updated July 27 to repair links
Ian Welsh: The Canadian Economy Under US Hegemony and Neoliberalism
For Bond Bears, Patience Is A Virtue.
… I do not have a lot of sympathy for the bond bears, mainly on the grounds that the individuals involved have been wrong in the same way for a long time, possibly decades. (As a recovering secular bond bull, my memory for terrible bond bear calls is long.) That said, I can see how someone could construct a more plausible case for inflation than last cycle (where there was no case whatsoever). As such, even though most of these bond bears have been repeatedly wrong, perhaps they could be bailed out this time.
Hoisington Quarterly Review and Outlook 2nd Quarter 2021
Cherry-picking economic models
How would you react if a renowned physicist, say, Richard Feynman, was telling you that sometimes force is proportional to acceleration and at other times it is proportional to acceleration squared? I guess you would be unimpressed. But actually, what most mainstream economists do amounts to the same strange thing when it comes to theory development and model modification.
James K. Galbraith: Dismal Economics
Although neoclassical economics relies on assumptions that should have been discarded long ago, it remains the mainstream orthodoxy. Three recent books, and one older one, help to show why its staying power should be regarded as a scandal.
It’s not the debt we need to fix, stupid! It’s our thinking.
The ad nauseam repeated claim that our public debt is excessive and that we have to balance the public budget is nothing but absolute nonsense. The harder politicians — usually on the advice of mainstream establishment economists — try to achieve balanced budgets for the public sector, the less likely they are to succeed in their endeavour.
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Public debt is normally nothing to fear, especially if it is financed within the country itself (but even foreign loans can be beneficent for the economy if invested in the right way). Some members of society hold bonds and earn interest on them, while others pay taxes that ultimately pay the interest on the debt. The debt is not a net burden for society as a whole since the debt ‘cancels’ itself out between the two groups. If the state issues bonds at a low-interest rate, unemployment can be reduced without necessarily resulting in strong inflationary pressure. And the inter-generational burden is also not a real burden since — if used in a suitable way — the debt, through its effects on investments and employment, actually makes future generations net winners.
Bubble Fare:
Super Stonks!
Kofinas is the creator of the wildly popular podcast Hidden Forces – a weekly must-listen for this chicken. Both as a host on his own show and as a guest on others, he has discussed the concept of market nihilism to describe what happens when people not only invest in something that is essentially worthless, but they invest in it because it is essentially worthless, assuming only that others will follow them into the scheme. There’s a purposeful emptiness in the decision. They know it is a Ponzi, or effectively a Ponzi, but they invest anyway, both because the prospect of huge returns is irresistible (even if it comes at the expense of others) and because they want to protest “the system.”
… I quote from the transcript here:
“I wish I could tell you what I think is going on other than to say that there’s rot, there’s a kind of societal decay. And also, I think technology plays a role… It’s all about narrative and that narrative can be very empty. It’s only skin deep. I did an episode with Lily Francus where we talked about this in the case of GameStop. And it’s not the only time I’ve done this. I did a recent episode, actually, on Ethereum and a thesis that someone had put forward for why its price was going to increase by over 10 X or 30 X, and none of these explanations actually deal with, I would argue, really, fundamental reality the way that you and I would think about it. In some ways it’s an advanced meta-conception of the world, which is that the reality is what everyone else thinks it is. And so, if I want to make money, I simply have to try and get ahead of the curve of what that narrative is going to be. And what’s dangerous is that in such a world, you can actually co-create reality. You can play a role in shaping that reality.”
COVID-19 notes:
The Delta Variant Will Drive A Steep Rise In U.S. COVID Deaths, A New Model Shows
Zeynep Tufecki: Delta Dysfunction
Ian Welsh: The Decision to Let Covid Go Chronic
has been made
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There is a playbook for defeating pandemics, it is well understood, and only a few countries ran it.
Covid has made the rich much richer. It kills old and poor people primarily. Selling Covid boosters every year or even twice a year for $150/pop to everyone who can afford them is a lovely new sinecure for pharma.
Because Covid has proved to be a great boon to almost everyone important, i.e., everyone who actually makes decisions or influences them, there’s no reason to end it.
And so it appears it’s going to go chronic.
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Global warming: planning not pricing
It was no accident that the EU and G20 have turned to William Nordhaus, an American economist and Nobel laureate for economics advice on climate change. Nordhaus gave the keynote address at the Venice conference. He said that “It is a painful, painful realisation, but I think we need to face it: Our international climate policy, the approach we are taking, is at a dead end.” But what was Nordhaus’ answer to this dismal conclusion? He called for a “climate club” of countries willing to commit to a carbon price
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So the carbon pricing and taxation solution, even if it worked to lower emissions, is a pipedream as it can never be implemented globally before global warming reaches dangerous ‘tipping points’. All the latest climate science suggests that the tipping points are approaching fast and allowing fossil fuel production to continue while trying to reduce its use by ‘market’ solutions’ like carbon pricing and taxes will not be enough. Even the IMF has admitted that market solutions have not worked.
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What is the alternative? Mark Carney, former Bank of England governor and climate change envoy for the UN and many multi-nationals, reckons it is ‘regulation’. … Carney’s answer is really an excuse for continuing to expand fossil fuel production.
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This is disingenous nonsense. Carbon pricing schemes just hide the reality that, as long as the fossil fuel industry and the other big multinational emitters of greenhouse gases are untouched and not brought into a plan for phasing them out, the tipping point for irreversible global warming will be passed. Instead of waiting for the market to speak, and for ‘regulation’, we need a global plan where fossil fuel industries, financial institutions and major emitting sectors are brought under public ownership and control.
Steve Keen: How economists trivialise already trivial estimates of economic damage from global warming
My point here (which we’ll make in the paper using DICE itself in GAMS) is that even with his trivial damages function (highlighted in Equation ; the damage coefficient in the 2016 version on Nordhaus’s website; in 2018 he reduced this to 0.00227), had Nordhaus made damages affect the inputs to production as well as the outputs, he would have generated predictions for the economic impact of global warming which would have been troubling. Instead, he trivialized the dangers and let us sleepwalk into the horror story that, it seems, is starting to unfold this decade.
The Net-Zero Narrative Is Riddled With Holes
Yep, it’s bleak, says expert who tested 1970s end-of-the-world prediction
A controversial MIT study from 1972 forecast the collapse of civilization – and Gaya Herrington is here to deliver the bad news
Extreme weather takes climate change models 'off the scale'
As Arctic warms, scientists wrestle with its climate ‘tipping point’
World's Food Supplies In Jeopardy Amid Climate Disasters
hat tip Yves Smith, who says: The Gates Foundation and the WEF are steamrolling normal UN processes as part of a campaign to discredit sound agroecology practices:
Beware UN Food Systems Summit Trojan Horse
Undoubtedly, the world needs to reform existing food systems to better serve humanity and sustainable development. But the UN World Food Systems Summit must be consistent with UN-led multilateralism.
Small farms are the future of food systems
The insect apocalypse: ‘Our world will grind to a halt without them’
B.C.’s rare inland rainforest at risk of collapse, international scientists warn in new study
The province’s unique inland temperate rainforest is home to endangered species and cedar trees more than 1,000 years old — but its old-growth ecosystems could be destroyed in less than a decade if logging continues at its current pace
The World Will Run Out Of EV Batteries By 2025
Nuclear power’s reliability is dropping as extreme weather increases
A comprehensive analysis shows that warmer temperatures aren't the only threat.
ESG Tweets of the Week:
JKSteinberger: Don't have time for this nonsense, but it truly takes a certain kind of self-involved white dude like @ezraklein and @tednordhaus to wisely opine that climate scientists and activists don't *actually* believe climate to be an existential threat.
Stephen Barlow: These mainstream political, media and corporate figure disingenuously pretend to accept the science and disingenuously claim to be working on finding solutions to the problem, whilst pursuing business as usual, and obstructing any progressive action.
Other [Older] Fare:
How You Know
I've read Villehardouin's chronicle of the Fourth Crusade at least two times, maybe three. And yet if I had to write down everything I remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a page. Multiply this times several hundred, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves. What use is it to read all these books if I remember so little from them?
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Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why.
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reading and experience are usually "compiled" at the time they happen, using the state of your brain at that time. The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life. Which means it is very much worth reading important books multiple times. I always used to feel some misgivings about rereading books. I unconsciously lumped reading together with work like carpentry, where having to do something again is a sign you did it wrong the first time. Whereas now the phrase "already read" seems almost ill-formed.
Pics of the Week:
Climate crisis: 50 photos of extreme weather around the world – in pictures
EXTRA [controversial or non-market-related] FARE:
Climate Crisis Fare:
Thomas Neuburger: 'Because Nothing Else Has Worked'
While I don't yet advocate for Andreas Malm's ideas, I strongly advocate discussing them.
Slavoj Žižek: Last Exit to Socialism
Slavoj Žižek writes in Jacobin that today's exploding ecological crises open up a realistic prospect of the final exit of humanity itself. Might socialism be our off-ramp, or is it already too late?
COVID Fare:
Corona: A Primer
Corona has been a complete failure of policy and science. Everything that the media tells you about Corona is wrong, and everything your government has done about Corona is pointless. In what follows, there will be no citations, but you can easily ascertain the truth of everything here.
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Corona is dangerous, almost exclusively, to the old, the obese, and the already ill. Almost all deaths and serious cases happen in these very identifiable sub-populations. In children, Corona is less dangerous than influenza. The risk stratification of Corona is so extreme, that most people fail to understand their own risk. Almost everybody under 60 or 70 drastically overestimates the risk Corona poses to them. This is true even among sceptical readers of this essay.
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The lockdowns have never had any clear effect on the spread of Corona. Infections receded after Spring 2020 with the arrival of Spring weather. While other human coronaviruses are influenced powerfully by seasonal and regional effects, epidemiologists have downplayed the seasonality of Corona, in a transparent attempt to allow mass containment measures to claim victory for the seasonal ebb in cases.
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There is no evidence, anywhere, that community masks do anything. They won’t stop aerosolised transmission any more than they will protect you from a chlorine gas attack, and respirators (like N95 or FFP2 masks) will have no effect unless they are properly fitted, you are clean-shaven, and you are trained in their use. Even healthcare professionals working in controlled environments with extensive experience have high rates of error, and it is essentially impossible for anyone to use respirators effectively in everyday life. Mask mandates don’t drive infections down, lifting them doesn’t cause cases to spike, and changes or enhancements to mask mandates also do nothing.
A Pandemic of The Vaccinated?
What do the substances sold to us as “vaccines” -even if they’re not in the general sense of the word-, actually do? They don’t limit the risk of infection, we know that now, but we could have known it already, the producers told us. Of course the politicians and their experts said otherwise for as long as they could, but with recent rapidly rising infection rates among the fully vaccinated, we’ll hear much less of that. That story died.
So what do they do? The one thing left, and which the producers DO claim, is they make (Covid-related) illness less severe. But has anyone seen any irrefutable proof of that? If so, please send it. Not some hint at proof, nothing halfway, we’re not interested in that, but absolute and irrefutable. Like Godot.
Something we do know the vaccines do, the mRNA ones but also AZ and J&J, is they induce your cells to produce spike proteins.
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In short, after some 7 months of the vaccines being used, we know they are useless for preventing infection, even if loud voices keep insisting the world will come to an end if not everyone gets vaccinated. They may lead to a huge number of false positives though, meaning that once your cells start producing spike proteins, you may well get sick anyway. Sort of like a self-fulfilling prescription. Solution from industry and experts: boosters, induce cells to produce more toxic proteins. Hmmm.
I’m not sure you would call the ensuing disease Covid-19, even if it has the same spike proteins, but it will have many of the same symptoms: pulmonary issues, myocarditis, other heart problems, blindness etc.
And death. By now you must have seen some numbers, even if the media and politics keep them from you. The latest count in the US is about 11,000 deaths from the vaccines, and there is a court case being filed that claims the real count is 45,000. It could well be much more, but it’s hard to prove. All we need to know really is that in the past, 25-50 deaths was all it took to shelve a vaccine.
Adverse reactions other than death are if possible even harder to get a grip on. The VAERS system says there are presently some 450,000 reported, but the UK’s MHRA yellow Card system was already well above 1,000,000 there two weeks ago, so you can pick any number you like. These systems typically register between 1-10% of events.
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It’s very popular these days to talk about the Pandemic of the Unvaccinated, but what if what we’re really looking at is a Pandemic of the Vaccinated? When the breeding ground for a virus doesn‘t change much, there is not much reason for it to mutate. That reason comes for instance in the form of a vaccine, especially one that is non-sterilizing (doesn’t prevent further infection) and is used on an enormous scale.
Instead, they’ll have you believe the opposite: that the unvaccinated (80% of whom are safe to begin with) cause a virus to mutate, and the vaccinated stop that mutating, even if they continue to infect people around them. There is no logic in that.
Denninger: The Flag Is In Tatters
You either had Covid now or will get it, like it or not. It is as certain as winter. Further, if Delta arose it won’t be the last one. Worse, we now know, conclusively that these vaccines are not sterilizing, which means every vaccinated person is a viral mutation factory and won’t know they have it in many cases. We also know it does not block transmission, as was just demonstrated on the HMS Queen Elizabeth and in the Texas Delegation.
You cannot out-vaccinate a mutating virus; the reason is quite simple as the virus passes through people and mutates faster than you can modify vaccination formulas. I warned early on that the use of non-sterilizing vaccines was known dangerous back when IPV came out for Polio and is why Sabin’s OPV formula, which is sterilizing, was universally used in conjunction with IPV in the US until polio was no longer circulating here. In fact we kept using OPV in the United States for another 20 years after the nation was declared polio-free. Why? Because not doing so — using non-sterilizing IPV alone when polio was still circulating in the population — was damned dangerous as it placed evolutionary pressure on the virus that could cause more disease rather than less and we knew it.
There are no sterilizing Covid-19 vaccines and no evidence we can develop one. The manufacturers admitted their trials were not intended to prove that originally but now we have the data and zero of the shots produce sterilizing immunity. That’s scientific fact at this point. In short we have no choice but to drop the bull**** and accept that we have to live with Covid-19. It will never go away. It has become an endemic virus like the cold or flu viruses and will be with us forever. In addition eradication was always doomed to fail because it has animal reservoirs, specifically at least cats and ferrets. We have no choice in this matter.
Within a very short period of time if Delta is what they claim in terms of infectivity you’re going to see a dramatic shift here as we have in Britain and Israel. The data from Israel says natural infection is 6-7x as effective in preventing a future infection as the jab. The virus will shortly run out of non-jabbed people to infect and the vax-vs-nonvax numbers showing up in the ER will shift dramatically. The bad news is that those who got a “hidden” adverse effect, especially thrombosis of any sort, are at a very high risk of getting monkey-hammered if and when their immunity fails and they get infected anyway because that pre-existing damage will be synergistic with the virus effects.
Denninger: Here It Comes
… The "spike unit" that the jabs are all constructed around, it has developed, something known to the NIH and the pharmaceutical companies before Covid-19 was claimed to exist in January of 2020. There is a transfer agreement from the NIH to a university dated prior to that time, and some evidence that the exact spike configuration found in Covid-19 was being discussed in scientific papers long before that. How can you have a scientific discussion, write papers on and transfer technology related to something that isn't known to exist yet? Fauci was grilled on this the other day by Congress, asked directly if the spike in Covid-19 was identical to that in said paper, and refused to answer with a yes or no. He knows damn well what the answer is and if he lied that would be proved perjury and a criminal offense. If he tells the truth then the etiology of Covid-19 is conclusively known to wildly pre-date the so-called "discovery" and now we must start asking all sorts of other questions; said questions degenerate very rapidly into criminal culpability on the part of many including a whole bunch of people right here in the US. Fauci looked very nervous in that hearing -- exactly like a man who has been caught bull****ting since the start, there's a half-million bodies piled up as a result and his neck is itching.
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I remind you that in September of 2020 the first scientific paper was published indicating that the “Spike” was quite possibly the direct cause of the serious damage and virtually all Covid-19 deaths. Several papers followed starting in December of 2020, prior to mass-distribution of the jabs, confirming that the spike was directly capable of causing pathology — that is, severe damage — without the rest of the virus being present at all. Failing to halt the roll-out to prove that the vaccines, which all cause production of said spike in your body, would not cause the same effects was criminally insane and grossly negligent given the science at the time. This was not an “accident” since the studies were published and known — it was deliberate blindness undertaken in the interest of speed and money before human safety and indeed human life.
CDC Withdraws PCR Tests: “They Can’t Tell SARS-CoV-2 from Influenza”
UK Government Advisor Admits Masks Are Just "Comfort Blankets" That Do Virtually Nothing
Dr Colin Axon, a SAGE advisor for the government told the London Telegraph that medics have given people a “cartoonish” view of how how microscopic viruses travel through the air, and the masks have gaps in them that are up to 5000 times bigger than Covid particles.
“The small sizes are not easily understood but an imperfect analogy would be to imagine marbles fired at builders’ scaffolding, some might hit a pole and rebound, but obviously most will fly through,” Axon said.
“Once a particle is not on a biological surface it is no longer a biomedical issue, it is simply about physics. The public has only a partial view of the story if information only comes from one type of source,” Axon continued, adding
“Medics have some of the answers but not a whole view.”
Noting that the “mask debate is about the particle journey,” Axon explained that “Masks can catch droplets and sputum from a cough but what is important is that SARS CoV-2 is predominantly distributed by tiny aerosols.”
“A Covid viral particle is around 100 nanometres, material gaps in blue surgical masks are up to 1,000 times that size, cloth mask gaps can be 500,000 times the size,” Axon urged.
Rage Against the Vaccine
I have the feeling that the story about Covid and the vaccines is about to change dramatically, but that it will take some time for us to realize it, because so much on the topic is not reported. The change will have to be undeniable before it is acknowledged.
That is, we will be moving from “the vaccines will save you” to “the vaccines may kill you”. And I don’t mean through unintentional and unfortunate adverse effects, though those are bad enough, and much more common than we are “allowed” to know. I mean that the spike proteins the vaccines force your cells to make, kill more people than the virus they purportedly protect against.
Maybe I’m a bit early, not just because this would go against the overwhelming narrative grain, but also because the process itself that will lead to this, is not yet advanced enough. But perhaps that would merely mean an early warning.
I’m not a fan of what is called “the vaccines” as we presently know them. They have been too poorly researched and too poorly tested, and therefore too risky to inoculate 100s of millions of people with. Which is why they were never approved, at least that part of the process had not been politicized yet.
Well, not fully. They did get emergency authorizations, for which other substances, that could have saved countless lives, needed to be banned and ostracized. But in the end it all comes down to what the “vaccines” accomplish over the medium- to long term, and that is exactly the part that was never tested.
Have the “vaccines” saved (m)any lives to date? It’s hard to say, they were rolled out when spring came in the northern hemisphere, a time when a year before infections plummeted. That they are skyrocketing now, in the middle of summer, may thus be a very bad sign. We won’t know until summer’s over. But there are a few things we can point to. …
… Let’s go to case exhibit one: India. Where officially 3% of people have been vaccinated, but the Delta variant has been conquered.
… Case exhibit number two: Israel. Lots of vaccinations, but also many infections. A 30x rise in infections over the past month while vaccinations were at full speed.
… But at least those fully vaccinated will get less sick, you say. Well, this Israeli source casts doubts on that ubiquitous claim
… I liked this from @ScottAdamsSays: “If a vaccination doesn’t stop you from getting a disease, but it does reduce the symptoms, wouldn’t that be called a therapeutic?” Yes, but what do you call it if it doesn’t do that either? Where is the evidence, other than in big words? Remember how Remdesivir was marketed in much the same way, and billions spent on it, only to find it was an absolute bust.
… I said recently that I think the reaction to the vaccines not working will be more lockdowns and masks and vaccination pressure, in order to prevent people from finding out that the vaccines don’t work. There’ll be much talk of Delta -and Gamma- spreading like crazy and leaving us no choice, but in the end that won’t make the vaccines work.
…This graph from Iceland is a good way to close. As vaccinations rise, so do infections.
How the Covid Scam Is Perpetrated.
The Panic Pandemic
Fearmongering from journalists, scientists, and politicians did more harm than the virus.
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“There’s always a certain amount of herd thinking in science,” Kulldorff says, “but I’ve never seen it reach this level. Most of the epidemiologists and other scientists I’ve spoken to in private are against lockdowns, but they’re afraid to speak up.”
To break the silence, Kulldorff joined with Stanford’s Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford to issue a plea for “focused protection,” called the Great Barrington Declaration. They urged officials to divert more resources to shield the elderly, such as doing more tests of the staff at nursing homes and hospitals, while reopening business and schools for younger people, which would ultimately protect the vulnerable as herd immunity grew among the low-risk population.
They managed to attract attention but not the kind they hoped for. Though tens of thousands of other scientists and doctors went on to sign the declaration, the press caricatured it as a deadly “let it rip” strategy and an “ethical nightmare” from “Covid deniers” and “agents of misinformation.”
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The traditional strategy for dealing with pandemics was to isolate the infected and protect the most vulnerable, just as Atlas and the Great Barrington scientists recommended. The CDC’s pre-pandemic planning scenarios didn’t recommend extended school closures or any shutdown of businesses even during a plague as deadly as the 1918 Spanish flu. Yet Fauci dismissed the focused-protection strategy as “total nonsense” to “anybody who has any experience in epidemiology and infectious diseases,” and his verdict became “the science” to leaders in America and elsewhere.
Fortunately, a few leaders followed the science in a different way. Instead of blindly trusting Fauci, they listened to his critics and adopted the focused-protection strategy—most notably, in Florida. Its governor, Ron DeSantis, began to doubt the public-health establishment early in the pandemic, when computer models projected that Covid patients would greatly outnumber hospital beds in many states. Governors in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan were so alarmed and so determined to free up hospital beds that they directed nursing homes and other facilities to admit or readmit Covid patients—with deadly results.
But DeSantis was skeptical of the hospital projections—for good reason, as no state actually ran out of beds—and more worried about the risk of Covid spreading in nursing homes. He forbade long-term-care centers to admit anyone infected with Covid and ordered frequent testing of the staff at senior-care centers. After locking down last spring, he reopened businesses, schools, and restaurants early, rejected mask mandates, and ignored protests from the press and the state’s Democratic leaders. Fauci warned that Florida was “asking for trouble,” but DeSantis went on seeking and heeding advice from Atlas and the Great Barrington scientists, who were astonished to speak with a politician already familiar with just about every study they mentioned to him.
“DeSantis was an incredible outlier,” Atlas says. “He dug up the data and read the scientific papers and analyzed it all himself. In our discussions, he’d bounce ideas off me, but he was already on top of the details of everything. He always had the perspective to see the larger harms of lockdowns and the need to concentrate testing and other resources on the elderly. And he has been proven correct.”
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Social-media platforms continued censoring scientists and journalists who questioned lockdowns and mask mandates. YouTube removed a video discussion between DeSantis and the Great Barrington scientists, on the grounds that it “contradicts the consensus” on the efficacy of masks, and also took down the Hoover Institution’s interview with Atlas. Twitter locked out Atlas and Kulldorff for scientifically accurate challenges to mask orthodoxy. A peer-reviewed German study reporting harms to children from mask-wearing was suppressed on Facebook
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Unlike many proclaimed crises, an epidemic is a genuine threat, but the crisis industry can’t resist exaggerating the danger, and doomsaying is rarely penalized.
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Journalists kept highlighting the most alarming warnings, presented without context. They needed to keep their audience scared, and they succeeded. For Americans under 70, the probability of surviving a Covid infection was about 99.9 percent, but fear of the virus was higher among the young than among the elderly, and polls showed that people of all ages vastly overestimated the risk of being hospitalized or dying.
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This experience should be a lesson in what not to do, and whom not to trust. Do not assume that the media’s version of a crisis resembles reality. Do not count on mainstream journalists and their favorite doomsayers to put risks in perspective. Do not expect those who follow “the science” to know what they’re talking about. Science is a process of discovery and debate, not a faith to profess or a dogma to live by. It provides a description of the world, not a prescription for public policy, and specialists in one discipline do not have the knowledge or perspective to guide society. They’re biased by their own narrow focus and self-interest.
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Luminaries united on Zoom and YouTube to assure the public that “we’re all in this together.” But we weren’t. When the panic infected the nation’s elite—the modern gentry who profess such concern for the downtrodden—it turned out that they weren’t so different from aristocrats of the past. They were in it for themselves.
COVID Quotes of the Week:
Kunstler: I’ll tell you what’s really funny: the new Sam Harris “Making Sense” podcast with Dr. Eric Topol, veep of Scripps Research. These two just can’t make sense of why the folks outside their Southern California smuggery bubble have any reservations about getting vaxed-up against Covid-19. It’s like a mental illness to them — all these selfish, Trump-driven, flag-smooching ignoramouses beyond the pale of Wokery, who are putting at risk their science-loving betters in the PhD hives of the New Normal, while that King Kong of Covid variants (code-name Delta) rages through the hillsides and canyons beneath Mullholland Drive. The insolence! Can’t these morons just follow simple instructions (available 24/7 at CNN)?
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And now you want to convince half the country subjected to this tyrannical mind-fuckery to get a poorly-tested mRNA vaccine that might provoke blood clots and organ damage? Against a disease apparently manufactured under the sponsorship of our own government? I have to tell you, Sam and Eric, that your expectations are bit out-of-synch with the march of events. That half of the country not in thrall to your narratives won’t submit to your supposedly superior powers of reasoning and your empathic, nurturing concern for their well-being. They are quite convinced, based on a shit-ton of evidence and lived experience, that they are being played by a degenerate regime not at all run in their interests… that lies to them reflexively and incessantly.
Gerald Celente: With death and injuries from fully vaccinated people going higher by the thousands every week, there are no facts that will sway the pro-vax crowd. Celente says, “The facts don’t count. If you show the facts, it’s misinformation if you put out facts. It’s a conspiracy theory when you put out facts, and in the United Soviet States of America, you are not allowed to put facts on any social media because they will ban you. You are not allowed to say anything to disagree with the government or the (so-called) ‘health experts.’”
CO-VID of the Week:
The Other Side of the COVID Vaccination Argument, Video
COVID Conspiracy Fare:
Cascade Of Consequences.
Who Watches the Watchmen? - Fauci's 'noble lie,' exposed.
I've been trying for quite some time to get people to understand the full scope of the Dr. Fauci ‘situation,’ but it’s clear that segments of our national leadership are preventing an honest and open inquiry into his actions because they fear the backlash/collateral damage that will result from the tarnishing of their sacred cow.
GeoPolitical Fare:
What’s Really Going on in Cuba
The international media has exaggerated and manipulated these events to depict mass opposition to the Cuban government, police repression of peaceful protests and a regime in crisis. Meanwhile, the role of external forces, the existence of a concerted social media war on Cuba, the pernicious impact of US sanctions and the mobilisation of thousands of Cubans in support of the revolutionary government have been deliberately downplayed or ignored.
The Conservative Case for Cyberbullying America’s Generals
My interaction with the General serves as a microcosm of the American military’s cultural rot. Here we have a two-star General who spends his days on social media hyping a vaccine for an illness that poses minimal risk to his troops. When pressed on why America can’t win wars and why he embraces policies that treat healthy people like biohazards, his first response is to accuse his critics of treachery and then block them from view. This is what $693 billion a year buys you: unbridled arrogance from the leaders of a military that can’t win against third world tribesmen armed with small arms and homemade explosives. A significant portion of our military leaders, like General Donahoe, are totally detached from reality. They face no consequences for losing wars or losing troops to preventable suicides. Many of them don’t really command anything at all. They are so ensconced in layers of bureaucrats, staff, operations and logistics shops, briefs, intelligence reports, public affairs officials, and aides that there is usually no danger of the public uncovering their true character, lack of leadership, or empty careers. Twitter, for all its many flaws, provides a direct line into the thought process and values of the military’s elite class. Too often, the minds of our great and courageous “warriors” are filled with nothing more than anodyne policy statements, automatic deference to other members of the elite expert class, and received wisdom from the mouths of MSNBC hosts. A painful lesson for patriotic citizens, perhaps, but a necessary one. As these leaders spend their days scrolling twitter in the twilight of their careers, waiting to secure their pensions and post-retirement defense contractor gigs, they deserve to feel some heat from the people they allegedly serve. Getting “ratio’d” is, for many of them, the worst consequence they’ll ever face for overseeing institutional failure.
Orwellian Fare:
Greenwald: FBI Using the Same Fear Tactic From the First War on Terror: Orchestrating its Own Terrorism Plots
Questioning the FBI's role in 1/6 was maligned by corporate media as deranged. But only ignorance about the FBI or a desire to deceive could produce such a reaction.
CaitOz Fare:
Our World Is Dying Because We Don’t Value Un-Making Things
I talk a lot about how we’re destroying our environment with a global system where human behavior is driven by the pursuit of profit, how the power structure which dominates that system does so by violence, exploitation, oppression, and the threat of nuclear war, and how we’re all going to die if we don’t change this system.
Whenever I say this I get a bunch of capitalism cultists bleating “You just don’t understand economics bruh,” which is the line they’ve been trained to say to anyone they see criticizing capitalism. It’s silly for a number of reasons, among them the fact that nobody who regurgitates that line understands economics themselves, and the fact that one’s understanding of economics has nothing to do with the death of the ecosystem our species relies on for survival.
The claim that anyone who opposes capitalism “just doesn’t understand economics” is premised on the notion that unfettered capitalism is the best way for a civilization to attain economic growth, which is arguably true; governments like China saw their economies explode when they started implementing elements of capitalism for pragmatic reasons. If you want to create a bunch of stuff and generate a tremendous amount of wealth, a good way to do that is by giving the capitalist class the protection of the state so they can rake in billions of dollars exploiting the global proletariat without being guillotined.
Problem is, that only looks like a valid point if economic growth is the only value by which you judge a system’s success. If you value quality of life, overall happiness, health, average lifespan, education, eliminating poverty, homelessness and hunger, and many other possible metrics, nations like the United States are far from ideal. If you value avoiding climate collapse, then the only way to think capitalism is the answer is to espouse on blind faith the belief that the world will be saved by greedy union-busting tech oligarchs who just want to make more stuff and send us all to space.
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This is why people who are awake to what’s going on in our world so often feel hopeless and despondent, and why the quote “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” resonates with so many. Because we live in a society that has no framework or conceptual infrastructure for valuing the disappearing of things, and because making things and turning a profit has no answer for our situation, solutions look impossible. …
Consciousness And Dysfunction Cannot Coexist
If you are reading this, it’s likely the result of a long and ongoing process where at some point you got very curious about what’s going on in the world and managed to punch through the fog of mass media psyops with a mixture of research, logic, and insight. But the fact that you had to do this means everyone is being constantly psychologically assaulted at mass scale by very powerful people.
You never signed up for this. None of us ever signed up to have our minds pummelled with continuous plutocratic psyops working to manipulate the way we perceive reality. This is an unprovoked act of aggression against us all, and a violation of our personal sovereignty.
Mass media, think tanks, NGOs, algorithm manipulation, social media censorship, the entire education system: all the systems which we’ve been conditioned to look to to figure out what’s going on in the world are just indoctrination programs disguised as information and education. It is disgusting, and it is abusive.
As long as the wealthy and powerful are manipulating the way we think, act and vote at mass scale, they’re going to keep enacting their psychopathic will upon the world. We’re going to have to find a way to wake up from the blanket of perception management they’ve laid over our species, or we will go the way of the dinosaur.
Luckily, we already have our answer on how to do that in everything we know about our species already. The only thing that ever leads to positive changes in human behavior is an expansion of consciousness.
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We can become collectively aware of abusive government and oligarchic systems of rule, and replace them with healthy systems of organization. We can become collectively aware of the ecocidal nature of predatory capitalism, and move into a collaborative relationship with our ecosystem. We can become collectively aware of the self-defeating nature of competition-based social models, and create systems in which people around the world collaborate for the good of the whole rather than competing with each other as individuals, corporations and countries.
This is a very simple principle: the more awareness there is, the more harmony there will be. But just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy.
The deck is stacked very aggressively against the collective expansion of consciousness. Government secrecy, propaganda, and systematic indoctrination from early childhood are all carefully engineered by the ruling class to ensure the continuation of their rule.
All we can do in response to this is help spread awareness as much as we can. Right now the number of people who understand what’s going on is very small, and the powerful aim to keep it that way; that’s why internet censorship campaigns are ramping up like never before and critical natsec journalism is being aggressively attacked. But if we can be very clever and spread truthful information in a way that helps wake up even one person to what’s really going on, our numbers grow by that much, and then that’s one more person you have working to awaken the world.
It’s not at all impossible to get an explosion of collective consciousness happening in such a scenario. Not easy. But certainly not impossible.
So the answer to the ever-present question “What can we do?” is, spread awareness. …
Warmongers Should Be Treated Like Serial Killers And Child Rapists
It’s really odious how they’re framing this get-together as two men from differing ideological backgrounds overcoming their little disagreements to find common ground. We’re talking about someone who has pushed for psychopathic acts of military violence at every opportunity throughout his entire career, and has had an ungodly amount of success in doing so. As the co-founder of the influential neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century and major Bush administration thought leader, Kristol played a key role in manufacturing support for the invasion of Iraq and ushering in an unprecedented new era of US military expansionism, a fact for which he remains completely unapologetic.
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Saying you disagree with Bill Kristol’s engineering the Iraq war but found plenty of common ground on liberalism and patriotism is the same as saying you disagree with Jared Fogle on his raping children but found plenty of common ground on his fondness for Subway sandwiches.
It’s like announcing you just had lunch with serial killer Edmund Kemper and, while you disagree with his policy of murdering women and copulating with their severed heads, you really respect his opinions on immigration.
I’m actually being charitable here. There’s not a pedophile or serial killer on earth who has contributed as much death and suffering to our world as William Kristol.
Satirical Fare:
Space Returns Unwanted Amazon Delivery Outer space has returned an unwanted Amazon package that was sent to it unsolicited yesterday. According to witnesses, the package floated gently back down to earth after being rejected. Locals have asked Amazon to please "pick this thing up and bring it back to the warehouse" as no one really wants it around or knows what to do with it. If you know who ordered a giant metal gumdrop with 4 dudes in it, please call Amazon immediately.
added July 27:
COVID Addendum:
A Tale of Two Narratives
TAE Summary:
The Mainstream Narrative
– It is not known where Covid 19 originated but the most likely origin is the transmission from an animal to humans
– Covid 19 has killed 600K people in the US
– Trump botched the Covid 19 response costing many lives
– Many deaths were preventable if we’d tested, masked, tracked and locked down better
– Vaccines are good and have eradicated polio, measles, whooping cough and other diseases
– Vaccines against Covid 19 are safe and effective and have saved many lives with only minor, acceptable adverse reactions
– There are no effective treatments for Covid 19 besides the vaccines
– Covid is spread by droplets and aerosols from infected people, both symptomatic and asymptomatic, and can be spread through momentary casual contact both indoors and outdoors
– Children and young adults are at risk form Covid 19 and can spread the disease and should take the same precautions and measures as adults
– We need to do whatever it takes to defeat Covid 19 including frequent testing, mass vaccination, continued lockdowns and wearing masks
– The best information comes from the CDC, FDA and NIH
– The mainstream media warns us of the dangers of Covid 19 but unfortunately many do not take these warnings seriously
– As usual, conspiracy theorists and nut-jobs abound
– Antivaxxers are against all vaccines and now also against the Covid 19 vaccines
– Antivaxxers have believed phony information disseminated by scurrilous, right wing charlatans
– These people cost many lives and are the reason Covid still spreads and mutates
– They are responsible for continued lockdowns and the further decimation of the economy
– They are selfish, evil and anti-science
– The Covid 19 response is all about trying to get us back to normal as quickly as possible
The Counter Narrative
– Covid 19 was most likely created in a lab in China or the US
– Covid 19 kills people but far fewer than the official count
– Almost all officials in government have botched the Covid 19 response, costing many lives
– Most deaths were preventable if we had investigated and deployed early treatments including vitamin D, zinc, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin
– Vaccines are good and have eradicated polio, measles, whooping cough and other diseases
– The Covid 19 vaccines however are not actually vaccines but gene therapy and have not been adequately tested
– The Covid 19 vaccines have serious side effects including death and other as yet unknown consequences which are not being investigated and are suppressed by the media
– We need to defeat Covid 19 and the best way to do this is through early outpatient treatment with known, effective drugs and known drug protocols for hospitalized patients
– Covid 19 is primarily spread by aerosols from symptomatic and pre-symptomatic people, mostly in indoor situations with poor ventilation where peoples spend a long time together
– Children and young adults are at low risk from Covid 19 and need take fewer precautions and measures but should be treated with drug protocols if infected
– Masks, distancing and lockdowns are mostly ineffective
– The best information comes from front-line doctors who actually treat patients and experienced researchers who have no financial interest in big pharma
– The CDC, FDA and NIH are largely compromised because of their association with and funding by drug companies
– The mainstream media is also compromised by their association with big pharma and the government
– The truth about Covid 19 is suppressed and labeled conspiracy theory in order to support the mainstream narrative
– People who insist that the vaccines are the only way to fight Covd 19 have believed lies told to them by the MSM from big pharma and a corrupt medical establishment
– The vaccine narrative has cost many lives and ineffective vaccines are responsible for the continued spread and mutation of Covid 19
– The fallacious mainstream narrative is responsible for all lock downs and the decimation of the economy
– The people who push the mainstream narrative are evil and anti-science; The people who believe this narrative are naive, dogmatic and anti-science
– The Covid 19 response is all about money, power and control
