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The Lasting Consequences of Lockdowns

Even after the Covid-19 vaccines roll out, herd immunity is reached, and the virus is long gone, the drastic policies of today will last long into the future.

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Penned by Ethan Yang at American Institute for Economic Research

There has been much discussion over the immediate effects of public health interventions such as business closures and restrictions on social activity in response to Covid-19. It is clear that lockdowns have led to a number of adverse consequences such as unprecedented economic retraction, psychological stress, suicides, and disruptions to all sorts of important social institutions. These factors alone, combined with the questionable efficacy of lockdown policies in preventing Covid-19 deaths, should encourage consideration for the contrary. However, what has seen sparse attention is the long-term consequences that come with drastic lockdown policies.

Lockdowns do not happen in a vacuum, history keeps moving even after Covid-19 is gone and the actions we take today will set the foundation for tomorrow. For example, if we forcefully redistributed all the wealth in society we could easily eradicate poverty and inequality. However, in the long term that would likely lead to severe economic retraction and require that the United States government become a dictatorship. That society is not worth living in and we would be better off if we hadn’t done so. Setting aside the general debate around the short-term efficacy of lockdowns, it seems that the long-term consequences of lockdowns only promise more hardship. Planning not just for next year, but for the generations decades ahead that will inherit this country once our time here is done is one of the true indicators of responsible leadership. 

Accelerated Economic Calamity

It is abundantly clear that lockdown policies such as nonessential business closures and movement restrictions have ravaged the economy in the short term. It is also clear that in the near future the security of small businesses remains uncertain as Yelp reports that 60% of restaurants will never reopen. Such developments are certainly painful but perhaps one of the most important and least discussed issues is the potential economic crisis that may result years into the future. A crisis that will not just affect small businesses and vulnerable families but the entire country. 

Closing down the country has forced the US government to implement trillions of dollars worth of quantitative easing to prop up Wall Street and stimulus checks to prop up Main Street. If lockdowns continue such policies will need to continue. The result is an unprecedented level of government debt. Forbes writes,

“For the first time U.S. debt is now about equal to GDP (Gross Domestic Product), like the sound barrier we once thought if we hit it we might explode.”

Although the US government can afford to go further into debt it would now be crossing into a fiscal and monetary unknown. How much longer can the government print money to finance its programs and will this lead to a point where future Americans will need to take painful if not devastating austerity measures? 

The Federal Reserve has indicated that it intends to keep interest rates low until 2023, which may not only encourage rash investing decisions on Wall Street but for the average American Market Insider writes

“The Fed’s somewhat vague language is of little comfort to Americans working to build up their savings. In the months since the Fed slashed rates, the yields on checking accounts and savings vehicles have cratered. And for the foreseeable future, Americans will need to make some tough calls to ensure their money is working for them.”

Even after the Covid-19 vaccines roll out, herd immunity is reached, and the virus is long gone, the drastic policies of today will last long into the future. The worst-case scenario is that the current policies hasten the timeline for a financial crisis or worse. 

Forbes poses a potential consequence of our current economic policies when it writes

“But we are on a collision course with another force, as we see further increasing Main Street insolvencies, unemployment and the weakening of the finances of ordinary households and businesses. If the Fed were to ease up “printing money,” we might see significant deflation, like Japan in the 1990s. Worst still, we might see rapidly increasing inflation. This would produce the secular stagflation former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has spoken of—remember President Jimmy Carter?”

Although nobody is sure to what extent the government can continue printing money without severe consequence, and it is entirely possible that it could go for much longer, we are testing the boundaries of monetary policy. 

The stock market, particularly the S&P 500, has essentially been propped up by quantitative easing since the Obama administration. This is even more true now as the market continues to reach all-time highs despite economic devastation throughout the real economy. The market is due for a serious correction in the form of a recession which is being prevented but also further exacerbated by money injections from the government. We are pretty much generating a stock market bubble.

The worst-case scenario is that all these terrible things happen at once. If so, then we have set up the next generation and very likely ourselves for a devastating financial crisis with little tools left to mitigate it as we have exhausted them today. 

Preserving Our Structure of Government

The economic policies of lockdowns will push the country into a new frontier where economists are still debating over how the monetary physics work. However, there is little debate when it comes to the damage lockdowns have done to our system of constitutional government.

The authority to enact a lockdown policy doesn’t just come out of thin air. All government power is derived from explicitly granted authority or precedent. By breaking unwritten molds and sometimes outright violating the law, politicians at the state and federal level are eroding the guard rails that prevent domestic tyranny.

For example, the police power gives the government the authority to establish its own laws that protect the general welfare of the public. That is a rather vague rule and the crafters most likely felt that the power would be used in a narrowly tailored fashion, not with arbitrary lockdown policies. California’s new 10PM-5AM curfew and Michigan’s ban on selling seeds are two rules that come to mind that if left unchallenged will erode the meaning of narrowly tailored. This would further expand the arbitrary powers of government to act without democratic consent.

In 1905, a mandatory vaccination policy led to a Supreme Court case known as Jacobson v Massachusetts, which cemented the government’s power to curb individual rights in the name of public health. That court case has now been used to justify but also sometimes fight current lockdown policies. The court case itself mandates that such policies must be narrowly tailored as vaccination is more widely viewed as directly related to stopping pandemics. However, lockdowns will likely create a precedent for the government to waive individual rights with almost little justification if left unchallenged. 

Perhaps the most concerning behavior of politicians during lockdowns is the blurring of institutional checks and balances. The law in question is the separation of powers doctrine, which most notably applies to the relationship between the legislative and the executive branch. Before the governor of a state can declare a lockdown, that power must be granted by the state legislature. 

Many governors have decided to circumvent that rule and exercise power that the people never granted them, which is textbook tyranny. The governor of Michigan attempted to extend her emergency powers in order to continue the state’s lockdown against the wishes of the legislature. In Wisconsin, the governor and his unelected state health department acted without any authorization from the legislature to implement lockdown policies. These are just two examples that were fortunately declared unconstitutional but it is clear that across the country governors are getting away with such power grabs. 

Such power grabs do not happen and just go away when the virus is gone. These powers and precedents oftentimes become ingrained into the law, leaving us all less free and less prosperous. One doesn’t need to look any further than the PATRIOT Act which was enacted after the terrorist attacks on 9/11. That bill introduced an entire slew of controversial and borderline unconstitutional rules that are still in place today, even after the threat of terrorism has subsided from public attention. Much like lockdowns, it is questionable whether the extra powers granted to the government actually aided in the prevention of terrorism but we still live with the consequences.

Key Takeaways

The long-term consequences of a policy are what makes it sustainable. There is a reason why many are hesitant to enthusiastically hop on radical ideas that drastically alter the structure of government or go against established economics. The reason is that we do not simply exist in the moment and long-term stability is preferable to short-term passions. In terms of economic policy, it is important that we actually allow the next generation a shot at prosperity, not spoil it with our actions today. 

Our system of constitutional checks and balances may make governing slow and cumbersome but they are there for a reason. That reason is to maximize the longevity and stability of a free society. The Founders could have crowned George Washington king as he was extremely popular, but this country was built to last through the ages, not one personality. Problems will come and go but our responsibility to future generations to pass on a country that is as free if not freer is something that must be tended to every day. 

While there is certainly a vigorous debate over the short-term efficacy of lockdown policies, there can be little question about the long-term sustainability of what we are doing to ourselves. Alongside the immediate consequences of lockdowns, our leaders should consider the long-term problems as well to ensure we do not pass along a degraded shell of our society to our posterity in exchange for a short-term goal. Years into the future, we should be able to be proud of who we are, not who we used to be. 

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‘White People, You Are The Problem’: AT&T’s Internal ‘Racial Reeducation Program’ Leaked

I think I found the “systemic racism” we’ve been told so much about!

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Image Credit: Mike Mozart/Flickr

“AT&T Corporation has created a racial reeducation program that promotes the idea that ‘American racism is a uniquely white trait’ and boosts left-wing causes such as ‘reparations,’ ‘defund police,’ and ‘trans activism,'” Christopher Rufo reports.

From City Journal:

I have obtained a cache of internal documents about the company’s initiative, called Listen Understand Act, which is based on the core principles of critical race theory, including “intersectionality,” “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “white fragility.” CEO John Stankey launched the program last year and, subsequently, has told employees that private corporations such as AT&T have an “obligation to engage on this issue of racial injustice” and push for “systemic reforms in police departments across the country.”

According to a senior employee, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, managers at AT&T are now assessed annually on diversity issues, with mandatory participation in programs such as discussion groups, book clubs, mentorship programs, and race reeducation exercises. White employees, the source said, are tacitly expected to confess their complicity in “white privilege” and “systemic racism,” or they will be penalized in their performance reviews. As part of the overall initiative, employees are asked to sign a loyalty pledge to “keep pushing for change,” with suggested “intentions” such as “reading more about systemic racism” and “challenging others’ language that is hateful.” “If you don’t do it,” the senior employee says, “you’re [considered] a racist.” AT&T did not respond when asked for comment. 

On the first page of AT&T’s Listen Understand Act internal portal, the company encourages employees to study a resource called “White America, if you want to know who’s responsible for racism, look in the mirror.” The article claims that the United States is a “racist society” and lays out its thesis plainly: “White people, you are the problem. Regardless of how much you say you detest racism, you are the sole reason it has flourished for centuries.” The author, Dahleen Glanton, writes that “American racism is a uniquely white trait” and that “Black people cannot be racist.” White women, she claims, “have been telling lies on black men since they were first brought to America in chains,” and, along with their white male counterparts, “enjoy the opportunities and privileges that white supremacy affords [them].”

[…] In the “Act” section of the training program, AT&T encourages employees to participate in a “21-Day Racial Equity Habit Challenge” that relies on the concepts of “whiteness,” “white privilege,” and “white supremacy.” The program instructs AT&T employees to “do one action [per day for 21 days] to further [their] understanding of power, privilege, supremacy, oppression, and equity.” The challenge begins with a series of lessons on “whiteness,” which claims, among other things, that “white supremacy [is] baked into our country’s foundation,” that “Whiteness is one of the biggest and most long-running scams ever perpetrated,” and that the “weaponization of whiteness” creates a “constant barrage of harm” for minorities. The 21-Day Challenge also directs employees to articles and videos promoting fashionable left-wing causes, including “reparations,” “defund police,” and “trans activism,” with further instruction to “follow, quote, repost, and retweet” organizations including the Transgender Training Institute and the National Center for Transgender Equality.

Rufo reported earlier this month that Walmart is training white employees that “white is not right.”

Coca-Cola is training white employees to “try to be less white.”

I think I found the “systemic racism” we’ve been told so much about!

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COVID Baby Bust Accelerates Nine Months After Lockdowns

Bloomberg shows a shocking chart that when factoring all the deaths in 2020 and into 1Q21, including virus-related deaths, U.S. births only exceeded deaths by 45,000 in February and March.

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Melissa Megginson/Flickr

In a previous note last month, we said one of the biggest deflationary threats looms over the U.S. economy, that is, birth rates have fallen to their lowest level in a generation. Diving deeper into the baby bust, new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows nine months after the virus pandemic was first declared a national emergency, U.S. births plunged 8% in December, according to Bloomberg

CDC data showed an acceleration in birth declines for the second half of 2020. Full-year data shows that the number of babies born countrywide fell 4% to 3.6 million, the most significant decline since 1973, the start of the stagflation of the 1970s. 

The latest CDC data disproves the mainstream media’s narrative of a “COVID Baby Boom” as much of the nation was cooped up in their homes during lockdowns. 

The data appears to show millennials were not in the ‘mood’ to have a child during the global health catastrophe. The declines in births have been occurring for several years as the younger generation, trapped in insurmountable debts, can barely afford rent and groceries, nevertheless raise a child. 

On a state-by-state basis, California in December led the declines, which plummeted 19%. For the second half of the year, New Mexico, New York, Hawaii, and West Virginia saw decreases ranging from 8% to 11%.

We noted California’s population continues to drop as a mass exodus of residents escapes the liberal hell hole of high taxes, unaffordable homes, and violent crime. The younger generation in the state appears to be having fewer children, exacerbated by the pandemic. 

Bloomberg shows a shocking chart that when factoring all the deaths in 2020 and into 1Q21, including virus-related deaths, U.S. births only exceeded deaths by 45,000 in February and March. 

Source: Bloomberg 

In terms of race, births in December had the most significant reduction among Asians, plunging 19% from the same period in 2019.

What this shows are some early signs of a COVID baby bust. But most of this is a continuation of a trend that’s been happening for more than a decade. With birthrates faltering and debts soaring. We believe the primary secular economic trend is, and has been for at least a decade is deflation – as we’ve said before, Japan is a microcosm of what America is facing as the “3-D’s” of debt, deflation, and the inevitability of demographics implosion continues to widen the wealth gap. 

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Have the Great Reset Technocrats Really Thought This Through?

The only thing left to destroy in a world populated by elites alone, are other elites.

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Felton Davis/Flickr

The only thing left to destroy in a world populated by elites alone, are other elites. It would seem that the desire to dominate others does not simply come to an end on its own.

With the UN World Food Program announcing that some 270 million people worldwide now face starvation, the ongoing debate about the real aims of the technocracy is profound. The question is whether their aim tends more towards major population reduction, or more towards a new type of slavery.

It appears that philosophical and long-term practical questions remain a mystery. We will argue that evil, not simply the influence of the base upon the superstructure, is at the core of this endeavor. We have defined evil as inflicting the highest degree of pain upon the greatest number of resisting subjects. In short, we have defined evil as sadism, inflicting evil because it brings satisfaction to those inflicting it.

Because evil is fundamentally a destructive force, it cannot create anything: nothing in it is truly novel nor of use to humanity. Its pleasures are short-lived and spurious. It is unsustainable, self-defeating, ultimately leading to self-destruction.

We have adequately assessed from any number of sources that nefarious interests are behind this process, who seek to make the process also about the exercise of power, in addition to several other aims (remaining in power, exercising power in ways consistent with their occult beliefs about evil, etc.). We understand that they are ‘evil’ because they involve a type of ‘power-over’ (as opposed to power-with/consent) which derives this power from fear-mongering and terrorism upon the population. Terrorism here is defined as the operationalized use of fear, pain, and other injury towards socio-political aims.

Had their plans not been rooted in evil, they would have used soft-power tactics like manufacturing consent, to arrive at their ends.

The aim of the Great Reset is to transition the ruling plutocratic oligarchy into a technocratic one. The basis of plutocracy is finance, and the introduction of AI and automation eliminates the basis for finance as the foundation of an economy of scale. This is because automation and deflation move in tandem, making new technologies net losers. Therefore a new paradigm accounting for this post-financial ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, must be introduced.

Side-by-side comparison of auto-assembly line: 1920 vs. 2020 – ‘Humans need not apply

But the ideology of the Great Reset is based within the old financialist paradigm, which is one of cost externalization. When human beings are no longer involved in the valorization process in the production of goods and services, then humanity itself is the cost that requires externalization – elimination.

But how it is that sadism became the occult religion of the ruling class, presents a “chicken-or-the-egg” type of question. That is, did the corporate ideology mutate into occult sadism, or did occult sadism find its expression through the corporate ideology? This question will no doubt form the basis of later inquiry.

We often defer to nefarious motivations or processes in terms of ‘greed’, or ‘self-interest’, ‘power obsession’ or the ‘crisis of capital accumulation’, ‘speculative bubbles’.

And these do not suffice in the final analysis, though they provide explanatory power. The problem arises in predictive power, because while we face a crisis of diminishing returns due to automation (as the increasing tendency towards net loss on new large capital investments), the real psychological needs that motivate the present plutocracy as a power-group are actually undermined in significant and sudden population reduction, or new post-coercive technologies that eliminate human agency. This may seem counter-intuitive, but in light of an understanding of the self-defeating nature of evil, we will explore this question.

When we map out the probabilities of three intersecting policy vectors, we can understand this question even better. Those policy vectors are a.) neuralink/AI/Neural Implants/magneto proteins and related transhumanism, b.) depopulation as part of stated Agenda 2030 goals, c.) automation/roboticization, 4IR, and IoT.

This will follow from our last piece on the subject, The Great Reset Morality: Euthanization of the Inessentials:

Neural Implants

The development and introduction of neural implantsmagneto proteins, etc., can go in any number of directions. Some types of these promise to give elites ‘super-human’ cognitive abilities. However, another very practical application is to mandate that these are used on the general populace as to handicap them or control their thoughts in some way.

In that sense, neural implants can work like pharmaceuticals are used in psychiatry. In the creation of this sort of Huxleyesque ‘Brave New World’, we can easily see the continuation of a paradigm already existing today. This is one where it is common-place to find various predictable depressions, anxieties, and neuroticisms caused by contemporary social conditions, but treated psychiatrically instead of resolved socio-economically.

Neural implants can also perform a similar function, but go even further. Beyond emotions or basic effect on the re-uptake of certain hormones like serotonin, etc.; neural implants can direct thoughts or change whole cognitive processes. Beyond feelings, drives, and impulses, neural implants promise to produce actual thoughts in the minds of the subject.

LLNL engineer Vanessa Tolosa holds up a brain implant – credit: Extreme Tech Magazine, July 2014

In between these two is a hybrid form – nanotech and chemogenetics working with optogenetics. Because the delivery system to the brain can be through injection, nanolipids and other compounds can come in the form of shots. These can be delivered as part of a required ‘vaccination’ regimen (insofar as that term has been redefined), as nanotech features already in the Covid-19 shot.

Therefore, such can be included – whether disclosed to the public or not – in required vaccinations.

The development of these would seem, however, to be a technology that would support slavery, but does not rule out genocide. Certainly the ability to control the thoughts of a population would greatly mitigate risk in the view of the state apparatus, especially as it moves towards genocide.

Depopulation: Myths vs. Facts

Population control and population reduction have long been policy at various institutions and think tanks committed to global governance, from the UN to the World Economic Forum. It was a part of the UN’s Millennium goals, and since the dawn of the 21st century, has been part of UN Agenda 2030.

It is important to now introduce a framework for understanding the problem of population in light of economic development. The long standing view is that economic development leads to population stagnation, even decline. The idea here is that education and urbanization are processes which lead towards better knowledge of basic family planning, in tandem with improved access to abortion and birth control.

The underlying postulate is that people naturally do not want to be burdened with children, that children are an affront to freedom in the abstract. The formula is that as people are better educated and have more meaningful work and interesting lives, they know both how to prevent pregnancy and also no longer have ‘primitive’ inclinations towards large family building.

This mythology was built up around a notion that people are fundamentally self-interested in the narrowest sense, to the exclusion of other desires, needs, and impulses. They are presented as the norm such to furthermore create a broader culture which opposes procreation.

Instead, the real mechanism pushing population stagnation in the 1st world are increased pressures of work, and increased costs of living. Rather than ascribing population stagnation to improved conditions of life, these are more related to austere conditions imposed by late modernity. The costs of property, of rents, of food, and also because of the decline in quality of goods through increased planned obsolescence, has placed more economic pressure on individuals and couples. It has led to the requirement that both members of a household are working full-time. And even with this, home ownership in cosmopolitan centers is practically impossible for most. Austerity has also led to stagnation in life expectancy.

This truth is exposed in actual policy papers like “New strategies for slowing population growth” (1995). Here, the doublespeak is evident, with easily decipherable phrases within it; “…reduce unwanted pregnancies by expanding services that promote reproductive choice and better health, to reduce the demand for large families by creating favorable conditions for small families…”. What could possibly be meant by ‘create favorable conditions for small families’?

Economic development does not reduce population, but if we add austerity and demanding and inflexible work obligations, then we land on an answer. Economic prosperity, as it has for time immemorial, promises to greatly increase the population in the absence of a program of population reduction. Because an organic 4IR not brought in by the technocracy would decrease work obligations and increase quality of life markers, we would expect a population boom.

Consequently, projections that that population will top off at just under 10 billion by the 2060’s are as erroneous as they are linear. Without a technocracy working to actively reduce population, as they believe, an economy based on automation and AI would see a population explosion.

Conclusion

It is still likely that the would-be technocrats have indeed thought out the end-game, and that there are any number of possibilities that will allow them to harvest sadistic pleasure as an exercise of absolute power, in perpetuity. This might mean increasing fear of extermination far beyond actual population reduction. It could mean maintaining many aspects of agency for the controlled population, so that their pains are internalized in multivariate and complex fashions, that include confused feelings of self-blame, identifying with the abuser, resentment, regret, and also violations of will and dignity. Again, if will is not a factor, then all of these potential arenas of psychological pain are not present.

To frame the following, it is fundamental to understand that in a post-labor civilization, the status of humanity no longer exists upon a metric of utility. Either civilization exists to improve the human condition, or to increase human suffering. There are no trade-offs or costs. Society is either good or evil.

But evil is short lived and short-sighted, and this is why: Sudden population reduction is a fire-cracker, it explodes just once. The pleasure in the process of eradicating billions of people, and the fear, pain, and suffering this would cause, within the span of a few short years, only gets to be enjoyed once. It’s a sacrificial ritual upon the altar of Moloch that can only be performed one time.

Likewise with post-coercive technologies: Without agency, controlling people serves no purpose in terms of violating their own will or desire. Causing pain on a subject that does not resist because he has no will, gives the sadist much less pleasure than would pain on a subject against their will.

Moreover, the position of being elite is relative to a number of factors such as distribution of wealth, power, and/or privilege, and the sheer numbers in terms of population, that one possesses these advantages over.

If there are only elites remaining, then they would have merely introduced a new kind of egalitarian society on the foundation of superabundance and a miniscule human population. If living conditions of an existing humanity can be greatly reduced, then the relative privilege and luxury enjoyed by the elites grows in that proportion.

Absent some radical life-extending technology, it is conceivable that science and technology have already reached the zenith point at which privilege and luxury cannot be furthered. A reasonable solution would be to reduce living conditions for others so as to enhance their own relative privilege. The greater number of people who live in reduced conditions, the more privileged one’s position of privilege actually is.

Likewise, it would seem that maintaining some human population as ‘possessions’ would serve to augment ownership over human beings, perhaps the most valuable type of possession because they are aware that they are owned – but only if that humiliates them. For what other purpose is there for slavery, in a world without human labor?

Does it have any meaning, or is any satisfaction achieved, by governing over people without the possibility to have the will to either consent, or conversely, resent the ruler? Here we can understand it along these lines: the possibility for agency means that governing can happen with their support, or against their will.

But neural implant control over cognitive processes, eliminates the possibility for will, which would deprive technocrats of the pleasure of ruling with or against the will of the ruled.

Therefore, the destructive evil framework of those behind the Great Reset is revealed. The use of strategy, planning, and cunning to achieve their desired result is prevalent. But have they examined the foundation of their desires? Do they understand what their victory would deliver to them?

The only thing left to destroy in a world populated by elites alone, are other elites. It would seem that the desire to dominate others does not simply come to an end on its own.

For these reasons, it is likely that some elites have seen the problem in this end game. This would explain the inter-elite conflict which we have explored previously, and will return to in the near future.

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