This is the alt-news thread

[UnseenParticipant]

What is going on in the world of alt-news? What is alt-news? Alt-news is where the independent journalists roam. The ones who don’t receive a paycheck from “the newspaper of record,” the three broadcast networks, the cable news networks, the major news services, etc., and who don’t have a desk jockey upstairs telling them what they can and can’t say.

So, the first job is to convince you that you can’t trust all those major sources starting with the one that many would put forward as the most trustworthy news source in the world, the British Broadcasting Corporation. So let’s consider how unbiased their “fact checking” is:

[UnseenParticipant]

Lab leak or wet market. Where did Covid come from? The major media parrot Fauci and largely ignore learned contrarians.

[UnseenParticipant]

Dr Robert Redfield Jr. served as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry from 2018 to 2021. He is an expert on a par with Dr. Anthony Fauci who is fairly certain that Covid-19 came out of a lab doing gain of function research.

While the mainstream media may have briefly covered the testimony of Dr. Redfield, they soon reverted to the Fauci position, calling anything contradicting him “misinformation.” So now, apparently, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry is a misinformer for having and expressing an opinion contrary to Dr. Fauci’s.

Democracy, I was taught, thrives on debate. During the last four or five years (the Covid years) it seems like undermining debate is more important than promoting it, when misinformation may be involved.

I think it’s clear by now that the U.S. was funding something describable as gain of function research in various labs outside the U.S. including China and Ukraine. This raises the question of whether such research should even be done. Will doing so prepare us for the next great pandemic or actually CAUSE it?

• This reply was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by  Unseen.

[UnseenParticipant]

Whether or not you think RFK Jr is a nut job, if you invite him in for an interview, do an actual interview. Here is a case of a respected journalist, Krystal Ball (her real name), tossing journalistic principles out the window to do a hit job on her interviewee (if you can call him that in this case). In this video, Jimmy Dore lays it all out for us:

Since then, it’s been pointed out that Breaking Points is endorsing Marianne Williamson, the woo-peddler, for President in 2024, and so this now appears as an attempt to keep RFK Jr from moving up the rankings above Williamson.

BTW, this disastrous interview caused many to unsubscribe from Breaking Points. It’s fun to watch Saager, who I’m sure realizes that his partner is doing the unthinkable.

[UnseenParticipant]

Epstein buddy Bill Gates and Caribbean children. What could go wrong?

[UnseenParticipant]

Government spending (those checks we all got) and supply chain issues played a role in inflation, but why don’t we hear more in the mainstream media (who make their money from advertising) about the role played by the major corporations?

Sure, maybe their costs went up due to Covid, and some surely showed restraint, but many took advantage of the situation to raise prices either more than they needed to or even when they really didn’t need to at all, using Covid as a handy excuse.

Relatively minor sources like Bloomberg admitted it but your most widely popular sources buried it, probably worried about their bottom line.

[onyangomakagutuParticipant]

First, two disclaimers. I am not an economist and I am ignorant of the happenings in the US of A. But I know two things, in a free market economy, business are price takers unless where they are monopolies where they dictate both price and output. They exist to make profit. And when there is more cash in the economy, prices will go up. Now those whose salaries or pensions are fixed would suffer greatly from rising prices.

Pandemics interfere with supply chains. SO you have more cash than goods demanded and prices definitely rise.

My take is this guy is saying things a first year macroeconomics student would know. There is nothing to see here, unfortunately.

[UnseenParticipant]

onyangomakagutu wrote:

First, two disclaimers. I am not an economist and I am ignorant of the happenings in the US of A. But I know two things, in a free market economy, business are price takers unless where they are monopolies where they dictate both price and output. They exist to make profit. And when there is more cash in the economy, prices will go up. Now those whose salaries or pensions are fixed would suffer greatly from rising prices. Pandemics interfere with supply chains. SO you have more cash than goods demanded and prices definitely rise. My take is this guy is saying things a first year macroeconomics student would know. There is nothing to see here, unfortunately.

I completely understand what you are saying. I knew it going in. I believe he knows that, too. What he’s pointing out is the immorality of taking advantage of a bad situation. Simply because one can do something, it doesn’t follow that one must do something.

If I run upon a man on the sidewalk and his wallet has fallen out of his pocket and I can see that it contains a fair number of high-denomination bills. Let’s add that I have a small debt problem (if thugs are after me to pay my debt, that takes the situation to another level).

I can do several things. I can call Emergency Services to get an ambulance and follow their i instructions for keeping him alive in the meantime, also seeing that no one takes his wallet and/or money.

I can take his wallet and money, keep the money and toss the wallet, and call Emergency Services and follow their instructions for keeping him alive.

I can grab the wallet and money and leave him there maybe hoping her survives but not really caring much.

So, the question addressed in the post above (“Media finally admits…”) is the ethical one.

Now apply it to businesses finding a vulnerable public in the midst of the pandemic. You seem to be saying that when it comes to a business in the free market, anything goes.

Is that really the hill you want to make your last stand on?

[UnseenParticipant]

Is a unified homogenous global approach dictated by the World Health Organization a good thing? Many countries are considering signing on to a WHO treaty that would do just that.

The WHO is dominated by China, Big Pharma, and private megadonors like The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It is unelected and thus uncontrollable. It subsumes to itself what the truth is regarding pandemic disease, claiming the role of sole arbiter of what is true and what is “misinformation,” allowing them to suppress even highly-qualified scientific debate in the interest of providing a unified front, even if it is wrong. And the WHO has been wrong about many things.

To me, it seems that should this project succeed and all or almost all of the planet agrees to all respond the same way, that’s great if the response is correct. However, imagine the dimensions of the disaster should its chosen response fail and actually make things worse!

Would it not be better for each country to decide what it feels would work best for its people, if only by giving feedback on what’s working and what is not?

 

 

[onyangomakagutuParticipant]

Is that really the hill you want to make your last stand on?

Well, corporations have been doing this all along. Not that it is the right thing to do.

Maybe the Fed should have intervened in the market to control prices because i don’t see how individual businesses operating in a free market economy would not respond to inflation pressures in the market.

[UnseenParticipant]

onyangomakagutu wrote:

Is that really the hill you want to make your last stand on?

Well, corporations have been doing this all along. Not that it is the right thing to do. Maybe the Fed should have intervened in the market to control prices because i don’t see how individual businesses operating in a free market economy would not respond to inflation pressures in the market.

The point being made wasn’t that businesses raised prices because market forces forced them to but that some businesses raised prices behind a false claim or false impression that they had to. The operative descriptor being “false.”

Business A watches business B raise prices because their supplier is experiencing problems acquiring inventory of a key ingredient. A uses a different supplier or a different ingredient and could hold the line on prices. Not only would this benefit the consumer because the price of their product would not go up, but it would give them a leg up on their competitor. But the piece above says that we now know that in many cases A saw B raise prices and decided to match the increase hiding behind imaginary supply line issues.

I suppose some would say “All’s fair in love and business” but is it fair when they are hiding behind a falsehood?

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Unseen and onyangomakagutu,

Kyle Kulinski has it all wrong. Not only was there stimulus paid for by inflating the currency via The Federal Reserve, but the Federal Government also subsidized companies payrolls and added massive new benefits of food and Over-The-Counter drugs to existing Medicare/Medicaid benefits. Also, the Biden Administration used COVID-19 as a pretext to ramp up spending in all kinds of Federal and State programs totally unrelated to the pandemic. All this taken together created the overall rise in prices.

Also, the so-called “price gouger” business is the unsung hero in any crisis or disaster because “price gouging” is what keeps goods on the shelf and encourages consumers to conserve and encourages manufacturers to ramp up production and competition and bring prices and supplies back to their previous level. Wage and price controls encourage stampedes to buy and shortages which hurt everyone.

[TheEncogitationerParticipant]

Unseen,

The point being made wasn’t that businesses raised prices because market forces forced them to but that some businesses raised prices behind a false claim or false impression that they had to. The operative descriptor being “false.”

Business A watches business B raise prices because their supplier is experiencing problems acquiring inventory of a key ingredient. A uses a different supplier or a different ingredient and could hold the line on prices. Not only would this benefit the consumer because the price of their product would not go up, but it would give them a leg up on their competitor. But the piece above says that we now know that in many cases A saw B raise prices and decided to match the increase hiding behind imaginary supply line issues.

I suppose some would say “All’s fair in love and business” but is it fair when they are hiding behind a falsehood?

So why don’t all prices and all wages go up forever?

[UnseenParticipant]

TheEncogitationer wrote:

Unseen,

The point being made wasn’t that businesses raised prices because market forces forced them to but that some businesses raised prices behind a false claim or false impression that they had to. The operative descriptor being “false.” Business A watches business B raise prices because their supplier is experiencing problems acquiring inventory of a key ingredient. A uses a different supplier or a different ingredient and could hold the line on prices. Not only would this benefit the consumer because the price of their product would not go up, but it would give them a leg up on their competitor. But the piece above says that we now know that in many cases A saw B raise prices and decided to match the increase hiding behind imaginary supply line issues. I suppose some would say “All’s fair in love and business” but is it fair when they are hiding behind a falsehood?

What does that have to do with price gouging during the Covid crisis?

 

[UnseenParticipant]

Little House on the Prairie. Charming stories of pioneering America’s prairielands or Ayn Randesque libertarian propaganda?

[Author]

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