Whatever happened to the WEF?  One minute they were everywhere in the media and now they have all but disappeared from public discourse.  After the pandemic agenda was defeated and the plan to exploit public fear to create a perpetual medical autocracy was exposed, Klaus Schwab and his merry band of globalists slithered back into the woodwork.  To be sure, we'll be seeing them again one day, but for now the WEF has relegated itself away from the spotlight and into the dark recesses of the Davos echo chamber. 

Much of their discussions now focus on issues like climate change or DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), but one vital subject continues to pop up in the white papers of global think tanks and it's a program that was introduced very publicly during covid.  Every person that cares about economic freedom should be wary of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) as perhaps the biggest threat to human liberty since the attempted introduction of vaccine passports.

The WEF recently boasted in a new white paper that 98% of all central banks are now pursuing CBDC programs.  The report, titled 'Modernizing Financial Markets With Wholesale Central Bank Digital Currency', notes:

“CeBM is ideal for systemically important transactions despite the emergence of alternative payment instruments...Wholesale central bank digital currency (wCBDC) is a form of CeBM that could unlock new economic models and integration points that are not possible today.”

The paper primarily focuses on the streamlining of crossborder transactions, an effort which the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has been deeply involved in for the past few years.  It also highlights an odd concept of differentiated CBDC mechanisms, each one specifically designed to be used by different institutions for different reasons.  Wholesale CBDCs would be used only by banking institutions, governments and some global corporations, as opposed to Retail CBDCs which would be reserved for the regular population.

How the value and buying power of Wholesale CBDCs would differ is not clear, but it's easy to guess that these devices would give banking institutions a greater ability homogenize international currencies and transactions.  In other words, it's the path to an eventual global currency model.  By extension, the adoption of CBDCs by governments and global banks will ultimately lead to what the WEF calls "dematerialization" - The removal of physical securities and money.  The WEF states:

"As with the Bank of England’s (BOE) RTGS modernization programme, the intention is to introduce a fully digitized securities system that is future-proofed for incremental adoption of DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology). The tokenization of assets involves creating digital tokens representing underlying assets like real estate, equities, digital art, intellectual property and even cash. Tokenization is a key use case for blockchain, with some estimates pointing towards $4-5 trillion in tokenized securities on DLTa  by 2030." 

Finally, they let the cat out of the bag:

"The BIS proposed two models for bringing tokenization into the monetary system: 1) Bring CBDCs, DTs and tokenized assets on to a common unified ledger, and 2) pursue incremental progress by creating interlinking systems.

They determined the latter option was more feasible given that the former requires a reimagination of financial systems. Experimentation with the unified ledger concept is ongoing."

To interpret this into decoded language - The unified ledger is essentially another term for a one world digital currency system completely centralized and under the control of global banks like the BIS and IMF.  The WEF and BIS are acknowledging the difficulty of introducing such a system without opposition, so, they are recommending incremental introduction using "interlinking systems" (attaching CBDCs to paper currencies and physical contracts and then slowly but surely dematerializing those assets and making digital the new norm).  It's the totalitarian tip-toe.   

The BIS predicts there will be at least 9 major CBDCs in circulation by the year 2030; this is likely an understatement of the intended plan.  Globalists have hinted in the past that they prefer total digitization by 2030.

A cashless society would be the end game for economic anonymity and freedom in trade.  Unless alternative physical currencies are widely adopted in protest, CBDCs would make all transactions traceable and easily interrupted by governments and banks.  Imagine a world in which all trade is monitored, all revenues are monitored and transactions can be blocked if they are found to offend the mandates of the system.  Yes, these things do happen today, but with physical cash they can be circumvented. 

Imagine a world where your ability to spend money can be limited to certain retailers, certain services, certain products and chosen regions based on your politics, your social credit score and your background.  The control that comes with CBDCs is immense and allows for complete micromanagement of the population.  The fact that 98% of central banks are already adopting this technology should be one of the biggest news stories of the decade, yet, it goes almost completely ignored.   

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is quite upset, after Vladimir Putin quoted German philosopher Immanuel Kant - who the Russian president called "one of the greatest thinkers of both his time and ours," and said that the philosopher's call "to live by one's own wits" is relevant today.

"A country must live by its own wits… This does not mean that we do not care about the interests of others... but we will never allow Russia’s interests to be neglected. In some countries, among our neighbors, this thesis has been forgotten. Many live by someone else’s wits. This will not bring them any good," Putin told a group of college students in Kaliningrad - where Kant was born in 1724 (previously known as Königsberg, which belonged to the Kingdom of Prussia before becoming part of the Russian empire).

According to Scholz, "Putin doesn’t have the slightest right to quote Kant, yet Putin’s regime remains committed to poaching Kant and his work at almost any cost," he told an audience at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, Die Zeit reports.

According to Scholz, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not in alignment with Kant's teachings - noting that the philosopher spoke of the interference of states in the affairs of other nations. He also defended Ukraine's decision not to enter into peace talks with Moscow, and that 'forced treaties' could not achieve 'perpetual peace' - something Kant spoke of.

Putin has praised Kant over the years - suggesting in 2013 that he should be made an official symbol of the Kaliningrad Region.

Kaliningrad administrators hit back at Scholz' comments - saying in a Tuesday statement that nobody has done more than Russia to "perpetuate the memory of the great philosopher and his teachings," adding "Immanuel Kant died as a subject of the Russian crown. It seems to me that this, more than any words of all possible German politicians, shows the position of the great philosopher regarding Russia."

Kant was born in 1724 and died in 1804, and spent his entire life in Königsberg. During his later years, specifically from 1758 until his death, Königsberg and the entirety of East Prussia temporarily came under Russian control due to the events of the Seven Years' War (1756-1763). Although Prussia regained control over Königsberg after the war, Kant's status during those specific years was technically as a subject of the Russian Empire.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

A government funded LGBT activist group that is active in more than half of Scotland’s schools has called puberty blocking drugs, which effectively sterilise children, “wonderful.”

LGBT Youth Scotland, which is registered as a charity, has also declared that children should have the “autonomy” to decide whether to take puberty blockers without the views of their parents interfering.

The group, which receives almost £1 million per year in taxpayer funding, issued a statement in opposition to a decision to suspend the prescription of the drugs to children by the country’s gender reassignment centre, Sandyford Clinic in Glasgow.

The Telegraph reports that LGBT Youth Scotland’s Trans Rights Youth Commission declared “We would like to be clear about the wonderful impacts that accessing gender affirming care can have,” adding “Gender affirming care is about our right to do what we want with our own body. It is freedom. We deeply urge Sandyford to reconsider this decision.”

Yesterday, @JennyGilruth defended the presence of this rogue charity in Scottish schools. They have repaid her by calling puberty blockers 'wonderful' &, disturbingly, calling for “bodily autonomy” for young children.

They are a safeguarding nightmare. https://t.co/Fadx7V5FUF

— For Women Scotland (@ForWomenScot) April 24, 2024

The comments come in the wake of a major long term study in the UK that concluded that treatment gender-confused children have been offered was built entirely on “shaky foundations” and that there is “no good evidence to support the global clinical practice of prescribing hormones to under-18s to pause puberty or transition to the opposite sex.”

The review also noted possible risks such as infertility and damage to brain function and growth.

The author of the review, retired consultant paediatrician Dr Cass, formerly the president of the Royal College of Paediatrics, called the evidence for life altering drugs “remarkably weak” and warned that transgender activists are the ones “deliberately spread(ing) misinformation.”

Since the review was published, Cass has been subject to abuse and cannot use public transport over fears for her safety.

Gender report author cannot travel on public transport over safety fears

Full story ??https://t.co/FpfxdP3FX4

— Sky News (@SkyNews) April 20, 2024

As we highlighted last week, LGBT Youth Scotland is also encouraging teachers in Scottish schools not to communicate with parents if their children express a desire to ‘transition’ to a different gender.

It was also revealed earlier last week that schools signed up to the LGBT Youth Scotland charter scheme are appointing children as “LGBT champions” and being encouraged to question pupils about their sexual orientation and gender.

Scottish primary schools appoint children as young as FOUR as 'LGBT Champions' https://t.co/tXLhur4fSi

— GB News (@GBNEWS) April 18, 2024

Earlier this week, Scotland’s education secretary Jenny Gilruth, defended the group as helping to create “inclusive” environments, and said that it is up to schools whether they sign up for the charter scheme.

Jenny Gilruth refused to answer whether LGBT Youth Scotland, whose remit is young people between 13 and 25, was working in primary schools with kids as young as 2. But we know it is. So why is the Scottish Government trying to keep it secret? https://t.co/aUhp7RkFGc pic.twitter.com/LcLU6xb0Bq

— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) April 24, 2024

Scottish Conservative deputy leader Meghan Gallacher hit back noting that parents have been “outraged” by “cult like” materials distributed by LGBT Youth Scotland, and pointing to an account of one parent who claimed her daughter had been “radicalised” by trans ideology after her school became involved with the group.

'My daughter was ‘radicalised’ by Scottish LGBT club in school'

Read the full story below ?? https://t.co/y7MG7U2c3n

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) April 19, 2024

The account notes that the child’s decision to begin identifying as male was kept from the parents by the school, but that the girl soon reverted after being sent to a private school in England.

Gallacher urged that “LGBT Youth Scotland’s ideological and dogmatic response to the Cass review sums up why many are extremely concerned about their continued influence on kids in our schools.”

On top of all this, LGBT Youth Scotland was recently embroiled in a scandal with one of its employees under investigation for alleged grooming and child sex abuse:

Scottish Government-funded LGBT charity worker suspended after sex abuse claimshttps://t.co/6de5hDJOy6

— Scottish Express (@ScotExpress) January 28, 2023

1./ A charity that sheltered leading figures in the biggest and most appalling paedophile scandal in Scottish criminal history are now invited into primary schools to ask kids if they are gay or trans. Just another average day in SNP(aedo) Scotland. ??https://t.co/g8j3eL9g6A

— Malcolm Clark (@TwisterFilm) April 18, 2024

We have previously highlighted how radical lobbyist trans activist groups such as Stonewall are injecting LGBTQ+ propaganda into teaching, and even recruiting ‘activist’ teachers to ignore government guidance that has essentially said schools do not have to adopt ‘gender identity ideology’ or recognise ‘social transitions’ among pupils.

These groups masquerading as charities are siphoning taxpayer money to fund their extreme operations, which are directly targeting children.

*  *  *

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

In 2011, Bhutan sponsored a UN resolution that invited governments to prioritize happiness and well-being as a way to measure social and economic development.

And thus, the World Happiness Report was born.

In 2012, the first report released, examining Gallup poll data from 2006–2010 that asked respondents in nearly every country to evaluate their life on a 0–10 scale. From this they extrapolated a single “happiness score” out of 10 to compare how happy countries are.

More than a decade later, the 2024 World Happiness Report continues the mission to quantify, measure, and compare well-being. Its latest findings also include how countries have become happier in the intervening years.

Visual Capitalist's Pallavi Rao visualizes these findings in the chart below, which shows the 20 countries that have seen their happiness scores grow the most since 2010.

Which Countries Have Become Happier Since 2010?

Serbia leads a list of 12 Eastern European nations whose average happiness score has improved more than 20% in the last decade.

In the same time period, the Serbian economy has doubled to $80 billion, and its per capita GDP has nearly doubled to $9,538 in current dollar terms.

Since the first report, Western Europe has on average been happier than Eastern Europe. But as seen with these happiness gains, Eastern Europe is now seeing their happiness levels converge closer to their Western counterparts. In fact, when looking at those under the age of 30, the most recent happiness scores are nearly the same across the continent.

All in all, 20 countries have increased their happiness score by a full point or more since 2010, on the 0–10 scale.

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

In October of 2023 in my article ‘It’s A Trap! The Wave Of Repercussions As The Middle East Fights “The Last War”’ I predicted that a multi-front war was about to develop between Israel and various Muslim nations including Lebanon and Iran. I noted:

“Israel is going to pound Gaza into gravel, there’s no doubt about that. A ground invasion will meet far more resistance than the Israelis seem to expect, but Israel controls the air and Gaza is a fixed target with limited territory. The problem for them is not the Palestinians, but the multiple war fronts that will open up if they do what I think they are about to do (attempted sanitization). Lebanon, Iran and Syria will immediately engage and Israel will not be able to fight them all…”

So far, both Lebanon and Iran have directly engaged Israeli military forces and civilian targets. Syrian militias are also declaring they will once again start attacking US military bases in the region. In my article ‘World War III Is Now Inevitable – Here’s Why It Can’t Be Avoided’ published on April 5th I noted that:

“I warned months ago…that the war in Gaza would expand into a multi-front conflict that would probably include Iran. I also warned that it would be to Israel’s benefit if Iran entered the war because this would eventually force the US to become directly involved. To be sure, Iran has already been engaging in proxy attacks on Israel through Lebanon, but Israel’s attack on the Iranian “embassy” or diplomatic station in Syria basically ensures that Iran will now directly commit to strikes on Israeli targets.”

Iran did indeed commit to a large scale missile and drone based attack on Israel, a situation which has had some curious consequences. Of course, US naval forces aided Israel’s Iron Dome in shooting down the majority of drones and missiles sent by Iran. However, even though there are several videos showing that some cruise missiles hit their targets, the Israelis have been reticent to admit that any damage was done.

I suspect it’s because the cruise missiles struck military targets instead of civilian targets and Israel doesn’t want to release any information on what was hit. Iran’s drones were likely meant to act as decoys for anti-air defenses. They are much cheaper than the missiles used by Israel and the US to shoot them down.

Whether or not these strikes had any real affect on Israeli offensive capabilities we’ll probably never know. What we do know is that Israel’s counter-strike was much smaller than most analysts expected. Does this mean that the tit-for-tat is over and both sides are going hands-off? That would probably be the smart decisions, but no, that’s not what’s happening here.

Israel’s limited response was likely due to a lack of clarity on how much the US government under Biden is willing to participate in the war during an election year. What we will see in the next six months is a steady escalation towards winter, followed by new bombardments with far more extensive destruction than we recently witnessed.

In other words, spring is just the dress rehearsal for what will happen in winter.

Here are the most probable scenarios as 2024 rolls forward…

Air Strikes On Iran

I have little doubt that Israel will commit to extensive aerial strikes on Iran this year or very early in 2025, and we’ll see very quickly if Russian air defense technology sold to the Iranians is effective or ineffective. Iran’s drone program may be useful in helping to even the playing field against Israeli fighter jets, but then again, the technology gap could be extensive.

The Israeli public position will be that their strikes are focused on taking down any existing Iranian nuclear labs. There is no solid evidence that Iran has made much headway in developing nukes (they might have dirty bombs), but the notion of nukes is more than enough in terms of public relations and justification for the war.

Iran Blocks The Strait Of Hormuz

The Strait of Hormuz would be at the top of the list of primary targets for Iran. It is the narrowest point of access to the Persian Gulf and oversees the passage of around 25%-30% of the world’s total oil exports. Blocking it is relatively easy – All Iran has to do is sink a few tankers into the shallow waters or destroy enemy ships passing through, creating a barrier that will make transport of oil impossible.

This would also make naval operations for Israel or the US difficult. Clearing obstructions would take time and expose forces to Iranian artillery which can be fired from up to 450 miles away. Once artillery is locked in on a narrow point or pasage, nothing is going to get through. As we’ve seen in Ukraine, a blanket of artillery fire is essentially unstoppable.

Anti-ship missiles wouldn’t even be necessary and would probably prove less effective, unless they are hypersonic. Iran can also utilize its small fleet of diesel submarines to deploy naval mines in the strait.

Once the Hormuz is disrupted and global oil shipments slow down the US military will join the war if they haven’t done so already.

Israeli Attack Leads To Ground War With Iran/Lebanon

A ground war between Iran and Israel is inevitable if the tit-for-tat continues, and much of it will be fought (at least in the beginning) in Lebanon and perhaps Syria. Iran has a mutual defense pact with both countries and Lebanon is generally a proxy for Iranian defense policy.

Iran will have active troops or proxy forces in all of these regions, not to mention the Houthis in Yemen striking ships in the Red Sea. There are questions in terms of how Iraq will respond to this situation, but there’s not a lot of love between the current government and Israel or the US.

The Iraq government did not initially condemn the attack by Hamas against Israel on October 7th and has voiced support for the Palestinians in Gaza. It’s unlikely that they would willingly allow the use of their territory for projecting an offensive against Iran. The use of Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti territory is possible for invasion IF the US gets involved, and the Persian Gulf would be a primary point of attack. But, both the US and Israel lack enough regional bases needed to project large scale ground forces into Iran (keep in mind that bases in Afghanistan are now gone).

Turkey is another staging ground for US forces but they certainly don’t like Israel, meaningTurkey is going to be off limits. Like Iraq, I think it will be difficult to convince Turkey, a vocal defender of Gaza, to support an invasion force or exploit their border for operations.

What about Pakistan? No, not a chance. It’s important to remember that many of these nations have worked with the US in the past, but they have angry populations to deal with. Support for an attack on Iran could lead to civil unrest at home.

The war would mostly be fought by air and by sea with US and Israel seeking to dominate the Persian Gulf. A lot of the ground fighting will be done in neighboring countries. A direct invasion of Iran would be an exhaustive affair with mountain terrain that must be reached by going through allied territories.

Can it be done? Yes. Could the US and Israel/allies win? Yes, as long as the goal is destruction and not occupation. Would it be costly? Absolutely. Far too costly to be acceptable to the western public these days, and a war that would require extensive military recruitment or a draft which Americans in particular will not tolerate.

Gas Prices Skyrocket

Think gas prices are high now? Just wait until 25% of the world oil exports are locked out of the market for months at a time. We might see double the prices at the pump; perhaps even triple, and that’s not counting the inflationary conditions already ongoing in the west.

This would be a disaster for the economy as energy prices affect EVERYTHING else. Costs on the shelf will climb right along with oil.

Military Draft And Attacks On Liberty Activists

Below the surface, there are many benefits to expanding the war in the Middle East for the globalists. War can be blamed for the inflationary collapse they created. War can be used as an excuse to implement even more aggressive censorship standards in Europe and the US. War can be used to create a military draft which will trigger great unrest in the US and some parts of the EU. War could invariably be used to rationalize martial law. And, it could even be used to stall or disrupt elections.

At bottom, the war in Ukraine, the war in the Middle East and the many other regional wars that will probably erupt in the next few years have a cumulative effect that causes confusion and chaos. All that is needed is a short period of disarray and a lot of economic panic and the public may even forget who created the mess in the first place Liberty activists caught in the middle of these events will take action to defend their freedoms, and I have no doubt we will be accused of “aiding foreign enemies” or working as “agents of the Russians, Iranians, etc.”

Russian Involvement And World War

Given that NATO has seen fit to engage in a proxy war in Ukraine it makes sense that Russia would return the favor and engage in a proxy war in Iran. Don’t be surprised to see a lot of discussion in the media in the coming months about Russian “advisers” in Iran as well as Russian weaponry. Russia already has military bases in Syria and defense agreements with Iran. It would appear that the US and allies are being set on a collision course with Russia that will lead to direct kinetic interactions.

At this stage world war will already be well underway. Russia and the US may never actually try to strike each other’s territory and nuclear exchange makes little sense for anyone (especially the globalists who would lose their financial and surveillance empire in the blink of an eye) but they will be fighting each other in regional wars in multiple spots across the globe. It seems to me that this process has already been set in motion, and once the avalanche starts, it’s very hard to stop.

*  *  *

If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch.  Learn more about it HERE.

Authored by John and Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“It is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That’s the way to soften up a democracy.”

- J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit

“Nothing is real,” observed John Lennon, and that’s especially true of politics.

Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

Take the media circus that is the Donald Trump hush money trial, which panders to the public’s voracious appetite for titillating, soap opera drama, keeping the citizenry distracted, diverted and divided.

This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.

Everything becomes entertainment fodder.

As long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.

“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.

On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.

This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day.

Yet look behind the spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama that is politics today, and you will find there is a method to the madness.

We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.

This is how you persuade a populace to voluntarily march in lockstep with a police state and police themselves (and each other): by ratcheting up the fear-factor, meted out one carefully calibrated crisis at a time, and teaching them to distrust any who diverge from the norm through elaborate propaganda campaigns.

Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest propagandists today is the U.S. government.

Add the government’s inclination to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,” and you have the makings of a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

This “policing of the mind” is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of what will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”

You may not hear much about the government’s role in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven fake news—often with the help of the corporate news media—because the powers-that-be don’t want us skeptical of the government’s message or its corporate accomplices in the mainstream media.

However, when you have social media giants colluding with the government in order to censor so-called disinformation, all the while the mainstream news media, which is supposed to act as a bulwark against government propaganda, has instead become the mouthpiece of the world’s largest corporation (the U.S. government), the Deep State has grown dangerously out-of-control.

This has been in the works for a long time.

Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, in his expansive 1977 Rolling Stone piece “The CIA and the Media,” reported on Operation Mockingbird, a CIA campaign started in the 1950s to plant intelligence reports among reporters at more than 25 major newspapers and wire agencies, who would then regurgitate them for a public oblivious to the fact that they were being fed government propaganda.

In some instances, as Bernstein showed, members of the media also served as extensions of the surveillance state, with reporters actually carrying out assignments for the CIA. Executives with CBS, the New York Times and Time magazine also worked closely with the CIA to vet the news.

If it was happening then, you can bet it’s still happening today, only this collusion has been reclassified, renamed and hidden behind layers of government secrecy, obfuscation and spin.

In its article, “How the American government is trying to control what you think,” the Washington Post points out “Government agencies historically have made a habit of crossing the blurry line between informing the public and propagandizing.”

This is mind-control in its most sinister form.

The end goal of these mind-control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.

The government’s fear-mongering is a key element in its mind-control programming.

It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, global pandemics, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.

A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled whether through propaganda, brainwashing, mind control, or just plain fear-mongering.

Fear not only increases the power of government, but it also divides the people into factions, persuades them to see each other as the enemy and keeps them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.

This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being brainwashed—manipulated—into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward.

This unseen mechanism of society that manipulates us through fear into compliance is what American theorist Edward L. Bernays referred to as “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

It was almost 100 years ago when Bernays wrote his seminal work Propaganda:

“We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

To this invisible government of rulers who operate behind the scenes—the architects of the Deep State—we are mere puppets on a string, to be brainwashed, manipulated and controlled.

All of the distracting, disheartening, disorienting news you are bombarded with daily is being driven by propaganda churned out by one corporate machine (the corporate-controlled government) and fed to the American people by way of yet another corporate machine (the corporate-controlled media).

“For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it,” writes investigative journalist Nick Davies.

So where does that leave us?

Americans should beware of letting others—whether they be television news hosts, political commentators or media corporations—do their thinking for them.

A populace that cannot think for themselves is a populace with its backs to the walls: mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all.

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 time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state.

If not, if we continue to sit back and lose ourselves in political programming, we will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.

Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

EMPs (Electromagnetic Pulse) are a trope that is often used in prepper fiction.

We often think of an EMP attack as the worst-case, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenario that is just around the corner.

There’s little doubt that it would change everything, but what’s the truth?

Here’s what an expert has to say about EMPs

Nobody knows this better than Dr. Arthur T. Bradley. Dr Bradley is a NASA engineer and the leading expert on EMPs in the preparedness community. He’s the author of Handbook to Practical Disaster Preparedness and the must-have Disaster Preparedness for EMPs and Solar Storms. I’ve had the opportunity to speak with him before myself, and you couldn’t ask for a nicer, more down-to-earth person. He really knows what he’s talking about and he shares information without hyperbole. He is the person I trust the most for information in this genre.

In this compelling interview, Brian Duff interviews Dr. Bradley to get the real answers. If you want to separate fact from fiction, watch this video.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

Children who received an original COVID-19 vaccine have little protection against hospitalization just months after vaccination, according to a new study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Children initially have 52 percent protection against hospitalization but that estimated effectiveness plummeted to 19 percent after four months, according to the paper.

Protection against so-called critical illness also dropped sharply, from 57 percent to 25 percent, researchers found.

The researchers include CDC employees and the paper was published in the CDC’s weekly digest on April 18.

The study covered children who received two or more doses of the original Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines from Dec. 19, 2021, through Oct. 29, 2023.

The study involved children aged 5 to 18 who were hospitalized with acute COVID-19 and tested positive for the illness and compared them to a control group of children hospitalized with COVID-19-like symptoms but who tested negative for COVID-19.

Researchers drew data from the Overcoming COVID-19 Network, which includes health care sites in most of the United States, and ended up with 1,551 case patients and 1,797 in the control group.

The study found that “receipt of =2 original monovalent COVID-19 vaccine doses was associated with fewer COVID-19–related hospitalizations in children and adolescents aged 5–18 years; however, protection from original vaccines was not sustained over time,” Laura Zambrano, a CDC epidemiologist, and her co-authors wrote.

It also recorded a similar drop in protection against critical illness, defined as being placed on mechanical ventilation, vasoactive infusions, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or dying.

The researchers asserted that the results highlighted the current CDC guidance that all people aged 6 months and older receive one of the newest COVID-19 vaccines, which were introduced in the fall of 2023 with clinical data from just 50 humans and no efficacy estimates. The CDC only publishes papers in its weekly digest, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, after they’re shaped to “comport with CDC policy.” The papers are not peer-reviewed.

Ms. Zambrano did not respond when asked for data suggesting that the currently available shots provide longer-lasting protection than the original vaccines.

The CDC’s website says, in promoting vaccination, that COVID-19 vaccines are “effective at protecting people from getting seriously ill, being hospitalized, and dying” but the hyperlink that ostensibly supports the statement goes to a page that is not live.

U.S. authorities have been moving COVID-19 vaccines to a once-a-year model, similar to influenza vaccines. The model features updating the formulation of the vaccines on an annual basis, in an acknowledgment that any protection the vaccines give quickly wanes. The formulation is typically updated in the fall.

Just 14 percent of children, and 23 percent of adults, have received one of the newest vaccines as of April 6, according to CDC estimates. The available vaccines are messenger RNA (mRNA) shots from Pfizer and Moderna and an alternative from Novavax.

Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, noted that, according to the new paper, the maximum effectiveness estimates against hospitalization were 61 percent, regardless of how the data were sliced, that more deaths were recorded among the case patients, and the median hospitalization duration was four days for both groups.

“I do not see how a clinician whose concern is treating patients and whose job does not depend on pushing mRNA vaccines would find this a basis for recommending shots—quite the contrary,” Dr. Orient, who was not involved in the research, told The Epoch Times in an email.

“It reeks of conflict of interest.”

Stated limitations of the paper include not assessing post-infection immunity and a lack of sequencing data.

The conflict of interest section runs 688 words and includes some of the authors reporting funding from Pfizer and Moderna or ownership of Pfizer stock.

Smaller is better...at least in the world of building EVs for the Asian market.

And while less scrupulous publications might take this opportunity to make stereotypical jokes about height, we'll do no such thing and instead will simply report that according to the IEA's Global Electric Vehicle Outlook 2024, released Tuesday, China dominated the EV market in 2023.

In fact, it made up 60% of global sales, according to a new report from Reuters. The report forecasts that by 2030, electric vehicles will represent one-third of all cars in China.

The latest IEA report highlights China's increasing dominance in the global electric vehicle market, particularly across Asia's burgeoning economies. China is capitalizing on its extensive industrial capabilities to expand its EV influence, promoting more affordable electric vehicles in nations like Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia, the report says.

The key to China's success has been managing cost, the IEA report notes: "In China, we estimate that more than 60% of electric cars sold in 2023 were already cheaper than their average combustion engine equivalent."

It continued: "However, electric cars remain 10% to 50% more expensive than combustion engine equivalents in Europe and the United States, depending on the country and car segment."

"In 2023, 55% to 95% of the electric car sales across major emerging and developing economies were large models that are unaffordable for the average consumer, hindering mass-market uptake," the IEA report continued, according to Reuters.

"However, smaller and much more affordable models launched in 2022 and 2023 have quickly become bestsellers, especially those by Chinese car makers expanding overseas."

The report emphasizes China's growing edge due to making affordable EVs, which is proving successful across Asia.

European and U.S. automakers, by contrast, target wealthier customers with costlier, luxury EV models.

In Asia, countries like Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia are rapidly adopting EVs, supported by favorable policies and incentives, enhancing the market share of Chinese manufacturers.

In 2023, EV sales soared in these regions despite broader market contractions. Additionally, China faces its challenges, including potential EU tariffs and an oversupply in its EV market. The IEA report suggests that for widespread EV adoption, European and U.S. manufacturers need to focus on lowering costs and improving infrastructure.

You can read the IEA's full report here. 

Via The College Fix,

A new study out of UCLA says same-sex couples are at greater “risk of exposure to the adverse effects of climate change” than straight couples.

These effects include “wildfires, floods, smoke-filled skies, and drought,” according to a report from KQED.

Same-sex couples disproportionately live in coastal regions and cities, which are more vulnerable to such disasters. They’re also more likely “to live in areas with poor infrastructure, worse-built environments.”

Washington DC, which rates high for “climate risks” such as heat waves, floods, and “dangerously strong winds,” has the greatest proportion of gay couples in the U.S.

San Francisco ranks second, and also faces a high climate change risk. According to KQED report, the city’s Leather & LGBTQ Cultural District flooded 22 years ago, “swamping” the entire area.

The closest supermarket, Rainbow Grocery, also got flooded.

Ari Shaw, director of International Programs at UCLA’s School of Law’s Williams Institute who specializes in “international human rights, LGBTI politics, and U.S. foreign policy,” noted the study “cuts against the narrative” that LGBT individuals “have access to all the resources that they need.”

From the story:

Shaw said his team considered same-sex couples because the U.S. Census gathers information on cohabitating same-sex households but does not broadly collect sexual orientation or gender data.

“This study helps to shine a light on what is likely a much larger and more complicated picture,” he said. “Our findings probably understate the true impact that climate change is having on LGBTQ people.”

The new research moves the needle in helping the nation understand who is at risk of climate disasters, UC Irvine sociology professor Michael Méndez said. He previously studied how queer communities are often left out of disaster planning.

“The needle is moving slowly,” Méndez said. “These disasters are not happening in isolation. If an individual is feeling discrimination, or a lack of safety in their home and a disaster happens, they can feel even more vulnerable.”

But what Méndez said the study doesn’t reveal is who the same-sex couples are in terms of [race], income and their positions in society.

Among several recommendations, Shaw and study co-author Lindsay Mahowald say climate disaster relief should be “administered without discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression,” and that future surveys like the U.S. Census ought to include “measures of sexual orientation and gender identity.”

A 33-year old Iranian activist and rapper who has recently been involved in anti-government demonstrations has been handed a shockingly draconian sentence by an Iranian court. Toomaj Salehi was first arrested in Oct. 2022 for publicly backing the so-called 'anti-hijab' protests which swept the ultra-conservative Islamic country. But this week...

"Branch 1 of Isfahan Revolutionary Court... sentenced Salehi to death on the charge of corruption on Earth," his lawyer quoted the court's ruling as saying. The state laid out its case focused on a highly ambiguous charge of spreading "propaganda".

Salehi's lawyer further described that the court "in an unprecedented move, emphasised its independence and did not implement the Supreme Court's ruling" - while noting that "we will certainly appeal against the sentence."

The charges further centered on the Revolutionary Court accusing him of "assistance in sedition, assembly and collusion, propaganda against the system and calling for riots."

In September of 2022, Iran's Islamic 'morality police' arrested 22-year old Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini for "improper hijab" as she entered a subway station. Activists say she had been beaten and later died in custody, while Iranian authorities claim she suffered a natural health episode (state media and officials described it as a heart attack), fainted and hit her head on the ground.

Her death sparked months of protests across major cities featuring anti-government slogans and clashes with police. Some international reports say that in total over 500 demonstrators died, while reports said dozens of police and security service personnel were killed and wounded.

Iranian authorities at the time attempted to tie the raging domestic unrest to an externally supported destabilization campaign by Tehran's enemies Israel and the United States.

As for the rapper and his immense popularity and influence in Iran, Sky News has observed that "Salehi, who has 2.3 million followers on Instagram, had posted videos after Amini's death talking about 'revolution' and resistance." According more of his background:

His songs also highlight the widening gap between ordinary Iranians and the country’s leadership, accusing authorities of “suffocating” the people without regard for their well-being.

His angry lyrics resonate among Iranians who are increasingly discontent and alienated by Iran’s clerical establishment -- and by the politicians who fail to keep their promises of change.

Salehi has shared his songs on his Instagram and Twitter accounts. But those accounts became inaccessible while he was in custody.

An sample of his music:

Iran (alongside Saudi Arabia and Egypt) leads the Middle East in number of executions each year. In 2023 alone, Iran hanged at least 834 people, which was an 8-year high. This is partly because the Islamic Republic has recently launched a new 'war on drugs' crackdown, but also amid geopolitical tensions it has executed suspected spies in greater numbers.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Supreme Court on April 23 directed the U.S. Department of Justice to reply to a man convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol.

Justices said the department’s response to Russell Alford is due May 23.

Mr. Alford was convicted by a jury of four misdemeanor counts but is challenging two of the charges, arguing that they don’t apply to his conduct.

The charges should not have been brought because the laws on which they’re based bar disorderly and disruptive conduct in a Capitol building and in a restricted building, but Mr. Alford merely entered the Capitol and stood silently against a wall before exiting, the Supreme Court was told in a filing from Mr. Alford’s lawyers.

U.S. District Judge Tonya Chutkan, an appointee of President Barack Obama, originally rejected Mr. Alford’s request to dismiss the counts, finding that his “mere presence inside the Capitol disturbed the public peace or undermined public safety.”

A federal appeals court, after reviewing the rejection, upheld it in January. While Mr. Alford was “neither violent nor destructive ... a jury could rationally find that his unauthorized presence in the Capitol as part of an unruly mob contributed to the disruption of the Congress’s electoral certification and jeopardized public safety,” the ruling stated.

“The court should grant review because this case presents an important question of federal statutory interpretation,” Mr. Alford’s lawyers wrote to the Supreme Court, describing the appeals court ruling as “establish[ing] a slippery and counter-textual standard for criminalizing conduct in settings for political activity.”

One of the laws, 18 U.S.C. § 1752(a)(2), bars people from “knowingly, and with intent to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of government business or official functions, engages in disorderly or disruptive conduct in, or within such proximity to, any restricted building or grounds when, or so that, such conduct, in fact, impedes or disrupts the orderly conduct of government business or official functions.”

The other, 40 U.S.C. § 5104(e)(2)(D), makes it a crime to “utter loud, threatening, or abusive language, or engage in disorderly or disruptive conduct, at any place in the grounds or in any of the Capitol Buildings with the intent to impede, disrupt, or disturb the orderly conduct of a session of Congress or either house of Congress, or the orderly conduct in that building of a hearing before, or any deliberations of, a committee of Congress or either house of Congress.”

The lower court rulings were wrong in part because they focused on the effects of Mr. Alford’s conduct, not the nature of the conduct, according to the writ to justices.

That focus “collapses the conduct element into the harm element by giving the adjectives no apparent force,” they said. They argued later that merely being present “is not disorderly conduct unless the presence is in defiance of an order to disperse.”

If the court grants the petition, it would review the case and decide if the rulings were appropriate.

The Department of Justice’s Solicitor General, Elizabeth Prelogar, told the court on April 12 that the government was waiving its right to file a response to the filing, “unless requested to do so by the court.” The petition was distributed to justices on April 18 for their scheduled May 9 conference. Then, on Tuesday, justices directed the Department of Justice to file a response to Mr. Alford.

Lawyers for Mr. Alford and the government did not respond to requests for comment.

If justices take up the petition and rule in favor of Mr. Alford, a number of other Jan. 6 defendants and convicts could see charges thrown out.

Obstruction Charge

The court already agreed to review another charge brought against many Jan. 6 defendants.

Justices sat for oral arguments on April 16 concerning obstruction of an official proceeding, a charge brought against former police officer Joseph Fischer after he entered the Capitol on Jan. 6.

One of Mr. Fischer’s attorneys said the charge should not have been brought because the law was only intended to be used in cases of evidence tampering.

Ms. Prelogar told justices that the charge was proper because it was “not limited to evidence impairment.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch, appointed by former President Donald Trump, wondered whether the government would bring the charge against people who heckled the court.

“Would a sit-in that disrupts a trial or access to a federal courthouse qualify? Would a heckler in today’s audience qualify, or at the State of the Union address? Would pulling a fire alarm before a vote qualify for 20 years in federal prison?” he asked.

Another justice later questioned if protesters blocking access to a trial would face the charge, noting that protests have taken place in the past at the Supreme Court but the government did not charge the protesters under the law.

Ms. Prelogar said the law might apply in such cases, if there was proof of “corrupt intent.”

Justices are due to hand down a decision in the case at some point in the future.

Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

The UniParty's Day Of Infamy, Part 1

The clusterf*ck in the US House of Representatives this past weekend is surely the final straw. The dreadful grip of the UniParty on national security policy has finally produced sheer madness in a single package. To wit:

• $95 billion of foreign aid boondoggles that do not benefit America’s homeland security in the slightest.

• An extension of section 702 of FISA that wantonly expands an already egregious affront to the Fourth Amendment.

• The illegal transfer of billions of sovereign assets stolen from Russia to its enemies in Kiev.

• A national security ban on 15-second TikTok videos about dances, pranks, pets and poppycock viewed overwhelmingly by under 30-year-old Americans whose viewing habits are of zero value to the Chicoms in Beijing.

It is bad enough that there is not an iota of informed consideration behind any of this. But what is really alarming is that every single House Democrat (210) voted in favor of $61 billion for the Ukrainian Demolition Derby. This included a 97-0 vote among so-called Dem “progressives”, who also voted 96-0 in favor of aid to Taiwan—the purpose of which is surely not a more pacific neighborhood on the Pacific Rim.

Once upon a time, the Democrats were the party of the peace candidates. No more, which surely explains their fury at RFK, who is.

At the same time, only fourteen Republicans voted against all four components of this wholesale assault on constitutional liberty and fiscal rectitude. As we have previously documented, America is now careening on fiscal automatic pilot toward a $140 trillion 4/23/24, 12:40 PM The UniParty’s Day of Infamy, Part 1 https://davidstockman.substack.com/p/the-unipartys-day-of-infamy-part 2/11 public debt by mid-century, but the overwhelming share of House Republicans choose to hammer the US economy with even more debt to fund pointless foreign aid boondoggles, while shackling private citizens and entrepreneurs with government intrusions based on the paranoid lies of the national security state.

In this context it was the predictable histrionics of the bevy of neocon warmongers on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal that brought home the full extent of the challenge. Namely, that the mainstream narrative in the Imperial City and among the nation’s elite media is so utterly wrong-headed and morally obtuse that only the complete abandonment of the core framework of contemporary national security policy can save the day.

Accordingly, the “domino” theory needs be repudiated once and for all. Likewise, the Washington-Jefferson doctrine of “no entangling alliances” needs be revived in place of the vestigial cold war notion that informs Washington’s current destructive and bankrupting policies. We are referring to the wholly obsolete notion that America’s homeland security depends upon a worldwide system of military alliances, bases and kinetic power projection capabilities that enable Washington to function as the great Global Hegemon, who is ready, willing and able to intervene in virtually any spate that erupts among the 8 billion peoples of the planet.

The fourteen GOP stalwarts listed below essentially said, no dice to these tired, dangerous, costly and risible formulations: Neither Russia nor China pose even a remote military threat to the American homeland, while proxy wars and economic sanctions against “adversaries” demonized by the Deep State actually undermine domestic liberty and prosperity for no justifiable reason of homeland security at all.

With respect to the latter, for instance, there is no real reason for the sweeping multihundred billion cost to the American economy of sanctions and trade restrictions on China, Iran or Russia. And, similarly, there are no security threats in the world today that even remotely justify the national security state’s intrusion into the rights and privacies of American citizens.

Still, the pseudo-intellectuals at the WSJ trotted out Hitler, Tojo and the “isolationist” epithet as if these references prove anything at all, when, in fact, none have any real relevance to the world of today. There are simply no industrial state tyrants on the march anywhere on the global horizon that resemble even the apparent facts of the 1930s, let alone the actual historical realities of the matter.

The fact is, Stalin and Hitler were sui generis. They were one-time accidents of history arising from the folly of Versailles and the punitive peace of the victors enabled by Woodrow Wilson’s pointless intervention in a European war that would have otherwise ended in stalemate and the mutual exhaustion and bankruptcy of all the combatants.

That is to say, the DNA of the world’s nations is not infected with incipient tendencies toward totalitarianism and aggression. Maintaining the global peace and pacific commerce of the nations does not depend upon an alliance of virtuous interventionists or a Global Hegemon, prepared to enforce its writ at the slightest breakout of local and regional quarrels and conflicts.

At the end of the day, laissez faire is the path to prosperity in both economics and international affairs. Military alliances and Hegemons everywhere and always fall captive to the arms merchants they foster.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the honor roll from last weekend’s rampage of folly by the UniParty consists of a mere 14 House Republicans, who were awarded the scarlet “I” by the war-happy globalists at the Wall Street Journal:

Fourteen Republicans voted against all four bills on the House floor, including the one that would force a sale of TikTok from Chinese ownership. Here’s the dishonor roll in alphabetical order: Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Lauren Boebert (Colo.), Andrew Clyde (Ga.), Elijah Crane (Ariz.), Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Bob Good (Va.), Paul Gosar (Ariz.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), Andy Harris (Md.), Thomas Massie (Ky.), Troy Nehls (Texas), Ralph Norman (S.C.), Matt Rosendale (Mont.), Chip Roy (Texas).

The unavoidable meaning of the votes is that these Members don’t believe the U.S. should support allies threatened by authoritarians on the march. Like Republicans in the 1930s who slept while Hitler and Tojo advanced, these Republicans apparently think America can sit out these fights in splendid isolation. But history suggests that if they prevail, American sons and daughters would eventually have to fight. Better to help allies who want to help themselves.

The isolationist caucus lost this round, but this GOP tendency is dangerous. Another 17 Members voted for arms for Israel but not for Taiwan and Ukraine. Do they want to encourage a Chinese invasion? Perhaps if Florida is attacked, they’ll awaken to the reality of the world’s growing dangers.

No, Florida is not about to be attacked by Putin, Xi or the Ayatollahs. This is just scary bedtime story stuff that no informed adult should accord any credibility whatsoever.

Needless to say, the GOP most rabid neocon and warmonger, Senator Lindsay Graham, is neither informed nor, apparently, even of adult mind.

His incoherent, bloodthirsty rant actually made the WSJ editorialists sound thoughtful by comparison.

“Here’s what I will tell you. If you give Putin Ukraine, he will not stop,” Graham said during an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” “This is not about containing NATO and if you give him Ukraine, there goes Taiwan because China’s watching to see what we do.”

“I want to know what they’re talking about over there before they kill us here. And if you shut this thing down, you’ve turned the war into a crime,” Graham said. “We’re not fighting our crime, we’re finding a bunch of people who would kill all of us if they could get here. So, when you intercept information from a foreigner overseas talking about America, I want to know what they’re talking about.”

The Ukranian military, with our help, has killed about 50 percent of the combat power of the Russians,” Graham said Sunday. “This is the year [of] more. They’re going to have more weapons, but we also want them to have new weapons.”

Nor was the House GOP to be outdone by Senator Graham’s bellicose fulminations. Recently resigned Rep.  Ken Buck let it be known that if you actually understand that America’s homeland security is in no way enhanced by Washington’s misguided proxy war on Russia, as does Rep. Marjorie Greene, why then you surely are a traitor in the pay of Vlad Putin himself:

“Well, Moscow Marjorie has reached a new low,” Buck said of his former colleague.

“She is just mouthing the Russian propaganda and really hurting American foreign policy in the process. She’s acting completely irresponsibly. And again, when history looks at this period of time, Russia invaded Ukraine, Ukraine is fighting for its freedom, and we should be with the freedom fighters in this war.”

Of course, the insanity of $200 billion of NATO funds already wasted; hundreds of thousands dead; millions fleeing the country to avoid the mayhem of war and the cruelty of being drafted as cannon fodder to serve the perverted pleasure of Washington’s armchair warriors; and the civilian infrastructure of one of Europe’s largest countries in shambles—all have nothing whatsoever to do with “freedom fighters”.

The undeniable fact is that there is nothing at stake worth fighting for in Ukraine that even remotely resembles democratic virtue. It has been a cesspool of egregious corruption virtually since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1991, and recently even required a visit from the head of the CIA to tell Zelensky and his fellow thieves to “knock it off” on the corruption front.

To the contrary, as the venerable anti-war writer William Astore put it, the real purpose of Ukrainian installment of the Forever Wars is the enrichment of the merchants of death who have captured the levers of power in Washington:

Of course, this is yet another triumph for the MICIMATT: the military-industrialcongressional-intelligence-media-academe-think-tank complex. Its power and greed are almost irresistible. Add that to AIPAC, threat inflation, and fear-mongering and perhaps it is irresistible until the U.S. empire final collapses under the weight of its own folly.

Yet all of the mindless bellicosity of the Washington interventionists is not simply ludicrous nonsense from an empirical viewpoint. More importantly, the current neocon/interventionist Washington consensus blatantly repudiates the sage advice of both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson from more than 220 years ago. Together they articulated a theory of foreign policy that was not “isolationist” at all, but realist and evidence-based.

That is, these wise Founders held that foreign policy should be based on the facts and circumstances of national interest at any given point in time, and that when the facts change and alliances become obsolete, they should be jettisoned.

From George Washington’s Farewell Address: “The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence, she must be engaged in frequent controversies the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities… it is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world…”

As further amplified by Jefferson in his 1801 inaugural address, this realist doctrine viewed external military alliances to be arrangements of convenience and should be freely abandoned or reversed as indicated by changing needs of the national interest. Citing Washington’s Farewell Address as his inspiration, Jefferson described the doctrine as-

“peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations—entangling alliances with none.”

That famous phrase is precisely the policy cornerstone that fits today’s realities. America’s homeland security doesn’t require militarized alliances or the wherewithal to maraud militarily around the globe because there are no military-industrial-technological powers that can threaten its security.

Accordingly, institutions like NATO may well have served the national interest 70 years ago with respect to Stalinist Russia and its military capacities and intentions toward its erstwhile but estranged wartime allies in the West. But even there the open archives from both sides of the cold war cast considerable doubt on whether Stalin and world communism were actually on the march or had either the intention or military capability to enslave western Europe, to say nothing of the American homeland on the far side of the Atlantic and Pacific Moats.

As it happened, the Henry Wallace peaceful accommodationist wing of the Roosevelt coalition may have been closer to the truth than the Wall Street based coteries of Henry Stimson, James Forrestal, Dean Acheson and the abominable Dulles Bothers, who actually formulated the nation’s cold war policies during that era.

But that question was resolved once and for all in 1991 when the Soviet Union disappeared into the dustbin of history, and not because of NATO or even Reagan’s Star Wars threat. The real reason was that centralized state communism doesn’t work: Neither for the people it exploits and oppresses, nor for the ruling elites and state-empowered comrades who may have delusions of grandeur about the sustainability of their own rule, to saying nothing of extending it to peoples beyond their borders.

Yet even as the true lesson of Soviet Communism’s collapse marched across the pages of history after 1991, the entrenched military-industrial-foreign policy apparatus was not about to relinquish its power, budgets and perks, just as Eisenhower had warned in another of America’s great Farewell Addresses in 1961. In fact, NATO morphed into something far more obnoxious than a cancellable alliance that had accomplished its mission and was slated for early retirement under the Washington-Jefferson doctrine.

And well it should have been because after 1991, there was no there, there. The Russian rump of the Soviet Union even today has a GDP of merely $2.2 trillion compared to the $28 trillion GDP of the USA and $46 trillion for all 32 NATO countries combined. And Russia has a military budget of barely 6% of NATO’s $1.25 trillion of combined defense expenditures and but one aircraft carrier.

Furthermore, the latter is a 20th century relic that has been in drydock repair since 2017 and is outfitted with neither an armada of escort ships and warplanes or even a crew. The Russian military, therefore, has no way to land on the shores of New Jersey or even enter the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, for that matter. Nor is Putin stupid enough to invade Poland, which offers nothing but centuries of animosity to all things Russian.

Then again, if Poland really believed all the anti-Putin rhetoric spouted by its rightwing government, it would be spending a lot more on defense in 2024 than $30 billion and 3.1% of GDP; nor would it be offering to house NATO nuclear weapons next door to the Russian Bear, as its president did this week.

“If our allies decide to deploy nuclear arms on our territory as part of nuclear sharing, to reinforce NATO’s eastern flank, we are ready to do so,” Polish President Andrzej Duda said in an interview published today by the Fakt newspaper.

In truth, Duda’s offer is just another case of client state politics run amuck. Rid the scene of Washington’s entangling alliance with the relic of NATO, and the voters of Poland would be looking for a new government. And they would do so even as they were sending it leaders to Moscow to seek mutual accommodation from the natural trade and commercial relationships that are inherent in its geography.

The fact is, 33-years after the demise of the Soviet Union NATO is not simply a pointless obsolete relic. It has morphed into the greatest armaments marketing and sales organization in the history of mankind. The only benefit that came from betraying Bush the Elder’s promise to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand a “single inch” to the east has accrued to the defense contractors, especially the US based giants.

As RFK has cogently pointed out, when the NATO alliance mushroomed from 16 nations to now 32 countries, every one of the new members had to conform their weapons systems and munitions to NATO standards. Not suprisingly, Lockheed, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics and United Technologies prospered mightily–even as they effectively roamed the halls of Congress spreading the lies embedded in the above Wall Street Journal rendition of dominoes and the essentiality of Washington’s obsolete global alliances.

Yet two of the four components of Saturday’s abomination were directed against China, predicated on the same illusion that led to the vast threat-inflation with respect to the Soviet Union. To wit, Chinese Communism, even in the thinly veiled guise of “red capitalism”, is no more viable or sustainable than the Soviet version.

At the end of the day, if you don’t have free markets, constitutionally protected property and personal rights of expression and assembly and honest bankruptcy courts to dispose of failed economic bets, you do not have a sustainable economy or permanently rising prosperity. Period.

To the contrary, China is a vast house of economic cards and statist malignancies propped up by $50 trillion of unpayable debt incurred in barely two decades. Accordingly, it is utterly dependent upon the hard currency earnings from $3.5 trillion of annual exports, mainly to the West, to keep its vast excess of infrastructure and housing investment from capsizing the whole Rube Goldberg Contraption. In the event of war, this export lifeline would soon find its way to Davy Jones’ Locker, along with China’s entire jerry-built economy.

So, it’s not going to be invading anyone, probably not even Taiwan. Chairman Xi and his team of rulers may love to quote Mao and color themselves red ideologically, but they also know that what stands between them and an uprising of China’s oppressed 1.5 billion inhabitants is a consistent and reasonably rising level of internal prosperity.

That rules out a Chinese Armada of black ships heading for the coast of California. Indeed, even the Navy they have today consists of two repurposed Soviet Era aircraft carriers and one new build of far less formidable and lethal capacity than Washington current Gerald Ford class carriers. And its other 400 Navy vessels consists largely of coastal patrol vessels that likely would not make it to the shores of California in one piece.

In terms of lethal firepower, in fact, the US Navy has 4.6 million tons of displacement, averaging 15,000 tons per ship. By contrast, China’s Navy has but 2.0 million tons of displacement, averaging only 5,000 tons per boat. That is to say, the Chinese Navy is totally visible, assessable and trackable, and is not remotely of the size and lethality that would make an invasion of America remotely plausible.

Finally, the main military capacity that is needed for homeland security in the present world, of course, is America’s triad strategic deterrent including 3,800 nuclear warheads. At any moment in time these are scrambled and dispersed -

• along the ocean bottoms among 16 Ohio class subs each bearing 80 independently targetable warheads.

• aloft in the global airspace on a fleet of 66 B-2 and B-52 heavy bombers  

• buried deep in hardened underground silos bearing more than 1,000 ICBM warheads.

This awesome retaliatory force cannot possibly be detected or 100% neutralized by a would-be nuclear blackmailer.

As it happens, the triad deterrent costs about $65 billion per year according to a recent CBO analysis, and full protection of the US shorelines and airspace behind the great ocean moats could bring a total Fortress America model of homeland defense to $400 billion per annum, at most.

The other $500 billion in today’s 050 function represents the ill-gotten budgetary conquests of the military-industrial-intelligence complex, and all the think tanks, NGOs and beltway bandits who make a living getting paid by DOD, State, AID, NED etc. to manufacturing inflated threats and scary stories about sinister foreigners. Such malefic malarky was on full display in the US House last weekend. Accordingly, there is only one cure. A powerful force from outside the beltway needs to splinter the UniParty into a thousand pieces.

That’s the real mission of Robert F Kennedy’s Jr. independent candidacy for President, as we will further amplify in Part 2.

Quiet macro day with Durable Goods Orders looking like a beat - but only because of sizable downward revisions - as orders and shipments are actually down on a YoY basis.

Source: Bloomberg

But stocks were messy with an opening bid immediately squelched and post-EU-close ramp faded into the US close. Small Caps were the day's laggard as Nasdaq outperformed while The Dow and S&P desperately tried to get green...

Nasdaq and The Dow got back above their 100DMAs while Small Caps cannot hold above theirs...

Goldman's Chris Hussey pointed out that, despite an uptick in rates today (yields on 10-year Treasuries are up 6bp to 4.66%), yield sensitive sectors like Tech, Utilities, and Real Estate are outperforming.

On the flip side, Industrials are lagging on the back of particularly weak earnings in Transports.

Source: Bloomberg

And stepping even further back, 9 of the 10 worst-performing stocks in the S&P 500 today reported results after the close yesterday, or before the open this morning -- highlighting how earnings are driving stocks amidst a macro vacuum (at least for today).

Volumes were muted today once again, according to Goldman's trading desk, as they noted once again that hedge funds were slightly better to buy (buying Indust., Info Tech, Disc.), Long-Onlys slight for sale (selling Mats, Disc.,).

TSLA had a big day - its best since Jan 2022 - after earnings last night (that reaffirmed its strategy wasn't too crazy)...

The basket of MAG7 stocks ended unchanged after a strong open thanks to TSLA's gains as traders await META's earnings after the bell...

Source: Bloomberg

Treasury yields were higher across the board today (with the long-end underperforming) as the following two-day chart shows, the 10Y & 30Y yields are back above pre-PMI levels from yesterday while 2Y is at the lows from yesterday...

Source: Bloomberg

The yield curve (2s30s) steepened dramatically once again, now up 14bps in two days, back to one-month highs (still inverted)...

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar ended modestly higher on the day, pulling back during the US session from overnight gains...

Source: Bloomberg

Yen was slammed (again) as traders continue to call The BoJ's interventionist bluff...

Source: Bloomberg

...as JPY is now well below the last intervention threshold (back at its lowest in 34 years)...

Source: Bloomberg

Bitcoin took another kicking today, tumbling back to a $63,000 handle...

Source: Bloomberg

...once again driven by extreme selling pressure from the perpetual futures market...

Amid all the excitement today, gold ended unchanged and traded in a narrow range...

Source: Bloomberg

Crude prices slipped back from yesterday's surge despite a big crude draw...

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, Goldman's Dominic Wilson and Kamkshya Trivedi highlight how geopolitical tensions and stickier than expected US inflation prints have transitioned markets to trading more of a 'policy shock' than a 'growth upgrade'...

...a development that is making directional trades trickie.

Earlier today we reported that for at least 40% of Americans - up from 27% just two years ago - the American Dream is dead and buried and has been replaced with the American nightmare: renting for life.

And here's why: according to a new survey from Clever Real Estate, a St. Louis-based real estate company, thanks to the galloping housing inflation, the median-priced home in the U.S. now costs $332,494, with NAR and Census Bureau data reporting that the median Existing and New Home sale price has risen to $393,500 and $430,700...

... meaning prospective buyers need an annual income of at least $119,769 to afford it with a 10% down payment.

That's about $45,000 more than the typical household earns annually ($74,755). Even with a 20% down payment, home buyers would need to earn at least $98,202, still well above the typical salary.

The last year that the median buyer put down 20% was 1989, according to data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR). Today, the median buyer puts down just 15% of a home's purchase price.

The median U.S. income earner ($74,755) with 10% down could only afford a home that costs $207,529 — 38% less than the current median-priced home.

A median-income family aiming to afford a median-priced home would need a hefty 45% down payment, or mortgage rates would need to drop from the current rate of 7.2% to 4% to make it work.

Even with a savings rate of $1,000 each month, it would take a household five and a half years to amass the $66,500 needed for a 20% down payment on a home priced at the median of $332,494.

As it stands, 61% of Americans find themselves priced out of the market even with a 20% down payment.

The median home is affordable for median earners in just four states (West Virginia, Ohio, Iowa, and Indiana)...

... and only six of the 50 largest metro areas:

1. Pittsburgh, PA
2. Cleveland, OH
3. St. Louis, MO
4. Memphis, TN
5. Indianapolis, IN
6. Birmingham, AL

Unsurprisingly, Los Angeles is the least affordable city, where buyers need an income of a whopping $249,471 to comfortably afford a median-priced home — nearly three times the actual median income of $87,743.

Read the full report at: http://www.listwithclever.com/research/how-much-house-can-i-afford-2024

Former US Congressman Ron Paul has gone completely ham on Speaker Mike Johnson, first - writing in a recent Op-Ed that Johnson has "betrayed liberty and the Constitution" after reauthorizing FISA surveillance but casting the deciding vote that tanked an amendment to require a warrant.

Section 702 authorizes warrantless surveillance of foreign citizens. When the FISA Act was passed, surveillance state boosters promised that 702 warrantless surveillances would never be used against American citizens. However, intelligence agencies have used a loophole in 702, allowing them to subject to warrantless surveillance any American who communicated with a non-US citizen who was a 702 target.

...

Despite the fearmongering by Mike Pompeo and others, as well as the opposition of both President Biden and Speaker Johnson, the amendment failed to pass by only one vote. The amendment would have passed had Speaker Johnson not cast a rare floor vote (speakers usually do not vote on legislation) against the amendment. -Ron Paul

Paul went further this week - calling Johnson out for being a complete sellout and acting, once again, against the interests of Americans.

"Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is reported to have bragged to his colleagues about how easily Speaker Johnson gave Democrats everything they wanted and asked for nothing in return," Paul noted, adding that Johnson "reached across the aisle, stiffed the Republican majority that elected him speaker, and pushed through a massive gift to the warfare corporate welfare state." in passing a massive aid package for Ukraine and Israel.

"After the House voted to send another $60 billion to notoriously corrupt Ukraine, members waved Ukrainian flags on the House floor and chanted, ‘Ukraine! Ukraine!’ While I find it distasteful and disgusting, in some ways, it seemed fitting."

Watch:

Ron Paul Trashes Speaker Mike Johnson in Stunning New Monologue

“Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is reported to have bragged to his colleagues about how easily Speaker Johnson gave Democrats everything they wanted and asked for nothing in return.”

“In the worst example of… pic.twitter.com/aVSTxeTNfs

— The Vigilant Fox ?? (@VigilantFox) April 23, 2024

Here's what Tucker Carlson had to say recently about Johnson...

Tucker Carlson: "Here's the illusion we fall for time and again. We imagine that evil comes like fully advertised as such, like evil people look like Anton Lavey...Evil is an independent force that exists outside of people, that acts upon people...What vessel do they choose? The… pic.twitter.com/ugF3bMgxcx

— Camus (@newstart_2024) April 21, 2024