Friday, July 31, 2020
Monday, July 27, 2020
On Florida's SURGING Death Toll...
What do all these news accounts have in common?
“Florida Sets Yet Another Coronavirus Record: 173 Deaths In A Day”
“A record 173 Floridians died from the virus Thursday, an average of more than one every eight minutes.”
“The 134 new confirmed deaths is the second-largest increase on record, coming five days after the largest one-day jump of 156 last week.”
“COVID-19 has ravaged Florida, with more than 237,000 people testing positive and 2,013 dying from the virus in July alone.”
So what characteristic do all of the reports share? They are all false.
It is not true that 173 people died from COVID-19 “in a day” in Florida. Nor did 134, or 156 on previous days.
It is also untrue than 2,013 had died in July when that story was published.
All of these scary headlines are based on the number of deaths reported by the state on any given day. This is not the same as the number of deaths that occurred on those days.
The difference might seem trivial. But it’s crucial because the press is using the timing of Florida’s death reports to whip up a frenzy about COVID-19 running riot in the state.
Take a look at the chart below. The blue bars are the number of deaths reported in four days last week. Notice the sharp uphill climb? That’s the story the press has been telling.
But those deaths didn’t occur on those days. In fact, the vast majority of them occurred days, or even weeks, before. The actual date of these deaths is indicated by the orange bars.
In fact, as of Sunday, the biggest one-day death toll so far in the state occurred back on July 16, when 114 are known to have died. And when the press was claiming that 2,013 had died in July, the actual number of known deaths was 1,847.
As we noted in this space last week, this distortion is being repeated by the media in state after state that has seen a recent spike in coronavirus cases. While deaths attributed to coronavirus have increased, the “surge” is a fiction because many of those deaths happened earlier.
But almost no news outlet explains this difference clearly to readers. The Miami Herald is one exception.
In a recent story, it noted — after shouting about hitting a new record for daily deaths — that “the 173 deaths …. does not necessarily mean that every person died in the past 24 hours. In Florida, the deaths announced on a given day could be from several days earlier because the state information does not include the exact date of death.”
But even the Herald didn’t have to leave readers guessing as to how many of those 173 died in the previous 24 hours. Florida’s COVID-19 tracking site had it right on the main page. Of the 173 reported, the number of people who actually died that day was … 19.
This is only one of the problems with the death counts being shouted from the media rooftops.
Here again, Florida serves as a model of how to sow fear.
First there’s the missing context.
While 173 deaths reported in a single day sounds like a lot, it pales in comparison to the peak reached in New York and New Jersey earlier this spring.
New York’s reported deaths topped 1,000 on more than one day in April. That’s in a state with 9% fewer people than Florida.
New Jersey’s peak was 523 on April 20. That’s three times the current “record” set in Florida — in a state that has 59% fewer residents.
Another way to look at it is that the death rate in Florida at the moment is 273 per million residents. In New York, it’s 1,680 and in New Jersey it’s 1,785.
In other words, the current situation in Florida is nothing at all like what happened in the northeast in the spring. Yet that critical information never gets conveyed by the press.
Another bit of missing context is where these deaths are occurring.
That’s not to say these deaths are less important. But it does provide a needed backdrop for everyone else in the state. Their risk is tiny by comparison.
This finding also shows that what’s needed most is to protect at-risk populations, something that the generalized lockdowns failed to do. Pretending that coronavirus “doesn’t discriminate” is a dangerous fiction.
Then there’s the fact that Florida’s death count is almost certainly inflated because the state is counting people who died with the virus, not just those who died because of it.
A report by CBS-12 in West Palm Beach, for example, found that the state has counted as coronavirus deaths:A 60-year-old man who died from a gunshot wound to the head.Out of 581 deaths attributed to coronavirus, “The I-Team found eight cases in which a person was counted as a COVID death, but did not have COVID listed as a contributing cause of death.”
A 90-year-old man who fell and died from complications of a hip fracture.
A 77-year-old woman who died of Parkinson’s disease.
What’s more, only 169 deaths were listed as due to coronavirus without any other contributing factors.
(As a side note, why is a local TV news team digging into the numbers, while the national media is content to repeat whatever the government tells them?)
As we’ve said before, this sort of overcounting is going on nationwide, largely because the CDC has told states to report deaths this way.
The question that deserves to be answered is why the mainstream press seems so willing and eager to whip up fear, rather than provide all the relevant facts, in context, so the public can make its own informed decisions about how to respond to this disease.
Sunday, July 26, 2020
Friday, July 24, 2020
Fauci
Ten years ago I published an article called “No More Crying ‘Spanish Flu,’” in part because with every pandemic or potential pandemic that’s exactly what public health service gurus and the media were doing. And in part because the comparison to the 1918–19 flu was always ludicrous, based not on science but primal fear.More on Fauci from Fumento
Well, it’s happened again. And this time the klaxon-ringer is no less than the nation’s top health official, National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci.Even a virus far more deadly than that of the Spanish flu would not pose a similar threat because of tremendously different conditions then and now.Fauci’s advice and counsel during the coronavirus pandemic has been “uneven,” to say the least. Most recently, he said of New York, the state with the second-highest COVID-19 deaths per capita, that the state did it “correctly.” But he’s never been particularly reliable. In 1983, he made a huge splash with a medical journal article stating that AIDS could be transmissible through casual contact. Fauci repeated the pattern during successive disease panics, such as when he declared 16 years ago that we’re “due” for “massive person-to-person” spread of Avian flu H5N1.
While Fauci didn’t define “massive,” according to one estimate by a CDC modeler “even in the best-case scenarios” it would “cause 2 to 7 million deaths” worldwide. British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson (whose prediction of 500,000 coronavirus deaths in Britain and two million in the U.S. would lead to economically ruinous nationwide lockdowns in both countries) scaled that back to “only” 200,000. As it turned out, the disease killed 440 worldwide.
More recently, Fauci sounded the threat of the Zika virus, demanding billions more in taxpayer funds. It barely touched two U.S. states before burning out on its own.
As to his Spanish flu comparison, on Tuesday he told a Georgetown University webinar, “If you look at the magnitude of the 1918 pandemic where anywhere from 50 to 75 to 100 million people globally died (325 to 430 million adjusted to today’s population), that was the mother of all pandemics and truly historic. I hope we don’t even approach that with this, but it does have the makings of, the possibility of … approaching that in seriousness.”
Granted, he’s still ahead of CDC Director Robert Redfield, who has already indirectly stated that coronavirus is worse than the Spanish flu. But that may not be saying much.
We already know that COVID-19 has a far lower mortality rate than even lesser 20th-century flu pandemics. The CDC’s “best estimate” is around 0.26 percent. That compares to about 0.67 percent for the “Asian flu” of 1957–58, which in turn was vastly milder than Spanish flu.
Further, even a virus far more deadly than that of the Spanish flu would not pose a similar threat because of tremendously different conditions then and now.
In 1918, the world was at war. In part because of that, people were in far poorer general health than we are today, with malnourishment commonplace. We know malnourishment is a powerful factor in infectious disease severity. Apparently only 10 to 15 percent of Irish people who died during the great potato famine of 1845–50 actually starved, with the rest carried off by diseases such as typhus.
Far from “social distancing,” soldiers were packed like veritable sardines in barracks, box cars, ships, and trenches. The first identified outbreak of the disease, curiously associated with Spain, was actually in the crowded environs of Fort Riley, Kansas.
Back then, medicine was not so advanced as it is today: “The arsenal of available medical countermeasures to treat pandemic influenza virus infections in 1918 was quite basic and largely limited to supportive care,” notes one medical journal paper. Common “treatments” included aspirin, fresh air, and sunshine.
We’ve come a long way. Among other things, we’ve developed flu vaccines, pneumonia vaccines, and pulmonary intubation. There were no effective antivirals until fairly recently, and, rather amazingly, even use of IV tubes for hydration, nourishment, and continuous medicine injection wasn’t common in the U.S. until the 1960s.
Unfortunately, development of new medicines remains agonizingly slow compared to, say, incredible advances with electronics. So despite almost countless new drugs being developed against COVID-19, don’t expect any miracles in the near future.
But in the last century we’ve certainly done a lot of pharmaceutical shelf-stocking, and there’s nothing a pharma company loves more than getting new tricks out of old drugs. Thus one such, the steroid dexamethasone, appears to make pulmonary intubation significantly safer and thus more effective for coronavirus patients, while another, the antiviral remdesivir, appears to at least shorten coronavirus hospital stays and may also reduce mortality.
Although there are about 140 COVID-19 vaccine candidates and some now approaching Phase III (usually the final phase) of testing, it shouldn’t be simply assumed we’ll shortly have one that’s both safe and reasonably effective shortly. So it would be questionable to base policies on that assumption. But advances in the studies of virology, immunology, and computing power, especially artificial intelligence, mean we can probably expect such a vaccine in record time.
And this is rather important: There were no antibiotics in 1918–19, and, as one medical journal paper put it, “The majority of deaths in the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic likely resulted directly from secondary bacterial pneumonia caused by common upper respiratory-tract bacteria.” The chief researcher for that paper?
Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Thursday, July 23, 2020
Wednesday, July 22, 2020
The people with hidden immunity against Covid-19
While the latest research suggests that antibodies against Covid-19 could be lost in just three months, a new hope has appeared on the horizon: the enigmatic T cell.
The clues have been mounting for a while. First, scientists discovered patients who had recovered from infection with Covid-19, but mysteriously didn’t have any antibodies against it. Next it emerged that this might be the case for a significant number of people. Then came the finding that many of those who do develop antibodies seem to lose them again after just a few months.
In short, though antibodies have proved invaluable for tracking the spread of the pandemic, they might not have the leading role in immunity that we once thought. If we are going to acquire long-term protection, it looks increasingly like it might have to come from somewhere else.
But while the world has been preoccupied with antibodies, researchers have started to realise that there might be another form of immunity – one which, in some cases, has been lurking undetected in the body for years. An enigmatic type of white blood cell is gaining prominence. And though it hasn’t previously featured heavily in the public consciousness, it may well prove to be crucial in our fight against Covid-19. This could be the T cell’s big moment.When researchers tested blood samples taken years before the pandemic started, they found T cells which were specifically tailored to detect proteins on the surface of Covid-19.T cells are a kind of immune cell, whose main purpose is to identify and kill invading pathogens or infected cells. It does this using proteins on its surface, which can bind to proteins on the surface of these imposters. Each T cell is highly specific – there are trillions of possible versions of these surface proteins, which can each recognise a different target. Because T cells can hang around in the blood for years after an infection, they also contribute to the immune system’s “long-term memory” and allow it to mount a faster and more effective response when it’s exposed to an old foe.
Several studies have shown that people infected with Covid-19 tend to have T cells that can target the virus, regardless of whether they have experienced symptoms. So far, so normal. But scientists have also recently discovered that some people can test negative for antibodies against Covid-19 and positive for T cells that can identify the virus. This has led to suspicions that some level of immunity against the disease might be twice as common as was previously thought.
Most bizarrely of all, when researchers tested blood samples taken years before the pandemic started, they found T cells which were specifically tailored to detect proteins on the surface of Covid-19. This suggests that some people already had a pre-existing degree of resistance against the virus before it ever infected a human. And it appears to be surprisingly prevalent: 40-60% of unexposed individuals had these cells.
It looks increasingly like T cells might be a secret source of immunity to Covid-19.
The central role of T cells could also help to explain some of the quirks that have so far eluded understanding – from the dramatic escalation in risk that people face from the virus as they get older, to the mysterious discovery that it can destroy the spleen.
Deciphering the importance of T cells isn’t just a matter of academic curiosity. If scientists know which aspects of the immune system are the most important, they can direct their efforts to make vaccines and treatments that work.
How immunity unfolds
Most people probably haven’t thought about T cells, or T lymphocytes as they are also known, since school, but to see just how crucial they are for immunity, we can look to late-stage Aids. The persistent fevers. The sores. The fatigue. The weight loss. The rare cancers. The normally harmless microbes, such as the fungus Candida albicans – usually found on the skin – which start to take over the body.
Over the course of months or years, the HIV virus enacts a kind of T cell genocide, in which it hunts them down, gets inside them and systematically makes them commit suicide. “It wipes out a large fraction of them,” says Adrian Hayday, an immunology professor at King’s College London and group leader at the Francis Crick Institute. “And so that really emphasises how incredibly important these cells are – and that antibodies alone are not going to get you through.”
During a normal immune response – to, let’s say, a flu virus – the first line of defence is the innate immune system, which involves white blood cells and chemical signals that raise the alarm. This initiates the production of antibodies, which kick in a few weeks later.
“And in parallel with that, starting out about four or five days after infection, you begin to see T cells getting activated, and indications they are specifically recognising cells infected with the virus,” says Hayday. These unlucky cells are then dispatched quickly and brutally – either directly by the T cells themselves, or by other parts of the immune system they recruit to do the unpleasant task for them – before the virus has a chance to turn them into factories that churn out more copies of itself.
The good and bad news
So, what do we know about T cells and Covid-19?
“Looking at Covid-19 patients – but also I’m happy to say, looking at individuals who have been infected but did not need hospitalisation – it’s absolutely clear that there are T cell responses,” says Hayday. “And almost certainly this is very good news for those who are interested in vaccines, because clearly we’re capable of making antibodies and making T cells that see the virus. That’s all good.”
In fact, one vaccine – developed by the University of Oxford – has already been shown to trigger the production of these cells, in addition to antibodies. It’s still too early to know how protective the response will be, but one member of the research group told BBC News that the results were “extremely promising”. (Read more about the Oxford University vaccine and what it's like to be part of the trial).
There is a catch, however. In many patients who are hospitalised with more serious Covid-19, the T cell response hasn’t quite gone to plan.
“Vast numbers of T cells are being affected,” says Hayday. “And what is happening to them is a bit like a wedding party or a stag night gone wrong – I mean massive amounts of activity and proliferation, but the cells are also just disappearing from the blood.”
One theory is that these T cells are just being redirected to where they’re needed most, such as the lungs. But his team suspects that a lot of them are dying instead.
“Autopsies of Covid-19 patients are beginning to reveal what we call necrosis, which is a sort of rotting,” he says. This is particularly evident in the areas of the spleen and lymph glands where T cells normally live.
Disconcertingly, spleen necrosis is a hallmark of T cell disease, in which the immune cells themselves are attacked. “If you look in post-mortems of Aids patients, you see these same problems,” says Hayday. “But HIV is a virus that directly infects T cells, it knocks on the door and it gets in.” In contrast, there is currently no evidence that the Covid-19 virus is able to do this.
“There are potentially many explanations for this, but to my knowledge, nobody has one yet,” says Hayday. “We have no idea what is happening. There’s every evidence that the T cells can protect you, probably for many years. But when people get ill, the rug seems to be being pulled from under them in their attempts to set up that protective defence mechanism.”
Dwindling T cells might also be to blame for why the elderly are much more severely affected by Covid-19.
Hayday points to an experiment conducted in 2011, which involved exposing mice to a version of the virus that causes Sars. Previous research had shown that the virus – which is also a coronavirus and a close relative of Covid-19 – triggered the production of T cells, which were responsible for clearing the infection.
The follow-up study produced similar results, but the twist was that this time the mice were allowed to grow old. As they did so, their T cell responses became significantly weaker.
However, in the same experiment, the scientists also exposed mice to a flu virus. And in contrast to those infected with Covid-19, these mice managed to hold onto their T cells that acted against influenza well into their twilight years.
“It’s an attractive observation, in the sense that it could explain why older individuals are more susceptible to Covid-19,” says Hayday. “When you reach your 30s, you begin to really shrink your thymus [a gland located behind your sternum and between your lungs, which plays an important role in the development of immune cells] and your daily production of T cells is massively diminished.”
What does this mean for long-term immunity?
“With the original Sars virus [which emerged in 2002], people went back to patients and definitely found evidence for T cells some years after they these individuals were infected,” says Hayday. “This is again consistent with the idea that these individuals carried protective T cells, long after they had recovered.”
The fact that coronaviruses can lead to lasting T cells is what recently inspired scientists to check old blood samples taken from people between 2015 and 2018, to see if they would contain any that can recognise Covid-19. The fact that this was indeed the case has led to suggestions that their immune systems learnt to recognise it after being encountering cold viruses with the similar surface proteins in the past.
This raises the tantalising possibility that the reason some people experience more severe infections is that they haven’t got these hoards of T cells which can already recognise the virus. “I think it’s fair to say that the jury is still out,” says Hayday.
Unfortunately, no one has ever verified if people make T cells against any of the coronaviruses that give rise to the common cold. “To get funding to study this would have required a pretty Herculean effort,” says Hayday. Research into the common cold fell out of fashion in the 1980s, after the field stagnated and scientists began to move to other projects, such as studying HIV. Making progress since then has proved tricky, because the illness can be caused by any one of hundreds of viral strains – and many of them have the ability to evolve rapidly.
Will this lead to a vaccine?
If old exposures to cold viruses really are leading to milder cases of Covid-19, however, this bodes well for the development of a vaccine – since it’s proof that lingering T cells can provide significant protection, even years after they were made.
But even if this isn’t what’s happening, the involvement of T cells could still be beneficial – and the more we understand what’s going on, the better.
Hayday explains that the way vaccines are designed generally depends on the kind of immune response scientists are hoping to elicit. Some might trigger the production of antibodies – free-floating proteins which can bind to invading pathogens, and either neutralise them or tag them for another part of the immune system to deal with. Others might aim to get T cells involved, or perhaps provoke a response from other parts of the immune system.
“There really is an enormous spectrum of vaccine design,” says Hayday. He’s particularly encouraged by the fact that the virus is evidently highly visible to the immune system, even in those who are severely affected. “So if we can stop whatever it’s doing to the T cells of the patients we've had the privilege to work with, then we will be a lot further along in controlling the disease.”
It seems likely that we are going to be hearing a lot more about T cells in the future.
Sunday, July 19, 2020
What Passes for 'Peaceful Protests' in the Main Stream Media Today...
Saturday, July 18, 2020
London Bridges Falling Down...
The first document is a 57-page summary of a three-day FBI interview in January 2017 with Christopher Steele's 'primary sub-source' in the anti-Trump allegations and 'dossier.' Document number two takes apart a New York Times article written by Michael Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti, and Matt Apuzzo.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has released two newly-declassified documents related to government surveillance abuses against the Trump campaign in 2016.
The first document, withheld from public view until now, is a 57-page summary of a three-day FBI interview in January 2017 with Christopher Steele’s so-called "primary sub-source" in the anti-Trump allegations and "dossier."
According to the analysis by Sen. Graham's office:The document reveals that the primary "source" of Steele’s election reporting was not some well-connected current or former Russian official, but a non-Russian-based contract employee of Christopher Steele’s firm. Moreover, it demonstrates that the information that Steele's primary source provided him was second and third hand information and rumor at best.Document number two, also withheld from public view until now, takes apart a New York Times article written by Michael Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti, and Matt Apuzzo.
Critically, the document shows that Steele's "primary sub-source" disagreed with and was surprised by how information he gave Steele was then conveyed by Steele in the Steele dossier.
Comments made by then-FBI agent Peter Strzok undercut a litany of claims made in the Times article, which was entitled: "Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contact With Russian Intelligence."
Claim in NYT article: "Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump's presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials."
Note by Strzok: "This statement is misleading and inaccurate as written. We have not seen evidence of any individuals in contact with Russians (both Governmental and non-Governmental)" and "There is no known intel affiliation, and little if any [government of Russia] affiliation[.] FBI investigation has shown past contact between [Trump campaign volunteer Carter] Page and the SVR [Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation], but not during his association with the Trump campaign."
Claim in NYT article: "... one of the advisers picked up on the [intercepted] calls was Paul Manafort, who was Mr. Trump's campaign chairman for several months ..."
Note by Strzok: "We are unaware of any calls with any Russian government official in which Manafort was a party."
Claim in NYT article: "The FBI has obtained banking and travel records ..."
Note by Strzok: "We do not yet have detailed banking records."
Claim in NYT article: "Officials would not disclose many details, including what was discussed on the calls, and how many of Trump's advisers were talking to the Russians."
Note by Strzok: "Again, we are unaware of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intel officials" and "Our coverage has not revealed contact between Russian intelligence officers and the Trump team."
Claim in NYT article: "The FBI asked the NSA to collect as much information as possible about the Russian operatives on the phone calls ..."
Note by Strzok: "If they did we are not aware of those communications."
Claim in NYT article: "The FBI has closely examined at least four other people close to Mr. Trump ... Carter Page ... Roger Stone... and Mr. Flynn."
Note by Strzok: "We have not investigated Roger Stone."
Claim by NYT: "Senior FBI officials believe ... Christopher Steele ... has a credible track record."
Note by Strzok: "Recent interviews and investigation, however, reveal Steele may not be in a position to judge the reliability of subsource network."
Claim by NYT: "The FBI's investigation into Mr. Manafort began last spring [2016]."
Note by Strzok: "This is inaccurate ... our investigation of Manafort was opened in August 2016."
Claim by NYT: "The bureau did not have enough evidence to obtain a warrant for a wiretap of Mr. Manafort's communications, but it had the NSA closely scrutinize the communications of Ukrainian officials he had met."
Note by Strzok: "This is inaccurate ..."
There is as yet no explanation in the documents or from the New York Times as to the identities of the four "American officials" who apparently provided the misleading and false information; or what their motivation was.
However, it is clear that inaccurate reporting such as that in the Times had a significant influence on the trajectory of the Trump-Russia collusion probe, which ultimately concluded there had been no collusion on the part of Trump, anyone in the Trump campaign, or any U.S. person.
Friday, July 17, 2020
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.
In response to President Trump's commutation of Roger Stone's prison sentence last week, the Russia investigation's two lead prosecutors published op-eds in the nation’s top newspapers that fueled the collusion narrative their own investigation failed to validate. As they chided Stone and others for alleged deceptions, both Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller and one of his top deputies, Andrew Weissmann, made claims greatly at odds with their official report, discrepancies that they did not acknowledge.
Neither responded to emailed requests Thursday for comment.
The Mueller op-ed, published in the Washington Post, does not just take aim at Stone – who was convicted for lying about his failed efforts to make contact with WikiLeaks regarding emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee in 2016. Mueller focuses, instead, on what he calls "broad claims that our investigation was illegitimate and our motives were improper."
In a bid to refute that criticism, Mueller begins by defending the FBI's justification for launching the probe. "By late 2016," he writes, "the FBI had evidence that the Russians had signaled to a Trump campaign adviser that they could assist the campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to the Democratic candidate," Hillary Clinton. The campaign adviser is George Papadopoulos, whose barroom conversation with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer served as the basis for the Trump-Russia probe. (Downer passed this tip to the U.S. government in late July – though Mueller writes "late 2016.")
Contrary to Mueller's assertion, the record shows the FBI was not acting on any evidence that "the Russians had signaled" anything to Papadopoulos, but instead on the Australian diplomat's recounting of vague hearsay -- which Papadopoulos never relayed to anyone else in the Trump campaign. The bureau’s own documents make this clear. The recently declassified FBI electronic communication (EC) that officially opened its Russia investigation, code-named Crossfire Hurricane, states that Downer had told the U.S. government that Papadopoulos had "suggested the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist" the Trump campaign by anonymously releasing damaging, yet "unclear," information about Clinton and President Obama. Not only was this tip vague, there was no evidence that the "some kind of suggestion" actually came from the Russian government or even a Russian national.
Instead, Downer was relaying what he claims Papadopoulos told him about an unspecified suggestion he had received of Russian assistance. Papadopoulos later told the FBI that the suggestion came from a conversation with Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic. But Downer did not hear about Mifsud at the time, and his tip to the FBI accordingly made no mention of him. Regardless of the exact date it learned of Mifsud, the U.S. government has never formally claimed or presented evidence that he was a Russian government representative or was relaying information that he had received from Russia. (After leaving office, former FBI Director James B. Comey claimed without evidence that Mifsud was “a Russian agent” in a Washington Post op-ed.)
The Mueller Report conspicuously avoided such a label. It instead stated that Mifsud had suspected "connections to Russia." Its inventory of such connections is this: Mifsud was apparently in touch with "a one-time employee" of the Internet Research Agency (the private Russian social media company that Mueller indicted before dropping the case) about "possibly meeting in Russia," but the investigation "did not identify evidence of them meeting." Mifsud was also apparently in contact with a social media account "linked to an employee of the Russian Ministry of Defense." At his congressional hearing one year ago, Mueller declined to discuss Mifsud's identity or explain why the FBI had not arrested him after interviewing him in Washington, D.C., in February 2017. Mueller also did not explain why his office did not charge Mifsud for perjury despite claiming in its final report that he had made false statements.
Recently declassified December 2017 testimony from Andrew McCabe, the former FBI deputy director who helped launch and oversee the Russia probe, support these details.
Speaking to the House Intelligence Committee, McCabe said the Papadopoulos-Mifsud tip was not considered evidence of a Russia connection. Asked to explain why the FBI never sought a FISA surveillance warrant on Papadopoulos, McCabe responded: "Papadopoulos' comment didn't particularly indicate that he was the person that had had -- that was interacting with the Russians." That admission not only contradicts Mueller's claim that the "FBI had evidence that the Russians had signaled" something, it raises an important question for his team to answer: Why did the FBI open – and continue – the Trump-Russia investigation based on a hearsay comment from a Trump adviser whom they did not believe was actually interacting with Russia?
After claiming that the collusion investigation was predicated on evidence of Russian outreach to the Trump campaign, Mueller's op-ed turns to Roger Stone. The veteran Republican operative, Mueller writes, "lied about the identity of his intermediary to WikiLeaks," as well as about "the existence of written communications with his intermediary."
But that claim from Mueller is at odds with his investigation’s failure to establish that Stone had an intermediary to WikiLeaks. In both public and private, Stone claimed to have intermediaries, but as the Mueller team found out, they were two individuals, Randy Credico and Jerome Corsi, who never made contact with WikiLeaks. The only interaction that either Credico or Corsi had with WikiLeaks during the campaign came when Credico interviewed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on his radio show in August 2016. And the only known contact between Stone and WikiLeaks before the election came when WikiLeaks wrote Stone, in a Twitter message, to cease making "false claims of association." This exchange was excluded from Stone's indictment and the Mueller Report, and Mueller's op-ed is no different.
Mueller also makes a striking claim about Stone's supposed Russian contacts and foreknowledge of WikiLeaks releases. "Stone became a central figure in our investigation," Mueller writes, "for two key reasons: He communicated in 2016 with individuals known to us to be Russian intelligence officers, and he claimed advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ release of emails stolen by those Russian intelligence officers."
While Stone claimed advance knowledge, Mueller omits that he never asserted that Stone actually had such knowledge.
Mueller's reference to communication with Russian agents is likely the Twitter messages exchanged with Guccifer 2.0, the online persona that Mueller alleges was a front for Russian intelligence. Yet the only known communication between the two is in fact exculpatory for Stone. Stone sent Guccifer 2.0 just three short messages. None mentioned the stolen DNC emails. The closest they came to coordination was when Stone asked Guccifer 2.0 to retweet an article in The Hill. Mueller implies that all of this was grounds to investigate Stone, when it was evidence that Stone's contact with Guccifer 2.0 was minimal and inconsequential.
Three days after Mueller’s piece was published, the top prosecutor on his team, Andrew Weissmann, published an op-ed in the New York Times that went even further. While Mueller's article tried to defend his investigation, Weissmann effectively called for it to continue: Stone, Weissmann argued, should be brought "before a grand jury."
Weissmann – now a legal analyst for MSNBC and preparing for the September publication of his memoir on the Mueller probe -- bases his argument on the possibility that Stone hid incriminating information in order to protect Trump. Stone, Weissmann claimed (approvingly quoting the sentencing federal judge), "had been prosecuted for 'covering up for the president.'" Stone, Weissmann added, was found guilty of "lying to Congress about the coordination between the Trump 2016 campaign, Mr. Stone, WikiLeaks and Russia," and putting him before a grand jury would "get at the truth of why he lied."
Yet Stone's own case – and, of course the Mueller Report, which found no conspiracy -- underscored that there was no such "coordination," which is presumably why Stone was never accused, let alone convicted, of lying about it. The word "coordination" only appears once in his indictment: in describing the FBI investigation of potential Trump-Russia collusion, not in describing anything to do with Stone.
Stone was instead convicted of making false statements to Congress about his failed efforts to obtain information about WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign. Stone's case and trial underscored that these efforts went nowhere: Both individuals whom he tapped as his intermediaries, Corsi and Credico, had no contact with WikiLeaks and no inside information of its plans. The suggestion to the contrary by Weissmann in the New York Times' op-ed section is contradicted by the paper's own reporting on Stone's trial last year, when it noted that Stone "had no real ties to WikiLeaks."
Despite this, Weissmann goes on to suggest, without evidence, that Stone still has something to hide. "If there was nothing nefarious about his coordination efforts, why did he lie about them to Congress?" the investigator writes. "This question remains unanswered, as the Mueller report notes." Yet the Mueller team has already answered Weissmann's question. In revealing that the Trump campaign tried to learn about WikiLeaks' plans through Stone – who had no inside information – Weissmann and his colleagues showed that the campaign had no "coordination" with WikiLeaks and no advance knowledge of its publications.
Weissmann fails to mention that his own team of prosecutors consciously avoided the very action that he is now advocating. The Mueller team never interviewed Stone or tried to bring him before a grand jury after an exhaustive investigation of Stone and his associates. By November 2018, CNN reported, "[r]oughly a dozen of Stone's current and former associates have been contacted by Mueller's team for interviews or to testify before the grand jury."
The Mueller team's pursuit of Stone included an engagement with Corsi that descended into farce. The Mueller investigators, the Washington Post later reported, spent more than two months "chasing tantalizing leads offered by Corsi," even "dispatch[ing] FBI agents around the country to interview potential witnesses," but, after "expending valuable government money and precious time," found "themselves unable to untangle Corsi’s assertions." This included multiple sessions with Corsi where Mueller prosecutors "spent weeks coaxing, cajoling and admonishing the conspiracy theorist, as they pressed him to stick to facts and not reconstruct stories." They even delved into philosophical territory: "At times, they had debated the nature of memory itself."
If, after all of this effort, Weissmann and the Mueller team thought that Stone was coordinating with WikiLeaks or had something to hide, they could have questioned him or brought him before a grand jury. But by the end of 2018, Stone was no longer claiming that he had a back channel to WikiLeaks and had corrected his prior statements to the contrary. Presumably, the Mueller team had reached the same conclusion after questioning scores of Stone's associates and chasing down leads from coast to coast. And presumably, they would have expected Stone to tell them the same story under oath.
That would have negated their ability to prosecute him, and it would have denied them an opportunity to advance the collusion theory with one final indictment. In January 2019, the Mueller team chose an off-ramp: Stone was indicted for making false statements to a House inquiry all the way back in September 2017. The Mueller team released a lengthy indictment that suggested a collusion angle, and conducted an early morning SWAT raid on Stone's Florida home with television cameras present.
Stone's January 2019 indictment appeared to be the Mueller probe's final act, the last in a series of cases that publicly implied collusion without ever alleging that such collusion occurred. These two op-eds suggests that effort continues.
Weissmann and Mueller's new public statements about Stone and the Russia investigation are only the latest in a series of contributions to the collusion narrative. In response, Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham has said that he will seek Mueller's testimony. If Weissmann is summoned as well, this would be a critical opportunity, through sworn testimony under penalty of perjury, to get to the bottom of claims about the Russia investigation – although perhaps not the ones that the prosecutors behind it want the public to focus on.
Thursday, July 16, 2020
Has Sweden Cracked the COVID19 Code and Achieved "Lockdown" Herd Immunity
Tuesday, July 14, 2020
Monday, July 13, 2020
Sunday, July 12, 2020
BountyGate
Gareth Porter @ The Gray Zone
The New York Times dropped another Russiagate bombshell on June 26 with a sensational front-page story headlined, “Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says.” A predictable media and political frenzy followed, reviving the anti-Russian hysteria that has excited the Beltway establishment for the past four years.
But a closer look at the reporting by the Times and other mainstream outlets vying to confirm its coverage reveals another scandal not unlike Russiagate itself: the core elements of the story appear to have been fabricated by Afghan government intelligence to derail a potential US troop withdrawal from the country. And they were leaked to the Times and other outlets by US national security state officials who shared an agenda with their Afghan allies.
In the days following the story’s publication, the maneuvers of the Afghan regime and US national security bureaucracy encountered an unexpected political obstacle: US intelligence agencies began offering a series of low confidence assessments in the Afghan government’s self-interested intelligence claims, judging them to be highly suspect at best, and altogether bogus at worst.
In light of this dramatic development, the Times’ initial report appears to have been the product of a sensationalistic disinformation dump aimed at prolonging the failed Afghan war in the face of President Donald Trump’s plans to withdraw US troops from it.
The Times quietly reveals its own sources’ falsehoods
The Times not only broke the Bountygate story but commissioned squads of reporters comprising nine different correspondents to write eight articles hyping the supposed scandal in the course of eight days. Its coverage displayed the paper’s usual habit of regurgitating bits of dubious information furnished to its correspondents by faceless national security sources. In the days after the Times’ dramatic publication, its correspondent squads were forced to revise the story line to correct an account that ultimately turned out to be false on practically every important point.
The Bountygate saga began on June 26, with a Times report declaring, “The United States concluded months ago” that the Russians “had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year.” The report suggested that US intelligence analysts had reached a firm conclusion on Russian bounties as early as January. A follow-up Times report portrayed the shocking discovery of the lurid Russian plot thanks to the recovery of a large amount of US cash from a “raid on a Taliban outpost.” That article sourced its claim to the interrogations of “captured Afghan militants and criminals.”
However, subsequent reporting revealed that the “US intelligence reports” about a Russian plot to distribute bounties through Afghan middlemen were not generated by US intelligence at all.
The Times reported first on June 28, then again on June 30, that a large amount of cash found at a “Taliban outpost” or a “Taliban site” had led US intelligence to suspect the Russian plot. But the Times had to walk that claim back, revealing on July 1 that the raid that turned up $500,000 in cash had in fact targeted the Kabul home of Rahmatullah Azizi, an Afghan businessmen said to have been involved in both drug trafficking and contracting for part of the billions of dollars the United States spent on construction projects.
The Times also disclosed that the information provided by “captured militants and criminals” under “interrogation” had been the main source of suspicion of a Russian bounty scheme in Afghanistan. But those “militants and criminals” turned out to be thirteen relatives and business associates of the businessman whose house was raided.
The Times reported that those detainees were arrested and interrogated following the January 2020 raids based on suspicions by Afghan intelligence that they belonged to a “ring of middlemen” operating between the Russian GRU and so-called “Taliban-linked militants,” as Afghan sources made clear.
Furthermore, contrary to the initial report by the Times, those raids had actually been carried out exclusively by the Afghan intelligence service known as the National Directorate of Security (NDS). The Times disclosed this on July 1. Indeed, the interrogation of those detained in the raids was carried out by the NDS, which explains why the Times reporting referred repeatedly to “interrogations” without ever explaining who actually did the questioning.
Given the notorious record of the NDS, it must be assumed that its interrogators used torture or at least the threat of it to obtain accounts from the detainees that would support the Afghan government’s narrative. Both the Toronto Globe and Mail and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) have documented as recently as 2019 the frequent use of torture by the NDS to obtain information from detainees. The primary objective of the NDS was to establish an air of plausibility around the claim that the fugitive businessman Azizi was the main “middleman” for a purported GRU scheme to offer bounties for killing Americans.
NDS clearly fashioned its story to suit the sensibilities of the US national security state. The narrative echoed previous intelligence reports about Russian bounties in Afghanistan that circulated in early 2019, and which were even discussed at NSC meetings. Nothing was done about these reports, however, because nothing had been confirmed.
The idea that hardcore Taliban fighters needed or wanted foreign money to kill American invaders could have been dismissed on its face. So Afghan officials spun out claims that Russian bounties were paid to incentivize violence by “militants and criminals” supposedly “linked” to the Taliban.
These elements zeroed in on the April 2019 IED attack on a vehicle near the US military base at Bagram in Parwan province that killed three US Marines, insisting that the Taliban had paid local criminal networks in the region to carry out attacks.
As former Parwan police chief Gen. Zaman Mamozai told the Times, Taliban commanders were based in only two of the province’s ten districts, forcing them to depend on a wider network of non-Taliban killers-for-hire to carry out attacks elsewhere in the province. These areas included the region around Bagram, according to the Afghan government’s argument.
But Dr. Thomas H. Johnson of the Naval Postgraduate School, a leading expert on insurgency and counter-insurgency in Afghanistan who has been researching war in the country for three decades, dismissed the idea that the Taliban would need a criminal network to operate effectively in Parwan.
“The Taliban are all over Parwan,” Johnson stated in an interview with The Grayzone, observing that its fighters had repeatedly carried out attacks on or near the Bagram base throughout the war.
With withdrawal looming, the national security state plays its Bountygate card
Senior US national security officials had clear ulterior motives for embracing the dubious NDS narrative. More than anything, those officials were determined to scuttle Trump’s push for a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan. For Pentagon brass and civilian leadership, the fear of withdrawal became more acute in early 2020 as Trump began to demand an even more rapid timetable for a complete pullout than the 12-14 months being negotiated with the Taliban.
It was little surprise then that this element leapt at the opportunity to exploit the self-interested claims by the Afghan NDS to serve its own agenda, especially as the November election loomed. The Times even cited one “senior [US] official” musing that “the evidence about Russia could have threatened that [Afghanistan] deal, because it suggested that after eighteen year of war, Mr. Trump was letting Russia chase the last American troops out of the country.”
In fact, the intelligence reporting from the CIA Station in Kabul on the NDS Russia bounty claims was included in the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) on or about February 27 – just as the negotiation of the US peace agreement with the Taliban was about to be signed. That was too late to prevent the signing but timed well enough to ratchet up pressure on Trump to back away from his threat to pull all US troops out of Afghanistan.
Trump may have been briefed orally on the issue at the time, but even if he had not been, the presence of a summary description of the intelligence in the PDB could obviously have been used to embarrass him on Afghanistan by leaking it to the media.
According to Ray McGovern, a former CIA official who was responsible for preparing the PDB for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, the insertion of raw, unconfirmed intelligence from a self-interested Afghan intelligence agency into the PDB was a departure from normal practice.
Unless it was a two or three-sentence summary of a current intelligence report, McGovern explained, an item in the PDB normally involved only important intelligence that had been confirmed. Furthermore, according to McGovern, PDB items are normally shorter versions of items prepared the same day as part of the CIA’s “World Intelligence Review” or “WIRe.”
Information about the purported Russian bounty scheme, however, was not part of the Wire until May 4, well over two months later, according to the Times. That discrepancy added weight to the suggestion that the CIA had political motivations for planting the raw NDS reporting in the PDB before it could be evaluated.
This June, Trump’s National Security Council (NSC) convened a meeting to discuss the intelligence report, officials told the Times. NSC members drew up a range of options in response to the alleged Russian plot, from a diplomatic protest to more forceful responses. Any public indication that US troops in Afghanistan had been targeted by Russian spies would have inevitably threatened Trump’s plan for withdrawal from Afghanistan.
At some point in the weeks that followed, the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency each undertook evaluations of the Afghan intelligence claims. Once the Times began publishing stories about the issue, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe directed the National Intelligence Council, which is responsible for managing all common intelligence community assessments, to write a memorandum summarizing the intelligence organizations’ conclusions.
The memorandum revealed that the intelligence agencies were not impressed with what they’d seen. The CIA and National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC) each gave the NDS intelligence an assessment of “moderate confidence,” according to memorandum.
An official guide to intelligence community terminology used by policymakers to determine how much they should rely on assessments indicates that “moderate confidence” generally indicates that “the information being used in the analysis may be interpreted in various ways….” It was hardly a ringing endorsement of the NDS intelligence when the CIA and NCTC arrived at this finding.
The assessment by the National Security Agency was even more important, given that it had obtained intercepts of electronic data on financial transfers “from a bank account controlled by Russia’s military intelligence agency to a Taliban-linked account,” according to the Times’ sources. But the NSA evidently had no idea what the transfers related to, and essentially disavowed the information from the Afghan intelligence agency.
The NIC memorandum reported that NSA gave the information from Afghan intelligence “low confidence” – the lowest of the three possible levels of confidence used in the intelligence community. According to the official guide to intelligence community terminology, that meant that “information used in the analysis is scant, questionable, fragmented, or that solid analytical conclusions cannot be inferred from the information.”
Other intelligence agencies reportedly assigned “low confidence” to the information as well, according to the memorandum. Even the Defense Intelligence Agency, known for its tendency to issue alarmist warnings about activities by US adversaries, found no evidence in the material linking the Kremlin to any bounty offers.
Less than two weeks after the Times rolled out its supposed bombshell on Russian bounties, relying entirely on national security officials pushing their own bureaucratic interests on Afghanistan, the story was effectively discredited by the intelligence community itself. In a healthy political climate, this would have produced a major setback for the elements determined to keep US troops entrenched in Afghanistan.
But the political hysteria generated by the Times and the hyper-partisan elements triggered by the appearance of another sordid Trump-Putin connection easily overwhelmed the countervailing facts. It was all the Pentagon and its bureaucratic allies needed to push back on plans for a speedy withdrawal from a long and costly war.
Saturday, July 11, 2020
Woke/ Cultural Capitalism 101: or the New Opium of the Masses
And, of course, the ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is multiculturalism, the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each local culture the way the colonizer treats colonized people—as ‘natives’ whose mores are to be carefully studied and ‘respected’. That is to say, the relationship between traditional imperialist colonialism and global capitalist self-colonization is exactly the same as the relationship between Western cultural imperialism and multiculturalism: in the same way that global capitalism involves the paradox of colonization without the colonizing Nation-State metropole, multiculturalism involves patronizing Eurocentrist distance and/or respect for local cultures without roots in one’s own particular culture. In other words, multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a ‘racism with a distance’—it ‘respects’ the Other’s identity, conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed ‘authentic’ community towards which he, the multiculturalist, maintains a distance rendered possible by his privileged universal position. Multiculturalism is a racism which empties its own position of all positive content (the multiculturalist is not a direct racist, he doesn’t oppose to the Other the particular values of his own culture), but nonetheless retains this position as; the privileged empty point of universality from which one is able to appreciate (and depreciate) properly other particular cultures—the multiculturalist respect for the Other’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’s; own superiority.- Slavoj Zizek, "Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism"
Diverse interests are created that view each other as greater enemies than they do foreign threats. Since the common civilizational enemy has been successfully repulsed, it can no longer serve as an effective target for and outlet of people’s sense of superiority, and human psychology generally requires an adversary for the purpose of self-identification, and so a new adversary is crafted: other people in the same civilization. Since this condition of leisure and empowerment, as well as a perception of external threats as non-existential, are the results of a society’s success, success is, ironically, a prerequisite for a society’s self-hatred. What Freud has called the “narcissism of small differences” (in Civilization and Its Discontents)—the urge to compete against others even through minor distinctions like a virtuous action or the newest gadget—becomes one motivation through which a particular interest expresses its superiority over others.-Benedict Beckeld, "Oikophobia: Our Western Self-Hatred"
Friday, July 10, 2020
The Affirmative Action Chickens Have Come Home to Roost
Watching the news, you would never guess that the research found black officers were just as likely as white officers to shoot an unarmed black suspect.
On Saturday, a man drove his car onto a Seattle freeway that had been closed by a Black Lives Matter crowd. The driver killed one person and seriously injured another after going the wrong way up a ramp and then around a barricade. Reports noted that police “don’t believe impairment was a factor.” Over the weekend, news outlets replayed the brutal hit, but there’s one thing you won’t learn from their coverage: The driver was black and his victims were white.
NPR linked this attack to other car-ramming incidents by “right-wing extremists targeting Black Lives Matter protesters.” They quote a researcher about how these right-wingers were “trying to intimidate the most recent wave of BLM protesters, to stop their movement.”
The driver was a Seattle local named Dawit Kelete. But you’ll find scant mention of the driver’s ethnicity in mainstream media coverage. You might have more easily learned that Kelete was black by going to the Australia Broadcasting Corporation. The American national media also doesn’t note that Kelete’s two victims were white. You can find that out over at the U.K.’s Daily Mail.
Among the few U.S. outlets to mention the race of the driver is Heavy.com. The rest of the news media seemingly would rather have people assume that a white driver attacked two black protesters. Acknowledging the driver’s and victims’ ethnicity wouldn’t advance their narrative of oppression, so it apparently isn’t newsworthy.
One case doesn’t prove a pattern. It could just be that while the American media knows almost everything about this killer, including his name, age, and where he lives, they couldn’t find information on his race. Possibly the foreign news outlets were just lucky to discover that information.
Of course, the media outlets might honestly not view race as essential to the story. But their selective reporting of it shows that they think race is important when it involves certain situations. The problem is that this gives readers a biased perspective, inflaming prejudice, and creating stereotypes.
Research conducted by the Crime Prevention Research Center, of which I am president, on all police shootings from 2013 to 2015 found that while local news coverage will often mention the race of the officer and the suspect, the national coverage is much more selective. While the evidence indicates that black officers are no less likely to shoot suspects than white officers, local news coverage of black officers shooting black suspects gets picked up by the national news in just 9 percent of cases. By contrast, 38 percent of the cases in which local news reported on a white officer shooting a black suspect get national coverage.
The selective coverage creates the belief that white officers are the problem — they are the ones shooting blacks, presumably because white officers treat black suspects differently than white ones. Watching the news, you would never guess that the research found that black officers were just as likely as white officers to shoot an unarmed black suspect.
The media’s selective coverage has done real harm. It has heightened racial divides and sown distrust of the police in the communities that need them most. Now, with police sidelined and facing “defunding,” gun violence is rising fast in major cities around the country.
The media similarly seems intent on claiming that mass public shooters are disproportionately white and right-wing when nothing could be further from the truth. While 58 percent of the mass public shooters from 1998 to 2019 were white (excluding people of Middle Eastern descent), about 75 percent of the total U.S. population was white. Middle Eastern Arabs made up just 1 percent of the population but accounted for 8 percent of shooters. Of all the mass killers, 72 percent have no known political affiliation or views — only 3 percent are known to be conservative or Republican.
Race and politics increasingly divide Americans, and selective media reporting is largely to blame. The media, not Trump, is fanning the flames of violence. The destruction and the long-term harm that is being done to heavily minority parts of our cities is their responsibility.
Thursday, July 9, 2020
Spectre's and Other Phantasms
The first, automatic reaction of today’s enlightened liberal reader to The Communist Manifesto is: Is the text not simply wrong on many empirical accounts, with regard to the picture it gives of the social situation, as well as with regard to the revolutionary perspective it sustains and propagates? Was there ever a political manifesto that was more clearly falsified by subsequent historical reality? Is The Communist Manifesto not, at best, an exaggerated extrapolation of certain tendencies discernible in the 19th century?
So, let us approach The Communist Manifesto from the opposite end: Where do we live today, in our global “post … ” (postmodern, postindustrial) society? The slogan that is imposing itself more and more is that of “globalization”: the brutal imposition of a unified world market that threatens all local ethnic traditions, including the very form of the nation-state. And, in this situation, is not the description in the Manifesto of the social impact of the bourgeoisie more topical than ever?
“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty, and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all newly formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
“The need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
“The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All long-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life-and-death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw materials, but raw materials drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.”
Is this not, more than ever, our reality today? Think about Ericsson phones, which are no longer Swedish, about Toyota cars, 60% of which are manufactured in the USA, about the Hollywood culture that pervades the remotest parts of the globe … Yes, this is our reality—on condition that we do not forget to supplement this image from the Manifesto with its inherent dialectical opposite, the “spiritualization” of the very material process of production. That is to say, on the one hand, capitalism entails the radical secularization of social life—it mercilessly tears apart any aura of authentic nobility, sacredness, honor, etc.
“It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”
However, the fundamental lesson of the “critique of political economy” elaborated by the mature Marx in the years after the Manifesto is that this reduction of all heavenly chimeras to the brutal economic reality generates a spectrality of its own. When Marx describes the mad, self-enhancing circulation of capital, whose solipsistic path of self-fecundation reaches its apogee in today’s metareflexive speculations on futures, it is far too simplistic to claim that the specter of this self-engendering monster that pursues its path disregarding any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction, and that one should never forget that, behind this abstraction, there are real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources the capital’s circulation is based, and on which it feeds like a gigantic parasite. The problem is that this “abstraction” is not only in our (financial speculator’s) misperception of social reality, but that it is “real” in the precise sense of determining the structure of the very material social processes: the fate of whole strata of the population and sometimes of whole countries can be decided by the “solipsistic” speculative dance of Capital, which pursues its goal of profitability in a blessed indifference to how its movement will affect social reality. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much uncannier than the direct precapitalist socioideological violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their “evil” intentions, but is purely “objective,” systemic, anonymous. Here we should recall Etienne Balibar, who distinguishes two opposite but complementary modes of excessive violence in today’s world: the “ultraobjective” (“structural”) violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism (the “automatic” creation of excluded and dispensable individuals, from the homeless to the unemployed), and the “ultrasubjective” violence of newly emerging ethnic and/or religious (in short: racist) “fundamentalisms”—this second “excessive” and “groundless” violence is just a counterpart to the first violence.
The fact of this “anonymous” violence also allows us to make a more general point about anticommunism. The pleasure provided by anticommunist reasoning was that communism made it so easy to play the game of finding the culprit, blaming the Party, Stalin, Lenin, ultimately Marx himself, for the millions of dead, for terror, and for gulags, while in capitalism, there is nobody on whom one can pin guilt or responsibility, things just happened that way, through anonymous mechanisms, although capitalism has been no less destructive in terms of human and environmental costs, destroying aboriginal cultures … In short, the difference between capitalism and communism is that communism was perceived as an idea which then failed in its realization, while capitalism functioned “spontaneously.” There is no Capitalist Manifesto.
Tuesday, July 7, 2020
Do Black Children's Lives Matter to the Charity Fundraisers at Black Lives Matter?
Mekhi James, a 3-year-old boy, cried, "It hurts", after he was shot in Chicago.
Then he died.
Sincere Gaston, a 1-year-old boy, was also shot and killed in Chicago. A 3-year-old girl was shot in the chest while playing in the front yard with other children. She was among the four toddlers shot in Chicago in two weeks. Older children are also being shot. An 8-year-old girl was grazed in the head, and a 5-year-old boy in the buttocks.
Natalia Wallace, a 7-year-old girl described as “quiet and sweet” was shot and killed on the sidewalk.
“Where is the outrage? Our babies are being shot. These are our babies," Chicago PD's Chief of Operations Fred Waller, who is African-American, asked.
The question ought to be directed to Black Lives Matter as the BLM Effect fuels shootings and deaths around the country. And the most vulnerable of the BLM Effect’s victims are black children.
Eight children under the age of 10 have been shot in Chicago in the past few weeks. The cause of these shootings is an upsurge in crime from the Black Lives Matter riots that have devastated the country.
The Black Lives Matter riots are killing black people, and particularly black children, in two ways.
Chicago murders are up 83% in June, while arrests fell 55%, street stops 74%, and traffic stops 86%. If you want to see what defunding the police looks like, just stop by Chicago and bring a bulletproof vest.
John Catanzara, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police, blames a new Ferguson Effect in the George Floyd era where officers, “pause and say: ‘I want to go home today safe. I want to make sure I keep my job. And I want to make sure I don’t go to jail.'"
Mayor Lightfoot argues that it’s due to the police being tied up by the Black Lives Matter protests.
And they’re both right. The BLM Effect has a dual function.
The protests are tying up large numbers of cops, leaving gang members free to fight their battles, and the dismantling of proactive policing and the scapegoating of cops makes the police less proactive.
Alderman Chris Taliaferro, the African-American chair of the Chicago City Council Committee on Public Safety, said, "Our police officers don’t want to be the next headline."
Even as Democrats around the country endorsed Black Lives Matter and championed defunding the police, Chicago’s black political leaders rushed 1,200 cops to the streets for the July 4th weekend.
African-American Police Superintendent David Brown ordered sweeps of street corners for gang members and pleaded with the courts to keep them in jail for at least the weekend.
"Our endgame is arrests," he said, vowing to break, "the pipeline for shootings and murders in Chicago."
A white ACLU official warned that would, “drive a wedge between the CPD and communities of color.”
While Democrats, their leftist leaders, and the media insist that the real threat to black people comes from police officers and white ‘Karens’ who try to defend themselves, the truth is in the hospitals.
Not just black people, but black children are being shot across America because of the anti-police riots.
In Detroit, a 9-year-old boy and 10-year-old girl were shot while shooting off fireworks.
In Washington D.C., a world away from where Democrat and Republican politicos sell out children like him by conspiring on “police reform” and “criminal justice reform”, Davon McNeal, an 11-year-old boy, was shot and killed while grabbing a phone charger and earbuds before heading to a July 4th BBQ.
Mayor Muriel Bowser offered her "thoughts and prayers". But the little boy shot at the Frederick Douglass apartments didn't need thoughts and prayers recited on Twitter, he needed the police.
The boy’s mother was a community D.C. Violence Interrupter and his grandfather is a Guardian Angel. He was surrounded by alternatives to police, including a city initiative that spent $10 million on community activists that were supposed to somehow ‘interrupt’ violence, but don’t stop bullets.
"We’re protesting for months, for weeks, saying, ‘Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter.’ Black lives matter it seems like, only when a police officer shoots a black person," John Ayala, the boy's grandfather, said.
"What about all the black-on-black crime that’s happening in the community?”
In St. Louis, a 4-year-old boy was shot in the head over the July 4th weekend. He was one of 4 children shot on the Fourth of July in the city and one of over 60 children that have been shot there this year.
St. Louis Children's Hospital's ER has seen more children with gunshot wounds in May than any previous month in its history.
An 8-year-old girl was shot and wounded on July 4th in Cleveland. A 15-year-old boy was among three people who were shot in Boston in 24 hours. In Delano, California, an 11-year-old and a 12-year-old girl were shot and killed at a party. The girls were Latino and their lives don’t matter at the moment.
But in New York City, TreShawn, an 11-year-old boy was wounded while playing outside his home.
There’s a 44% increase in shootings and a 23% rise in murders in New York City. Call it the BLM Effect.
"More people not in jail," NYPD Chief of Department Terence Monahan said, explaining the rising violence. "Rikers Island in New York is empty. Between Covid, between bail reform, the protests caused animosity towards the police, which took us out of neighborhoods that needed us the most."
In Rutherfordton, North Carolina, Aaliyah Norris, a 7-year-old girl, was shot and killed by Shaquille Francis. Her 9-year-old older sister won't sleep and won't eat after the murder.
Royta Giles Jr., an 8-year-old boy, was shot and killed in a Birmingham mall. Another girl was wounded. A 5-year-old boy was also shot and wounded in Birmingham while riding in a car.
Royta will receive a tiny fraction of the media attention and leftist outrage that Rayshard Brooks did. When a movement cares more about a violent thug than a little boy, that sums its moral compass.
A 6-year-old girl was shot and killed in Palm Bay, Florida. Two children were shot in a drive-by attack in Baton Rouge. A 5-year-old and a 12-year-old were shot during a gun battle in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Clarity Coleman, the 5-year-old, was shot in the leg while being pulled on a wagon.
“I didn’t even know that I got shot until I started feeling the pain,” Chyesha Smith, the 12-year-old, said.
70 children were shot in Philadelphia this year. A 43% rise. 96% of the child victims of violence are black.
This is what Black Lives Matter looks like in the real world.
In Minneapolis, where the city council has voted to defund the police, 50 kids from a youth football team, some as young as 5 years old, ran for cover as shots were fired by rival thugs in a park. Elsewhere, a 7-year-old boy was shot in the foot. 116 people were shot in June. That's a 400% increase.
Sasha Cotton, who heads the city's office of violence prevention, blamed angst and trauma from Floyd's death. Her office's plan to prevent the violence is to urge the victims not to retaliate.
Coach Thompson, who is black, said, "It was crazy to have 50 to 60 rounds fired and no police presence.”
But he’s considering supporting the defunding of the police.
The BLM Effect is taking black lives across America. In Milwaukee, shootings are up 95%, in Hartford, they've risen 36%, and in New York City, shootings are up 142%. In just one week, an extra 37 people were shot. That excess capacity can be credited to Black Lives Matter and all of its supporters.
While Democrat leaders grappled with taking down statues of the great explorer and possibly even renaming the city, Columbus, Ohio is experiencing one of its deadliest years.
Cincinnati is headed toward its deadliest year in over two generations. Murders are up 65%. The average murder victim is black. Only 4 were white.
“Each of those lives matter and the majority of those who have lost their lives this year, last year and the year before that are African Americans. It's unfortunate to say it is at the hands of other African Americans," Christopher Smitherman, the black head of Cincinnati’s public safety committee, said.
Smitherman is the former president of Cincinnati’s NAACP.
Black Lives Matter falsely pretends that black people are mostly endangered by police, when in reality, in some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country, they’re protected by police officers.
And those police officers are increasingly black.
Black Lives Matter declared war on the police on behalf of criminals. The death toll in black lives is shocking. And the toll in the lives of black children is even more heartrending. When the police leave, the criminals take over, and the hospitals and morgues pile up with the black victims of gang violence.
That’s the BLM Effect.
Supporting Black Lives Matter means not only supporting criminals over the police, it means enabling the mass deaths of black people and black children that inevitably follow in the wake of the riots.
If you support Black Lives Matter, you’re killing black children.
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