U.S. Institutional Confidence Reaches "Zero" - The Proof is in the Pudding

Sundance, "Jury Verdict, Clinton Lawyer Michael Sussmann Found Not Guilty of Lying to FBI"

All media reporting of this case will be done through the prism of their own cooperation in the perpetration of the fraud. The MSM knew along with everyone else inside and outside of government, that their efforts to create the Trump-Russia conspiracy and collusion narrative were based on fraudulent pretext manufactured by the Clinton campaign. They all knew it. They all acted collaboratively, and they all engaged purposefully.

Michael Sussmann was accused of lying to the FBI about working for Hillary Clinton at the time he took fraudulent information to the FBI about Donald Trump. A Washington DC jury has found Sussmann NOT GUILTY.

While Sussmann was pushing fraudulent information into the open hands of FBI Legal Counsel James Baker, another Clinton campaign contractor, Glenn Simpson from Fusion GPS, was pushing similarly constructed fraudulent information -including the Christopher Steele dossier- into the media and DOJ via Bruce Ohr.

The not guilty verdict simply means the FBI knew, or should have known, Michael Sussmann was delivering the fraudulent Trump-Russia collusion nonsense directly from the Hillary Clinton team. The FBI claims they didn’t know, the jury by finding Sussmann not guilty, says the FBI did know.

The BIGGER question is, what’s next?

Durham constructed this case around the premise the FBI and DOJ was duped or tricked by Hillary Clinton operatives, specifically including Michael Sussmann. It would be very weird if Durham now flipped the premise and began targeting DOJ or FBI officials around the premise they were “not duped.”

Therefore, I still think Durham stays exclusively focused on the outside actors and ignores all of the corrupt internal DOJ and FBI activity.

The prosecutorial approach by John Durham positioned all of the corruption outside the institutions of government, thereby protecting them.

The bad guys, the corrupt lawbreakers, are the people directly connected to the Clinton Campaign and all of the political and legal agents in/around the Clinton political machine.

As the Durham narrative unfolded, the brave and honorable institutions of government were victims to the horrible, terrible activity by the Clinton outsiders.

Pay no attention to the aligned politics and weaponization of the White House, DOJ, DOJ-NSD, FBI main, FBI-CoIntel, CIA, Senate Intelligence Committee, or memberships therein. The entire apparatus of the most robust, capable, excellent and diligent intelligence apparatus in the history of all mankind, along with all the oversight mechanisms that exist to support that apparatus, was duped by Hillary Clinton’s team.

Bill Barr was the bondo, John Durham is the spray paint.

On Villainy

Time to put my metal on
Whose blood to spill?
I don't know
Whose side I'm on?

Two armies are coming at me
Their flags and weapons look the same
One tells the truth, the other's lying
And they're both calling my name

This is how villains are made
This is how villains are made
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, oooh
No one ever starts that way
But this is how villains are made

Time to put my metal on
Whose neck to cut?
I don't know
Whose side I'm on?

There lies my sanity
There goes my mind, I could not save
I don't trust, but I see right in front of me
I don't know who to betray

Ah, aah, aah, aah
Ah, ah
Ah, aah, aah, aah
Ah, ah
Ooh, ooh, oooh
Ah, ah
Ooh, ooh, oooh

This is how villains are made
This is how villains are made
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, oooh

So easily we're persuaded
When the lines are blurred and faded
No one ever starts that way
But this is how villains are made

This is how villains are made

More Rules for Thee, But NOT for Me...

Ultra-MAGA Time!

Deep State Empire

I Think that Gays Should Stop Having Sex with Monkeys

 ...I mean, show a little pride.  So far only 2 monkey pox victims out of 330 possible cases have been "gendered" as female.

Buzz Hollander, "Cultural Sensitivity Is Getting in the Way of Stopping Monkeypox"

Sorting through expert opinion on Monkeypox runs into some very 2022 problems

Monkeypox. My patients are asking about it, so I decided to educate myself about it, and share what I learned. What I found is that it’s probably not as mysterious as the media presents it. However, it’s no mystery why what’s likely going on is being soft-pedaled. It’s insensitive.

I am not going to provide a lot of background on monkeypox, as most everyone has already heard about it by now. There are fine threads on Twitter about its basics (a fairly severe orthopoxvirus endemic to several African nations, usually carried by rodents and passed on to humans in close contact), prior outbreaks (outside of Africa, historically limited to one country at a time), and contagiousness (not very). We have thoughtful videos, journal articles, and blogs for those interested in learning all about monkeypox.

The scary part, the part that keeps monkeypox in the headlines, is that so much is unknown. We don’t conclusively know whether something about the monkeypox virus or its human hosts changed to make it suddenly appear in so many places. (Though initial genomic sequencing suggests “the virus hasn’t mutated to become more transmissible”.) While we do have an old (rather brutal) vaccine in fair supply, and a newer (probably safer) vaccine in very limited supply, we lack much experience with how well they protect someone from an exposure. Ditto the available antivirals, which have far more animal data than human. So much uncertainty, and most of all, a lack of consensus as to what is really happening.

That’s what everyone really wants to know: “Why is monkeypox suddenly spreading in over a dozen countries, for the first time ever, and does this mean it’s going to sweep the world?” Expert opinion seems to break into two camps.

The “Everybody Should Be Concerned” crowd can be exemplified by the (very capable) Bill Hanage, here quoted in a Telegraph article:

Concerning. Then we have what appears to be the more widely held view, that this outbreak is limited in scope to those closely connected to the clusters of European sex-heavy gatherings which appear to have served as super-spreader events for monkeypox. We might call this the “MSM” camp, where we refer not to “main stream media,” but rather “men who have sex with men.” Here is World Health Organization’s Dr David Heymann:

Speaking to the BBC, the ECDC’s Dr. Andrea Ammon struck a similar tone:

What are we to believe when the experts disagree? While I have my doubts, the “Everybody Should be Concerned” camp does have its points. Not all the dots connect our initial cases to that 80,000 strong Gay Pride gathering in the Canary Islands or the Madrid sauna serving as MSM hotspot. The traveler from Nigeria who was the UK’s first diagnosed case of monkeypox has not been connected to either, as well.

Theories abound as to why we might have had months of quiet community transmission before the outbreak was ignited by a super-spreader event. We might have crossed a tipping point in immunity that enabled random chance to take over, with the steady proportional decay of people with cross-immunity to monkeypox from their pre-1970s smallpox vaccine.

All this strikes me as possible, just not likely. Largely for one reason: we doctors might be fools, but we’re pretty good at pattern recognition. Pictured below is a pattern that would lead to a quick call to a dermatologist, infectious disease specialist, or the local public health department, because that is not your grandmother’s childhood chicken pox:

Unless the monkeypox virus mutated into a frequently un-pox-like form — and it does not appear the composition of the strains isolated from the current outbreak differ much from those of prior outbreaks — I struggle to believe this has been simmering for a while. Certainly, by now, all those missed cases would have the CDC’s phones ringing off the hook with calls from doctors who would now be second-guessing their shaky shingles and hand, foot, and mouth disease diagnoses.

There’s also the striking pattern of a high proportion of our known cases being youngish men, many who have sex with other men, and with travel histories not from endemic regions in Africa, but places like Spain. These dots are hard not to connect.

The first U.S. case in Massachusetts had visited Canada; a Canadian case had visited Belgium; and the Belgian case had been to Portugal, which sits next to the Spanish epicenter, per this European CDC report:

Since the warning first went out in relation to these large, MSM gatherings, it’s reasonable to claim that we might only be looking in the places where MSM go, like Sexually Transmitted Infection clinics frequented by the gay community, so we create a self-fulfilling prophecy of finding mostly gay male cases. I can’t buy this argument, though. Everyone has been looking for monkeypox for a solid week, and the remarkable lack of female cases and people without travel histories is striking.

I side with Dr Heymann; I think the balance of evidence and opinion favors his “single introduction” view. I question the more worrisome perspective that there were distinct introductions from Africa into multiple European and American nations, and community spread carrying on in several places at once.

That’s not to say we don’t have a problem on our hands. Just not so big a problem, as it seems more likely that monkeypox happened to be in the right place at the right time to trigger an outbreak, rather than some new threat to the world that it never posed before.

While the connection to MSM events has led a few to characterize “this” monkeypox as sexually transmitted, the prevailing point of view is that, like all monkeypox strains, close contact invites spread, whether via large respiratory droplets, bodily secretions like saliva, or the fluid within the rash blisters. Sex obviously falls in the “close contact” category. To a lesser degree, so, too, does being someone’s roommate or family member.

Interestingly, in the last major American outbreak of monkeypox in 2003, in which a pet retailer amazingly thought it was a good idea to keep Ghanaian rodents in close proximity to prairie dogs, and then sell the latter as household pets (okay, that’s a whole lot of bad ideas going on all at once there), none of the 47 human cases transmitted monkeypox to anyone else. Maybe people who think prairie dogs make great pets tend not to have a lot of close contacts, but that’s a remarkable lack of transmission. Also interesting is that 31% of cases ended up in the hospital in contrast to the low rates currently being reported. It’s possible that repeat handling of an infected prairie dog leads to a slightly different infection than sexual contact with a human being; but I’ll leave this stuff to the experts (and late show monologue writers).

In any case, anyone can get monkeypox, but in May of 2022, you were much more likely to get monkeypox if you were a man sleeping with men. This raw fact, coupled with the disease being endemic in Africa, leads to some ugly stereotyping in private, and overly gentle medical reporting in public.

Now, I know I promised a primer without cultural sensitivity, but that was pertaining to the factual part. The truth is, I am culturally sensitive, and don’t like seeing any group being ridiculed, abused, or stigmatized based on their choices. Anyone willing to challenge their preconceptions around the “hypersexual gay men” narrative evoked by tales of gay saunas and a Gay Pride sexual free-for-all might benefit from reading a post like this.

Medicine, though, demands brutal honesty. Right now is a really bad time for sex parties of any sort, especially in the gay and bisexual community. Men who have sex with men should be extra respectful of their close contacts for a couple weeks if they might have been within one or two degrees of separation of the gatherings in Europe that kicked off the monkeypox epidemic.

It has to be okay to say this. An essential part of medicine is having discourse with patients that discourages behaviors that risk disease or erode health. Some people love to drink to excess, or feast on fast food, or chain smoke Camels. We call out these behaviors (ideally in non-judgmental, collaborative ways that actually work). Promiscuous sex, on the part of heterosexuals, homosexuals, transexuals, or anyone, was never a public health winner: not in the era of HIV nor Covid; not long ago, given syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, etc.; and certainly not right now during a growing monkeypox outbreak. I don’t have an ounce of moralism on this subject — this is just medical reality.

I get the feeling that the Main Stream Media camp is a bit constrained in expressing this reality, for fear of offending an oft-harassed demographic. We are pointed towards very thoughtful warnings to avoid stigmatizing men who have sex with men, like this piece from The Conversation:

I agree — had the trigger been a St Patrick’s Day bar crawl, and the Irish-American community a hotspot for monkeypox, the societal response would have been different. But the correct advice would be the same: if you participated in the event, or share close quarters with someone who did, please take a couple weeks off from intimate activity with others until you know you are not beset with muscle aches, swollen lymph nodes, and a rash that makes you wish you had stayed home in the first place.

This is the public health message that should be going out in the MSM community. Instead, we have press statements like this coming from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, ostensibly to protect the people they serve:

There is literally not a single sentence in their 7 paragraph statement to acknowledge that perhaps large gatherings involving promiscuous sex also currently jeopardize public health.

I might be old-fashioned. I might just be old. I do think it is possible, however, to communicate honestly and effectively without having to tip-toe around people’s feelings. If we can succeed in doing so, we might find ourselves talking about something other than monkeypox before long.

Not Ukraine, It's Mykraine!

Just Can't Stop the Lies...

White Supremacy Tropes and Recycled Anti-Semitism

Ricki Hollander, "White supremacy and the Jews: The latest iteration"

Given the anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories that have been used against Jews for centuries, it’s unsurprising that critical race theory (CRT) provides a convenient guise to attack Jews today.

Much has been written about the social justice wars being fought in the halls of academia—university classics programs targeted as foci of white supremacy to be dismantled; professors leaving academia because of its increasingly repressive climate; an illiberal atmosphere in which dissent to “progressive” dogma informed by critical race theory (CRT) is muzzled.

Pamela Paresky, a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, indicates that “despite its laudable goal of opposing racism and white supremacy, CRT relies on narratives of greed, appropriation, unmerited privilege, and hidden power.”

These are evocative of the anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories that have been used against Jews for centuries, so it’s unsurprising that CRT provides a convenient guise to attack Jews today. As Paresky notes, “the subtlety is that, instead of targeting Jews directly, the target of critical social justice is ‘whiteness.’”

A case in point is the public dispute over the legacy of Heinrich Schenker, a Jewish music theorist from Galicia who lived in the late 19th and early 20th century.

In Autumn 2019, Hunter College Professor Phillip Ewell, a self-described black practitioner of “white music theory,” authored a critical-race analysis of the field to explain how black musicologists are disadvantaged. His central theme accused Schenker of being an ardent racist and admirer of Hitler who shared the Nazis’ ideology of biological/genetic supremacy. He argued that Schenker’s music theory was imbued with the hierarchical belief of inequality that guided his racial supremacist view, joining his musical and supremacist theories into a cohesive, racist worldview. He condemned Schenker’s musical analysis as an “institutionalized racialized structure,” comprising a “white racial frame” to benefit the dominant white race of music theory and blamed generations of Schenkerian scholars for maintaining this frame by “whitewashing” the music theorist’s racist views and separating them from his musical theory. Any disagreement with this view was condemned, a priori, as complicity in the perpetuation of racism.

Timothy Jackson, a tenured music theory professor and director of the Center for Schenkerian Studies at the University of North Texas (UNT), saw this as a case of character assassination and, with fellow scholars at the university, put out an open call for papers responding to the attack on Schenker for publication in the Journal of Schenkerian Studies that he co-founded.

A symposium of responses—both positive and negative—to the CRT study were published, with Jackson authoring an article refuting Ewell’s assertions. Jackson pointed out that Schenker (1868-1935) had started off as a German elitist with cultural superiority views typical of Germans during the Great War period, but that those views evolved and Schenker categorically rejected the Nazis’ racist ideology. According to Jackson, Ewell had distorted history by erasing the music theorist’s proud Jewish identity, faith, and the discrimination he suffered for being a Jew―which necessarily precluded any admiration for Nazi ideology. He pointed to Ewell’s alteration of certain German-language passages, which were removed from their context or misconstrued, to provide proof of Schenker’s racism. (In a subsequent article, Jackson further detailed how quotes were manipulated in Ewell’s article to paint Schenker as “a virulent racist” akin to German Nazis and American white supremacists). Jackson tied these charges of racism attributed to Schenker and his mainly Jewish students to larger currents of Black anti-Semitism that holds Jews as white supremacists at fault for Black suffering.

As a result, Jackson was pilloried on social media. The Society for Music Theory condemned the journal’s symposium as designed to “replicate a culture of whiteness.” A censure resolution signed by professors and graduate students accused Jackson of promoting anti-Black racism. UNT ordered an investigation of the professor and the use of the journal to publish the responses. Jackson was removed from the magazine and funding ceased for the Center of Schenkerian Studies he directed. He became a pariah among his fellow faculty members and graduate students, many of whom left, fearing negative repercussions for their future employment prospects were they to complete their dissertations under his supervision.

The professor, in turn, filed a federal lawsuit against faculty members and a graduate student for defamation of character and against the university for retaliating against his right to academic free speech.

While the case is certainly not the first to pit scholars against those who use critical race theory to discredit classical studies, it demonstrates the ease with which anti-Semitic tropes of supremacy and racism are incorporated into trending ideologies—often with adherents unaware of the sordid history behind these tropes.

The theme of Jewish supremacy was a mainstay of Nazi indoctrination. The age-old anti-Semitic canard about Jews seeking to dominate the world’s non-Jews was popularized in the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion and resurrected by the Nazis who promoted it as incontrovertible truth. Similarly, the Nazis projected their own racism—the notion of the racial superiority and purity of the Aryan race—onto Jews. In this way, the Nazis falsely accused Jews of the evil and immorality that was at the core of their own ideology: They imposed upon their subjects their belief of German supremacy while accusing Jews of being supremacists. They aspired to Aryan racial purity while accusing Jews of being racists.

“With every means [the Jew] tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate,” Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf.

Schenker was targeted as a white supremacist and racist, rather than as a Jewish supremacist. His Jewish identity was erased from the charges against him, as accusations of white supremacy against Jews necessitates the erasure of their non-white, Jewish identity and the accompanying context of anti-Jewish bigotry.

CRT proponents reject racial colorblindness as a form of racism. In fact, Ewell argues that “colorblind racism is the most significant form of racism in music theory’s white racial frame and has been used for decades to dismiss those who wish to cite our racialized structures and ideologies.”

Yet the very same CRT adherents practice “Jew blindness” when it comes to depicting Jews as white supremacists. They erase the Jews’ unique experiences of discrimination. And this paves the way for their targeting under the more acceptable aegis of social justice.

That was the case in May 2020, when, against a backdrop of legitimate protests against the killing of George Floyd, the local leader of the LA chapter of Black Lives Matter called for “an uprising, a rebellion, a revolt” through Fairfax, an orthodox Jewish enclave and the oldest Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles. Businesses were vandalized and some of the area’s synagogues were defaced with spray-painted obscenities and anti-Israel slogans, provoking fear and apprehension among the neighborhood’s Jewish residents and business owners. The leader later explained that the decision to target this neighborhood was “very deliberate” in order “to disrupt spaces of white affluence” so “it’s not just black people who are suffering at the hands of white supremacy.”

By painting a predominantly Jewish community as a bastion of white supremacists, the rioters could deflect and challenge accusations of anti-Semitism against them. In their minds, this was a social justice battle against white supremacy. Social justice warriors contend that charges of anti-Semitism deflect attention from the real racists, the “white supremacists,” even when those so labelled are the targeted Jews themselves.

And so, it was in the battle over Schenker. Among the charges leveled on social media against Jackson, whose Jewish grandparents fled persecution in Europe and whose family members perished in the Holocaust, was that he is not only an anti-Black racist but one motivated by “a disguised form of anti-Semitism.”

The attacks against Jackson were meant to shut down academic debate about Schenker’s legacy. Any question of Schenker’s Jewish experience negating the characterization of him as a white supremacist was dismissed as evidence of the questioner’s own racism, thus keeping alive the anti-Semitic trope without resolving the question.

Professor Jackson resolved the question by exploring Schenker’s Jewish identity and its impact on the accusations against him. He observed that while Schenker was a complex person with human foibles, he was certainly not the racial supremacist he was accused of.

Whatever the motivation behind such charges, one thing is certain: the vilification of Jews as racists and supremacists, disproportionate to their actions and stripped of context or nuance, is yet another iteration of an all-too-familiar anti-Semitic trope.