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Monday, July 12, 2021

2021-07-12

sorta skimpy on the regular fare this week 


Regular Fare:

Creditocracy: A Geopolitical Economy (Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson)

 

Currency Wars: The World Is On The Verge Of An Epochal Monetary Revolution (Tuomas Malinen, GnSEconomics.com)

 


(not just) for the ESG crowd:

Canadian governments have spent $23 billion supporting three pipelines since 2018: report

A new report finds Canadian governments have provided billions to support pipelines — none of which have been completed to date — even as experts worry pipelines themselves undermine progress on climate goals.

 

 

Pics of the Week:

Pacific Northwest heatwave “virtually impossible” without climate change






EXTRA [controversial or non-market-related] FARE:

 

Regular Fare:

Blair Fix: Is Human Probability Intuition Actually ‘Biased’?

The ‘goal’ of evolution is not to produce rational behavior. Evolution produces behavior that works — behavior that allows organisms to survive. If rationality does evolve, it is a tool to this end. On that front, conscious reasoning appears to be the exception in the animal kingdom. Most animals survive using instinct.

That brings me to the topic of this essay: the human instinct for probability. By most accounts, this instinct is terrible. And that should strike you as odd. As a rule, evolution does not produce glaring flaws. (It slowly removes them.) So if you see flaws everywhere, it’s a good sign that you’re observing an organism in a foreign environment, a place to which it is not adapted.

When it comes to probability, I argue that humans now live in a foreign environment. But it is of our own creation. Our intuition, I propose, was shaped by observing probability in short samples — the information gleaned from a single human lifetime. But with the tools of mathematics, we now see probability as what happens in the infinite long run. It’s in this foreign mathematical environment that our intuition now lives.

 

 

ESG Fare:

Why tar sands, a toxic ecosystem-destroying asphalt, can’t fill in for declining conventional oil

Bitumen is what a desperate civilization mines after it’s depleted its cheap oil. It’s a bottom-of-the-barrel resource, a signal that business as usual in the oil patch has ended. To use a drug analogy, bitumen is the equivalent of scoring heroin cut with sugar, starch, powdered milk, quinine, and strychnine. Calling the world’s dirtiest hydrocarbon “oil” grossly diminishes the resource’s huge environmental footprint. It also distracts North Americans from two stark realities: we are running out of cheap oil, and seventeen million North Americans run their cars on an upgraded version of the smelly adhesive used by Babylonians to cement the Tower of Babel. That ancient megaproject did not end well. Without a disciplined plan for them, the tar sands won’t either.

 

 

COVID Fare:

 

Those dying post-vaccine: Where are the autopsies?

By Jane M. Orient, M.D., executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, AAPS.

… I find it shocking that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Joint Commission that accredits hospitals are not demanding autopsies or testing of vaccine samples. It is not possible to declare a product safe and effective without obtaining direct evidence from potential victims.

The manufacturers are protected against product liability, thanks to Congress. But where is the accountability of the government agencies charged with protecting us, or of the private entities coercing employees or students to take an experimental, potentially dangerous, or even lethal product?

 

UK Gov. release 23rd report on Adverse Reactions to the Covid-19 Vaccines

 

Things to Know before You Allow your Child to get the COVID-19 Vaccine

Why the Program for Vaccinating Children for COVID-19 is based on Lies

if you follow mainstream Media, you’ll get the impression that there’s a need to get children vaccinated anyhow, based on three premises:

·         children need to be vaccinated to help to avoid infection of adults

·         these new vaccines have no long term adverse effects

·         there is consensus in the scientific community about the safety of these new therapies

THESE STATEMENTS ARE PLAIN LIES, and that can be easily proven if you take the time to do proper research.

 

Keeping society open: The endemic solution

The popular narrative reeks so pungently that we almost have to keep debunking these absurdities to dispel the trance that too many seem to be under.

C-19: It’s novel, it’s new, it’s unprecedentedly dangerous!

No, it’s not! There is a family of coronaviruses. To that extent, this may have been ‘new’ and ‘novel, but not in any way to suggest that either our immune systems or our medical science was dealing with some uniquely implacable foe. Furthermore, it seems to have been circulating from the latter half of 2019. Medical researchers have repeatedly confirmed there were both examples of pre-existing immunity and crossover immunity due to prior immunological experience with similar pathogens. And now data clearly shows this was nothing unprecedented.

It is primarily spread by droplets and infected surfaces

No, it isn’t. It is an airborne virus, and flourishes in congested, poorly ventilated indoor spaces, and is spread by minute particles. Ergo, being ‘locked’ in is simply insane. Even the US CDC confirms, there is roughly 1 in 10,000 chance of being infected by touching a surface. So, all this mass sanitising and social distancing was more kabuki theatre than anything else.

Everyone is equally at risk!

No, they’re not! This is highly age stratified. Certainly, in the developed world, 93%+ of the deaths are above 70. There is a remarkably good recovery rate above 70, close to 97% for those without serious comorbidities. Another 6 to 10% fall within the ages of 40 to 69 (again, the majority with existing preconditions we are told by meta-analysts at leading universities) and below 40 the mortality rate gets increasingly nominal and infinitesimal.

There is no treatment

Yes, there is! There is, of course, the Nobel Prize winning, WHO essential drug, Ivermectin There are studies, randomised trials, overwhelming front line clinical experience from around the world all testifying to its saving graces. There is also HCQ and Zinc, Corticosteroids, Monoclonal Antibodies, Vitamin D3, Budesonide and numerous others that are part of demonstrably effective, early treatment protocols. If treated early during the viral stage, leading doctors in the US, UK, Zimbabwe, India, Mexico, South Africa confirm virtually every symptomatic patient can be saved.

Overall, even including the inflammation and thrombosis phase of the illness (when it becomes successively more dangerous) the most effective protocols have shown 85 to 90% reduction in hospitalisation and deaths.

....

Everyone should be masked! 

No, they shouldn’t! In 2019 WHO had reviewed the 10 most seemingly credible mask studies, all of whom concluded masks don’t work in pandemic situations except in very crowded contexts and should not be used. This was also the conclusion up until the 2020 haemorrhage of medical sanity, of the US CDC, the European Medical Association, the Australian authorities, Johns Hopkins University and virtually everywhere else. There is no new research or any new studies that have led to this somersault. The only randomised trail done over this period, in Denmark, is consistent with all the earlier studies.

Dr. Frankenstein Fauci in his highly vocal emails disdains the use of such masks as well. The nano particles are too small for the masks to arrest anything. Anything other than respirators fitted to the face, which are not practical beyond a few hours, allow ready access to viral invaders, as we’ve said before. This is why one doesn’t use such masks to protect against anthrax, asbestos, black mould, all of which have larger particles. 

Masks are unhygienic, suppress oxygen flow, force you to inhale your own waste, and there are no long-term studies that demonstrate any efficacy or even confirm the safety of breathing in and out in such an encased, inhibited manner for a protracted period of time. Moreover, there’s the simple “live” case study of comparing open US states without mask mandates with those that are ‘muzzled,’ and one can see that there is no benefit in terms of mortality and overall results (on the contrary), other than totemic compliance and pathetic virtue signalling. 

By the way, there is not one recorded instance of outdoor transmission (even CDC accepts it is less than 1%). Therefore, unless you dislike breathing in oxygen there truly is no explanation for the endurance of this mad, sad ritual, when we are outside. 

...

We must vaccinate everybody!

Actually, we need great caution! There are numerous early treatments. On that basis alone, the Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) should be rendered illicit and inapplicable (this is why there are such desperate attempts to suppress and smear these treatments). So, the deaths and adverse effects recorded even in government databases (which confess to being between 1-20% of actuals) are greater than the cumulative total for all other vaccines since such tracking was undertaken, at least since 1995. 

The types of issues range from severe neurological damage, myocarditis, life threatening blood clots, fertility issues, tragic pregnancy consequences and too many others to itemise or catalogue.

... Beyond that we now know that the spike proteins, even without the virus, are lethal and this is what we are injecting in the case of the mRNA vaccines primarily. They also do not stay localised and instead spread throughout our organs (SALK Institute study, autopsy plus repeated testimony by Dr Robert Malone, one of the founders of the mRNA technology

...

Re-opening society: A call to action

We had three of the world’s most eminent doctors present to policy makers here, and the conclusions in terms of re-opening society and keeping it open are given below.

1. Keep society open, solvent, functioning and able to provide public health resources to its citizens as well as livelihoods. Lockdowns are penal, take a devastating human toll which only worsens, and as demonstrated, backfire, and data shows that conclusively around the world. They do not help given all transmission is indoor, most people are not at risk, and abundant early treatments exist for the symptomatic.

2. Keep people out of hospitals by providing early treatment, open air clinics, mobile clinics. If treatment is given early on, the period of infectiousness can be vastly reduced to as little as five days. Home treatment guides can be provided and contact information for resources that can provide telemedicine, drive by clinics, guidance, treatment and early support, should be widely circulated. We can actively benchmark experience with everything from ivermectin to monoclonal antibodies ...

...


McCullough: 9 Reasons Not to Support, Mandate Investigational COVID19 Vaccines

(via Ilargi, who said, “McCullough is clear and concise. Wonder how long LinkedIn will keep this up.” Answer: not long enough for me to find it there)

1. COVID-19 vaccination is voluntary research. The COVID-19 public vaccination program operated by the CDC and the FDA is a clinical investigation and under no circumstance can any person receive pressure, coercion, or threat of reprisal on their free choice of participation. Violation of this principle of autonomy by any entity constitutes reckless endangerment with a reasonable expectation of causing personal injury resulting in damages.

2. COVID-19 vaccines do not work well enough. The current COVID-19 vaccines are not sufficiently protective against contracting COVID-19 to support its use beyond the current voluntary participation in the CDC sponsored program. A total of 10,262 SARS-CoV-2 vaccine breakthrough infections had been reported from 46 U.S. states and territories as of April 30, 2021. Among these cases, 6,446 (63%) occurred in females, and the median patient age was 58 years (interquartile range = 40–74 years). [..]

3. COVID-19 vaccines have a dangerous mechanism of action. The Pfizer, Moderna, and JNJ vaccines are considered “genetic vaccines” or vaccines produced from gene therapy molecular platforms.[i] [ii] They have a injurious mechanism of action in that they all cause the body to make an uncontrolled quantity of the pathogenic spike protein from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This is unlike all other vaccines where there is a set amount of antigen or live-attenuated virus. This means for the Pfizer, Moderna, and JNJ vaccines it is not predictable among patients who will produce more or less of the spike protein. The spike protein itself has been demonstrated to injure vital organs such as the brain, heart, lungs, as well as damage blood vessels and directly cause blood clots. Additionally, because these vaccines infect cells within these organs, the generation of spike protein within heart and brain cells in particular, causes the body’s own immune system to attack these organs. [..]

7. People are dying and being hospitalized in record numbers in the days after COVID-19 vaccination. Based on VAERS as of June 25, 2021, there were 6,985 COVID-19 vaccine deaths reported and over 23,257 hospitalizations reported for the COVID-19 vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna, JNJ). By comparison, from 1999, until December 31, 2019, VAERS received 3167 death reports (158 per year) adult death reports for all vaccines combined. Thus, the COVID-19 mass vaccination is associated with at least 39-fold increase annualized vaccine deaths reported to VAERS. COVID-19 vaccine adverse events account for 98% of all vaccine-related AEs from Dec 2020 through present in VAERS..

 

German Trial Lawyer’s Legal Team Suing for Flu/COVID Damages

Along with over 1,000 lawyers and more than 10,000 medical and scientific experts, he and his team began legal proceedings against the Pharma-controlled CDC and WEF dark forces for all things related to flu/covid crimes against humanity.

Besides masks that don’t protect and risk respiratory harm, PCR tests nearly always wrong when positive, and destructive to normal interactions social distancing, Fuellmich called flu/covid jabs designed to harm health, not protect and preserve it as falsely claimed, in breach of the Geneva Conventions, the Nuremberg Code and other human rights laws.

 

 

Orwellian Fare:

 

Thomas Neuburger: An Independence Day Reflection: How the Rich Plan to Rule a Burning World

If the wealthy had ever planned to save our species from the coming climate catastrophe, they would be doing so now, and we would be watching them do it.

           

To keep things simple and (should it need saying) obvious: If the super-rich, those who own and control most first-world governments and many second-world ones, had ever planned to save our species from the coming climate catastrophe, they would be doing so now, and we would be watching them do it.

Instead, we're seeing the opposite. They're building highly militarized "security" states even in democracies, states that can and will protect only wealth from the millions — and later, the billions — of refugees their deliberate and obvious policies will create.

If by their deeds we shall know them, then we know them plenty already. They have no plan to save the global climate for the globe's inhabitants. Not because they don't think the crisis is coming, but because they don't want to.

What they do plan to do instead is save themselves.

If I were running that operation (I'm not), the one that transitions the world from wealth-controlled relative peace to wealth-protected global chaos, I'd have only one goal — keep the masses of people silent and complacent until nothing can be done to stop the separation of their small, energy-rich world from the larger, poorer world of the rest of us.

The story of how that will occur, the phases this project will go through, are the subjects of later work. But for now, suffice it to say, believe your eyes. The security state — the one that keeps them safe — is nearly complete. They're building it in front of us.

 

Explaining Xi’s Crackdown on the Chinese Tech Sector

Whether you think Donald Trump is a dictator wannabe who incited a treasonous insurrection on January 6, 2021, and continues to propagate the “Big Lie” to this very day, or you think the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him and Joe Biden is a powerless, dementia-ridden puppet of the deep state, this article is for you. For the purpose of today’s post, it doesn’t matter which of these two versions of reality you believe, or even which one is closest to the truth.

It is an objective and apolitical fact that big tech in the US – Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google – believed and acted as though the first version were fact. The sitting President’s Twitter and Facebook accounts were initially suspended and then ultimately deleted. An active social media platform, Parler, was shut down altogether by Apple, Google, and Amazon, in perhaps the largest de-platforming of all-time. These things happened, and it was a gigantic deal. You can think these companies performed their obvious and patriotic duties to save the republic, or you can think they are tools of the deep state who facilitated an unjust transfer of power, but you can’t deny their eye-popping display of power.

I don’t think you can deny Xi Jinping noticed, either.

… Trump may or may not have wanted to become a dictator, but Xi is an actual one, and is acting accordingly.

 

 

CaitOz Fare:

 

The Sociopaths Are Cocksure While Those With Empathy Are Full Of Doubt

In a 1933 essay lamenting the rise of Nazism in Germany, Bertrand Russell wrote: “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Which is of course a dynamic that’s still at play in the modern world; the Dunning-Kruger effect is a thing, and one need only to look at American presidents to see that there’s little relationship between one’s intelligence and how far they can rise if they get it in their heads that they ought to be in charge of things.

But I think a much bigger factor in the problems our world faces is not so much about intelligence as empathy.

...

it got me thinking a lot about how messed up our world is because people who let themselves be vulnerable so often choose to be silent, while people with no empathy or connection to others can speak freely.

Have you ever noticed how the major influencers on social media are able to simply ignore all the mountains of negative feedback they receive online and just go on with their days unbothered, but for you it’s hard to ignore even one niggling comment? Have you ever wondered how they do that?

But you know who would have no problem simply dismissing the perspectives of others like they don’t matter? Narcissists and sociopaths.

you naturally wind up with narcissists and sociopaths occupying the positions of influence in our society. Which says a lot about why things are as fucked as they are. Combine this with the fact that the most influential voices in this model are those who have benefitted from the status quo, and the fact that wealth kills empathy, and the fact that money uplifts those who are willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead no matter who they have to step on, and it’s no wonder that we find ourselves ruled by sociopaths who manipulate public thought to their advantage.

 

The Empire Depends On Psychological Compartmentalization

There is a whole other world happening just below the surface of mainstream public attention. The membrane of celebrities and entertainment and partisan bickering overlays public perception of the world almost the entire time, only occasionally being disrupted by short-lived blasts of dissonance piercing through the fog.

You’ll be reading about what Ronnie Republican said to Debbie Democrat, and it will feel so real and normal, then all of a sudden you’re getting blasted in the face with talk of Jeffrey Epstein getting suicided in prison amid reported ties to government-run sexual blackmail operations using minors for the purpose of controlling society’s leading influencers. Then it gets quickly memory-holed, the membrane returns, and it’s back to Ronnie and Debbie once again.

But before the fog returns there’s always a short-lived moment of “What?? Huh??” as you try to re-orient yourself to reality in light of the new information you just received. What you just saw is completely irreconcilable with your current view of the world, the one you’ve been fed piece-by-piece by school and mass media and internet algorithms. The clash between your comfortable existing worldview and the new information you just received causes a kind of psychological discomfort known as cognitive dissonance, which makes it hard to hold them both at the same time.

Compartmentalization comes in when we’re scrolling through our news feed and see something about the horrors that are being unleashed upon Yemen with the help of our government; it doesn’t square with the model of the world we’ve been trained to hold in our minds, so we dissociate it from our model. It comes in when we remember that we were lied to about Iraq. It comes in when we think about what humankind’s way of living on this planet is doing to our ecosystem.

Compartmentalization is a weapon of the propagandists. It’s a glitch in our cognitive processing which means they don’t have to work as hard to keep us living in a lie-based reality tunnel; all they have to do is construct our perception of reality for us, and from there our own psychological defense systems will do the work for them.

And this is what we must do if our species is to survive into the future. We must find a way to move past the cognitive dissonance from a lie-based way of living into a truth-based way of living, and become a truth-based species with a truth-based relationship with each other and with our ecosystem. If we keep hiding from reality, we’ll compartmentalize ourselves right out of existence.

 


Other Quotes of the Week:

 

CaitOz: Nothing about America changed in any meaningful way after Trump took office or after he left. An oligarchic empire kept doing the things the oligarchs and imperialists had always planned on doing. All that changed were the narratives laid on top of this very boring reality.

What actually changed? The tweets. The punditry. The levels of pundit-manufactured hysteria on each side. Nothing real and significant in terms of actual government policy and behavior. The powerful capitalize on people’s inability to distinguish narrative from reality.

 

Cait2: Space colonization will never happen. It’s a delusion promoted by billionaires who have a vested interest in marketing the idea that the ecologically unsustainable nature of status quo capitalism can be resolved by turning humanity into a spacefaring species. They are lying.

Capitalism has no answer for the destruction of our ecosystem. Money and profit motive have no wisdom for dealing with this predicament. That’s why capitalism stans either pretend the destruction isn’t happening or pretend the world is about to be saved by greedy tech oligarchs….. The solution to humanity’s problems is not to attempt the impossible task of fleeing to space, it’s to transcend our self-destructive patterning and move into a collaboration-based relationship with each other and with our ecosystem. Just like any individual who refuses to accept responsibility for their predicament, we’re collectively flailing all over the place to place the solution anywhere but on us changing. We’ll either become a conscious species or we’ll die. There are no other options on the table.

 

Kunstler: Advice to the mindfuck-hesitant: When “Joe Biden” and Kamala Harris come to your door selling vaccines, treat them as you would, say, a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses proffering Watchtower magazines

 

Anna de Buisseret: Our expert psychologists’ evidence states that psychological warfare is being conducted on the population as a whole and on individuals. The expert analysis is that the impact of this is that not a single person is capable of giving informed consent as they have been brainwashed.

 

James W. Carden: There is abundant evidence deriving from White House tapes and an apparently endless series of biographies, histories, and documentaries that for most of their time at the pinnacle of power, President Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his chief foreign policy adviser and subsequently secretary of state, were more or less bananas.

 

Mac10: Of all of the various pump and dump schemes from this era, cyclical reflation is by far the largest and most widely believed delusion. This society is in mass denial over Japanification and the fact that there are now extreme levels of excess capital and excess capacity, both of which are deflationary. However, it's this excess capital that keeps propagating these lies and myths as it rotates from one global pump and dump scheme to the next in search of zero sum gains.

 


Tweet [Thread] of the Week:

 

Darryl Cooper, AKA MartyrMade, is a researcher, writer, and podcaster has put together one of the most brilliant Twitter threads you will ever read.  Over the course of 35 tweets, he examines fact after fact from the last five years to explain why conservatives — the people who used to believe in our government, in law enforcement, in the election process — have become cynical, disillusioned, and prone to accepting conspiracy theories to explain the manifest breakdowns in the American system.

 

Here’s an even more concise edited string of Mr. Cooper’s most pungent points:

The FBI/etc spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using evidence manufactured by the Clinton campaign. We now know that all involved knew it was fake from Day 1…. Everyone involved lied about their involvement as long as they could…. It’s hard to describe to people on the left (who are used to thinking of gov’t as a conspiracy… Watergate, COINTELPRO, WMD, etc) how shocking & disillusioning this was for people who encourage their sons to enlist in the Army…. They could have managed the shock if it only involved the government. But the behavior of the corporate press is really what radicalized them [conservatives]. They hate journalists more than they hate any politician or gov’t official, because they feel most betrayed by them…. Many of them don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc would lie to them if there was. They have every reason to believe that, and it’s probably true.”

 


Big Thoughts:

 

Opinion Entrenchment

How do and should we form and change opinions? Logic tells us to avoid inconsistencies and incoherences. Language tells us to attend to how meaning is inferred from ambiguous language. Decision theory says to distinguish values from fact opinion, and says exactly how decisions should respond to these. Regarding fact opinion, Bayesian theory says to distinguish priors from likelihoods, and says exactly how fact opinion should respond to evidence.

Simple realism tells us to expect errors in actual opinions, relative to all of these standards. Computing theory says to expect larger errors on more complex topics, and opinions closer to easily computed heuristics. And many kinds of human and social sciences suggest that we see human beliefs as often like clothes, which in mild weather we use more to show our features to associates than to protect ourselves from the elements. Beliefs are especially useful for showing loyalty and morality.

There’s another powerful way to think about opinions that I’ve only recently appreciated: opinions get entrenched. In biology, natural selection picks genes that are adaptive, but adds error. These gene choices change as environments change, except that genes which are entangled with large complex and valued systems of genes change much less; they get entrenched.

We see entrenchment also all over our human systems. …

Beliefs also get entrenched. That is, we are often in the habit of building many analyses from the same standard sets of assumptions. And the more analyses that we have done using some set of assumptions, the more reluctant we are to give up that set. This attitude toward the set is not very sensitive to the evidential or logical support we see for each of its assumptions. In fact, we are often pretty certain that individual assumptions are wrong, but because they greatly simplify our analysis, we hope that they are still enable a decent approximation from their set.

….

Across a wide range of contexts, our reluctance to consider contrarian claims is often less due to their lacking logical or empirical support, and more because accepting them would require reanalyzing a great many things that one had previously analyzed using non-contrarian alternatives.

 

Eating Endangered



… The irony, of course, is that although Americans farm and eat animals on such a large scale, we also spend immense time and energy caring about endangered ones. In 1973, Congress passed the Endangered Species Act, which provided a framework for funding conservation efforts and proposed the necessity of safeguarding critical habitats. In fiscal year 2016, federal and state agencies spent at least $1.6 billion on threatened and endangered species. For better or worse, endangered animals like pandas are intertwined with our notions of conservation. We parade them as symbols of the environmental movement, and they provide us—along with annual global temperature and inches of sea level rise—with a clear metric for the state of our environmental collapse. When a species on the endangered list is brought back from the brink of extinction, its revival is hailed as a major success for environmentalism. Yet such ‘victories’ are dwarfed by the routine killing and eating that happens every year: at least 1.5 billion pigs, 500 million sheep, 400 million goats, and 300 million cattle are slaughtered and eaten annually in a global operation that, to most people, exists outside of the realm of environmentalism. To better understand our society-wide contradiction between wanton consumption and performative preservation, it helps to start with the Enlightenment. …

 

Satirical Fare:

21 Million Floridians Evacuated After State Deemed Structurally Unsound

 

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