Authored by Todd Hayen via Off-Guardian.org,

Do any of you think we are over-reacting? I don’t think so, but the sheep-folk certainly do. They claim they are willing to let bygones be bygones and just put it all in the past and get on with life.

I am sure everyone reading this is aware of the bombshell editorial The Atlantic dropped recently with their amnesty nonsense. I don’t think I have been more livid reading an article since the days of seeing piece after piece about how effective masks are against viral transmission.

I won’t comment on The Atlantic blather directly here, as there have been many fine responses to it, but wow, what a piece. So typical of a bully trying to pretend he loved his victims all along when he knows he is cornered and about to be punished. One last punch disguised as a kiss.

I just got back from a little cruise. Major ports were Barcelona, Rome, Florence, Monaco, and a smattering of little French and Italian hideaways. I had mixed feelings about going, but realized that if this tsunami we all see coming a few miles off the shore has the potential of wiping out most travel in the foreseeable future, I figured I might as well get something in before the onslaught.

It was nice in a lot of ways, as would be expected, but in other ways unusually disconcerting. For one thing, very, very few people had masks, and thus there was a palatable scent in the air of “Covid is a thing of the past.”

One would think this was a good thing, but instead it exuded a very clear vibe of denial.

Oddly enough, not wearing masks, and believing Covid to be over, to me is just another example of compliance to authority.

I know that seems a stretch, but if Covid were real, coupled with the truth that the vaccines do not work, and we were told again and again that there would be no natural herd immunity without a working vaccine, and we still hear of infections rising, variants being created, and hospitals becoming over crowded, why would people think the disease just died and disappeared? The reason is because we were told it was over.

We were told we suddenly didn’t need masks, that we could party with friends, vaxxed or unvaxxed, that we could gather in huge crowds, get on cruise ships (no one even cared that I was unvaccinated.) We were told what was true, what was real and what to worry or not worry about. And like sheep, most people blindly followed.

So shouldn’t I be happy? If I were, it would be for all of the wrong reasons. It is true we are all happy when the slave owner puts down the whip. Whip or not, however, we are still slaves.

I, too, bask in the sun of my controlled freedom—I went on a cruise didn’t I? After two years of not being “allowed to”—so I am just as guilty of this sort of compliance. I am one step closer to truth though; I know this offer of freedom is a tactic, a ploy, and a ruse.

I’ll take a scrap of bread when it is offered, but I will not succumb to complacency and forgive my master for his cruelty when he behaves, albeit for just a moment, as my friend. Most everyone else seems fine to let bygones be bygones.

I am not, and I suspect most of you reading this are not as well.

The great danger I see here in the masses just carrying on in complacent forgiveness is that they are encouraged to stay blind. Surely if they speak out against the atrocities that the world has experienced over the past three years they would quickly be categorized as a trouble maker, a pariah, and a misfit.

“Just get over it, man, it’s all over.”

Is it? No, of course not, you and I know that, and it is all still going on in various ways under the covers now, in the dark recesses of the culture: persecutions, continued efforts to vaccinate, and particularly vaccinate children, warnings of an “upcoming dark winter” where restrictions will come back into the mainstream. On and on, you know what I am speaking of.

However, the mass attitude now, as per The Atlantic piece, is “nothing all that much really happened.”

No one died unnecessarily due to the Covid response, no one got sick, no one lost their job or their livelihood, no one suffered socially (particularly children wearing masks in school), no one suffered educationally, nothing bad really happened.

If you are still pissed about all that DID happen, then you are overreacting…much ado about nothing.

So get over it, forget and forgive.

Not everyone on the world has read that article, but what I saw in Europe, it seems that most people, at least on physical observation, are basically taking on that attitude.

It breaks my heart.

I think about the countless mothers sitting by their children in countless hospitals nurturing them through a totally unprecedented heart incident.

I think of the countless families standing together at the funeral of a loved one, dead prematurely from a heart attack, blood clotting, or cancer—cause unknown, unless you want to apply the newly created diagnoses, “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome.” What the hell is that?

A novel disease and now a common cause of death? Easy peasy explanation, eh? I think of the countless numbers of people suffering from a myriad of strange afflictions, which suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

I think again of countless people having suffered unconscionably, and pointlessly, after losing their jobs, their businesses, their life savings, and their livelihood—the countless children with lower IQs, and those who have suffered social retardation due to the mask mandates, social distancing, and mandatory online teaching at home with no socialization at all.

I could write 100 pages describing all of this—but most people don’t know, and if they do, don’t care, or just attribute all of this horror to the “cost of living—some are lucky in life, some are not.”

During my recent cruise not a word was uttered about any of this, thousands of people were encountered walking the streets of Rome, Florence, Barcelona, all laughing, eating, drinking, playing. While just beneath their feet, hidden a foot underground, there are skulls and bones of the fallen—all forgotten, and the perpetrators all forgiven.

When I was occasionally shaken from my self-induced and compliant vacation reverie, my heart ached talking to all of the young vibrant crewmembers on our ship.

I would hear of their plans to be married, create families, further their careers and live fully their vibrant lives—followed with the admission that they all had to be vaccinated to get their current jobs on the ship.

What really lies ahead for these beautiful children of God so innocent and full of life? I would shake my head, “maybe none of this is true, and maybe I am making more of it than it really is. Maybe they are right, and it really wasn’t that bad, just a mistake made here and there that we really could get over. It is all fine…let’s move on.”

Then a bone cracks under my foot—just a few inches from the surface of awareness—the truth. And I slip back into reality.

Authored by Stu Cvrk via The Epoch Times,

The brilliant former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was once quoted as saying, “Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn’t change.” That is absolutely true, but the meanings of commonly understood words are frequently corrupted, represented, or obfuscated by nefarious people.

Both the Chinese Communist Party and the U.S. Democratic Party are masters at obfuscating language to achieve their political objectives. There are even some interesting similarities in certain aspects of messaging by both parties.

Let us explore the thesis.

Democracy

In order to convey a false sense of the legitimacy, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-ruled government Xi Jinping regularly opines about the crackpot term “whole people’s democracy,” which is then endlessly repeated in the echo chamber of state-run Chinese media. The concept is absurd because there is no such thing as genuine democracy in a one-party dictatorship in which only CCP-approved candidates occupy positions across all levels of government.

The report presented by Xi during the recently concluded 20th National Congress of the CCP included a new slogan that embellishes “whole people’s democracy”: acting for people, relying on people. This is simply more twisted gobbledygook, as the CCP has been “acting for the people” without regard to any democratically-obtained input from the Chinese people since the communist regime took power in 1949.

Red Guard members wave copies of Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book” during a parade in Beijing on June 1, 1966. (Jean Vincent/AFP via Getty Images)

The Democratic Party, too, has an odd definition of democracy. Throughout the 2022 election campaign, one of the key pillars of the Democrats’ election narrative has been the imperative to “save our democracy.” Joe Biden attempted to close the political sale on Nov. 2 in a speech devoted almost entirely to condemning “extreme Republicans” and urging voters to “preserve democracy” by electing Democrats, as reported by the New York Post here.

Coupled with the continuing Biden administration’s weaponizing of federal agencies against perceived political opponents (e.g., arresting peaceful anti-abortion activists, suppressing political speech, and refocusing on the investigation and prosecution over various “domestic terrorists” like the J6 protestors), Biden’s naked political appeal is akin to the CCP’s ongoing efforts to perpetuate a one-party state. After all, “saving our democracy” is a thinly veiled slogan whose real meaning is to save the Democrats, not the democratic actions of Americans who are poised to sweep the Democratic Party out of political power, as noted here by The Epoch Times.

Democrats would apparently like to “act for people and rely on people” by encouraging voters to support a one-party Democrat-run state analogous to communist China!

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, alongside House Democrats, holds the CHIPS for America Act, providing domestic semiconductor manufacturers with billions in subsidies to cut reliance on foreign sourcing, after signing it during an enrollment ceremony outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington on July 29, 2022. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

Political Purges

Xi Jinping completed a political purge of former leader Hu Jintao and his faction of the CCP during the 20th Party Congress. In a shocking display, Hu was frog-marched out of the Congress during an obviously staged event intended to convey to the assembled CCP apparatchiks and the rest of the world that Xi is completely in charge. Besides Xi, the six other standing members of the newly-appointed 20th Politburo are all Xi allies and confidants, as are the members of the new Central Military Commission. Enter the era of complete unanimity of CCP thoughts and deeds, and a return to Mao-style authoritarianism—and a very dangerous time for the Chinese people and the world in general.

Young Red Guards brandish copies of Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book” in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The Red Guards rampaged through Chinese towns, terrorizing people, particularly the elderly. (Jean Vincent/AFP via Getty Images)

Chinese people demonstrate during the “great proletarian Cultural Revolution” in front of the French embassy in Beijing on January 1967. Protesters show symbols of the Revolution such as the portrait of Mao Zedong, banners, and the book “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung.” Since the cultural revolution was launched in May 1966 at Beijing University, Mao’s aim was to recapture power after the failure of the “Great Leap Forward.” The movement was directed against those “Party leaders in authority taking the capitalist road.” (Jean Vincent/AFP via Getty Images)

A Chinese man stands alone to block a line of tanks heading east on Beijing’s Avenue of Eternal Peace during the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 5, 1989. (Jeff Widener/AP Photo)

The Democratic Party is deep into conducting its own political purge of the “Republican faction” from the greater U.S. polity: suppress dissent, redesignate political dissenters as “domestic terrorists,” and refocus federal law enforcement on political crimes. The actions involve silencing and canceling the political speech of those who dissent from Democrat political orthodoxy. For example, the Department of Homeland Security has embarked on an “expansive effort” to influence Big Tech and social media giants, as reported here and revealed through analysis of “years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents—obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents.”

Misinformation and disinformation are now apparently what the Democrats and bureaucratic allies deem them to be, despite the public outcry that deep-sixed (at least temporarily) the DHS’s “Disinformation Governance Board” earlier this year. Never mind the First Amendment that protects all political speech. Democrats know better than the Founders did!

The Biden administration has loosened the definition of “domestic terrorists” to smear, attack, and investigate J6 protestors, those who question the adherence to due process during the 2020 election, and vocal “America First” supporters.

Several hundred J6 protestors have been pursued vigorously for nearly two years, while thousands of violent antifa and BLM rioters (politically supported by many Democrats, as noted here) have been virtually ignored by the Democrat-controlled DOJ and FBI. The FBI targeted True the Vote after alleged election-related crimes by Chinese-owned Konnech Corporation. And after years of lies about now-dismissed Trump-Russia collusion and other politically-motivated efforts to “get Trump,” the FBI carried out an unprecedented action against a former U.S. president by raiding Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in August.

An aerial view of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home after FBI agents searched it, in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 15, 2022. (Marco Bello/Reuters)

The Democrats’ three-pronged effort to suppress dissent, as defined by their own party, target Democrat-defined “domestic terrorists,” and prosecute/harass/raid Democrat political opponents is eerily similar to the CCP’s decades-long campaign to squelch all political resistance against the Chinese communist regime.

A Brave New World

The CCP and the Democratic Party each have their own visions of what amount to variations on the dystopian future, as presented in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in which each party exercises totalitarian control of their respective societies. We must remember, those visions were also marketed with flowery words and slogans that mask reality.

From the newest amendment to the CCP’s constitution approved during the 20th Party Congress comes the slogan of “advancing the building of an open, inclusive, clean, and beautiful world that enjoys lasting peace, universal security, and common prosperity.” Riiiiiggght. The “shared future” promised by the CCP involves boots on the necks of all dissenters (especially ethnic and religious minorities in China), complete and intrusive social controls to manage the behavior of individual citizens, and arbitrary and punitive measures such as those associated with Xi’s “zero-COVID policy” that continues to destroy businesses and lives.

The Democratic Party’s vision for America’s future is laid out in their party platform here. Behind the flowery words such as “stronger fairer,” “universal affordable,” and “healing the soul,” a glimpse at that future has already been presented to Americans over the past two years: economic chaos, massive inflation, out-of-control crime, the fentanyl scourge, sexualizing children, and foreign policy incompetence.

The reality of the Democrats’ future vision for America includes gender affirmation (human experimentation and barbarism), unlimited women’s “healthcare” (infanticide), counting all votes (rigged elections), “free” healthcare (including for the increasing number of illegal aliens), and much, much more. How do the secular Democrats equate all of this damage to “healing the soul” of America?

The above comparisons between the Chinese Communist Party and the Democratic Party in the United States are similar but not matching—yet. However, what the CCP has managed through 73 years of totalitarian control of communist China gives us a glimpse of the future in the U.S. under long-term Democrat domination and control of the federal government.

But American voters who understand the true meaning of the words already spoken may have other ideas for our future.

Authored by Joe Guzzardi (emphasis ours),

Canada’s Immigration Minister Sean Fraser recently announced a bold immigration plan that has serious long-term deleterious consequences for the nation’s population growth and environmental degradation.

Fraser’s goal is, by 2025, to add 1.45 million permanent resident immigrants to address what he and other government officials claim is a critical labor shortage; allegedly 1 million Canadian jobs are unfilled. Fraser said: “Make no mistake. This is a massive increase in economic migration to Canada.” The Minister’s new plan projects a flood of new arrivals that will see 465,000 foreign nationals in 2023, rising to 500,000 in 2025. By comparison, 405,000 permanent residents were admitted last year.

Fraser’s immigration vision to admit a record-breaking number of immigrants is inspired by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s sentiments. Following his 2019 election wherein he campaigned on more immigration, he followed up with welcoming messages to refugees. Defending his massive immigration increase, Fraser repeated familiar refrains about an aging Canadian population and a low birth rate. Without immigration, Fraser foresees a Canada that won’t have the financial resources to fund schools, hospitals and other services. In short, Fraser used scare tactics to deceive Canada’s citizens.

Canada’s long-standing commitment to higher immigration levels has created an unprecedented population surge. In 2021, Canada’s population rose to 37 million people, up 5.2 percent from 2016, driven mostly by immigration, according to official government data. Downtowns and distant suburbs of large cities have experienced the largest growth rates.

Canada added 1.8 million people between 2016 and 2021, with nearly 80 percent of those new residents arriving from across the globe. Research from Statistics Canada (StatsCan) published in its Census 2021 release gives Canada the dubious distinction of being the fastest growing G7 country. Almost 90 percent of new immigrants settled in urban centers, Statscan said, edging up the proportion of Canadians living in large urban centers to 73.7 percent from 73.2 percent five years ago. During the five-year time period studied, Toronto’s population increased 16.1 percent, Montreal, 24.2 percent, and Vancouver, 7.4 percent. The report concluded that Canada continues to urbanize as large city centers benefit most from new arrivals to the country. But not all Canadians would use “benefit” as a descriptor for rapid, uncontrolled population growth.

Fraser’s plan is so ill-conceived that even the most basic and fundamental need of arriving immigrants – affordable housing – will be an insurmountable challenge. Canada is undergoing a severe housing crisis that has driven home prices out of the range for many buyers. Simply put, more people mean that more homes and more roads that lead to them must be built. And new home development creates urban sprawl.

Mike Moffatt, executive director of the Smart Prosperity Institute, outlined the crisis that exploding population has wrought for environmentalists. “What [land] isn’t being used for housing is either being used for nature, like the Greenbelt, or for farmlands, – and we’re already losing 175 acres a day in Ontario of farmland to development.”

Ontario environmentalists like Moffatt are fighting to save its glorious Greenbelt from ever-greater development and sprawl. Today, plans to run a highway through a portion of the belt are advancing.

Like most environmentalists in Ontario, Moffatt fears that at any time the government could decide to develop “little pieces” of the Greenbelt. Sooner or later, Moffatt fears, those little pieces could add up to great big chunks.

To be crystal-clear, the new immigrant total will far exceed 1.45 million. New immigrants will grow their existing families and petition certain family members. Princeton University scholars estimated, conservatively, that each migrant petitions three relatives living abroad. Within a generation, the 1.45 million new Canadians could swell to more than 3 million.

Trudeau and Fraser have concocted an immigration plan that will devastate Canada. Immigration isn’t a one-off. Arriving immigrants need nurturing, a compassionate exercise that often comes at the expense, at least partially, of the native-born population. The Canadian government and the corporate elite are all-in on more immigrants. But, if the population at large knew that the arriving 1.45 million immigrants would more than double during many of their lifetimes and degrade Canada’s natural beauty, it would be staunchly opposed.

By Sagarika Jaisinghani, Bloomberg Markets Live reporter and analyst

This earnings season hasn’t been for the faint-hearted, marked by profit warnings, job cuts and share-price volatility — all while high inflation and dollar strength wreak havoc. The bad news is that worse may be to come.

S&P 500 companies had the lowest share of profit beats since the first quarter of 2020, according to data from Bloomberg Intelligence, even after expectations were lowered going into the season. Those that missed — such as Alphabet Inc. and FedEx Corp. — were severely punished, while investors rewarded the likes of Intel Corp. for concrete plans to deal with rising costs and an economic downturn.

“Earnings this quarter were an early hint of what’s to come as we go through an environment of slowing growth,” said Ronald Temple, head of US equity at Lazard Asset Management. “Estimates have started to come down but they don’t yet reflect the economic outlook and need to fall much more.”

Even after Thursday’s huge sentiment boost from good inflation news, investors will need to assess how slower growth and rising costs will affect margins going forward, as well as how prepared companies are for a raft of other factors — from staffing to the impact of China’s reopening.

Here’s what we learned from third-quarter results:

Margin Squeeze Is Getting Worse

Data from JPMorgan Chase & Co. showed more pressure on margins this quarter as companies faced higher costs for materials, energy and labor, while slowing consumer demand limited their ability to raise prices.

With firms including Nike Inc. and appliances maker Whirlpool Corp. issuing profit warnings, Barclays Plc strategists said in a report that management teams in general were now less optimistic about maintaining high margins.

Analysts have been cutting margin expectations — but some say more is needed. “Input costs should be plateauing, but that won’t be enough to erase the pain for the bottom line” next quarter, said Sophie Lund-Yates, an equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown. “It isn’t just costs that are pinching margins, but weaker revenue growth too.”

Staffing Tops CEO Concerns

Conference calls showed that executives are facing a staffing headache. Big tech firms are embarking on huge layoffs in a new age of austerity for the industry — but companies in other sectors are struggling to find enough staff in a tight labor market. Wages have also become a pain point as workers contend with soaring living costs.

Esty Dwek, chief investment officer at Flowbank SA, expects layoffs to spread from tech to other sectors. “Prudence will be the name of the game going forward,” she said.

China Still a Curveball

China’s Covid Zero policy continued to have a global impact, with Apple Inc. saying shipments of its latest iPhone models will be lower than previously expected after lockdowns disrupted factories. But as the country relaxes restrictions, investors are counting on a boost to global earnings.

China generates about 6% of revenue for companies in the Russell 1000 Index, with technology, energy and consumer companies set to benefit the most from a reopening, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. Still, one curveball could come from the impact on inflation as demand for commodities and the yuan rises, strategists warn.

Europe Set for a Shock

A sharp increase in energy company profits and euro weakness meant European earnings held up far better than those in the US and emerging markets — but the region may be in for a shock next year.

Bloomberg Intelligence strategists see Europe’s lead fizzling out as Chinese earnings return to double-digit growth and US profits pick up. Europe will suffer due to a slowdown in energy earnings and as companies and consumers endure a gas crisis this winter.

Analysts Are Always Too Positive

While profit estimates for the next couple of years have been coming down, the number and magnitude of misses this quarter showed that analysts were still too cheerful.

Willem Sels, global chief investment officer of private banking and wealth at HSBC Holdings Plc, said the current outlook for inflation and economic growth suggests no US earnings growth for 2023. With analysts projecting a 6% increase, “estimates are still too optimistic,” he said.

Among other changes incoming CEO Elon Musk has hastily made at Twitter has been the addition of once “verified” restricted blue checkmarks to the profiles of anyone who ponies up $8 per month for a Twitter Blue subscription.

This, combined with the ability to change ones display name on Twitter, has led to a deluge of fake accounts for politicians, celebrities and corporations that look extremely close to “official” social media accounts. 

Before Musk’s takeover, the company had made sure to grant verification status to people that it wanted to ensure could not be impersonated. Now, under Musk’s regime, just the opposite is taking place. 

Among the confusion are now accounts that appear to be from people like US president George W. Bush, wherein he tweeted offensive messages that were then re-tweeted by a similarly official looking former British prime minister Tony Blair account. 

Other impersonators included a fake O.J. Simpson account that confessed to the murder of his former wife, and a fake LeBron James account claiming to be asking for a trade from the Los Angeles Lakers. 

Meanwhile, other users have had trouble changing their names back after Twitter appeared to remove the feature to try and fix the original verification issue. For example, the Financial Post notes that singer Doja Cat “found that she was unable to change her display name back from “christmas” after a new rule came in”.

“I don’t wanna be Christmas forever @elonmusk please help I’ve made a mistake,” she pleaded with Musk on the platform. 

In another example, someone impersonating a fake Eli Lilly account appeared to have wiped billions from the company’s market cap after it Tweeted that the company was “excited to announce” that “insulin is free now”.

Did Twitter Blue tweet just cost Eli Lilly $LLY billions?

Yes. pic.twitter.com/w4RtJwgCVK

— Rafael Shimunov is on Mastodon (@rafaelshimunov) November 11, 2022

The company had to step in and correct the record:

We regret to inform you that we will not be giving away insulin, a publicly funded invention that was given away by its creator to be given away to people so they don’t die.https://t.co/lft5DvAlKf

— Rafael Shimunov is on Mastodon (@rafaelshimunov) November 11, 2022

Elsewhere on the site, other accounts were impersonating political figures like Sen. Ted Cruz. One account, sporting the name “Ted Cruz” with a blue checkmark, wrote: “The first time I entered my human wife, I said, groaning into her ear, “This is exactly how mother said it would feel”. 

It elicited a response from a fake Ben Shapiro account.

I don’t think this is what the @gop thought would happen when Elon took over. pic.twitter.com/GUZlBuGnY5

— Seamus Blackley (@SeamusBlackley) November 11, 2022

Entrepreneur Mark Cuban also lodged complaints, namely that “the new system made it harder to filter out notifications”. He said he used the platform to screen out verifications in the past in order to reduce the amount of noise he encountered on the platform. 

“I just spent too much time muting all the newly purchased checkmark accts in an attempt to make my verified mentions useful again,” Cuban remarked. 

Elon Musk responded: “It’s working for me. That said, we can definitely make the verified mentions tab more usable.”

Musk said in response to the issue the company is removing many legacy blue checkmarks and will be adding “official” tags to people’s bios – which would essentially replace the former purpose of the blue checkmark, to validate an account’s validity. 

Late in the day on Friday, the confusion prompted Sen. Ed Markey to reach out to Twitter for answers “about its new verification and impersonation policies”, according to CNBC. 

In a letter to Elon Musk, Markey wrote: “Safeguards such as Twitter’s blue checkmark once allowed users to be smart, critical consumers of news and information in Twitter’s global town square. But your Twitter takeover, rapid and haphazard imposition of platform changes, removal of safeguards against disinformation, and firing of large numbers of Twitter employees have accelerated Twitter’s descent into the Wild West of social media.”

Authored by Charles Kennedy via OilPrice.com,

• The energy crisis in Pakistan has deepened this year.

• Gas supplies available for households will be very limited this winter.

• Pakistani households will have gas available for three hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon, and three hours in the evening.

Pakistan has no other option but to ration natural gas supply this winter, with gas provided three times a day for cooking to households, amid acute shortages and a forex crisis in the world’s fifth most populous country, an official from the petroleum ministry told a Parliament panel this week.  

The energy crisis in Pakistan has deepened this year, and now, natural gas supplies will be very limited for households, according to officials.

“There would be no gas supply (to household consumers) for 16 hours” a day, Muhammad Mahmood told the Parliament’s Standing Committee on Petroleum, as carried by the local outlet Dawn.  

Pakistani households will have gas available for three hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon, and three hours in the evening, Mahmood added.

Pakistan—whose population is the fifth largest in the world after China, India, the United States, and Indonesia—has been experiencing an energy crisis as the country cannot afford to import a lot of energy products at the current high prices. The stronger U.S. dollar and the sky-high LNG prices have worsened the country’s finances, with foreign exchange reserves down in October to their lowest level in three years.

In April, soaring prices of LNG and coal on the international markets left Pakistan with having to cut electricity supply to households and industry as the country, in a deep political and economic crisis, could not afford to buy more of the expensive fossil fuels.

This year, Europe has been outbidding Asian customers for LNG supply as it has scrambled to secure gas supply with very low pipeline imports from Russia. High spot rates for LNG have discouraged many buyers and users of the super-chilled fuel in Asia, including in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

Meanwhile, industry customers across South Asia have turned to fuel oil because of the high prices of natural gas. In Pakistan, oil-fired power generation has surged five-fold this year, Lucy Cullen, Principal Analyst, APAC Gas & LNG Research at Wood Mackenzie, said in September.

“Demand-side management measures are being implemented, but the situation is likely to worsen,” Cullen added.

While many analysts and economists will be talking for months about the epic downfall of crypto-exchange company FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried, their focus will be primarily on the billions lost, the mismanagement of funds, the fraud inherent in yield farming and the alleged betrayal of investor trust.  This is a tale as old as time and not anything surprising.  What many in the mainstream are missing, though, is Fried’s attachments to the World Economic Foundation, various global elitists and his avid sermonizing of the tenets of “effective altruism”, which are nearly identical to the tenets of Klaus Schwab’s Stakeholder Capitalism agenda.

The WEF lists FTX as a corporate “partner” and participant, which means the company must meet the globalist organization’s standards for Stakeholder Capitalism, a socialist economic model which deconstructs the Adam Smith and Milton Friedman free market foundation.

Milton Friedman argued that the only responsibility of business should be growth and profit (within the boundaries of the law) with the shareholders in mind.  The WEF insists that the Friedman philosophy must be abandoned and that the job of wealthy elites and corporations is to use profits as a tool for managing society (the so-called “stakeholders”).  In other words, corporate leaders should become cultural and political leaders fulfilling greater ideological goals, all of them decidedly socialist/Marxist in origin.  

Stakeholder Capitalism becomes a way to trick the public into investing their faith in corprorate leadership because these companies are no longer simply “in it for the money,” they are in it for the survival of the world and the species, right?  The companies become saviors, not just mercantilists.  That kind of blind faith allows people to be taken advantage of in a big way.  It’s the same kind of faith once applied to kings and monarchies centuries ago, and it usually leads to various forms of feudalism.

In the WEF’s vision of the future, the average person will “own nothing, have no privacy and be happy about it” while corporate elites in partnership with governments micromanage all production, all distribution and all finance. 

An ongoing example of the early stages of this model is ESG, a credit system in which loans are given to companies and individuals based on their ESG score, derived from how dedicated they are to globalist causes.  In the near future, if you don’t promote social justice ideology and support establishment climate change claims, then you might not be able to get a loan from the bank for your business.  You might not be able to get a mortgage loan for a new home.  In fact, you might not even be allowed to have a bank account. 

FTX and Fried heavily relied on investment firms like Blackrock, which is a major component of the spread of ESG.  This may be why FTX regularly announced their devotion to climate and social justice projects, it kept them in the good graces of the ESG overlords. 

A key component of Stakeholder Capitalism is the need for a digital currency framework, which might explain the WEF’s interest in FTX as a partner.  The move to a cashless society is the next step necessary for the micro-management of the economy and the ability to dole out rewards or punishments based on ESG scoring.  It is an incremental top down implementation of a framework similar to China’s “social credit system.”

The concept is being sold by the WEF and their corporate partners as way to create “equity” within the economy by incentivizing the redistribution of wealth from the very rich to the very poor and to ‘humanitarian causes.”  It uses access to the banking apparatus and the economy itself as a carrot or a cudgel.  Really, it is the ultimate form of centralization and control posing as a charitable movement for the greater good.  But without the freedom to succeed and the freedom to fail, there can be no greater good.  

Evidence is mounting that the equity measures involved in Stakeholder Capitalism will actually erase wealth rather than create wealth.  To be sure, it would make the majority of people financially even – Instead of being equally rich, we will all suffer in equal poverty.

The downfall of FTX and Sam Blankman-Fried illustrates this problem with clarity.  Fried constantly espoused the pie-in-the-sky ideals of Stakeholder Capitalism, engaging in a kind of corporate charity built on socialist guidelines and climate cultism, while at the same time draining client accounts.   

The FTX profit strategy was based initially on taking advantage of imbalances in international crypto exchange rates; a limited window for a quick cash grab rather than an idea for long term viability. It also relied on the crypto market constantly reinventing the wheel with new branding and marketing to grow demand for technology that the majority of people around the world don’t really need or particularly desire.  

Fried suggests that his intent all along was to expand capital as a means to give it away to leftist causes.  He donated over $40 million to Democrat campaigns, for example.  The problem was he failed in business while giving away the money of his clients at the same time.  Some people argue that his clients are partly culpable for the losses, but Fried explicitly stated that his company would not use client funds in such a way.  He lied to them, which is not a great feature of a supposed humanitarian.          

Being 30 years old and naive certainly didn’t help him, but Fried is a perfect example of why corporation leaders have no business being involved in social engineering.  They are not qualified enough nor intelligent enough nor benevolent enough to mold society at large; no one is that wise or experienced.  Beyond that, the Stakeholder Capitalism ideology is rooted in socialist drivel, making FTX a socialist drivel-based company.

The model is designed to inevitably reduce the standard of living for most people over time rather than improve it.  Fried just showed us how and why.  

FTX is a petri dish for the disease of Stakeholder Capitalism.  In the end, FTX and Fried are a warning to us all that business should be separate from politics and cultural moderation. They are better off focusing on making money and increasing productivity and innovation; those companies that can’t should be allowed to fail, not be propped up as pillars of social cohesion.  This is the true way to ensure human progress.  In the meantime, the rest of us are much better off without their help and “charitable” oversight.   

Leading up to Sam Bankman-Fried’s spectacular implosion – in which his firm FTX evaporated billions in wealth after the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange allegedly commingled client assets with his trading firm into a liquidity crunch – he became the sixth-largest donor in this year’s midterm election cycle, giving some $40 million to mostly Democratic candidates and causes.

According to Forbes, Bankman-Fried was second only to George Soros among billionaire donors to Democratic groups during the 2022 midterm election cycle.

FTX allegedly loaned Alameda Research – a trading firm founded by Bankman-Fried – roughly $10 billion in client assets, which has landed him under federal investigation by the SEC, CTFC, and the Justice Department – the latter of which already had been working on a months-long investigation, according to the Wall Street Journal. The CTFC, meanwhile, is tasked with regulating certain elements of the crypto markets – including digital assets that are as commodities, and crypto exchanges and clearinghouses.

In late September, Bankman-Fried admitted that his political donations were mostly to Democrats, and Republican recipients were ‘targeted’.

Spot the rare journalism by host Chuck Todd;

But it goes much deeper than that

Bankman-Fried ‘heavily courted’ the CFTC, “and funded several key lawmakers charged with overseeing the agency, pouring cash into their campaign coffers,” as the Daily Caller notes.

The CFTC is charged with regulating certain elements of the crypto marketplace, including digital assets that are commodities as well as crypto exchanges and clearinghouses. The agency is overseen by the Senate and House Agriculture Committees, with the former tasked with approving CFTC commissioners nominated by the president.

The former FTX CEO personally donated to the Senate committee’s chairwoman, Democratic Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, contributing over $20,000 to the Stabenow Victory Fund and $5,800 to her campaign for Senate. Bankman-Fried donated roughly $6,000 to the committee’s ranking member, Republican Arkansas Sen. John Boozman, as well, and $5,800 to the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Commodities, Risk Management and Trade, Republican Montana Sen. John Hoeven. -Daily Caller

Others have connected dots and concluded that FTX may have been a money laundering operation.

https://t.co/rFHsbYk41U

— Gordo Stevens 🇺🇸 (@GordoCDA) November 12, 2022

What’s more, a PAC founded by FTX executive Ryan Salme, American Dream Federal Action, spent over $1 million on Boozman during the 2022 election cycle, as well as more than $1 million on House Agriculture Committee member and Republican Minnesota Rep. Brad Finstad.

Bankman-Fried also donated $27 million to the Protect Our Future PAC, which primarily works to elect Democrats. It spent over $1 million towards Rep. Shontel Brown (D-OH), a member of the House Agriculture Committee.

Another donation linked to members of the House Ag committee includes $200,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), headed by Chair Sean Patrick Maloney, and nearly $6,000 to Maloney himsself. He also gave $20,000 to the campaign and victory fund of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), whose father worked for the NXIVM sex cult in the early 2000s, where he made $25,000 per month.

In addition to his campaign contributions to the lawmakers tasked with CFTC oversight, Bankman-Fried sought closer relations with the agency itself.

Bankman-Fried personally lobbied for legislation in the Senate Agriculture Committee that would grant the CFTC greater regulatory oversight over the crypto industry, according to Coindesk, and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying the CFTC, SEC and members of Congress on the legislation.

The bill, known as the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act, which would grant the CFTC “jurisdiction to oversee the spot digital commodity market,” was introduced by Stabenow, Boozman, Booker and Republican North Dakota Sen. John Thune, three of whom are beneficiaries of Bankman-Fried’s donations.

For its lobbying team, FTX hired former Republican Rep. Mike Conaway, longtime chair of the House Agriculture Committee, and committee staffer Scott Graves to lobby lawmakers on crypto-related issues. -Daily Caller

As a thought experiment, imagine what Bankman-Fried’s financial ‘goodwill’ would have bought the firm if FTX hadn’t divided by zero and imploded.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

This week, we saw another incident of protesters shutting down an event to prevent others from hearing opposing views. At an event with commentator and author Ann Coulter, one protester yelled “Your words are violence.” It is the latest example of how some on the left are treating free speech as harm on college campuses. Unlike many other incidents, however, Cornell has stood by the right of the student group, Network of Enlightened Women, to hold the event and pledged to hold students accountable for the cancellation of the speech.

Students and faculty previously pressured Cornell to cancel Coulter as someone who engages in “hate speech” and declared her speaking on campus as harmful. Cornell stood with free speech. However, the event lasted only 30 minutes until protesters succeeded in shouting down Coulter. 

One man is shown screaming “we don’t want you to be here, your words are violence… They are threats, you cannot be speaking here. We don’t want your ideas here! Leave! Leave! Your words are violence! Your words are violence!”Two students chanted “no KKK no fascist USA” as they are escorted out by security. Others blared circus music and blew whistles.

The Cornell Review reported a common tactic: protesters “seemed to be employing a chain tactic, beginning just as soon as the last heckler was removed, so as to continuously speak over Coulter.”

Joel Malina, vice president for University Relations at Cornell, told Campus Reform.“Eight college-age individuals were removed from the auditorium following Cornell protocols. All Cornell students among the disrupters will be referred for conduct violations.” He also apologized to Coulter.

Cornell is to be commended for its stance, particularly if it proceeds with appropriate sanctions for these students. The incident also shows the value of limiting these events to faculty and students of Cornell, who are subject to rules protecting free speech and open discourse on campus.

We have previously discussed the worrisome signs of a rising generation of censors in the country as leaders and writers embrace censorship and blacklisting. The latest chilling poll was released by 2021 College Free Speech Rankings after questioning a huge body of 37,000 students at 159 top-ranked U.S. colleges and universities. It found that sixty-six percent of college students think shouting down a speaker to stop them from speaking is a legitimate form of free speech.  Another 23 percent believe violence can be used to cancel a speech. That is roughly one out of four supporting violence.

Faculty and editors are now actively supporting modern versions of book-burning with blacklists and bans for those with opposing political views. Others are supporting actual book burning. Columbia Journalism School Dean Steve Coll has denounced the “weaponization” of free speech, which appears to be the use of free speech by those on the right.

We discussed this issue with regard to a lawsuit against SUNY. It is also discussed in my recent law review article, Jonathan Turley, Harm and Hegemony: The Decline of Free Speech in the United States, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. We have seen how in universities (including state schools) this can turn into a type of “heckler’s veto” where speeches are cancelled in advance or terminated suddenly due to the disruption of protesters.

This has been an issue of contention with some academics who believe that free speech includes the right to silence others.  Berkeley has been the focus of much concern over the use of a heckler’s veto on our campuses as violent protesters have succeeded in silencing speakers, including a speaker from the ACLU discussing free speech.  Both students and some faculty have maintained the position that they have a right to silence those with whom they disagree and even student newspapers have declared opposing speech to be outside of the protections of free speech.  At another University of California campus, professors actually rallied around a professor who physically assaulted pro-life advocates and tore down their display.

In the meantime, academics and deans have said that there is no free speech protection for offensive or “disingenuous” speech.  CUNY Law Dean Mary Lu Bilek showed how far this trend has gone. When conservative law professor Josh Blackman was stopped from speaking about “the importance of free speech,”  Bilek insisted that disrupting the speech on free speech was free speech. (Bilek later cancelled herself and resigned after she made a single analogy to acting like a “slaveholder” as a self-criticism for failing to achieve equity and reparations for black faculty and students).

A few years ago, I debated NYU Professor Jeremy Waldron who is a leading voice for speech codes. Waldron insisted that shutting down speakers through heckling is a form of free speech. I disagree. It is the antithesis of free speech and the failure of schools to protect the exercise of free speech is the antithesis of higher education. In most schools, people are not allowed to disrupt events. They are escorted out of such events and told that they can protest outside of the events since others have a right to listen to opposing views. These disruptions however are often planned to continually interrupt speakers until the school authorities step in to cancel the event.

Recently, we have seen convocations and other important events disrupted by such protesters. Universities will have to take a stand or lose control over their campuses. Students who disrupt classes or events must be held accountable if we are to maintain open and free discourse on our campuses.

Authored by Lia Onely via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

An Israeli study found that antibody levels after a fourth dose of the Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine returned to similar levels as after the 3rd dose after about four months.

The study, conducted among health care workers at the Sheba Medical Center, the largest hospital in Israel, found that the immunological protection of the 4th dose “was much smaller and had waned completely by 13 weeks after vaccination.”

It found “no substantial additional effectiveness over a third dose at 15 to 26 weeks after vaccination.”

The authors concluded that these findings suggest the 4th dose and possible future boosters “should be timed wisely to coincide with disease waves or to be available seasonally, similar to the influenza vaccine.”

The six-month follow-up study was published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Nov. 9.

The study led by Dr. Michal Canetti and Dr. Gili Regev-Yochay, the head of the Infection Prevention and Control unit at Sheba, followed employees who did not fall ill before the study, beginning Dec. 27, 2021, to July 10, 2022, when the Omicron virus variant was dominant in Israel.

The researchers tested the immune response of 6,113 employees and performed a monthly follow-up of the antibody levels in their blood. In addition, they performed a vaccine effectiveness analysis of 11,176 employees after the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th doses.

The weekly levels of antibodies throughout the period after the receipt of the 3rd and 4th doses were found to be similar and the study said were higher than after receiving the 2nd dose.

Effectiveness of the fourth dose against infection started at just 52 percent during the first five weeks after administration and dropped to negative 2 percent at 15 to 26 weeks. A growing number of studies have detected negative effectiveness, which means the vaccinated are more likely to get infected.

Pfizer did not respond to a request for comment.

Read more here…