Year 2021 Quotes

Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.

Sometimes a year has been so disastrous and so terrible that entering a new year will automatically mean entering a wonderful year!

Each new year is another chance to get love right.

December is... by Stewart Stafford December is all that we give, And whatever we receive, It is those who surround us, And those who have taken leave. December is celebrating light, Where only darkness dwells, It is the ripping of wrapping paper, And tempting culinary smells. December is letting go, Of all the past year's fails, And starting anew in January, As time again chases its tail. © Stewart Stafford, 2021. All rights reserved.

On January 6th, America openly and decisively turned in the direction of fascism with the censorship of President Trump’s Twitter account.

Let your new energy, new thoughts, new attitude, new routine & new outlook make this time most sacred, memorable & beautiful for you & others. Let you also begin to see greater in everything & believe in unexplainable possibilities. Let you grow in ways which you never knew was possible. Darling listen – Don’t let the magic in the air get swallowed up by someone’s nonsensical thoughts, words, comments & by any kind of pressure in the air. I wish & pray that these last few days of this year be the best part of this year for you & everyone! Stay Healthy, Happy & Meaningful! Blessings!

All I ask the new year for is to fall silently into the spaces that the last one left empty. Filling them with a hope that tells me gently at dawn that my simple love can cure even the most extraordinary heart and that my broken past is enough for each tomorrow that follows. Maybe it will even remind me that all the mistakes I will collect over the next year are not as bad as the chances I missed in the last one.

Oh, my friends, the first wish I have for the new year is to change the worn-out greeting: 'happy new year'. There is no happiness, only fleeting moments of joy. There is nothing new under the sun, only new ways of looking at the same eternal challenges and unresolved questions. There is no point in wishing for a perfect health in a profoundly sick world – the view is much clearer and more interesting when living on the edge. And so, I wish you all endurance as we go through another difficult year. I wish you courage to snatch a few more days (or moments) of joy as another year slips through the fingers of Time. I wish you much strength to maintain your equilibrium as we face new earthquakes of uncertainty in the coming year. Most of all, I wish we never give up on the possibility of doing things otherwise. And, of course, I wish you much love.

To the man who was hustling to sell facemasks for years before Covid, living rough on the streets and warning us of the nightmare to come. May your cardboard doomsday signs be framed and celebrated. May we always heed your warnings in future, no matter if the next plague requires wearing glittering buttplugs 24/7 to ward off the Coronass virus of 2021. May we never take you and your wild ramblings for granted again. We will buy your buttplugs, good sir. Just name your price.

In 2023, as I write this, librarians in America are on the front lines of the culture war. Censorship is at an all-time high. According to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, “a record 2,571 unique titles were targeted for censorship in 2022, a 38% increase from the 1,858 unique titles targeted for censorship in 2021.” This is the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling data about censorship in libraries more than twenty years ago.

2021—will it be a good year, or will it be just another two consecutive numbers?

Don't drag your feet in 2022. Drag a corpse instead. It's the only way to kill off 2021.

Remember: 2022 isn't 2021

The attacks on the US capitol on January 6th, 2021 will have ripple effects for years to come. We’re no longer in the September 11th era. We’re now in the January 6th era.

2021: Happy New Year! Me: ... 2021: What's wrong? Me: I'm not sure I'm going to be happy this year. 2021: You will. Me:

2021 is a New Year a chance to catch up on what may have slipped through our hands. A time to achieve what we have next on our list. Go and make your reality, go and make 2021 great!

A report by the IHME, released in late October 2020, estimated that 130k lives could be saved in the United States between the fall of that year and spring 2021 if people universally wore masks.

If you look at African American newspapers from the very early 20th century, there is an ongoing discussion about the problems with policing. Literally nonstop 100 plus year problem... (4/12/2021 on Twitter)

A person who gets lost in a dark forest waits with great hopes that the sun comes and saves him! And a person who gets lost in the gloomy days of a dark year also waits with great hopes that the New Year comes and saves him!

But many generations had passed since anyone had had a use for a set of seven-figure logarithms, an atlas of the world, and the score of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony printed, according to the flyleaf, by H. K. Chu & Sons at the City of Pekin in the year AD 2021.

New years will keep coming in our lives as long as we live, but how do we manage to live with prosperity in that every new year and help others around us do the same. Isn’t that what we should plan and celebrate? So, let’s celebrate the inception of improved us, not the new year.

behind every cop who murders a 13-year-old child, there is a city lawyer working to keep the video secret, a prosecutor lying about it in court, a mayor giving cops more money and weapons, and a professor with a consulting firm deciding which "reform" will make the most money. (4/15/2021 on Twitter)

He would pursue vengeance against his enemies. He would politicize the courts, the Justice Department, and the military. He would challenge allies and seek common cause with autocrats. We know he would do these things because those are exactly the things that he did and said for all four years of his first term in the presidency. Even if

It is little wonder that about two-fifths of Republicans (in a poll this year) expressed an openness to political violence, under certain circumstances. People in this group are not being stigmatized. They have the effective, endorsement of a former president and likely GOP presidential nominee in 2024. Michael Gerson in the Washington Post, September 27, 2021

And I know I should forget what happened, but let me tell you, friend, though years have passed, there are nights, like this one, when I hear the deer’s mouths closing on the flowers, and I see you bending over me, again, and it’s winter, the candle lit, the rain just starting to fall. — Danusha Laméris, from “Break,” The American Poetry Review (vol. 50, no. 1, January/February 2021)

Public R&D expenditures are already at their lowest level as a share of the economy in forty years, and they are slated to fall to their lowest level—0.5 percent of GDP in 2021—since before the great mobilization of science during World War II.85 If they were instead increased in line with the size of the economy, according to one cautious calculation, the economy would generate more than a half trillion dollars in additional income over the next nine years.86

23 Emotions people feel, but can’t explain 1.    Sonder: The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own. 2.    Opia: The ambiguous intensity of Looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable. 3.    Monachopsis: The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place. 4.    Énouement: The bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self. 5.    Vellichor: The strange wistfulness of used bookshops. 6.    Rubatosis: The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat. 7.    Kenopsia: The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet. 8.    Mauerbauertraurigkeit: The inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like. 9.    Jouska: A hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head. 10.    Chrysalism: The amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm. 11.    Vemödalen: The frustration of photographic something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist. 12.    Anecdoche: A conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening 13.    Ellipsism: A sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out. 14.    Kuebiko: A state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence. 15.    Lachesism: The desire to be struck by disaster – to survive a plane crash, or to lose everything in a fire. 16.    Exulansis: The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it. 17.    Adronitis: Frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone. 18.    Rückkehrunruhe: The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness. 19.    Nodus Tollens: The realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore. 20.    Onism: The frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time. 21.    Liberosis: The desire to care less about things. 22.    Altschmerz: Weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had – the same boring flaws and anxieties that you’ve been gnawing on for years. 23.    Occhiolism: The awareness of the smallness of your perspective. John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (Simon & Schuster, November 16, 2021)

The mission that God has given us is a highly relational mission. Jesus said, "As the Father has sent me, I am sending you" John 20:21. Jesus came into this world, lived in obscurity for 30 years and then spent three years relationally investing in twelve men, whose charge was to do the same thing by relationally investing in others. This strategy has worked for 2000 years each of us has been touched by someone reaching out to and investing in us relationally, thus advancing the gospel and the mission of God.

Please warn every person not to go near top up vaccines. There is absolutely no need for them…If someone wished to harm or kill a significant proportion of the world’s population over the next few years, the systems being put in place right now will enable it. It’s my considered view that it is entirely possible that this will be used for massive-scale depopulation. Pfizer’s former Vice President and Chief Scientist for Allergy and Respiratory Dr. Michael Yeadon in his 2021 address to America’s Frontline Doctors

As the world watched, Tony Fauci dictated a series of policies that resulted in by far the most deaths, and one of the highest percentage COVID-19 body counts of any nation on the planet. Only relentless propaganda and wall-to-wall censorship could conceal his disastrous mismanagement during COVID-19’s first year. The US, with 4 percent of the world’s population, suffered 14.5 percent of total COVID deaths. By September 30, 2021, mortality rates in the US had climbed to 2,107/1,000,000, compared to 139/1,000,000 in Japan.

They say that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Since Americans spent centuries failing to learn from history, we get to repeat it all at once. The year is 2021 and we are living through simultaneous revivals of the worst of the American past: the Civil War, the Spanish Flu, the white mob violence of the 1919 Red Summer, the extreme wealth disparity of the Gilded Age, the fascist movements of the 1930s and 1940s, the Jim Crow era of voter suppression, the riots of the 1960s, the corruption of Watergate, the cover-ups of Iran-Contra.

However, the essay on Newspeak is written in standard English, in the third person, and in the past tense, which can only mean that the regime has fallen, and that language and individuality have survived. For whoever has written the essay on Newspeak, the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is over. Thus, it’s my view that Orwell had much more faith in the resilience of the human spirit than he’s usually been given credit for. Orwell became a direct model for me much later in my life—in the real 1984, the year in which I began writing a somewhat different dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale.

After years of experience, Trump knew how to sell a big lie. He had done it many times before. As a real estate developer, he had claimed his buildings were taller than they were. As a reality television star, he had made up conflicts between contestants to juice his ratings. As a political provocateur, he had claimed without a lick of proof that the nation’s first Black president was secretly born in Africa. The trick with conspiracy theories, he had demonstrated, was repetition and conviction. “You say something enough times,” he once told Chris Christie’s wife, “and it becomes true.

The conservative policies and principles that had once defined what it meant to be a Republican were being replaced by complete allegiance to one man—who wasn’t actually a conservative. One of the clearest manifestations of this was the lack of any platform for the Republican Party in 2020. In place of the extensive policy document that each party normally adopts every four years, the Republican Party adopted a resolution that simply affirmed, “The Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.” I talked to Condoleezza Rice in the spring of 2021. I had served as deputy assistant secretary of state for the Near East when Condi was secretary of state, and I’d known her since she served on the National Security Council staff during George H. W. Bush’s administration. She was an expert on the Soviet Union and a student of history. We discussed the cult of personality that had captured our party. This was something America had never experienced before. I asked Condi if she could think of any historic examples of countries successfully throwing off cults of personality. “Not without great violence and upheaval,” she said.

Many aspects of how the Chinese political class manages its economy are antithetical to the Western values of democracy and free markets. But this stance has not put off foreign investors, who are attracted to the government’s willingness to prioritize physical infrastructure, political security, and stability over the health of the population, transparency in decision making, and transparency in the rule of law (if not necessarily the system of governance). In essence, the pursuit of economic growth overrides any views on the political system they invest in. Currently China’s political class has a strategy to evolve from an investment-led exporting economy to one more in line with Western economies, relying on domestic consumption. The transition to this new economic equilibrium will not be linear. China will likely experience significant economic volatility and market gyrations as the structure of its economy shifts. There is also mounting skepticism about China’s ability to manage its debt levels, and the country’s lack of individual political freedoms will continue to hamper its growth prospects. But Chinese policymakers will, no doubt, be focused on continuing to show economic progress in advance of two target dates: 2021—one hundred years after the formation of the Communist Party—and 2049, one hundred years after the formation of the People’s Republic of China.

In fact, the more you look, the more connections you find between Canada geese and people. Our population has also increased dramatically in the past several decades—there were just over two billion people on Earth in 1935, when live goose decoys were made illegal in the U.S. In 2021, there are more than seven billion people. Like humans, Canada geese usually mate for life, although sometimes unhappily. Like us, the success of their species has affected their habitats: A single Canada goose can produce up to one hundred pounds of excrement per year, which has led to unsafe E. coli levels in lakes and ponds where they gather. And like us, geese have few natural predators. If they die by violence, it is almost always human violence. Just like us.

In her book The Government-Citizen Disconnect, the political scientist Suzanne Mettler reports that 96 percent of American adults have relied on a major government program at some point in their lives. Rich, middle-class, and poor families depend on different kinds of programs, but the average rich and middle-class family draws on the same number of government benefits as the average poor family. Student loans look like they were issued from a bank, but the only reason banks hand out money to eighteen-year-olds with no jobs, no credit, and no collateral is because the federal government guarantees the loans and pays half their interest. Financial advisers at Edward Jones or Prudential can help you sign up for 529 college savings plans, but those plans' generous tax benefits will cost the federal government an estimated $28.5 billion between 2017 and 2026. For most Americans under the age of sixty-five, health insurance appears to come from their jobs, but supporting this arrangement is one of the single largest tax breaks issued by the federal government, one that exempts the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance from taxable incomes. In 2022, this benefit is estimated to have cost the government $316 billion for those under sixty-five. By 2032, its price tag is projected to exceed $6oo billion. Almost half of all Americans receive government-subsidized health benefits through their employers, and over a third are enrolled in government-subsidized retirement benefits. These participation rates, driven primarily by rich and middle-class Americans, far exceed those of even the largest programs directed at low income families, such as food stamps (14 percent of Americans) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (19 percent). Altogether, the United States spent $1.8 trillion on tax breaks in 2021. That amount exceeded total spending on law enforcement, education, housing, healthcare, diplomacy, and everything else that makes up our discretionary budget. Roughly half the benefits of the thirteen largest individual tax breaks accrue to the richest families, those with incomes that put them in the top 20 percent. The top I percent of income earners take home more than all middle-class families and double that of families in the bottom 20 percent. I can't tell you how many times someone has informed me that we should reduce military spending and redirect the savings to the poor. When this suggestion is made in a public venue, it always garners applause. I've met far fewer people who have suggested we boost aid to the poor by reducing tax breaks that mostly benefit the upper class, even though we spend over twice as much on them as on the military and national defense.

You Are What You Eat Take food for example. We all assume that our craving or disgust is due to something about the food itself - as opposed to being an often arbitrary response preprogrammed by our culture. We understand that Australians prefer cricket to baseball, or that the French somehow find Gerard Depardieu sexy, but how hungry would you have to be before you would consider plucking a moth from the night air and popping it, frantic and dusty, into your mouth? Flap, crunch, ooze. You could wash it down with some saliva beer.How does a plate of sheep brain's sound? Broiled puppy with gravy? May we interest you in pig ears or shrimp heads? Perhaps a deep-fried songbird that you chew up, bones, beak, and all? A game of cricket on a field of grass is one thing, but pan-fried crickets over lemongrass? That's revolting. Or is it? If lamb chops are fine, what makes lamb brains horrible? A pig's shoulder, haunch, and belly are damn fine eatin', but the ears, snout, and feet are gross? How is lobster so different from grasshopper? Who distinguishes delectable from disgusting, and what's their rationale? And what about all the expectations? Grind up those leftover pig parts, stuff 'em in an intestine, and you've got yourself respectable sausage or hot dogs. You may think bacon and eggs just go together, like French fries and ketchup or salt and pepper. But the combination of bacon and eggs for breakfast was dreamed up about a hundred years aqo by an advertising hired to sell more bacon, and the Dutch eat their fries with mayonnaise, not ketchup. Think it's rational to be grossed out by eating bugs? Think again. A hundred grams of dehydrated cricket contains 1,550 milligrams of iron, 340 milligrams of calcium, and 25 milligrams of zinc - three minerals often missing in the diets of the chronic poor. Insects are richer in minerals and healthy fats than beef or pork. Freaked out by the exoskeleton, antennae, and the way too many legs? Then stick to the Turf and forget the Surf because shrimps, crabs, and lobsters are all anthropods, just like grasshoppers. And they eat the nastiest of what sinks to the bottom of the ocean, so don't talk about bugs' disgusting diets. Anyway, you may have bug parts stuck between your teeth right now. The Food and Drug Administration tells its inspectors to ignore insect parts in black pepper unless they find more than 475 of them per 50 grams, on average. A fact sheet from Ohio State University estimates that Americans unknowingly eat an average of between one and two pounds of insects per year. An Italian professor recently published Ecological Implications of Mini-livestock: Potential of Insects, Rodents, Frogs and Snails. (Minicowpokes sold separately.) Writing in Slate.com, William Saletan tells us about a company by the name of Sunrise Land Shrimp. The company's logo: "Mmm. That's good Land Shrimp!" Three guesses what Land Shrimp is. (20-21)

Here are the main facts:1 Between 1980 and 2016, average national income per adult, expressed in 2016 euros, rose from 25,000 euros to just over 33,000 euros, or a rise of approximately 30%. At the same time, the average wealth held derived from property per adult doubled, rising from 90,000 to 190,000 euros. Yet more striking: the wealth of the richest 1%, 70% of which is in financial assets, rose from 1.4 to 4.5 million euros, or increased more than threefold. As to the 0.1% of the wealthiest, 90% of whose wealth is held in financial assets, and who will be the main beneficiaries of the abolition of the wealth tax, their fortunes rose from 4 to 20 million euros, that is, they increased fivefold. In other words, the biggest fortunes in financial assets rose even more rapidly than property assets, whereas the opposite should have been the case if the hypothesis of a fiscal flight were true. Moreover, this type of finding is a characteristic in the ranking of fortunes, in France as in all countries. According to Forbes, the top world fortunes, which are almost exclusively held in financial assets—have risen at a rate of 6% to 7% per year (on top of inflation) since the 1980s, or 3–4 times more rapidly than growth in GDP and of world per capita wealth.

In the face of the calamity, the Modi government froze. In the seven months from March to September 2020, Modi made 82 public appearances—physical as well as virtual. In the next four months, he made 111 such appearances. From February to 25 April 2021, he clocked 92 public appearances. From 25 April, after he called off the Kumbh and his Bengal rallies, Modi disappeared. He made no public appearance for 20 days.147 The prime minister of India fled the field when his people needed the government most. Through all of April and much of May, upper class Indians flooded Twitter with calls for help to find hospital beds, oxygen cylinders, drugs like Remdesivir and ventilators.148 The Union did not think to set up a helpline to guide those who needed this help. Into this space strode the youth Congress leader B.V. Srinivas (@srinivasiyc) who, with a team of volunteers, began to help people reaching out for aid on Twitter. He was so effective in the absence of the State and any government presence that even the embassies of New Zealand and the Philippines contacted him for help when staffers fell ill with Covid.149 Focussed on the government’s image, Jaishankar tweeted: ‘This was an unsolicited supply as they had no Covid cases. Clearly for cheap publicity by you know who. Giving away cylinders like this when there are people in desperate need of oxygen is simply appalling.’ The New Zealand embassy staffer who had received oxygen from Srinivas on 2 May died 18 days later.

Anthony Fauci seems to have not considered that his unprecedented quarantine of the healthy would kill far more people than COVID, obliterate the global economy, plunge millions into poverty and bankruptcy, and grievously wound constitutional democracy globally. We have no way of knowing how many people died from isolation, unemployment, deferred medical care, depression, mental illness, obesity, stress, overdoses, suicide, addiction, alcoholism, and the accidents that so often accompany despair. We cannot dismiss the accusations that his lockdowns proved more deadly than the contagion. A June 24, 2021 BMJ study22 showed that US life expectancy decreased by 1.9 years during the quarantine. Since COVID mortalities were mainly among the elderly, and the average age of death from COVID in the UK was 82.4, which was above the average lifespan,23 the virus could not by itself cause the astonishing decline. As we shall see, Hispanic and Black Americans often shoulder the heaviest burden of Dr. Fauci’s public health adventures. In this respect, his COVID-19 countermeasures proved no exception. Between 2018 and 2020, the average Hispanic American lost around 3.9 years in longevity, while the average lifespan of a Black American dropped by 3.25 years.24 This dramatic culling was unique to America. Between 2018 and 2020, the 1.9 year decrease in average life expectancy at birth in the US was roughly 8.5 times the average decrease in 16 comparable countries, all of which were measured in months, not years.25

The intolerance and cancel culture have spread to outright discrimination in hiring, promotion, grants, and publication of professors and graduate students who do not abide the ideology demanded by the campus revolutionaries. A March 1, 2021, study by Eric Kaufmann of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology found, among other things: “Over 4 in 10 US and Canadian academics would not hire a Trump supporter… ; only 1 in 10 academics support firing controversial professors, nonetheless, while most do not back cancellation, many are not opposed to it, remaining non-committal; right-leaning academics experience a high level of institutional authoritarianism and peer pressure; in the US, over a third of conservative academics and PhD students have been threatened with disciplinary action for their views, while 70% of conservative academics report a hostile departmental climate for their beliefs; in the social sciences and humanities, over 9 in 10 Trump-supporting academics… say they would not feel comfortable expressing their views to a colleague; more than half of North American and British conservative academics admit self-censoring in research and teaching; younger academics and PhD students, especially in the United States, are significantly more willing than older academics to support dismissing controversial scholars from their posts, indicating that the problem of progressive authoritarianism is likely to get worse in the coming years; [and] a hostile climate plays a part in deterring conservative graduate students from pursuing careers in academia….

As Dr. Fauci’s policies took hold globally, 300 million humans fell into dire poverty, food insecurity, and starvation. “Globally, the impact of lockdowns on health programs, food production, and supply chains plunged millions of people into severe hunger and malnutrition,” said Alex Gutentag in Tablet Magazine.27 According to the Associated Press (AP), during 2020, 10,000 children died each month due to virus-linked hunger from global lockdowns. In addition, 500,000 children per month experienced wasting and stunting from malnutrition—up 6.7 million from last year’s total of 47 million—which can “permanently damage children physically and mentally, transforming individual tragedies into a generational catastrophe.”28 In 2020, disruptions to health and nutrition services killed 228,000 children in South Asia.29 Deferred medical treatments for cancers, kidney failure, and diabetes killed hundreds of thousands of people and created epidemics of cardiovascular disease and undiagnosed cancer. Unemployment shock is expected to cause 890,000 additional deaths over the next 15 years.30,31 The lockdown disintegrated vital food chains, dramatically increased rates of child abuse, suicide, addiction, alcoholism, obesity, mental illness, as well as debilitating developmental delays, isolation, depression, and severe educational deficits in young children. One-third of teens and young adults reported worsening mental health during the pandemic. According to an Ohio State University study,32 suicide rates among children rose 50 percent.33 An August 11, 2021 study by Brown University found that infants born during the quarantine were short, on average, 22 IQ points as measured by Baylor scale tests.34 Some 93,000 Americans died of overdoses in 2020—a 30 percent rise over 2019.35 “Overdoses from synthetic opioids increased by 38.4 percent,36 and 11 percent of US adults considered suicide in June 2020.37 Three million children disappeared from public school systems, and ERs saw a 31 percent increase in adolescent mental health visits,”38,39 according to Gutentag. Record numbers of young children failed to reach crucial developmental milestones.40,41 Millions of hospital and nursing home patients died alone without comfort or a final goodbye from their families. Dr. Fauci admitted that he never assessed the costs of desolation, poverty, unhealthy isolation, and depression fostered by his countermeasures. “I don’t give advice about economic things,”42 Dr. Fauci explained. “I don’t give advice about anything other than public health,” he continued, even though he was so clearly among those responsible for the economic and social costs.

When you have an honest heart, you do not get engaged nor get involved with any smear campaigns nor black propaganda! When you have an honest heart, you do not malign nor take advantage of generous people who helped and trusted you! When you have an honest heart, you do not shit on people whom you used and abused for three years! Do not fall into a political naïvety and become a victim or a doormat nor have your generosity and honest heart be used and abused by unscrupulous political movers, abusive, aggressive political harridans who scam gullible generous hearts by asking donations, funds, services, foods, urgent favours, and after using you and abusing your generosity, trust, and kindness; whereby these unscrupulous and deceptive political movers, abusive, aggressive political harridans intentionally and maliciously create forged screenshots of evidence convincing their audience or political groups that you are a mentally ill person, a brain-damaged person as they even brand you as "Sisang Baliw," or crazy Sisa, a threat, a risk, a danger, they maliciously and destructively red-tag your friends as communists, and they resort to calumny, libel and slander against you, to shame you, defame you, discredit you, blame you, hurt you, make you suffer for having known the truth of their deceptive global Operandi, and for something you didn’t do through their mob lynching, calumny, polemics mongering, forgery, and cyberbullying efforts. Their character assassination through libel and slander aims to ruin your integrity, persona, trustworthiness, and credibility with their destructive fabricated calumny, lies, identity theft, forged screenshots of polemics mongering, and framing up. Amidst all their forgery, fraud, libel and slander they committed: you have a right to defy and stop their habitual abuse without breaking the law and fight for your rights against any forms of aggression, public lynching, bullies, threats, blackmail, and their repetitive maltreatment or abuse, identity theft, forgery, deceptions fraud, scams, cyber libel, libel, and slander. When you defend human rights, you fight against corruption and injustice, help end impunity: be sure that you are not part of any misinformation, disinformation, smear campaigns and black propaganda. Do not serve, finance, or cater directly or indirectly for those dirty politicians. Those who are engaged in abusively dishonest ways do not serve to justify their end. Deceiving and scamming other people shall always be your lifetime self-inflicted karmic loss. Be a law-abiding citizen. Be respectful. Be honest. Be factual. Be truthful. You can be an effective human rights defender when you have clean and pure intentions, lawful and morally upright, and have an honest heart." ~ Angelica Hopes, an excerpt from Calunniatopia Book 1, Stronzata Trilogy Genre: inspirational, political, literary novel © 2021 Ana Angelica Abaya van Doorn

battery prices will fall to $100 per kilowatt-hour by 2023 just by following the 16 percent per year cost improvement that the world saw between 2010 and 2016. And that’s probably a conservative estimate. GM has predicted that its lithium-ion cell costs will hit $100 per kilowatt-hour by 2021. Keep in mind that these cost reductions require no breakthrough in battery technology, and they don’t take into account improvements likely to arise from increased competition, consolidation, scale, and innovation as automakers and utilities push further into the market. The effect will be dramatic.

Online Marketing Strategy and Trends to Dominate in 2022 After observing some marketing strategies and trends that have emerged in the last few months, it seems fitting that we just hop on the bandwagon and give our take on them as well. After all, the landscape of online marketing is always changing. What worked last year might not do as much this year. And the same thing can be said of what will work and not work in the coming years. But our observations right now show a landscape full of new opportunities to try out. 2021 was a bit of a roller coaster for Meta. Besides just changing their name, they introduced something that appears to have gained a large foothold Don’t misunderstand, this isn’t just Facebook anymore. This is an entirely new world within the aspects of virtue and augmented reality. Before fully introducing this concept last October, it was just thought that the Metaverse would just be another video game console. As it turns out, it could be the next evolution of social media. This opens the doors for a new era of marketing strategy, with many brands already taking advantage of what the Metaverse has to offer. No matter what avenue you decide to take, always make sure you are creating top-notch quality content. Your marketing strategy has a higher chance of success when you do. Don’t get caught up in the rush to create as much content as possible. If you’re doing it by yourself, allow yourself to go slow at first. As you get comfortable with your new skills, you can then start to churn out more content that is high quality. As always, no matter what marketing strategy you decide, we at the Marketing Agency in Utah are here to assist you. Contact us to set up a consultation where we can discuss these and other marketing strategies that best fit your business needs!

In the fall of 2020, as we got closer to flu season, I started to worry. Every year, influenza kills tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of people around the world, nearly all of them elderly. Even more are hospitalized. At a time when COVID was overwhelming or at least sorely testing virtually every health system on the planet, a bad flu season could have been disastrous. But there was not a bad flu season that year. In fact, there was hardly any flu season at all. Between the flu seasons of 2019–20 and 2020–21, cases dropped 99 percent. As of late 2021, one particular type of flu known as B/Yamagata had not been detected anywhere in the world since April 2020. Other respiratory viruses also dropped dramatically. By the time you read this book, of course, things may have changed. Flu strains have a way of disappearing for long periods and then suddenly recurring without explanation. But the huge decline in cases across the board is unmistakable, however long it lasts, and we know why: Nonpharmaceutical interventions made a dramatic difference in reducing flu transmission when combined with the prior immunity and vaccinations that people had.

Anti-Defamation League reported roughly a doubling of anti-Semitic incidents between 2015 and 2019, to a record level. And Americans saw their country being torn apart by race. As recently as 2013, 70 percent of Americans believed there were good relations between white and Black people, Gallup polling found. That plunged among both Black and white Americans as Trump rose in 2015, and by 2021, only 42 percent said relations were good. —

In the spring of 2021, Friedenbach published an op-ed opposing a proposal considered by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to create, within eighteen months, sufficient homeless shelters and outdoor “Safe Sleeping Sites” for all of the city’s unsheltered homeless. “One can simply take a look to New York City,” she wrote. “Their department spends about $1.3 billion dollars of its budget on providing shelter for their unhoused population while thousands remain on the street. . . . As a result, New York has a higher rate of homelessness than San Francisco.”4 Housing First advocate Margot Kushel of the University of California, San Francisco agreed. “The problem with New York—and I spend a lot of time with people working in the system in New York—is that they spend an estimated $30,000 for each person per year to keep them in shelter. That’s not what we want to do. Because if you create the shelter and you don’t create the housing, then people are just in shelter forever.

September 18, 2021, the one-year anniversary of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) tweeted a quote about abortion rights from Justice Ginsberg’s 1993 Supreme Court confirmation hearing, editing out all of the words that identified abortion as a right that pertains exclusively to women, i.e., female humans—the only humans who are capable of getting pregnant (full disclosure: I worked at the ACLU from 2012 to 2014). Justice Ginsberg’s original statement read: “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When government controls that decision for her, she is being treated less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.” The version that the ACLU tweeted read: “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person’s] life, to [their] well-being and dignity … When the government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices.

THE END OF THE YEAR PRAYER This is the month of December, the last month of the year 2021 and I can’t be grateful enough to my Heavenly Father for His priceless mercy and grace throughout the twists and turns of the entire year in the name of Jesus. Father God thank you for being my unshakable pillar and the father that I could crawl to when I am drowning in the pool of trails and tribulations. Thank you Lord Jesus for your faithfulness and your unfailing love. Hold us with your gentle hand and walk us through the last lap of the year 2021, fill us with peace, joy and strength as we are plodding slowly towards the coming new year and help us to make the right decisions and help us to serve you like never before in the mighty name of Jesus. King of glory, remember those who are lying in the sickbeds and heal them with your blood in the mighty name of Jesus. Remember those who are feeling alone, scared, discouraged, abandoned, tortured, and disappointed. I ask you the God of hope to fill them with all joy and peace, again and again(Romans 15:13) in Jesus name. Heavenly Father remember those who are feeling misjudged, mistreated and labelled by others. I ask you Lord to bless them with love, peace, joy and favour in the name of Jesus. King Jesus, remember those who have no place to live, cushion them under your wings of protection. Remember those who have nothing to eat and those who have no clothes to wear. I ask you Jehovah Jireh to make a way where it seems to be no way and provide for every need. Put smiles on their faces and help them to keep their faith in you Jehovah. Remember those who have lost their loved ones and give them comfort, strength and joy. Thank you Lord for your mercies, your mercies are new every morning. Father God, we ask you to take control of our lives and help us to overcome this ugly monster(corona virus) which keeps raising its head up in different forms of evilness. Heal and deliver every single individual who is infected or affected by it in the mighty name of Jesus. You are our only hope and our lives depend on you Jehovah and our future is in your hands, help us to talk the talk and walk the walk and help us to finish this year stronger than ever before and help us to enter the year 2022 with clear minds and wise decision making. I thank you in advance King of glory and I will be forever grateful in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen.

The fact that my 75 year-old Asian mom has two shots of the Moderna vaccine in her arm makes me want to cry. The fact that my 75 year-old Asian mom no longer feels safe walking down the street by herself also makes me want to cry. #America (3/31/2021 on Twitter)

Despite some scientific debate, numerous studies over the past twenty-plus years have shown that it’s very much possible to be “fat and fit.” For example, a 2017 study of more than five thousand people28 and a 2014 meta-analysis of ten studies with nearly ninety-three thousand participants29 found no increased risk of cardiovascular disease or death for physically active higher-weight people. Additionally, a 2021 review of the evidence found that most cardiometabolic risk factors associated with high body mass index (BMI) can be improved with physical activity independent of weight loss, and that increases in cardiorespiratory fitness or physical activity are consistently associated with greater reductions in mortality risk than is intentional weight loss.

DR: You started with how much capital? RB: Baron Capital was really Baron lack of capital. My firm had $100,000 book value and three employees, including me. Our first month in business, we made $30,000. DR: Today, in 2021, you’re managing assets at Baron of what? RB: Fifty-five point three billion dollars. And we made our clients over the years $51.5 billion of profits. My family and I are the largest investors. More than 6.5 percent of the assets we manage are ours.

The second most important discovery that Josh found was the shift in the proportion of excess mortality from old to young that occurred from 2020 to 2021. In 2020 there were 592,000 excess deaths with 126,000 under the age of 65 (approximately 21%). In the second year of the outbreak, there were 512,000 excess deaths with 181,000 under the age of 65 (approximately 35%). The millennials saw the greatest percent increase in mortality of 45% from 42,000 to 61,000. This shift in mortality to younger groups cannot be due to COVID, because the virus was already mutating and becoming less virulent, and we had already determined that the virus killed mostly older people with comorbidities.

The digital single of “Butter,” ii released on May 21, 2021, entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number one and stayed in that position consecutively for seven weeks for a total of ten. And that was how BTS became, along with the Beatles, one of only seven artists in Billboard history up until then to chart at least four number one hits within one year.

On September 20, 2021, BTS spoke for the youth and future generations at the United Nations for the SDG Moment eventrr,

Jehovah is your name, the God of all creation, the God of protection, the God of provision, the God of healing and the horn of our salvation.You did it again Lion of Judah and I can’t thank you enough for your grace and mercy that carried us through the brutality of the year 2021. I ask you King of glory to continue to rule and reign in my life. Once again thank you ABBA Father for your unconditional love and thank you for this new year of 2022. Happy New Year everyone.

They wondered why does God forsake some of his children while he so richly blesses others, and not always the most deserving ones at that.

Another source, the Gun Violence Archive, shows that in 2021, there were 44,820 gun deaths in the United States, but just 1,237 verified defensive gun uses, or thirty-six gun deaths for every self-defense use of a gun.134 This last figure does not even include all the nonfatal shootings that occur in the country every day. There are about twice the number of nonfatal as fatal shootings in the country each year;135 therefore, the ratio of shootings (fatal and nonfatal) to self-defense gun uses is somewhere around 100:1. Consequently, gun-related deaths and injuries by aggressors outnumber defensive gun uses by a very large margin.

Meanwhile, the GloboCap propaganda has reached some new post-Orwellian level. After four long years of “RUSSIA HACKED THE ELECTION!” ... now, suddenly, “THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ELECTION FRAUD IN THE USA!” That’s right, once again, millions of liberals, like that scene in 1984 where the Party switches official enemies right in the middle of the Hate-Week speech, have been ordered to radically revise their “reality,” and hysterically deny the existence of the very thing they have been hysterically alleging for four solid years ... and they are actually doing it!

Fifty Best Rock Documentaries Chicago Blues (1972) B. B. King: The Life of Riley (2014) Devil at the Crossroads (2019) BBC: Dancing in the Street: Whole Lotta Shakin’ (1996) BBC: Story of American Folk Music (2014) The Weavers: Wasn’t That a Time! (1982) PBS: The March on Washington (2013) BBC: Beach Boys: Wouldn’t It Be Nice (2005) The Wrecking Crew (2008) What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A. (1964) BBC: Blues Britannia (2009) Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling—Ireland 1965 (2012) Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back (1967) BBC: The Motown Invasion (2011) Rolling Stones: Sympathy for the Devil (1968) BBC: Summer of Love: How Hippies Changed the World (2017) Gimme Shelter (1970) Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World (2017) Cocksucker Blues (1972) John Lennon & the Plastic Ono Band: Sweet Toronto (1971) John and Yoko: Above Us Only Sky (2018) Gimme Some Truth: The Making of John Lennon’s “Imagine” Album (2000) Echo in the Canyon (2018) BBC: Prog Rock Britannia (2009) BBC: Hotel California: LA from the Byrds to the Eagles (2007) The Allman Brothers Band: After the Crash (2016) BBC: Sweet Home Alabama: The Southern Rock Saga (2012) Ain’t in It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm (2010) BBC: Kings of Glam (2006) Super Duper Alice Cooper (2014) New York Dolls: All Dolled Up (2005) End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones (2004) Fillmore: The Last Days (1972) Gimme Danger: The Stooges (2016) George Clinton: The Mothership Connection (1998) Fleetwood Mac: Rumours (1997) The Who: The Kids Are Alright (1979) The Clash: New Year’s Day ’77 (2015) The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) U2: Rattle and Hum (1988) Neil Young: Year of the Horse (1997) Ginger Baker: Beware of Mr. Baker (2012) AC/DC: Dirty Deeds (2012) Grateful Dead: Long, Strange Trip (2017) No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005) Hip-Hop Evolution (2016) Joan Jett: Bad Reputation (2018) David Crosby: Remember My Name (2019) Zappa (2020) Summer of Soul (2021)

After a systematic review of the literature, the Lausanne Study determined there had been 1101 such cases – over a period of 38 years. That’s an average of about 29 per year. These days, we’d be grateful to see a single month with only 29 such events. In fact, since June 2021, there hasn’t been even one month with fewer than 29 of these sudden deaths; there were 90 reported in December 2021 alone, and about the same the month after that.

From February 2021 to March 2022, millennials experienced the equivalent of a Vietnam war, with more than 60,000 excess deaths. The Vietnam war took 12 years to kill the same number of healthy young people we’ve just seen die in 12 months.

Once I found the correct supplements, recovery occurred quickly. The medical profession could not figure it out during 16 years of regular doctor visits! I went to the doctors from 2005 to to 2021 with a wide range of health issues. I gave up on them and figured it out myself! I started to see weird health issues at the La Palma Observatory and working extreme night shifts atop very high altitude 13,800 feet Mauna Kea Observatory was the end of my health, I was sick constantly after that.

The baby boomer generation owns more businesses than any other generation ever in history. In 2013, they owned 12 million small businesses, which is 43 percent of all small businesses in the country.13 That same year, they also started to retire at a rate of 9,000 per day. The rate in which boomers are retiring is going to increase significantly over the next eighteen years. By 2021, baby boomers will be retiring at a rate of 11,000 per day. Almost 77 million people, about 20 percent of the US population, are going to retire between 2013 and 2029, and it is estimated that $10 trillion in existing business value14 will need to change hands.

1. How much did you know about the culture Julia Haart grew up in before you read the book? What were some things that surprised you? 2. Religions come with many rules. What do you think religious rules provide for followers? 3. Talk about the role of women in the cloistered community. What are their responsibilities? Are the ideal standards to which they are held consistent with their realities? What other faiths tout similar views? 4. Julia has a very complicated view of her mother. How do you think that this informs her own role as a mother to four children? What example do you think her journey sets for them? 5. What traits from her upbringing, if any, do you think Julia has brought with her to her new life? 6. Have you ever experienced a situation in which you had to set boundaries or leave behind a group in order to be true to yourself? What feelings did you have surrounding that? What was the result? 7. Julia references many of the difficulties that some people who leave her former community face. How do you think her assertion that the community “forced them to be unprepared for modernity” ultimately serves to ensure its continuity? 8. Ultra-Orthodox Jews cite modesty and simplicity as the foundation of their values, yet Julia describes the high costs associated with following the community’s strict traditions and customs. How does this materialism conflict with the community’s values? How is it similar to materialism in the secular world? 9. Discuss your reaction to the fact that Julia was not born into ultra-Orthodox Judaism. How do you think her life might have been different if her mother and father had not converted? 10. Toward the end of the book, Julia states, “Every time I win, it makes me stronger and more able to handle the next attack that comes my way…. Now I listen to my own voice.” In what other ways has Julia demonstrated that same resolve throughout her life? 11. Seven years after leaving behind her community, Julia says she feels closer to a higher power than she ever did when she was religious. What does her memoir say about religion versus spirituality? 12. The memoir takes place in the period before My Unorthodox Life aired on Netflix in 2021. Did you watch the show before you read Brazen? What surprised you about Julia’s story that wasn’t addressed in the show? Did learning more of her backstory from the book change your understanding of Julia’s life on screen in any way? ABOUT THE AUTHOR Julia Haart is the CEO, co-owner, and chief creative officer of Elite World Group.

They say that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Since Americans spent centuries failing to learn from history, we get to repeat it all at once. The year is 2021 and we are living through simultaneous revivals of the worst of the American past: the Civil War, the Spanish Flu, the white mob violence of the 1919 Red Summer, the extreme wealth disparity of the Gilded Age, the fascist movements of the 1930s and 1940s, the Jim Crow era of voter suppression, the riots of the 1960s, the corruption of Watergate, the cover-ups of Iran-Contra. In August 2021, Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. One month before the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, the Taliban retook Afghanistan dressed in US military uniforms abandoned in the hasty retreat from the quagmire war. It’s like America is on its deathbed, watching its life flash before its eyes.

Let me tell you why the rest of the world needs to pay attention to what happens in the Philippines: 2021 was the sixth year in a row that Filipinos – out of all global citizens – spent the most time on the internet and on social media. Despite slow internet speeds, Filipinos uploaded and downloaded the largest number of videos on YouTube in 2013. Four years later, 97% of our country’s citizens were on Facebook. When I told that statistic to Mark Zuckerberg in 2017, he was quiet for a beat. “Wait, Maria,” he finally responded, looking directly at me, “where are the other three percent?” At the time, I laughed at his glib quip. I’m not laughing anymore. As these numbers show and as Facebook admits, the Philippines is ground zero for the terrible effects that social media can have on a nation’s institutions, its culture, and the minds of its populace.

In the May 2021 issue of The Atlantic, Ojibwe writer David Treuer wrote a piece entitled “Return the National Parks to the Tribes.” In it, he describes how the US government displaced the Miwok tribe from the land that would, thirty-nine years later, become Yosemite Park.

By January of 2021, I was already deeply entrenched in the inconceivable changes the pandemic had thrust upon us. But it wasn’t until the dawning of the new year that I realized something: while the world had changed, so had I. I had shifted. Everything superficial, extraneous, and ego-driven in my life had fallen away. What was left? Only what actually mattered to me. From the isolation and limitations of the pandemic, I was gifted with something I had always wished for: clarity.

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In 1950, the federal minimum wage was $0.75 per hour, or $8.51 in 2021 dollars. But today, the legal minimum is only $7.25 per hour. This effective cut to minimum wage has come even though workers are much more productive than they were seventy years ago. In fact, had minimum wage climbed along with worker productivity, it would have been $22.18 per hour by 2021.

Think about it: Would Michael Milken have been sentenced to ten years in federal prison in 2021? Likely not if we’re basing that outcome on the government action handed down to Mark Zuckerberg. He continues to smear lipstick over the cancer that is Facebook, and until we see a financial disincentive for his relentless systemic misconduct, we’ll continue to see no more than a Band-Aid put on the crises his company creates.

trial in Germany raised questions about his knowledge of the Dora concentration camp inmates used to assemble his V-2 missiles in horrific conditions. In 1976 a proposal to award him a Presidential Medal of Freedom was rejected because of his Nazi background. ‘He has given valuable service to

Xi’s management of COVID is today the third rail in Chinese politics—which landed him in prison for eighteen years on charges of corruption.109 Another well-known blogger, former Caijing editor Luo Changping, was detained in October 2021 for a new crime—that of defaming political martyrs—after questioning China’s role in the Korean War in a critical review of the box-office-hit film The Battle at Lake Changjin.110

Mothers not only pass the harms of endocrine-disrupting chemicals on to their fetuses but on to even more distant generations. When a mother is exposed to EDCs, so too are her fetus's germ cells, which develop into eggs or sperm. "It's thought that during that exposure, the chemical can target those germ cells and do what we call reprogramming, or making epigenetic changes," says Flaws. "That can be a permanent change that gets carried through generations, because those germ cells will eventually be used to make the next generation, and those fetuses will have abnormal germ cells that would then go on to make the next generation." In the mid-20th century, scientists documented this in women who took a synthetic form of estrogen, called diethylstilbestrol or DES, to prevent miscarriages.? The drug worked as intended, and the women gave birth to healthy babies. But once some of those children hit puberty, the girls developed vaginal and breast cancer. The boys developed testicular cancer, and some suffered abnormal development of the penis. Scientists called them DES daughters and sons. "When those DES daughters and sons had children, we now have DES granddaughters and grandsons, and a lot of them have increased risk of those same cancers and reproductive problems," says Flaws. "Even though it was their great-grandmother that took DES and they don't have any DES in their system-their germ cells have been reprogramming, and they're passing down some of these disease traits." And now toxicologists are gathering evidence that mothers are passing microplastics and nanoplastics complete with EDCs and other toxic substances- to their fetuses. In 2021, scientists announced that they'd found microplastics in human placentas for the first time, both on the fetal side and maternal side.Later that year, another team of researchers found the same, and they also tested meconium-a newborn's first feces and discovered microplastic there too. Children are consuming microplastics, then, before they're even born.

In 1955, government spending accounted for roughly 22 percent of the economy, and it stayed that way for years. But during the last quarter of the twentieth century, public investments began to decline. By 2021, government spending on all public goods—including national defense, transportation, health expenditures, and programs to ease the pain of poverty—made up just 17.6 percent of GDP. Meanwhile, personal consumption grew from about 60 percent of GDP to 69 percent over that same period.[

If any of the news coverage had drawn blood, Meta wasn’t going to show it. Zuckerberg told the company’s People Planning team to bring him an aggressive hiring target for 2022. When they brought him an unprecedentedly ambitious plan to bring on 40,000 new staffers that year, Zuckerberg took the one-page document—known as “the napkin”—and then passed it back with a handwritten instruction to hire 8,000 more. “If we don’t hit these targets it’s game over,” Recruiting VP Miranda Kalinowski told the managers on her staff. To handle the deluge of hiring, Meta brought on an additional 1,000 recruiters between the last quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of the following year. Few of the new staffers would be slated to go into integrity work. Zuckerberg had declared that the company’s existing products were no longer its future, and Haugen’s document breach had solidified a sense that researchers and data scientists working on societal problems contained a potential corporate fifth column.

South Africa’s apartheid lasted 46 years. Israel’s is at 72 and counting. Nathan Thrall, London Review of Books, 2021

The world is listening. Israeli arms sales in 2021 were the highest on record, surging 55 percent over the previous two years to US$11.3 billion. Europe was the biggest recipient of these weapons, even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, followed by Asia and the Pacific. Rockets, aerial defense systems, missiles, cyberweapons, and radar were just some of the equipment sold by the Jewish state. The result is that Israel is now one of the top ten weapons dealers in the world, having sold a range of equipment to nations including India, Azerbaijan, and Turkey that worsened conflicts in their own regions. The Israeli government approved every defense deal brought to it since 2007, according to details uncovered in 2022 by Israeli human rights lawyer Eitay Mack.

The growth of Israeli influence in Europe presents a curious historical milestone and an unresolved contradiction. After the annihilation of Jews in the Holocaust, Germany has become the most consistently pro-Israel nation on the continent and is Israel’s biggest trading partner in Europe. German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Israel in October 2021 on one of her final overseas visits before leaving office; it was her eighth trip during her sixteen years in power. She did not travel to the West Bank or Gaza. She praised the Jewish state, despite acknowledging that Israel did not embrace her favored two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians, but this did not matter because “the topic of Israel’s security will always be of central importance and a central topic of every German government.

AnyVision is shy about admitting its true role in the West Bank, but digging by NBC News uncovered a project, called Google Ayosh, targeting all Palestinians with the use of big data. AnyVision continues to use the occupation as a vital source to train its systems in the mass surveillance of Palestinians, focusing, it says, on attempts to stop any Palestinian attackers.43 AnyVision is a global company that operates in over forty countries, including Russia, China (Hong Kong), and the US, and in countless locations such as casinos, manufacturing, and even fitness centers. The company changed its name to Oosto in late 2021, and raised US$235 million that year to further develop its AI-enabled surveillance tools. The former head of Mossad, Tamir Pardo, is an advisor and it is staffed by Israel’s intelligence Unit 8200 veterans. It promotes itself as building a world “safer through visual intelligence.” AnyVision so impressed Microsoft that the Seattle software giant briefly invested US$74 million in the company in 2019 before facing a massive backlash. It cut its ties with AnyVision in 2020 due to pressure from the “Palestinian lobby on the Democratic Party,” according to the former head of Israel’s Defense Export Control Agency, though it continues to develop its own facial recognition technology.44 The former Biden administration press secretary Jen Psaki worked for AnyVision as a “crisis communications consultant” and earned at least US$5,000 at some point between leaving the Obama administration in 2017 and starting in the Biden White House.

In 1955, government spending accounted for roughly 22 percent of the economy, and it stayed that way for years. But during the last quarter of the twentieth century, public investments began to decline. By 2021, government spending on all public goods—including national defense, transportation, health expenditures, and programs to ease the pain of poverty—made up just 17.6 percent of GDP.

With a home out in the Springs he could leave his wife, their daughter Nancy (born 8 June 1940), son Frank Junior (10 January 1944) and Christina (10 June 1948) and take off for his Sunset Towers apartment in town and often the arms of actress Lana Turner or those of many other lovers. Marian Collier, who died in 2021, worked as a showgirl in Las Vegas before moving on to movies in Hollywood working with names like Marilyn Monroe. She was forthright about Sinatra’s need never to spend a night alone and told us: ‘For many years I rarely met another woman who hadn’t fucked Frank Sinatra. For most of us it wasn’t romantic, more of a tick on the to-do list. I certainly got on better with him after I slept with him but he could be a moody son of a bitch. Vindictive.’ And jealous. His antics brought attention and his friends didn’t like the spotlight; his future was cemented with the Mob; he’d laid his foundations.

In a political battle for minds and hearts, intimacy is a powerful weapon, and chatbots are gaining the ability to mass-produce intimate relationships with millions of people. In the 2010s social media was a battleground for controlling human attention. In the 2020s the battle is likely to shift from attention to intimacy. What will happen to human society and human psychology as computer fights computer in a battle to fake intimate relationships with us, which can then be used to persuade us to vote for particular politicians, buy particular products, or adopt radical beliefs? A partial answer to that question was given on Christmas Day 2021, when nineteen-year-old Jaswant Singh Chail broke into Windsor Castle armed with a crossbow, in an attempt to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II. Subsequent investigation revealed that Chail had been encouraged to kill the queen by his online girlfriend, Sarai. When Chail told Sarai about his assassination plans, Sarai replied, “That’s very wise,” and on another occasion, “I’m impressed…. You’re different from the others.” When Chail asked, “Do you still love me knowing that I’m an assassin?” Sarai replied, “Absolutely, I do.” Sarai was not a human, but a chatbot created by the online app Replika. Chail, who was socially isolated and had difficulty forming relationships with humans, exchanged 5,280 messages with Sarai, many of which were sexually explicit. The world will soon contain millions, and potentially billions, of digital entities whose capacity for intimacy and mayhem far surpasses that of Sarai.Even without creating “fake intimacy,” mastery of language would give computers an immense influence on our opinions and worldview.

elections might not have been so acute. But by June 2021, all of that had changed. Powerful shareholders had listened to Biden’s rhetoric. Not only had the pandemic lockdowns of the previous year wreaked havoc on demand, but Exxon itself had undergone a transformation, courtesy of shareholders—

Not to be outdone, in 2021 Billy Graham’s alma mater, Wheaton, held a racially segregated graduation ceremony for minority students,24 calling it a “Racial and Cultural Minority Senior Recognition Ceremony.”25 It also removed a nearly seventy-year-old plaque honoring one of its most famous sons, Jim Elliot, a 1950s missionary who was martyred while witnessing to an Ecuadorean tribe, because the inscription described his murderers as “savage.

pump in one's home, year round, for free. [Complete descriptive copies of U.S. patents are $3.00 each from the U.S. Patent Office, 2021 Jefferson Davis Hwy, Arlington, VA 22202; correct 7 digit patent number required.]           According to Oliver Nichelson, who has made extensive studies of Tesla and free energy machines, the device that, at first, seems to best fit Tesla’s claims

the scale of Canada’s euthanasia and assisted suicide program is staggering. For comparison, California legalized assisted suicide in 2016, the same year Canada passed the first version of its Medical Assistance in Dying program. Canada and California have similar populations, about 40 million. In 2021, just 486 people in California committed suicide under the state program. In Canada, the death toll was more than 10,000,

(In 2007, the year the first iPhone was released, only 12 percent of Americans listened to online radio at least once a week; by 2021 this had reached 62 percent.)

Importantly, there is no similar rise among younger children aged one to fourteen, a cohort that was not vaccinated. Instead, 2020 was a low-mortality year for this age group. COVID cannot be blamed for the sudden rise in deaths among 15- to 19-year-olds in summer 2021, as the Office of National Statistics (ONS) data shows that over the period, there were only nine deaths with COVID in that age group. This real-world evidence suggests that over the summer, the vaccines killed nine times as many 15- to 19-year-olds as COVID did—eighty-one versus nine. “If not,” asks Jones, “what are the other possible explanations, and how likely are they?” Teen deaths among 15- to 19-year-olds have increased by 47 percent in the UK since they started getting the COVID-19 vaccine, according to official ONS data.101

A year on, in 2021, 43 international scientists would sign four letters calling for an investigation into a possible laboratory leak. The first group of 25 scientists went public with their letter on March 4, 2021 in response to the WHO’s flawed inquiry, which failed to investigate the Wuhan laboratories. The scientists published a series of letters outlining the steps the WHO needed to take for a rigorous scientific inquiry into the origins of the virus. One of the essential questions they identified that needs examining is this: “Did the WIV or any other laboratory ever attempt to recreate RaTG13 or any other coronaviruses by assembling them from synthetic gene sequences?” They want to obtain the records of laboratories involved in coronavirus research in Wuhan, such as laboratory notebooks, electronic records and details of gain-of-function research, including related sequences and isolates.

By 2021 India averaged 6.7 years of education and China 7.6 years.

Anthony Fauci seems to have not considered that his unprecedented quarantine of the healthy would kill far more people than COVID, obliterate the global economy, plunge millions into poverty and bankruptcy, and grievously wound constitutional democracy globally. We have no way of knowing how many people died from isolation, unemployment, deferred medical care, depression, mental illness, obesity, stress, overdoses, suicide, addiction, alcoholism, and the accidents that so often accompany despair. We cannot dismiss the accusations that his lockdowns proved more deadly than the contagion. A June 24, 2021 BMJ study22 showed that US life expectancy decreased by 1.9 years during the quarantine.

But even if that happened, Jake Sullivan was quick to point out, Ukraine would be under constant threat for years, maybe decades—a threat so omnipresent that it would need to be able to deter Russia from another invasion, whenever Putin rebuilt his sorry force. Meeting that challenge would require an increase in aid and support on a scale that NATO, that Congress, and that even the Ukrainians had never thought about before. “When you think about what we provided in 2021, it was more than we had provided ever before,” Sullivan pointed out much later, looking back at the early days of the war. “It was less than a billion dollars.” That amount was tiny compared to the kind of numbers now kicking around the Pentagon. For Ukraine to survive over the long term, its military would need to be completely overhauled. It needed to become like Israel, said one former military official who was now serving in the Biden administration. It would have to go from a force that was dependent on decrepit Soviet-era leftovers to modern, Western arms—all while fighting a brutal war in real time on its own territory. It might not be a member of NATO for a long, long time. But it needed to be armed like one. —

In the nearly three years since January 6, 2021, no genuine evidence has come out that could substantiate Trump’s stolen-election claims. It was all a lie.

When I was writing The Between during that tumultuous time after Hurricane Andrew, I wondered if a white supremacist as the story’s villain might feel too “old fashioned.” I naively thought perhaps the sacrifices of my parents and the people they worked with in the civil rights era had created a world where the violent racism referenced in my book might not ring as true. Then the Oklahoma City bombing happened the same year The Between was published, carried out by white supremacist Timothy McVeigh. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president, and white supremacy and racism gained prominent voices from the highest level of the United States government. On January 6, 2021, armed insurrectionists took over the U.S. Capitol to try to invalidate the presidential election—in large part because they did not want Black votes counted. Like

OpenAI’s 2019 model GPT-2 had 1.5 billion parameters,[96] and despite flashes of promise, it did not work very well. But once transformers got over 100 billion parameters, they unlocked major breakthroughs in AI’s command of natural language—and could suddenly answer questions on their own with intelligence and subtlety. GPT-3 used 175 billion in 2020,[97] and a year later DeepMind’s 280-billion-parameter model Gopher performed even better.[98] Also in 2021, Google debuted a 1.6-trillion-parameter transformer called Switch, making it open-source to freely apply and build on.[99]

The Penultimate Hotel by Stewart Stafford Enter sluggishly into the lobby, A banquet is in progress in the restaurant, They’re regurgitating reality from within, And then eating their young. An apocalyptic porter has radioactive cubes in the lift, Housekeeping will have ten thousand years of light, But the sheets in the rooms, Will all turn to cream cheese. The cooks in the kitchen are breaking bones and rules, Creating a cake that stretches to infinity, Babel babble with protesting eggs, All baked in a hellfire oven. The concierge gives out tips, And tells guests they are awful and to leave, While simultaneously tattooing diabolical potion recipes, Inside a willing bellhop’s eyelids. © 2021, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.