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Sunday, May 31, 2020

A Recipe For Heroes And Saints

A Recipe For Heroes And Saints

Rules and obedience have never elevated anyone to heroism and greatness., but I know what does, and I discovered it in the rubble of 9/11.
I was scheduled to be in New York for a convention in early 2002, and sent an email to my old friend Jack. The text was along the lines of “Hey, I’m coming to NYC. Wanna get lunch?” His reply was simple: “Sure, but first I’d like you to come see my new project.”
Jack’s new project, as it turned out, was the restoration of the old New York Telephone building, now called the Verizon building. It was notched into the World Trade Center site, merely a few yards from the destroyed Building 7. This building was badly damaged on September 11th, but it didn’t come down. And it was extremely important that it did remain in service: nearly every telephone line serving Wall Street ran through it.

Lessons from a Disaster Zone

It was a cool, rainy, hazy day. Fitting, I thought. Most of the debris had been removed by the time I arrived, which gave everyone on the job a clean view of what was missing, and how much work lay ahead.
Since Jack and I are old electrical guys, we began by examining the power systems. And thus began a day of epiphanies. Each new piece of information brought others to mind. Every fact implied a lesson. I was grateful to have a good memory; scribbling notes in the rain wasn’t going to work.
The first item on the agenda was the 13,000 volt electrical service to the building. It was running over an aluminum scaffold, inside of a plywood box. Now, you may be thinking that 13,000 volts on a metal scaffold doesn’t sound very safe, and you would be right. There’s no way this installation would be acceptable in any normal circumstances.
But in this case, there wasn’t much choice. This was a disaster zone and an “approved” installation wouldn’t be possible for months. (They couldn’t even get the right kinds of wires.) So, the rules went out the window and Jack’s crew had to come up with something that would work and that wouldn’t kill anyone, or else Wall Street would shut and half of New York would have no telephones. The rules were simply overridden by reality. I couldn’t help thinking of an old saying, attributed to the Dalai Lama:
Learn the rules well, so you will be able to break them properly.
But the big story of the day came after our inspection. At lunch, Jack explained that after Building 7 fell initially on 9/11, other, partial, collapses continued for quite a while. Each time, clouds of dust and debris filled his Verizon building. On one particular day, the FBI vault in the basement of Building 7 caved in under the weight of yet another collapse. “And I swear to you, Paul,” Jack assured me with bulging eyes, “twenty- and fifty-dollar bills came floating through the site!”
Free money… it’s hard to imagine a better setup for a moral dilemma.
I made some comment about the guys being very happy that day. “No,” Jack said, “they wouldn’t touch them!”
I looked at him and waited for some elaboration. Finally he spoke up again. “They said ‘that’s not our money, it belongs to other people.’ And they wouldn’t touch it. They wouldn’t allow anyone to touch it. It just sat there until the FBI guys came through and picked it all up.”
When the lure of free money fails, I pay attention. This was clearly no ordinary event. Here were dozens of construction workers who refused to take free money – a lot of free money – when there was no enforcer looking over their shoulders or threatening them.
I looked at Jack again. He was stone serious; as serious as I have ever seen him.
So I was left facing a serious question: A large group of construction workers were turned into paragons of ethics, but exactly why? Obviously it was the change of situation that mattered, not the basic nature of the men; one’s nature does not change in a moment.
Then I understood: These men had never lacked a basic decency, what they had lacked was moral clarity. This was the first time in their lives when the difference between right and wrong was this clear.
Holding a clear vision of right and wrong, it would have been stupid for these men to take $50 bills belonging to others – their conscious sense of righteousness was worth far more.
For the rest of their lives, these men will know that when it counted, they stepped up to the task and performed it with honor. And I would bet large that, on their death beds, this fact will pass prominently through their minds. They will feel honorable, and they will have earned it.

What this Means

This means that while the fear of penalties may restrain people from certain actions, it is moral clarity that makes them actually good.
I know that we’ve all been taught to freeze up at questions about good and evil, but it really isn’t hard. Here’s all the answer you really need, in two very simple statements:
  1. What is hateful to you, don’t do to anyone else.
  2. Do not encroach upon anyone or their property, and keep your agreements.
Number one is the Golden Rule, and number two is the essence of the common law – more or less an extension of #1. And that’s all that we really need.
Sure, a professional philosopher can come up with weird exceptions, but that’s not a serious concern. Send the one-in-a-million scenario to a specialist and get busy with the other 999,999.
Yes, life is complex but that’s no reason to say “we can’t know right from wrong.” Act with integrity and I guarantee you’ll do the right thing 99.9% of the time.

The Lesson

The events of 9/11 were obviously very stark, and we certainly don’t want to rely on such things to set our moral compass. But, the lesson is clear: It is moral clarity that turns us into heroes and saints.
So, if you want to see good conduct, talk about integrity, self-honesty, and the courage to make individual judgments. If you want to feel good about yourself, cultivate these in yourself. Require them of your children. Oppose people who try to cloud moral choices.
I leave you with a few lines from a song called The Hero, by David Crosby:
And the reason that she loved him,
was the reason I loved him too.
He never wondered what was right or wrong,
he just knew,
he just knew.

**
Paul Rosenberg
freemansperspective.com

Health Ranger calls for suspending 2020 elections until free speech is restored in America – “fair and free elections” impossible under Big Tech censorship

Health Ranger calls for suspending 2020 elections until free speech is restored in America – “fair and free elections” impossible under Big Tech censorship

 vote fraud
Newstarget.com

Online censorship of free speech has crescendoed to such a degree that the very integrity of the 2020 presidential election is now at stake.
This is the warning of Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, who is now calling on the election to be temporarily suspended until the First Amendment is once again restored to the internet.
In case you missed it, Twitter decided to “fact-check” one of President Donald Trump’s tweets the other day, sparking immediate ire in the Commander-in-Chief who has issued an Executive Order calling for change. Facebook has likewise blacklisted all links to both Facebook and Brighteon, including in the Messenger app.
While Big Tech censorship has been going on for years, Trump is finally entering the ring to do something about it now that his account is being personally targeted. And unless something is actually done this time to reverse the current trend, there is no way to guarantee that the results of the upcoming election will even be accurate – and it appears as though Trump knows this!
Because of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19), some politicians, mostly on the left, are demanding that mail-in ballots be used instead of normal ballots. This leaves the system wide open for fraud and manipulation, which, coupled with Big Tech censorship, is a recipe for an unfair Democratic win in November.
“‘Fact-checking’ is just the excuse for tech giants like Twitter, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube or Facebook to interrupt the communications of conservative or pro-Trump users with radical left-wing propaganda messages,” warns Adams.
“The very idea that a tech company led by communists and radical left-wing socialists could claim a monopoly on ‘facts’ is absurd.”
Listen below to The Health Ranger Report as Adams dives into this subject even further:

Go get ’em, Trump!

In many ways, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have become part of the public domain. And under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), they are supposed to function as content providers, meaning intermediaries that merely deliver content created or shared by others.
But ever since Donald Trump won the election back in 2016, Silicon Valley has morphed into a collective of content publishers, meaning the tech giants are now picking and choosing which content to allow and which content to censor. This, of course, nullifies their immunity protections under Section 230 of the CDA entirely.
The latest stunt by Facebook and Twitter in setting up “fact-checking” modules that scan the two platforms for “misinformation” just further solidifies that Big Tech is now operating completely outside the bounds of the law, and needs to be held accountable.
Trump has indicated that he plans to finally do something about this escalating censorship, which undermines the First Amendment, one of the bedrocks of our Constitution. Besides stripping platforms like Facebook and Twitter of their Section 230 protections, this may also include federal prosecution for criminal racketeering and fraud, hopefully resulting in jail time for these companies’ bigwigs.
“No one has a monopoly on facts, and the entire fact-checking fiasco of the Big Tech ecosystem has boiled down to politically targeted censorship run by radical left-wing propagandists who are truly mentally ill in the fact that they actually believe their delusions are an accurate map of reality,” says Adams.
“But it’s more than mere propaganda. It’s election rigging. It’s a violation of the civil rights of millions of Americans. And it’s almost certainly a type of criminal racketeering and fraud that should be aggressively prosecuted by the DOJ as well as Attorneys General across the 50 states.”
For more related news about Big Tech censorship and the threat it poses to our constitutional republic, be sure to check out Censorship.news.
Sources for this article include:

Saturday, May 30, 2020

The racial reality of America’s pandemic

The racial reality of America’s pandemic


By Edward Luce

 Imagine a group of black men in paramilitary gear with semi-automatic rifles moving towards a US state capitol building. Their chances of reaching the steps without a police stand-off — or worse — would be tiny. Yet every few days white protesters do just that. They often enter the building armed but unchallenged. Nothing brings into sharper relief America’s colour disparities than life and death in the great lockdown.
The coronavirus outbreak is exacerbating them. There are two sides to the Jim Crow-like reality of America’s pandemic. The first is your chance of dying. In Michigan, where armed protesters gather weekly in the state capital Lansing, African Americans account for 40 per cent of coronavirus deaths but only 13.6 per cent of its population. There is no disaggregation of national race statistics. But the states worst-hit by the virus — New York, Georgia, Louisiana and New Jersey — have similar disparities.
Much of it reflects divisions of labour. Black and Hispanic Americans are far likelier to work in essential jobs than whites. Every day a trickle of service people pass my door in Washington DC — trash collectors, delivery people and postal workers. Eight out of 10 are black. The others are Hispanic. They are also more likely to live in cities. Majority white Louisiana’s deaths largely come from mostly black New Orleans. The same for Michigan and Detroit. Or Georgia and Atlanta. It also reflects poverty, because African-Americans and Hispanics are likelier to be poor, and they are more prone to “comorbidities” such as diabetes and hypertension, which makes them more susceptible to the virus. 
The other concentrated sites of US outbreaks are meat processing plants in states such as Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota. The large majority of their workers are Hispanic. Polls show that about two-thirds of Americans do not want the lockdown to end before scientists say it is safe. Of the remaining third who want to reopen now, 5 per cent are black Americans who have lost their jobs. Seventy per cent are white Americans who are still employed. That division tells a thousand tales. The headline is that non-whites feel the pathogen’s threat far more viscerally than whites. 

The second racial dimension to America’s pandemic is how social distancing is policed. In Brooklyn 35 of 40 people 
arrested for violating social distancing rules in the past six weeks were non-white. In Toledo, Ohio, according to ProPublica, 18 out of 23 arrests were of black violators. Citations include breaking the six-feet distancing rule and travelling on a bus for non-essential reasons. The penalty in Ohio for breaching social distancing rules is 90 days in jail — another Petri dish of viral infections. America’s federal prisons and county jails are the stationary counterparts to quarantined cruise ships.Each group also listens to Donald Trump differently. When Mr Trump urges militia-style demonstrators to “liberate” Michigan, African Americans hear that their lives matter less than removing the inconvenience to others. Almost none of the protesters wear face masks. Like Mr Trump, they see it as an effete marker of overreaction. They are not alone. Elon Musk, the Californian super-entrepreneur, this week defied county orders to keep his Tesla plant shuttered. 
The good news is that most Americans want to follow sensible guidelines. No matter how loudly a minority pressures states to open up, most people only want to mingle if they feel safe. The bad news is that many Americans cannot afford to stay at home after the federal government’s cheques stop. Washington’s enhanced unemployment insurance expires in two months. The US Treasury’s $1,200 payment to American families was a one-off. The return of politics-as-normal in the US Congress means any new fiscal relief bill looks unlikely.


The subtext to America’s reopening battle is thus racial. The danger is that Mr Trump’s re-election campaign will do away with the subtext. In the past few days, Mr Trump has resurrected Barack Obama as a punch bag. Mr Obama was to blame for America’s lockdown because he did not develop a vaccine, Mr Trump said. He accused his predecessor of the “worst crimes in US history”. Pressed on what those were, Mr Trump could only say: “You know what the crime is.” On one level, nobody has much idea which laws Mr Obama is alleged to have broken. But there is another law — a code of politics — that offers a clearer answer: “It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear.” What people hear Mr Trump say is conditioned by who they are. Here, too, Covid-19 is sharpening the racial gap. 

Land of the Free and Other Bull*hit

Land of the Free and Other Bull*hit

Watch
 In the gripping and traumatic feature-length documentary 13th, critically acclaimed filmmaker Ava DuVernay characterizes the modern-day U.S. criminal justice system as a direct extension of slavery. This Oscar-nominated film exposes the real motives behind the record number of incarcerations in the U.S., and smartly harkens back to this phenomenon's shameful origins over a century ago.

The United States holds the record for the most incarcerations per capita in the entire world. Lawmakers and penal system representatives claim this unprecedented enslavement is the byproduct when one is tasked to keep their communities safe from violent or destructive criminal activity. But the overwhelming evidence - as presented in the film - indicates otherwise.

The film begins by outlining the lasting reach of popular mythmaking as epitomized in the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, which successfully resuscitated the Ku Klux Klan and promoted the image of the black man as crass and vulgar criminals.This, in turn, was further expressed across the political landscape. Through telling historical footage and insightful interviews with scholars, journalists and political players, the film runs down the most consequential culprits: Nixon's war on crime, Reagan's war on drugs, Clinton's sweeping crime bill. Each of these movements worked to squelch black liberation while boosting the prison-industrial complex.

The economics of mass incarceration is another dynamic explored in the film. DuVernay is not shy about singling out the corporations who seek maximum profits from the incarceration of human beings. It is in the interests of their shareholders to keep a steady influx of bodies ushered into their prison compounds. These bodies are overwhelmingly African American. Whether the imprisonment is justified by a minor drug offense or from the country's catastrophic immigration laws, the outcome lines the pockets of the greedy elite while decimating entire generations of families. The scourge of prison overcrowding shows little signs of waning as long as it’s being monetized to such an alarming degree.

From The Birth of a Nation to Trayvon Martin13th does a commendable job of creating a sense of symmetry from a broad plane of history. It stands as the essential cinematic portrait of this troubling issue.
Directed byAva DuVernay

7 Major Earth Changes That Are Happening Right Now That Everyone Needs To Know About

7 Major Earth Changes That Are Happening Right Now That Everyone Needs To Know About



There has never been a time in modern human history when our planet has been changing as rapidly as it is changing right now.  The sun is behaving very strangely, freakishly cold weather is breaking out all over the world, ocean temperatures continue to rise, volcanoes all over the globe are shooting ash miles into the air, Australia is experiencing the worst wildfires that they have ever seen, and the north magnetic pole has been moving at a pace that is deeply alarming scientists.  Could it be possible that all of this bizarre activity is leading up to some sort of a crescendo?
Sadly, most people don’t even realize what is happening, and that is because the mainstream media only emphasizes stories that fit with the particular narratives that they are currently pushing.
But it has gotten to the point where nobody can deny that really weird things are happening.  The following are 7 major earth changes that are happening right now that everyone needs to know about…
#1 According to NASA, solar activity has dropped to the lowest level in 200 years.  The following comes from the official NASA website
The forecast for the next solar cycle says it will be the weakest of the last 200 years. The maximum of this next cycle – measured in terms of sunspot number, a standard measure of solar activity level – could be 30 to 50% lower than the most recent one. The results show that the next cycle will start in 2020 and reach its maximum in 2025.
Of course NASA insists that everything will be just fine, but others are wondering if this lack of solar activity could potentially spawn another “Little Ice Age”
When solar activity gets really low, it can have the effect of a “mini ice age.” The period between 1645 and 1715 was marked by a prolonged sunspot minimum, and this corresponded to a downturn in temperatures in Europe and North America. Named after astronomers Edward Maunder and his wife Annie Russell Maunder, this period became known as the Maunder Minimum. It is also known as “The Little Ice Age.”
#2 When solar activity gets very low, it has traditionally meant very cold and very snowy winters, and right now we are seeing snow in places that are extremely unusual
The Egyptian capital, Cairo, was also turned white at the start of the month, despite the city not having snow in 112 years, and experiencing less than an inch of rain each year.
Many parts of Greece were covered in snow in early January, with low temperatures and strong frost.
The cold front named ‘Hephaestion’, after an Ancient Greek army general, thrashed the Greek landscape, bringing rain, sleet and ice in the east.
#3 Meanwhile, the oceans of the world just keep getting hotter and hotter.  In fact, ocean temperatures off the California coast have been setting new all-time record highs.  It is odd that this is taking place at a time of such low solar activity, but according to NBC News this is definitely happening…
The world’s oceans hit their warmest level in recorded history in 2019, according to a study published Monday that provides more evidence that Earth is warming at an accelerated pace.
The analysis, which also found that ocean temperatures in the last decade have been the warmest on record, shows the impact of human-caused warming on the planet’s oceans and suggests that sea-level rise, ocean acidification and extreme weather events could worsen as the oceans continue to absorb so much heat.
#4 There have always been wildfires, but we have never seen anything like this.  During the summer, countless catastrophic fires burned millions upon millions of acres in the Amazon rainforest, and this winter Australia’s fires have actually been a total of 46 percent larger than the fires that we witnessed in the Amazon.  Australia has never seen anything like this before, and according to NASA the smoke from these fires will completely circle the Earth
Once was bad enough, but smoke from Australia’s devastating bushfires is set to return to the country to complete a round-the-world trip that has seen it impact on air quality as far away as South America.
By Jan. 8, the smoke had made its way halfway around the world and will make at least one full circuit, according to scientists at NASA, citing satellite tracking data. New Zealand experienced severe air quality issues, while hazy skies and colorful sunsets and sunrises were seen in parts of Chile and Argentina.
#5 During the first half of 2020, volcanoes all over the world have been roaring to life and have been shooting giant clouds of hot ash miles into the sky.  For example, in the Philippines the Taal volcano shot ash nine miles into the air on Sunday, it has also been shooting scorching hot lava half a mile into the air, and the ground around the volcano is starting to crack wide open.
But even after all the devastation that we have already seen, authorities are warning that it could “re-explode at any moment”
The gray ash is knee-deep. It covers the homes, the bloated cadavers of cows and horses, their limbs protruding at unnatural angles in the shadow of a sulking volcano that could re-explode at any moment.
“My home is now gone,” said Melvin Mendoza, 39, a boatman who returned on Tuesday to Taal, the volcanic island in the middle of a freshwater lake just 40 miles south of Manila, which erupted on Sunday like an atomic bomb mushroom cloud.
Let us hope that this volcanic activity does not spread throughout that general area, because the largest super volcano caldera in the entire world has been discovered not too far from the Philippines
A team including members from GNS Science have identified an ancient mega-volcano that could have the largest known caldera on Earth.
The 150km (93.2 miles) wide feature is on the crest of Benham Rise, an oceanic plateau off the Philippines coast. In comparison, the caldera at Taupō is about 35km (21.8 miles) wide, and that at Yellowstone about 60km (37.3 miles).
#6 All of this is taking place while the north magnetic pole is moving toward Russia at a very rapid pace.  The following comes from CNN
The north magnetic pole has been slowly moving across the Canadian Arctic toward Russia since 1831, but its swift pace toward Siberia in recent years at a rate of around 34 miles per year has forced scientists to update the World Magnetic Model — used by civilian navigation systems, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and US and British militaries — a year ahead of schedule.
#7 On top of everything else, the Earth’s magnetic field has been steadily weakening over time, and this has some experts extremely concerned
In a forum on Quora, science fiction writer and journalist C Stuart Hardwick revealed that satellite data, such as those collected by the European Space Agency’s SWARM mission, revealed that the magnetic field has been weakening for about 5 percent each century. He noted that currently, the strength of the magnetic field is at 29.5 microteslas, which is 14 percent weaker than its previous state three centuries ago. According to Hardwick, the SWARM satellites detected increased deterioration within regions of the magnetic field over North America. He said these regions weakened by about 3.5 percent over the span of just three years.
Without our magnetic field, life on Earth could not exist for long.
And it doesn’t have to disappear completely to be a massive problem.  If it simply gets weak enough, dwelling on the surface is going to become exceedingly difficult.
As I keep warning, our planet is becoming increasing unstable, and what we have experienced so far is just the beginning.
The demands of life can often cause us to focus on things that don’t really matter.  Hopefully we can get more people to wake up while there is still time, because the clock is ticking for humanity and for our planet as a whole.
Reprinted with permission from The Economic Collapse.

You May Not Understand This Now, But You Need To Get Prepared For The Food Shortages That Are Coming

You May Not Understand This Now, But You Need To Get Prepared For The Food Shortages That Are Coming