Proposed COVID-19 FIRESIDE CHAT For PRESIDENT TRUMP

From Bill Bonner

A Fireside Chat for Trump

“My fellow Americans, I speak to you tonight about a grave matter of urgent importance.

“Our nation has faced many challenges in the 244 years since the Declaration of Independence. And we’ve made many mistakes. We are only human. And we get carried away from time to time and do stupid things.

“We see a problem. Naturally, we want to fix it. Or we see a threat. Naturally, we want to protect ourselves from it.

“But not every problem can be fixed by the federal government. Nor can the federal government protect you from every risk. Remember, we only have two kinds of power. We can take your money. Or we can tell you what to do.

“Every penny we spend – whether we disguise it in a tax cut or as printing-press money – must come from you. Every law we pass… every rule… every regulation… is an infringement on your freedom.

“Sometimes it is necessary. Often it is not. And sometimes, the fix is much worse than the problem.

“I will give you one example of what I mean: Prohibition. In 1920, alcohol was seen as such a big threat to the nation… and the benefits of eliminating it were so blindingly obvious… we passed a Constitutional Amendment banning it.

“After all, the evidence was abundant and clear. Alcohol led to crime, domestic violence, unemployment, premature death – the list was long; the proof was impeccable.

“But while the government could make it illegal, it couldn’t make it unpopular.

“Some research shows that alcohol consumption actually went up after it was outlawed. So did the collateral damage – alcohol related deaths, caused by dangerous moonshine and bathtub gin… as well as a move by criminal gangs into the liquor business.

“And Prohibition turned us into a nation of law-breakers… and gave the federal government vast new powers to arrest and control the population.

“But we learned from this experience. In 1933, prohibition was repealed. And now 100 years after the 18th amendment made Demon Rum illegal, we see that it was much better to treat alcohol as a health issue, not to make war on it.

Another Big Mistake

“I’m speaking directly to you tonight because I think we are making another mistake – a big one. I’m talking about the ‘war’ we are currently conducting against the COVID-19. It is driven by similar fears and hysteria.

“The media is full of lurid stories… hospitals over-run… cases soaring… body counts rising. But those stories could be written about any influenza.

“The 1918 ‘Spanish’ flu killed 0.5% of the U.S. population. The 1957 ‘Asian’ flu killed only one-tenth as many – 0.06% of the U.S. The 1968, ‘Hong Kong’ flu killed 0.05% of the U.S. And the 2009, ‘Swine’ flu carried off only 0.004% of the U.S.

“As of last week, the COVID death toll stood at 0.05% in the U.S. and will probably end up near 0.1% – or one tenth of one percent of the population.

“Of course, we don’t want to lose anyone to the disease. But nor do we want to succumb to a panicky over-reaction.

“Mankind has lived with infectious diseases for as long as we’ve existed. So far, at least, we have never fully beaten them. But they don’t beat us, either. They make us sick, but they usually don’t kill us. We are much more useful to viruses alive – coughing, sneezing, and spreading them – than dead.

“That is probably why the COVID tends not to kill the people who socialize the most, young people, because they are the best disease spreaders. Let’s look at the numbers.

The COVID-19 Numbers

“If you are under the age of 24, your chances of dying from the COVID virus are very small – not even statistically significant. You’re much more likely to die in an auto accident. Of course, we could ban automobile travel to protect you, but we don’t think it is worth it.

“If you are in the working population – between 25 and 65 – your odds of dying from the virus are higher, but still very much within tolerable limits of everyday life. People who die in this age group are about 30 times more likely to die of something other than the COVID-19 – at least so far.

“After 65… the danger rises. Sharply. Especially if you have ‘comorbidities.’ And when you get to be over 85, your chance of dying from the disease is more than 1,000 times greater than it is for a 20-year-old.

“But so is your chance of dying from almost any other disease.

“Yes, I hate to break it to you… But when you get to be over 85, something is going to kill you – and soon. The COVID is just one of them. Even so, as of last week, it was only responsible for about 10% of the deaths in this age category for this year.

“So our best strategy for dealing with the disease is obvious. Those who are most vulnerable should stay away from people who might have the disease… and wait for the viral cycle to pass.

“Fortunately, most of the vulnerable are over 65. They don’t have to go out to work… or to socialize. They can fairly easily keep their distance, wear face masks, wash their hands, and so forth.

“For the rest, were it not for all the media attention, most people who get it would not even know that they had it. It does not represent an outsized risk.

Two Problems With the Lockdown

“But why not listen to the doctors and force everyone into a Lockdown and eradicate the disease?

“There are two reasons.

“First, if we were a small island nation, it might be possible to keep the virus out. In a country as large, diverse, and mobile as the U.S., there is no way. It would be like trying to stamp out drugs or alcohol.

“Already, some 20 million Americans have probably been infected. There is no way to get rid of it entirely.

“Second, doctors can tell you how to avoid the disease. Vulnerable people should pay attention. But I represent the whole nation… not just those who are afraid of getting the COVID.

“Shutting down our economic and social lives may help a few people avoid or delay the disease, but it also prevents people from living fully.

“It is by working together that we satisfy our material needs. It is how we earn the things we want and need. And it is by socializing that we satisfy our spiritual, psychological, and communal needs. Cut them off… and we, as a people, are poorer… with less of what we really want in life.

“Those who suffer most are young people – those who are building lives, careers, businesses, and families; that is, those who are least vulnerable to the virus.

Heart of the Matter

“And so now we come to the heart of the matter. Those of us who are over 65 might make it safer for ourselves by forcing everyone else – including school children – to isolate themselves and wear face masks.

“But it would stifle and stunt the lives of our own children and grandchildren. What kind of people would we be if we did that?

“We will all die, sooner or later. Do we want it chiseled on our tombstones: ‘Here lies a coward who sacrificed his own children to save himself from the COVID-19?’

“Some things are important enough to risk a little danger. In the Blitz of London, for example, German planes dropped bombs on the city for 56 nights in a row. A million houses were damaged or destroyed. Nearly 20,000 people were killed.

“Night after night, the people of the city slept on the hard concrete of their subway stations. Then, in the morning, they got up, brushed themselves off, and got back to work.

“If all they cared about was their own safety, they might have fled the city or surrendered it. But other things were important, too. Their own dignity and honor, for example… their freedom… and the kind of nation they were leaving their children. We don’t want to leave them a nation of pusillanimous weaklings, snitches and COVID cops.

“Today, as much as we want to avoid getting sick, other things matter, too. And we shouldn’t hold 280 million Americans under the age of 65 hostage… just for the convenience of the 50 million over that age.

“We are already developing promising new treatments and vaccines. In the meantime, those of us in the vulnerable category know how to protect ourselves. If we are afraid of the disease, we can practice social distancing, wash our hands, and wear face protection.

“As for the rest, let’s let them live their lives – working with each other… socializing… worshipping… and smiling at each other, without the government interfering.

“Thank you.”

When The MSM Says "Ban Fake News!" They Really Mean "Ban Free Thinking!"

A recent missive on CLIMATE ALARMISM from Conservative leadership candidate Derek Sloan caught my eye: "Stop Climate Alarmism!"

“Climate alarmism” is an ideological approach that claims human use of fossil fuels has a dangerous effect on the world’s climate and will lead to human extinction.

This claim is not supported by science. Thousands of studies from peer-reviewed scientific journals contradict or cast serious doubt on the claims made by climate alarmists.

Climate alarmism is a massive deception used by the left to expand government power and taxation, erode personal freedoms, and run “green energy” subsidy scams paid for by taxpayers.

Ontario is still paying for the Green Energy Act of 2009, which increased energy bills by 70% while driving businesses from the province in the name of promoting “green energy” through subsidies. Disgraced former Trudeau Principal Secretary Gerry Butts was behind the GEA, and now he heads up a group looking to launch a similar plan nationally.

Plans involving “green energy” subsidies always result in radically higher energy costs that ordinary Canadians must pay.

Even though climate alarmism is unscientific, rallying cries to “fight climate change” go unchallenged and have led to policies that cripple our energy sector, banish manufacturing jobs, make energy rates skyrocket, and shatter national unity.

The Paris Agreement was created out of climate alarmism. Attempts to meet its goals will destroy our oil and gas industry, while at the same time serving as justification for an unconstitutional carbon tax that makes life more expensive for us all.

I am the only CPC leadership candidate who is pushing back against climate alarmism. O’Toole, MacKay, and Lewis will adhere to the climate alarmism that robs Canadians of prosperity. Leslyn Lewis’ academic and professional life over the past few years has been heavily concerned with promoting and lobbying for “green energy”. Erin O’Toole is committed to meeting Trudeau’s Paris emissions goals. And Peter McKay is promising all sorts of green energy subsidies.

I am the only candidate who will withdraw Canada from the Paris Agreement and cancel the useless cash grab of a carbon tax it justifies.

I am the only candidate who will NEVER subsidize the “green energy” scams that enrich a few but make life more expensive for the many.

Canadians are ready for a change. The next leader of our party must have environmental and energy development policies that treat our natural resources as an asset, not as a liability.

I will keep energy affordable, which will raise the standard of living for all Canadians.

Our energy policies have to be different than Trudeau’s, not a Liberal-lite or green Tory version of them like the other candidates are proposing.

- Derek Sloan -

So, inspired by his take on all this, I composed a little missive of my own to supplement his:

DON'T WORRY: THE LEGACY MSM IS DEAD, THE INTERNET KILLED IT!

Here's a short history lesson to bolster your spirits:

I think people still listen to the legacy mainstream media from sheer habit, and it tells them climate alarmism is real science, or, they presume, if not, then far too many people will still believe it to risk them challenging it in any election, so they presume that we should all continue to go along (with this criminal lie) to get along with, if not the criminals promoting it themselves, then at least with all the other dupes, who will otherwise vote against us anyway. But what many if not most people don't quite realize - and neither do the people involved in the legacy media print, radio and TV industry itself quite yet - is that the legacy media is dead and the Internet killed it.

And its purpose was always at least tacitly accepted as one of exploitive propaganda - it pretended to bring to our attention stories of interest to us, but which were first of all of interest to those who ran it. Everyone knows the cost we pay for our daily or weekly newspapers has always been at most at the break-even level of the costs of printing and distributing it, not the real cost of producing it, which was covered by advertisers solicited to pay for running their advertisements within it. And ditto for radio and TV ads - they exchanged access to our attention spans directly to corporations for money.

Similarly, though, the focus of the articles themselves could be and often were paid to be slanted towards or away from any given political and/or corporate position, effectively lobbying the government via direct access to the public mind to influence policy decisions by crafting and gaming popular opinion, swaying it one way, or the other - and often, even on the very same page, by playing one off the other, accepting money to promote both options at once, thereby hypocritically inducing a sense of inconsistency and schizophrenia-like, cognitively dissonant helplessness and dependency in the minds of the general public at large, while simultaneously pretending that, even if life was too complex for anyone, maybe even including such experienced self-determined expert authorities as your humble media pundit authors themselves, to ever really be able to accurately determine causes and effects, nevertheless, either way, as they were established "establishment" semi-celebrities, you still needed them and their putative authoritative expertise to interpret the big bad complex world for you and to advise you as to what where and when you should do about it - which mostly involved obeying authority in general and going along with their criminal lies to get along with the other scary lying criminals anyway.

And their control over the public mind of the average citizen, too harried by daily life to indulge in their own research on all of the many, fragmentary topics presented, was almost assured, because they got to edit their own comments sections, and only decided to print letters to their editors which they found compatible with their own exploitive world-view and those of their highest-paying advertisers.

The information (and propaganda) flowed in one direction only.

But then along came the Internet and cellphones, which effectively paired up the previously diverse technologies of one's personal TV, radio and even two-way ham radio, with one's typewriter and camera, while allowing the former peons in the public to create, archive, and widely share one another's home movies, articles and opinions on it all directly in comment form with each other, thus making not only all of those earlier technologies but also the legacy media themselves and their opinion-making models of mind-control obsolete.

Suddenly, the information started to flow both ways, and the truth started to corrupt their subjectively exploitive monologue narratives with objective facts and logical dialogues, freeing the people's minds from their control.

Their predictable response was to double-down on their existing business model of paid-for article slants and outright lies to preserve their monopoly control over corporate ownership of all political policy agenda propaganda, both to and from the various parties currently in and out of power, selling us such lies as climate alarmism and systemic racism to destabilize certain governments, keeping all the members of the voting public feeling unsafe and unhappy until, as Tucker Carlson recently put it, they learned how to vote "correctly" again.

And even while the new propaganda masters became the Internet's own gatekeepers - those corporations such as Google, which itself became the Index for the entire Internet, and reciprocally Wikipedia - itself in the end really only a hotbed of subjectivist leftist propaganda dressed up as objectively neutral fact-checkers and collectors - and the various social media collators such as Facebook and Twitter, who all accept corporate advertising money - including money from the legacy media corporations themselves - to skew the search results towards themselves and away from their opponents, who in this case now include the intrepid individual members of the curious and investigative public themselves, including anonymous whistle-blowers exposing their previously safe conspiracies, by banning thought-crimes (unspecifically but primarily and generally, the "crime" of thinking for one's self) - they are also directly lobbying our governments to allegedly "regulate" them selves, in a duplicitous effort to really only further enshrine only their own rights to exist over the inevitable tides of innovations and otherwise inevitable technological evolution which would otherwise replace them with new models of freedom, by really only effectively regulating us by restricting our ability to access and freely promote our own thoughts, which the lying hypocrites collectively and in lock-step continue to slanderoulsy decry as "Fake News!"

So this election depends a lot more on how many of the public have already accessed the available Internet options which will tell them the truth and allow them to decide for them selves, and how many have not been able or inclined to, and as such remain dependent on the lies told by the legacy enemedia dinosaurs, than on the actual platforms designed and promoted online by the various contestants involved. One can have an absolutely consistent Conservative platform focusing on individual rights which benefits everyone equally no matter what group or gang identity politics others try to interest them in to exploit them for their own ends, but might still fail, depending on how much it gets throttled and shadow-banned, not only on the Internet, but also out in the hands-on legacy of the newsprint and radio media, with which the older voters - those more likely to actually vote conservative - still habitually engage.

The legacy media scum have pretty-much memory-holed conservative thought so far, and I know from my own lengthy involvement at the various levels of politics that many of our members are of that older and still Internet-illiterate generation, seeking to conserve the old ways, while our libertine "liberal" criminal opponents always have, still do, and always will quite predictably continue to focus on the youngest and most insecure new and ever-larger voting cohorts, to promise them a continuation of that "YAY FREE STUFF!" they have always gotten by default and depended on directly from their parents, thus extortively playing on that insecurity to keep them dependent and enslaved on the liberal plantations forever - or at least until they grow up, and learn to vote conservative, at which time they have become obsolete to liberal needs for power, which will continue to beguile and exploit the next and ever-larger and younger cohort of new voters against them, too.

Rinse and repeat, they hope - but even as the smaller and older cohorts literally die off (possibly even due to their own plannedemics!) the younger generations, growing up with the Internet, may prove too savvy to fall for such obvious tired old tricks after all, and seeing their economic freedom prospects dwindle under the iron grip of the legacy corporations, all revolt against it.

I sincerely hope we win this upcoming election, but even if we don't win - this time - we should never give up hope, but must keep on educating the next and the next and the next younger (and ever-larger) generations of voters to vote for sanity and freedom and individual rights, over a "safe" continuance of tyrannical ignorance and collectivist rights-depriving slavery disguised as security.

Modern Conservative thought is based on very simple scientifically immutable principles of individual freedoms gained through the logical embrace of rights with reciprocal responsibilities.

It's an objectively factual and internally consistent, all-or-nothing, concretely "philosophical" proposition - not the sort of pick-and-choose inconsistency of subjectively opinionated liberal hypocrisy.

Libocrisy is based on avoiding one's responsibilities while extortively claiming ever-more rights over others to enslave them. It's nothing more or less than fraud, theft, and crime as a predictable feature, not a glitch.

"WOKENESS" IS WEAKNESS!

 GENERALIZING FEARS AS "FEAR!" ENSLAVES! LIES ARE ATTEMPTED THEFTS, AND THEFT ALWAYS ENSLAVES EVERYONE, BOTH LIARS AND THEIR VICTIMS!"

 Here's both how and why even lying "for" (aka stealing the truth from) people, always goes horribly - and often very quickly - wrong:

Hypocrites not only use THE most generalized pattern-detected threat (aka "God"/The Universe) as their main if not only alibi to excuse attacking any and all of its sub-categorical and symptomatic component parts, but they also summarize and exaggerate any and all detected-as-holistic sub-patterns of even only potentially threatening behavior as deliberate attacks on them, too.

And this (generalizing and abstracting principles from their specific contexts) is what all academics always do - they hate forests because they let on tree's root trip them up once!

In fact, psychotic hypocrites will tell any lie to defend their feelings: to ignore fear and embrace hope alone as a plan - for instance, insisting despite all facts to the contrary, that the races and sexes are equal.

In reality, they already know that they're unequal - Whites HAVE invented everything, while the non-Whites have not; ditto for men building and defending everything, while women have not and do not - yet they are scared of the reactions of potentially dangerous non-Whites and women to these simple and obvious truths, and so, choose to habitually lie about them.

And their lies have consequences - as the most basic form of at least attempted theft, even such "harmless, peace-keeping white lies" enslave everyone, too. Entire industries and reams of restrictive laws have sprung up to defend the lies: "Multi-Cultural," "Tolerant" "Diversity;" "Anti-Cis-Gender," "Down-with-Whitey," BLM/Antifa mobs in our streets, and the recent rise of communist thought police.

Putting emotionally defensive false "opinions" forth as "facts" has long been a "constitutional," religious right in the West - such "holy" lying is a legally protected right which has resulted in enabling all such insanities to ensure an unearned equality of outcome.

Yet the facts remain: despite potential hurt feelings, some people, both as individuals and as overall groups of individuals, ARE smarter and/or stronger, etc; i.e: "better" than others, while those others are less able to compete in the world. So, since such abundant and indeed ubiquitous examples of evolution exist, why should the smart and strong automatically be enslaved to the weak and stupid?

Right now, it's because even the smart and strong (in general, Whites) are of course neither smart or strong enough to maintain the will to defend them selves from their own simple fears of the obvious: that relatively "smarter" and/or "stronger" people have always been by definition, still remain and always will remain (as statistical outliers) in a relative minority status when compared to the hordes of stupid, weak, and easily-triggered emotionally unstable and probably dangerous people - and so they often mis-calculate, albeit still "rationally" (as based on these permanent ratios) them selves, based only on their irrational fears, the self-enslaving and animalistic instinctual "group might makes right" notion that they must ignore their own brain's more recently developed, and so , weaker, higher right-makes-might functions, the self-enslaving notion that, to remain physically safe, they must sacrifice their own freedom to lies.

SO, WHAT HAPPENED?

Let’s assume (because it’s true) that each “race” or ethnic breed of human is simply the result of different families growing up in different geographical areas, where different traits were needed to survive.

In the hot lands where food was plentiful, being lazy, impulsive, and promiscuous was the key to survival.

Laziness was a bonus because of over-heating, and unimaginative patience was needed both for fishing and for hunting (which mostly involved falling asleep near the local watering-hole, and waiting for animals to come down for a drink anyway).

Impulsiveness was needed for when on occasion a snake or panther would drop out of the trees to eat one – since fighting wasn’t an option, running away and hoping they’d eat the slower members of one’s family (even if one’s own offspring had to be abandoned without further thought) was the only logical survival response.

And since those problems existed, but so did copious amounts of food, being promiscuous and winning the survival game by creating and abandoning offspring was the way to win with quantity over quality.

Compare that to the cold lands, where food (and natural animal enemies) were scarce – in such a place, being lazy, impulsive, and promiscuous wouldn’t work, and would in fact get one killed off pretty quick.

There, one needed to plan ahead, save up food, and limit the number of mouths one had to feed.

Therefore only the smarter families have been forced by their own survival circumstances to learn how to manipulate their own environments, rather than have their environments continue to rule them.

Only they are capable of adapting to new conditions and stresses, of scrupulously learning to understand how to repair old things and invent new things.

Only they are naturally endowed with the potential foresight to be capable of managing their own estates on this planet.

And the historic White traits of creative individualism and self-sufficiency (which have resulted in our stable societies) are also by-products of this need (and opportunity) to plan things in advance for survival. 

ENTER: "THE WHITE CURSE:"

Let's define terms: Intelligence is speed of thought and memory. Smarts or wisdom is how one uses that intelligence (hint: honesty is the best policy, and deliberately self-inflicted paranoia leads to all other ultimately stupid "mental illnesses").

The White Curse is that increased intelligence leads to a certain type of stupidity denied to the less intelligent breeds: the one and only real drawback of White intelligence is that the ability to see so far into the future leads some of the more weak-minded ones ("liberals") to see all the potential problems as inevitable, and so they become paranoid masochists who hypocritically pretend to instantly compromise with - to go along (with their criminal lies, mostly to the effect that there are no criminals or crimes, but only equally helpless fellow victims) to get along (with the scary lying criminals) - and tempt them to Submit to - and actually cause, and/or induce others to cause - those very same problems which cause those pains they fear the most! That way, they can pretend to 'control' and cancel the additional pains caused by fearing them! Notice how all the destructive self-hating "liberals" are whites! No other breeds on earth act that way!

It takes a certain level of intelligence to be that stupid!

On the other hand, Why does this paranoid fear of other, lesser races' potential jealousy aka the slanderous "racism" trope work so well on Whites only? Simply because Whites are the most individualistic and least racist people on Earth, and therefore Whites are also the global minority, and most if not all of them instinctively already know it, that's why! We don't "oppress minorities;" its the opposite!

But then such emotion-driven thought-killing literally psychotic cowards always instantly Submit to their sympathy for others' only potentially jealous rage, and foolishly attempt to "pre-emptively, defensively" enslave everyone else to their own selfish fears by demonstrating the same of others.

And it's reached it's ridiculous, if still "logical" conclusions, too: people see tall vs short people, and demand equality, by cutting the legs off the tall ones. I'm not kidding; this is coming, as a "logical" extension of the existence and coddling of those people who "feel" and get quack doctors who also "feel" the same way "for" them, that they "should" be cripples, and demand - and get!' them to perform literally crippling surgeries on them, removing healthy limbs to increase their feelings of equally-helpless fellow victimhood!

Why else do physically strong, but mentally weak men try to become women?

Why else do some fact-avoiding heedless libertines like Rachel Dolezal and Shaun "Talcum-X" King, pretend to be Blacks?!

Why does almost everyone on "the Left" these days, insanely demand we legalize all crimes, fire all the police, and empty out all the prisons?!

Because they are all cowards, who want to be on the side of the might-made "right" majorities. Fools!

So, by aggregating and then abstracting their own circumstantial, situational fears from those scenario contexts, as "FEAR! itself," they create THE #1 "Inevitable" Force alibi to excuse their own criminal actions and desires to defraud the self by always attacking every one and every thing else first. They blame their own initial choice to abstract and generalize their own fears into "Fear!" on literally anything and everything BUT that truth - that to sum up and generalize such disparate separate and unrelated incidents into a paranoid and masochistic self-inflicted false perception of a hostile universe WAS their own hypocritical choice in the first place!

Their own emotional feeling - not "feelings," but the single-focus feeling (of "Fear!") is their sole motivation to slanderously then blame their intended innocent victims (i.e: everyone and everything else) as their wrongful oppressors all the time, while also thereby simultaneously displaying their false pride self-image as the righteously heroic and oppressed innocent victim, meekly and mildly advising those same others, that hope alone is always the best plan - for thee, but, alas, as I'm such an obvious victim, not for me at all, ever, or at best only to a lesser extent, for, as the Prime Victim, I alone am not only entitled, but am required to stand guard, and as Fear's expert Authority and high priest, direct, guide, and shepherd the rest of you blind, sleepy sheeple to secure pastures; (selfishly enslave you to my fears by denying they exist) i.e: "The Devil's greatest trick (lie) was to pretend he didn't exist (AS the Devil, by playing an equally helpless, fellow victim)!"

VICTIMS OF FEAR:

So, how do we overcome such lying criminal nonsense? As usual, only through educating people about the nature of their emotions, (not as mysterious inevitable forces beyond control, but as simple re-presentations of space-time basics) so hypocritical criminals can not use them as believably valid alibis to excuse their crimes to other people, ever again. Only thus can others discard their false claims.

RATIONALITY VS. IRRATIONALITY:

Hypocrisy (paranoid masochism; pre-emptively, defensively destroying the self and all others in a pretend attempt to "control" one's own aggregated fears of/as "Fear!" BY causing those very same, worst-case scenario pain-causing damage-inflicting problems one fears the most) is by all loogical definitions the most ir-rational mis-calculation any one can ever make. And, as the very definition of "irrationalism" itself, it IS inevitable: One can choose to be EITHER right, OR wrong. It IS a "zero-sum" game, and all dedicated, self-determined "painful"-responsibility-averse libertine hypocrites must already know the truth in order to be so perfectly able to try to avoid it all the time. And choosing to do nothing is also always still a choice. One is Right or wrong; there are no "gray areas."

It's BINARY.

The greedy, envious, competitive HOPE of being first to attack, first to find and discover, first to win the race - first is best, always "Better Than You!" is driven by the FEAR of having others beat you to it all first.

So (to neutralize this seemingly "Endless, Eternal Struggle" driven by the fear of "If I don't rush in first, some other fools will surely beat me to it, because you always all do it too!") people must be taught what their emotions really are, so they will know that only the calm, emotionless and enlightened people can have the focus, drive and control to always win over such still emotionally-impaired fools.

"Here's how your own brain already works, and what your emotions really are - it's quite simple to learn and teach:

Our emotions aren't even thoughts, much less morals or a sense of "spirituality." Emotions are always effects, never causes. They are mere reflections of the three basic states of space-time (the solid past, the fluid present, and the nebulous future, respectively): solid fear, fluid greed, nebulous hope. Not exactly worth defending, much less getting into any "religious" wars over!

And people "think" (feel) that Fear is the most inevitable if not the only real emotion, simply because it alone literally feels solid.

;-)

The past is our future: Polio vaccine mythology was created for profit

From Bob Livingston's Personal Liberty Alerts

In 1910 the Rockefeller-Gates General Education Board combined with the Carnegie Foundation and the American Medical Association to buy their way into controlling interests in the major medical schools.

They propped them up with grants and "securities" to fund medical education and began a campaign of calumny and slander against those schools in which the socially and religiously elected political bosses had no interest — schools of holistic medicine. These competing schools were represented as low-grade and inferior to the newly accredited allopathic schools.

This forced the shuttering of over half the medical schools in the U.S. and gave the Rockefeller-Gates/Carnegie/AMA cabal total control over medical education and licensing in the country.

It granted them the power to dictate how medicine could be practiced and who could practice it.

Meanwhile, the Rockefeller Medical Institute was churning out medicines and distributing their manufacture to various Rockefeller-owned drug companies, including IG Farben industries in Germany — a conglomeration of six major German pharmaceutical companies. (A side note, the IG Farbenindustries building is the only German building the allies were forbidden from targeting during World War II, and it survived the war virtually unscathed.)

Once they'd essentially taken over the drug manufacturing industry, the Rockefeller-Gates/Carnegie/AMA cabal not only controlled who could practice medicine and how medicine could be practiced in the U.S., it also controlled which drugs could and could not be prescribed. And it required the prescribing of the drugs based on profit rather than whether they were effective or even harmful.

Fast forward to the 1950s and rise of the "polio epidemic."

Yes, pay close attention, dear reader, because rest assured that in the near future you will be able to reread this and replace "polio" with "coronavirus" and the result will be the same.

A polio epidemic was indicated by the medical powers as when an area saw 35 cases per 100,000 in a given year. The number of polio cases in the U.S. increased until 1952 when it peaked at around 58,000 cases with about 3,200 deaths: This in a nation of 157.6 million people, as shown in the graph below from ProCon.org.


On April 12, 1955, the U.S. government licensed the Jonas Salk vaccine which contained an inactivated polio virus. Less than a month later the vaccine was suspended to investigate cases of paralysis caused by the vaccine. After changes were made to production methods the vaccine program was restarted on May 27. In August of 1960 Albert Sabin, M.D.'s oral polio vaccine was licensed and recommended by the U.S. Surgeon General. Salk's vaccine was phased out in 1968. Salk was, in fact, a medical criminal on the order of Josef Mengele who used Federal funds to conduct medical experiments on helpless patients at a Michigan insane asylum.


The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the Roosevelt Warm Springs Foundation and The National Foundation of Infantile Paralysis (March of Dimes) combined forces to push a PR campaign to turn polio into a major health crisis and promote the need for vaccines. PR master Carl Byoir and stars like Sammy Davis Jr., Tennessee Ernie Ford and Lucille Ball were employed to promote the need for the Salk polio vaccine.

But by the time the vaccine began to be used on Americans the number of polio cases had declined to 28,985 with 1,043 deaths. Polio cases in England and Wales were also dropping precipitously, with no vaccine.

In 1956, six New England States reported sharp increases in polio rates, from more than double in Vermont to 645 percent in Massachusetts, despite — or rather because of — the polio vaccine program. Idaho and Utah saw such an increase in polio cases and deaths they halted the vaccine program.

Listed below are public health statistics (U.S. Public Health Reports) from the four states which adopted compulsory polio vaccination, and the figures from Los Angeles, California:

Tennessee
1958: 119 cases of polio before compulsory shots
1959: 386 cases of polio after

Ohio
1958: 17 cases of polio before compulsory shots
1959: 52 cases of polio after

Connecticut
1958: 45 cases of polio before compulsory shots
1959: 123 cases of polio after

N. Carolina
1958: 78 cases of polio before compulsory shots
1959: 313 cases of polio after

Los Angeles, Calif.
1958: 89 cases of polio before forced shots
1959: 190 cases of polio after

The Rockefeller-controlled pharmaceutical companies, which benefited financially from the polio outbreak, funded the writings on the history of polio and its treatment. As such, the pharmaceutical companies were presented in the best possible light.

Americans were not told about the many people who developed paralysis after being vaccinated against polio. Nor were they told about David Bodian, M.D., Ph.D., from the Poliomyelitis Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. Bodian told the International Poliomyelitis Conference in 1954 — the year before the polio vaccine was introduced — injections and other vaccines, such as the DTP vaccine, "may be causing polio."

Polio's rise in the United States coincided with the increased use of pesticides in the 1950s, many of which were byproducts of chemical weapons manufactured during World War II. These pesticides were found to increase susceptibility to viral infections, studies showed.

Exposure to pesticides also came through milk, which was heavily contaminated with pesticides and from crops being dusted with government-approved pesticides. Much of the milk had to be destroyed, according to a U.S. Senate report.

Researchers recognized a higher incidence of polio among those who had undergone tonsillectomies. Ice cream, made from contaminated milk, was commonly given to children following tonsillectomies. And tonsils play a key role in warding off infections — a role not understood in the mid-20th Century.

The CDC's 'numbers'

The 'decline' in suspected polio cases in the U.S. can be traced to sleight-of-hand by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which over the decades following 1950 began to reclassify what was and was not considered polio. In other words, over the last 60-plus years, the CDC eradicated polio by simply giving a different name to diseases that would have in the 1950s been called "polio."
In 2002 the journal Lancet published a study showing that about half of the cases of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma being diagnosed annually were linked to a monkey virus called SV-40. SV-40-contaminated polio vaccines were given to a generation of Americans in the 1950s and 60s. SV-40 is now being found in brain and bone tumors and in other cancers previously rare that are becoming more prevalent. It has also been detected in lung cancers and lymphatic cancers.

Former Food and Drug Administration virologist John Martin said, "SV-40 infection is now widespread within the human population almost certainly as a result of the polio vaccine." How widespread? About 200 million Americans were exposed to SV-40 between 1955 and 1963, and estimates put the cancer rate in that population at one in 200 as a result of exposure to SV-40. And researchers have found that it can be transmitted sexually and can be passed down from mother to child.

Evidence of SV-40 infection has been found in children born after 1982, leading some experts to suggest the virus may have even remained in the polio vaccine until as late as 1999, even though it was suspected by some researchers like Dr. Maurice Hilleman and Dr. Benjamin Sweet in the late 1950s.

Yet the myth that polio was eradicated by vaccine drives the modern-day vaccine schedule in which children receive about 26 vaccinations before they reach the age of 18 months and another dozen or so before age 18.

The medical fascists start at birth, doing everything they can to take away your freedom to determine what's best for the health of your children. Therefore, when mandatory "COVID" vaccinations begin in order to 'eradicate' the disease, and when you need a "COVID Card" to move freely, only the perceptive will see the police state trampling on the rule of law. The rest will be happy the government folks came to help and protect them.


Bretigne Shafer's words in First, they came for the anti-vaxxers ring truer today than ever before: "For centuries, people have been aware that being out in public carries certain risks — among them, the risk that one might contract a disease from another person. Never before have people widely asserted that they have the right to demand that everyone around them take all possible precautions at whatever cost to themselves to make this environment absolutely risk free. If, as the mandatory vaccination proponents contend, we can demand that everyone around us take every conceivable precaution against every communicable disease, what else can we demand of them?"

Yours for the truth, 

Bob Livingston

The New Abnormal

They are calling it the "new normal". I refuse to conform. It's ABNORMAL.

According to one top British doctor colleague: "It's all farcical" (Dr. John Lee, former Professor of Pathology at Hull York Medical School and a recently retired NHS consultant).

"In this crazy world, citizens who thought they lived in a sane, civilized country are treated like imbeciles, unable to make everyday risk assessments for themselves," he complains.

As a result, they are bound by farcical rules, exemplified by the re-implemented Northern lockdown, where it is permitted to meet a lover with whom you do not co-habit in a hotel, but not in either of your private homes!

You can get married… but your father is not allowed to walk you down the aisle on the day of your dreams!

Britain, US, and the rest of the once-civilized world, it seems has gone from lockdown to la-la-land! The unbelievable damage to everyone's health and society's economic structure is totally impossible to over-estimate. We may never recover. But it won't be a new "normal", it will be an abnormal, desperate, miserable, unsustainable and, frankly, intolerable world. 

What are we doing to the future for our kids and grandkids? Has anyone ever asked THEM? No of course not. This whole charade is a take-over of human rights that makes the Nazis and Khmer Rouge look like Red Cross volunteers.

Grounded in dubious science and cowardly politics, the grievous wounds we have inflicted upon ourselves with the COVID-19 lockdown are becoming more evident every day.

Yet still, some doctors are screaming that people MUST take this disaster more seriously; that people are not obeying; that it is reckless and suicidal to ignore orders. Who are these crazy medical psychopaths? Have they taken leave of their senses? What happened to good, old-fashioned science and epidemiology?

The numbers don't justify even the slightest concern, when compared to other causes of death. The "pandemic" is a hoax, forced on the population by: 

• medical shills
• Corrupt politicians, following god-knows-what path to power
• Cyber-criminals, such as Facebook, Google and Twitter, who are determined to undermine the public's entitlement (yes, ENTITLEMENT) to the truth; the full truth and nothing but the truth.

Madness

While the world burns to ruin, and trade and industry vanish before our eyes, governments continue to bankroll idlers with furlough schemes, which allow individuals to lie on the beach, lawn or sofa while everything around them collapses. Soon there will be no employment for them to return to. By then, it will be too late.

Yet ministers, senators and other leaders talk as if it was all "under control". Nothing could be further from the truth.

We are living in A WORLD GONE MAD.

The whole health industry is on hold and dying as rapidly as patients. You can die of cancer, stroke, heart disease and diabetes. Nobody cares. Service is "shut" for the summer. But if you likely die of "the virus", everyone flies into agonies of dread and threatens to return to lockdown, or even more wild measures for public "safety".

Say what? The only threat to public safety is insane politicians, with their knee jerk reactions, looking for some kind of acclaim that they "did their duty". I have been saying all along, as most of you know, that we will die of politicians, not the virus.

The grievous wounds they have inflicted on us with the COVID-19 lockdown are becoming more evident every day.

It is particularly acute in the UK, where measures designed to help the health service withstand coronavirus cases have resulted in tens of thousands of people with cancer, heart disease and diabetes find themselves consigned to ever-longer waiting lists, left undiagnosed and untreated. 

Where Is The Perspective? 

The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics reveal cancer deaths were almost four times higher than they should have been in the month of June.

What this means in reality is that tens of thousands more people will die of cancer due to counter-measures for this virus that, according to the latest figures, is killing less than a tenth of the number it was at its peak and overall has resulted in a similar number of fatalities to those we'd expect during a bad influenza season.

Yet, in London alone, those waiting for surgical procedures for more than a year have shot up to almost 20,000 from just 1,154 across the whole of England 18 months ago.

Why don't politicians get this? What is gripping them in this macabre slow dance of death? Maybe their brains have been taken over by aliens or lizards; their neurological systems are shot!

Of course it's no joke really. Because the figures are being so obviously faked, we may never know precisely how many people have died and will die of COVID-19, but we know the death rate globally is very low, between 0.1 and 0.5 per cent of those infected, according to research group Swiss Policy Research.

What we do know is that the majority of deaths occurred in people with pre-existing conditions and that the median age of those who died from COVID is above 80.

In the eyes of many in the political and scientific establishment , action was necessary. But as Dr. John Lee warned us back in May, the Government's eagerness to lockdown amounts to nothing more than the medicine of the madhouse.

To put that in perspective, when Boris Johnson saw fit to implement total lockdown on March 23 there had been just 335 COVID deaths in Britain.

So why were there no demands for a national shutdown in Britain in the winter of 2014/15, when more than 28,000 people died from seasonal flu; or during the Hong Kong flu epidemic of 1968, when a million people died worldwide, some 80,000 of them in Britain?

Science? I Don't Think So

This panic is not being fuelled by science or numbers.

Despite the apocalyptic warnings by Professor Neil Ferguson, whose criminally bad predictions are the basis of the WHO's dire predictions, the cases have to be faked and yet are still not coming anywhere near the forecast that governments have been using to justify their over-reaction to the situation (I almost said "to the crisis" but there is no crisis!)

Ferguson’s model predicted a worst-case estimate of 510,000 deaths in the UK, and 2.2 million deaths in the US. In fact we have, as of today: 46,000 and 159,000 respectively (and these are seriously and deliberately over-estimated, remember).

If anyone had checked this guy Ferguson's dismal former record, they would have found lunatic exaggerations. According to ace reporter Jon Rappoport (nomorefakenews.com):

Ferguson was responsible for excessive animal culling during the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak. He warned the UK government that 150,000 people could die. Six million animals were slaughtered as a precaution, costing the country billions in farming revenue. In the end, 200 people died.

In 2005, Ferguson was accused of creating panic by overestimating the potential death toll during the 2005 Bird Flu outbreak. Ferguson estimated 200 million could die. The real number was in the low hundreds. HELLO?

In 2009, one of Ferguson’s models predicted 65,000 people could die from the Swine Flu outbreak in the UK — the final figure was below 500!

Why would anyone listen to this man?

Surprise! Earlier this week, Ferguson, a former member of Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), until he was forced to resign for allowing a girlfriend to visit him in defiance of the lockdown he helped create, appeared on the BBC Radio 4 Today program to warn that reopening schools next month risked increasing the infection rate.

The trouble is, computer models such as Ferguson's, predicting the spread of disease, may be an interesting academic exercise, but in the real world, where lives and nations are on the line, THE DATA, on which the projections are based, are elusive. Without accurate data, what do you have? How about opinion, bias, and conjecture? (Jon Rappoport)

Thing is, Ferguson is not alone. Somebody is spinning the data. But who? (Yes, WHO?) Dr David Nabarro, the World Health Organisation's (WHO) special envoy on COVID-19, told the same radio program we will see 'very bad surges' if more action isn't taken.

Instead of admitting they have been catastrophically wrong, these insane dudes continue to act as if they had been right all along.

Dr. John Lee turns dark and serious when he says the following:

"We like to believe we are better than the Soviet Union. But time and again we have seen the same totalitarian impulse in the Government's instructions, from Stay Home, Save Lives, Protect the NHS, to social distancing and wearing face masks — all in the absence of reliable evidence these measures do any real good and plenty to suggest harm.

"No one dares to admit the lockdown itself may be completely misguided, because then everything that has been done in its name will be seen to have been pointless.

"For months it has been clear that our own government, the US, and administrations internationally are in a fantasy world, determined to contain a virus which cannot be stamped out."

Viruses have been with us forever and will always be. BUT WE HAVE OUR IMMUNE SYSTEMS, WHICH I TRUST MORE THAN ANY DAMNED POLITICIAN.

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby

Trump Encourages Crony Capitalism - Leaks Govt Vaccine Grant Info to Insider Traders at KODAK

Evil government wendigo spirits... Resurrecting dead money... The 'tell' of premium strike prices... Kodak knew what was coming... The rankest crony capitalism... I wish them swift and terrible justice... Stand up straight, with your shoulders back... This Kodak story has taken a whole new turn... In last Friday's Stansberry Digest, I (Dan Ferris) suggested Eastman Kodak (KODK) was channeling Ursula K. Le Guin's sci-fi novel, The Lathe of Heaven. Just like in the novel, we accused Kodak, in league with the U.S. government, of trying to rewrite Kodak's past to justify lending it $765 million to start a pharmaceutical company – a business it has spent a total of six (miserable) years in during its 131-year history. With the ink still wet on last Friday's Digest, the story took a darker turn, more akin to the plot of the 2019 film remake of Pet Sematary [sic], based on Stephen King's 1983 novel. In Pet Sematary, emergency room physician Louis Creed and his family leave the hectic pace of Boston for a peaceful house in the woods near the small town of Ludlow, Maine. There, the family discovers a pet cemetery (identified by a misspelled sign, "Pet Sematary") on their property. To keep from spoiling the film's plot too much, let me just say that beyond the "pet sematary" lies an old burial ground inhabited by a wendigo, a mythological evil spirit from Algonquin Indian folklore. If you bury a dead person or animal on the old burial ground, the wendigo brings it back to life... And, in the movie, this process corrupts the dead into a murderously evil "undead" version of their former self. So, how is Eastman Kodak like the undead of Pet Sematary? If you argue that Kodak wasn't dead before the government resurrected it, you're right. The business never quite died. (I'll let its 2012/2013 bankruptcy slide and call it a mere near-death experience.) But the stock has been stone cold "dead money" for at least six years... After emerging from bankruptcy in September 2013 with its share price around $19, Kodak shares peaked the following January at $37.40. It was all downhill after that... The stock closed as low as $1.55 this March – during the COVID-19 bear market – a peak-to-trough drop of 96%. It was dead money. Go bury it out beyond the Pet Sematary... ... and cue the wendigo, who in this tale happens to be the President of the United States... Donald Trump – whose motionless hair and orange skin also suggest a brush with something not of this world – decided at some point during the COVID-19 pandemic that the U.S. should bring some of its pharmaceutical production back from China and India to U.S. shores. Via executive order on May 14, Trump invoked the Defense Production Act of 1950, which was passed 70 years ago to "facilitate the production of goods necessary for the national security." The next plot point of this movie was for the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation ("DFC") to start calling on U.S.-based companies like Kodak. The DFC was created in 2018 when Trump signed the Better Utilization of Investments Leading to Development ("BUILD") Act into law. It's a government lending institution, which tells you everything you need to know. As we said last week, "government capital allocation" is a malodorous oxymoron. I promise you every penny these wendigos lend will corrupt the recipients... Let's get into the necessary details of this Kodak story... On Tuesday, July 28, the DFC announced Kodak would receive a $765 million loan. As we reported last week, the stock took off. It reached a high of $11.80 that day, up from $2.62 the day before. The share price got as high as $60 on July 29. Alright, movie fans, hit pause, take a potty break and get some fresh popcorn. Now comes the part when the DFC wendigo temps Kodak executives with immortality (or maybe just a super comfy retirement), corrupting their decrepit souls and damning them for all eternity... On Monday, July 27 – the day before the announcement that sent the stock soaring – four members of Kodak's management team received stock option grants at strike prices of $3.03, $4.53, $6.03, and $12. Remember, the stock closed at $2.62 that day. So three of the four strike prices were at large premiums to the stock price. In a brilliant exposé of the Kodak/DFC option grant story in his newsletter, Mike (he doesn't have a last name, at least publicly) of Non-GAAP Thoughts calls the July 27 grants "spring-loaded options," because they were made with full knowledge of impending bullish news. He also commented on the premium strike prices... When you see insiders suddenly accept options with premium strike prices, pay attention. That's not an arbitrary decision and is explicitly contemplated. I can only speculate on why the changes occurred at Kodak, but based on past experience this is the kind of behavior you'd see from insiders extremely bullish on the prospects of the company. The grants were made (by the board of directors) on July 27, the day before the $765 million loan announcement... but didn't have to be publicly reported until July 29... the day after the announcement. This is suspicious enough, but it doesn't end here... Kodak held its annual meeting on May 20 – six days after Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to fight COVID-19. On that day, Kodak directors were granted options at those same four exercise prices. It's clear the July 27 option grants were made with full knowledge of the impending loan announcement. Kodak CEO Jim Continenza also made it clear in an earlier on-the-record interview with a local media outlet that he started working with the DFC two months before the July 28 announcement. It sure looks like Kodak knew a big chunk of money was coming their way when directors received option grants on May 20. Another weird fact is that directors had received restricted stock grants back in January. It would be more normal for them to receive equity or option grants once a year, around the time of the annual meeting. Some companies also do quarterly grants in lieu of cash compensation for directors. Why the double-dip equity grants? The COVID-19 pandemic hadn't really hit U.S. shores in January. But it was certainly in full swing by May 20. Mike at Non-GAAP Thoughts concludes the obvious... I don't think it's a stretch to believe the Board was willing to push the governance envelope to double dip on equity grants and maximize their financial upside. He also points out that Kodak's 2020 first quarter 10-Q report contains the following interesting disclosure... On May 12, 2020, a Chinese subsidiary of Kodak transferred approximately $70 million to a U.S. subsidiary of Kodak in anticipation of an inter-company transaction. I believe starting up a new pharmaceutical business qualifies as an inter-company transaction. Again, this two-month 'diligence period' was established publicly... ... before the announcement, supporting the increasingly suspicious timeline... Kodak is based in Rochester, New York. In an interview with RochesterFirst.com, published the day the loan was announced, Continenza said the company had been working with the DFC every day for two months. His comments also seem to suggest the federal government is run by a bunch of bureaucratic bulls in a China shop, shoving money around willy-nilly. (I mean... what idiot says, "We need to make drugs in the U.S. Call Kodak!"?) Here's an excerpt from the interview... [Assistant to the President and Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy at the White House Dr. Peter] Navarro does not take enough credit for what he did. He's the one who was like, 'can you do this, get to the point, get it done, bye.' This was literally two months ago that's how fast this has been moving, but it was every day. Once you're in, you're in. I was joking, we were given five days by Dr. Navarro, he calls it Trump Time, and I learned what that is to get this done and we did it in four because I said Trump Time is five, we're going to do better, we have to do better and my team did and it was amazing. Taken at face value, Continenza's comments suggest the government – perhaps to get itself a job-creation, "made-in-the-USA" win – shoved hundreds of millions of dollars at Kodak, telling them to "get it done" on some stupidly short timetable. This is how the worst management people operate... They call up their stressed-out underlings, bark orders, and never accept responsibility when it becomes clear the project either should never have been done in the first place, or needed much more time to be done right. Trump is the typical "get-it-done" guy... and the DFC strikes me as a vehicle for shoving money at politically palatable targets like Kodak. (On a related note, don't bother writing in about me criticizing Trump. There's no meaningful difference between Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton or any of the rest of them. No one who can get elected will perform well in office. No one who would perform well in office can get elected.) The interview makes clear that folks at Kodak knew the DFC was interested in making some type of investment at least two months prior to the announcement date. Putting it all together... Here's the timeline... May 12: Kodak moves $70 million from a Chinese subsidiary to a U.S subsidiary "in anticipation of an inter-company transaction." May 14: Trump issues executive order invoking (among others) the Defense Production Act. May 20: Kodak makes director option grants at premium prices. Approximately May 28 (according to Continenza's RochesterFirst interview): Kodak and the DFC start talking about its new drug business. July 27: More option grants. July 28: DFC announces a $765 million loan to Kodak, causing its share price to rise roughly four-fold. July 29: Kodak's stock price hits $60 in trading volume roughly 167 times the prior days (which was roughly 22 times July 27 volume). July 30: Non-GAAP Thoughts article citing suspicious option grant dates and strike prices. July 31: Wall Street Journal publishes article citing potential $95 million windfall for Continenza. August 4: Wall Street Journal publishes article citing new SEC investigation into the DFC loan.  It sure looks to me like Kodak knew what was coming... And they knew it very soon after Trump's May 14 executive order invoking the Defense Production Act. It looks like they got aggressive with option grants on May 20 to take advantage of the windfall – essentially conspiring to make the largest possible transfer of taxpayer-funded loan money to Kodak management brokerage accounts. And now – late to the party as usual – the SEC has taken note and has begun an investigation. Meanwhile, Non-GAAP Thoughts completed its investigation and published the results on July 30 – even before the Wall Street Journal started getting wise. If this doesn't scream at you as the rankest crony capitalism, maybe you need a quick course on the term... As it happens, I recently interviewed Nick Sorrentino of the Against Crony Capitalism website (AC2news.com) for an upcoming episode of the Stansberry Investor Hour podcast. Here's an excerpt from the website's "About" page, in answer to the question, "What is Crony Capitalism?"... Crony capitalism is the marriage of the state and private special interests. Some people have called it corporatism, mercantilism, fascism, or even Communism. We will call it crony capitalism. By whatever name, it is phony capitalism. Over the years the public has been taught that many of the problems it faces on a day to day basis such as the lack of jobs, rising prices, corruption in Congress, and so on are a result of capitalism. If so, it is a perverted capitalism. These unsavory realities are largely the result of government/private "partnerships." Whether in banking, agriculture, housing, energy, transportation, manufacturing, or nearly any other facet of the economy, the "unsavory" parts are often the result of public/private collusion. Why can't you get any kind of return on your money in a CD, the traditional vehicle for retirees? Crony capitalism. Kodak executives and directors, unable to get a decent return on the business they're running into the ground, decided instead to take the crony route to riches. I said last week I wish them well. I'd like to rescind that. I wish them swift and terrible justice... No matter what happens to the folks running Kodak, I doubt anyone will ever speak up for the victim in all of this... That's The Forgotten Man of William Graham Sumner's 1883 essay of the same name, who works, votes, sometimes "prays – but he always pays – yes, above all he pays." For context, I wrote about this essay back in the April 21 Digest... In the cronyistic Kodak affair, the Forgotten Man is both the taxpayer and the long-suffering Kodak shareholder. Both groups work, vote, sometimes pray and above all, they always pay. What ever shall I tell them? Well, the market has already spoken with Kodak's surge to $60 sucking in all-too-human, greedy innocents... with the crash back to roughly $15 today turning their Kodak bet to a sizeable loss. To make the most of a bad situation, I can offer two practical lessons to all investors, one financial and one spiritual... First comes the practical financial advice... Here's an idea of how one might profit, or at least not lose from similar situations, from Mike at Non-GAAP Thoughts (to whom my hat is off)... Overall, you didn't have to wait for an inadvertent leak to capitalize on Kodak's stock pop. You could have deducted something material was on the table 2 months ago when directors decided to double dip on equity grants and shifted to options over RSUs. Corporate governance "dark arts" can surprisingly be good source of ex-ante signals so always pay attention to sudden changes in grant timing, grant type, and price hurdles. You'll be surprised how often the same story plays out. Having put another arrow in our trading and investing quiver, let's now attend to the spiritual lesson attending such unpleasantness... What can I possibly tell the taxpayers and Kodak shareholders to help them move forward from the current debacle? Here's the spiritual advice... Stand up straight with your shoulders back, like every victorious lobster... That's right, a lobster. If you've read Jordan B. Peterson's brilliant book, 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos, you'll recognize the advice as Peterson's Rule 1, which makes ample use of the lobster reference. Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, goes into great detail about what happens in lobsters' nervous systems during their territorial squabbles, which separate winner lobsters from loser lobsters. He writes that chemicals like serotonin and dopamine play similar roles in both humans and lobsters and quips, "In one of the more staggering demonstrations of the evolutionary continuity of life on Earth, Prozac even cheers up lobsters." Peterson even provides an investment tie-in when contemplating how female lobsters choose mates: Females outsource the problem to the machine-like calculations of the dominance hierarchy. They let the males fight it out and peel their paramours from the top. This is very much what happens with stock-market pricing, where the value of any particular enterprise is determined the competition of all. Like lobsters searching for mates, male and female investors alike let the marketplace fight it out, showing them which companies deserve their capital. The government tried to fake them out by giving Kodak a loan it otherwise never could have gotten. Many investors were faked out, bought into this frenzy and have already lost money. They should take heart... Standing up straight with your shoulders back works in reverse, too... In other words, a loser can set himself on the pathway to a winning life by assuming a winner's posture. Besides signaling to others, standing up straight with your shoulders back also signals to your own nervous system that you're a winner. Peterson writes that your nervous system responds with real chemical changes that help you grow in confidence and effectiveness, as soon as you start merely acting like a victorious lobster. As Peterson puts it... Standing up straight with your shoulders back is not something that is only physical, because you're not only a body. You're a spirit, so to speak – a psyche – as well. Standing up physically also implies and invokes and demands standing up metaphysically. Standing up means voluntarily accepting the burden of Being. Your nervous system responds in an entirely different manner when you face the demand of life voluntarily. You respond to a challenge, instead of bracing for a catastrophe. You see the gold the dragon hoards, instead of shrinking in terror from the all-too-real fact of the dragon... So attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around... Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence. Attending carefully to their posture won't get Kodak shareholders their money back. But I believe it'll leave them far, far less likely to put their capital in with another bunch of losers. Standing up straight with their shoulders back will make them more likely to wind up investing in a world class management team next time... As for the rest of us taxpayers... Seeing the Kodak management team for what it is – a bunch of defeated lobsters trying to cheat the taxpayer so they can retire rich – helps us learn to avoid others like them in the future. In any case, the market has spoken... Now it's up to the Forgotten Men of this episode to stand up straight with their shoulders back, heed the market's lesson, cut losses, and move forward in the light of their new knowledge. If you stand up straight with your shoulders back, Peterson ultimately concludes... Then you may be able to accept the terrible burden of the World, and find joy. Look for your inspiration to the victorious lobster, with its 350 million years of practical wisdom. This just may be the best antidote to the wendigo spirits.