Democrats Addicted to COVID Fear Porn

...but can they extend their "Government Savior" vaccination political placebo gambit?

Let's Talk about Waukesha... before the DOJ CRS Censors Bury and Remove it All from History

Waukesha will hold a moment of silence today, marking one week since a car drove through a city Christmas parade, killing six people and injuring scores of others.https://t.co/QMNccpBI0y

They must have very dangerous self-driving cars in Wisconsin, as they operate w/o any mention of drivers... 

— CNN (@CNN) November 28, 2021

The Banished Voice of Sanity Still Haunting the Halls of DC....

video reprised...

On Celebrating America's Indigenous Cultures Over Thanksgiving...

A Merry Christmas Present from *President Joe Biden and Compliments of the NIH/CDC Funded Wuhan Institute of Virology!

Statement by President Joe Biden on the Omicron COVID-⁠19 Variant

This morning I was briefed by my chief medical advisor, Dr. Tony Fauci, and the members of our COVID response team, about the Omicron variant, which is spreading through Southern Africa. As a precautionary measure until we have more information, I am ordering additional air travel restrictions from South Africa and seven other countries. These new restrictions will take effect on November 29. As we move forward, we will continue to be guided by what the science and my medical team advises. 

For now, I have two important messages for the American people, and one for the world community.

First, for those Americans who are fully vaccinated against severe COVID illness – fortunately, for the vast majority of our adults — the best way to strengthen your protection is to get a booster shot, as soon as you are eligible. Boosters are approved for all adults over 18, six months past their vaccination and are available at 80,000 locations coast-to-coast. They are safe, free, and convenient. Get your booster shot now, so you can have this additional protection during the holiday season.

Second, for those not yet fully vaccinated: get vaccinated today. This includes both children and adults. America is leading the world in vaccinating children ages 5-11, and has been vaccinating teens for many months now – but we need more Americans in all age groups to get this life-saving protection. If you have not gotten vaccinated, or have not taken your children to get vaccinated, now is the time.

Finally, for the world community: the news about this new variant should make clearer than ever why this pandemic will not end until we have global vaccinations. The United States has already donated more vaccines to other countries than every other country combined. It is time for other countries to match America’s speed and generosity.

In addition, I call on the nations gathering next week for the World Trade Organization ministerial meeting to meet the U.S. challenge to waive intellectual property protections for COVID vaccines, so these vaccines can be manufactured globally. I endorsed this position in April; this news today reiterates the importance of moving on this quickly.

\All three companies have commenced testing against the strain, which is projected to be up to 500 percent more transmissible than any other variant seen since the pandemic began.

⚠️My god—the new #B11259 variant being possibly ~500% more competitively infectious is the most staggering stat yet. Also, #NuVariant has more than >2x the number of bad spike mutations than Delta. Here’s an updated 🧵👇

Model by @JPWeiland matches up with graph by @jburnmurdoch pic.twitter.com/SFvFEbD7QO

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) November 26, 2021

What-If Global Warming has NOTHING to Do with CO2?

C. J. Berends, "On the Cause of the Mid-Pleistocene Transition"

Maayan Yehudai, et al, "Evidence for a Northern Hemispheric trigger of the 100,000-y glacial cyclicity"

The New American Gnosticism: Myth's of the 1619 Project

James Lindsay, "The Calamity of Scientific Gnosticism"

If we think of the general madness of the world at the present in terms of the familiar biological taxonomical hierarchy: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species, while something like “Critical Whiteness Studies” might be a species within the Critical Race Theory genus, which is in turn classifiable in the neo-Marxian Family, Marxian Order, and Hegelian Class, the question arises: in what the Kingdom are all these interrelated insanities to be found? I assert that it is that ancient parasitic bugbear known as Gnosticism. In fact, the systematic Hegelian project and especially Marxism, which materialized it, would therefore define the Gnostic phylum of Scientific Gnosticism (though, by definition, “scientistic” would be better) that completes the taxonomy. Whatever might be said about other branches in Kingdom Gnosticism, Scientific Gnosticism is perhaps the most calamitous ideological phylum human beings have so far managed to contrive. Within that phylum, though taxonomically placed otherwise, we would find all of the failures of Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism, for example. We will also find our present plight, the so-called “public-private partnership,” which synthesizes Communism and Fascism into one new terror to be managed technocratically, in mockery of the science it will invoke to establish yet another unnecessary tyranny upon the world and its generally innocent people.

The essence of Gnosticism can be expressed in three beliefs. These are (1) that it is not you or your theories that are wrong, but the world itself; (2) that we have been flung into this miserable and intolerable condition against our wants; but (3) are able to attain a consciousness, a knowledge—a Gnosis—that will allow us to repair the world and ourselves. In this regard, Gnosticism is a perverted impulse toward progress, which describes the circumstance in which we have improved our ability to live in the world through a better understanding of it and ourselves in it. That is, progress means better according our lives with reality as it is and thus doing better in reality. Gnosticism turns progress upside-down—inverts it—by reframing it away from the effort to prosper in the world as it is and toward remaking it into a world that is not and, because this non-reality is essential to the Gnostic project, cannot be.

In that regard, Gnosticism is the perversion—the inversion—of epistemology, which is how we might go about knowing what we know and that we know it. Philosophically speaking (which is to say loving wisdom, not mistaking ourselves for the wise), knowledge is a tricky matter. While theologies are content to assert an absolute Truth in the Deity, they also, when mature, also insist that man’s fallibility and limitation prevents him from knowing that Truth as the Deity would. In other words, while there may be some absolute Truth, it is not man’s lot to know it within the circles of this world. To capital-K (or G) Know would position us as gods ourselves—and so whispers the Serpent of Genesis—which is out of accordance with the order of Creation. God’s mind is not our mind, and our minds are not equipped to fathom the ways of the Deity. Instead, we must be content to pursue or to love knowledge, or wisdom, and, if theological, God, and to pursue it as best we may in humility and in recognition of our proneness to error.

The theistic Gnostic, often theosophists, turns this upside-down. Absolute knowledge is available and hidden from us by those who have ordered the world. God is not the Creator who put order to the world and then called it good; He is a tyrant and the warden of a universal prison locked from within, keeps that which is truly Good for Himself, and by maintaining for us a state of ignorance keeps us enslaved. Knowledge of the higher truth, that the Garden is in fact a prison, sets us free of it, at which point we can reshape the world nearer to our hearts’ desires. Religion and Truth merely have to be exposed as the limiting lies that lead us to see the chaos of our lives as ordered, but in ways beyond our knowledge, and our misery as contentment and even joy. Accordingly, Knowledge of the Absolute Truth, Gnosis, is the way to true freedom. We just have to bite into the fruit, and capital-G Knowledge is ours.

So much for premodernity. Theistic Gnosticism is its own set of phyla in our taxonomical tree. In the modern era, epistemology has shifted into the scientific. Where many of the theologically savvy have recognized the scientific method as a tool to gain provisional and limited knowledge of God’s creation, they have come into harmony with those who see order in the brute fact of Nature herself. Science becomes the method by which we ask hard questions of the world, whether it be named Creation or not, and seek to ascertain what we can of its order. There is no shortcut to this process. Science is intrinsically agnostic—without Gnosis. Science, when it hasn’t ossified into some doctrine of scientism, proceeds entirely on the assumption that we do not know. Whereas The Science is settled; the science is never settled. Every hypothesis can be challenged. Every claim to knowledge can be overturned, especially any claim to Knowledge. Science is therefore by definition anti-Gnostic, just as are the healthy expressions of theistic faith. To allow the category error, Nature, whether product of God or not, has ordered the world as it has, for reasons that may forever remain inscrutable to us, and by our application of reason (gift of God or not), we might come to understand some portion of the order in which we live.

This agnostic fact of science bears a number of relevant consequences. One is that, since science is interested in ascertaining provisional truths about all that is, a Scientific Gnosticism must seek to call truths things which are not. This is why non-reality is essential to Scientific Gnosticism, and the form it takes is Theory. Theory sits atop reality and provides the right understanding, such that those who embrace Theory are the only ones who can truly understand reality. Socialism can only be properly understood by Socialist Man, who is a Scientific Gnostic. Another consequence readily follows. Scientific Gnosticism is scientistic, not scientific at all. It uses the prestige of science as a pretense to its own insight, but it is a counterfeit and an inversion in the same way that premodern Gnostic cults are counterfeit, inverted religions, which the faithful call “heresies.” One familiar is here reminded of the feminist philosopher Kelly Oliver, who called for a revolution against the “absolute authority of recalcitrant Nature” in a now-infamous 1989 paper in a paragraph in which she asserts that we can be freed from that prison by abandoning “true theories” and “false theories” for “strategic theories.”

Some in the modern era—notably G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx in his wake—believed that such an understanding of the emerging epistemology of that era, science, presents only a low-level understanding of the world as it is. Theirs is a world that becomes, not a world that is, and it does so through the intrinsically negative process of highlighting “contradictions.” Unless a claim to direct revelation is made, contradictions are a typical route to Gnosis for the Gnostic. As the Serpent whispered the first “contradiction” in Genesis—that ye be made in the image of God but are not as God—so raged Marx that the very point of understanding the world is to change it, by “ruthless criticism of everything that exists,” no less. And so Death entered the world as answer to the rebellion against the order of the world, which, in fact, will not change.

The term for “science” in German, Wissenschaft, carried less strict a meaning in the 19th century than its contemporary translation in English, and it was with that Wissenschaft that these German modern-era Scientific Gnostics worked. That Wissenschaft more accurately refers to “knowledge” than to the more specific term, “science,” and the systematic speculative idealist Hegel separated it into two levels: Verstand (“Understanding”) and Vernunft (“Reason”). A nearer articulation of the meaning of these terms, however, would be (agnostic) understanding (of provisional truths about the world) and (Gnostic) Theory, which is to say systematic contextualization—that is, ideology—of that understanding and everything else.

For Hegel, this meant that his own systematic philosophy was the better understanding, the Wissenschaftlicher, of Understanding (and therefore also not wrong). This is a great, and Gnostic, intellectual swindle. Hegel’s “philosophy,” for an actual philosophy it is not, becomes the doctrine through which all knowledge is put into its proper context. Hegel’s “Reason” is the Absolute, which those with Theoretical consciousness bring to completion. Thus, in Hegel, in Marx, and in their intellectual descendants throughout this taxonomical tree, who are in the current end “Woke,” we have the emergence of a “Scientific Gnosticism” that, in our own era, is often mockingly referred to as “The Science.” That a Scientific Gnosticism is, itself, an oxymoronic contradiction in terms is no impediment to The Science, because in-contradiction is its authentic state of being. That’s because it is an inversion of science done in the name of “progress” that seeks to remake the world rather than to understand it and to prosper in accordance with it.

Marx was quite explicit about The Science, which he referred to as Wissenschaftlicher Sozialismus—usually given as “Scientific Socialism,” though the suffix –licher implies that it is more scientific (than science, one might presume). Scientific Socialism is an approach that went on to mischaracterize lowly Verstand science as “bourgeois science,” which in turn led to the unnecessary deaths of possibly more than a hundred million people in the Soviet Union and China. Recalcitrant nature, contra Kelly Oliver, retained its recalcitrance despite the strategery of the Theory.

Strategic theories, Gnostic Theories, turn out only to be good for obtaining power and abusing it, but they cannot deliver Utopia, no matter how many Theorists (Marxian, neo-Marxian, or Woke) spin them in new ways. They cannot remake the broken world into which we have been flung because it is not, in fact, broken in the first place. Vernunft (Theory, usually named Reason) isn’t very reasonable. Socialist Man doesn’t, as it turns out, know better, and he will never be able to reorder the world nearer to his heart’s desire.

Couldn’t we say, though, that that was then and this is now, and we’re no longer in the modern era but the postmodern, in which Scientific Gnosticism cannot be because there is neither Science nor Gnosis to be had? That was the postmodernists’ contention, anyway. All science, all knowledge, all truth is a proud claim to Gnosis, and that, they seem to assert, cannot be had anyway. So we might read Lyotard on the “postmodern condition” or understand Foucault’s dire warnings about biopower. “It’s not that everything is bad; it’s that everything is dangerous”: all progress is an illusion, and the world cannot be remade, nor us within it. Even the neo-Marxists of the late 1960s—undoubtely Scientific Gnostics of the first order—cleaved their Gnosticism in this direction, which is to say in the negative. Negative thinking becomes positive, admonished Marcuse, and the revolutionary potential of the movement is located within the absence of liberation while retaining consciousness of its historical possibility. It may not be possible to cast a positive image of the Utopia, claimed Adorno, but Utopia exists in the negative. Utopia is the possibility of what may be when all oppression is removed. Put otherwise, we might not know what Heaven will look like, but it’s not this and we’ll know it when we see it—now get in the car. This is still Gnosticism, and their mode, profoundly modernist even as it flirted with the postmodern, in the Scientific mold.

Regarding the challenge of postmodernism proper, at least three things must be said. First, the postmodernists, for all their insights and astute warnings about The Science, failed to understand the science it mimics. Second, though their dialectics turned almost completely negative, not even they gave up on Gnosticism. Instead, they retained it in different shape, so that the remaking of the world and Man within it was made totally internal and subjective. Their goal was to reject all meaning and truth, and this is but an avant garde, nihilistic, fashionably 1970s-French way of asserting that they in some way knew so much better, better enough to be able to sit aside from the whole world and shit on it at every turn. Third, their critique, even for what worth it retains in spite of these contradictions and confusions, doesn’t matter because in the years since postmodernism came to America, the Scientific Gnostics merely figured out ways to incorporate it into their Scientific Gnosticism—and they won the fight.

The result of the postmodern turn in Scientific Gnosticism wasn’t its end; it was its kaleidoscopic (literally, that’s their word for it) explosion. Now Gnostic consciousnesses proliferate at the level of identity politics, and these define the entire collection of genera in the “Woke” family or families in our taxonomical hierarchy. Queer Theory sees “queer” as an “identity without an essence,” and so every narcissistic adolescent obtains a specialized Gnosis of the world and its functioning located firmly in their own unstable sense of self that is contextualized by The Science of sex, gender, and sexuality. Race is socially constructed and imposed, says Critical Race Theory, so only by understanding yourself in terms of its structurally deterministic machinations can Gnostic awareness of Race Theory be rightly obtained. Understanding systems and their operation through the black magick of socialization awakens a Gnostic consciousness in every conceivable domain of identity, but Scientific Gnosticism it remains. Postmodernism didn’t kill Scientific Gnosticism; it merely pushed it deeply into the plural.

In this way, we can understand the madness of the current world. Gnosticism is again ascendant in a new postmodern and scientistic form, and Gnostic cults have captured countless people and far too many institutions. The trouble is: they think they Know, and they think that with their Knowledge, they can remake the world and those who are so unfortunate to inhabit it in its Fallen form. As a result, droves of otherwise sensible human beings yet again feel as though they have been flung into a broken world and, with the right Theory, the right Gnosis, they can properly contextualize all that they think they understand and so remake the world and themselves to match.

In practice, then, because these are metaphysically based cults, all stories, including stories about data, must serve Theory because Theory is the map to that Absolute knowledge—consciousness, be that class, feminist, critical, racial, or otherwise—that God and Nature otherwise would withhold from us, no matter how good our theology or our instruments. In this understanding, we can see that nothing has changed and that the “liberation” held out as Theory’s promise is false. Recalcitrant nature—human and otherwise—will remain recalcitrant. Second reality will not become reality. Theory put into practice will fail. They will not achieve “liberation” because liberation from reality is not possible, no matter how self-indulgently miserable and resentful anyone becomes by believing they capital-G Know what they can only pretend to know.

The Irresponsible Left Have Forgotten Their Roots

Erasing Thoreau's Non-Violence Red-Line Since "Civil Disobedience"...

Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less despondent spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race should find them; on that separate but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not _with_ her, but _against_ her--the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor. If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, "But what shall I do?" my answer is, "If you really wish to do anything, resign your office." When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned from office, then the revolution is accomplished. But even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man's real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.

Ghosts of Thanksgivings Future...

...or Present?

The Logistics Problem in a Nutshell

The On-Going Destruction of Evidence of a What We Are Told is 'A Crime that Never Happened'...

Margot Cleveland, "Whistleblower Videos Capture Pennsylvania Election Officials Destroying Evidence"

A complaint alleges Pennslyvania election officials were tearing tapes 'into pieces and placing ... them into the trash stating they will have a campfire to burn the data.'

Several residents of Delaware County Pennsylvania filed a sprawling lawsuit Thursday against the former Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, Delaware County, the Delaware County Board of Elections, and more than a dozen individual election officials. The lawsuit followed Wednesday’s night release of videotapes taken by a whistleblower capturing concerning behavior by several election officials in the Keystone state.

A source familiar with the lawsuit provided access to the tapes, noting the then-unnamed whistleblower had come forward with video evidence purporting to show Delaware County, Pennsylvania election officials destroying records from the November 2020 general election. The videos were also filed with the complaint and a bevy of exhibits the plaintiffs maintain support the allegations contained in their 91-page complaint.

The complaint, filed by Delaware County residents, Ruth Moton, Leah Hoopes, Gregory Stenstrom, as well as the Friends of Ruth Motion campaign, prevented both detailed alleged violations of state election law during the November 2020 election and claims of a conspiracy after the election to hide the numerous problems and illegalities that occurred during the last presidential election.

While the minutia of the election law recited in the complaint may escape the public’s notice, allegations that the defendants conspired to destroy or alter election data, materials, and equipment, “to prevent the discovery of the fraudulent results of the November 3, 2020 election, and the violation of various state and federal election laws,” when coupled with the videos, may finally awaken the sleeping masses to the cause of election integrity.

A May 21, 2021 request for 2020 election data and information submitted to Delaware County under Pennsylvania’s Right to Know Law served as an impetus for the alleged conspiracy and cover-up, as the complaint told the story.

A week later after the Right to Know request, a conversation is captured between two individuals, identified by those with knowledge of the lawsuit, as James Allen, the Director of Election Operations for Delaware County, and Jim Savage, identified by Delaware County’s directory as the Chief Custodian/Voting Machine Warehouse Supervisor.

In that video provided to The Federalist, Allen is heard telling Savage, “Then get rid of the pads and the second scanners.”

“We can’t talk about it anymore,” Savage replies, with Allen questioning, “Why?” “It’s a felony,” Allen countered.

The complaint added more texture to this video, alleging that Savage then “encouraged a private conversation to continue the conversation of the removal of the pads and scanners due to other Delaware County employees and [contract employee] Regina Miller,” being present.

The following month the whistleblower filmed a conversation she had with another Delaware County official, James Ziegelhoffer, according to a source with knowledge of the lawsuit. Ziegelhoffer, also known as Ziggy, held the position of “Judge of Election” for the Western Precinct in the Media Borough.

This tape purports to capture Ziggy saying, “What we have here . . . is evidence. Right? Let them figure that out.”

The whistleblower interjects, “Yes, but what I don’t understand and this makes — honestly this makes me nervous. Is why tapes were being thrown away?”

Ziggy begins to deny the claim, “No, no tapes were,” when the Whistleblower cuts him off:

“No, you guys have been throwing away tapes … so what tapes are you throwing away? Like why?”

“They’re all unidentifiable,” he counters before the whistleblower interrupts again: 

“But it’s been that way since the November elections, so why would you throw anything away. Because you have to save it for 22 months,” the unnamed source is heard saying in the video, a reference to federal retention mandates.

“Yes there are tapes that are being tossed,” Ziggy finally acknowledges, but adds, “but they are of no audit value.”

A third video appears filmed in the same large room and captures a man identified by individuals with knowledge of the lawsuit as a Delaware County lawyer, Tom Gallager. As Gallager tears the tapes from the voting machines and discards them, the whistleblower can be heard asking: “Tom, why do you have to rip it up? Makes you feel better?”

“At this point,” Gallager replies, “I don’t want anybody to pick it up, and thinking we threw stuff away.”

“We’re gonna have a little campfire going,” Ziggy adds.

Several allegations in the complaint mesh with this video as well, with the plaintiffs alleging Delaware County layer, Tom Gallagher, and Ziegelhofer “set up a long table full of November 3, 2020, election data, and selectively destroyed the machines/proof tapes along with other November 3, 2020 records by tearing it into pieces and placing [it] into the trash stating they will have a campfire to burn the data.”

“Regina Miller became nervous” the complaint continues, alleging that Miller “informed the pair that they were violating numerous state and federal laws.” According to the complaint, Ziegelhoffer justified his actions by claiming “there was no audit value” to the November 3, 2020, election data.

Miller, who was a contract employee with Monarch Staffing, also claimed that in July of 2021, Allen threatened to consider a complaint taken to anyone else but him, as a “second and final violation of chain of command.” The complaint further alleged that Savage “told Regina Miller that he would have someone killed if he was ever betrayed by someone at work and described a story that he heard regarding someone from the county that someone “ratted on.”

Attempts to speak with Allen proved unsuccessful, with an administrative assistant stating he was in a meeting, but agreeing to convey my media request to him. Allen did not return my call. A call to Savage went unanswered and the County also ignored requests for comments from the gentlemen along with Gallager and Ziegelhoffer.

After detailing the purported violations of election law and the alleged destruction of election records and the claimed conspiracy, the complaint presented five legal theories for recovery, with Count I for common law fraud, Count II for fraudulent misrepresentation, Count III for negligent misrepresentation, Count IV for a claim for common law quo warranto, which apparently is a Pennsylvania claim for fraud related to elections and Count V for Mandamus and Equitable Relief.

While, if true, the allegations seem to scream of violations of the law, none of the claims alleged seem a close fit to the facts proffered to the court in the complaint. Also troubling is grasping the remedy the plaintiffs seek.

Typically money damages are awarded for fraud, but how do you monetize the harm to a voter when he is disenfranchised by election officials who counted illegal or fraudulent votes? Similarly, what court order (or mandamus) or other injunction could make the plaintiffs whole again.

The litigation, however, may have served another purpose: To highlight what the plaintiffs believe were widespread violations of state and federal election law and to expose the alleged conspiracy to cover up those problems, and thereby prevent a repeat in future elections.

Still, the videos may not be enough for those so blinded by their distaste for Trump that they cannot see the real threat to our democracy: elections without integrity and an electorate unable to trust the official outcome.

Note: Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. Cleveland served nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk to a federal appellate judge and is a former full-time faculty member and adjunct instructor at the college of business at the University of Notre Dame. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

The Intelligence Community or "IC" - America's "Nocturnal Council"

So much for the idea of a "Separation of Powers".... 

ATHENIAN: No man can be a true worshipper of the Gods who does not know these two principles—that the soul is the eldest of all things which are born, and is immortal and rules over all bodies; moreover, as I have now said several times, he who has not contemplated the mind of nature which is said to exist in the stars, and gone through the previous training, and seen the connexion of music with these things, and harmonized them all with laws and institutions, is not able to give a reason of such things as have a reason. And he who is unable to acquire this in addition to the ordinary virtues of a citizen, can hardly be a good ruler of a whole state; but he should be the subordinate of other rulers. Wherefore, Cleinias and Megillus, let us consider whether we may not add to all the other laws which we have discussed this further one—that the nocturnal assembly of the magistrates, which has also shared in the whole scheme of education proposed by us, shall be a guard set according to law for the salvation of the state. Shall we propose this?

CLEINIAS: Certainly, my good friend, we will if the thing is in any degree possible.

-Plato, "The Laws" 

Plato, "The Laws"

The guardians of the law ought to take especial care of the different ages of life, whether childhood, or manhood, or any other age. And at the end of all, let there be some one guardian of the law presiding, who shall be chosen by the friends of the deceased to superintend, and let it be glory to him to manage with fairness and moderation what relates to the dead, and a discredit to him if they are not well managed. Let the laying out and other ceremonies be in accordance with custom, but to the statesman who adopts custom as his law we must give way in certain particulars. It would be monstrous for example that he should command any man to weep or abstain from weeping over the dead; but he may forbid cries of lamentation, and not allow the voice of the mourner to be heard outside the house; also, he may forbid the bringing of the dead body into the open streets, or the processions of mourners in the streets, and may require that before daybreak they should be outside the city. Let these, then, be our laws relating to such matters, and let him who obeys be free from penalty; but he who disobeys even a single guardian of the law shall be punished by them all with a fitting penalty. Other modes of burial, or again the denial of burial, which is to be refused in the case of robbers of temples and parricides and the like, have been devised and are embodied in the preceding laws, so that now our work of legislation is pretty nearly at an end; but in all cases the end does not consist in doing something or acquiring something or establishing something—the end will be attained and finally accomplished, when we have provided for the perfect and lasting continuance of our institutions; until then our creation is incomplete.

CLEINIAS: That is very good, Stranger; but I wish you would tell me more clearly what you mean.

ATHENIAN: O Cleinias, many things of old time were well said and sung; and the saying about the Fates was one of them.

CLEINIAS: What is it?

ATHENIAN: The saying that Lachesis or the giver of the lots is the first of them, and that Clotho or the spinster is the second of them, and that Atropos or the unchanging one is the third of them; and that she is the preserver of the things which we have spoken, and which have been compared in a figure to things woven by fire, they both (i.e. Atropos and the fire) producing the quality of unchangeableness. I am speaking of the things which in a state and government give not only health and salvation to the body, but law, or rather preservation of the law, in the soul; and, if I am not mistaken, this seems to be still wanting in our laws: we have still to see how we can implant in them this irreversible nature.

CLEINIAS: It will be no small matter if we can only discover how such a nature can be implanted in anything.

ATHENIAN: But it certainly can be; so much I clearly see.

CLEINIAS: Then let us not think of desisting until we have imparted this quality to our laws; for it is ridiculous, after a great deal of labour has been spent, to place a thing at last on an insecure foundation.

ATHENIAN: I approve of your suggestion, and am quite of the same mind with you.

CLEINIAS: Very good: And now what, according to you, is to be the salvation of our government and of our laws, and how is it to be effected?

ATHENIAN: Were we not saying that there must be in our city a council which was to be of this sort: The ten oldest guardians of the law, and all those who have obtained prizes of virtue, were to meet in the same assembly, and the council was also to include those who had visited foreign countries in the hope of hearing something that might be of use in the preservation of the laws, and who, having come safely home, and having been tested in these same matters, had proved themselves to be worthy to take part in the assembly—each of the members was to select some young man of not less than thirty years of age, he himself judging in the first instance whether the young man was worthy by nature and education, and then suggesting him to the others, and if he seemed to them also to be worthy they were to adopt him; but if not, the decision at which they arrived was to be kept a secret from the citizens at large, and, more especially, from the rejected candidate. The meeting of the council was to be held early in the morning, when everybody was most at leisure from all other business, whether public or private—was not something of this sort said by us before?

CLEINIAS: True.

ATHENIAN: Then, returning to the council, I would say further, that if we let it down to be the anchor of the state, our city, having everything which is suitable to her, will preserve all that we wish to preserve.

CLEINIAS: What do you mean?

ATHENIAN: Now is the time for me to speak the truth in all earnestness.

---

Sundance, "How Did Ordinary American People Become Domestic Terrorists in The Eyes of The Deep State"

Barack Obama and Eric Holder did not create a weaponized DOJ and FBI; the institutions were already weaponized by the Patriot Act.

Instead, what Obama and Holder did was to take the preexisting system and retool it so the weapons of government only targeted one side of the political continuum. This point is where many people understandably get confused.

In the era shortly after 9/11, the DC national security apparatus was constructed to preserve continuity of government and simultaneously view all Americans as potential threats. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) were created specifically for this purpose.

What Barack Obama and Eric Holder did with that new construct was refine the internal targeting mechanisms so that only their ideological opposition became the target of the new national security system. This is very important to understand as you dig deeper into this research outline.

Washington DC created the modern national security apparatus immediately and hurriedly after 9/11/01. DHS came along in 2002, and within the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 the ODNI was formed. When Barack Obama and Eric Holder arrived a few years later, those newly formed institutions were viewed as opportunities to create a very specific national security apparatus that would focus almost exclusively against their political opposition.

The preexisting Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Dept of Justice (DOJ) were then repurposed to become two of the four pillars of the domestic national security apparatus. However, this new construct would have a targeting mechanism based on political ideology. The DHS, ODNI, DOJ and FBI became the four pillars of this new institution. Atop these pillars is where you will find the Fourth Branch of Government.

We were not sleeping when this happened, we were wide awake. However, we were stunningly distracted by the economic collapse that was taking place in 2006 and 2007 when the engineers behind Obama started to assemble the design. By the time Obama took office in 2009, we sensed something profound was shifting, but we can only see exactly what shifted in the aftermath. The four pillars were put into place, and a new Fourth Branch of Government was quietly created.

As time passed, and the system operators became familiar with their new tools, technology allowed the tentacles of the system to reach out and touch us. That is when we first started to notice that something very disconcerting was happening. Those four pillars are the root of it, and if we take the time to understand how the Fourth Branch originated, questions about this current state of perpetual angst will start to make sense.

Grab a cup of your favorite beverage, and take a walk with me as we outline how this was put together. You might find many of the questions about our current state of political affairs beginning to make a lot more sense.

Remember, it is not my intent to outline the entire history of how we got to this place where the intelligence community now acts as the superseding Fourth Branch of Government. Such an effort would be exhausting and likely take our discussion away from understanding the current dynamic.

History provided enough warnings from Dwight D. Eisenhower (military), to John F. Kennedy (CIA), to Richard Nixon (FBI), to all modern versions of warnings and frustrations from HPSCI Devin Nunes and ODNI Ric Grenell. None of those prior reference points are invalid, and all documented outlines of historic reference are likely true and accurate. However, a generational review is not useful, as the reference impacting us ‘right now‘ gets lost.

Instead, we pick up the expansive and weaponized intelligence system as it manifests after 9/11/01, and my goal is to highlight how the modern version of the total intelligence apparatus has now metastasized into a Fourth Branch of Government. It is this superseding branch that now touches and influences every facet of our life.

If we take the modern construct, originating at the speed of technological change, we can also see how the oversight or “check/balance” in our system of government became functionally obsolescent.

After many years of granular research about the intelligence apparatus inside our government, in the summer of 2020 I visited Washington DC to ask specific questions. My goal was to go where the influence agents within government actually operate, and to discover the people deep inside the institutions no one elected and few people pay attention to.

It was during this process when I discovered how information is purposefully put into containment silos; essentially a formal process to block the flow of information between agencies and between the original branches. While frustrating to discover, the silo effect was important because understanding the communication between networks leads to our ability to reconcile conflict between what we perceive and what’s actually taking place.

After days of research and meetings in DC during 2020; amid a town that was serendipitously shut down due to COVID-19; I found a letter slid under the door of my room in a nearly empty hotel with an introduction of sorts. The subsequent discussions were perhaps the most important. After many hours of specific questions and answers on specific examples, I realized why our nation is in this mess. That is when I discovered the fourth and superseding branch of government, the Intelligence Branch.

I am going to explain how the Intelligence Branch works: (1) to control every other branch of government; (2) how it functions as an entirely independent branch of government with no oversight; (3) how and why it was created to be independent from oversight; (4) what is the current mission of the IC Branch, and most importantly (5) who operates it.

The Intelligence Branch is an independent functioning branch of government, it is no longer a subsidiary set of agencies within the Executive Branch as most would think. To understand the Intelligence Branch, we need to drop the elementary school civics class lessons about three coequal branches of government and replace that outlook with the modern system that created itself.

The Intelligence Branch functions much like the State Dept, through a unique set of public-private partnerships that support it.   Big Tech industry collaboration with intelligence operatives is part of that functioning; almost like an NGO. However, the process is much more important than most think. In this problematic perspective of a corrupt system of government, the process is the flaw – not the outcome.

There are people making decisions inside this little known, unregulated and out-of-control branch of government that impact every facet of our lives.

None of the people operating deep inside the Intelligence Branch were elected; and our elected representative House members genuinely do not know how the system works. I assert this position affirmatively because I have talked to House and Senate staffers, including the chiefs of staff for multiple House & Senate committee seats. They are not malicious people; however, they are genuinely clueless of things that happen outside their silo. That is part of the purpose of me explaining it, with examples, in full detail with sunlight.

(Continued @ Sundance's website - Link also Above)

Rappin' Political

Want to Know "Why" America's Politics Seem Broken and Problems Seem Unsolvable?...

...we let Self-Interested and Elite Politicians and their Media Enablers "Frame" the So-Called "Problems" in a Manner so as to Preclude Anyone Else Ever Asking the Right Questions and/or Permit Real Solutions from Emerging.

Today We Need "Populist" Citizen-Philosophers to Ask Some Different Questions and Provide a Different "Framing" for America's Now "Endemic" Problems.  No Wonder "Elites" the World Over HATE "Populism".

So... After watching the 2 Video's Above, Do you think America has a "Homelessness Problem" OR a Regulatory Induced and Therefore Structural and Systemic "Housing Affordability Problem"?... because IMO the Former Seems but a Very Minor Symptom of the Latter..

Covid Mission Accomplished!

Kurt Schlichter,"Time to Declare Victory Over COVID"

Can we just end this COVID nonsense now, or do some people have such empty lives that they can’t get beyond this ridiculous societal spasm because they need it to give their existence meaning? Sadly, they do, and you can see them licking their thin lips at the thought of more lockdowns. Except I am sick – pardon the expression – of having my life disrupted by their personal psychodramas. I get that this silly pandemic has been the most exciting, edgy, and interesting thing that will ever happen to many of our fellow citizens. It’s been their chance to cocoon in their condos watching Netflix and feeling like they are cheating death. But to the rest of us, it’s a pain in the Schumer and we’ve gone along with the whining sissies for too long.

The pandemic is over. We won. Deal with it.

Stop with this mask crap. Masks don’t work and we all know they don’t work but the paranoid freaks who form a huge part of President *’s lame base insist we wear them as some sort of totem to ward off the evil coronaspirits. It’s stupid + superstition – stupidstition.

Follow the science? Where’s the science saying the masks have any effect but to give lonely, sexually underutilized lib wine mommies the giddy thrill of pretending they are confronting some perilous peril when they gag their pale, dopey kids and wrap a thong around their talkslots in order to go out in the sunshine and take a walk.

It’s dumb and degrading. But then liberals and their sissycon fellow travelers are dumb and they enjoy being degraded, and while I’m not going to kinkshame them, count me out. Masks are ridiculous and this freaky fetish needs to end. Find your thrills with mask porn in the nether reaches of the internet if that’s your jam, but stop insisting I join in your circle of jerks by stringing glorified tissue paper in front of my face.

Is there a risk from not wearing a mask? Not any appreciable risk, but if there were, so what? I’ll roll the dice in exchange for some dignity.

Now is the part where I am somehow supposed to acknowledge that a lot of people have died of the Chinese flu, but that’s not the point and I need not make it. Diseases happen, then they stop happening. Yeah, people are still getting sick, and a lot of them are vaccinated people. Remember how we were told a bunch of contradictory things about the vaccine?

Trump is behind it, so it’s bad.

Now Biden’s sort of president, so vaccines are good and will totally protect you.

In fact, they are so good we are demanding that you take them.

And natural immunity is not a thing.

And side effects are not a thing either.

But but but no one ever said that vaccines will totally protect you.

Vaccines only make the diseases you get less bad.

How could you ever think we meant the vaccine meant you couldn’t get it or spread it when we told you that?

Now, everyone must get a vaccine that fails to protect others in order to protect others – wait, what?

I got the disease and I got the vaccine and I’m going to live my life, but here I am writing this on an airplane having to nurse a beer instead of chugging it so the sky Stasi doesn’t come over and give me the 900th warning about how federal law – DUN DUN DUN – commands we ritually don our useless serf muzzles.

The stewardesses actually reminded people that if the oxygen masks drop, we could then, and only then, remove our face thingies. Just the day before, my pal Jesse Kelly had tweeted that he heard that very announcement on a plane, and in my naïveté, I briefly thought that our society could not be that stupid, but there it was, right there in the midst of the standard safety brief. Never underestimate the stupidity of the establishment.

But then, you know there are people so dumb and so terrified of the Chinese virus that they’d be trying to huff oxygen through a mask. And, sadly, the people who these same dummies sort of elected cater to them. Maybe we should let Darwin cull the herd a bit. And maybe next time, Fauci can fund a Chinese experiment in altering viruses to only infect stupid people, like the guy who got on the plane last and spent ten minutes trying to wedge his steamer trunk into the bulging overhead bin.

People are still getting sick and here’s a bit of news for the slow kids in the back row – that’s going to keep happening. This disease is here and it’s now endemic and that’s how it’s going to be no matter how much pandemic theater we perform. There will be waves of it, and the answer is not to do what Biden in front of the Pope to ourselves every time the rates spike. The answer is to shrug and go on with our lives.

Remember a few weeks ago when Florida’s rates spiked, and it was somehow DeSantis’s fault? Well, now the paranoid blue state rates are spiking and it is somehow DeSantis’s fault. The blue states are slobbering at the thought of shutting down again. I have a different strategy – do nothing. Eventually, everyone is going to get it, and maybe that’s not that bad. Almost all of you who will get it will be fine; if you have some vulnerabilities, like lung issues or you follow the Chris Christie diet, maybe you should take extra precautions. But don’t ask me to. I kicked its ass when I had it. Your problems are your problems, and I am not going to stay in my house because you can’t stay out of Golden Corral.

Free the kids from the tyranny of COVID fanatic schools.

Free citizens from the tyranny of vaccine fascists who think choice means killing babies but not declining shots.

Free everyone from stupid rules that amount to ritual toobining, delivering only mild transitory pleasure to bossy people unable to obtain pleasure through dignified pursuits.

It’s time to live again, and just because you have no life to return to doesn’t mean I’m not going to live mine.

When is a Vaccine No Longer a Vaccine?

When it no longer produces IMMUNITY it no longer belongs to the scientific/ medical classification  of IMMUNE-OLOGY, to which only "real vaccines" belong!  

What types of vaccines are there?

Based on a number of these factors, scientists decide which type of vaccine they will make. There are several types of vaccines, including:

a) Inactivated vaccines
b) Live-attenuated vaccines
c) Messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines
d) Subunit, recombinant, polysaccharide, and conjugate vaccines
e) Toxoid vaccines
f) Viral vector vaccines

a) Inactivated vaccines

Inactivated vaccines use the killed version of the germ that causes a disease.


Inactivated vaccines usually don’t provide immunity (protection) that’s as strong as live vaccines. So you may need several doses over time (booster shots) in order to get ongoing immunity against diseases.


Inactivated vaccines are used to protect against:

Hepatitis A
Flu (shot only)
Polio (shot only)
Rabies

b) Live-attenuated vaccines

Live vaccines use a weakened (or attenuated) form of the germ that causes a disease.

Because these vaccines are so similar to the natural infection that they help prevent, they create a strong and long-lasting immune response. Just 1 or 2 doses of most live vaccines can give you a lifetime of protection against a germ and the disease it causes.

But live vaccines also have some limitations. For example:

Because they contain a small amount of the weakened live virus, some people should talk to their health care provider before receiving them, such as people with weakened immune systems, long-term health problems, or people who’ve had an organ transplant. 

They need to be kept cool, so they don’t travel well. That means they can’t be used in countries with limited access to refrigerators.

Live vaccines are used to protect against:

Measles, mumps, rubella (MMR combined vaccine)
Rotavirus
Smallpox
Chickenpox
Yellow fever

c) Messenger RNA vaccines—also called mRNA vaccines

Researchers have been studying and working with mRNA vaccines for decades and this technology was used to make some of the COVID-19 vaccines. mRNA vaccines make proteins in order to trigger an immune response. mRNA vaccines have several benefits compared to other types of vaccines, including shorter manufacturing times and, because they do not contain a live virus, no risk of causing disease in the person getting vaccinated.

mRNA vaccines are used to protect against:

COVID-19

d) Subunit, recombinant, polysaccharide, and conjugate vaccines

Subunit, recombinant, polysaccharide, and conjugate vaccines use specific pieces of the germ—like its protein, sugar, or capsid (a casing around the germ).

Because these vaccines use only specific pieces of the germ, they give a very strong immune response that’s targeted to key parts of the germ. They can also be used on almost everyone who needs them, including people with weakened immune systems and long-term health problems.

One limitation of these vaccines is that you may need booster shots to get ongoing protection against diseases.

These vaccines are used to protect against:

Hib (Haemophilus influenzae type b) disease
Hepatitis B
HPV (Human papillomavirus)
Whooping cough (part of the DTaP combined vaccine)
Pneumococcal disease
Meningococcal disease
Shingles

e) Toxoid vaccines

Toxoid vaccines use a toxin (harmful product) made by the germ that causes a disease. They create immunity to the parts of the germ that cause a disease instead of the germ itself. That means the immune response is targeted to the toxin instead of the whole germ.

Like some other types of vaccines, you may need booster shots to get ongoing protection against diseases.

Toxoid vaccines are used to protect against:

Diphtheria
Tetanus

f) Viral vector vaccines

For decades, scientists studied viral vector vaccines. Some vaccines recently used for Ebola outbreaks have used viral vector technology, and a number of studies have focused on viral vector vaccines against other infectious diseases such as Zika, flu, and HIV. Scientists used this technology to make COVID-19 vaccines as well.

Viral vector vaccines use a modified version of a different virus as a vector to deliver protection. Several different viruses have been used as vectors, including influenza, vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), measles virus, and adenovirus, which causes the common cold. Adenovirus is one of the viral vectors used in some COVID-19 vaccines being studied in clinical trials. 

Viral vector vaccines are used to protect against:

COVID-19

The future of vaccines

Did you know that scientists are still working to create new types of vaccines? Here are 2 exciting examples:

DNA vaccines are easy and inexpensive to make—and they produce strong, long-term immunity. 

Recombinant vector vaccines (platform-based vaccines) act like a natural infection, so they're especially good at teaching the immune system how to fight germs.

Current Covid-19 Vaccine Types:

The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines are messenger RNA vaccines also called mRNA vaccines. mRNA vaccines are some of the first COVID-19 vaccines authorized and approved for use in the United States.

The Johnson & Johnson Janssen vaccine, a viral vector vaccine, is among the COVID-19 vaccines authorized for emergency use in the United States.

New Covid-19 Vaccines with Stage III Trials Completed NOVAVAX:

NOVAVAX - NVX-CoV2373 is a subunit vaccine made from a stabilized form of the coronavirus spike protein using the company’s recombinant protein nanoparticle technology. The purified protein antigens in the vaccine cannot replicate or cause COVID-19. The vaccine also contains a proprietary adjuvant, MatrixM™. Adjuvants are additives that enhance desired immune system responses to vaccine. NVX-CoV2373 is administered by injection in liquid form and can be stored, handled and distributed at above-freezing temperatures (35° to 46°F.) A single vaccine dose contains 5 micrograms (mcg) of protein and 50 mcg of adjuvant. The vaccine is administered as two intramuscular injections 21 days apart. The technology used for this vaccine was developed under a long-standing contract with the Department of Defense.

Results from a Phase 3 clinical trial enrolling 15,000 adults in the United Kingdom showed a two-dose regimen of NVX-CoV2373 was highly effective(link is external) in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 overall and also demonstrated high efficacy against the Alpha variant strain of SARS-CoV-2.

What a Sad Little Man...

The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot

Mistah Kurtz -- he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy
 

I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.


II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom


III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.


IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.


V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Unmasking the Red-Masqued Media

When Covid Enters the 7th Room after the Clock Has Struck the 12th (Midnight) Hour and We've Received the 50th Booster...

Will Prince Fauci Receive his Final/ Just Reward?  Will We?

T.L. Hesse, "An Edgar Allan Poe horror story resonates in a time of COVID and vaccines"

In 1842, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a horror story entitled The Masque of the Red Death. It turns out to be a very powerful metaphor for what the Democrat party is doing with COVID and the vaccines in America, in 2021.

In the story, a mysterious plague that causes people to bleed to death is abroad in the land. Prince Prospero takes over a walled and gated abbey and fills it with his rich friends so that they can avoid the Red Death that is bringing so much misery to the land. Safe behind the abbey’s walls, Prospero organizes a lavish, masked costume ball that will be held in seven different rooms, each decorated in a different color.

Our modern Democrat rulers, who feel so superior to us, are having their own lavish parties, whether in Martha’s Vineyard, in expensive restaurants such as the French Laundry, or at a Getty heiress’s wedding, while the hoi polloi couldn’t even attend a funeral or say goodbye to loved ones. Now, we need permission to work or shop. And in 2021, the masks are for you to wear, not the elites.

In Poe’s story, the seventh room is different from the rest. The walls are black but the stained glass windows are red. The combination sheds a garish light upon the guests, making them quite grotesque in appearance.

The partiers in the black room become inexplicably uneasy whenever the ebony clock rings in the hour, so the dancing stops and the band stops playing. When the bells stop, the guests start to feel foolish and vow not to be alarmed when the clock strikes again, and yet they grow uneasy with each hour’s bells.

In 2021 America, instead of a clock, we have the diminutive Dr. Fauci sounding the alarm in perfect harmony with the MSM constantly reminding us about the latest COVID statistics and offering dire predictions. When these predictions don’t come to pass, we are temporarily relieved until the next hour’s alarms, news, and predictions make us apprehensive all over again.

At last, it’s midnight in the black room. The clock strikes twelve. The guests stand still and the band stops playing as all nervously wait for the clock to finish its twelve strokes. But this time, with the last chime, things do not return to normal. Instead, a figure wearing a mask and a dark, blood-spattered robe that looks like a funeral shroud appears, seemingly mocking Prospero and his guests.

Enraged, Prospero confronts this uninvited guest who dared mock him and his gathering of elites. When Prospero, who has chased the guest with a dagger finally reaches him and tries to unmask him, Prospero instead cries out and falls dead, with all the signs of the plague upon his face and body. The terrified crowd somehow finds the courage in numbers to attack this assassin before he can flee.

However, when the guests strip the figure of its mask and robe, they find nothing underneath. Almost instantaneously, they contract the Red Death and die en masse. The plague had taken its revenge against Prospero and the elites who thought they were superior to everyone else and could defeat death itself. The story concludes with the line “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”

Our elites also believe that they can have dominion over COVID (or us?) through the vaccine. Unlike Prospero and his guests, they are forcing all of us to dance at that ball, whether we want to or not. And as noted, we must wear those masks. Instead of Prospero's willing guests, we have been made his unwilling guests—all for a virus with a 99.7% survival rate. And as COVID recedes, it begins to look as if the vaccine itself has become the new Red Death.

Just as the revelers discovered that they were wrong about what lurked behind the costume of the Red Death, many Americans believe that we are not seeing what's really behind the rush for vaccinations? That is, what is the invisible agenda? Perhaps we’ll all find the answer to that after the clock strikes midnight.

Happy Birthday!

 

Samuel Nicholas was born in 1744 to a Quaker family. He owned and operated the Conestoga Wagon Tavern in Philadelphia and is credited with starting the Marine Corps. Nicholas had many advantages early in life. At age 7, his uncle, Attwood Shute, the Mayor of Philadelphia; paid for him to attend the Philadelphia Academy. What is now known as the University of Pennsylvania, it quickly became affiliated with the prestigious Philadelphia Academy. He finished his studies at the Academy in 1759 at the age of 15 and became heavily involved with high society upon graduation.

In 1766, Nicholas organized the Gloucester Fox Hunting Club, one of the first hunt clubs in America, and later became a member of the Patriotic Association. Two years later, he married Mary Jenkins, the daughter of a local businessman. Shortly after Nicholas married, he took over the Connestogoe (later Conestoga) Wagon Tavern which was owned by his father-in-law. Nicholas and his wife had three children, a daughter and two sons, Samuel, Jr., and Charles Jenkins Nicholas.

Because of his established role in Philadelphia society, when the Second Continental Congress began looking for men to fight in the Navy, they contacted Samuel Nicholas to assist them.

Nicholas was officially commissioned as Captain of the Marines on November 5, 1775. At that time, the Marines were officially started as a branch of the Navy ready to fight for independence on shore and at sea. The Marines were considered more quickly trained as combat fighters rather than strategic fighters. Five days later, on November 10, the Second Continental Congress allowed two battalions of Marines to be enlisted. Later that month, on November 28, Nicholas’ commission was confirmed by Congress and signed by John Hancock. His pay was initially set at $32 per month. When asked to design the uniforms for the Marines, Nicholas used a template from the hunting outfits of the Gloucester Fox Hunting Club, which used a leather collar. He incorporated these collars into the uniforms, which is how Marines came to be known as “leathernecks.”

K-12+: Imprinting & Practicing the Government's Secular Religion

More "Muh Russia"...

John Solomon, "New court documents detail alleged web of lies used to fabricate Steele Dossier, frame Trump"

Civil, criminal case records create portrait of how Igor Danchenko allegedly misled America as primary source for Christopher Steele dossier.

The indictment of Igor Danchenko, the primary source for the discredited Steele dossier, provides damning evidence alleging the Russian analyst repeatedly lied to the FBI. But it's only part of a larger portrait emerging in federal court records chronicling how the U.S. government was bamboozled into investigating Donald Trump for Russia collusion by a circle of players connected to Hillary Clinton.

Just a few weeks before his arrest Thursday, Danchenko was served in late September with a federal subpoena in a separate civil case brought by executives connected to the Russia-based Alfa Bank. That case, like the indictment, has produced evidence Danchenko contrived the intelligence he provided to former MI6 agent Christopher Steele in 2016.

Danchenko is not a defendant in the civil case, but rather a witness that the Alfa executives want testimony and documents from. The executives are seeking possible damages against Fusion GPS, the Clinton-connected research firm that hired Steele to write the dossier.

The dossier, funded by Clinton's campaign law firm during the height of the 2016 campaign, became prime evidence used by the FBI to justify FISA surveillance warrants targeting the Trump campaign and former adviser Carter Page, even though agents were never able to verify most of the allegations and in some cases debunked them as false or Russian disinformation.

A federal judge ordered that Danchenko be properly served with papers in the civil case after the Alfa executives' legal team submitted sworn statements from several Russian citizens alleging that Danchenko concocted stories of Trump-Russia collusion and falsely claimed they had provided the information as willing sub-sources for the dossier. He was served the subpoena in late September through his lawyer Mark Schamel, according to court records.

Motion 

Schamel did not return a call to his office Thursday seeking comment. Danchenko appeared briefly in court and tried to plead innocent to the Durham charges Thursday, but a judge said it was premature to accept a plea.

In the civil case, the plaintiffs have produced several statements from Russian citizens challenging Danchenko and his dossier work.

"In contrast to what Mr. Danchenko told U.S. authorities, I was not a 'source' for the Dossier," Russian journalist Lyudmila Nikolayevna Podobedova said in a sworn declaration submitted to U.S. District Judge Richard Leon on June 21 in the Alfa case. "I never provided Mr. Danchenko (or anyone else) with any information related to the contents of the Dossier ..."

Podobedova said she believe she is the woman identified in the dossier as Sub-Source 5 but that she did not provide the information attributed to her in the dossier though she talked on the phone in 2016 with Danchenko.

"My view is that once Mr. Danchenko realized that the Dossier was coming under scrutiny, he decided to point at me to make it look as if I were involved in the Dossier and thus add credibility to his work," her declaration said.

Likewise, Russian academic Alexey Sergeyevich Dundich said he believes he is the person identified in the dossier as Danchenko's "Sub-Source 4" and declared the information attributed to him was contrived and did not come from him as alleged.

"I believe that Mr. Danchenko framed me as Sub-Source 4 to add credibility to his low-quality work, which is not based on real information or in-depth analysis," Dundich's declaration states. "My impression is that Mr. Danchenko fabricated the information published in the Dossier to make quick money. It is apparent to me that the Dossier is a deliberate fraud and a collection of idle rumors."

A third Russian, banking industry journalist and currency collector Ivan Mikhailovich Vorontsov, alleged in his court declaration that he not only was falsely portrayed as "Sub-Source 2" in the Steele dossier, but that Danchenko later apologized for doing so.

"Although it is apparent that Mr. Danchenko claimed that I was a source of information for the Dossier, in fact I was not a 'source' for the Dossier," Vorontsov said. "I never provided Mr. Danchenko (or anyone else) with any information associated with the contents of the Dossier generally ... Mr. Danchenko later confirmed this to me as well when he expressed guilt for dragging me into this whole controversy concerning the Dossier.

He added: "I believe that the Dossier was fabricated to fit whatever the client who requested the information wanted to receive."

The portrait of a dossier infused with deception and lies was furthered Thursday when Durham unsealed a grand jury indictment accusing Danchenko of lying at least five times to the FBI during the Russia case, lies the prosecutor said hindered agents from getting the truth about the dossier and its underlying allegations.

"All of DANCHENKO's lies were material to the FBI because, among other reasons, (1) the FBI's investigation of the Trump Campaign relied in large part on the Company Reports to obtain FISA warrants on Advisor-1, (2) the FBI ultimately devoted substantial resources attempting to investigate and corroborate the allegations contained in the Company Reports, including the reliability of DANCHENKO's sub-sources; and (3) the Company Reports, as well as information collected for the Reports by DANCHENKO, played a role in the FBI's investigative decisions and in sworn representations that the FBI made to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court throughout the relevant time period," the indictment charged.

You can read the full indictment here:

The indictment says Danchenko's lies included telling the FBI he got an anonymous tip on Trump-Russia collusion that he believed came from a former Russia-American Chamber of Commerce official and he tried to follow up on it.

"In truth and fact, and as DANCHENKO well knew, DANCHENKO never received such a phone call or such information from any person he believed to be Chamber President-1, and DANCEHNKO never made any arrangements to meet Chamber President-1 in New York," the indictment said. "Rather, DANCHENKO fabricated these facts regarding Chamber President-1."

Another lie, alleged in the indictment, was that Danchenko falsely denied to agents that he got any information for the Steele dossier from an American public relations executive who was deeply tied to Hillary Clinton as well as the Russian ambassador in Washington and other senior Russian government officials.

"DANCHENKO stated falsely that he had never communicated with a particular U.S.-based individual — who was a long-time participant in Democratic Party politics and was then an executive at a U.S. public relations firm — about any allegations contained in the Company Reports," the charge documents said. "In truth and in fact, and as DANCHENKO well knew, DANCHENKO sourced one or more specific allegations in the Company Reports anonymously to PR Executive-l."

The indictment didn’t name the PR executive, but Ralph D. Martin, the lawyer for longtime Washington PR executive Charles Dolan Jr. confirmed to CNBC and the New York Times that Dolan was in fact the executive named in the indictment. Martin declined further comment, citing the ongoing criminal case.

Dolan served in Bill Clinton's campaigns for president as a state chairman, was appointed to an advisory board in the Clinton State Department and later "actively campaigned and participated in calls and events as a volunteer on behalf of Hillary Clinton" in 2016, the indictment noted. He is treated as a witness in the indictment, not accused of wrongdoing. And the indictment noted Dolan claimed the Clinton campaign did not know about his dealings with Danchenko.

Danchenko's alleged lie about the PR executive was particularly harmful to the FBI, the indictment charged, because it "bore upon PR Executive-l's reliability, motivations, and potential bias as a source of information."

The indictment also touches on one of the most salacious allegations in the dossier — one that was never corroborated — that Trump had engaged with prostitutes at a Moscow hotel. The indictment suggested that the PR executive, Dolan, could have been connected to part of the allegation because he had visited with hotel staff on 2016 and learned that Trump stayed in the presidential suite at the hotel. But it noted there was no basis for the sexual allegation.

"During the aforementioned tour of the Presidential Suite, a Moscow Hotel staff member told the participants, including PR Executive-1, that Trump had stayed in the Presidential Suite. According to both Organizer-1 and PR Executive-1, the staff member did not mention any sexual or salacious activity," the indictment noted.

The indictment offered one last tantalizing piece of information: An American think tank official introduced Danchenko to both Steele and Dolan years before the dossier.

The indictment did not name the think tank official. But FBI documents obtained by Just the News show Steele told agents in fall 2017, a year after he was terminated as a confidential source in the Russia case, that the think tank official was Fiona Hill, a National Security Council official who later would emerge as a key witness against Trump in the Ukraine impeachment proceedings. Trump was acquitted in that trial.

"The primary subsource was introduced to STEELE and ORBIS by FIONA HILL in or around 2011," the FBI document quoted Steele as saying. Hill at the time worked with Danchenko at the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank then run by former Clinton administration official Strobe Talbott.

"Emphasizing the sensitivity, STEELE explained that HILL now worked for the White House on the National Security Council," the 2017 FBI document added. "HILL has a very high opinion of the primary sub-source, and she told STEELE that he and ORBIS should take a look at him. HILL is one of STEELE's close friends."

In congressional testimony during impeachment, Hill was not as adoring of Steele, suggesting it was likely Steele and his dosser had been duped by some Russian disinformation.

"It's very likely that the Russians planted disinformation in and among other information that may have been truthful, because that's exactly, again, the way that they operate," she told lawmakers in 2019.