Regular Fare:
Why Lower Yield
Treasuries Are More Attractive Than Higher Yield
In what follows, I want to
draw out some implications of an interesting post by Greg Obenshain at Verdad
Capital. In the post, Obenshain laid out data showing a number of things about
Treasury bonds. Most notably, that they are a great investment if you are
worried about the prospect of a recession or depression – and this is so no
matter at what starting yield you are investing.
Inflation is coming, well, it could be, or, it might
happen, gosh …
One could make a pastime
observing the way that so-called ‘expert’ commentators change their commentary
as the data unfolds. As one rather lurid prediction fails, their narrative
shifts to the next. We have seen this tendency for decades when we consider the
way mainstream economists have dealt with Japan. The words shift from those
implying immediacy (for example, of insolvency), to those such as ‘could’,
‘might’, ‘perhaps’, ‘under certain conditions’ and more. The topics shift. The
commentariat were obsessed with ‘this time is different’ during the GFC and the
‘debt insolvency threshold’ rubbish that the likes of Reinhardt and Rogoff
propagated. That is, until they were sprung for spreadsheet incompetence. More
recently, we have apparently forgotten how many governments were about to go
broke and the mania has shifted to inflation. The data shows some price spikes
earlier in the year which set of the dogs. Now, things might be shifting again.
It is a pastime following all this. Short memories, no shame is the only
requirement that is required to be a mainstream economics commentator.
Prescient knowledge is not included in that skill set.
…
The question then is whether
this sort of wage-price or price-wage spiral could respond to the current
supply chain cost shocks to perpetuate an accelerating inflation.
My assessment is that there
is little prospect of a 1970s-style stagflation because the structural and
institutional factors that were crucial to the 1970s episode are no longer
relevant.
“China
manufactures things and social cohesion."
And America manufactures financial instruments and decay.
What has been described in
the American press as a Chinese crackdown on private enterprise is more in the
nature of an existential choice for Beijing. The government has decided to live
by producing stuff instead of by betting on financial speculation.
China wants to be a nation
full of engineers, not financial engineers—of computer chips rather than
chocolate chips, of innovation over financial experimentation. Additionally,
Beijing wants an education system that actually educates, rather than creating
a cottage industry of woke credentialism but little in the way of genuinely
independent thought, or skills appropriate to prosper in the 21st century.
This is the context in which
we should view Beijing’s recent crackdown on a number of prominent, publicly
quoted companies on China’s stock exchange, which include some very significant
global names across a broad swath of industries.
…
Here in the United States,
we lost our way decades ago, when we decided that the only social
responsibility of a corporation was to increase its profits, community
considerations, customer care, and employees be damned. Our corporations
increasingly became laboratories for economist Milton Friedman’s “stockholder
theory”: The idea that shareholders, being the owners and the main risk-bearing
participants, ought therefore to receive the biggest rewards deriving from a
company’s value-creating activities. Wall Street investment banks have actively
promoted and promulgated Friedman’s ideas for over half a century.
A profound policy shift is
under way in China. To achieve the goals of ensuring social stability and
making economic growth more sustainable, policy-makers have initiated a
far-reaching and wide-ranging regulatory tightening cycle. This new course will
shape the evolution of China’s economy and capital markets in the coming years.
The implications? Rebalancing the shares of corporate profits and wages in GDP
as well as recalibrating China’s equity risk premium.
Broadly speaking, we believe
that policy-makers’ goal of ‘common prosperity’ focuses on the challenges of
rising income inequality. Significantly, this parallels the unfolding policy
shift in the US, albeit with different approaches and starting points (see
Sunday Start: The Paradigm Shift). While this change in policy should not come
as a surprise since income inequality is a global issue, the speed, scale and
intensity of the measures we are seeing in China today are unexpected.
To take a step back, from a
macroeconomic perspective, ‘common prosperity’ is consistent with rebalancing
China’s economy towards consumption. In the early phase of China’s modern
economic development, the most pressing need was to create employment
opportunities to meet a sharp and sustained rise in China’s working age
population. To address this, policy-makers took the approach of incentivizing
investment, especially in the manufacturing sector. Costs for a wide variety of
inputs across land, labor, capital and energy were kept low, while growth took
precedence over the environmental impact of industrialization. The result was a
rise in the ratio of fixed investment to GDP from 24% in 1990 to 42% in 2020,
which catalyzed a period of fast-paced GDP growth, in the process lifting
hundreds of millions out of poverty. …
China’s
crackdown on the three mountains
This is the Everest facing
China: how to raise productivity to meet the social needs of its 1.4bn people,
in the face of vagaries of the profitability of its capitalist sector. China’s
workforce is falling. productivity growth has been slowing and China faces a
technology and trade war with the US and its imperialist allies. The three
mountains will not be climbed unless that Everest is also conquered.
65% Of American Workers Would Take A 5% Pay Cut To Be Able To Permanently Work From Home
Bubble Fare:
Hussman: The Folly of Ruling Out a
Collapse
COVID-19 notes:
COVID-19 Vaccines Don’t Really Work
as Hoped
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Top
Scientists to Biden and Congress: 'Go Big on Climate... Do So Now'
"We must take immediate action to sharply reduce
heat-trapping emissions to limit the worst climate change impacts, protect
public health and lives, and limit economic harms."
World
to hit temperature tipping point 10 years faster than forecast
Heatwaves in
Siberia are now releasing methane trapped in the rocks
Atlantic
currents weaken, signalling weather changes - study
Net zero target
for 2050 is too slow, and a strategy for climate failure
Nature paper behind a firewall but available here.
Study reveals an
increase in the frequency of nuclear power outages caused by climate change
Biden
Administration Targets 50% Of Entire Auto Fleet To Be Electric By 2030
Toyota Warns
(Again) About Electrifying All Autos. Is Anyone Listening?
EVs Cost 1.6 To
2.3 Times More To Service Than Internal Combustion Vehicles, New Study Show
Other Fare:
Humans could
recolonize Earth after mass extinctions with ectogenesis
Learning to Live
in Steven Weinberg’s Pointless Universe
Steven Weinberg, who died last week at the age of 88, was not only a
Nobel laureate physicist but also one of the most eloquent science writers of
the last half century. His most famous (or perhaps infamous) statement can be
found on the second-to-last page of his first popular book, The First Three
Minutes, published in 1977. Having told the story of how our universe came into
being with the big bang some 13.8 billion years ago, and how it may end untold
billions of years in the future, he concludes that whatever the universe is
about, it sure as heck isn’t about us. “The more the universe seems
comprehensible,” he wrote, “the more it also seems pointless.”
For thousands of years, people had assumed just the opposite. Our
ancestors gazed at the world around us—the people and animals, the mountains
and seas, the sun, moon and stars—and saw the divine. As the 19th Psalm puts
it: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his
handiwork.” Even Isaac Newton saw a universe filled with purpose. In his
masterwork, the Principia, he wrote: “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets,
and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent
and powerful being.”
Science advanced by leaps and bounds in the centuries following Newton,
and scientists dialed back much of the God-talk. Many thinkers suggested that
the universe runs like a mighty clockwork. Perhaps a creator was needed at the
very beginning, to set it going, but surely it now runs on its own. Einstein,
who often spoke of God metaphorically, took a different tack. He rejected a
personal deity, but saw a kind of pantheism—roughly, the identification of God
with nature—as plausible.
In the second half of the 20th century, many saw even these lesser gods
as redundant. In A Brief History of Time (1988), Stephen Hawking speculated on
the possibility that the universe had no precise beginning; his controversial
“no-boundary proposal” (formulated in the 1980s with Jim Hartle) suggested that
time might have behaved like space in the universe’s earliest moments. Without
a “time zero,” there was no moment of creation—and nothing for a creator to do.
(It’s hardly a surprise that some people who balk at the teaching of evolution
also object to the teaching of big bang cosmology.)
Hawking’s materialist philosophy, shared by Weinberg and many other
prominent physicists, sees the universe as arising through some combination of
chance and natural law. Where Prince Hamlet saw purpose in even the minutest
occurrence—“There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow”—many of
today’s scientists see only the impersonal laws of physics.
Quotes of the Week:
"The Right engages in Climate Denial but the Dems, including Obama, engage in Climate Deception."
2019: AMOC’s collapse in next 300 years only under worst-case warming scenarios (IPCC)
Now: AMOC close to collapse
> Severe monsoon disruption
> Worse storms in Europe
> More sea level rise
> More danger to Amazon and Antarctic
Climate chaos always reliably worse than we think
EXTRA [controversial or non-market-related] FARE:
Regular Fare:
American elites want magical
technological fixes to climate change because they refuse to confront the truth
that seriously addressing the problem would require limits to their own power
and luxury.
Tweet/Thread of the Week:
Below is a summary from my recent talk on 33 core beliefs prevalent in modern culture contrasted with our underlying biophysical realities.
Vinay Gupta: I find myself wondering this morning how many people actually get my work - here we are, 20 years in to me continually writing, teaching, communicating, building - and I can't tell if a lot of people get it and are mostly quiet or if very few people actually got it.
Which is it?
It probably helps if I define it: here is my best short summary.
1) The human race is currently running the world like a death camp for poor humans, and particularly for the other species we farm or drive into extinction.
2) Fixing this situation is possible, but requires will.
That's the core thesis. Then,
3) It is possible, by mass collaboration using any available mechanism (open source, markets, new religious movements etc.) to live without this continuous catastrophic violence.
…
6) Existing political structures perform extremely poorly because they can't handle technically complex long duration multi-actor conflicts - government as we know it was designed for winning land wars in Europe pre-WW2 and can't handle nukes and climate
7) It is possible to dramatically increase our psychological resilience through meditation with a specific emphasis on handling difficult emotions like fear and helplessness. Trained people turn away from the difficult situations less, and cope more.
Climate Crisis Fare:
Excerpt from
“The Geopolitics of Resource Wars”
Global peak oil production
happened in 2018 (EIA 2020), and the energy crisis will probably hit by
2025. The coming energy crisis and
climate change is likely to trigger resource wars over oil as well as civil
wars as nations they sink into starvation and poverty. Indeed, this is already
happening, see my book review of Ahmed’s “Failing States, Collapsing Systems
BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence” here.
The thing is, this is a
unique collapse. Pre-fossil civilizations fell when they’d cut down their
forests and eroded their topsoil. Most wars devastated rural areas and
survivors streamed to cities. But after the energy crisis, food won’t be able
to be transported to cities, so perhaps in an energy crisis people will abandon
cities for the country to seek and grow food.
Then again, cities have always been a parasite of rural areas and
farmers, perhaps ways will be found to channel remaining energy into food
transport. But in the end, 80 to 90% of future generations will need to return
to farming.
If you’re thinking of
escaping to the country ahead of the energy crisis, consider living in a town
for the sake of defense, and if you plan to farm or grow food, buy land within
bicycling distance. Good luck!
COVID Fare:
Ishi Nobu: Covid-19 Pandemic: Daily World Report
The virus V2 causes covid-19, which is a mild cold at
worst in healthy people, most of whom never even know they were infected if
they don’t get tested. Indeed, some 60% of V2 transmissions are by carriers who
feel fine: 35% presymptomatic (before getting sick) and 25% asymptomatic (never
getting sick). Only unhealthy children are at risk of covid.
With statistical exception, covid is a hazardous
disease only to those who chose not to keep themselves in good health via bad
lifestyle decisions: overeating, poor diet, and lack of exercise. That
situation applies to the majority in many nations. Over 80% of Americans and
Brits are fat and out of shape. Covid death rates are 10 times higher in
countries where most adults are overweight, such as the US and Britain.
Covid is a public health crisis only because the
public is not in good health – by choice. This seminal fact is universally
ignored by the sensationalist mainstream press, which milks the tragedy story.
People who eat meat are significantly more likely to
develop severe covid. Pescatarians (fish eaters) had 59% lower odds of
developing serious illness from covid, while those on a plant-based diet
(vegans) were 73% less likely.
V2 continually adapts, primarily to facilitate
infection and contagion. New V2 varieties keep being discovered. Viruses
mystically transmit among compatriots worthy innovations. Several of the
variants are converging on the same solution to improved contagion (convergent
evolution), thereby illustrating that adaptation is teleological
(goal-oriented). A recently seen variant had a combination of traits only
previously seen singularly in other variants.
New Zealand physician Ashley Bloomfield: “Influenza
was first recorded in 1172 in Europe. These viruses don’t die out. They change
over time. What we are seeing with these new variants with the covid-19 virus
is that they become more transmissible and less deadly over time.”
Generally, variants do not cause more serious illness.
But some might. Such varieties are likely more hazardous by dint of being able
to ramp viral load quicker, sending the immune system into a terrible tizzy.
Severe covid is, after all, an autoimmune disease, not a viral disease per se.
The highly infectious Delta variant, which likely
originated in India, has become dominant worldwide. Headaches, a sore throat,
and a runny nose are common symptoms of Delta variant covid, with fever, cough
and loss of smell less common (those latter symptoms being typical of original
V2 virus infecting humans). Though twice more contagious, mortality from Delta
is no worse than other V2 variants.
Another variant of note is Delta Plus, which can
apparently evade vaccination and infection immunity. Delta Plus has a mutation
from the the Beta variant (from South Africa) that affords greater contagion.
Delta Plus has been spotted in dozens of countries. Delta Plus was first
noticed in Nepal.
The Lambda variant, first spotted in Peru, is up and
coming. Lambda is an innovator, with mutations that make it look like it may
give Delta competition. Lambda has already been noticed in 26 countries, and is
widespread in South America.
Most people in the world – perhaps 3/4ths – have
already been exposed to V2. In many nations, such as the USA and most of
Europe, over 90% have encountered V2.
The endless covid pandemic remains vibrant, with fresh
waves of contagion in many nations. Rather than improve their health care
systems, many governments impose harsh restrictions which are known to be
ineffectual – purely a political ploy to promote the lie to a gullible populace
that the domestic epidemic is being “controlled”.
…
Governments around the world failed to prepare for the
inevitable pandemic. The initial panic and woefully pitiable response to the
pandemic exemplifies the incompetence which spells inexorable doom in
addressing self-extinction caused by industrial pollution, overpopulation, and
unsustainble resource consumption.
Few countries bothered with more than limited,
selective testing. Hence the virus readily moves through populations surreptitiously
via asymptomatic transmission.
Mike Ryan, the WHO’s top emergencies expert, said 9
October 2020 that authorities should “avoid these massive lockdowns that are so
punishing to communities, to society and to everything else.” Ryan linked
soaring covid cases in the northern hemisphere to the failure to quarantine
people exposed to the virus. Nations did not taken the lesson.
…
You should be tested for V2 before being vaccinated.
There is no reason to get jabbed if you have been exposed to V2. The elderly
and frail should also avoid vaccination, especially with the radical mRNA
vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, which pose the hazard of a significant side
effects. For instance, the mRNA jabs are known to cause heart problems which
are otherwise rare.
Women typically have worse side effects from V2 jabs
than men. One reason is that the jabs are too potent for women – the dosages
decided in a sexist manner in being calibrated toward men.
The big lie about V2 vaccines is that the risk of
severe covid is worse than the jabs – not true. A V2 jab will make you sick,
and you risk severe reaction. By contrast, covid is a mild cold at worst for
healthy people.
There is no standard for vaccine efficacy. Western
commercial V2 jab makers have rigged their numbers and regulators are too
mathematically ignorant to object.
Even after massive application, epidemiologists remain
uncertain how effective vaccines are, especially against variants for which
they were not designed. Jabs often help prevent severe covid among those most
at risk: the obese and those in bad health due to lifestyle choice. The paucity
of data owes to not tracking outcomes.
V2 vaccines are designed to prevent severe prolonged
disease – at the cost of mild disease for days. Jabs are not intended to limit
covid spread, nor are they proving effective in doing so.
…
Despite mass jab campaigns, most nations have
authorized V2 vaccines for “emergency” use only. The US has yet to approve a V2
vaccine as “safe and effective” for the general population, even as its
promotes vaccination among the general population.
…
Covid has been a tremendous boon to commercial vaccine
makers. V2 jab makers will rake in over $100 billion in 2021. At least 9
executives in V2 jab-making companies have become billionaires thanks to covid.
Further, V2 jabs have been a tremendous exercise in profiteering. Jab makers
are charging at least 5 times cost. To celebrate, Pfizer and Moderna are
jacking prices up further in the EU. Plutocratic home nations of these vaccine
makers (e.g, US, Germany) have refused to waive their patent laws to provide
greater distribution at less cost.
More than 4.31 billion peopled have been jabbed
against V2 worldwide, with by far the most in China (1.73 billion). Jabbing has
not made a notable difference in pandemic infection numbers. The rate of
vaccination is slowing as rich nations reach saturation and poor nations cannot
afford the expensive jabs.
…
Vaccines are increasingly faltering against newly
evolved variants. In the US, 75% of those freshly infected had been fully
vaccinated against V2. As a way to encourage regular cash injections from
vaccines, jab makers are publicizing that vaccine efficacy wanes in less an a
year.
…
Rich nations are starting to mass vaccinate teenagers
against V2 – an unnecessary and imprudent gesture, as covid is nothing to a
healthy child, whereas the V2 jabs are a decided hazard.
…
Moderna was the first to treat babies as guinea pigs
for its jab. In the rush to profit others, including Johnson & Johnson,
follow. This is a gross moral violation – but expectable in a world where greed
and fear trample morality daily.
…
Viral escape – evolving to elude vaccination – is a
certainty. “The virus is traveling in a direction that is causing it to escape
from our current vaccines and therapies that are directed against the viral
spike,” immunologist David Ho on 8 March 2021. That said, news reports continue
to claim that the jabs being given are effective against severe covid.
Further, mass jab campaigns inspire V2 to accelerate
its evolution to more smartly evade the immune system – an obvious evolutionary
move-countermove dynamic which is being ignored. A savvier strategy would be to
only vaccinate at-risk people.
…
Side effects to V2 vaccines are a serious problem.
Jabs from AstraZeneca-Oxford, Pfizer-BioNTech, and Johnson & Johnson are
especially prone to serious side effects. For the 2-jab vaccines, side effects
from the 2nd jab is worse than the first.
Side effects are more common in those who have already
been infected with V2. For those with long covid, a jab may jolt the immune
system into reconsidering its attack on the body. Long covid is an autoimmune
disease.
…
For healthy young people especially, V2 jabs may cause
worse symptoms than infection by the V2 virus itself. This is because viral
loading in the body is gradual (if the virus is not defeated early on), whereas
a vaccine is a viral shock treatment.
The mRNA jabs – by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna – may
kill people in frail health and cause heart problems in the young. Europe’s
drug regulator has acknowledged this. The USA drug safety agency is adding a
warning label to these jabs as risky: known to cause circulatory problems,
especially in the young. US military personnel, in excellent health, have had
chest pain and heart inflammation from mRNA jabs.
…
Cats and dogs are susceptible to covid – and are a
likely source of contagion. People spread covid to their pets.
Fauci and the NIH Knew Covid-19 “Vaccines” Could Lead to Antibody-Dependent Enhancement
Three days ago, I published an article about Dr. Robert Malone’s warning that we might very well be witnessing the emergence of a deadly condition called Antibody-Dependent Enhancement within the population of people who were injected with Covid-19 “vaccines”.
… Late last night, an anonymous source forwarded a screenshot of a report attributed to John Wiley and Sons that is found at the bottom of NIH’s website. The report specifically warned of the distinct possibility that people who are injected with Covid-19 “vaccines” could develop the very Antibody-Dependent Enhancement that Dr. Malone keeps ringing the alarm about. Not only was this information suppressed from the public, the government-media-corporate complex went out of their way to censor—in the case of Dr. Malone destroy—anyone who questions the safety and efficacy of these boosters that are still undergoing clinical trials.
Even though I knew all along that the US government, and governments around the world, were lying through their teeth about the origins of Covid-19 and were likewise peddling medical misinformation about the scientific integrity of the “vaccines”, it was still shocking to read the following paragraph right on NIH’s website:
“The specific and significant COVID-19 risk of ADE should have been and should be prominently and independently disclosed to research subjects currently in vaccine trials, as well as those being recruited for the trials and future patients after vaccine approval, in order to meet the medical ethics standard of patient comprehension for informed consent.” [source NIH]
Despite the fact advisors from John Wiley & Sons explicitly advised the NIH to disclose to research subjects in the three-month trials that were conducted last year as well as to all recipients once the “vaccines” garnered approval for general use, over 160 million Americans and more than 2 billion people around the world were never told about the distinct possibility that they could end up developing a disease called Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE) which leads to our body’s natural immune system getting compromised and starts attacking vital organs.
… This is not some fluke occurrence that could not have been foreseen, “vaccines” that produce spiked proteins by way of mRNA or adenovirus were studied on lab animals—specifically ferrets and cats because they are more susceptible to Coronavirus—for over twenty years. Though the test subjects initially acquired synthetic antibodies, once their immunization window expired and they were challenged with SARS-CoV-1, the lab animals that were injected with the “vaccines” were wiped out. The warning on NIH’s website was alluding to this very real possibility but the very authorities we entrust to protect us instead concealed this information and conditioned billions of people to get jabbed without informed consent.
Worse disease progression after Covid vaccination?
How does ADE work? The latest publication from Pfizer, which presents the follow-up to the approval study, also proves that the vaccines are at least not effective against the severe courses of COVID . It shows no effectiveness of the vaccination against death and no relevant absolute effectiveness against severe courses (we will report on this separately). But why ADE? Because an increased viral load in the nasal epithelium in vaccinated people looks like ADE after six months. How come? Infection-enhancing antibodies ( ADEs ) bind antibodies that are formed against the vaccine after being vaccinated to bind to the virus when it is infected later. But instead of neutralizing it, the antibodies increase the uptake (endocytosis) of the virus by the types of cells that the virus can infect. There are different molecular mechanisms for this; the antibodies act like a catalyst that accelerates the biochemical reaction, here the endocytosis of the virus-receptor complex in the cell. The phenomenon is known from vaccines against RSV (respiratory syncitial virus) and the dengue virus. It was also in the development of vaccines against the closely related with SARS-CoV-2 Coronaviridae MERS and SARS-CoV-1 observed and contributed to the unsuccessful clinical development of vaccines against these viruses.
ADE is very dangerous because the syndrome can cause vaccinees who would have survived an infection naturally without vaccination to become very seriously ill or even die, even though they would have hardly developed any symptoms without vaccination. Malone rightly points out that ADE can occur 6 to 9 months after vaccination, especially in the case of an unfortunate composition of the antibodies in the phase of titer decline.
Covid19 Vaccine
Efficacy & Effectiveness – The Elephant (Not) In The Room
Vaccine efficacy is
generally reported as a relative risk reduction (RRR). It uses the relative
risk (RR)—ie, the ratio of attack rates with and without a vaccine—which is
expressed as 1–RR. Ranking by reported efficacy gives relative risk reductions
of 95% for the Pfizer–BioNTech, 94% for the Moderna–NIH, 91% for the Gamaleya,
67% for the J&J, and 67% for the AstraZeneca–Oxford vaccines. However, RRR should
be seen against the background risk of being infected and becoming ill with
COVID-19, which varies between populations and over time. Although the RRR
considers only participants who could benefit from the vaccine, the absolute
risk reduction (ARR), which is the difference between attack rates with and
without a vaccine, considers the whole population. ARRs tend to be ignored because they give a much less
impressive effect size than RRRs: 1·3% for the AstraZeneca–Oxford, 1·2% for the
Moderna–NIH, 1·2% for the J&J, 0·93% for the Gamaleya, and 0·84% for the
Pfizer–BioNTech vaccines.
Leaky Blood
Vessels: An Unknown Danger of COVID-19 Vaccination
In this letter to
physicians, Doctors for Covid Ethics explains why recent findings regarding
vaccine-immune interactions suggest that “vascular damage and leakage” is
likely to occur following COVID-19 vaccination. The findings add to work
published last year showing that spike protein in the bloodstream directs an
immune factor known as complement to attack the inner vessel lining, resulting
in damage and leakiness of the vessels.
The severity of this effect
can be expected to intensify with each injection, rendering booster shots
“uniquely dangerous”.
The letter explains why
booster shots can be expected to cause increasingly severe “vascular injury
occurring at multiple sites throughout the body” with “potentially devastating
effects.” Given that no clinical trials have examined booster shots and their
impact upon this foreseeable vaccine-immune pathway, we ask the question: “Are
we about to witness the birth of an entirely new world of autoimmune disease?”
Myocarditis and
Pericarditis After Vaccination for COVID-19
That's still
"rare," but far more than what was expected had Centers for Disease
Control's (CDC's) numbers from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System
(VAERS) been accurate.
Larry Sanger: The Astonishing
Hubris of a Global Experimental Vaccine
It is an objective,
indisputable fact: never in the history of the world has there been a global
push to administer an experimental medicine to all of humanity, billions of us,
at the same time.
I want you to stop and
reflect on that. Imagine the hubris it required both to carry out this plan and
to propagandize the world to carry it out.
“Hubris?” you ask. “What do
you mean?”
The Covid vaccines are
experimental. The FDA has not approved them. Most vaccines require years to
test and approve, in no small part because we want to make sure they don’t have
dangerous long-term side effects, which they can have; the CDC has published a
list of problems with selected approved vaccines. Many experimental vaccines
never make it out of the experimental phase. CNN made similar points back when
Trump was, wrongheadedly (I thought so at the time) pushing for rapid approval
of the Covid vaccines. Of course, the mercurial news organization hastened to
forget all that when the Biden administration decided rapid vaccine deployment
was a good idea.
…
what if we discover some
horrifically high incidence of catastrophic side-effects that do not show up
for two or five or ten years? Scientists tell us that that is possible. It is
unfortunately possible that more people will die from these experimental
vaccines than would have died from a virus that kills fewer than 1% of those
who contract it.
Do not misunderstand me. I
am not claiming that is happening. I am not even saying that it is terribly
likely. I am saying it is possible, because these are experimental vaccines.
Frankly, the hubris required
for carrying out this plan, and for taking the lead in propagandizing the world
to carry it out, is jaw-dropping and scary to me. If a world leader is willing
to take such gambles with all of humanity, what else are they prepared to do? I
really wonder.
Yves Smith: Eric Topol Discusses Covid Vaccines Not Meeting Expectations, Breakthrough Cases Sicker.
It looks as if conventional wisdom on the Covid vaccines has run head first into some ugly realities. Eric Topol, formerly a “Get vaccinated, problem solved” cheerleader, grapples out loud with troubling data about Covid deaths and breakthrough cases with a serious journalist, David Wallace-Wells of New York Magazine. The short version is that both measures are much worse than expected and the trajectory bodes ill.
We’ll go through many of the bad trends Topol and Wallace-Wells identify, including one we hadn’t wanted to believe when IM Doc started telling us of it privately via e-mail weeks ago, and presented in comments yesterday: that his breakthrough cases have been typically sicker than those among the unvaccinated. Topol is seeing the same thing and his population isn’t from IM Doc’s part of the world.
Topol may have fallen for orthodox thinking, but sits on the Scripps Research board as the founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute , he has tremendous clout and can’t be dismissed, both by virtue of his reputation and because the data he and Wallace-Wells discuss speaks for itself. But the officialdom has bet so heavily on magical vaccines being the solution for Covid that the denialism is likely to remain strong and get even uglier.
As we say often here, it would be better if we were wrong, but it appears we haven’t been. And I don’t like sounding triumhpalist; I felt nauseous during September 2008 when just about everything we said about the credit, mortgage and derivative markets in 2007 and 2008 was proven correct, and then some.
However, Topol and Wallace-Wells substantiate what we and our experts, IM Doc, GM, KLG and Iganacio have been saying from early on: the vaccines were overhyped. ...
...
Unfortunately, this is rule by MBA, or pathological big organizational behavior, writ large. Too many bosses want to hear only good news from subordinates, which means they engage in cover ups or delays, hoping things will either blow over or they can find someone else to scapegoat. And now we run our country based on short-term careerist calculations.
While we can hope for well deserved days of reckoning to come eventually, too many people will suffer in the meantime due to their negligence and cowardice.
CDC Director
Makes Case Vaccination Passports are Futile
CDC Director Rochelle
Walensky stated the vaccine does not prevent COVID-19 infection, nor does it
stop the vaccinated person from transmitting the infection or the delta
variant. According to Director Walensky, the only benefit from the vaccine now
is presumably that it reduces the severity of symptoms. If a vaccinated and
non-vaccinated person have the same capacity to carry, shed and transmit the
virus – with or without symptoms – then what difference does a vaccination
passport or vaccination ID make? According to the CDC TODAY, both the vaxxed
and non-vaxxed person walking into a restaurant, store, group, venue or
workplace present the exact same risk to other people there, so how does the
presentation of proof of vaccine make any difference?
The fires I am thinking of
are of a more “symbolic” art: the propaganda and censorship that on the one
hand keep us from asking the questions that need to be asked, and on the other
hand from hearing from those who can help us formulate those questions. It has
gone to such an extreme now that most people are not even aware that there are
such questions, including many politicians and health “experts”. It is indeed
the biggest global propaganda operation ever, and it’s costing, and destroying,
scores of lives.
We are stuck between a fake
one-dimensional reality of lockdowns, masks and vaccines that are supposed to
keep us safe but don’t, and a different reality of masks and lockdowns that
don’t stop much of anything but instead cause many problems of their own, and
vaccines that have already killed 1000s and hurt millions of people, and that
may well lead to much bigger problems, like for instance “the birth of an
entirely new world of autoimmune disease” through antibody-dependent
enhancement (ADE).
We are not allowed to read
about that, or watch a video, or talk about it, even if the people who involved
are distinguished health professionals, in the same way that we are not allowed
to talk about early treatment of Covid through for instance anti-virals; we are
supposed to shut up and get jabbed. But we are not all completely stupid.
We do not believe
unquestioningly that Anthony Fauci and his ilk have a monopoly on truth and
science, even (or especially) if they are the only ones allowed to talk.
Instead, we think that if he were right, there would be no need for all the
banning and censoring and deleting of doctors who don’t always agree with him.
We cannot afford to stifle dissent, we never could. We need conversation and
discussion, and we’re not getting any.
Whether it’s McCullough,
Mercola, Robert Malone, Pierre Kory or anyone else, it’s insane to silence them
for spreading misinformation. For all we -that means you- know it’s Fauci et al
who spread misinformation. How would you know though? His is the only
information that is spread at all. He effectively has a monopoly.
The point is not whether you
agree with Fauci or the CDC or anyone else, the point is that this doesn’t give
you the right to silence those who don’t agree. You don’t have that right if
only because it keeps us from finding out what is real or not, and eventually
from saving people’s lives. Which is what everyone’s main concern should be,
but apparently is not, or there would be no silencing
…
A lot of people by now have
lost their marbles, and we need to hope that those who haven’t, can make
themselves heard. Or the immediate future looks awfully bleak.
CO-VID of the Week:
Covid
is a Global Propaganda Operation
Dr Piers Robinson is an
expert on communication, media and world politics, focusing on conflict and war
and especially the role of propaganda He is presently Co-Director of the
Organisation for Propaganda Studies, Convenor of the Working Group on Syria,
Propaganda and Media and Associated Researcher with the Working Group on
Propaganda and the 9/11 ‘War on Terror’ From 2016 – 2019, he was Professor and
Chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism at the University of
Sheffield. Dr Robinson has served on the boards of several academic journals.
He has lectured at the NATO Defense College in Rome and briefed senior UK
military commanders and diplomats.
His Research interests focus
on Organised Persuasive Communication and Contemporary Propaganda and his
current projects include Propaganda and the Syrian conflict; Propaganda and the
9/11 Global War on Terror and Covid19. Dr Robinson’s books include the Routledge
Handbook of Media, Conflict and Security (2016), Pockets of Resistance: British
news media, war and theory in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, (2010) and The CNN
Effect: the myth of news, foreign policy and intervention.(2002).
COVID Quotes of the Week:
"So for children, the balance of risks is very clear:
The risk of the vaccine is greater than the risk of Covid itself"
COVID Tweet Vid of the Week:
Taylor Hudak: Dr. Michael Yeadon says governments are lying to us about Covid-19: "I've spent 40 years training & practice in life science. I have no incentive whatsoever to make this stuff up. What I'm telling you is true -- that you're being misled."
COVID Tweet Thread of the Week:
There was never a claim that vaccines reduce transmission. This is borne out in the data and begs the question why there is still a narrative that everyone must be vaccinated to protect the vulnerable. Ironically, the opposite is more apparent.
COVID Conspiracy Fare:
John Michael Greer: A Hypothesis
I’ve been watching the unfolding of the current Covid-19 pandemic since the first news stories about it in the late fall of 2019, and like many people, I find the official story that’s grown up around the virus and the response to it impossible to take seriously. Partly that’s because the official narrative has been veering around like a well-greased weathercock on a blustery day, and partly it’s because large elements of that narrative are contradicted by scientific studies or, in many cases, the press releases on which the narrative itself is based. The fact that people are now being banned from social media for quoting pharmaceutical companies’ own documents is a good indication that there’s some serious falsification going on here.
Yet I find it just as hard to believe the main alternative story on offer these days. This is the claim that the virus and the vaccine are part of a sinister plan to take away what remains of civil liberties worldwide, along the lines of Klaus Schwab’s maunderings about a Great Reset. The problem here is that this sort of scheme would require governments and corporations everywhere to behave with a degree of competence they very clearly don’t display in any other context.
On reflection, it seems to me that what’s happened over the last two years makes sense if you simply factor in the shortsightedness, incompetence, and venality that government and corporate sectors alike have displayed in all their other dealings of late. With this in mind, I’ve sketched out a hypothetical reconstruction of what has actually been happening. It’s speculative but it accounts for the facts as I know them. As usual, I’ve focused on events in the United States, the one country I know tolerably well; readers in other countries will need to modify this story to fit their own local conditions. I haven’t footnoted anything; do your own internet searches on the important concepts listed below and you’ll find plenty of data.
At any rate, here’s a hypothesis about the real story behind Covid-19. ....
Stage One: Business as Usual
The Covid-19 coronavirus was manufactured as part of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. Gain-of-function research? That’s one of the currently hot fields of virus research, involving genetic engineering to make viruses more virulent in their effects on tissue cultures. It’s dangerous enough that federal regulations prohibit it in the US, which is why it was going on in China. Funding for the research, however, came from one of the many US government slush funds that prop up the pharmaceutical industry, by way of a pass-through entity to provide a fig leaf of plausible deniability. This is normal practice, part of the culture of kleptocracy that funnels tax dollars into corporate pockets with zero accountability.
Stage Two: A Minor Little Oopsie
Someone made a mistake, and the Covid-19 coronavirus got outside the supposedly secure facility where it was being kept.
...
Stage Three: Cashing In On The Sick
Then the pharmaceutical industry realized that Covid-19 had the potential to be a gargantuan cash cow.
...
Stage Five: Marketing Maneuvers
The political systems of modern industrial nations are riddled with graft, and so corporate interests can reliably get politicians to say and do whatever will help boost their profits. Once the goal du jour became marketing the vaccine to as many people as possible, therefore, politicians did what they were paid to do and turned on a dime, insisting that Covid-19 was sure to kill us all unless we all got vaccinated, and slapping on mask mandates and shutdowns as part of the political theater. That was purely a marketing gimmick.
...
Stage Six: The Pushback Begins
The problem is that a great many Americans do not trust the medical industry. There’s good reason for their mistrust, as medical malpractice has long been among the leading causes of death in the United States, and medical profiteering is far and away the leading cause of bankruptcy here as well. Thus an impressive number of people—possibly as many as half the population—flatly refused to get the vaccines. It didn’t help that the vaccines themselves turned out to have serious immediate side effects, including sudden death, at a rate a couple of orders of magnitude higher than any other vaccine currently in use. Though Soviet-style censorship was slapped on social media to keep “misinformation” from spreading, hard questions about the official narrative got asked with increasing frequency, and the number of people getting the Covid-19 shots flatlined: while the US government is now claiming that 70% of adult Americans are vaccinated, other sources of data suggest that the actual number is much less than that.
Stage Seven: Don’t Breathe A Word Of This
There was another reason for people to be suspicious, though that wasn’t clear at first. Everyone who’s had to use Microsoft programs knows that Bill Gates’ management style tends to produce second-rate, bug-ridden products that don’t work the way they’re supposed to work, and have to be pushed on reluctant consumers via high-pressure marketing and monopolistic practices. It turns out that the same was true of the biotechnology on which the Covid-19 vaccines are based. That would have been discovered in the usual way during the two to five years of testing a new vaccine normally gets, but the Covid vaccines didn’t get that; the first one to be authorized had a total of eight weeks of not especially rigorous testing, the others didn’t get much more, and so a far from minor problem slipped past. In the spring of 2021 word thus began to trickle out that the Covid-19 vaccines had a serious problem with ADE: once the initial protection wore off, a process which took a few months, people who’d been vaccinated were much more likely to get seriously ill from repeat exposure to Covid-19 than people who hadn’t. Thus the federal government and the medical industry suddenly had a self-inflicted disaster on their hands.
Stage Eight: Panic In The C-Suites
...
Stage Nine: Things Get Serious
This is where we are as I write this. If my hypothesis is right, here’s what we can expect.
Stage Ten: Hoping for a Miracle
As ADE becomes more common, breakthrough infection clusters will pop up with increasing frequency, and the higher the percentage of the population in that region is vaccinated, the worse they will be. Variants will be blamed for this. Word of the imminent crisis will spread through the upper levels of society, however, causing increasingly frantic and irrational behavior, until it becomes next to impossible to get anything done if it depends on the government or big corporations. Medical laboratories will scramble to find a way to counteract ADE, though that’s been tried for decades now without success. Meanwhile the people who refuse to get vaccinated won’t budge no matter how much furious rhetoric and punitive policy gets dumped on them. Once this becomes clear, authorities will insist that everyone but a few holdouts has been vaccinated, in the fond hope that people will believe them one more time.
Stage Eleven: Into The Endgame
When ADE becomes too widespread to ignore and people begin to die in significant numbers, expect governments to proclaim the arrival of the predicted new hyper-lethal variant and impose a new round of shutdowns, mask mandates, and the like. The media will insist that the people who are dying are all unvaccinated as long as they can get away with it; pay attention to the vaccination status and health outcomes of people you know for a reality check. Unless some way of stopping ADE-enhanced infections can be found in a hurry, medical systems will buckle under the caseload and triage will become the order of the day. How soon this will happen, if it does, is impossible to say in advance. It’s also impossible to know in advance how soon it will become clear that the vaccines are responsible—or just how violent a backlash against the political and economic establishment this could provoke.
Global Research E-Book, Centre for Research on Globalization. By Prof
Michel Chossudovsky.
Hat tip Edward Curtin: Professor Michel
Chossudovsky: Truthteller Extraordinaire
Michel Chossudovsky is a
freedom fighter.
In the case of the corona
crisis propaganda campaign, the truth has been available nearly from the start,
and Chossudovsky, with his website Global Research, has been one of the most
unrelenting voices of sanity and freedom.
Global Research has for
decades been on top of the most important issues of our times, from the events
of September 11, 2001 through the Iraq War, the endless so-called war on
terror, the U.S. wars on Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Serbia, Palestine,
Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, etc., the multiple financial crises, CIA coups and
assassinations of domestic and foreign leaders, the new Cold wars against
Russia and China, right up to today’s world-wide covid propaganda war.
Started by Michel
Chossudovsky on September 9, 2001, the website is part of The Centre for
Research on Globalization (CRG), which is an independent research and media
organization based in Montreal, Canada.
Global Research has been a
beacon of light for twenty dark years.
It has ignored no topic, no matter how controversial. It has published an enormous amount of
writing and research by many writers, exploring matters from multiple
viewpoints, including conflicting ones.
Like any website that posts an enormous amount to engender debate, the
quality of the articles varies, but on average it is very high. Chossudovsky’s own writing has been
outstanding and comprehensive.
Starting in January 2020, at
the start of the corona crisis, he has been assiduously tracking its
development in article after article. (Other contributors, such as Peter
Koenig, et al., have also published very important work on the crisis at
GR.) Michel’s work (he is my friend and
colleague and I am a long-time contributor) on this is similar to what he has
done for twenty years since the murderous events of September 11, 2001 and the
official propaganda about them. Global Research is a deep repository of
research and writing exposing the official lies about those attacks.
In December 2020, he
released a free E-Book of his corona crisis writings and has continually
updated it, the last being on July 27, 2021.
In addition, he continues to write regular powerful articles on the
corona propaganda and other matters.
What follows is a short
quasi-review of Chossudovsky’s extraordinary contribution to exposing the vast
official lies surrounding COVID-19. I say quasi because it will serve no
purpose to repeat much of what he writes. Like all true gifts, his E-Book is
given freely, but in the spirit of genuine gift exchange, readers of it should
pass it on to others, for we are at a world-wide turning-point that has few if any
precedents. If you doubt that, a reading
of his work will disabuse you of your reticence in recognizing its reality.
We Are Many. The
Oppressors Are Not.
The imperial war against countries that defy the US hegemonic imperatives
involves a few steps. The target
population is deprived of their basic necessities by economic embargo, trade
sanctions, travel restrictions and demonization of its leader. The society is destabilized by the lack of
resources and economic activities. The
opposing forces in the country are generously funded by the empire to build a
momentum against the defying “regime” in the name of “revolution,” “democracy,”
“freedom” and etc. The communities are divided.
The institutions are compromised to serve capital, adding more
confusions and predicaments to the population.
Quite often this is sufficient enough to silence those who defy such
interventions and it results in an overthrow of the existing order. The society is transformed to suit the
colonial policies concocted by western industries, which result in resource
extraction, privatization, financialization, exploitation of cheap labor,
construction of US military bases and so on.
Quite a few middle eastern countries have defied such interventions
resulting in proxy wars and western military interventions.
That was the war on terror which continues to this day as the US forces
are freely employed against the world according to its “war on terror legal
framework,” while its measures are still in place as restrictions against our
legal rights as well as restrictions at airports and so on.
Many of us raised our voices against the obvious crime of invading other
countries, colonizing them and subjugating them. To my surprise there were people who objected
to our assertion saying that if we didn’t invade them, they would have invaded
us, they were “terrorists,” and so on.
Enormous profits were generated by this huge public project, war, at the
expense of the people in the war torn countries as well as oppressed people in
some of the richest countries of the world. No one was held accountable for
deaths and destruction. The war to save
people from terrorists was a huge capitalist project to expand the power and
wealth of hardened criminals who call themselves politicians, philanthropists,
businessmen, intellectuals, patriots, academics, and so on.
…
Fast forward to 2021–the era of war on virus. We are experiencing a
massive wealth transfer to the rich and powerful, which can be best described
by Jeff Bezos thanking his workers and customers for his rocket ride. [2] The
cynical exploitative violence inflicted against workers is found in all sectors
across the country, creating destruction of small community businesses, massive
homelessness, suicide surge, spike in drug related deaths. Lockdown measures are wreaking havoc in vital
social relations, which must now be reorganized.
The virus event has turned the dwindling healthcare system into mask
wearing, social distancing and getting injected with extremely lucrative
experimental genetic modification drugs—which are surrounded by unprecedented numbers of injuries and deaths,
far surpassing all combined prior vaccine injury and death reports to the CDC
reporting system VAERS. The lockdown
measures and profit oriented measures against the virus further narrowed the
capacity of the general healthcare system, resolution in huge numbers of
patients without vital care for their urgent conditions. Destroying the
healthcare system for the sake of saving lives is only an aspect of the current
mobilization. The education system,
which has been under attack for generations by corporate forces, has received a
blank check to fire faculties, turn classes into online tutorials, and pursue a
new mission to create obedient workers for the Forth Industrial Revolution. The financial institution has accelerated its
herding of the population into the digital realm where people are conditioned,
commodified, and exploited as data. In
every industry, a massive restructuring process for profit is occurring in the
name of Covid measures.
Now, I understand that respiratory illnesses can be very dangerous.
…
We are told that there is a deadly disease out there and the only
solution is to vaccinate. Our life and
death are determined by one of the largest corporate entities, the medical
industrial complex.
Just as the war on terror was described as a “crusade”—legitimizing the
twisted religious and cultural superiority of the colonizers, disguising white
man’s burden as humanitarian obligation —
the war on virus crowns “science” as its guiding force. However, needless to say, the credibility of
the “science” is proportional to the accompanying might of wealth and
power—just as the facts of war are bought and sold as “journalism”. Propaganda
lies fill the air as those who oppose are marked as “others” who deserve to be castigated as being outside of
the protection of the gated community.
This way of framing—the medical industrial complex—is useful in
understanding the dynamics within the capitalist hegemony. However, such an entity is also a part of the
media industrial complex, non profit industrial complex, political industrial
complex, and of course military industrial complex. In short, our lives are dictated by multiple
dynamic forces of oligarchs, orchestrating a “reality” which firmly manifests
as a capitalist framework—a cage to condition our lives based on its
imperatives.
…
The media, politicians and major institutions carefully instigate
conflicts among the people by demonizing opponents over vaccines and lockdown measures,
while protecting “pandemic” narratives one way or the other.
Some people might think that things must get worse before it gets better.
Things can certainly get worse but it looks like it only means more
fragmentation of communities and destabilization of institutions, which allows
further erosion of people’s interests by the capitalist domination along with
justifications for its draconian measures.
This probably gives a comfortable feeling for those privileged ones in
gated communities. This also accompanies the exacerbation of fascist momentum,
which always justifies the forces of western imperial hegemony—remember how the
Trump phenomenon pushed neoliberal policies, which are embraced by the both
corporate parties, while justifying anything else to oppose Donald Trump, who
was largely perceived as an obvious caricature of the narcissistic failing
empire? The US capitalism moves forward
while oscillating left and right within the acceptable spectrum of imperialism.
In short, everything is under control according to those who destroyed
the middle eastern countries. The only
difference is that now the target is us. We are under attack. Some of us are demonized by the establishment
to play the role of scapegoats. Some of
us are praised as heroes saving lives and sacrificing themselves. Our
communities are being destroyed to be further consumed by the colonizers of
humanity and nature.
The war on virus is meant as a crucial background of destabilization and
fear which helps extract huge amount of public spending in the name of saving
lives, saving environment and saving people’s livelihoods—which are all under
attack by the savagery of the very capitalist domination. Since the war on virus is largely targeting
the public money, we are bombarded with an unprecedented amount of wholesale
propaganda narratives, as if we are thrown into the process of corporate
electoral process—we are supposed to vote yes to those lucrative capitalist
fixes for the capitalist problems by going along with the narratives. Public outcries against the policies are
safely consumed among the populations as people are forced to fight among
themselves. Moreover, the war on virus
is meant to be a perpetual war.
Inconceivable “mistakes” will be made, victories would be declared here
and there, facts will be revealed when convenient, while much of the facts are
distorted to prop up the pretense of this vast protection racket scheme by the
oligarchs. One step forward, and one
step backward, our lives swirl within the torturous theater of the “medical
crisis,” but the real solution is never to be found within it. The empire can not lose the war but the
empire has no intention of winning the war either, for the winning can destroy
the domesticated momentum of the in-fighting among the people, as well as an
assortment of “activism” backed by the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, which
effectively drives capitalist agendas in the name of “our democracy”.
…
Our real enemy is not the “antivaxxers,” or the gullible people swallowing
the corporate propaganda. The real enemy
is the imperial oligarchs who are shaping our society in order to continue
their ways of exploitation and subjugation.
They are shaping the capitalist cage to squeeze the last remnants of our
imagination and our connection to humanity and nature. How can we defy the colonization of humanity
and nature? How can we be a part of the
resistance against the criminal pyramid scheme which is bound to implode with
its destructive nature? How can we build
our ways to be in harmony with ourselves, with each other and with nature? We are a part of the countless people who
have held the dream of such a harmony.
We stand strong with them in solidarity.
We are many. The oppressors are not.
Brandon Smith: We Will Not
Comply: A Campaign Against Medical Tyranny
We are currently at the cusp
of a great conflict against the powers that be; people who are exploiting the
(mostly manufactured) covid crisis for unprecedented political and economic
control. And when I say “manufactured”, I mean that there is no crisis, no need
for mandates, no need for lockdowns and no need for vaccine passports.
…
This essay is a little different from what I usually write in that it is
not so much an appeal to pure reason or pure science and more an appeal to
principle.
GeoPolitical [Our So-called Leaders are Sociopathic Shits] Fare:
America
needs to listen to the anguished operators of our flying death robots
Blinded by the Light: Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Age of Normalized Violence
This narrative of redemption was soon challenged by a number of historians who argued that the dropping of the atom bomb had less to do with winning the war than with an attempt to put pressure on the Soviet Union to not expand their empire into territory deemed essential to American interests.[19] Protecting America’s superiority in a potential Soviet-American conflict was a decisive factor in dropping the bomb. In addition, the Truman administration needed to provide legitimation to Congress for the staggering sums of money spent on the Manhattan Project in developing the atomic weapons program and for procuring future funding necessary to continue military appropriations for ongoing research long after the war ended.[20] The late Howard Zinn went even further asserting that the government’s weak defense for the bombing of Hiroshima was not only false but was complicitous with an act of terrorism. Refusing to relinquish his role as a public intellectual willing to hold power accountable, he writes “Can we … comprehend the killing of 200,000 people to make a point about American power?”[21] Other historians also attempted to deflate this official defense of Hiroshima by providing counter-evidence that the Japanese were ready to surrender as a result of a number of factors including the nonstop bombing of 26 cities before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the success of the naval and military blockade of Japan, and the Soviet’s entrance into the war on August 9th.
"I remember him saying first, like as he was doing it, ‘Do you want
to go somewhere else,'" she said, adding "And then him saying to me
when I pulled away, he got finished doing what he was doing, and I kind of just
pulled back and he said, ‘Come on man, I
heard you liked me.’ And that phrase stayed with me because I
kept thinking what I might’ve said and I can’t remember exactly if he said ‘i
thought’ or ‘I heard’ but he implied that I had done this."
Jo
Biden pinched this
little girls nipple live on tv and y’all did nothing but vote for the guy, (
& shame survivors who called out his bad behavior)
who kept
giving you every reason not to vote for #blueMaga trump!
Youtube
video of Joe Biden molesting a little girl on live TV
Joe
Biden IS A SEXUAL PREDATOR.. of CHILDREN
Orwellian Fare:
Paul Craig Roberts: Obama Did NOT
Kill Osama bin Laden
The American People Live In a World of False Narratives
Gaslighting:
The Psychology of Shaping Another’s Reality
“Question
everything” has become the new motto, but are we capable of answering those
questions?
Presently
the answer is a resounding no.
Moral Injury and
Forever Wars: The after-action Military Suicides Americans don’t Want to Hear
About
CaitOz Fare:
After
Russiagate, Why WOULDN’T People Be Skeptical About Covid?
… I’m going to ask you to put yourself in the shoes of someone you might
not normally be inclined to.
Imagine you’re someone on the political right watching this whole thing
unfold. Imagine that from late 2016 to mid-2019 you were watching the mass
media aggressively shove this story down everyone’s throat that a US president,
whom you support, is secretly working for a hostile foreign government with the
goal of subverting the United States of America. The media you consume have
been highlighting all the massive, glaring plot holes in this narrative the
entire time, so you know it’s not true, yet you’ve still got friends, coworkers
and family members who believe it is.
Can you imagine how disgusted you’d get with the media watching this
happen day after day? How outraged? How resentful? If you’re really putting
yourself there, I think you probably can.
Now imagine a year later these exact same media institutions start
telling you there’s a novel coronavirus which we’re all going to have to
sacrifice some personal liberties in order to stop. We might have to stay in
our homes, wear a mask, get injected with new drugs we’re not sure about,
possibly while watching our bank account drain and our business go under, and
all these media institutions you just watched lie to everyone’s face for years
on end are aggressively saying you need to do this and support this or you’re a
dangerous monster whose voice should be banned from social media.
How well do you imagine that would go over with you?
… People on the left who saw through the Russiagate madness would be
skeptical as well.
… The way people are acting like trust in media-sanctioned narratives
should be a given after those institutions literally just discredited
themselves in front of everyone is insane.
… What I do know is that things are getting increasingly ugly and
authoritarian as global capitalism looks more and more like the end of a
Monopoly game, and that media institutions have no business complaining that
people don’t trust them after spending years actively alienating their trust.
The sooner humanity wakes up from its unwholesome relationship with mental
narrative, the better.
The bad news is the oligarchic empire is
ratcheting up authoritarian control with the goal of trapping us in an
Orwellian dystopia so gradually we don’t notice, but the good news is they
won’t succeed because they’ll get us all killed via nuclear war or climate
collapse first.
…
The mass media just spent years leading the world on a wild goose chase
for Trump-Russia collusion that never existed and now have the absolute gall to
act like people are deranged lunatics for not trusting them about elections,
viruses and vaccines.
Other Quotes of the Week:
Roderic Day: The way Tiananmen 1989 is
"remembered" (a senseless and cruel massacre) is literally the exact
opposite of what it actually was (one of the first CIA colour revolutions to be
resisted). (Link to article.)
Ian Welsh: For decades the fact that
our “masters” were incompetent psychopaths didn’t seem to matter all that much;
sure some people were getting hurt, but it wasn’t you, right? And if it was,
well you lost your power and money so
you didn’t matter and couldn’t do anything.
Now it’s you or grandmother or you kid getting a protentially life-long
disability.
You replace your elites, by whatever method will work, or they will keep
killing and crippling you.
Peter Daou: THEY DID IT!
✔️NO eviction moratorium
✔️NO minimum wage hike
✔️NO filibuster reform
✔️NO court expansion
✔️NO medicare for all
✔️NO green new deal
✔️NO closing child cages
✔️NO end to oil drilling
✔️NO student debt help
✔️NO pandemic plan
✔️NO consequences for Trump officials
Matt
Stoller: Everything
about Obama's ex-Presidency is just so hilariously cringe.
“Only
family and close friends!”
Big Thoughts:
Edward Snowden: Apophenia
How the Internet Transforms
the Individual into a Conspiracy of One
1.
The easier it becomes to
produce information, the harder that information becomes to consume — and the harder
we have to work to separate the spurious from the significant.
Humans are meaning-making
machines, seeking order in the chaos. Our pattern recognition capabilities are
a key determinant in defining intelligence. But we now live in a dystopian
digital landscape purpose-built to undermine these capabilities, training us to
mistake planned patterns for convenient and even meaningful coincidences.
…
2.
The German psychologist
Klaus Conrad called this premonitory state apophenia, defined as perceiving patterns
that don't actually exist and referring them back to an unseen authority who
must be pulling the strings. It’s a theory he developed as an army medical
officer specializing in head traumas under the Third Reich. Today, it’s
analogized to political conspiracy thinking.
3.
Here’s a better way to
think: in an apophenic, information-glutted world where you can basically find
evidence for any theory you want, where people inhabit separate online
realities, we should focus on falsifiability (which can be tested for) over
supportability (which cannot).
Other Fare:
Just love this intro: Getting
The Time Scale Right-I
For us, humans, our time
zone, or horizon, if one wishes, within which we live with the illusion of
understanding this world, is usually 40-50 years, not counting roughly first 20
years of our youth, the time when we generally don't give a damn. After those
40-50 years, the march to wisdom and profundity is usually interrupted by the
breaks for taking Metamucil, visits to general surgeons, colonoscopies and
trying to remember some inconsequential shit, like what was the name of your
political economy professor in naval academy or what is the fucking password to
your credit card on-line account, which seemed so easy to remember first 5-6
hours and which mysteriously evaporated into the vastness of your brain's
neurons without a trace after a couple of weeks. But that is us, humans. States
and nations have different time scales and those are measured in many decades,
centuries and even millennia. Reconciling our personal human times scales with
those of the nations is, realistically, a tall order. Our experiences simply
oscillate with different frequencies.
Why it is important. Paul
Robinson wrote a piece on Gorbachev and collapse of the USSR.
Satirical Fare:
Cuomo
Increasingly Desperate To Shift Focus Back Onto Nursing Home Deaths
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