Your news for the week ahead
Undercurrents shaping our culture
One of the services I offer you is giving you stories and news from around the world from a perspective which no mainstream media source will dare to provide.
So let`s get straight to it.
The George Floyd anniversary
Believe it or not, it has been a year since George Floyd died.
In an historic first, to mark the anniversary, the US foreign service flew Black Lives Matter flags at various embassies around the world, the first time an NGO flag has been made an official emblem.
This comes with some consequences as China has already said the US`s self-acknowledged genocidal treatment of black Americans is proof that liberal capitalism is a great threat to human rights, and an example of the superiority of their socialism with Chinese characteristics.
As American networks shot footage at the George Floyd memorial in the crime-stricken Minneapolis, they inadvertently filmed a drive-by shooting taking place. Of course, Minneapolis was one of many cities that cut police funding in the wake of riots and protests, which left scores dead and billions of dollars worth of damage.
Murders have shot through the roof around the US, the largest ever increase, mostly in black areas. More than 4000 extra murders have been recorded.
Meanwhile, to mark the great new era, US arms manufacturer, Lockheed Martin have been sending their white male employees on their own days of reflection for all their sins. Again, I am sure Lockheed executives who provide weaponry for US misadventures around the world have some guilt to face, but fortunately they can ignore that as they focus on their whiteness instead.
I think many activists need to acknowledge that they may need to question the implications of having become so enmeshed in the American military-industrial complex.
One document that was discussed has been leaked:
I am not sure what to make of this list of negative traits.
Another study shows the futility of mask mandates
You can read it here.
But you shouldn`t have to because it is so obvious that they could not possibly work - even surgeons reckon they might not do much in an operating theatre.
“It has never been shown that wearing surgical face masks decreases postoperative wound infections. On the contrary, a 50% decrease has been reported after omitting face masks. The present study was designed to reveal any 30% or greater difference in general surgery wound infection rates by using face masks or not… These results indicate that the use of face masks might be reconsidered. Masks may be used to protect the operating team from drops of infected blood and from airborne infections, but have not been proven to protect the patient operated by a healthy operating team.”
For those inclined to read studies etc, here is a convenient list of all the studies which have shown the futility of masks.
But a picture paints a thousand words too:
You were told that Asian countries had lower rates than Western countries because they wear masks anyway. That was false. Plus they wear masks mostly because of dirty air.
This only ends when we stop testing and just focus on treating the sick. There are very effective therapeutics and prophylactics out there. This should be the focus. The utter neglect of treating the sick was basically genocidal. I will write more about this later. Intriguingly, there were many South African doctors who were at the forefront of treatments which would have prevented millions of deaths but for the intervention of pharmaceutical financial interests.
Miss South Africa can now be a man
To much acclamation, Miss South Africa has officially been declared open for entry to transgender men.
Seems a bit strange to me.
Will somebody with male chromosomes be declared the country`s most beautiful woman soon? Surely in the crisis of attempting to change one`s genitals and hormonal make-up, one would not be motivated to enter beauty contests?
This is just one more point of propaganda driven by activist groups who no way represent anything like a majority position on the issue.
Every now and then, though, some inconvenient reporting still makes it through the politically correct censors.
60 Minutes in the USA recently profiled teenagers who regretted sex change operations. These stories are everywhere but hardly get told.
Gender dysphoria is a sad but thankfully rare mental illness. Valorising it as some kind of lifestyle choice to teens who are suffering through the most confusing time in history, exposed to endless media, is cruel. The exploding number of teens seeking hormone blockers and irreversible surgery, no matter what your position on this issue is, can surely not be seen as anything but extremely worrying?
These stories above are heartbreaking.
I will write a philosophical analysis of this movement at some point in the future.
What really happened in the US election?
This past week, it was verifiably demonstrated that US voting machines are faulty and susceptible to fraud, in an important swing state:
At the heart of the mysterious year that was 2020 was surely the impeachment of Trump, and then the strangest election in history. One candidate, after not even campaigning, received more votes than any candidate in history.
Trump himself received millions more votes than he did in 2016. No president has done that and then lost. Obama lost votes in 2012 compared to 2008 and still won.
Then Biden smashed the number of votes anybody has ever received, despite Trump winning more of the black and Hispanic vote than any other Republican in a generation, despite being invisible in the campaign, despite being on record supporting the most unpopular legislation and policies in the US over the past forty years - support for Iraqi Wars, the surveillance state, free trade with Mexico and China, and blanket protections for credit card companies and banks in cases of consumer bankruptcy.
I stayed up and watched the results come in. It was the most bizarre thing I have ever seen. Near the end, the betting markets had all swung to Trump. He had crushed Biden in the most important swing states, Florida and Ohio, defied all expectations amongst minorities, and was leading in all the remaining swing states handily.
And then the results stopped coming in and the media said counting had stopped. Then something even stranger happened. Results suddenly came in again! I don`t know why nobody has commented on this. And suddenly Biden was in the lead. The anomalies pile up. Trump gained amongst black voters everywhere around the country except in a few cities that were in the states counted last. Biden underperformed Obama in every major city except those last counted cities.
Then the challenges from Trump came in, and the media reported that all his challenges were nonsense and the courts had dismissed them out of hand.
But this is not true.
The cases were never heard. Evidence was never even allowed to be submitted. The judges simply refused to look at it.
Read this article for a summary of these cases and why they were dismissed.
Here are some highlights:
We learned nothing from a lawsuit dismissed by a state judge in Georgia (Boland v. Raffensperger) on the basis that the plaintiff had sued an “improper party” rather than hearing the merits of why the ballot rejection rate allegedly dropped from 1.53 percent in 2018 to 0.15 percent in the 2020 general election.
Also, did 20,000 people vote who do not live in the state, when Georgia’s electoral votes were allotted by an approximately 12,000 margin to Biden? We never learned the answers to those questions nor even examined the evidence, because Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was not a candidate for office nor the election superintendent who conducted the election, and therefore per state law, was not liable.
Similarly, a Trump lawsuit in Michigan (Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. v. Benson) alleging state law was violated by the failure to allow access by observers, and seeking to stop counting, was ruled moot since it was not filed until 4:00 p.m. on Nov. 4, after votes were counted. So we are left with the memory of the videos of vote counters clapping as Republican observers were evicted and of covers being placed over windows. The judge on this case also said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson bore no legal responsibility for video monitoring of drop boxes nor of making video from such surveillance available, despite a recently passed law requiring surveillance of all drop boxes installed after Oct. 1.
A lawsuit in Pennsylvania, Metcalfe v. Wolf, claimed “approximately 144,000 to 288,000 completed mail-in and/or absentee ballots” in Pennsylvania may have been illegal based on testimony from a U.S. Postal Service contractor. The contractor said he was hired to haul a truck of what he believed to be this many completed mail-in ballots from New York to Pennsylvania. The complaint also alleged there was “evidence” of ballots that were backdated at a postal facility in Erie. The judge tossed it since the state’s Election Code required their request to be filed within 20 days of the alleged violation, which was Nov. 23. They filed Dec. 4. We’ll never know if that truck brought in pallets of completed ballots—an amount sufficient to overturn the state’s Electoral College vote.
In Wisconsin, the Trump v. Evers suit alleged that violations of state election law had occurred in Milwaukee and Dane Counties as municipal clerks issued absentee ballots without the required written application, that they illegally completed missing info on ballots, that absentee ballots were wrongly cast by voters claiming “Indefinite Confinement” status (and for which no ID was provided), and that Madison’s “Democracy in the Park” event violated election laws.
A divided Wisconsin Supreme Court refused to hear the lawsuit, sidestepping a decision on the merits of the claims and instead ruling the case must first wind its way through lower courts—an effective death sentence given the timing.
The Supreme Court also refused to hear any of Sidney Powell’s cases—in Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan—and in doing so, deprived Americans of the chance to hear evidence for and against very serious claims that electronic voting machines could be manipulated. Of all of the allegations, perhaps none more so instilled fear into voters as the possibility that our votes could be tampered with and changed, thwarting democracy itself.
Did the machines really show decimal totals for votes rather than integers? Were they designed to flip votes, and in such a way that no audit could trace it? Were these machines connected to the internet on election night, and did data show that foreign actors accessed it? Voters will never know. The court could have held these claims up to the objective light of justice, and either exposed it all as painfully true or wildly false, but it didn’t.
When most needed, the court that once took the time to render a decision on whether a tomato is a fruit or vegetable chose to punt on each of the key presidential election cases. American voters are worse off for it as confidence in elections erodes.
In conclusion, something inspirational from the notorious Hunter S Thompson:
Once again, I remind you, you receive this service for free. I would like to think I am able to share perspectives with you that you cannot get anywhere else, in this age of unprecedented weirdness.
I have no social media, so I rely on you to share my work and help me build an audience to one day make this work sustainable and even more in-depth, and thus allow me the resources to break big stories for you consistently, as I did regarding the Wuhan lab.
I have some more stories coming for you that are virtually historic, so keep reading and sharing.