at a time when the country was waging war "on different fields, on different levels, and with different weapons," Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling declared: Too many wars are fought almost as if by rote. Too many wars are fought out of sloganry, out of battle hymns, out of aged, musty appeals to patriotism that went out with knighthood and moats. Love your country because it is eminently worthy of your affection. Respect it because it deserves your respect. Be loyal to it because it cannot survive without your loyalty. But do not accept the shedding of blood as a natural function or a prescribed way of history—even if history points this up by its repetition. That men die for causes does not necessarily sanctify that cause. And that men are maimed and torn to pieces every fifteen and twenty years does not immortalize or deify the act of war… find another means that does not come with the killing of your fellow-man.
Finally, prepare yourselves for what lies ahead. The demons of our age—some of whom disguise themselves as politicians—delight in fomenting violence, sowing distrust and prejudice, and persuading the public to support tyranny disguised as patriotism and/or keeping us "safe." Overcoming the evils of our age will require more than intellect and activism. It will require decency, morality, goodness, truth and toughness. As Serling concluded in his remarks to the graduating class of 1968: "Toughness is the singular quality most required of you… we have left you a world far more botched than the one that was left to us… Part of your challenge is to seek out truth, to come up with a point of view not dictated to you by anyone, be he a congressman, even a minister… Are you tough enough to take the divisiveness of this land of ours, the fact that everything is polarized, black and white, this or that, absolutely right or absolutely wrong. This is one of the challenges. Be prepared to seek out the middle ground … that wondrous and very difficult-to-find Valhalla where man can look to both sides and see the errant truths that exist on both sides. If you must swing left or you must swing right—respect the other side. Honor the motives that come from the other side. Argue, debate, rebut—but don’t close those wondrous minds of yours to opposition. In their eyes, you’re the opposition. And ultimately … ultimately—you end divisiveness by compromise. And so long as men walk and breathe—there must be compromise… Are you tough enough to face one of the uglier stains upon the fabric of our democracy—prejudice? It’s the basic root of most evil. It’s a part of the sickness of man. And it’s a part of man’s admission, his constant sick admission, that to exist he must find a scapegoat. To explain away his own deficiencies—he must try to find someone who he believes more deficient… Make your judgment of your fellow-man on what he says and what he believes and the way he acts. Be tough enough, please, to live with prejudice and give battle to it. It warps, it poisons, it distorts and it is self-destructive. It has fallout worse than a bomb … and worst of all it cheapens and demeans anyone who permits himself the luxury of hating."
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the only way we'll ever achieve change in this country is for the American people to finally say "enough is enough" and fight for the things that truly matter. It doesn't matter how old you are or what your political ideology is. If you have something to say, speak up. Get active, and if need be, pick up a picket sign and get in the streets. And when civil liberties are violated, don't remain silent about it. Wake up, stand up, and make your activism count for something more than politics in a world turned upside down. The post The Age of Fear: A Graduation Message for Terrifying Times appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Friday 14 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 Former CNN White House correspondent Michelle Kosinski declared on Twitter last week that American journalists would "never expect … Your own govt to lie to you, repeatedly" and "Your own govt to hide information the public has a right to know." Kosinski denounced "Trump's unAmerican regime" and declared, "No one should accept this." Kosinski's comments epitomize the "Trump-washing" of American history that explains much of the media's rage, hypocrisy, and follies in the last five years. Kosinski's mindset also helps explain why Americans’ trust in the media has collapsed. Kosinski spent years as CNN's State Department correspondent, but her inside sources apparently never mentioned to her how she was helping them con the world. As history professor Leo Ribuffo observed in 1998, "Presidents have lied so much to us about foreign policy that they've established almost a common-law right to do so." In 1965, Arthur Sylvester, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, berated a group of war correspondents in Saigon: "Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you're stupid. Did you hear that? Stupid." A few weeks before the 9/11 attacks, New York Times columnist Flora Lewis wrote that "there will probably never be a return to the … collusion with which the media used to treat presidents, and it is just as well." But the toppling of the World Trade Center towers made the media more craven than at any time since Vietnam. The media's shameless deference was one of the most underreported stories of the Iraq War. Washington Post reporter Karen DeYoung admitted in 2004: “We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power.” PBS's Bill Moyers noted that "of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC and CBS nightly news, from September 2002 until February 2003, almost all the stories could be traced back to sources from the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department." Jim Lehrer, the host of government-subsidized PBS's NewsHour, explained his timidity in 2004: "It would have been difficult to have had debates [about invading Iraq] … you’d have had to have gone against the grain." Lehrer explained why he and other premier journalists seemed clueless on Iraq: "The word 'occupation,' keep in mind, was never mentioned in the run-up to the war. It was 'liberation'…. So as a consequence, those of us in journalism never even looked at the issue of occupation." The elite journalists looked only where government told them to look. Former president George W. Bush's lying America into a ruinous war has not deterred liberal media outlets from rehabilitating him as the "good Republican" in contrast to Trump. Kowtowing is the high road to media stardom. A leak from the White House, like a touch from a saint, can instantly heal a reporter's lame career. For many journalists, "access" is more important than truth. In DC, there is more cachet in snaring exclusive interviews with policymakers than in exposing official wrongdoing. Being invited into the inner sanctums is "close enough for government work" to learning what the feds are actually doing. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman observed, "The [George W.] Bush administration has made brilliant use of journalistic careerism. Those who wrote puff pieces about Mr. Bush and those around him have been rewarded with career-boosting access." Knowing when to be sycophantic is as vital to career advancement as recognizing which fork to use at a Georgetown dinner party. Is the problem that journalists don't know history or that journalists don't know how to read—or both? Kosinski's assertion that American journalists would "never expect their own govt to hide information the public has a right to know" is astounding on both scores. The federal government is creating trillions of pages of new secrets every year. The more documents bureaucrats classify, the more lies politicians can tell. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has become mostly a mirage. (FOIA is never mentioned in Kosinski's Twitter feed.) After she was appointed secretary of state, Hillary Clinton effectively exempted herself from FOIA, setting up a private server to handle her official email. The State Department ignored seventeen FOIA requests for her emails prior to 2014. Prior to the 2016 election, the State Department claimed it needed seventy-five years to fully answer a FOIA request on Hillary Clinton's aides' emails—thereby protecting Hillary from revelations that could have hurt her with voters. Perhaps Kosinski is unaware that the Trump-era secrecy she denounced flourished mightily thanks to the beloved Obama administration. In 2011, Obama's Justice Department formally proposed to permit federal agencies to falsely claim that documents that Americans requested via FOIA did not exist. The Obama White House crippled FOIA responses by adding a new requirement for all federal agencies to permit the White House to review and potentially veto releases of requested FOIA documents that had "White House equities"—i.e., anything that might make the Obama administration look bad. A 2016 congressional report noted that many journalists had abandoned "the FOIA request as a tool because delays and redactions made the request process wholly useless for reporting." My own experience, stretching back thirty years, is that federal agencies routinely presume that anyone who has publicly criticized their programs forfeits his rights under FOIA. Kosinski never tweeted about the role of the "state secrets" doctrine in permitting the Justice Department to shroud torture, war crimes, and illegal surveillance. The state secrets doctrine presumes "government knows best, and no one else is entitled to know." The George W. Bush administration routinely invoked "state secrets" to seek "blanket dismissal of every case challenging the constitutionality of specific, ongoing government programs," according to a study by the Constitution Project. A federal appeals court slammed the Obama administration's use of "state secrets" for presuming that "the judiciary should effectively cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the CIA and its partners from the demands and the limits of the law." Last month, the Biden administration joined the torture secrecy hall of shame by urging a court to dismiss a lawsuit brought by an American citizen who claimed he had been tortured in Egypt, because the alleged torturer had diplomatic immunity because he works for the International Monetary Fund. (I thought the IMF was only entitled to torture economies.) As the legal fate of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and John Kiriakou illustrates, telling the truth is the only war crime now recognized by the US government. Kosinski's assertions exemplify the new media storyline that Americans should respect Washington again now that Biden is president. But Leviathan doesn't turn over a new leaf merely because a different hand swears an oath of office on the Bible. Lies are political weapons of mass destruction, obliterating all limits on government power. The more powerful government becomes, the more atrocities it commits and the more lies it must tell. But we can't trust the press corps to expose any abuses that might imperil invitations to fancy receptions. As I warned in a 2018 op-ed in The Hill, "Perhaps the biggest whopper in Washington nowadays is the assumption that the government and the political class will automatically be trustworthy once the Trump era ends…. There will still be a thousand precedents for federal coverups and duplicity. And neither political party nor the bureaucracy has shown any itch to cease deceiving the American people." But I doubt that Kosinski read that piece or anything else that some government official didn't hand her on a silver platter. Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute. The post The Media Wants You to Trust Washington Again Now That Trump Is Gone appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Friday 14 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 I'm in a tiny Tirana café built around a eucalyptus tree. John Belushi, the Madonna and someone's deceased grandma charm its wooden walls. I sip a macchiato to start my day. At the bar, an old man in an old suit orders a raki. It's not quite nine, yet he's downing a shot of five-alarm firewater. A minute later, another grandpa does the same. Near the Avni Rustemi roundabout, there are grilled meat joints where I sometimes sit after dark, enjoying the breeze and gazing at the sidewalk. For around $5, I can stuff my face with kebabs, sausages and fries, and drink a large beer. Even in the morning, though, there are old farts at these zgara places, with fat mugs in front of them. Albanians start early, I've learnt. In Shkoder, there are many kebab carts on sidewalks. Served on a soft roll, each costs less than a buck. Some mustard would help, certainly, but this is not Germany. Though no soft drinks are for sale, many carts have raki, though not always advertised. I've been advised that raki goes well with kebabs, best eaten with fingers. Fork tines ruin the taste. Half a liter of raki costs less than two bucks, enough for a temperate slush for two days. It's much cheaper than beer. A Shkoderian, Asti, tells me, "I drink raki when I get up, before I drink water, or eat food." He laughs, showing no teeth. "Some people drink it at five in the morning." "But if you start so early, you must keep drinking it all day!" "True." We're sitting in a café on Skanderbeg Street, not far from the Mother Teresa Statue, with its reverent flowerpots. At other tables, there are five men, all middle-aged. Michael Jackson is on the radio. Outside the plate-glass windows, beautiful young women keep parading by. Seemingly assured, with the world at their high heels or Adidas, they have their own unsquelched terrors. Most cafes serve raki, of course, but many stores also sell it. Pointing to a tobacco shop across the street, I ask Asti, "They sell raki too?" "Maybe. Many do. People know where to buy." "So it's not regulated?" "No." Forty-four-years-old, Asti looks at least 60. About 5-10, he has that classic Albanian beak nose, and dresses rather shabbily, usually in a white T-shirt. Albanian men past 40 tend to be much more formal. Even when riding a junk yard bicycle with a plastic bag-covered seat, many wear a suit and dress shoes. In his 20's, Asti spent three years in Greece working as a construction worker, gardener, office cleaner or packer in a garment factory. Asti's two older brothers also do construction, same as their father, "I am the worst. That's why I made small money. I was always a dreamer. I read too much." Asti has taught himself four foreign languages, Greek, Italian, English and French, with the last his weakest, "I started to learn it after I was 30-years-old." His English is fluent enough, with few mistakes, such as his substitution of the French "magasin" for the English "store." Asti has written a 200-page novel, longhand, "As a boy, I had two dreams, learn a foreign a language, and write a novel." So he's done it, though it's only read by maybe three people, before being tossed away. Publishing anything anywhere is nearly impossible. With a population of just three million, Albania's book market is miniscule, but at a Shkoder sidewalk kiosk, I saw translated titles by all these authors displayed: Orhan Pamuk, Amos Oz, Mario Vargas Llosa, Junot Diaz, Bukowski, Richard Kapuscinski, Jane Austen, Homer, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Swift, Goethe, Voltaire, Pushkin, Dumas, Orwell, Pasolini, Kundera, Kafka, Sartre, di Beauvoir and Faulkner. There were also several Kadare novels, of course, and serious history books, such as Jack Weatherford's Genghis Khan, Misha Glenny's Histori e Ballkanit and Bhuto's Pajtimi [Reconciliation]. All this, at a tiny shop in a provincial city, so don't tell me Albanians aren't civilized. Moving boxes and delivering for a food and beverage distributor, Asti makes less than 100 euros a month, but his duties are light. Often, he just sits at a nearby café. "I have a problem, you see. I'm slightly schizophrenic. I must take medicines every day." Mixed with raki, they're curing his madness, apparently. To give you an idea of prices here, a fat baguette is about 60 cents. A sandwich costs $1 to $1.50. In a rather nice Shkoder restaurant, I saw an old man order pilaf with a single kebab for just a buck. A macchiato is 50 to 70 cents at most cafes. A bus ride in Tirana is 40 cents, and 30 cents in Shkoder. Earning just over 200 euros monthly, Asti's wife labors in a garment factory. They have two girls, aged 14 and 11, and an 8-year-old boy. One afternoon, he joins his dad and me for a long walk through the mostly drab outskirts of town. Three overgrown concrete bunkers are rare highlights. Quiet, the kid is just happy to be out of the house. We pass two young men on a motorbike truck. "Gypsies," Asti explains. "They buy junk." Another time, Asti has joked, "The Gypsies, they beg all day, then sing and drink until three in the morning. A Gypsy boy starts to smoke at 3-years-old, drink alcohol at 5-years-old. A Gypsy girl is a mother at 12-years-old." And, "A 15-year-old Gypsy leaves her 3-year-old boy at an intersection. When someone says, 'Why are you leaving him there like that?' She says, 'I'm too old to work. He makes more money than me.'" And, "During Communism, the border guards shot everybody who tried to escape, but not the Gypsies. If they saw a Gypsy escaping, they'd say, 'Have a safe trip! I hope you'll have a nice life over there! Don't come back!" When Asti was 14, soldiers dragged to his village two corpses behind a truck. These young men had been tortured then shot for escaping. With everyone gathered, a soldier asked a woman while pointing at a mangled cadaver, "Do you know who that is?" "No." "It's your son," he laughed. Asti, "I will never forget that. He had bullet holes in his face and on his chest. No one could recognize who he was. They showed the corpses to all the villages, to scare people, you know, from escaping." Asti also told me about Dom Simon Jubani, a Shkoder priest who was jailed, and often tortured, for 26 years. In late 1990, Father Jubani conducted an illegal mass at a cemetery attended by thousands. His book, From the Depths of Hell, I Saw Jesus on the Cross, has not been translated into English, only French. Unlike so many anti-Communists, Father Jubani did not praise the USA, but said on live Albanian television that Uncle Sam was "the master of terrorism." This most impresses Asti. With his foreign languages, Asti also supplements his pinched income by giving tours for tips, or for steering tourists towards hotels, with each referral earning him one euro. The Covid crisis has dried up this side hustle, however. Luckily for Asti, he pays no rent. He shares with one brother a charming house built by their dad. Eleven people sleep in six bedrooms over two floors, and they have a pleasant and productive garden that grows tomatoes, eggplants, olives, onions, scallions and grapes, the last a must for most Albanian houses, even Muslim ones, with any patch of earth. I've seen countless grape arbors on concrete roofs. Homemade rakia is best. I've sat at a cafe with this brother. Fifty-three-years-old, with close cropped white hair, he's ravaged from decades of rakia, so now mostly sips B-52, the energy drink. He also likes to gamble, when there's extra cash, which is almost never. Though a master with floors, he hardly works. Asti's mother also lives there. For 27 years, she took care of 23 cows and milked them. At her retirement, the state gave her one more cow. Her monthly pension of 100 euros isn't quite enough to cover food and medicines, and she's still in pretty good health. In simple black, she's often seen sitting on an armchair on their shady porch. From Asti's house to his workplace downtown is just a twenty-minute walk, so there's no transportation cost. Asti has no motor vehicle. Compared to Tirana, bicycles are much more visible in Shkoder, and at least a dozen streets here resemble flea markets, with vendors, many of them rural people, selling absolutely everything on sidewalks, not just produce and clothing, old or new. I've seen used sewing needles, rusty frying pans, TV antennas, ancient microwaves and prehistoric washing machines, etc. At bulletin boards with death notices, old people often peruse, to check for their friends and quietly delight at those younger who have perished. One day, each will jump at seeing his own face and name, for he will realize, with finality, that he has become a ghost. After a decade in Greece, Asti's other brother moved to Italy 20 years ago. He's doing well and has a Georgian wife, a relative of Stalin. Scoping out Il Bel Paese, Asti visited his brother for two months, "I could only make small money there, so I went home. You know, Albanians went there very early, in 1991. Some of us did bad things, so Italians, they really didn't like us, but we are doing better. Albanians have Italian friends. They feed them, buy them drinks. Now, Italians don't hate us so much." Foreign jobs simply pay more, so going abroad has become a standard aspiration here. Very nice houses built from money sent back challenge those who remain. Hamstrung for 45 years from the harshest Communism, Albanians are still recovering. Just be thankful you haven't experienced a Hoxha. "Your son is eight-years-old," I say to Asti. "Maybe he won't have to go anywhere when he's 20." "I don't know. I hope so. I'd like to keep him close to me." "When you're an immigrant, you have so many problems." "That's true. People humiliate you, look down on you. They say you're taking their jobs, that you're only there to send money to Albania." War, insane ideology and free transfer of capital have dislocated millions of people. Millions more must flee from societies they themselves have befouled, through collective stupidity, cowardice or depravity. It's who they are, simply. Before you sneer or curse, though, remember that you too may end up just like them, perhaps even before dawn. How much have you contributed to your nation's destruction? A visible minority anywhere is like an albino or midget. Even if he's never treated differently, which is impossible, he's likely to build up resentment at being so odd, even if his distinctiveness is viewed favorably. A traveler, though, doesn't mind such handicap, for he gets the entire world in exchange. Easily bothered people can't move an inch. To really see any country, it's important to get out of the capital, with all its financial, cultural and power distortions, so I've been taking buses or passenger vans here and there, with almost no idea what I'm going to see. On each trip, I'm the only foreigner, but everything has been smooth. Once, I found myself sitting on a round cushioned stool in the narrowest aisle, for all other seats had been taken. Also on an improvised perch and with a bicycle tire between her legs, the woman facing me could barely suppress a grin. Northern Albania was Skanderbeg's stronghold, so the last part of the country to yield to the Turks. Its mountainous villages are also repositories of Albania's most ancient mores. This is Albania at its most savage, true and tested. Shkoder is the main city of this region. Asti, "Goat milk is best for babies, and goat meat is also very good. In the mountains, there are wild goats. You can only shoot them with a silencer, because if they hear the sound of your gun, they'll jump three meters in the air!" I've visited Shkoder twice before, but only this time, did I get a room, for three nights. Booking it online, I didn't know its address was purposely incorrect, to evade the tax man, I suppose. To reach this unmarked property, I had to meet a young man at a street corner. It was like the worst spy movie. Smiling, he emerged from the dark. Though the online price was $12 per night, he asked for over $14 before checking me in. Since it was already evening, and I was exhausted and more than buzzed, I didn't protest too much. It was still dirt cheap. There is no breakfast, as promised, but the room is large and comfortable. With two narrow beds, a couch, coffee table, chest, cabinets, sinks and TV, it's a basic apartment, so for a long stay, it wouldn't make a bad base. A bare bulb dangles from the ceiling. My bathroom is indeed private, though not en-suite, and the water heater must be just for show. Nothing happened after I plugged it in, flipped on the switch and fidgeted with the dial. All my showers, then, have been bracingly brief. The toylike toilet seat is suitable only for last stage anorexics. On my second contact, it loudly cracked. Still usable, it pinches one's thigh slightly. For a buck maybe, they can replace it with an old one, off the sidewalk. Two of my three keys were likely forged during the Ottoman era, if not Venetian or Roman. So many of the big boys have marched down this corridor. Since they're impossible to use, I haven't locked my door, but it's fine. The owner is in the next room, so she can be my watchdog. Plus, we're on the second floor, over a small courtyard, down a longish, narrow path, off an alley. (Four doors down is a Baptist church, sign of a changing Albania.) I'm near Edith Durham Street, with its Saint Stephen Catholic Cathedral, built in 1858 with Ottoman permission. During Communism, it was converted into a sports hall, where ping pong was played and gymnasts could tumble and fall. After it was renovated in 1993, Pope John Paul II celebrated a mass there, with Mother Teresa in attendance. Faint on an outside wall, there's an all-seeing eye inside a radiating pyramid, with this inscription in Italian, "DIO VEDE TUTTO." That's our best hope for justice, isn't it? Unless we're the torturer, swindler or simple adulterer, then the absence of God means all is forgiven. Hallelujah! More than anyone, Durham corralled Albania for English readers. Asti's kids attend Edith Durham School. It's heartening to see her honored. It's baffling how a nation that's nestled between Rome and Greece, thus at the heart of Europe, could be so little known, and still so dimly seen. Read Durham's High Albania, to start. Spending much time here, Durham recorded Albania's enduring customs, including its blood feuds. These have not been eradicated, incredibly. Honor still matters. Durham in 1909, "Such backwaters of life exist in many corners of Europe—but most of all in the Near East. For folk in such lands time has almost stood still." Albania's most exotic superstitions and practices, then, predate their exposure to the Turks and Islam, so don't point your finger eastward with your diatribes. These are the deepest layers of Europe, its bedrock. Durham, "Marriage is arranged entirely by the head of the house. The children are betrothed in infancy or in utero. Even earlier […] The most singular part of the business is the readiness with which most youths accept the girl bought for them. I never heard of one refusing, though I met several 'Albanian virgins,' girls who had sworn virginity to escape their betrothed." Durham, "According to the Canon a man is absolute master in his own house, and, in the unmodified form of the law, has the right to kill his wife, and any of his children. My informants doubted whether the killing of the wife would be tolerated now. She would be avenged by her own family. A man may, however, kill his wife with the consent of her family […] By the Canon a man could divorce his wife by cutting off a piece of her dress and sending her home thus disfigured." Albanian women did enjoy a certain leniency. Durham, "A woman is never liable for blood-vengeance, except in the rare case of her taking it herself. But even then there seems to be a feeling that it would be very bad form to shoot her […] I roused the greatest horror by saying that a woman who commits a murder in England is by law liable to the same punishment as a man." Durham on Albanian hospitality, "The sacredness of the guest is far-reaching. A man who brought me water from his house, that I might drink by the way, said that I now ranked as his guest, and that he should be bound by his honour to avenge me should anything happen to me before I had received hospitality from another." There were no prisons on Albanian mountains, so justice was often meted out through revenge, but its violence had to be proportionate. Durham, "I would remind you that we play the same game on a much larger scale and call it war," and she wrote that before the two World Wars, with its millions butchered, and entire cities, filled with civilians, obliterated in a flash. More than a century later, there are no more infant betrothals, legally discretional wife killings, sartorial divorces or fiercely honorable protection of guests, but the mindset that gave rise to such habits must still linger, like a bias, ghost, undercurrent or whiff, in this weather. Honor was everything. Even if it would get him killed, a man must act correctly. Justice and balance had to be achieved. "Ah, shut up already," I can hear a chorus rising. "Those Albanians are just Turkic barbarians, with their chains of brothels encircling this disgusting world. Too bad there isn't one in my Christian town. All we have are thrift stores and tattoo parlors. Never had Balkan pussy. Dark meat, I reckon. What's this shit about Albanians being white?! I'm so white, I'm invisible! I only show up online, anonymously. Hold on a sec, let me adjust my new panties. Bought them on sale yesterday. Too much polyester chafes my purple balls. My wife just told me she's a lesbian, by the way. That's all right, I'm a lesbian too, but in a man's body. We can keep having the worst sex ever, once a year. Fuck the Albanians!" Still lagging, Albanians are the most unadulterated whites alive, and that's to their advantage, whatever you may think. They're some of the last Europeans with balls. Sadly, they're trying to catch up by reading Barack and Michelle Obama, Kamala Harris, and about Joe Biden and Elon Musk. They're listening to the worst American rap, and imitating it. In Tirana, there's a George W. Bush Boulevard, and in Kamez, there's a Donald Trump one. Many seem to think the American flag has talismanic power. In Lezhe, there's the American Strip Nightclub. Ogling local girls, patrons can pretend they're staring at fake boobs and many more tattoos. In the dim, reddish light, they can add piercings to gyrating flesh. On the fringe, Albanians are unaware they're in much better shape than the toxic center, with its radiating foulness. Before Albanians are fully sucked in, though, the satanic cesspool will implode, thus saving them from soul sapping contamination. Running for the hills when necessary, they've endured for over two thousand years, as countless other tribes have lost not just land, but language and memory. These hardy survivors will likely outlast yours. By chance, I'm in Shkoder on Flowers Day, what they call Saint George’s Day here. Strolling through a well-landscaped park, I'm suddenly surrounded by beaming angels in paper headdresses, Native American style. Some wear goofy polyester skirts, with sequined or stitched flowers. On a stage, kids sing or dance, but innocent happiness is everywhere. From toddlers to the very old, they are simply enjoying themselves, being themselves. As published at Unz Review, 5/10/21. Reprinted with the author's permission. The post Love of Raki, High Jumping Goats, and Edith Durham appeared first on LewRockwell.  | Friday 14 May 2021 11:01 PM UTC-05 Seventy-five years ago, the Tokyo Trial began. Also known as the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, and formally as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), it was set up to try 28 senior Japanese admirals, generals and officials for an assortment of crimes committed during the Second World War. Few in the West remember, let alone comment on the trial today. Its anniversary has had almost no media coverage, even if it was earlier the subject of an excellent Netflix docudrama, Tokyo Trial (2016). Yet, 75 years on, this trial deserves our attention. Not least because its impact can still be felt today. On 21 April this year, Japanese premier Yoshihide Suga flaunted his disagreement with the guilty verdicts and seven hangings dictated by the IMTFE. He sent a ceremonial offering to the Yasukuni Shrine in Chiyoda, Tokyo, where several 'Class A' Japanese war criminals, so designated by the verdicts of the IMTFE, are buried. Suga's gesture 'predictably angered' Beijing and Seoul, since Chinese and Koreans retain bitter memories of Japanese occupation before and during the Second World War. The Tokyo Trial lasted from 3 May 1946 until 12 November 1948. It generated a 48,000-word transcript and a 1,200-page majority judgment made by seven of the 11 judges, who were drawn from 11 nations. Of the 55 counts brought against the defendants, no fewer than 45 were dismissed. Yet, floodlit for filming, the trial was never a purely legal affair. Rather, it was a political event that was to shape the development of postwar Japan. A Pyrrhic victory? The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, first and foremost, marked the political subordination of Japanese to American imperialism, formalising the doctrine of Japanese war guilt. In doing so, it sought to exonerate America and Britain for their colonial and racial exploits before and during the war – and for their use of atomic weapons at the end of it. Thanks in part to the Tokyo Trial, Japan remains a junior, non-nuclear partner to America today. The IMTFE also exposed the racist aspects of the West's behaviour in the Asia-Pacific. Although the trial recounted stomach-churning interwar and wartime Japanese attacks on the Chinese and others, it also highlighted, thanks to its Japanese and American defence lawyers, clear double standards on the part of the white West. As a result, the Tokyo Trial emboldened the postwar Japanese right, and proved to be a political blow from which, in Asia, America has never entirely recovered. The Tokyo Trial was thus a Pyrrhic victory for the Americans. It let slip the veil that Washington and the West wanted to draw over their racial record in the Far East. Notable absences On 13 February 1946, shortly before the IMTFE convened, the supreme commander for the Allied powers, as General Douglas MacArthur was then called, shocked Japanese ministers by rejecting their draft constitution for postwar Japan and imposed America's own draft instead. To show who was boss, MacArthur's intermediary, General Courtney Whitney, ridiculed a Japanese aide, saying: 'We have been enjoying your atomic sunshine.' (1) That set the martial tone for the IMTFE, whose terms of reference were written by MacArthur. The IMTFE convened in the auditorium of the elite Imperial Army Officers' School, Japan's West Point, in Ichigaya, near the centre of Tokyo. Both the physical courtroom and the list of crimes were modelled on the Nuremberg Trials. Read the Whole Article The post The Tokyo Trial: A Hollow Victory for US Imperialism appeared first on LewRockwell.  |  |
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