Regular Fare:
Rabobank: The NecronOmicron Has Been Opened, And The Results Will Be Terrible
Trust me, neither Powell nor Yellen truly understand this issue yet even after their limited mea culpas yesterday ... If they did, then just like hapless characters in Lovecraft novels, they would have been driven mad by the knowledge of their true powerlessness in the face of far greater forces. … True, the collapse in energy prices we have just seen is deflationary – and indeed, the real fear for many is a surge in supply-side inflation, and then a Fed policy error, and then a deflationary monster on the other side.
Rabobank: The IMF Warning Of "Economic Collapse" Should Get Headlines
The IMF are warning of “economic collapse”, which should get headlines. Not because the IMF have any kind of track record of being timely or right about anything, but because the Fund so rarely says anything negative for fear of being seen as precipitating the crises which the policies it imposes always end up creating anyway
Why Has the Press Ignored Retailers’ Crappy Black Fridays, as Experts Warn of Coming Bankruptcies?
Table 1 The Conference Board expectations data in the eight biggest US states, 2007 and 2021
… the Fed planning to tighten as consumers are retrenching is misguided. Remember the Fed mistakenly thinks it can stimulate growth when all it can stimulate is speculation in assets, but it can choke activity.
Mainstream economics — a harmful fantasy
Lance Roberts: Inflation vs. Deflation – Which Is The Bigger Threat In 2022?
… The sharp decline in money supply suggests deflationary impulses in the economy will become visible around the middle of 2022. Which is roughly when the Federal Reserve plans to hike interest rates. This is significant in the debate of inflation vs. deflation.
However, there are still significant headwinds to inflation over the next decade outside of money supply changes.
The most direct evidence of the decline of economic prosperity is the rise in social welfare as a percentage of disposable incomes. Recycling tax dollars is a zero-sum game and increases the deflationary pressures on the economy from debt required to fund it.
… Consider the role of wages in the inflation vs. deflation question. When wages fail to keep up with inflation, consumption will contract, contributing to the deflationary bias.
Michael Roberts: The US rate of profit in 2020
Other Charts: (links: one, two, three, four, five)
Bubble Fare:
Policy Error 2.0 aka. SUPER CRASH
Zerohedge and their vast array of useful idiots won. Their success is self-evident in the number of fools to follow. Testament to the strength of numbers. Ironically, they DOOMED their own prediction of runaway inflation by luring the ultimate fools - the Fed itself. In the event, they officially assisted the Fed to make the EXACT same mistake they made post-Lehman 2008 which is to believe that inflation is the greater threat to the economy and therefore ignore all of the risks that have coalesced at the end of the cycle. These people don't know that inflation ALWAYS peaks at the end of the cycle, because they banished cycles with printed money. Be that as it may, inflationist pundits can now take FULL pride in having trapped a generation of gamblers in dead end trades that are set to explode with extreme dislocation. A true measure of success. Now Powell is OFFICIALLY boxed into the fake inflation narrative.
…
Not only is inflation transitory, but all real-time indicators show that it has already peaked and is very quickly receding. The CPI that so many bloggers today refer to is stale data, weeks and months old. There are several indicators that track much more closely to inflationary trends.
First and foremost is Treasury inflation expectations themselves.
…
And why is December 2018 important? Because that is the last time Powell was forced to reverse policy and stop tightening because markets were imploding.
He will ultimately be forced to do the same thing all over again, but today's events just doomed bulls trapped in the casino unknowingly. …
DENIALATION: The Problem That Fixes Itself
This week, Omnibomb hysteria is imploding the reflation trades while inflation hysteria is simultaneously imploding the Tech/deflation trades. Neither risk poses any real threat to society at large. Each side of the political spectrum can take credit for ramping hysteria to lethal levels - the left on the pandemic and the right on inflation. Both sides politically motivated to stir up their base and serve their own agenda. What they have in common is that they have not even the slightest clue as to the financial consequences of their mass hysteria. Quite the opposite - central banks have given them the illusion that their pandemonium has been extremely lucrative.
Negative real yields as generated by commodity speculation will be their death trap. Today's policy-makers continue to ignore the relationship between commodity speculation and inflation. As commodities rise they feed back into CPI, driving real yields lower. This in turn accelerates the asset flows to commodities. This asset-driven inflation spiral continues until such time as prices are fully disconnected from fundamentals. Then the bubble bursts and the spiral goes in reverse. OPEC is the latest party to succumb to inflation hysteria, promising to proceed with an output increase in January despite the risk of Omnibomb and the FOMC. Fooled by speculation and the negative yield feedback loop. Oil demand is nowhere near where it was pre-pandemic and oil volatility has exploded as the speculative premium unwinds.
…
History will say that the true policy error was ignoring fatal levels of asset inflation and then freaking out at the first sign of price inflation.
…
The market has been extremely volatile this week, with alternating rallies and crashes. However, the crashes keep growing larger as the market stair steps lower.
…
All of which points to the fact that the only true shortage in this world is in IQ. And that supply shortage is going to be exorbitant.
THE MADOFF MOMENT
Basically what happened is that the pandemic shut down supply chains and depleted inventories. This created a massive temporary supply demand imbalance. Profiteers took advantage of the situation by raising prices, which set off a buying panic that was accelerated by the wealth effect. Here we see below that wholesale inventories have recovered and retail sales are now diverging massively from consumer sentiment.
Meanwhile, a combination of factors have ensured that this "bailout" will be nothing like the ones in the past. First off politically it will be untenable as the middle class watches their retirement implode in real-time. Secondly, Biden has already said there will be no lockdown under Omicron, so the Fed won't have cover to re-start their *special* bailout programs used in 2020. And lastly of course, this fake inflation theme has ensured the Fed remains sidelined until such time as they realize they abandoned the "transitory" concept at the exact wrong time.
Albert Edwards: Here's Why The FAANGs Will End Up Sinking Like The BRICs
I have a similar feeling that in a decade’s time FAANGs (and US tech generally) will go the way of the BRICs as another example of acronym investing going horribly wrong.
Albert Edwards: Here's Why The FAANGs Will End Up Sinking Like The BRICs
I have a similar feeling that in a decade’s time FAANGs (and US tech generally) will go the way of the BRICs as another example of acronym investing going horribly wrong.
QsOTW:
“Rosemont Seneca”: We saw a global risk contagion event in capital markets today (11/26); Bitcoin lost over 8.0% of its value, the S&P dropped -2.2% and gold ended the session flat on the day after a mostly positive session. We expect more days like this in 2022.
Sirota: Have you noticed that all the media fearmongering about wage inflation hasn’t mentioned the soaring salaries of corporate executives?... Have you noticed that stories about expensive essential goods don’t mention the record profits of the companies selling them?
COVID-19 notes:
The epidemiological relevance of the COVID-19-vaccinated population is increasing
High COVID-19 vaccination rates were expected to reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in populations by reducing the number of possible sources for transmission and thereby to reduce the burden of COVID-19 disease. Recent data, however, indicate that the epidemiological relevance of COVID-19 vaccinated individuals is increasing. … Peak viral load did not differ by vaccination status or variant type … The US CDC identifies four of the top five counties with the highest percentage of fully vaccinated population (99.9–84.3%) as “high” transmission counties. Many decisionmakers assume that the vaccinated can be excluded as a source of transmission. It appears to be grossly negligent to ignore the vaccinated population as a possible and relevant source of transmission when deciding about public health control measures.
The majority of SARS-CoV-2-specific antibodies in COVID-19 patients with obesity are autoimmune and not neutralizing
Cognitive bias in crisis decision-making
Gordon Woo outlines what the House of Commons report on coronavirus lessons learned to date tells us about groupthink and cognitive bias in making crisis decisions.
… The Economics Nobel Laureate, Daniel Kahneman, has noted that the confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence, but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.
… In all risk assessment, cognitive bias is a potentially dangerous pitfall. Other than groupthink, experts are prone to availability bias (reliance on what immediately comes to mind, e.g. SARS), and optimism bias (expecting a positive outcome, e.g. limited transmission). Cognitive bias is not restricted to any profession, and is prevalent amongst finance professionals.
How well masks protect
A detailed study shows the maximum risks of being infected by the coronavirus for different scenarios with and without masks
Warning: COVID-Fueled Mental Health Crisis Will Be a Costly Second Pandemic
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Rain to replace snow in the Arctic as climate heats, study finds
Climate models show switch will happen decades faster than previously thought, with ‘profound’ implications
Tooze: Fossil Fuel’s Downfall Could Be America’s Too
How U.S. polluters might drag the country’s economy down with them.
Green Technologies Have a Glaring Problem of Scale
Due to unavoidable physical constraints, future green technologies offer little promise for achieving economies of scale. Many of the improvements suggested to improve their performance remain marginal and frequently come with the environmental costs of additional embedded energy requirements, extensive land use and greater material complexity. The outcomes achieved under laboratory conditions are not guaranteed to be viable at the scale necessary for them to make a significant difference.
Efforts to improve energy efficiency remain essential, but those efforts are not likely to reduce aggregate energy use. The vehicles and appliances of 2050 will likely be more efficient than those of today, but precisely because of their greater efficiency there will be many more of them. Under almost any scenario, global electricity demand will increase between now and 2050
Profiting from the Carbon Offset Distraction
Carbon offset markets allow the rich to emit as financial intermediaries profit. By fostering the fiction that others can be paid to cut greenhouse gases (GHGs) instead, it undermines efforts to do so
…At best, net-zero is a zero-sum game maintaining atmospheric GHG levels. But progress requires CO2 reduction, i.e., being net-negative, not just net-zero.
Many carbon credits sold as offsets do not additionally remove carbon as claimed.
How To Spot A Carbon-Free Con
· Nearly every company on earth seems to be setting themselves net-zero targets, but a majority of those pledges have very little substance behind them
· One major issue is that companies set these targets so far in the future that there is next to no accountability for those in charge
· Another thing to look out for is the wording of these commitments, with companies (and countries for that matter) often moving responsibility for their emissions elsewhere
Other / Fun Fare:
Here's Why Movie Dialogue Has Gotten More Difficult To Understand (And Three Ways To Fix It)
Pics of the Week:
Picturing the invisible: The Fukushima disaster 10 years on
Visualizing the Accumulation of Human-Made Mass on Earth
Contrarian Perspectives
Extra [controversial or non-market-related] Fare:
*** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Regular Fare:
Tracey: How the Biden Family Gets Away With an Enormous Amount of Sleaze
PFIZER IS LOBBYING TO THWART WHISTLEBLOWERS FROM EXPOSING CORPORATE FRAUD
Pfizer is among the Big Pharma companies trying to block legislation strengthening whistleblowers’ ability to report corporate fraud.
The Secretive Prisons That Keep Migrants Out of Europe
Tired of migrants arriving from Africa, the E.U. has created a shadow immigration system that captures them before they reach its shores, and sends them to brutal Libyan detention centers run by militias.
Canadian News Media Is Dominated by Corporate Lobbyists
An investigation carried out by Ricochet in collaboration with Jacobin finds Canadian TV panels are dominated by lobbyists. These corporate pundits are treated as impartial talking heads, but they’re actually part of an effort to defend Canadian capitalists.
CIA Files Say Staffers Committed Sex Crimes Involving Children. They Weren’t Prosecuted.
Declassified CIA inspector general reports show a pattern of abuse and a repeated decision by federal prosecutors not to hold agency personnel accountable.
Unsustainability / Climate Collapse Fare:
***** Murphy: Caught Up in Complexity
Readers of this blog will know that I have come to some big-picture conclusions about success and failure that are unsettling. I don’t like them myself. Not only do they create an inner sadness about where I think the human endeavor is heading, but they result in a sort of isolation that I would rather not suffer—introvert though I am. Among other academics at my institution, it is rare for me to find kindred spirits, even among groups self-selected to care about environmental issues. Most don’t seem to see very far beyond climate change in the lineup of existential threats, increasingly focusing on inequities within the human population that stem from climate and environmental disturbances. I am glad that climate change awareness is high (a genuine threat), but even if climate change had never arisen, I think we would still be in grave trouble from the more fundamental flaws in our explosive approach to living on Earth.
… But I still try to understand why so few of my colleagues have reached similar conclusions. The easy answer is that I’m just plain wrong. But believe me, I have tormented myself to try to discover the missing piece and go back to being a happy human bumping along in this race to who-knows-where. It’s not that my unconcerned colleagues have thought more deeply about the issues and can help a rookie out, in my experience.
In this post, I venture some guesses about the disconnect—some of which may even be on target. …
***** Seeing the Big Picture | Nate Hagens
Understanding the critical connections between our values, our economy and our world
Climate Tweets of the Week:
PaulM: Forget 1.5°C. Highest CO2e levels since the Miocene MCO, (4-10°C): but there is nothing yet to stop an increase to levels as high as in the transition to the Eocene (PETM: 2-3x CO2 from background levels of ~900 ppm for 8-13°C). We can’t “act” [appropriately] until we understand where we are.
COVID Fare:
*** COVID mRNA shots are a ‘technology designed to poison people’: Canadian doctor
“That’s one of the great scandals of these vaccines is that no proper toxicity studies have been carried out … But … we can be certain that in principle, we can be quite certain that the total dose of these vaccines that you can tolerate before you die is limited,”
…
his opposition to the vaccine was “not in spite of [his] medical education, but BECAUSE of it.”
“There is just no way that any competent medical scientist who makes an honest effort to himself could not see that these vaccines – in particular the mRNA vaccines, which are touted as ‘the safe choice’ – will cause grave harm, and with a sufficient number of cumulative doses certain death.”
Despite approval from the likes of Health Canada, all currently available COVID-19 vaccines are experimental, with clinical trials not set for completion until 2023.
late addition, but I had to include it:
********* el gato malo: the last time tony fauci was pushing masks for disease mitigation
Fenton: The impact of misclassifying deaths in evaluating vaccine safety: the same statistical illusion
the same results arise if, instead of a one-week delay in death reporting there is a misclassification of newly vaccinated deaths; specifically, any death of a person occurring in the same week as the person is vaccinated is treated as an unvaccinated, rather than vaccinated, death.
Fenton: Possible systematic miscategorisation of vaccine status raises concerns about claims of Covid-19 vaccination effectiveness
Lyons-Weiler: Two Studies Provide Evidence that CDC Is Still Both Overcounting COVID-19 Deaths and Undercounting COVID-19 Vaccine Deaths
Crawford: Leaked Pfizer Post-Marketing Safety Report
Demasi: Fresh doubts over data integrity in Pfizer mRNA trial
Lyons-Weiler: "Re-Fact": A Word That Just Might Set Us Free
So-called "Fact-checkers" posture as if their opinion is the final word. They claim unwarranted special value of their opinion on issues, but their articles are still opinion blog articles.
In this article, I review some of gaffs made by so-called “fact-checkers” and offer a new word to the English language that can be used to provide a return volley to scale down the undue influence attributed to an article merely because it appears on a website with the descriptor “Fact Check”.
Kirsch: Fact checking the fact checkers
the same results arise if, instead of a one-week delay in death reporting there is a misclassification of newly vaccinated deaths; specifically, any death of a person occurring in the same week as the person is vaccinated is treated as an unvaccinated, rather than vaccinated, death.
Fenton: Possible systematic miscategorisation of vaccine status raises concerns about claims of Covid-19 vaccination effectiveness
Lyons-Weiler: Two Studies Provide Evidence that CDC Is Still Both Overcounting COVID-19 Deaths and Undercounting COVID-19 Vaccine Deaths
Crawford: Leaked Pfizer Post-Marketing Safety Report
Demasi: Fresh doubts over data integrity in Pfizer mRNA trial
Lyons-Weiler: "Re-Fact": A Word That Just Might Set Us Free
So-called "Fact-checkers" posture as if their opinion is the final word. They claim unwarranted special value of their opinion on issues, but their articles are still opinion blog articles.
In this article, I review some of gaffs made by so-called “fact-checkers” and offer a new word to the English language that can be used to provide a return volley to scale down the undue influence attributed to an article merely because it appears on a website with the descriptor “Fact Check”.
Kirsch: Fact checking the fact checkers
“Overall, I’d say that we’ve had a pandemic of fear. And fear has affected almost everybody, whereas the infection has affected relatively few,” said Risch.
“By and large, it’s been a very selected pandemic, and predictable. It was very distinguished between young versus old, healthy versus chronic disease people. So we quickly learned who was at risk for the pandemic and who wasn’t.
“However, the fear was manufactured for everybody. And that’s what’s characterized the whole pandemic is that degree of fear and people’s response to the fear.”
Vanden Bossche: From an immunological point of view, boosters and mass vaccination are as harmful as mold on a wall
Crawford: Systemic Vaccine Efficacy, Part 4: Consistency
… But here's the kicker: it should have been a stretch for anyone to believe from the start that an extremely fast spreading respiratory virus that enters the body through ACE2 receptors, then into the lungs, and then into the bloodstream...would be beaten by an intramuscular injection that produces the wrong antibodies in the wrong place.
Nobody should be shocked that research keeps piling up showing viral loads and infection rates (Salvatore et al, 2021 preprint) looking the same. It would have been surprising for a non-mucosal "vaccine" to work the way we want. Even worse, the forms of "vaccines" we have accepted allow the virus to take root in the body, including in immunocompromised patients who can carry it for months on end, which is likely the driver of variant roulette.
We should have been more skeptical when the self-reported Pfizer trial involved …
Lyons-Weiler: Confusing Public Health Messaging Kills: Resources on Early Aggressive Treatment
Timing is essential in COVID-19 treatment. Universal knowledge of aggressive early treatment is required to counter reckless disinformational whiplash
A massive number of physicians around the country have circled around a handful of clear-cut, easy-to-follow protocols that science says reduces hospitalization. The entire gambit that early, aggressive treatment is in competition with vaccines was a red herring; the vaccine failure proves that public health messaging that buried and killed (for a while) COVID-19 therapies has been incredibly costly in terms of lives lost and the scale and scope of COVID-19 disease burden. Disinformation kills.
… The reality is that the public deserves to know the truth about early aggressive treatment regardless of vaccination preferences.
… PLEASE stop confusing the masses about early, aggressive treatment. It’s killing people. People are being hospitalized, given risky medicines, put on ventilators and dying needlessly because they go into phase 2 COVID-19 needlessly. MATH+, Dr. Brownstein’s maintenance protocol both keeps Vitamin D levels up well before they are needed
…
These two resources are super-important.
C19Early.com
https://c19early.com/
IVMETA.com
https://ivmmeta.com/
Also share the following please
https://covid19criticalcare.com/
https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(20)30673-2/fulltext
https://www.oatext.com/pdf/JTS-3-186.pdf
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2050312120925344
https://www.publichealthpolicyjournal.com/general-5
https://www.publichealthpolicyjournal.com/clinical-and-translational-research
Berenson: Huge new study shows ZERO Covid deaths of healthy German kids over 4 or adolescents
The findings, in a nutshell: if you let your healthy child or teenager receive the mRNA Covid vaccine, you are insane
German physician-scientists reported Monday that not a single healthy child between the ages of 5 and 18 died of Covid in Germany in the first 15 months of the epidemic.
Not one.
Even including children and adolescents with preexisting conditions, only six in that age range died, the researchers found. Germany is Europe’s largest country, with more than 80 million people, including about 10 million school-age children and adolescents.
Serious illness was also extremely rare.
Kirsch: 28X increase in stillbirths in multiple parts of Canada
But get this... it's only happening to vaccinated moms. I wonder what is causing this? Nobody has a clue.
Deaths among Children are 44% higher than the 5-year-average since they were offered the Covid-19 Vaccine according to ONS data
Malone: 1 in 2680 young men develop acute myocarditis/pericarditis in adolescents following Comirnaty vaccination in Hong Kong
Crawford: Disturbing Details About Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting
I spent an hour-and-a-half on the phone with Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting Database (VAERS) researcher Albert Benavides today.
… After today, however, I have a new respect (and fear) for the illusion that is VAERS.
… So, the number of people in the VAERS reports who did die might be 50,000 or 100,000 or even higher! We just aren't allowed to know. That's the WONDER of the system, I suppose.
… This issue of non-public death declarations associated with case reports is part of the massive underreporting (we know this since the number of people in the Medicare database who have died post-vaccination is over a million) of the publicly available numbers, including suppression of reporting within the medical community.
… It becomes harder and harder by the day to maintain a shred of respect for those running our public health regulatory agencies. There is no pharmacovigilance. There is no regulation with respect to experimental COVID-19 injectable products.
Kirsch: They are now blaming all the deaths after vaccination on Post-Pandemic Stress Disorder (PPSD)
I'm serious. You cannot make this stuff up. Even if you tried.
OK, get this… (this is not a joke)…
Physicians are now blaming post-pandemic stress disorder (PPSD) for all the cardiac deaths (that are only happening to vaccinated patients shortly after they get the vaccine).
I’m serious. You can’t make ()*&U like this up. You really can’t.
…
Note that the more common affliction, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), doesn’t affect your heart at all.
But “post-pandemic” stress? Well now, that’s completely different!
Chudov: Post Pandemic Stress Disorder Covers up Vaccine Injuries
Mysterious "PPSD" causing blood clots and embolisms
…
The Evening Standard article goes on to describe this mysterious disorder:
………
The article is totally amazing. The good news is that it provides some actual facts, which it immediately tries to cover up under the guise of a fictional “post-pandemic stress disorder”.
El gato malo: i see we have now reached the "cover up" stage of the vaccination campaign
did someone leave the gaslight on?
THIS is just staggering in its predatory mendacity.
…
this is a desperate lie from a desperate class of state run doctors desperate to shift the blame for that which they have wrought.
nothing more.
…
there is no question that lockdowns, social alienation and ostracization, etc have caused piles of mental health problems. this is what makes it a great smokescreen. but there is no way that’s translating to heart attacks, strokes, blood clots, and myo and pericarditis in young people like this. it doesn’t do that (or at least not to any meaningful extent).
what DOES do that are these vaccines. and it concentrates MOST in the young and, seemingly, in athletes.
…
this is an attempt to mask and shift the cause of serious harm while allowing that harm to continue.
…
it’s really very simple. this heart risk outcome has become too prevalent to hide. so they need to shift the blame and they are willing to lie to the people and keep harming them to do so.
…
the folks that implemented it are unrepentant.
they are not your friends.
they do not have you best interests at heart.
they are scared, they have their whole careers on the line, and they have become accustomed to wielding the weapons of mass deception.
this makes them very, very dangerous.
El gato malo: northern new england
assessing the assessments
…
clearly, brandon was trying to pass off seasonality as vaccine efficacy.
this prediction of a “clear link” between vaccines and lower rates and lower severity looks to have failed utterly.
there is simply no other way to put it.
it was just a cross correlation of vaccine rates and latitude.
seasons shifted, and so did covid expression. and vaccines seem to have done little or nothing to stop it.
… meanwhile, covid has dropped to the lowest rates since data collection began in the southern states biden and others were so anxious to pillory.
this has been an utter shambles of misinformation and misleading claims coming from DC.
… this is either such rank incompetence or such towering mendacity as to disqualify those promulgating it from any future epidemiological utterances, much less determinations on what constitutes disinformation
*** El gato malo: the omicron absurdities continue
more bizarre tall tales, data misrepresentation, and outright fabulism
let’s have a bit of a round up, shall we?
firstly, the primary terror being spread on omicron is that it has MUCH faster spread than any other variant before it. this is based on the rate of spread in south africa. but as certain internet felines have been wont to opine “reporting case rates without reference to testing level is tantamount to lying.”
and this is even worse. not only is testing adjusted case rate not scary, but there is a second wrinkle hidden in this data: most of this rise is due to a data discontinuity that blew all the averages into the stratosphere because the nature of the reporting changed.
on nov 23, south africa started including antigen tests in its case count. … so, there’s the mystery of the incredible spread rate solved. it’s a data splice. never, ever trust a trend change that takes place at a data splice. it’s 99%+ likely to be a data artifact. this certainly appears to be.
… next up, we have the “wE nEeD tO ISOlatE tHe sOUrCE!” so lock down travel nonsense. not only is this known not to work, but it’s way too late anyway. by the time you notice the spread of a respiratory pathogen, it’s already everywhere. this is why lockdowns and travel restrictions are just clown theater. they have a zero % chance of working.
omicron is already everywhere. if it were playing risk, this would be a hilariously stupid allocation of armies. but if it’s playing “pandemic,” well, it’s already over. it’s going global. this horse is long since out of the barn, over the fence, and was last seen gaining speed through the neighbor’s yard…
next up is vaccine evasion. the answer here is “maybe” though frankly, so were the last ones. in the UK data, the vaccinated were getting much higher case rates than the unvaccinated. so this is hardly new.
but, unlike past variants, the vaccine companies are now leading the charge on “the vaccines will not work on omicron.” this is a 180 flip from past variant claims.
this represents an interesting pivot. i suspect it is self serving. the data is simply becoming too clear that the vaccines do not stop spread and instead make it worse. (just as certain cats warned about) the northeast in the US is about to be a calamity. hospitalizations in new hampshire, vermont, and maine are already exceeding last years peak despite sky high vaxx rates.
cases in MA, CT, RI, NY are now rising rapidly as the warm fall comes to an end and winter begins. watch for them to follow the northern neighbors. this is NOT omicron. this is delta. the vaccines are already falling apart in terms of efficacy because mRNA vaccines against a spike protein were and remain a BAD idea. it’s a bad design and was never going to plausibly provide durable sterilizing immunity. this leakiness has almost certainly made the virus itself worse.
my take is that this omiron vaccine evasion is not new, it’s just an excuse to hide what was already happening.
unless omi is going to lead to worse outcomes than “double the risk of contracting covid” it’s hard to see what the fuss is about, and if that IS the claim, then it’s awfully hard to see why “take more vaxx” is the answer.
and yet the “solutions” are the same tired zero data talking points.
so, now we are to believe that because this variant is vaccine evading, the solution is to take twice as much of a vaccine already known to have the worst side effect profile of any vax ever approved for US use and that this variant has already evaded?
because that sounds like pouring more water on a lithium ion battery fire…
Chudov: Omicron May Spread as Fast as Chickenpox or Measles
Expect Omicron to be all around you in weeks.
Toby: A couple more censored Instagram posts
I’ve noticed that the Stasi are very sensitive about boosters. The top two FDA vaccine regulators quit rather than approve boosters. After the FDA’s expert advisory committee overwhelmingly rejected boosters back in September, the FDA refused to even allow the committee to meet to consider the matter a second time (and just pushed it through by order of the corrupt FDA Commissioner in November). They know that they do not have a scientific leg to stand on so they turn to censorship.
COVID Tweets & Quotes of the Week:
Garcia: Since Omni is the Greek root word for all, and Cron is derived from Chron, or time, this wasn't just an ordinary Joe-gaffe. Biden was simply and honestly signaling that he would continue the grand old presidential tradition of All Bullshit, All the Time.
University of Oxford Professor Jim Naismith: “The ONS survey results on prevalence shows that the Scottish and English approach to masking, although formally different since July, has made no meaningful difference to Delta,”
Schachtel: The average age of a COVID death both in the United States and abroad is about the same as the average lifespan. In previous global plagues, this was not at all the case. The hysteria surrounding COVID Mania is the product of the world’s largest and most widespread case of wholesale statistics fraud, corruption, and deceit.
“If human nature & history teach anything, it is that civil liberties face grave risks when governments proclaim indefinite states of emergency”
– Judge Doughty in his order blocking Vaccine mandate.
Yarvin: What the West is doing wrong is governance theater. … Fortunately or unfortunately, the first school is in charge—mostly. The measure of their capacity for governance is seen by these strange, pointless half-measures: the leaky travel bans, the loose cloth masks, the restaurant face-covering sit-down waltz. This is not covid control. It is covid control theater. It is not coercion for a purpose; it is coercion for the purpose of coercion.
“The first step is to give up the illusion that the primary purpose of modern medical research is to improve Americans’ health most effectively and efficiently. In our opinion, the primary purpose of commercially funded clinical research is to maximize financial return on investment, not health.” —John Abramson, M.D., Harvard Medical School
Miller: when Fauci declares himself a representative of Science, it’s a statement of his religious devotion. He’s not referring to the science of, say, the human manipulation of viruses that can lead to a global pandemic, research Fauci once said he believed was worth the risk. Or to the science that has possibly led to eleven million deaths worldwide and altered the lives of every citizen of every industrialized nation on the planet. Fauci believes himself to be a force for good, no matter how many people or puppies have to die to achieve that good.
Escobar: Robert F Kennedy Jr’s The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health should be front-page news in all the news media in the US. Instead, it has been met with the proverbial thundering silence.
Kunstler: The Covid psychosis is just a reassignment of the Trump derangement.
Sanders: We were conditioned for the worst, and when the projections proved to be buncombe, our relief never progressed into righteous anger at having been played.
**** el gato malo: i urge you to watch the video and hear him, in his own words. because this is who tony fauci was, and he has not gotten better. he’s just become more powerful and more nastily manipulative and narcissistic. ,., the fact that it was literally the same guy who is still at it should deeply embarrass us all
El gato malo: this has NOT been “following the science” is has been the abrogation of a century of evidence based epidemiology and social mores in order to take a devastating and self-serving joy ride with the world’s populace like it was some sort of video game. … this was done to you, not for you. and it was done by people who damn well knew better.
Schachtel: We’ve seen this movie before. Since early 2020, the “new, dangerous, unprecedented COVID strain” playbook has remained the same. It’s now been almost two years since the first “new strain” came on the scene.
Kisin: They're not demonising the unvaccinated to get more people protected against COVID. Nearly 93% of adults in England have COVID antibodies. Politicians want the majority to blame the minority for one reason and one reason only: so we don't blame them.
Tessa: As far as Omicron, it’s an interesting thing. Because the new variant of concern is mild but terrifying, while the vaccines don’t work but do, we can be safely recycled and boostered, without turning the page in the marketing brochure. That is, until our natural immunity is fried after booster #5.
“This is really a technology designed to poison people, there’s really no two-ways about it.”– Dr. Michael Palmer (Professor of Biochemistry, University of Waterloo) on mRNA vaccines
No one will be “forcibly brought” to a vaccination center to get jabbed against their will, although rest assured, they will be “forcibly” placed behind bars if they continue to refuse.
Blumenthal: Australian Hayley Hodgson was placed in a Covid internment camp despite testing negative for the virus (3x). She was confined to a box for 14 days, offered valium when she complained about confinement, and lost her job
Peckford: “The Provincial Governments by their various draconian measures are violating the Charter (the Supreme Law of Canada): Section 2, freedom of assembly, association, religion, conscience, & expression; Section 6, the right of mobility & to pursue a livelihood anywhere in Canada; Section 7, the right to life, liberty & the security of the person; and Section 15, the right of equality before the law.”
The New York Times has identified the latest culprit that’s to blame for the egregious spread of online “misinformation. Cat videos.
Yes, really, cat videos – and GIFs.
CO-VIDs of the Week:
Robert Kennedy Interviewed by Tucker Carlson
COVID Anecdotes:
Not Just Players - Premier League Matches Disrupted By Fans Having 'Medical Emergencies' In The Stands
Tessa: Honest People Series: Dr. Mary Bowden
Most of us would rather be treated by Dr. Bowden than Dr. Fauci.
… Dr. Bowden’s crime? She used her knowledge and professional expertise to treat her COVID patients, and she seemingly helped them improve their health and not die. According to her, she treated about 2000 COVID patients, and no one was hospitalized or died. No one! Among other things—you guessed it—she dared prescribe ivermectin. The prescribed ivermectin seemingly dared work well, and her patients dared continue staying in one piece and alive—which was setting an awful example for the general public since no one who acts in defiance of the official CDC guidelines is permitted to thrive, from a moral perspective. Why? Because it’s immoral to jeopardize the establishment narrative and the sales of Holy Vaccines! OMG! What will happen to the poor BlackRock investors if medical doctors stop toeing the line and start endangering the sales of strategically critical medical products?!!
So the hospital system wisely chose to punish the irreverent doctor.
In a sane world, one would think that a doctor with such stellar results would be celebrated and praised—but no, not in our upsidedown world! In our world, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street are seemingly writing the rules of our behavior (while being the most prominent institutional investors in every big corporation in every big industry—including the media). In our world, medical murder is celebrated (my heart!!)—while doctors who treat their patients successfully in ways that go against the investors’ commercial interests are made to be outcasts. It’s an upsidedown world, and I am disgusted!
COVID “VAX” Mandate / Pushback Fare:
Vaccine Mandates: Unscientific, Divisive, and Enormously Costly
El gato malo: this has NOT been “following the science” is has been the abrogation of a century of evidence based epidemiology and social mores in order to take a devastating and self-serving joy ride with the world’s populace like it was some sort of video game. … this was done to you, not for you. and it was done by people who damn well knew better.
Schachtel: We’ve seen this movie before. Since early 2020, the “new, dangerous, unprecedented COVID strain” playbook has remained the same. It’s now been almost two years since the first “new strain” came on the scene.
Kisin: They're not demonising the unvaccinated to get more people protected against COVID. Nearly 93% of adults in England have COVID antibodies. Politicians want the majority to blame the minority for one reason and one reason only: so we don't blame them.
Tessa: As far as Omicron, it’s an interesting thing. Because the new variant of concern is mild but terrifying, while the vaccines don’t work but do, we can be safely recycled and boostered, without turning the page in the marketing brochure. That is, until our natural immunity is fried after booster #5.
“This is really a technology designed to poison people, there’s really no two-ways about it.”– Dr. Michael Palmer (Professor of Biochemistry, University of Waterloo) on mRNA vaccines
No one will be “forcibly brought” to a vaccination center to get jabbed against their will, although rest assured, they will be “forcibly” placed behind bars if they continue to refuse.
Blumenthal: Australian Hayley Hodgson was placed in a Covid internment camp despite testing negative for the virus (3x). She was confined to a box for 14 days, offered valium when she complained about confinement, and lost her job
Peckford: “The Provincial Governments by their various draconian measures are violating the Charter (the Supreme Law of Canada): Section 2, freedom of assembly, association, religion, conscience, & expression; Section 6, the right of mobility & to pursue a livelihood anywhere in Canada; Section 7, the right to life, liberty & the security of the person; and Section 15, the right of equality before the law.”
The New York Times has identified the latest culprit that’s to blame for the egregious spread of online “misinformation. Cat videos.
Yes, really, cat videos – and GIFs.
CO-VIDs of the Week:
Robert Kennedy Interviewed by Tucker Carlson
COVID Anecdotes:
Not Just Players - Premier League Matches Disrupted By Fans Having 'Medical Emergencies' In The Stands
Tessa: Honest People Series: Dr. Mary Bowden
Most of us would rather be treated by Dr. Bowden than Dr. Fauci.
… Dr. Bowden’s crime? She used her knowledge and professional expertise to treat her COVID patients, and she seemingly helped them improve their health and not die. According to her, she treated about 2000 COVID patients, and no one was hospitalized or died. No one! Among other things—you guessed it—she dared prescribe ivermectin. The prescribed ivermectin seemingly dared work well, and her patients dared continue staying in one piece and alive—which was setting an awful example for the general public since no one who acts in defiance of the official CDC guidelines is permitted to thrive, from a moral perspective. Why? Because it’s immoral to jeopardize the establishment narrative and the sales of Holy Vaccines! OMG! What will happen to the poor BlackRock investors if medical doctors stop toeing the line and start endangering the sales of strategically critical medical products?!!
So the hospital system wisely chose to punish the irreverent doctor.
In a sane world, one would think that a doctor with such stellar results would be celebrated and praised—but no, not in our upsidedown world! In our world, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street are seemingly writing the rules of our behavior (while being the most prominent institutional investors in every big corporation in every big industry—including the media). In our world, medical murder is celebrated (my heart!!)—while doctors who treat their patients successfully in ways that go against the investors’ commercial interests are made to be outcasts. It’s an upsidedown world, and I am disgusted!
COVID “VAX” Mandate / Pushback Fare:
Vaccine Mandates: Unscientific, Divisive, and Enormously Costly
Bavaria Inches Closer to a Vaccine Mandate for Public Sector Employees
In response to this absurd legal harassment, an employee of the Institute of Pathology of the LMU Faculty of Medicine, here in Munich, released a brief internet video pointing out the boundless absurdity of the new rules:
In less than five minutes, she catalogued all the obvious absurdities we have confronted for months: Corona deaths are a small portion of overall mortality right now; problems with hospital capacity arise from staffing shortages, not Corona; the new rules, which harass unvaccinated healthcare personnel with de facto weekly fines of around 150 Euros, will only make these staffing shortages worse.
After her video had racked up thousands of views … =
… grounds for immediate termination and banning from the university.
Hundreds of Google employees sign manifesto opposing vaccination mandate
Berenson: The god that failed
How to open the eyes of anyone who still thinks Covid vaccines are working as promised
…
Instead, try one simple question. The simplest possible. The public health equivalent of Ronald Reagan’s, Are you better off today than you were four years ago?
The question is this: If the vaccines work, what’s going on?
camp australia: the brochure vs reality
Eugyppius: Is it in the end all just words?
Thoughts on how we get out of this.
…
Dissent, therefore—even of the kind I engage in here—has a purpose. It is not just words, and it is not mere preaching to the choir. We have to sow doubt among true believers and ridicule the official line at every opportunity, but we also have to create a broader cultural space that is more interesting and more dynamic and more explanatory than their flat, boring world of interconnected largely false doctrines preserved in amber.
…
…
Remember always that it is an enormous help to us, that none of this nonsense actually works. It is a complete joke, everything that they do.
COVID Conspiracy Fare:
Thomas DiLorenzo: The Most Striking Fact in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s New Book
… And what Fauci doesn’t control through government funding, other government bureaucrats at NIH and elsewhere do. They are Fauci wannabes in this corrupt, stinking, fraudulent field of “public” health. No wonder Dr. Scott Atlas, a real doctor and medical researcher, was so shocked at the immense incompetence he was exposed to while serving on President Trump’s COVID task force and sitting through meetings with dopey Fauci
Think Carefully About Accepting The Concept Of Vaccine Passports
As the architects of the Build Back Better society assist you in creating easier ways to show your vaccinated and compliant status, perhaps it is prudent to pause and think about the discussions that take place behind the opaque glass doors.
Roberts: More Evidence that the Covid Conspiracy Theory Is a Fact
Chudov: URGENT -- Omicron "variant" likely to be man-made
· However, the omicron variant appears to have derived directly from the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, one that has not been observed in the wild in months. — Washington Times
· In other words, while scientists can tell that this variant evolved from a strain that was circulating in mid-2020, in the intervening months there's been no trace of all the intermediate versions that scientists would have expected to find as it morphed into its current form. — NPR
…
That this Omicron is a descendant of the original Covid as of 1.5 years ago, which is long dead, and no similar variants were found, leaves the only likely hypothesis to be a human, lab origin.
Crooke: Now or Never: The Great ‘Transition’ Must Be Imposed
A new wave of restrictions, more lockdowns, and – eventually – trillions of dollars in new stimmie cheques may be in prospect.
…
Of course, the Pharma-Establishment know that the vaccines are no panacea. There are ‘higher interests’ at play here. It is driven rather by fear that the window for implementing its series of ‘transitions’ in the U.S. and Europe is closing. Biden still struggles to move his ‘Go-Big’ social spending plan and green agenda transition through Congress by the midterm election in a year’s time. And the inflation spike may well sink Biden’s Build Back Better agenda (BBB) altogether.
…
The window for the Re-Set may be fast closing. One observer, noting all the frenetic Élite activity, has asked ‘have we finally reached peak Davos?’. Is the turn to authoritarianism in Europe a sign of desperation as fears grow that the various ‘transitions’ planned under the ‘re-set’ umbrella (financial, climate, vaccine and managerial expert technocracy) may never be implemented?
Cut short rather, as spending plans are hobbled by accelerating inflation; as the climate transition fails to find traction amongst poorer states (and at home, too); as technocracy is increasingly discredited by adverse pandemic outcomes; and Modern Monetary Theory hits a wall, because – well, inflation again.
Rose: Is someone staggering the more 'toxic' Vax Lots?
There’s a new fascinating video out there in the inteur-web that is claiming that dangerous Vax Lots (VLs) (VLs more frequently associated with a higher number of Adverse Events (AEs)) are being deployed to the U.S. population, strategically, by staggering them, to ensure that these dangerous lots are always in the ‘system’ in an attempt to carry out ‘discrete dosage testing’.
******* Alice: Letter to an Agree-to-Disagree Relative
Imagine the Holocaust is happening again. Only this time, it’s on a planetary scale. And there aren’t any Allies coming to the rescue—because they’re just as guilty as the Axis.
Then imagine you have incontrovertible proof that mass extermination is occurring, and it has been devised by megalomaniacal self-styled gods; patented and formulated by pharmaceutical megacorporations; imposed by governments (or else) and official agencies; implemented by hospitals, doctors, and the medical community; and covered up by mainstream media and Big Tech.
Now imagine people are telling you sharing evidence of that atrocity is making them uncomfortable. They want to change the subject; they want to agree-to-disagree.
How would you feel when you’re doing everything in your power to prevent more human beings from being massacred, and most people don’t want to hear about it, don’t want to think about it, don’t want to even consider the snowballing scientific data because it contradicts the worldwide propaganda campaign being scripted by the very entities committing these crimes against humanity?
I know that sounds hyperbolic. That’s what purveyors of the Biggest Lie in world history count on. It is too titanic, too ridiculous to be believed.
All of their mouthpieces tell you so. They tell you we’re “anti-vaxxers.” They tell you we’re “conspiracy theorists.” They tell you we’re spreading “misinformation.”
… “And how about that totalitarianism spreading around the globe like, hmm, well, like a highly contagious virus?”
“Or did you hear about Dr. Mengelfauci funding savage experiments on beagles where the sadists slashed their vocal chords so they wouldn’t be annoyed by the dogs’ screams while their faces were being devoured by sand flies until they died?”
“Oh, and what about all those cases of post-injection myocarditis, pericarditis, cardiac events, strokes, stillborn deaths, newborn deaths, and the nearly million adverse event reports—including 18,853 deaths through November 12, 2021—in VAERS alone? Why do you think the media didn’t tell you about any of those injuries and deaths? Weird, right?”
“Incidentally, did you know all those people who died from COVID could have been saved if early treatment protocols like ivermectin had been promoted or even permitted and interventions like Remdesivir, Midazolam, and ventilation had been prohibited?”
Orb Weaver, Crayfish, and Myths of Texas
In the months immediately after the pandemic was declared, I felt driven to share research I’d assembled over the course of about five years on digital identity and social impact investing as most people were narrowly focused on health concerns. I knew augmented / extended / mixed reality was coming along with behavioral nudges, and that biometric identity was needed to scale social impact investing and human capital futures markets.
…Over time I began to discern a complex landscape of information warfare – layers of managed narrative, shock and awe, attention misdirection, group think, and media celebrity culture.
…We are living through a time of profound social reckoning… We’re in a struggle for soul, spirit, and consciousness. Just when we need stability most, we realize many of our cultural anchors were actually shallow rooted myths, dangerously eroded by decades of psychological and economic warfare. We are adrift in swirling debris of what we thought the world was, trying to figure out what comes next.
Amid the flotsam and jetsam our task is to find a way forward; and yet it is a slog. Twenty-one months and counting IS a marathon. Over the past few months I admit my energy has evaporated. I am trying to figure out life outside the career I had for seventeen years. I am feeling increasingly disconnected from time and place – fighting the Metaverse, but also being pulled into it. The initial excitement of adding my two cents to the conversation has faded. Many predictions I made back in March and April of 2020 have started coming to fruition and are finally acceptable for bigger outlets to start talking about. These developments continue to be presented in a piecemeal fashion, often missing important context.
I have to practice letting all of that go.
Rose: Taking Back Our Freedoms - we will need each other
Very informative websites created by amazing human beings
…Everyone is experiencing the difficulties with the intentional polarization of all people. And of course, fear is and always has been the best tool to manipulate a population. The new lexicon of rhetorical banalities like ‘anti-vaxxer’ and ‘do it for the greater good’, ‘save grandma’ and my personal favorite ‘it’s safe and effective’, has made it not only easy for everyone to finger-point and hand-wave, but I believe it has been the integral part in the polarization and division steps.
Words are powerful. And I believe that words can be powerful triggers. Especially if uttered by a loved one. When one hears a trigger word, one might categorically shut-down. On command, it seems. Not only that, in some cases these trigger words can result in one becoming ferocious. Defending the most indefensible entities like big pharma companies. It is very hard for me to understand this defensiveness. It is very hard for me to understand how and why one could get to a point where instead of listening/exchanging/engaging, one attacks. This is because, I think, it rests in a place beyond logic. It’s the lizard brain. Emotions. Triggers. Cognitive dissonance and such. It is almost too hard for most people to believe that this could possibly be happening. And if they even considered the possibility, their foundation would crumble. Would it? How could we be lied to like this? It can’t be possible. Because if it was, it would mean that I would have to accept the fact that I was wrong and I was successfully deceived by someone I trusted. How painful is that?
…
One more tidbit. I was also on a call with PANDA the other night had the pleasure of speaking with David Charalambous (he’s a behavioral analyst) and he has started a project called Reaching People. If you want to hear a summary of what this movement is about you can click here. Basically, he and his team are writing the protocol enable people to reach people. Most of the masses are in a state of what some call ‘hypnosis’ (amazing video by my buddy Robert Malone) that has disabled an ability to think critically or to even consider that the narrative might be wrong. I think that this protocol, and the concept itself, is one of the most essential tools we will all need if we are to navigate our way out of this mess.
Worth reading for the lengthy preamble on wokeness, before delving in to the topic of the title
*** Eugyppius: There isn’t one plan, there are fifty thousand, and nobody is in charge.
More thoughts on conspiracies, now that I’ve angered many readers
GeoPolitical Fare:
No way around it, all regime change policies are bound to crash and burn
A new book finds that failure is baked in the cake yet the US insists on playing with fire again and again.
Welsh: What Would Chinese Democracy Look Like?
Mahbubani also discusses what sort of person would be elected if China was a democracy.
Think Theodore Roosevelt, who, if you aren’t aware, was a raging warmonger. Xi, and the CCP in general, are a moderating influence on Chinese foreign affairs. China’s population has far more aggressive feelings than China’s current rulers; they are still furious about the “century of humiliation” and they want China to be the number one nation in the world; certainly to be dominant in its sphere of influence: exactly as Americans did in the late 19th century and the 20th century, entire.
The Usual Suspects Are Trying To Foment A Crisis With Russia
Doctorow: Russian attack on Ukraine imminent?
For its part, the Kremlin has vehemently denied having any designs on Ukraine and claims that Washington is behind this fake news which is intended to encourage the Zelensky government to do something quite stupid
….
Now, in the latest remarks to come from the Kremlin, it would appear that we all, my peers among Western commentators and I, have been wrong-footed. Putin has said as clearly as conceivable within the traditional language of international diplomacy that if the USA puts offensive missile systems onto Ukrainian soil, thereby cutting the warning time of attack on Moscow to 5-7 minutes, then the Russians will station their hypersonic attack missiles on surface and submarine vessels within 5-7 minutes striking distance of Washington, D.C.
In short, what we potentially now have before us is the Cuban Missile Crisis Redux. Only this time the gamblers with the fate of the world are playing with the cards face up.
Doctorow: The United States pushes Russia to the brink of war, then cries “wolf”
My position on cause and effect remains resolutely defiant of the Western media consensus about Russia’s culpability. The media differ only in the degree of foolishness by which they explain Russian objectives and thinking processes. Even the most prestigious and seemingly serious Western media like the BBC have been handing the microphone to utter nitwits whose only merit for their purposes is hatred and disdain for Russia. … I ask instead what does Washington hope to achieve by pouring kerosene on the flames of the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation.
…
Of course, all of these calculations on the American side are reckless. The Russians have plainly said that they deem the Ukrainian government to be U.S-controlled, not a free agent, and they hold Washington directly responsible for whatever may happen on the ground in their neighborhood. So the threat of a regional war remaining localized and not escalating to exchange of blows between the Great Powers is unclear. Moreover, there is the question of how the Chinese may use the pending conflagration over Ukraine to their own advantage in settling their contest with the U.S. over Taiwan and control of the South China Sea.
As I have been saying for some time, the near term fate of humanity rests not in combating Global Warming but in resolving the threats to global peace emanating from Washington as it tries by hook or by crook to maintain the worldwide hegemony that is fast slipping through its fingers.
Orlov: Russia’s Greatest Weapon is not a Weapon
Orwellian Fare:
Some Swedes Are Getting Vaccine Passports On IMPLANTABLE MICROCHIPS
Why not have ones COVID vaccination status applied to an implantable chip in order to participate in society?
Recommended for reading in full if only as a short case study on mainstream media lying to promote agendas of plutocracy:
*** The 'Missing' Star Athlete Peng Shuai Is Not Missing At All
The New York Times has falsely claimed that the Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai accused her former lover of sexual assault. She did not do that.
In her post on the Chinese website Weibo (English translation) Peng Shuai only lamented that the relation with her old lover had come to an end. She did not accuse him of anything that could be considered an assault. The NYT made that up. [New York Times Invents 'Sexual Assault' #MeToo Case To Blame China]
CaitOz Fare:
********** Annual Write-Up On What I’m About And What I’m Doing Here
It seems pretty obvious to me that our species is headed for disaster if our large-scale behavior remains dictated by systems in which people and nations compete with each other for power and profit rather than collaborating with each other for the good of everyone. The pursuit of profit for its own sake is killing our biosphere and the agenda of unipolar domination is driving us ever closer to nuclear war, so I find it no exaggeration to say that our very survival depends on abandoning capitalism and imperialism in favor of collaboration-based models of operation.
…
But we’ll never move into the kind of healthy systems we need for survival as long as we are being successfully manipulated into accepting the status quo by those who benefit from it. A tremendous amount of my work goes into attacking the establishment propaganda machine and highlighting its malignant effects, because from my point of view that’s the glue holding the whole extinction stew together.
There’s a loose alliance of plutocrats and government agencies roughly centralized around the United States who make the real decisions of consequence behind the theatrical displays of electoral politics and official governmental systems, and those decisions are what’s driving us to extinction via environmental collapse or nuclear armageddon. It seems clear to me that these power-hungry individuals are far too deeply unconscious and unwise to take any interest in steering us away from this suicidal trajectory, so things aren’t going to get better until ordinary people rise up and use the power of their numbers to force them to. But this will never happen as long as people are being successfully propagandized away from doing so by the mass media and other systems geared toward controlling the dominant narrative about the world.
…
In order to take power, ordinary people are going to have to reclaim our minds from those who are manipulating us into consenting to our oppressive, exploitative, ecocidal, omnicidal status quo. This is going to mean helping each other awaken to the many ways in which we are being manipulated by the powerful;…
Covid is interesting in that it has a propaganda campaign that everyone’s aware of and encouraged to participate in. So you’ll see things like when Jimmy Dore got slammed earlier this year for talking about his adverse vaccine reaction, not because it was false, but because it hurt the propaganda effort.
There’s no basis whatsoever for the belief that Dore lied about having adverse reactions, but he got raked over the coals anyway. You see things like that all the time: people forcefully discouraged from talking about raw facts because it might hurt the vaccine effort or whatever.
You are free to believe this propaganda campaign is a good thing, or that it’s a necessary evil, but what you can’t do is deny that it’s a propaganda campaign. There’s a concerted effort to manage perception, and the rank-and-file public is actively participating in that effort.
None of this is to deny that there’s misinformation about Covid and vaccines etc; there’s an incredible amount of stupid bullshit and sloppy thinking out there. But there’s also a fair bit of real information that people simply cannot discuss outside certain echo chambers without being stomped down.
This is a fairly new development, where the public is encouraged not just to share a certain message but to aggressively shut down anything which doesn’t perfectly align with it regardless of whether or not it is based in fact. Narrative managers are watching this one closely.
…
Things are fucked, the people who are making them fucked will keep doing so until stopped by the public, and the public is being psychologically manipulated away from stopping them by propaganda. That’s our whole struggle right now, and it’s happening on many different fronts.
Other Quotes of the Week:
***** Kunstler: The thesis called mass formation psychosis put forward lately by the Belgian psychologist Mattias Desmet — goes a long way to explaining the disgraceful mindfuckery that Western Civ has fallen for in our time, promulgated by a thinking class that descended into abject madness.
Escobar: American hysteria over the “imminent” Russian invasion of Ukraine has exploded every geopolitical Stupid-o-Meter in sight – and that’s quite an accomplishment.
Bates: When mentioning my trips to China to teach permaculture and ecovillage design, I often encounter a knee-jerk response, wherein my friends feel it necessary for them to bring up the punishment of Uyghurs to even have a conversation of any kind about China. And of course it is impossible to say anything kind about ethnic cleansing and mass detention so I just tend to agree and continue the conversation. Occasionally, I feel a loss of nuance that erodes our shared understanding of things and I will wade in with a deeper analysis. That seldom goes well. There is a purple fog that descends when hypnotic triggers implanted by popular culture are squeezed.
Long Reads / Big Thoughts:
Greer: An Empire of Dreams
There’s a fond belief among the comfortable classes of our time, and for that matter every other time, that the future can be arranged in advance through reasonable discussions among reasonable people. Popular though this notion is, it’s quite mistaken. What history shows, rather, is that the future is always born on the irrational fringes of society, bursting forth among outcasts, dreamers, saints, and fools. It then sweeps inward from there, brushing aside the daydreams of those who thought they could make the world do as they pleased.
…
To begin with, the popularity of conspiracy theories is a sensitive measure of the degree to which people no longer trust the conventional wisdom of their time. That’s an explosive issue just now, and for good reason: the conventional wisdom of our time is fatally out of step with the facts on the ground. Look across the whole range of acceptable views presented by qualified pundits, and by and large you’ll find that a randomly chosen fortune cookie will give you better guidance. The debacle in Afghanistan is only one reminder of the extent that a popular joke about economics—“What do you call an economist who makes a prediction? Wrong.”—can be applied with equal force to most of the experts whose notions guide industrial societies.
What makes the astounding incompetence of today’s expert opinions so toxic is that nobody in the corporate media, and next to nobody in the political sphere, is willing to talk about it. … , and so on at great length—one rule remains sacrosanct: no one outside the managerial class is supposed to question the validity of the next round of expert-approved policies, no matter how obviously doomed to fail they are.
… Conspiracy theories in society are the collective equivalent of schizophrenia in the individual, and they have the same cause: the systematic gaslighting of individuals who know that they are being lied to.
…
The first point to keep in mind is that when Tartarian believers say that the history taught to them in the schools is full of lies, they’re right. The history taught to children in every literate society is a mix of well-meaning attempts to summarize the terrifying complexity and ambiguity of the past, on the one hand, and self-serving mythologies meant to justify existing distributions of wealth and influence, on the other. These days, as in most civilizations in decline, the balance has swung very far toward the latter.
… No matter how much self-serving nonsense gets spewed out by the pharmaceutical industry, to cite only one obvious example, self-proclaimed skeptics embrace it with the same blind faith that they denounce as fundamentalism in other contexts. “Pfizer said it, I believe it, that settles it” is their invariable motto.
Sheridan: The Twilight of the Narrative
…
As the corona event drags on interminably, there are those in the dissenter camp who still think the “narrative is about to crack” any day now and the “truth” will be revealed.
This mindset from the old, pre-internet world is no longer valid in the world we live. There is no unifying narrative any more that is going to crack and be replaced by a better, more truthful narrative. Rather, there are now just a seemingly infinite number of sub-narratives with a dominant narrative imposed on top of them. The dominant narrative is not necessarily truthful, just dominant. The emergence of the “conspiracy theory” label alongside the daily censorship that now happens on social media platforms are among a number of tactics that are now used to try and subdue alternative narratives in the hope of allowing a centralised narrative to form. But it never does for the simple reason that you cannot coerce people into believing a narrative. Narratives must evolve organically with a feedback loop between top-down and bottom-up. The increasing use of censorious tactics in the last couple of years reveals the underlying weakness of the dominant narrative. The powers that be have gone all out in attempting to hold together a narrative that itself doesn’t make sense as it is changed willy-nilly according to purely political considerations.
It’s tempting to think the politicians are doing it on purpose with some larger objective in mind. But what if there is no larger objective? What if these tactics are simply what is required now to create any type of dominant narrative at all? What if these tactics are now the price you pay to create a narrative? If so, that price has gone through the roof. We can usefully call this narrative inflation. If you increase the supply of money, you get monetary inflation. If you increase the supply of narratives, you get narrative inflation. The price to create a dominant narrative has gone up for a number of reasons but one is that the internet opened the floodgates on the flow of information and allowed multiple alternative narratives to be created. This has created its own dynamic independent of the political and economic considerations that are also driving the trend. It may turn out that one of the consequences of allowing free and instant information is to destroy centralised narratives.
…
The system itself is the thing people believe in. The public discourse which existed prior to the internet was facilitated through a system in which the media was known as the “fourth estate”. Its job was to hold government to account. Of course, this was not a perfect system but, as the saying goes, it seems it was better than all the others. It was certainly better than the system we have now where the media does not hold the government to account at all and is little more than a public relations branch of the government.
…
Our post-internet public discourse provides some evidence for this assertion. It has become completely detached from reality or, to put it another way, it represents only one version of reality: the one that comes from the top-down. This process is especially advanced in the US. It hit a fever pitch with the Trump presidency and has not relaxed since. There are now at least two mutually incompatible narratives going on in the US meaning that agreement about the fundamentals which hold society together is called into question on an almost daily basis …. Within this new world, the idea that the “narrative is about to crack” doesn’t make sense. The dominant narrative is held in place by power, not by truth.
…
We are entering a time when even the idea of a centralised narrative is no longer believed in. If Plato was right, this fact alone is an existential threat to the state and it is understandable that the state would strive to fix the problem. But it’s almost certainly too late. All of the censorship and victimisation in the world won’t put humpty dumpty together again. Going forward I expect we’ll still have an “official narrative” but nobody will really believe it. That’s what is implied by the falling revenue numbers of the mainstream media channels. Will that lead to the disintegration of the state? Plato would have said yes. We may be about to test that theory.
Brownstein: The Power of Kindness
… Every day presents opportunities to practice kindness as we let go of our personal sense of importance.
Cory Doctorow: Give Me Slack
My parental worries, ca. 2021.
Sadly, NOT Satirical Fare:
Twitter Slaps 'Unsafe' Label On American Heart Association mRNA Vaccine Warning
Pics of the Week:
Bates: When mentioning my trips to China to teach permaculture and ecovillage design, I often encounter a knee-jerk response, wherein my friends feel it necessary for them to bring up the punishment of Uyghurs to even have a conversation of any kind about China. And of course it is impossible to say anything kind about ethnic cleansing and mass detention so I just tend to agree and continue the conversation. Occasionally, I feel a loss of nuance that erodes our shared understanding of things and I will wade in with a deeper analysis. That seldom goes well. There is a purple fog that descends when hypnotic triggers implanted by popular culture are squeezed.
Long Reads / Big Thoughts:
Greer: An Empire of Dreams
There’s a fond belief among the comfortable classes of our time, and for that matter every other time, that the future can be arranged in advance through reasonable discussions among reasonable people. Popular though this notion is, it’s quite mistaken. What history shows, rather, is that the future is always born on the irrational fringes of society, bursting forth among outcasts, dreamers, saints, and fools. It then sweeps inward from there, brushing aside the daydreams of those who thought they could make the world do as they pleased.
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To begin with, the popularity of conspiracy theories is a sensitive measure of the degree to which people no longer trust the conventional wisdom of their time. That’s an explosive issue just now, and for good reason: the conventional wisdom of our time is fatally out of step with the facts on the ground. Look across the whole range of acceptable views presented by qualified pundits, and by and large you’ll find that a randomly chosen fortune cookie will give you better guidance. The debacle in Afghanistan is only one reminder of the extent that a popular joke about economics—“What do you call an economist who makes a prediction? Wrong.”—can be applied with equal force to most of the experts whose notions guide industrial societies.
What makes the astounding incompetence of today’s expert opinions so toxic is that nobody in the corporate media, and next to nobody in the political sphere, is willing to talk about it. … , and so on at great length—one rule remains sacrosanct: no one outside the managerial class is supposed to question the validity of the next round of expert-approved policies, no matter how obviously doomed to fail they are.
… Conspiracy theories in society are the collective equivalent of schizophrenia in the individual, and they have the same cause: the systematic gaslighting of individuals who know that they are being lied to.
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The first point to keep in mind is that when Tartarian believers say that the history taught to them in the schools is full of lies, they’re right. The history taught to children in every literate society is a mix of well-meaning attempts to summarize the terrifying complexity and ambiguity of the past, on the one hand, and self-serving mythologies meant to justify existing distributions of wealth and influence, on the other. These days, as in most civilizations in decline, the balance has swung very far toward the latter.
… No matter how much self-serving nonsense gets spewed out by the pharmaceutical industry, to cite only one obvious example, self-proclaimed skeptics embrace it with the same blind faith that they denounce as fundamentalism in other contexts. “Pfizer said it, I believe it, that settles it” is their invariable motto.
Sheridan: The Twilight of the Narrative
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As the corona event drags on interminably, there are those in the dissenter camp who still think the “narrative is about to crack” any day now and the “truth” will be revealed.
This mindset from the old, pre-internet world is no longer valid in the world we live. There is no unifying narrative any more that is going to crack and be replaced by a better, more truthful narrative. Rather, there are now just a seemingly infinite number of sub-narratives with a dominant narrative imposed on top of them. The dominant narrative is not necessarily truthful, just dominant. The emergence of the “conspiracy theory” label alongside the daily censorship that now happens on social media platforms are among a number of tactics that are now used to try and subdue alternative narratives in the hope of allowing a centralised narrative to form. But it never does for the simple reason that you cannot coerce people into believing a narrative. Narratives must evolve organically with a feedback loop between top-down and bottom-up. The increasing use of censorious tactics in the last couple of years reveals the underlying weakness of the dominant narrative. The powers that be have gone all out in attempting to hold together a narrative that itself doesn’t make sense as it is changed willy-nilly according to purely political considerations.
It’s tempting to think the politicians are doing it on purpose with some larger objective in mind. But what if there is no larger objective? What if these tactics are simply what is required now to create any type of dominant narrative at all? What if these tactics are now the price you pay to create a narrative? If so, that price has gone through the roof. We can usefully call this narrative inflation. If you increase the supply of money, you get monetary inflation. If you increase the supply of narratives, you get narrative inflation. The price to create a dominant narrative has gone up for a number of reasons but one is that the internet opened the floodgates on the flow of information and allowed multiple alternative narratives to be created. This has created its own dynamic independent of the political and economic considerations that are also driving the trend. It may turn out that one of the consequences of allowing free and instant information is to destroy centralised narratives.
…
The system itself is the thing people believe in. The public discourse which existed prior to the internet was facilitated through a system in which the media was known as the “fourth estate”. Its job was to hold government to account. Of course, this was not a perfect system but, as the saying goes, it seems it was better than all the others. It was certainly better than the system we have now where the media does not hold the government to account at all and is little more than a public relations branch of the government.
…
Our post-internet public discourse provides some evidence for this assertion. It has become completely detached from reality or, to put it another way, it represents only one version of reality: the one that comes from the top-down. This process is especially advanced in the US. It hit a fever pitch with the Trump presidency and has not relaxed since. There are now at least two mutually incompatible narratives going on in the US meaning that agreement about the fundamentals which hold society together is called into question on an almost daily basis …. Within this new world, the idea that the “narrative is about to crack” doesn’t make sense. The dominant narrative is held in place by power, not by truth.
…
We are entering a time when even the idea of a centralised narrative is no longer believed in. If Plato was right, this fact alone is an existential threat to the state and it is understandable that the state would strive to fix the problem. But it’s almost certainly too late. All of the censorship and victimisation in the world won’t put humpty dumpty together again. Going forward I expect we’ll still have an “official narrative” but nobody will really believe it. That’s what is implied by the falling revenue numbers of the mainstream media channels. Will that lead to the disintegration of the state? Plato would have said yes. We may be about to test that theory.
Brownstein: The Power of Kindness
… Every day presents opportunities to practice kindness as we let go of our personal sense of importance.
Cory Doctorow: Give Me Slack
My parental worries, ca. 2021.
Sadly, NOT Satirical Fare:
Twitter Slaps 'Unsafe' Label On American Heart Association mRNA Vaccine Warning
Pics of the Week:
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