There comes a point where negotiation becomes surrender. Those actively undermining you will always demand more than their right. Those behind the Great Reset have been creating no-win situations for voters for decades to this exact end.
Over the summer Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Poland’s Mariusz Moraweicki led the opposition to the EU’s budget and COVID-19 relief package standing firm that funds not be tied to any internal political decisions member EU states make.
Both of these countries have incurred the wrath of German Chancellor Angela Merkel over things they do she doesn’t like, invoking Article 7 against Poland over changes made to its Supreme Court, for example.
So, this is nothing new. Neither is the way the EU conducts itself in negotiations.
For the past four years we’ve watched the EU put the United Kingdom through the worst kind of psychological torture over Brexit negotiations which have been anything but.
Fishy Brexit Talks
It’s been a calculated and cynical campaign coordinated with global media, foreign governments, paid political propagandists and intelligence agency operatives.
Through bullying, bad arguments, derision and shaming the relentless pressure of sociopaths and psychopaths wears most people down to the point where they negotiate away something that they didn’t have to.
They get you to agree to putting on a mask to make people feel better, accepting “sensible” gun legislation, voting for the guy who promises to only take 25% of your income versus that guy that wants 40%, etc.
In Brexit talks the EU tried to cleave off Northern Ireland as a cost to Brexit or maintain control over British law through the European Court of Justice.
Negotiation is a natural part of human interaction. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, as long as both sides approach the negotiation honestly.
But, in politics, especially when dealing with those of a particularly self-righteous leftism so common today — as as shorthand I’ll just call them Commies — negotiation for them is a tactic in a strategic war.
Because at the core of their argument is always the threat of violence at worst and emotional blackmail at best. And that forms the basis for a negotiation that truly isn’t one, but made to look like you have a say in the outcome.
But in reality you don’t. They want all that you have and are willing to take it from you one bite at a time. In fact, the most psychotic of them truly enjoy this process of consuming you slowly.
Brexit negotiations have supposedly come down to how much French fishermen will still be able to plunder British fishing waters even though the U.K. is supposedly a sovereign country. The latest offer from the clueless Michael Barnier is the Brits get tithed 15 to 18% of what the French steal.
BREAKING: the EU's chief negotiator Michel Barnier will propose that between 15pc and 18pc of the fish quota caught in UK waters by EU fleets will be restored to the UK under a free trade agreement, @rtenews understands
This is supposed to be seen as a breakthrough, according to the breathless regime media. But really it’s an insult. If the U.K. is sovereign and by international law these waters are theirs, then the EU has no rights to them unless the Brits grant them access.
But it seems on this small issue, which has now become symbolic of the entire Brexit process, the U.K. is still saying no. Negotiating even this small point is tantamount to surrender.
And they are right. Because agreeing to anything with these people is ultimately telling them what your price is.
Cigarettes and Blindfolds?
This is why, in all things political from the local to the trans-national, every small victory codified into some rule or same treaty is used as a springboard to the next victory and so on. There is no end to the war until one side achieves total domination or the other side, backed into a corner, stands its ground.
While I’ve used Brexit talks as the metaphor here, it’s not really apropos because Brexit, legally, already happened. In a little over a month there may be no formal relationship between the U.K. and the EU.
For Hungary and Poland, however, the situation is far more existential. And it is why they had to veto the 7-year EU budget and with it the COVID-19 relief package two weeks ago.
This piece of news is truly one of the most historic decisions made by any national leader in 2020. And if not for the U.S. presidential election fraud it may well have been the biggest story of the past month.
Neither Hungary nor Poland have the economic or political power of even the U.K. Together they aren’t close to the U.K. in global influence. And because of that have much more to lose in angering the EU gods in Brussels than the Brits ever did.
It’s why both Prime Ministers Orban and Moraweicki tread lightly and go along with so many terrible edicts that come from the EU — really from France and Germany — against their will.
Both men understand the difficult position their countries are in, trapped between no less than three major powers — the U.S., the EU and Russia. The balancing act between those three powers is, at best, a difficult one. At worst, it’s a complete nightmare.
So them standing tall here is truly a momentous event and most probably a harbinger of big changes coming to the EU. They’ll both be under the most intense pressure to cave. Expect activation of Soros-bots in Hungary.
The smartest thing either could do right now is to open up new rounds of talks with the Russians who just announced they are pretty much done with negotiating anything more with the EU.
That would give them both tremendous leverage with Brussels, by cutting down their list of ‘enemies’ from three to two, even if it means courting further sanctions from Merkel and her new Stasi.
Where the State, as an institution, is at its most pernicious is in providing a vector by which these people, when their arguments are rejected via persuasion, can force them into being through the ballot box or legislative fiat.
And since we all agreed to be governed by these rules, so the argument goes, then you have to submit to the outcome otherwise there is chaos. And that’s the rhetorical and psychological wedge tyrants use to separate you from your liberty and, most importantly, your money.
When in the Course of Human Events…
But what happens when the people in the negotiations lie, cheat, manipulate and bend the rules? What happens when negotiations at one point in time, say July at the European Council Summit, yield one outcome and the final legislation says the exact opposite?
If you are Viktor Orban and Mariusz Moraweiki you stand your ground and realize that anything less than outright rejection is full on surrender, no different than the argument over EU fishing access to UK waters.
This is what these men had to do. Because by tying vague EU standards of what constitutes violations of the ‘rule of law’ to disbursement of funds under the budget is far more than what Hungarians or Poles signed up for when they entered the EU in the first place.
It is precisely because of this creeping centralization of control to the unelected bureaucracy in Brussels that the Brits voted for Brexit, in effect, twice. The second time they did so even more emphatically than in 2016.
Hungary and Poland are very clear as to what their problems are and why they will not budge. Read their joint statement here. The most important part is the final paragraph however.
Our common proposal is to facilitate the speedy adoption of the financial package by establishing a two-track process. On the one hand, to limit the scope of any additional budgetary conditionality to the protection of the financial interests of the Union in accordance with the July conclusions of the European Council. On the other hand, to discuss in the European Council, whether a link between the Rule of Law and the financial interests of the Union should be established. If it is so decided, then the appropriate procedures foreseen by the Treaties, including convening an intergovernmental conference, should be considered in order to negotiate the necessary modification of the Treaties.
Note they use the word ‘negotiation.’ But they also tie the outcome of that negotiation to a modification of the Treaties signed by each member state. In effect, saying, we as heads of state will negotiate the best possible offer, but it will still be up to you, the people, to ratify this.
And if you turn us down, then so be it.
This, of course, is anathema to the World Economic Forum, Open Society Foundation and the rest of the burgeoning technocracy being built through the expansion of powers wielded by the European Commission, which this budget and relief package sought to greatly expand.
We all know how voters choose in Europe when it comes to the European Union and the vote is open, fair and the people well-informed. The EU would never survive such a vote on the amendment of the Treaties which form it.
Orban, especially, knows this. And he has taken on the leadership role in this fight. You know he is effective because they despise him, drawing him up as a cartoonishly evil cross between Snidely Whiplash and Vlad the Impaler.
And despite the massive amount of money Soros spends in Hungary to overthrow Orban it hasn’t worked. So, something will have to be done quickly to remove him from the game board or we’ve reach Peak EU.
Reset This!
Because the Great Reset is predicated on a few things occurring.
The EU having a budget and mechanism in place where the Commission has tax/spend and debt issuance capability.
This gives them the political bludgeon necessary to consolidate power in Brussels the same way income tax redistribution undermined Federalism in the U.S.
Extending the COVID-19 narrative to purposefully destroy what’s left of the middle class in Europe and the U.S.
Donald Trump being overthrown as President of the U.S. restoring power there to those loyal to the WEF.
All Populist leaders in Europe – like Matteo Salvini, Geert Wilders, Boris Johnson, Germany’s AfD, Austria’s Freedom Party — neutralized leaving Orban alone against Angela Merkel.
Brexit undermined to the point where either Boris Johnson’s government falls or the U.K. collapses into a failed police state indistinguishable from V for Vendetta.
Control not only over traditional television media but also the flow of information through the newer social media networks, limiting access to any countervailing narratives.
Most of these are in place.
Johnson’s personal weakness has squandered one of the greatest political victories of the past century in less than a year.
Trump’s chances of overturning a fraudulent election are at best a coin flip, and realistically, vanishingly small.
AfD has been neutralized in Germany. Italy’s electoral situation is mixed. Austria has been consolidated under a fake populist Sebastian Kurz.
Local police are openly despotic in enforcing the most draconian lockdown regulations.
But Orban and Moraweicki have stood their ground. Trump is standing his ground. David Frost in the U.K., not Boris Johnson, is standing his ground. Will their example inspire others to do the same?
It is tempting to focus only on the individuals involved in the budget crisis: to dismiss Orbán and Morawiecki as rogue despots with no public mandate for their actions and to assume that, if full and fair democratic processes were observed, both Poland and Hungary would favour policies similar to those found in Northern and Western Europe.
Yet such a view does not chime with the democratic elections held in the V4 region this year: Duda won the Polish presidency in an affirmation of socially conservative values, while elections in the Czech Republic and Slovakia saw very strong performances by anti-immigration parties. It also ignores the fact that the Visegrád Four – whose histories of war, occupation, and communist authoritarian rule in the twentieth century differ so greatly from their northern and western counterparts – have long pursued policies in opposition to some of the EU’s core tenets.
And what core tenets do the EU practice other than extortion, bribery, backroom dealing and arm-twisting, pray tell? Because on display right now all across Europe, from where I’m sitting, there ain’t a lotta tolerance, equality and compassion.
Oh, right, those are ‘mostly peaceful’ water cannons they’re using in Berlin.
Negotiating with Terrorists
And up until the past two weeks or so, decent, productive people have negotiated, they have bargained in the Kubler-Ross model of grief, rather than accept the need to openly confront the real problems in their governments.
The lesson of 2020 to this point has been that negotiation is no longer an option. There can be no settlement on fishing for the Brits, the rule-of-law for EU member states.
For Americans all negotiating has achieved is a terminally corrupt central government running sham elections with a compliant and hostile media telling them they are deplorable scum.
We are now expected to accept the results because they said so. Um, yeah, no.
The only way to accept the current reality is to believe the very people who you wouldn’t buy a used couch from no less lead your government are telling you the unvarnished truth.
Accepting any version of the narrative that this was a close election in the U.S. is the most pathetic form of negotiating your own surrender I’ve seen in quite a long time.
This is the unbridgeable gap of modern politics. It is the infinite gulf between surrender and negotiating with terrorists.
The realization is fast dawning on the people across the West that the terrorists don’t wear odd clothes, carry Ak-47s and speak in foreign tongues.
They are the ones telling you to let Grandma die of loneliness in a nursing home, forbidding you from buying a Turkey for Christmas that can feed more than 6 people and spitting on people for not wearing a mask in public.
Airlines operate in a market that's dictated by supply and demand: If more people want to fly a specific route than there are available seats, then tickets on those flights cost more.
That makes scheduling and predicting demand a huge part of maximizing revenue for airlines. There are, however, numerous factors that go into how airlines decide which flights to put on the schedule.
Every airport has only a certain number of gates, flight slots and runway capacity, limiting carriers' flexibility. That's why during times of high demand — like flights to Las Vegas during Super Bowl week — do not usually translate to airlines sending more planes to and from that destination.
Airlines generally do try to add capacity every year. That's become challenging as Boeing has struggled to keep up with demand for new airplanes. If you can't add airplanes, you can't grow your business. That's caused problems for the entire industry.
Every airline retires planes each year. In general, those get replaced by newer, better models that offer more efficiency and, in most cases, better passenger amenities.
If an airline can't get the planes it had hoped to add to its fleet in a given year, it can face capacity problems. And it's a problem that both Southwest Airlines (LUV) and United Airlines have addressed in a way that's inevitable but bad for passengers.
Southwest Airlines has not been able to get the airplanes it had hoped to.
Image source: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Southwest slows down its pilot hiring
In 2023, Southwest made a huge push to hire pilots. The airline lost thousands of pilots to retirement during the covid pandemic and it needed to replace them in order to build back to its 2019 capacity.
The airline successfully did that but will not continue that trend in 2024.
"Southwest plans to hire approximately 350 pilots this year, and no new-hire classes are scheduled after this month," Travel Weekly reported. "Last year, Southwest hired 1,916 pilots, according to pilot recruitment advisory firm Future & Active Pilot Advisors. The airline hired 1,140 pilots in 2022."
The slowdown in hiring directly relates to the airline expecting to grow capacity only in the low-single-digits percent in 2024.
"Moving into 2024, there is continued uncertainty around the timing of expected Boeing deliveries and the certification of the Max 7 aircraft. Our fleet plans remain nimble and currently differs from our contractual order book with Boeing," Southwest Airlines Chief Financial Officer Tammy Romo said during the airline's fourth-quarter-earnings call.
"We are planning for 79 aircraft deliveries this year and expect to retire roughly 45 700 and 4 800, resulting in a net expected increase of 30 aircraft this year."
That's very modest growth, which should not be enough of an increase in capacity to lower prices in any significant way.
United Airlines pauses pilot hiring
Boeing's (BA) struggles have had wide impact across the industry. United Airlines has also said it was going to pause hiring new pilots through the end of May.
United (UAL) Fight Operations Vice President Marc Champion explained the situation in a memo to the airline's staff.
"As you know, United has hundreds of new planes on order, and while we remain on path to be the fastest-growing airline in the industry, we just won't grow as fast as we thought we would in 2024 due to continued delays at Boeing," he said.
"For example, we had contractual deliveries for 80 Max 10s this year alone, but those aircraft aren't even certified yet, and it's impossible to know when they will arrive."
That's another blow to consumers hoping that multiple major carriers would grow capacity, putting pressure on fares. Until Boeing can get back on track, it's unlikely that competition between the large airlines will lead to lower fares.
In fact, it's possible that consumer demand will grow more than airline capacity which could push prices higher.
Simple blood test could predict risk of long-term COVID-19 lung problems
UVA Health researchers have discovered a potential way to predict which patients with severe COVID-19 are likely to recover well and which are likely to…
UVA Health researchers have discovered a potential way to predict which patients with severe COVID-19 are likely to recover well and which are likely to suffer “long-haul” lung problems. That finding could help doctors better personalize treatments for individual patients.
Credit: UVA Health
UVA Health researchers have discovered a potential way to predict which patients with severe COVID-19 are likely to recover well and which are likely to suffer “long-haul” lung problems. That finding could help doctors better personalize treatments for individual patients.
UVA’s new research also alleviates concerns that severe COVID-19 could trigger relentless, ongoing lung scarring akin to the chronic lung disease known as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, the researchers report. That type of continuing lung damage would mean that patients’ ability to breathe would continue to worsen over time.
“We are excited to find that people with long-haul COVID have an immune system that is totally different from people who have lung scarring that doesn’t stop,” said researcher Catherine A. Bonham, MD, a pulmonary and critical care expert who serves as scientific director of UVA Health’s Interstitial Lung Disease Program. “This offers hope that even patients with the worst COVID do not have progressive scarring of the lung that leads to death.”
Long-Haul COVID-19
Up to 30% of patients hospitalized with severe COVID-19 continue to suffer persistent symptoms months after recovering from the virus. Many of these patients develop lung scarring – some early on in their hospitalization, and others within six months of their initial illness, prior research has found. Bonham and her collaborators wanted to better understand why this scarring occurs, to determine if it is similar to progressive pulmonary fibrosis and to see if there is a way to identify patients at risk.
To do this, the researchers followed 16 UVA Health patients who had survived severe COVID-19. Fourteen had been hospitalized and placed on a ventilator. All continued to have trouble breathing and suffered fatigue and abnormal lung function at their first outpatient checkup.
After six months, the researchers found that the patients could be divided into two groups: One group’s lung health improved, prompting the researchers to label them “early resolvers,” while the other group, dubbed “late resolvers,” continued to suffer lung problems and pulmonary fibrosis.
Looking at blood samples taken before the patients’ recovery began to diverge, the UVA team found that the late resolvers had significantly fewer immune cells known as monocytes circulating in their blood. These white blood cells play a critical role in our ability to fend off disease, and the cells were abnormally depleted in patients who continued to suffer lung problems compared both to those who recovered and healthy control subjects.
Further, the decrease in monocytes correlated with the severity of the patients’ ongoing symptoms. That suggests that doctors may be able to use a simple blood test to identify patients likely to become long-haulers — and to improve their care.
“About half of the patients we examined still had lingering, bothersome symptoms and abnormal tests after six months,” Bonham said. “We were able to detect differences in their blood from the first visit, with fewer blood monocytes mapping to lower lung function.”
The researchers also wanted to determine if severe COVID-19 could cause progressive lung scarring as in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. They found that the two conditions had very different effects on immune cells, suggesting that even when the symptoms were similar, the underlying causes were very different. This held true even in patients with the most persistent long-haul COVID-19 symptoms. “Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis is progressive and kills patients within three to five years,” Bonham said. “It was a relief to see that all our COVID patients, even those with long-haul symptoms, were not similar.”
Because of the small numbers of participants in UVA’s study, and because they were mostly male (for easier comparison with IPF, a disease that strikes mostly men), the researchers say larger, multi-center studies are needed to bear out the findings. But they are hopeful that their new discovery will provide doctors a useful tool to identify COVID-19 patients at risk for long-haul lung problems and help guide them to recovery.
“We are only beginning to understand the biology of how the immune system impacts pulmonary fibrosis,” Bonham said. “My team and I were humbled and grateful to work with the outstanding patients who made this study possible.”
Findings Published
The researchers have published their findings in the scientific journal Frontiers in Immunology. The research team consisted of Grace C. Bingham, Lyndsey M. Muehling, Chaofan Li, Yong Huang, Shwu-Fan Ma, Daniel Abebayehu, Imre Noth, Jie Sun, Judith A. Woodfolk, Thomas H. Barker and Bonham. Noth disclosed that he has received personal fees from Boehringer Ingelheim, Genentech and Confo unrelated to the research project. In addition, he has a patent pending related to idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Bonham and all other members of the research team had no financial conflicts to disclose.
The UVA research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, grants R21 AI160334 and U01 AI125056; NIH’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, grants 5K23HL143135-04 and UG3HL145266; UVA’s Engineering in Medicine Seed Fund; the UVA Global Infectious Diseases Institute’s COVID-19 Rapid Response; a UVA Robert R. Wagner Fellowship; and a Sture G. Olsson Fellowship in Engineering.
To keep up with the latest medical research news from UVA, subscribe to the Making of Medicine blog at http://makingofmedicine.virginia.edu.
After having moved from Canada to the United States, partly to be wealthier and partly to be freer (those two are connected, by the way), I was shocked,…
After having moved from Canada to the United States, partly to be wealthier and partly to be freer (those two are connected, by the way), I was shocked, in March 2020, when President Trump and most US governors imposed heavy restrictions on people’s freedom. The purpose, said Trump and his COVID-19 advisers, was to “flatten the curve”: shut down people’s mobility for two weeks so that hospitals could catch up with the expected demand from COVID patients. In her book Silent Invasion, Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, admitted that she was scrambling during those two weeks to come up with a reason to extend the lockdowns for much longer. As she put it, “I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them.” In short, she chose the goal and then tried to find the data to justify the goal. This, by the way, was from someone who, along with her task force colleague Dr. Anthony Fauci, kept talking about the importance of the scientific method. By the end of April 2020, the term “flatten the curve” had all but disappeared from public discussion.
Now that we are four years past that awful time, it makes sense to look back and see whether those heavy restrictions on the lives of people of all ages made sense. I’ll save you the suspense. They didn’t. The damage to the economy was huge. Remember that “the economy” is not a term used to describe a big machine; it’s a shorthand for the trillions of interactions among hundreds of millions of people. The lockdowns and the subsequent federal spending ballooned the budget deficit and consequent federal debt. The effect on children’s learning, not just in school but outside of school, was huge. These effects will be with us for a long time. It’s not as if there wasn’t another way to go. The people who came up with the idea of lockdowns did so on the basis of abstract models that had not been tested. They ignored a model of human behavior, which I’ll call Hayekian, that is tested every day.
That wasn’t the only uncertainty. My daughter Karen lived in San Francisco and made her living teaching Pilates. San Francisco mayor London Breed shut down all the gyms, and so there went my daughter’s business. (The good news was that she quickly got online and shifted many of her clients to virtual Pilates. But that’s another story.) We tried to see her every six weeks or so, whether that meant our driving up to San Fran or her driving down to Monterey. But were we allowed to drive to see her? In that first month and a half, we simply didn’t know.
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