Regular Fare:
Brace For 2022 As Global Credit Impulse Goes Negative
When the credit impulse is negative, expect that growth will cool down significantly in the next six to nine months afterwards. Said differently, we could see growth slowdown from Q2-Q3 onwards in 2022. This has not been priced in by any investors at that stage. Both short- and medium-term factors explain the contraction in the global credit impulse : the contraction in the flow of new credit in most developed countries (the United Kingdom, the euro area and Japan, for instance) and the tight monetary and fiscal policies implemented by China since early 2021. This has been recently reversed. But it will take time before it has a net positive global effect on growth. Our leading indicator has a very good track record.
If it proves to be right once more, the year 2022 could be less quiet than most currently anticipate on the macroeconomic front.
More Than $100 Billion Was Stolen From Pandemic Relief Funds, Secret Service Says
The $100 billion figure is "at a minimum," a new report from AP says.
Albert Edwards' 2022 Outlook: Four Big Surprises... And Lots Of Pain
His "third surprise" may be, well, the most surprising - Edwards expects that easing supply bottlenecks combine with soggy commodity prices to drive US headline CPI inflation back well below 2% (this is also the inventory glut thesis floated by Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank). Hence, the SocGen skeptic expects "current inflation fears to evaporate as H1 unfolds and bond yields to decline sharply."
The "fourth and final surprise" will come out of China, where after continued growth disappointments in the face of tight money (that has helped weaken industrial commodity prices in H2 2021), Beijing will be forced to launch a Powell-like policy pivot (we have already seen the early signs of this in the past few weeks) and the Chinese monetary floodgates are re-opened - including a burst in China's credit impulse and rapid renminbi devaluation .
Other Charts: (links: one, two)
QOTW:
Brian Eno: I see a world absolutely awash with loose money and speculation because the various governments of the world, unwilling to make any serious structural changes that would threaten the present status quo, have decided to solve every problem by printing more money to throw at it. This is presumably why stocks soar when there’s an emergency like Covid – because speculators realise that a new emergency means a new infusion of money, and they know that much of it will end up in their hands.
Bubble Fare:
2022: END OF THE PONZI CYCLE
In addition to lethal doses of monetary heroin, this era's excess stock market returns are a function of an aging society reaching peak retirement. Passive "dumb money" inflows have been creating their own Ponzi-like market returns. … There has never been an asset class in human history wherein valuations don't matter. When asset valuations are predicated strictly upon inflows they temporarily detach from their intrinsic values and then they ultimately crash back to down to reality. The greater the distance back to reality, the harder the fall.
… My prediction is that we have now seen peak consumption orgy and the hangover will be BRUTAL. In this late cycle we saw above average retail sales, durable good sales, home sales, and car sales. All far above trend in both price AND quantity. All driven by inflation hysteria and of course the central bank wealth effect. Both of which factors are highly correlated on the upside AND the downside.
…Unfortunately, this society only discovers "right" when wrong explodes. Their sanctimonious outrage is stoked by their Ponzi scheme losses. Always looking for someone else to blame. What's coming in 2022 is what the Chinese now call "common prosperity". Meaning, first asset markets must crash and THEN there will be more political consensus about prioritizing people above corporate profit.
COVID-19 notes:
The Slow Rollout of Rapid Tests
I thought the Biden administration would at least make original pandemic errors. But no, its been making all the same errors. Slow on vaccines, slow on rapid testing and slow on new drugs, and far too little investment. Still after a year and half of shouting it from the rooftops we are getting some rapid tests. Josh Gans has an interesting reminder focusing on Canada that this has been an example of expert failure not just US failure.
U.S. Hospitals Pushed to Financial Ruin as Nurses Quit During Pandemic
Nurses in the United States Were Burnt Out Before Omicron. What’s Next?
If it proves to be right once more, the year 2022 could be less quiet than most currently anticipate on the macroeconomic front.
More Than $100 Billion Was Stolen From Pandemic Relief Funds, Secret Service Says
The $100 billion figure is "at a minimum," a new report from AP says.
Albert Edwards' 2022 Outlook: Four Big Surprises... And Lots Of Pain
His "third surprise" may be, well, the most surprising - Edwards expects that easing supply bottlenecks combine with soggy commodity prices to drive US headline CPI inflation back well below 2% (this is also the inventory glut thesis floated by Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank). Hence, the SocGen skeptic expects "current inflation fears to evaporate as H1 unfolds and bond yields to decline sharply."
The "fourth and final surprise" will come out of China, where after continued growth disappointments in the face of tight money (that has helped weaken industrial commodity prices in H2 2021), Beijing will be forced to launch a Powell-like policy pivot (we have already seen the early signs of this in the past few weeks) and the Chinese monetary floodgates are re-opened - including a burst in China's credit impulse and rapid renminbi devaluation .
Other Charts: (links: one, two)
QOTW:
Brian Eno: I see a world absolutely awash with loose money and speculation because the various governments of the world, unwilling to make any serious structural changes that would threaten the present status quo, have decided to solve every problem by printing more money to throw at it. This is presumably why stocks soar when there’s an emergency like Covid – because speculators realise that a new emergency means a new infusion of money, and they know that much of it will end up in their hands.
Bubble Fare:
2022: END OF THE PONZI CYCLE
In addition to lethal doses of monetary heroin, this era's excess stock market returns are a function of an aging society reaching peak retirement. Passive "dumb money" inflows have been creating their own Ponzi-like market returns. … There has never been an asset class in human history wherein valuations don't matter. When asset valuations are predicated strictly upon inflows they temporarily detach from their intrinsic values and then they ultimately crash back to down to reality. The greater the distance back to reality, the harder the fall.
… My prediction is that we have now seen peak consumption orgy and the hangover will be BRUTAL. In this late cycle we saw above average retail sales, durable good sales, home sales, and car sales. All far above trend in both price AND quantity. All driven by inflation hysteria and of course the central bank wealth effect. Both of which factors are highly correlated on the upside AND the downside.
…Unfortunately, this society only discovers "right" when wrong explodes. Their sanctimonious outrage is stoked by their Ponzi scheme losses. Always looking for someone else to blame. What's coming in 2022 is what the Chinese now call "common prosperity". Meaning, first asset markets must crash and THEN there will be more political consensus about prioritizing people above corporate profit.
COVID-19 notes:
The Slow Rollout of Rapid Tests
I thought the Biden administration would at least make original pandemic errors. But no, its been making all the same errors. Slow on vaccines, slow on rapid testing and slow on new drugs, and far too little investment. Still after a year and half of shouting it from the rooftops we are getting some rapid tests. Josh Gans has an interesting reminder focusing on Canada that this has been an example of expert failure not just US failure.
U.S. Hospitals Pushed to Financial Ruin as Nurses Quit During Pandemic
Nurses in the United States Were Burnt Out Before Omicron. What’s Next?
Counting the neurological cost of COVID-19
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
James Hansen: “Don’t Look Up,” the American Dream, and An Appeal
Fossil Fuel Company Enbridge: Climate Change Means We Need to Make Money Now, Not Later
The pipeline giant Enbridge is making a novel argument in defense of jacking up consumer prices: the climate crisis is heating up, so Enbridge needs to make higher profits now.
‘We are ingesting microplastics at levels consistent with harmful effects’
Walmart illegally dumps 1m toxic items in landfills yearly, lawsuit claims
Pics of the Week:
Trees, seeds and urban bees: Age of Extinction’s year in pictures
Images of dead giraffes highlight Kenya climate crisis
and, because its not just Christmas time, its Saturnalia time:
Contrarian Perspectives
Extra [controversial or non-market-related] Fare:
*** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Unsustainability / Climate Collapse Fare:
Critics of “Don’t Look Up” Are Missing the Entire Point
its critics were not only missing the point of the film in important ways, but that the very way they discussed the film exemplified the problem that the film was trying to draw attention to
Week 51: Merry Electric Christmas ⚡️
“Whatever you say, this is better than a fossil driven car.”
A man I spoke to the other day took some time to explain to me why EVs are such a good solution for the climate, and that people like me, questioning the core concept of EVs, are backwards looking losers who do not understand the greatness of them.
COVID Fare:
I am increasingly coming across too much excellent COVID-related content (with contrarian evidence-based points-of-view!!) to link to it all
Read everything by eugyppius; el gato malo; Mathew Crawford; Steve Kirsch; Jessica Rose!
Paul Alexander, Berenson, Chudov, Lyons-Weiler, Toby Rogers are also go-to mainstays; a list to which I have added Andreas Oehler, Metatron and, Julius Ruechel; Denninger worth staying on top of too for his insights, and especially his colorful language; and Norman Fenton; I will of course continue to post links to key Peter McCullough material, and Geert Vanden Bossche, and Robert Malone, and Martin Kulldorff, and Jay Bhattacharya, and Pierre Kory, and Tess Lawrie, and, and, and…
but going forward, my linking to material by those mainstays mentioned above will be reduced to key excerpts and/or essential posts
Dr. Peter McCullough: 5 Essential Truths About COVID-19
1) COVID-19 is ONLY spread when symptoms are present. …
2) Asymptomatic testing is not FDA cleared or supported by any regulatory bodies. …
3) Natural immunity is robust, complete, and durable–it’s “one and done.” …
4) COVID-19 is a treatable illness in high-risk patients with early sequenced multidrug therapy. …
5) The genetic COVID-19 vaccines are not sufficiently safe or effective for the public. Vaccine mandates should be dropped, and the vaccine program should be paused for safety review. …
***** Early COVID-19 treatment guidelines
Is The Omicron Surge Mostly Due To Massively Increased Testing?
El gato malo: 2/3 of recent UK "covid hospitalizations" are not for covid
it's long past time we re-thought the manner in which we count covid
at what point will the world wake up to the fact that we are currently inhabiting far more of a testdemic than a pandemic?
…
data from the UK is showing that only 1 in 3 recent “covid hospitalizations” is actually in the hospital for covid. the vast majority were there for something else and tested positive after admission. this is literally tripling the reported count of new patients.
…
how, at this stage of affairs and after 2 years of time to learn to get the stats straight is everyone still getting this all so wrong? it outright beggars belief.
how is anyone supposed to make decisions or analyze data when the quality is this low?
if you relentlessly test everyone in sight, symptomatic or no, for covid using overclocked PCR tests at 40+ Ct you’re going to find it everywhere. these tests were never actually suited for purpose and have been locking onto trace virus, dead virus, and all manner of other non-clinical positives.
this is not a sound basis for analysis or behavior.
this has been widely known for ages. and yet it persists unabated.
it has spilled over into every other statistic. …. nothing else is counted this way. ever.
…
continuing to treat this “data” as though it is clinically or societally meaningful has become a far greater problem than the disease itself.
the cure, of course, is simple:
stop this OCD level testing strategy. ….
Eugyppius: The Beginning of the End?
The virus part of the pandemic will probably soon be over.
…
Right now, everything tells us that the virus part of the pandemic will soon be over.
The major question, is how the rest of the Corona Circus will respond. Some thoughts on that:
In the short term, rising cases will probably fuel demand for more vaccinations. This is the blunt, stupid way that our public health experts respond to infections now, but it is not a game that will go well for the vaccinators. The vaccines will fail even more profoundly in stopping Omicron transmission, and there will be far fewer severe outcomes for them to prevent. I don’t know how long the crackpot vaccination regime can survive overt absurdities like this.
Omicron will probably also unwind the broader containment regime. South Africa has already abandoned their most intrusive tracing, quarantine and isolation policies, declaring a shift towards mitigation (which is what they should have done in the first place). Trying to defeat a minimally symptomatic highly contagious virus with the comically inadequate tools of the contact tracer is simply too ridiculous.
In the longer term, things look much more uncertain. It is hard to shake the feeling that Corona has swept away the last vestiges of liberal democracy in Europe, and perhaps in the whole world. I don’t think these political systems have been very good for the West, but our new theocratic regimes steered by the Corona astrologers have been vastly worse. As soon as the hysteria boils off, many of these villains will begin trying to get the panic machine up and running again. The alternative is a future where nobody much cares what they have to think, where they’re no longer able to interfere in millions of lives, and – perhaps most crucially – where a lot of politicians, journalists, and ordinary people begin to realise what utter failures they and their policies have been. There are failures that lose you your job, there are failures that make you a public disgrace, and then there are their failures, the kind that lead to arrest, indictment, imprisonment, and worse.
As of today, there are 6,339,531 genome sequences of SARS-CoV-2 (alias hCoV-19), and growing.
Chudov: Being Vaccinated DOUBLES the Risk of Getting Omicron
The conclusion from this data is that in the UK, being vaccinated DOUBLES the chance of catching Omicron compared to the unvaxxed. How could this be? Isn’t it crazy? It can easily happen, exactly the same thing is happening in Denmark, and the article below will hopefully explain.
Berenson: The simplest way to understand the insanity of boosting for Omicron
We call them vaccines. But it is clear after a year of use that the mRNA shots do not produce a robust long-term B- or T-cell immune response.
What they do is drive up antibodies to the spike protein (to unnaturally high levels, levels that all by themselves may cause problems, but put that aside). And those antibodies are extremely narrowly focused, not just on the spike protein but on a particular part of it.
In other words, they basically turn your body into a factory for generating monoclonal antibodies for the original wild-type virus.
But THOSE ANTIBODIES DON’T WORK ANYMORE AGAINST OMICRON. Its shape is too different. They can’t attach properly.
Berenson: Pandemic of the vaccinated
This absolutely brutal preprint from Denmark shows zero vaccine effectiveness against Omicron beginning two months after “peak” protection (lol, peak), and sharply negative protection three months out. In other words, vaccinated people were much MORE likely to get Omicron beginning about 100 days after the second dose. What about boosters? They did, well, very little. But go get one anyway! Pfizer will thank you….
…
The curious case of New South Wales
A wasted opportunity to avoid becoming a Nazi state
When Australia started imposing lockdowns and basically copying all the other same mistakes as the rest of the “civilised” world, I was still a bit more naive than I am now and really wondered why they didn’t learn from those mistakes and avoid them.
…
I don’t know what you see. It depends what tint your glasses have in a lot of cases but my acuity is about as high as it comes. And what I see is a state with no COVID that only gets COVID concomitant with the main rollout of COVID vaccinations and subsides when vaccination subsides.
You might call it a coincidence if you hadn’t observed the exact same pattern in 200 other countries and states (and again depending on the tint of your specs!).
Alexander: It was always clear to me, the vaccines never worked, failed; period; they brought (in my mind intentional) a failed non-sterilizing (non-neutralizing) vaccine; could have NEVER worked; 200%
Only way out of this is to stop the vaccine program, end all mandates and implement an immediate safety review; we need to understand just how devastating these vaccines were; we need accountability
I have always felt that this was intentional, that the vaccines were failed out of the box, never worked against any strain or variant, Delta or omicron. Could not work. They could not be so inept and incompetent. Those involved. To bring something that would be failed and we would need to be on a never-ending boosting program. Our natural immunity sees the full viral ball and imprints on that, all the proteins, the spike, the envelope, nucleocapsid, membrane proteins, all the nooks and crannies on the viral ball, all patterns (sugars, glycans), all proteins and thus how could one expect to bring a vaccine that focuses on antibodies to one protein which is the spike and its receptor binding domain which is the real business part and where the mutations take place…of course then any change will render the antibodies blind and the vaccine ineffective. Yes you will push antibodies up each boost etc. but so what? They will decline after 3-4 months and you are left with nothing for the vaccine does not sterilize, does not stop infection or transmission. This vaccine CANNOT give you what natural immunity could and these beasts like CDC, NIH Francis Collins, Fauci et al, Walensky etc. knew this.
They all knew this. They all know that the vaccine is based on the initial Wuhan March 2020 strain and we have Delta variant predominant and now omicron. Wuhan has been long gone and they know it yet pushing you to use a vaccine that ‘WILL’, not MAY, but ‘WILL’ fail. It cannot work. And they know it bring toxic side effects but pushing you and to vaccinate your child. To me these are criminals. … If you asked me how would you make a vaccine that would be a full failure and could even kill a whole lot of people, akin to a biological weapon, I would say make it just like this one and roll it out this way too…these beasts like Fauci and Collins know that the spike is being translated in cells in the body and presented on the cell surface of our endothelium (inner vascular layer cells of all our arteries, veins, capillaries) and disrupts the glycocalyx (any disruption to the glycocalyx layer on top of the endothelial layer disturbs clotting/potentially promotes); it is the body, our body, our immune system e.g. antibodies, killer lymphocytes etc. attacking the spike as it sits there, tearing up the cells and tissues and causing clots, bleeds etc.
…
The fact is speaking strictly immunology, we will never be able to achieve population level herd immunity with these vaccines because we cannot cut the chain of transmission; these vaccines have failed; it was always clear to me; it is that simple; they do not work; you never ever use a non-sterilizing vaccine in the midst of a pandemic; ever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! you will only drive the natural selection of infectious and potentially deadly variants, basic immunology and virology, evolutionary biology. you also cannot discuss this without understanding the role of natural immunity, innate immunity (first line of defense), and the force of early treatment and prophylaxis with those drugs.
Are COVID-19 data reliable? The case of the European Union
Eugyppius: Omicron is Not Normal
Everything suggests this variant was leaked from a laboratory engaged in gain-of-function research.
Omicron is not normal. No immediate progenitors are known; its closest relatives are viruses last seen in early- to mid-2020. The orthodox explanation for this awkward fact, is that it has spent the last 18 months lurking “in a geography with poor genomic surveillance … or … in a chronically infected individual.” The simpler explanation is that it leaked from a laboratory.
As el gato malo and others have indicated, evidence is strong that Omicron circulates preferentially in the vaccinated. In all likelihood, it is the result of gain-of-function research, in which SARS-2 was passaged repeatedly through convalescent or vaccinated plasma, in the hopes of helping the virus evade acquired immunity. The purpose of this research would be to anticipate future immune-escape variants that vaccines might target.
Omicron carries a series of highly unlikely and suspicious mutations in its spike protein. It is hard to imagine that these mutations can have arisen via natural processes, because all but one of them are nonsynonymous – that is, they code for different amino acid sequences. Starkly mutated variants favoured by natural selection should have a great many meaningless synonymous mutations as well.
…
UPDATE: Igor Chudov points to his own similar analysis from 2 December.
El gato malo: the evidence of your own eyes and ears
1. masking and lockdown never worked and still don’t
2. vaccinating/boosting in the middle of a peak seasonal surge is directly counterproductive when the vaccine causes well documented immuno-suppression for ~2 weeks post dosing. (data HERE)
3. despite promises to the contrary, the vaccines are not sterilizing and never were. they do not stop spread or infection or reduce viral load.
4. and counter to michelle’s final point, vaccines do NOT stop you from playing host or reduce mutations. in fact, leaky vaccines are notorious for making viruses worse by inverting their evolutionary gradient by imposing a new selector that demands greater virulence. this is also WELL DOCUMENTED and looks to have INCREASED DELTA CFR. she and milind have that one exactly backwards. societal scale leaky vaccine administration (especially if it mitigates symptoms and severity while allowing spread) is the antithesis of social duty. the enhanced spread and greater virulence leaves EVERYONE worse off, even the vaxxed.
Denninger: Here’s A Reality Check
Pfizer has disclosed in their own data that for young people the shots are as dangerous, as measured in hospitalization, for ***** as they are for caused myocarditis.
Since infection is never certain but inoculation, once you take it, is, there was never an argument for authorizing these jabs in healthy young people simply on the math. We did it anyway and we’re still advocating it.
That is just one condition but let’s be clear: If you jab your kid you’re putting them at equal or greater risk of being hospitalized from one side effect of the ******* alone as from *****-19 itself. If you do that as a parent, you’re a monster. If you do it as a young adult on your own absent some individualized risk, you’re stupid.
Anyone who believes that an agent injected into the muscle of the arm that can and does sometimes cause inflammation of the heart will not also cause inflammation of other tissues and, through doing so, also cause damage to other tissues has rocks in their head. The scope of that additional damage is completely unknown because we’re not performing any surveillance nor did we originally. We have never, for example, taken a group of 100 people, pulled full blood work including markers for inflammation, cardiac damage and others, then vaccinated them and repeated said tests on a 2, 4, 8 and 16 week interval to determine if we got negative metabolic changes and if we did, whether they were transient or durable. Nobody knows because we never did the work….
Oehler: Lying through Their Numbers - Ontario Edition
…
To the dismay of the Covid-19 “authorities”, these numbers show that unvaccinated constitute 17% of all reported cases, and their share in the total population is also 17%.
What’s more, there are 4.57 times more cases reported in other “vaccination” statuses than among the unvaccinated. And the unvaccinated are a minority of the ICU cases and less than 1/3 of the hospitalizations. There goes the myth of “the pandemic of the unvaccinated” (still very much in use in Canada).
This:
“Public Health Ontario is reporting 4,383 new COVID cases today. Among the new cases reported today were 746 unvaccinated, 172 partially vaccinated, and 3,243 fully vaccinated people. 222 cases were reported without vaccination status information.”
Became this:
“Health Minister Christine Elliott says 918 of today's cases are in people who are not fully vaccinated, and 222 are in people whose vaccination status isn't known.”
Norman Fenton: New ONS report on deaths by vaccination: serious anomalies and further obfuscation
As the data is simply not credible, we believe this entire new report should be disregarded.
Bendell: Lies Damn Lies and Hospitalisation Statistics
… So why is this issue so important? Because it has played into a wider narrative that has demanded conformity and limited our willingness to consider alternative or complementary approaches. When the data started looking poor for vaccine effectiveness in stopping case numbers, then at least we were told it is near perfect at reducing hospitalisations. That also helped give us the impression that we would have less severe symptoms if we are vaccinated against Covid. It helped us to think it might be the socially responsible thing to do to get vaccinated and reduce the stress on the health services. Well, none of that is true. We have been conned. The pharmaceutical industry invents the standards that the regulators use and then when those standards don’t work for it anymore then they invent new ones like the test-negative method.
…
“Trust the science” has been the message from many medical bureaucrats and their champions in mass media. However, a rigorous questioning of science is the very basis of science. That includes a critical unpacking of any statistics.
…
hospitalisation data provides no support for the idea of mass vaccinations nor for any coercion of the general public, whether moral or practical.
…
What else might the medical bureaucrats have been getting wrong? My reading of this situation is that we need to rescue medical science from the corporations that have captured the bureaucracies and brains of people working in the medical profession. But who is going to do that?
More than 150 Comparative Studies and Articles on Mask Ineffectiveness and Harms
It is not unreasonable to conclude that surgical and cloth masks, used as they currently are being used (without other forms of PPE protection), have no impact on controlling the transmission of Covid-19 virus. Current evidence implies that face masks can be actually harmful. The body of evidence indicates that face masks are largely ineffective.
*** Michael Tracey: Government Officials Using Phony "Emergency Powers" To Impose Vaccine Passports
…In its infinite Scientific™ wisdom, the city of Boston, Massachusetts just announced a new “vaccine passport” system set to take effect next month. This was one of the first major actions of the recently-elected mayor, Michelle Wu, who’d been hailed by many as a paradigm-shifter for her inspiring Progressive potential. Wu’s passport system is endearingly called “B Together,” because there’s nothing more emblematic of heartwarming communal “togetherness” than compulsory monitoring of medical activity by the government. Waiters, front-desk clerks, and movie theater ushers will join “together” to carry out this very important epidemiological task.
…
The stated purpose of this system is “to address rising COVID-19 cases” in Boston caused by the “Omicron” variant. This seems a bit strange, because what we’ve been told is supposed to be so alarming about “Omicron” (pronounced “Oh, c’mon”) is that it’s extra transmissible — with rapid viral spread observed even among those who are fully vaxxed and “boosted” out the wazoo, drowning in daily “rapid tests,” and quadruple-masked at the first sign of human contact. These measures have evidently not succeeded in curtailing the exponential spread. Nonetheless, the hammer is about to come down hard again on “The Unvaccinated,” allegedly because they pose such a unique transmission threat. If you don’t quite follow the logic there, you simply must not understand The Science, dummy.
Ruechel: How the Grinch Stole Christmas from Nursing Home Patients Who Won't See Another One
The anguish caused by isolation is horrific. "Isolation and loneliness are associated with a 50 percent increased risk of developing dementia, a 32 percent increased risk of stroke, and a nearly fourfold increased risk of death among heart failure patients, according to separate studies." Being denied access to their families is, quite literally, a matter of life and death. And it's happening all over again.
…
There is a legitimate rationale for testing visitors to nursing homes in order to try to keep respiratory viruses out of facilities where our most vulnerable live. Nursing homes are one of the few places where it makes sense to test everyone who comes through the doors during peak cold and flu season. Covid has not changed this equation - this risk has existed in equal measure every single cold and flu season, and every public health official knows this. Yet politicians and health officials nevertheless prioritized rapid tests for school children in order to pander to fearful helicopter parents instead of giving these tests to long-term care homes. So, while the rest of society has transformed itself into a lunatic nation of hypochondriacs, the vulnerable are once again condemned to life-threatening isolation. That's the cruel gift that the government gave our most vulnerable for Christmas.
…
If you want to give someone the precious gift of family this Christmas, take your rapid tests and donate them to your local long-term care homes, hospitals, and nursing homes. And demand that they re-open their doors to the families of those locked up inside.
COVID Tweets & Quotes of the Week:
Ilargi: Sunetra Gupta (Oxford), Martin Kulldorff (Harvard), and Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford) are top scientists. Fauci labeled them “fringe epidemiologists”. That’s how much respect he has for science and scientists.
Malone: This is the most intrinsically anti-science global organization ever implemented in the history of modern man. The closest historical approximation to this monstrosity is the Catholic Church during the Spanish inquisition.
Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare: Although we encourage all citizens to receive the COVID-19 vaccination, it is not compulsory or mandatory. Vaccination will be given only with the consent of the person to be vaccinated after the information provided. Please get vaccinated of your own decision, understanding both the effectiveness in preventing infectious diseases and the risk of side effects. No vaccination will be given without consent. Please do not force anyone in your workplace or those who around you to be vaccinated, and do not discriminate against those who have not been vaccinated.”
Kirsch: I agree with WHO: Don't use the vaccines to kill children. Yes, that’s what he said. He admitted that some countries are using the boosters to kill children. We both agree that they shouldn’t do that. This is not a doctored video. It was a legitimate Freudian slip.
But, referring to most everywhere else…
El gato malo: this is all clearly performative public health theater at the expense of everyone else. … but this is all kabuki virology. covid is already endemic. nothing is going to put it back in a bottle or could even if they tried.
Kunstler: Why is the CDC not setting up early treatment centers around the USA, where people with symptoms can receive monoclonal antibody infusions and kits of well-known, cheap, safe and effective oral medicines that can be used easily at home to defeat the virus? (Those medicines have been surreptitiously outlawed by our own CDC, you know.) Is it outlandish to suppose that the official “Joe Biden” government objective is to allow as many people to die as possible in order to keep the public terrorized? Meanwhile, they’ve provoked the public to line up for Covid tests using a PCR system so discredited for Covid detection that months ago the CDC scheduled it to go offline on December 31st
***** Huskynut: I’ve never done an open letter before – never had something I felt so passionately about as the precipice on which NZ is currently balanced. We’re way beyond any realm of “adults sharing political opinions” and a long way into “a cult just took my country”. I need to send this, yet I fear it will miss the mark, in which case I will have wasted my last shot. … … … … I could go on, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past months is that facts are little more than an inconvenience to Believers, whether they’re the Jehovah’s Witness at the front door, or the Covid Cult member. I could provide dozens of links to all manner of science, from epidemiological to psychological, all driving gaping holes in the mainstream narrative. And then, like clockwork, I watch the person’s defense to cognitive dissonance kick in and there’s a rapid retreat into their cosy Beliefs, where the government is Kind, all manner of Science is Settled and Jabs are Highly Safe and Effective.
**** Rogers: The paradox here of course is that never before have so many people who claim to be woke in fact been so totally asleep and unaware of the world as it actually is.
Levant: If a public health propagandist publicly and routinely calls for strict lockdowns (including jailing people without masks) it is legitimate for an independent press to see if they are following their own rules. It would be weird not to.
*** Roche: After two years, could we please stop freaking out about every new variant or development? Could we use a little common sense and a little of our accumulated knowledge about respiratory viruses? Could we turn the rhetoric down on vaccines and masks and lockdowns, at least for the holidays? …
*** A Concerned Canadian Psychologist in British Columbia: One can only assume that the provincial health authorities’ relationship-splitting social engineering interventions will increase loneliness and isolation and associated risks for depression, anxiety, PTSD, self-harm, suicide, and drug toxicity for all. This is psychology 101. … How is it then that psychologists with PhDs and years of expertise related to the psychological and relational risks for deleterious mental and physical health outcomes related to social isolation and exclusion can sit by and swallow a one-sided narrative about pandemic risks and harms, while passively accepting ongoing public health restrictions that marginalize and psychologically harm British Columbians? Unfortunately, psychology has played a key role in the fear-based messaging that has led us to this point. Shouldn’t psychology also play a role in preventing the harms of discrimination, social isolation and exclusion, and marginalization?
Menton: But even as the Omicron variant continues to undermine the necessity of getting vaccinated, there is unwavering insistence that vaccination is the key to ending the pandemic and that to remain unvaccinated is a burden on society. … If the unvaccinated are a strain on the healthcare system, then obesity is significantly more of a burden. Should the government control what people can and cannot eat, and what the portion size is? Does the government have the right to mandate exercise? If the unvaccinated stress our emergency care resources, then drug and alcohol addicts do so tenfold. Does that mean the government can — or should — force-prevent substance use?
Mark Crispin Miller: “Having called severe reactions to the COVID jabs extremely “rare” (although they’re not), and deemed inflammatory heart disease among young athletes “normal” (although it’s not), doctors in Big Pharma’s pocket are now telling us that many, if not all, of those reporting—and, often, displaying—grievous harm post-“vaccination” are deluded—i.e., nuts—due to Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), which has been on the books for years, but has now been specifically deployed to make all those horrific “vaccine” injuries seem like a pathological delusion
Farber: They profusely issue politically correct antipathy in a vortex of vile propaganda pretending to be “science.” We are always the paper to the scissors, the scissors to the rock, and the rock to the paper. We are not a “side,” not a body of evidence…. Never mind that we are consistently correct, while they are jaw-droopingly ill-informed.
Nayna: I think the core of the split between the Americans who want to send in troops to rescue us from our own government and the bizarre "everything is great" reporting here is that Americans see our deranged policies contextualized through a social media delivery mechanism that selects for the most shocking clips and case studies. They rightfully scream "1984!" when the day-to-day experience for most people here is something like Brave New World with alcohol in place of Soma.
El gato malo: so stop. just stop. all of it.
stop counting covid. stop obsessing. stop complying. disobey.
…whether or not this virus was man made, this calamity certainly was and we can end it any time.
just make the choice.
Anecdotal COVID Fare:
Athlete collapses/deaths following vaccination
A former CIA operative fact checked the stories and found they were true. Why isn't the mainstream media doing these stories??
1. 01/01/21, Windmore, Pennsylvania, USA Dead
Blake Barklage (17), a tennis player at La Salle High School in Windmore, Pennsylvania. Collapsed and died with cardiac arrest, after his team’s victory in the PCL. News Story
2. 03/01/21, Portugal Dead
Alex Apolinario (24), Brazilian Alverca FC soccer player collapsing on pitch with cardiac arrest during match. Died four days later News Story
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164. 19/10/21
Megan Roth (34), Marathoner, running trainer and sub-elite runner. Suffered a cardiac arrest and collapsed During the Boston Marathon. Onlookers performed CPR on her and saved her life. News Story
165. 20/10/21, Italy (26) Dead
Ronald Biglione (26), Argentine Deportivo Club Independencia football player hospitalized with blood clots (thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura)after 2nd shot. Died 5 Nov News Story
166. 20/10/21, Germany (65), Dead
Hans-Günter Kinnen (65), Weiler-Volkhoven tournament coordinator, youth manager, former player News Story
167. 21/10/21, NSW Central Coast, Australia
Cienna Knowles (19) Australian equestrian star hospitalized due to blood clots, vomiting, fever, wet in sweat, heart palpitations, headache, sore muscles & joints like hell, blurry vision after Pfizer vaccine. News Story and instagram
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281. 05/12/21 Italy Dead
Fabio Pedretti (24), from Gardone Valtrompia, collapsed and died while running the Uno di Monticelli, a night trail running event on the hills of Franciacorta in Monticelli Brusati. In the final km of the 20 km race he collapsed and could not be resuscitated. News Story
CO-VIDs of the Week:
***** Why I Don't Want to Show my Vaccine Passport
IT'S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE..
All things COVID Pushback Fare:
Journalist Alex Berenson SUES Twitter for 'violation of the First Amendment' over his permanent ban for questioning COVID vaccines
Anger over mask mandates, other covid rules, spurs states to curb power of public health officials
Republican lawmakers pass laws to restrict the power of health authorities to require masks, promote vaccinations and take other steps to protect the public health.
*** Eisenstein: Divide, Conquer; Unite, Heal
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I actually dislike arguing about vaccines. Yes, I have my opinions, but neither the passion nor interest to research the topic deeply enough to competently argue them. I think Covid vaccines are overall harmful, but not compared to rain forest destruction, militarism, or neoliberal capitalism. Or world hunger, which killed ten million people in 2021, half of them children, and stunted the growth of tens of millions more—numbers that dwarf casualties from Covid or its vaccines. I also prefer to avoid the debate because its very terms take for granted a system of industrial medicine that has something like vaccination built into it.
So why do I engage this issue at all? My entree has been not vaccines per se, but vaccine mandates. It is only in small part personal—I resent attempts to coerce me into overriding my strong instinct in a matter of body sovereignty. But so what. Worse things can happen to a human being—and are happening. However, these “worse things” are expressions of the same ideology and system of domination and the war on the Other. The mandates are Trojan horses for an apparatus of control that will also crush resistance to other violations of Life, human and otherwise.
********** The Mask and the Face
McGill University is still one of the saner and more reasonable universities in the land, with many devoted and hard-working students, professors, and administrators, including those with whom I am here disagreeing on matters of enormous public import.
For that reason, and out of professional respect, I will not identify my interlocutor, who is fulfilling a duty to the university. It was, after all, I who raised the issue. Or rather, it was I who decided before term began that I must inform the administration, at each appearance of new demands that I believe unjust or unfit for purpose, both of my dissent and, where necessary, my refusal to cooperate.
… My letter, I fear, is a tad intemperate. But the very real damage being done by the present policies (regarding which the university is not entirely hostage to the government) to so many people in our community, to the fundamental laws of our country, and to the whole fabric of our society, is so great as to require a firm stance and a public rebuke. I regret that this is the case, and I regret that it takes the form of a dispute in which my own actions figure. This is not about me, as it is not about any one administrator. It is about all of us.
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Dear […]
Thank you for responding on behalf of the provost, and for passing on the congratulatory letter to our students from the city’s director of Public Health. As you know, in any McGill communication I receive, I don’t read past the point where it begins offering me unsolicited medical advice, which is beyond the university’s competence and which I have made clear I regard as a form of harassment. But this letter, being from an external bureaucrat, I read through with some interest. I was struck by this line: “La vaccination demeure le geste civique le plus efficace pour préserver nos acquis de cet automne.”
“Vaccination remains the most effective civic gesture to preserve our achievements this autumn.” What remarkable transparency and simplicity!
Vaccination—or, more accurately, an experimental injection with lipid nanoparticles of uncertain and possibly toxic effect on bodily tissues, used as a delivery system for genetic instructions designed to reprogram certain cells so as to cause them to produce an unknown quantity of a spike-protein pathogen with equally uncertain, but certainly dangerous, effects on the immune system and on other crucial systems, circulatory, nervous, reproductive, etc.—has, mirabile dictu, become le geste civique.
Then again, what else could it become? For plainly it has not become a means of prevention of the spread of a coronavirus, even allowing (as I do not) that preventing spread is a rational and achievable goal. The latest iteration of the virus appears, if anything, to prefer the vaccinated.
Isn’t that convenient? Omicron is highly transmissible but not very severe, so according to the new definition of a “pandemic,” onwards and upwards with pandemic measures! Perhaps the achievement of which Dre. Drouin speaks, then, is merely that of putting the first two needles in every arm, as a prelude to the many more that are to come? With your help, she’s certainly done well with that.
Yet here we are: masked, isolated, feastless and party-less, sent back online to begin winter term, because this response to COVID has proved the abject failure that honest scientists warned from the outset it would be. The Great Reset—sorry, the dangerous pandemic—rolls on, with no end in sight. One of your administrative colleagues at a nearby university told some of her professorial charges, who had expressed concern about the psychological and pedagogical well-being of their students, to expect three or four more years of this. I hope there will be some annual variation in the congratulatory note, particularly as the needle count rises and morale drops still more precipitously.
COVID vaccination was always primarily a civic gesture, of course, for it was never medically justified or justifiable for the majority of people, especially young people like our students. That this gesture has been elicited from the latter by manipulation, censorship, bullying and in some sectors coercion, not only of adults but now even of young children, requires one to ask what sort of gesture it really is and what kind of civic life it points toward. So does the fact that, together with associated policies such as lockdowns and denials of early treatment, it has plainly done far more harm than good.
You do know, I trust, that in far too many cases the harm was permanent or fatal. That (as FOIA requests have confirmed) is something that was known to Pfizer from early days, and to the regulatory agencies by, at the latest, three months into the rollout. It has become still more evident since then, despite the studied ignorance of those in charge of Public Health. Even for people capable of benefiting from the injections, who are mainly among the elderly, they pose a serious risk.
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In short, I reverse the charge. I am jeopardizing no one; present policies are jeopardizing almost everyone. That twofold claim I am prepared to back with solid evidence, not merely with the technique your committee seems to prefer: endless repetition
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I still believe that it is the vocation of the university to enable open, free, and honest pursuit of knowledge and understanding. I believe in the liberty to undertake that pursuit without politically or economically or ideologically motivated interference and reprisals, a liberty that was recently reaffirmed by the Independent Scientific and Technical Commission on the Recognition of Academic Freedom in the University Environment. I don't know how far McGill remains committed to such things, though I still know colleagues and students who are passionately committed. I will not betray the latter by changing my behaviour to conform to policies that contradict science in the name of science. I will not speak against the mask through the mask, or against vaccine passports by first presenting one.
The refusal to permit faces to be out in the open, where they can be read and appreciated, or indeed to permit particular people to be out in the open, is closely allied with the refusal to place data and arguments out in the open. No one can now deny that these dehumanizing categories, "vaccinated and unvaccinated," or for that matter "masked and unmasked," are utterly meaningless in terms of the totally futile goal of preventing the spread of a coronavirus. That in the university, of all places, this is not being acknowledged, is the silent tolling of the mourner's bell. …
COVID Corporatocracy / Conspiracy Fare:
*** Kirsch: How RFK Jr. went from "a good guy" to an "anti-vaxxer"
I talked to him this morning about what led him down the anti-vax path nearly 20 years ago. Here's the story, condensed to make it a quick read.
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Clearly, the CDC can completely get away with lies about the safety of thimerosal even 20 years later.
So they are going to use similar techniques to convince everyone the current vaccines are safe, even in light of all the evidence that it isn’t. And they’ll get away with it for decades even after killing over 150,000 Americans in 2021 without anyone noticing.
Silencing critics through censorship, de-platforming, ad hominem attacks, and refusing to debate are all techniques that engage in today to hide the truth and keep it hidden for decades.
Kunstler: Reindeer Games
Molnupiravir, you see, works as a DNA polymerase inhibitor, the same as (sshhhhh) ivermectin, except that, unlike ivermectin — which is considered about the safest drug in the world, and which won a Nobel prize for its inventor — Molnupiravir is hardly tested at all. The FDA calls it an “investigational drug,” meaning it is subject to Murphy’s Law, as the “vaccines” have proved to be. Nor has it passed through any approval process so far. It’s being released under an FDA emergency use authorization, which relieves Merck of any liability problem if people are harmed by it. Molnupiravir will cost $700 for a five-day course of treatment (ten pills) compared to $20 for a course of ivermectin. The US government bought $2.2 billion worth of Molnupiravir. Pfizer’s Paxlovid, is actually a two-drug treatment, requiring the HIV-drug ritonavir to give it a buddy-boost. The US government bought $5-billion worth of Paxlovid.
And so now we see why US public health officialdom and the non compos mentis “Joe Biden” & Co. worked so hard, along with social media and cable news, to outlaw all the other cheap and highly-effective Covid early treatment drugs on the scene. Not just ivermectin but fluvoxamine, hydroxychloroquine and so on. They’ve even interfered with deliveries of monoclonal antibodies to stifle its use. You can see clearly what a racketeering operation this has been all along between the FDA, the CDC, Dr. Fauci’s NIAID and the pharmaceutical industry.
There is also the shell game currently being played by Pfizer and its two “vaccines” — the one still under an emergency use authorization called BioNTech, and Pfizer’s replacement for that, Comirnaty, which has received an FDA approval under shady circumstances. The catch is, Pfizer refuses to release Comirnaty in the USA because approved drugs do not enjoy that shield against liability. Pfizer’s BioNTech vaxx has injured and killed many thousands of people the past year. If the two vaxxes are the same, you can expect Comirnaty to kill and injure plenty of victims, and Pfizer will be sued up its pfizoo.
*** Malone: Omicron has Cracked Open the Overton Window
Welcome to the new paradigm shift
In the case of COVID-19, the use of the noble lie has been used by government and world health officials as well as legacy media sycophants to restrict and even close the Overton window regarding issues such as mask use, vaccination strategies, and lockdowns. To be explicitly clear, the Overton Window is a political concept which is being actively manipulated to constrain scientific discourse.
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Dr. Fauci has been particularly egregious in his attempts to limit the Overton Window by his repeated use of the “noble lie.” A “Noble Lie” is knowingly propagated by politicians, often to advance an agenda. A Noble Lie is intrinsically paternalistic. The deceiver assumes that lying serves the best interest of society. Fauci’s misinformation and lies have been targeted at influencing behavior of public and government officials, including politicians. He has effectively used the Noble Lie to expand and limit the Overton Window and in effect, control the narrative that politicians can act on and stay within the safety limits of their constituency.
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By use of limiting what is acceptable speech on COVID-19, authoritarianism in the form of vaccine mandates, lock-downs and mask use have come to dominate governmental responses throughout the world. And the USG public health has normalized propaganda as a tool for enforcing their policy decisions on American and the world.
Tucker: Fauci’s War on Science: The Smoking Gun
Those weeks following the release of the Great Barrington Declaration did feel odd.
On the good side, medical doctors, scientists, public health workers, and citizens all over the world were thrilled that three top scholars in fields of public health and epidemiology had spoken out against lockdowns and for a reasoned approach to Covid. They eagerly signed the document.
Yes, there were some attempts to sabotage it too, with fake names and so on, which should have been a clue about what was coming. The fakes were deleted in days and new methods of confirming signatures were deployed.
The document, on the one hand, said nothing controversial. The right way to deal with this pandemic, it said, was to focus on those who could face severe outcomes from disease – a very plain point and nothing new. There was nothing to be gained by locking down the whole of society because of a pathogen with such a huge differential in its demographic impact.
The virus would have to become endemic in any case (including the realization of “herd immunity,” which is not a “strategy” but a descriptive term widely accepted in epidemiology) and certainly would not be stopped by destroying peoples’ lives and liberties.
The hope of the Declaration was simply that journalists would pay attention to a different point of view and a debate would begin on the unprecedented experiment in lockdowns. Perhaps science could prevail, even in this climate.
On the bad side, and at the very same time, following the release, the attacks began pouring in, and they were brutal, structured to destroy. The three main signers – Sunetra Gupta (Oxford), Martin Kulldorff (Harvard), and Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford) – made the statement as a matter of principle. It was also born of frustration with the prevailing narrative.
Mostly this declaration was intended as an educational effort. But the authors were being called vicious names and treated like heretics that should be burned. There certainly was no civil debate; quite the contrary.
It was all quite shocking given that the Declaration was a statement concerning what almost everyone in these professional circles believed earlier in the year. They were merely stating the consensus based on science and experience. Nothing more. Even on March 2, 2020, 850 scientists signed a letter to the White House warning against lockdowns, closures, and travel restrictions. It was sponsored by Yale University. Today it reads nearly like a first draft of the Great Barrington Declaration. Indeed on that same day, Fauci wrote to a Washington Post reporter: “The epidemic will gradually decline and stop on its own without a vaccine.”
But following the March 13-16, 2020 lockdowns, the orthodoxy had evidently changed. And suddenly. The signers of the GBD had declined to change with it. Thus did they endure astonishingly brutal smears.
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What historian Phil Magness has discovered, with newly unearthed emails, comes not as a shock to any of us but it is satisfying to see the confirmation of what we suspected. It seemed at the time that the effort to attack and destroy both the GBD and its authors was coordinated from the top. Here at last is the proof that our intuition was not crazy.
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You can discover more about this in Scott Atlas’s book on the topic. These new emails confirm his account. It was an outright war on top scientists, people whose views on matters of public health were not different from the professional consensus only earlier in the year.
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Chudov: Omicron as a Bioweapon: Thoughts and Implications
Instead, I would like to concentrate on the thought that Omicron is a bioweapon. This is not because this is necessarily the likeliest hypothesis. It is impossible to even guess what is the “likelier” hypothesis. There is too much that we do not know. What we need to do, instead of guessing probabilities, is outline the possibilities. My main reason for writing about the possibility that Omicron is a bioweapon is because this has not been covered enough and it deserves to be covered.
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What seems like a nefarious goal to you, may seem like a humanity saving idea to someone else. For example, let’s consider for a minute that someone decides to release a virus to reduce our population in half. This idea is abhorrent to you and certainly to me, but to someone it may amount to “saving our planet from the global warming”.
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To be sure, as of now, omicron does not seem to be a tool of depopulation. The objective of this article is not to convince you that something crazy is definitely happening. My objective is to show you that crazy things occasionally do happen and we need to be on lookout and that it is a possibility, not yet excluded by evidence.
Archbishop Vigano’s startling warning to the American people: I think it is so very good I am simply printing it here...he speaks for me
I am a scientist but much of what is here appeals to me...lets just say this Archbishop has more gonads than the entire US congress and Senate and all western global leaders and in fact most
“DEAR AMERICAN PEOPLE, DEAR FRIENDS, for two years now, a global coup has been carried out all over the world, planned for some time by an elite group of conspirators enslaved to the interests of international high finance. This coup was made possible by an emergency pandemic that is based on the premise of a virus that has a mortality rate almost analogous to that of any other seasonal flu virus, on the delegitimization and prohibition of effective treatments, and on the distribution of an experimental gene serum which is obviously ineffective, and which also clearly carries with it the danger of serious and even lethal side effects. We all know how much the mainstream media has contributed to supporting the insane pandemic narrative, the interests that are at stake, and the goals of these groups of power: reducing the world population, making those who survive chronically ill, and imposing forms of control that violate the fundamental rights and natural liberties of citizens. And yet, two years after this grotesque farce started, which has claimed more victims than a war and destroyed the social fabric, national economies, and the very foundations of the rule of law, nothing has changed in the policies of Nations and their response to the so-called pandemic.
Last year, when many still had not yet understood the gravity of the looming threat, I was among the first to denounce this coup, and I was promptly singled out as a conspiracy theorist. Today more and more people are opening their eyes and beginning to understand that the emergency pandemic and the “ecological emergency” are part of a criminal plan hatched by the World Economic Forum, the UN, the WHO, and a galaxy of organizations and foundations that are ideologically characterized as clearly anti-human and – this needs to be said clearly – anti-Christian.
One of the elements that unequivocally confirms the criminal nature of the Great Reset is the perfect synchrony with which all the different Nations are acting, demonstrating the existence of a single script under a single direction. And it is disconcerting to see how the lack of treatment, the deliberately wrong treatments that have been given in order to cause more deaths, the decision to impose lock downs and masks, the conspiratorial silence about the adverse effects of the so-called “vaccines” that are in fact gene serums, and the continuous repetition of culpable errors have all been possible thanks to the complicity of those who govern and the institutions. Political and religious leaders, representatives of the people, scientists and doctors, journalists and those who work in the media have literally betrayed their people, their laws, their Constitutions, and the most basic ethical principles.
GeoPolitical Fare:
NY Times: US Hid True Toll of Air Wars; Thousands of Dead Civilians, Many of Them Children
President Barack [O.bomb.a] called it “the most precise air campaign in history”
Garcia: War On Earth, Bad Vibes To Humans
For one brief shining moment this past weekend, the New York Times broke out of its role as establishment mouthpiece and publicist for the powerful, and practiced some real journalism.
"Hidden Pentagon Records Reveal Patterns of Failure In Deadly Airstrikes" was the banner headline of the two-part blockbuster written by Azmat Khan. Of course, euphemizing the US government's decade-long campaign of drone terror and mass murder of civilians in the middle East as a tactical "failure" is the very essence of Timesianism.
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As the Times series on the drone slaughters and their coverups establishes - in case after case after gruesome case - there has never been any accountability. Any accountability is reserved for the exposers of war crimes, like Julian Assange and Daniel Hale, the former drone operator who was sentenced last June to 45 months in prison for the crime of leaking documents on war crimes to the press - the same kind of documents that the Times now finally sees fit to print, to little or no reaction from either the political class or from the rest of the corporate media. I guess everybody's too busy tweeting about their "mild" Omicron test results while gaslighting the unvaxxed.
Vid of the Week:
Catherine Austin Fitts: "Pick A Side. We Are At A Fork In The Road. One Road Leads To Slavery, The Other Road Leads To Freedom."
CaitOz Fare:
Maturity Is Realizing That Propaganda Isn’t Something That Only Happens To Other People
Western mass media consumers are no less propagandized than North Koreans or any of the other nations we’re told to pity because their government indoctrinates them with state media, in fact they are arguably more propagandized, which is why Noam Chomsky said that any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the US media. The way the public is manipulated into consenting to all the agendas of the powerful without their even knowing that they are being propagandized has arguably been the most astonishing feat of social engineering anywhere in the world.
The Big Threats Are The Ones We Can’t Come Back From: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
You simply cannot understand international controversies without understanding the propaganda spin that goes into them and having an acute awareness that your own society participates in those propaganda operations. You just can’t. If you don’t get this, you don’t get anything.
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The only ultimate threats to humanity are those we can’t fix later on. Nuclear annihilation. Environmental collapse. Dystopia where total information control and automated weaponry make revolution impossible. On anything else we can always course correct after realizing our mistake. We’re only really locked in if we make a mistake that we can’t come back from.
Other Quotes of the Week:
Christine Nelson, via Lyons-Weiler: Civilization is just a temporary failure of entropy.
Long Reads / Big Thoughts:
The Economics of Repulsion
In traditional capitalism, the supply of commodities is finite and their exploitation leads to depletion of the supply. By mining coal, diamonds or drilling oil, access to these commodities becomes increasingly more difficult, which requires deeper mines, oil drills, and more sophisticated technology, all of which increases production costs. For a fixed demand, this reduction in supply results in a rise of perceived value and higher price.
In cognitive capitalism, where information is the main commodity, the imbalance resides on the opposite side. Its economics is governed by diminishing demand. Human attention is biologically limited – there is a finite amount of information our brains can absorb and store at any given time. Supply of information, on the other hand, is unlimited and comes practically at no cost – ideas can come out of nowhere (or as a result of the general intellect) and, in principle, cannot be exhausted.
Since everyone is competing for the same fraction of our (limited) attention, sooner or later cognitive capitalism becomes a zero-sum game. For a brain already overloaded with information to pay attention to something new, it has to neglect something else. Every spec of information, every new idea, therefore, has an inherent ephemeral quality and carries a potential of becoming worthless.
In order to insert itself into the tight space of the already saturated attention space, new information has to be able to shock. It does not necessarily have to be relevant or carry semiotic value; it only needs to be sufficiently loud to overpower other voices. And, in competitive markets, such loud information wins and gradually dominates. Cognitive capitalism, thus, inevitably leads to semiotic inflation — more information buys less meaning – and ultimately to hyperinflation when information carries no meaning whatsoever. ….
Satirical Fare:
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
James Hansen: “Don’t Look Up,” the American Dream, and An Appeal
Fossil Fuel Company Enbridge: Climate Change Means We Need to Make Money Now, Not Later
The pipeline giant Enbridge is making a novel argument in defense of jacking up consumer prices: the climate crisis is heating up, so Enbridge needs to make higher profits now.
‘We are ingesting microplastics at levels consistent with harmful effects’
Walmart illegally dumps 1m toxic items in landfills yearly, lawsuit claims
Pics of the Week:
Trees, seeds and urban bees: Age of Extinction’s year in pictures
Images of dead giraffes highlight Kenya climate crisis
Contrarian Perspectives
Extra [controversial or non-market-related] Fare:
*** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Unsustainability / Climate Collapse Fare:
Critics of “Don’t Look Up” Are Missing the Entire Point
its critics were not only missing the point of the film in important ways, but that the very way they discussed the film exemplified the problem that the film was trying to draw attention to
Week 51: Merry Electric Christmas ⚡️
“Whatever you say, this is better than a fossil driven car.”
A man I spoke to the other day took some time to explain to me why EVs are such a good solution for the climate, and that people like me, questioning the core concept of EVs, are backwards looking losers who do not understand the greatness of them.
COVID Fare:
I am increasingly coming across too much excellent COVID-related content (with contrarian evidence-based points-of-view!!) to link to it all
Read everything by eugyppius; el gato malo; Mathew Crawford; Steve Kirsch; Jessica Rose!
Paul Alexander, Berenson, Chudov, Lyons-Weiler, Toby Rogers are also go-to mainstays; a list to which I have added Andreas Oehler, Metatron and, Julius Ruechel; Denninger worth staying on top of too for his insights, and especially his colorful language; and Norman Fenton; I will of course continue to post links to key Peter McCullough material, and Geert Vanden Bossche, and Robert Malone, and Martin Kulldorff, and Jay Bhattacharya, and Pierre Kory, and Tess Lawrie, and, and, and…
but going forward, my linking to material by those mainstays mentioned above will be reduced to key excerpts and/or essential posts
Dr. Peter McCullough: 5 Essential Truths About COVID-19
1) COVID-19 is ONLY spread when symptoms are present. …
2) Asymptomatic testing is not FDA cleared or supported by any regulatory bodies. …
3) Natural immunity is robust, complete, and durable–it’s “one and done.” …
4) COVID-19 is a treatable illness in high-risk patients with early sequenced multidrug therapy. …
5) The genetic COVID-19 vaccines are not sufficiently safe or effective for the public. Vaccine mandates should be dropped, and the vaccine program should be paused for safety review. …
***** Early COVID-19 treatment guidelines
Is The Omicron Surge Mostly Due To Massively Increased Testing?
El gato malo: 2/3 of recent UK "covid hospitalizations" are not for covid
it's long past time we re-thought the manner in which we count covid
at what point will the world wake up to the fact that we are currently inhabiting far more of a testdemic than a pandemic?
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data from the UK is showing that only 1 in 3 recent “covid hospitalizations” is actually in the hospital for covid. the vast majority were there for something else and tested positive after admission. this is literally tripling the reported count of new patients.
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how, at this stage of affairs and after 2 years of time to learn to get the stats straight is everyone still getting this all so wrong? it outright beggars belief.
how is anyone supposed to make decisions or analyze data when the quality is this low?
if you relentlessly test everyone in sight, symptomatic or no, for covid using overclocked PCR tests at 40+ Ct you’re going to find it everywhere. these tests were never actually suited for purpose and have been locking onto trace virus, dead virus, and all manner of other non-clinical positives.
this is not a sound basis for analysis or behavior.
this has been widely known for ages. and yet it persists unabated.
it has spilled over into every other statistic. …. nothing else is counted this way. ever.
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continuing to treat this “data” as though it is clinically or societally meaningful has become a far greater problem than the disease itself.
the cure, of course, is simple:
stop this OCD level testing strategy. ….
Eugyppius: The Beginning of the End?
The virus part of the pandemic will probably soon be over.
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Right now, everything tells us that the virus part of the pandemic will soon be over.
The major question, is how the rest of the Corona Circus will respond. Some thoughts on that:
In the short term, rising cases will probably fuel demand for more vaccinations. This is the blunt, stupid way that our public health experts respond to infections now, but it is not a game that will go well for the vaccinators. The vaccines will fail even more profoundly in stopping Omicron transmission, and there will be far fewer severe outcomes for them to prevent. I don’t know how long the crackpot vaccination regime can survive overt absurdities like this.
Omicron will probably also unwind the broader containment regime. South Africa has already abandoned their most intrusive tracing, quarantine and isolation policies, declaring a shift towards mitigation (which is what they should have done in the first place). Trying to defeat a minimally symptomatic highly contagious virus with the comically inadequate tools of the contact tracer is simply too ridiculous.
In the longer term, things look much more uncertain. It is hard to shake the feeling that Corona has swept away the last vestiges of liberal democracy in Europe, and perhaps in the whole world. I don’t think these political systems have been very good for the West, but our new theocratic regimes steered by the Corona astrologers have been vastly worse. As soon as the hysteria boils off, many of these villains will begin trying to get the panic machine up and running again. The alternative is a future where nobody much cares what they have to think, where they’re no longer able to interfere in millions of lives, and – perhaps most crucially – where a lot of politicians, journalists, and ordinary people begin to realise what utter failures they and their policies have been. There are failures that lose you your job, there are failures that make you a public disgrace, and then there are their failures, the kind that lead to arrest, indictment, imprisonment, and worse.
As of today, there are 6,339,531 genome sequences of SARS-CoV-2 (alias hCoV-19), and growing.
Chudov: Being Vaccinated DOUBLES the Risk of Getting Omicron
The conclusion from this data is that in the UK, being vaccinated DOUBLES the chance of catching Omicron compared to the unvaxxed. How could this be? Isn’t it crazy? It can easily happen, exactly the same thing is happening in Denmark, and the article below will hopefully explain.
Berenson: The simplest way to understand the insanity of boosting for Omicron
We call them vaccines. But it is clear after a year of use that the mRNA shots do not produce a robust long-term B- or T-cell immune response.
What they do is drive up antibodies to the spike protein (to unnaturally high levels, levels that all by themselves may cause problems, but put that aside). And those antibodies are extremely narrowly focused, not just on the spike protein but on a particular part of it.
In other words, they basically turn your body into a factory for generating monoclonal antibodies for the original wild-type virus.
But THOSE ANTIBODIES DON’T WORK ANYMORE AGAINST OMICRON. Its shape is too different. They can’t attach properly.
Berenson: Pandemic of the vaccinated
This absolutely brutal preprint from Denmark shows zero vaccine effectiveness against Omicron beginning two months after “peak” protection (lol, peak), and sharply negative protection three months out. In other words, vaccinated people were much MORE likely to get Omicron beginning about 100 days after the second dose. What about boosters? They did, well, very little. But go get one anyway! Pfizer will thank you….
…
The curious case of New South Wales
A wasted opportunity to avoid becoming a Nazi state
When Australia started imposing lockdowns and basically copying all the other same mistakes as the rest of the “civilised” world, I was still a bit more naive than I am now and really wondered why they didn’t learn from those mistakes and avoid them.
…
I don’t know what you see. It depends what tint your glasses have in a lot of cases but my acuity is about as high as it comes. And what I see is a state with no COVID that only gets COVID concomitant with the main rollout of COVID vaccinations and subsides when vaccination subsides.
You might call it a coincidence if you hadn’t observed the exact same pattern in 200 other countries and states (and again depending on the tint of your specs!).
Alexander: It was always clear to me, the vaccines never worked, failed; period; they brought (in my mind intentional) a failed non-sterilizing (non-neutralizing) vaccine; could have NEVER worked; 200%
Only way out of this is to stop the vaccine program, end all mandates and implement an immediate safety review; we need to understand just how devastating these vaccines were; we need accountability
I have always felt that this was intentional, that the vaccines were failed out of the box, never worked against any strain or variant, Delta or omicron. Could not work. They could not be so inept and incompetent. Those involved. To bring something that would be failed and we would need to be on a never-ending boosting program. Our natural immunity sees the full viral ball and imprints on that, all the proteins, the spike, the envelope, nucleocapsid, membrane proteins, all the nooks and crannies on the viral ball, all patterns (sugars, glycans), all proteins and thus how could one expect to bring a vaccine that focuses on antibodies to one protein which is the spike and its receptor binding domain which is the real business part and where the mutations take place…of course then any change will render the antibodies blind and the vaccine ineffective. Yes you will push antibodies up each boost etc. but so what? They will decline after 3-4 months and you are left with nothing for the vaccine does not sterilize, does not stop infection or transmission. This vaccine CANNOT give you what natural immunity could and these beasts like CDC, NIH Francis Collins, Fauci et al, Walensky etc. knew this.
They all knew this. They all know that the vaccine is based on the initial Wuhan March 2020 strain and we have Delta variant predominant and now omicron. Wuhan has been long gone and they know it yet pushing you to use a vaccine that ‘WILL’, not MAY, but ‘WILL’ fail. It cannot work. And they know it bring toxic side effects but pushing you and to vaccinate your child. To me these are criminals. … If you asked me how would you make a vaccine that would be a full failure and could even kill a whole lot of people, akin to a biological weapon, I would say make it just like this one and roll it out this way too…these beasts like Fauci and Collins know that the spike is being translated in cells in the body and presented on the cell surface of our endothelium (inner vascular layer cells of all our arteries, veins, capillaries) and disrupts the glycocalyx (any disruption to the glycocalyx layer on top of the endothelial layer disturbs clotting/potentially promotes); it is the body, our body, our immune system e.g. antibodies, killer lymphocytes etc. attacking the spike as it sits there, tearing up the cells and tissues and causing clots, bleeds etc.
…
The fact is speaking strictly immunology, we will never be able to achieve population level herd immunity with these vaccines because we cannot cut the chain of transmission; these vaccines have failed; it was always clear to me; it is that simple; they do not work; you never ever use a non-sterilizing vaccine in the midst of a pandemic; ever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! you will only drive the natural selection of infectious and potentially deadly variants, basic immunology and virology, evolutionary biology. you also cannot discuss this without understanding the role of natural immunity, innate immunity (first line of defense), and the force of early treatment and prophylaxis with those drugs.
Are COVID-19 data reliable? The case of the European Union
Eugyppius: Omicron is Not Normal
Everything suggests this variant was leaked from a laboratory engaged in gain-of-function research.
Omicron is not normal. No immediate progenitors are known; its closest relatives are viruses last seen in early- to mid-2020. The orthodox explanation for this awkward fact, is that it has spent the last 18 months lurking “in a geography with poor genomic surveillance … or … in a chronically infected individual.” The simpler explanation is that it leaked from a laboratory.
As el gato malo and others have indicated, evidence is strong that Omicron circulates preferentially in the vaccinated. In all likelihood, it is the result of gain-of-function research, in which SARS-2 was passaged repeatedly through convalescent or vaccinated plasma, in the hopes of helping the virus evade acquired immunity. The purpose of this research would be to anticipate future immune-escape variants that vaccines might target.
Omicron carries a series of highly unlikely and suspicious mutations in its spike protein. It is hard to imagine that these mutations can have arisen via natural processes, because all but one of them are nonsynonymous – that is, they code for different amino acid sequences. Starkly mutated variants favoured by natural selection should have a great many meaningless synonymous mutations as well.
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UPDATE: Igor Chudov points to his own similar analysis from 2 December.
El gato malo: the evidence of your own eyes and ears
1. masking and lockdown never worked and still don’t
2. vaccinating/boosting in the middle of a peak seasonal surge is directly counterproductive when the vaccine causes well documented immuno-suppression for ~2 weeks post dosing. (data HERE)
3. despite promises to the contrary, the vaccines are not sterilizing and never were. they do not stop spread or infection or reduce viral load.
4. and counter to michelle’s final point, vaccines do NOT stop you from playing host or reduce mutations. in fact, leaky vaccines are notorious for making viruses worse by inverting their evolutionary gradient by imposing a new selector that demands greater virulence. this is also WELL DOCUMENTED and looks to have INCREASED DELTA CFR. she and milind have that one exactly backwards. societal scale leaky vaccine administration (especially if it mitigates symptoms and severity while allowing spread) is the antithesis of social duty. the enhanced spread and greater virulence leaves EVERYONE worse off, even the vaxxed.
Denninger: Here’s A Reality Check
Pfizer has disclosed in their own data that for young people the shots are as dangerous, as measured in hospitalization, for ***** as they are for caused myocarditis.
Since infection is never certain but inoculation, once you take it, is, there was never an argument for authorizing these jabs in healthy young people simply on the math. We did it anyway and we’re still advocating it.
That is just one condition but let’s be clear: If you jab your kid you’re putting them at equal or greater risk of being hospitalized from one side effect of the ******* alone as from *****-19 itself. If you do that as a parent, you’re a monster. If you do it as a young adult on your own absent some individualized risk, you’re stupid.
Anyone who believes that an agent injected into the muscle of the arm that can and does sometimes cause inflammation of the heart will not also cause inflammation of other tissues and, through doing so, also cause damage to other tissues has rocks in their head. The scope of that additional damage is completely unknown because we’re not performing any surveillance nor did we originally. We have never, for example, taken a group of 100 people, pulled full blood work including markers for inflammation, cardiac damage and others, then vaccinated them and repeated said tests on a 2, 4, 8 and 16 week interval to determine if we got negative metabolic changes and if we did, whether they were transient or durable. Nobody knows because we never did the work….
Oehler: Lying through Their Numbers - Ontario Edition
…
To the dismay of the Covid-19 “authorities”, these numbers show that unvaccinated constitute 17% of all reported cases, and their share in the total population is also 17%.
What’s more, there are 4.57 times more cases reported in other “vaccination” statuses than among the unvaccinated. And the unvaccinated are a minority of the ICU cases and less than 1/3 of the hospitalizations. There goes the myth of “the pandemic of the unvaccinated” (still very much in use in Canada).
This:
“Public Health Ontario is reporting 4,383 new COVID cases today. Among the new cases reported today were 746 unvaccinated, 172 partially vaccinated, and 3,243 fully vaccinated people. 222 cases were reported without vaccination status information.”
Became this:
“Health Minister Christine Elliott says 918 of today's cases are in people who are not fully vaccinated, and 222 are in people whose vaccination status isn't known.”
Norman Fenton: New ONS report on deaths by vaccination: serious anomalies and further obfuscation
As the data is simply not credible, we believe this entire new report should be disregarded.
Bendell: Lies Damn Lies and Hospitalisation Statistics
… So why is this issue so important? Because it has played into a wider narrative that has demanded conformity and limited our willingness to consider alternative or complementary approaches. When the data started looking poor for vaccine effectiveness in stopping case numbers, then at least we were told it is near perfect at reducing hospitalisations. That also helped give us the impression that we would have less severe symptoms if we are vaccinated against Covid. It helped us to think it might be the socially responsible thing to do to get vaccinated and reduce the stress on the health services. Well, none of that is true. We have been conned. The pharmaceutical industry invents the standards that the regulators use and then when those standards don’t work for it anymore then they invent new ones like the test-negative method.
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“Trust the science” has been the message from many medical bureaucrats and their champions in mass media. However, a rigorous questioning of science is the very basis of science. That includes a critical unpacking of any statistics.
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hospitalisation data provides no support for the idea of mass vaccinations nor for any coercion of the general public, whether moral or practical.
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What else might the medical bureaucrats have been getting wrong? My reading of this situation is that we need to rescue medical science from the corporations that have captured the bureaucracies and brains of people working in the medical profession. But who is going to do that?
More than 150 Comparative Studies and Articles on Mask Ineffectiveness and Harms
It is not unreasonable to conclude that surgical and cloth masks, used as they currently are being used (without other forms of PPE protection), have no impact on controlling the transmission of Covid-19 virus. Current evidence implies that face masks can be actually harmful. The body of evidence indicates that face masks are largely ineffective.
**** There
are so many elephants in the room
. . . it feels like we're on safari
…
Experimentally distinguish. Such very important words. Two words that
contain the essence of the scientific method.
In terms of elephants what
we’re doing is trying to find the elephant in the room. The predictions of QM,
whichever interpretation you use, have not (yet) failed experimental test. If
there’s an elephant in the room we know it’s a bloody small and subtle one - it
keeps hiding behind the sofa - and we can’t find the bugger.
The problem I have, with the
“official” version of the covid narrative, is that it is not internally
self-consistent and there are more elephants in the room than there is space.
These are not subtle buggers at all. They’re not hiding behind the sofa -
there’s at least 20 of them sitting on the thing, drinking tea and smoking
weed, whilst discussing the finer points of Wittgenstein.
If I tried to list all the
problems I have with the official version of all things covid I would probably
be here until next Christmas.
I had a chat with two of the
elephants sitting on my sofa. They’re on their 10th cup of tea and quite
animated. Having torn Wittgenstein apart they’re laying into covid now. One of
them, Nelly, had had enough and was packing her trunk - she wanted to say
goodbye to the covid circus.
What you stupid humans have
forgotten, she said, is to follow the scientific method. You just can’t see
what’s right there in front of your pitifully small noses.
It works like this, she
said. You formulate hypotheses, your best guesses as to what’s
happening. You then test those hypotheses against what you
observe. If you’d done that with covid, you wouldn’t now be up Loxodonta Creek
without a paddle.
If you frame
all-things-covid in terms of hypotheses, instead of scientific
“fact” it becomes much clearer.
·
Asymptomatic transmission is
a significant driver : hypothesis
·
Lockdowns significantly slow
down transmission and/or save lives : hypothesis
·
Masks have a significant
effect on transmission : hypothesis
·
Keeping 6ft away from people
reduces transmission : hypothesis
·
The only way out of this is
vaccination : hypothesis
·
Surfaces are a significant
source of infection : hypothesis
These are just some of the hypotheses we have been treated to. They are NOT facts. They are “guesses” which need to be checked against observation. Instead, they’ve been adopted like some kind of Holy Writ. In the process we’ve adopted all sorts of bizarre behaviours in pursuit of an illusory “safety”.
None of those hypotheses listed above have successfully passed the test of experiment. Perhaps the most pernicious of all is the asymptomatic transmission hypothesis. It is this, more than any other, that has driven most of the absurdity and tyranny.
Curiously, though, we might have actually made this one come true to some extent. If you have a medical product that doesn’t stop the virus replicating, but does stop your body from producing the usual symptoms of infection, it seems at least plausible that you have a situation where use of this product turns you into a genuine asymptomatic transmitter. But like any other hypothesis, this needs testing too. .....
*** Michael Tracey: Government Officials Using Phony "Emergency Powers" To Impose Vaccine Passports
…In its infinite Scientific™ wisdom, the city of Boston, Massachusetts just announced a new “vaccine passport” system set to take effect next month. This was one of the first major actions of the recently-elected mayor, Michelle Wu, who’d been hailed by many as a paradigm-shifter for her inspiring Progressive potential. Wu’s passport system is endearingly called “B Together,” because there’s nothing more emblematic of heartwarming communal “togetherness” than compulsory monitoring of medical activity by the government. Waiters, front-desk clerks, and movie theater ushers will join “together” to carry out this very important epidemiological task.
…
The stated purpose of this system is “to address rising COVID-19 cases” in Boston caused by the “Omicron” variant. This seems a bit strange, because what we’ve been told is supposed to be so alarming about “Omicron” (pronounced “Oh, c’mon”) is that it’s extra transmissible — with rapid viral spread observed even among those who are fully vaxxed and “boosted” out the wazoo, drowning in daily “rapid tests,” and quadruple-masked at the first sign of human contact. These measures have evidently not succeeded in curtailing the exponential spread. Nonetheless, the hammer is about to come down hard again on “The Unvaccinated,” allegedly because they pose such a unique transmission threat. If you don’t quite follow the logic there, you simply must not understand The Science, dummy.
Ruechel: How the Grinch Stole Christmas from Nursing Home Patients Who Won't See Another One
The anguish caused by isolation is horrific. "Isolation and loneliness are associated with a 50 percent increased risk of developing dementia, a 32 percent increased risk of stroke, and a nearly fourfold increased risk of death among heart failure patients, according to separate studies." Being denied access to their families is, quite literally, a matter of life and death. And it's happening all over again.
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There is a legitimate rationale for testing visitors to nursing homes in order to try to keep respiratory viruses out of facilities where our most vulnerable live. Nursing homes are one of the few places where it makes sense to test everyone who comes through the doors during peak cold and flu season. Covid has not changed this equation - this risk has existed in equal measure every single cold and flu season, and every public health official knows this. Yet politicians and health officials nevertheless prioritized rapid tests for school children in order to pander to fearful helicopter parents instead of giving these tests to long-term care homes. So, while the rest of society has transformed itself into a lunatic nation of hypochondriacs, the vulnerable are once again condemned to life-threatening isolation. That's the cruel gift that the government gave our most vulnerable for Christmas.
…
If you want to give someone the precious gift of family this Christmas, take your rapid tests and donate them to your local long-term care homes, hospitals, and nursing homes. And demand that they re-open their doors to the families of those locked up inside.
COVID Tweets & Quotes of the Week:
Ilargi: Sunetra Gupta (Oxford), Martin Kulldorff (Harvard), and Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford) are top scientists. Fauci labeled them “fringe epidemiologists”. That’s how much respect he has for science and scientists.
Malone: This is the most intrinsically anti-science global organization ever implemented in the history of modern man. The closest historical approximation to this monstrosity is the Catholic Church during the Spanish inquisition.
Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare: Although we encourage all citizens to receive the COVID-19 vaccination, it is not compulsory or mandatory. Vaccination will be given only with the consent of the person to be vaccinated after the information provided. Please get vaccinated of your own decision, understanding both the effectiveness in preventing infectious diseases and the risk of side effects. No vaccination will be given without consent. Please do not force anyone in your workplace or those who around you to be vaccinated, and do not discriminate against those who have not been vaccinated.”
Kirsch: I agree with WHO: Don't use the vaccines to kill children. Yes, that’s what he said. He admitted that some countries are using the boosters to kill children. We both agree that they shouldn’t do that. This is not a doctored video. It was a legitimate Freudian slip.
But, referring to most everywhere else…
El gato malo: this is all clearly performative public health theater at the expense of everyone else. … but this is all kabuki virology. covid is already endemic. nothing is going to put it back in a bottle or could even if they tried.
Kunstler: Why is the CDC not setting up early treatment centers around the USA, where people with symptoms can receive monoclonal antibody infusions and kits of well-known, cheap, safe and effective oral medicines that can be used easily at home to defeat the virus? (Those medicines have been surreptitiously outlawed by our own CDC, you know.) Is it outlandish to suppose that the official “Joe Biden” government objective is to allow as many people to die as possible in order to keep the public terrorized? Meanwhile, they’ve provoked the public to line up for Covid tests using a PCR system so discredited for Covid detection that months ago the CDC scheduled it to go offline on December 31st
***** Huskynut: I’ve never done an open letter before – never had something I felt so passionately about as the precipice on which NZ is currently balanced. We’re way beyond any realm of “adults sharing political opinions” and a long way into “a cult just took my country”. I need to send this, yet I fear it will miss the mark, in which case I will have wasted my last shot. … … … … I could go on, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past months is that facts are little more than an inconvenience to Believers, whether they’re the Jehovah’s Witness at the front door, or the Covid Cult member. I could provide dozens of links to all manner of science, from epidemiological to psychological, all driving gaping holes in the mainstream narrative. And then, like clockwork, I watch the person’s defense to cognitive dissonance kick in and there’s a rapid retreat into their cosy Beliefs, where the government is Kind, all manner of Science is Settled and Jabs are Highly Safe and Effective.
**** Rogers: The paradox here of course is that never before have so many people who claim to be woke in fact been so totally asleep and unaware of the world as it actually is.
Levant: If a public health propagandist publicly and routinely calls for strict lockdowns (including jailing people without masks) it is legitimate for an independent press to see if they are following their own rules. It would be weird not to.
*** Roche: After two years, could we please stop freaking out about every new variant or development? Could we use a little common sense and a little of our accumulated knowledge about respiratory viruses? Could we turn the rhetoric down on vaccines and masks and lockdowns, at least for the holidays? …
*** A Concerned Canadian Psychologist in British Columbia: One can only assume that the provincial health authorities’ relationship-splitting social engineering interventions will increase loneliness and isolation and associated risks for depression, anxiety, PTSD, self-harm, suicide, and drug toxicity for all. This is psychology 101. … How is it then that psychologists with PhDs and years of expertise related to the psychological and relational risks for deleterious mental and physical health outcomes related to social isolation and exclusion can sit by and swallow a one-sided narrative about pandemic risks and harms, while passively accepting ongoing public health restrictions that marginalize and psychologically harm British Columbians? Unfortunately, psychology has played a key role in the fear-based messaging that has led us to this point. Shouldn’t psychology also play a role in preventing the harms of discrimination, social isolation and exclusion, and marginalization?
Menton: But even as the Omicron variant continues to undermine the necessity of getting vaccinated, there is unwavering insistence that vaccination is the key to ending the pandemic and that to remain unvaccinated is a burden on society. … If the unvaccinated are a strain on the healthcare system, then obesity is significantly more of a burden. Should the government control what people can and cannot eat, and what the portion size is? Does the government have the right to mandate exercise? If the unvaccinated stress our emergency care resources, then drug and alcohol addicts do so tenfold. Does that mean the government can — or should — force-prevent substance use?
Mark Crispin Miller: “Having called severe reactions to the COVID jabs extremely “rare” (although they’re not), and deemed inflammatory heart disease among young athletes “normal” (although it’s not), doctors in Big Pharma’s pocket are now telling us that many, if not all, of those reporting—and, often, displaying—grievous harm post-“vaccination” are deluded—i.e., nuts—due to Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), which has been on the books for years, but has now been specifically deployed to make all those horrific “vaccine” injuries seem like a pathological delusion
Farber: They profusely issue politically correct antipathy in a vortex of vile propaganda pretending to be “science.” We are always the paper to the scissors, the scissors to the rock, and the rock to the paper. We are not a “side,” not a body of evidence…. Never mind that we are consistently correct, while they are jaw-droopingly ill-informed.
Nayna: I think the core of the split between the Americans who want to send in troops to rescue us from our own government and the bizarre "everything is great" reporting here is that Americans see our deranged policies contextualized through a social media delivery mechanism that selects for the most shocking clips and case studies. They rightfully scream "1984!" when the day-to-day experience for most people here is something like Brave New World with alcohol in place of Soma.
El gato malo: so stop. just stop. all of it.
stop counting covid. stop obsessing. stop complying. disobey.
…whether or not this virus was man made, this calamity certainly was and we can end it any time.
just make the choice.
Anecdotal COVID Fare:
A former CIA operative fact checked the stories and found they were true. Why isn't the mainstream media doing these stories??
1. 01/01/21, Windmore, Pennsylvania, USA Dead
Blake Barklage (17), a tennis player at La Salle High School in Windmore, Pennsylvania. Collapsed and died with cardiac arrest, after his team’s victory in the PCL. News Story
2. 03/01/21, Portugal Dead
Alex Apolinario (24), Brazilian Alverca FC soccer player collapsing on pitch with cardiac arrest during match. Died four days later News Story
…
164. 19/10/21
Megan Roth (34), Marathoner, running trainer and sub-elite runner. Suffered a cardiac arrest and collapsed During the Boston Marathon. Onlookers performed CPR on her and saved her life. News Story
165. 20/10/21, Italy (26) Dead
Ronald Biglione (26), Argentine Deportivo Club Independencia football player hospitalized with blood clots (thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura)after 2nd shot. Died 5 Nov News Story
166. 20/10/21, Germany (65), Dead
Hans-Günter Kinnen (65), Weiler-Volkhoven tournament coordinator, youth manager, former player News Story
167. 21/10/21, NSW Central Coast, Australia
Cienna Knowles (19) Australian equestrian star hospitalized due to blood clots, vomiting, fever, wet in sweat, heart palpitations, headache, sore muscles & joints like hell, blurry vision after Pfizer vaccine. News Story and instagram
…
281. 05/12/21 Italy Dead
Fabio Pedretti (24), from Gardone Valtrompia, collapsed and died while running the Uno di Monticelli, a night trail running event on the hills of Franciacorta in Monticelli Brusati. In the final km of the 20 km race he collapsed and could not be resuscitated. News Story
CO-VIDs of the Week:
***** Why I Don't Want to Show my Vaccine Passport
includes good discussion of the role of skepticism in science
"It’s not for privacy reasons that I don’t want to take advantage of my vaccine passport as for a number of reasons ranging from scientific to logical, moral, ethical, social and philosophical. It's a complex issue that can't be explained in a few minutes."
IT'S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE..
All things COVID Pushback Fare:
Journalist Alex Berenson SUES Twitter for 'violation of the First Amendment' over his permanent ban for questioning COVID vaccines
Anger over mask mandates, other covid rules, spurs states to curb power of public health officials
Republican lawmakers pass laws to restrict the power of health authorities to require masks, promote vaccinations and take other steps to protect the public health.
*** Eisenstein: Divide, Conquer; Unite, Heal
…
I actually dislike arguing about vaccines. Yes, I have my opinions, but neither the passion nor interest to research the topic deeply enough to competently argue them. I think Covid vaccines are overall harmful, but not compared to rain forest destruction, militarism, or neoliberal capitalism. Or world hunger, which killed ten million people in 2021, half of them children, and stunted the growth of tens of millions more—numbers that dwarf casualties from Covid or its vaccines. I also prefer to avoid the debate because its very terms take for granted a system of industrial medicine that has something like vaccination built into it.
So why do I engage this issue at all? My entree has been not vaccines per se, but vaccine mandates. It is only in small part personal—I resent attempts to coerce me into overriding my strong instinct in a matter of body sovereignty. But so what. Worse things can happen to a human being—and are happening. However, these “worse things” are expressions of the same ideology and system of domination and the war on the Other. The mandates are Trojan horses for an apparatus of control that will also crush resistance to other violations of Life, human and otherwise.
********** The Mask and the Face
McGill University is still one of the saner and more reasonable universities in the land, with many devoted and hard-working students, professors, and administrators, including those with whom I am here disagreeing on matters of enormous public import.
For that reason, and out of professional respect, I will not identify my interlocutor, who is fulfilling a duty to the university. It was, after all, I who raised the issue. Or rather, it was I who decided before term began that I must inform the administration, at each appearance of new demands that I believe unjust or unfit for purpose, both of my dissent and, where necessary, my refusal to cooperate.
… My letter, I fear, is a tad intemperate. But the very real damage being done by the present policies (regarding which the university is not entirely hostage to the government) to so many people in our community, to the fundamental laws of our country, and to the whole fabric of our society, is so great as to require a firm stance and a public rebuke. I regret that this is the case, and I regret that it takes the form of a dispute in which my own actions figure. This is not about me, as it is not about any one administrator. It is about all of us.
…
…
Dear […]
Thank you for responding on behalf of the provost, and for passing on the congratulatory letter to our students from the city’s director of Public Health. As you know, in any McGill communication I receive, I don’t read past the point where it begins offering me unsolicited medical advice, which is beyond the university’s competence and which I have made clear I regard as a form of harassment. But this letter, being from an external bureaucrat, I read through with some interest. I was struck by this line: “La vaccination demeure le geste civique le plus efficace pour préserver nos acquis de cet automne.”
“Vaccination remains the most effective civic gesture to preserve our achievements this autumn.” What remarkable transparency and simplicity!
Vaccination—or, more accurately, an experimental injection with lipid nanoparticles of uncertain and possibly toxic effect on bodily tissues, used as a delivery system for genetic instructions designed to reprogram certain cells so as to cause them to produce an unknown quantity of a spike-protein pathogen with equally uncertain, but certainly dangerous, effects on the immune system and on other crucial systems, circulatory, nervous, reproductive, etc.—has, mirabile dictu, become le geste civique.
Then again, what else could it become? For plainly it has not become a means of prevention of the spread of a coronavirus, even allowing (as I do not) that preventing spread is a rational and achievable goal. The latest iteration of the virus appears, if anything, to prefer the vaccinated.
Isn’t that convenient? Omicron is highly transmissible but not very severe, so according to the new definition of a “pandemic,” onwards and upwards with pandemic measures! Perhaps the achievement of which Dre. Drouin speaks, then, is merely that of putting the first two needles in every arm, as a prelude to the many more that are to come? With your help, she’s certainly done well with that.
Yet here we are: masked, isolated, feastless and party-less, sent back online to begin winter term, because this response to COVID has proved the abject failure that honest scientists warned from the outset it would be. The Great Reset—sorry, the dangerous pandemic—rolls on, with no end in sight. One of your administrative colleagues at a nearby university told some of her professorial charges, who had expressed concern about the psychological and pedagogical well-being of their students, to expect three or four more years of this. I hope there will be some annual variation in the congratulatory note, particularly as the needle count rises and morale drops still more precipitously.
COVID vaccination was always primarily a civic gesture, of course, for it was never medically justified or justifiable for the majority of people, especially young people like our students. That this gesture has been elicited from the latter by manipulation, censorship, bullying and in some sectors coercion, not only of adults but now even of young children, requires one to ask what sort of gesture it really is and what kind of civic life it points toward. So does the fact that, together with associated policies such as lockdowns and denials of early treatment, it has plainly done far more harm than good.
You do know, I trust, that in far too many cases the harm was permanent or fatal. That (as FOIA requests have confirmed) is something that was known to Pfizer from early days, and to the regulatory agencies by, at the latest, three months into the rollout. It has become still more evident since then, despite the studied ignorance of those in charge of Public Health. Even for people capable of benefiting from the injections, who are mainly among the elderly, they pose a serious risk.
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In short, I reverse the charge. I am jeopardizing no one; present policies are jeopardizing almost everyone. That twofold claim I am prepared to back with solid evidence, not merely with the technique your committee seems to prefer: endless repetition
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I still believe that it is the vocation of the university to enable open, free, and honest pursuit of knowledge and understanding. I believe in the liberty to undertake that pursuit without politically or economically or ideologically motivated interference and reprisals, a liberty that was recently reaffirmed by the Independent Scientific and Technical Commission on the Recognition of Academic Freedom in the University Environment. I don't know how far McGill remains committed to such things, though I still know colleagues and students who are passionately committed. I will not betray the latter by changing my behaviour to conform to policies that contradict science in the name of science. I will not speak against the mask through the mask, or against vaccine passports by first presenting one.
The refusal to permit faces to be out in the open, where they can be read and appreciated, or indeed to permit particular people to be out in the open, is closely allied with the refusal to place data and arguments out in the open. No one can now deny that these dehumanizing categories, "vaccinated and unvaccinated," or for that matter "masked and unmasked," are utterly meaningless in terms of the totally futile goal of preventing the spread of a coronavirus. That in the university, of all places, this is not being acknowledged, is the silent tolling of the mourner's bell. …
COVID Corporatocracy / Conspiracy Fare:
*** Kirsch: How RFK Jr. went from "a good guy" to an "anti-vaxxer"
I talked to him this morning about what led him down the anti-vax path nearly 20 years ago. Here's the story, condensed to make it a quick read.
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Clearly, the CDC can completely get away with lies about the safety of thimerosal even 20 years later.
So they are going to use similar techniques to convince everyone the current vaccines are safe, even in light of all the evidence that it isn’t. And they’ll get away with it for decades even after killing over 150,000 Americans in 2021 without anyone noticing.
Silencing critics through censorship, de-platforming, ad hominem attacks, and refusing to debate are all techniques that engage in today to hide the truth and keep it hidden for decades.
Kunstler: Reindeer Games
Molnupiravir, you see, works as a DNA polymerase inhibitor, the same as (sshhhhh) ivermectin, except that, unlike ivermectin — which is considered about the safest drug in the world, and which won a Nobel prize for its inventor — Molnupiravir is hardly tested at all. The FDA calls it an “investigational drug,” meaning it is subject to Murphy’s Law, as the “vaccines” have proved to be. Nor has it passed through any approval process so far. It’s being released under an FDA emergency use authorization, which relieves Merck of any liability problem if people are harmed by it. Molnupiravir will cost $700 for a five-day course of treatment (ten pills) compared to $20 for a course of ivermectin. The US government bought $2.2 billion worth of Molnupiravir. Pfizer’s Paxlovid, is actually a two-drug treatment, requiring the HIV-drug ritonavir to give it a buddy-boost. The US government bought $5-billion worth of Paxlovid.
And so now we see why US public health officialdom and the non compos mentis “Joe Biden” & Co. worked so hard, along with social media and cable news, to outlaw all the other cheap and highly-effective Covid early treatment drugs on the scene. Not just ivermectin but fluvoxamine, hydroxychloroquine and so on. They’ve even interfered with deliveries of monoclonal antibodies to stifle its use. You can see clearly what a racketeering operation this has been all along between the FDA, the CDC, Dr. Fauci’s NIAID and the pharmaceutical industry.
There is also the shell game currently being played by Pfizer and its two “vaccines” — the one still under an emergency use authorization called BioNTech, and Pfizer’s replacement for that, Comirnaty, which has received an FDA approval under shady circumstances. The catch is, Pfizer refuses to release Comirnaty in the USA because approved drugs do not enjoy that shield against liability. Pfizer’s BioNTech vaxx has injured and killed many thousands of people the past year. If the two vaxxes are the same, you can expect Comirnaty to kill and injure plenty of victims, and Pfizer will be sued up its pfizoo.
*** Malone: Omicron has Cracked Open the Overton Window
Welcome to the new paradigm shift
In the case of COVID-19, the use of the noble lie has been used by government and world health officials as well as legacy media sycophants to restrict and even close the Overton window regarding issues such as mask use, vaccination strategies, and lockdowns. To be explicitly clear, the Overton Window is a political concept which is being actively manipulated to constrain scientific discourse.
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Dr. Fauci has been particularly egregious in his attempts to limit the Overton Window by his repeated use of the “noble lie.” A “Noble Lie” is knowingly propagated by politicians, often to advance an agenda. A Noble Lie is intrinsically paternalistic. The deceiver assumes that lying serves the best interest of society. Fauci’s misinformation and lies have been targeted at influencing behavior of public and government officials, including politicians. He has effectively used the Noble Lie to expand and limit the Overton Window and in effect, control the narrative that politicians can act on and stay within the safety limits of their constituency.
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By use of limiting what is acceptable speech on COVID-19, authoritarianism in the form of vaccine mandates, lock-downs and mask use have come to dominate governmental responses throughout the world. And the USG public health has normalized propaganda as a tool for enforcing their policy decisions on American and the world.
Tucker: Fauci’s War on Science: The Smoking Gun
Those weeks following the release of the Great Barrington Declaration did feel odd.
On the good side, medical doctors, scientists, public health workers, and citizens all over the world were thrilled that three top scholars in fields of public health and epidemiology had spoken out against lockdowns and for a reasoned approach to Covid. They eagerly signed the document.
Yes, there were some attempts to sabotage it too, with fake names and so on, which should have been a clue about what was coming. The fakes were deleted in days and new methods of confirming signatures were deployed.
The document, on the one hand, said nothing controversial. The right way to deal with this pandemic, it said, was to focus on those who could face severe outcomes from disease – a very plain point and nothing new. There was nothing to be gained by locking down the whole of society because of a pathogen with such a huge differential in its demographic impact.
The virus would have to become endemic in any case (including the realization of “herd immunity,” which is not a “strategy” but a descriptive term widely accepted in epidemiology) and certainly would not be stopped by destroying peoples’ lives and liberties.
The hope of the Declaration was simply that journalists would pay attention to a different point of view and a debate would begin on the unprecedented experiment in lockdowns. Perhaps science could prevail, even in this climate.
On the bad side, and at the very same time, following the release, the attacks began pouring in, and they were brutal, structured to destroy. The three main signers – Sunetra Gupta (Oxford), Martin Kulldorff (Harvard), and Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford) – made the statement as a matter of principle. It was also born of frustration with the prevailing narrative.
Mostly this declaration was intended as an educational effort. But the authors were being called vicious names and treated like heretics that should be burned. There certainly was no civil debate; quite the contrary.
It was all quite shocking given that the Declaration was a statement concerning what almost everyone in these professional circles believed earlier in the year. They were merely stating the consensus based on science and experience. Nothing more. Even on March 2, 2020, 850 scientists signed a letter to the White House warning against lockdowns, closures, and travel restrictions. It was sponsored by Yale University. Today it reads nearly like a first draft of the Great Barrington Declaration. Indeed on that same day, Fauci wrote to a Washington Post reporter: “The epidemic will gradually decline and stop on its own without a vaccine.”
But following the March 13-16, 2020 lockdowns, the orthodoxy had evidently changed. And suddenly. The signers of the GBD had declined to change with it. Thus did they endure astonishingly brutal smears.
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What historian Phil Magness has discovered, with newly unearthed emails, comes not as a shock to any of us but it is satisfying to see the confirmation of what we suspected. It seemed at the time that the effort to attack and destroy both the GBD and its authors was coordinated from the top. Here at last is the proof that our intuition was not crazy.
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You can discover more about this in Scott Atlas’s book on the topic. These new emails confirm his account. It was an outright war on top scientists, people whose views on matters of public health were not different from the professional consensus only earlier in the year.
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Chudov: Omicron as a Bioweapon: Thoughts and Implications
Instead, I would like to concentrate on the thought that Omicron is a bioweapon. This is not because this is necessarily the likeliest hypothesis. It is impossible to even guess what is the “likelier” hypothesis. There is too much that we do not know. What we need to do, instead of guessing probabilities, is outline the possibilities. My main reason for writing about the possibility that Omicron is a bioweapon is because this has not been covered enough and it deserves to be covered.
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What seems like a nefarious goal to you, may seem like a humanity saving idea to someone else. For example, let’s consider for a minute that someone decides to release a virus to reduce our population in half. This idea is abhorrent to you and certainly to me, but to someone it may amount to “saving our planet from the global warming”.
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To be sure, as of now, omicron does not seem to be a tool of depopulation. The objective of this article is not to convince you that something crazy is definitely happening. My objective is to show you that crazy things occasionally do happen and we need to be on lookout and that it is a possibility, not yet excluded by evidence.
Archbishop Vigano’s startling warning to the American people: I think it is so very good I am simply printing it here...he speaks for me
I am a scientist but much of what is here appeals to me...lets just say this Archbishop has more gonads than the entire US congress and Senate and all western global leaders and in fact most
“DEAR AMERICAN PEOPLE, DEAR FRIENDS, for two years now, a global coup has been carried out all over the world, planned for some time by an elite group of conspirators enslaved to the interests of international high finance. This coup was made possible by an emergency pandemic that is based on the premise of a virus that has a mortality rate almost analogous to that of any other seasonal flu virus, on the delegitimization and prohibition of effective treatments, and on the distribution of an experimental gene serum which is obviously ineffective, and which also clearly carries with it the danger of serious and even lethal side effects. We all know how much the mainstream media has contributed to supporting the insane pandemic narrative, the interests that are at stake, and the goals of these groups of power: reducing the world population, making those who survive chronically ill, and imposing forms of control that violate the fundamental rights and natural liberties of citizens. And yet, two years after this grotesque farce started, which has claimed more victims than a war and destroyed the social fabric, national economies, and the very foundations of the rule of law, nothing has changed in the policies of Nations and their response to the so-called pandemic.
Last year, when many still had not yet understood the gravity of the looming threat, I was among the first to denounce this coup, and I was promptly singled out as a conspiracy theorist. Today more and more people are opening their eyes and beginning to understand that the emergency pandemic and the “ecological emergency” are part of a criminal plan hatched by the World Economic Forum, the UN, the WHO, and a galaxy of organizations and foundations that are ideologically characterized as clearly anti-human and – this needs to be said clearly – anti-Christian.
One of the elements that unequivocally confirms the criminal nature of the Great Reset is the perfect synchrony with which all the different Nations are acting, demonstrating the existence of a single script under a single direction. And it is disconcerting to see how the lack of treatment, the deliberately wrong treatments that have been given in order to cause more deaths, the decision to impose lock downs and masks, the conspiratorial silence about the adverse effects of the so-called “vaccines” that are in fact gene serums, and the continuous repetition of culpable errors have all been possible thanks to the complicity of those who govern and the institutions. Political and religious leaders, representatives of the people, scientists and doctors, journalists and those who work in the media have literally betrayed their people, their laws, their Constitutions, and the most basic ethical principles.
GeoPolitical Fare:
NY Times: US Hid True Toll of Air Wars; Thousands of Dead Civilians, Many of Them Children
President Barack [O.bomb.a] called it “the most precise air campaign in history”
Garcia: War On Earth, Bad Vibes To Humans
For one brief shining moment this past weekend, the New York Times broke out of its role as establishment mouthpiece and publicist for the powerful, and practiced some real journalism.
"Hidden Pentagon Records Reveal Patterns of Failure In Deadly Airstrikes" was the banner headline of the two-part blockbuster written by Azmat Khan. Of course, euphemizing the US government's decade-long campaign of drone terror and mass murder of civilians in the middle East as a tactical "failure" is the very essence of Timesianism.
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As the Times series on the drone slaughters and their coverups establishes - in case after case after gruesome case - there has never been any accountability. Any accountability is reserved for the exposers of war crimes, like Julian Assange and Daniel Hale, the former drone operator who was sentenced last June to 45 months in prison for the crime of leaking documents on war crimes to the press - the same kind of documents that the Times now finally sees fit to print, to little or no reaction from either the political class or from the rest of the corporate media. I guess everybody's too busy tweeting about their "mild" Omicron test results while gaslighting the unvaxxed.
Vid of the Week:
Catherine Austin Fitts: "Pick A Side. We Are At A Fork In The Road. One Road Leads To Slavery, The Other Road Leads To Freedom."
CaitOz Fare:
Maturity Is Realizing That Propaganda Isn’t Something That Only Happens To Other People
Western mass media consumers are no less propagandized than North Koreans or any of the other nations we’re told to pity because their government indoctrinates them with state media, in fact they are arguably more propagandized, which is why Noam Chomsky said that any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the US media. The way the public is manipulated into consenting to all the agendas of the powerful without their even knowing that they are being propagandized has arguably been the most astonishing feat of social engineering anywhere in the world.
The Big Threats Are The Ones We Can’t Come Back From: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
You simply cannot understand international controversies without understanding the propaganda spin that goes into them and having an acute awareness that your own society participates in those propaganda operations. You just can’t. If you don’t get this, you don’t get anything.
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The only ultimate threats to humanity are those we can’t fix later on. Nuclear annihilation. Environmental collapse. Dystopia where total information control and automated weaponry make revolution impossible. On anything else we can always course correct after realizing our mistake. We’re only really locked in if we make a mistake that we can’t come back from.
Other Quotes of the Week:
Christine Nelson, via Lyons-Weiler: Civilization is just a temporary failure of entropy.
Long Reads / Big Thoughts:
The Economics of Repulsion
In traditional capitalism, the supply of commodities is finite and their exploitation leads to depletion of the supply. By mining coal, diamonds or drilling oil, access to these commodities becomes increasingly more difficult, which requires deeper mines, oil drills, and more sophisticated technology, all of which increases production costs. For a fixed demand, this reduction in supply results in a rise of perceived value and higher price.
In cognitive capitalism, where information is the main commodity, the imbalance resides on the opposite side. Its economics is governed by diminishing demand. Human attention is biologically limited – there is a finite amount of information our brains can absorb and store at any given time. Supply of information, on the other hand, is unlimited and comes practically at no cost – ideas can come out of nowhere (or as a result of the general intellect) and, in principle, cannot be exhausted.
Since everyone is competing for the same fraction of our (limited) attention, sooner or later cognitive capitalism becomes a zero-sum game. For a brain already overloaded with information to pay attention to something new, it has to neglect something else. Every spec of information, every new idea, therefore, has an inherent ephemeral quality and carries a potential of becoming worthless.
In order to insert itself into the tight space of the already saturated attention space, new information has to be able to shock. It does not necessarily have to be relevant or carry semiotic value; it only needs to be sufficiently loud to overpower other voices. And, in competitive markets, such loud information wins and gradually dominates. Cognitive capitalism, thus, inevitably leads to semiotic inflation — more information buys less meaning – and ultimately to hyperinflation when information carries no meaning whatsoever. ….
Satirical Fare:
Pics of the Week:
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