Hibernation Television

All of the people, some of the time

Hi folks, today I want to share a few extremely telling video clips, mostly of people who held power and then came to question it – and also talk a little about how our modern emphasis on emotions makes us politically stupid and irresponsible, regardless of our certainty or our faction.

Of course this emotion-over-reason emphasis is not only a deliberate attempt by a very few, to weaken the power, rights and voices of all of us everyday individual citizens, and weaken society and unity itself at the same time – to their exclusive benefit – it is also incredibly expensive! But even though a ton of money and effort is spent, twisting our heads around into pretzels, so we will consent to madness and even feel proud, when we are behaving in ways we should be ashamed of, there is no one but us who can figure out how to get over it and find each other (our real strength) once again.

As I have mentioned before (and so won’t digress about too far today) I come from a commune which descended into a policy of near universal child abuse, so I understand not just how long denial can last, but also how much additional pain and trouble comes to silenced victims who were never acknowledged, or (all too often) made to feel the abuse they suffered was their own damn fault, over a half-century arc (and counting). The point here is not the tragedy, but that it was avoidable, if only the necessary attitude of responsibility, rather than emotional certainty, was present at the right time.

And here I should mention a particularly sharp and useful idea I encountered in an essay on Edward Bernays. My regular readers will have heard me mention him – the inventor of “Public Relations” and nephew of Freud, selling every bit of his uncle’s insights about our hidden selves straight to the wealthy and corrupting corporate elite, far faster and more tellingly than their general benefit has weighed for normal people, even to this day. (I am still open to arguments on this, but that the harms of advertising and propaganda outweigh personal emotional gains, feels ever clearer to me daily now).

The nifty insight was this. Do you want to know when you are encountering public relations? That is, corporate manipulation of your thinking, that pretends it is objective, instead of ultimately, advertising?

Look for any variation of this phrase in any news story “Experts Say”.

I did a piece awhile ago about how often we hear the term “Average” as if that word alone makes the numbers which follow it, mean something clear. It does not – we need to know whether this average is Mean Mode or Median, at absolute minimum, and giving us all three together, would reveal a lot of complexity, that selecting just one of them can often completely hide. By using the difference between their knowledge and our ignorance, “experts” can (and often do) use a real fact to lie, by hiding a much more important fact behind it.

And just for a reference check – the word Rational comes from Ratiocination – establishing the ratio of importance between different facts and ideas. That is – NOT EVER HIDING THE BIG STUFF!

When we encounter “Experts Say” we often accept the information which follows in that same kind of lazy sloppy way, when we should be asking, which experts, paid by who, to accomplish WHAT goal (for which faction in society, which is trying to take advantage of, or win advantage over, which other factions, over what arc of time, at what cost to all of us, and society in general).

Adam Smith rather wittily (and accurately) said long ago, “Gentlemen of the same profession do not meet together, except to defraud the general public.” Experts may not all be like this, but many are.

Consider all of the millions spent on think-tanks and creepy corporate serving legislation mills, that the biggest corporations in our society continue to fund, to try their best to take every possible advantage of all of us citizens, and then remember to ask, every single time – Am I listening to THEIR experts?

The most outrageously citizen-insulting version of this in recent memory was a story a few months ago, which said experts had determined that home gardening for food was wasteful and inefficient. Stop trying to feed yourself, peasants. And stop trying to make salt or homespun, while you’re at it!

Of course we know for certain that some big agribusiness wanted this depressing hopelessness promoting conclusion to circulate. No – you can’t even do that for yourself, even though growing food for ourselves was the very basis of civilization. Just stew in utter futility and accept all orders.

What we should have demanded was the entire model of the study. Were they looking at best practises and the way newer gardeners were adapting old wisdom? Were they adding in wasteful old techniques that we know are already fading? Were they counting poverty-desperation farming and urban hobbyists together? And seriously, did they talk to people who were good at it, and loved it?

No wait though – didn’t I just say we should work on being more rational and less emotional? And now I’m suddenly saying we should find the lovers and talk to them, isn’t that a contradiction?

Not in the slightest, and this is crucial, folks. I’ve had a ton of weird jobs over the years, with tools in my hands and in academic environments also and I have to say, pretty much everywhere, some people are really into the thing they are doing, and most are just doing the bare minimum to get by.

As far as I can tell (and my bias here is entirely on the side of enthusiasm, as a free magic add to life) the slackers do not save much energy or trouble, and they certainly don’t make the hours of work pass faster.

The thing about keeners is that they are set up mentally to actually like to do the work (sometimes directly, and sometimes by cleverly gaming their own reward system). In any shop, lab or faculty, you will always find a few folks who ‘network’ supremely well for this most honest reason – they are useful as can be to everyone, and generally friendly also, because for them, that very same duration work-day contains a whole lot more possibilities for satisfaction. Makes them better work partners.

But the thing about an expert who is just doing the minimum, much like an instructor who is only a few chapters ahead of their students in the workbook (seen this gross insult to students with my own eyes, repeatedly), is that they aren’t interested enough in the subject or the world to be curious modest and wide ranging. They know only what they are required to know and can repeat that on command, just as we would expect of any Pavlovian creature. But they don’t even care to know how it connects to the ever changing world.

The person you really want to hear from, about any subject you can name, is someone who still doesn’t think they know enough yet (and never ever will), someone still humbled and fascinated is always interested to hear where they were wrong last week, so they can be less wrong next week.

You can tell this kind of love and mastery difference in musicians, instantly. Any jazz program graduate can play a few old standards well, but only a genuine talent or gigging master can make entirely instrumental jokes, not a single word involved, and crack you up completely. They can PLAY.

Now think about the twenty-something experts who we are so often shown, on what passes for news these days (noose was always a better name for it). Not even a few chapters ahead in the book, really, more often many libraries behind, for anyone who has been paying attention and remembers.

But they don’t remember, aren’t curious and weren’t taught reality, so they can’t regurgitate anything but what was in their ever more obsolete textbook. So with each appearance they make – they slowly contribute to distorting and rewriting the actual complex and lesson-filled reality we all lived together, one emotive dumbing-down power-serving and citizen-debilitating “Factoid” at a time.

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Now let me bring on my first guest, for one of the most important interviews of this century. Jeffery Sachs was hired by the highly respected magazine ‘The Lancet’ to coordinate their piece about the origins of Covid. This came after the NATURE article, which was the original “Follow the Science!” story that was used to brand you a racist, if you said it looked like a lab leak, instead of a wet market (though why ‘lab’ is more racist, boggles the mind). You really have to watch this one, so many big clues. Most importantly, as happened here, sometimes when you ask an expert, you happen to accidentally call the guy who did a bad thing. Sometimes the guy who did the bad thing is needed by a government, to pacify a frightened public. Sometimes a lie is so big, and so many are implicated in that lie and all that flows from it, that it will very likely never be examined to the extent it deserves. (Kennedy assassination, anyone?)

But ratiocination folks – we can’t use any facts or fears to hide mass harm to children. JUST NO!

I am not (and not interested in) peddling any conspiracy theories. The very first true thing we knew about Covid was that it presented minimal danger to children, and very great danger indeed to the aged, infirm and those with co-morbidities (more common in the rich west, than many other places).

The Cochrane study of studies (long considered important SCIENCE reference) on masking, found that even in the most skilled careful and professional environments with the best gear available (that is, doctors in N95 masks) masking produced no statistically significant reduction in transmission.

I was at the very far end of careful with that myself (custom nose-piece for close fit, and double layer) and because I am a caregiver with a respiratorily fragile wife, I don’t regret that effort. But I want you to think about something. Every single parent who yelled at a kid about not wearing their mask, every teacher, every authority of every kind who thought being angry at a kid was being helpful, WAS WRONG.

I don’t mean they were evil or bad, I’m just saying all of that negative emotion (absolutely all of which always counts and adds-up, for kids) was based on our personal feelings of fear, rather than any genuine evidence of effectiveness. We punished natural kid play behavior, for years in a row.

Still think I’m making a lot out of little? How about a few (very) hard numbers from my own town Toronto – the metro area has roughly three million citizens now (greater Toronto region more like nine plus). Fourth largest municipality in North America, according to the latest on Wikki-P (but we’ll discuss them another time, ‘kay?) ;o)

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So – cumulative totals as of Nov 15 2022 (when they stopped counting, because Omicron was so contagious everyone got a piece of it, and so much less threatening, far fewer were struck down).

Total deaths (from that three million population) according to official City of Toronto data

Between age zero and seventeen———–Six

Between eighteen and twenty nine——-Fifteen

Thirty to forty-nine——————————–One hundred and sixteen

Fifty to sixty-nine———————————–Seven Hundred and eighty seven

Over seventy years of age———————-Three thousand six hundred and twenty seven

By the time we get to fifty-somethings (like me), we are at two full orders of magnitude greater risk than the risk to children – for over seventies, that’s three orders of magnitude – and yes, this was known quite solidly, very early on, and was borne out at every phase, by clear case number data.

But somehow we found a way to make something that presented the least risk to children by a clear and dramatic margin, cause great and lasting harm to every single one of our children, and we still act as if questioning that, is a horrible heresy.

Why is standing up for kids heresy?

When did that kind of obvious craziness become normalized, anyhow?

Hate to say it, but right about the same time that workers stopped making gains.

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We have to be clear folks, the boomers didn’t win delicious new social freedoms by making massive new contributions to society, they simply ganged-up and stole them from other generations (future, in particular, but they also broke the chain of loyalty to the past). We are still trying to sort out how much of what they took (and still greatly appeals to majorities, to be sure) we can actually afford to grab as individuals – and how much was always supposed to be folded-back into the commons, to ensure a nourishing start for those who come after us. What used to be known as a healthy society (a claim we haven’t been able to make in the west, for many generations).

There is plenty of evidence on all sides that the fields have been starved for fertilizer for many seasons (which feels extra strange, because fertilizer is almost all we ever hear on mass media).

Beyond this I have to ask – do you know any poor people or not? And this question fits with the recurrent question in American politics about voter ID. It isn’t crazy to want people to prove who they are, when they show up to help steer the big boat. But we also know there are groups in society who fear the state much more than others (often with reasons not immediately obvious to others, who live elsewhere). In America, they are characterized most often as people of colour, but I’ve had poor friends my whole life, and that is a standard sort of fear, which is by no means confined to race.

So when the government says it will do something that will hurt everyone a lot, but don’t worry, you can sign up for a relief cheque or a special pass if you just present the correct paperwork, the people who are most likely to be left out of the help, are the very same poor who most desperately need it! Seriously, ask someone who has done any kind of social work. The grind of long term modern poverty does not produce a mindset which prioritizes paperwork (no matter how much their caseworker might wish it to be so).

The whole pandemic was run like this – by people who don’t love their work (and aren’t ahead of us in the book) who were just trying to cover their ass and clock their hours, rather than thinking about the real and struggling people out there that they are sworn to actually and faithfully SERVE.

The lockdowns did the most (and truly massive) damage to the kids and the poor. This is simply true. Are you going to tell me it is right-wing to question massive state damage to the poor? (really?)

I will say it again, a little differently from the ways I have said it before. Many people who now call themselves “left” are simply fakes, posers, unprincipled narcissists. I can’t help also putting it in the language of old-school class-based leftists (from back in the day when the left won one major society-wide advance after another, over decades of dedication, solidarity, heart and struggle).

They are most precisely – bourgeois reactionaries. People who think their own feelings are important (rather than their actions in the world, and interactions with others) whose idea of suffering is more emotional than physical, and whose conception of the world is based more on interpretation, than direct struggling with the far more complex but also far more educational hard realities of survival – as an outright majority of the people on the planet still are.

The real left is about finding reasons for mutual respect solidarity and union – from there, everything else gets easier. (And this old left was a great friend of the faithful too – bringing that enduring source of organization and power into the big tent also)

I’m not just being a grouchy old bastard here. Phones have made the head-traps much more inescapable and intense than they used to be, no question about it, but never listen to anyone who tells you that we weren’t brainwashed at all before them. That was the whole point of Television, and Hollywood before that, and Radio before that. (Many scholars still argue that modern nationalism wasn’t even really possible, until the unifying force of radio propaganda created “national narratives”)

The point isn’t the medium but their nasty message – be more selfish, prideful, wasteful and reckless.

All of which translates into – consume what we tell you (which is whatever makes us most profit, no matter how grotesque the offstage costs of the enterprise). The political corruptions and environmental harms around Lithium extraction for electric vehicle batteries is on the same very long line with beaver hats, laudanum baby-sitting and cyanide skin-care. (Romans always love their beautiful lead mugs most especally!)

As I’ve mentioned before – this impulsive reckless selfish self is the exact idiot side of all of us, which every great spiritual tradition in history tries to help us overcome, so we can reach down deep and get into the good stuff. Feels too simple and almost pushy to say it is all about reaching our higher potential as human beings, within our finite time love and attention, but it really is, so I will.

Anyhow, way too many of us are miserable and lonely now, so we have to stop and remind our friends on a regular basis, there are a whole lot of approaches we still haven’t tried lately. Calling things hopeless, means surrendering to the sums of one single limited paradigm, while childishly pretending we didn’t chose (or surrender to) that paradigm ourselves! Or that we aren’t solely responsible for finding a better heart and life filled approach, when our old way runs out of steam.

I forget whether it was Lenin Stalin or Trotsky who first suggested this technique:

“Accuse your opponent of the thing you are doing to them, to create enough confusion to help cover up your otherwise obvious crimes against them.”

But I can say with certainty that the version of it that you and I have felt most often, came not from historical communist maniacs, but rather out of control palace-guard enforcers (CIA FBI and the local equivalents ACROSS THE ENTIRE WESTERN WORLD) – working not even for the health of capitalism and general prosperity (bad enough), but exclusively for cheating soulless monopolists. That tiny group of maniacs who have proven they will kill for cash and do so repeatedly, on a scale that in any sane and well governed society would have had them up on a gallows many years ago, for outrageous crimes against the state, people and humanity. Preferably, thousands of crimes ago.

We all understand that corruption is a part of every society (probably built-in to the civilizational hazards of overspecialization, delegation and power distribution, but we’d need a control group, to have any hope of testing that – and by the time we did East Timor, we had killed them all off).

Corruption at a low level, like small businesses being extorted by city officials, in order to pass inspections (happened at every small business I ever worked) is lousy, frustrating and depressing. But corruption at the very highest levels of governance is something else entirely. Not only is such illegitimate gathering and misuse of power, capable of doing mass harm and even outright murder on a staggering scale – IN OUR NAMES – but also, in its arrogant overcapacity, it is uniquely capable of endangering the entire civilization it falsely governs. Betting all of the wealth, culture and accumulated achievements of all of the citizens they are so sure are “beneath them” on gaining an even greater competitive advantage, for those same already wealthy and corrupting few.

To be clear, global competition and market share ain’t nothing (wealth really is a lot less inevitable than many in the west now think) but these dangerous reckless gambling games are sure as hell not what any of us are ever voting FOR. Somehow, some ‘expert’ manages to slip it in after, even if we voted very clearly and obviously against the policy in huge numbers. Some Democracy.

My leftist friends (even those who now look at me askance) will remember that 9/11 shocked many Americans on the right, because they didn’t understand how much resentment America had stoked in other countries, and so didn’t see that kind of blowback coming. Leftists were still hurt, but much less shocked, which means they were able to think clearly, long before those on the right who, in their state of fear and anger, authorized major rollbacks to the constitution (still in place to this day) with the so called “patriot act” and also wasted this entire century on pointless war, making even more people overseas angry with America, in a way which brought no benefit at all to normal citizens. (Oil companies and weapons makers on the other hand – America’s super-citizens – absolutely loved it).

The funny thing is, the combination of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump had the exact same shocking-into-irrationality effect on the left, that 9/11 had on the right. I saw it coming from a mile away, because I still have a lot of poor and working-class friends and they are freakin’ pissed (with absolutely excellent reason – uncountable broken promises, power plays and wholesale thievery).

There are still some on the right who have a hard time with the “Why are they angry at us?” question. But most have had a chance to calm down and think again, and they understand that even when a family looks and lives very differently from us, they are still just trying to get by and give their kids a good life. There is no people on earth who we can’t relate to, if we look with the goodness of our hearts, instead of using the target-scope of our fear hate and wallets.

The fake left – and that part of the sincere left which is still paralyzed by fear confusion and anger (much like the Republicans who were so gung-ho about invading Iraq) have not made such progress.

They are still not asking – why are workers angry? (Simple – ‘cause Demicans, Republicrats, banks, big business and big tech have all got together and screwed them for DECADES non-stop – and they’ve all made one another stinking rich with incestuous corruption in the process).

The idea that people can call themselves left, and yet openly mock desperate workers for being upset, should be freaky satire in very bad taste, rather than the active state of thinking of tens of millions of (at least temporarily) willful gleeful traitors to the working class.

But we are where we are. I know there are stages involved in working through shock or grief, I get it, really. But try to get through them all before we’re literally nuked, ‘kay? That would just be so nice.

I hate that I have to keep saying this (because it is obvious from everything else I write and say) but I really don’t like Donald Trump as a man or a president. But he wasn’t Hitler, that was not a freakin’ insurrection, and Joe Biden is not an improvement, sorry, but just no. This megalomaniac mega-dick is right this instant playing chicken on the edge of totally avoidable nuclear war for nothing but corporate profit and his own immediate political advantage.

Ask yourself this, do you love Joe Biden enough to trade Paris Berlin and London for him? Your kids?

This is not a likely outcome, but the possibility of it has been raised by orders of magnitude, thanks to the incredibly blind, bullying, infantile and reckless refusal of any and all western diplomacy. Problem is, for those who have not been paying close attention. OUR BEST STUFF IS UTTER SHIT.

I’m sorry to be so rude about that, but the lying is so high-power, I have to yell to break the trance. Seriously folks, the finest military equipment in the west has proven itself second-rate when tested.

This isn’t just our wildly overpriced, gas guzzling and impossible to maintain mechanized vehicles, or our dirt-intolerant artillery which requires barrel replacement many times more often than similar Russian gear which typically costs much less, but works far better. (Uncle Sam pays six thousand bucks for every single 155mm shell he buys – Vlad gets his made for under six hundred).

It isn’t even about the drone war (though the Russians have swamped the Ukrainians early lead in production even there, and are now manufacturing the world’s first tank, to come off the line with built-in drone EW countermeasures).

Remember that old line – “Sometimes quantity has a quality all it’s own.”

Well sometimes something shown in a tactical (single or several battle) situation – very very clearly – also has important strategic (nation to nation) implications.

What the war in Ukraine has shown those like me, who are watching every single day, (because half of history appears only briefly and then gets buried again) is that we are way way behind on missiles.

For my old leftie chums who can remember Reagan, one of the scariest things about his so called “Star Wars” program (which included plans like setting off nukes over the US and Canada, to knock down other nukes – thank you Edward Teller) was that if the program ever did work (which it absolutely never did, and still doesn’t, despite many wasted trillions) the ability to intercept almost all of your opponent’s missiles, while yours got through, would be a dangerous temptation toward a “First Strike” attack, where you would deliberately start a nuclear war, because with the surprise advantage and far better air defence missiles, your planners now think your side can outright WIN.

Now – to be clear – no you can not ever win a nuclear war. No one can. Also, entirely contrary to the Vampire – Hitler amalgam presented on the news, while Putin may not be a nice man, he isn’t anywhere like as irrational as our own leaders. He moves methodically, not impulsively, though he, like all politicians, also has to balance demands from the far more hot-headed.

(He’s got his own Lindsay Graham faction to deal with – Zhirinovsky, the all time OTT funniest – once threatened Russia would simply change gravity a bit, so the US would be submerged undersea!)

BUT – Biden is so deeply involved in screwing Russia, by using Ukraine as a weapon against them (supervising the preparation for this deliberately created war, was one of his main jobs as VP under Obama) that he is completely incapable of sticking to any red lines. He just keeps escalating, hard.

Here’s the thing. NATO countries do not have any supersonic re-entry vehicle warheads in service. Really – Hard Zero (and not even anything close to production, because despite security concerns, stock prices are a far bigger priority for weapons firms now, so we’d have teasing leaks aplenty).

Russia now has proven capabilities in this new realm, in every single class of missiles – and these aren’t test systems, they are being built in quantity right now. Yes, the Ukrainians can still shoot down the cheap old Soviet era stuff, sometimes, with the very newest Patriot missiles (about five million a shot, two shots per, on average), but they can’t even touch the new stuff. None of it. Not even once.

(And yes Ukrainian government officials are on the record about this, and our wildly shitty weapons)

It was Trump who tore up the intermediate ballistic missile treaty with Russia (which was the result of years of diplomatic effort) because the neocons he foolishly hired (just as demented as the Democratic ones) convinced him that they needed to compete with China in this class of weapons, and so America could no longer afford the old treaty, even though many still credit that (IRBM) treaty with preventing a likely nuclear world war three in Europe, during the long and incredibly wasteful cold war paranoia period.

Here’s the sum point, if you haven’t already assembled the pieces of it yourself.

Even with superiority in global reconnaissance, we can’t hit any of their best missiles, ever – but with their (best in the world, battle tested) Anti Air systems, they can knock down all of our lousy and most of our best missiles, most of the time – and they have an even newer system being battle tested now, which will go into production as soon as the inevitable kinks are worked out. Already generations behind in both air weapons and defence, and we’re about to be even behinder.

This means that the Russians, without having sought it, now have a realistic possibility of getting away with a Nuclear First Strike, and we have absolutely no way at all to stop them – except through the best tool of all (and the one we should have used to prevent the war in the first place) diplomacy.

Playing a game of Nuclear chicken just to win an election? Makes Jan Sixth look like a picnic.

You can actually hate two (or even dozens) of leaders and politicians at once, you know?

It is still allowed, I swear it! (And there are so many great reasons).

I can guarantee you one thing, if you say “But I have to support them doggedly, no matter how many times they betray and insult me, my community and my wishes, because something else scares me so much” (emotion over reason) you are announcing in advance they have your vote already for sure, even if they screw you (and the working class, and Ukraine) mercilessly and relentlessly. So you might as well just bend over now and start smiling, that’s the oar and boat you selected yourself.

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Finally, I want to change mass-denial channels once more and leave you with one of the most surprising and courageous interviews I have ever heard (much more recent). Again from a man who was brought inside the halls of power (because even though he was a leftist himself, he was one of the greatest experts in the world, on the subject of balance of payments).

I shared an interview about global economic issues which he did with this same extraordinary Polish citizen reporter a few weeks ago. (Also worth looking up), but when he did that one, he told her to ask him back to talk about what was happening in Gaza, because he had a unique insight.

And indeed he does.

Michael Hudson Talking with Anya K about the truth of the destruction of Gaza.

You will not ever sneer or mock the idea of the “Deep State” again

(without eternal damage to your soul)

And I need to add this here also, because no other voice should count more right now this instant, in this most peril-infused moment. (This one really does need a trigger warning though, you will cry).

Palestinian children thanking student protestors being hauled off to jail by police in America.

“We hear you and we love you”

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Just a few links today (I already asked you to watch lots, don’t mean to waste your whole day).

I do not talk about medications much (fear and fury to reason ratio, so wildly unfavourable), but I do follow the news there also. The makers of Ivermectin won their lawsuit against the FDA for defamation recently. If you laughed and said “horse paste” you were actually repeating propaganda which really translates into “Screw the poor of the world.” The drug is cheap and safe, and it really was shown effective against covid in multiple studies elsewhere, which did not replicate here.

The debate about why it seemed to work elsewhere (where they couldn’t afford our bespoke wunderwaffen) and not here, is also interesting – some believe that the ivermectin cured other illnesses that people didn’t know they had, which also improved their covid survival – possible.

Paxlovid on the other hand – well, follow the science!

First on the pricing of the stuff – Ten thousand percent markup – wow, am I in the wrong business!

And on how well it worked. Um, well, did it? (most expensive pill ever, so that part worked, whoops)

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At any rate, this local news story definitely caught my eye. The Canadian government set up a fund for vaccine injured people, and they have already had to add tens of millions more to the pot. Hmm.

CTV – National vaccine injury fund topped-up two years ahead of time (because seventy five million wasn’t enough). Good news though, if you got killed, the government will “Support” you with cash!

And for the record, I have two close friends who were hospitalized directly because of the shot. Please don’t ever call them anti-vaxxers again, that is an ignorant insult. If they hadn’t got the vaccine, they wouldn’t have been hurt, dummies – YOU ARE VICTIM BLAMING – STOP IT!

What made covid scary was that covid was scary. NOT RUMOURS SKEPTICISM OR DISOBEDIENCE. Surely we can see clearly by now that they want vast powers of censorship to cover their tracks, not improve our safety (and sure as hell not safeguard our right to free expression – remember that?).

Of course I must say the covid vaccines were completely safe effective and free – they prevented all transmission and disease, just like we were promised. That’s what you saw happen too, isn’t it? ;o)

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This clip – a member of the European parliament asking a Pfizer exec about transmission testing, for those who haven’t yet seen it, is already a genuine worldwide smash-hit comedy classic!

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I love the quote (and apologize for my inability to attribute it precisely, just now) “I go after the Democrats because they have a unique capacity to betray the workers”

But here is Harry Belafonte expressing the thing much better still, with the last thing MLK said to him. (And right to their suddenly ashen faces – just so damn WOW – see how corporate war state serving Obama looks next to a man of character – and then tell me again how much you miss mister “Murder Tuesdays”)