Jerome Powell is Finished
Warren has made clear her decision to make Powell’s potential renomination as Chair of the Federal Reserve yet another partisan battle. Jerome Powell is now an elephant, and we predict he will be donkey-kicked to the curb of history in short order.
How Dominant are Big US Corporations?
Looking at this data, Bichler and Nitzan argue that big corporations are more powerful than ever. So although the Biden administration may talk about enforcing antitrust law, Bichler and Nitzan think that the government is unlikely to put a serious dent in the power of dominant firms.
Here’s where I enter the debate. I am more optimistic than Bichler and Nitzan that the US government will challenge corporate power. The reason is that the COVID crisis has forced a drastic change in government policy.
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The steady creep of corporate power (from 1950 to 2019) elicits a feeling of inevitability. And had 2020 been a ‘normal’ year, corporate power might have continued to increase. But 2020 was not a normal year. It was the year of COVID. While there is little to love about the COVID pandemic, it did demonstrate something important: society is the way we make it.
It is our collective ethos that determines the balance of power between big corporations and government. Yes, the ethos can seem inevitable. And under ‘normal’ circumstance, it is difficult to change. That’s why for the last half century, big corporations increasingly dominated society, all the while championing the ethos of ‘free markets’. But we should not forget that an ethos can change, sometimes in a shockingly short time.
George Magnus: Why China’s Evergrande debt crisis is the tip of an iceberg
Consider that much of Evergrande’s liabilities comprise pre-sale deposits by almost 1.5 million households, all of which would see their savings lost. The company’s employees and others bought financial products that it issued to help fund itself, and they too would risk losing money in a worst case default. The government will not want unhappy citizens to be on the hook. I expect that rather than a spectacular Lehman-type crisis, China will go through a period of financial distress, which will squeeze growth hard.
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All real estate booms go bust eventually, and China’s turn may have come. Yet the country has never experienced a meaningful decline in property prices, which have risen by almost 50 per cent since 2015 alone according to Bank of International Settlements data. Lower prices would undermine Chinese consumption, and in turn investment. They will also have adverse implications for banks as loan losses rise and the value of high real estate collateral in loan agreements declines. Local governments, which depend heavily on land sales to fund their spending would become even more financially stressed and be less able to meet obligations.
Exactly how this crisis will be resolved is murky but it is inevitable that losses will somehow be allocated among creditors, investors and depositors. This will be a painful process that is likely to cost growth and jobs, and in extremis, it could give rise to social or political instability too.
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Under other political circumstances, a reboot of China’s development model would be hastened to breathe new life into “reform and opening”, income and wealth redistribution, deregulation of service industries and the productive private sector. Yet, none of this is on Xi Jinping’s agenda. On the contrary: The prior market-oriented reform and opening era is over, displaced by a more totalitarian governance system, the restoration of state firms to “commanding heights” and a sharp leftward political lurch.
IIPPE 2021: imperialism, China and finance
We showed in our presentation that this imperialist bloc gets something like 1.5% of GDP each year from ‘unequal exchange’ in trade with the dominated countries and another 1.5% of GDP from interest, repatriation of profits and rents from its capital investments abroad. As these economies are currently growing at no more than 2-3% a year, this transfer is a sizeable support to capital in imperialist economies.
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In sum, our evidence shows that imperialism is an inherent feature of modern capitalism. Capitalism’s international system mirrors its national system (a system of exploitation): exploitation of less developed economies by the more developed ones. The imperialist countries of the 20th century are unchanged. There are no new imperialist economies. China is not imperialist on our measures. The transfer of surplus value by UE in international trade is mainly due to the technological superiority of companies in the imperialist core but also due to a higher rate of exploitation in the ‘global south’. The transfer of surplus value from the dominated bloc to the imperialist core is rising in dollar terms and as a share of GDP.
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The great hope of the 1990s, as promoted by mainstream development economics that Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) would soon join the rich league by the twenty-first century, has proven to be a mirage. These countries remain also-rans and are still subordinated and exploited by the imperialist core. There are no middle-rank economies, halfway between, which could be considered as ‘sub-imperialist’ as some Marxist economists argue. King shows that imperialism is alive and not so well for the world’s people. And the gap between the imperialist economies and the rest is not narrowing – on the contrary. And that includes China, which will not join the imperialist club.
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I argued that since the 1949 revolution that threw out the comprador landlords and capitalists (who fled to Formosa-Taiwan), China has no longer been capitalist. The capitalist mode of production does not dominate in the Chinese economy even after the Deng market reforms in 1978. In my opinion, China is a ‘transitional economy’
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If China were just another capitalist economy, how do we explain its phenomenal success in economic growth, taking 850m Chinese off the poverty line?; and avoiding any economic slumps that the major capitalist economies have suffered on a regular basis? If it has achieved this with a population of 1.4bn and yet it is capitalist, then it suggests that there can be a new stage in capitalist expansion based on some state-form of capitalism that is way more successful than previous capitalisms and certainly more than its peers in India, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia or South Africa. China would then be a refutation of Marxist crisis theory and a justification for capitalism. Fortunately, we can put China’s success down to its dominant state sector for investment and planning, not to capitalist production for profit and the market.
For me, China is in a ‘trapped transition’. It is not capitalist (yet) but it is not moving towards socialism, where the mode of production is through collective ownership of the means of production for social need with direct consumption without markets, exchange or money. China is trapped because it is still backward technologically and is surrounded by increasingly hostile imperialist economies; but it is also trapped because democratic workers organisations do not exist and the CP bureaucrats decide everything, often with disastrous results.
Of course, this view of China is a minority one.
Other Charts:
Bubble Fare:
Global Warning Ignored
The U.S. on the other hand is pursuing a model that I call "transparent criminality". There is an abiding belief that as long as everyone knows the system is rigged then's it ok. Everyone knows QE is welfare for the rich. Everyone knows that wealth inequality is at a record high. Everyone knows that Fed members are front-running the stock market. Everyone knows that Robinhood is a front-end to Citadel's HFT dark pool. Everyone knows that Wall Street is profoundly corrupt and rife with conflict of interest.
Therefore, it's all ok.
Case in point, housing bubble 2.0 has now achieved dimensions that dwarf the first bubble. But everyone knows it's a bubble, so it's apparently not a problem this time around.
COVID-19 notes:
WE’RE ALREADY BARRELING TOWARD THE NEXT PANDEMIC
“We’re so focused on these high-tech solutions because they appear to be what a high-income country would do,” Alexandra Phelan, an expert on international law and global health policy at Georgetown University, told me. And indeed, the Biden administration has gone all in on vaccines, trading them off against other countermeasures, such as masks and testing, and blaming “the unvaccinated” for America’s ongoing pandemic predicament. The promise of biomedical panaceas is deeply ingrained in the U.S. psyche,
Vaccine-Only Mandates as a Manifestation of the Bizarre Civil War-Stoking Impulses of the Professional-Managerial Class in the US
Never in my worst nightmares did I imagine I would ever want Bernanke and Geithner back in charge.
… But compared to the clown show we have managing the Covid crisis, the Fed-Treasury team was a paragon of managerial virtue. There is every reason to loathe their banking system friendly, cognitively captured priorities, backed by Obama’s fundamental conservatism and personal reluctance to cross anyone in the clubs he’d just joined. But they were bloody well competent at pursuing those bad objectives.
By contrast, most readers are all too familiar with the sorry conduct of public health establishment in the US over the course of the Covid crisis, from the initial denial of the possibility that it could become a pandemic,1 to advising against masks, to ending lockdowns too early, to imposing too few restrictions on international air travel, to refusal to impose quarantines with teeth, to the premature May “Mission Accomplished, take off your masks” pronouncement.
Today, we’ll discuss the vaccine mandates as a perverse example of the “othering” that has become a prominent and not-productive element of the official response to Covid. It as if this focus designed to serve the emotional needs of those in charge, in particular reaffirm their claim to authority and assertion of special privileges, rather than prevent death and suffering. And the “others” are responding in kind to the open hostility, starting with Biden saying he’s lost patience with the unvaccinated.
Vaccinations Alone Insufficient to Combat Delta….
A Covid strategy that relied pretty much exclusively on vaccinations could conceivably have worked with the original “wild type’ or “Wuhan” variant, where experts estimated that a ~65% vaccination level would reduce the replication rate to less than one, so the pathogen would fizzle out. There might still be outbreaks in low-vaccination areas, but Covid would be reduced to an intermittent, low-level problem.
But with Delta being far more contagious, or as the experts would say, having a higher unmitigated R0, it would take a correspondingly much higher level of vaccination to lower the R0 to below one, with most experts pegging it at 85% if not higher.
Getting to 85% would be daunting…
… Despite efforts to impugn data out of Israel showing declining efficacy of Pfizer vaccine4, confirmed by a large-scale study out of Mayo, it appears that the current vaccines do very little to reduce contagiousness.
… We will skip over children for the rest of this discussion, but bear in mind that they create even more problems for viability of the Biden Administration vaccine-fixated response.
… the Biden Administration instead is doubling down on its failed strategy of shaming by escalating and adding coercion into the mix, via vaccine mandates.
… And the reason the doubling down on a failed vaccination strategy via coercive mandates isn’t that the absolute levels of refusals will be all that high, but that they are almost certain to hit the already staff-starved hospitals, who have had a steady bleed of personnel due to burnout and reluctance to take even more exposure to Covid under Delta. Hospitals simply can’t afford to lose more staff.
… This is very serious – I think these Biden people have no idea what they are about to unleash. They have seriously underestimated how common these feelings are in large swaths of this country. Places that grow the food and drill the oil. They have underestimated how many minorities feel the same way. Their worst prophetic nightmares are coming true daily before their eyes. They have been told these days were coming all their life and have been steeling themselves for it. They are not anti-vax in any way shape or form. This passport, get fired, lose your life and livelihood is the Rubicon to them – and as of today it has officially been crossed.
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In other words, the harder you look at it, the more difficult it is to find any logic for vaccine coercion without a parallel hard push for non-pharmaceutical interventions. Is it desperation and denialism? Blind belief in their own authority and self-perceived moral superiority? Sheer laziness, because a multi-pronged approach would be hard?
I can’t fathom it save perhaps deep-seated cynicism in action. The best-informed recognize the US lacks the will and the institutional capacity to manage the pandemic, and so the vaccine mandate is just another Pharma-enriching approach that also pre-positions the blame cannons squarely at Bubba. In reality, the adopted a “let-er-rip” strategy and the vaccines are at best an effort to protect the health care system…but they aren’t succeeding at that either under Delta.
It’s already obvious that the results will not be good unless the officialdom gets lucky and Covid evolves into a more contagious yet wimpier variant. And so far, the gods have not been kind.
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Megan Seibert and William Rees: Through the Eye of a Needle: An Eco-Heterodox Perspective on the Renewable Energy Transition
We add to the emerging body of literature highlighting cracks in the foundation of the mainstream energy transition narrative. We offer a tripartite analysis that re-characterizes the climate crisis within its broader context of ecological overshoot, highlights numerous collectively fatal problems with so-called renewable energy technologies, and suggests alternative solutions that entail a contraction of the human enterprise. This analysis makes clear that the pat notion of “affordable clean energy” views the world through a narrow keyhole that is blind to innumerable economic, ecological, and social costs. These undesirable “externalities” can no longer be ignored. To achieve sustainability and salvage civilization, society must embark on a planned, cooperative descent from an extreme state of overshoot in just a decade or two. While it might be easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for global society to succeed in this endeavor, history is replete with stellar achievements that have arisen only from a dogged pursuit of the seemingly impossible.
Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven't We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?
Despite three decades of political efforts and a wealth of research on the causes and catastrophic impacts of climate change, global carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise and are 60% higher today than they were in 1990. Exploring this rise through nine thematic lenses—covering issues of climate governance, the fossil fuel industry, geopolitics, economics, mitigation modeling, energy systems, inequity, lifestyles, and social imaginaries—draws out multifaceted reasons for our collective failure to bend the global emissions curve. However, a common thread that emerges across the reviewed literature is the central role of power, manifest in many forms, from a dogmatic political-economic hegemony and influential vested interests to narrow techno-economic mindsets and ideologies of control. Synthesizing the various impediments to mitigation reveals how delivering on the commitments enshrined in the Paris Agreement now requires an urgent and unprecedented transformation away from today's carbon- and energy-intensive development paradigm.
Scientific team uncovers additional threat to Antarctica's floating ice shelves
"The thinning of the ice melange that glues together large segments of floating ice shelves is another way climate change can cause rapid retreat of Antarctica's ice shelves," said co-author Eric Rignot, UCI professor of Earth system science. "With this in mind, we may need to rethink our estimates about the timing and extent of sea level rise from polar ice loss—i.e., it could come sooner and with a bigger bang than expected."
People under 40 will experience 'unprecedented life' of climate change disasters, study says:
Intergenerational inequities in exposure to climate extremes
Quotes of the Week:
It's clear the masses still haven't figured out that 0% interest rates imply 0% real economic growth. Hence, all returns are a zero sum game. Only their own RECORD misallocation of capital has been driving this Ponzi market ever higher. … In summary, us "perma bears" have been "wrong" all this time while the masses added record leverage to their Ponzi scheme during a depressionary pandemic. This monetary-fueled asset mania coming at the end of the longest cycle in U.S. history has served its purpose of concealing the weakest and fakest economic recovery in history. Millennials are nothing more than the latest cannon fodder for Wall Street's massive money machine which thrives on monetizing ignorance. And in this society, there is a bull market in ignorance because the IQ bar keeps going lower, and lower, and lower. Any questions?
Fed economist: “I leave aside the deeper concern that the primary role of mainstream economics in our society is to provide an apologetics for a criminally oppressive, unsustainable, and unjust social order.”
Re MMT: “It feels like we’ve reached a stage where even the most strident dissenters are beginning to recognise that their arguments around fiscal responsibility and the moral necessity of austerity are more about identity politics and partisanship than sound economic theory.”
Re: Françoise Drumetz and Christian Pfister’s new Banque de France working paper “The Meaning of MMT.”
Romanchuk: This paper has a thin veneer of scholarship but underneath it is filled with what can only be described as bullshit
Musk: "The transition period with new technology is always a little bumpy. The truth is that people are actually not great at driving these two-ton death machines."
Fun Fare:
Electric car drivers suffocating on own smugness
Is this the boat Batman would sail?
Pics of the Week:
There are many ways to make a flat map of the world – each of them a unique distortion
EXTRA [controversial or non-market-related] FARE:
Regular Fare:
Chevron V. Donziger: An update
We all know environmental degradation is an existential threat to our species. We’ve heard it enough times. We get it.
We also know fossil fuel companies are resisting the changes we must make in order to avoid overwhelming catastrophes. We get that too.
What we don’t always realize is the lengths to which fossil fuel companies will go in order to silence the resistors, shut down the opposition, and avoid consequences for their egregious actions. When we do know - when we’re informed - it should awaken all of us. For what they can do to anyone, they could one day do to you.
Steven Donziger is a Harvard law school graduate who went to Ecuador in the 1990’s. He was traveling with a team of lawyers and doctors to view the horrific evidence that Texaco, an oil giant since bought by Chevron, had poisoned a huge swath of the Ecuadorian Amazon during oil drilling in the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s. What they saw were the results of a massive and man-made environmental disaster that poisoned the water, earth and food of tens of thousands of people. Worst of all, the evidence indicated it was done deliberately as part of an engineering plan to save $3 per barrel. This horror was not an accident.
Ultimately, Steven led a team of lawyers in procuring a $9.5B judgement against Chevron that was affirmed by the Ecuadorian Supreme Court. Yet that was not the end of the story. For Chevron - while note even arguing the veracity of the disaster - chose not to pay the judgment. Instead, they chose to come after the lead lawyer who held them accountable: namely, Steven Donziger. In Donziger’s words, “The company’s goal is to silence my advocacy, bankrupt my family, and intimidate activists and environmental allies.”
Donziger has now spent over 780 days under house arrest. He stands to be sentenced on Oct. 1 for contempt of court charges stemming from his refusal to turn over to Chevron his cell phone and computer containing confidential data on environmental activists here and in Ecuador. The Department of Justice having chosen not even to pursue the case, it was turned over- incredibly -to Chevron itself to prosecute.
Most Americans would not believe that here in the United States, a corporation could literally use an American court to criminally prosecute its critics. And yet that is exactly what has happened: a show trial that leaves an American environmental lawyer punished harshly and at risk of imprisonment, for the not-to-be-tolerated crime of standing up to Chevron.
Six-Month Sentence for Lawyer Who Took on Chevron Denounced as 'International Outrage'
Conviction of Steven Donziger, said one critic, "perfectly encapsulates how corporate power has twisted the U.S. justice system to protect corporate interests and punish their enemies."
Really Fast Glance.
It seems that the issue with understanding the economy persists. … I will never stop reiterating--economy IS energy. No energy--bid your dreams of becoming global power goodbye, unless you secure energy supply, such as China is doing this very moment. So, highlighted in red are countries with a severe deficit of energy as represented in MTOE (Million Tons Oil Equivalent).
… I mean it when I say that using Western "economic statistics", especially in monetary form is as useless as treating cancer with aspirin.
… For anyone who didn't drink the Kool-Aid of Western economism and strategic (pseudo)thought it was clear for a long time that Europe was on her downward spiral and as latest events with energy deficit have shown one cannot live on shares, abstract economic indices and outright delusional statistics. To live--one must produce. To live well--one has to have a good grasp of what good life is, a problem Western political "scientists" wrestle without any success for a long time. One can live without latest Mercedes model, one cannot live without heat in winter and air-conditioning in summer. In the end, less expensive and no less practical Skodas or Ladas are available. In the end, there is always Toyota, or Hyundai. We live inside the ongoing collapse of the old world and evaporation of the old myths and chimeras.
COVID Fare:
Zelenko et al: The Vaccine Death Report (pdf)
Evidence of millions of deaths and serious adverse events resulting from the experimental COVID-19 injections
Greenwald: An NBA Star and New York's Governor Show That Liberal COVID Discourse is Devoid of Science
That the unvaccinated are inherently primitive and stupid troglodytes was always a claim as baseless and offensive as it is counter-productive.
Kulldorff: Hospitals Should Hire, Not Fire, Nurses with Natural Immunity
Among many surprising developments during this pandemic, the most stunning has been the questioning of naturally acquired immunity after a person has had the Covid disease. We have understood natural immunity since at least the Athenian Plague in 430 BC.
eugyppius: We Are All Cattle Now
BioNTech/Pfizer and the rest are basically livestock vaccines: They’re not very safe, they don’t work very well, and everyone has to get them.
There is nothing surprising about the failure of our vaccines. In fact it was totally predictable.
Coronavirus vaccines have been used in animals for years, with extremely unimpressive results.
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Our own SARS-2 vaccines, despite their fancy mRNA and virus vector technology, are entirely of a piece with veterinary standards. They have a poor side effect profile, they provide only temporary and partial protection against infection, and they are deployed on a vast scale with no regard for the evolutionary pressure they place on the virus or their broader consequences for infection dynamics.
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IBV vaccines protect the chickens from infection for only about nine weeks. That‘s long enough for the chickens destined to be eaten, but those raised for their eggs require constant boosters. They receive two or three attenuated virus vaccines at first, and then periodic deactivated virus boosters thereafter, to maintain their protection. Adenovirus vector vaccines have been tried in chickens, with efficacy similar to that induced by the attenuated virus vaccines. This is very likely an unstated reason that vaccine vector and mRNA messenger technology were used for our own SARS-2 jabs. It was known from experience with animals that deactivated virus vaccines would not work nearly as well, and that attenuated viruses were too dangerous.
eugyppius: The Conservation of Corona
The ascendancy of more transmissible (and possibly also more pathogenic) Delta strains is a consequence of the worldwide vaccination campaign. This is now the most salient and the most important side-effect of the universal vaccination campaign. Our vaccines elicit antibodies that select for more aggressive SARS-2 lineages, which escape vaccine-induced immunity by replicating in the lungs of infected people faster and earlier.
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Let’s have another look at the Yeh and Contreras preprint I linked in my post on Vaccine Failure and the Way Out. This paper has been kicked about by disingenuous or stupid people pretending it proves that the vaccines stop mutations. It proves no such thing. Mutations happen at a more or less constant rate across all virus genomes, with or without vaccines. The paper does show that the vaccines reduce the overall mutation frequency of SARS-2. That is, the more you vaccinate, the more genetically uniform SARS-2 becomes. What these people do not understand, or pretend not to realise, is that this is basically the opposite of victory. Reducing mutation frequency is the same as exerting positive selection pressure on SARS-2. This is what happens when vaccines select for vaccine-resistant strains.
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This is why Yeh and Contreras, the authors of this paper, conclude that “More virulent SARS-CoV-2 strains have emerged with enhanced transmissibility and immune evasion properties to cause breakthrough infections” and that “the virus becomes more contagious as it is screened through the vaccinated population.” As with the Marek Effect in chickens, overly aggressive viral strains that take their hosts out of circulation too early face substantial disadvantages, but they become the flavour of the month when you change the equation by introducing mass vaccinations.
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There is no reason to think this effect will stop here. Third and probably even fourth doses will be administered widely in the coming months. Delta-specific vaccines are also in the works. All of these will increase pressure on the virus, very likely in the same direction. These vaccinations will favour more transmissible, more pathogenic strains – strains which are already out there somewhere, circulating at low levels. Our best hope is that most vaccinated people develop mild Corona infections over the coming months, while the vaccines still protect the more vulnerable among them from serious symptoms. Governments everywhere should cease all containment measures. The worst case, would be to keep everyone immunologically naive while continuing to pursue mass vaccination policies that only make everything worse.
Rose: A Report on Myocarditis Adverse Events in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) in Association with COVID-19 Injectable Biological Products
el gato malo: the number of single vaxxed people strongly predicts covid deaths
&
covid heads north for the winter
this is counter to expectation and to the general gradient of evolutionary pressure. higher fatality is maladaptive to maximizing spread which is what genes do.
it’s like seeing water run uphill.
when you see such things, it’s generally because some other force is working on the system. leaky vaccines have been known to do this. they select for hotter, deadlier variants.
this would seem consistent with the idea that the vaccines are now the big driver of viral evolution and perhaps spread
…
it could be a lot of things or a combination of things. if others have plausible theories on this, i’d love to hear them.
and no, it’s not “less lockdown and less masking.” it’s clear that none of that ever made any difference.
but one thing seems clear: something is going seriously wrong here. with all this immunity and vaccination, there is no reason we should be seeing such an explosion of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths unless we’re fundamentally altered the equation in some important way. the variants do not seem to explain anything like this size of surge or its off season nature.
if these trends hold, we could be in for a rough winter.
Harvard Business School Shuts Down After Massive Covid-19 Outbreak Despite Almost All Students Being Fully Vaccinated
The school, which has a population of more than 1700 students, had a significant Covid-19 outbreak after cases started rising in September. This news comes as 95 percent of students and 96 percent of staff at the school being reported as fully vaccinated, yet this did not appear to stop Covid from making its way through those on campus.
India's Ivermectin Blackout: The Secret Revealed
Western media, including MSN, finally acknowledged what was contained in those Uttar Pradesh medicine kits. Among the medicines were Doxycycline and Ivermectin. …. Dr. John Campbell broke India’s Ivermectin Blackout wide open on YouTube by revealing the formula of the secret sauce, much to the dismay of Big Pharma, the WHO, and the CDC. Readers will want to watch this before it is taken down. See mark 2:22. Each home kit contained the following: Paracetamol tablets [tylenol], Vitamin C, Multivitamin, Zinc, Vitamin D3, Ivermectin 12 mg [quantity #10 tablets], Doxycycline 100 mg [quantity #10 tablets]. Other non-medication components included face masks, sanitizer, gloves and alcohol wipes, a digital thermometer, and a pulse oximeter.
Denninger: The Flu Shot Stupidity
So Faux Snooz now is out with this:
"It’s perfectly reasonable to get vaccinated right now," Dr. Stanley Deresinski, clinical professor of medicine and infectious diseases at Stanford University, told Fox News, noting the recommendation to get a flu shot extends through the end of October. "You could roll the dice and get it later with the assumption that the flu season is going to come later wherever you are."
Or you could suck-start a shotgun, Mr. Deresinski.
After the last 18 months I really don't care what you advocate or advise. Nor any other doctor. Or nurse. Or politician.
You see, the folks in your profession lied too many times over too short of a period of time for it to be overlooked as "mistakes." You've been caught, and rather than apologize and point the finger at who coerced you into lying (or even better, shivving them in public on TeeVee) your response was to double down and place your job and income above people's lives.
If I can read medical journal articles so can you. But it's not my job to do so -- it is, however, part of yours. As alleged "experts" you have a duty to keep up to date on what's been discovered and to be prepared to discuss and debate it. Dismissing such out of hand isn't the mark of a professional in any field; it is the mark of someone who wields credentials as a weapon and deserves to have them shoved up their ass.
But now the joke's on you. You've destroyed the credibility of the so-called "medical profession" on a permanent basis for a huge number of people, myself included. I'd rather go to a Voodoo practitioner for medical advice; there, at least, all I might get conned out of is $20 or $50 to sacrifice a chicken to a piece of rock with some feathers sticking out of it.
You, on the other hand, will tell me to go eat chicken soup for a viral infection that has a reasonable chance of becoming systemic and screwing me hard rather than debating the merits and risks with me, and then allowing me to choose from possibly-effective, unproved drugs that have decades-long safety records and thus, at worst, won't do any more than the chicken soup -- but on the other hand they might work. Indeed, while the so-called "gold standard" trials of tens of thousands of people in double-blind, placebo-controlled objective studies haven't been done on them you have not demanded, as professionals, that the organs of government run those trials over the preceding 18 months and get the answers when nobody else will because said drugs are off-patent and cheap. There is thus no incentive to spend the half-million to few million dollars to run such a trial. The government, of course, blows billions on known-bogus tests and uses them as fear pornography instead.
Indeed you're perfectly happy to shove Remdesivir, which a very large multi-national study showed was worthless and worse, on the data has a nasty side effect profile that screws about a quarter of recipients in one form or another, up my arm should I wind up in the hospital. The only "benefit" from that drug, on the data, is to the hospital and manufacturer in the form of revenues. Yet today, more than six months post-publication of that peer-reviewed study in the NEJM, it is still considered "Standard of Care Slaughter."
We could also discuss shoving infected persons into nursing homes, refusal to call for isolation of nursing home personnel 24x7 at the initiation of the pandemic when we did not know how to control cross-infection at all, refusing to recognize natural immunity via infection to this day despite multiple large data sets proving it is equal or superior to a vaccine and screaming about massssssks -- which all the way back to 1981 were proved worthless when used in an operating theater by trained medical personnel. Among the general public who are untrained and couldn't maintain proper sterile procedure if they wanted to you obviously can't do better than the results found in an operating room. That was a lie -- not a mistake -- and you knew it, particularly after over a dozen attempts to falsify that result were undertaken over the next 20 years and not one of them succeeded. Yes, it's part of your damn job, *******, to read and understand those studies too before you open your crap-spewing orifice.
Now comes Merck who, big shock, invents an oral protease inhibitor that will be on patent and appears to work. I’m not surprised at those results; they may or may not bear out over time but it wouldn’t shock me if they do. You see, Merck has every reason to invest money in something they’ll profit handsomely from if it does work. Who has a similar incentive if HCQ, Ivermectin, Budesonide, Claritin+Zpak and several other readily-available, inexpensive and off-patent medications also work? Nobody. There’s no way to prevent some other generic manufacturer from making the sales, is there? Why would you study a drug if you didn’t get to keep the proceeds from success? Does that prove they don’t work? Nope. That which you don’t study you don’t prove.
Clinical Outcomes of Over-the-Counter COVID-19 Prophylaxis and Treatment
There is a pressing need for formulations and methods for COVID-19 alleviation that can be easily accessed and utilized by the public. That the alleviation should encompass prophylaxis and early-stage treatment is underscored by studies confirming spread of COVID-19 by asymptomatic/pre-symptomatic carriers; by widespread upsurges of new confirmed COVID-19 cases amid second-wave concerns; and by identification of ongoing mutations of the COVID-19-causing SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus with diverse infectivity rates. We present a 20-week study of our clinical experience with a multi-component over-the-counter (OTC) “core formulation” regimen used in a multiply exposed, high risk population. The OTC core supplementation formulations used include zinc and zinc ionophores; vitamins C, D3 and E; and l-lysine.
COVID Quotes of the Week:
Well. Here comes Singapore. With one of the longest uninterrupted mask mandates in the world & 80+% of the entire population vaccinated, they’re nearing a new high in cases. Just think of how excited experts & politicians are to completely ignore this & push for more mandates!
In another pandemic development, CNN’s go-to doctor and vaccine pusher, Leana Wen of George Washington University, declared startlingly that vaccinated people are now a threat to the unvaccinated because the vaxed carry high viral loads, making them efficient Covid-19 spreaders. Is that what a “vaccine” is supposed to do? Enhance disease transmission?
Every time you point out that post-vaccination Corona hospitalisations and deaths are the same or worse than pre-vaccination Corona hospitalisations and deaths, you hear the same thing: It’s because we raised the lockdowns. People are circulating a lot more now. Imagine how worse it would be without the vaccine. This is so massively disingenuous, that anyone telling you this is either stupid or lying. In many cases, probably both.
I understand that the vaccine would help if you have COVID, you’ll be able to have less symptoms from contracting it. But with me having COVID in the past and having antibodies, with my current age group and physical fitness level, it’s not necessarily a fear of mine. Taking the vaccine, like I said, it would decrease my chances of having a severe reaction, but it does open me up to the albeit rare chance but the possibility of me having an adverse reaction to the vaccine itself. I don’t believe that being unvaccinated means infected or being vaccinated means uninfected.
My wife is a triple board certified doctor in the Bronx. She worked at the hospital that had the highest Covid death rate in all of NYC. She went down hard w/Covid in April 2020 and missed two months of work. She recovered and went back. For 15 years she served the poor – underprivileged patients on welfare in the Bronx – none of them had private insurance. She resigned on Friday and I could not be more proud of her.
NY Governor Hochul proclaims, "The vaccine comes from God" and asks those present in the megachurch congregation, "I need you to be my apostles."
COVID Tweet Thread of the Week:
Chesnut: The continuous presence of spike protein will almost certainly cause male sterility via m6A methylation. Metformin suppresses m6A methylation! Covid-19 is not a blood vessel disease. It is a disease of impaired metabolism and autophagy (inducing senescence) caused by the spike protein’s massive upregulation of m6a methylation. The endothelial dysfunction is from the spike protein’s suppression of autophagy and simultaneous attack on ACE2 receptors. Epigenetic changes are reversible. A constant presence of spike protein will maintain the deleterious environment.
Once again, the medical establishment is completely incorrect as to the origins of the bioweapon that is SARS-CoV-2 and the disease that it causes. We are dealing with a VERY sophisticated bioweapon that impairs autophagy, metabolism and ion channels. I believe the hypercoagulation being observed is from the body being unable to clear the massive number of dead cells caused by the spike protein. The spike protein both causes massive damage and prevents its “cleanup.”
We Will Not Comply: Red States Should Offer Sanctuary To Businesses, Military And Medical Personnel
I continue to suspect that the reason for this sudden dive into totalitarianism is because there is something wrong with the vaccines themselves and if there are tens of millions or hundreds of millions of unvaccinated people left, then these people will act as a control group. That is to say, they will act as proof that the vaccines are not safe if things go awry. The establishment can’t allow that.
COVID Conspiracy Fare:
el gato malo: were some folks a little TOO prepared for this pandemic?
tinfoil cat: stringing some red yard on the corkboard
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the claims that the covid-19 vaccine was developed in mere days has always looked pretty implausible. that’s an AWFULLY compressed timeframe. years of work on these other targets has not even resulted in a product that has reached phase 3 and even p2 was pretty thin.
it’s also just the sort of thing that the silicon valley hucksters love to pretend they did. it makes them look like wizards and heroes. and we all know how much they LOVE to cultivate that image. lying to look like the smartest guy in the room is just silicon valley small-talk. the real pros will pull stunts you cannot even conceive, much less believe.
…
it even seems to include such luminaries as aspiring james bond villainy, klaus schwab, head of the WEF who, in an odd coincidence or truly telling harbinger, held a large simulation exercise on pandemic response.
in late october.
in 2019.
now THAT is quite the co-ink-i-dink.
…
this “simulation” was held under the auspices of an organization (the WEF) that has ties to xi and to the folks who built lab P4. it was attended by the same people who rushed to the fore during the pandemic and gained massive prestige and profits. and these people were tied in many ways to the folks who would have known for real what was happening in wuhan.
something starts to smell fishy here, and it’s not the seafood market.
adding to this, the gates foundation made a killing on covid, some of it very suspicious in its timing.
…
but also note the players. fauci was neck deep in wuhan. he was a long standing proponent of GoF and had funded that very lab to to work on bat viruses.
and suddenly, sleepy moderna, a hype factory without a product to its name and that used to elicit such broad criticism for theranos-like secret data that even “nature” called it “not fit to print”, leaps to the fore in days with a product for just the emergency at hand despite having never managed to produce another vaccine in the 4 years before because “the NIH just happened to have one laying around?”
this begins to strain credulity. badly.
…
i suspect there is a helluva story (or a visit from the black helicopters one night) for a journo really willing to dig into just how this mRNA tech arrived just in time in 2 separate places, both tied to folks tied deeply to wuhan.
was moderna a biotechnology launderer for the NIH?
even john grisham would sit slack-jawed in awe at this plotline.
Pandemic: Political and economic consequences underneath a false flagged health banner
This article discusses the political and economic consequences underneath the false flagged health banner while some rake in the cash….
…
Faction 1 – Governments, Big Pharma and Pro-Vaxxers
… The last almost two years have typified disaster capitalism thinking spectacularly. They want to make you safe by implementing a biosecurity state. In a nutshell, for this faction, the arrival of the 2020 pandemic was about as accidental as the sun rising in the east. They created a pandemic narrative that is nothing but a cover story to conceal from the public what in reality is the biggest asset transfer ever (more about this following in economic sections). … Today, no one in government seems to know the goal anymore. Could be: slow the spread, minimize infections, drive down the R naught, eradicate the bug, reduce severity, create a germ-free world, or is it just maximize compliance with any and all ‘controlled bullshittery’? Administrations are full of mediocre people who don’t give a damn what the goal is, as long as they can feel important making others jump through the hoops they hold. And Big Pharma is not there for your health, but is only focused on profit.
…
It is not surprising that in this ceaseless torrent of propaganda designed to make sure people don’t understand, but act mindlessly, thinking that they are doing the best for themselves and their neighbors, that the following developed:
Faction 2 – Dissidents
… On the surface of it, they fight for their health, but it is actually a freedom fight against the de-legitimization of their rights.
…
Faction 3 – The quiet ones
These are the knowledgeable, the educated; they may be accepting of vaccinations or not; and this group wants to discuss these events with smarts and sense in terms of how modern humanity should and can handle this global outbreak.
Discussions of therapeutics vs vaccinations or both or a different solution in a time of plague is a common discussion point in this group and they tend not to see the necessity for vaxxes, and strongly insist that other solutions exist, which of course they do. This group includes real committed physicians and medical staff who quickly had developed a number of treatment modalities and started speaking about early and effective treatments. This group acknowledge that we may be in extreme circumstances and for that, we must have a common conversation and real disclosure about vaccinations, but they also acknowledge that trust in the first group is Zero for good reason.
… Punitive action, cancellation and complete disdain was and still is shown by Faction One and Faction two against this group because insisting on quality information without hysterics is verboten.
CO- VIDs of the Week:
COVID19/11: Narratives Intertwined is OffG’s new series of short interviews with prominent voices in the alternate media, vocal Covid sceptics and leading figures in the 9/11 truth movement.
The series is intended to both mark the 20th anniversary of the World Trade Center collapse, and discuss how that event helped shape the modern world and, in turn, set the stage for the Covid “pandemic”.
In the order I would recommend watching, of the four interviewees whom I have been following for years re: geopolitics and U.S. imperialism:
WATCH: COVID19/11 – Ed Curtin. Episode Fifteen of Narratives Intertwined
WATCH: COVID19/11 – CJ Hopkins. Episode Twelve of Narratives Intertwined
WATCH: COVID19/11 – Eva Bartlett. Episode Fourteen of Narratives Intertwined
WATCH: COVID19/11 – Piers Robinson. Episode nine of Narratives Intertwined
GeoPolitical Fare:
NOT MAKING HEADLINES:
AZ Audit Could Not Find the Identity of 86,391 Voters – They Don’t Appear to Exist and 73.8% Are Democrat or No Party Affiliation
Now With Comments.
Blain, obviously, is fully ignorant on Russia because he doesn't understand the weight difference between UK and her rather dubiously qualified PM BoJo and Russia and Putin. The difference is not just in the weight category, and UK and any separate EU country is orders of magnitude less important geopolitically than Russia. The difference in is in power. Blain, being "investor" doesn't operate with such categories because they are beyond the grasp of the run-of-the-mill British "financial strategist" and a product of Western "school of economics". That is why Western "strategists" cannot find their own ass with their own two hands in brightly lit room, since none of them understands real economy, real power, including military one and, being a product of Western non-STEM education, they do not have a grasp of physical economy in terms of advanced manufacturing. But that is not the main issue. The main issue is what highlighted in yellow.
Talk about being ignorant and suffering from the acute case of folie de grandeur while being British. Putin is not going to "ask anything" from BoJo and UK. Least of all legitimacy? LOL.
Orwellian Fare:
Turley: YouTube Bans Channels Airing Criticism of Vaccines
Once again, rather than rebutting or refuting claims made by others, many sought to silence those with opposing views. YouTube will not allow people to hear views that do not comport with an approved range of opinions. The move magnifies concerns that we are seeing the emergence of a new type of state media as private companies conduct censorship operations barred by the Constitution for the government to conduct directly.
Military leaders saw pandemic as unique opportunity to test propaganda techniques on Canadians, Forces report says
In Praise of Whistleblowers
Edward Snowden. Daniel Hale. Chelsea Manning. Julian Assange. And of course Daniel Ellsberg. These and other whistleblowers courageously spoke out to reveal the lies the government feeds us to keep us pacified and compliant.
What do whistleblowers do? Some might say they speak truth to power. But power already knows the truth, indeed the powerful manufacture the truth, and they like their near-monopoly on truth and its creation and distribution.
What whistleblowers really do is speak truth to the powerless. They speak truth to us, and their version of the truth is one that reveals the manipulation and mendacity of the powerful. It exposes power to the light, revealing the rot, the greed, the lies, and for this act of defiance and of patriotism, the whistleblower must be punished. … America’s punishment of principled whistleblowers is yet another sign of the death of democracy in America.
Marine officer who blasted leaders over Afghanistan withdrawal now in the brig
“All our son did is ask the questions that everybody was asking themselves, but they were too scared to speak out loud.”
Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks
The CIA plot to kidnap or kill Julian Assange in London is a story that is being mistakenly ignored
Assange and Khashoggi were targeted because they fulfilled the primary duty of journalists – telling the public what governments want to keep secret
Will the United States Officially Acknowledge That It Had a Secret Torture Site in Poland?
Michael Tracey: Academia Is Establishing A Permanent Surveillance Bureaucracy That Will Soon Govern The Rest Of The Country
Having now received a tsunami of messages from people across the US (and a few internationally) about the surveillance regimes being permanently installed at their educational institutions — in contravention of earlier assurances that the current academic year would mark a long-awaited “return to normalcy,” thanks to the onset of mass vaccination - there are a few conclusions to draw.
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These administrators have so much invested in the infrastructure of “case” detection they’ve constructed over the past year and a half — not to mention the wider ideological project of “stopping the spread” at all costs — that it’s impossible to imagine conditions under which they’d voluntarily move to dismantle the surveillance systems over which they preside. And not just because the new powers conferred by this infrastructure — the ability to micromanage the private lives of young adults, track and adjudicate the propriety of their movements, etc. — is probably creepily intoxicating on a level these administrators may not be overtly conscious of, and in any event would almost certainly never publicly admit.
No, the infrastructure won’t be dismantled any time soon because doing so would also require accepting a major paradigm shift in how COVID is understood. And for certain segments of society, that whole system of thought is just too all-consuming. Benign instances of transmission — i.e. transmission that results in no severe disease, which is almost invariably the case with vaccinated young adults at astronomically low risk from COVID — would have to stop being portrayed as alarming “outbreaks,”
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Having read way too much administrative jargon recently, there are a number of obnoxious rhetorical strategies they employ to engender acceptance of edicts that more and more people seem to recognize are wildly, overbearingly arbitrary. “We all have to hold each other accountable,” these administrators will often pronounce, or some variation thereof, which ironically shields them from accountability for their own capricious and intrusive actions. Their orders are often cloyingly filled with artificial appeals to “the community,” which raises the question of who elected these surveillers and snoops to be spokespersons for “the community,” and how they even define “communities,” which seem to contain growing segments of unwilling inhabitants.
One key thing to know is that despite their pretension of acting at the direction of “expert” epidemiologists and public health officials, the day-to-day decisions about practical implementation at these places often come down to the individual discretion of officials who in no sane world would ever be deferred to on questions of infectious disease protocol, or really anything else of significance.
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Do you find any of this arbitrary or ridiculous? Tough luck. Because nowadays all public and private officials apparently have to do is incant the magic word “Delta,” and people whose dictates about proper interpersonal behavior would otherwise be ignored are suddenly imbued with this awesome, unchallengeable power. Their decrees must be obeyed, preferably with effusions of gratitude.
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Well, there you have it. Vaccination was never the gateway to normalcy it was presented to be, and the only option is apparently to instate “Permanent Emergency” protocols with no cognizable “off-ramp” in sight … Reneging on these prior assurances is portrayed as some inherently unavoidable fait accompli, rather than a conscious policy choice undertaken to the exclusion of other vastly more sensible options. Choosing another option would mean re-assessing the underlying logic of constantly surveilling a 99% vaccinated population of healthy young adults with these increasingly dubious “tests,” and gathering their private data so as to opine about the permissibility of their social activities. College administrators are totally committed — politically, professionally, metaphysically — to that logic. There’s also an entire financial infrastructure that’s been erected to sustain the endless provision of nonsensical testing services. Ultimately, these officials can’t or won’t extricate themselves from the scolding surveillance paradigm — and why would they? That would entail the relinquishment of power.
employer vaccine mandates
and hey, that last part, not creepy at all, right? just real time all the time tracking of you linked to an ID you need to go pretty much anywhere or work (and will likely soon need to renew frequently as in israel).
i’m sure governments won’t use it for anything creepy or untoward or expand the reach of this program to encompass more and more intrusive things. i mean when have they ever done THAT before?
IT’S A FOURTH TURNING: WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?
We are in the midst of a saecular winter that is guaranteed to become more violent and bitter, as the malevolent forces propelling this Crisis have decided to ramp up fear propaganda to implement their global reset, using authoritarian methods to compel the masses to comply. I’ve intellectually understood we would be faced with trials and tribulations that would threaten the continuation of our way of life and survival as a unified nation. The reality is proving to be far worse. The core elements of debt, civic decay, and global disorder are most certainly propelling this Crisis towards its bloody climax. I knew there was no way to sidestep or escape this Fourth Turning.
But I didn’t expect a Deep State coup against a sitting president; a stolen presidential election through the collusion of the surveillance state, Big Tech, Big Media and billionaire oligarchs; a weaponized flu used as cover for an imploding financial system; an authoritarian global lockdown which has destroyed small businesses and impoverished the working class, while enriching mega-corporations and the elite ruling class; and now a Big Pharma experimental gene therapy disguised as a vaccine used to divide America into hostile tribes spewing hate online, with a strong possibility of violence because Biden and his handlers are attempting to provoke those refusing his vaccine mandate into committing acts of aggression.
…
I find it both fascinating and disturbing to observe the level of madness engulfing our world, as the sociopath class of mind manipulators and propaganda specialists use their well-honed psychological techniques to scare the masses into subservience and implement their diabolical Great Reset plan where we own nothing, they own everything, and our future is a boot stamping on our faces forever. They are using our willful ignorance, technological bread and circuses, inability to understand risk, and susceptibility to fear exploitation, to increase their power and control over governmental, financial, and societal levers.
They want us under-educated and over-medicated. That is how they broaden their wealth, power and control. None of what has happened since the Fall of 2019 has occurred by accident or due to bad luck. It has been scripted, according to the plan agreed upon by the global elites (Gates, Soros, Schwab, Bloomberg, Zuckerberg) and implemented by corrupt politicians (Biden, Cuomo, Newsom, Whitmer), captured bankers (Powell, Dimon), corporate shysters (Bezos, Musk), and of course the compliant fake news propaganda media (CNN, MSNBC, NYT, Washington Post).
When overnight repo rates began hitting 10% in September of 2019, Jerome Powell was ordered to start cutting rates and restart QE. The global elite were in danger of seeing a reduction in their ungodly level of wealth. In an amazing coincidence, Event 201 took place in October 2019, simulating a global pandemic, and run by Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum (Schwab), Johns Hopkins, and members of the MSM.
It just so happened a bio-weapon lab in Wuhan, working on gain of function viruses, funded by Anthony Fauci, accidentally or purposely released a highly transmissible but relatively non-lethal (to anyone under 80 or not weighing 275 pounds) virus in November 2019. It appears the Chinese covered this up for at least two months, while allowing it to spread across the globe. The WHO, WEF, Fauci and the Trump hating media covered up the facts about China’s creation of this pandemic of fear.
An over-hyped pandemic with a scary name and an unlimited marketing campaign was just what the doctor ordered to set the Build Back Better Great Reset plan in motion. It gave Powell and the Fed cover to unleash trillions in electronic money printing to sustain and enrich their Wall Street owners, billionaire oligarchs, and politicians spending trillions to prop up an economy they purposely shut down. It gave Democrat governors and mayors the cover to implement their “steal the election” plan through massive mail-in ballot fraud,
… The arrogance and hubris of the malevolent globalist oligarchy has attained epic heights, as they successfully stole a presidential election and completed their four-year coup against Trump. They have flogged the January 6 unarmed selfie insurrection to death with their media lapdogs to keep the Trump forces on the defensive. They have installed a dementia ridden empty vessel Trojan horse as president, with a vacuous hateful kackling hyena as vice president
… The specific events that drive a Fourth Turning are never the same, as technology advances, empires rise and fall, and global interconnectedness increases. What doesn’t change is human nature, with all its downsides of greed, envy, hubris, murder, and hate. Throughout history sociopaths have risen to power, showing no empathy for their fellow man, seeking power and control over their people, attempting to conquer and destroy other countries, and prone to commit atrocities on a grand scale against their own citizens. This Fourth Turning is no different.
… The twist in this Fourth Turning has been the emergence of the Deep State, in collusion with Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Media, Wall Street, and the globalist billionaire cabal to strip the people of their rights while convincing a huge swath of willfully ignorant frightened sheep they are doing it for their own good. This is how evil wins. This is how a society devolves into tyranny and dictatorship. The immense level of unpayable debt underlies everything happening. The actions taken by central bankers at the behest of their Wall Street owners and captured politicians are an act of desperation to keep this debt pyramid scheme from imminent collapse, but virtually assures a far worse outcome of hyperinflation and depression.
… This was before the Orwellian doublespeak campaign of revisionist history was implemented with haste, due to the vaccine narrative collapsing under the weight of facts, data, doctors and journalists brave enough to speak out and warn the public. Most have been disappeared from social media by the Silicon Valley thought police. Prior to this scamdemic, the definition of a vaccine was well defined and unquestioned by the scientific community. A vaccine was designed to prevent a disease from occurring. The polio vaccine and smallpox vaccine didn’t lessen the symptoms of those diseases. They protected you from ever getting them.
At minimum a vaccine provides immunity against the disease. As these mRNA “vaccines” have been jabbed into over 1 billion people on the planet, it seems they don’t make you immune from the virus, don’t protect you from getting the virus, don’t keep you from spreading the virus, and don’t even protect you from being hospitalized or dying from the virus. Even their latest re-definition of vaccine, changed by those controlling the narrative doesn’t apply.
… Lastly, Twitter and the MSM consistently post articles and commentary saying Ivermectin is Not Approved by the FDA for Treating Covid-19 and is only for cows and horses. We wouldn’t want to eat into the billions of Big Pharma profits by actually promoting a safe, effective, and cheap drug which has virtually eradicated Covid in India.
… Real fact checkers, not the current batch of Orwellian thought police, would conclude these vaccines are anything but safe and effective.
… It should be clear to any open-minded critical thinking individual this has never been about your health, but about their insatiable appetite for power and control over how our society functions, who benefits, and who reaps the financial rewards. Always follow the money.
… The herd was corralled by fear into believing the vaccines would protect them. At first, they virtue signaled their intellectual superiority and contributions to mankind by getting the jab. Only foolish stupid Trumpers would resist this miracle drug
… The vaxxed are angry because the unvaxxed are putting them at risk because their vaxx doesn’t work. Got it? And this anger is being stoked by Biden and his minions, as they attempt to create chaos, havoc, and violent upheaval in this country.
… There has always been a sinister minority operating in the shadows pulling the wires of whoever is in the White House. If they do not comply with the orders of those pulling those wires, they receive the JFK treatment.
… This is a revolution initiated by those at the top of the pecking order in a bold attempt to increase and consolidate their power, control, and wealth.
… But here is where hope enters the picture. There are far more of us than them.
CaitOz Fare:
The Corporations Are The Government: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
I just cannot understand why all these damn anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists don’t trust a government that actively works against the public interest 100 percent of the time.
I mean if you can’t trust institutions that are deliberately constructed to subvert the common good for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful at every turn, who can you trust?
…
Leaving aside the horrifying normalization of worldwide online speech being controlled by Silicon Valley plutocrats, does anyone actually believe that censoring vaccine skepticism will lead to increased trust in the vaccines? Does that really sound like something that would work?
“Obviously the best way to convince conspiracy theorists to trust their institutions is to have an elite cabal of billionaire megacorporations in Silicon Valley coordinate the blanket censorship of their online speech.”
Yeah great idea, dipshit.
…
If there are future humans on the other side of the existential hurdles our species is approaching there is a zero percent chance that they still destroy the environment to manufacture useless junk because they all need jobs to keep numbers in their bank accounts so they don’t starve.
Manufacturing Culture
In Hollywood the Pentagon rewrites scripts about the military
to manufacture consent for a globe-spanning empire
to make US soldiers look like good guys
to make US wars look like good wars
to ensure continued recruitments
to ensure a steady supply of young bodies
to feed into the engine of a giant mechanical dragon
that is fueled by human blood.
They pipe our heads full of John Bolton brainworms
and Lockheed Martin dreams.
Other Quotes of the Week:
Doomberg: What is the future of a country in which the top 1% hoard a combined net worth 16 times greater than the entire bottom 50%? What is the future of a country in which minor offenses by “everyman” individuals are prosecuted, and major offenses committed by powerful figureheads are permitted?
Not satisfied with mere good fortune, America’s elite are indulging in an orgy of staggering self-enrichment, the scale of which would make even Bacchus blush.
el gato malo: after what we have seen in the last 18 months, can you possibly trust these people to prioritize, manage, and allocate an infrastructure bill this large? (or, frankly, with anything more dangerous than a PB&J sandwich with the crust cut off?)
could it possibly be anything but an out of control gravy train and crony capitalist debacle?
it’s clear they are not even trying to tell the truth. they are not truthful people.
Using accusations of ‘disinformation’ to suppress scientific criticism, steer media coverage, and silence political opponents is not part of the operating system of a free society.
No way Soviet propaganda was this bad
Big Thoughts:
Welsh: The Advantage of Permission & The Fall Of Oligarchies
All things human end. All oligarchical ages end, just as do all democratic ages, aristocratic ages and so on. The question is when and how? The ideal is to use what remains of the machines of effective democracy and government to end this oligarchical age. China has recently cracked down on billionaires and tech exploitation of workers (for example, they made abuse of app delivery workers illegal). They did so because the CCP understands its interests: it doesn’t want opposing power centers, and because the CCP wants the Chinese economy to work for everyone because they don’t want serious dissent.
The need for survival concentrates the CCP’s minds. Whatever one thinks of them, they can, as Matt Stoller points out, still govern.
Our elites, on the other hand, are pigs at the trough. There is nothing they will not do to become richer, and they have no eye for the longer run, only for power and money and now.
This has worked well for them for so long they do not believe it will ever end.
It will. It will either end because the populace ends it (led by a chunk of fallen elite or elite who decides to betray the other elites) or because the necessary conditions for its success crumble. This can be an end to geopolitical supremacy (which Western elites are scared of, which is why the onrushing Cold War with China) or collapse of the environmental conditions and resources necessary to continue this mode of production, which is something our elites are not scared of (no, they aren’t scared of climate change.)
Unfortunately, at this time, it seems most likely that this configuration will end because of environmental and societal collapse.
Satirical Fare:
THE AUSTRALIEN GOVERNMENT HAS MADE AN AD FOR ITS NEW AUKUS MILITARY ALLIANCE, AND IT’S SURPRISINGLY HONEST AND INFORMATIVE
Pics of the Week:
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