The Hidden Truth of the 2020 US Election, by 'Jim in San Marcos'

The following is in part intended as a rebuttal to, or alternative take on, Paddington's 'Email From America (4)', on the party-political-motivated skewed voting arrangements in the USA. 

Jim's original is at his site here. 

The US is splitting apart.  On one side we have the Republicans, and on the other side we have the Democrats, News Media and Internet.  Normally the Republicans and Democrats balance each other out and the independents decide the elections.  Now we have CNN, MSN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Facebook and Twitter solidly on the side of Democrats.  These internet conglomerates censor the news by blocking users from distributing content that they deem misinformation or by omission, failing to report the news.  Basically, this is censorship.  The news media, through their biases, are influencing the thoughts of the country.  The funny thing is, these people probably only represent about 5 percent of the population. 

Most voters begin to think about elections a week before the event.  A majority of American voters don't follow politics, have no memory of the performance of their candidate over the last 4 years.  The news media and social media will guide them in choosing a candidate. 

Our last election had flagrant voter and media fraud.  The Democrats, the news media and the internet giants like Facebook and Twitter censored all of it.  They were against Trump. They censored the Biden laptop that exposed the corruption and graft in the Biden family before the election. It is now slowly coming to light.  People don’t fully appreciate how powerful censorship by omission is.  This helped swing the election to Biden.  You can see the newspaper bias when you read “Trump falsely claims that he won the election.” The word “falsely” doesn’t belong in the sentence.  That is for the reader to decide. Including the word, makes the sentence an opinion.

A lot has been discussed about the convenience of mail-in voting.  If you lived in a country like China or Russia, would you want mail-in voting?  Fill the ballot out wrongly and you might end up in a gulag rehab camp.  

Democrats and Republicans vote the party line most of the time.  With mail-in votes, you also have included people who would not make an effort to vote in person.  These are the votes to focus on.  10 million dollars will buy a lot of advertising and it is always questionable how effective it is.  Take the same 10 million and send out couriers to purchase those blank ballots. Figure they would pay up to $200 per ballot. Imagine a courier is given 2,000 dollars and told to show up with 10 ballots filled out with their parties’ candidates selected, that’s not hard to do. You knock on the voter’s door and offer to help them fill out the ballot, give the voter $100 and drop it off for free. Such a deal.  If you are poor, $100 is something tangible that can be spent.  It is only one vote, no big deal, take the money.  If you are the courier, any part of the $200 not given to the voter for their ballot, is the courier's, free and clear. 10 million dollars could buy 50,000 votes.  Zuckerberg spent $420 million on the 2020 election. 

The Democrats want voters to be able to vote without having a voter ID.  They also want them to vote absentee without any identification. In California, if you get mailed a ballot, you can vote.  That mail-in ballot is worth money, you can sell it. By forcing the voter to vote in person, the ability to buy votes disappears.  If you have a city of 100,000 voters, figure 60 percent will vote. With mail-in voting, many of the ballots of people who have moved or have died get returned to the polling place. Those returned absentee ballots are blank checks.  Who’s to say how many were returned to the election board? No one will know if those “votes” somehow get submitted and counted, especially if there is no voter ID or signature required.  This is what the Democrats want to do in every state: unrestricted, no-ID voting.

The Democrats in the past have been the party of repression.  After the civil war, The Democrats took over the south. They passed laws to keep blacks from voting, referred to as “Jim Crow" laws.  They also formed the Klu Klux Klan that went around terrorizing and killing blacks. They were for segregation in schools. Times have changed the Democrats used to represent the working man, now they represent big money and labor unions.

The thing not fully comprehended by outsiders, is the fact that many election districts have ways of keeping the local people in power.  A city that is run by Democrats for 50 years is kind of an indication that something is not right. It doesn’t matter how you vote; the same party gets reelected.  In that case, people stop voting, they consider it a waste of time. Think about it: if a city doesn't update the voter rolls, a lot of ballots get returned by the Post Office.  Who is to say that post office returned 100 or 10,000 ballots? Wink Wink, most voter fraud is at local levels.

The super-rich people in this country are now aligning with the Democratic party.  They are trying to fragment the rest of the population, by tearing down our historical statues and rewrite our history with critical race theory.  I don’t think we are ready for this. This isn’t what Democracy is all about.  Live and be free, not live and fear the "woke" people. 

Something is not right. And the further we go in time; more things seem to be falling apart. Biden is destroying the fabric of our democracy and everything else to boot. Obama’s quote about Joe Biden, “Don’t underestimate Joe's ability to F things up,” rings true.

WEEKENDER: Sunak's Shine Has Come Off, by Wiggia

Rishi Sunak has gone from distributor of a bottomless pit of money to someone who has had the sunshine taken away all in the matter of a couple of weeks.

Is it all his fault? It depends were you are coming from: no chancellor can go on doshing out billions like he has forever. How much of that was his personal decision we are unlikely to be told, but some sort of cabinet decision on the matter was likely.

The whys and wherefores of the good that money did or not as the case may be will be debated long into the future. The fact that the undeserving managed to get their hands on so much and the fraud that went on are different matters and that part of it should be dealt with in a transparent way now; not that this or any other government is likely to be transparent if it reveals major shortcomings in their administration in these matters, they simply don’t do that any more nor resign.

Sunak was looking like a likely candidate for Boris’s job should Partygate bring him down, but again Boris has been lucky that war has sidelined any immediate action or even longer term penalty for what was in effect just sticking two fingers up at the general population who had just been told how they must act in the face of a killer disease, or not as it transpired; perhaps they all knew and the whole thing was one big con.

The Chancellor was brought down to earth when he realised or was forced to change tack and tax all and everything to claw back the huge sums of money he had thrown at various aspects of defeating the virus. His handling of that is questionable and probably would be with any chancellor faced with the same problems; where he went wrong was to be so obvious with his jam tomorrow scenario just before the next election.

It is difficult to believe an intelligent man would go down a path that anyone who has been around a generation or two has seen so many times before. Bribing the population to vote for you only works if things are normal, not if the country is in deep do-do and needs help right now; that is such a cynical move it is hard to believe all ministers were behind it, or is it that governments in this country have not had to make big decisions very often whilst under the EU governance?

On top of that he has had to contend with an energy crisis, so Boris gets lucky with a war and Sunak has the chair kicked away from under him; add to that the sudden ‘discovery’ of his wife’s wealth and how she should be taxed to the hilt despite not even being a British national, and suddenly all and sundry are piling in on him.

The truth is whatever he does the country and much of Europe is stuffed. Our shortcomings on so many fronts over so many years have all contrived to burst the bubble at the same time. Our energy crisis is mostly of our own making, not just going the so called green route, but as I said in a previous piece our infrastructure on nearly all fronts has been ignored and kicked down the road for as long as I can remember.

Boris has backtracked on energy production and has said we will have seven new nuclear plants up and running by 2030; quite simply it won't happen: if one is ten years into being built and no commissioning date yet, why should we believe that seven will magically appear? The cost of all these at the same time, however long it takes, will be enormous.

A public already under a cost of living attack from inflationary prices and energy shortages and energy itself roughly doubling in price in twelve months and no sign that the end is in sight, will hardly be in a position to fund the nuclear project.

And what do we do in the meantime, burn furniture? Some energy industry experts are talking about rationing in the not too distant future, this is where smart meters will become compulsory and rationing plus peak pricing on top of the huge rises currently will just about finish many marginal families off.

Sunak has no real answers to all of this as the cupboard is bare unless the BoE starts printing money again. Cheap money is no longer an option as it relies on almost zero interest rates yet higher interest rates are virtually the only weapon against inflation; for years this cheap money option has impoverished savers, and now they can’t put the brakes on as the national debt becomes unaffordable with higher interest rates - just a one percent rise costs the exchequer 22 billion in extra interest payments. The thought of a return to normal interest rates at around five to six percent must mean certain people in the ministry of finance having apoplexy.

Do they even care? It’s a fair question: the recent debate over MPs wage rise, a modest one in the scheme of their salaries is taken out of context; MPs have now got an obscene expenses limit, far in excess of the one that the scandal was created from; it even has a built in energy allowance for their second homes as well as travel allowances, eating etc. On top of this two thirds of MPs are on committees, have various ministerial roles and the same for the opposition parties, all of which add to their basic salaries. The salary as a pointer to MPs' earnings is not by any means the full picture; giving your pay rise to a charity is just virtue signalling as it is a drop in the ocean for most MPs.

So no they haven’t a clue what the man in the street is suffering at the hands of their decisions, and at the current time there is little they can do about it. It is all too late: decades of neglect on several fronts have brought us to this point, the virus and subsequent energy crisis has just pushed us over the edge.

This week alone there have several pointers or feelers put out to our future restricted way of life. Those of a green persuasion actually think this is good, but it comes at a huge cost to the nation and an ongoing drop in living standards. Some of the measures envisaged are already being trialled: the sudden appearance on supermarket shelves of endless vegan meals can only be triggered by the lobbying to eradicate meat eating, as there are never that amount of people ready to jump ship on meat eating at any one time.

Road pricing has raised its head again as the end game is to limit private car ownership by cost of vehicles. The recent price rises are way above what is warranted and many believe they are there to make EVs seem cheaper than they are.

“Reports have said that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, is interested in bringing back the pay as you go system to try and fill the £40 billion void left by car tax.”

The RAC has revealed that the IEA is proposing, on the back of energy shortages, measures to reduce car driving; that includes adding to the already banned vehicles in cities with a car-free Sunday as well as reductions in speed limits to save fuel usage.

https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/news/fuel-prices/car-free-sundays-among-10-point-plan-to-cut-oil-demand/

Being cynical, I see this fits in well with those in the green ranks who only want us to have public transport to use.

Air travel is a bit more difficult: the desire after two years of confinement to travel to sunny climes is a built in factor for many, and any attempt to curb that at the moment would involve a nasty backlash on any one thinking aloud on those lines, yet it will come. The whole largely unnecessary saga of getting on a plane is enough to put anyone off flying, ‘turn up and go’ is so last year.

It appears inevitable that the inflationary price rises the public are now suffering will put a damper on discretionary spending even for those above the poverty line. That in turn means less taxes for the chancellor as people pull their horns in on spending and an effect on those producing goods that fewer people can afford. VW made an interesting statement this week as to future models when they said they are getting out of the volume as in cheaper high production number models’ and planning for more up market models with a bigger profit margin; good luck with that if things continue as they have been doing. Car production is down considerably, partly because the manufacturers have had difficulty getting semi conductors, another case of all eggs in one basket, and also because many people having lost jobs or not being able to work have simply not had the funds for new cars. Will it improve? Who knows; perhaps it will never get back to how it was.

House prices are still rising, and although two properties for different reasons went on sale next to me and sold in two and four weeks, in the current circumstances is this sustainable? Logically no: the housing market often seems to be a law to itself, it still needs people with money to buy though like any other commodity and the cheaper mortgages are drying up making it more difficult to get one and more expensive. This must start to put a brake on the market soon or am I wrong again on this one? Yet it makes no sense to still be rising.

One can add to all this the 5.7 million public servants who thanks to taxpayers' money are mainly ring-fenced from the hardships in the private sector. Strong unions still abound here and pensions are a much better buffer than outside the sector in the current financial climate. This sector views life from within a protected lifestyle; that doesn’t bode well either for productivity or useful analysis when nothing outside affects you.

Which brings me back to Sunak. His and the government's decision to drop the triple lock on pensions that are the lowest in Europe is more than shameful with what is going on. Not affordable? Please, everything else is: that complete waste of time HS2 is going north of £100 billion and no wavering there for so little gain.

Hand wringers believe we treat those coming here in dinghies appallingly; for people that have never contributed a single penny to this country I think bed and board in a four star hotel and a little spending money plus seeing a doctor on arrival is if you break it down actually better than a base level pensioner who has to pay for his food and energy if he can as well as rent etc. etc.. The cost to the country of that is running into billions if you include all the other illegal arrivals here.

'While their asylum claims are being processed they are provided free housing accommodation, free access to the National Health Service (NHS), free dental and eyesight care, education for their children, and a weekly allowance £37.75 to £39.60 per week, all at taxpayer expense.’

So shiny Richi has had the gloss removed from his post. He becomes yet another cog in a rather lacklustre HoC. I am not going to repeat what I think of the majority of the incumbents in the HoC: it speaks for itself; the future does not look good.

Oh, and why does Boris keep appearing in stage managed hospital visits? In the last one he was wandering around with his tie tucked in and his sleeves rolled up; why not give him a white coat and stethoscope and be done with it? The thought of playing doctors and nurses obviously appeals to him, why else does he keep going back? It certainly has no effect on the efficiency of the NHS.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Maurice Ravel, by JD

Maurice Ravel, (born March 7, 1875, Ciboure, France—died Dec. 28, 1937, Paris)

"At age 14 he was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire. Completing his piano studies, he returned to study composition with Gabriel Fauré, writing the important piano piece Jeux d’eau (completed 1901) and a string quartet.

Careful and precise, Ravel possessed great gifts as an orchestrator, and his works are universally admired for their superb craftsmanship; he has remained the most widely popular of all French composers."
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Maurice-Ravel

The first video here is a piano roll of Ravel himself playing his famous Pavane and has provoked a strange discussion in the comments in both French and English arguing for and against his ability as a piano player and then whether the piece ought to be a lament or a jolly dance - (Ravel n'était pas un virtuose (ce qu'était Debussy par contre) Horriblement joué est vraiment exagéré. C'est tout de même un sacré document qui donne une idée de ce que voulait Ravel pour l'exécution de cette oeuvre, SON oeuvre.)

Ukraine: the big picture - revisited, by Sackerson

Peter Hitchens has said it: the real struggle in Ukraine is between the US and Russia.  In his subsequent rebuttal of people who have swallowed our war propaganda he repeats:

‘A foolish Western policy has goaded Russia into an irrational act… I have argued ceaselessly against the deliberately dangerous policy of NATO enlargement, and against the destabilisation of Ukraine by outside intervention.’

Why has Russia done it?

Natural resources, say some. Ukraine is rich in agriculture and minerals; but it is a vast country and much harder to hold than to invade. Besides, Russia is already the world’s biggest exporter of wheat and boasts huge mineral reserves of its own. 

On the other hand the West is tempted, and finance plays its part, says Professor Prabhat Patnaik, who argues that the IMF, once simply an international rescue-bank, is now used to enforce ‘investor-friendly’ economic restructuring on the borrower; in Ukraine’s case this entailed reforms such as cutting spending on education and health and slashing the gas price subsidy to its consumers, who are already the poorest in Europe. Patnaik claims that the IMF deliberately loaned more than Ukraine could ever repay, so paving the way for taking land and mineral resources in lieu; it will end, he says, by turning Ukraine into Greece and the economy will be disrupted as masses emigrate for a better life:

Domestic populism. Putin courts his people’s support by adopting the role of national/ethnic protector. Article 69 (3) of his revisedConstitution of 2020 extends this protection to Russians abroad and Article 79 allows him to ignore international treaties that stop him doing it, e.g. in his annexation of Crimea. That said, war is a costly gamble; did Putin really ‘cast the die’ just to boost his popularity?

Defence. Geography makes Russia vulnerable to invasion from the West, which has happened five times since 1605.  As for nuclear weapons, officially the US has only 100 in Europe (map here) but we must pray that the Pentagon is never convinced that a nuclear war is winnable with a massive pre-emptive strike, say from missiles smuggled to near the Russian border. President Putin has been referencing the 1962 Cuban MissileCrisis since 2019, when Washington withdrew from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF)Treaty. Nor can we assume that Russia would refrain from using its own nukes if seriously threatened: post 1991 we discovered that ‘the Soviets planned early and heavy use of nuclear weapons in many scenarios including outbreak of conventional war in Europe.’ Hawks should understand that both sides would be safer with a buffer zone.

Securing future economic growth. Russia’s foreign minister Lavrov sees the United States as wanting ‘to come back to a unipolarworld’ and says ‘the West has repeatedly attempted to stall the independent andautonomous development of Russia.'  Strategically, eastern and southern Ukraine are vital elements, not only in Russia’s military and naval security in the region, but also in her international trade via waterways.

Before the Soviet collapse and EU/NATO encroachment, the Black Sea was very largely a Red lake, except for the shores of north-eastern Greece and northern Turkey. Now, if we look at the map and visualise both Ukraine and Georgia within the fold (still under consideration), Blue is certainly crowding what is left of (what was once) Red. Without Crimea and its warm-water port Sevastopol, Russia would be boxed-in to the north-east corner and feeling vulnerable.

Accordingly, Russia has long been strengthening its facilities in that Sea. The Sochi Olympics served a dual purpose: in 2014 America’s The Nation magazine scoffed at Putin’s $51 billion dollar ‘white elephants’, missing the greater potential of the new Sochi airport, and of the development of the ports there, at Novorossiisk (in preparation for oil and gas shipping) and at Port Kavkaz - which faces Port Crimea across the Kerch Strait, the two linked (road and rail) since 2019 by Russia’s Crimean Bridge, Europe’s longest. South Stream, the planned undersea gas pipeline to Bulgaria, jinking through Turkey’s zone to avoid Ukraine, had to be scrapped because of political fallout from the Crimea annexation, but it is clear that the Black Sea is a hugely important trading nexus for Russia.

So is the Sea of Azov, after which Ukraine’s hardest-line regiment is named. Until 2014 the Sea of Azov was jointly controlled by Russia and the Russophile eastern Ukraine. The River Don empties into it, and is connected to the Volga, which flows into the Caspian, by the Volga-Don Canal, which strains to accommodate modern shipping needs. One proposal is/was for a vast  Eurasia Canal linking the Caspian to the Azov and so on to the Black Sea; in 2007 Kazakhstan’s PresidentNazarbayev enthused that the canal ‘would make Kazakhstan a maritime power and benefit many other Central Asian nations as well’; an alternative Russian plan is to widen the Volga-Don Canal. 

Either way, a hostile Ukrainian force on the western shore of the Azov would again pose a threat to Russian trade and prosperity in the area, and indirectly to long-term plans for a Eurasian trading bloc as envisaged in  the International North–South TransportCorridor or Damir Ryskulov’s scheme of a Trans-Asian Corridor of Development (below):

To conclude, America has been pursuing an outdated geopolitical policy originally aimed at containing the spread of Communism.  The mystery is why the US continued to foster China’s ascendancy after the Soviet collapse; Professor John Mearsheimer, who in 2015 blamed America for the Ukraine crisis, sees this as a ‘colossal strategic blunder’, saying we should settle with Putin and ‘pivot’ towards Asia. Nevertheless, conservative historian David Starkey thinks it is too late; pace Sellar and Yeatman America can no longer remain ‘top nation’ and pace them plus Francis Fukuyama, History has not ‘come to a .’ 

Indeed, why should they?

MPs to sell their sperm to China (spoof, from our archives)

 Originally posted 8 December 2013...

"UK and China agree £45m pig semen export deal" (Guardian, 4 December 2013)

_________________________________________________________________
Pig hails deal to sell MPs' sperm to China

The Palace of Westminster echoed to the sound of popping champagne corks yesterday, as the nation's top people celebrated an historic trade agreement with China. Addressing a meeting composed of members of both Houses, the Empress of Blandings announced a multimillion pound scheme to improve the human stock of the PRC by the export of highly-prized British sperm.

It all began when Chinese police officers came to the UK on the trail of international Triad connections. "They said they were looking for criminals," said the Empress, "and we told them to find their own, as we had spent centuries bulding up our collection. When the misunderstanding had been cleared up, they became interested in our ruling class.

"At first they couldn't believe that it was possible to combine a political career with multiple outside interests, from handfuls of directorships to consultancies, journalism, novel-writing and taxpayer-funded travel. In their world, those who neglect public duties in favour of private projects are, sooner or later, shot.

"We had to explain to them that we don't execute psychopaths here, we put them in charge. How else could we have got China hooked on opium just to earn silver to pay for our Lapsang Souchong? That's when they realised that their efforts to create an orderly society had led them to a national shortage of world-conquering shitweasels.

"Fortunately, they also noted the hyper-priapic nature of many of you, evidenced not only by extramarital affairs but -" [a legal adviser whispered urgently into the Empress' floppy ear. "Really? The ancient Greeks didn't see any harm in it."] Anyhow, all that top-quality jizz that has previously gone to waste can now be put to profitable use.

"Plastic collecting boxes will be fitted to the backs of all red and green benches - front-benchers will go on diplomatic missions to the Far East, as usual - and donors will be credited with half the sale proceeds. We expect a great improvement in attendance as a result, and with luck, Parliament will be self-financing by the end of the decade."

The Empress graciously acknowledged the standing ovation and returned to her country estate, leaving the assembled representatives to their troughs.

EMAIL FROM AMERICA (5): Pharma's slaves, by Paddington

Tracking the chaos...

Insulin was discovered in 1921 by Sir Frederick Banting, Charles Best and J.J.R. Macleod at the University of Toronto and was later purified by James Collip. This discovery allowed millions of Type I diabetics to have a relatively normal life, when previously they would only live a year or so after diagnosis.

Banting refused to have his name on a patent because he felt that it was unethical for a doctor to profit from saving lives. Best and Collip sold the patent to the University for $1, citing similar feelings.
Fast forward a few decades, and many hedge funds have invested heavily in pharmaceutical companies, including every manufacturer of insulin in the US. In order to make the most of their investments, they have bought political influence to make competition more difficult, and have increased prices to maximize their profit.

Bearing in mind that the standard explanations of development costs and safety checks really do not apply for a drug developed 100 years ago, in which the newest changes are over 20 years old, one can note that the price of a vial of insulin in the Humalog brand went from $21 in 1999 to $332 in 2019.
And those costs have not risen at the same rate elsewhere. In 2018, the Rand corporation listed the 10 countries where insulin was most expensive: The USA $98.70, Chile $21.48, Mexico $16.48, Japan $14.40, Switzerland $12.46, Canada $12.00, Germany $11.00, South Korea $10.30, Luxembourg $10.15 and Italy $10.03.

On Friday, the US House of Representatives voted on a bill to reduce the copay (what the consumer pays) of insulin to $35. This move to reduce prices is part of the GOP platform, yet only 12 Republicans voted for the bill, and 193 voted against it.

And insulin is just the tip of the iceberg.

Hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli bought the rights to Daraprim, a decades-old drug used to treat a fatal parasitic infection, and raised the price for a pill from $13.50 to $750. He went to prison shortly thereafter - not for this disgusting behaviour, but for defrauding some investors in his hedge fund.

Mylan purchased the rights to the EpiPen self-injector (to treat life-theatening allergic reactions) from $50 per unit to $300 over a few years, resulting in massive increases in profits and huge rewards for CEO Heather Bresch, who just happens to be the daughter of quasi-Democrat Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. The latter has been one of the two Democratic senators responsible for blocking much of the people-oriented legislation that the Biden administration has tried to pass.

Legal slavery ended in the US in 1865, but our lives and our health are still for sale.

The fifth element