England’s female footballers rocked the World Cup – falling just short of winning it all for the first time since 1966 – but still that was not good enough for some.

As Paul Joseph Watson explains in the following clip, The Lionesses got shade for being “too white”.

“It’s not good enough to just be women when you’re playing oppression Olympics ‘Top Trumps’,” he scoffs after people flipped out over a team photo that’s apparently not “British enough” because of some blonde, blue-eyed vibes.

This gentleman being interviewed on Sky News took umbrage at the blondes…

“It’s okay to be blonde-haired and blue-eyed but I do think we need to ask ourselves questions about why is it that we’ve got um… a lack of diversity.”

However, one fun fact that seems to have gone missing:

The England team’s black player percentage is higher than the country’s actual stats.

It seems the word “diversity” is getting a makeover, and not in a good way…

Watch the full clip below:

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

A taxpayer-funded gender identity clinic in Britain has been heavily criticized for approving testosterone treatment and a double subcutaneous mastectomy on a female patient who had been diagnosed with 14 separate mental health disorders.

The Gender Identity Development Service (Gids), based at London’s Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, is due to close down next year after staff blew the whistle on how the service was being run and a Care Quality Commission inspection of the clinic ruled it “inadequate,” expressing significant concerns over “clinical practice, safeguarding procedures, and assessments of capacity and consent to treatment.”

Further details of individual case files are rarely available; however, a recent lawsuit against the clinic has exposed one example of the concerns over the safeguarding of children and vulnerable adults.

It relates to a claim brought by a 22-year-old who argued that healthcare professionals at the clinic failed to comply with statutory duties towards transgender young people with special educational needs and disabilities.

In her interim report, Dr Hilary Cass referenced the high number of ‘looked after children’ being referred to the Tavistock.
This young woman is one example, referred at age 14. Read the details.
Thread. https://t.co/Zf4tx8eMyb

— TransgenderTrend (@Transgendertrd) August 21, 2023

During the judgment delivered on Aug. 11, it is stated that the claimant, who was born a female but now identifies as a male, has a total of 14 diagnosed mental health disorders “and continues to have complex needs.”

“His difficulties have been medically described as Mild Mental Retardation, Attachment Disorder, Emotion Dysregulation, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (“ADHD”), Oppositional Defiant Disorder (“ODD”) and (Autism Spectrum Disorder (“ASD”), dyslexia, severe anxiety, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (“PTSD”) and low self-esteem,” the judgment by Mrs Justice Foster DBE read.

It further recounted the claimant’s troubled upbringing, explaining the claimant, who had been a patient at the clinic since the age of 14, is illiterate and was raised initially by his mother who was a recovering drug addict and was subjected to domestic violence from a young age.

The claimant lived in numerous locations across England during his childhood and attended eight separate primary schools before going into the care system at the age of 13.

He has been known to mental health services since the age of 12.

The decision by the gender clinic to approve life-changing hormone therapy and surgery for an individual with such complex mental health disorders was criticized by Conservative peer Zac Goldsmith, who called for the “utterly barbaric” professionals involved to be “locked up.”

This young person has been diagnosed with 14 mental health disorders.
The response from these ghouls is to chop up her body and fill her with hormones. How is this different to lobotomies?
These professionals are utterly barbaric and need locking up https://t.co/j8ki5LPcqz

— Zac Goldsmith (@ZacGoldsmith) August 22, 2023

The case was also condemned by anti-trans British pressure group, Transgender Trend, and Gender Critical Autistics (GCA), a group for autistic adults and the parents of autistic children who have concerns about gender identity and transgender activism on the rights of other groups, which described the case as “shocking.”

The closure of the Tavistock clinic was delayed back in May until March next year when it will be remodeled and replaced by two regional hubs.

It continues to treat around 1,000 patients on its books, but no new first-patient appointments will be made until the new hub opens. It is understood that several thousand children are on waiting lists for gender-related treatment after an influx in referrals in recent years.

Via Remix News,

Europe is unavoidably heading towards a triple crisis, German publicist Thomas Fasbender told Preussische Allgemeine in an interview on the occasion of the publication of his new book, “The eerie century” (Das unheimliche Jahrhundert).

The subtitle of the book, “Before the turning point,” is a direct quote of an expression taken from Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s special address to the Bundestag on Feb. 27, 2022, in reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In it, he used the word “Zeitenwende.”

While the official translation for the word used by the German government is “turning point” or “watershed moment”, the original German term refers to both a changing of times and a geopolitical shift.

“I chose the term ‘turning point’ because it was brought into play by Olaf Scholz. Although the book was essentially written before then, we are indeed experiencing a change of epoch. However, it is much more extensive than Scholz described,” the author said in the interview.

He says that the current triple crisis Europe is facing will have a defining impact on the continent for the rest of the century.

“Europe is heading for a triple crisis, the effects of which will affect us massively throughout the century.”

First, there is the rapid loss of power by Western Europe after some 500 years of global dominance.

“The times when the British, French, Germans, and others left their mark on the world politically, culturally, scientifically, technically and economically is history,” he said.

Fasbender says the second crisis, the climate change crisis, cannot be tackled by simply stopping it:

“The second major crisis is climate change. The fact is that it is happening. In recent years, the discussion has focused on who is responsible for it and how it can be stopped. “

“But we will not succeed in stopping it. So we have to ask ourselves: What does it mean in concrete terms to live in a world that is two or more degrees warmer? What effects will this have, how do we deal with it?”

“What we do in Germany has virtually no impact. I find it all the more astonishing that we are only now beginning to address the issue of adaptation. This is all the more important because we can only spend each euro once. Either for climate protection (which will not be possible) or for climate adaptation.”

The third, but by no means least important crisis, is the population explosion in the Sub-Saharan region, which essentially also encompasses the previous two:

“The third issue is population growth in Africa, especially in the Sub-Saharan region. There, we are seeing a doubling of the population by 2050 and even a quadrupling by 2100.”

“Sometime in the 22nd century, more than half of the world’s population will come from sub-Saharan Africa. This is where the real turning points lie dormant.”

“We are entering a world in which Europe may still be perceived as a living museum. Certainly no longer as a beacon or role model,” he said.

People work together to pull, according to the locals, a capsized boat ashore at the beach where several people were found dead in Dakar, Senegal, Monday, July 24, 2023. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)

Fasbender concludes that “We Europeans are also hampered by the fact that many either do not grasp the new realities or do not want to accept them. On the contrary, we continue to overestimate ourselves.”

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“Make no mistake about it…your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason… I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.”

– Justice Antonin Scalia dissenting in Maryland v. King

Be warned: the DNA detectives are on the prowl.

Whatever skeletons may be lurking on your family tree or in your closet, whatever crimes you may have committed, whatever associations you may have with those on the government’s most wanted lists: the police state is determined to ferret them out.

In an age of overcriminalization, round-the-clock surveillance, and a police state eager to flex its muscles in a show of power, we are all guilty of some transgression or other.

No longer can we consider ourselves innocent until proven guilty.

Now we are all suspects in a DNA lineup waiting to be matched up with a crime.

Suspect State, meet the Genetic Panopticon.

DNA technology in the hands of government officials will complete our transition to a Surveillance State in which prison walls are disguised within the seemingly benevolent trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and the need to guard against terrorists, pandemics, civil unrest, etc.

By accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc.

It’s getting harder to hide, even if you think you’ve got nothing to hide.

Armed with unprecedented access to DNA databases amassed by the FBI and ancestry website, as well as hospital newborn screening programs, police are using forensic genealogy, which allows police to match up an unknown suspect’s crime scene DNA with that of any family members in a genealogy database, to solve cold cases that have remained unsolved for decades.

As reported by The Intercept, forensic genetic genealogists are “combing through the genetic information of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in search of a perpetrator.”

By submitting your DNA to a genealogical database such as Ancestry and 23andMe, you’re giving the police access to the genetic makeup, relationships and health profiles of every relative—past, present and future—in your family, whether or not you or they ever agreed to be part of such a database.

Indeed, relying on a loophole in a commercial database called GEDmatch, genetic genealogists are able to sidestep privacy rules that allow people to opt out of sharing their genetic information with police. The end result? Police are now able to identify and target those very individuals who explicitly asked to keep their DNA results private.

In this way, merely choosing to exercise your right to privacy makes you a suspect and puts you in the police state’s crosshairs.

It no longer even matters if you’re among the tens of millions of people who have added their DNA to ancestry databases. As Brian Resnick reports, public DNA databases have grown so massive that they can be used to find you even if you’ve never shared your own DNA.

That simple transaction—a spit sample or a cheek swab in exchange for getting to learn everything about one’s ancestral makeup, where one came from, and who is part of one’s extended family—is the price of entry into the Suspect State for all of us.

After all, a DNA print reveals everything about “who we are, where we come from, and who we will be.” It can also be used to predict the physical appearance of potential suspects.

It’s what police like to refer to a “modern fingerprint.”

Whereas fingerprint technology created a watershed moment for police in their ability to “crack” a case, DNA technology is now being hailed by law enforcement agencies as the magic bullet in crime solving, especially when it helps them crack cold cases of serial murders and rapists.

After all, who wouldn’t want to get psychopaths and serial rapists off the streets and safely behind bars, right?

At least, that’s the argument being used by law enforcement to support their unrestricted access to these genealogy databases, and they’ve got the success stories to prove it.

For instance, a 68-year-old Pennsylvania man was arrested and charged with the brutal rape and murder of a young woman almost 50 years earlier. Relying on genealogical research suggesting that the killer had ancestors who hailed from a small town in Italy, investigators narrowed their findings down to one man whose DNA, obtained from a discarded coffee cup, matched the killer’s.

In another cold case investigation, a 76-year-old man was arrested for two decades-old murders after his DNA was collected from a breathalyzer during an unrelated traffic stop.

Yet it’s not just psychopaths and serial rapists who are getting caught up in the investigative dragnet. In the police state’s pursuit of criminals, anyone who comes up as a possible DNA match—including distant family members—suddenly becomes part of a circle of suspects that must be tracked, investigated and ruled out.

In this way, “guilt by association” has taken on new connotations in a technological age in which one is just a DNA sample away from being considered a person of interest in a police investigation. As Jessica Cussins warns in Psychology Today, “The fundamental fight—that data from potentially innocent people should not be used to connect them to unrelated crimes—has been lost.”

Until recently, the government was required to at least observe some basic restrictions on when, where and how it could access someone’s DNA. That was turned on its head by various U.S. Supreme Court rulings that heralded the loss of privacy on a cellular level.

For instance, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Maryland v. King that taking DNA samples from a suspect doesn’t violate the Fourth Amendment. The Court’s subsequent decision to let stand the Maryland Court of Appeals’ ruling in Raynor v. Maryland, which essentially determined that individuals do not have a right to privacy when it comes to their DNA, made Americans even more vulnerable to the government accessing, analyzing and storing their DNA without their knowledge or permission.

It’s all been downhill since then.

Indeed, the government has been relentless in its efforts to get hold of our DNA, either through mandatory programs carried out in connection with law enforcement and corporate America, by warrantlessly accessing our familial DNA shared with genealogical services such as Ancestry and 23andMe, or through the collection of our “shed” or “touch” DNA.

Get ready, folks, because the government has embarked on a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.

This has been helped along by Congress (which adopted legislation allowing police to collect and test DNA immediately following arrests), President Trump (who signed the Rapid DNA Act into law), the courts (which have ruled that police can routinely take DNA samples from people who are arrested but not yet convicted of a crime), and local police agencies (which are chomping at the bit to acquire this new crime-fighting gadget).

For example, Rapid DNA machines—portable, about the size of a desktop printer, highly unregulated, far from fool-proof, and so fast that they can produce DNA profiles in less than two hours—allow police to go on fishing expeditions for any hint of possible misconduct using DNA samples.

Journalist Heather Murphy explains: “As police agencies build out their local DNA databases, they are collecting DNA not only from people who have been charged with major crimes but also, increasingly, from people who are merely deemed suspicious, permanently linking their genetic identities to criminal databases.”

All 50 states now maintain their own DNA government databases, although the protocols for collection differ from state to state. Increasingly, many of the data from local databanks are being uploaded to CODIS, the FBI’s massive DNA database, which has become a de facto way to identify and track the American people from birth to death.

Even hospitals have gotten in on the game by taking and storing newborn babies’ DNA, often without their parents’ knowledge or consent. It’s part of the government’s mandatory genetic screening of newborns. In many states, the DNA is stored indefinitely. There’s already a move underway to carry out whole genome sequencing on newborns, ostensibly to help diagnose rare diseases earlier and improve health later in life, which constitutes an ethical minefield all by itself.

What this means for those being born today is inclusion in a government database that contains intimate information about who they are, their ancestry, and what awaits them in the future, including their inclinations to be followers, leaders or troublemakers.

For example, police in New Jersey accessed the DNA from a nine-year-old blood sample of a newborn baby in order to identify the child’s father as a suspect in a decades-old sexual assault.

The ramifications of this kind of DNA profiling are far-reaching.

At a minimum, these DNA databases do away with any semblance of privacy or anonymity.

These genetic databases and genomic technology also make us that much more vulnerable to creeps and cyberstalkers, genetic profiling, and those who would weaponize the technology against us.

Unfortunately, the debate over genetic privacy—and when one’s DNA becomes a public commodity outside the protection of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on warrantless searches and seizures—continues to lag far behind the government and Corporate America’s encroachments on our rights.

Moreover, while much of the public debate, legislative efforts and legal challenges in recent years have focused on the protocols surrounding when police can legally collect a suspect’s DNA (with or without a search warrant and whether upon arrest or conviction), the question of how to handle “shed” or “touch” DNA has largely slipped through without much debate or opposition.

As scientist Leslie A. Pray notes:

We all shed DNA, leaving traces of our identity practically everywhere we go… In fact, the garbage you leave for curbside pickup is a potential gold mine of this sort of material. All of this shed or so-called abandoned DNA is free for the taking by local police investigators hoping to crack unsolvable cases… shed DNA is also free for inclusion in a secret universal DNA databank.

What this means is that if you have the misfortune to leave your DNA traces anywhere a crime has been committed, you’ve already got a file somewhere in some state or federal database—albeit it may be a file without a name.

As the dissenting opinion to the Maryland Court of Appeals’ shed DNA ruling in Raynor rightly warned, “A person can no longer vote, participate in a jury, or obtain a driver’s license, without opening up his genetic material for state collection and codification.”

It’s just a matter of time before government agents will know everywhere we’ve been and how long we were at each place by following our shed DNA. After all, scientists can already track salmon across hundreds of square miles of streams and rivers using DNA.

Today, helped along by robotics and automation, DNA processing, analysis and reporting takes far less time and can bring forth all manner of information, right down to a person’s eye color and relatives. Incredibly, one company specializes in creating “mug shots” for police based on DNA samples from unknown “suspects” which are then compared to individuals with similar genetic profiles.

Of course, none of these technologies are infallible.

DNA evidence can be wrong, either through human error, tampering, or even outright fabrication, and it happens more often than we are told.

What this amounts to is a scenario in which we have little to no defense against charges of wrongdoing, especially when “convicted” by technology, and even less protection against the government sweeping up our DNA in much the same way it sweeps up our phone calls, emails and text messages.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s only a matter of time before the police state’s pursuit of criminals from the past expands into genetic profiling and a preemptive hunt for criminals of the future.

It was not that long ago that a veritable army of trolls would emerge upon our merest mention that precious metal markets (like all other markets) are manipulated, whether by commercial or central banks, or by random assorted hangers on.

Today, we can table that particular debate in perpetuity, after US District Judge Edmond Chang sentenced the former head of JPMorgan’s precious-metals desk and his top trader to prison for spoofing, fraud and market manipulation.

Michael Nowak, whom we first highlighted back in 2019…

JPM’s gold spoofing strategy was adopted by Michael Nowak, who was JPMorgan’s global head of precious metals trading when he was put on leave last month: DOJ.

And that’s why Jamie Dimon is richer than you

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 16, 2019

… and most recently profiled last year, and who once upon a time was not only an LBMA board member but also ran gold and silver trading at JPMorgan, as well as his top trader Gregg Smith were sentenced Tuesday in Chicago with Nowak receiving a term of one year and one day while Smith was given two years, the stiffest sentence yet in a recent government crackdown on questionable trading practices.

As we reported at the time, both men were convicted at a trial last year. Smith, 59, was described as “the most prolific spoofer that the government has prosecuted to date” while Nowak, 49, has been called “the boss” behind the scheme.
In imposing sentence, the judge said Smith and Nowak clearly knew what they were doing was wrong.

“This is a serious offense that you committed,” Chang said to Nowak. “What happened here was the equivalent of putting out lies — and many lies — into the market. Market integrity is a crucial component to the financial markets. These lies moved the market. It’s not like they had zero impact.”

Smith and Nowak “used their positions as some of the most powerful traders in the worldwide precious metals markets to engage in an egregious effort to manipulate prices for their benefit,” Acting US Assistant Attorney General Nicole M.

Argentieri said in a statement, adding the Justice Department was committed to holding “accountable those who engage in fraud and manipulation that undermines the investing public’s trust in the integrity of our commodities markets.”

As Bloomberg reports, the stiff (for a banker) prison sentences were intended to “send a message” that market manipulation will be punished, the judge said. “I’m trying to deter all forms of financial fraud in the market,” he said, clearly unaware of this thing called the Federal Reserve.

Chang ordered Nowak to start his sentence on Oct. 23 and Smith on Jan. 15. Lawyers for both men said they planned to appeal their convictions.

Prosecutors had initially sought sentences of six years for Smith and five years for Nowak, but on Tuesday said they were revising those down to around two years. Both men’s lawyers argued that they should be spared jail because neither gained personally from the spoofing. Of course, both main made millions in bonuses which would never have been paid had they not generated huge gains for Jamie Dimon’s criminal enterprise.

The JPMorgan case was part of a crackdown by federal prosecutors on illegal spoofing, where traders place bogus orders to move prices up or down and then quickly cancel them before they can be executed. Smith and Nowak used the technique to manipulate gold and silver prices from 2008 to 2016, or the entire duration of the period in which we said – and showed – that gold manipulation was rampant, for which were frequently mocked and ridiculed.

Convictions for Smith, Nowak and a third trader who was found guilty in November, Christopher Jordan, capped a string of wins by prosecutors in spoofing cases targeting some of Wall Street’s biggest banks, including Bank of America, Deutsche Bank AG and Morgan Stanley. Two former Deutsche Bank and two former Bank of America traders previously each received one-year sentences.

JPMorgan, the largest US bank and the biggest US financial criminal enterprise by far, agreed in 2020 to pay $920 million to settle the Justice Department’s allegations against it — the biggest fine by any financial institution accused of market manipulation since the 2008 global financial crisis.

Prosecutors also charged several members of the team Nowak led at JPMorgan. Three of them pleaded guilty and testified against Nowak and Smith. The witnesses described how Nowak and Smith routinely placed huge buy and sell orders they never intended to execute — part of their strategy to push prices in the direction that would profit the bank.

Christiaan Trunz, a former Smith protege and one of the traders who pleaded guilty and cooperated, told jurors that he learned to spoof by watching Nowak and Smith for years. When Trunz came under scrutiny for his own spoof trades, he said Nowak coached him to lie to compliance officials and later counseled him against pleading guilty as prosecutors were preparing criminal charges against top executives on the trading desk.

Trunz testified that Smith was so fast at placing and canceling bogus orders that his colleagues would joke that he needed to put ice on his fingers to cool them down.

“This was an open strategy on the desk,” said Trunz, who sat next to Smith and watched him click his computer mouse rapidly to place and cancel trades. “It wasn’t hidden.”

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via DailyReckoning.com,

The last three and a half years have been times of enormous upheaval.

It has affected politics, economics, culture, media and technology. It’s not just about the spreading of economic, cultural and demographic decay. Millions and billions of lives have been wrecked, to be sure, but there is also a big impact on the way we see the world around us.

What we once trusted, we now doubt and even disbelieve as a matter of new habit. The simple categories of understanding that we once deployed to make sense of the world have been tested, challenged and even overthrown. Old forms of ideological commitments have opened their way to new.

This particularly pertains to intellectuals. Or should in any case.

If you have not shifted your thinking in some respect over these years, you are either a prophet, asleep or in denial.

The way social media works today, influencers are reluctant to admit it lest risk their followings built out of a prior cultural landscape. This is really too bad.

There is nothing wrong with changing, adapting, migrating and calling out truth even if that contradicts what you once said or how you used to believe.

There is no need to change your principles or ideals. What should change in light of evidence is your evaluation of the problems and threats, your outlook on the relative priorities of focus, your perceptions of the functionality of institutional structures, your awareness of issues and concerns about which you had limited prior knowledge, your political and cultural allegiances and so on.

These days, this intellectual migration seems mainly to have affected the left. Nearly daily I find myself having the same conversations with people in person, on the phone or online. It is from an Obama voter and someone with traditionally “liberal” allegiances.

The COVID era utterly shocked them in what they discovered about their own tribe. They aren’t liberal at all.

They supported universal quarantine, forced face coverings and then mandatory jabs pushed by a tax-funded corporate monopoly. Concerns about human rights, civil liberties and the common good suddenly evaporated. Then of course they turned to the most blunt instrument of all: censorship.

The trauma felt by principled people who imagined themselves to be “on the left” is palpable.

But the same is true of people “on the right” who were aghast to observe that it was Trump and his administration that greenlighted lockdowns, spent many trillions forcing COVID compliance and then threw public monies at Big Pharma to rush a shot by bypassing all standards of necessity, safety and effectiveness.

The promise to “make America great again” ended in wreckage coast-to-coast. For Trump partisans, this realization that it all happened under their hero is hard to take, a triangulating rope-a-dope.

Even more strangely, it was the “never Trumpers” on the right who most strongly supported lockdowns, masking and shot mandates.

The libertarians are another story entirely, one that nearly surpasses understanding. Among the higher echelons of this faction in academia and think tanks, the silence from the start and even years later was truly deafening.

Instead of standing up to totalitarianism, as the whole of the intellectual tradition had prepared them to do, they deployed their clever heuristics to justify outrages against core freedoms, even the freedom to associate.

So yes, observing one’s own tribe collapse into craven careerism and coercion is disorienting. But the problem goes even deeper. The most striking alliance of our time has been to observe the lockstep of the elites in government, media, tech and academia.

The reality blows apart the traditional binary of public vs. private that has dominated ideological discussion for centuries.

This binary is nicely represented by the sculpture in front of the Federal Trade Commission.

It shows a man holding back a horse. It’s man vs. beast, completely different species and totally different interests, one demanding to move forward and the other holding it back.

The point of the sculpture is to celebrate the role of government (man) in controlling trade (industry). The contrary position would condemn government for controlling industry.

But what if the sculpture is pure fantasy even at its very structure?

In reality, the horse is either carrying the man or pulling a cart that carries the man. Are they cooperating together in a partnership that is allied against consumers, stockholders, small businesses, the working classes and people more generally?

That realization — the very essence of what was revealed to us in the course of the COVID response — utterly shatters core presumptions behind the dominant ideologies of our times and going far back in time.

That realization requires a recalibration from honest thinkers.

I had to reevaluate my own cherished beliefs about markets and politics, which was painful in many ways. But it was necessary.

Below, I take you on that journey — and show you why we must adjust our thinking to adapt to new realities. Read on.

The Scales Fell From My Eyes

I was going through an archive of writings from the 2010s in search of some insight or possibly something to reprint. I found many hundreds of articles. None of them jumped out at me as necessarily wrong but I found myself rather bored with their superficiality. Yes, they are entertaining and fascinating in their way but what precisely did they reveal?

There was no consumer product unworthy of rhapsodic celebration, no pop tune or movie that didn’t reinforce my biases, no new technology or company undeserving of my highest praise, no trend in the land that was contrary to my conception of progress all around us.

It’s exceedingly difficult to recreate an older state of mind but let me try. I saw myself as a composer of hymns to material progress all around us, a cheerleader of the glories of all market forces. I lived with this public-private binary.

All that was good in the world came from the private sector and all that was evil came from the public sector. That easily became for me a simplistic, good vs. evil conception of the great struggle, and also blinded me to the ways that these two ideal types play together in real life.

Armed with this ideological weaponry, I was ready to take on the world.

And so Big Tech came in for massive celebration from me, even to the point that I completely ignored warnings of capture and surveillance. I had a model in mind — migration to the digital realm was emancipatory while attachment to the physical world was mired in stagnation — and nothing could shake me from it.

I had also implicitly adopted an “end-of-history” style of triumphalist thinking that befits the generation that saw freedom win the great Cold War struggle.

And so the final victory of liberty was always at hand, at least in my fevered imagination.

This is why the lockdowns came as such a shock to me. It flew in the face of the linear structure of historical narrative that I had constructed for myself in order to make sense of the world.

This is why the best comparison of the COVID years might be to the Great War, the global calamity that was simply not supposed to happen based on the wild optimism cultivated during the Gilded and Victorian epochs of decades earlier.

The very foundations of peace and progress had gradually eroded, and prepared the way for terrible war, but that generation of observers did not see it happening simply because they were not looking for it.

To be sure, and uniquely so far as I can tell, I had been writing about the prospect of pandemic lockdowns for the previous 15 years. I read their research, knew of their plans and followed their germ games. I drummed up awareness and called for hard limits on what the state could do during a pandemic.

At the same time, I had become accustomed to treating the academic and intellectual worlds as something external to the social order. In other words, I never once believed that these cockamamie ideas would ever leak into our own lived realities.

Like so many others, I had come to regard intellectual discussion and debate as a challenging and most enjoyable parlor game that had little impact on the world. I knew for sure that there were crazy people extant who dreamed of universal human separation and the conquering of the microbial planet by force.

But I had presumed that the structures of society and the trajectory of history embedded too much intelligence to actually implement such delusions. The foundations of civilization were too strong to be eroded by gibberish, or so I had believed.

What I had overlooked were several factors.

• First, I didn’t understand the extent of the rise, independence and power of the administrative state and the impossibility of controlling its authority through elective representatives. I simply did not anticipate the fullness of its reach.

• Second, I had not understood the extent to which private industry had developed a full working relationship with the structures of power in its own industrial interests.

• Third, I had overlooked the way consolidation and cooperation had developed between pharmaceutical companies, public health, digital enterprises and media organs.

• Fourth, I had failed to appreciate the tendency of the public mind to drop knowledge accumulated from past wisdom. For example, who would have believed that people would forget what they once knew, even from thousands of years of experience, about exposure and natural immunity?

• Fifth, I did not anticipate the extent to which high-end professionals would give up all principles and curry favor with the new policy priorities of the government/media/tech/industry hegemon. Who knew that nothing about the main themes of patriotic songs and movies would have stuck when it most mattered?

• Sixth, and this is perhaps my greatest intellectual failing, I had not seen how rigid class structures would feed conflicting interests between the professional class of laptop workers and the working classes who still need the physical world to accomplish their goals.

On March 16, 2020, the laptop class conspired in a forced digitalization of the world in the name of pathogenic control, and this came at the expense of some two-thirds of the population who depended on physical interactions for their livelihood and psychological well-being.

This aspect of class conflict — which I had always chalked up to be a Marxian delusion — became the defining feature of the whole of our political lives. Instead, the lack of empathy from the professional class was evident everywhere, from academic opinion to media reporting. It was a society of serfs and lords.

For those who are researchers, writers, academics or just curious people who want to understand the world better — even improve it — to have one’s intellectual operating system so profoundly disturbed is an occasion of profound disorientation. It is also a time to embrace the adventure, recalibrate and set about correcting and finding a new path.

When your ideological system and political allegiances fail to provide the explanatory power we are seeking, it is time to improve them or give them up entirely.

Not everyone is up to the task. Indeed, this is a major reason why so many want to forget about the past three and a half years. They would rather close their eyes to the new realities and default back to their intellectual comfort zones.

For any writer or thinker of integrity, this should not be an option. As painful as it might be, it is best just to admit where we went wrong and set out to discover a better path. This is why so many of us have adopted a paradigm called the “COVID test.” Few pass. Most fail. They failed in shockingly public and inexcusable ways: left, right and libertarian.

The influencers who flopped so badly in these years and have yet to own up to it deserve neither attention nor respect. Their attempt to pretend they were never wrong and then move on as if nothing much has happened is embarrassing and disreputable.

But those who come to terms with the wreckage all around us and seek to understand its causes and the way forward deserve a listen and appreciation. For it is these people who are doing their best to save the world from another round of disaster.

As for the rest, they are taking up air space and should, in a just world, be tutoring the children with learning losses and delivering meals to the vaccine-injured.

In the land of the ‘free’ and the home of the distraught: New research reveals an alarming number of middle-aged Americans are drowning their troubles away in binge drinking and getting higher than a kite to pass the time. 

The University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future (MTF) found binge drinking, marijuana use, and hallucinogen consumption among middle-aged adults 35 to 50 (prime-age workers) hit record highs in 2022. 

“While binge drinking has generally declined for the past ten years among younger adults, adults aged 35 to 50 in 2022 reported the highest prevalence of binge drinking ever recorded for this age group, which also represents a significant past-year, five-year and 10-year increase,” MTF wrote in the report. 

“The value of surveys such as MTF is to show us how drug use trends evolve over decades and across development, from adolescence through adulthood,” said Megan Patrick, research professor and principal investigator of the MTF panel study. 

Adults aged 35 to 50 aren’t turning to sports cars and wild adventures in what might be a midlife crisis. Instead, a staggering 28% have resorted to marijuana in the past year, while 4% have used hallucinogens. 

Patrick said, “Behaviors and public perception of drug use can shift rapidly, based on drug availability and other factors. It’s important to track this so that public health professionals and communities can be prepared to respond.”

Major findings of MTF’s report: 

• A whopping 44% of young adults smoked marijuana this past year, a drastic climb from the 28% a decade prior.

• Daily cannabis use? Skyrocketing. Over 1 in 10 young adults smoke marijuana on a daily basis, nearly double from a decade ago. 

• Middle-aged (35-50) aren’t far behind; their pot smoking has more than doubled in 10 years, with 28% now getting high.

• Trippy times: Both young and middle-aged adults are experimenting with hallucinogens like LSD and shrooms at higher rates. Specifically, 8% of those 19-30 and 4% of the 35-50 brackets. 

• The e-cigarette craze is alive and well; young adults vaping nicotine surged from 14% in 2017 to 24% in 2022.

• Binge drinking: Nearly 30% of middle-aged folks are on a binge-drinking spree, reaching all-time highs in 2022. That’s up from 25% in 2017 and 23% in 2012. 

The findings aren’t surprising. We reported earlier this year that a ‘shroom boom‘ was blasting off as middle-class soccer moms and average working-class folks were increasing their consumption of psilocybin, the main active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms. Even Janet Yellen joined in on the craze while in China… 

Numerous studies have shown those who used psilocybin were able to curb drinking and other drug addictions easier. These studies add to increasing research showing that psychedelics paired with therapy could treat mental health issues.  

MTF’s latest report shows Americans are binging on whatever they can get their hands on, indicating a looming mental health crisis. But, of course, the corporate media are blind to this crisis. They would rather focus on ‘climate change’ using fuzzy math. 

Authored by Nick Giambruno via InternationalMan.com,.

Thanks to rampant inflation, socialism – and the poverty it inevitably brings – could soon become irreversibly entrenched in the US, just like in numerous Third World countries.

Rapidly rising food, housing, medical, and tuition prices are squeezing Americans – many do not understand the actual cause of their falling living standards.

The explosion in the cost of living is a predictable consequence of the Federal Reserve’s ongoing currency debasement.

Since the Covid mass hysteria, the Federal Reserve has printed more money than it has for the entire existence of the US.

From the founding of the US, it took over 227 years to print its first $6 trillion. But during Covid, the US government printed over $6 trillion in a matter of months.

It’s important to put such large numbers into context.

A trillion is a massive, almost unfathomable number.

The human brain has trouble understanding something so huge. So let me try to put it into perspective.

If you earned $1 a second 24/7/365—about $31 million per year—it would take you over 31,688 YEARS to make $1 trillion.

So that’s how enormous a trillion is.

When politicians carelessly spend and print money measured in the trillions, you are in dangerous territory.

In short, the Fed’s actions during the Covid scam amounted to the biggest monetary explosion that has ever occurred in the US.

Initially, the Fed and its apologists in the media assured the American people its actions wouldn’t cause severe price increases. But unfortunately, it didn’t take long to prove that absurd assertion false.

As soon as rising prices became apparent, the mainstream media and Fed claimed that the inflation was only “transitory” and that there was nothing to be worried about. When the inflation was obviously not “transitory,” they told us “inflation was actually a good thing.”

Of course, they were dead wrong and knew it—they were gaslighting.

The truth is that inflation is out of control, and nothing can stop it.

Even after the most intense rate hiking cycle in US history, price increases remain persistent.

That’s not to mention that prices are never going back to the levels they were. We’re at a new baseline that only gets adjusted higher.

It’s like trying to run on a treadmill where the speed only ratchets up.

That’s why many people struggle to keep their heads above water. They simply cannot keep up with the rising prices.

Michael Saylor was correct when he said, “The road to serfdom consists of working exponentially harder to earn a currency that is growing exponentially weaker.”

Even though the media won’t tell you, the Fed’s currency debasement is the primary reason why most people are feeling the economic pain of inflation today. They know it’s becoming harder and harder to maintain their lifestyle—but many don’t understand why.

They’ll blame supply chain problems, Vladimir Putin, and greedy corporations… anything but the Fed as the source of inflation.

The media’s search for the real cause of inflation is like OJ Simpson’s search for “the real killers,” only more absurd.

The deliberate confusion created around inflation opens the door for opportunistic politicians who promise supposed freebies to ease the pain of inflation. Many, unfortunately, succumb to this siren’s call.

Perverse as it is, the policies offered to people suffering from inflation create even more inflation. In other words, inflation has a way of perpetuating itself, much like a heroin addiction, because people will keep wanting more and more of the very thing that is poisoning them.

For example, a Newsweek poll shows 63% of Americans “strongly support” government stimulus checks to combat inflation.

In other words, let’s fight the effects of currency debasement by engaging in even more currency debasement.

The more inflation reduces living standards, the more people push for misguided government policies like universal basic income, price controls, inflation relief stimulus checks, and a higher minimum wage… which creates a cycle of rising prices.

It’s only a matter of time before “fight for $15″—the rallying cry for a $15 minimum wage—becomes “fight for $20.” Then it’s “fight for $50,” “fight for $100,” and so forth.

People should really fight to end the Federal Reserve and the fake money they create out of thin air and force everyone else to use. It’s the only way to end this insidious cycle that impoverishes everyone except the politically-connected insiders closest to the money printing.

But, of course, that’s not going to happen.

Instead, the more likely outcome is that the US is headed straight into an inescapable downward spiral of a political-inflation cycle that follows a clear pattern and creates a self-perpetuating doom loop.

1. In a fiat currency system, the government will inevitably print an ever-increasing amount of currency to finance itself.

2. This makes prices and living costs rise faster than wages.

3. The average person feels the pain but doesn’t understand what’s happening.

4. More people support politicians who promise freebies to supposedly relieve the pain inflation causes.

5. In order to pay for the “freebies,” the government prints more currency.

6. This creates even more inflation, and the cycle repeats.

Most of America Depends on the Government

At this point, we have to ask ourselves whether the political situation in the US will improve. Unfortunately, the data points to a troubling but inevitable answer… “no.”

The reason is simple: a growing majority of US voters are receiving money from the government.

An estimated 47% or so of Americans already receive some form of government benefit. But I don’t think that accurately reflects the situation. At least, not when considering all the government employees and those in the nominally private sector who feed off the warfare state. This includes defense and other government contractors who win huge, no-bid contracts.

People involved in the military-industrial complex live off government slops as much or more than those who collect food stamps and other traditional forms of welfare. Yet they aren’t counted in the statistics. Any honest account of who depends on the government needs to include them.

When you count everyone who lives off political dollars instead of free-market dollars, we’re already well north of 50% of the US population.

In other words, the US has already crossed the Rubicon. There’s no going back.

The growing majority of voters who collect net benefits from the government is a built-in constituency to perpetuate policies financed by ever-increasing inflation.

That’s a big reason why I think currency debasement is inevitable.

What You Can Do

Unfortunately, most people have no idea how bad things can get when the political-inflation cycle spirals out of control, let alone how to prepare.

The price of groceries, medical care, tuition, rent, and everything else will only rise. The only question is, how fast will prices rise?

It’s an established trend in motion that is accelerating and approaching a breaking point.

We will likely see incredible volatility in the financial markets that could decimate many ordinary people’s life savings and retirement assets.

But I’m not just talking about a stock market crash or a currency collapse…

It’s something much bigger… with the potential to alter the fabric of society forever.

It’s created an economic situation unlike we’ve ever seen before, and it’s all building up to a severe crisis on multiple fronts.

It could all go down soon… and it won’t be pretty.

It will result in an enormous wealth transfer from savers to the parasitical class—politicians, central bankers, and those connected to them.

Countless millions throughout history were wiped out financially—or worse—during periods of profound change because they failed to see the correct Big Picture and take appropriate action.

Don’t be one of them.

That’s exactly why I just released an urgent new report with all the details, including what you must do to prepare. It’s called, The Most Dangerous Economic Crisis in 100 Years… the Top 3 Strategies You Need Right Now. Click here to download the PDF now.

Authored by Catherine Yang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Former President Donald Trump confirmed on Monday that he will be surrendering to authorities at Fulton County Jail in Georgia on Thursday, Aug. 24, over the charges he faces for contesting the state’s 2020 election result.

“Can you believe it? I’ll be going to Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday to be ARRESTED by a Radical Left District Attorney, Fani Willis, who is overseeing one of the greatest Murder and Violent Crime DISASTERS in American History,” he wrote on Truth Social.

“In my case, the trip to Atlanta is not for ‘Murder,’ but for making a PERFECT PHONE CALL! She campaigned, and is continuing to campaign, and raise money, on this WITCH HUNT. This is in strict coordination with Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ. It is all about ELECTION INTERFERENCE!”

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had brought charges against President Trump and 18 co-defendants, all of whom were charged under Georgia’s Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. In all, the 98-page indictment included 161 acts of racketeering and 41 total charges. President Trump was charged on 13 counts.

Bond Set at $200,000

Also on Monday, Judge Scott McAfee began setting bond and release conditions for the defendants.

According to newly posted court records (pdf), President Trump has agreed to have his bond set at $200,000.

Following negotiations with the prosecution, Attorney John Eastman’s bond was set at $100,000; Scott Hall, a bail bondsman, had bond set at $10,000; Attorney Kenneth Chesebro’s bond was set at $100,000; and attorney Ray Smith III’s bond was set at $50,000.

All of the defendants have bond conditions that prohibit what they can say, but President Trump is the only one whose restrictions include specific details, including prohibiting him from making any “direct or indirect threat of any nature” against codefendants, victims, the community, including in his “posts on social media or reposts of posts made by another individual on social media.

Rising Poll Numbers

President Trump’s polling has only trended upwards since his first indictment in April.

Amid a flurry of recent legal action—motions have been filed in both criminal and civil cases that President Trump is named in—the GOP frontrunner’s polling has only improved.

On Aug. 21, new poll numbers released put President Trump well ahead his challengers, especially as runner-up Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s numbers have been slipping.

The difference was 62-16 percent according to a CBS poll, 57-18 percent according to a Quinnipiac University poll, and 53-16 percent according to a Fox News poll.

In Iowa, a poll carried out by Des Moines Register, NBC News, and Mediacom put him at 42 percent of the vote that surveyed likely Republican caucus-goers. Mr. DeSantis came in at 19 percent, and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) placed third with 9 percent. When the former president was indicted for the first time earlier this year, he likewise saw a surge in the polls—and in fundraising.

Observers have noted that the increased legal action against him may only make his supporters dig their heels in, as the legal challenges might be viewed as political action on the behalf of his rival, the incumbent president.

President Joe Biden has stayed quiet on the matter, ignoring questions from the media about President Trump’s indictments. President Trump and his legal team have repeatedly denounced the cases brought against him as “election interference” and a “witch hunt” given the timing of the cases.

Besides the Georgia case, President Trump is facing charges brought against him by the Department of Justice in both Washington, D.C., and Florida. Like the Georgia case, the Washington case concerns his challenge of the 2020 election results, but in federal instead of state court. The Florida case, also in federal court, regards his alleged mishandling of classified documents. Both cases are being overseen by special counsel Jack Smith.

The Republican favourite is also facing both criminal and civil suits in New York.

Janice Hisle contributed to this report.