Thursday, March 19, 2015

The Manufactured Ebola Crisis

There’s a new meme taking over the news about how President Obama has stepped up to lead the country and the world in the fight against Ebola. El Paso Inc. provides an example. “In recent months, Obama caught criticism for going golfing immediately after speaking about the beheading of an American, and for attending a fundraiser after an airliner was shot down in Ukraine,” it wrote. “This time, as the Ebola threat hit home in America, the president suddenly cleared his schedule, canceling travel and appearances to consult with Cabinet members and talk with world leaders about how to contain the epidemic.” Wow, what a hero.
The only problem is this story is a travesty. Two months ago Ebola was a little known disease that made an occasional headline in the US when an outbreak occurred in Africa. The only reason it’s news today is the president who never wants to let a good crisis go to waste invited Ebola into the country because an outbreak in Africa wasn’t going to motivate Americans to surrender more of their freedom and money to Obama and his henchmen.
The most obvious way to protect Americans from Ebola would be to not bring people with Ebola into the country. That’s a standard response to any outbreak of disease, but instead of doing that, Obama intentionally brought two infected Americans into the country against the advice of the CDC director.
Airlines don’t want people with Ebola on their jets because they don’t want to help infect their passengers and crew for two reasons: they’re compassionate people, and it would cost them much money. This is standard operating procedure for a serious outbreak of disease, and countries around the world that have closed their borders to the hard-hit African countries remain Ebola-free. Yet US airlines continue to fly passengers from the inflicted areas into the US without testing them for the virus. It’s almost inexplicable unless Obama threatened them with civil rights prosecution for discrimination if they didn’t.
And Obama’s henchmen all lied to us about the ability of the US health care system to deal with Ebola. They lied to us about how it’s transmitted. They lied to us about pretty much everything.
For example, all government’s experts originally claimed Ebola couldn’t be transferred through the air. A few weeks later the CDC admitted it could be spread through a sneeze or cough. Joe Alton, M.D. tells the truth. “The well-known and respected Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota recently notified the CDC and the World Health Organization that ‘there is scientific and epidemiologic evidence that Ebola virus has the potential to be transmitted via infectious aerosol particles,’” he informs. “For the first time, they include exhaled breath in their report.” So much for it not being airborne.
When the first Dallas nurse showed symptoms, Obama’s henchmen immediately, boisterously blamed her and the hospital for failing to follow protocol. Foxnews reported, “Top federal doctors acknowledged Sunday that a ‘breach in protocol’ resulted in a Dallas hospital worker getting Ebola while treating the country’s first patient and said changes in the handling of such cases are being made.”
This was a reflexive lie. It came out immediately even though the liars had no idea what had occurred. They promised to investigate to find the breach. Government tacitly admitted the lie when it quietly changed its protocols. The Huffington Post reports, ‘Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said those caring for an Ebola patient in Dallas were vulnerable because some of their skin was exposed. … "So there were parts about that protocol that left vulnerability, parts of the skin that were open,’ Fauci said.” He didn’t admit fault or apologize for previously blaming the nurse.
As for how prepared our healthcare system was, now Obama’s henchmen want to build an Ebola hospital in every state. That’s an admission no state was prepared.
Obama will ask Congress to steal more money from taxpayers to fight Ebola, as if the hundreds of billions the government already wastes on politicizing health care aren’t enough. The Pentagon, of all organizations, is creating a rapid response team for domestic Ebola cases. The generals must plan to unconstitutionally lock Americans in Obama’s new, domestic Ebola hospitals and give forced vaccinations. Stealing our money and freedom is what this manufactured crisis was about from the beginning. Our rulers and their propagandists ratchet up panic while pretending to fight it.
The government can’t save us from Ebola, but private companies can. Despite knowing nothing about Ebola when the outbreak hit, Firestone in Liberia stopped it. Even government-funded NPR notes, “Firestone Did What Governments Have Not: Stopped Ebola In Its Tracks.” Obama might cut off NPR’s funding for that.
Please don’t fall for this evil scheme. Malnutrition, especially of selenium and vitamin C, makes people more susceptible to Ebola. Famine and malnutrition is why Ebola strikes in destitute African countries but rarely elsewhere. You won’t read that from government’s propagandists.

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Google and Apple Won’t Save You

NSA spying is old news. A year ago people were up in arms and congressmen demanded reform. It was all a smokescreen intended to soothe angry people until they got distracted by other stories like Obama starting a third war in Iraq.
It worked. The National Journal reports, “The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved the Justice Department's request for another 90-day extension of the National Security Agency's controversial mass-surveillance program, exposed publicly last summer by Edward Snowden and authorized under Section 215 of the post-9/11 Patriot Act. The spying authority is next set to expire on Dec. 5.” There’s no outrage at this rubber stamp.
But recent announcements by Apple and Google claiming they would encrypt all information on their phones by default gave some commentators hope. Don’t fall for it. Apple and Google are so thoroughly protected and controlled by government, they’re effectively government agencies. They wouldn’t do anything to bite the hand that feeds them.
Google and Apple, Goopple, are trying to recover from the public relations nightmare that resulted when NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked information showing these companies gleefully participated in NSA spying on their customers. Government’s giant corporate agents scrambled to make it appear they were being forced to spy against their will, but they never resisted until their complicity was made public. They aren’t sorry they spied for the government. They’re just sorry they got caught.
While the plutocrats from Goopple huddled in the world’s most outrageously expensive resorts with NSA bureaucrats trying to figure out how to recover from this PR debacle, small, nimble organizations like Silent Circle and Redphone implemented strong encryption protocols on mobile devices. Silent Circle is a security company, and Redphone is an open source project, so both have a genuine interest in securing your communications. Making encryption cheap - free in the case of Redphone - and easy for the masses created a new problem for NSA spies because it takes them years to defeat strong encryption. The more widespread encryption becomes, the more likely NSA won’t have the resources to defeat every encrypted communication. They might miss seeing some naked pictures of teenagers, and they can’t tolerate that. Their only hope was to outlaw such encryption, but those small companies don’t have enough customers to justify Congress targeting them with a law.
Those products also created problems for Goopple because they drew customers, especially foreign, away. So big business and big government - one in the same really - jointly conceived a solution: Goopple would encrypt all its data too, forcing Congress to outlaw it, protecting both NSA and Goopple.
As if orchestrated, because it was, Google and Apple announced their plans the same day. FBI howled in outrage the next. The Washington Post reported, “FBI Director James B. Comey sharply criticized Apple and Google on Thursday for developing forms of smartphone encryption so secure that law enforcement officials cannot easily gain access to information stored on the devices — even when they have valid search warrants.”
His comments were the most forceful yet from a top government official but echo a chorus of denunciation from law enforcement officials nationwide. Police have said that the ability to search photos, messages and Web histories on smartphones is essential to solving a range of serious crimes, including murder, child pornography and attempted terrorist attacks.”
In other words, NSA’s institutionalized, legalized perverts and therefore other hackers must be able to secretly ogle your children’s sexts supposedly to protect your children from other perverts who might ogle them. Cops want you to believe they were never able to solve a crime until they gained the power to hack cellphones. That’s ridiculous. The only hinderance to law enforcement this encryption creates is forcing them to obey the Constitution by obtaining a warrant.
The real problem with default, strong encryption is it forces NSA to obey the Constitution too. It blocks bulk spying on a huge segment of people worldwide. The phony complaints by law enforcement gives politicians in both parties the pretense they need to demonize Goopple and pass a law banning this encryption “to protect the children” right after the election. As always, the plutocrats, politicians and spies win. The people lose.
Journalist Tom Engelhardt describes the futility of ubiquitous spying. “It’s quite an achievement, especially when you consider its one downside: it has a terrible record of getting anything right in a timely way,” he writes. “Never have so many had access to so much information about our world and yet been so unprepared for whatever happens in it.”
While the NSA spies monitors social media of high school students for personal titillation, they’re unable to find a top al Qaeda recruiter operating in Britain, and they allowed an American jihadist to come and go freely between the US and Syria before he set off a suicide bomb in Syria. The FBI says it has no way to stop ISIS jihadists with American passports from re-entering the country and attacking Americans.
That’s because our rulers consider us, not terrorists, their real enemies.

Monday, March 2, 2015

October Surprise Again

Imagine you are President Obama. You are being overrun by events of your own making. ISIS is cutting off people’s heads in Iraq, so you just started a third war in Iraq and expanded it to Syria, something even President Bush wasn’t dumb enough to do. You are threatening war with Russia, the country with the world’s second biggest nuclear arsenal, in Ukraine, something else even Bush wasn’t dumb enough to do. You invited Ebola into America, and, no surprise, it came. You invited an unprecedented invasion of illegal immigrant children to flood the US, and you are spending taxpayer money to find them homes in every state and to give them lawyers. Another mystery virus, Enterovirus D68, has killed more Americans than Ebola, and may be linked to the illegal immigrant children.
You’re also drowning in scandals. You coerced all US personnel with knowledge of the Benghazi massacre into silence, but a group of contractors, US veterans all, exposed a number of lies you and Hillary Clinton told about that night. In a brazen cover-up, the IRS continues to clownishly destroy records about targeting conservative groups. Your Secret Service director just resigned in scandal. Under constant, well-deserved fire, your closest public ally, Attorney General Holder, suddenly announced his resignation. That usually precedes a major revelation of corruption, and Holder has plenty of scandals of his own in his closet including Fast and Furious.
In other words, you’re in deep political doodoo and an election is just four weeks away as of this writing. Republicans threaten to take over the Senate where Harry Reid has shamelessly provided you cover since Republicans took the House in 2010. Your former CIA chief and Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta,  just released a book throwing you under the bus. RealClearPolitics puts your approval rating at 43 percent. Faced with overwhelming evidence, even some Democrats have concluded you are intentionally harming the country. Not one Democrat will allow you to campaign on his behalf.
But you have one thing working for you: the bubble economy of the super-rich continues to swell, producing phony numbers that make it appear the economy as a whole is improving, albeit at a snail’s pace.
You also have the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) under your command to exaggerate the economy on your behalf. This is nothing new. The BLS lies about the economy every month. The economic numbers it releases to great fanfare are almost always quietly revised down a month later. It does this regardless of whoever is in power because it promotes the power and legitimacy of the state, not just one party.  The BLS publishes perpetual propaganda to make it appear the economy is doing better than it really is. But from time to time, it goes even further overboard than usual for the political benefit of its boss, the president, regardless of party.
Obama seriously needs the help now, so it was no surprise that the September jobs report released by BLS the first Friday in October was abnormally rosey. Bloomberg reports, “A surprisingly powerful surge in hiring pushed unemployment to a six-year low of 5.9 percent in September as the U.S. labor market showed renewed vigor. ” Even establishment economists, the supposed experts who continually overestimate the strength of the economy, were surprised at how much the BLS fudged the numbers to benefit Obama. Bloomberg expounds, “The drop in unemployment was the biggest surprise, exceeding all forecasts. The rate, which is derived from a Labor Department survey of households, was projected to hold at 6.1 percent, according to the Bloomberg survey median. Estimates ranged from 6 percent to 6.2 percent.” But dropping the official unemployment number below 6 percent carries a huge psychological advantage, so the BLS provided it. The BLM even increased the August numbers, which is practically unheard of.
But as always, the more important information is buried in the fine print. Newsmax reported, “The so-called participation rate, which measures the number of Americans employed or looking for a job as a share of the working-age population, decreased to 62.7 percent, the lowest since February 1978, from 62.8 percent a month before.”
Also, depressed wages remained stagnant, and a record number of young, black teens and women aren’t working. Obama is waging economic war on the middle class, women, and minorities, contrary to what the headlines would have us believe. Even the S&P just hit an eight week low.
This is deja vu from two years ago. In August 2012, right before the Obama-Romney election, BLS reported an unbelieveable and psychologically important drop in unemployment from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent, and Obama subsequently won the election despite the labor participation rate falling significantly then too. Voters tend not to read past the headlines.
So Obama is up to his old tricks, but while the Waldorf Astoria Hotel sold for a record $2 billion, making the Hiltons even richer, laid off and part-time workers, women, and young blacks know this economy is only working for Obama and his super-rich cronies, not the poor or middle class.