Regular Fare:
“Capitalism’s over”: The man who made millions by betting the economy would never recover
Gary Stevenson, the Patriotic Millionaire and former trader, on predicting disaster – and why it can only be avoided by closing the wealth gap
… Now 35, having retired in 2014, Stevenson is an economist focusing on wealth inequality.
… While on the trading floor, he developed his theory: the impact of wealth inequality on demand was dooming the post-crash recovery. His job was to predict interest rates, which he described as a “pretty close proxy to predicting recovery”. While he read economic forecasts that rates would rise, Stevenson bet the opposite.
Back home, old friends and their families told him that they were remortgaging or selling their houses, saving up every penny, struggling to buy property or pass it down to their children. While his well-off colleagues were buying houses, the people of his past had no money to spend – wealth stopped flowing through the system. Therefore, went his theory, interest rates would never rise.
*** Blair Fix: The Truth About Inflation
Inflation is always and everywhere a phenomenon of structural change. — Jonathan Nitzan
Milton Friedman has been dead for more than a decade, but his ghost still haunts us. In the 1960s, Friedman declared that inflation is ‘always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon’ — a problem of printing too much money. Since then, whenever inflation rears its head, you can count on someone to reanimate Friedman’s ghost and blame the government for spending too much.
If only inflation were so simple.
Like much of economic theory, Friedman’s thinking appears plausible on first glance. Inflation is a general rise in prices. And since prices are nothing but the exchange of money, more circulating money means prices must increase. Hence, inflation is ‘always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon’.
Unfortunately, this thinking falls apart on further inspection. The problem is that it treats inflation as a uniform rise in prices. That’s theoretically convenient, but empirically false. In the real world, inflation is wildly divergent. ….
…
Back to inflation. Faced with rising prices, most monetarists will quickly call for government belt tightening. Their logic works like this:
· Inflation is linked to the money supply, via the formula MV = PT (where M is the quantity of money and P is the average price level);
· The government controls the money supply;
· The government needs to spend less.
Like most good ideologies, this argument contains a devious trick. What monetarists won’t tell you is that the money supply gives meaningful insight into inflation only if price change is uniform. If price change varies wildly by commodity (as it does in the real world), then the movement of the average price tells you little (if anything) about the movement of individual prices. And that means the money supply tells you little (if anything) about real-world inflation.
Faced with this problem, the monetarist solution is to make their ideas ‘work in theory’. Assume inflation is uniform. Call for austerity. Repeat.
…..
Having seen that price change varies greatly between commodities, you might wonder why this matters. Well, it matters because it means that inflation is not purely a ‘monetary’ phenomenon. Inflation redistributes income.
Since doing his doctoral work in the 1990s, Jonathan Nitzan has gone on to publish (together with Shimshon Bichler) some eye-opening research on the distributional effects of inflation. Nitzan and Bichler have discovered, for instance, that inflation systematically benefits big business.
…
Notice how this evidence changes your view of inflation. It makes it hard to blame government for the problem. You see, if big business is systematically benefiting from inflation, it implies that these big corporations are raising prices faster than everyone else. In other words, it is oligopolies that are driving inflation.
So it seems that in the real world, inflation looks nothing like it does in economics textbooks. Yes, inflation is a ‘monetary phenomenon’ — as is anything to do with prices. But more importantly, inflation is a power struggle over who can raise prices the fastest.
Other Charts:
(source links: one, two, )
Back to inflation. Faced with rising prices, most monetarists will quickly call for government belt tightening. Their logic works like this:
· Inflation is linked to the money supply, via the formula MV = PT (where M is the quantity of money and P is the average price level);
· The government controls the money supply;
· The government needs to spend less.
Like most good ideologies, this argument contains a devious trick. What monetarists won’t tell you is that the money supply gives meaningful insight into inflation only if price change is uniform. If price change varies wildly by commodity (as it does in the real world), then the movement of the average price tells you little (if anything) about the movement of individual prices. And that means the money supply tells you little (if anything) about real-world inflation.
Faced with this problem, the monetarist solution is to make their ideas ‘work in theory’. Assume inflation is uniform. Call for austerity. Repeat.
…..
Having seen that price change varies greatly between commodities, you might wonder why this matters. Well, it matters because it means that inflation is not purely a ‘monetary’ phenomenon. Inflation redistributes income.
Since doing his doctoral work in the 1990s, Jonathan Nitzan has gone on to publish (together with Shimshon Bichler) some eye-opening research on the distributional effects of inflation. Nitzan and Bichler have discovered, for instance, that inflation systematically benefits big business.
…
Notice how this evidence changes your view of inflation. It makes it hard to blame government for the problem. You see, if big business is systematically benefiting from inflation, it implies that these big corporations are raising prices faster than everyone else. In other words, it is oligopolies that are driving inflation.
So it seems that in the real world, inflation looks nothing like it does in economics textbooks. Yes, inflation is a ‘monetary phenomenon’ — as is anything to do with prices. But more importantly, inflation is a power struggle over who can raise prices the fastest.
Other Charts:
(source links: one, two, )
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Ten Million a Year
David Wallace-Wells on polluted air.
Deep Adaptation: Could Climate Change Lead To Societal Collapse?
- The ‘Deep Adaptation’ movement situates the conversation about society’s future in a new realm, one in which catastrophic climate change is a given.
- The movement creates a framework to think about climate adaptation by inviting people to contemplate four guiding questions.
- But despite its contributions to thinking about climate change, ‘Deep Adaptation’ has a weak premise at its core: that climate change will lead to society’s collapse.
Contrarian Perspectives
Extra [controversial or non-market-related] Fare:
*** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Regular Fare:
The Bottlemen: Gucci Gear X
Riley and Dan reflect on the contours of Canada's response to ongoing climate and ecological collapse happening in its West, and how through all its activities it is encouraging more of the same.
Maximum Excess
For a multitude of reasons, the pandemic took World inequality from asinine to lethal levels. Most pundits today blame central banks for pumping liquidity into bond markets and setting off a global hunt for yield that has bid up every asset class on the planet. They assiduously ignore their own role in embracing this asset bubble and informing us that anything that goes wrong with it is a "policy error", their legal escape clause from culpability. However, we know that these people are addicted to monetary stimulus.
…
There are two sides to the price/rent ratio. One side is partying like it's 1929 and the other side is skipping the holidays this year.
The Edge Of The Abyss
Re: Hussman
So let me get this straight, we have the most concurrent indications of a market top in decades, but you are NOT calling the top. Why? Because to do so would risk credibility if the melt-up continues, that's why.
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Worse yet, he gets defensive about being a “perma-bear”. He apologizes for not taking part in this festival of idiots. Make no mistake, I may be a perma-bear now, but I will gladly use the buy order when valuations return to earth. I call it buy low and sell high. It’s an old fashioned concept that today’s speculators have never heard about.
…
You cannot be too bearish right nor too critical of this festival of idiots. But you can put your capital and credibility at risk by having ANY part in it.
Welsh: The Terror Of Electronic Money
Electronic money is inherently authoritarian. (Bitcoin is authoritarian and deflationary, and deflation rewards first movers and the rich far more than normal people.)
…
If work sucks, life sucks. And with e-money, you won’t even be able to opt out of the formal economy.
Welcome to Hell.
Older Fare:
***** Blair Fix: Can the World Get Along Without Natural Resources?
…
If this bright future does come to pass, it will be because we’ve manage to shed our delusions. Contrary to the proclamations of neoclassical economists (like Robert Solow), the world cannot get along without natural resources. That this fact needs stating is a testament to the shallowness of economic theory.
In this post, I show you how economists reached such bizarre conclusions. And I offer some thoughts about the role that resources actually play in sustaining human societies.
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Although climate change may destroy our food supply, we shouldn’t worry. According to Nordhaus, we’ll all be safe inside our air-conditioned offices, with productivity unimpaired. For this tortured logic, Nordhaus was awarded the (fake) Nobel prize in economics. Noting the irony, anthropologist Jason Hickel aptly called it the “The Nobel Prize for Climate Catastrophe”. (If you’re appalled by Nordhaus’ work — and you should be — check out Steve Keen’s in-depth debunking of it).
…
The physicist Arthur Eddington once remarked: “if your theory is found to be against the [laws] of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.” Neoclassical economics profoundly contradicts these laws. Yet sadly, we’re still awaiting its humiliating collapse. Neoclassical economics is founded on an embarrassing error. It assumes that income indicates contribution to production. For a century, this error has led economists to conclude that natural resources are unimportant. They see that the natural resource sector earns a tiny fraction of all income. And so they infer that we could get rid of this activity and still retain the vast majority of ‘economic output’. Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t work like that. Income doesn’t tell us about the importance of resource flows. It never has and it never will.
(Unsustainability / Ecological / Climate) Collapse Fare:
We Don't Talk About Collapse To Revel In It, We Talk About Collapse to Prevent It
If one possible result of the current system is collapse, realizing the system itself must be changed isn't doom-and-gloom, it's problem-solving.
…
It's not the analysis of vulnerabilities that causes collapse, it's refusing to look at vulnerabilities because to do so is considered negative. Why not be optimistic and just go with the consensus that the status quo is impervious to serious disruption? Can-do optimism is all that's needed to overcome any spot of bother.
The problem is humanity's propensity to confuse optimism with magical thinking.
Picking Winners
In 1997 there was the fight over the Kyoto Protocol, widely criticized for concessions to the US insistence on market mechanisms; followed in 2001 by George W. Bush’s announcement that he would not implement it anyway. In 2009, many expected that Barack Obama’s election would clear the way for a legally binding agreement at COP15, in Copenhagen – officially branded ‘Hopenhagen’ by the UN. Instead, negotiations nearly collapsed over bitter disagreement between developed and developing countries, and eventually culminated in a weak deal brokered behind closed doors by Obama and Wen Jiabao. Six years later, the Paris agreement was hailed as a world-historic triumph, even though the voluntary commitments made by individual member states failed to add up to the agreement’s stated goals. As climate activists pointed out, and even the text of the agreement acknowledged, although the agreement set a goal of limiting global warming to ‘well below 2º C’, the aggregated commitments would result in an estimated 3º of warming. Nor were the Paris Accords complete: they dictated that signatories update their pledges five years later. This was the key task set for COP26 in Glasgow.
… Pledges aside, carbon emissions continue more or less unabated.
Week 47: Nuclear fusion energy is coming. Will it save us?
In this issue: ▸ How fusion energy works ▸ New hope for fusion ▸ The fusion players ▸ The places we cannot afford to destroy ▸ Environmentalists do not have greener portfolios ▸ And much more...
In other news, the places humanity must not destroy to avoid climate chaos have been revealed.
A detailed new mapping has pinpointed the carbon-rich forests and peatlands that humanity cannot afford to destroy if climate catastrophe is to be avoided. The vast forests and peatlands of Russia, Canada and the US are vital, researchers found, as are tropical forests in the Amazon, Congo and south-east Asia.
Climate Tweets of the Week:
1. It's not very surprising that journalists and scientists have been unable or unwilling to take my messaging seriously, but it's the leading activists who have been the greatest disappointment. It's a matter of serious regret.
2. It's only when people have grasped the true nature of our predicament (aerosols, high climate sensitivity etc) that they can act appropriately instead of making the situation even worse.
...
COVID Fare:
Jessica Rose: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has written a new book
It just might blow your mind.
…
Here’s a summary of the book by RFK himself:
In my book, I lay bare how Fauci, Gates and their collaborators:
*** Demasi: Are adverse events in Covid-19 vaccine trials under-reported?
‘Severe Reactions’ to Covid Vaccines are Far More Common Than Official Data Show: Here is the Stunning New Evidence
The Baris poll shows that simply the “serious adverse effects” from the Covid vaccines – described as events so serious they “prevent daily activity” – were reported to be 5.2% among all groups. This spans self-identified Democrat, Republican, and Independent voters. Independent voters had the highest reported serious adverse effect rate at 6.5%.
…
it’s not just pollsters who are sounding the alarm on serious Covid vaccine events: Cardiologists are reporting a huge spike in heart inflammation cases to the American Heart Association (AHA). A cardiac surgeon has circulated a warning to the AHA that heart inflammation markers are drastically increasing in patients in conjunction with increasing mRNA Covid vaccination rates. …“Dr. Jessica Rose, who is normally positive about vaccines, says that VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System), the US database for vaccine injuries, has only managed to collect an estimated 1% of the total number of serious side effects from mRNA injections,’
Pfizer, Moderna Vaccines ‘Dramatically Increase’ Heart Attack Risk, Renowned Cardiologist Warns
In an analysis presented during a meeting of the American Heart Association, Dr. Steven Gundry, a pioneer in infant heart transplant surgery, said mRNA COVID vaccines put many patients at higher risk of a new acute coronary syndrome, such as a heart attack.
Berenson: A frightening new potential explanation for vaccine-driven myocarditis and other problems
Researchers in the New England Journal of Medicine raise the possibility of an uncontrolled autoimmune response to the coronavirus spike protein that may last indefinitely
Downstream effects of the antibodies that people produce against the coronavirus spike protein may lead to myocarditis and even neurological concerns, two veteran medical researchers have written in the top medical journal in the United States.
Our immune systems produce these antibodies in response to both vaccination and natural infection with Covid. However - though the researchers do not say so explicitly, possibly because doing so would be politically untenable - spike protein antibody levels are MUCH higher following vaccination than infection. Thus the downstream response to vaccination may be more severe.
El gato malo: is it vaccines or is it covid causing athletes to collapse on the field?
Jessica Rose: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has written a new book
It just might blow your mind.
…
Here’s a summary of the book by RFK himself:
In my book, I lay bare how Fauci, Gates and their collaborators:
- invented and weaponized a parade of fraudulently concocted global pandemics, including bird flu (2005), swine flu (2009) and Zika (2015-2016), in order to sell novel vaccines, enrich their Pharma partners and increase the power of public health technocrats and Gates’ entourage of international agencies.
- used “gain-of-function” experiments to breed pandemic superbugs in shoddily constructed, poorly regulated laboratories in Wuhan, China, and elsewhere, under conditions that almost certainly guaranteed the escape of weaponized microbes, in partnership with the Pentagon, the Chinese military and a shady cabal of bioweapons grifters.
- made a series of prescient predictions about the imminent COVID-19 pandemic — almost to the day. Their precision soothsaying further awed a fawning, credulous and scientifically illiterate media that treats Gates and Fauci as religious deities, insulates them from public criticism and vilifies their doubters as heretics and “conspiracy theorists.” Adulatory mainstream media abetted Fauci’s conspiracy to cover up COVID’s origins at the Wuhan lab.
- teamed with government technocrats, military and intelligence planners, and health officials from the U.S., Europe and China to stage sophisticated pandemic “simulations” and “Germ Games.” Exercises like these, encouraged by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, laid the groundwork for imposition of global totalitarianism, including compulsory masking, lockdowns, mass propaganda and censorship, with the ultimate goal of mandating the coercive vaccination of 7 billion humans.
- practiced, in each of their “simulations,” psychological warfare techniques to create chaos, stoke fear, shatter economies, destroy public morale and quash individual self-expression — and then impose autocratic governance.
*** Demasi: Are adverse events in Covid-19 vaccine trials under-reported?
‘Severe Reactions’ to Covid Vaccines are Far More Common Than Official Data Show: Here is the Stunning New Evidence
The Baris poll shows that simply the “serious adverse effects” from the Covid vaccines – described as events so serious they “prevent daily activity” – were reported to be 5.2% among all groups. This spans self-identified Democrat, Republican, and Independent voters. Independent voters had the highest reported serious adverse effect rate at 6.5%.
…
it’s not just pollsters who are sounding the alarm on serious Covid vaccine events: Cardiologists are reporting a huge spike in heart inflammation cases to the American Heart Association (AHA). A cardiac surgeon has circulated a warning to the AHA that heart inflammation markers are drastically increasing in patients in conjunction with increasing mRNA Covid vaccination rates. …“Dr. Jessica Rose, who is normally positive about vaccines, says that VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System), the US database for vaccine injuries, has only managed to collect an estimated 1% of the total number of serious side effects from mRNA injections,’
Pfizer, Moderna Vaccines ‘Dramatically Increase’ Heart Attack Risk, Renowned Cardiologist Warns
In an analysis presented during a meeting of the American Heart Association, Dr. Steven Gundry, a pioneer in infant heart transplant surgery, said mRNA COVID vaccines put many patients at higher risk of a new acute coronary syndrome, such as a heart attack.
Berenson: A frightening new potential explanation for vaccine-driven myocarditis and other problems
Researchers in the New England Journal of Medicine raise the possibility of an uncontrolled autoimmune response to the coronavirus spike protein that may last indefinitely
Downstream effects of the antibodies that people produce against the coronavirus spike protein may lead to myocarditis and even neurological concerns, two veteran medical researchers have written in the top medical journal in the United States.
Our immune systems produce these antibodies in response to both vaccination and natural infection with Covid. However - though the researchers do not say so explicitly, possibly because doing so would be politically untenable - spike protein antibody levels are MUCH higher following vaccination than infection. Thus the downstream response to vaccination may be more severe.
El gato malo: is it vaccines or is it covid causing athletes to collapse on the field?
they have stopped denying that it’s happening.
it has become sufficiently common and sufficiently obvious that they can no longer ignore it and must address it instead and offer up an explanation.
as i will lay out below, this poses a serious problem for them because now we have a testable hypothesis.
if we agree that athletes are, indeed having an extremely disproportionate number of heart issues of late, then the “why” can be assessed by timing.
· if it’s covid causing this issue, it should have been present last year as well.
· if it’s the vaccines, this issue should have emerged in 2021 but not in 2020.
FDA report finds all-cause mortality higher among vaccinated
Lyons-Weiler: We Saw This Coming... Increased Risk of New Variant Infection in the Vaccinated Only
Preprint of a study shows increased risk of infection in the vaccinated. We Tried To Warn You. #Pathogenicpriming is Real.
… Here’s the title, the link and the Abstract. The article speaks for itself.
Increased risk of infection with SARS-CoV-2 Beta, Gamma, and Delta variant compared to Alpha variant in vaccinated individuals
El gato malo: more early takes on omicron variant
reports from SA indicate that the virus is VERY mild
a virus “wants” one thing: to spread. make a copy of me and pass it on. that’s the whole ballgame. harming the host and incapacitating them is maladaptive to this goal. mild viruses spread better. asymptomatic viruses spread best of all. and that looks more and more like the case here. omicron looks milder than delta
… Dr. Eli David: "It may be highly transmissible, but so far the cases we are seeing are extremely mild." —Chair of the South African Medical Association
… this is good news, not a reason for terror. the ideal outcome would be a virus with no symptoms and infinite spread that would immediately inoculate everyone.
… as this virus looks to outcompete delta, but with lower risk, the idea that we want to keep it out seems exactly wrong. this is the variant you want. more spread, considerably less risk, mostly asymptomatic, but will generate the real, sterilizing immunity that the vaccines do not.
this is how pandemics end, not how panics should begin.
watching the west once more lose its collective mind is just pathetic.
…pandemics can and do end themselves and it’s become manifestly obvious that the vaccines developed here and pushed endlessly as panacea are of little to no help in that regard and quite a strong case to be made that they have made it, overall, worse for everyone, including the vaccinated.
boosters, lockdowns, and travel bans are not the way out. the generation of low risk natural herd immunity is.
Are We Overreacting to Omicron?
…
For example, the vaccine has failed to stop infection and spread against Delta. We have research findings by Singanayagam et al. (fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including to fully vaccinated contacts), by Chau et al. (viral loads of breakthrough Delta variant infection cases in vaccinated nurses were 251 times higher than those of cases infected with prior strains early 2020), and by Riemersma et al. (no difference in viral loads when comparing unvaccinated individuals to those who have vaccine “breakthrough” infections and if vaccinated individuals become infected with the delta variant, they may be sources of SARS-CoV-2 transmission to others) that reveal the vaccines have very suboptimal efficacy.
This situation of the vaccinated being infectious and transmitting the virus has also emerged in seminal nosocomial outbreak papers by Chau et al. (HCWs in Vietnam), the Finland hospital outbreak (spread among HCWs and patients), and the Israel hospital outbreak (spread among HCWs and patients). These studies have also revealed that the PPE and masking were essentially ineffective within the healthcare setting. All of the HCWs were double-vaccinated yet there was extensive spread to themselves and their patients.
El gato malo: botaswana (b.1.1.529) variant histrionics
do humans ever get tired of being lied to and falling for the same tricks?
just in time for the holidays and the real start of seasonal covid expression, here’s the same exact pollyannas prophesying the same exact doom using the same exact tactics of “super scary new variant.”
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“most mutations ever on the spike protein!” sounds scary, but it’s not.
it might actually be great news. viruses tend to mutate to become less, not more dangerous. that’s their evolutionary gradient to maximize reproductive fitness. killing the host is badly maladaptive.
Schachtel: New variant hysteria comes from same institution that popularized lockdowns & previous COVID scares
Just as with previous ruling class-fomented bouts of Hysteria-19, there is no statistical cause for alarm over this new strain, which is one of over 100,000 mutations of the coronavirus.
The “new strain” has hardly produced any lab confirmed cases, but a panicked narrative has already been seeded in the public. The U.K. in particular has driven the fear to new levels.
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Similar to every other government-prescribed policy to fight a war on a virus, travel bans do not actually work to stop a virus, but they do successfully agitate the markets and masses into bouts of madness.
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Outside of the Chinese Communist Party, no other institution has been as influential in driving destructive COVID-19 policies than Imperial College London.
Denninger: Only Two Things Are Infinite....
… This “variant” has no evidence of being more-deadly; it may in fact be less-so. Indeed that is the natural mutational pattern coronaviruses follow over time. There is no evidence in the form, for example, of higher hospital admissions, ICU utilization and death in those in which this variant has been detected. In other words thus far all the scaremongering has been based on….. exactly nothing as there are no facts currently in evidence to support such fear.
The vaccines clearly do not work. International travel has been vaccinated-only everywhere for quite some time. So the person(s) who brought the virus into your nation with this “variant” were vaccinated.
Kirsch: 45% of deaths after COVID vaccination happen in the first 2 weeks
It's 59% at 4 weeks and 63% at 5 weeks. Doing some very conservative estimates on the number of Americans killed by the vaccine leads to the inevitable conclusion that the vaccines should be stopped.
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Note: The actual number killed by the vaccines is at least 150K (estimated 8 different ways), but we’re trying to be as conservative as possible here giving any critics nothing to complain about.
Lyons-Weiler: Fauci's Most Blatant and Harmful Political Statement Yet. His Laughing was Inappropriate and Weird
Repeats he "is Science"; Laughs off criticism during the pandemic. And no, Dr. Fauci, you are (still) not Science. This will not age well.
CDC: 30% of Hospital Workers in US Still Unvaccinated
Arjun Srinivasan, MD, associate director for healthcare-associated infection prevention programs at the CDC: Healthcare personnel "are not fully immune from vaccine misinformation,"
A President Betrayed by Bureaucrats: Scott Atlas’s Masterpiece on Covid
I’m a voracious reader of Covid books but nothing could have prepared me for Scott Atlas’s A Plague Upon Our House, a full and mind-blowing account of the famed scientist’s personal experience with the Covid era and a luridly detailed account of his time at the White House. The book is hot fire, from page one to the last, and will permanently affect your view of not only this pandemic and the policy response but also the workings of public health in general. Atlas’s book has exposed a scandal for the ages. It is enormously valuable because it fully blows up what seems to be an emerging fake story involving a supposedly Covid-denying president who did nothing vs. heroic scientists in the White House who urged compulsory mitigating measures consistent with prevailing scientific opinion. Not one word of that is true. Atlas’s book, I hope, makes it impossible to tell such tall tales without embarrassment.
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If you have heretofore believed that science drives pandemic public policy, this book will shock you. Atlas’s recounting of the unbearably poor thinking on the part of government-based “infectious disease experts” will make your jaw drop
Rapid and Effective Vitamin D Supplementation May Present Better Clinical Outcomes in COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) Patients by Altering Serum INOS1, IL1B, IFNg, Cathelicidin-LL37, and ICAM1
Conclusions: Vitamin D treatment shortened hospital stay and decreased mortality in COVID-19 cases, even in the existence of comorbidities. Vitamin D supplementation is effective on various target parameters; therefore, it is essential for COVID-19 treatment.
Eugyppius: Ignorant and Afraid
Politicians and bureaucrats aren't immune to their own propaganda, and they really are as ill-informed as they seem.
…
While I don’t agree with James Lindsay, that we are on the verge of a Second Enlightment, I think his distinction between official, curated, peer-reviewed information and analysis; and counter-cultural internet hive-mind information and analysis, is instructive.
All in all, it is the hive-mind that has been vastly more successful at understanding what is going on – not only as far as Corona, but everywhere. This has been obvious now for years. It is even true in my own field, where the official discourse suffers from a pervasive, unoriginal banality, while alternative theories pondered by intelligent outsiders and anonymous Twitter accounts become every day vastly more interesting. The reasons are simple: There are more people involved; the barriers to publishing are lower; nodes that provide bad analysis are easily removed; the thinkers are more thoroughly networked to each other; they gather audiences solely on the basis of their ability; they consider everything, not just the official line.
Meanwhile, it is only official, curated information that is allowed to inform bureaucratic decisions. Products of the hive-mind are deliberately excluded, via gate-keeping mechanisms like peer review and credentialism. All of the terrified Angela Merkels of the world act within an environment of outdated, poor-quality information, all the time.
Again, this is not unique to Corona. In an interview I will never find again, someone asked Noam Chomsky about the failures surrounding the American debacle in Afghanistan. He responded that it was above all a reflection of the distorted and inaccurate intelligence assessments that pollute the thought of American foreign policy planners and military strategists. Random people on the internet, he said, had a better view of the situation from the start.
Exactly the same phenomenon plagues official responses to Corona. The problem with curated information isn’t just that it is slow, subject to inertia, and produced by insular out-of-touch functionaries. Because the information has political importance, there are incentives everywhere to manipulate and degrade its quality. Bureaucratic actors will lie about what is going on to curry favour, save face or evade blame. What is more, many advisers, analysts and modellers are only in the position of providing analysis in the first place, because we need more women in STEM, or because they tell the Faucis of the world what they want to hear, or because they have the right combination of sociopathy and narrow-mindedness necessary to ascend complex bureaucratic hierarchies.
Corona policies really are as stupid as they look. Politicians and bureaucrats have locked themselves into a sad parody of the film Contagion, and their increasingly unsustainable, erratic behaviour merely reflects their desperation.
Ilargi: It’s Time To Dump Pfizer
In 2020, no American was vaccinated. In 2021, 60% of them were. If the vaccines had been effective, that should have meant 60% fewer positive tests, hospitalizations, and certainly deaths, or if not 60%, at least a substantial percentage. But the opposite happened: Covid deaths went up, and not a little bit. Between mid August and mid November 2021, they increased some … 60%.
That is all you need to know. The vaccines do not work. And not just “not as advertized”, they do not work at all. Granted, there appears to be a 2-3 month window in which they suppress something in the virus, but 2-3 months is not nearly enough to be labeled a “vaccine”. And the “something” may well be just an accumulation of binding antibodies that turn against the “patient”‘s immune system, certainly when boosters are applied.
Of course the media, politics and industry claim it’s because “the unvaccinated act as reservoirs of the virus” (someone actually said that), and it’s because of Delta. But no separate vaccine was ever launched for Delta, and the boosters people get now are the same substance that they claim made boosters necessary in the first place. The Science.
Forget it all. The vaccines don’t work, and we need to move on. But we can’t. Because our “leaders” signed deals with Pfizer et al that gave the latter complete immunity from any harm caused by their vaccines, and -more importantly- made it illegal to use, promote, research, any other drugs that could have worked against Covid. And those deals still stand now that the vaccines have failed.
Kirsch: The right way to handle the pandemic
33 recommendations, including:
Vaccines
· Stop the vaccines now. The current COVID vaccines kill more people than they can possibly save from COVID, even if they were 100% effective
…
Masks
· Instruct public health officers to recommend that businesses post signs saying WARNING: face masks are NOT recommended. They have not been shown to stop COVID and mask wearing may be harmful to your health.
Fairness
· There should be no restrictions whatsoever placed on any person who has recovered from a COVID infection.
· Vaccinated and unvaccinated people should be treated the same way since they are equally likely to be infected or spread COVID.
…
Accountability
· Criminal prosecution against FDA, CDC, and NIH leaders who are suppressing the science in favor of the narrative. I can assure you, these people are corrupt.
Kirsch: How to oppose federal, state, local, employer, school, and club masking guidelines
Masks don't work. So why do we have masking requirements on planes, at work, etc? What's the best way to end the madness?
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They said I must comply with their guidelines. Wow.
They were not interested in discussing the science or medical rational. I asked for the cost-benefit analysis they used to come up with this recommendation. I received nothing. I asked for the name of their (obviously incompetent) medical advisor who is advising the board, and received no answer.
This is ridiculous. What is happening at Martis Camp is no different than what is happening everywhere else. The fact that science doesn’t matter to any of these people is evidence of mass brainwashing. People do what the are told to do, even if it harms their health. They don’t question authority even when the authority is wrong.
*** Jessica Rose: Ho, Ho, Ho?
Santa also is a big fan of Joe Rogan, by the way. Sources tell me.
COVID Anecdotal Fare:
Yet Another Professional Soccer Player Suddenly Collapses In The Middle Of A Game
*** New England Journal of Misinformation
Brianne Dressen Letter
I was a participant in Astra-Zeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine trial [1]. I suffered serious and severe adverse effects after the first dose of AZC1222, was disabled and remain so today.
I write to request inaccuracies in the trial publication be corrected, and to demand complete reporting of the trial publication and results.
The authors state that 180 AZD1222 recipients “withdrew” and “all serious adverse events will be recorded from the time of informed consent through day 730.” This is inaccurate. During hospitalization due to my adverse events, the trial investigators unblinded me, saw that I had received AZD1222 and recommended that I not receive the second dose. The trial smartphone app was subsequently disabled on my phone. I did not withdraw. I was withdrawn, and AstraZeneca chose to stop collecting my data after 60 days despite the fact that I remain with persistent symptoms one year later.
The trial publication lacks complete reporting of my adverse events, and readers are not informed that the trial smartphone app did not allow study participants to record adverse events in their own words.
The authors state that “No new vaccine-related safety signals were identified” but this may be an unreliable conclusion due to test clinics and the study sponsor neither recording nor reporting adverse events that did occur in study participants like myself.
Tessa Lena: Seeing the Face of the Machine: Medical Edition
So when it comes to this current situation, and the holy medical product that has been injuring many people, the victims need to be heard. On the basic level, whether one believes in conspiracies or not, it’s just not fair at all that the people who have been harmed—and there are many—get to see the betrayer’s back, are told to talk to the hand, and so on. It’s just not fair. Can we agree on that?
Here is a testimony by Brianne Dressen who volunteered for a trial, was injured, removed from the trial, and had to refinance her home to pay for healthcare expenses
Tens of Thousands of Australians Want Compensation for COVID Vaccine Injuries
COVID Quotes of the Week:
Proponents of vaccine mandates typically claim that everyone who can be vaccinated has a moral or ethical obligation to do so for the sake of those who cannot be vaccinated, or in the interest of public health. I evaluate several previously undertheorised premises implicit to the ‘obligation to vaccinate’ type of arguments and show that the general conclusion is false: there is neither a moral obligation to vaccinate nor a sound ethical basis to mandate vaccination under any circumstances, even for hypothetical vaccines that are medically risk-free. Agent autonomy with respect to self-constitution has absolute normative priority over reduction or elimination of the associated risks to life. In practical terms, mandatory vaccination amounts to discrimination against healthy, innate biological characteristics, which goes against the established ethical norms and is also defeasible a priori. …
“Restrictions on freedoms can be justified only if they are reasonably necessary to preserve what makes human life worth living, because freedom is a necessary condition of a life worth living and, therefore, worth preserving.”
Yves Smith: Specifically, at 3:48, Topol having just depicted Delta as unanticipated, says of Omicron that it was even more unanticipated because it is chock full of mutations. Having heard years of “Whocoulddanode?” after the global financial crisis, it’s galling to hear that excuse for elite failure trotted out again.
Dr Angelique Coetzee: “It’s all speculation at this stage. It may be it’s highly transmissible, but so far the cases we are seeing are extremely mild,” she said. “Maybe two weeks from now I will have a different opinion, but this is what we are seeing. So are we seriously worried? No. We are concerned and we watch what’s happening. But for now we’re saying, ‘OK: there’s a whole hype out there. [We’re] not sure why.’”
The World Health Organization (WHO) on Sunday criticized the “heavy burdens” that travel bans place on southern African nations and urged countries across the globe not to impose flight bans unless they are “scientifically based” amid concerns over the new COVID-19 variant, Omicron.
Kuntsler: It’s pretty clear that citizens of the liberal democracies are fed up with being pushed around, jabbed, driven out of business, lied-to, gaslighted, and deprived of their livelihoods. They increasingly can’t believe any of the bullshit issued by the medical establishment and its political hand-maidens, and why should they?
Kunstler again: Half the nation can’t think straight, and for a good reason: The relentless mindfuckery abroad in this land courtesy of your politicized news media, the despotic social networks, the bottomless greed of the pharmaceutical-makers and their errand boys in the CDC, plus the malevolent generosity of sponsors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and George Soros. Thus, the blue mommies of America follow Pied Pipers like NPR and Sanjay Gupta holding hands with Big Bird to vax-up the kids.
El gato malo: kathy hochul has been more or less (to use a technical term of psychiatric art) bonkers since the moment she assumed the mantle of empire state gubernatorial power from andy “let’s lie to the justice department about what happened to grandma” cuomo. … clearly, this woman is more than a few fries short of a happy meal. she seems deeply determined to prove her self to be the “fire” to señor andy’s “frying pan.”
COVID Tweets of the Week:
Zuby: Talking that freedom talk with Tucker Carlson.
COVID Vax Mandate Pushback Fare:
LA Firefighter Being "Investigated" For Literally Wiping His Ass With Vaccine Mandate Letter
COVID Conspiracy Fare:
The Left’s COVID Failure
Throughout the various phases of the global pandemic, people’s preferences in terms of epidemiological strategies have tended to overlap closely with their political orientation. Ever since Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro expressed doubts as to the wisdom of a lockdown strategy in March 2020, liberals and those on the Left of the Western political spectrum, including most socialists, have fallen over themselves to adhere in public to the lockdown strategy of pandemic mitigation — and lately to the logic of vaccine passports. Now as countries across Europe experiment with tighter restrictions of the unvaccinated, Left-wing commentators — usually so vocal in the defence of minorities suffering from discrimination — are notable for their silence.
As writers who have always positioned ourselves on the Left, we are disturbed at this turn of events. Is there really no progressive criticism to be made about the quarantining of healthy individuals, when the latest research suggests there is a vanishingly small difference in terms of transmission between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated? The Left’s response to Covid now appears as part of a broader crisis in Left-wing politics and thought — one which has been going on for three decades at least. So it’s important to identify the process through which this has taken shape.
In the first phase of the pandemic — the lockdowns phase — it was those leaning towards the cultural and economic right who were more likely to emphasise the social, economic and psychological damage resulting from lockdowns. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s initial lockdown scepticism made this position untenable for most of those leaning towards the cultural and economic Left. Social media algorithms then further fuelled this polarisation. Very quickly, therefore, Western leftists embraced lockdown, seen as a “pro-life” and “pro-collective” choice — a policy that, in theory, championed public health or the collective right to health. Meanwhile any criticism of the lockdowns was excoriated as a “right-wing”, “pro-economy” and “pro-individual” approach, accused of prioritising “profit” and “business as usual” over people’s lives.
In sum, decades of political polarisation instantly politicised a public health issue, without allowing any discussion as to what a coherent Left response would be.
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There’s a similar dynamic at play today. Take, for example, the high-tech surveillance measures, digital IDs, crackdown on public demonstrations and fast-tracking of laws introduced by governments to combat the coronavirus outbreak. If recent history is anything to go by, governments will surely find a way to make many of the emergency rules permanent – just as they did with much post-9/11 anti-terrorist legislation. As Edward Snowden noted: “When we see emergency measures passed, particularly today, they tend to be sticky. The emergency tends to be expanded”.
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Another factor explaining the Left’s embrace of “Covid measures” is its blind faith in “science”. This has its roots in the Left’s traditional faith in rationalism. However, one thing is believing in the undeniable virtues of the scientific method – another is being completely oblivious to the way those in power exploit “science” to further their agenda. Being able to appeal to “hard scientific data” to justify one’s policy choices is an incredibly powerful tool in the hands of governments – it is, in fact, the essence of technocracy. However, this means carefully selecting the “science” that is supportive of your agenda – and aggressively marginalising any alternative views, regardless of their scientific value.
This has been happening for years in the realm of economics. Is it really that hard to believe that such a corporate capture is happening today with regard to medical science? Not according to John P. Ioannidis, professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford University. Ioannidis made headlines in early 2021 when he published, with some colleagues of his, a paper claiming that there was no practical difference in epidemiological terms between countries that had locked down and those that hadn’t. The backlash against the paper – and against Ioannidis in particular – was fierce, especially among his fellow scientists.
This explains his recent scathing denunciation of his own profession. In an article entitled “How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science”, Ioannidis notes that most people – especially on the Left — seem to think that science operates based on “the Mertonian norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism”. But, alas, that is not how the scientific community actually operates, Ioannidis explains. With the pandemic, conflicts of corporate interest exploded – and yet talking about them became anathema. He continues: “Consultants who made millions of dollars from corporate and government consultation were given prestigious positions, power, and public praise, while unconflicted scientists who worked pro bono but dared to question dominant narratives were smeared as being conflicted. Organized skepticism was seen as a threat to public health. There was a clash between two schools of thought, authoritarian public health versus science – and science lost”.
Ultimately, the Left’s blatant disregard and mockery of people’s legitimate concerns (over lockdowns, vaccines or Covid passports) is shameful. Not only are these concerns rooted in actual hardship but they also stem from an understandable distrust of governments and institutions that have been undeniably captured by corporate interests. Anyone who favours a truly progressive-interventionist state, as we do, needs to address these concerns – not dismiss them.
Chudov: Media's false fearmongering about Michigan
They always are meant to blame the unvaccinated for the situation and to scare people into getting vaccinated.
The problem is that these articles are lies.
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You can easily look at the situation and usually you can show that
· the number of hospitalized Covid patients is similar to last year (despite “safe and effective” vaccines)
· the number of non-Covid patients (usually sick vaccinated people) is about 20-30% higher than a year ago
· shortage of staff is due to firings of unvaccinated workers
Fortunately, there are simple tools that let you look into any locale (for example Grand Rapids, Michigan) and debunk these articles.
Rogers: High tech global genocidal feudalism
RFK Jr.'s recent speech in Milan shines a new light on the role of the CIA in pandemic planning
There is still a piece of this whole debacle that does not make sense to me. Gain of function research is just a euphemism for bioweapons research. Gain of function research has never produced a useful consumer pharmaceutical product but it has produced a lot of bioweapons. Bioweapons research has been going on since the first World War — every major industrialized nation has a bioweapons program
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I think a strong case can be made that nation-states no longer exist (or nation-states only exist as an official narrative to keep the peasants in line in each country). Under global monopoly capitalism there are just two classes — the elites and everyone else (us).
Eugyppius: The Ideology of Corona Containment
The system of political beliefs and demands that have grown up around mass containment increasingly resemble a novel, malignant ideological system.
The truth is that no other political system could have produced Corona containment, as we’ve experienced it. First-world democracies are anything but systems for channelling the will of the people. Instead, with the rise of mass media and mass society, they have become elaborate consensus-farming operations. Unique in history, they are governing systems that use mass media to call into being the phenomenon of public opinion, which is then shaped by a combination of propaganda and political participation into a tool of governance and consensus in its own right. The majority is thus first acclimated to the agenda of the state, and then deployed to enforce governmental directives and to repress dissidents, the non-compliant and, increasingly, even the disinterested. Corona containment is an obvious product of a system like this, depending as it does on widely distributed consensus policies that are enforced less by the police than by enthusiastic majorities deputised by journalists.
***** Paul Kingsnorth Hits Vaccine Tipping Point
He has just released an essay wondering what the hell is going on with Covid and our response to it. He’s asking the kinds of questions that our media ought to be asking, but are not. Here’s how it begins:
Perhaps it’s because I’m English, or perhaps it’s my age, or perhaps it’s just blind prejudice, but when I wake to the news that the Austrian government has interned an entire third of its national population as a ‘danger to public health’, a chill runs down my spine.It’s about to be Germany too, according to German officials. Lockdown and forced vaccinations. Maybe — maybe — such police-state measures would be justified if vaccines worked. But notice this, says Kingsnorth:
Austria, I think to myself. Ah.
I look at the news photos of armed, masked, black-clad police stopping people in the streets to ask for their digital papers, and I read stories of others arrested for leaving their own house more than the permitted once a day, and I hear Austrian politicians intoning that those who refuse to accede to the injection are to be shunned and scapegoated until they acquiesce. Then I watch interviews with ‘ordinary people’, and they say that the ‘unvaxxed’ had it coming. Some of them say that they should all be jailed, these enemies of the people. At best, the ‘anti-vaxxers’ are paranoid and misinformed. At worst they are malicious, and should be punished.
A few days later I wake up to some more news about Austria: from next year, everyone in the country will have a covid vaccine forced into them by the state, overriding their right to what certain people, who have gone very quiet recently, used to call ‘bodily autonomy.’
I am watching all this from Ireland, the country which has the highest vaccination rate in Western Europe, at over 94% of the adult population. At the same time, curiously, we have the highest covid infection rates in Western Europe too. The government has not been able to explain this fact, but it is a trend that has recently manifested in some other highly-vaccinated places too: Gibraltar, Israel, West Flanders. High levels of vaccination do not seem to correspond with low-levels of disease; often quite the opposite.Paul, who remains unvaccinated, and explains why, says he’s not as worried about the vaccine itself as what the vaccine symbolizes. More:
In other parts of the world, strange things are happening too. Africa, for example. Africa’s population is the largest, fastest-growing and materially poorest of any continent. Few governments there can afford to supply their people with the pricey corporate vaccines which we in the West have staked our nations on. Only 6% of Africa’s population is vaccinated, and national healthcare systems barely exist in many places, yet the WHO describes the continent as ‘one of the least affected regions in the world’ by the virus. In fact, the richer, more ‘developed’ parts of the world seem to be suffering worst from the pandemic.
Nobody seems to be able to explain any of this, but that hasn’t changed the official direction of travel. Certainly in Ireland, the script remains the same. For six months we have been living with vaccine apartheid, with the ‘unvaxxed’ excluded from much of society, but it hasn’t worked. Rates of infection are shooting up as winter arrives – as you might expect with a respiratory virus. We were all told recently to work from home, and another lockdown is on the cards. A midnight curfew has recently been imposed on pubs and nightclubs. This is odd, as only vaccinated people have been allowed into them for months, and we have repeatedly been assured that vaccinated people are safe to be around.
In an honest society, all of this would have been subject to robust public debate. We would have seen scientists of all opinions openly debating on TV and radio and in the press; views of all kinds aired on social media; journalists properly investigating reports of both vaccine successes and vaccine dangers; serious explorations of alternative treatments; public debates about the balance between civil liberties and public health, and what ‘public health’ even means. But we have not seen this and we will not see it, for debate, like dissent, is out of fashion. The media here in Ireland has not asked a critical question of anyone in authority for at least eighteen months. Google’s algorithms are busy burying inconvenient data, while the social media channels from which most people receive their worldview are removing or suppressing critical opinions, even if they come from virologists or editors of the British Medical Journal.
Day after day, I have been waking and wondering: what is going on?
We live in an apocalyptic time, in the original sense of the Greek word apokalypsis: revelation. What is happening on the surface is revealing what has always lain beneath, but which in normal times is hidden from view. All of the action now is in the underworld. Beneath the arguments about whether or not to take a vaccine that may or may not work safely, glides something older, deeper, slower: something with all the time in the world. Some great spirit whose work is to use these fractured times to reveal to us all what we need to see: things hidden since the foundation of the modern world.One more passage:
Covid is a revelation. It has lain bare splits in the social fabric that were always there but could be ignored in better times. It has revealed the compliance of the legacy media and the power of Silicon Valley to curate and control the public conversation. It has confirmed the sly dishonesty of political leaders, and their ultimate obeisance to corporate power. It has shown up ‘The Science’ for the compromised ideology it is.
Most of all, it has revealed the authoritarian streak that lies beneath so many people, and which always emerges in fearful times. In the last month alone I have watched media commentators calling for censorship of their political opponents, philosophy professors justifying mass internment, and human rights lobby groups remaining silent about ‘vaccine passports.’ I have watched much of the political left transition openly into the authoritarian movement it probably always was, and countless ‘liberals’ campaigning against liberty. As freedom after freedom has been taken away, I have watched intellectual after intellectual justify it all. I have been reminded of what I always knew: cleverness has no relationship to wisdom.
I have learnt more about human nature in the last two years than in my preceding forty-seven. I have learnt some things about myself too, and I don’t especially like them either. I have noticed my ongoing temptation to become a partisan: to judge and condemn those on the other side of the question – those sheeple, those malicious enemies of Truth. I have noticed my tendency to seek out only sources of information which confirm my beliefs. Revelation is never comfortable.
Most of all, though, what the covid apocalypse has revealed to me is that when people are frightened, they can be easily controlled.
Control: this is the story of the times. Across the world we are seeing an unprecedented claim to control staked by the forces of the state, in alliance with the forces of corporate capital, over your life and mine. All of it converges on the revealed symbol of our age: the smartphone-enabled QR code that has, with frightening speed and in near-silence, become the new passport to a full human life. As ever, our tools have turned on us. Another revelation: they were never our tools to begin with. We were theirs.
My own sense of foreboding is deepening daily. Beneath the surface, down in those depths, I am far from the only one who can see what is emerging. The Narrative does not hang together, the story does not gel, but it is doing its job nonetheless. It is being used to summon forth and justify an unprecedented authoritarian technocracy which is hemming us all in with no consent, no debate, and no right to opt out.Buy a subscription and read it all. Trust me, you will not regret it. His Substack essays are always terrific. With this one, Paul Kingsnorth moves himself from being someone you should read to someone you must read as a guide through the darkness ahead. Kingsnorth has reached a breaking point:
In a short but momentous two years, this is who we have become. We in the West, who have spent decades, if not centuries, lecturing the rest of the world about ‘freedom’, and sometimes trying to bomb them into accepting it. We who invented this thing called ‘liberalism’; we who are now burying it. It didn’t take much, did it, for our words to be revealed as hollow?
Next week I will write more on what I see happening, and where it is heading. But for now, it is enough to say that my personal Vaccine Moment has arrived. Where once I was on the fence, now I am firmly off it. Even if I were to be convinced that these vaccines worked safely, I could never get myself a vaccine passport and acquiesce in the technological segregation of society. I could never scan my code without shivering. I cannot participate in this.Take a look, says Paul, at this clip from November 21 of the chief minister of Australia’s Northern Territory raging against the vaccine-hesitant — and not just the vaccine-hesitant, but anyone who questions mandates for any reason:….
We all have a breaking point, and we all should, because this is the means by which our human intuition screams to us that something is wrong. This is mine. I will not go along with what is happening. I will not validate what is emerging. I will resist it. I will take my stand.
Video: Has Justin Trudeau Been Duly Vaccinated? Registered Nurse Expresses Doubt on Authenticity of Trudeau’s Vaccine Jab
Whistleblower Nurse Says Politicians Receive Saline Instead of mRNA Jab. Crisis in Slovenia
In a video on Facebook, which has been deleted by YouTube, the woman claiming to be the head nurse of the University Medical Center in Ljubljana, which takes care of receiving and managing the jab bottles for politicians, resigned and gave a press conference on the scandal
Orwellian Fare:
How to escape Google
As a well-known US podcaster recently discovered, Google is indeed “hiding information” from its users. This has actually been known for many years, but it has become especially obvious and serious during the coronavirus pandemic.
In fact, censorship by Google has become so bad that nowadays, advanced Internet users are using Google primarily to monitor the current extent of censorship, not to actually search for anything.
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DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Qwant, Ecosia, Swisscows, MetaGer and other search engines are primarily relying on Microsoft Bing, although some of them may be adding a few other contextual sources or important privacy features. But with most searches, you will simply get Bing results.
If Microsoft Bing, one day, should decide to apply Google-style censorship (or get forced to do so), sophisticated Western Internet users will either have to rely on Russian Yandex, or will finally have to create an independent, real and uncensored search engine.
Are We Already Living In A Brave New World? – Huxley's Warning To The World
Lawrence: "'If you remember, you're alive.'"
Oliver Stone on 'JFK Revisited.'
There are many things to say about Oliver Stone’s just-released new film, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass. One of them is that Stone’s new work demolishes, thoroughly and conclusively, the official version of what happened on 22 November 1963.
CaitOz Fare:
***** Impending Planetary Disaster Should Unite Us, Yet We Remain More Divided Than Ever
**** Humanity Is Still Trying To Be Born
Things are fucked. That’s our current situation in a nutshell.
In a slightly bigger nutshell, things are fucked because powerful people are making them fucked, and they won’t stop making things fucked unless ordinary people use their superior numbers to make them stop, but ordinary people are being psychologically manipulated away from making them stop by propaganda.
This is happening in countless ways, both on a global scale and on national scales around the world, and on pretty much any other scale you want to break the collective humaning fractal down to.
On a global scale we’re seeing it in the way our biosphere is being destroyed due to human behavior driven by the reckless pursuit of profit for its own sake. In the way US warmongering is leading to a final confrontation with Russia and China that could easily end all life on Earth. In the way increasingly authoritarian agendas are being rolled out by ruling power structures to exert greater and greater control of populations. In the way oppressive and exploitative status quo political systems are held in place in supposedly free societies despite the glaring mountains of evidence that those systems do not serve the interests of ordinary people.
All of these dire realities are manipulated, distorted, re-framed or simply omitted by the sources which people have been trained to look to for information about the world. As long as we’re successfully manipulated away from forming a clear picture of what’s going on, things will remain fucked.
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Overthrowing our oppressors is only the first boss fight in the very first level of the video game. It won’t be enough to simply remove the systems which enable our oppression, because if we do that without also expunging the forces within ourselves which gave rise to them we’ll just wind up creating more oppressive systems.
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Modern humans with their current brain structure have only been around for somewhere between 35,000 and 100,000 years, which is less than the blink of an eye on the historical scale of the rest of life on this planet. The advent of agriculture gave rise to civilization some 12,000 years ago, in turn giving rise to civilization and the general fucked up situation we now find ourselves in.
In the yawning expanse of time that this universe has left in its lifespan, that’s nothing. And if we can make the jump and evolve beyond this awkward apes-with-hydrogen-bombs transition phase into a truly conscious species, a truly human species, we can create an amazing life together for a much, much greater expanse of time
*** A Sense Of Perspective, If You Please
“Should the US and its allies intervene militarily in-”
No. The answer is no. The answer is always no. As evidenced by generations of unbroken history in the modern world. How fucking hard is that?
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Issues that make sense to focus on a lot:
· Our imminent doom via nuclear war or environmental collapse
· Imperialism
· Dystopian authoritarianism
· Abuses of capitalism
Issues that don’t make sense to focus on a lot:
· Electoral politics
· Society getting “too woke”
· Social media feuds
…..
The opinion that there should be literally no dissent anywhere at all about government Covid policies which affect everyone is one of the most bat shit insane beliefs you could possibly come up with.
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Racism is a real problem that must be made conscious AND ALSO the issue is often manipulated to protect the status quo.
Climate change is real AND ALSO manipulative plutocrats are looking to benefit from it.
Covid is dangerous AND ALSO it’s being used to advance unjust agendas.
Because our brains are wired to reject any information which could threaten our worldview, it provides more cognitive ease to simply dismiss every part of any idea that might add layers of complexity to your position. But doing so distorts our perspective.
We’re Sleepwalking Into Nuclear War
At no point is it permissible to question if these nations might be reacting defensively to western aggressions and discuss the possibility of working toward detente.
Other Quotes of the Week:
Lawrence: Ray McGovern.. once observed in one of his speeches that it’s not enough to dwell on the incessant rains that fall upon us. The true task is to build arks. The thought, the challenge, has ever since remained with me. What do we do, what else, as we advance our critique of empire, as we seek to unbury our humanity from empire’s crumbling edifice?
Bates: History is replete with examples of civilizations that placed their equivalents of deca-billionaires or centa-billionaires at the top of the decision-making pyramid. That did not end well.
Doctorow: I point now to the latest manifestations of an indigenous “wokeness” in Europe that is following a parallel track of righteous intolerance that we see in the United States as promoted by Black Lives Matter and the anti-Culture bandwagon.. In both parts of the world the result is stifling political correctness that threatens anything resembling humanism, sophistication and breadth of thinking.
Menton: Is President Biden doing anything right? To this observer, his policies range from at best merely incompetent, to at worst malicious hatred of the country and people whose interests he was elected to advance. Somewhere in between those two extremes we have Biden’s energy policy. In this arena, appropriate adjectives would be inconsistent, incoherent, and destructive. Don’t even attempt to make sense of it. To summarize in one word, it is complete madness.
Robinson: Perhaps even more disturbing than this crazy logic is the fact that it comes from the mouth of ‘a long-time observer of Russian politics in Washington.’ If you want to know why US policy towards Russia is so screwed up, there you have it. For if that’s the quality of Washington’s seasoned ‘Russia hands’, there’s really no hope. […& bonus: Moreover, if you look at the specific cases Macaes cites, the facts demonstrate the exact opposite of what he claims.]
Anatol Lieven: Only the most insane of US politicians and commentators actually want to go to war with Russia in Ukraine.
Big Thoughts:
Greenwald: The Cynical and Dangerous Weaponization of the "White Supremacist" Label
In dominant elite discourse, no evidence is needed to brand someone a "white supremacist." The belief that it will produce political or personal gain suffices.
Brownstein: Transforming Our Ingratitude into Gratitude
how individuals cooperate and bring forth the miracles of the modern economy
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Ungrateful thinking may seem justified given what a thinker sees as reality. Without a historical context and literacy in economics, a person can be caught up in an ill-informed thought storm yet be sure they understand the world clearly and objectively.
In their book The Knowledge Illusion, cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Phillip Fernbach observed that “In general we don’t appreciate how little we know; the tiniest bit of knowledge makes us feel like experts. Once we feel like an expert we start talking like an expert.”
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“The Use of Knowledge in Society” is arguably the most important journal article written by a social scientist in the 20th century. Hayek’s insight was deceptively simple: “The economic problem … is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.” Put another way, knowledge is dispersed: “The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated forms but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”
Government planners turn a blind eye to Hayek’s insight. It is not just fervent planners who resist Hayek’s insight. Anyone who wants to rely on “experts” to make the world a better place will struggle with Hayek’s ideas, even while contentiously debating which “experts” to follow.
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When the urge to control arises, we can stand down; the world doesn’t depend on our limited understanding. And although it is beyond the scope of this essay, we can apply Hayek to our daily lives. We all have an inner central planner; understanding Hayek can help us downsize the destructive part of our ego. The more you try to control your life, the more your mental capacity is occupied with trying to do the impossible, the more you lower the quality of your life.
Pincourt: Counter Wokecraft: An Executive Summary
The battle against wokeism, aka the Critical Social Justice perspective, is entering its third phase. The first phase involved sounding the alarm and drawing attention to this retrograde, caustic, atavistic, anti-modern, anti-liberal, anti-science and anti-scientific creed. The second phase whose end we are now approaching involved understanding, analyzing and describing to the public at large what characterizes the creed, where it comes from, its results and the extent to which it has captured our institutions. The third phase involves challenging the creed and recapturing our institutions. The beginning of this phase began in earnest in K-12 education with parents all across the US joining together to reclaim control over what their children are being taught. While doing so, lessons are being learned and shared. These experiments are essential to success. What has been missing is a unified presentation of the phenomenon, the strategies and tactics used to entrench it, and those that can be used to defend against it; in a word, a guide. The purpose of Counter Wokecraft is to play this role.
Other Fare:
Canadian government denies McGill professor grants on the grounds that his mandatory DEI statements describe color-blind hiring based on merit
Kambhampati has been turned down for his last two grants because of insufficient diversity statements, which are mandatory. And in Canada, if you don’t past muster with that statement, your grant gets canned without even being evaluated for scientific merit.
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Kambhampati said he didn’t go public after the first grant was rejected but decided to speak out now because the increasing use by the government of equity, diversity and inclusion, aka “EDI,” provisions, as well as woke culture, are killing innovation, harming science and disrupting society.
“I believe this is an important stand to make. I will not be silenced anymore,” he said.
Pics of the Week:
