2022-01-01

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

Regular Fare:

Confusion Reigns

What on earth were they doing?

Rocked but undaunted by the great financial crisis the orthodoxy of our central banks survived to fight another day. The system had been saved. That no one saw the onrushing crisis is still being debated. Of course some people saw it coming. Anyone with a scintilla of understanding of Minsky for instance. But those folk are hard to find in the top seats of central banks.

The objective of the so-called independent central bank is to preserve the system. To make it safe for markets to continue undisturbed by the intrusions of political whims. To save, that is, capitalism from the depraved intrusions of democracy. The idea is to separate as firmly as possible the political and the economic realms. After all as economists seem to believe: people are astonishingly rational when they participate as market members, but are hopelessly self-indulgent and irrational when they participate as voters. We all suffer from split personalities in economic orthodoxy. Rational one minute, mindlessly mixed up the next. It’s an interesting view of human behavior. It undergirds, in rather more formal guise, orthodoxy and its resolute defense of central bank independence.

….

We have been told for decades that printing money for politically motivated reasons such as bolstering social programs is destabilizing and flat out wrong. Only a fool would advocate printing tons of money and flooding it into the economy. As for monitoring the debt: well, that’s beyond the pale.

Until.

Until it isn’t.

So let me get this right.

Printing money for political reasons is just bad. Printing money to save the system is wonderful.

The ease with which orthodoxy has been bent in order to save the system seems to indicate a certain — how do I say this delicately? — lack of principle.



Matt Stoller: Corporate Profits Drive 60% of Inflation Increases

Higher prices aren't just a result of supply chain chaos or government spending. Inflation is being driven by the pricing power and higher profits of corporations, costing $2,126 per American.



Roberts: Forecast for 2022

…. Then, in my view, there is a third leg in the aftermath of COVID slump to come, probably in 2022. In my 2021 forecast, I raised the possibility that such was the size of corporate debt and the large number of so-called ‘zombie companies’ that were not even making enough profit to cover the servicing of their debts (despite very low interest rates), that a financial crash could ensue.

…

So this year could be the one for a financial crash or at least a severe correction in stock market and bond prices, as interest rates rise, eventually driving a layer of zombie corporations into bankruptcy. This is what central banks fear. That is why most are being very cautious about ending the era of easy money. And yet they are being driven to do so because of the sharp rise in the inflation rates of prices of goods and services in many major economies.

…

In conclusion, assuming no new disasters from the continuing COVID pandemic, the world economy will grow in 2022, but nowhere near as fast as in the ‘sugar-rush’ year of 2021. And by the end of this year, most major economies will have started to slip back towards the low growth, poor productivity trends of the Long Depression of 2010s, with prospects of even slower growth over the rest of the decade.



Deaths of despair: the unrecognized tragedy of working class immiseration



A golden age of macro economic statistics 4. A Bank of England treasure trove.

The Bank of England has a 28 MB Excel dataset containing: “A millenium of macro economic data”. A treasure trove. A good thing about it: as it are long term series and as these are roughly based on national accounts data and not just on economics 101 it’s not only focused on GDP but also on sectoral developments and flows between and within sectors.

Other Charts: (links: one, ..)

Bubble Fare:

How To Survive The Mega Collapse Of 2022

The S&P 500’s current valuation, when compared to its historical valuations going back to 1871, reveals a stock market with significant risks. As of the December 30 market close, the Cyclically Adjusted Price Earnings (CAPE) ratio is 40.09.

That’s over 137 percent higher than the CAPE ratio’s long-term historical average…and well above the 32.56 CAPE ratio reached in September 1929. The only time the CAPE ratio has been higher is for a brief moment at the dot com bubble peak, in December 1999, in the run-up to the new millennium, when it hit 44.19.

[Bubble] Quotes of the Week:

Cycle denial will be lethal for those who are addicted to bullshit.


Crash is too polite a term for what is about to take place. Crash implies a linear trajectory for asset prices. One that has a beginning, a middle, and an end capitulation phase, followed by an eventual rally. Instead, what is about to take place will be a non-linear thermonuclear asset detonation.




COVID-19 notes:

Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Early Child Cognitive Development: Initial Findings in a Longitudinal Observational Study of Child Health

Results of this study highlight that even in the absence of direct SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 illness, the environmental changes associated COVID-19 pandemic is significantly and negatively affecting infant and child development.



(not just) for the ESG crowd:


CN Rail wins right to privately prosecute northern B.C. rail blockade participants


Forget The Straws, Over A Billion Masks Now Pollute The Ocean




RIP Fare:

Desmond Tutu


E.O. Wilson


Tom Lovejoy




Other / Fun Fare:

Space Colonists Will Likely Resort to Cannibalism, Scientist Says

"They are going to eat each other if there is no other way to survive."



Ontario Police Are Looking Long & Hard For Thieves Who Stole Over $90K Worth Of Condoms




Pics of the Week:

15 jaw-dropping weather photos on 500px





Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [Controversial] Fare:

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




Regular Fare:

Alternate Reality Traps Democrats in World of Dumb

… But Hillary’s delusional take is not hers alone. After a second White Claw the faithful will insist Hillary did win the popular vote, which counts as actually winning in Clinton Math. They’ll quickly tell you Hillary only lost because Trump cheated or the Russians helped. The Dems and the media so believed that Trump did not actually win-win that they spent his entire term in office trying (unsuccessfully) to negate him, impeach him, prosecute him, or just magically wish him away with a fan-fiction interpretation of the 25th Amendment which presupposed Mike Pence was more evil then they were. The high point of the delusion was Russiagate, a saga entirely made-to-order by the Clinton team and fluffed by the media.

…

So looking ahead to the democracy dies in the darkness delusion which appears to be the centerpiece of the Democratic campaign of 2024, Americans must be tutored to believe the Capitol riot was part of a massive conspiracy involving Trump, hoping to end democracy in the United States by overturning the 2020 election results via some means no one is able to articulate

….

There is no realistic scenario that could have changed anything that mattered, and no evidence of any national-scale conspiracy underlaying the riot. It was just a bunch of angry people who got out of control for a couple of hours then went home to wait on being arrested months later. None of the rioters has been charged with treason or terrorism, mostly just trespassing. None of the arrested claimed they acted under any organized structure set in place by Trump or anyone else. In their trials each basically said the same, things got out of hand.

After selling voters that something that did not happen happened, the Democrats must then explain how after four years in power they have not really done much to bulk up democracy except whine about stuff that’s unfair, such as Republican gerrymandering (but not Democratic gerrymandering) and Republican poll watchers (but not Democratic poll watchers) and Republicans not accepting election results (but not Democrats like Stacey Adams not accepting election results.) Never mind out-and-out garbage like the same court system is racist when it acquits one shooter and on-the-mark when it finds another guilty based on the races of shooter and victim. Voters will also have to buy in to the Democratic delusion all the bad stuff they said Trump was gonna do but did not do — LGBT concentration camps, war with Iran, fascism — will for certain happen the next time.

Elect us to save democracy, say the delusional Democrats, ignoring the reality that democracy is bumbling along pretty much as it was intended to do.



Reality is impinging upon the Democrats' carefully constructed COVID tyranny

Biden ran on a promise: he was going to federalize the COVID response and end COVID in America. He introduced vaccine mandates for federal employees and those doing business with the federal government and had OSHA do the same for every business with more than 100 employees. Various states, cities, and businesses, especially when it came to health care, followed suit. We were also told that if we even breathed the same air as a COVID person, we had to quarantine ourselves for ten days. In the last two days, that promised federal response, COVID mandates, and quarantines have all fallen apart, thanks to the very contagious but seemingly relatively harmless omicron variant.

Biden made a lot of promises during the campaign, and the media graciously refused to demand details:…



Tweet Fare:

Bhavik Lathia: This is the best thing you’ll see on the Internet before 2021 ends. Elon Musk goes on the Bernie Sanders Experience.



Unsustainability / Climate Catastrophe / Collapse Fare:

Tom Murphy: Don’t Look Surprised

I just watched Don’t Look Up! on Netflix. While the movie has a number of flaws, on the whole I recommend it for the insights it contains in its parody of human attention deficit disorder.

…

But What’s Our Comet?

The purpose of the movie was obviously not to warn us of the literal threat of an inbound comet. It was about more realistic threats that get shoved aside in favor of more fun pursuits. In fact, the Presidential staff in the movie rattled off all the existential threats that they’ve felt justified in waving aside: economic collapse; loose nukes; rogue AI; car exhaust killing the atmosphere; drought; famine; alien invasion; population growth; the hole in the ozone. But which threat does the movie really represent? Is it climate change (probably, in the minds of those who produced the movie)? Is it COVID? Is it nuclear war? Is it something else, or does it even have to be identified? Maybe it’s an apt stand-in for any or all of the challenges we face, and focusing on what the threat is “supposed” to be is a pointless distraction.

But this intended substitution exercise is one place where the movie risks losing impact. Consider that the cometary threat:

1. had a well-defined date that was only six months out;

2. was of a pretty unambiguous nature (look up!);

3. promised total devastation—not a matter of degree;

4. was consistent with prehistoric events that have unambiguously caused mass extinctions on Earth.

Present-day threats are a bit murkier, lacking all four of these qualities. Stood up side-by-side, our real perils may elicit mere shrugs.

But in another sense, the movie’s message is grim indeed. If we can’t acknowledge and confront a threat as clear as a cometary impact, then what hope do we have of mounting a meaningful response to the slow-burn, debatable, milder, and unprecedented (unproven) existential threats we currently face?

Of course, the movie itself does not prove anything about how we would actually respond to a comet, but it does highlight some real tendencies that are apparent in today’s world. … Part of the root problem is that too few people have the ability to independently assess looming threats, and so must rely on what others tell them. … The inability to internalize unfamiliar, uncertain, or unsettling news was on frequent display in the movie. I have often encountered a similar phenomenon in what might be called “hope insistence.”

…

Final Thoughts

I very much liked that the movie occasionally interposed scenes from nature, reminding us that it’s not all about us. I also liked the line: “They’re not even smart enough to be as evil as you’re giving them credit for,” describing the holders of power.

Like most movies, this one has serious problems. But let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater. On balance, I think it calls attention to important failure modes in our societal preferences and norms. It beautifully plays on themes of greed, materialism, disinformation, denialism, hero worship, celebrity obsession, and tribalism. They’re not making that stuff up out of whole cloth, and we would do well to tame those tendencies for the tough times ahead.



‘Degrowth’ Isn’t Just About the Economy. It’s About Culture.

To save the planet, the degrowth movement calls not for us to sacrifice prosperity, but to redefine it.

…

Ultimately, degrowth is inevitable. We will either choose this path voluntarily, or we will be forced into it violently and uncontrollably as a result of environmental disasters. If we want to prevent the suffering and tragedies that accompany such drastic shifts, we must bring about a culture of degrowth. And where the cultural winds blow, the political winds will follow.



Menton: Finally, New York State Tells The World How To Achieve Net Zero Carbon Emissions

Sometimes, it seems like the world is just flailing away in its concerted efforts to achieve zero carbon emissions. In the U.S. the President can’t get his grand “green” plans through a Congress controlled by his own party. In Europe, a countryside blanketed with wind turbines can’t counteract a wind drought in 2021, and emissions rise even while natural gas prices spike to nearly 10 times the U.S. level.

New York may be a late-comer to Net Zero plans, but by God, our politicians and bureaucrats are so much smarter than those clowns across the country or the pond. In 2019 the New York legislature enacted the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (Climate Act), self-described on the State’s website as “the nation-leading [law] to empower every New Yorker to fight climate change at home, at work, and in their communities.” The Climate Act set a series of highly ambitious targets for emissions reductions (e.g., 70% renewable electricity by 2030, 100% zero-emission electricity by 2040, 85% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050). It also created a Climate Action Council to figure out how to achieve these targets. Task number one for the CAC has been to propound a so-called “Scoping Plan,” containing the details informing us how this will be accomplished.

Through 2020 and 2021 we waited on pins and needles as the CAC and some seven advisory sub-panels held dozens of meetings and beavered away on their big report. And then finally, on December 20, the curtain went up: the CAC finally released its Draft Scoping Plan to the public. Follow this link to download a copy of the full thing — 330 pages, not including appendices.

If you think that a document with this kind of build-up and heft would contain at least a little serious effort to grapple with the major engineering problems of decarbonizing everything from the electrical grid to home heating to private autos to aviation to ocean shipping, all at the same time, think again. The words “incompetent” and “amateurish” come to mind, but don’t really even begin to describe how bad this work product is.

…



Jacobson: Hopium, Apocaloptimism and Hausfather

I was in a Twitter discussion recently with Dr. Zeke Hausfather, a well-known climate scientist & IPCC author. Hausfather is a top-notch, first-rate guy in every manner. He is well-educated, thoughtful in his comments, well-respected by his peers and a great science communicator. Here was our Twitter exchange, in part.

My Tweet:

I’m thinking that 2022 is going to be the most f**ked up

year on planet Earth since the year -65,000,000.

Hausfather’s reply:

Depends on ones definition of f-ed up. I’d rather be born in

2022 than in any other year in human history given my odds

of surviving childhood, getting access to education, and

having a long fulfilling life.

…

…

So, yes, Hausfather is right. Start to finish, he is right.

Except, all of these statements require a world that is human-habitable. They need a planet Earth with less CO2, less CH4 and more resources. They require a planet that is not over-populated with hungry and horny homosapiens. Hausfather’s claims require the future to be more or less similar to the past.

Hausfather’s vision requires infrastructure that can survive ever greater calamities, supply chains that function to allow production and delivery of necessities and food growing regions that aren’t flooded or dustbowls. Hausfather’s statement requires every element of the architecture of civilization that has allowed us to create this moment in history when 2022 is indeed the best year ever for a child to be born. Unfortunately, as I described in this post, there are at least 40 reasons why the future will be nothing like the past.

There are two words that describe the disconnect between the incredible successes of humanity’s past and the catastrophic reality of humanity’s future. These terms are defined many places on the Internet (Google is your friend). I’m going to quote the definitions from the Universal Map of Doom by Gail Zawacki.

The first word is “apocaloptimist,” which is defined as follows:

23. Apocaloptimist – A person (or organization) that makes a powerful case that Armageddon is nigh, but posits unsubstantiated hope that human ingenuity will solve the problems in time.

Hausfather is an apocaloptimist. He is brilliant enough to clearly see where humanity is headed and has documented some of the facts of our apocalyptic trajectory in his own research and writing. But, as implied by his Tweet, he also strongly believes that the climate-saving processes and social movements already in place will be sufficient so that a child born today will live a long and fulfilling life.

The second word is “hopium,” which is defined as follows:

24. Hopium – arguably coined by Lonewolf back in 2000 on the Survival Acres forum, designating that deranged condition in which a person is deluded into thinking humanity will survive omnicide.

Hausfather uses the word “hopium” in his Twitter Bio, describing himself as a “Dangerous hopium peddler.” Hausfather’s self-assessment is spot-on, though I doubt he is using this term seriously. It is a deranged condition. His view is deluded. Humanity will not survive the destruction of all life on planet Earth that is well underway.

The sixth great extinction is not a joke to be mocked in a Twitter bio by self-deprecating humor. It is a tragic truth. I am so sad about humanity’s collective future and the suffering that is to come. It is heartbreaking. Losing everything means losing everything.

We are on the same side. We see the same facts. However, the future and the past have become disconnected. The current stability, wealth and health of humans all over the planet has been created by centuries of innovation and scientific discovery. And in the last 200 years, it’s also been driven by extracting material wealth from fossil fuels and choking our planet with poisonous gasses.

Global industrial civilization is coming to an end. And with it, our long and fulfilling lives.




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, Paul Marik, and Tess Lawrie, and Zelenko, and, and…
but going forward, my linking to material by those mainstays mentioned above will be reduced to key excerpts and/or essential posts



Malone: “We’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it."

So, let's look at the evidence.

…This has meant that I have had to spend the last two days gathering up my documentation. There is so much of it, that trying to organize it is problematic. Of course, once I have my full response – I will post it here also as well as sending it off to Reuters. Therefore, this Substack is not going to be an essay but instead a synthesis of some of what I have discovered.

…. I also have been compiling my references. I have 140 references so far that related to harms done by the vaccines. For those that are interested, the list can be found by clicking here.



Alexander: EXCESS MORTALITY; Just so you know, ERs are now swamped with seriously ill patients — but many don't even have COVID; we will be seeing many entering hospital for all types of illness that got worse

This is something you have to consider...do not buy everything the media tells you...we have to look at excess mortality (excess deaths) and we are beginning to see excess deaths not due to COVID.....



eugyppius: SARS-CoV-2 Loves the Vaccines

The end of the year is an appropriate time to review what has happened and where we are now.

The mRNA vaccines aren’t very safe; they cause a wealth of severe side effects, particularly in the lowest-risk age cohorts. These side effects outweigh the risks of SARS-2 infection for everyone under 40; for those in good health facing the vastly milder Omicron, there is really no reason to be vaccinated. The second dose of Moderna is particularly dangerous for young men.

In exchange for these injuries, our novel pharmaceutical products reduce the severity of symptoms and the risk of severe outcome from Corona infection. In particular, they move deaths out of the Corona column, but they do not have substantial effects on all-cause mortality.

What is more, the vaccines cannot reduce transmission.



Sucharit Bhakdi, MD and Arne Burkhardt, MD.: Covid Vaccines: Why They Cannot Work, And Their Causative Role In Deaths

a written summary of Dr. Bhakdi’s and Dr. Burkhardt’s presentations at the Doctors for COVID Ethics symposium

Why the vaccines cannot protect against infection

A fundamental mistake underlying the development of the COVID-19 vaccines was to neglect the functional distinction between the two major categories of antibodies which the body produces in order to protect itself from pathogenic microbes. The first category (secretory IgA) is produced by immune cells (lymphocytes) which are located directly underneath the mucous membranes that line the respiratory and intestinal tract. The antibodies produced by these lymphocytes are secreted through and to the surface of the mucous membranes. These antibodies are thus on site to meet air-borne viruses, and they may be able to prevent viral binding and infection of the cells.

The second category of antibodies (IgG and circulating IgA) occur in the bloodstream. These antibodies protect the internal organs of the body from infectious agents that try to spread via the bloodstream. Vaccines that are injected into the muscle – i.e., the interior of the body – will only induce IgG and circulating IgA, not secretory IgA. Such antibodies cannot and will not effectively protect the mucous membranes from infection by SARS-CoV-2. Thus, the currently observed “breakthrough infections” among vaccinated individuals merely confirm the fundamental design flaws of the vaccines. Measurements of antibodies in the blood can never yield any information on the true status of immunity against infection of the respiratory tract. The inability of vaccine-induced antibodies to prevent coronavirus infections has been reported in recent scientific publications.

The vaccines can trigger self-destruction

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.

…

Conclusion

Histopathologic analysis show clear evidence of vaccine-induced autoimmune-like pathology in multiple organs. That myriad adverse events deriving from such auto-attack processes must be expected to very frequently occur in all individuals, particularly following booster injections, is self-evident. Beyond any doubt, injection of gene-based COVID-19 vaccines places lives under threat of illness and death. We note that both mRNA and vector-based vaccines are represented among these cases, as are all four major manufacturers.



Hat tip Ilargi, who says

“James Lyons-Weiler discusses the same issue.”

As Evidence of Pathogenic Priming Mounts, Calls for New Medical Approaches to Mute Autoimmunity Must Be Addressed

A compilation of evidence is disturbing. Further mass casualties might be preventable.

Pathogenic priming, as originally described, is the act of exposing people (or animals) to epitopes that match human proteins, leading to the inducement of autoreactogenic antibodies that attack tissues anywhere in the body. I described pathogenic priming in April, 2020 and predicted that tissues across the body could become afflicted due to exposure to COVID-19 proteins.

Evidence is mounting that points to pathogenic priming contributing morbidity and mortality among the vaccinated, including

· Increased all-cause mortality

· Histopathological evidence of autoimmunity across various organs.

An important message, with data, came to me today on one of my many email threads. I am sharing this on Popular Rationalism with permission Ronald Kostoff, who fowarded the analysis below:

A German pathologist performed autopsies on fifteen post-inoculation patients who died, and found that >90% had their organs attacked by their immune systems (autoimmunity). The following video describes the main results (https://www.bitchute.com/video/fHIT55iM4Zv9/ ), and a written summary follows ( https://doctors4covidethics.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/end-covax.pdf). The full 4 hr symposium that was live-streamed on December 10th, 2021 and that contains this and other valuable information can be found here Gold Standard Covid Science in Practice: Interdisciplinary Symposium II, December 10, 2021 – Doctors for COVID Ethics (doctors4covidethics.org).

Commenting on the above, Ronald wrote:

"If the autopsy findings are confirmed by other pathologists with additional samples, and if they are combined with the findings of Dr. Hoffe (>60% inoculant recipients have elevated D-dimer tests and evidence of clotting) and Dr. Cole (increase in cancers after inoculation, including twenty-fold increase in uterine cancer), we are seeing a disaster of unimaginable proportions. The conclusion (if supported by further data) is that essentially EVERY inoculant recipient suffers damage, with more damage after each shot. The damage could be cumulative, and the shots may be synergistic. Given the seriousness of the types of damage (autoimmune diseases, cancer, re-emergent dormant infections, clotting/strokes, cardiac damage, etc.), these effects will translate into lifespan reduction, which should be counted as deaths from the inoculations. So, in the USA, where ~200M people have been fully inoculated, the number of deaths will not be the 10,000 or so reported in VAERS, or 500,000-1,000,000 scaled-up deaths from VAERS, but could be closer to tens of millions (or more) when the inoculation effects play out!

What the above three findings (Burkhart, Hoffe, Cole, and I suspect many others who have not yet come forward) show is that the post-inoculation effects are not rare events (as reported by the media-gov't), but are in actuality frequent events. They may be, in fact, universal, with different degrees of severity and damage for each recipient. The question is whether it is possible to reverse these inoculation-based adverse events. Can the innate immune system be fully restored? Can the microclotting be reversed? Can the autoimmunity be reversed? There is a wide spectrum of opinions on whether this is possible, none of which is overly convincing. Are we headed for the situation where the ~30% unvaxxed will be devoting their lives to operating whatever is left of the economic infrastructure and serving as caretakers for the vaxxed?

The above sounds extreme, and maybe when more data are gathered from myriad credible sources the results and conclusions may change, but right now the above data seem to synchronize with the demonstrated underlying mechanisms of damage. Additionally, we seem to be doubling down on inoculations, with fourth booster being proposed for Israel, and UK suggesting quarterly boosters."

Povidone Iodine (PVP-I) Oro-Nasal Spray: An Effective Shield for COVID-19 Protection for Health Care Worker (HCW), for all



Intranasal inhibitor blocks omicron and other variants of SARS-CoV-2



no, n95 masks do not stop covid either

masks failed. they do not stop covid, masks never stopped covid, could not stop covid, and were known for 100 years not to stop respiratory viruses. the data from schools is outlandishly strong.

sorry to all the talismanic adherents out there who want to feel like they “did something” and visibly show tribal affinity and signal virtue, but you have all been had.

the studies supporting this pseudoscience are all junk (mass gen, kansas, bangladesh, 200 silly droplet models) and the high quality studies all show inefficacy and have for generations.

they do not even work as source control when worn by trained medical staff in operating theaters.

that is not what they are for.

…..

these are populist political talking points, not epidemiology.

…

all the breath comes out the top and sides and the virion hangs in the air for ~2 weeks afterwards. the idea that you just need 6 feet of space and droplet control was entirely invented. it never had any basis in fact.

this would all have been laughable were it not so crazily tragic.

masks have become a literal addiction. (this is a known and studied phenomenon)

and people have lost all perspective on them.



Children develop robust and sustained cross-reactive spike-specific immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection

SARS-CoV-2 infection is generally mild or asymptomatic in children but a biological basis for this outcome is unclear. Here we compare antibody and cellular immunity in children (aged 3–11 years) and adults. …

New data show that, compared with adults, children infected by SARS-CoV-2 preferentially activate pre-existing immunity to endemic common-cold coronaviruses that are cross-reactive with SARS-CoV-2.



Omicron: A Drug Developer’s Perspective

The authors conclude that the prospect of controlling spread of Omicron and the future SARS-CoV-2 variants by vaccination is not viable, especially if the virus continues to enhance its abilities in immune evasion and transmissibility.



COVID vaccination and age-stratified all-cause mortality risk

Accurate estimates of COVID vaccine-induced severe adverse event and death rates are critical for risk-benefit ratio analyses of vaccination and boosters against SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in different age groups. However, existing surveillance studies are not designed to reliably estimate life-threatening event or vaccine-induced fatality rates (VFR). Here, regional variation in vaccination rates was used to predict all-cause mortality and non-COVID deaths in subsequent time periods using two independent, publicly available datasets from the US and Europe (month-and week-level resolutions, respectively). Vaccination correlated negatively with mortality 6-20 weeks post-injection, while vaccination predicted all-cause mortality 0-5 weeks post-injection in almost all age groups and with an age-related temporal pattern consistent with the US vaccine rollout. Results from fitted regression slopes (p<0.05 FDR corrected) suggest a US national average VFR of 0.04% and higher VFR with age (VFR=0.004% in ages 0-17 increasing to 0.06% in ages >75 years), and 146K to 187K vaccine-associated US deaths between February and August, 2021.

…Comparing our estimate with the CDC-reported VFR (0.002%) suggests VAERS deaths are underreported by a factor of 20, consistent with known VAERS under-ascertainment bias

…Comparing our age-stratified VFRs with published age-stratified coronavirus infection fatality rates (IFR) suggests the risks of COVID vaccines and boosters outweigh the benefits in children, young adults and older adults with low occupational risk or previous coronavirus exposure.

…Interestingly, our estimates of 133K to 187K vaccine-related deaths are very similar to recent, independent estimates based off of US VAERS data through August 28th, 2021 by Rose and Crawford.



Tucker: The Psychological Cruelty of Denying Natural Immunity

…And this universal tactile experience has also given rise not so much to another round of panic – that is certainly there – but exhaustion and the great question: when will all this end? It ends, as the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration said, with the arrival of population immunity. In this sense, it is like every pandemic that has come before.

…

The people who denied us this knowledge, this confidence, have engaged in a cruel game with human psychology. What makes it worse is that they knew better. Fauci, Walensky, Birx, and all the rest, have the training and the knowledge. They are not unaware.

Perhaps Gates’s ignorance is understandable but the rest of these people have actual medical training.

They have always known the truth.

Why have they done this to us? To sell vaccines? To elicit compliance? To reduce us all to fearful subjects who are easier to control?

I’m not sure we know the answers.



Lyons-Weiler: An Open Letter to the FDA on Ivermectin and COVID-19 Treatments

Re: Letter to The Federation of State Medical Boards

The purpose of this letter is to inform you that both the medical community and the general public understand that your letter dated 12/13/2021 to the Federation of State Medical Boards is both misleading and dangerous, as it will lead to a continuation of harmful medical practices and the denial of early, aggressive treatments that have been shown to reduce morbidity and mortality associated with disease that results from the infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The public finds your letter to be misguided and spurious, to be point of nearly appearing erratic. Your counterfactual letter claims ….



el gato malo: yes, the vaccines were supposed to stop covid spread. yes, the "experts" told us so.

adventures in revisionist history

the revisionist history around vaccines is getting pretty extreme. let’s be VERY clear:

· yes, they were promised to stop spread, contagion, and provide herd immunity.

· yes, those promises were made by the same “experts” currently claiming “vaccines were never supposed to stop spread, just reduce severity.”

· yes, they were so committed to this that they literally changed the definition of “herd immunity” to EXCLUDE natural immunity.

(of course, they then changed the definition of “vaccine” as well to make this look like less of a failure)

· and yes, all the unprecedented lock down and mask up policies were pushed explicitly as “only necessary until we get the vaccines.”

despite the massive PR offensive underway to deny this, these are the facts.

this is what they sold us.

and we have the receipts.

i’m going to compile them here so people have them. if you have more, please drop links in the comments. this is information that needs to be preserved instead of whitewashed out of existence.



*** Rigger: Hello Science, my old friend, I've come to talk with you again

…

Definitions matter in science

… Does anyone know what the definition of an “unvaccinated” person is these days? I don’t. It obviously doesn’t work like virginity, because if you’ve only been jabbed once I think you’re still classed as unvaccinated.

The vaccines themselves do not appear to be very good at stopping infection or transmission. The data does seem to suggest there’s some temporary effect at reducing symptom severity.

This is what we used to call a prophylactic. These days, it’s a vaccine - and the definition of what a vaccine is and does has had to be changed. The strange thing is that, if the many studies showing that ivermectin has a prophylactic effect are correct, it would mean we would have to class ivermectin as a vaccine, by the same rules.





COVID Tweets & Other Quotes of the Week:

Crawford: The one-two punch of Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone appearing on the Joe Rogan Experience over the last few days of 2021 is generating earthquakes and tidal waves. A few days ago, McCullough's interview was already the most viewed podcast of all time, with 40 million views. I suspect the pair of these could shoot far past 100 million in the upcoming days. That's exciting. It means you're not alone. Far from it. That's hope.


Massie: The booster shot was never about reducing symptoms. The booster shot was about trying to maintain the lie that the vaccine could prevent people from contracting and spreading COVID. That lie was the basis for all vaccine mandates, and it completely disintegrated this month.


*** Peter Tchir, re omicron: The big problem I find is that many people don’t want you to know the facts.


Aaron Rodgers: If science can’t be questioned, it’s not science anymore; it’s propaganda … When did science become this blind agreement and then not having any debate over what can actually heal people and work for people. That makes no sense


Ilargi: I think maybe Malone got banned [from Twitter] because he’s about to go on Joe Rogan. Whose interview with Peter McCullough was the most popular one he did at 40 million listeners.


Solomon: It is outrageous and unfair that a story that is completely accurate and points out an important legal distinction between the two versions of vaccines gets blocked and my account suspended


*** Squires: How come Japan has had much lower levels of airborne disease? It's a mystery; we may never know...


Roche: The CDC's forecasting is as good as everything else the agency does.


Fenton: From table 1b of the recently released ONS survey on the Omicron variant. Of those testing positive with Covid, the probability they have Omicron variant inceases with number of vaxx doses.


Pearson: Astonishing fact. 70% of London’s so-called “COVID hospitalizations” are diagnosed several days after admission for other ailments.

They are NOT COVID patients. A positive test 8 days after admission means the hospital basically gave the patient COVID.


Even Fauci now admits similarly: And what we mean by that: If a child goes into the hospital, they automatically get tested for COVID and they get counted as a COVID-hospitalized individual, when, in fact, they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that. So it’s over counting the number of children who are, quote, hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID


El gato malo: clearly, there have been covid conspiracies. fauci and his merry band of miscreants colluded to attack and discredit the great barrington declaration and try to declare its august authors “fringe” despite the fact that any one of them has more good science lying around on their desk at any one time than tony has seen in his lifetime. but this was just the tip of the gaslighting iceberg.


Taibbi: For a while now it’s been clear the primary objective of most pandemic coverage is to scare the socks off mass audiences. Good news, bad news, boring news, interesting news, news that’s more of a wash in the final analysis, news that’s a net plus overall: it’s all presented as terrifying


Rudolph Rigger: Many of us wake up every day wondering what fresh hell is this? Our wonderment at the absurdity of it all is only surpassed by the anger at the destruction wrought by our response to covid - the collateral damage, if you like.


Malone: So, now comes a more transmissible but weaker version of the virus. We should all be celebrating! Over half of us have natural immunity. Over half of us are vaccinated. Unless we are elderly or have significant other co-morbidities, we will be fine. For many, if not most, will seem like another cold, if we notice it at all. Even the unvaccinated or COVID-19 naive person should be just find, if they don’t have significant co-morbidities. Of course, one isn’t actually allowed to suggest these ideas on many social media platforms. One can’t be at all critical of the government pandemic response or the fearporn - such talk will get you banned, censored and branded with a scarlet letter “AV” (the dreaded “Anti-Vaxxer” label). I am not an anti-vaxxer, but I will wear this label with pride - speaking truth to power always has consequences.


Jonathan Witt: Here’s a thread of cliff notes for the @joerogan podcast with Dr Robert Malone. Would still recommend listening to the full episode but if you don’t have time right now this is how it went down.




COVID Tweet Vids of the Week:


Peter McCullough


*** Peter C.Gøtzsche, M.D.: "Big Pharma has corrupted Healthcare"


*** Jordan Schachtel: They lied.


*** Justin Hart: Dr. Fauci on CNBC

Host: "I wonder whether you felt there had been a communication error..."

Fauci: "Well I think it was the question of what people interpreted..."


Clown World Today: “nobody said the vaccine prevents infection and transmission!”





CO-VIDs of the Week:


*** The Guelph Awakening Project: Behind the Scenes at an Inclusive University (<3min)

*** Vaccine Hesitancy EXPLAINED



Video version of his earlier essay:

Konstantin Kisin: Why Don’t They Believe Us?

You’re struggling to understand where all this vaccine hesitancy comes from. Let me help you.

….. The same people who told you Brexit would never happen, that Trump would never win, that when he did win it was because of Russian collusion but also because of racism, that you must follow lockdowns while they don’t, that masks don’t work, that masks do work, that social justice protests during pandemic lockdowns are a form of “health intervention,” that ransacking African American communities in the name of fighting racism is a “mostly peaceful” form of protest, that poor and underserved children locked out of shuttered schools are “still learning,” that Jussie Smollett was a victim of a hate crime, that men are toxic, that there is an infinite number of genders, that COVID couldn’t have come from a lab until maybe it did, that closing borders is racist until maybe it isn’t, that you shouldn’t take Trump’s vaccine, that you must take the vaccine developed during the Trump administration, that Andrew Cuomo is a great leader, that Andrew Cuomo is a granny killer, that the number of COVID deaths is one thing and then another … are the same people telling you now that the vaccine is safe, that you must take it, and that if you don’t, you will be a second-class citizen.

Understand vaccine hesitancy now?



(CENSORED) Joe Rogan interviews Dr. Robert Malone: The Video



'Fascist Psychopath': Justin Trudeau Calls the Unvaccinated 'Racist and Misogynistic Extremists'





Anecdotal COVID Fare:


Algerian player dies after collapsing on pitch as spate of tragedies hit football

Algerian footballer, Sofiane Loukar (30) has became the 4th footballer to die of a heart attack this week The others include Croatian footballer Marin Cacic (23), Oman international player Mukhaled Al-Raqadi (39), Egyptian goalkeeper, Ahmed Amin 35).




All things COVID Pushback Fare:


Protests Erupt In South Korea Over Vaccination Deaths



The Tyranny of Vaccine Mandates

Legal Professor James Allen blows the whistle



It's Madness What Is Happening To College Kids

This is a post about the absolutely insane, crushing restrictions being imposed on young, healthy vaccinated (often booster and often naturally immune) people by institutions of knowledge. In order to prove my thesis that these policies are misguided, let me start with some basics.

…

Category 3 (useless, virtue signaling theater) is the most common. Wearing your mask when you enter a restaurant and walk to your table, but not when you sit there for two hours laughing and drinking is one example. The fact this policy exists reflects serious impairment in thinking and total failure of policy makers.

…

What is the net balance? The net balance is these policies are catastrophically detrimental to them. Moreover, there is no countervailing benefit to staff or society to justify the huge imposition. It is morally and scientifically bankrupt.



Tessa: A Conversation with Dr. Emanuel Garcia in New Zealand

This story is about a brave and classy human being and a medical doctor in New Zealand, who had his medical license suspended and was forced to retire due to his opposition to mandates and his general sense of dignity and a lack of desire to fold under the boot.

… Once the pandemic narrative and measures stopped making any sense, Dr. Garcia called for scientific rigor and adhering to medical ethics—which led to a suspension of his license.



Malone: Resist. The Time is Now.

The underlying truths of the grossly mismanaged globally coordinated response to the COVID-19 outbreak are becoming increasingly apparent to common citizens throughout the world. The United States Health and Human Services (HHS) system, once considered the world standard for medical research and for insuring purity, safety and effectiveness of drugs and vaccines, is now being seen by many as corrupt and compromised. Over the next year, additional data documenting and supporting this corruption will continue to emerge. The growing tide of whistleblowers, truth tellers and their lawyers will swell to the point that it will overwhelm the censorship and propaganda which the guilty and their accomplices are desperately using to try to hide their duplicity.

Looking forward into this new year that is now upon us, I predict that a broad global consensus will emerge that the integrity of our entire western health care systems, our media, big tech, and western political systems has been breached by the corrupting influence of a financial system that has lost integrity and become decoupled from any sense of morality, and which perceives no economic value in either fundamental human dignity or community. A financial system which has become completely decoupled from the historic concept of the nation-state. One that defines and thereby degrades human beings as mere economic units to be exploited for rents and profit using a wide range of innovative strategies.

This globalized financial system exists for one purpose only: to maximize return on investment. And those who control this system see centralized global totalitarianism as a more efficient management structure for extracting value from you and me. To them, the logic of a digital social credit system is compelling, as it will optimize population control and maximize profit.



Rose: Whoever makes the music, controls the world

I choose to believe there are more intelligent people than brainwashed people. I choose to believe that liars always get found out and cannot exist in nature for very long. It goes against truth, see?

The street party was captured on video. Now don’t get me wrong. If it offends you to see healthy people out and about having fun and dancing and making art, then you’re more than free to watch the BBC and emprison yourself in isolation and fear. But for anyone who wants to be free, to express, to dance, to share to create - LET’S MAKE MUSIC AND PARTY. TOGETHER. I suggest that this be the theme for 2022.




COVID Corporatocracy / Conspiracy Fare:


Lancet Editor Comes Clean, Admits He Knew Peter Daszak Had 'Significant, Regrettable' Conflicts Of Interest



The Experts™ Have No Idea What They're Doing

Their policies are made up, evidence free nonsense and they're being proven catastrophically wrong more and more every day

I use a trademark when referring to The Experts™, because The Experts™ describes a specific set of preferred Twitter personalities that determine government policy.

There are many, MANY legitimately credentialed experts that do not agree with the pervasive groupthink and hive mind mentality that dominates popular discourse.

Vinay Prasad, Martin Kuldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, Scott Atlas, Sunetra Gupta, Carl Heneghan, Stefan Baral, Tracy Hoeg and many others have contradicted the “consensus” and spoken out against COVID policies that achieve little, with tremendous negative ancillary consequences.

Instead of incorporating their opinions and research into decision making, politicians like Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins have vilified and attempted to discredit them for the crime of accurately assessing the tremendous failure of lockdown related policies.

Many media outlets have predictably jumped on the band wagon, mainly by ignoring their input entirely. How many times have Fauci, Andy Slavitt, Peter Hotez or Leana Wen been featured on major television? How many times have Kuldorff or Bhattacharya?

That’s not an accident. It’s a purposeful prioritizing of a specific viewpoint over another. Fear at all costs, endless and pointless interventions, and disgraceful authoritarianism.

Rationality, proportion, risk-benefit discussions, and accepting reality are anathema to the media, and thus they refer exclusively to The Experts™ when covering the COVID response.

But the narratives are collapsing. The Experts™ are failing. Their policies aren’t working, in remarkably dramatic fashion.

Consequently, the great messaging shift is underway. The Experts™ are clearly lying, desperately trying to regain control of the narrative as their beloved policies collapse in on themselves.

They’re deliberately ignoring their previous sentences, providing cover for the fact that they’ve been exposed as hopelessly incompetent authorities who’ve ignored inconvenient reality.

So let’s go through a few of their more dramatically inaccurate claims and the unfolding situation in the winter wave.

….



Kunstler: Stop and Assess

Reality is penetrating the fog and fury of propaganda spewed out over cable-TV news in what may be the last desperate full-out campaign to sell “vaccines” to the credulous. Omicron is a bust, despite the shrieking about overstuffed hospitals (they’re not) in The New York Times. Just as there is a crack-up boom in the final stage of a financial crisis, there is a climactic surge of hysteria in the Covid-19 war against Western Civ. Now, Dr. Anthony Fauci is pushing proof-of-vaxx for US air travel because, “[a] vaccine requirement for a person getting on the plane is just another level of getting people to have a mechanism that would spur them to get vaccinated…” he laid it out on ABC News’s This Week show Sunday with Jonathan Karl.

Monday morning on NPR, Dr. Fauci was beating the drum about the unvaxxed being a menace to society as maxi-spreaders of omicron. Is it possible he hasn’t heard that the vaxxed are catching it at a greater rate despite their vaxxes than the unvaxxed? Do you know why? Because their previous vaxxes have de-tuned their immune systems, that’s why. By the way, so far, one death has been attributed to omicron in the US — and even that case is a muddle. And Dr. Fauci is beseeching the twice-vaxxed to go get boostered? Is he determined to wreck absolutely every immune system in the land? Kind of looks that way, a little bit.

I confess I am torn between two views of this fiasco. The first is that the notoriously incompetent Dr. Fauci and his colleagues (read RFK, Jr.s book) simply blundered through the Covid-19 disaster making a series of reckless choices, and about halfway through the crisis made the dastardly decision to cover-up their errors by doubling and tripling down on these mistakes. For instance, the policy to suppress and ban cheap and effective treatments that would have un-horsed their stupendously profitable “vaccines” from the emergency use authorization that got the mRNA cocktails into the public’s arms without proper testing. Some months down the road we will learn that this Fauci combine caused millions of people to die unnecessarily both from treatments withheld and from the adverse effects of vaxxes themselves.

The other view — that is becoming ever-harder to disregard — is that the Covid-19 pandemic was a deliberate program by a gang of powerful international adventurers to install a regime of surveillance and extreme control over formerly free citizens — all in the service of “re-setting” the ailing global financial system, reducing the population of elder pensioners to relieve the West’s payment obligations, and stifling industrial economies as a cure for climate change. It has sounded a little preposterous to me that such manifest evil, as otherwise seen only in James Bond movies and newsreels of the Nazis, could actually be true. But it is looking more and more of-a-piece with actions like the years-long mischief between Dr. Fauci and the Wuhan lab; the preparatory positioning of the pharma companies for just such a pandemic, including patent filings, to enable the quick release of their dubious “vaccines”; the janky mail-in ballot election of 2020 with the installation of an obvious puppet President “Joe Biden”; the insane legislation agenda of the Democratic Party; the long-running Woke insurrection against Western culture, values, and common sense; and the arrant bad faith of the news media reporting all the above as dishonestly as possible.

It may turn out to be various combinations of both views, with a uniting overlay of mass formation psychosis. In any case, I’m serenely convinced that we will learn the truth about all this, and perhaps not too far down the line. At this point, the official narratives are crazier than anything out of Alice in Wonderland, leading with the nakedly absurd idea that the vaxxed must be protected from the unvaxxed — though all are susceptible to Covid and equally capable of spreading it.

Do the doctors actually still believe this fucking nonsense? The ones on TV, maybe, but the rank-and-file must be getting rather nervous about what they have been responsible for in following the diktats of corrupt public health officials.



Rudolph Rigger: Bohemian Jab-sody

… The unholy alliance between governments and pharma appears to have us in its clutches - and they sure as hell don’t want to let us go, do they?

They’re still banging all the drums they have in an insane and deranging cacophony.

Lockdown, mask, lockdown, mask, socially distance, one-way, one way, vaccine this and vaccine that, mandate, mandate, fuck the unvaxxed.

That last sentence sounded better in my head with a bit of rhythm and the drummer from the Muppets.

As it’s close to the end of the year I had thought about writing a kind of summary and having a stab at a few predictions - but I literally have no idea how everything is going to play out in 2022. Part of me thinks “it can’t be worse, surely?”, but I really wouldn’t bet the farm on that.

Although I do try to poke a lot of fun at things, underneath it all is a profound sadness, and a profound anger. So much (and maybe all) of what we’ve done has been senseless, needless and, even worse, damaging.

The “safe and effective” vaccines have turned out to be not so safe and not so effective, after all. It’s too big to hide now - although those who lovingly gaze with adoring eyes at the Divine Hypodermic of Salvation would probably beg to differ. These once-human cacti have been boosted so much they have the Glorious Goo squirting out of every orifice.

It’s heart-breaking. Whilst Big Pharma as an overall entity is probably not something I’d hold up as a particularly stellar example of morality, there are lots of people working for these organizations who are not motivated principally by greed, but by a genuine desire to improve our health. I’m sure the thousands of scientists working on the vaccines really did want to create a safe and effective product.

They failed, but our opprobrium shouldn’t be directed at the scientists. It needs to be directed at those who engineered the insane vaccine lust that has allowed the unscrupulous to profit from a dangerous and ineffective product.

We never were in any real kind of “emergency”, but this is the pretext by which all sorts of morally questionable things have been imposed. It’s the same pretext which has allowed the Goo generators to have zero liability for the juice of despair. The needless and damaging restrictions and measures could only be lifted, they told us, when the Messiah, Vaxxus, arrived. The Goo was our one and only Saviour. Nothing short of the divine intervention of Big Pharma could save us.

The vaccines haven’t saved us. I think they’ve made things worse. It’s kind of obvious to those whose eyes haven’t been Pfizered shut, that the Goo is having a serious impact on people’s hearts. It’s having a physical impact and a spiritual impact. Not only has it buggered up our tickers, it has also seriously buggered up our moral compass.

That’s just one thing we know about that has become too big to hide now. The attempts to explain this away in the media have been bizarre and transparent. Here’s some of the things we’ve seen in the media that have been offered as “explanations” of the rise in heart problems:

· cold weather

· climate change

· post-pandemic- stress-disorder (PPSD)

· missing breakfast

· too much freedom

If you had to do a double-take at those last two items, I don’t blame you. But, yes, these have been proffered as explanations.

They must have some meeting beforehand to think up some new things - anything except words beginning with the letter ‘V’.

… Such are the “scientists” we are bludgeoned into following.

… There is no sense in which the ‘pandemic’ or the virus itself was “unprecedented”. Our grotesquely disproportionate response to it, however, has been truly unprecedented.



Linda Bonvie and Mary Beth Pfeiffer: A Myth is Born: How CDC, FDA, and Media Wove a Web of Ivermectin Lies That Outlives The Truth

New Mexico officials admit they were wrong: Two people died from covid. NOT from ivermectin. Yet the CDC generated the nation's highest health alert and a thousand fake headlines on false cases.



Oehler: Endgame Take 4 - IoNT in Jabs Turns You into Autonotom

Explaining how graphene oxide/hydroxide in "vaccines" turns recipients into autonotoms, one jab at a time.

First, watch this video by La Quinta Columna, Dec. 27, 2021

The Covid vaxxines are human-to-transhuman conversion kits to enslave & eliminate humanity

Sounded so far-fetched to me that I had to dig deeper into the subject. To my astonishment, it all hashes out. The pertinent nanotechnology has been in active development over the last two decades, but not as much in the public eye as it should have been, considering the implications. This area of technology is called Internet of Nano Things (IoNT). I will provide the overview of the literature below.

….

Now, the insistence that everybody gets multiple jabs, the actual number of which is open-ended, makes sense when the amount of these nano-devices don’t fit into one jab and come from different suppliers in different batches and releases, on a time schedule. The activation of these injected nano-devices will be achieved via electromagnetic radiation, thus powering the nano-devices, using a headset or a small local emitter,




GeoPolitical Fare:


The U.S. Military Is a Machine of Impunity

Wartime savagery requires that its perpetrators are told that their actions are acceptable — maybe heroic — and must not cease.

MY EDUCATION IN wartime savagery started in Bosnia in the 1990s. Reporting on the war, I visited death camps, saw civilians get shot and beaten, interviewed torturers, and was arrested multiple times for being in the wrong place and asking too many questions. Despite all of that, I sensed at the time that my Balkan lessons were incomplete — and those instincts have been confirmed by the past 20 years of U.S. warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.



How Not To Explain The Ukraine Crisis

The PBS NewsHour invited on just about the worst person in the U.S. government to help Americans understand the crisis in Ukraine, writes Mike Madden.

US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, who choreographed the 2014 coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically-elected government and set the current crisis in motion, was invited by PBS NewsHour on Dec. 7 to explain the standoff in Ukraine.

Typical of Western media, the story began with Russia’s involvement in eastern Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, which took place in March 2014. The crisis actually began a week earlier with the violent overthrow of democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 22, 2014. While accusations flew of Russian aggression, invasion and annexation, there was not a word about the US instigated coup or Nuland’s role in it.



New Book: Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy




Orwellian Fare:


Gov't Can't Be Trusted With Cellphone Tracking Amid Pandemic: Former Ontario Privacy Commissioner



CIA Experimented on Hundreds of Orphans, Torturing Them to Reveal Psychopathic Traits—Report




CaitOz Fare:


Silicon Valley Should Not Restrict Public Discourse About Covid Measures Which Affect Everyone

Everyone should oppose the removal of Malone and commentators who share his views, regardless of whether they agree with them or vehemently despise them. The reason for this is very simple: only a fool would support government-tied monopolistic billionaire corporations regulating public discourse about Covid responses which affect us all. This is true regardless of what you personally happen to believe about mRNA vaccines.

Arguments that Malone and his ilk are peddling “misinformation” have no bearing on the question of whether they should be removed from the platforms everyone uses to debate ideas and discuss information. It is entirely legitimate to make arguments that their claims are inaccurate, but it is not at all legitimate to claim that platforms which large sectors of humanity have come to rely on for public discourse should interfere with or obstruct those conversations.

Even if we were to accept unconditionally the position that people should be banned from such platforms if they are posting “misinformation”, who exactly do we imagine would be determining whether something is misinformation or not? Will we be consulting some impartial, agendaless, omniscient demigod through some sort of crystal ball or magical rune portal? Or would we in fact be relying on flawed human beings looking at the information through the lens of their own cognitive biases, agendas, perceptual distortions and knowledge limitations?

I ask because historically what these giant Silicon Valley corporations have been doing to determine who gets to have a voice and who doesn’t is working in consultation with think tanks funded by governments and the military-industrial complex like the Atlantic Council and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, as well as working with the US government directly to an increasingly intimate degree. This fact is devastating to the popular argument that these are merely private corporations enforcing their Terms of Service, since they are becoming inseparably interwoven with government power. In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is state censorship.

Public discourse is consolidated on these gigantic platforms to such an extent that getting your ideas heard by a large number of people requires participation in them, and now they are determining how issues of such immense political importance as government pandemic responses may be discussed, and doing so in increasingly intimate collaboration with the most powerful governments on earth.

…

Humanity is a mess. We’re dealing with so many deep, deep problems and facing so many existential hurdles in our immediate future, and it’s clear that the people in charge aren’t going to navigate us through them with any degree of skill. This means we’re going to have to figure things out as a collective, and we’re not going to be able to do that if we’re forbidden from communicating with each other in ways the powerful don’t approve.

Certainly allowing human speech to flourish unrestricted would mean a lot of people saying things that we disagree with, and even saying things that are objectively and demonstrably wrong. But the alternative is allowing speech to be controlled by the same power structure which saw fit to invade Iraq, which is currently committing genocide in Yemen and pushing us toward direct military confrontation with Russia and China. Government-tied oligarchic megacorporations are among the very last institutions who should be in charge of worldwide political discourse.

The future of humanity depends on our ability to bring light to the darkness, to bring awareness to that of which we are not aware. As with individual awakening, a collective awakening will necessarily be sloppy, clumsy, and full of confrontation and awkward conversations. But it’s the only way we can begin working our way toward becoming a species whose actions are based on truth rather than untruth, on consciousness rather than unconsciousness. Until that happens, we will necessarily continue along our self-destructive trajectory



***** If You Haven’t Researched Arguments Disputing A Western Narrative, You Don’t Understand The Issue

…

This same principle applies to “conspiracy theories” as well, both for and against. If you haven’t reviewed the evidence for and against a given theory, then unless it’s something that’s self-evidently absurd at a casual glance it would be silly and asinine for you to take a confident position on it one way or the other. This also applies to arguments for and against measures that have been implemented and could potentially be implemented in response to Covid-19.

…

It’s very easy to select a position on an issue which conforms to your ideological preferences and your understanding of the world. It’s much harder to sincerely dedicate yourself to finding out whether or not something is true, or whether the truth of the matter is a lot less certain than the talking heads in the western news media are making it seem. But it’s the only way you can really have a legitimate position on such matters.

This should be a widespread and common sense understanding, and it is to everyone’s detriment everywhere that it isn’t.



We’ll Either Rise As A Collective Or Perish As Individuals: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Everyone who’s freaking out about wokeness and identity politics can relax. Liberals are 100 percent certain to get bored with that schtick and forget all about it without having helped a single member of any minority or marginalized group. Ask the immigrants and the kids in cages.

❖

The powerful are able to manipulate humanity collectively to such an extent that our compliance now has us staring down the barrel of extinction on multiple fronts. No individual can stop them. They won’t be stopped until the people begin thinking and organizing collectively too.

Which is of course why all collectivist movement is stomped out with whatever degree of violence is necessary. Our rulers are not even the slightest bit worried about us as individuals, but they are absolutely terrified of the idea of having to face us as a unified collective.

If individualism ever had an argument to begin with, it certainly hasn’t got one anymore. Humanity’s collective behavior is now so powerful that it can literally end our world. The only thing we can control now is whether that behavior is toward health or destruction.

Oh you just want the government to leave you alone and let you go about your business as an individual, do you? Well guess what blossom? Even if you went off grid and lived a truly independent life, the ways the powerful are organizing the collective will still get you killed by nuclear war or environmental destruction. Even if you support a radically individualist status quo like voluntaryism or minarchism, you’re never going to get a chance at creating that status quo without mass-scale collective organization against the current status quo. An “anarchist” who dismisses mass collective organization is just a LARPer.

The need to begin thinking and organizing collectively has shown up at your doorstep. The luxury of thinking of yourself as an individual is no longer yours. Unhealthy mass-scale human behavior will destroy us all if we cannot make the changes necessary to turn it toward health.

We will either rise as a collective or perish as individuals. All other options have been taken off the table.

❖

Humans are not rational animals. That’s clearly evident in our behavior at mass scale and as individuals. We are driven by our conditioning. If any kind of “free will” can be said to exist at all, it’s only to the extent that we choose to bring consciousness to that conditioning.

❖

The only obstacle to the creation of paradise on earth is the limits of human perception. Our inability to see what’s happening behind the veils of government secrecy. Behind the distortions of propaganda. Behind the illusory nature of the ego. We just need to find a way to see.

Seeing is all that’s required. If enough people could clearly see what’s going on in their world, in their government, and in themselves, the shift into healthy and harmonious functioning would immediately change from seemingly impossible to self-evidently inevitable.



Other Quotes of the Week:

Lawrence: How fitting that Joe Biden’s first year in the White House ends with his long-touted Summit for Democracy, a two-day affair that ended a couple of weeks before Christmas. I can’t decide whether the occasion was more farce than embarrassment or if it was the other way around. Either way, it stands as just the right signature for an administration that, not quite 12 months in, proves farcical and embarrassing all at once.


Puzder: Of course, politicians often overstate things and sometimes outright lie. Nothing new there. It’s the in-your-face nature of the administration’s falsehoods that is stunning.


Smith: While there have been a few shining examples of independent and mostly unbiased journalism in the MSM, these moments are as rare as Loch Ness Monster sightings and almost as unbelievable. The public has been lied to so consistently that sometimes we ignore legitimate journalism when it pops up because it’s safer to assume the media is disingenuous at all times.




Long Reads / Big Thoughts:


Ian Welsh: CDC Jumps The Shark & Experts Die Another Death

… People want scientists in organizations like the WHO and CDC to be non-political, to say what the best science says and they haven’t and trust is broken.

In general, the idea of expertise has been broken over the last few decades, because experts acted badly or weren’t experts.

This requires a bit of unpacking and expert is a bad word. Economists are experts, but they are not scientists, they’re ideologues. They study how the world should be and try and force the world to be like that.

Economists are moral philosophers, in effect. Or theologians. If they presented themselves as that “we believe in markets and utility maximization and utility is a metaphysical concept for us and we think this is the best way to organize society” that’d be honest.

If they were honest, you could sort of trust them. “Oh, so macro-economists are like Christian preachers who say that society should be based on their beliefs of what an ideal society is like!!” That’s not at all the same sort of expert as a biologist or physicist.

Over 99% of economists didn’t predict the financial collapse. They didn’t realize there was a housing bubble. Because economists and other fake scientists presented themselves as scientific experts, and when their advice was followed it was CRAP, they discredited the very idea of expertise.

Then actual scientists let themselves be politically compromised and have completed the job.

I read a lot of people who say “trust the experts.” Shut up.

They experts disgraced themselves. The economists, the psychologists, the biologists, etc, etc… Too many of them have either presented themselves as something they’re not (scientists) or actual scientists have fudged the science.

This even goes down to hedging things that are well agreed on. Climate change, for example.

The consensus forecasts have almost been universally too optimistic, for decades, because scientists were playing political games and trying to be palatable.

Actual scientists need insulation from politics. People who are playing politics need to not be insulated from politics. Central bankers and economists are not scientists, they are political actors whose actions hurt some people & help others.

Central banks should be under direct control of elected officials. Scientists in the CDC and WHO should be heavily insulated from political power. Climate scientists need insulation as well.



Toby Rogers: The collapse of western bourgeois democracy. Why and what comes next?

I’m still chewing on this line from Giorgio Agamben’s book, Where are we now? The epidemic as politics (to read my earlier book review click here). Agamben’s thesis, repeated throughout the book, is that:

We are experiencing the end of an era in the political history of the West, the era of bourgeois democracy founded on constitutions, on rights, on parliaments, and on the division of powers. This model was already facing a crisis: constitutional principles were increasingly being ignored, and the executive power had almost entirely replaced the legislative by operating — as it now does exclusively — through legislative decrees [aka “executive orders”]. With the so-called pandemic, things went further: what American political analysts called the “Security State” — which was established in response to terrorism — has now given way to a health-based paradigm of governance that we term “biosecurity”. It is important to understand that biosecurity, both in its efficacy and in its pervasiveness, outdoes every form of governance that we have hitherto known. As we have seen in Italy — but not only here — as soon as a threat to health is declared, people unresistingly consent to limitations on their freedom that they would never have accepted in the past. (p. 60)

This is an astonishing statement — new and terrifying in its implications. Yet it lands like common sense and something we already knew but just did not dare say out loud. In the movement for medical freedom and personal sovereignty we keep trying to return to a reset point, whether that is 2019 or 1985 or 1950. Agamben is saying that the horse has already left the barn and it ain’t coming back.

If indeed western bourgeois democracy has come to an end (and that’s a big if) the first question is why? Why did this system that seemed so stable and to deliver so much freedom and prosperity to so many come to an end? I have two answers:

1. It was never thus. I’m a huge fan of the book Contract and Domination by Carole Pateman and Charles Mills. They argue that in every era, logic and reason are constructed to serve the interests of capital. What seems civilized and enlightened in every era is just cover for a much more brutal reality that is happening behind the scenes.

Western liberal democracy was always a velvet glove that hid the iron fist of conquest, colonialism, and exploitation. For 500 years the flourishing of western liberal democracy was financed by staggering levels of violence — first in the colonies of the new world and then through a system of global neocolonialism maintained via a vast military industrial complex. Workers in the developing world who wanted higher wages and nations that wanted to control their own natural resources were smashed. And the benefits of this system were not widely distributed and instead tended to accrue to about 10% of the population in the developed world.

For a brief period, from about 2005 to 2015 when the internet was ubiquitous and free, it appeared that billions more people would soon have a voice and become enfranchised. We saw that with the uprising of the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and popular movements for democracy in Southeast Asia. But this alarmed the ruling class and so they have taken steps to control the conversation and prevent actual democratization from happening again. And the social justice warriors who were cheering on the uprisings in other countries have now been PSYOPsed into welcoming censorship and totalitarianism in the U.S.

2. Monopoly capitalism is more powerful than it has ever been. Industries are more concentrated than ever and characterized by monopoly or oligopoly. In a previous era, the East India Company was powerful and had global reach (and controlled the British state and British military). But we’ve never seen a concentration of power and wealth to this degree. The predatory billionaire robber barons of today — Gates, Zuckerberg, Pichai, Dorsey, Bezos, Soros, Bloomberg, Slim — destroyed western liberal democracy because they could, because they just prefer Pharma totalitarian and a Chinese-style high tech surveillance state. They figure, if Pharma can help them to reduce the global population by 15% or more, all the better.

What comes next?

IF western liberal democracy has fallen and is unlikely to return, then what comes next? Agamben, without spelling out the details, hints at a bleak future, “governments are preparing an even more inhumane and unjust world” (p. 97).

…



Guest Post – A Letter To Our Children

To all the children of parents fighting the New World Order / Agenda 2030 / Build Back Better / Techno-Fascism / Bio-Tyranny / Transhumanism,

You are not alone.

Remember, your parents love you very much, and most likely you love them right back. Sadly, the world we knew is gone. Perhaps the parents, the way you knew them, have changed in front of your eyes. Very likely their truths are no longer aligned with your truths, or with what your peers believe, nor with what you learn in school and university. Which is exactly the opposite of how it used to be.

The young are supposed to rebel, not the old. But we live in extraordinary times. Although, this is not exactly a rebellion, rather a human / planetary defense mission. This sounds lofty, but the fact is, we are at war. Your parents are defending humanity. You should be very proud. Don’t worry that you don’t see it now. This is, after all, a war of deception, but later you will understand that you came from parents who stood up to tyranny.

Understand that when children, the elderly, along with other people are being attacked, parents cannot sit idly. They are not wired that way. True, a lot of parents don’t fight this fight. For whatever reason, they cannot, or will not decipher this war. It doesn’t mean the war doesn’t exist. We don’t know the answer to why some people see it, and some don’t. I believe this is a spiritual battle. Maybe some of us come with information that other souls don’t have. Once a parent sees it, they CANNOT let it go. It would be to go against our soul’s mission, our deepest truth, and our deepest instinct to protect humanity.

You will likely feel loss, confusion, anger, and sadness. My heart is heavy that this generation had to experience such a heavy burden at the beginning of their lives. But a heavy burden comes with the promise of light and rewards. When our controllers are removed, you will have your entire life in front of you. We will not, but this is our gift to you. Spend time on your feelings, feel your emotions, be gentle with yourself. Don’t worry, your parents will understand your puzzlement, your confusion. They very likely deeply regret that they only gave you tools to navigate peacetime, and did not prepare you for a time at war. But most parents didn’t know this was coming, and they are winging it, just like you are.

One day, hopefully soon, this will be over, and the conflict with your parents will be just a whisper in the wind. It may feel like a storm now.

Ride the wind, and then let the storm slowly turn into a breeze that will gently pass by, and all that will be left is a gentle brush on your cheek, reminding you of a parent’s tender touch.


Pics of the Week: