Scott Minerd: Things Couldn’t Be Better
The COVID Delta Variant’s Looming Threat to Risk Assets.
When asked why Guggenheim frequently comes up with out-of-consensus and sometimes seemingly crazy views, I remind people that our process is driven by data and not opinion which can be affected by emotion or pressures to conform to opinions of others. The consensus is often a warm and fuzzy place where others join, providing the comfort associated with agreement and a sense of community and safety. And if the consensus is wrong at least you have company with whom to lament and console. Nevertheless, none of this pays the bills.
Having opinions outside of the consensus can be a lonely and isolated place without comfort from others while exposing oneself to harsh criticism and moments of self-doubt. No one can ever be right 100 percent of the time, and there is always some probability that you can misinterpret the data.
Having just come through the worst pandemic in more than a century, I hesitate to focus on it again. But at the risk of sounding like Chicken Little (as I did in my commentaries from February and March 2020), the evolving data on the Delta variant are extremely disturbing, and dare I add similar to the data we saw last year.
We Need Radical Economic Change—Not Biden's Corporate Capitalism
Stimulus packages are not enough. Only practices of deep democracy and shared ownership can end our cycle of economic disaster.
Why MMT rejects the loanable funds theory
Philip Pilkington: Monetary Faith
Long Reads:
Real-world economics review issue no. 96 – Post-Neoliberal Economics – download whole issue
plus:
Learning to Treat Our Natural World Realistically Through Unlearning Mainstream Economics? A Commentary on the Recent Work of Peter Söderbaum. by Jamie Morgan
Bubble Fare:
"It's Over, It's All Over" - The Death Of China's Bitcoin Mining Industry
Bitcoin is an environmental disaster - Part 1
Bring on the hate, coiners
COVID-19 notes:
Delta cloud over world economic growth
The general outlook of capitalist governments and their economic agencies has been that after the 2020 recession, induced by the COVID-19 pandemic—the deepest since the Great Depression of the 1930s—the global economy would return to a path of growth.
Despite the recent upturn in the major economic centres, this rosy scenario is now very much in question, because of the spread of the Delta variant of the virus.
… “Vaccine access has emerged as the principal fault line, along which the global recovery splits into two blocs,” the IMF said. Some countries could “look forward to further normalisation of activity this year,” but many others “still face resurgent infections and rising death tolls.”
The IMF said recovery was not assured, even in countries where infections were currently very low, so long as the virus circulates elsewhere. That warning was confirmed within a week of being issued. The Delta variant continued to spread, including in countries with a relatively higher level of vaccinations.
Fluid Dynamics of Respiratory Infectious Diseases Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering. PDF
Hat tip: naked capitalism, who says: "Long, but super-interesting."
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Researchers say ‘overexploitation of the Earth’ has seen many of its ‘vital signs’ deteriorate to record levels.
William Rees: Growth through contraction: Conceiving and eco-economy
We are cursed to live in interesting times. The human enterprise is in a precarious state of “ecological overshoot” propelled by excessive economic activity and growing populations. Eco-overshoot (hereafter, “EO”) exists when the human demand for renewable (self-producing) resources exceeds ecosystems’ regenerative capacities and waste discharges from people and their economies exceed ecosystems’ assimilative/recycling capacities. This is the archetypal definition of biophysical unsustainability.
…
EO is a recent phenomenon. Anatomically modern H. sapiens have been around for over 300,000 years (Callaway, 2017) but took nearly the whole of that period to reach a population of just one billion in the early 19th century. Then in only 200 years, < 1/1500th as much time, human numbers ballooned by a factor of seven and will top 7.9 billion in 2021 (Figure 1). At the same time, real gross world product increased >100-fold and per capita incomes (consumption) increased by a factor of 13 (25 in rich countries) (Roser, 2013). Of course, Earth didn’t get any larger.
We can extract two important lessons directly from the sudden, exponential expansion of the human enterprise. First, the entire phenomenon was made possible by fossil fuels. Gross world product and fossil energy consumption (along with carbon emissions) have increased in lock-step; a similar relationship holds within individual industrial nations with readily explicable variations (e.g., Chima and Freed, 2005). Obviously other products of the scientific revolution – e.g., improving public health – contributed to the boom, but fossil fuels (FFs) were essential. FFs power the global industrial machine; they were (and remain) the principal means by which humans acquired access to all the food and other material resources needed to expand the human enterprise at virtually full biological potential. In population ecology terms, rapidly evolving technology and abundant cheap energy eliminated many of the “negative feedbacks” (e.g., disease, food and other resource shortages, etc.) that historically held our populations in check. Human numbers and virtually all material flows associated with H. sapiens responded with exponential exuberance in what some authors have termed the “great acceleration” (Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill, 2007).
Second, of perhaps 15,000 generations of humans, only the most recent 10 or so have experienced sufficient population/economic growth (and technological change) in their lifetimes to notice. For 99.9% of human evolutionary history, human numbers everywhere fluctuated in the vicinity of local carrying capacities as the latter varied with shifting climate and other ecological variables (including bouts of plague which in the 14th century wiped out a third to half of the Eurasian population in just a few years). In short, while the present generation and other recent cohorts of H. sapiens take continuous growth to be the norm – most economists get nervous if growth falls much below a “healthy” 2-3%/year which means GDP doubles every 23 to 35 years – the past few decades of explosive growth comprise the single most anomalous period in human history.
Concern for EO per se has yet to penetrate economic and developmental policy circles; few politicians have even heard of it. Nevertheless, EO arguably constitutes a crisis of unprecedented proportions. EO is the meta-problem: issues like climate change; plunging biodiversity; tropical deforestation; acidifying oceans; expanding deserts; soil/landscape degradation; air, water and land pollution; resource scarcity and completion; etc., (even the CoViD-19 pandemic), while serious in themselves, are all are mere symptoms of this greater malaise.
Thomas Neuburger: 'The Economist' Notices the Climate
No one with real power wants to stop the wreck that even they know is coming.
…
It's fair to say that what we've seen this year will happen almost every year going forward — plus it will get worse. Note that Death Valley reached its all-time record — 54°C or 129°F — in both of the last two years.
Almost everyone alive today will see summers with no Arctic ice. That day is not far off. Almost everyone born today will see winters with no Arctic ice. Destruction of the white expanse of Arctic ice, which reflects solar energy back into space before it’s converted to heat — consider the difference between a white surface and a black surface on a bright day — is one of many accelerants our species is pouring with abandon onto the fire of our own demise.
It's clear the editors of The Economists (this was an unsigned, editor-written piece) fully understand that the planet will soon be largely uninhabitable by our species, and in this century.
…
And that's the reason we're stuck where we are today. No one with real power wants to stop the wreck that even they know is coming. They're content just to talk about it.
Critical measures of global heating reaching tipping point, study finds
Carbon emissions, ocean acidification, Amazon clearing all hurtling toward new records.
U.N. climate panel confronts implausibly hot forecasts of future warming
Many of the world’s leading models are now projecting warming rates that most scientists, including the modelmakers themselves, believe are implausibly fast. In advance of the U.N. report, scientists have scrambled to understand what went wrong and how to turn the models, which in other respects are more powerful and trustworthy than their predecessors, into useful guidance for policymakers.
A Soil-Science Revolution Upends Plans to Fight Climate Change
A centuries-old concept in soil science has recently been thrown out. Yet it remains a key ingredient in everything from climate models to advanced carbon-capture projects.
Heatwave causes massive melt of Greenland ice sheet
"An Environmental Disaster": An EV Battery Metals Crunch Is On The Horizon As The Industry Races To Recycle
Despite EVs bring zero emission while being driven, the "mining, manufacturing and disposal process for batteries could become an environmental disaster for the industry," FT wrote.
Straubel said to FT: “It’s not sustainable at all today, nor is there really an imminent plan — any disruption happening — to make it sustainable.”
The big eco dilemma: How rare earth metals have become a thorn in the side of the green agenda
The world is getting ever more reliant on rare earth metals as it eyes a more environmentally friendly future. And this is a problem, because we don’t have enough of them and they are massively polluting to process.
The plan has angered environmentalists because of what one, who did not want to be named, described as the “horrific” ecological footprint of lithium mining on soil, water and air, as well as increased carbon emissions, which, ironically, is what the EU wants to curb.
The rush for lithium, said environmentalists, is difficult to square with the EU’s desire to be a world leader in climate change and environmental legislation.
“It is not only a dichotomy, I would even go as far as saying it’s an hypocrisy, because right now we’re dealing with an issue of over-consumption that is driving the ecological and climate crisis,” said Diego Francesco Marin
Behind the Rise of U.S. Solar Power, a Mountain of Chinese Coal
How To Think About International Responsibility For Climate Change
You and your frenemy Billy and six other people are stranded on a remote island. Fortunately, the island is covered in mango trees. Unfortunately, Billy is a greedy bastard and on the first morning you wake up to discover that he’s eaten half the mangos on the whole damned island. The rest of you now need to conserve your mangos carefully if you are to survive. You try to hash out an agreement with Billy on the number of mangos that each person is allowed to eat. If each of you eats one mango a day, you figure you’ll be able to hold out indefinitely without exhausting the mango supply.
But every night Billy continues to eat at least two mangos. And, sick of watching Billy gorge himself on mangos while everyone else conserves, everyone else begins to take a little more mango here and there. It gets to the point where Billy is eating two mangos a day, and everyone else is eating about 1.25. Nobody is eating a sustainable quantity of mangos. We’re all going to starve soon if this keeps up.
You desperately try to work out a collective agreement to limit mango consumption that everyone will abide by. Billy, with just an unbelievable amount of nerve, argues that he is not actually responsible for the bulk of the mango problem, because the non-Billy portion of the population is responsible for 1.75 excess mangos per day while he is eating only one excess mango per day. When he says this, everyone else develops a sudden uncontrollable desire to choke Billy with a mango. It is clear he is using sophistry to distract from his own greed. But Billy doubles down: he is only a fraction of the problem, he says, and everyone else is responsible for more of it than he is. The fact that Billy eliminated half the mangos on night one is rarely mentioned.
In relating this charming tropical parable, I am of course talking about global carbon emissions, with Billy a stand-in for the United States, and everyone else a stand-in for the developing world. …
Revealed: the true extent of America’s food monopolies, and who pays the price
Other Fare:
A Canadian geologist, Elizabeth C. Turner of Laurentian University, may have found the earliest fossil record of animal life on Earth, according to a report published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Around a billion years ago, a region of northwest Canada now defined by steep mountains was a prehistoric marine environment where the remains of ancient sponges may be preserved in mineral sediment, the paper says.
Pics of the Week:
New York’s Dreamy, Disorienting Reopening
also
EXTRA [controversial or non-market-related] FARE:
Regular Fare:
Edward Fullbrook: Economics 999
Science tells us that humankind is now in a state far more perilous than any it has ever known, perhaps ever imagined, and that its cause is the impact that the economy has come to have on planet Earth. Meanwhile the daily news tells us that around the world there is rapid acceleration – at least as rapid as in the 1930s – of tyranny, racism and anti-democracy linked to the economy’s forty-year upward redistribution of wealth and income.
We also know that the economy that has come to have these colossal negativities has been engineered, steered, and rationalized by the beliefs, policies, and teachings of an economics variously called “neoclassical”, “mainstream”, “orthodox” and “neoliberal”. But it was never economics’ intention to lead humanity to the cliff’s edge. Quite the opposite: it was expected to lead humans towards better and better lives forever more. But for some time now science has been telling us that the opposite will soon happen, that the economy is now an existential threat to civilization. In other words, never has a theoretical system been so thoroughly falsified as neoliberal economics.
…
In physics, falsifications are not a problem. To the contrary, they are something for physicists to celebrate because they mean they have come closer to understanding the physical world, and this satisfies the truth-seeking ethos that rules their profession. But, except on its fringes, the ethos that governs economics is quite different. So different that today many economists are dedicated to covering up the falsification of traditional economics, and many more to covering up the degree of its falsification, for example blanking the non-linearity and irreversibility of ecological change, referring to “climate change” or “global warming” but never to ecological collapse or extinction. And it is this latter group that is the most dangerous to humanity because there is a strong chance that they will succeed in stalling radical recreation of the economy until global tipping points are passed and it is too late to save humanity and its civilization.
…
now with time rapidly running out, it is absolutely essential that we find a way of quickly reversing economics’ role in humanity’s greatest ever crisis.
Climate Fare:
Bardi: When the Ice Will be Gone: The Greatest Change Seen on Earth in 30 Million Years
An image from the 2006 movie "The Meltdown," the second of the "Ice Ages" series. These movies attempted to present a picture of Earth during the Pleistocene. Of course, they were not supposed to be paleontology classes, but they did show the megafauna of the time (mammoths, sabertooth tigers, and others) and the persistent ice, as you see in the figure. The plot of "The Meltdown" was based on a real event: the breakdown of the ice dam that kept the Lake Agassiz bonded inside the great glaciers of the Laurentide, in the North American continent. When the dam broke, some 15,000 years ago, the lake flowed into the sea in a giant flood that changed Earth's climate for more than a thousand years. So, the concept of ice ages as related to climate change is penetrating the human memesphere. It is strange that it is happening just when the human activity is pushing the ecosystem back to a pre-glacial period. If it happens, it will be the greatest change seen on Earth in 30 million years
…While more ice ages were discovered, it was also clear that Earth was ice-free for most of its long existence. Our times, with permanent ice at the poles, are rather exceptional. Let's take a look at the temperatures of the past 65 million years (the "Cenozoic"). See this remarkable image:
the idea that we could go back to a new ice age was legitimate in the 1950s, not anymore as we understand the role of human activities on climate. Some people maintain that it was a good thing that humans started burning fossil hydrocarbons since that "saved us from a new ice age." Maybe, but this is a classic case of too much of a good thing. We are pumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere that our problem is now the opposite: we are not facing an "icehouse Earth" but a "warmhouse" or even a "hothouse" Earth.
A "hothouse Earth" would be a true disaster since it was the main cause of the mass extinctions that took place in the remote past of our planet. Mainly, the hothouse episodes were the result of outbursts of CO2 generated by the enormous volcanic eruptions called "large igneous provinces." In principle, human emissions can't even remotely match these events. According to some calculations, we would need to keep burning fossil fuels for 500 years at the current rates to create a hothouse like the one that killed the dinosaurs (but, there is always that detail that non linear systems always surprise you . . .)
Still, considering feedback effects such as the release of methane buried in the permafrost, it is perfectly possible that human emissions could bring CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere at levels of the order of 600-800 ppm, or even more, comparable to those of the Eocene, when temperatures were 12 degrees higher than they are now.
The World’s First Small Nuclear Reactor Is Now Under Construction
Aging nuclear power plants should not have life extended
Preface. Below are my notes from the Greenpeace 146-page “Lifetime extension of ageing nuclear power plants”.
Read the following aging descriptions as poetry if you don’t know what the components are, since it certainly conveys why nuclear plants grow more dangerous with age. And just imagine how fast you’d die after being fried by radiation and heat! Even metal and cement will eventually crack, corrode, and break.
Reading this makes me want to shut nuclear power plants down as soon as possible. They are clearly not a “solution” to replace fossil energy, especially because their nuclear wastes will poison the earth for hundreds of thousands of years, and I see no hope we’ll bury them before the energy crisis (global oil production peaked in 2018 (EIA 2020)) and the energy to do so no longer exists.
Climate Quotes of the Week:
Things are so bad on the environment I am not sure whether to continue blaming the hairless monkey or blame God for creating such a miscreant species. I'm on the fence right now. Until I see this Roman Circus explode in every direction, my faith will be tested.
… Which is why all signs point back to the Grand Casino, because until it explodes, no one will be on the same page. And instead we will have this denialist paradise which is now human history's biggest global Ponzi scheme. And linked to it is a massively leveraged way of life that has the carbon footprint of an extinction level event.
Okay, future humanity, here goes: I never, ever, ever stop thinking about climate change or worrying that we’re rapidly approaching our doom. I worry about myself and my corner of the world, but I also worry as much if not more about the poor and dispossessed around the globe, about the drought and famine refugees. I worry about the collapse of civilization, and equally about the rise of fascism. I think about this stuff nearly every minute of the day—well, that’s not quite right. It’s more like it’s a constant low hum in the background of my brain, occasionally flowering into full consciousness for a few minutes or hours. But it is impossible to think about it consciously all the time or we would go mad.
COVID Fare:
New Mandate That MUST Be Enforced NOW (Denninger)
Work in health care? I don’t care if you are in direct patient-care or not; if you work in a medical facility of any sort this applies to you if you took the jab. We now know if you become infected with Covid, and you had the jab, you will have a higher viral titer before becoming symptomatic, if you become symptomatic at all. That is, you, compared against someone who did not take the jab where you are both infected, are much more likely to transmit the virus to someone else before knowing if you get infected. Since viral replication occurs in hours per cycle, not days, testing, unless on an every day basis, is not sufficient to detect the risk. Nearly everyone coming into a medical facility is at heightened risk of one sort or another; people do not, generally-speaking, go into medical facilities if all is well. This is certainly true for hospitals and “urgent care” facilities.
Masks cannot mitigate this risk as the virus is in aerosols and when you exhale you will thus project it into the environment if it is present. It does not matter if you use an N95 or surgical mask
A last word of caution to all those pretending the Covid-19 pandemic is toning down (VanDen Bossche)
Taken together, mass vaccination conducted on a background of high infectivity rates enables more infectious, increasingly VI-escaping variants to expand in prevalence. This evolution inevitably results in inclining morbidity rates in both, the non-vaccinated and vaccinated population and precipitates the emergence of circulating viral variants that will eventually fully resist vaccine-mediated immunity (VMI). This is why mass vaccination campaigns should not be conducted during a pandemic of a highly mutable virus, let alone during a pandemic of more infectious variants (unless transmission-blocking vaccines are used!). It is critical to understand that a rapid decline in viral infectivity rates that is not achieved by natural infection but merely results from expedited mass vaccination campaigns will only delay abrupt propagation of emerging, fully vaccine-resistant viral variants and hence, only delay the occurrence of a high wave of morbidity and mortality.
Ruin Them (Denninger)
If you go into the hospital for any reason they test you. Why? Because if you’re positive they want their magic $13,000 Biden Money (formerly Trump money) if you’re on Medicare and Medicaid for treating a “Covid case.” Biden is still continuing this bull**** no matter why you’re there. Chest pain? Covid! Oh, never mind the heart attack. So are the “hospitalized” actually hospitalized for Covid or is Tennessee counting anyone in the hospital who tested positive irrespective of the reason for their admission? This particular game has been run since March of 2020 and nobody has put a stop to it because they’re making money from it — lots of money. Never mind that these jabs are not behaving like a vaccine. US Code: “The term “vaccine” means any substance designed to be administered to a human being for the prevention of 1 or more diseases.”
The data is that these jabs do not prevent disease. They also do not prevent transmission of disease. In fact they appear to, if you get a breakthrough case, make transmission more likely in that the Ct data from these miners shows equal or lower values on balance in the vaccinated cohort with one sample at Ct22! Reminder: The lower the Ct the more virus you have in your body. Now granted this is a small group — very small. But it is extremely concerning that the lowest Ct recorded among these cases was a fully-vaccinated person. Where is the data from the state labs and CDC on these “breakthroughs” and their Ct numbers generally? It’s not being reported. I bet you can guess why not without needing more than one guess.
This appears to be confirmed as something that does indeed happen by the reported “super-spreading” person who (1) was fully-vaccinated, (2) infected more than 60 other people and (3) most of those whom he gave it to were also vaccinated. He obviously was an extremely-efficient emitter of virus! The only remaining argument for the jabs is that they make a personal severe outcome less likely. Here the data is somewhat more-reassuring but the adverse effect profile of the shots is not reassuring at all, it is being deliberately glossed over, and as a result the question as to whether or not to take them is a deeply personal decision that must be informed by your personal medical status coupled with intentional deception on those advocating for the jabs.
Well, Duh. This Is Why It Was Stupid (Denninger)
To be sterilizing a vaccine must prevent infection. Since you never get infected you never replicate the virus and thus do not shed it. If you do not shed it the potential path of the viral life-cycle for that particular infection ends with you and thus you cannot pass on or cause a mutation. You are sterile against that disease; from the point of view of the virus you are a lifeless rock. Among commonly-used sterilizing vaccines are MMR (measles, mumps and rubella), Varicella (chicken pox), OPV (oral polio) and others... A vaccine that is not sterilizing permits the virus to infect you and replicate and as a result you can infect others. Technically it is not a vaccine at all (which by definition prevents infection); it is a prophylactic therapy. Such a “vaccine” instead acts to reduce or eliminate symptomatic disease. You don’t know you’re sick and you don’t get sick. You don’t go to the hospital and you don’t die. Unfortunately, since you don’t know you’re sick but are infected and the virus is both replicating in you and shedding you are more likely to spread the infection to others. All of the current Covid jabs are in this category
… The problem with non-sterilizing vaccines is simply this: There is no safe means of mass-use of non-sterilizing vaccines so long as transmission within the community does or is likely to exist.
Journalists claim alternative Covid-19 news has been 'censored' to create 'one official narrative'
Elijah, who came up with the group’s name and found it “therapeutic” to talk to others with the same concerns, told Press Gazette: “It’s been unprecedented the way Covid-19 has been reported in the UK but not just in the UK, worldwide. “There’s only been one official narrative played out in the mainstream media and that has not changed over time. “There’s only been one ‘scientific truth’ allowed to be discussed: the one endorsed by worldwide governmental regulatory bodies, even that has been very selective. This has given the public a distorted view of the truth which has been highly damaging.” Elijah said her biggest concern was about “censorship” of information online that goes against this narrative and referred to the Trusted News Initiative, through which the BBC, other publishers and tech giants flag up the most dangerous disinformation to each other.
“For a long time, we’ve been in this dark era of censorship that’s been embodied by the Trusted News Initiative which cuts across big tech and all mainstream media,” she said. “It’s been packaged around this war on disinformation or misinformation- where anything that’s gone against the official narrative has not just been ‘fact checked’ but has been suppressed or removed.” Ex-BBC radio journalist Gosling told Press Gazette he had interviewed two doctors who shared counter-narratives – Dr Tess Lawrie of the Evidence-based Medicine Consultancy in Bath who called for early treatment to take place post-Covid diagnosis, and Florida-based immunologist Dr Stanley Laham who called for the use of ivermectin and warned against the use of the approved but “experimental” vaccines – but that both were removed from Youtube on grounds of misinformation.
Gosling said he wanted to speak out against fear-inducing and sometimes inaccurate coverage. He pointed as one example to a BBC Newsround segment last month in which a contributor claimed the Pfizer vaccine was “100% safe” for 12 to 15-year-olds. Gosling submitted a complaint about the “shocking” and “disgusting” claim and the BBC has since removed the claim from the online article and video and published a correction. Gosling said: “Our main concern is that there’s a very powerful lobby behind many of these Covid measures, including treatment, lack of treatment and vaccines, obviously, but there isn’t much of a lobby in the other direction. And I think most of us feel that our employers of various sorts have not been representing both sides.”
Covid Vaccines: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
The latest data from Israel, which has used primarily the Pfizer mRNA vaccine, indicates that vaccine effectiveness against Delta coronavirus infection and symptomatic (“mild”) disease has dropped from about 95% to about 40%, whereas effectiveness against hospitalization and severe disease (i.e. low blood oxygen levels) remains at 80% to 90% (see chart). Importantly, in people who got vaccinated already in January 2021 (primarily the elderly), protection against infection and mild disease may already have dropped to near 0% (see chart). Moreover, since the Delta covid outbreak is still accelerating in Israel, the effectiveness against hospitalization and severe disease may further decrease (due to lags in hospitalizations). (Update: New data from Hebrew University shows that protection against severe disease has already dropped to 80%; compared to the original 96%, this results in a five-fold increase in residual risk.)
…
The Israeli data shown above indicates that effectiveness against infection and mild symptoms decreases rapidly over time and reaches near-zero levels after about half a year. Most likely, this is because covid vaccines do not achieve mucosal immunity (in contrast to natural infection) and serum antibody levels (i.e. antibodies in the blood) decrease within months (see chart below).
Thus, the false promise of very high protection against “symptomatic infection”, found during official vaccine trials, was simply based on very high short-term serum antibody levels mimicking mucosal immunity.
…
Thus, vaccine protection even against severe disease will likely further decrease due to new variants, or, in the very worst case, will turn into antibody-dependent disease enhancement (ADE), if high levels of non-neutralizing antibodies aggravate the infection. Indeed, this is what happened in the case of vaccines against SARS-1 and dengue fever.
…
However, there is a very real risk that additional vaccinations, which inject or induce the coronavirus spike protein, could substantially increase the risk of serious cardiovascular and neurological adverse events, such as strokes, GBS and heart muscle inflammation. Globally, covid vaccines may already have killed tens of thousands of people. Alternatives include safer oral vaccine candidates or medically supervised, low-dose oral live virus challenges in low-risk people.
Covid Scam Unraveling at High Speed
Despite vaccination providing “substantial protection,” “universal masking is essential to reduce transmission of the Delta variant,” the CDC says. This amounts to the claim that masks offer more protection than vaccination. This claim is also known to be false. Unless the mask is a N95, masks offer no protection.
The CDC document says “new research suggests vaccinated people can spread the virus.”
The CDC document says: “vaccinated individuals infected with delta may be able to transmit the virus as easily as those who are unvaccinated. Vaccinated people infected with delta have measurable viral loads similar to those who are unvaccinated and infected with the variant.”
The CDC document says: “Vaccine breakthrough cases are expected to increase as a percentage of total cases as vaccine coverage increases.” In other words, the breakthrough cases described as “rare” by the CDC are not rare. Studies in Singapore and other countries show that 75 percent of new Covid infections reportedly occur in people who are vaccinated.
CDC reports that 74% of new Covid Cases in Massachusetts are in fully vaccinated people.
Sooner or later perhaps the CDC and NIH will consider whether there is a “delta variant” or whether the “variant” is the illnesses caused by the vaccine. With the majority of what are called “new Covid cases” or “breakthrough cases” in Singapore, UK, Israel and many other countries occurring among the vaccinated, certainly the circumstantial evidence is that the “outbreak cases” are illnesses caused by the vaccines.
The irony is that the “pandemic” will likely turn out to be the product of the pcr test that is being withdrawn because of its high rate of false positives and inability to differentiate between flu and Covid, and the real outbreak is the result of injecting people with the Covid spike protein. In other words, the vaccination program created the Covid problem.
Instead of considering these likelihoods, the health agencies and Big Pharma shills are trying to achieve universal vaccination for profit reasons and are ignoring the evidence of the mass outbreak of Covid illnesses among the fully vaccinated.
Necessity Of Covid-19 Vaccination In Previously Infected Individuals
“Individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 infection are unlikely to benefit from COVID-19 vaccination ..”
Vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals have similar viral loads in communities with a high prevalence of the SARS-CoV-2 delta variant
Antibody Evolution after SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccination
We conclude that memory antibodies selected over time by natural infection have greater potency and breadth than antibodies elicited by vaccination
Sloppy Pfizer Booster Clinical Trial Consent Form Provides Way to Exclude Reactions That Require Emergency Care
Israeli Scientist Says Covid-19 Could Be Treated For Under $1/Day
Ivermectin, a drug used to fight parasites in third-world countries, could help reduce the length of infection for people who contract coronavirus for less than a $1 a day, according to recent research by Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer
COVID Tweet Threads of the Week:
VaccineTruth:
Robert Malone has said you need to measure duration, distribution, and amount for the spike protein. FDA never did this; one of our researchers did. They found spike protein is still circulating 5 months from vaccination in 100% of patients tested (6 people; random pick). And yes, they plan to publish this. But I wanted to give our followers advance notice. One of the 6 had spike in 15% of his monocytes!!! This is NOT limited to 5 months out… This could last for years, we just don’t know yet. The 6 were randomly picked. They wanted to use them as “healthy controls.” Then the researchers freaked out when they found this. Whoa. Anyone can verify this but nobody in academia will attempt to do this. The results will be too embarrassing. It will prove Malone was right the whole time about importance of measuring those 3 things. He said this on the Darkhorse podcast that was censored on YouTube.
THIS IS NOT NORMAL. The antigen is supposed to stick around for a week or two and vanish. Is it any wonder why people who have been vaccinated have long term symptoms? Part of this is permanent damage caused by the inflammation (which causes scarring which doesn’t heal)… The antigen (in this case spike) is SUPPOSED to disappear in 2 weeks. So this can explain long-term vaccine symptoms (along with permanent or temp damage from the inflammation and blood clots caused by the vaccine). Permanent damage is from scarring caused by inflammation. Anyone can replicate this if they have the proper assays. Will anyone? Will they be able to get it published? That’s the big question. Journals censor by deeming unfavorable research as “out of scope” for the journal.
The Vaccines Don’t Work
On Thursday, an internal CDC slide deck was “leaked”. On Friday, an “official” document was presented. The first is more interesting, because it contains things that are ostensibly not meant for public consumption (how to present…). The second is made up of a lot of official looking terminology. What else? But both largely say the same thing: there is no difference between the infection rates of vaccinated and non-vaccinated people. Of course that is then dressed up again in calls to get vaccinated, they can’t help themselves…
In colorful language such as “the war has changed” and “Delta spreads as easily as chickenpox”, the CDC tries very hard to undermine -even deny- it own findings. The slide deck is here:
…“The Delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox and may be spread by vaccinated people as easily as the unvaccinated, an internal C.D.C. report said.”
… Perhaps because of the big words used to dress up the story, or perhaps because people have become so conditioned to react to everything Covid with fear, the logical conclusion of these two documents is not drawn anywhere. Which is that notions such as vaccine mandates and vaccine passports should now be discarded. There is no reason for a “vaccine” to be applied if you get infected with it as easily as without.
Some will still claim that they stop more severe sickness, but evidence of that is scarce at best, and it has nothing to do with the “societal functions” of not infecting others that the mandates and passports are designed for. If we know what’s good for us, it’s back to the drawing board.
There is of course no reason from an individual point of view to get vaccinated either: even if you believe that you might get less sick, you would still have to weigh that against the risks the vaccines come with.
… I think perhaps the biggest problem of all right now is that there is so much invested in official narratives. That is as logical as it is unfortunate. And I get it, all those politicians and experts are slowly and very reluctantly realizing that they bet on the wrong horse, and to turn a ship of state around is much harder
… Now they want to put masks on the vaccinated. That must mean the vaccines don’t work, right? No, no, they swear, the vaccines are very very efficient. It’s just that you have a very rare breakthrough case now and then, because no vaccine is perfect. So for a few rare breakthrough cases you’re going to tell millions of Americans to mask up? And then you see that New York State alone has 11,000 of such very rare cases.
Pfizer wants to give everyone a booster shot this fall. I was thinking they must have made some improved version against Delta, but no, it’ll be a third shot of the same “vaccine”. But wait, we just found it doesn’t work against Delta.
… For some obscure reason we have accepted the idea that we can do no risk stratification, that everyone is at equal risk, and therefore everyone should undergo the same treatment. And then we find out that this treatment doesn’t work, or only half, or only for a few months, etc.
… We find the vaccine is not a vaccine, but a therapeutic. An untested one at that. While we could have focused on prevention, either for everyone or just for the vulnerable, and early treatment for early victims. As 80% of people were never at risk at all and 80% have already been infected and survived.
There are plenty ways to do prevention and we have discarded them all, in favor for a treatment that now turns against us. That is to say, the vaccine makes the virus more, not less, dangerous. It’s not the unvaccinated that are the pool the virus mutates in, it’s the vaccinated.
And it’s not only the mutations. All Covid therapeutics used in the west induce the vaccinees’ body to produce spike proteins, which are toxic to the body. Initially, it was claimed that they would stay near the site of injection, but we soon found that they spread through the entire body, and assemble especially in the most vulnerable spots: lungs, testes, placenta etc.
And that’s not all either: we now see suspicions that the spike proteins remain active in the body, and continue to be produced inside the body, for much longer than we were told they would be. An as yet unpublished report will claim that they have been found five months after injection, instead of mere days. The potential consequences would be much more disastrous than the virus. …
Poke
ME: CDC, should I get poke if I already had Covid?
CDC: “Yes, you should be poked regardless of whether you already had COVID-19. That’s because experts do not yet know how long you are protected from getting sick again after recovering from COVID-19.”
ME: Oh, so we don’t know how long natural immunity lasts. So, how long does poke-induced immunity last?
CDC: “There is still a lot we’re learning about pokes and CDC is constantly reviewing evidence and updating guidance. We don’t know how long protection lasts for those poked.”
ME: Okay, but wait a second. I thought you said the reason I need the poke was because we don’t know how long my natural immunity lasts, but you’re saying we ALSO don’t know how long poke immunity lasts either. So, how exactly is the poke immunity better than my natural immunity?
CDC: …
ME: Uh … alright. But, haven’t there been a bunch of studies suggesting that natural immunity could last for years or decades?
CDC: Yes.
NEWYORKTIMES: “Years, maybe decades, according to a new study.”
ME: Ah. So natural immunity might last longer than poke immunity?
CDC: Possibly.
ME: Okay. If I get the poke, does that mean I won’t get sick?
BRITAIN: Nope. We are entering a seasonal spike and half of our infections and hospital admissions are poked people.
ME: CDC, is this true? Are there people in the U.S. catching it after getting poked?
CDC: We stopped tracking breakthrough cases. We accept voluntary reports but aren’t out there looking for them.
ME: Does that mean that if someone comes in the hospital with Covid, you don’t track them because they’ve been poked? You only track the UN-poked Covid cases?
CDC: That’s right.
ME: Hmm. Well, if I can still get sick after I get the poke, how is it helping me?
CDC: We never said you wouldn’t get sick. We said it would reduce your chances of serious illness or death.
ME: Oh, sorry. Alright, exactly how much does it reduce my chances?
CDC: We don’t know “exactly.”
ME: Oh. Then what’s your best estimate for how much risk reduction there is?
CDC: We don’t know, okay? Next question.
ME: Um, if I’m healthy and don’t want the poke, is there any reason I should get it?
CDC: Yes, for the collective.
ME: How does the collective benefit from me getting poked?
CDC: Because you could spread the virus to someone else who might get sick and die.
ME: Can a poked person spread the virus to someone else?
CDC: Yes.
ME: So if I get poked, I could still spread the virus to someone else?
CDC: Yes.
ME: But I thought you just said, the REASON I should get poked was to prevent me spreading the virus? How does that make sense if I can still catch Covid and spread it after getting the poke?
CDC: Never mind that. Also, if you stay unpoked, there’s a chance the virus could possibly mutate into a strain that escapes the pokes protection, putting all poked people at risk.
ME: So the poke stops the virus from mutating?
CDC: No.
ME: So it can still mutate with the poke?
CDC: Yes.
ME: This seems confusing. If the poke doesn’t stop mutations, and it doesn’t stop infections, then how does me getting poked help prevent a more deadly strain from evolving to escape the poke?
CDC:
CDC: You aren’t listening, okay? The bottom line is: as long as you are unpoked, you pose a threat to poked people.
ME: But what KIND of threat??
CDC: The threat that they could get a serious case of Covid and possibly die.
ME: My brain hurts. Didn’t you JUST say that the poke doesn’t stop people from catching Covid, but prevents a serious case or dying? Now it seems like you’re saying poked people can still easily die from Covid even after they got the poke from an unpoked person! Which is it??
CDC: That’s it, we’re hanging up now.
ME: Wait! I just want to make sure I understand all this. So, even if I ALREADY had Covid, I should STILL get poked, because we don’t know how long natural immunity lasts, and we also don’t know how long poke immunity lasts….
…And I should get the poke to keep a poked person from catching Covid from me, but even if I get the poke, I can give it to the poked person anyways. And, the other poked person can still easily catch a serious case of Covid from me and die. Do I have all that right?
……
ME: Um, hello? Is anyone there?
COVID Conspiracy Fare:
When Things Don’t Add Up
This national freak-show-of-the-mind might account for the many recent instances of science talking out of its booty-hole, led by its very personification, Dr. Anthony (“The Science”) Fauci, proud papa of SARS-CoV-2 (stage-name: Covid-19), with all its fabulous HIV and monkeypox gain-of-function bells and whistles. Dr. Fauci’s mighty, 20-year effort to bring forth this gift to mankind happens to coincide neatly with the collapse of advanced techno-industrial economies, a frightful condition that was already causing enough trouble in the world before Covid-19 marched in. Some suspect that Covid-19 is a contrived cover for all that, perhaps even an attempt to manage the journey down.
The Covid 19 panic, which has been driving formerly civilized societies crazy for eighteen months, prompted the bringing-forth of The Science’s follow-up project: vaccines to stop the spread of the virus. Enter the scene, these vaxes did, like, a day-and-a-half after Covid-19 pirouetted onstage. Hmmmm. Could someone have been working on those vaxes backstage before the dread virus even premiered? Were patents issued for them pre-dating January, 2020? Seems so. But never mind that for now. The vaxes were rolled out to fanfares over a year ago and those moiling masses of America, the superfluous holders of bachelor’s degrees in Oppression Studies — for whom, sadly, the world had run-out of paying positions — lined up like kids at Santa’s throne in Macy’s on Black Sunday for their Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson jabs. Whew…! That was a close call!
Or was it? Naw, not even close, actually. Since now it turns out that the jabs don’t seem to work that well. The official story got murkier last week when the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported internally to staff (it leaked) that “fully vaccinated people might spread the Delta variant at the same rate as unvaccinated people.” Whoopsie…. In a Delta variant outbreak on Cape Cod last month, three-quarters of the infected were fully vaxed-up patients. The story got darker because The New York Times, the usually-reliable mouthpiece for The Science and his allies in “Joe Biden’s” public health bureaucracy, let slip that, “The Delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox and may be spread by vaccinated people as easily as the unvaccinated.”
Wuh-oh…! A worm the size of an Amtrak Acela train has turned in the myocarditic heart of our nation’s capital. Things have changed overnight — didn’t they see it coming? — and now the government is freaking out as it appears to have some serious ‘splainin’ to do — and right on the heels, too, of an hysterical month-long campaign to persuade the remaining unvaxed millions to submit to the needle, climaxed by threatening the obdurate “hesitants” with taking away their employment and ability to participate in commerce and social life. All that sound-and-fury for what? For vaccines that don’t work… and which, quite possibly, could leave you seriously ill, even dead?
There’s one beguiling explanation I’ve heard — from Brandon Smith of Alt-Markets.us, and others — for that hysterical campaign of recent days to jab every last hold-out: the need to eliminate what’s called the “control group,” the bunch of people who, in any drug trial, are given no drug, or a fake shot (like saline), or a placebo (mindfuck agent) to see if the real thing actually works. The desperate effort couldn’t have been more idiotic, since there was no realistic hope of gulling the remaining unvaxed into getting a shot, and the effort only made the “Joe Biden” admin look even more dishonest and despotic.
GeoPolitical Fare:
Biden isn’t withdrawing troops from Iraq, he’s relabeling their mission
The move only serves to reinforce America’s forever wars.
Welsh: A Brief Note On Afghanistan And The Taliban
… When you think of your time in Afghanistan, keep that in mind. Your image should always be of innocents being blown away in a wedding party.
That’s America. That’s who you are. In essence it’s who you were in Vietnam. And that’s why Americans should always be on their knees, praying that God isn’t just.
Astore: Destroying the Village in Vietnam
Buy a brick! The USA is selling Ukraine
As we all know, to sell something useless one first has to buy something useless. At some point, Washington bought Ukraine – for a high price. The process of buying took a long time, as Ukraine was bought part by part.
When finally in 2014 all of Ukraine became the property of the US, White House quickly realized, to its horror, that several US administrations had been investing significant amounts of money in a completely useless product.
…
As far as Ukraine is concerned… Well, nobody concerns himself with Ukraine anymore. The Ukrainian citizens are left with the only hope that at some time in the future, after a series of re-sales, this invalid, which is Ukraine, in spite of its obnoxious personality, a habit to gnaw at the owner’s furniture, damage wallpaper, and crap all over the place, would end up an good hands. But this is very unlikely..
American Politicians Line Up With Israel Against Ben & Jerry’s
“Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is placing Ben and Jerry’s on an official government blacklist because the ice cream company is removing its product from Israel in protest of the Zionist regime’s war actions. DeSantis is standing against free speech and the free market by using the power of the state to blacklist a private company choosing to do business the way it wants. This case has massive implications for civil liberties in America going forward. Which business will be targeted next for not supporting Israel? DeSantis previously banned criticism of Israel or Jewish people in public schools and colleges.”
Strange, isn’t it, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google can censor because they are private companies, but Ben & Jerry’s can’t protest because they are a private company..
Orwellian Fare:
Chris Hedges: The Price of Conscience — Hale Sentenced to 45 Months
Jonathan Cook: Craig Murray’s Jailing The Latest Move To Kill Independent Journalism
Kunstler: Things Get Ripe
Besides trying to just live their lives in these days of socioeconomic meltdown, which, Gawd knows, is hard enough, the people can barely sort out the seemingly malevolent intentions of the folks in-charge of the monster that government has become. And so, the question arises: are they actually trying to kill us all, or are they so corrupt and stupid that everything they touch falls apart? In other words, is it mastermindery or clusterfuckery?
On the former side, you have that gallery of international villains out of the James Bond playbook: Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, and George Soros — megalomaniacs armed with mega-money, a sho’nuff recipe for trouble — representing the emergence of a world-saving regime, in concert with lackey national leaderships. Their narrative goes like this: humans have over-replicated, like maggots in a trash can, they’re wrecking the planet and gobbling (our) resources, and we must find a way to get rid of them that looks like a natural catastrophe so the hidden powers-that-be don’t get blamed for pulling a global Auschwitz. Hence Covid-19 and the sketchy vaccinations. (“The Great Reset.” You will be dead and you will like it!)
I must say, I don’t go for that story, even if that trio have played their parts in some wicked doings du jour. Rather, I subscribe to the latter scenario: the likelihood that we’re in a pile-up of quandaries that we can only pretend to manage, and that all our pretenses of control and management only make things worse, while making a mockery of human ingenuity. This does not rule out an element of personal greed and attempted power-mongering, but look, for instance, at where all that has left the hapless Dr. Tony Fauci.
Bullshit Fare:
Cory Doctorow: Bankruptcy and elite impunity
I've been writing about the Sackler crime-family for years, as a new generation turned the family's benzo empire into a opioid powerhouse, exceeding the Rockefeller family fortune by pushing Oxycontin and jumpstarting an epidemic that has claimed 800,000 American lives.
The Sacklers are canny: for years, they laundered their reputation through elite philanthropy, using blood money to paint their names on the world's great cultural institutions and spending comparable sums to threaten journalists and critics into silence about their crimes.
But no one can run across a river on the backs of alligators forever – eventually, even the fleetest grifter will lose a leg. The Sacklers eventually came into the crosshairs of district attorneys, federal enforcers, bereaved families and recovering addicts.
Outwardly, the family continued to maintain their innocence and assure us that they would prevail in court. Privately, they laundered billions into offshore financial secrecy havens.
Every big con needs a blow-off, a final trick that lets the crook wriggle out of the gator's jaws. For the Sacklers, that was a breathtaking capture of the bankruptcy system, in the person of Judge Robert Drain of the SDNY, the American judiciary's top billionaire enabler.
The gambit worked. Drain will unilaterally settle all the Sacklers' victims claims for $4b, leaving the Sacklers to keep $6.7b in blood money. No Sackler will go to jail. No Sackler will face financial hardship. Key documents will never be unsealed.
…
If this sounds familiar, it's because it's a pathology in all areas of the judiciary.
…
Elite impunity is rotting America and threatening the planet itself.
There's nothing it doesn't touch.
Simone Biles is a survivor of Larry Nasser's abuse. The claims of Nasser's survivors were wiped out by a bankruptcy judge
CaitOz Fare:
For Every Whistleblower They Make An Example Of, They Prevent A Thousand More
In other words, if you tell the public the truth about your government’s crimes, you will be made an example of so nobody else tries to do that. And then for that brave and selfless act, you’ll be smeared as doing it for “self-aggrandizement”.
… The US government makes no secret of the fact that it uses draconian prison sentencing to keep people from reporting the truth about its murderous behavior.
… And it works. Of course it works.
… Think about what this means for a minute. This means that what we know about malfeasance in so-called “free democracies” like the United States is necessarily just the tiniest tip of the iceberg compared to what we do not know, because for every bit of information that leaks out there are orders of magnitude more which remain secret. They remain secret because, like any gang member, government insiders know what happens to those who talk.
Keith Olbermann Wants Jimmy Dore Banned From All Platforms
Proving once again he doesn’t care who he has to step on to claw his way to rock bottom, fallen liberal media hero Keith Olbermann has called for the complete removal of left wing comedian and podcaster Jimmy Dore from all internet platforms.
…
And while everyone was freaking out about the idea of imaginary fascism sneaking in through the back window, actual fascism strolled through the front door. More and more excuses are being invented to censor, deplatform and marginalize everyone outside the Overton window of war, oligarchy, ecocide and oppression, and more and more people within that window are becoming increasingly comfortable with the idea. Internet censorship, jailing journalists for telling the truth about the powerful, mind-warping mass propaganda campaigns and rapidly escalating authoritarianism are all becoming normalized throughout our society, and it can’t lead anywhere good.
They’re Normalizing Police Robots By Calling Them “Dogs”
For as long as there have been governments and rulers, there has been an acute awareness in elite circles that the public vastly outnumber those who rule over them and could easily overwhelm and oust them if they ever decided to. Many tools have been implemented to address this problem, from public displays of cruelty to keep the public cowed and obedient, to the circulation of propaganda and power-serving religious doctrines, but at no time has any power structure in history ever produced a guaranteed protection against the possibility of being overthrown by their subjects who vastly outnumber them.
The powerful have also long been aware that robot and drone technologies can offer such a protection.
Australian War Crimes Syndicate To Police The Streets Of Sydney
This would be the same ADF which has been caught committing horrific war crimes in Afghanistan, by the way. These are the wonderful people who will be going door to door through Sydney’s poorest and least-white neighborhoods “ensuring compliance with restrictions”.
Falling
· Crowdfund Israeli spyware surveillance on your own government to keep them from selling the nation to BlackRock while the world burns and billionaires masturbate in low earth orbit
· Organize a grassroots whatever campaign so plastic politicians can feed you word salad with an ivory spork until armageddon
· Vote vote vote vote for Murder Stealing Slavery because if you don’t then Stealing Slavery Murder might win
· Get the Monsanto vaccine in one arm and the Google vaccine in the other while the TV man on every channel says everything’s normal and the Pentagon needs your insulin money
· Ask your doctor about Sedentrol™ to mute the gnawing sensation that you should release the parrots in your chest and fly with them to freedom instead of cranking a gear in a cubicle which turns billionaires into trillionaires
· INVEST INVEST INVEST in crypto it’s computer money for libertarians
· Buy Bootcoin buy Copcoin buy Narnium I heard Elon just tweeted about it…
It’s cool how US progressives are learning that the Democratic Party is a narrative management op designed to continually derail the possibility of economic justice in America, and it’s sad that this lesson will be completely forgotten in the next partisan politics news cycle.
We were always headed toward more and more inequality, impoverishment and authoritarianism, whether you want to call the next step in that direction “the Great Reset” or some other name. We will necessarily continue along that trajectory until we replace our dominant systems.
There has never been a better time to crush capitalism.
Other Quotes of the Week:
Taibbi: On This Week With George Stephanopoulos this past Sunday, a bafflegab of Washington poo-bahs including Chris Christie, Rahm Emmanuel, Margaret Hoover, and Donna Brazile — Stephanopoulos calls the segment his “Powerhouse Roundtable,” which to my ear sounds like a Denny’s breakfast sampler, but I guess he couldn’t name it Four Hated Windbags — discussed vaccine holdouts.
… this latest moral mania — and make no mistake about it, the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” PR campaign is the latest in a ceaseless series of such manias, dating back to late 2016 — lays bare everything that’s abhorrent and nonsensical in modern American politics, beginning with the no-longer-disguised aristocratic mien of the Washington consensus. If you want to convince people to get a vaccine, pretty much the worst way to go about it is a massive blame campaign, delivered by sneering bluenoses who have a richly deserved credibility problem with large chunks of the population, and now insist they’re owed financially besides.
Welsh: Hale is a hero but I feel bad for him, less because of the jail sentence, though I’m sure it’ll be horrific, than because, of course, his proving that drone murders were even worse than we thought did nothing to slow or stop them, because the American people don’t care and American elites are depraved psychopaths for whom mass murder means nothing… I hope Daniel Hale comes thru this as well as can be expected. As for everyone else, your leaders are depraved psychopaths. Don’t expect them to respond to moral reasoning, and since they despise you as weak, don’t expect them to respond to threats. They cannot be reasoned with, only removed, then prosecuted for their crimes against humanity and the world.
Snowden: The first thing I do when I get a new phone is take it apart. I don’t do this to satisfy a tinkerer’s urge, or out of political principle, but simply because it is unsafe to operate. Fixing the hardware, which is to say surgically removing the two or three tiny microphones hidden inside, is only the first step of an arduous process, and yet even after days of these DIY security improvements, my smartphone will remain the most dangerous item I possess.
... In my infinite optimism, however, I can’t help but regard the arrival of the Pegasus Project as a turning-point—a well-researched, exhaustively-sourced, and frankly crazy-making story about a “winged” “Trojan Horse” infection named “Pegasus” that basically turns the phone in your pocket into an all-powerful tracking device that can be turned on or off, remotely, unbeknownst to you, the pocket’s owner.
Big Thoughts:
The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk”
So-called rationalists have created a disturbing secular religion that looks like it addresses humanity’s deepest problems, but actually justifies pursuing the social preferences of elites.
In a late-2020 interview with CNBC, Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn made a perplexing statement. “Climate change,” he said, “is not going to be an existential risk unless there’s a runaway scenario.” A “runaway scenario” would occur if crossing one or more critical thresholds in the climate system causes Earth’s thermostat to rise uncontrollably. The hotter it has become, the hotter it will become, via self-amplifying processes. This is probably what happened a few billion years ago on our planetary neighbor Venus, a hellish cauldron whose average surface temperature is high enough to melt lead and zinc.
Fortunately, the best science today suggests that a runaway scenario is unlikely, although not impossible. Yet even without a runaway scenario, the best science also frighteningly affirms that climate change will have devastating consequences.
…
All of this is to say that even if billions of people were to perish in the coming climate catastrophe, so long as humanity survives with enough of civilization intact to fulfill its supposed “potential,” we shouldn’t be too concerned. In the grand scheme of things, non-runaway climate change will prove to be nothing more than a “mere ripple” —a “small misstep for mankind,” however terrible a “massacre for man” it might otherwise be.
Even worse, since our resources for reducing existential risk are finite, Bostrom argues that we must not “fritter [them] away” on what he describes as “feel-good projects of suboptimal efficacy.”
…
Returning to climate change once again, we can see how Tallinn got the idea that our environmental impact probably isn’t existentially risky from academic longtermists like Bostrom. As alluded to above, Bostrom maintains that non-runaway (which he calls “moderate”) global warming, as well as “threats to the biodiversity of Earth’s ecosphere,” as “endurable” rather than “terminal” for humanity. Similarly, Ord claims in The Precipice that climate change poses a mere 1-in-10,000 chance of existential catastrophe, in contrast to a far greater 1-in-10 chance of catastrophe involving superintelligent machines (dubbed the “Robopocalypse” by some). Although, like Bostrom, Ord acknowledges that the climate crisis could get very bad, he assures us that “the typical scenarios of climate change would not destroy our potential.”
Ian Welsh: Rationality Is Not A Way Out Of Group Action Problems like Climate Change and Covid
Instrumentalism and utilitarianism allow you to say to yourself “well, I know virtue ethics would say this is bad, but actually it’s good because it’ll lead to a better world.” Meanwhile there you are with policies that lead to the Amazon being clearcut and dumping so much CO2 and methane into the world that eventually the world’s forests just start burning down and permafrost methane starts exploding like bombs.
…
Rationalism just says “how do I get what I want?” Virtue ethics and red lines say “you can’t get it by doing evil.”
This is why straight utilitarians and instrumentalists are either hypocrites or fools. Either they know that their ethics allows for monstrous behaviour and doesn’t guarantee results, or they know it produces subpar results for a lot of people, even most people, but they expect to be in the minority who benefits (which, by the way, is very rational.)
Don’t worship at the cult of rationalism or instrumentalism. Virtue ethics and red lines have their own problems, and there are reasons for being wary of them too, but at the end of the day, if getting what you want requires you to hurt a lot of people, perhaps you aren’t doing it because you truly believe it’ll make the world a better place?
Ugo Bardi: The Truth About Décolletages: an Epistemic Analysis
The problem is that science has been badly banalized, bowdlerized, politicized, financialized, and more. With scientists nowadays selling themselves cheap to whoever wants to buy them, it is hard to discount Deloria's position. Like him, I am starting to distrust scientists.
But I still believe in "science" as an attempt to understand the world around us. Science is, in the end, a set of epistemic tools. It is up to us to use them well, not as an excuse to disparage the wisdom of our ancestors. Which is the point that Deloria makes.
Science has little to do with the TV utterances of pompous scientists. It is not represented by the inflated claims of the newest trick that, maybe, will solve this or that problem. It is not about the silly power games that academics play, those who pretend to teach our young how to behave. It does not tell us to do things we feel are wrong to do and, if it does, then it is wrong science.
True science, as the name says, is about knowledge, and knowledge is never fixed, never complete, never written in stone. Like the universe, knowledge changes all the time, and change is what we need to learn to appreciate. Science doesn't give us absolute truths. But it does tell us something about the infinite variety of the way the universe works and its beauty -- ultimately a homage to the Goddess of Earth, Gaia. This is the kind of science we can trust.
Tweet of the Week:
The system is collapsing under the weight of its own internal contradictions. The rich are siphoning every last bit of value into their own pockets before the final curtain. The politicians are marionettes controlling the demolition. Direct your attention accordingly.
Satirical Fare:
CDC Director Alarmed After Googling ‘Covid Cases’ For First Time in Weeks
Australians Getting Ready To Overthrow Tyrannical Government—Wait, Nevermind, Seems They Gave Up All Their Guns
Reports are coming in from the land down under that the people of Australia are getting ready to overthrow their tyrannical government—oh wait, they actually gave up all their guns. Amid the fears over the Delta strain of the virus, armed military members were patrolling the streets to make sure people were all at their correct address while helicopters and drones circled overhead to order people to go back inside if they ventured out at all in what the nation could only describe as some Orwellian nightmare. Many Aussies decided it was time to do something about the situation. “Blimey, this right here is a dog’s breakfast! No blokes gone walkabout since they brought in the military to cover us, shrimp on a barbie,” said a man who simply goes by Croc.
An American translator was found who told us that what Croc was saying was that the entire continent nation of 25 million people was living under martial law with no end in sight because a little over 900 people had died from coronavirus throughout the pandemic. “We were totally fed up with this and were all set to tell them Blokes and Sheilas to right buzz off, but then we remembered that we let the government have all our guns already,” Croc continued somberly. At publishing time, Australians were asking the aboriginals if they had any of those cool dart guns or at least some bevvies to make it through the lockdowns.
Pics of the Week:
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