James Galbraith: Behavioral economics and complexity economics
A revolutionary change in economics is long overdue.
Economics has become increasingly detached from its object of study and the orthodoxy is fundamentally flawed as a social science because it advocates a prescriptive methodology while lacking any serious engagement with epistemology and ontology. The resulting epistemic fallacy means it promotes a narrow implicit world view as if a factual truth. Failures here include imposition of limited quantitative methods and mathematically formalist methodology that exclude qualitative aspects of reality and the use of isolated/closed systems thinking for an open system reality.
Economies are the socially structured institutional process involving the interaction of humans with the natural world. Social reproduction is achieved only within the bounds of the given structure and mechanisms of biophysical reality. The form and scale of economic processes depends upon a set of spatially and temporally contextual social institutions. That is economics concerns the form and function of social provisioning process which can take various forms and are far from limited to price-making market or capitalist institutions. Starting from processes of social provisioning, economics becomes the study of plural historical, actual and potential economies with their underlying institutional arrangements and biophysical basis rather than a singular abstract idealised “economy”. This broadens analysis not only to what institutions, norms and values shape the economic process and agents’ behaviours, but also to what are socially desirable and ecologically sustainable systems of social provisioning. Economics is neither value free nor ethically neutral but its stance on both should be made explicit. It must also be realist about how economies are reproduced via social and ecological mechanisms. That means linking to both power relations and ethical and just means of provisioning, but also material and energy throughput that respects others (human and non-human). The aspirations of economists to provide for the well-being of humanity, if taken seriously, mean a revolutionary change in economics is long overdue.
China Credit Growth Unexpectedly Collapses
Other Charts:
Bubble Fare:
Haters Gonna Hate: What Volatility Charts Tell Us About the Next Big Spike
Why I No Longer Invest In Stocks And Bonds
I simply can’t bring myself to put money into “the markets” anymore.
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Reason number three is simply that the markets no longer make sense. In fact, I’ve now taken to calling them “exchanges,” not wishing to denigrate the concept of markets. The technical tools the eager young men and women of previous generations used no longer hold. They were never perfect, of course, but now they are superfluous …
Reason number two is simply that the big “markets” are not just relics of the past, but have become enemies of the future. …
Reason #1: The deep reason that free markets matter is not economic, but moral. … My point here is that the best possible ROI (return on investment) isn’t an automatic virtue, and a large number of investments in “the markets” support abuse and even death.
Crypto Fare:
The DOJ’s Crypto Dragnet is Bigger Than You Think
I should also clarify that I’m not personally pro- or anti-crypto per se. My fascination with the topic comes from the incredible amount of utterly blatant lawlessness that seems so easy to spot by anybody curious enough to look. As a person who tries hard to follow the rules and operate within the confines of the physical society of the here and now, I am flabbergasted by the risks certain key crypto players are willing to take in the hopes of achieving the digital riches of tomorrow. This is even more shocking when one considers the permanency and public nature of blockchain ledgers.
A regular retort from crypto enthusiasts goes something like this: the US dollar is a giant Ponzi scheme, Wall Street is totally corrupt and exists to enrich the top 1%, the big banks launder billions of fiat currency per year for all manner of unseemly characters, and our politicians are nothing more than a mob family with unjustified power to police us. To which I say I totally agree!!! I simply marvel at the naive belief – held by most people in the crypto space – that the powers that be either don’t have the ability to beat down this rebellion or somehow will be unwilling to do so at the time of their choosing.
That time appears to be pretty much now.
COVID-19 notes:
Don’t Panic, But Breakthrough Cases May Be a Bigger Problem Than You’ve Been Told
Current public-health messaging may understate the scale and risk.
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Key takeaways from the new IPCC report
Playing Nice With the Fossil Fuel Industry Is Climate Denial
A new report on climate change shows the futility of the Biden administration’s electric vehicle dream.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released the first, nearly 4,000-page installment of its Sixth Assessment Report. The report, from a working group of over 200 scientists, distills the current consensus about the physical science of climate change from 14,000 peer-reviewed studies. This consensus is grim: None of the emissions scenarios this report highlights see warming kept below 1.5 degrees Celsius
James Hansen and Makiko Sato: July Temperature Update: Faustian Payment Comes Due
None of the measured forcings can account for the global warming acceleration. … It follows that the global warming acceleration is due to the one huge climate forcing that we have chosen not to measure: the forcing caused by imposed changes of atmospheric aerosols. … we have so far only felt a fraction of the eventual warming due to the presumed decrease of aerosols of the past several years.
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For now, we can only infer that Earth’s energy imbalance – which was less than or about half a watt per square meter during 1971-2015 – has approximately doubled to about 1 W/m2 since 2015. This increased energy imbalance is the cause of global warming acceleration. We should expect the global warming rate for the quarter of a century 2015-2040 to be about double the 0.18°C/decade rate during 1970-2015, unless appropriate countermeasures are taken. The Faustian payment that we noted in 1990 and is discussed in detail elsewhere is now due.
Dr. Faust had to pay the debt himself. We have willed it to our children and grandchildren.
Breaching tipping points would increase economic costs of climate change impacts
Central bankers' “net zero 2050” scenarios fail on risk basics
Today Breakthrough launches our new report Degrees of Risk, which looks at how financial regulators are underestimating systemic risks and may repeat the mistakes of the Global Financial Crisis. This extract examines the “net zero 2050” (NZ2050) scenarios produced by the central bankers' Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) and finds they are not adequately addressing the real risks and uncertainties of climate change.
Analysis: Benchmark of Big Oil on methane emissions shows ‘significant gap’ between reality and reporting
Siberian wildfires dwarf all others on Earth combined.
The Cryptocurrency Lobby Is a New Major Climate Enemy
Other Fare:
Gell-Mann Amnesia, Dissonance, and Resolution
The concept of cognitive dissonance is understood by most curious knowledge seekers. It is the state of holding conflicting beliefs---and humans are great at it. It's no wonder we invented music. We may be hypnotized by harmonious, resolved chords. But we get adventurous and let in discordance---particularly when it's well designed. Perhaps we feel it as part of the nature of our conflicts.
Lacking anything close to the perfect understanding of the universe, we tend to place certain amounts of trust in principles. Perhaps all living things have their heuristics, whether or not most other species rise to the level of consciousness humans have achieved. I see it as a matter of life economics---"actions reveal preferences" as the economists say. And survivor bias really does point the way to better principles. But perhaps economics is also a reason for the holding of discordant beliefs. The work that it takes to resolve---individually or socially as a group (and group "belief" adherence does affect survival, for some softer conception of "belief")---can be more work than the reward is worth. Thus we settle into various states of cognitive dissonance.
And also Gell-Mann amnesia.
Gell-Mann amnesia may be most easily understood by a simple example, so I'll point to Ben Hunt's chosen quote by Michael Crichton:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
We have all read the New York Times or any other newspaper (of any political slant) and been disgusted by the absurdity of what we were reading---about our own topics of expertise. But then we turn the page and lap up some other story that might be just as absurd, trusting the papers of record. The same goes for CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Oprah's Cult Factory, and essentially every other form of media. Most people quickly forget the absurd statistics, dishonest reporting, the "science reporting", or the hidden advertisements masquerading as journalism. They forget and move on consuming more. That's Gell-Mann amnesia, and we've lived through an era of mass Gell-Mann amnesia because the cognitive dissonance it entails falls into an economic equilibrium.
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this is how Gell-Mann amnesia ends. Yes, there is/was an awakening. So, the Woke were invented. Yes, we caught a glimpse of who the fascists are. So, they invented antifascists. Yes, there is an alternative media. So, there are limited hangouts. Yes, people realized that racism was institutional. So, BLM was invented. Yes, USAID was a CIA front that participated in mass sterilization of native Peruvians, and a thousand other horrible things have happened around us even if we can't imagine that those were our neighbors who did them. Everything old is new again.
The corruption is endemic.
But the equilibrium of control is breaking. It's breaking because those who hold power have to hire increasingly absurd fiction writers just to keep the over-educated, over-busy masses confused enough to recognize the clash of values---and the fact that the guy at the punch bowl isn't the one the party goers thought they elected to mix the drinks. The music changed tempo---faster and faster---and the sense-making of the chord progressions can't keep up. The new first violin is cackling mad and it's hard to notice the conductor isn't exactly all there. So, the partygoers start to think about leaving the party, but is it ending as a scene by Edgar Allen Poe?
EXTRA [controversial or non-market-related] FARE:
Regular Fare:
Welsh: Humanity’s Completely Broken Feedback Systems
If you want to understand how we got where we are, it’s simple: our strongest feedback systems to our decision making people are telling them “everything’s great, stay on course!”
For over 40 years now the rich have gotten richer. Politicians have gotten richer. Corporate officers, CEOs and executives have gotten richer.
Money is reward, and the reward centers for our elites are going off like a slot machine that constantly pays millions. BLING! BLING! BLING!
Whenever someone says “you should do less of this thing that makes you more money and power”, which is essentially everything that needs to be changed from Covid (making them richer) to climate change (still more oil to pump, baby) to ending pharma patents (Bill Gates says NO) to fixing inequality or feeding hungry people or housing the homeless, well, their fortunes (or bribes) come from making these things worse.
Capitalism is supposed to provide a feedback system. It isn’t the best feedback system, but if forced or allowed to work (and only government can enforce it, which is why rich people can’t be allowed, as they always purchase the government) it makes individuals and corporations who can’t even make a real profit go bankrupt.
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Since all the feedback systems put in place by humans had broken (no one in power cared or cares about UN climate reports), we then had to wait for the world to start smacking us around.
That has started, with wildfires and northern hurricanes and so on (and Covid, to some extent), and the logistics system has proven itself to be fragile and easily disrupted exactly as many of us pointed out, while power and water systems and so on show their fragility as well.
But it’s not enough yet, this is all stuff the rich can ignore: have more than one home, have them off the grid, travel by private jet, etc, etc…
So the feedback will continue until it becomes so severe either the Proles do a Versailles on unresponsive elites or the elites feel more endangered than their bank accounts can make up for. (A hundred million+ dollars can buy a LOT of immunity. You may be dead before they feel it.)
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It’s hard to see a way out of this now, because there isn’t one.
Instead the way out will be forced. When fear rises to the necessary level, those who betray society as a whole for their own interest will be dealt with. If they’re lucky it will be thru democratic norms, if they aren’t lucky, it will be the justice of the mob. In either case it will be too late to stop the worst of climate change and ecological collapse.
Climate Collapse Fare:
Engelhardt, Our Not-So-Slow-Motion Apocalypse
There Is No Will To Fight Climate Change
The United States under Joe Biden has doubled down on the absurd narrative that the United States has the national capacity and moral stature to lead the world’s response to climate change.
Let me dismiss this claim in a few words.
First, the doom of the climate change regime was sealed when the United States refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol in 1998.
It was double doomed when the United States under Barack Obama imposed a successor regime that eliminated legally binding caps for anyone.
It was triple doomed when Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement.
It was quadruple doomed when the United States under Joe Biden decided that its highest priority and organizing principle of policy was to treat the People’s Republic of China as America’s prime geopolitical adversary.
Doom doom de doom doom doom. You get the picture.
It is not only the U.S. which is guilty here. All political system seem to prefer short term rewards over avoiding future pain., especially when others can be plausibly blamed for the outcome. The U.S. is just the most hypocritical actor here.
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Which lets me agree with Peter Lee's scary conclusion:
Lacking a time machine that can take us back to 1998 when we still had a chance to turn things around--or a nice big catastrophic war that wipes out enough humanity and industrial capacity to accomplish the same thing--it might be up to the planet to deal with the problem herself: churning up enough sea level rise, weather calamity, drought, famine, and disease to reduce the human load on the planet by the ugliest means imaginable.
That’s all the climate change optimism I can muster, and that’s it!
This not a pessimistic view but a realistic one.
Climate change: the fault of humanity?
In its summary for Policy makers, the IPCC states clearly that climate change and global warming is “unequivocally caused by human activities.” But can climate change be laid at the door of the whole of humanity or instead on that part of humanity that owns, controls and decides what happens to our future? Sure, any society without the scientific knowledge would have exploited fossil fuels in order to generate energy for production, warmth and transport. But would any society have gone on expanding fossil fuel exploration and production without controls to protect the environment and failed to look for alternative sources of energy that did not damage the planet, once it became clear that carbon emissions were doing just that?
Indeed, we now know that scientists warned of the dangers decades ago. Nuclear physicist Edward Teller warned the oil industry all the way back in 1959 that its product will end up having a catastrophic impact on human civilization. The main fossil fuel companies like Exxon or BP knew what the consequences were, but chose to hide the evidence and do nothing – just like the tobacco companies over smoking. The scientific evidence on carbon emissions damaging the planet, as presented in the IPCC report, is about as incontrovertible as smoking in damaging health. And yet little or nothing has been done, because the environment must not stand in the way of profitability.
Pessimism, Cynicism & the Democratic Party
It's not a moral or psychological failing to see Manchin, Biden and the rest as irredeemably opposed to everything actual people actually need. It's simply realistic.
… "Pessimism" and the Climate War
Climate Tweets of the Week:
The scientists don't get it either. As a general rule, however bad someone thinks the situation is, they should multiply that by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude.
COVID Fare:
Defining Away Vaccine Safety Signals
What if it turns out that vaccines are killing and crippling millions of people around the world, but that those harmed are just well enough spread out that almost nobody saw sufficient signals to build an intuition about the problem? And what if the agency most responsible for examining safety signals defines their algorithm using a nonsensical mathematical formula that hides nearly all serious problems?
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As with a great deal of health care regulation during the declared pandemic, changes were made to the VAERS system and also to safety signal analysis leading up to the experimental mass vaccination program officially targeting COVID-19.
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Do you kinda get the sense that the PRR function is designed to hide signals of unsafe vaccines, not to identify them?
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At some point, when the potential for conflicts of interest are high and the point of failure is fundamental to the task of those doing the job, incompetence should no longer be differentiated from criminal intent. Mathematicians and statisticians worthy of the title do not miss the kind of scale invariance or mean-reversion we see embedded in the PRR---particularly not when working in a dedicated group on a serious problem. There is a pride among geeks in identifying subtle mathematical or logical flaws in a system, and this is not subtle at all.
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Not only does the PRR need to get out of line for a safety signal to be generated, the use of 'and' instead of 'or' means that other additional criteria must also be satisfied before the CDC self-reports a safety signal! And the chi-squared criterion isn't helping the situation.
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So, when you define away the problems on paper, they just cease to exist?
Calling this a safety system is decidedly unsafe. Even worse---given that numerous academics, including statisticians, reviewed this document, it is hard to believe that the scale invariance embedded in the definition of PRR, or the logic that includes meeting multiple criteria at the same time, went unnoticed. It certainly appears that the CDC's goal was to establish an illusion of safety, and a reason to ignore the true signs of danger.
Michael Yeadon: Covid-19 Injections Dangerous For Mothers and Babies
The covid-19 vaccines currently subject to emergency use authorisations all share a common and novel feature: they are gene-based products. Instead of containing a small amount of killed or live-attenuated pathogen, they instead comprise genetic code, instructions as it were to manufacture in our own cells a part of the pathogen. In some products, the genetic code is of DNA & use a weakened respiratory virus to ensure delivery to our cells, or of messenger RNA (the intermediate between the DNA of our genes and the protein product thereby manufactured). There is a further commonality: they cause the recipients cells to manufacture a portion of the SARS-CoV-2 virus called the spike protein. This is literally the spike projecting outwards from the spherical object that contains the virus itself.
As detailed elsewhere in this packet of information, coronavirus spike proteins are biologically active and they initiate the blood coagulation cascade among other properties. It is alleged that it is the induction of blood coagulation in various locations in the body which is responsible for a high proportion of the serious adverse events including deaths which are being reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) in the USA and in analogous databases elsewhere. The rate of fatal outcomes following covid-19 vaccination, usually from clotting or bleeding disorders, is extraordinary and exceeds that from any previous vaccine by a very large amount, which this reviewer estimates is of the order of 60-fold.
That this astonishingly high rate of adverse events after vaccination is a consequence of two factors: 1. The manufacturers were simply not required to study the way the product moves around the body after injection and 2. They were not required to study the functional effects of the genetic code within the product after administration. There are no products on the mass market which operate in this way. It is my expert opinion that this is the greatest failure of medicinal product regulation in relation to reproductive health since thalidomide and is very much greater in terms of societal impact. It is imperative that all these products be suspended until improved safety testing can determine whether there are any groups in whom the benefits outweigh the risks.
Things the establishment got wrong about wuhan-coof
I’ve neglected to talk about the Wuhan death virus until now, mostly because I’ve been enjoying the spectacular fuckery on display, the gaping credulity, the mass hysteria and the moronic panic. Also because the last thing anybody needed over the last year and a half is yet another dipshit adding to the noise. My employers asked me to evaluate the situation using the best public knowledge back in March and April 2020, and I did so; I did pretty well with my estimates. I haven’t thought about it much since then, other than on the occasions in which the situation inconveniences me: and then only to the extent that I get the job done. It’s simply not that interesting, and knowing something of history I’m not particularly worried about the disease; more worried about governments using it as an excuse for totalitarian shenanigans. As such, it’s worth remembering how badly “the authorities” have handled the situation from the earliest days, in the same spirit as Matt Taibbi’s excellent discombobulation of the similarly insane Russiagate conspiracy theories. None of my statements below are scientifically or historically controversial, though I’m sure someone will attempt to argue otherwise. Here’s my list of establishment fuckups:
1 It’s just the flu.
Yeah, they actually said that. For a long time. I assume because Orange Man was taking it seriously.
2 Fatality Rate:
People still think the infection fatality rate of the ‘rona is equivalent to that of the black death. It’s not. It isn’t harmless either. This is exactly the kind of thing our modern “technocrats” are completely unable to deal with. It’s nowhere near as bad as the Spanish Flu. It’s somewhere around the fatality rate of the 1968 Hong Kong flu or the 1957 Hong Kong flu. By the way, we didn’t react to either disease the way we did to this one; most people alive back then didn’t even remember them happening. It took months and months before the numbers were in (despite little old me figuring it out in April); now the CDC has pretty good numbers. Ones which will get you banned from Facebook if you mention them. FWIW for Americans (who are fat, old and unhealthy compared to world standards) below 18, your chances of croaking of the thing if you’re infected is about 1 in 50,000 or 100,000. For 18-49, 1 in 2000. 50-64, 1 in 200 (a bad flu, basically) and 65+ it is 1 in 20 (much worse than the flu). The data which inform these numbers were available in April; I had the integral nailed basically from the cruise ship figures. It’s useful to compare to chances of dying of other things. For example, a 12 year old’s chances of dying of corona-chan if infected (which seems to be a rare occurrence for some reason) is about the same as being struck by lightning.
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8 Lock downs.
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8 Lock downs.
They mostly didn’t work. Remember when opening Texas back up was tantamount to genocide? Yeah, I remember that. Remember when everyone in Florida was gonna die unless they lock up immediately? I remember that too. Remember when Georgia committed genocide by opening in summer of 2020? Remember when everyone in Sweden was going to immediately croak? None of those things came to pass. Locked down California had a higher death rate than not-so-locked down Florida who mostly did the sane thing of protecting their numerous old people rather than locking everyone up where they could cough on each other. Sweden did better than most of Europe. Nothing big happened in Texas or Georgia when they opened up, other than small businesses coming back to life. Remember when California, Connecticut, Massachusetts saved all those lives by implementing harsh lock downs? Well, that actually never happened at all. You can juggle the statistics in a way that make it look like there is some marginal effect here, but whatever it is, the effect is marginal, where the effect on people’s every day lives was enormous and entirely negative. Aka lock downs are basically ineffective outside of some very narrow circumstances, like cutting off air travel (which the establishment was against, and they now lie about) and living on an island. Quarantine sort of works, but it needs to be applied in a sane way, for example, the way it was with measles and polio outbreaks before vaccines. Just locking everyone up doesn’t work. It’s definitely the favorite technique of tyrants; has been since the 1600s. Didn’t work back then either, but it sure made people poor and angry. Reminder: only the Swedes (and Japanese and Belorussians but we don’t talk about them) got it right. I know it makes the human soybeans real mad: but they were right and the totalitarian numskull official “experts” were wrong.
9 Two weeks to flatten the curve.
9 Two weeks to flatten the curve.
Yeah, I remember that. Somehow that turned into “oh you idiots are going along with this; let’s do it forever.”
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13 Airborne/aerosolized pathogen.
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13 Airborne/aerosolized pathogen.
It was abundantly obvious from the goddamned cruise ship data that the virus was airborne; from the very get-go. Some sniffly lawyer in New Rochelle spread it to half the big apple in the early days. Choir members in churches had a very hard time. No matter how many “fomites” one man could spread, even a huge slob, it was obvioso it had to be airborne. Only now are people beginning to admit this. After a year of learned magnificoes and most official channels stating categorically that this couldn’t possibly be true. Instead we had people doing ridiculous things like washing their groceries with bleach because muh fomites. This obvious fact could have informed policy; you can do shit like install better air filters instead of security theater like neurotically constantly sterilizing your hands. The “over cautious” approach of health and political authorities to obvious truisms like the fact that the ‘rona was an airborne pathogen is extremely typical of their responses to everything. If it was politically convenient they were absolutely sure of themselves, even if it was obviously wrong. Faced with ridiculous, preposterous amounts of evidence, they dragged their feet, demanded double blind studies and other such theater, and eventually, a year or two later, admitted they might have been wrong, but how dare you notice that they were wrong.
14 Cross-immunity/asymptomatic.
14 Cross-immunity/asymptomatic.
A friend of mine tested positive for ‘rona antibodies; he felt a bit run down and wondered if he had been exposed. He had been (modulo false positives). I had spent the previous week being a tourist with the guy; for all I know I was exposed to it as well (I felt fine; mostly ate and drank too much). There is now abundant evidence for both asymptomatic carriers and cross immunity from exposure to other corona viruses. For months this was dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Now it’s accepted as fact.
15 Multiple infections.
15 Multiple infections.
People can indeed get the ‘rona a couple of times. This is used as a justification for vaccinating people who already had the disease. This practice is, of course, known to be bullshit: that isn’t how the immune system works. Believing that somehow the vaccine is better than the infection in protecting against reinfection is stygian ignorance, and attribution of nonexistent magical powers to muh technology. People administer the vaccines to people who had the illness anyway. Why? Don’t know, but considering the other nonsense in circulation, you can’t blame the tinfoil helmet types for being a bit suspicious of the “authorities.” Frankly, vaccinating people who already had the disease sounds dangerous to me. Since the vaccine sides are related to autoimmune problems when your cells start producing viral proteins; that’s going to happen even more if you’ve already got an immune system that knows what to do; such as among previously infected people. FWIIW every indication is that natural immunity by itself is superior to prevent future infection.
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19 Treatments/prophylaxis.
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19 Treatments/prophylaxis.
There was reasonable early evidence hydroxychloroquine has some salubrious effect. However Orange Man liked it, so it had to be proven wrong with fraudulent studies. There’s still some evidence it might have benefits. Plenty of other substances have strong evidence of effectiveness, including the humble “vitamin-D hammer.” At this point, the evidence that dying of corona-chan is partially dying of vitamin-D deficiency is so overwhelming, all public health officials should be held criminally liable for not suggesting everyone start taking 5000 iu a day. It’s good for you and will prevent other problems even if it has no effect on your Chinese lung-butter survival rates. Similar comments may apply to zinc. Ivermectin appears like it could be efficacious, both as a preventative and a treatment; maybe it is, maybe it isn’t - but it is absolutely politicized in the US at least, and I could get banned on most social media platforms for suggesting we look into it. Of course, there’s no money to be made using common and harmless drugs and supplements. More to the point, in the US, you can’t legally use experimental vaccines if there are efficacious treatments available. Saying these things, which appear to be statistical facts, is considered so dangerous, tech companies will ban hammer you for the crime of saying them. There are still huge efforts to prevent people knowing about these potential treatments, and US doctors are basically not allowed to use them, even though the side effects are fewer than that of OTC medicines such as Tylenol. Even if the above treatments were useless or marginal; the government approves useless or marginal treatments all the time. But they typically only do so when there is money involved. They even did it for corona-chan; remdesivir is probably useless, but it’s patented and it sure does make some money Gilead can use for campaign contributions. Instead of making these off-label treatments available to doctors, the swine remove a common and completely harmless OTC supplement, N-acetyl-cysteine from circulation when it proves it may be of utility in treating this illness. What kind of garbage human would even consider doing this? The kind of goon we hire to run the FDA apparently. Can everyone say “regulatory capture” boys and girls?
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22 Censorship as public health measure.
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22 Censorship as public health measure.
This is a truly preposterous thing in light of all of the above. Not only are Alex Jones tier tin-helmet types being censored, but respectable scientists who do not conform with the prevailing establishment opinions are also being censored and demonized. The very concept of “freedom of speech” is that voices outside of the consensus might be right about some things, and a society which practices free speech is better off than one which attempts totalitarian thought control. Of course, people are prey to all kinds of bad ideas, but our “elites” are also (allegedly) people, and it’s obvious from the above they don’t really know what they’re talking about either. Science only works in conditions of free speech, you fucking murble-wurble-wub-science nincompoops.
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Could be wrong can’t tell yet:
1 Vaccinations efficacy.
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Could be wrong can’t tell yet:
1 Vaccinations efficacy.
Most people think of various kinds of ronavax as a sterilizing vaccination the way polio vaccines are; not so. This has obvious and non-obvious consequences. The obvious one is you could be vaccinated and get sick or die of ‘rona anyway. The not so obvious one is that this will simply cause the virus to become more easily spread to people who have been vaccinated: that’s how evolution works. It may also become more deadly: this happened with a non-sterilizing vaccine for a chicken herpes virus. While the preliminary large scale evidence for vaccination effectiveness is reasonably convincing by now, it’s far from definitive, and is entirely short term. Back when it seemed it might be Orange Man Vaccine, they sure were cautious about shipping things too soon. It is entirely possible vaccinated countries start getting the ‘rona at rates comparable to what one would expect come winter time, we’ll know this science experiment was a towering error. Especially if the deaths peak up as well. I’m not saying that will happen, but it could happen, and nobody should accept “muh variants” and “muh booster shots” as explanation and solution.
Indeed, eventually, vaccine or no vaccine, the virus will eventually be just another coronavirus endemic in the populace, just as it was in 1889 when HCoV-OC43 probably became endemic. There’s an obviously true thing our psychological terrorist “technocrats” and their enablers won’t tell you. Barring huge breakthroughs SARS‑CoV‑2 will be with us forever. It will be with us for so long, eventually it will no longer be called SARS-Cov-2; it will have some other more innocuous name like HCoV-NL63 does. It will eventually just be another respiratory virus of no particular distinction. No lung borne ailment, let alone a viral one, has ever been eliminated by humanity. FWIIW the attention paid to coronaviruses now may end up telling us a lot of sudden death or clotting or viral pneumonia is associated with rare reactions from the other endemic coronaviruses. Would be interesting to know; probably a good many human ailments we attribute to nonsense like eating bacon are actually viral or bacterial; our science is so bad here it took until 2005 to fully recognize the fact that human ulcers were caused by Helicobacter pylori.
Oh yeah, while I’m at it; there sure are a lot of “95% effective” vaccines. I have not looked closely at the raw data, but the probability of there being multiple 95% effective vaccines seems pretty low to me; even based on Benford’s law. When I see 95% all I can think of is p-value hacking. FWIIW CDC fucked up looking at breakthrough cases, because, I guess, it would be bad marketing for the vaccines. Evidence becoming overwhelming though. Iceland is looking pretty bonkers. So much so, Iceland’s chief epidemiologist has stated that herd immunity must be achieved via viral infection. Only “kooks” seem to have noticed this, and it may be wrong, but Iceland unlike the US is still a serious country, so it must be taken at least as seriously as the idea that a 17 year old who already had the ‘rona must be vaccinated.
2 Vaccines: strategy
Indeed, eventually, vaccine or no vaccine, the virus will eventually be just another coronavirus endemic in the populace, just as it was in 1889 when HCoV-OC43 probably became endemic. There’s an obviously true thing our psychological terrorist “technocrats” and their enablers won’t tell you. Barring huge breakthroughs SARS‑CoV‑2 will be with us forever. It will be with us for so long, eventually it will no longer be called SARS-Cov-2; it will have some other more innocuous name like HCoV-NL63 does. It will eventually just be another respiratory virus of no particular distinction. No lung borne ailment, let alone a viral one, has ever been eliminated by humanity. FWIIW the attention paid to coronaviruses now may end up telling us a lot of sudden death or clotting or viral pneumonia is associated with rare reactions from the other endemic coronaviruses. Would be interesting to know; probably a good many human ailments we attribute to nonsense like eating bacon are actually viral or bacterial; our science is so bad here it took until 2005 to fully recognize the fact that human ulcers were caused by Helicobacter pylori.
Oh yeah, while I’m at it; there sure are a lot of “95% effective” vaccines. I have not looked closely at the raw data, but the probability of there being multiple 95% effective vaccines seems pretty low to me; even based on Benford’s law. When I see 95% all I can think of is p-value hacking. FWIIW CDC fucked up looking at breakthrough cases, because, I guess, it would be bad marketing for the vaccines. Evidence becoming overwhelming though. Iceland is looking pretty bonkers. So much so, Iceland’s chief epidemiologist has stated that herd immunity must be achieved via viral infection. Only “kooks” seem to have noticed this, and it may be wrong, but Iceland unlike the US is still a serious country, so it must be taken at least as seriously as the idea that a 17 year old who already had the ‘rona must be vaccinated.
2 Vaccines: strategy
As evidence mounts the vaccine wasn’t as effective as the propaganda said, we’re receiving calls for mandatory vaccination and persecution of the unvaccinated from precisely the same people who told us we needed to have a war in Mesopotamia and totalitarian surveillance state. David Frum has literally never been correct about anything, and the fact that this ridiculous, sinister neocon lizard is still taken seriously is in itself completely discrediting of “the establishment.” Since deplatforming and un-personing is now a fashionable way of dealing with sources of harmful “misinformation,” if anyone is deserving of this, it is David Frum, whose ideas have literally cost the US trillions of dollars, tens of thousands of lives, and sown chaos in large swathes of the world and caused 800,000 violent deaths. You could run a pretty good public policy institute by asking Frum what he thinks, and then suggesting the country do the opposite. For certain, Frum has done vastly more harm in the world with their actual misinformation than people like the Alex Jones.
3 Vaccines: dangers.
3 Vaccines: dangers.
These are unquestionably the most dangerous vaccines fielded for mass consumption for decades; there’s been around 10,000 directly attributed deaths in the US, and possibly more that didn’t get counted. There has been reasonable speculations that vaccinations may be as dangerous as the virus itself at the present levels of infection herd immunity. This is almost certainly true for younger people; now officially so as far as the UK government is concerned, and people who want to vaccinate your kids are doing so entirely out of political malice. It’s obvious now that there is some cross-immunity with other endemic coronaviruses. Unfortunately it doesn’t show up in antibodies; only in the T-cell immunity memory system. If there were a test for this, one could figure out who to give the somewhat shitty and dangerous vaccines to and leave everyone else alone.
Oh yeah, in case you need more things to worry about, it’s entirely possible the present generation of vaccines cause something called antibody dependent enhancement, making you more likely to die if you get a wuhan-lung butter infection on some time scale (remember, everything here is a time series process). They claim this hasn’t happened, but it’s still pretty early, and I’m virtually certain that a statistician who found early evidence of it would have a hard time informing people about it, because censorship is the order of the day. FWIIW I am tracking both things, and so far it hasn’t showed up in the overall mortality statistics.
Do Masks Work? A Review Of The Evidence
How did mask guidance change so profoundly? Did the medical research on the effectiveness of masks change—and in a remarkably short period of time—or just the guidance on wearing them?
…
In truth, the CDC’s, U.K.’s, and WHO’s earlier guidance was much more consistent with the best medical research on masks’ effectiveness in preventing the spread of viruses. That research suggests that Americans’ many months of mask-wearing has likely provided little to no health benefit and might even have been counterproductive in preventing the spread of the novel coronavirus.
…
In sum, of the 14 RCTs that have tested the effectiveness of masks in preventing the transmission of respiratory viruses, three suggest, but do not provide any statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis, that masks might be useful. The other eleven suggest that masks are either useless - whether compared with no masks or because they appear not to add to good hand hygiene alone—or actually counterproductive. Of the three studies that provided statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis that was not contradicted within the same study, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than hand hygiene alone, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than nothing, and one found that cloth masks were less effective than surgical masks.
Lionel Shriver: Why vaccine passports are pointless
An Open Letter to the Person Who Gave Me COVID
If the chance of being struck by lightning increased tenfold tomorrow, this would not affect my behavior in any way. Not being neurotic, I don’t live my life as if the present rate of lightning strikes is precisely as high as I can tolerate.
It has become almost impossible to have a rational conversation about any of this. For one thing, most people are shockingly misinformed. Ask the average person what the likelihood is of someone in his age cohort needing to be hospitalized for COVID, and his answer will be off by a factor of 10, if not 100. Guaranteed.
For that matter, I cannot believe how many people think masks are accomplishing anything. The laughable "studies" on masks generally assume what they set out to prove, and/or confine themselves to strangely arbitrary timeframes, before explosions in COVID spread.
…
COVID comes and goes seasonally and regionally, and blows its way past our silly masks and six-foot floor stickers.
Berenson: Boost The Insanity
The real-world data – from Israel, the United States, and everywhere else – are clear. Protection from infection fades within months even against the original coronavirus. It shrinks essentially to zero against the Delta variant (we can argue about time vs. variant effects, but the answer doesn’t matter in this context, either way the vaccines have stopped working). For now, vaccine advocates are clinging to the hope that even if the vaccines do not protect against infection, they still provide some protection against more serious illness and death. I think the jury is still out on that question, but again it is largely irrelevant for this conversation – the Covid wards are filling in Israel, and most people in them are older and vaccinated. If the vaccines do offer any help after a few months against serious illness, it is far less than the 95-99 percent protection that advocates have claimed.
Thus the move for a third shot. And possibly more shots to come. But please – please! – understand how radical a move this is. At this point, these shots are basically being pushed forward on the basis of VERY early data from VERY small trials – a few dozen volunteers, at most – showing that people had significantly more antibodies a month after receiving a third dose. I don’t doubt these slides are accurate. THE VACCINES MAKE YOUR CELLS PRODUCE THE SPIKE PROTEIN. YOUR BODY THEN MAKES ANTIBODIES TO THOSE PROTEINS. That’s what they do, and they’re very good at it. More vaccine makes your body do it more. But that’s only the beginning of what we should know before encouraging a third dose. Here’s a PARTIAL list of questions we haven’t answered:
Does a third dose of the vaccine ACTUALLY REDUCE INFECTIONS IN THOSE PEOPLE WHO RECEIVE IT? Does it reduce deaths (remember, even the original, huge Covid trials didn’t answer that question)? Will the third dose produce a transient spike in infections, as the first dose appears to? Will the antibodies last longer this time because we have more of them after the second dose, or will they decline more quickly? Does the vaccine confer ANY long-term protection through T-cell immunity? Will people who have received a third dose be vulnerable to future variants? Will they be more or less vulnerable than people who have been infected and recovered and are are naturally immune? Will the side effects – which are generally much worse after the second dose than the first – be still worse after the third?
Will some people die from those side effects? What is the overall safety profile of the third or more doses in a large population? Does it differ by age? I could go on, but I hope this is enough to show you how little we know. Offering a third dose essentially means offering an entirely new vaccine regimen.
Vanden Bossche: C-19 Pandemia: Quo Vadis, Homo Sapiens?
The WHO’s mass vaccination program has been installed in response to a public health emergency of international concern. As of the early days of the mass vaccination campaigns, at least a few experts have been warning against the catastrophic impact such a program could have on global and individual health. Mass vaccination in the middle of a pandemic is prone to promoting selection and adaptation of immune escape variants that are featured by increasing infectiousness and resistance to spike protein (S)-directed antibodies (Abs), thereby diminishing protection in vaccinees and threatening the unvaccinated. This already explains why the WHO’s mass vaccination program is not only unable to generate herd immunity (HI) but even leads to substantial erosion of the population’s immune protective capacity.
As the ongoing universal mass vaccination program will soon promote dominant propagation of highly infectious, neutralization escape mutants (i.e., so-called ‘S Ab-resistant variants’), naturally acquired, or vaccinal neutralizing Abs, will, indeed, no longer offer any protection to immunized individuals whereas high infectious pressure will continue to suppress the innate immune defense system of the nonvaccinated. This is to say that every further increase in vaccine coverage rates will further contribute to forcing the virus into resistance to neutralizing, S-specific Abs. Increased viral infectivity, combined with evasion from antiviral immunity, will inevitably result in an additional toll taken on human health and human lives.
Immediate action needs, therefore, to be taken in order to dramatically reduce viral infectivity rates and to prevent selected immune escape variants from rapidly spreading through the entire population, whether vaccinated or not. This first critical step can only be achieved by calling an immediate halt to the mass vaccination program and replacing it by widespread use of antiviral chemoprophylactics while dedicating massive public health resources to scaling early multidrug treaments of Covid-19 disease.
Denninger: This Is Why You Can’t Get There From Here
“Does it make sense that someone would want to avoid putting unknown chemicals in their body? Is it reasonable not to fully trust the pharmaceutical industry? It doesn’t take a lot of Googling to find lawsuits and settlements of billions of dollars involving harms, false claims and withheld information by drug companies. Isn’t it true that we have only short-term data on the effects and side effects of the vaccines, if only because the trials began less than two years ago?”: Why yes, yes it does. Vioxx, for one. And not just once either. There was a wee problem with the original IPV (Injected, Salk polio vaccine) too. It was contaminated with a cancer-causing agent. How many did it harm at the same time it helped? We don’t really know, but we do know it caused cancers – including in kids.
Then there’s the fact that IPV was rapidly followed by OPV, oral polio, which until the 1990s was still used in America. Why? Because IPV was non-sterilizing; that is, “leaky.” Guess what? All the Covid vaccines are too. That’s bad. It is, in fact, what promotes mutation. We’ve known that for 70 years which is why we used both. Every single so-called expert in the field knows this and that what they attempted to do this time was very likely to fail, as I pointed out before we began. Now it has failed exactly as I expected. The question becomes this: Why did those so-called “experts” go down a path that was known decades ago to be nearly-certain to not work?
Denninger: Well, ****….
Oh yeah, in case you need more things to worry about, it’s entirely possible the present generation of vaccines cause something called antibody dependent enhancement, making you more likely to die if you get a wuhan-lung butter infection on some time scale (remember, everything here is a time series process). They claim this hasn’t happened, but it’s still pretty early, and I’m virtually certain that a statistician who found early evidence of it would have a hard time informing people about it, because censorship is the order of the day. FWIIW I am tracking both things, and so far it hasn’t showed up in the overall mortality statistics.
Do Masks Work? A Review Of The Evidence
How did mask guidance change so profoundly? Did the medical research on the effectiveness of masks change—and in a remarkably short period of time—or just the guidance on wearing them?
…
In truth, the CDC’s, U.K.’s, and WHO’s earlier guidance was much more consistent with the best medical research on masks’ effectiveness in preventing the spread of viruses. That research suggests that Americans’ many months of mask-wearing has likely provided little to no health benefit and might even have been counterproductive in preventing the spread of the novel coronavirus.
…
In sum, of the 14 RCTs that have tested the effectiveness of masks in preventing the transmission of respiratory viruses, three suggest, but do not provide any statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis, that masks might be useful. The other eleven suggest that masks are either useless - whether compared with no masks or because they appear not to add to good hand hygiene alone—or actually counterproductive. Of the three studies that provided statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis that was not contradicted within the same study, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than hand hygiene alone, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than nothing, and one found that cloth masks were less effective than surgical masks.
Lionel Shriver: Why vaccine passports are pointless
If both classes of citizen can still get and spread the virus, vaccination is not an act of noble altruism
...
Now that vaccine passports are already coming to a theater near you, it’s ironic that Public Health England (PHE) has just released figures that cast this whole wheat-from-chaff project as scientifically daft. Extrapolating from data, vaccines appear to protect the over-fifties from Delta infection by a paltry 17 percent. As for transmissibility? Once infected, both the vaccinated and unvaccinated carry almost identical viral loads. PHE notes that ‘this suggests limited difference in infectiousness’.
Our political high priests don’t seem to have taken this bad news on board. I’ve observed before that vaccine passports are pointless if the vaccines work; unvaccinated people pose no threat to the medically impervious. But vaccine passports are also pointless if vaccines don’t work. Should the vaccinated and unvaccinated both be roughly as vulnerable to infection and as capable of transmitting the virus, they pose a nearly equal danger to others. If on average the vaccinated are only 17 percent safer company, that’s a pretty dismal stat on which to base a vast new social apartheid.
An Open Letter to the Person Who Gave Me COVID
If the chance of being struck by lightning increased tenfold tomorrow, this would not affect my behavior in any way. Not being neurotic, I don’t live my life as if the present rate of lightning strikes is precisely as high as I can tolerate.
It has become almost impossible to have a rational conversation about any of this. For one thing, most people are shockingly misinformed. Ask the average person what the likelihood is of someone in his age cohort needing to be hospitalized for COVID, and his answer will be off by a factor of 10, if not 100. Guaranteed.
For that matter, I cannot believe how many people think masks are accomplishing anything. The laughable "studies" on masks generally assume what they set out to prove, and/or confine themselves to strangely arbitrary timeframes, before explosions in COVID spread.
…
COVID comes and goes seasonally and regionally, and blows its way past our silly masks and six-foot floor stickers.
Berenson: Boost The Insanity
The real-world data – from Israel, the United States, and everywhere else – are clear. Protection from infection fades within months even against the original coronavirus. It shrinks essentially to zero against the Delta variant (we can argue about time vs. variant effects, but the answer doesn’t matter in this context, either way the vaccines have stopped working). For now, vaccine advocates are clinging to the hope that even if the vaccines do not protect against infection, they still provide some protection against more serious illness and death. I think the jury is still out on that question, but again it is largely irrelevant for this conversation – the Covid wards are filling in Israel, and most people in them are older and vaccinated. If the vaccines do offer any help after a few months against serious illness, it is far less than the 95-99 percent protection that advocates have claimed.
Thus the move for a third shot. And possibly more shots to come. But please – please! – understand how radical a move this is. At this point, these shots are basically being pushed forward on the basis of VERY early data from VERY small trials – a few dozen volunteers, at most – showing that people had significantly more antibodies a month after receiving a third dose. I don’t doubt these slides are accurate. THE VACCINES MAKE YOUR CELLS PRODUCE THE SPIKE PROTEIN. YOUR BODY THEN MAKES ANTIBODIES TO THOSE PROTEINS. That’s what they do, and they’re very good at it. More vaccine makes your body do it more. But that’s only the beginning of what we should know before encouraging a third dose. Here’s a PARTIAL list of questions we haven’t answered:
Does a third dose of the vaccine ACTUALLY REDUCE INFECTIONS IN THOSE PEOPLE WHO RECEIVE IT? Does it reduce deaths (remember, even the original, huge Covid trials didn’t answer that question)? Will the third dose produce a transient spike in infections, as the first dose appears to? Will the antibodies last longer this time because we have more of them after the second dose, or will they decline more quickly? Does the vaccine confer ANY long-term protection through T-cell immunity? Will people who have received a third dose be vulnerable to future variants? Will they be more or less vulnerable than people who have been infected and recovered and are are naturally immune? Will the side effects – which are generally much worse after the second dose than the first – be still worse after the third?
Will some people die from those side effects? What is the overall safety profile of the third or more doses in a large population? Does it differ by age? I could go on, but I hope this is enough to show you how little we know. Offering a third dose essentially means offering an entirely new vaccine regimen.
Vanden Bossche: C-19 Pandemia: Quo Vadis, Homo Sapiens?
The WHO’s mass vaccination program has been installed in response to a public health emergency of international concern. As of the early days of the mass vaccination campaigns, at least a few experts have been warning against the catastrophic impact such a program could have on global and individual health. Mass vaccination in the middle of a pandemic is prone to promoting selection and adaptation of immune escape variants that are featured by increasing infectiousness and resistance to spike protein (S)-directed antibodies (Abs), thereby diminishing protection in vaccinees and threatening the unvaccinated. This already explains why the WHO’s mass vaccination program is not only unable to generate herd immunity (HI) but even leads to substantial erosion of the population’s immune protective capacity.
As the ongoing universal mass vaccination program will soon promote dominant propagation of highly infectious, neutralization escape mutants (i.e., so-called ‘S Ab-resistant variants’), naturally acquired, or vaccinal neutralizing Abs, will, indeed, no longer offer any protection to immunized individuals whereas high infectious pressure will continue to suppress the innate immune defense system of the nonvaccinated. This is to say that every further increase in vaccine coverage rates will further contribute to forcing the virus into resistance to neutralizing, S-specific Abs. Increased viral infectivity, combined with evasion from antiviral immunity, will inevitably result in an additional toll taken on human health and human lives.
Immediate action needs, therefore, to be taken in order to dramatically reduce viral infectivity rates and to prevent selected immune escape variants from rapidly spreading through the entire population, whether vaccinated or not. This first critical step can only be achieved by calling an immediate halt to the mass vaccination program and replacing it by widespread use of antiviral chemoprophylactics while dedicating massive public health resources to scaling early multidrug treaments of Covid-19 disease.
Denninger: This Is Why You Can’t Get There From Here
“Does it make sense that someone would want to avoid putting unknown chemicals in their body? Is it reasonable not to fully trust the pharmaceutical industry? It doesn’t take a lot of Googling to find lawsuits and settlements of billions of dollars involving harms, false claims and withheld information by drug companies. Isn’t it true that we have only short-term data on the effects and side effects of the vaccines, if only because the trials began less than two years ago?”: Why yes, yes it does. Vioxx, for one. And not just once either. There was a wee problem with the original IPV (Injected, Salk polio vaccine) too. It was contaminated with a cancer-causing agent. How many did it harm at the same time it helped? We don’t really know, but we do know it caused cancers – including in kids.
Then there’s the fact that IPV was rapidly followed by OPV, oral polio, which until the 1990s was still used in America. Why? Because IPV was non-sterilizing; that is, “leaky.” Guess what? All the Covid vaccines are too. That’s bad. It is, in fact, what promotes mutation. We’ve known that for 70 years which is why we used both. Every single so-called expert in the field knows this and that what they attempted to do this time was very likely to fail, as I pointed out before we began. Now it has failed exactly as I expected. The question becomes this: Why did those so-called “experts” go down a path that was known decades ago to be nearly-certain to not work?
Denninger: Well, ****….
“Antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) of infection is a safety concern for vaccine strategies. In a recent publication, Li et al. (Cell 184 :1-17, 2021) have reported that infection-enhancing antibodies directed against the N-terminal domain (NTD) of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein facilitate virus infection in vitro, but not in vivo. However, this study was performed with the original Wuhan/D614G strain. Since the Covid-19 pandemic is now dominated with Delta variants, we analyzed the interaction of facilitating antibodies with the NTD of these variants. Using molecular modelling approaches, we show that enhancing antibodies have a higher affinity for Delta variants than for Wuhan/D614G NTDs.
We show that enhancing antibodies reinforce the binding of the spike trimer to the host cell membrane by clamping the NTD to lipid raft microdomains. This stabilizing mechanism may facilitate the conformational change that induces the demasking of the receptor binding domain. As the NTD is also targeted by neutralizing antibodies, our data suggest that the balance between neutralizing and facilitating antibodies in vaccinated individuals is in favor of neutralization for the original Wuhan/D614G strain. However, in the case of the Delta variant, neutralizing antibodies have a decreased affinity for the spike protein, whereas facilitating antibodies display a strikingly increased affinity. Thus, ADE may be a concern for people receiving vaccines based on the original Wuhan strain spike sequence (either mRNA or viral vectors).”
You stupid, stupid bastards….. Coronaviruses have a long history of doing this sort of thing and its one of the reasons we’ve never managed to have a vaccine developed for them before; it simply doesn’t work. But we were sure it wouldn’t happen this time. It had happened all the other times, but not this time. We were so sure we didn’t need to take the several years required to prove it. We’re smart! We have the new technology, never before deployed in man or beast, which we were absolutely certain would evade the risk that had always, in previous trials, derailed attempted vaccines. Oh, and there were also billions of dollars involved for the companies involved and many newly minted billionaires to be, including the NIH itself who holds some of the patents involved.
So here’s what happened. In mid-December, before the first person had full vaccinated immunity, cases were falling dramatically in the United States. Herd Immunity. For real. It was over. We had suffered, but, had we not been stupid, Covid was more-or-less finished with us. Yes, there were and would remain some of us who hadn’t gotten it, and the extremely rare person who could get it a second time, that would continue to get the virus. It was, however, over. But we were stupid. We jabbed a huge percentage of our population. And as has occurred every other time with coronavirus vaccine attempts the virus mutated around the protection and in fact used the vaccine antibodies to enhance infection. Delta is in fact promoted by those who were vaccinated. As with all other Covid variants most people get a mild or no real illness, but some people get hammered.
However, prior infection doesn’t help if you got jabbed since you took a drug that helps the virus attack you. We created a third wave by our own stupidity: Stupidity seen in nation after nation, but only in nations with high vaccine prevalence; Israel, the UK, Iceland and here in the United States. Don’t run the bull**** on me that this isn’t happening: Not only is the science now in on how its happening but Israel and Palestine, two nations literally next door to each with one having near 100% vaccination and the other about 10% could not be more-stark. Palestine is seeing a small uptick in infections while Israel is getting hammered. The “smartest men in the room” screwed not just a nation — bad enough — but an enormously-large part of the world. Including, quite possibly, you. There’s a reason we’ve never attempted to vaccinate against coronaviruses before. THIS IS THE REASON!
Infection-enhancing anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies recognize both the original Wuhan/D614G strain and Delta variants. A potential risk for mass vaccination?
Denninger: Here Comes Nosocomial DISASTER
Reasonable conclusions drawn from this data:
• The vaccines do not prevent health care workers from getting infected; the antibodies are ineffective.
• When health care workers get infected post-vaccination with Delta they are not becoming infected from the community; they are passing it among each other.
• Their viral loads and thus infectiousness are extremely high; in other words they become a reservoir of extreme infection risk to other employees in the facility and, it must be assumed to the patients in their care.
• A reasonable hypothesis (but not proved) is that the vaccines are in fact potentiating viral replication via ADE-type effects, specifically given the paper I pointed to yesterday. That is the act of encouraging or even forcing medical workers to take the jabs is leading to higher viral loads and thus greater infectiousness — that is, greater risk to patients rather than less.
All of the Evidence Is In: The Covid Vaccine Is a Failure
Both vaxxers and anti-vaxxers are endeavoring to make the Covid vaccine a vaxx issue.
It is not a vaxx issue.
It is an issue of the vaccine. Due to Big Pharma greed and Tony Fauci’s hubris, an experimental technology was rushed into mass usage prior to its many adverse consequences being known.
Making it a vaxx issue makes it difficult to stop the use of the double-dangerous vaccine as no vaxxer wants to concede defeat to anti-vaxxers.
The solution is to remove the censorship of experts and the ban on known cures. Ivermectin and other known substances can stop the spread of the virus, and expert debate can lead to treatments for those millions who have been damaged by the vaccine.
The current blind and ignorant authoritarianism must cease.
…
Following the conclusions of a Nobel prize-winner in medicine and other top level experts, I have attributed what the medical establishment calls new cases, breakthroughs, delta variant, to adverse responses to the vaccine itself, thus questioning the existence of the delta variant. But after listening to Dr. Robert Malone, it appears that there are variants also, and will be more variants. Thus the new breakout of what are reported as Covid cases consists of both adverse reactions to the vaccine and illnesses from the new variants.
Dr. Malone is the inventor of the mRNA technology that was used to develop the mRNA vaccine. He is a member of the establishment. He is not a kook, conspiracy theorist, or anti-vaxxer. He is so solid a member of the establishment that the Department of Defense has relied on him for years. Where Dr. Malone differs from the establishment is in his unwillingness to keep quiet when he sees that the ruling Covid narrative does not fit the facts.
Dr. Malone explains (at the 50 minute mark) that what the vaccine is doing, in addition to killing and injuring people’s health, which he does not emphasize, is evolving the virus, in a manner of speaking, training it to escape vaccines. In other words, the vaccine itself amplifies variants that cannot be prevented by vaccines.
Harvard Med Professor Censored For Contrarian Covid Posts
Martin Kulldorff started relying on LinkedIn to share news and views on COVID-19 policy after Twitter suspended the Harvard Medical School professor for a month for questioning the protective power of masks. Now the Microsoft-owned professional social network is scrutinizing his posts, going so far as to remove two for violating its misinformation policy. It’s at least the second action LinkedIn has taken this summer against a vaccine scientist who questioned COVID-19 orthodoxy. It suspended Robert Malone, who credits himself as the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, for alleging dangers from the “spike protein” in mRNA vaccines, citing heart-inflammation reports in some vaccinated young people and highlighting Big Tech censorship and conflicts of interest. A LinkedIn “senior executive” personally apologized to him for wrongful removal, Malone said.
Kulldorff made a similar cost-benefit argument against mandatory COVID vaccinations for young people in a June op-ed. He directed Twitter followers to find the op-ed on his LinkedIn page because “Twitter does not allow vaccine scientists to freely discuss vaccines.” Now he’s directing Linkedin followers to find him on Twitter, though the scientist confirmed to Just the News that he is concerned about further censorship there, “so I self-censor on Twitter.” One of Kulldorff’s Harvard Med colleagues spoke against LinkedIn for the censorship. “The point is not whether a minority viewpoint is right,” bioethics professor Jonathan Darrow, who cowrote a journal article with Kulldorff last year, wrote in an email. If such views are silenced, “public health options may be closed off prematurely, matters may be erroneously believed to be settled, and needed research may never be conducted.”
[..] COVID-19 orthodoxy has “unjustifiably tarnished” the reputations of scientists such as Stanford University’s John Ioannidis, “one of the most well-respected luminaries” in evidence-based medicine, Darrow said. Ioannidis lost that respect “because he publicly presented data about COVID’s infection fatality rate that were politically unpopular.” Censorship is also “communicable,” according to Darrow, “potentially tipping the scales of public judgment one way or the other and leading to a downward spiral of intolerance in which minority views are increasingly suppressed.”
SAGE Advisor Says Lockdowns Can No Longer Be Justified
A top SAGE adviser to the UK government says that COVID lockdowns can no longer be justified and that measures to control the virus should instead be aimed at protecting the most vulnerable. Professor Andrew Hayward, a University College London epidemiologist, said that the days of disruptive restrictions imposed on everyone should end in favor of a more targeted approach. “I think as we generally move into an endemic rather than pandemic situation the potential harm that a virus can cause at a population level is much less,” Hayward told BBC Radio 4. “So you can’t really justify such broad population-wide control measures and we tend to target the control measures more to those who are most vulnerable,” he added.
Ivermectin Wins in India
News of India's defeat of the Delta variant should be common knowledge. It is just about as obvious as the nose on one's face. It is so clear when one looks at the graphs that no one can deny it. Yet, for some reason, we are not allowed to talk about it. Thus, for example, Wikipedia cannot mention the peer-reviewed meta-analyses by Dr. Tess Lawrie or Dr. Pierre Kory published in the American Journal of Therapeutics.
Horowitz: Why won’t our government even inform people about importance of vitamin D?
The most vaccine-hesitant group of all? PhDs
What’s more, the paper found that in the first five months of 2021, the largest decrease in hesitancy was among the least educated — those with a high school education or less. Meanwhile, hesitancy held constant in the most educated group; by May, those with Ph.Ds were the most hesitant group. So not only are the most educated people most sceptical of taking the Covid vaccine, they are also the least likely the change their minds about it
CO-VID of the Week:
Dr. Peter McCullough – Ends The Pandemic With 5 COVID Facts
1. The virus does not spread asymptomatically.
2. We should never test asymptomatic people.
3. Natural immunity is robust, complete, and durable.
4. COVID-19 is easily treatable at home.
5. The current vaccines are obsolete, unsafe, and unfit for human use.
COVID Tweet / VID of the Week:
Well-spoken doctor with very clear comments, very much well worth listening to:
More COVID facts the CDC & Biden Administration doesn't want you to hear.
COVID Conspiracy Fare:
The Ultimate Power of The Word “NO”
Fear is the primary tool of authoritarians. It mentally disarms the population. We know about the desire to physically disarm the population, by trying to take away guns. Well, fear is the tactic for mental disarmament. When one is afraid, one makes bad decisions. One doesn’t think things through. One tends to act impulsively in an attempt remove immediate dissatisfaction. One tends not to question, but blindly obey. In a state of fear, one may submit and agree that 2+2=5; only to afterwards be filled with regret at doing such a stupid thing. Fear is meant to break your individual will. Your will to say the word “NO” stands in the way of every authoritarian scheme. The authoritarian needs you to say “YES,” even if you don’t really believe it. The authoritarian will pull all the levers available, and move all the pieces on the board to corner you, all with the goal of getting you to say “YES.”
Mass propaganda is designed to get you to say “YES”. Everywhere you look, you see the same exact message. “Say YES”…”Say YES”…”Say YES”…
Slapping the mask on your face provided two wins for authoritarians: First, you said “YES” to allowing authoritarians to dress you when you left your house. Second, it conditioned you to realize that all others had their wills broken too.
Kunstler: Brace for impact
My Pillow man Mike Lindell’s three-day Cyber Symposium demonstrated a couple of things about the current depraved state of our nation: You could prove pretty conclusively that the national election of 2020 was saturated with fraud; and that no one in the news business would either care or dare to report it. Otherwise, it’s a little early to tell whether the exercise will have any effect on the country’s mood, though it is apparently a fact that millions tuned into the event on the few Internet sites that evaded the efforts to hack it out of existence.
The presentations by physicist Douglas Frank, law professor (New Mexico State U) David Clements, and retired army intelligence analyst Seth Keshel made a multi-dimensional case that the Dominion vote tallying machines were both pre-programmed with insidious algorithms and were also run remotely by Internet connection through servers in Senegal tied to China the night of Nov. 3, 2020. Even so, the vote in favor of Donald Trump so overwhelmed the programming that oafish mopping-up operations with bogus write-in paper ballots had to be conducted on-the-fly to make sure the election came out in “Joe Biden’s” favor.
It was interesting to be reminded that four key states — Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — all claimed to have stopped counting votes around 10:30 eastern time, and nobody reporting the tally on TV (a national ritual going back seventy years) seemed to consider anything irregular about it. But since when in US elections do officials not work through the whole of election night to reach a result? The answer, of course, is never before. It is, as they say, not a thing. Shouldn’t that have been a national WTF moment?
And so began the secret after-hours hijinks, such as in the Fulton County, GA, arena, where poll watchers were shooed out of the joint and then ballot-counters supplied by a Stacey Abrams-owned temp worker company got foolishly caught on a security camera running reams of paper ballots multiple times through their machines… and the arrival in Philadelphia of a truck from Long Island delivering tens of thousands of fresh paper ballots… and so on through the long night of supposedly no vote counting.
Obviously, aligned interests in the universe were determined to make sure that Mr. Trump would under no circumstances be allowed to win that election, as he had done to the incendiary mortification of Hillary Clinton & Company in 2016. He had to be gotten rid of in order to ensure continuity of the racketeering operation that government had become under the influence of money from China. Was it perhaps that simple?
Hard to say. There was the slime trail from Hunter Biden’s laptop files of emails and business memoranda showing an impressive cash flow between CCP-connected Chinese companies and the Biden Family’s bank accounts. But that was neatly suppressed by a coordinated effort between Twitter, Facebook, Google, and the news media. The Department of Justice then pretended to “open a case” against Hunter B, and the public never heard another peep about it. Not to mention that the DOJ sat on the laptop secretly during the February 2020 impeachment trial when the very matter at issue — the Biden Family’s illicit business dealings in Ukraine — was laid out in hard evidence on those laptop files, and withheld from the defense.
Barely a month later, the Manchurian candidate “Joe Biden” came fresh off thumping losses in the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary to “win” the Super Tuesday contest and prompt the dropping-out of his rivals for the nomination. Anyone else think that was more than just a little weird? Not to mention “Joe B’s” phantom election campaign — those pathetic venturings-out from his Wilmington crypt to a few events where nobody but the news media showed up? Never before, apparently, has the world beheld such a conquering hero!
And so here we are: eight months deep into a “Joe Biden” regime. Was ever so bold an attempt to utterly wreck a nation carried on in such plain sight? Who does not hear the “giant sucking sound” as America whirls down the drain? In the foreground, obscuring everything else, is the fog around the Covid-19 melodrama. It can’t possibly be about the vaxes, which, day by day, are demonstrating their growing inefficacy and lethal side-effects.
It appears to be much more about activating a Chinese model of social control. A great many citizens detect this and demur from vaxing-up. “Joe Biden’s” public health officers did not do a very good job convincing the “hesitant” to join in the vaccine orgy. It’s a hard sell while “Joe Biden’s” homeland security side shows a cavalier indifference to a million border-jumpers with a 40 percent Covid-19 infection rate not just walking into the country but being helpfully distributed hither-and-yon from sea to shining sea. Who is paying all those bus and plane fares?
The regime is trying to soften up the public for mandatory vaxes now, using its propaganda arms to turn up the volume on pandemic fear and new variants, using phony statistics and threats to turn the unvaxed into social pariahs, including schoolchildren. The regime is playing with nitroglycerine there. How desperate and crazy are they, really? Is something wicked coming their way? I think so, and I think they know it’s so, and I think they have just about run out of tricks for avoiding it.
The Paradigm of Scientism and Complexity
We live in a period of rapid change and redefinition of any kind of identity, including scientific identity. It is no longer just a matter of a normal scientific debate (which has become more and more impossible) but of a real internal split in Science.
The scientism paradigm was based on the research of domination over nature - and more and more on its reprogramming, according to the interests of humanity - for a certain period has improved the conditions of life.
Then the trend reversal started. And now the main planetary problems are caused and aggravated by the current techno-scientific model that reached the height of its power and at the same time the peak of its unsustainability, in every sector.
A model in which almost all of what we call "Science" is merged with technology and economy - so as to be inseparable in every aspect. And the large transnational corporations are dominated by the transversal power of the IT corporation.
It is a model in which the war against "the human" - and within the human psyche - tends to replace the physical war. The planetary battlefield is now our feelings and our cognitive - and epistemological - patterns.
However, there is also a new, emerging model based on a radically different scientific and cultural paradigm that proposes a science capable of self-criticism, and a technology that is more humble and friendly to the Nature that sustains us - and to our own human nature from which we are constituted.
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In this period, we have witnessed an epochal nemesis of the enlightenment reason. With a unilateral and unrestrained development, technoscience has definitively reversed itself into its opposite: an obfuscation and a radical repudiation of rationality itself. Having severed any link with the complexity of life, this approach becomes structurally obtuse.
A good fraction of the political and economical sectors make use of this obfuscation of reason by using the crisis and the implosion of scientific thought for power purposes - or sometimes of declared impotence. In turn, they feed a market of technological products in which the military and civilian sectors are structurally intertwined, as it was from the beginning. Every macro-economic sector is by now structurally interwoven - and dominated - by the companies that manage the backbone of IT tools. (The new era of epistemic dominance).
The information corporation, being a network of power transversal to all the great corporations (energy, financial, material, cognitive, and media) - unifies them and allows similar cultural and political lines shared on a planetary scale. These convergent choices occur both through deliberate and centralized public decisions - and through processes of involuntary "systemic" automatism, parceled out and not made explicit.
State Science, therefore, proposes solutions that are dead ends. That is, it imposes a framing in hyper-sectorial complications, deadly for the social, economic, and ecological fabric - and for the human psyche. This framing is deadly for the very concept of humankind and civilization, because
- through the practice of misdirection/distancing/masking - is eroded at the root of the bond of mutual trust between people, which is the foundation of the human interaction.
Moreover, the pact of trust between citizens and institutions is also eroded, because with the health passport, and the like, it is established that basic human rights are granted only to those who accept the decisions of the State, which can suspend human rights on the basis of health conditions (all sick until proven otherwise) and behavior in the most personal choices (denying the freedom of care - and so the way is paved for any subsequent abuse).
For over a year now, the State has been heavily entering the private and emotional life, the choices of the most intimate sphere and the very body of all people, without limits and without counter-balances. Hence, also, the need to resort to a surrogate of religious faith - in science and in vaccine miracles - to be able to support what is not sustainable with a reasonable use of reason.
Moreover, all the premises (scientific, legal, and customary) remain in place for the same model of management of the epidemic to be proposed again at the seasonal resumption of variants, or other threats. Finally, this approach seems destined to become the basic political-scientific model, usable in its basic lines to face all emergencies.
So not only the upcoming health threats but also the climate emergency, much more impressive and complex, - as well as the crises of energy and food resources, also related to overpopulation - and caused by an economic model centered on the destruction of essential resources: land, air, water, and natural and social ecosystems. A model that imposes the massive increase of every technology in every field.
The suspension of human and constitutional rights, increasing computer control for political purposes (Chinese style social control), and the dehumanization of life, in every field. That is the New Normal, presented, and believed by many, as an inevitable choice. But, in addition to confusion, in this madness, there is also a method, whose paradigmatic constants can be recognized.
Recognizing this method can help us understand (in part) why the vast majority of the scientific, academic, and intellectual world has adhered to an irrational and failed description and management of the pandemic.
Charles Eisenstein: Mob Morality and the Unvaxxed
... To say that official sources exclude all dissent overstates the case. In fact, peer-reviewed publications and highly credentialed medical doctors and scientists concur with much of what I’ve said. Admittedly, they are in the minority. But if they were right, we would not easily know it. The mechanisms for controlling misinformation work equally well to control true information that contradicts official sources.
The foregoing analysis is not meant to invalidate other explanations for Covid conformity: the influence of Big Pharma on research, the media, and government; reigning medical paradigms that see health as a matter of winning a war on germs; a general social climate of fear, obsession with safety, the phobia and denial of death; and, perhaps most importantly, the long disempowerment of individuals to manage their own health.
Nor is the foregoing analysis incompatible with the theory that Covid and the vaccination agenda is a totalitarian conspiracy to surveil, track, inject, and control every human being on earth. There can be little doubt that some kind of totalitarian program is well underway, but I have long believed it an emergent phenomenon agglomerating synchronicities to fulfill the hidden myth and ideology of Separation, and not a premeditated plot among human conspirators. Now I believe both are true; the latter subsidiary to the former, its avatar, its symptom, its expression. While not the deepest explanation for humanity’s current travail, conspiracies and the secret machinations of power do operate, and I’ve come to accept that some things about our current historical moment are best explained in those terms.
Whether the totalitarian program is premeditated or opportunistic, deliberate or emergent, the question remains: How does a small elite move the great mass of humanity? They do it by aggravating and exploiting deep psycho-social patterns such as the Girardian. Fascists have always done that. ...
GeoPolitical Fare:
Jeffrey Sterling: Unwanted Spy
There has never been a more dangerous time to be a whistle blower. Western governments are working in concert to enact legislation that conceals their wrongdoing. During his recent sentencing, drone whistle blower Daniel Hale said, “I am here because I stole something that was never mine to take — precious human life.”
Hale was sentenced to 45 months in prison. He joins a growing list, and that list includes Jeffrey Sterling. Mr. Sterling is a former CIA agent who was sentenced to 42 months in prison for leaking.
Lev Tolstoy About Afghanistan: "It Happened Because it had to Happen"
I proposed an interpretation of the Afghan disaster in a recent post of mine together with a report on the story of how the oil reserves of the region of the Caspian Sea were enormously overestimated starting with the 1980s. Some people understood my views as meaning that I proposed that crude oil was the cause of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. No, I didn't mean that. Not any more than the story of the "butterfly effect" means that a butterfly can actually cause a hurricane -- of course it would make no sense.
What I am saying is a completely different concept: a butterfly (or dreams of immense oil reserves) are just triggers for a series of events that have a certain potential to happen. Take a temperature difference between the water surface and the air and a hurricane can happen: it is a thermodynamic potential. Take a military industry that makes money on war, and a war can take place: it is a financial potential. A hurricane and a military lobby are not so different in terms of being complex adaptive systems.
So, let me summarize my opinion on the Afghanistan conflict. I think that these 20 years of madness have been the result of a meme gone viral in the mid-1980s and that triggered an event that happened because there were the conditions to make it happen: the invasion of Afghanistan.
It all started in the mid-1980s, when an American geologist, Harry Cook, came back from Kazakhstan with a wildly exaggerated estimate of the oil reserves of the Caspian area. He probably understood the uncertainty of his numbers, but statistical thinking is not a characteristic of American politicians. Cook's numbers were taken at face value and further inflated to give rise to the "New Saudi Arabia" meme, resources so abundant that they would have led to a new era of oil prosperity. At this point, people started thinking about how to put their hands on the (hypothetical) Caspian bonanza.
Even before the presence of these reserves was proven (or disproven), in the mid-1990s, negotiations started for a pipeline going from the oil fields of Kazakhstan to the Indian Ocean going through Afghanistan. That involved negotiating with the Taleban and with a Saudi Arabian oil tycoon named Osama Bin Laden. Something went wrong and the negotiations collapsed in 1998. Then, there came the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan. It was only in the mid-2000s that actual drilling in the Caspian area laid to rest the myth of the New Saudi Arabia. But the occupation of Afghanistan was a fact and it lasted until 2021.
Does this story explain 20 years of US occupation of Afghanistan at a cost of 2 trillion dollars and the humiliating defeat we see now? No, if you think in terms of cause and effect. Yes, if you think of it in terms of a diffuse meme in the minds of the decision-makers. I can't imagine that there ever was someone masterminding the whole folly. But there was this meme about those immense oil reserves north of Afghanistan that influences all the decisions made at all levels. Memes are an incredibly powerful force.
Now Would Be A Great Time For George W Bush To Shut The Fuck Up.
And it is entirely the fault of the US-centralized empire. The Taliban only came to power in the first place because the US backed their predecessors (whom they also actively radicalized) against the Soviet Union and its leftist Afghan allies in the eighties, then Bush invaded and rained explosives from the sky for twenty years, killing hundreds of thousands of people.
After four decades of interventionism and two decades of full-scale occupation following generations of shocking savagery and terrorism being inflicted upon the Afghan people by the British, it is perfectly fair to say that one hundred percent of Afghanistan’s problems today can be blamed entirely on the US and its allies.
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Yeah that’s sane and normal. Hello I’m a very serious newscaster; now here to explain what’s happening in Afghanistan let’s turn to a Bush administration PNAC neocon who’s helped create mountains of corpses and who is literally always wrong about literally everything. This could only happen in a media environment where blatant war propaganda is routinely disguised as news reporting.
What the US empire has done to Afghanistan is unforgivable. Utterly unforgivable. Never forgive those monsters. Never forget what they did to that poor country. Never forget that the next time you are asked to support another act of US military interventionism it will with absolute certainty be based on lies, fail to accomplish what its proponents claim, end in disaster, result in many broken promises to all parties involved, cost trillions of dollars, and benefit nobody but the very worst among us.
Escobar: The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan Back with a Bang
Welsh: The Taliban Take Control Of Afghanistan
As I noted recently, once the US left Afghanistan, the Taliban would rule. This was obvious, and only completely delusional fools thought otherwise. Anyone who thought so should never say anything about military affairs ever again. Yes, the government army was larger and better equipped, but they have zero legitimacy and the Taliban are better fighters.
Not that being better fighters was needed, in most cases there was hardly any fighting and “government” forces just surrendered because of that whole “zero legitimacy” thing. (Also, they’re corrupt from bottom to top. They weren’t in it to fight, they were in it to be on the take.)
There is a lot of hand wringing among the usual liberal suspects about the bad shit that is now going down: collaborators being killed, women being beaten, the end of women’s rights and so on.
All of this is true, and not irrelevant, but not sufficient to argue the US should have stayed in Afghanistan indefinitely, and let a guerilla war rage on while Americans used drones to kill 90% innocents.
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The point here is that what Afghanistan needs is peace. It will be a bad peace for a lot of people, there is no question. The Taliban are nasty and medieval. But it will be peace and people will mostly be safe. If the US decides to stop shooting stuff up, maybe Afghans can even have safe weddings and funerals.
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As for Americans, I’m extremely disheartened though entirely unsurprised to see prominent liberals arguing for forever-war. There’s this weird idea in America that you are somehow still, in any way, “good” when it comes to invading and destroying other people’s countries, that you have a right to take such actions and that America doesn’t need its own Nuremberg trials.
Greenwald: The U.S. Government Lied For Two Decades About Afghanistan
… None of this was true. It was always a lie, designed first to justify the U.S’s endless occupation of that country and, then, once the U.S. was poised to withdraw, to concoct a pleasing fairy tale about why the prior twenty years were not, at best, an utter waste. That these claims were false cannot be reasonably disputed as the world watches the Taliban take over all of Afghanistan as if the vaunted “Afghan national security forces” were china dolls using paper weapons. But how do we know that these statements made over the course of two decades were actual lies rather than just wildly wrong claims delivered with sincerity? …
Eric Margolis: Like it or not, Taliban is Afghanistan’s true independence movement.
After 20 years of B-52 carpet bombing of Afghanistan, murderous drone strikes, 350,000 puppet soldiers, 20,000 mercenaries, nearly two trillion dollars in US spending, destruction of countless Afghan villages, the killing up to one million Afghans, spreading the opium trade around southeast Asia and Europe, abetting wide scale torture…. after all this the US-run Afghan’s puppet `president’ and his drug-dealing cronies have fled embattled Kabul like thieves in the night.
Taliban – more accurately the Islamic Movement of Afghanistan – has been slandered by almost every western news outlet and wrongly called a terrorist movement linked to the late Osama bin Laden. Heavily-propagandized Americans, Canadians and British have been inundated by this torrent of government lies against Afghanistan’s Pashtun (Pathan) people.
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We have to stop drinking our own Kool-Aid over Afghanistan, stop believing our own western and communist propaganda and try to accept that what we are so far seeing is the liberation of this war-ravaged land from four decades of first Soviet, then US occupation.
Making a "No Shit" Headline Permanent...For a While.
Expect a lot of trite self-evident BS like this occupying the first pages of the West's media in coming weeks, with "scholars" expressing their opinions which are worthless in any practical sense. In related news, the sky is blue, water is wet etc. For Kugelman personally--learn about real war, in spare time, you know. The problem, of course, is deeper, much deeper than obvious humiliation of the United States.
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By the "do not work like this" I mean a two-bit sublimation by Western "academe" of own complexes into pseudo-scientific dick-measuring contests in matters in which they have no even minimal competencies--a defining feature of modern West's (pseudo) "intellectual" class. Real great powers care about order and predictability, not some clusterfuck which is left by the United States anywhere it goes to "promote democracy".
Phil Giraldi wrote an excellent piece on this matter, namely American ambassadorship using a pseudo-"scholar" and certified clown Michael McFaul as an example, and stated:
Whenever one gets into discussions about the decline of America’s ability to positively influence developments around the world a number of issues tend to surface. First is the hubristic claim by successive presidents that the United States is somehow “exceptional” as a polity while also serving as the world’s only superpower and also the anointed Leader of the Free World, whatever that is supposed to mean. Some critics of the status quo also have been willing to look a bit deeper, recognizing that it is the policies being pursued by the White House and Congress that are out of sync with what is actually happening in Asia, Africa and Latin America, being more driven by establishing acceptable narratives than by genuine interests.
Not only the United States doesn't have a diplomacy, as a tool of a statecraft, in any operational sense, it fails in something which is even more important--intelligence. As the events in Afghanistan have shown, US "intelligence" estimate on Kabul being able to hold on for "around 90 days" was not just bad, which is always the case in the last few decades, but it was obviously a figment of imagination, and not a good one at that. Recall Patrick Armstrong's:
NO, YOUR INTELLIGENCE IS ACTUALLY BAD. VERY BAD.
Or Margarita Simonyan's famous address to the US:
I’ve been telling you for a long time to find normal advisers on Russia. Sack all those parasites.
They will not, and they will continue to believe own BS, because if they will stop deluding themselves, they will have to live with unbearable facts of their responsibility for what they have done around the world and to own country, which is...well, read my latest book.
Turchin: State Collapse and Nation Building in Afghanistan
In short, I fully expect Taliban to be successful in building the new state in Afghanistan. We may not like it, but we will have to live with it.
Orwellian Fare:
White House Twitter account apparently ‘OUTS’ intelligence officials and locations with post showing Afghan security briefing
O (No!) Canada: Fast-Moving Proposal Creates Filtering, Blocking and Reporting Rules—and Speech Police to Enforce Them
Canada’s Military Is Spying on Canadian Citizens
Under the cover of the pandemic, the Canadian military has practiced forms of domestic surveillance and psychological manipulation typically reserved for wartime occupations. The Canadian military has honed the techniques it used to monitor political activists and spread disinformation during the thirteen years it spent assisting the US-led intervention in Afghanistan.
The most high-profile Al Qaeda plot foiled after 9/11 was an FBI scam
The biggest Al Qaeda plot the FBI claimed to have foiled in the years following the 9/11 attacks involved no weapons, no plot, and no Al Qaeda. Instead, the vague, implausible threat by a group of construction workers in Florida to blow up U.S. buildings, including Chicago’s Sears Tower, was mostly the making of the FBI, whose undercover operatives sought out the men, promised them money, and coached them over months to implicate themselves in a conspiracy to commit violent acts they never actually intended or had the means to carry out.
CaitOz Fare:
You Need To Understand That The US Is The Most Tyrannical Regime On Earth
You get a lot of moral clarity when you realize that the US government is the most despotic and corrupt regime on the entire planet by a very wide margin. This clarity informs your perspective in a way that helps you see through a lot of the propaganda narratives that are laid over the public’s vision about what’s going on in our world.
Afghanistan Proves The US Military Needs Its Budget Slashed To Ribbons
This is an unforgivable outrage that cries out to the heavens for vengeance. Not the Taliban takeover; that was always the inevitable result of letting Afghanistan be controlled by Afghans. I’m talking about the invasion and 20-year occupation of that nation by the US and its allies.
It is only by the most aggressive narrative management and journalistic malpractice that people around the world are not calling for the heads of the architects of this occupation. For twenty years the world was systematically lied to that the US coalition was building a government and military that could stand on its own, and that this goal was right around the corner and just needs a little more time. Now it’s crunch time, and we learn that what they’ve been building in Afghanistan this entire time was a fake movie set made of cardboard.
Citing Corrupt Think Tanks For News Reports Is Blatant Propaganda
So in summary, government agencies and war profiteers paid for a report which manufactures consent for their agendas among policymakers and the public, and mass media institutions passed this off as “news”.
And this is exactly what these think tanks exist to do: cook up narratives which benefit their immensely powerful and unfathomably psychopathic sponsors, and insert those narratives at key points of influence.
“Think tank” is a good and accurate label, not because a great deal of thought happens in them, but because they’re dedicated to controlling what people think, and because they are artificial enclosures for slimy creatures. Their job, generally speaking, is to concoct and market reasons why it would be good and smart to do something evil and stupid.
You Can Never Do Everything, But You Can Always Do Something
This approach to revolution is not satisfying for the ego, but, since the solution to our existential crisis likely sits on the other side of a mass-scale awakening from the egoic consciousness which is the source of all our problems, this is perhaps as it should be.
We’re Destroying Our World Over Imaginary Nonsense
Censoring people for talking about Covid policies that affect everyone is what you get when your institutions have such an extensively established track record of deceitful and unethical behavior that you know you can’t win the public over through simple argumentation and facts.
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For generations incremental reform has been the dominant political strategy for advancing positive change, and the only incremental reform we’ve seen is toward more war, more ecocide, more corruption, more exploitation and more oppression. It’s time to admit incrementalism doesn’t work.
How to fight climate collapse by working within the system:
· Elect corporate warmongers who promise to start moving toward sustainable energy in the next century as long as it doesn’t inconvenience the powerful
· Cloth grocery bags
· Maybe Elon Musk will save us?
· Paper straws
Other Quotes of the Week:
The CIA gets a large part of its off the books funding from poppies.
The Taliban banned poppy growing. The CIA moved its poppy farms to Colombia. Over the past years, much has been moved back.
Afghanistan GDP is $20 billion; the UNODC estimated the country’s overall illicit opiate economy in 2017 at $6.6 billion.
Will the CIA make a deal with the Taliban this time?
Another masterpiece by #RajaniKanth.
______
Ode to Empire
[for John Hobson]
Wars without
pause
pride without
cause
Occupations
free of laws
mass murder
just because
no contrition
no remorse
all a prosaic
matter of course
…
Big Thoughts:
Plague And Polity
Leadership is essential in times of crisis, but in a time where there were no cures, and, indeed, basically no useful information, where could it be found? The Black Death not only massacred countless millions, it also seriously eroded the legitimacy of much of the existing power structures. Writing three centuries later, Thomas Hobbes described the life of an individual in an anarchic state as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Such a condition was approximated, even exceeded, during the Black Death.
For the average person, locked in a subservient, deeply exploitative secular feudal relationship, and tightly bound emotionally and spiritually to the Church, to watch institutions fail had to be wrenching. Given the extraordinarily high mortality rate, it’s hard to see how even the survivors wouldn’t have been personally impacted. But, even if you had no close relatives as casualties, what would be your reaction to a relentless killing machine that leadership had shown itself unable to stop. A Hobbesian social contract which involves a mutual exchange of obligations between the ruler and the ruled requires a competent sovereign.
We can argue that it’s unfair to blame a sovereign for a failure to protect against something over which it has absolutely no control and for which it has few effective tools. Fair doesn’t matter. Reciprocal obligations require an effective response, and, in most cases, neither religious nor secular leadership had it.
The Work Of Intellectuals
Suffice it to say that from the dissident side of the intellectual coin, the work of Antonio Gramsci, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Pierre Bourdieu, Henry Giroux, James Baldwin, C. Wright Mills, Doug Kellner, Stanley Aronowitz, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Michel Foucault, Ellen Willis, Eddie Glaude, and Cornel West represent some of the best and most provocative ideas and examples to date about the roles and responsibilities of intellectuals in modern times. Out of these conversations comes more exacting representations of the intellectual based on the kind of work she or he does. From Pierre Bourdieu comes the idea of the Collective Intellectual. From Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux we get the Transformative, Critical, and Accommodating Intellectual. Doug Kellner gives us the Postmodern Intellectual. Most famously, Antonio Gramsci offered up the Organic, Traditional and Hegemonic Intellectual. From Noam Chomsky, we get a simple dichotomy between Dissident Intellectuals vs. Commissar Intellectuals. Michel Foucault identified Specific Intellectuals. And then there is the beloved Public Intellectual. There is also a significant body of work specific to the role of Black Intellectuals.
From the hegemonic side of the intellectual coin, the work of Richard Hofstadter, David Horowitz, Bill Bennett, Thomas Sowell, William F. Buckley, and Heather Mac Donald represent the work of intellectuals who, not surprisingly, deny or minimize the importance of their role in manufacturing a form of common sense that rationalizes the status quo of culture, power and knowledge. Their attacks on dissident intellectuals distracts from their own role as hegemonic intellectuals. Their attacks are not on intellectual work per se but on dissident intellectual work that exposes how various ideologies of official power naturalize oppression, violence, poverty, sexual harassment, white supremacy, and other social modalities of brutality and injustice. The primary project of hegemonic intellectuals, in addition to producing intellectual work in the service of established ideological, cultural, educational, and/or military power, is to attack dissident intellectual work and the intellectuals that produce it.
From the cynic’s perspective, the work by intellectuals about intellectuals is a form of elevated navel-gazing necessitated by its irrelevance in matters of everyday life and work. The general public in the United States sees intellectuals as disconnected from their everyday struggles and concerns. From this perspective, intellectuals don’t actually work like the laborers amongst us, but are engaged in a kind of elitist moralizing, one that has no concrete product beyond finger-wagging, criticizing, and the conceit that they are smarter than everyone else.
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Unlike dissident intellectuals, hegemonic intellectuals are not constrained by the imperative to speak the truth and reveal lies. They are only required to speak the truth as it is understood within the constraints of their ideology. This makes hegemonic intellectuals ideologues without apology. By contrast, dissident intellectuals, although always working to advance an ideological project, are not policed by the ideology they are working to advance. It’s an important distinction to recognize. The best work of dissident intellectuals is constrained and grounded by a commitment to what Cornell West discusses as moral consistency; that is, they must remain principled in their critiques, not caring if someone or some system is ideologically aligned or sympathetic with their own project.
Big Thoughts:
Plague And Polity
Leadership is essential in times of crisis, but in a time where there were no cures, and, indeed, basically no useful information, where could it be found? The Black Death not only massacred countless millions, it also seriously eroded the legitimacy of much of the existing power structures. Writing three centuries later, Thomas Hobbes described the life of an individual in an anarchic state as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Such a condition was approximated, even exceeded, during the Black Death.
For the average person, locked in a subservient, deeply exploitative secular feudal relationship, and tightly bound emotionally and spiritually to the Church, to watch institutions fail had to be wrenching. Given the extraordinarily high mortality rate, it’s hard to see how even the survivors wouldn’t have been personally impacted. But, even if you had no close relatives as casualties, what would be your reaction to a relentless killing machine that leadership had shown itself unable to stop. A Hobbesian social contract which involves a mutual exchange of obligations between the ruler and the ruled requires a competent sovereign.
We can argue that it’s unfair to blame a sovereign for a failure to protect against something over which it has absolutely no control and for which it has few effective tools. Fair doesn’t matter. Reciprocal obligations require an effective response, and, in most cases, neither religious nor secular leadership had it.
The Work Of Intellectuals
Suffice it to say that from the dissident side of the intellectual coin, the work of Antonio Gramsci, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Pierre Bourdieu, Henry Giroux, James Baldwin, C. Wright Mills, Doug Kellner, Stanley Aronowitz, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Michel Foucault, Ellen Willis, Eddie Glaude, and Cornel West represent some of the best and most provocative ideas and examples to date about the roles and responsibilities of intellectuals in modern times. Out of these conversations comes more exacting representations of the intellectual based on the kind of work she or he does. From Pierre Bourdieu comes the idea of the Collective Intellectual. From Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux we get the Transformative, Critical, and Accommodating Intellectual. Doug Kellner gives us the Postmodern Intellectual. Most famously, Antonio Gramsci offered up the Organic, Traditional and Hegemonic Intellectual. From Noam Chomsky, we get a simple dichotomy between Dissident Intellectuals vs. Commissar Intellectuals. Michel Foucault identified Specific Intellectuals. And then there is the beloved Public Intellectual. There is also a significant body of work specific to the role of Black Intellectuals.
From the hegemonic side of the intellectual coin, the work of Richard Hofstadter, David Horowitz, Bill Bennett, Thomas Sowell, William F. Buckley, and Heather Mac Donald represent the work of intellectuals who, not surprisingly, deny or minimize the importance of their role in manufacturing a form of common sense that rationalizes the status quo of culture, power and knowledge. Their attacks on dissident intellectuals distracts from their own role as hegemonic intellectuals. Their attacks are not on intellectual work per se but on dissident intellectual work that exposes how various ideologies of official power naturalize oppression, violence, poverty, sexual harassment, white supremacy, and other social modalities of brutality and injustice. The primary project of hegemonic intellectuals, in addition to producing intellectual work in the service of established ideological, cultural, educational, and/or military power, is to attack dissident intellectual work and the intellectuals that produce it.
From the cynic’s perspective, the work by intellectuals about intellectuals is a form of elevated navel-gazing necessitated by its irrelevance in matters of everyday life and work. The general public in the United States sees intellectuals as disconnected from their everyday struggles and concerns. From this perspective, intellectuals don’t actually work like the laborers amongst us, but are engaged in a kind of elitist moralizing, one that has no concrete product beyond finger-wagging, criticizing, and the conceit that they are smarter than everyone else.
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Unlike dissident intellectuals, hegemonic intellectuals are not constrained by the imperative to speak the truth and reveal lies. They are only required to speak the truth as it is understood within the constraints of their ideology. This makes hegemonic intellectuals ideologues without apology. By contrast, dissident intellectuals, although always working to advance an ideological project, are not policed by the ideology they are working to advance. It’s an important distinction to recognize. The best work of dissident intellectuals is constrained and grounded by a commitment to what Cornell West discusses as moral consistency; that is, they must remain principled in their critiques, not caring if someone or some system is ideologically aligned or sympathetic with their own project.
another excerpt from:
Charles Eisenstein: Mob Morality and the Unvaxxed
... Many if not most people get the vaccine in an altruistic civic spirit, not because they personally fear getting Covid, but because they believe they are contributing to herd immunity and protecting others. By extension, those who refuse the vaccine are shirking their civic duty; hence the epithets “filth” and “assholes.” They become the identifiable representatives of social decay, ready for surgical removal from the body politic like cancer cells all conveniently located in the same tumor.
Social stability depends on people rewarding altruism and deterring antisocial behavior. These rewards and deterrents are encoded into morals and then into norms and taboos. Performing the rituals and avoiding the taboos of the tribe, and shaming and punishing those who do not, one rests serenely in the knowledge of being a good person. As an added benefit, one distinguishes oneself as part of the moral majority, a full member of society, and not part of the sacrificial minority. Our fear of nonconformity is born of ancient experience so deeply ingrained it has become an instinct. It is hard to distinguish it from morality.
The fear operating in the ostracism of the unvaxxed is mostly not fear of disease, though disease may be its proxy. The main fear, old as humanity, is of a social contagion. It is fear of association with the outcasts, coded as moral indignation.
In any society some people are especially zealous in enforcing group norms, values, rituals, and taboos. They may be controlling types, or they may simply care about the common good. They serve an important function when the norms and rituals are aligned with social and ecological health. But when corrupt forces hijack the norms through propaganda and the control of information, these good folks can become instruments of totalitarian control.
Those doing the scapegoating may honestly, even fervently, believe the narrative of “the unvaccinated endanger others.” Again, while I find the evidence to the contrary persuasive, I won’t try to build a case for it beyond the hints I’ve offered already. As the saying goes, you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into to begin with. Furthermore, most of the citations I would use would come from blacklisted sources, which, owing to their heresy, are unacceptable to those who trust official sources of information. If you trust the official sources, why, then you trust their exclusion of the heretical information. When official sources exclude all dissent, then all dissent becomes a priori invalid to those who trust them. ...
On Feeling Small: Reading John Of Salisbury’s Metalogicon
“I am by nature too dull to comprehend the subtleties of the ancients; I cannot rely on my memory to retain for long what I have learned; and my style betrays its own lack of polish.”[1] Among the benefits that reading the twelfth-century philosopher John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon has brought me were the pleasure of finding a witty and humane voice to introduce me to the new and faraway world of 12th-century learning (of which voice I intend to give plenty of examples below), and the fact that he helped me quit Twitter (again, more to follow). Apart from those, however, a major one was certainly the consolation of seeing an unquestionably capable thinker express his intellectual limitations in terms that seem genuine, going further than what perfunctory modesty would have required.
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John has already implicitly abstracted from his own feelings of inadequacy, and has learned to look kindly upon them; he feels his lack of powers acutely, but he asks and thereby gives sympathy. “Would it not be unjust”, at his age and with all the distractions of his responsibilities, “to expect of me the mental spryness of youth, the quick comprehension of glowing natural talent, and an exact memory, always sure of itself?”[3] John makes himself small, but by connecting his own stature to the universal human condition, he also shows us how to feel small without self-hatred.
Douthat’s God Argument
So the phenomena (P) to explain are:
A) our part of the universe seems tuned to allow life, which exists here, and is ordered,
B) humans now exist, are conscious, and have particular concepts of beauty and morals
C) humans think big thoughts, and have made some progress understanding the universe
D) humans also come across some weird stuff we don’t understand
The usual “science” (S) theory says:
A) a big enough dumb universe can have many differently-tuned parts; in one life arises
B) lasting life eventually creates order and minds with abstract intelligence
C) intelligence naturally creates concepts of consciousness, beauty, and morality
D) intelligence will try to and can understand some but not all of its universe
The alternative “God” (G) theory says:
A) A “perfect” mind exists without a universe, or even time, needs no resources, has no mental limits
B) Just by thinking, this mind can learn anything and create universes, life, creatures, and minds
C) This mind has particular concepts of beauty and morals, and gave them to humans
D) This mind makes some humans see strange things for various mostly-unknown reasons
So which of theories S or G does better at explaining P?
For more on same, see Jerry Coyne:
Douthat: Science gives us more reason than ever to believe in God
I’m always puzzled when people who show reasonably high intelligence confess that they’re religious—even deeply religious. These people include Andrew Sullivan, NIH head Francis Collins, and NYT columnist Ross Douthat. Though I usually disagree with Douthat and his conservative views, at least they’re based on data, however misinterpreted. But his deep faith (pious Catholicism), which he displays in embarrassing detail in his new NYT essay, is beyond my ken.
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As I began to write this summary and critique of his arguments, I felt more and more that even very smart people are willing to accept dubious claims if it makes them feel good. In other words, they lack well-tuned organs of skepticism and are ridden with confirmation bias.
Conspiracy Fare:
I love / hate this commentary by Akim Reinhardt; so typical of lazy liberal logic: if you believe in Lizard People conspiracy theories, you’re crazy; so if you believe 9/11 inside job conspiracy theory, you’re crazy too.. if you believe vaccines cause autism, you’re crazy; so if you distrust novel mRNA COVID vaccines, you’re crazy too. Of course, no need to base opinions on factual evidence: why not just categorically state that, for instance, there are mountains of evidence that there was no voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and precisely NO evidence of any voter fraud. Right.
The Millions Of Christs Of America
Satirical Fare:
CNN Praises Taliban For Wearing Masks During Attack
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