Albert Edwards: We Should Start Worrying About The Coming Recession
The SocGen permabear also refers to two charts from the latest IMF Financial Stability Report, both of which address a point we have frequently made, namely that in the past it was always China's massive credit expansion that pulled the world out of the economic dumps. This time, however, no such thing is happening. To wit, the chart on the left shows how much more restrictive Chinese financial conditions are now relative to the west
Lacy Hunt Sticks With His Message: Lower Bond Yields On The Way
Citing unproductive debt, velocity, and a negative multiplier from government debt, Lacy Hunt sticks with his prognosis of lower treasury yields.
Pettis: Will China’s Common Prosperity Upgrade Dual Circulation?
Chinese leaders know that they want to discontinue the country’s existing growth model, but they haven’t yet landed on what the sustainable alternatives are. Beijing’s new common prosperity policy will only help shift domestic demand at the margins, but a full-fledged rebalancing will require a more radical transformation.
In a September 2021 interview, Logan Wright of the Rhodium Group came up with an especially felicitous way of describing the economic conundrum Beijing faces. “I think there’s generally more coherence right now in Beijing about the critique of China’s current growth model,” he explained, “rather than coherence around what that alternative would really look like.”
I agree. Over the past decade or more, Beijing has developed a clear understanding of the limitations of its once highly successful growth model. Chinese leaders recognize that the country’s reliance on high savings to fund high investment no longer made sense once China had closed the enormous gap that had emerged by the late 1970s between its moderately high investment needs and its extremely low investment level. Once that gap was closed and even reversed, sometime in the mid-2000s, an extraordinarily high savings rate could no longer create sustainable demand by funding productive investment.
But because China’s high savings rate was the obverse of an extraordinarily low consumption rate, Beijing could not allow investment growth to decline without causing a sharp decline in GDP growth. And yet at the highest levels of Chinese economic policymaking circles, there is a recognition that nonproductive investment has become a serious problem. In an important July 2021 essay by Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the country’s “new development dynamic,” for example, he demanded that China improve the quality and returns of economic growth and that the country should begin to pursue “genuine rather than inflated GDP growth.”
In theory, it would be possible to accomplish this by shifting a huge amount of investment with low or negative economic returns into high-productivity sectors of the new economy. But Beijing has been trying unsuccessfully to do this for years, and for reasons I have discussed elsewhere, this is likely to be almost an arithmetical impossibility. That is why Chinese policymakers largely recognize that China must transform its growth model into one in which the consumption share of GDP rises substantially. But while Chinese policymakers understand the limitations of the country’s current growth model, they have failed to present a coherent alternative.
To explain what I mean, it helps to go back a little.
…
The math is otherwise quite straightforward. As long as Chinese government officials and businesses retain and invest a disproportionately large share of Chinese income (while households correspondingly retain a disproportionately low share), the only sustainable way to rebalance domestic demand in the direction of more consumption requires that either the Chinese government or Chinese businesses absorb the bulk of the transfers to the household sector. If businesses have to absorb the costs, Beijing risks derailing China’s engine of growth. That leaves the government as the only option. Until Beijing recognizes that it cannot rebalance its economy without transfers from local governments to ordinary households, it does not have a coherent vision of a sustainable alternative to its current economic growth model.
Bad Reporting On Latest Sveriges Riksbank Prize In Memory Of Nobel.
Household Experiences in America During the Delta Variant Outbreak (PDF). Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Reich: Is America experiencing an unofficial general strike?
… Corporate America wants to frame this as a “labor shortage.” Wrong. What’s really going on is more accurately described as a living-wage shortage, a hazard pay shortage, a childcare shortage, a paid sick leave shortage, and a healthcare shortage. Unless these shortages are rectified, many Americans won’t return to work anytime soon. I say it’s about time.
The Real Reasons Behind China’s Energy Crisis
Cheap pricing and too much coal are leaving Chinese in the dark.
Other Charts: (links: one, two, three,)
Bubble Fare:
Felder: Where Are We In The Market Cycle?
Lately, I’ve started to notice many signs suggesting we are now well past the peak in risk appetites. To begin with, Citi’s panic/euphoria model, developed by Tobias Levkovich (and renamed in his honor after he sadly passed away last weekend), is a terrific visual representation of this phenomenon. In the early part of this year, it soared to a new high, taking out the high put in just over 20 years ago, at the height of the Dotcom Mania. It has since rolled over from that peak although it remains in extreme territory.
…
This would seem to suggest we have moved from the party stage to the hangover stage of the mania.
The New Permanent Plateau Of Bullshit
On the other side of super asset bubble meltdown, gamblers will come to realize that all they bought was the biggest empty load of hot air in human history...
The greatest fear I've heard over and over again is that we are headed for "stagflation", and of course there is a trade for that - commodities, Bitcoins, alt-currencies, real estate etc. Never mind that those asset classes are part of the super asset bubble. This argument of stagflation is of course wishful thinking for those who are whistling past the graveyard of the greatest debt bubble in human history.
… Wishful thinking. It never once occurs to any of these people that they are watching a credit crisis unfold in real-time. Not A credit crisis - THE CREDIT CRISIS.
MMT Fare:
Kelton: The Kentucky Owl
Congressman Yarmuth is more than generically conversant with MMT. He put in the time and effort required to really understand the framework. It’s the confidence that comes from mastering the MMT lens that made it possible for him to pursue this line of questioning with Acting White House Budget Director, Shalanda Young back in June.1 The following exchange occurs at the 3:03:40 mark.
Chairman Yarmuth: “We’ve been accumulating debt in this country for two-hundred-and-thirty-some odd years. Has anybody ever been asked to pay off their share of the debt?”
Acting Director Young: “No, Mr. Chairman.”
Chairman Yarmuth: “Is there any likelihood that that would happen?”
Acting Director Young: “No, Mr. Chairman.”
Chairman Yarmuth: “There’s a book out now called The Deficit Myth by economist Dr. Stephanie Kelton, and when she talks about the debt she says you shouldn’t think of it as the debt. You should think about that as the total investment the federal government has made in the United States people—the population— over the history of the country, minus taxes.
Acting Director Young: “It seems fair, and I would add that if we’re worried about the debt when it comes to investment we have to be concerned when it comes to consideration of tax cuts.”
COVID-19 notes:
How many people get 'long COVID?' More than half, researchers find
Short-term and Long-term Rates of Postacute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 Infection. A Systematic Review
COMMENTARY: What can masks do?
Part 1: The science behind COVID-19 protection
Part 2: What makes for a good mask study — and why most fail
Application of Portable Air Purifiers for Mitigating COVID-19 in Large Public Spaces
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
COP-Out? World's Largest Polluter Won't Attend Climate Summit, Kerry Pessimistic On Progress
Update: As if to confirm the shitshow we expected below, just two weeks before a crucial summit in Rome, Bloomberg reports that the world’s major economies are gridlocked in their efforts to agree concrete steps to tackle climate change.
Preparatory talks between G-20 officials this week failed to end in an agreement to reduce coal subsidies and curb methane emissions. There wasn’t even a consensus on striving toward net-zero emissions and limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees from pre-industrial levels, according to three people familiar with the matter.
China and India, two of the world’s biggest emitters and largest coal users, have failed to submit updated climate pledges.
One person described the negotiating round as a disaster.
Are they all suddenly realizing at once - amid the glorious FUBAR situation occurring in global energy markets - that their goals are a) infeasible, b) a giant waste of time and money without China's firm commitment and c) will create social unrest and lead to them losing their political power. …
U.S. Coal Use Is Rebounding Under Biden Like It Never Did With Trump
The Road To Clean Energy Is Messier Than [
The climate disaster is here
Earth is already becoming unlivable. Will governments act to stop this disaster from getting worse?
…
Until now, human civilization has operated within a narrow, stable band of temperature. Through the burning of fossil fuels, we have now unmoored ourselves from our past, as if we have transplanted ourselves onto another planet. The last time it was hotter than now was at least 125,000 years ago, while the atmosphere has more heat-trapping carbon dioxide in it than any time in the past two million years, perhaps more.
Other Fare:
What Do Dogs (and Other Animals) Do All Day and All Night?
Quotes of the Week:
but seriously: this is not demand driven, it’s supply and supply-line constraint.
everything from labor to energy to food and transportation has been made artificially scarce by a panoply of bad policy amounting to the greatest concatenation of global own goals since the 1930’s.
St. Louis President James Bullard: “I would put 50% probability on the dissipation story and 50% probability on the persistent story."
EXTRA [controversial or non-market-related] FARE:
*** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Regular Fare:
The Grayzone – Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire with Michael Hudson
Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton speak with economist Michael Hudson about his book “Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.”
Enraged Father Says School Covered Up Daughter's Bathroom Rape; Trans Student Had Previous Incident
Climate Crisis Fare:
Jacobson: Top 40 Impacts of Climate Change
Most of these consequences are already happening to some degree. Many of these are harbingers of the collapse of modern industrial civilization. Some of these are foretelling of the sixth great extinction. All of them are extraordinarily sad.
As I write this, politicians all over the world continue to side with the fossil fuel industry. Greenhouse gasses, including CO2 and methane, continue to spike. Weather events just gets more deadly and more chaotic. It’s hard to believe we have until 2050 (net-0) or even 2030 to get on track. Truth: we don’t.
…
Fucking entitled, resource stealing, humanity killing, mega-consuming modern Western civilization, with our electric bikes & cars, recycling programs, plastic bag & straw bans and solar/wind/hydro greenwashing. None of that is enough. None of it addresses the existential problems we face, not even close.
There is so much suffering ahead. Be kind, be generous, be of service. …
Alex Steffen: Dispatches from an Unready World
Four perspectives on the Brittleness Bubble and our future.
...
In the absense of insight or guidance into how to ruggedize their lives and communities — and faced often with a lack of resources to act even if they knew what to do — many people hunker down and hope for the best, living to enjoy the world and the weather they have, while it lasts.
Whitney Webb: Wall Street’s Takeover of Nature Advances With Launch of New Asset Class
… The climate change panic that is now rising to the take the place of COVID-19 panic will surely be used to savvily market NACs and similar tactics as necessary to save the planet, but – rest assured – NACs are not a move to save the planet, but a move to enable the same interests responsible for the current environmental crises to usher in a new era where their predatory exploitation reaches new heights that were previously unimaginable.
Brazil, Amazon, World: Crimes Against Humanity
More News On The Progress Toward Eliminating Fossil Fuels
The bureaucrats of the world, particularly in the UN and developed countries, have the idea that they are going to eliminate all use of fossil fuels by somewhere around 2040-50. They have no conception of how to accomplish that, other than to order from on high that it shall occur and assume that somebody else will figure out the details. This gives the rest of us the opportunity to sit on the sidelines and observe how bureaucratic fantasy gradually runs into the brick wall of physical reality.
Back in June I covered the Report just out from Ren21 Renewables Now wherein we learned that in the ten years from 2009 to 2019, despite hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies for intermittent wind and solar power, the percent of world final energy consumption coming from fossil fuels had dropped all the way from 80.3% to 80.2%. Oh, but world final energy consumption was substantially up over that decade from about 320 to 385 exajoules, so despite all the strenuous efforts to reduce their use, in fact annual fossil fuel consumption had increased from about 260 to 310 exajoules. …
In short, it’s continued growth in consumption all the way through 2045, albeit with the growth leveling off toward the end of the period. But basically, OPEC projects that any and all decreases in oil consumption achieved by the OECD nations (developed countries) will be offset and more by increases in the rest of the world.
Useless Green Energy Hitting The Wall
And finally, the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Agency has just (October 6) come out with its annual International Energy Outlook. This is the sage projection of our wisest gurus of how the production and consumption of energy will change over the three decades from now until 2050. Surely then these guys will show us how the world will achieve the true path to Net Zero carbon emissions within that time frame, if not much sooner.
OK, then, here is the key chart:
Wait a minute! Could they really be saying that, rather than being on a path to oblivion, all major fossil fuel categories (petroleum, natural gas and coal) will continue to see increased usage right on through 2050, and with no indication that any decline will have begun even then? Yes, that is exactly what they are saying. Indeed the projected increases in consumption of two of those fuels are quite dramatic — up in the range of 50% for natural gas and 40% for petroleum. Yes, so-called “renewables” are projected to increase dramatically; but after thirty years of this, they will still, according to EIA, provide only about 25% of “primary energy consumption,” which is less than petroleum alone, and barely a third of the combined contribution of petroleum, natural gas and coal.
We Need More Radical Climate Fiction
Literature has seen an uptick in "cli-fi," fiction about possible climate dystopias and utopias. But too much of that climate-change-related fiction lacks any kind of radical political imagination.
it will take imagination and vision for humans to survive the climate crisis — a willingness to believe in things that seem impossible. Most climate-focused art emphasizes the urgency of the crisis, which is needed, but it’s more compelling to see artists imagining our survival, even how we might thrive.
COVID Fare:
eugyppius: The Earliest Infections
Multiple converging lines of evidence show that SARS-2 spread unnoticed for months, especially in Italy, from October 2019.
…
The new chronology als shows that standard views of the transmissibility and pathogenicity of SARS-2 have been wildly exaggerated. Community spread went unnoticed for months in Italy and France and surely elsewhere in Europe too. Some doctors noted strange bilateral pneumonia cases in their elderly patients in the last months of 2019, but there was no obvious hospitalisation or mortality signal until very late in the winter. The earliest identified cases in Italy are all concentrated in the northern Italian pandemic epicentre, but the lesson is that it took multiple months for these early infections to reach critical mass. The Lombardy outbreak wasn’t seeded in the middle of February by Patient 1 from Codogno. All of this mind-numbing discussion of exponential growth has obscured the intriguing fact that the earliest stages of the pandemic, in the absence of all restrictions, unfolded very slowly indeed.
Finally, this adjusted chronology drives us to wonder to what degree our own policies encourage the primary public health signals of SARS-2 infections, namely high hospitalisation rates and mortality. The sequence of events was the same everywhere in the world outside China: Mass testing programs, followed by surging hospital admissions and then excess mortality spikes. Overuse of ventilators caused many early deaths, but it is worth considering if there are not also other, subtler ways that our suppression policies enhance Corona as well.
The Plague of the Poor
A dangerous COVID-era authoritarianism targets the most vulnerable—and threatens the foundation of democratic society
When President Joe Biden announced sweeping new vaccine mandates for 100 million Americans, he stated that these measures were necessary to “protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers.” But isn’t the vaccine itself supposed to be what protects the vaccinated? Not well enough, apparently. So whose interests are served by mandating a leaky vaccine that prevents neither infection nor transmission of a disease that is chiefly dangerous to people over 75 or with serious preexisting medical conditions?
“The unvaccinated” is a group defined more by class than by any other characteristic (perhaps besides age).
…
During lockdowns, essential and frontline workers bore the brunt of COVID-19 cases while affluent professionals stayed home, teleworked, and ordered delivery. These workers were once called “heroes.” Now the Zoom class labels the same workers “anti-vaxxers” if they prefer to rely on the natural immunity many of them have already acquired from previous infections.
…
The principle of informed voluntary consent dictates that each individual must be given accurate information about a procedure’s benefits, risks, and alternatives. Many Americans got vaccinated thinking that it was a ticket to freedom or a panacea that would provide full protection with no downsides. For others, there is now no possibility of consent if they also want to keep their jobs and participate in society: The decision to be vaccinated is being made for them by their employers or elected officials. While many point out that we have long had vaccine mandates (for polio as a requirement for child care and elementary schooling, for example), requiring proof of vaccination at restaurants, gyms, and entertainment venues is coercion of a different degree. Firing thousands of workers for not being vaccinated (including those, to repeat, who have natural immunity through infection) is also unprecedented, as is requiring children to take a vaccine they derive virtually no benefit from in order to comfort fearful adults.
…
The incestuous relationship between pharma, regulatory bodies, Congress, and the media has undermined the public’s ability to access unbiased information. Discussions about unpatented and repurposed antivirals or early outpatient treatments are vigorously censored online by monopoly tech platforms. As the unvaccinated are increasingly treated with open derision and scorn, the vaccination campaign has come to be defined by public shaming and disregard for medical ethics.
…
Given that the COVID-19 vaccines do not appear to stop the spread of the virus, there is simply no medical or moral justification for vaccine mandates and passports. Those comfortable with these policies should ask themselves how they would feel if a fourth jab is soon required to buy groceries, take a domestic flight, rent an apartment, access a bank account, be admitted to an ER, or receive unemployment benefits after being fired for noncompliance. The emerging bio-authoritarianism that began as “two weeks to flatten the curve” will metastasize into something even more repellent and dangerous unless it is forthrightly opposed now, through boycotts, protests, lawsuits, labor action, and civil disobedience.
el gato malo: sweden wins again
many have attempted to malign sweden on covid. mostly, this seems political. they did not adopt the draconian policies of lock down, mask up, and panic, panic, panic of the rest of the world.
unfortunately, this tendency was inflamed and enabled by the fact that for some reason i have never managed to really get to the bottom of, the swedes adopted the incredibly inclusive counting policy for covid deaths of “any death for any reason within 30 days of any covid diagnosis, symptomatic or no.”
this led piles of alleged “covid deaths” (with roughly 75% in hospitals and nursing homes) that has little or nothing to do with covid. covid is an effective opportunistic infection and PCR tests are extremely sensitive. when you’re weak and dying anyway, it moves in. and you get called a covid death even for trace virus. but a lot of these people were dying anyway. this is borne out in the numbers
neither of the last two years is even noteworthy in comparison to the years before them. 20/21 is shaping up to be the second lowest in swedish history. hardly the stuff of calamities…
sweden looked very much like the other nordics, none of whom had a bad (or even noticeably variant) all cause mortality year.
contrast this to the US data …
More Than 200,000 Have Already Died From the COVID Jab in the US
The CDC, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health are all “spreading misinformation about the vaccine versus early treatment.” In a nutshell, these agencies are saying the complete opposite of what is true — classic Orwellian doublespeak.
They claim the COVID shots are safe and effective, when the data show they’re neither, and they say there is no safe and effective early treatment, which is clearly false. At the same time, our medical freedoms are being stripped away under the guise of public health — all while an immense death toll from the vaccine is allowed to take place right before our eyes.
Mathew Crawford: Mechanistic Evidence of Vaccine-Induced Mortality
We already have plenty of evidence painting a picture of a great deal of COVID-19 and vaccine-associated injury caused by the spike protein (here and here). Recent research (Patterson et al, 2021) suggests long haulers have a hard time exercising until spike protein filters from the body, which dovetails into evidence we discuss below. In this article, we discuss the addition of both dose dependence and delivery dependence of damage associated with mRNA inoculations (Pfizer and Moderna) to the evidence pool. As we continue, ask yourself what evidence would move your needle [of judgment] toward a likelihood of substantial vaccine-induced mortality if all of this does not.
In a paper published on August 18 (Li et al, 2021), researchers examined the effects of mRNA vaccine delivery in an animal model. The results are profound, sometimes demonstrative, and sometimes subtle. My list of concerns may span several articles. This study alone condemns continued human experimentation. It contributed to a body of evidence that will hopefully be instructive for generations as to why never again to jump past basic safety experiments in the balance between the desire for a solution and reasonable costs paid in achieving it [to a problem barely felt on the level of the global population].
What seems particularly sad about all this is that there are so many other solutions from early treatment medicine, to intentionally inoculation with less harmful coronaviruses, to nasal sprays, to less risky vaccines.
We Need More Radical Climate Fiction
Literature has seen an uptick in "cli-fi," fiction about possible climate dystopias and utopias. But too much of that climate-change-related fiction lacks any kind of radical political imagination.
it will take imagination and vision for humans to survive the climate crisis — a willingness to believe in things that seem impossible. Most climate-focused art emphasizes the urgency of the crisis, which is needed, but it’s more compelling to see artists imagining our survival, even how we might thrive.
COVID Fare:
eugyppius: The Earliest Infections
Multiple converging lines of evidence show that SARS-2 spread unnoticed for months, especially in Italy, from October 2019.
…
The new chronology als shows that standard views of the transmissibility and pathogenicity of SARS-2 have been wildly exaggerated. Community spread went unnoticed for months in Italy and France and surely elsewhere in Europe too. Some doctors noted strange bilateral pneumonia cases in their elderly patients in the last months of 2019, but there was no obvious hospitalisation or mortality signal until very late in the winter. The earliest identified cases in Italy are all concentrated in the northern Italian pandemic epicentre, but the lesson is that it took multiple months for these early infections to reach critical mass. The Lombardy outbreak wasn’t seeded in the middle of February by Patient 1 from Codogno. All of this mind-numbing discussion of exponential growth has obscured the intriguing fact that the earliest stages of the pandemic, in the absence of all restrictions, unfolded very slowly indeed.
Finally, this adjusted chronology drives us to wonder to what degree our own policies encourage the primary public health signals of SARS-2 infections, namely high hospitalisation rates and mortality. The sequence of events was the same everywhere in the world outside China: Mass testing programs, followed by surging hospital admissions and then excess mortality spikes. Overuse of ventilators caused many early deaths, but it is worth considering if there are not also other, subtler ways that our suppression policies enhance Corona as well.
The Plague of the Poor
A dangerous COVID-era authoritarianism targets the most vulnerable—and threatens the foundation of democratic society
When President Joe Biden announced sweeping new vaccine mandates for 100 million Americans, he stated that these measures were necessary to “protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated co-workers.” But isn’t the vaccine itself supposed to be what protects the vaccinated? Not well enough, apparently. So whose interests are served by mandating a leaky vaccine that prevents neither infection nor transmission of a disease that is chiefly dangerous to people over 75 or with serious preexisting medical conditions?
“The unvaccinated” is a group defined more by class than by any other characteristic (perhaps besides age).
…
During lockdowns, essential and frontline workers bore the brunt of COVID-19 cases while affluent professionals stayed home, teleworked, and ordered delivery. These workers were once called “heroes.” Now the Zoom class labels the same workers “anti-vaxxers” if they prefer to rely on the natural immunity many of them have already acquired from previous infections.
…
The principle of informed voluntary consent dictates that each individual must be given accurate information about a procedure’s benefits, risks, and alternatives. Many Americans got vaccinated thinking that it was a ticket to freedom or a panacea that would provide full protection with no downsides. For others, there is now no possibility of consent if they also want to keep their jobs and participate in society: The decision to be vaccinated is being made for them by their employers or elected officials. While many point out that we have long had vaccine mandates (for polio as a requirement for child care and elementary schooling, for example), requiring proof of vaccination at restaurants, gyms, and entertainment venues is coercion of a different degree. Firing thousands of workers for not being vaccinated (including those, to repeat, who have natural immunity through infection) is also unprecedented, as is requiring children to take a vaccine they derive virtually no benefit from in order to comfort fearful adults.
…
The incestuous relationship between pharma, regulatory bodies, Congress, and the media has undermined the public’s ability to access unbiased information. Discussions about unpatented and repurposed antivirals or early outpatient treatments are vigorously censored online by monopoly tech platforms. As the unvaccinated are increasingly treated with open derision and scorn, the vaccination campaign has come to be defined by public shaming and disregard for medical ethics.
…
Given that the COVID-19 vaccines do not appear to stop the spread of the virus, there is simply no medical or moral justification for vaccine mandates and passports. Those comfortable with these policies should ask themselves how they would feel if a fourth jab is soon required to buy groceries, take a domestic flight, rent an apartment, access a bank account, be admitted to an ER, or receive unemployment benefits after being fired for noncompliance. The emerging bio-authoritarianism that began as “two weeks to flatten the curve” will metastasize into something even more repellent and dangerous unless it is forthrightly opposed now, through boycotts, protests, lawsuits, labor action, and civil disobedience.
el gato malo: sweden wins again
many have attempted to malign sweden on covid. mostly, this seems political. they did not adopt the draconian policies of lock down, mask up, and panic, panic, panic of the rest of the world.
unfortunately, this tendency was inflamed and enabled by the fact that for some reason i have never managed to really get to the bottom of, the swedes adopted the incredibly inclusive counting policy for covid deaths of “any death for any reason within 30 days of any covid diagnosis, symptomatic or no.”
this led piles of alleged “covid deaths” (with roughly 75% in hospitals and nursing homes) that has little or nothing to do with covid. covid is an effective opportunistic infection and PCR tests are extremely sensitive. when you’re weak and dying anyway, it moves in. and you get called a covid death even for trace virus. but a lot of these people were dying anyway. this is borne out in the numbers
- ~90% of swedish deaths were in people over 70 years old.
- the average death was over 81 years old. (81.75 is my best estimate).
- life expectancy in sweden is 82.96.
- it’s a clear, sensible definition with no ambiguity or bias
- it captures ALL trades offs from covid deaths to deaths of despair from lockdowns to 20 other knock on effects we might not even have considered. it’s the real, no-exclusions butcher bill. it’s the best basis for a full accounting of public health effects on mortality.
- everyone counts it the same way. this means countries can be readily compared.
neither of the last two years is even noteworthy in comparison to the years before them. 20/21 is shaping up to be the second lowest in swedish history. hardly the stuff of calamities…
sweden looked very much like the other nordics, none of whom had a bad (or even noticeably variant) all cause mortality year.
contrast this to the US data …
More Than 200,000 Have Already Died From the COVID Jab in the US
The CDC, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health are all “spreading misinformation about the vaccine versus early treatment.” In a nutshell, these agencies are saying the complete opposite of what is true — classic Orwellian doublespeak.
They claim the COVID shots are safe and effective, when the data show they’re neither, and they say there is no safe and effective early treatment, which is clearly false. At the same time, our medical freedoms are being stripped away under the guise of public health — all while an immense death toll from the vaccine is allowed to take place right before our eyes.
Mathew Crawford: Mechanistic Evidence of Vaccine-Induced Mortality
We already have plenty of evidence painting a picture of a great deal of COVID-19 and vaccine-associated injury caused by the spike protein (here and here). Recent research (Patterson et al, 2021) suggests long haulers have a hard time exercising until spike protein filters from the body, which dovetails into evidence we discuss below. In this article, we discuss the addition of both dose dependence and delivery dependence of damage associated with mRNA inoculations (Pfizer and Moderna) to the evidence pool. As we continue, ask yourself what evidence would move your needle [of judgment] toward a likelihood of substantial vaccine-induced mortality if all of this does not.
In a paper published on August 18 (Li et al, 2021), researchers examined the effects of mRNA vaccine delivery in an animal model. The results are profound, sometimes demonstrative, and sometimes subtle. My list of concerns may span several articles. This study alone condemns continued human experimentation. It contributed to a body of evidence that will hopefully be instructive for generations as to why never again to jump past basic safety experiments in the balance between the desire for a solution and reasonable costs paid in achieving it [to a problem barely felt on the level of the global population].
What seems particularly sad about all this is that there are so many other solutions from early treatment medicine, to intentionally inoculation with less harmful coronaviruses, to nasal sprays, to less risky vaccines.
eugyppius: Maximum Vaccination
The vaccines can't control Corona, which is why they won't stop vaccinating.
Corona is primarily dangerous to the very old and the already sick. Occasionally, it is true, somebody who is younger or not already sick ends up dying. This happens with influenza and other viruses too. While that’s regrettable, Corona is not the leading cause of tragedies like these, and on balance they are too rare to pose an overarching unprecedented global threat to our hospitals, or to public health, or to the nursing homes, to whatever it is we’re supposed to be worried about right now. Given the stratified nature of Corona risk, the majority of the gains to be had from stimulating SARS-2 antibodies are concentrated in around 10-15% of the population. This is true whatever you believe about the vaccines, their safety or their efficacy.
If you want to lower hospitalisations and deaths, in other words, the difference between vaccinating 40% of your population and 80% of your population is not nearly as great as it seems. In fact, as you move to ever lower-risk cohorts, the volume of vaccinations required to reduce deaths grows in inverse proportion to the deaths you are reducing. This is the phenomenon of diminishing returns. It means that if you have vaccinated all the olds and sicks and an additional 50% or 70% of everyone, AND you are still suffering from a raging pandemic of the unvaccinated, there are probably not enough immunologically naive people left to give you a hope of vaccinating your way out.
The unspeakable truth is that the vaccines don’t suppress case rates at all. We have long known that their efficacy against infection fades to zero after week 20, but even at the high point — the first month after dose 2 — the protection is sure to be vastly overstated. This would be why even academic journals are starting to run pieces with titles like “Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States”:
...
A consequence of these failures is raging cognitive dissonance among the elite, and a substitution of the means for the end.
...
The only rationale necessary for vaccinating every last living organism is the same as the only rationale necessary for locking down all of human society: The disease statistics are not improving, and the only thing to do when they are not improving, is more of the thing that you sold to everyone beforehand, on basically no evidence, as the sole solution.
We have entered the world of Maximum Vaccination. Our best hope is that the farce of Corona suppression completes its self-discrediting arc before it can do much more damage.
Kulldorff: Covid, Lockdown And The Retreat Of Scientific Debate
The BMJ article is full of errors that ought to have never found their way into any publication. Here are some examples:
1/ My colleagues and I are described as ‘critics of public health measures to curb Covid-19’. On the contrary, throughout the pandemic we have strongly advocated better public health measures to curb Covid-19 – specifically protection of high-risk older people, with many ‘clearly defined’ proposals. The failure to implement such measures, in our view, has led to many unnecessary Covid deaths.
2/We are described as ‘proponents of herd immunity’ which is akin to accusing someone of being in favour of gravity. Both are scientifically established phenomena. Every Covid strategy leads to herd immunity. The key is to minimise morbidity and mortality. The language, here, is non-scientific: herd immunity is not a creed. It’s how pandemics end.
3/ It says we have ‘expressed opposition to mass vaccination’. Dr. Gupta and I have spent decades on vaccine research and we are all strong advocates for Covid and other vaccines. They are among the greatest inventions in history. To falsely credit the anti-vaccine movement with support from professors at Harvard, Oxford and Stanford is damaging for vaccine confidence. This is unworthy of a medical journal. …
Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 39
A reader sent me an interesting actuarial analysis of death rates overall and with CV-19 for Minnesota. It shows exactly what you would expect from following the data; there is no extra risk of death from CV-19 except in the very old. And CV-19 caused a steepening of the death age structure, there has been a higher proportion of deaths in the very old during the epidemic than there was before. I anticipate that at some point we will actually see deaths dip below the pre-epidemic average or rate, as there has been a significant pull-forward of deaths. That phenomenon is already present in Sweden.
…
Worth another look is this review of the research on masking, and other physical efforts, to prevent transmission of respiratory viruses. It was last updated by the Cochrane Institute in the fall of 2020. The Cochrane Institute is viewed as one of the pre-eminent sources of evidence-based Medicine. It found that the evidence did not support a benefit to masking in most situations. (Cochrane Review)
Denninger: Down To Only One Question Now..
Unfortunately, what this means is that now for anyone over 30 you are more likely to get infected, yes, adjusted for the population that is vaccinated, if you are vaccinated. Indeed in the 40-49 age group you’re close to double as probable on a per-population basis.
… So far this is not translating into higher risk of Covid hospitalization and death on a per-100,000 basis. But that the vaccine makes you more likely to both get and give to others the virus is now established. It is fact. It is in fact true for everyone who is over 30. I have pointed out that preventing infection was never in the cards; it was not part of the EUA, it was not part of the studies, it was never demonstrated. But this is much worse because now we are talking about a direct threat to others. The CDC, NIH and Biden almost-certainly know this. This is why the mad rush to demand you get jabbed
… The data from England is conclusive in that regard. I bet that they’ve known this was happening right here in the US for months now. I expected no effective protection. What I did not expect was negative protection, but that’s what we got. This portends the potential for very, very bad things. Specifically, if the impairment is only toward Covid-19; that is, this is some sort of VEI specific to Covid, then the issue ends there. For those with natural (recovered) immunity they don’t care and absolutely should not get the jab; indeed, if you’re recovered and take them you may destroy your protection in part or whole and wind up susceptible to repeat infection you would otherwise not be hit with!
… But the 900lb Gorilla is that the impairment may not be Covid-19 specific. In other words, the impairment may be immune system-generalized, in which case those who took the jabs are screwed because that immune damage could be long-lasting or even permanent, yet the protection against serious outcomes is specific to Covid. So yes, you’re “safer” against a serious outcome even while screwing everyone else, but at the same time you are wildly more susceptible to a severe or fatal outcome due to, for example, influenza.
Make It Make Sense To Me. I Dare You.
One of the fundamental assumptions in the OSHA draft is that mass vaccination is the best protection against COVID. What if it increasingly appears to be worse-than-nothing after about 6 months, and offsetting-penalties before that? People are clearly more susceptible to catching COVID in the 13 days immediately following vaccination, and the Public Health England data shows that the vaccinated are more prone to catching COVID (negative protection rate) after about 6 months, now in all ages above 30.
…
What is happening, as a result of this fast and tight squeeze is a separation out of people who are more independent of thought and action, who have also kept open some options for themselves, and who are at least suspicious of this power grab over their bodies. Many people who solve difficult problems in human society might be in this class. Many who already got COVID vaccines, especially early-adopters, can still have deep misgivings about what they now see happening, the totalitarianism of vaccination in places like Australia. Why? It does not make sense as presented. It seemed to make sense that way up through May or so… I think we can see the position of big pharma, wanting to control the narrative that pumps money to it.
The answer to a vaccine that makes you catch COVID after 6 months is boosters every 3 months, each at full price. Just don’t look at the 2 weeks after the shot. It’s not fair to count that. Don’t look at heart attacks after COVID vaccination. Don’t. No! Don’t look at all-cause-deaths. No!
Menton: Is There Any "Science" Behind Covid Mask Mandates?
I spend a lot of time at this site ridiculing the unfalsifiable hyperbole and altered data that pass for “science” in the field of climate change. But climate change is just one of many areas where people who have little idea what real science consists of nevertheless claim the mantle of science to order others around. Right now the response to Covid-19, the Chinese Virus, competes with the response to climate change for the most egregious misuse of the imprimatur of “science” to justify political goals.
As background for this post, I refer to the Manhattan Contrarian definition of “science,” which appeared, among other places, in this post of September 12, 2020: “Science is a process for understanding reality through using experiment or data to attempt to falsify falsifiable hypotheses.” Under this definition, the classic example of real science at work is the randomized controlled drug trial, best understood as an attempt to falsify the falsifiable hypothesis that the drug at issue is effective, through proving that a placebo works just as well. When the attempt at falsification fails, then the drug has been shown, at least provisionally, to be effective.
The Manhattan Contrarian definition of “science” is what I seem to remember learning on the subject back in junior high school, and that I have since confirmed by reading up on the work of philosopher Karl Popper and others. The alternative definition of “science” mentioned in my September 2020 post is that “science is what people who call themselves scientists do.” Under this alternative definition, “following the science” means taking instruction from whoever appear to be, or declare themselves to be, the most expert scientists of the moment. In the field of Covid-19, those people would be the CDC and the NIAID (Fauci’s organization), and everyone who takes funding from them and their allies and therefore can’t disagree with anything they say without risking job and career.
Back on August 5, the CDC “updated” their “guidance” on the subject of masking for students, teachers and other staff in schools. The updated guidance reads as follows:
CDC recommends universal indoor masking for all teachers, staff, students, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status.This piece of “guidance” is not a small deal. The numbers of students and teachers in K-12 schools in this country is enormous: … So under this “guidance,” the number of people trapped behind these masks all day every day for months on end would be well over 60 million, the large majority of them kids 17 and younger. Meanwhile, according to CDC data here, the number of kids 17 and under who have died of the virus inception to date is all of 478. That is way fewer kids than die of the flu in a normal flu season.
… Anyway, the CDC is filled with highly credentialed scientists, and surely they have only issued their “guidance” after giving the subject due and deliberate consideration. Isn’t going along with their advice “following the science”?
The other approach to the “science” — the Manhattan Contrarian approach — would be to look for the results of efforts to falsify the falsifiable hypothesis that mask wearing lowers the rate of infection and/or death among children 17 and younger. Now, you would think, wouldn’t you, that before issuing an edict that would impose all-day mask wearing on tens of millions of children at little risk from this disease, the CDC would have done a large and serious randomized and controlled study to demonstrate that this intervention actually works, if only just a little. You would be absolutely wrong. As far as I can determine, there has been no such study.
What’s the closest we can find on this subject? Looking around today, I find a long and thoughtful piece from the City Journal on August 11, 2021, by a guy named Jeffrey Anderson. The title is “Do Masks Work? A review of the evidence.” Anderson is identified as former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, so at least someone who knows something about statistics.
Anderson identifies a total of 14 what he calls “RCTs” (Randomized Controlled Trials) studying the effectiveness of mask wearing on reducing the spread of respiratory viruses. Almost all of them pre-date the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, and none focus on school-age children. OK, we’ll take what we can get. It turns out that there is exactly one large RCT dealing specifically with the effect of mask wearing on the transmission of Covid-19:
…
Here is Anderson’s summary of all 14 RCTs:
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.
In simple terms, it’s nothing, nothing and nothing. Not a single one of the 14 RCTs showed a statistically-significant benefit from mask wearing.
But surely the CDC must have some kind of studies to support its edict to subject tens of millions of innocent schoolchildren to all-day mask wearing. Yes. What they have is not RCTs, but rather so-called “observational” studies of restricted time periods and relatively small numbers of people. Here is a CDC release from September 24, trumpeting some of these latest studies. Healthy Skeptic (Kevin Roche) on September 28 calls these studies “CDC Garbage,” which they are. These studies are properly characterized as non-science. Instead of attempting to falsify the hypothesis under consideration, they attempt to confirm it, with complete freedom to truncate time periods, cherry-pick data, and ignore confounding factors to get the pre-determined answer. And Roche puts his finger right on the key issue, which is that the CDC is under enormous pressure from the White House and its masters in the teachers unions to get the “right” answer:
… Roche refers us over to this September 25 post by a guy named Vinay Prasad, going through obvious flaw after obvious flaw with the study on which CDC relies most heavily
…And that’s only the beginning. It goes on and on from there. The study made no effort at all to deal with many, many confounding factors. If you’ve got time, read some more. It’s sad, but you can’t trust a word that comes out of the government “scientists.”
Horse-Bleep: How 4 Calls on Animal Ivermectin Launched a False FDA-Media Attack on a Life-Saving Human Medicine
Our investigative reporters dug up the FDA memos documenting the start of a propaganda campaign, and got The New York Times to correct its false reporting.
In a hokey tweet on August 21, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration told Americans the obvious: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”
…
The story behind the tweet that went ’round the world shows how a myth was born about a safe, if now controversial, human drug that was FDA-approved for parasitic disease in 1996 and bestowed the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015. It is a story in which the barest grain of truth morphed into an anything-goes media firestorm.
…
This is how government gets away with some whoppers, and with the media’s help.
…
The effort to vilify ivermectin broadly has helped curb the legal supply of a safe drug. That’s what drove people to livestock medicine in the first place.
Ivermectin: a systematic review from antiviral effects to COVID-19 complementary regimen
are the branch covidians coming unhinged?
nah, they were always like this...
… i, for one, continue to marvel at how the chatterati that could not disparage the trumpian bleach shots stridently enough suddenly cannot countenance any dissent in the mandates for biden’s miracle elixir.
… the more fervently one believed that pfizer was deadly fraud juice under the orange man the more desperately they not only want it but seem to need to demand that you want it too under señor brandon.
these people are worse than folks that just started crossfit.
… i’d pity them if they were not so aggressively odious and invasive.
it’s a bit surreal to watch.
but it’s also clarifying. these people have no idea what they are being told. they do not care. their level of discernment is zero.
they care only who tells them.
the rest is just pretext. this is why so few politicians and media networks even attempt trying to sound plausible anymore.
Mathew Crawford: What I've Been Reading/Viewing
When I wrote Mathew's Favorite Pandemic Resources, I meant to add some additional authors, but a combination of distractions and a large world of excellent writers and journalists means such lists are always incomplete. Also, the more I see of substack, the more I appreciate what an amazing platform and resource this is on the whole. I highly recommend the inbox and RSS feed.
- If you haven't yet watched Dr. Peter's McCullough's talk 'Therapeutic Nihilism and Untested Novel Therapies' delivered at the 78th Annual Meeting of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, take the time.
- U.S. Mortality is a resource I plan to quote and grab images from in the future.
- Karen Hunt's essay Utopian Madness is one of the best essays I've ever read [see Long Reads below]. I have been working on one with significant overlap of thought, so I'll focus on adding value to the conversation rather than competing with her excellent presentation.
- Alex Berenson was going to be on my original resources list because he is doing the best job of filling in the immense gap of "pandemic" journalism. If I haven't linked to him among my enormous citation list (and I'm not even certain I haven't), it is because we take distinct vectors. But I read his articles often just in the course of keeping up with the pandemic news. Though I cannot recall which article (and his work is of high enough volume that I'm not going to hunt it down), I recall appreciating that he seemed to stop to learn something about statistics in order to tell a story the right way.
- Michael Capuzzo
- El Gato Malo (Boriqua Gato) is one of the anonymous gems of the pandemic. We should all have a serious conversation about why anonymity is so common among smart people engaging in the deeper discussions about the pandemic. At this point, I should admit that I did not sit and listen to a talking cat. That doesn't happen.
- The Expose
- Steve Kirsch seems to have taken tips from numerous people, and quickly improved his presentation skills. His videos here are of high quality, and will hit home with a lot of people uninterested in reading 200-page documents. They have received several hundred thousand views to date.
- Glenn Loury
- James "Dr. Jack" Lyons-Weiler
- Jessica Rose is my spirit sister. I am adopting her as such. She might be the living incarnation of Jordan from the movie Real Genius, but less awkward and with surfing skills.
- Jordan Schachtel
- Tessa (who fights robots)
- Matt Taibbi
- Unbekoming
- The Vaccine Court
…
What's Been Censored
Though it passed through peer review with no changes suggested, with publication contracts and fees executed, the research paper on vaccine associated myocarditis authored by my friends Jessica Rose, PhD and Dr. Peter McCullough in the journal Current Problems in Cardiology was unceremoniously taken offline without communication with either of the authors.
… The scientific publication industry has been broken for some time, but the absurdity seems to reach new heights weekly during this "pandemic".
CO- VIDs of the Week:
The Coming Real Pandemic of the Vaccinated
Drs. Trozzi and Alexander explain ADE and other dangers of the 'vaccines' and warn of the coming wave of deaths among those who have received these experimental gene therapies.
Dr. Mark Trozzi is an ER doctor with 25 years experience. He took a leave of absence early this year to fight Covid tyranny full time. His website is drtrozzi.com.
Dr. Paul Alexander is a world-class clinical epidemiologist who was trained at McMaster University, Canada's top university for epidemiological research. Dr. Alexander was fired from his position at the university for speaking the truth about the harms being caused by the Covid 'vaccines'.
Friday "Humor": Vaccine Efficacy 'Science' Explained
From 100% effective, "no deaths, no hospitalizations" to the imminent need for a 4th, 5th, 6th, semi-annual, bi-monthly "booster" dose and counting, here is the devolution of COVID vaccine efficacy exposed for all but the willfully blind to see...
COVID Tweets and Quotes of the Week:
Sir Christopher Chope MP:
“Our hospitals have got a large number of in-patients who are only there because those patients took the vaccine… there is causation between vaccination and damage caused by those vaccines yet the government… seems to be denying that”
The myth of 95% v$xxine effectiveness and the reality of the "cure" being worse than the disease.
Number of deaths in Taiwan after jabs exceeding covid deaths. What great reporting!
Nebraska Attorney General ruling on IVM & HCQ : “Allowing physicians to consider these early treatments will free them to evaluate additional tools that could save lives, keep patients out of hospitals, & provide relief for our already strained healthcare system.”
COVID Conspiracy Fare:
Greenwald: This is such an important exchange. CNN loves to herald itself as vital warriors against disinformation and lies, while vilifying independent voices like Joe Rogan as a plague on our discourse.
Yet here, Rogan all but forces Sanjay Gupta to admit CNN lied about him *on purpose*.
Kunstler: Poster Boy
Maybe Dr. Sanjay Gupta was born at night — but surely not last night. Apparently, CNN’s house doctor went into his interview on the Joe Rogan Experience with eyes wide shut. Did his handlers and preppers not have a clue that Joe would give Sanjay the business about CNN’s deliberate, incessant, and epic lying in the service of forces that seek to destroy the country, its people, and western civ with them?
The issue was Mr. Rogan declaring publicly that he took ivermectin with a suite of other drugs to get over Covid-19 in a few days’ time and then CNN’s defaming of the Nobel Prize winning drug as “horse de-wormer,” and defaming Joe Rogan for taking it. CNN’s bad faith propaganda plays a key role in the dishonest and untrustworthy campaign by America’s public health officialdom, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, to prevent the clinically-proven ivermectin early treatment protocol from being recognized by the FDA, because doing so would nullify the FDA’s emergency use authorization for the still-unapproved Covid-19 “vaccines.”
It was painful to watch Sanjay wriggle and try to squirm away from the accusation that his network lies knowingly to the public (and that he abets it). “It’s a lie that they’re conscious of, it’s not a mistake,” Joe Rogan said, pithing the famous TV doc like a common carpet moth. “You know that they know they’re lying,” he pressed on. “Do you think that’s a problem, that your news network lies?”
Yeah, it’s a problem, Sanjay finally admitted, lamely. And it’s no small problem that the nation’s community of doctors has allowed itself to be buffaloed into killing tens-of-thousands of patients across the land who are denied life-saving treatments, while harming and killing many others with “vaccines” which deliver toxic spike proteins that damage blood vessels and organs.
Sanjay Gupta is now the discredited poster boy for American doctors-without-honor and a medical system in abject collapse. All this lying by the government, the doctors, and the news media led to “Joe Biden’s” dastardly “vaccine mandate” — and fake, too, since there is still no actual legal instrument behind it — that is the final insult to medicine as legions of health-care workers ranging from doctors and nurses to janitors quit their jobs rather than submit to forced “vaccinations.”
Jordan Schachtel: The Manipulators: Frank Luntz & far-left group wage disinformation campaign for COVID tyranny
A shadowy far-left “public health” organization and TV “pollster” Frank Luntz have teamed up to run a full court press COVID-19 disinformation campaign, with the goal of persuading governments on all levels to further mandate tyranny on the masses, while attempting to convince American citizens of the necessity of these orders. Since the beginning of COVID Mania, Luntz and his benefactors have manipulated language to gather support for totalitarian government edicts and further legitimize these radical anti-American ideas in the general population.
peter daszak: supervillain origin story
there are a million stories in the naked city, but perhaps the story that really ought to be keeping you up at night is the story of the (increasingly ironically named) ecohealth alliance (EHA) and its founder, peter daszak.
it’s a story of nefarious plans, shady dealings, and stunning lapses in judgement and it’s a story that is FAR from over and looks to be, rather than leading to culpability and future restraint, heading for another chapter of more of the same
… our story starts in 2014 when US bans were put in place on so called “gain of function” (GoF) research on viruses. such research seeks to deliberately modify viruses to make them more dangerous, either more deadly, more contagious, or both. contrary to what many seem to believe, this is not the same as a weapons program. this is (mostly) done for the purposes of immunology to try to “head off” future risks and find vaccines and treatments. and not everyone was pleased with these new limits, least of all the NIH who had been working on dozens of such projects including a number with MERS (a close relative to SARS)
anthony fauci was a fierce and longstanding proponent of GoF research.
he opposed the ban and immediately sought to circumvent it. they did so by moving (at least some) of the research to wuhan.
…….
the NIH was neck deep in this. fauci was neck deep in this. both knew they were lying when they lied.
when you hear tales like this, one could be forgiven for thinking “jail” or even “the hague” but because this is government and connected all the way to the top, instead we see the opposite.
no one is held accountable. no one is fired or even given so much as a time out in the corner. fauci fauches on and peter, well, he’s getting new grants and new collaborations working with many of the same cast of characters from the last mess.
…
this is an industry that colors outside the lines and then instantly closes ranks around the money because that’s how you get to keep doing neat, scary stuff without accountability or pesky ethics or safety people nosing around.
so many folks at NIH look dirty here. they funded this work and then astonishingly had a vaccine candidate in what is alleged to be days. this area has been a hobbyhorse for fauci and fauci pals for decades. they ran a vast cover up and are all skating and landing on their feet so far,
Hopkins: The Great New Normal Purge
… It has absolutely nothing to do with a virus, which even the New Normal authorities admit. “The Unvaccinated” are no more of a threat to anyone than any other human being … except insofar as they threaten the New Normals’ belief in their delusional ideology.
No, we are way past rationality at this point. We are witnessing the birth of a new form of totalitarianism. Not “communism.” Not “fascism.” Global-capitalist totalitarianism. Pseudo-medical totalitarianism. Pathologized totalitarianism. A form of totalitarianism without a dictator, without a definable ideology. A totalitarianism based on “science,” on “fact,” on “reality,” which it creates itself.
… By April of 2022, either we’ll all be showing our “papers” to the New Normal Gestapo to be able to earn a living, attend a school, dine at a restaurant, travel, and otherwise live our lives, or we will have thrown a monkey wrench into the machinery. I do not expect GloboCap to abandon the roll-out of the New Normal over the longer term — they are clearly committed to implementing it — but we have the power to ruin their opening act (which they’ve been planning and rehearsing for quite some time).
*** What’s Really at Stake with Vaccine Passports
in fact, rather than thinking about vaccine passports as temporary, isolated, public health-related measures, we should view them as just one example of how the pandemic is accelerating the rollout of digital identity infrastructure and consider the broader implications for society, particularly as commercial and economic incentives predominate.
…
It is critical that we consider vaccine passports in this broader context of accelerating digital identity adoption, with the risk that digital identity infrastructure built and deployed in response to COVID-19 becomes permanent…. As a result, rather than asking how a given digital vaccination passport scheme protects individual privacy and security, we must examine how the introduction of these schemes would shift power and normalize ubiquitous identification across many aspects of our lives.
…
As Harvard scholar Shoshana Zuboff outlined in her seminal work, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, thwarted any momentum for emerging online privacy efforts in the United States, instead ushering in an era of surveillance exceptionalism and contributing to the rise of surveillance capitalism. As the US government came to see the internet and large Silicon Valley companies as instrumental to the intelligence community’s mission, it pushed for sweeping and extraordinary measures that privileged security over privacy or any liberty, among them the USA PATRIOT Act, which dramatically increased the government’s ability to surveil and collect information. Twenty years after 9/11, the PATRIOT Act and other “temporary” measures remain in effect. If 9/11 ushered in an era of mass surveillance, the pandemic has the potential to introduce the “ID turn” or the age of ubiquitous identification and the end of anonymity. Such a shift would, in turn, threaten the notion of “public” life, which requires the ability to be one of many in the crowd. In this way, what may appear to be temporary public health-related measures could risk embedding permanent digital identity infrastructure without our full consideration of the consequences.
Vax Mandate Pushback Fare:
911 System In Jeopardy As First Responders Reject Jab
Boeing workers stage protest near Seattle over U.S. vaccine mandate
Chicago police union head urges cops to defy vaccine mandate
Workers at Los Alamos nuclear lab in New Mexico sue over vaccine mandate
GeoPolitical Fare:
Andrew J. Bacevich and Annelle Sheline: The End of American Militarism?
Biden Must Confront Washington’s Addiction to Force
"The force of historical decline."
What causes national and civilizational decline? Can such decline be reversed? Is the American empire, with its hundreds of overseas military bases, destined for the historical graveyard wherein lie the corpses of all the once-grand empires of the past?
The U.S. currently exhibits multiple signs of national senescence to state the obvious. On the domestic front, the decay includes: a failed response to the Covid–19 pandemic, a pandemic of prescription drug overdoses-and a grotesque judicial settlement protecting the perpetrators, a catastrophic drought in the western half of the country and catastrophic storms elsewhere, infrastructure decay, extreme income inequality, a rent-extracting healthcare system that is one of the worst performing in the Western world, and a hollowed out industrial base.
In terms of military and foreign policy, the decay has manifested in the form of a wave of technical impotence and imperial over-extension: most prominently, a $2 trillion, two-decade failure in Afghanistan, a failure to abide by the standards of a treaty intended to govern Iran’s nuclear programs (perversely leading to an acceleration of said programs), a $1 trillion failure in Iraq (ironically leading to the expansion of Iranian influence in Iraq), a $1.5 trillion expenditure on the ineffective F–35 fighter plane, being outclassed by Russian hypersonic missile technology, incessant, Sinophobic saber rattling, and, the most glaring example of American foreign failure, the emergence of an alliance among Russia, Iran, and China, induced in no small measure by hawkish American policies.
With all this in view, is it even possible America will prove an exception to the apparently inevitable force of historical decline? Does the U.S. face a real-world version of Galadriel’s test in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings saga? Galadriel, an elf-like queen who is offered and resists the One Ring, a magical device that corrupts and eventually destroys any wielder, states: “I pass the test…. I will diminish, and pass into the West and remain Galadriel.”
What is our American “One Ring”? It is the myth of American exceptionalism, the assumption that we cannot fail, is it not? Is the consciousness of ourselves as humanity’s exceptions not the license we grant ourselves as we transgress every single one of the ideals that are—let us not miss this—the very basis of our claim to chosen-people status?
….
Gibbon, Spengler, and Toynbee provide descriptions of decline and explanations for it, but none of the three offers specific prescriptions for halting decline. (Only Bergson makes such an attempt.) In our time, however, there are two thinkers given to systematic design who have compelling, technically accomplished, and somewhat overlapping explanations as to the root nature of our 21st century decline. At the same time, each has proposed solutions that are, for the most part, in stark contrast to each other. These contemporary American thinkers are Professor James K. Galbraith, the progressive economist, and Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and entrepreneur.
China condemns U.S., Canada for sending warships through Taiwan Strait
Orwellian Fare:
Ben Norton: NATO's Plans To Hack Your Brain
Western governments in the NATO military alliance are developing tactics of “cognitive warfare,” using the supposed threats of China and Russia to justify waging a “battle for your brain” in the “human domain,” to “make everyone a weapon.”
Neuberger: The Afghan War Comes Home to Minneapolis
'We're gonna find some more people ... we're hunting people now.'
Can There Be Any Doubt That Hillary Was Behind The Trump/Russia Collusion Hoax?
I feel that I should comment on the indictment of lawyer Michael Sussman by Special Counsel John Durham while the issue is still current. Very likely you have already read extensively about Durham’s indictment of Sussman, which came down on September 16. Sussman was one of the lawyers, although not the head lawyer, at the firm of Perkins Coie, who worked for the DNC and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign in 2016.
This indictment is another instance by which we are learning step by step how the Democratic powers and their press side-kicks, through strict control of a “narrative,” think that they can get a critical mass of the American people to believe literally anything, no matter how preposterous. And to a remarkable extent, they are right.
CaitOz Fare:
Oh Great They’re Putting Guns On Robodogs Now
We are ruled by warmongers and sociopaths, and none of them have healthy plans for our future. They are not kind, and they are not wise. They’re not even particularly intelligent. Unless we can find some way to pry their fingers from the steering wheel of our world so we can turn away from the direction we are headed, things will probably get very dark and scary.
The US Has Placed Itself In Charge Over Which Nations Get To Eat
The globally influential propaganda multiplier news agencies AP and AFP have both informed their readers that a “fugitive” has been extradited to the United States.
“Fugitive businessman close to Venezuela’s Maduro extradited to US,” reads the AFP headline.
“Alex Saab, a top fugitive close to Venezuela’s socialist government, has been put on a plane to the U.S. to face money laundering charges,” AP announced on Twitter.
You’d be forgiven for wondering what specifically makes this man a “fugitive”, and what that status has to do with his extradition to a foreign government whose laws should have no bearing on his life. The Colombian-born Venezuelan citizen Alex Saab, as it happens, is a “fugitive” from the US government’s self-appointed authority to decide which populations on our planet are permitted to have ready access to food. His crime is working to circumvent the crushing US sanctions which have been starving Venezuelan civilians to death by the tens of thousands.
…..Venezuela… Iran… Syria… Yemen…
Starvation is the only kind of warfare where, because of the continual reframing of mass media propaganda, it is considered perfectly normal and acceptable to deliberately target a civilian population with deadly force.
…
It should really go without saying, but a power structure that would openly starve civilians to death to ensure global domination is not the sort of power structure that humanity should want dominating the globe. The willingness to do such monstrous things exposes a depravity and a lack of wisdom which has no business determining what direction our world should take into the future.
Things are so deeply, deeply fucked in so very, very many ways, and they are getting worse so very, very fast. And because status quo narrative control is so effective, hardly anyone is even aware of this. If humanity makes it out of this mess alive, it will look like a miracle.
But also, there is so very, very much we do not understand, and humans have so very, very much untapped potential we simply haven’t woken up to yet. There is plenty of room for future miracles to be hiding in all that space.
We are where we are because of our collective conditioned behavior patterns. Any movement away from our self-destructive patterning will necessarily come from an unpatterned direction, and will therefore be unexpected and unanticipated. That’s why it will look like a miracle.
Other Quotes of the Week:
president brandon has not held a real press conference in 3 months. and so the hour begat the woman and thus came the rise of jennifer psaki, america’s very own “baghdad barbie” who took up this mantle of plentiful prevarication and bravely declaimed: “hold my appletini and watch this”
it’s becoming the greatest show on earth. the far fetched and fanciful facts and astonishing repertoire of non-answers formulated to dodge and derail debate are truly a thing to behold..
[Excellent] Long Read:
*** Karen Hunt: Utopian Madness
“. . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey
We are in the midst of a mass psychosis. This psychosis is built upon delusions which originate in the ruling class. We must never forget that no matter how powerful the elite appear to be, no matter how intelligent or benignly nerdy, they are insane. In their deluded state, they believe they have all the answers and thus they deserve to have the absolute power to dictate those answers to the rest of us. If we disagree we are a danger to ourselves and to society. This they truly believe. They are our saviors.
In order to accomplish their goal of saving humanity they must inflict “menticide” on the masses, or a killing of the mind and the spirit. Joost Meerloo explains this in his book, The Rape of the Mind:
“Menticide is an old crime against the human mind and spirit but systematized anew. It is an organized system of psychological intervention and judicial perversion through which a [ruling class] can imprint [their] own opportunistic thoughts upon the minds of those [they] plan to use and destroy.”
In order to accomplish this, the elite must manufacture waves of fear within the populace. Each wave is followed by a period of relative calm, but after each calm, the fear intensifies. We’ve experienced such a period of calm this summer. A respite from our prisons. We were allowed to go mask-less, to travel a bit more, gyms reopened. And now, everything is even worse. By the winter the waves of terror, in the form of ever worsening news, conflicting reports and downright lies, will become overwhelming.
Confusion has resulted in the minds of all of us experiencing these onslaughts. Desperately, we try to decipher the strange and terrifying things that are happening around us and to us.
Meerloo further explains:
“Each wave of terrorizing . . . creates its effects more easily – after a breathing spell – than the one that preceded it because people are still disturbed by their previous experience. Morality becomes lower and lower, and the psychological effects of each new propaganda campaign become stronger; it reaches a public already softened up.”
Emotion, without reasoned thought to temper it, becomes the automatic response and, we feel, justifiably so. Meerloo again:
“Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot—it confuses those who think straight. The Big Lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal … than logic and reason. While the [people] are still searching for a reasonable counter-argument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault [them]with another.”
If you feel like you are always one step behind the game, you are. We keep repeating to one another in horrified fashion “I can’t believe this is happening.” And the more we say that, the more it normalizes the realization that these things we “can’t believe are happening” are happening. There becomes no answer other than to accept it.
Unless you live in a hut in the middle of the Amazon forest (and that’s beginning to look very appealing) you cannot escape the onslaught. Every single person with a smart phone gives in to this repeated propaganda, even those who think they don’t, because unless we throw away our devices, we are under its power to constantly influence us. And I mean constantly. Very few people ever turn off their devices anymore. We have learned to be connected twenty-four/seven. Throwing away our devices is not an option for anyone who wants to survive let alone excel in modern society.
This realization creates the “killing of the mind.”
…
But there is hope, offered to us by the all wise and powerful gods. Once we have accepted the totalitarian of health and safety “dos and don’ts,” we have a breakthrough of “psychotic insight.” Following the rules means we will be saved. Order can be restored. It does not matter if the rules are absurd, or if they say one thing one day and the opposite the next. We have received so much conflicting information by this point, our brains are too weary to contemplate unraveling it.
As one example, the science on masks has changed multiple times, but that’s okay because science changes. On the other hand, only the changes made by the State-accepted narrative are allowed. Anyone who presents an opposing view, no matter how rational—even if it has the potential to save millions of lives—is a heretic.
…
COVID was the perfect umbrella under which to create this new world. With the vaccine, and the FDA approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech vax, we have officially entered the Era of Totalitarian Rule under the guise of Health and Safety.
……
How can Musk and the others like him be so stupid?
Stupid, you say? They are the most brilliant minds. They are the visionaries who will catapult us into the future. Save us all. Why be such a downer?
Because they are all missing—we are all missing—the most fundamental truth of truths: our dangerous selves.
Just listen to the irrationality of famed scientist Stephen Hawking:
“Aggression may have had survival advantage in caveman days…but now it threatens to destroy us all. A major nuclear war would be the end of civilization, and maybe the end of the human race so space travel is our best bet for survival.”
Hawking understands the basic flaws of human nature. His stupidity comes in his solution: Leave the mess behind and go make an even bigger mess someplace else.
…
Humans have always ruled by fear and manipulation rather than compassion and truth. Just look at how the gods are even now achieving their goals through mass psychosis. We fight for power over one another, even within families. Nations threaten to take over each other’s territories. We use our best minds to develop ever more powerful killing devices. We impose our beliefs on one another. We exploit the earth and then dishonestly change from one method of exploitation to a new one, under the guise of caring for the planet. But the real reason is greed among the gods.
…
But they are not God. They are no different than any of us, only they hate to be reminded of that. They play a dangerous game. One they believe they can win because they have lost all connection to reality. They are irrational and arrogant.
And in following their lead, we are all losing our minds.
If we don’t rise up and cry from the highest mountains that these monsters above us are no better than bullies on the schoolyard and refuse to follow them, then we will never get anywhere. And more than that, if we don’t acknowledge that we let them do it by following their example, we are implicit and just as responsible for the catastrophic results.
…
Milan Kundera says in The Book of Laugher and Forgetting that “The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything.”
In our current world, we have given up our reason and submitted to the will of the gods.
…
The day is upon us when even our faces won’t matter anymore. We are being primed for this with masks.
…
“Quarantine” is a word used for those who are sick. But what we are actually experiencing is “house arrest.” We accept these backwards and upside down words without thought. In Australia they now have “centers for national resilience” where the sick can be held for indefinite periods of time. The sick? These are prisons.
…
I think most common folk are not fooled by these promises. We know the elite lie. Just like the promises of our government meant nothing for those left behind in Afghanistan. Just like the promises of a “new normal” if we obey the COVID rules. More and more people are rising up and saying forget it.
…
The list goes on and on of people rising up.
Will it be enough?
I don’t know. But what we must get back to is what the agenda really is. To exploit the common man and every resource on this planet, to achieve life among the stars for an elite few, and all that entails.
Those earthly gods who want to do this are insane. They want us all there with them, swimming in the sea of their insanity and eventually drowning.
…
They are schoolyard bullies playing a dangerous game beyond their ability and we must stop them. There is a beautiful world awaiting us all. And the only way to find it is to snap out of the mass psychosis and bring down the gods.
Other Fare:
Taibbi: Tea with Gruden.
Pics of the Week:
italian vaccine passport protests
VT, the most vaxx’d state:
No comments:
Post a Comment