"NATOstan Robots Versus the Heavenly Horses of Multipolarity" by Pepe Escobar

 

 Click here for Exit the Cuckoo's Nest's posting standards and aims. 

Click here to sign the People's Proclamation and send it to everyone you know.

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

NATOstan Robots Versus the Heavenly Horses of Multipolarity

Pepe Escobar

   August 29, 2023

The entire West is waiting at the room at the station with black curtains – and no trains.

❗️Join us on Telegram, Twitter, and VK.

We will all need plenty of time and introspection to analyze the full range of game-changing vectors unleashed by the unveiling of BRICS 11 last week in South Africa.

Yet time waits for no one. The Empire will (italics mine) strike back in full force; in fact its multi-hydra Hybrid War tentacles are already on display.

Here and here I have attempted two rough drafts of History on the birth of BRICS 11. Essentially, what the Russia-China strategic partnership is accomplishing, one (giant) step at a time, is also multi-vectorial:

– expanding BRICS into an alliance to fight against U.S. non-diplomacy.

– counter-acting the sanctions dementia.

– promoting alternatives to SWIFT.

– promoting autonomy, self-reliance and instances of sovereignty.

– and in the near future, integrating BRICS 11 (and counting) with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) to counter imperial military threats, something already alluded to by President Lukashenko, the inventor of the precious neologism “Global Globe”.

In contrast, the indispensable Michael Hudson has constantly shown how the U.S. and EU’s “strategic error of self-isolation from the rest of the world is so massive, so total, that its effects are the equivalent of a world war.”

Thus Prof. Hudson’s contention that the proxy war in Ukraine – not only against Russia but also against Europe – “may be thought of as World War III.”

In several ways, Prof. Hudson details, we are living “an outgrowth of World War II, whose aftermath saw the United States establish international economic and political organization under its own control to operate in its own national self-interest: the International Monetary Fund to impose U.S. financial control and dollarize the world economy; the World Bank to lend governments money to bear the infrastructure costs of creating trade dependency on U.S. food and manufactures; promoting plantation agriculture, U.S./NATO control of oil, mining and natural resources; and United Nations agencies under U.S. control, with veto power in all international organizations that it created or joined.”

Now it’s another ball game entirely when it comes to Global South, or Global Majority, of “Global Globe” real emancipation. Just take Moscow hosting the Russia-Africa summit in late July, then Beijing, with Xi in person, spending a day last week in Johannesburg with dozens of African leaders, all of them part of the new Non-Aligned Movement (NAM): the G77 (actually 134 nations), presided by a Cuban, President Diaz-Canel.

That’s the Russia-China Double Helix in effect – offering large swathes of the “Global Globe” security and high-tech infrastructure (Russia) and finance, manufactured exports and road and rail infrastructure (China).

In this context, a BRICS currency is not necessary. Prof. Hudson crucially quotes President Putin: what’s needed is a “means of settlement” for Central Banks for their balance of payments, to keep in check imbalances in trade and investment. That has nothing to do with a BRICS gold-backed supra-national currency.

Moreover, there will be no need for a new reserve currency as increasingly more nations will be ditching the U.S. dollar in their settlements.

Putin has referred to a “temporary” accounting unit – as intra-BRICS 11 trade will be inevitably expanding in their national currencies. All that will develop in the context of an increasingly overwhelming alliance of major oil, gas, minerals, agriculture and commodities producers: a real (italics mine) economy capable of supporting a new global order progressively pushing Western dominance into oblivion.

Call it the soft way to euthanize Hegemony.

All aboard the “malign China” narrative

Now compare all of the above with that piece of Norwegian wood posing as NATO secretary-general telling the CIA mouthpiece paper in Washington, in a unique moment of frankness, that the Ukraine War “didn’t start in 2022. The war started in 2014”.

So here we have a designated imperial vassal plainly admitting that the whole thing started with Maidan, the U.S.-engineered coup supervised by cookie distributor Vicky “F**k the E” Nuland. This means that NATO’s claim of a Russia “invasion”, referring to the Special Military Operation (SMO) is absolutely bogus from a legal standpoint.

It’s firmly established that the spin doctors/ paid propagandist “experts” of Atlanticist idiocracy, practicing an unrivalled mix of arrogance/ignorance, believe they can get away with anything when it comes to demonizing Russia. The same applies to their new narrative on “malign China”.

Chinese scholars which I have the honor to interact with are always delighted to point out that imperial pop narratives and predictive programming are absolutely useless when it comes to confronting Zhong Hua (“The Splendid Central Civilization”).

That’s because China, as one of them describes it, is endowed with a “clear-minded, purposeful and relentless aristocratic oligarchy at the helm of the Chinese State”, using tools of power that guarantee, among other issues, public safety and hygiene for all; education focused on learning useful information and skills, not indoctrination; a monetary system under control; physical assets and the industrial capacity to make real stuff; first-class diplomatic, supply chain, techno-scientific, economic, cultural, commercial, geostrategic and financial networks; and first-class physical infrastructure.

And yet, since at least 1990, Western mainstream media is obsessed to dictate that China’s economic collapse, or “hard landing”, is imminent.

Nonsense. As another Chinese scholar frames it, “China’s strategy has been to let sleeping dogs lie and let lying machines lie. Meanwhile, let China surpass them in their sleep and cause the Empire’s demise.”

Poisons, viruses, microchips

And that bring us full circle back to the New Great Game: NATOstan versus the Multipolar World. No matter the evidence provided by graphic reality, NATOstan in advanced seppuku mode – especially the European sector – actually believes it will win the war against Russia-China.

As for the Global South/Global Majority/”Global Globe”, they are regarded as enemies. So their mostly poor populations should be poisoned with famine, experimental injections, new modified viruses, implanted microchips as in BCI (Brain Computer Interface) and soon NATO As Global Robocop “security” outfits.

The coming of BRICS 11 is already unleashing a new imperial wave of deadly poisoning, brand new viruses and cyborgs.

The imperial master issued the order to “save” the Japanese seafood industry – a few scraps as quid pro quod for Tokyo acting as a rabid dog in the imperial Chip War against China, and dutifully pledging alliance at the recent Camp David summit side by side with the South Korean vassals.

The EU vassals, in synch, lifted Japan food import rules just as Fukushima nuclear wastewater was to be pumped into the ocean. That’s yet another instance of the EU continuing to dig its own grave – as Japan is set to suffer a Typhoon Number Ten type of blowback.

Radiation spread across the world through the Pacific will breed endless cancer patients around the world and simultaneously destroy the economy of several small island nations relying heavily on tourism.

In parallel, Sergey Glazyev, Minister of Macroeconomics at the Eurasian Economic Commission, part of the EAEU, has been among the very few warning about the new trans-humanist frontier: the Nanotechnology Injection craze ahead – something quite well documented in scientific journals.

Quoting Dr. Steve Hotze, Glazyev in one of his Telegram posts explained what DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has been doing, “injecting nanobots in the form of graphene oxide and hydrogel” into the human body, thus creating an interface between nanobots and brain cells. We become “a receptor, receiver and transmitter of signals. The brain will receive signals from the outside, and you can be manipulated remotely.”

Glazyev also refers to the by now frantic promotion of “Eris”, a new Covid variety, named by the WHO after the Greek goddess of discord and enmity, daughter of the goddess of night, Nykta.

Those familiar with Greek mythology will know that Eris was quite angry because she was not invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Her vengeance was to plant at the feast a golden apple from the gardens of Hesperides with the inscription “Most Beautiful”: that was the legendary “apple of discord”, which generated the Mother of All Catfights between Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. And that eventually led to no less than the Trojan War.

In the White Room, with black curtains

It’s oh so predictable, coming from those “elites” running the show, to name a new virus as a harbinger of war. After all, The Next War is badly needed because Project Ukraine turned out to be a massive strategic failure, with the cosmic humiliation of NATO just around the corner.

During the Vietnam War – which the empire lost to a peasant guerrilla army – the daily briefing at the command HQ in Saigon was derided by every journalist with an IQ above room temperature as the “Saigon follies”.

Saigon would never compare with the tsunami of daily follies offered on the proxy war in Ukraine by a tawdry moveable feast at the White House, State Dept., Pentagon, NATO HQ, the Brussels Kafkaesque machine and other Western environs. The difference is that those posing as “journalists” today are cognitively incapable of understanding these are “follies” – and even if they did, they would be prevented from reporting them.

So that’s where the collective West is at the moment: in a White Room, a simulacrum of Plato’s cave depicted in Cream’s 1968 masterpiece, partly inspired by William Blake, invoking pale “silver horses” and exhausted “yellow tigers”.

The entire West is waiting at the room at the station with black curtains – and no trains. They will “sleep in this place with the lonely crowd” and “lie in the dark where the shadows run from themselves”.

Outside in the cold, long distance, under the sunlight, away from the moving shadows, across roads made of silk and iron, the Heavenly Horses (Tianma) of the multipolar world gallop gallantly from network to network, from Belt and Road to Eurasia and Afro-Eurasia Bridge, from intuition to integration, from emancipation to sovereignty.

"German court convicts CJ Hopkins for satirical book cover" by The Grayzone

EH here. This is a particularly interesting interview with CJ Hopkins, particularly in the latter  half when part of a video by Naomi Klein is aired and discussed in light of a couple of Hopkins' articles. 

 Click here for Exit the Cuckoo's Nest's posting standards and aims. 

Click here to sign the People's Proclamation and send it to everyone you know.

Source: The Grayzone

"This Chinese SWOT Analysis Doubles As NATO’s Obituary" by Declan Hayes

 Click here for Exit the Cuckoo's Nest's posting standards and aims. 

Click here to sign the People's Proclamation and send it to everyone you know.

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

This Chinese SWOT Analysis Doubles As NATO’s Obituary

Declan Hayes

    

August 31, 2023

Though China, together with Russia, has a unique opportunity to lay the groundwork for a better world, that world cannot come to pass without Southern Asia and Southeast Asia being full partners in it.

❗️Join us on Telegram, Twitter, and VK.

This short analysis shows that, although the United States and its various satrapies might well prevail over the shorter term in its looming war with China, over the longer term, the Yankee warlords can have no future in Asia. The best that America can do is to somehow trick China into acting preemptively and to thereby score an important tactical victory that will delay the inevitable final day of reckoning for Asia’s Pax Americana.

Serial NATO apologist Mangesh Sawant makes this plain in his lengthy analysis comparing the military prowess of China against NATO. With the possible exception of the Taiwan Strait, there is nowhere that China’s navy could hope to prevail over the Americans and, given that America’s Japanese satrapy has a first class navy, any major showdown in the South China Sea would not end well for China’s merchant navy, which could even be put under blockade. The Americans’ remilitarisation of Northern Luzon in their former colony of the Philippines is also bad news for the Chinese, who have yet to display the sort of blue water naval capability the Americans, Japanese and Indians all possess in abundance. Because China still lacks the necessary C4ISR capabilities to give the Yankee navy a run for their money, they are best biding their time as the economic pendulum swings further in their favour.

China’s best move is to quietly abandon its idiotic nine-dash line and to mend its diplomatic and economic bridges with the Philippines and Vietnam, both of which the United States is priming against them. Instead of picking naval fights with the Philippines, China should be offering significant investment inducements as well as the military ties that entails, the objective being to offer the Philippines a future in league with China rather than the uncertain future Lithuania and Croatia both chose as a result of Yankee Sinophobic pressures upon them. Any such rapprochement would have to acknowledge and not unduly exploit the economic vulnerabilities the Yankee colonisers have deliberately lumbered the Philippines with over the last 120 years; because generations of Filipinos have suffered more than enough under the Yankee yoke, they do not need another overlord to salaam to.

Much the same goes for Vietnam, whose children continue to die this very day as a result of America’s indiscriminate use of Agent Orange and other weapons of mass destruction on their schools and orphanages. Because no less a person than Ho Chi Minh made it plain that Vietnam will never again be a Chinese vassal, China should respect that, if not for Vietnam’s sake, then for their own. The same goes for Korea which the Japanese, in their efforts to ape European thuggery, treated abominably, and tried to turn into a vassal of their emperor, making the Koreans sullenly wonder why the Japanese thought they were the new China.

Though the old saying that one Chinese person is smarter than one Japanese, but that three Japanese are smarter than three Chinese might still hold, Japan’s population is less than 9% that of China’s, and Japan has a median age of 48, compared to 37 for China. Not only does Japan not have the population to out-fight or out-smart China but, thanks to the Yanks, it no longer has the competitive edge in cutting edge technology.

This can be seen most clearly in the C4ISR field, which is highly dependent on top tier microchips where Yankeeland’s three Asian spokes of Japan, Taiwan and Korea, all of which have been controlled by their Yankee hub since 1945, had, when combined with the Dutch, the critical edge. Because all of these were subjected to crippling Yankee sanctions against China, the Chinese have responded much more fiercely than they did against the pipsqueak Croats and Lithuanians when they were put under similar Yankee pressure.

The upshot is that the Chinese are throwing their formidable demographic, scientific and financial resources at this bottleneck and they are now considerably along the road to being self-sufficient in those essential hi tech components.

Not only is the American sabotage of this industry a major loss for their three Asian spokes but it has, over a very short time window, made China a much more formidable foe. Having made China the workshop of the hi tech world, it seems the Yanks are hell bent on finishing the job of getting the Chinese to make everything, all whilst keeping them firmly locked below deck. The Chinese, needless to say, have their sights set much higher than being the Yanks’ eternal coolies and underpaid deck hands.

Faced with this onslaught by the Yankees and their Dutch puppets, the Chinese have responded with the mass production of lithography machines, thereby signalling that it will soon dominate the very top of the semiconductor industry with all the C4ISR repercussions that involves.

Yankee Sinophobia has even done severe damage to their own chip industry, which has been forced to forego the big profits to be made from China for some greater and more nebulous Pentagon purpose and, though the Yanks have tried to move their Apple and other hi-tech operations from China to India, quality control related issues have complicated that to a degree no modern company can tolerate.

Although India quite naturally presents a challenge to China, India should concentrate on tackling its own problems, rather than being an unthinking claw hammer for America and its Israeli sidekick to mug China with. Whatever advantages in night warfare those pair of rogues can gift India to use against China, they need only look at the fate of the Ukrainian Armed forces to realise the wisdom of the old saying to beware Greeks bearing gifts.

Although the Chinese Peoples’ Liberation Army has considerable air, land, sea and C4ISR weaknesses, they are all considerably mitigated by its cooperation with the Russian Armed Forces, with whom they have developed an advanced working partnership on a level comparable to anything NATO possesses. Crucially, as the Yanks themselves now admit, the High Command of both the Chinese and Russian Armed Forces, together with their political colleagues, have an excellent understanding of what they each must do so that they hang together, rather than separately at the end of a NATO rope.

From a Chinese perspective, the Russians have secured their Ukrainian front and, no matter how NATO’s ongoing Belarusian gambit plays out, there is absolutely no prospect of the Russian Chinese border being turbulent over the coming years.

Equally importantly, Russia has managed to ride the economic storm and, as the cretins of Croatia and Lithuania can attest inflation, the bug bear of all wars and the terror of Germany, is striking at the heart of NATO’s European empire rather than in the shops, supermarkets and malls of Moscow.

Despite the theft of Russian, Syrian and Iranian assets by British and American state-sanctioned criminals, those three countries still stand and China, short of demanding that the British return the treasures it stole from the Middle Kingdom, has yet to enter the Sumo ring.

The beauty of Sumo wrestling is that, though the ring is very small, the first rule is that you must be built like a giant gorilla to have any hope of prevailing in it. The question, then, is who will prevail in this, the mother of all Sumo battles, between the Chinese Colossus and the Yankee Godzilla.

Although the Yanks have been the undisputed top dogs ever since the Soviet Red Army crushed the Nazis, that era has ended. Just as, militarily, Russia isn’t Libya or Iraq, economically, sanctioned China is not sanctioned Cuba. They are as big and as dangerous as any Sumo wrestler and certainly far bigger and far more dangerous than anything which might emanate from Japan.

China’s railways, its bullet trains in particular, now put their Japanese and other competitors in the shade. Whereas Germany’s auto industry is struggling, China’s goes from strength to strength. When we consider that all of the West’s major auto players agree that a presence in all three mature markets of Japan, Western Europe and North America is essential to be a global player in their game and that the major upside was to be found in Latin America and Africa where Russia and China are both making headway, that spells bad news for NATO and Sweden in particular, which put all its eggs into trucking and buses but which is, by Chinese standards, an irrelevant pygmy producer.

Petro China is one of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies and China’s alliance with Russia shows that they are immune to the shortages the Axis powers suffered in the 1940s. Unlike Hitler’s Panzers, the Chinese can be assured that their tanks, once they begin to move, will keep moving forward.

As China’s tax base is progressive, it possesses considerable upside, something their tax and debt dependent NATO antagonists lack. As China’s balance of trade is in robust health, their war kitty, if such they have, is full.

And that war kitty is considerably enhanced by how the gold market has changed over the last few decades when apartheid era South Africa was incontestably the world’s largest gold producer. Now, China is in pole position, with Russia and Australia closely behind and South Africa falling very far behind to eight place. Although the light-fingered United States dominates the stocks held of gold, China’s role in the flow of gold warrants analysis as China is the world’s fifth biggest importer of gold. As Switzerland is far and away the biggest exporter of gold into China, we can be sure that much of that gold is not being used in jewellery fabrication or the electronics industry but is being squirelled away, along with Chinese and Russian gold, for the proverbial rainy day NATO’s storm clouds break over the South China Sea.

Though China’s sure and steady pace may well win this full spectrum dominance war against NATO, it cannot win it by colonising the South China Sea, by being thuggish in confrontations with the Indian Army in the Himalayas and by allowing NATO’s Uyghur proxies run riot in Syria. China must use the carrot in Asia and the stick against NATO’s Uyghur terrorists in Syria if they ever want to taste real time combat before NATO’s Asian armadas move on them.

China’s problems with India, Vietnam, the Philippines and some other potential NATO cats’ paws is one of resources and of diplomacy, which dictate that the solution to their countries’ water problems is not in California style derivatives markets where they end up either bidding or fighting against each other to NATO’s benefit but in solid Chinese, Indian and Asian engineering. Though China’s engineers should continue to plough ahead on their projects, they should be in no doubt that NATO knows their strengths, their weaknesses, their opportunities and their threats as surely as they themselves do.

At the most basic level, they boil down to China’s two problems of multiplication and division, that a small, localised Chinese problem becomes a big national problem when magnified by internal or external NATO aligned forces and that equitably dividing the national cake 1.425 billion ways, when NATO is hell bent on causing internal and external dissension, is no easy task.

Though China, together with Russia, has a unique opportunity to lay the groundwork for a better world, that world cannot come to pass without Southern and Southeast Asia being full partners in it. Though China’s leadership undoubtedly knows that, the problem is that so do the Americans and they are determined to ensure it does not come to pass. Though China may believe they hold all the cards in this great poker game, that alone is not sufficient to stop NATO kicking the entire table over or dealing, as they are wont to do, from the bottom of the deck. The Chinese, like the Russians and especially the Vietnamese before them, know the stakes. They best play their cards appropriately lest NATO once again out-bluffs or out-plays them.

"Grand Theft Corona" by Mark Oshinskie

 

Click here for Exit the Cuckoo's Nest's posting standards and aims. 

Click here to sign the People's Proclamation and send it to everyone you know.

Source: Dispatches from a Scamdemic

GRAND THEFT CORONA

MARK OSHINSKIE

AUG 24, 2023

149

118

6

Share

In 1983, I had an apartment on Martin Luther King Blvd. in Newark, New Jersey’s Central Ward. I looked out of place in the neighborhood. But the rent was affordable and I worked within walking distance.

Though in that “Brick City” of 325,000 there were at that time zero grocery stores, there was a bodega half a block from my steep stone stoop. I used to go there to buy milk and those tasty, cellophane-wrapped FrozFruit coconut ice pops. I became friendly with the store’s owner, an amiable, diminutive, mustachioed Puerto Rican gentleman in his forties who often wore a Guayabera shirt.

When I approached the counter one summer Saturday morning, the owner seemed uncharacteristically glum. I said, “Hey, what’s up? Is something bothering you.”

He frowned and said, “Last night, when I was closing, I put all my money for the week, $7,000, in the backseat of my car. But I couldn’t remember if I switched on my burglar alarm, so I went back inside to check. When I came back out, my cash box was gone. It took two minutes.”

Stunned, I offered, “Maybe they’ll catch the guys and you’ll get the money back.”

He frowned at my naive optimism. (I didn’t actually believe what I had said. I was just trying to cheer him up). He replied, with dismissive resignation, “Nah, it’s like you, brother. When you’re gone, you’re gone and you ain’t coming back.”

When one experiences theft directly—even if it’s just the contents of one’s purse or wallet—s/he feels indignation and anger and thinks that those who robbed them deserve punishment. People feel the same, strongly negative emotion when someone deceives them in a business transaction. The amount of money involved doesn’t even have to be very high.

Over 10 trillion dollars were foolishly spent on the Corona overreaction. Extremely out of his depth, both scientifically and economically, Trump irresponsibly sponsored six-trillion-dollars of CARES Act giveaways. His terrible judgment during this period, and his continuing vaxx promotion, must never be forgotten.

Biden & Company stacked four trillion more dollars of debt/contrived money on top of that, plus he mandated the jabs. Neither he nor Trump should ever again hold public office.

But most people didn’t think twice about these potlatches. They were too busy washing their hands, ordering DoorDash, buying masks and waiting in lines for 40 cycle PCR tests. To many, the government’s panicked and politically-motivated spending sprees didn’t register; they seemed unreal and diffuse. The funds were created and distributed electronically. Besides, most of us got, and many were mollified and distracted by, seemingly free money via “stimulus checks.”

Nearly 90% of the $800 billion of PPP “loans” were never repaid; nor were these vast sums ever expected to be. Additionally, at least $600 billion of “Covid relief” money was stolen via fraud or embezzlement. Most of those who sneakily dipped their buckets into this Amazon-at-flood-stage river of dollars will never be caught or prosecuted. Like the Newark merchant’s cash box, the missing money won’t ever be recovered.

The giveaways continue. For example, there’s still a widely-advertised tax credit for Covid employee retention. This scheme, which was estimated, in March, 2020, to cost the US Treasury $50 billion, had, by May, 2023, already cost $152 billion. And counting. Almost no one knows this is happening; they only notice when their own taxes increase.

All of the “Covid Relief” numbers are far too big to understand unless one has a good numbers sense and sits quietly in a room with some blank paper and does some ciphering. People thought it was a good idea to spend limitlessly and futilely on Grandma without considering the costs to her adult children and grandkids. Hey, Grandma used to make us cookies; she’s worth whatever we’ve got. And even what we don’t got. Even if we can’t, through the full range of “mitigation,” keep her alive for another two months in a nursing home, where she’s seldom visited. If she has to live in isolation and die alone to “stop the spread,” so be it.

But the effects of these giveaways are real, profound and lasting. Some entities and people made nearly incomprehensible sums. Forbes reported that a record 493 new billionaires were created in 2020-21. Despite being semi-mothballed for an extended period, hospitals made record profits of $20 billion from Covid relief. Pharma companies have made at least $100 billion from the failed vaxxes. And Gates-owned Gilead, which made the Remdesivir that many blame for hospital deaths, cashed in big-time. So did Zoom, Amazon and Netflix et al. Over 40 new shot, mask or test makers became billionaires, even though the masks and tests were scams and the shots flopped and killed or injured many.

The government’s issuance of all that fiat money has made you significantly poorer. There are five times as many dollars in the money supply now than there were in January, 2020. Thus, you’re paying 18% more for the things you buy today than you did in March, 2020. It’s also harder than ever to buy a first home. Those who can afford a down payment will pay far more mortgage interest for decades. They’ll/you’ll also pay more in taxes, in perpetuity. And if you didn’t already own an inflation hedge, such as real estate, stocks or metals—the prices of which have increased because all of that printed money had to go somewhere—you’ve missed out on a wave of profit-taking that better-capitalized people have caught. Inflation has devalued trillions of dollars of aggregate household savings. The relatively few rich got richer and the more numerous un-rich became noticeably poorer.

Inflation has a ratchet effect; once it occurs, it can’t be reversed. The Fed won’t sponsor deflationary measures. But the government spending/printing all of this inflationary money bothered people less than if somebody had slashed their car tire. Oblivious to cause and effect, most people—and their elected representatives—strongly supported policies that caused this inflation. They gullibly concluded Covid was an unprecedented health crisis that justified locking down a society and trashing an economy, even though humans had never before taken such measures.

While demagogues conned people about grandma, those impoverished by the massive Covid spending binge will have to work many more hours over many years to pay their bills. Consequently, some will live less long.

Studies show what should have been obvious, in March 2020, to anyone who could think: there were functionally no differences in health outcomes between the nations and states that went all-in on lockdowns, masks, tests and shots, and those that didn’t. By supporting “Covid Relief,” people got robbed far worse than they ever have. They effectively welcomed the bandits into their bank accounts and homes.

Most Americans believe that any bad outcome can be overridden or somehow redeemed. While this notion has emotional appeal, it seems unfounded. Not everything that’s broken can be put back together.

Aside from the widespread loss of wealth and the attendant social stratification, the experiences that young people could have had: the new friendships, the school bands and plays, athletics, proms, parties and graduations; and for adults, meetings of life partners, the unstarted families and gatherings, voyages and other uncreated memories were stolen from billions of people.

Gone.

And that time, those experiences and those resources are like you, brothers and sisters: they’re not coming back.