addendum to 2022-01-01, as the holiday break is giving me a chance to catch up with some extra reading, including some older posts I hadn't yet gotten too, most notably those by Joyce Kamen
Regular Fare:
***** Tim Morgan: #219. The unravelling begins
THE REALITY OF SCARCITY, THE SCARCITY OF REALITY
… The penny-plain picture now, of course, is that a vast gap has opened up between the consensus expectation of continuity and the hard reality of a post-growth economy. This gap is the counterpart of the chasm that exists between the ‘real’ economy of goods and services and the ‘financial’ economy of money and credit.
Our understanding of these dissonances sets an outline programme for ongoing analysis. The best routes to effective interpretation are those which (a) compare reality with perception, and (b) calibrate the relationships between the ‘two economies’ of money and energy. In the coming months, the aim here will be to add interpretive and statistical detail to the picture that is emerging as the aquatint wash of delusion fades away.
The divergence between expectation and reality isn’t – in itself – a new development. Many of us have long known that, over a very extended period, most economic “growth” has been a cosmetic product of breakneck and hazardous monetary expansion, that the underlying economy has been faltering, and that the confidence placed in ‘continuity’ lacks a basis in fact.
We can go further, recognizing that even the simulacrum of “growth” can’t last much longer, that the real prices of assets are destined to fall sharply in a context of broader financial distress, and that the balance of political power might be poised to shift, perhaps in a direction that, once upon a time, used to be called “left”.
What IS different now is that a process of fundamental change is already underway. The consensus case for continuity is crumbling, and is being exposed as a product of self-deception, wishful-thinking and economic incomprehension, spiced with absurd amounts of techno-utopianism.
The outcome mightn’t – and needn’t – be the wholesale “collapse” predicted by doomsayers.
But the game is up for what we might call the ‘continuity consensus’.
….
In any case, the current system depends on a continuity of increasing credit.
To be effective, then, rate rises would have to be big enough to trigger credit defaults, asset price slumps and a re-pricing of the financial system back into equilibrium with the constrained character of the underlying economy.
...
The paralysis of predicament
In practical terms, this means that positive real rates won’t be reinstated voluntarily, and this leaves us looking for pressures that might force us to act realistically.
The most obvious such pressure will come from households, which might accept the impairment of the scope for discretionary consumption, but won’t – and can’t – tolerate relentless increases in the cost of essentials.
This is where forecasting processes need to be reinvented, meaning rebased away from the fallacious assumption of ‘growth in perpetuity’.
...
None of this necessarily spells “collapse”, but it does establish a relationship between systemic risk and the prevalence of self-deception.
In this sense, our best hopes for a manageable future rest on an orderly assertion of reality, and the retreat of delusion.
Bonus QOTW:
The U.S. has been in a Japanified environment for at least 13 years, more likely as far back as the DotCom bubble. And yet, policy-makers and the public at large remain in total denial. The current fear of "inflation" is exhibit A of rampant denial... First off what do I mean by Japanification? I mean mired in a permanent state of structural deflation.
COVID-19 notes:
*** The Doctor’s Oldest Tool
RIP Fare:
Richard Leakey
Contrarian Perspectives
Extra [Controversial] Fare:
*** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Regular Fare:
***** David Collum: 2021 Year in Review: Crisis of Authority and the Age of Narratives
What began more than a dozen years ago as a synopsis of the year’s events in markets and finance for a few friends morphed beyond my control into a Year in Review (YIR)—an attempt to chronicle human folly and world events for the entire year. It captures key moments before they slip into the brain fog. The process of trying to write a coherent narrative helps me better understand WTF just happened and seminal moments that catch my eye.
… The title, “Crisis of Authorities,” is a double entendre. On the one hand, previously trusted authorities that we relied on to better understand the world are long gone. … Ponder the following: which acronymed organization do you still trust? FBI? CIA? FEMA? DOJ? CBS? ABC? Fox? CNN? At one point I would have comfortably offered up the CDC, FDA, and NIH. Portions of those three should be razed. Social media offered up one acceptable answer: KFC. The second, more deeply disturbing meaning is that smoldering socialism has veered toward authoritarianism, a seismic shift that is global and quite possibly unstoppable.
… I have lost friends and made new ones all because of the Great Partisan Divide. (Please excuse the caps throughout; everything now seems to demand a proper name and acronym.) My colleagues have put to rest doubts about whether I am nuts, noting that I am contrarian on all topics. Of course, they don’t hear about the ones for which I have no gripe, but their assertions are not entirely wrong. Friends let me be me, but there is something isolating about it. By contrast, I have many friends in the digital world for which the Venn Diagram of Ideas has a much greater overlap.
… Philosophy. I have let go of the belief that I know truth, because I am relentlessly doubting the veracity of the data from which my narrative derives. In the Age of Narratives, all I can offer is Dave’s Narrative. There is also no topic in the Year of Our Lord 2021 in which my opinion is non-partisan because all opinions are now partisan.
… My greatest strength and weakness are an ability to entertain almost any idea—entertain conspiracy theories and scamper down rabbit holes—until I hit paydirt or hardpan. Feel free to call me a conspiracy theorist; it helps me identify narrow-minded boneheads. What baffles me is why “conspiracy” is so pejorative. Men and women of wealth and power conspire. Anybody who cannot concede that point is an intellectual dingleberry (or works for the Deep State!)
… Remember the olden days when the wealthy and powerful nefariously assaulted the unsuspecting populace? If caught, scandal followed, heads rolled, and we moved on, leaving us plebes with the sense that justice was served. Since the government was small relative to GDP, the systemic corruption represented a few percent of the system. It’s now growing like a tumor and devoid of consequences for the powerful. In the Age of Narratives, we snarf down platters of propaganda served by powerful media empires. This bread and circuses is free but leaves us marinating in ignorance
… The Western media is now the arm of the State, no better than Pravda. Failed business model led the media into the oldest profession. How many narratives have we fallen for? How many have you fallen for? I think you owe it to yourselves to replay the tape from years past and ask whether you were duped. Malcolm Gladwell’s latest (see Books) suggests we are hard-wired to trust. As social animals, we cannot function if we don’t. It’s difficult to push back but push back we must. The more highly politicized the topic—climate change, pandemics, vaccines, elections, central banking, foreign wars—the greater the urgency to repel. I offer up one of several quotes from Gore Vidal, a thought-leader canted profoundly left whom I have come to view as the intellectuals’ George Carlin:
Our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention our own. ~ Gore Vidal
…
…
Contents
Part 1
1. Introduction
2. My Year
3. Investing – Gold, Energy, and Materials
4. Gold and Silver
5. The Economy
6. Inflation
7. The Fed
8. Valuations
9. Broken Markets
Part 2 (Coming Soon)
1. Covid-19 – The Disease
2. Covid-19 – The Response
3. Vaccine – The Risks
4. Vaccine – The Rollout
Part 3 (Coming Soon)
1. Biden – Freshman Year One Scorecard
2. Capitol Insurrection
3. Rising Authoritarianism
4. Conclusion
5. Acknowledgment
6. Books
The Year of the Abject: Making Sense of Nonsense
The volume of humans that are made redundant by the global triumph of capitalism has grown so much that it exceeds the managerial capacity of the planet. They cannot be re-assimilated into the “normal” life pattern and reprocessed back into the category of “useful” members of society. (Zygmunt Bauman)…
Perceived as a medium of grievance and spokesmen for collective traumas, politicians of the populist Right have been absolved of any accountability. Their biggest strength and their superpower is the absolute absence of any shame and embarrassment, even when faced with undeniable proof of their incompetence, lies, criminality and lack of an ethical backbone, no matter how obvious and damaging their culpability might be. They have been set free to establish new benchmarks of shamelessness, a unique political skill that always keeps them one step ahead of their political opponents, which has opened an entirely new political terrain never accessible before.
… The emergence of the rapidly growing white underclass and its irreversible marginalization in the last decades is beginning to get recognized as the fatal flaw of the American experiment, an outcome that is in conflict with its founding axioms and an evolving national trauma threatening to void it. Things have gone terribly wrong in the last 50 years
… As much as the political center may want to distance itself from the white underclass and its populist political representation, the significance of that moment forces them to pause and rethink one more time whether they are really prepared to win this battle and write the obituary for the American experiment.
The top episodes of wokeness in Canada last year
It’s from the National Post, of course, which is a conservative site, but do you think the most liberal Canadian newspaper (I’m not sure which one that is) would publish an article like the following? I’m a sucker for listicles of any sort, so of course I read it. Also, I’ve been paying more attention to the follies of Canada since I started learning that it may be even more steeped in progressive leftist lunacy than the U.S. But unlike the U.S., I don’t think that these extremes will drive Canadian voters towards the right. I may be wrong, so enlighten me if you know Canadian politics. Anyway, this is just for fun. …
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
el gato malo: vaccine evasion and an OAS signal in ontario
there is some really interesting data coming out of ontario on vaccine efficacy and vaccine evasion from omicron.
it also seems to be being widely misinterpreted/misread, so i want to put a paw in here and opine.
this is the key chart. (generated from the ontario gov’t website HERE)
…
vaccination just fell to a -33% VE for cases and this looks to be worsening rapidly, likely because of a rise in omicron prevalence.
this is consistent with not just vaccine escape, but vaccine driven acceleration.
…
whether this is just carelessness or sloth on the part the ontario health agencies or a subtle and cunning manipulation is anyone’s guess and i’m not going to wade into that.
…
but the conclusion here looks to be that this data (along with data from many other places) is consistent with omicron being not just a vaccine escaping variant, but one that is actually vaccine enabled.
PCR COVID-19 False Positives Will Continue in 2022 - Unless We Act Now
The general public is still not allowed to know a critical datapoint for their own PCR tests. Even if hospitalized, doctors deny patients and their families of the cycle threshold. ... Are Ct threshold values in use still as high as 35? 40? Thresholds this high causes, according to my colleague Dr. Sin Han Lee, will lead to as high as 90% false positives
Hospitalisations by COVID-19 vaccination status
1. Main points
· For all ages, 18+ years, as COVID-19 admissions rose between 06-Sep-20 and 31-Jan-21, and between 06-Jun-21 and 31-Oct-21, total admissions fell, suggesting COVID-19 was not instrumental on NHS pressure.
· The low point of the downward trend in admissions occurs in the week in which COVID-19 mass vaccinations begin.
· The rise in weekly admissions is concomitant with the rise in vaccinations and only abates when adult vaccinations also abate.
…….
The ultimate conclusion is the same across all age groups as it was for the aggregate data - there is substantial evidence showing that COVID vaccinations are the main driver of changes in overall hospital admissions. Since inception, admissions are higher than expected for several months, strongly suggesting that the vaccines cause more hospitalisations than they mitigate.
Bonus COVID Tweets & Quotes:
Lambert: It’s not fair to imply that CDC has been wrong about everything. Everything important, I grant, but not everything.
Berenson: Omicron is less dangerous if you’ve been infected before, and less dangerous if you haven’t. It’s less dangerous if you’re fat, and less dangerous if you’re thin. It’s less dangerous if you’re old, less dangerous if you’re middle-aged, and less dangerous (as in probably so not-dangerous its dangers can’t even be measured) if you’re young. It’s a cold. The only risk it represents is that our massive testing infrastructure is now disrupting society.
Rigger: Someone, somewhere, somehow, has managed to convince almost all world governments that they need to inject the entire population of the planet with some goo, several times a year, in order to combat a disease that, even in its more virulent original variant, only kills fewer than 3 people out of every 1,000 infected - with most of those being older than average life expectancy. Have we gone fucking insane?
Bedford: Have local health care “experts” done anything to gain my trust? Or have they done everything they possibly can to betray it?
Slane: ...why such a person would have been called a Conspiracy Nut. Yet a year later the same person is called a Conspiracy Nut for opposing these very things they got called a Conspiracy Nut for predicting, but which are now reality. …. It is baffling that people can view what’s going on so differently, but I would point out that all the views in the real world are derived from facts, data, reason, logic and historical examples, whereas all the views in the Metaverse are taken from Government and media propaganda.
El gato malo: they are literal lysenkoists pushing hallucinatory doctrine to deny biology, gender, genetics, and top down totalitarian control masquerading as pluralism, tolerance, and diversity. they are serial arsonists demanding to be lauded as firemen.
COVID Corporatocracy / Idiocracy / Conspiracy Fare:
Kunstler: Forecast 2022 — Dumpster Fire Blazing on the Frontier of a Dark Age
We still don’t know exactly what role the CCP and its Peoples’ Liberation Army played in the origins of Covid-19, and we don’t know because the US government doesn’t want us to know — because they had a role in it — and the news media won’t lift a finger to find out, either, because they are the propaganda arm of the regime in power. We do know an awful lot about the operations of Dr. Fauci and his colleagues in funding the development of the virus in Wuhan for the purpose of introducing a wildly profitable set of “vaccines” which, if anything, prolonged and exacerbated the pandemic, and harmed or killed millions all over the world.
We also know that this same set of players in public health and Big Pharma gamed the clinical trials that preceded the emergency use authorizations that loosed the “vaccines” on the people, and that they deliberately obstructed and suppressed proven treatments with inexpensive off-patent drugs that would have saved many hundreds of thousands of lives if they had been allowed within so-called standards-of-practice that rule medicine these days. The same gang fudged their statistical reporting wherever possible, especially by failing to fix the kludgy CDC VAERS website for listing adverse reactions to the “vaccines,” but also in creating conditions that made it impossible to discern actual Covid deaths from “vaccine” deaths, and deaths either caused by co-morbidities or extraneous occurrences such as highway accidents or gunshot killings.
Farrow: An Unsustainable Illusion
So drastic is the situation we face here in Quebec that we couldn't even sit down to enjoy the Orange Bowl last night, because Videotron somehow got screwed up by its attempt to persuade everyone's TV to churn out the government's latest duck-and-cower bulletin. That was especially unfortunate after the cancellation of the World Juniors over a few boys coming down with a cold, or at least testing positive for one.
… When I was young, and the world was a crueler and more dangerous place, you had to be sick to be sick. A "case" was someone who was not quite right in the head.
… Sorry, I may have got a bit carried away there. And don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that there is no emergency at all. Surely it's something of an emergency when you've already taken three poisonous death shots (as Dr Zelenko likes to call them) only to wake up with an omicron or upsilon stuck in your throat, your day-pass cancelled so you can't leave the flat, and the GAVI boys at the door with their syringes, promising you another shot every three months—every three weeks, if necessary—until you finally clot up and keel over. When they turn to go, you'll see the zero on their backs; funny how they all wear the same number. But the real zero is you, because you sold your birthright, your liberty to live, for a mess of their lipid nanoparticles.
That, I would say, is an emergency of the soul if not of the body, a quite dire emergency. But there's more. However your own heart is doing after the first three or four jabs, the monitor on our democracy is beeping ominously, which is also an emergency, a collective emergency. Nearly two years under government by order in council? More than twenty months of rule through duck-and-cower commands? And all for what, exactly?
… The fearsome COVID has never even managed to overwhelm the healthcare system, beyond the level of seasonal flus. Only the government's disastrous COVID policies have managed that—or will manage it, as the chickens come home to roost.
All for what, then? Not philanthropy! Not love of the neighbour! Not responsible government! Not science! Not truth! Rather, to crush those who are actually committed to such things, while making the wealthy wealthier and the powerful still more powerful.
The Media and The Experts™ Are Purposefully Spreading Disinformation
Experts and sycophant television anchors regularly lie to the public, with zero consequence
It’s important to highlight some of the more blatant, offensive examples of purposeful disinformation coming from The Experts™ and their media partners, because while their viewership might be shrinking dramatically each day, they’re still capable of doing incredible amounts of damage.
Corporate executives still listen to them and use their disinformation to determine policy. The party that controls the public health establishment, every major university, the entertainment industry, tech companies and most legacy media outlets is still watching and listening.
….
The people yelling the loudest to stop “disinformation” are often the ones promoting disinformation the most.
Peter Hotez is an incompetent conspiracy theorist, who is given a platform to spread disinformation with the encouragement of a nodding media activist.
And it should come as no surprise, given his mentor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, loves to spread disinformation and media sponsored authoritarianism himself.
Berenson: The Atlantic, oh my
As you know, this Stack could be devoted entirely to the idiocy of the elite media’s Covid coverage.
I generally can’t waste the time, not with far more important issues to cover, these days mostly vaccine-related: vaccine failure, vaccine side effects, vaccine mandates, vaccines for kids, vaccine passports, etc. Not to mention the lab leak, censorship, and a dozen others.
But every so often, we need to remember that the places that consider themselves the world’s ultimate arbiters of fact have not just failed to ask the right questions (how were the vaccine clinical trials designed?). Whether out of ignorance or ideology or both - probably both - they have actively misled their readers and viewers since March 2020. …
*** Joyce Kamen: The Despicable Defamation of a Lifesaving Doctor
My husband stood up to the media, the government, and rogue hospitals to save many lives and was attacked. But the truth—and all of his patients—survived.
….
“Oh, are we talking about ivermectin? Good! I want to know more about this,” she said, sitting down and waiting for Fred to begin answering Brad’s question. Fred and I looked at each other, because we knew exactly why Brad was asking. Yes, he really wanted to know what Fred, a physician, knew about ivermectin—a thirty-five-year-old workhorse of a drug, ranked by the WHO as safer than an aspirin; a drug that won its developers the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015; and a medicine that has eradicated parasitic pandemics and saved millions of lives in low-income and developing countries since 1987. He truly wanted to know if it actually worked, as many scientists, doctors and researchers have claimed, to treat every stage of covid-19 illness—from prevention to severe disease.
But more than that, we knew that what he really wanted to know was, “Fred, why were you dragged so mercilessly through the mud in the local and national media last month after you prescribed ivermectin for a dying patient whose wife went to court to compel the hospital to give it to him?”
Fred (and I) welcomed the opportunity to tell Brad and Jodie the whole story.
….
The account that follows is a summary of the story we told to Brad and Jodie. I would ask that you really “listen” as you read it. I don’t expect that every reader will instantly jump on board with what is presented here. But just know that what follows is the tough-to-take truth of what occurred. This is the story that many people would rather you did not hear.
Above all else, perhaps this story—now more of a “cautionary tale”—will help you see that the astonishing loss of life this pandemic has caused—and is still causing—was mostly unnecessary. Those innocent lives can never be reclaimed.
But the monstrous reasons why they died can be exposed.
My husband is Dr. Fred Wagshul—a Dayton, Ohio, area pulmonologist/critical care specialist with an unblemished thirty-five-year career spent saving thousands of lives. He is also one of the eight founding physicians of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. The now globally-renowned FLCCC came together in March of 2020 to develop effective protocols to save patients dying of covid-19.
The corrupt defamation of Fred (and many, many other doctors) by the media for his use of ivermectin to save his patients easily rose to the level of slander and libel…for which we are currently studying legal remedies. But to understand how we got here, the backstory is a necessary preface…
…
Repeated claims by the FLCCC that covid-19 was a “steroid responsive disease” went unheeded for months while thousands continued to die everyday—unnecessarily. Mortality rates from covid-19 in the nation’s hospitals ranged from averages of anywhere from 25 to 80 percent. The hospital ICUs where the FLCCC doctors worked were experiencing mortality rates of 4 to 8 percent. We conveyed this information to America’s public health agencies. We conveyed this information to America’s public health agencies. To CNN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and many more.
Wicked, wicked silence.
….
…
The protocol was neither conceived nor offered as an anti-vaccine regimen. It was an anti-dying prescription. It was a covid-19 safety net.
And it worked. Well. Very well.
But it soon became evident that Big Pharma and the nation’s public health agencies did not quite see it that way. Why? Because ivermectin is cheap, so it is unprofitable. It is a super-safe, powerhouse drug and its emergence as a proven, lifesaving therapy for covid-19 caused the industry to conjure visions of mega-profits from the vaccines and other novel covid drugs streaming in white-capped torrents down an insatiable drain.
That’s why they viewed the I-MASK+ Protocol as such a fierce threat to the vaccines—in which they had invested trillions of dollars.
… A thorough delineation here of the massive, coordinated campaign that ensued to malign ivermectin—including its high safety profile and its ability to thwart the virus—is unnecessary, given how ubiquitous its manifestations have become worldwide. But a few are worth mentioning for context.
….
Meanwhile, the scientific evidence demonstrating the efficacy of ivermectin continued to grow.
Study after study proved its ability to conquer COVID in every phase of the disease.
….
Lives have been lost to greed. That’s what the gun was made of. Millions and millions of innocent lives. And those who we know were party to this crime did so in broad daylight and with the assent of health policy officials worldwide who became complicit in the slaughter. …
Joyce Kamen: We Don't Know Much About Omicron—Yet—But We DO Know How to End the Pandemic
The world must pivot immediately to a virus extermination strategy using safe drugs that are proven to work.
…. Vaccine makers know that vaccines alone cannot eradicate the virus…or the pandemic. Public health agencies know it too. So do government officials who protect the towering pedestal on which they have installed the lucrative vaccines. The “guidance” the health agencies give to health care providers who are treating symptomatic covid-19 patients is simply to send them home, have them wait until they can no longer breathe, then come to the hospital—where many will be placed on ventilators. In their “guidance,” the agencies make no mention of the dozens of immune-boosting interventions or early therapeutics that could arrest progressing disease, keep patients out of hospitals, and preserve their lives. Yet these are the very agencies who have been empowered to guard public health.
It’s little wonder then that, over the last year, many countries with widespread vaccination programs continued to struggle to reduce case counts, hospitalizations and deaths. Some turned to the protocols based around early treatment therapeutics. Given what the science has shown us about the ability of some of the components to kill the virus, it is of little surprise these countries experienced dramatic drops in every crucial measure, resulting in hundreds of thousands of lives saved. In the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where ivermectin was used extensively, covid-19 is considered to be eradicated. Japan experienced similar successes, as did Argentina. Bangladesh—which mounted a program of widespread distribution of ivermectin and other early therapeutic interventions—recorded a single death from covid-19 in the month of November, 2021.
But the countries that relied solely on vaccines—with some even banning ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine—have not fared as well. …
Farber: A Pharmacist Speaks, Remembering Fauci's AZT Putsch In The 1980s "I Had To Dispense This Poison And Watch These Young Men Die"
He Tried To Warn Them, But Fauci's "Good Daddy" Spell Was Too Powerful. Was This Mass Ritual Sacrifice?
The US Federal Reserve Told Us in April 2020: Expect Universal Daily Testing If You Want to Participate in Society
… We are living through an economic event, a colonizing event, NOT a public health event. We are crossing a threshold into a human+ era of smartphone wielding cyborgs. There is some money to be made on the test kids and lab work, sure. The government will subsidize costs, especially for economically disadvantaged, because the end game is to bankrupt the state and make way for totalitarian public-private partnership impact investing opportunities. The BIG money is not in the sale of the tests themselves, but rather in prescriptive behavior management and nudges that will be enacted upon our bodies, minds, homes, and cities through autosurveillance.
…
Noise, noise, noise nudging you towards the universal testing protocol. If you get to that place, you’ll have a lot more time to spend researching the Internet of Bio-Nano Things, of which the images below are phase one.
Oehler: Jabs, Autonotoms and Nanotransceivers
Although it is getting more scary by the post, we must face the truth.
…….
If you have a simpler yet logical explanation for a seemingly insane break-neck administration of untested and harmful substances that actually make the Covid-19 worse, into EVERY human on a global scale and on a continuous, as we can now see, basis, be my guest.
Other Quotes of the Week:
Greenwald: Having unelected tech oligarchs ban duly elected members of Congress - or even the sitting President - from using their massive platforms is dystopian. Remember how many world leaders warned that FB & Twitter's banning of Trump was a threat to democracy.
… US liberals don't realize what a rogue and authoritarian faction they are because their media outlets keep all dissent from them.
… Even as their Party and leaders are overwhelmingly funded by large corporations, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, Democrats and liberals still like to posture as opponents of corporate power, yet they crave having unelected tech executives control and police political discourse.
Long Reads / Big Thoughts:
***** Eisenstein: Not an Essay, A Letter
I began 2021 with a declaration that I was going to turn away from writing essays and work on a screenplay instead. I noted a congealing of the body politic into mutually non-communicating reality bubbles. When there is no agreement about what is a valid source of fact, persuasion cannot bridge the divide. Besides, as the saying goes, you cannot reason someone out of a belief they didn’t reason themselves into to begin with. I was fed up and wanted to try something else. Or so I told my readers. And so I told myself.
You can’t argue with a story, I said. Stories slip beneath logic-garbed psychological defenses to connect people with truths prior to reason. I still believe that, and in fact I have been working on some screenplays for short films. However, as you may have noticed, I kept writing essays, more this year than ever. Why? Well, there were some hidden motives behind my impulse to stop. As these cleared, I turned toward writing essays again.
First, I had hit a wall of despair. I have been writing about the Technological Program of control and its political dimensions at least since The Ascent of Humanity, which I wrote from 2003-2006. That book even has a section entitled “The War on Germs.” It seemed to me that my life’s work was an abject failure that did nothing to stop the calamity. To continue writing that sort of thing seemed at the time about as useful as unfolding a parasol against a hurricane.
A second hidden motive was fear. I sensed danger: the danger of the mob, mass formation, totalitarianism. An instinct told me to keep my head down, to be canny, to work on a level that the enforcers would not easily recognize as subversive. This is what writers and artists did in the Communist Block, and what enslaved Africans did in the old South. They would encode their rebellion in art, songs, and stories, making it unrecognizable to their oppressors, to keep the flame of sanity burning. There is no shame in that.
However, after some months of despondency and the inner work that accompanies it, I also recognized that the current situation is not like it was in the antebellum South or the Communist block. Those pushing a techno-medical-totalitarian program are nowhere near to consolidating power to the extent of the Soviet Communists, the slave-owning class, the Nazi Party, or the medieval Catholic Church. Similar forces are at work—dehumanization, scapegoating, ideologies of control—but there is still time to turn the tide. Vocal dissent does not mean certain death.
Something else was operating in me besides the prudent instinct to display in-group attitudes as a safeguard against mob victimization. Lots of things in fact. Desire for approval. Wanting to keep both mom and dad happy. Aversion to conflict. Unwillingness to upset people. And a toxic self-doubt that arose from discounting my direct experiences and not trusting my gut feelings. These are some of the things that became visible to me over 2021. So I resumed speaking out against Covid orthodoxy after a hiatus of half a year.
The feeling of futility revisits me still. When people send me angry letters privately or denounce me publicly, I feel a pain bigger than the sting of personal rejection. It is the enervating ache of futility. I never wanted to take sides, because underneath this all is the ancient pattern of dehumanization, the categorizing of human beings into the good and the bad, the worthy and the unworthy, the deserving and the undeserving, the smart and the dumb, the valid and the deplorable. How can I speak out against practices that horrify me without othering those who support those practices? How can I affirm the sanity of the countercultural minority who see things as I do, without implying the insanity of those who do not? It is no solution to say something like, “You’ve been wrong and stood by in complicity with policies that have caused huge suffering, but that’s OK because we all make mistakes and God still loves you.’ How patronizing. It reminds me of a bumper sticker: “Jesus loves you. Everyone else thinks you’re an asshole.”
….
I don’t have an easy solution. We are in quite a mess. All I can do is to connect and reconnect to a truth beneath our differences, the truth that we are all brother and sisters, that we are each life itself, miraculous
Farber: The Passion Of Peter Duesberg
How Anthony Fauci And His AIDS Industry Sacrificed One Of America's Greatest Cancer Scientists [Chapter One]
If Duesberg’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he has been branded in mainstream media as the virologist who is wrong about HIV. His name entered the popular culture in the late 1980s pre-stamped with wrongness. You knew he was wrong before you knew what he had said in the first place. It wasn’t just that he was wrong, he was wrong to have even posed the question about which he was declared spectacularly wrong. He was wrong to have created an air-pocket for the public in which to even think about whether the HIV-AIDS hypothesis was right or wrong, because prior to him no such space existed, certainly no language. And this was his real crime.
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Duesberg, who discovered the first so-called onco-gene and mapped the genetic structure of ‘retroviruses,’ has argued since 1987 that HIV is not pathogenic, ie not capable of killing cells, ie not the cause of AIDS, either in the industrialized world or the Third World. His case is amply documented, and by now familiar. This is not a “debate”—it is a divided earth between two sets of conclusions reached by looking at the same data.
The cadre of scientists who signed a petition in 1991 stating they agreed with Duesberg and wanted the case re-opened included three Nobel Laureates, and up to 600 PhDs. Still, the standard paragraph in any article you’ll ever read about Duesberg will say that nobody agrees with Duesberg and that he as been “totally refuted,” “totally discredited, and even “disgraced.”
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“Doesn’t the book demonstrate very clearly that scientifically, nothing happened between 1994 and 2003? Zero. Absolutely nothing except one wrong epidemiological prediction after another, one failed poisonous drug after another. 0.000.000 cured. No vaccine, or even a fake vaccine. It’s a total failure. We’ve turned virology inside out and upside down to accommodate this bullshit hypothesis for 17 years now. It’s enough. It’s over.”
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“There is not a word in my book that calls Peter a good scientist, a bad scientist, a mediocre scientist, a great scientist or a brilliant scientist. What I have said is that he is a classical scientist. A classical molecular biologist. All he is interested in is rigorously testing dueling hypothesis. The twin pillars, AIDS and Oncogenes, both are crumbling because of the questions Peter Duesberg put into motion..”
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Duesberg has revived, honed, and formalized a new theory of cancer causation that was first articulated in 1914, by a fellow German. It is called the Aneuploidy Theory of cancer, and it posits that the cellular catastrophe that is cancer is caused not by a series of genetic mutations, as old dogma holds, but by a misfiring earlier on the timeline, in the critical moment that chromosomes divide, ie the moment of speciation.
Duesberg picked up on the discovery first made by German biologist Theodor Boveri in 1914—that all cancers have chromosomal abnormalities. The numbers of chromosomes in the cell are way off, first of all, and the chromosomes are broken, enlarged, and fused together as though mashed by faulty machinery.
Duesberg has provided a series of experiments, functional evidence, to back up his new hypothesis, placing aneuploidy at the center of the drama, and seeking to discard the role of mutant genes, for which he says there exists no functional proof of causation. Many cancer researchers are willing to follow him up to the point where here discards the mutant gene theory, arguing that both are an important part of the picture. But Duesberg, despite being the discoverer of the first so-called onco-gene in 1970, has been arguing since the early 1980s that mutant genes don’t cause cancer, and nor do retroviruses. The 2003 article in Scientific American titled “The Roots Of Cancer” put German biologist Theodor Boveri and Peter Duesberg as bookends on their timeline of a near-century long search for the genetic roots of cancer.
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