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Sunday, January 30, 2022

2022-01-30

 *** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)

Regular Fare:

China PMIs Show Economy On Verge Of Contraction Amid Continued Growth Slowdown








Fed Rate Hikes & Risks Of Financial Instability – Part II

... However, while the Fed is intent on hiking rates and reducing accommodation, I am reminded of an age-old proverb:

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

While the Fed may intend to hike rates and taper their balance sheet, the real question is, “can they?”

There are two primary considerations for the Fed as we progress into 2022. As noted in part-1, the reversal of liquidity is problematic.

As recently discussed, “deflation” is the overarching threat longer-term. However, in the short term, the flood of liquidity into the system created, as expected, surging inflationary pressures. With the measure of money in the system, known as M2, skyrocketing, the resulting surge in inflation is not surprising.

... As we indicated in part-1, inflation surged almost exactly 9-months after the massive infusions of fiscal policy. So while many, including the Fed, suggest inflation is problematic, M2 indicates disinflation remains the most likely outcome.


...... The evidence is quite clear that surging debt and deficits inhibit organic growth, and the massive debt levels are sensitive to increases in interest rates.



Other Charts: (source links: one, two, three, four, five)







Bubble Fare:


... Unfortunately, there is no bullish case anymore. Up until now the entire bull case which ignored valuations, was based upon  the ubiquitous belief that printed money is the secret to effortless wealth. Now that argument no longer exists. However, there remains an industry of financial salesmen who need sheeple to continue buying financial junk through all types of market risks and at the end of the cycle.

... In summary, the Fed is wrong. AGAIN. 
The economists who believe the Fed, are wrong. AGAIN. 



Jeremy Grantham’s recent piece, Let the wild rumpus begin, argued that the US is in its 4th “superbubble” of the last 100 years and is in its final stages.  This inspired us to refresh our bubble framework (below, taken from our 2017 blog post).  Many valuation measures of the US equity market are near historic highs and with the Fed about to tighten monetary policy, investors should naturally be skeptical of US equity allocations.

We are heavily influenced by the work of Charles Kindleberger and Hymen Minsky at Variant Perception, and we’ve dedicated much of our work to understanding how boom and bust cycles progress.

In Kindleberger’s classic, Panics, Manias and Crashes, he expands on earlier work by Minsky in Stabilizing an Unstable Economy. They found that no two bubbles are alike, but they all share a common structure. Below we’ve summarized the five key stages of market bubbles that allow you to identify them as they happen.


Vid of the Week:





COVID-19 notes:

Long COVID symptoms and duration in SARS-CoV-2 positive children — a nationwide cohort study

“Long COVID in children is rare and mainly of short duration.”





(not just) for the ESG crowd:

Fewer and fewer locations are suitable for snow-loving sporting events.




The Hard Math of Minerals

... Today, the material intensity of solar and wind systems and EVs is still of minimal consequence because those technologies account for only a few percentage points of the global energy system. But the material demands will become hard to ignore if the world’s economies all simultaneously pursue similarly ambitious policies to displace the fossil fuels that currently supply over 80% of all energy.

... In a recent report from the Geological Survey of Finland, researchers considered the minerals implications for achieving a so-called full transition; that is, using solar and wind to electrify all ground transport as well as to produce hydrogen for both aviation and chemical processes. They found the resulting demand for nearly every necessary mineral, including common ones such as copper, nickel, graphite, and lithium, would exceed not just existing and planned global production capabilities, but also known global reserves of those minerals. A recent analysis by the Wood Mackenzie consultancy found that if EVs are to account for two-thirds of all new car purchases by 2030, dozens of new mines must be opened just to meet automotive demands—each mine the size of the world’s biggest in each category today. But 2030 is only eight years away and, as the IEA has reported, opening a new mine takes 16 years on average.


... Canadian oil majors, royalty owners, and hydrocarbon pipelines are all priced as though disruption - actual replacement by wind and solar and electric vehicles - is going to happen in the next five years or so. But simple back of envelope economic calculations based on physics and energy density tell us that replacing fossil fuels (again, 80% of current world energy consumption) with those energy sources, the so-called "energy transition," is impossible. That means that the world is seriously under-investing in hydrocarbon production and traditional energy infrastructure, and over-investing in electric vehicles (TSLA) and in wind and solar boondoggles that will collapse the way the previous iteration (e.g. Suntech Power, Evergreen Solar, A123 Systems) did a decade ago.






Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

*** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)


Regular Fare:

Twenty Years of Horror at Guantánamo Bay
Twenty years since its opening, the United States continues to hold prisoners, most without charge, at Guantánamo Bay. The facility is an abomination that must be closed and its land returned to Cuba.




Biosphare:

Science is upheld as objective—but is that objectivity a help or a hindrance?

“Follow the science!” This value-neutral field with its objective logic and cold reasoning is our beacon of hope in an ecological crisis. But should we celebrate its lack of values, or is it time to shift our scientific paradigm?

That’s the argument of this week’s guest, ecologist Dan Fiscus, who says the very nature of science as value-neutral is a driving force in the climate crisis. He argues science will never be able to tackle the scale of the problem posed by the climate crisis until we infuse the field with ethics.

... Dan explains how the modern paradigm is ROAM: Reductionist, Objectivist, Analytic and Mechanistic. He describes its failures to understand and treat the environment as inseparable from Life, and proposes a new paradigm for the future.


Essential Short Vid of the Week:

introduction to science

relevant to climate
relevant to covid
relevant to all the themes and topics in all of my blogs









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; new addition: Marc Girardot; 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 Harvey Risch, and Michael Yeadon, and John Ioannidis, and Paul Marik, and Tess Lawrie, and Zelenko, and [local hero] Byram Bridle, and…
but going forward, my linking to material by those mainstays mentioned above will be reduced to key excerpts and/or essential posts


Analysis:


Examination of US States in summer/autumn 2021 shows conclusively that mass administration of the leaky COVID vaccine caused unseasonal outbreaks of the virus that causes COVID.

... According to Occam’s Razor, I am going to test the hypothesis that the 2021 phenomenon is due to mass vaccination. The scientific rationale is multifaceted. I recommend you review Dr Paul Alexander’s substack2 or el gato malo’s3 for the details but in summary, the COVID vaccine is “leaky”, i.e. it does not neutralise the virus.


Boosted people get Covid at TWICE the rates

....Since endless boosting is clearly out of question due to immune system damage from the shots, the boosted will soon become the “new double-vaccinated” and have more severe bouts of Covid, with possibly worse “variants”, as the years pass.

I say this with sadness as I have some boosted loved ones, and I hope to end up being wrong on this.







UCSF Professor Aditi Bhargava brought up the issue with N-antibodies in November of 2021. People have been too quick to dismiss her concern. In its Week 42 “COVID-19 Vaccine Surveillance Report” (published 21 October 2021), the UK Department of Health admits on page 23 that “recent observations from UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) surveillance data that N antibody levels appear to be lower in individuals who acquire infection following 2 doses of vaccination.” What does this mean? It means that the vaccine interferes with the body’s ability to make antibodies after infection against other parts of the virus.

In particular, vaccinated people do not appear to form antibodies against the nucleocapsid protein, the envelope of the virus, which is an important part of the response in unvaccinated people. The observation may explain why the vaccines actually produce negative efficacy as was shown in the Denmark study, for example. Reuters did a “fact check” on this concerning observation and, as expected, found nothing wrong. Who’d have guessed? They said that since the S-protein response was so robust, your body had no need to mount a robust N-antibody response. Not so fast… this is hardly a “known effect.” This seems more like a hand-waving argument to me. In checking with the experts I knew, nobody was aware of this being something to simply ignore.

.... The data agrees with her: it is showing the vaccines are producing negative efficacy and making our bodies more susceptible to being infected with other diseases including cancers and shingles


A science editor for the Süddeutsche Zeitung can't work out what we're even doing here, but he wants us to keep doing it.

... This doesn’t make any sense. The endemic phase begins when we decide it does; we could’ve declared Corona endemic last year if we wanted to. All endemic seasonal respiratory viruses surge in the winter. Otherwise, it hardly matters how many olds Germany has, or how thoroughly vaccinated they are. Nearly all susceptible people are going to get Omicron in the coming weeks whatever we do. It is the monsoon, and we are trying to stop the rain with umbrellas.

.... Someday, people – perhaps not Bartens, but other people – will realise that Corona isn’t the only risk in the world. Our restrictions are incredibly dangerous and represent a multitude of risks in themselves. Disrupting millions of lives and curbing social, cultural and economic activity for two years, will all have lasting consequences. This stuff has totally changed my life, and I can’t be the only one. In the coming years, we will discover, slowly and with growing unease, how much this has done to us, and our children, and all the complex and unpredictable damage we have caused – all for nothing, because SARS-2 will still be infecting people.


Why COVID vaccines cannot work & evidence of causative role in deaths after vaccination; histopathologic analyses on organs of 15 who died post vax; vaccine implicated in deaths of 14/15 cases (93%)
Vaccines that are injected into the muscle – i.e., the interior of the body – will only induce IgG and circulating IgA, not secretory IgA. This statement is critical and why we/I argue it never worked

..... A natural infection with SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) will in most individuals remain localized to the respiratory tract. In contrast, the vaccines cause cells deep inside our body to express the viral spike protein, which they were never meant to do by nature. Any cell which expresses this foreign antigen will come under attack by the immune system, which will involve both IgG antibodies and cytotoxic T-lymphocytes.

This may occur in any organ. We are seeing now that the heart is affected in many young people, leading to myocarditis or even sudden cardiac arrest and death. How and why such tragedies might causally be linked to vaccination has remained a matter of conjecture because scientific evidence has been lacking. This situation has now been rectified.

Histopathologic studies: ....




Commentary:




"Without a shred of clinical data to support this action, Biden has forced trained medical professionals to choose between treating their patients or breaking the law"



... Almost right from the get-go it was understood that kids, thankfully, were at extremely low risk from serious complications of covid. Even the much-vaunted LongCovid™ barely affects them - a recent large study on kids has shown that there is little difference to be found in reported LongCovid™ symptoms between those infected and not infected.

Kids are not particularly good at spreading it to others either. Teachers in Sweden, for example, haven’t been dropping like flies, despite schools being pretty much open throughout and with NO masking. That’s only one data point - but you can find plenty of studies that come to the same conclusion.

It makes sense (it is consistent) with what we know, or think we know, about the transmission of respiratory viruses - in general, if your immune system deals with things well, you’re not going to be producing a ton of viral load with which to infect others - and we know that kids deal with SARS-CoV-2 extraordinarily well.

Yet kids have shouldered such a heavy, heavy load. Their government induced covid-yoke has been anything but light. .. 

... What we’ve done to our kids, and appear to be still doing, has transgressed any acceptable limit by a country mile. But why the unholy and unhealthy obsession with putting massive restrictions on kids?

... Risk perception has been weaponized

... Suffer the little children? By God, haven’t we ensured that - for no discernible health benefit whatsoever. Our wanton devastation of our kids’ most precious developmental years has been utterly inconsistent with any accurate measure of the actual risk.


*** Thomas Fazi & Toby Green: 
The shared Covid risk is being outsourced to Africa

... So why have governments pushed towards compulsion, and why have so many supposedly progressive politicians — Jacinda Ardern, Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau to name but three — been among the most vocal supporters of this move? In our view, much of this relates to the perception of the “collective good”

... The Western liberal’s comforting canard, that “No one’s safe until everyone’s safe”, is shown really to mean that “Until I feel safe, I will continue to destroy the livelihoods and health outcomes of poor countries

... Once the inequities and medical colonialism implicit in the global drive is recognised, the progressive rhetoric around universal vaccination is revealed as a house of cards. This applies to the West as well. Much of the institutional framing has revolved around people’s “duty” to get vaccinated. People of all ages were told to get the jab — and now their children — to avoiding infecting others, to help reach herd immunity and “eradicate Covid”, and to stop taking up hospital beds. However, none of these arguments holds up to scrutiny.

It is now patently obvious that high levels of vaccination don’t correlate with fewer cases. Indeed, the most vaccinated region in the world, Europe, is also the one experiencing the greatest surge in new cases. While Israel, the first country in the world to administer a fourth dose of the vaccine, at the time of writing also has the highest number of daily new Covid cases per capita.

... It also means that the main rationale for vaccine passports — that of creating “Covid-free spaces” and reducing the spread of the virus — is completely unfounded, which is why several countries are now considering scrapping them.

... Ultimately, it would appear that the prevailing mass vaccination strategy of most countries has benefited neither the less vulnerable nor the most vulnerable.

Fortunately, the narrative does appear to be shifting. Even the WHO is now claiming that, precisely because the current vaccines have a negligible impact on prevention of infection and transmission, “a vaccination strategy based on repeated booster doses of the original vaccine composition is unlikely to be appropriate or sustainable”. The same concern was voiced by the vaccine strategy chief of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), Marco Cavaleri, who added that administering repeated booster doses could potentially lead to “problems with immune response” — that is, lower the overall protection of societies.

... None of this was ever progressive; a true progressive healthcare system in the future must be based on the WHO’s definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. Most important of all though, it must be driven by what communities need and want, and not what globalised technocrats determine is good for them.


We have to Talk about Nazism. How Our Times Do Indeed Echo an Earlier Totalitarian Era

.. I am seeking to explain in this series of essays, how otherwise nice people — and indeed Western people, who grew up with post-Enlightenment norms about human rights and the rule of law — can be doing evil now

..... How could good people be going along with this?

There are lessons from history that we have to learn, or re-learn, and quickly.

.... No one sensible is talking about comparing what we are living through now to those years and those horrors.

Rather, the vivid similarities between our moment in the West since 2020, and the earliest years of Nazi Germany’s civil society policies, are to the years 1931-33, when so many vicious norms and policies were set in place. 

... Casual, escalating cruelty, a culture of degradation of the “othered,” and a two-tier society, were built up in those years certainly at the behest of Nazi social policy. But the construction of a world of evil out of what had been a modern civil society, if a fragile one, was also endorsed and even policed by doctors, by medical associations, by journalists, by famous composers and filmmakers, by universities; by neighbors, by teachers, by shopkeepers — for years before the death camp guards were tasked with their own far more heinous cruelty.



Rock’n’roller Neil Young’s conniption over having to share the Spotify platform with Joe Rogan affords a glimpse into the glutenous mire that is a mind bethinking itself “progressive” these drear days of American unraveling. ....

It’s worth paying attention to just how disordered Mr. Young’s thinking is because it summarizes everything that has gone awry on the political Left: He is wrong two ways: 1) morally, and 2) on the facts of the matter — which is as wrong as you can be. Like virtually everyone on the Democratic Party / Woke / Progressive axis, he is obviously in favor of suppressing free speech. Since when did that become okay for old hippies?


The question was risk of myocarditis from COVID-19 vaccination vs. from COVID. Spoiler alert: CNN faceplants. Badly.

... Joe’s self-effacing is something public health can never do. But it’s part of what gives him appeal to the masses. When he makes a mistake, he reminds people it is their duty to figure things out for themselves, as well as they can. When he questioned the quality of the source of information, something the CNN host calls “moving the goalpost”, he was modeling behavior every person interested in getting to the truth should do.


Paul Craig Roberts, re: Kees Van Der Pijl’s new book, States of Emergency

...Van Der Pijl writes that pharmaceutical industry research grants make the industry the co-author of many articles and that more than half of all The Lancet‘s revenues come from pharmaceutical companies orders of reprints of articles supportive of their products. Van Der Pijl writes “According to the former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, who had 20 years of experience, it is simply no longer possible to believe much of the published clinical research.”


No one can ever force us to renounce our inner freedom.

Many weeks I receive emails from readers requesting help with Covid-related emotional struggles. One reader recently asked, “How do I go about trying to influence others to see the truth? I do not see many people listening. I am in despair; I am starting to feel that the cause is lost, and the survival option may be to shrink away into the shadows.” Another shared his fears and despair before requesting help:
I go to bed every night worrying about my children’s future and feeling powerless to help them. I cannot fathom what living in the World’s Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” will do to them. ..
......... Research findings indicate “eudaimonic well-being benefits immune function directly.” “Eudaimonic well-being” refers to the “deeper satisfaction from activities with a greater meaning or purpose.” Stress increases when meaning seems fleeting and we believe we must change our circumstances to achieve happiness. We know stress reduces our immune system’s capacity to fight viruses.

... “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.” 

The search for meaning is an individual journey. Opportunities abound to practice a new mindset. When government bureaucrats and politicians are cruel, we can model kindness in our daily lives. When they whip up hatred using us vs. them rhetoric, we can model valuing our shared humanity. When government makes it harder for businesses to flourish, our entrepreneurial insights show the way. No one can ever force us to renounce our inner freedom. Today, like every day, we will have opportunities to make more meaning in our lives.


Charts:




COVID Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

*** Bardi: This said, it should be clear that we have a big problem of corruption whenever science deals with something that is sold to the public and provides large profits. Not just big. It is enormous. 

eugyppius: I will never get tired of typing, that a great many people in high positions are just totally ignorant and misinformed about what is happening. This is more and more the case, as you move from hard empirical sciences to the more administrative, politically adjacent make-work enterprises like epidemiology (which is everything and nothing) and bioethics (which is anything but ethical). 

Rose: please, don’t kid yourself, this is a global coup. The same stupidity and fraud that caused the economic crash of 2007/8 has blanketed the business of drugs, and business is booming. It’s been happening for decades but it’s simply out of control now. Their business model is brilliant.

Ilargi: The UK Yellow Card system fails as badly as VAERS. And that is not a coincidence. It takes 40 minutes to fill out a form.

Hyland: They have failed to act on any of the Yellow Card reports they have received. There are currently 2,000 deaths reported and 500,000 adverse events. They should have stopped the programme before the deaths reached 100 and launched a thorough investigation.’

Rogers: The entire notion of the regulatory state is now discredited as all federal and most state regulators are captured by industry.

Ignacio: This indicates how low has come the bar for vaccine efficiency. A few weeks of some protection, without avoiding infection must be considered great performance and justify massive idiotic jabs… Such a poor result, from the epidemiological point of view does not sustain massive jabbing. .. The damage you are doing with massive jabs is higher than benefits even if we do not consider rare adverse effects.

Rigger, to the Pope: He can do the same thing I recommended to others in my last piece; he can just fuck right off. Have the Catholic Church not had enough of buggering up the lives of people (sometimes quite literally)? .. Presumably you had your own book “fact checked”

Rigger, again: To put it somewhat mildly, consistency hasn’t been one of the most notable characteristics of the response to covid. It has been more like the Hokey-Cokey : you put your left leg in, your left leg out, in, out, in, out, and shake it all about. You do the Hokey-Cokey and you turn around. And that’s what it’s all about.

Greenwald: Obviously, Spotify is not going to get rid of Rogan over Neil Young or Joni Mitchell. But for US liberalism, censorship is a virtual religion now, so they will start pressuring bigger names to do this. They try to make any platform toxic which allows dissent from liberal pieties.

Carolla: Their job is to push back against the man and Neil Young should know the man isn’t Joe Rogan, the man is Dr. Fauci, the man is Governor Gavin Newsom, the man is the CDC, the man is the WHO, the man is Biden

el gato malo: that’s a powerful phrase: “the life we knew before.” it’s the correct formulation. let’s hope it also includes another aspect of those halcyon days:
not having to constantly worry about the next panic driven authoritarian impulse from a capricious state intruding upon our lives and livelihoods because some epidemiologically illiterate health agency got the vapors.

Kirsch: Somebody is out of touch and it isn’t the truckers.
Trudeau has gone into hiding setting an example for the world on the right way to handle a crisis.

Farber: I believe Trudeau may be the first Globalist leader to be forced to, at the very least, resign. He may as well have said: “Let Them Eat Cake.” Does he want to be toppled?

and, finally:
what’s quebecois for “let’s go brandon”?
“truck fudeau.”



CO-VIDs of the Week:

Covid Vaccine Tricks - Are we being manipulated once more?


***** Part 1/3 by @avi_barak_media: How to take a virus and turn it into a pandemic.
Please share.
***** Part 2/3 ... Part 3/3


********** Dr. Ryan Cole - shocking if true...

pro-science, anti-BS™: 1/5 Sécurité des vaccins: un scandale se profilerait-il au Département de la Défense (USA) ?
"J'ai la confiance de personnes très haut placées au DoD, des médecins."
"Vous avez en moyenne 1,7 mio de déclarations de maladies par an."
"2021: en 10 mois , l'année du vaccin, 22 mio!"
[US military: average per year 1.7 million reports of all diseases combined. First 10 months 2021: 22 million.]








Anecdotal COVID Fare:

Kirsch: Tawny Buettner, RN observed a >10X increase in the rate of myocarditis after the vaccines rolled out
She worked in the Cardiothoracic Intensive Care Unit (CTICU) of a major children’s hospital in San Diego, California for more than 12 years. Here's her story about what happened after the vax rollout.


Vanessa Hamalian and her new Latitude Clinic have treated 1,092 covid patients with ivermectin and the FLCCC protocols—none with vaccines. Of those, 1,091 have recovered.

“I feel such passion to give primary healthcare access to all people that is free of judgment and condemnation and respects the individual’s intelligence and ability to make good choices for themselves and their families.”


Teacher Brianne Dressen recounts her horrifying and ongoing vaccine ordeal—and the coverup of adverse reactions by health officials, mainstream media, and the New England Journal of Medicine



Pushback Fare:

On Canada, COVID, the Convoy, and Class

... “They’re nicer, right? They like to apologize all the time too, I hear.” Canadians have a well-known reputation across much of the world.

I try my best to explain to them that Canadians are also politically apathetic in comparison to their more rebellious and spirited neighbours to the south. “Canada is a post-national state”, I will carefully explain, in that “……a sense of national identity has been eroded due to the rapid pace of demographic change and the overabundance of American media that frames much of their politics and culture, despite often not being applicable at all”. All the usual caveats about Quebec obviously apply, and it was that last failed referendum in that province in 1995 when we witnessed real political fervour from Anglo Canada in the form of demonstrations for Canadian unity that took place in Montreal. Since then, Canada has been quiet as a mouse. “What happens there?”, I am always asked. I reply: “nothing of consequence. It is the Globalist Test Area”.

It is with admitted and slight shock that I am watching the anti-COVID mandates Trucker Convoy now rolling towards Ottawa, where they plan on shutting down the nation’s capital to end the mandates that have kept this country largely closed (and miserable) these past two years. It is heartwarming to see Canadians finally, finally engage in a mass grassroots demonstration against the distant elites that govern them from afar. Some may find it inspiring. All I know is that I have never seen such a cross-country display in my lifetime. A cynic like myself can only applaud and dispense with the usual deeper analyses, in order to appreciate the moment.

....

Yes, Canada is a liberal democracy, but it’s a parliamentary system much more strict than its almost identical British mother and its American cousin. Canada is governed by the dictatorship of the Federal Cabinet, where parliamentary parties do not allow for free votes by their members on important bills. This severely restricts the actual choices and power that the citizens have. Add to this the managerial elite that has long ago captured the state, it is no wonder that Canadian citizens are apathetic and feel powerless.

The Convoy comes from a place of frustration; a frustration not just with the never-ending pandemic, but also a frustration with these snobby elites who look down upon them as the Victorian upper classes would have peered down on Cockney chimney sweeps. These leaders, whether in politics or science or culture, happily dictate to them with almost zero accountability whatsoever. They are the Ottoman officials looking down upon the rayah with barely-concealed contempt.

Most importantly, the frustration comes from not knowing where their place is in this constantly changing Canada and the knowledge that they are largely incapable of changing it for their own benefit. “When will this finally end?”, is followed by the more important question: “When do our lives get better again? When will see better days?”



We thought we have rights, enshrined in the Canadian Constitution and the Charter of Rights, defended by the governments and politicians on the federal and provincial levels, for good measure, and guarded by the judiciary and police bodies. As it has been aplenty demonstrated in the last two years, none of that has been true.

.... First thing first, the Charter of Rights has failed us all. The relative, nebulous rights that can be trampled upon and suspended and the slightest whim of the government or the medical establishment need to be replaced with tangible, inalienable rights befitting a human being. 

.... Sixth, the whole medical system should be brought back to the pre-1980s rules with the medial freedom for the physicians, and the practice of medicine that heals, not pushes drugs, jabs, and treatments for BigPharma.



When Trudeau referred to the convoy as a “fringe minority” with “unacceptable views” the journalists covering him didn’t push back and ask him why he would use such language. They just moved along. Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole has faced more difficult questions on this front at every step than Trudeau has. Apparently, the journalists on Parliament Hill these days think their job is to hold the opposition and not the government to account. It also appears their job to support some protest movements and attack others based on the personal preferences of the journalists. The line between columnists and commentators, like myself, and supposedly neutral, objective reporters gets blurrier by the day. The behaviour of Canada’s media from reporters to news anchors, show hosts to editors, has been shameful over the past few weeks. Can we really be shocked that public trust in the media continues to fall?




When you’re both essential, and fed up

... Or perhaps that was political theatre. 

The whole damned thing is theatre.

The man is a coward, and that’s being kind. In fact, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau—whom my dear husband dubbed the “duplicitous Ken doll” .. —is somehow managing to make a mockery even of pandemic theatre. The dude is impressive, to be sure.

Seeing that the truckers were coming this week, he decided to hide. Of course he did. Here is his justification for doing so: ..


the cure for the big lie is the "big, simple fact"

... trudeau has been a nasty little despot. he has championed the politics of division, vilification, and uncivil discourse masquerading as some search for the common good as he presumes to speak for the collective.

... he has many fellow travelers in this echo chamber happy to help carry this putrid water for him.

... the denizens of his echo chamber have spent so long hearing only one another and believing that they are the only voices speaking that i’m not even sure they can tell when they are lying anymore.

... credibility is hard won and easily lost. that’s the game. thanks for playing.

... what’s happening in canada right now is among the most important events in the world. this is a genuine uprising for freedom. it’s a template for everywhere. and yet it’s hard to even find it discussed in the US mainstream media ... this tells you all you need to know about what’s being done to manipulate your perceptions and hide this rising of we the people from the rest of us the people. this is exactly what the globalist class can least tolerate

... and so you flee. and you hide. gone are any vestiges of bravery or leadership. that was charade. that was sham. now we see the true mettle, and it is soft, it is weak.



The boy wonder, the fascist fop himself, has gone into hiding. He’s been exposed to SARS-TRUCK-50,000 and is running away like the little boy he appears to be.

According to the Ottawa protocol, he doesn’t even need to isolate. Yet the demented dandy, the weird and vicious popinjay of propaganda, the preening pillock, has squirreled himself away in a vain attempt to find his nuts.



In the world of the “new normal,” anyone who mentioned “civil rights” was hustled off social media and into First Amendment limbo. Democracy was mocked as a reactionary’s pipe dream – when it was mentioned at all. That’s the record, in brief, of the past two years. And if we have learned anything from this cavalcade of deceit, it is, or should be, that the COVID coup is fundamentally not about medicine or science. It is not about inflated “case” rates or jiggered statistics or fake news or the pseudo-studies circulated by propaganda outfits like the World Health Organization or the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yes, all those things have figured in the derangement of constitutional democracy that has characterized the COVID coup. But at bottom it’s not about any of them.

The real nature of the campaign is at once simpler and far more dangerous. What we’re experiencing is an attack on the very foundation of ordered liberty, an assault that is already in the process of submerging democracies beneath what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called a “permanent ‘state of exception.’” To put it bluntly: our ruling classes, in one country after another, have effectively switched off their nations’ constitutions and the whole set of civil liberties that are supposed to accompany them – not by formally abolishing them, mind you, but by adopting the extra-legal mechanisms of a “state of emergency” in place of normal constitutional procedures, with the result that the ordinary rules of democracy and the rights of individuals have, for most practical purposes, been indefinitely suspended 

... When an “emergency” involves suspending constitutional government for two years, it should be obvious that the “emergency” has ceased to be a real emergency (if it ever was one) and has become an extralegal norm 

... My point is that those of us who recognize what is happening are going to have to shift our tactics. We can no longer attack COVID19 propaganda in piecemeal fashion, challenging one medical falsehood at a time. That approach, I’m afraid, is likely to be self-defeating. As long as we focus on disproving each particular COVID “narrative,” the Infallible Ones can continue to manage the debate in mass media as a conflict between the interpretations of “experts” and those of “conspiracy theorists.” And that allows them to skirt the real issue. COVID fascism is not a comedy of scientific errors. For all intents and purposes, it is a coup d’état. And it must be resisted accordingly.





Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:

... But every time I see “rules-based international order” I reach for my gun, since I know what that means is the US seizing ships and invading countries and slamming everyone in sight with financial sanctions while fomenting fake revolutions and engaging in coups. Oh, other countries have been bad actors too, but really the “rules-based international order” means “there’s only one superpower.”

... The US “rules based international order” is doomed. That’s simply a fact, the US is no longer powerful enough to support it. You can’t have that after you’ve given up your position as the primary manufacturing state to another country. It’s impossible. 

... Given that US elites decided to give China their industrial core in exchange for a few pieces of silver so they could kick the shit out of the poor and the middle class internally, they’ve already made their choice. They got their money and their internal supremacy. The price is going to be their international primacy.

That was always the price. American international primacy was based on power and benefit sharing at home. When American elites decided that they’d rather be oligarchs, they decided they’d also rather not rule the world.

Putin and Xi are just pointing out the consequences of decisions already made.





... America’s own ruling class has more than its share of the unteachable types, as well as the cynical scoundrelism of Orwell’s description of the U.S. ruling elite as “mere bandits…consciously clinging to unjust privileges and beating down opposition by bribery and tear-gas bombs.” And when it’s not bombs at home, it’s bombs away. Or perhaps in Joe Biden’s case, both. The current president is perhaps the leading exemplar of American banditry, coupling treachery with an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. His own former boss, President Barack Obama, is said to have remarked upon his Vice President’s “ability to f*** things up.” And that ability has not diminished with time.

So, of course, to war. Whether in lock-step or goose-step, the rest of the ruling class amplifies Biden’s thirst for something, anything that provides respite from domestic catastrophe.



.... In short, once again, we see an organization ostensibly devoted to fighting disinformation engaging in it itself.



Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has criticized the “slightly imbalanced” coverage of the situation surrounding his country exhibited by some Western politicians and media. He was speaking to foreign reporters during a major press conference on Friday.



Western media and Western governments are all telling us one thing. But, suddenly, the actual players are all telling us another. Is it possible that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pushed an opportune situation too far and is now afraid of what he has unleashed?


Justin Trudeau’s strategy in Latin America has been to attack the region’s progressive governments. He has failed miserably. Now, as left-wing governments mount successive wins across the region, Ottawa may find it played the wrong hand.



... court documents, behind-the-scenes video footage and recently surfaced evidence reveal that Clinton and her top campaign advisers were much more involved in the more than $1 million operation to dredge up dirt on Trump and Russia than they have let on. The evidence suggests that the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory sprang from a multi-pronged effort within the Clinton campaign, which manufactured many of the false claims, then fed them to friendly media and law enforcement officials. Clinton herself was at the center of these efforts, using her personal Twitter account and presidential debates to echo the false claims of Steele and others that Trump was in cahoots with the Russians.



Orwellian Fare:

All factions, at certain points, succumb to the impulse to censor. But for the Democratic Party's liberal adherents, silencing their adversaries has become their primary project.

... When liberals’ favorite media outlets, from CNN and NBC to The New York Times and The Atlantic, spend four years disseminating one fabricated Russia story after the next — from the Kremlin hacking into Vermont's heating system and Putin's sexual blackmail over Trump to bounties on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, the Biden email archive being "Russian disinformation,” and a magical mystery weapon that injures American brains with cricket noises — none of that is "disinformation” that requires banishment. Nor are false claims that COVID's origin has proven to be zoonotic rather than a lab leak, the vastly overstated claim that vaccines prevent transmission of COVID, or that Julian Assange stole classified documents and caused people to die. Corporate outlets beloved by liberals are free to spout serious falsehoods without being deemed guilty of disinformation, and, because of that, do so routinely.

This "disinformation" term is reserved for those who question liberal pieties, not for those devoted to affirming them. That is the real functional definition of “disinformation” and of its little cousin, “misinformation.” It is not possible to disagree with liberals or see the world differently than they see it. The only two choices are unthinking submission to their dogma or acting as an agent of "disinformation.” Dissent does not exist to them; any deviation from their worldview is inherently dangerous — to the point that it cannot be heard. ...



I don’t like The Joe Rogan Experience. Not for political reasons. I just don’t think he’s very funny, and the times I’ve tried to listen to the show I found it boring, even when the guests were otherwise interesting.

In spite of my indifference, I’ve never understood the amount of vitriol that Rogan inspires. Again, I can’t claim an intimate familiarity with his beliefs, but while his politics seem somewhat inconsistent (something that’s true of the vast majority of Americans), on the whole he seems more progressive and leftish than most of the mainstream media. Why is this man a uniquely dangerous fascist, when the much more conservative and malignant beliefs of other info-tainment personalities go without much comment?

Turn on any news network for an hour and you’ll be subjected to a whole helluva lot of misinformation. This is such an obvious truth I don’t even know if I should bother googling for examples. Remember when Joy Reid brought on a “body language expert” to explain that Bernie Sanders was a lying Jew? When the media was lockstep in explaining that Iraq probably did 9/11 and even if they didn’t they’re still very dangerous and our troops will be greeted as liberators? When they said that Russia somehow stole the 2016 election and is also responsible for the collapse of our infrastructure? 

At the very least, the outrage against Rogan is selective enough to warrant examination. A person won’t get deplatformed for, say, supporting a war that kills a million muslims, arguing that the poor deserve to starve, consigning two generations of black men to the most aggressive and punitive legal system in world, or decrying the inefficiencies of single payer healthcare. You can hold all of these positions and not only receive airtime but still be considered a woke icon. But expressing skepticism toward a vaccine? That’s nazism, right there. We need everyone else to pull their work off this one platform to show how serious we are about fighting Bad Thoughts.

Ultimately, only the empowered favor censorship**.  They do so for one of two reasons: either they are lying and don’t want to get caught, or they realize they’re doing unpopular stuff and so they seek to disallow any scrutiny of their actions and beliefs. And, well… ugg…

See, the reason Covid vaccines are such a flashpoint right now is because the elite consensus does not hold up to scrutiny. If it did, there’d be no rush to silence critics. Vaccine mandates become a much more difficult sell when people are informed that the vaccines do not prevent the transmission of the disease. They greatly reduce the symptoms. They might lead to some reduction in transmission. But they do not prevent transmission. This is a scientifically undisputed fact. 

And yet, you can still go on TV and claim that the vaccines prevent transmission. That’s good misinformation, and so it’s not only allowed but encouraged. 

You see the problem here, right? Just from a public trust perspective?

I’ve mentioned this before, but the fact that official narratives regarding Covid have changed so many times should be manifest evidence of the idiocy of attempts to formally police “disinformation” in regards to public health.

.... But… the fucking glibness of this man, the inability to countenance the fact that admitting to lying on national TV might harm his credibility… this is the state of the American intelligentsia in the twenty-first century: we’re gonna lie to you, and you’re still gonna listen to you us, we are allowed to lie because we know what’s best and you’re too stupid to be trusted with the truth.

.... Prior to last year, the (much more correct) assessment of Joe Rogan was that he was an empty vessel, a curious and gentle meathead who allows his eclectic parade of guests to speak at length about whatever topics they please. Joe just nods along, and says stuff like “that’s wild.” He rarely pushes back. He lends an ear and encourages his listeners to do the same.

This assessment is still in place, and still mostly true. Only it’s now cast in a much more terrifying light. This very process–simply letting people speak without recrimination, regardless of whether or not their beliefs have been sanctioned by corporate media–is now understood as the means and ends of fascism.

... Media elites have grown accustomed to never, ever being challenged. Even when they are wrong. Even when they admit to lying. And especially when they advocate for policies that fail. The rest of the pundit class doesn’t hate Joe Rogan because he’s conservative, because he’s not really conservative. Nor do they hate him because he lies, because they lie all the time. They despise what he represents. The notion of having to explain themselves is such a massive indignity that they reject it out of hand. The thought that expert opinion could ever be debated, in any context, represents such a profound threat to their self-conceptualization that they have honestly come to believe it is a form of fascism.




.... I don’t particularly want to single out Neil Young here, he’s far from being the only one - but he has rather raised his wrinkly buggeration of a visage above the parapet. He is representative of a very worrying trend that has emerged. Where has this rising trend of fascist fuckwittery come from?

Who the holy fuck is Neil Young to determine what I can, and cannot, listen to?
Arrogant shite.

That goes for all of you who would would seek to control and limit what publicly available information others have access to.

YOU listened to Joe Rogan’s podcasts. You came to the conclusion that he was spreading “misinformation”. But now you want to ‘protect’ other people from the privilege of making their own minds up - the privilege you had.

You supercilious wanker.

In the most sonorous Thunbergian tones : how dare you!

..... these grotesque guardians, these rancid fuckholes of moral certitude really do need to fuck right off.



CaitOz Fare:


It takes a touch of madness to take seriously the possibility that your entire society is insane.

That’s why devoted critics of the oligarchic empire are often a bit odd; something in them was driven to wade into waters that most people aren’t psychologically prepared to enter.

It’s not that questioning the status quo is madness; just the opposite: it’s that “Maybe everything I’ve been taught is a lie and everyone I know is wrong and all the information I’m getting is designed to serve the powerful?” isn’t the sort of question you tend to ask when everything’s going your way. If you had a happy idyllic childhood where mummy and daddy loved you very much and have lived a life where things generally go okay for you, you’ll likely be psychologically stable, but you’re a lot less likely to go “Hey wait a minute—maybe all of this is bullshit!” That type of insight tends to fall to those who are just a hair off-kilter.

So here’s to all you heroic lunatics, waking the world up one pair of eyelids at a time. The smileyface gear-turners might scoff at you right now, but the world needs you, not them.

.....

Consider the possibility that all the Russia hysteria we’ve been fed the last few years was carefully rolled out to manufacture consent for the exact escalations against Russia that we’re seeing today, and all the framing of Russia as the hostile aggressor has been ass backwards.

Let’s not forget after all that this has been fundamentally driven from the beginning by the same intelligence agencies who have an extensive history of lying about exactly this sort of thing.




Washington: Russia’s gonna invade Ukraine.

Moscow: We’re not gonna invade Ukraine.

Kyiv: Yeah Russia’s not gonna invade Ukraine.

Washington: Russia’s definitely about to invade Ukraine.

Entirety of western media: RUSSIA 100% CERTAIN TO INVADE UKRAINE ANY SECOND NOW

............

The US government is the most evil and destructive regime on this planet and you should want its leadership to be ineffectual and its agendas to fail.

I’ve never encountered anyone who can refute my claim that the US is quantifiably the most evil and destructive government in today’s world. They try, but they generally weren’t even aware of the facts that I use to make my case until I show them to them. This says so much about the power of US propaganda.



One thing I’ve been meaning to write about these last few days has been the way mass media pundits have been insinuating or outright asserting that Fox News host Tucker Carlson is literally an agent of the Russian government.

Carlson has been accused of promoting Russian propaganda by mainstream narrative managers for frequently criticizing the Biden administration’s hawkish posture toward Russia regarding the entirely unsubstantiated claim that Moscow is preparing to launch an unprovoked military invasion of Ukraine.

... I’ve never gotten used to the insane McCarthyite accusations which US liberals will hurl without a second thought at anyone who disagrees with them. Every time it happens it startles and alarms me, and this latest trend of claiming that opposition to US military posture toward a nuclear superpower constitutes evidence of being a treasonous foreign intelligence operative is a marked uptick in the madness.

... The mass media, whose primary job is to propagandize the masses and who have an extensive history of lying to the public to manufacture consent for war, are not pushing the belief that Tucker Carlson is suspicious and sinister for questioning the official narrative about Russia. They are pushing the belief that anyone is suspicious and sinister for questioning the official narrative about Russia. 

... It’s worth considering the possibility that all the artificially manufactured Russia hysteria we’ve seen over the last five years has been geared toward building public support for the exact escalations we are seeing today. After all, it says a lot that Russiagate began with unevidenced claims by US intelligence agencies who have an extensive track record of lying, resulted in the reignition of a new cold war against a nation long targeted for destruction by the US intelligence cartel, and now there are tons of weapons being flown in to Ukraine and US troops are being moved to Eastern Europe in response to a threat we’ve still seen no evidence is actually real.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. If you can control what people believe about a certain thing, then you can control what they will do and what they will allow in response to that thing. Controlling people’s beliefs about reality is controlling their reality.


Other Quotes of the Week:

Soldo: The greatest and most important theological debate at present is occurring in the United States of America. It pits the “Woke” against the “Woke Until Yesterday”, whereby the new sins are constantly announced, defined, and redefined. ‘Cancel culture’ serves the purpose of retaining theological purity, as it beings with the Priesthood’s declaration of heresy that leads into the process of denunciation, defamation, expulsion, shunning, and de-economization of those who run afoul of these constantly-changing rules.

Soldo2: COVID regimes that have been put into place these past two years have served as a neat way to practice country-wide shutdowns. As Climate Change is now a global faith of the elites, one must conclude that ‘climate shutdowns’ will be part of our future, alongside social credit scores tied into carbon footprints for each and every citizen (with various elites being excused for the good of humanity, of course). The fight against climate change can only come by way of political authoritarianism, as no one votes for a significant decrease in their own living standards at election time.

marquis de posade: One of the best improvements you can do to your life is serendipity-maxing. Just increase your exposure to potential fortunate events (this basically means increasing your exposure to other people, since in our day and age most fortune flows from interpersonal connections). There's an insane focus on hard work and self-improvement in our culture which covers up the huge role dumb luck plays in daily life. Ask boomers, odds are they met their spouse and even got jobs by dumb luck. You can't max luck, but you can max the # of "dice throws" you get.
There's an insane focus on hard work and self-improvement in our culture which covers up the huge role dumb luck plays in daily life
Ask boomers, odds are they met their spouse and even got jobs by dumb luck
You can't max luck, but you can max the # of "dice throws" you get



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

Shermer: The Joe Rogan Effect
Why censorious responses to controversial claims is not the road to a free society

... I’ve known Joe Rogan for many years and appeared on his show five times (for example, here, here, here, here, and here). Unlike most talk-show hosts I have engaged with over the decades, a dialogue with Joe Rogan is like talking to an old friend, and he allows the conversation to advance organically without an agenda. He’s an exceptional conversationalist who is extremely high in trait openness, that is, he’s willing to consider almost any and all claims his guests push across the table. It’s not his job to filter ideas for his listeners. There’s no editing—the show is recorded and posted as is. Most of what people object to in his shows are things his guests say, not what he says. He’ll talk to almost anyone about almost anything. I agree with him on many topics, and disagree with him on many other topics, which is exactly what you’d expect about someone who talks for three to four hours a day, four to five days a week, often about interesting and important topics. If anyone agreed with Rogan about everything that would make him a cult leader, which he most certainly is not.

... The recent Rogan controversy calls up more general reasons why we should be extremely cautious in censoring people for their alleged heretical views, which I outlined in Giving the Devil His Due:
  1. Who decides which speech and thought is acceptable and which is unacceptable? You? Me? The majority? A thought committee? The language police? The control of speech is how dictatorships and autocracies rule. We must resist the urge to control what other people say and think.
  2. What criteria are used to censor certain speech? Ideas that I disagree with? Thoughts that differ from your thoughts? Anything that the majority determines is unacceptable? This is another form of tyranny, a tyranny of the majority.
  3. It is not just the right of the speaker to speak but for listeners to listen. When colleges deplatform speakers or students succeed in silencing a speaker through the heckler’s veto, the right of the audience to hear the speaker’s ideas are violated.
  4. We might be completely right but still learn something new in hearing what someone else has to say.
  5. We might be partially right and partially wrong, and by listening to other viewpoints we might stand corrected and refine and improve our beliefs.
  6. We might be completely wrong, so hearing criticism or counterpoint gives us the opportunity to change our minds and improve our thinking. No one is infallible. The only way to find out if you’ve gone off the rails is to get feedback on your beliefs, opinions, and even your facts. Alternative Facts are corrected by Confirmed Facts, but the confirmation bias means we are all subject to seeking only confirming evidence for our beliefs. To overcome it we must listen to our critics.
  7. Whether right or wrong, by listening to the opinions of others we have the opportunity to develop stronger arguments and build better facts for our positions. If you know only your own position you do not know it as well as you would if you knew your opponent’s position.
  8. Freedom of inquiry—a form of free thought and speech—is the bases for all human progress because of human fallibility. We are all wrong some of the time (and many of us most of the time) so the only way to know if you’ve gone off the rails is to tell others about your beliefs so that they may be tested in the marketplace of ideas. In science this is called conjecture and refutation, or hypothesis testing.
  9. My freedom to speak and dissent is inextricably tied to your freedom to speak and dissent. If I censor you, why shouldn’t you censor me? If you silence me, why shouldn’t I silence you? Once customs and laws are in place to silence someone on one topic, what’s to stop people from silencing anyone on any topic that deviates from the accepted canon?
So let’s all chill out about this latest media paroxysm and think for ourselves, and if you don’t like what Joe Rogan, his guests, or anyone else says about anything, explain why you think they’re wrong, what exactly you object to, why you think your opinion is better than their opinion, and especially if there are factual errors then point them out (there are now near-limitless platforms to get your voice heard). That is the essence of a free society. Let’s all work to keep it free.



Satirical Fare:

Soldo: The Tromsø Interviews: Scott Locklin - Science Dick
Elon Musk, Modern Science as Bullshit, Technology's Stagnation, web3's Potential, the Failure of Western Elites, and Right Wing Butt Plug Enthusiasm

Much like I believe all women, I also believe all scientists.  Without science, we are little more than cavemen (the pre-historic white kind, not the pre-historic minority cavepersons, of course).  It is with their direction that I have come through this pandemic thus far virtually unscathed.  I double and sometimes triple mask (N-95 only please!).  I recently got my booster shot (pics posted on my Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram), and my lawyers are currently negotiating with the Israeli Embassy to allow me to get a fourth shot. .. Last year, I laughed at how xenophobic people were towards Asians when this virus reached our shores but realized pretty quickly that this was a killer!  I quarantined myself up until scientists let me know that attending #BLM demonstrations was not a threat to my personal health since the virus would not treat it as a superspreader event.  I somehow got Corona anyway around 10 days later and was intubated for four months despite being a healthy 5'9, 325 lbs. man with Asthma and Type 2 Diabetes.  What I'm trying to get at here is that your criticisms of today's science are without merit, undemocratic, and probably racist too.

.......
... 

What 'low hanging fruit' is available when it comes to today's science in terms of actual advancement of knowledge?  Beyond that, what fields should scientists be tackling, and why?

Rather, at this point, "experts" have become so abysmally stupid, I'd be content if they'd learn enough basic arithmetic to perform the elementary statistics involved in socially useful endeavors such as epidemiology. You know, noticing things like people get lung butter in the winter....

... Nobody seems to know how to do basic applied research any more. Everyone knows how to have a Safety and Inclusiveness Committee and make a Code of Conduct for their open sores project (YES THIS IS DELIBERATE MISSPELLING YOU BALKAN CIGARETTE SMUGGLER), and people are much better at Javascript than they were 20 years ago. And there is no shortage of projects where it is claimed it will take 20 years or so to "get there."….which really just means "please fund this stupid thing long enough for us to retire." All basic research which should be funded by sane people has intermediate steps to achieve the goal and carefully laid out alternate plans to fill in the blanks.


Pics of the Week:












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