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Saturday, January 8, 2022

2022-01-08

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

Regular Fare:


To prevent inflation after World War II, America’s leading economists recommended strategic price controls. Is there a case for doing so today, too?

commenting in response:

....... Indeed, we could also claim, as mainstream economists do, that wage rises cause rising inflation because companies have to raise prices to sustain profitability.  But there is no causal or empirical validity for this.

.... So when Weber (and it seems MMT-guru Stephanie Kelton) cite the example of successful price controls in Communist China in its early years, they are comparing apples with pears.  Price controls won’t work to get inflation down without causing a recession in an economy dominated by the capitalist mode of production.  Squeezing profits across the board by such measures will only lead lower investment and production growth.

... And they are right to worry that ‘austerity’ is coming back. See this piece by Chicago economist, John Cochrane that blames inflation on excessive government spending.

Already even under ‘profligate’ Biden, the government is set to take more out of the economy than it is injecting into it. According to the Congressional Budget Office, federal government spending is set to decline by 7% on average up to 2026 compared with 2021 levels while tax revenues are expected to rise by 25%. The US federal budget deficit will be halved in 2022 and kept down for the following years. So no Keynesian-style fiscal stimulus is planned – on the contrary. The graph below shows that US fiscal policy is no longer stimulating aggregate demand.

... In my view, the current high inflation rates are likely to be ‘transitory’ because during 2022 growth in output, investment and productivity will probably start to drop back to ‘long depression’ rates.  That will mean that inflation will also subside, although still be higher than pre-pandemic.  Price controls will be ignored.



... I really should say more, but the spectacle of the Fed having engaged in mission creep and becoming the self-assigned regulator of the economy is now coming to its logical and sorry conclusion. In a system where economists have long been the only social scientists with a seat at the policy table, those experts have done a poor job of devising policies that will create stability, to the extent that can be achieved in a dynamic environment, and a reasonable level of growth. Of course many will now question the legitimacy of growth as an aim given global warming and the need to marshal resources better, but we’ll put that to the side.

It has been convenient for politicians to fob responsibility for economic stewardship to a typically oracular Fed and no do simple-minded things like emphasize economic stabilizers, as in programs that are countercyclical, where payments (economic stimulus!) rises when times are bad and fall when activity rebounds. But the wee problem is the most effective programs will target citizens with a high marginal propensity to spend, as in the low income, and in America, we hate the poor.



Benjamin Norton from Moderate Rebels interviews Dr. Michael Hudson.  The interview is more wide-ranging than the title suggests but, with razor-sharp intellect, Dr. Hudson breaks open the reason for today’s inflationary cycles.  Dr. Hudson again looks at the roots of de-dollarization, the new financial system, China’s purported slow-down, and common prosperity policy being implemented now.






.... 

Consumers splurged as they bought those things they couldn’t buy during lockdowns. Not only did they travel and go out to dinner, but some bought cars and houses and other big-ticket items. It was as if many consumers had a mid-life crisis simultaneously.

Most of that pent-up demand is quickly diminishing. The bills from those spending sprees are mounting, and life is slowly becoming more normal by the day. This additional source of spending is fading quickly.


Yarvin: Stagflation and neo-chartalism

If there is any rule of literary economics I have learned, it is that Friedrich List, the 19th-century German neo-mercantilist, got it right when he said that Adam Smith (his classical-liberal foil) was right about everything—given Adam Smith’s assumptions.

Both List and Smith were right about everything. Both the Austrian School and the neo-chartalist school (“Modern Monetary Theory,” the most godawful branding since “DuckDuckGo”) are right about everything—given their assumptions.

(It may be too much to say that legitimate “macroeconomists,” with their weird, mid-20th-century algebraic models of a mid-20th-century industrial economy, are right. We must concede the possibility that they used to be right—for the mid-20th-century.)

...

Who can forget the warning of Bulgakov’s cat, in “The Master and Margarita,” that foreign currency can get moldy under the floorboards? Every regime that finds it really has to reap the wealth of its serfs finds this “Master and Margarita Theory.”

.........

..... Stagflation is a condition of high consumer-price inflation and low labor demand. Stagflation is the future. We must bow to our new overlord, stagflation.

... Stagflation is the near and medium future because the covid boom is unsustainable, for two reasons. One, covid is no longer a palpable emergency and will find it harder and harder to justify subsidies. Two, the Fed has pushed the dilution handle so hard that serious price inflation is actually happening.

...

The system, dependent on constant appreciation, is highly sensitive to a depreciative shock. Eventually this shock, a recession or depression, will elicit a political response and the whole cycle will repeat. A smart person might even be able to time it.

But the recession may not affect the causes of inflation as much as one might hope—since these causes are not the wages paid to a fully-employed domestic labor army, but global imbalances in the supply of commodities and other goods with inelastic supply (for the moment, even chips). An inflationary recession is stagflation.

So America can have huge armies of working-age people who have no idea what to do with their lives, while prices for both capital (especially houses in Malibu) and goods (whether made in China, or sucked out of the sand in Kuwait) go up and up and up. Also, New York is joining San Francisco in the ‘70s nostalgia trip. Good times!




I have long argued that trying to apply a mainstream macroeconomics (New Keynesian) framework to the Japanese situation yields nonsensical predictions about rising interest rates, accelerating inflation, rising bond yields and government insolvency. Nothing like that scenario has emerged since Japan has introduced economic policies that ran counter to the mainstream consensus since the 1990s. Japan demonstrates key Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) principles and those that seek to deny that are really forced to invent a parallel-universe version of MMT to make their case. That version is meaningless. In Part 2, we extend that analysis to consider trade transactions, the fear of inflation, and the argument that the current generation are selfishly leaving their children higher tax burdens while we party on.



Homer-Dixon: The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare

in response, 

... Can you think of anything more pathetic? A committee!

......

America is not a trustworthy country, even by the admittedly sleazy standards of international relations. It is becoming less and less trustworthy. Canada is rich with resource, and especially water. This means we could easy re-industrialize if we simply accepted that it is in our interest to do so, rather than be a completely dependent and defenseless satrapy.



QOTW:

Lawson Steele, via Doomberg: To me, left unchecked, the price of carbon goes to infinity.

Kristine Mattis, via Jesse: This elite-generated social control maintains the status quo because the status quo benefits and validates those who created and sit atop it.  People rise to prominence when they parrot the orthodoxy rather than critically analyze it.   Real change in politics or society cannot occur under the orthodoxy because if it did, it would threaten the legitimacy of the professional class and all of the systems that helped them achieve their status.



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




Bubble Fare:

Risk Bubbles Are Deflating Everywhere, Some Market Watchers Say


Bubble Quotes Of The Week:

Gordon: The reality is central bankers are always reacting.  And much of what they do is merely an attempt to cleanup messes of their own making.


We have reached a juncture now wherein obligatory false optimism has merged with the pathology of denial. The best thing I can say about today's bullish financial pundits is that they are useless.

 


Welsh: Again, On Omicron & “Just give up and let everyone get it”

...... Covid has been a practice run for when climate change starts really hitting. It shows which societies are able to respond to a collective challenge.

Most of our societies have failed and because climate change, like Covid, is a world problem, that a few societies haven’t failed is unlikely to matter much, even to them. They’ll just stay together under pressure longer than we will.


(not just) for the ESG crowd:

and.



Other Fare:

To say we are the products of our biology, as the great scientist EO Wilson did, can’t be right-wing: it is simply the truth

.... Last week EO Wilson died, and the world lost one of its leading scientists. The professor had started by studying fire ants and his knowledge of ants was peerless. But he had broadened as he had aged and had begun to consider human beings. Humans are animals too, after all, so our social organisation, our behaviour, our hierarchies, our urges will, to some extent at least, be the product of our biology.

This, the foundation stone of sociobiology, seems an unremarkable observation, but it provoked a remarkable reaction. Marxists and radicals, well represented in American universities, saw it not as a scientific hypothesis but as a political attack. Their argument was that human behaviour was overwhelmingly the product of social and economic organisation. Humans were, in essence, a blank slate, one very much like another. If Wilson was right, then this idea was wrong. If Wilson was right, societies were going to be harder to change. If Wilson was right, people might not come out equal even with all the social engineering in the world. So Wilson simply couldn’t be allowed to be right.

The weapon of choice in the battle to take down sociobiology was the accusation of racism. ...

...

As we develop our capacity to study our genes we are going to learn more about human nature. We must be allowed to talk about that, even if the things we discover unsettle political activists and the orthodoxy they have adopted. We must defend good science against bad politics.

If the controversy over EO Wilson teaches us that, than the great scientist will have rendered us one final service.
 
 
Dawkins: Race Is a Spectrum. Sex Is Pretty Damn Binary.





Pics [and old vid] of the Week:

Best of 2021: Top 50 Photographs From Around the World 
 
 
Romanian ski instructor has a new member try to join his group.





Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

Exposing the Fraudulence of Elon Musk and Tesla



***** Tara Henley: Speaking Freely

Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 

... Those of us on the inside know just how swiftly — and how dramatically — the politics of the public broadcaster have shifted.

It used to be that I was the one furthest to the left in any newsroom, occasionally causing strain in story meetings with my views on issues like the housing crisis. I am now easily the most conservative, frequently sparking tension by questioning identity politics. This happened in the span of about 18 months. My own politics did not change.

To work at the CBC in the current climate is to embrace cognitive dissonance and to abandon journalistic integrity.

...

To work at the CBC is to submit to job interviews that are not about qualifications or experience — but instead demand the parroting of orthodoxies, the demonstration of fealty to dogma.

... It is to become less adversarial to government and corporations and more hostile to ordinary people with ideas that Twitter doesn’t like.

... It is to consent to the idea that a growing list of subjects are off the table, that dialogue itself can be harmful. That the big issues of our time are all already settled.

It is to capitulate to certainty, to shut down critical thinking, to stamp out curiosity. To keep one’s mouth shut, to not ask questions, to not rock the boat.

This, while the world burns.



Unsustainability / Climate Chaos / Collapse Fare:

Robinson: The Media’s Climate Coverage Is Indefensible

Members of the press think they’re doing a good job reporting on climate change. They need to read their own publications.




What snowflakes and physics can teach us about the economy, civilisation and crisis.

According to the laws of physics, the economy can only sustain itself by growing. So how bound are we by the laws of thermodynamics?

Professor Tim Garrett, atmosphere scientist at the University of Utah, argues we’re completely bound by those laws. He has modelled how the behaviour of snowflakes and clouds can be used to predict energy consumption and GDP, bridging the gap between economic theory and the natural world.

Tim’s research is nothing short of fascinating; this is a mind-bending hour you won’t regret. Listen to the episode here or catch it on Apple or Spotify.



COVID Fare:

I am increasingly coming across too much excellent COVID-related content (with contrarian evidence-based points-of-view!!) to link to it all
Read everything by eugyppius; el gato malo; Mathew Crawford; Steve Kirsch; Jessica Rose!
Paul Alexander, Berenson, Chudov, Lyons-Weiler, Toby Rogers are also go-to mainstays; a list to which I have added Andreas Oehler, Metatron and, Julius Ruechel; Denninger worth staying on top of too for his insights, and especially his colorful language; and Norman Fenton; I will of course continue to post links to key Peter McCullough material, and Geert Vanden Bossche, and Robert Malone, and Martin Kulldorff, and Jay Bhattacharya, and Pierre Kory, and Paul Marik, and Tess Lawrie, and Brian Tyson, 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

eugyppius: Errors, Forced and Otherwise
There is nothing as revealing as their mistakes.

Institutions that have succumbed to committee government have tendencies instead of strategies. Western Corona policies reflect the diffuse, profoundly demobilised attitude of the institutions that sustain them. We might say that these are tendential rather than strategic regimes. Their policies are not machines, carefully assembled to produce a desired outcome, but instead a random assemblage of everything that a few thousand different committees managed to dream up or copy from other committees in other countries doing the same thing, all because they seem to serve the same basic end. Tendential policies will always be less than the sum of their parts.

.... 

It would be embarrassing to refute these inadequate, desperate paragraphs, and so I won’t bother. This is what somebody who doesn’t have an argument sounds like. In view of the goals of Corona containment, this is a clear unforced error:

....

Ascribing the waxing and waning of Corona to government policies rather than the seasons opened the way for governments to declare an early victory for lockdowns and retire the more burdensome aspects of the containment circus.

...

The total inability of our policies to come to terms with how Corona is actually transmitted represents a third key and revealing mistake. SARS-2 spreads like a gas. The virus particles leave your lungs suspended in very tiny droplets, and they can remain in the air for hours. Inhaling these infected aerosols is mostly how people get Corona. Aerosolised transmission was obvious from very early on; contact tracers knew it just from studying the particulars of specific outbreaks. Yet the focus on fomites and droplets just won’t go away. Obsessions of this nature might have some side benefits for the Zero Covidians, in that masks increase the cost of social interaction and keep the pandemic visible, but these must be totally swamped by the downsides of planting in the minds of millions of people a false transmission model.

...

There is a lot to learn from mistakes like these, but the biggest lesson is about the incredible rank-and-file inertia driving Corona containment policies: Hundreds of thousands of poorly informed dim people in the middle bureaucracy bought very hard into the propaganda they helped create, and they now believe that vaccines, not recovery, are the only solution to Corona .... There is no turning off or redirecting or adding nuance to a broadly distributed consensus like this, which just marches on and on, oblivious to everything.

...

Omicron is qualitatively different from all prior SARS-2 lineages, and it’s encouraging that establishment mouthpieces have been open about this so far. If they aren’t able to take this exit, they will have to wait for the ideological fervour of the Corona enthusiasts and the vaccinators to subside, and that could take a very long time.


eugyppius: Wendepunkt

... It is a commonplace observation, but a true one: Since the vaccines began to fail in August, the vaccinators have been progressing through the proverbial five stages of grief. They spent a lot of time in denial, before becoming very angry and punitive. Then they began bargaining, hoping that SARS-2 would go away after four doses, or after five, with just the right dosing intervals, with a return to double masking, with child vaccinations. Now they appear to be drifting finally into depression and acceptance. They have realised, not a second too soon, that there is nothing to be done.

Omicron is a highly contagious variant with immune escape features. The vaccinators can vaccinate all they want, but their vaccines will not stop the waves of infection to come. A lot of the hyperbolic rhetoric about Corona was put about in the hopes that the most everyone wouldn’t be infected. They thought they could terrify people for a few years, vaccinate them, and harvest their gratitude for saving them from the worst respiratory virus since SARS. Now, though, it it is clear that everyone will have personal experience with Corona infection, whether or not they are vaccinated. This will destroy popular faith in measures, it will erode confidence in the vaccines, and it will do away with fear of the virus. Maybe a few people somewhere will still support containment, after two years of heavy restrictions, mandated vaccinations, and personal experience with infection, but I doubt there will be very many of them. It’s the beginning of the end.




... The chart below shows this ebb and flow of weekly all-cause mortality in Canada (Covid deaths are shown in purple). The past two years do not stand out from previous years despite the disappearance of the flu. The two winter Covid peaks are clearly within the same order of magnitude as previous bad flu seasons, very similar to the 2018/2019 or the 2015/2016 winter flu seasons. Covid displaced influenza and is now playing the role of "old man's friend". 

The raw Covid numbers (30,113 deaths in Canada as of December 22nd) would seem to contradict this. In a normal year between 6,000 and 8,000 people die of influenza or pneumonia in Canada, so we should only have seen approximately 14,000 Covid deaths during the pandemic if it were a true 1:1 replacement. But the higher Covid numbers are largely a product of PCR testing. Since Covid doesn't cure cancer or heart disease, the drops in heart disease, cancer, and other causes of death seen on the chart during the pandemic period are likely accounting errors caused by misattribution because any death with a positive PCR test was counted as a Covid death even if it was someone in a palliative care unit dying of cancer.

In 2018 no-one would have run a PCR test to look for influenza or rhinovirus or coronavirus in a long-term care patient dying of cancer, heart disease, dementia, or Alzheimer's, even if respiratory viruses did infect these patients as "old man's friend" in their final days of life. But in 2020 and 2021 that is precisely what is happening with Covid PCR tests, leading to a mass overcounting of Covid as the cause of death. Some Covid deaths really were caused by Covid, just as influenza and other respiratory viruses are the direct cause of some deaths every year, but Covid deaths were dramatically overinflated because of these misleading accounting practices.  

....

Viral Interference Through Revving up the Immune System

Remarkably, viral interference isn't just restricted to a single family of viruses. Even before Covid showed up it was well known that there is also viral interference between completely different viruses, such as between rhinoviruses (common cold) and influenza. This viral interference between unrelated viruses has everything to do with the different layers of our immune systems, which work in very different ways.

The cross-reactive immunity discussed in the previous section is a product of the adaptive immune system, which depends on previous exposure to teach the immune system how to recognize and combat future infections caused by a specific virus. Cross-reactive antibodies are a learned (trained) immune response. But those specialized antibodies cannot recognize and neutralize entirely different families of viruses.

But this is where the other part of the immune system comes in: the innate (non-specific) mucosal immune system. The mucosal immune system is the largest component of our immune system. It has both an adaptive and an innate component - it is this innate component of non-specific antibodies that provides the key to the puzzle. Rather than relying on a specialized learned response, the innate mucosal immune system produces non-specific antibodies that attack and neutralize any invader that comes through the door - that's what makes it effective as a rapid response first responder. The innate mucosal immune system is not as powerful/specialized as the adaptive immune system, but it is the body's first line of defense against any germ that tries to creep up your nostrils. The much slower reacting adaptive immune system is designed to get involved as the innate non-specialized mucosal system gets increasingly overwhelmed. And here's where things get interesting...

...
...

Sweden: The Wisdom of Not Locking Down Proves Itself. Even Delta Had No Teeth

Sweden never imposed any lockdowns, so the virus was as free to spread in Sweden as among Iowa's white-tailed deer population. Instead, Sweden followed the WHO's 2019 pandemic planning guideline, which every other Western nation ignored. And so, it should surprise no-one that the flu returned to Sweden long before any other Western nation. After such a long absence, the immunity debt to flu is causing a particularly large influenza season.  

....

And yet, deaths in Sweden have remained flat since late February of 2021, before vaccination even began. There was no reason to vaccinate anyone in Sweden - Sweden ended its pandemic with natural immunity before vaccination began.

....

Germany Proves Low Natural Immunity (Even with High Vaccination Rates) Is a Recipe for More Dying

By contrast, Sweden's close neighbor Germany did go down the lockdown path and consequently still has a very low level of natural immunity in its population (as of November 24th, 2021) despite being over 70% vaccinated as of December 24th, 2021. Like in Sweden, Omicron has yet to get a proper toehold. Most infections during the current wave are from the Delta variant. 

.....

Canada: A Test Case for Omicron on a Population with Low Natural Immunity. Is Omicron Still Mild in a Population Without Antibodies?

The flu has already returned to some (but not all) of Canada's southern neighbors. In places like Florida, Wisconsin, Montana, and Pennsylvania where the flu has returned, the pandemic is likely finished, just like in Sweden. 

Canada is not so lucky. It did everything it could to prevent the virus from spreading by imposing strict lockdowns and border closures. New Zealand lite. In all provinces. So, like Germany, it still has very low antibody levels; at the start of the vaccination campaign in January/February of 2021, a meagre 2.5% to 4% of Canadians had antibodies against Covid reflecting Canada's harsh rules. That number will be much higher by now, so Canada is not quite in New Zealand's island situation - the virus is here and circulating - but considering how strict Canada's authoritarian lockdown regime has been it is also unlikely that Canadian antibody levels are anywhere near levels seen in South Africa, Brazil, Sweden, or Florida.

And, as you would expect with such low natural immunity to Covid, the flu is still missing.
 
...

That's the context you won't hear on the 6 o'clock news. Scary waves on a graph lose their ominous look when there's a bit of context. These hospitalization "waves" are not (and never were) big enough to be considered waves. In the great scheme of things, these hospitalizations are tiny ripples. Hospitals were never at risk of being overwhelmed by Covid. They are being crippled by hysteria and by firing unvaccinated health care workers who are standing up for their individual bodily autonomy, as guaranteed by our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

And if these hospitalization statistics weren't scandalous enough, Ontario's Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Kieran Moore, has even confirmed that in some hospitals, 50% of Covid hospitalizations aren't actually people in hospital for Covid, they are incidental findings - a positive Covid test in a patient being treated for something else completely unrelated to Covid.

....

The take-home lesson from this deep dive is that lockdowns and vaccines didn't make a shred of difference to Covid outcomes, even as they delayed acquiring natural immunity and caused endless unnecessary misery. Meanwhile, the lifestyle differences that could have dramatically reduced the individual risk of severe outcomes for the vulnerable were completely ignored in favor of a hysterical obsession with vaccines, PCR tests, and suffocating social controls.

Once again, central planning has been exposed as a false god. It's time to stop living in fear; end this authoritarian control over our lives; end the universal vaccine rollout; relegate lockdowns to the dustbin of history; restore individual freedom, rekindle community interaction; get lots of exercise, good food, and sunshine; and live a normal life. At worst, we'll thrive like Sweden. At best, we'll set an example that will spread to other countries to help reverse the misery, starvation, and mental health issues have been imposed on so many people by the government over the course of this central planning experiment. Valuing life begins by respecting the individual autonomy of every single human being. 




A major Indiana-based insurance company reports unprecedented 40 percent death-rate increases industry-wide among working-age Americans in 2021 compared to pre-pandemic data.





A huge new study has found the risk of serious heart problems called myocarditis in men under 40 soars with each dose of a Covid mRNA vaccine – and is sharply higher than the risk from a coronavirus infection itself. The findings call into sharp question the efforts by American colleges and universities to make their students receive booster shots before returning to school this January – especially since other studies have shown that the risk of post-vaccine myocarditis is concentrated not merely in men under 40 but in those aged 16-25. 



Empirical analysis of symptomatic COVID and COVID deaths in England reveals no positive impact of any interventions but 100% concurrency between vaccinations and COVID "outbreaks" in late 2021.

........

Post Script
As usual, I am less pondering three possible answers to the question why the public health authorities are not doing this analysis:
  • They don’t have the skills - incompetence;
  • They don’t have the interest - misfeasance;
  • They have but didn’t like what it showed - malfeasance.
Have I missed anything?

To casually dismiss these findings as spurious correlations or coincidences would also be inappropriate given that these relationships appear very frequently in the majority of countries around the world in both my own numerous analyses and others10.



** (lots more charts there than here) ** Smalley: The COVID "cure" is worse than the disease.

Some things are indisputable. Death is one of them.

It is an undeniable, incontrovertible fact that deaths in England in 2021 are higher than 2020 (Figure 1). 2020 was the year that COVID, the “deadliest pandemic since the Spanish flu”1, hit our shores. Allegedly, it warranted an unprecedented grant of power to politicians and their small, unelected group of “experts”, to dictate every facet of our daily life in an attempt to defeat it.

2021 was the aftermath where we ended up with the collateral harm caused by the measures implemented by the government to thwart the virus.

Unfortunately, we have already demonstrated that those measures played no part whatsoever in mitigating transmission or death2. So, we’re just left with a comparison between who the virus killed and who the government killed. On face value, it looks like the government has won and we’ve only had one year so far.

...



Even so, the rise in 2021 is substantial. Whether we look at the vaccine again for this or consider the impact of the other interventions (denial of healthcare, increased stress, etc.) is moot. They are all government policy.

...

The cure is already worse than the disease. The cure is a virus also known as totalitarian government. ... If you don’t want your children to grow up in a miserable, fascist state or worse still die in it, I suggest you start paying more attention to the data and less to the propaganda on the television. The government is not your friend and does not have your best interests at heart.



... Basically, he says the vaccines harm people and shouldn’t be mandated. He calls out experts who look the other way on these harms.

I reproduce it here just for the record. It shows that there are experts (who have no conflicts of interest) who are willing to speak out.

Retired experts are the most honest since there is much less fear of retribution.
 



COVID hospitalizations and deaths throughout this pandemic have been inaccurately reported. This has been made clear by government health officials throughout the pandemic in multiple regions across the planet. One of them is in Ontario, Canada.

Dr. Kieran Moore, Ontario’s chief medical officer, reaffirmed this once again in a press conference held at the end of December. She stated that Ontario’s daily reported COVID hospitalization numbers haven’t been telling the fully story.

She confirmed that approximately 50% of COVID hospitalizations represent people who aren’t actually there suffering from COVID, but have gone to the hospital with something else, like a broken leg, and just happened to test positive. The Toronto Sun was one of the few media outlets to emphasize this.







This includes balance issues and dizziness and tinnitus.

First of all, I want to start with a background in Tinnitus because it is a commonly reported adverse event in the context of COVID-19 injectable products. Now it might surprise you guys (it surprised me) to know that Tinnitus is not a disease in and of itself - it is an indication that something is wrong with the auditory system that involves not only the ear, but the auditory nerve (also known as the Vestibulocochlear nerve) and the brain. This nerve is responsible for balance and hearing. Like the eyes, the ears can’t really function properly without this gorgeous sense-translator that we know as the brain. The ear bone’s connected to the rib bone. I mean the, brain bone. I mean…

.... 49% of the reports were made immediately and 67% were made within 24 hours of the injection date.

Ugh. I don’t know. What can I say. This is insane.



Lyons-Weiler: Simple Math Says Boosters Won't Be Tolerated

ACIP recently voted to recommend that 12- to 17-years olds “should” boost every five months. Based on no data for that age group, of course. So let’s turn to logic and reason.

Most 12- to 17-year olds will likely live to about 80 years old. That’s 960 months. That means boosting every five months for life means 192 boosters.

If you’re vaccinating and boosting, are you going to accept 192 boosters AND chronic risk of COVID? Especially since the vaccine now appears to make infection more likely? Do you see now that you bought your kool-aid from the wrong stand?




why the propensity to panic at just the wrong time makes humans into superstitious rubes that will do the wrong thing and think that it worked

..... your doctor could give you tetracycline or a lollipop, it’s going to have about the same effect on your flu. no matter what happens, you’ll be pretty much over it in 2 more days. neither will outperform chicken soup and some more netflix.

you doctor prescribes it because if he doesn’t, you’ll go find one who will because you’re sick and “go home, rest, get plenty of fluids” is not an answer you want. you want a fix. you want a solution, even if it’s snake oil.

but, because of the timing, you’re going to THINK that whatever they gave you worked. you have no control group, no counter-example. your doctor could give you a garlic necklace to wear and 3 days later you’d be swearing it cured you. that’s just how human pattern association works.

monkey see, monkey attribute. 

so lets talk about covid policy:

covid policy is these two things crashing into one another.

it’s the mass psychology of the stock market colliding with the epidemiological gompertz pattern of viral spread and attenuation and just as in the other cases, it tends to get worst right before it starts getting better. 

......

it’s already ending. masks are not going to work. they’re a talisman and a form of public health performance art cosplay. the evidence for this is literally overwhelming and was knowable, has been proven time and time again for covid, and has been known for 100 years.

the WHO knew it in 2019. masks cannot even stop flu, and flu is far less aerosol than covid. a 150nm virion takes weeks to fall to the floor in still air. tell me again how waiting to sit down to unmask makes one iota of difference…

US standing pandemic guidelines expressed it.

they are not source protection.

they do not work in schools.

even the feckless fauci knew it once upon a time.

and no, N95’s are no different.

so why do we keep doing it?

it’s because masks are the low energy panic reflex. lockdowns were too severe to sustain. the damage was too great and not even the fear raddled leaders could maintain them or had the inclination to try again.

but masks are a lesser ask. they are highly visible, performative, require personal action, and provide visible evidence of government governing and public health “doing something.”

but it’s all sugar pills. it will do nothing to stop covid. it is, quite literally, a wubbie in a thunderstorm. 

....

but none of this is doing anything, never did, and never could.

there is no place in the world that lockdowns, mask ups, or even widespread vaccine mandates have stopped or altered the gompertz curves here.

“virus gonna virus.”

look, i’m sorry, we all wish there was some policy that really worked, some silver bullet to save the day, but we do not always get what we want and at a certain point, we need to live in reality instead of hopeful hallucination.

we simply do not have effective tools to stop a pandemic from an aerosolized respiratory coronavirus.

...

“omnicold” is not a reason to shut down the world or limit your lives.

it’s a risk level humans have dealt with every cold and flu season for 200 years.

...

we’re literally mistaking the timing of the human panic reflex for the efficacy of non-pharma interventions against respiratory diseases and this reflex looks increasingly ingrained and autonomic.

this cycle must be broken.



Roche: When You Think They Can’t Get Any Stupider, You Are Wrong

Our Governor is a moron, ineducable, a blizzard of lies and misinformation, a coward, afraid of the truth, focussed on messaging and treating the public like they are as dumb as he is, and completely unwilling to acknowledge or take responsibility for his massive failures and his previous lies. 50,000 Minnesotans will die even if we lockdown. A couple of weeks and we will flatten the curve. Wear a mask and this will all be over. Get vaccinated and this will all be over. Get vaccinated and you won’t have to wear a mask. Now it is get tested and this will all be over. How long before people wake up and realize it is all lies, the IB has no clue what is going on or what a reasonable response would be.

Now he is opening even more testing sites, doing even more testing, all of people who think they may have the Omicron variant, all of people with no real symptoms, basically a winter cold. So we will have record numbers of cases that mean nothing, we will have children miss school; we will have people miss work; it will disrupt the economy again; people will seek health care they don’t need; putting even more pressure on over-burdened health resources because we are firing people who won’t get vaccinated; people will be unduly anxious, and on and on. There literally could not be a stupider policy.

And of course we will have massive numbers of false and low positives; we will have no idea who is actually sick or infectious; and people will repeatedly take tests and test positive, because like all coronaviruses, Omicron will always be there and will be in your nose or upper respiratory tract a lot of the time. So what? Look at what is happening with hospitalizations. Be grateful that CV-19 appears to be coming round to a seasonal coronavirus with minimal morbidity. This is likely exactly how we got the other four seasonal coronaviruses. They started out as serious epidemics, they ran through the population, adaptive immunity arose, the virus came to a truce with humanity–I get to keep infecting you and replicating, but I won’t do much damage.

I really cannot believe how absolutely insane our leaders are.
 


Links to Mask Studies

Several people asked for the links to the papers I mentioned in the mask op-ed. Here they are with a couple of others and some important additional observations.

Here is the UK Study on virus persistance on various surfaces. (UK Study)

And while I was looking for that I found a bonus paper on the same topic. (Medrxiv Paper)

The modeling face mask particle flows study. (AIP Paper)

And a bonus mannequin study from Japan. (ASM Paper)

If you do a citation search for research citing these papers you will find more. What you will really learn is that, as with most things, the notion that we understand how masks work, much less if they do, is bullshit. Just more garbage science masquerading as expertise. People can find all kinds of crappy research, or in the case of masking against CV-19, just make up bad research, to support anything they want. If you aren’t skeptical and questioning, and don’t understand statistics and choices in experimental design and the limits of those choices, you are way too accepting of the supposed objective virtue of science. In the US today, that doesn’t exist, it has been completely compromised by ideological dogma and rigidity. Anyone who questions that is like Galileo subjected to the inquisition. Now the ideological and political ends are all that matter,..



... I don’t believe I can find a different and more persuasive way to say what has repeatedly been said and is so painfully, painfully obvious.  We can’t defeat CV-19.  It doesn’t care about defeating us, it doesn’t care about being defeated, it doesn’t care about anything, it has one purpose–to replicate.  It will find a way to do that and will transform itself in whatever manner needed for that purpose.  Do we really not yet accept this?  Do we really not understand that our vain and pointless suppression attempts have actually made the consequences of the epidemic worse?  Can we not hit pause and reconsider our approach?



COVID Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

Macron: “I am not about pissing off the French people. But as for the non-vaccinated, I really want to piss them off. And we will continue to do this, to the end. This is the strategy.”... “We are putting pressure on the unvaccinated by limiting, as much as possible, their access to activities in social life.”
 
 
via Rigger: If you believe the government cares about health then you'll be bewildered about their decisions. If you believe the government are stark raving psychopaths with an insatiable lust for control, it all makes sense.
 
 
IM: COVID policy has become a religious belief for a significant portion of the public. It’s the only explanation that makes sense. There is no scientific, rational justification for a continued belief that “interventions” matter. All over the world, masks and vaccine passports are failing on an unprecedented scale. How can anyone still believe they work?


Toby: Covid is a replay of the 2008 global financial crisis but now the *rights to your body* are the asset that that has been bundled and sold off to global investors.
 

3 similar observations:

1. Tucker: Yesterday morning I listened to the oral arguments in the case of the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates as enforced by OSHA. It was a demoralizing experience. ... It was my first time hearing oral arguments in the Supreme Court. I might have thought that facts on the ground would actually matter to people who are holding the fate of human liberty in their hands. I might have thought that they would be getting their information from somewhere other than their political intuition, mixed with wildly inaccurate claims

2. Toby: I listened to the oral arguments this morning in connection with the OSHA vaccine mandate case. I found the whole experience depressing to the point where it is difficult to even write about it without losing my mind. Even if we win and this totalitarian government overreach is struck down, I fear for the future of our country.

3. Quackenboss: Can we talk about what the hell happened today with oral arguments on Biden’s vaccine mandates before the Supremes? If ever there was any respect for the office simply because of their career accomplishments and seriousness of the position, it’s all gone up in smoke now.


Risch: Fauci [..] not only isn’t trained in public health but has interests that do not align with the public health interests of the United States


FL Surgeon General Dr. Ladapo: “This idea that you could stop this w/vaccines was unrealistic.. Mismatch btwn policies & reality, & more ppl need to wake up to that & stop participating in this really dystopian view of public health.. It’s unhealthy, divisive & political”
 
 
Farrow: I don't know how many times, and in how many ways, people can be lied to and still pretend that everything is fine, but those who are beginning to wonder about that might consider a couple of things that would change if those "unvaccinated by choice" became vaccinated against their choice. First, no one at all would be fine, for all would be in the same leaky vaccine boat, dependent on perpetual booster shots and other such rapacious measures. Second, no one would any more have choice, for the very principle of choice would be gone.


Roche: So here is the question.  How long are you going to take this crap?
 
 
Kunstler: Lunacy is exhausting. Soon enough, even the crazed governments of Euroland and Australia will suddenly drop their lockdowns and vaccination tyrannies as reality presses on the bubbles they occupy.


eugyppius: It is obvious that we are at a turning point, even if everyone has yet to realise it – even if France is sharpening vaccine requirements, even if Italy has imposed vaccine mandates for everyone over 50, and even if Canada is for the moment determined to remain a prison state. 

 
Greer: The result is a collective frenzy being eagerly fed by a great many people. Of course it’s not surprising that the corporate media would push scare stories at full volume. Whoring out the news to sell advertising space is their stock in trade, and “if it bleeds, it leads” has taken precedence over responsible journalism since before there was responsible journalism.  Still, this isn’t limited to the media.
...
One of the ways America’s caste system played into the pandemic was that most people in the privileged classes got to work from home, instead of being laid off or made to go into work straight through the crisis the way the working classes did.  That showed a good many people in the managerial class that they can do their jobs perfectly well without the poisonous office politics and mean-spirited authoritarianism of their workplaces. Now that the pandemic is winding down, they’re scrambling around for excuses to stay out of the office a little longer.  The latest Covid variant is just another source of grist for that mill.



CO-VIDs of the Week:

Murder Inc: Joe Rogan Interview With Drug Litigation Expert John Abramson Possibly More Shocking Even Than McCullough Or Malone



Anecdotal COVID Fare:

Tragic: Double-Vaxxed 13-Year-Old Dies From “Unexplained Cardiac Arrest”



All things COVID Pushback Fare:
 

on the one hand, i don’t mean to pick on noah. he’s actually one of the good ones and i like and agree with quite a bit of what he’s written on a number of topics. but on the other, i really do, because he was one of the good ones and the good ones in the middle were supposed to fight the good fight here.

this was clearly not confined to just him. a stunning number of folks from alleged logicians and ethicists to one time lions of libertarianism all caved and crumbled and failed. noah is just a convenient exemplar for a trend that’s now taking off all through media and “opinion leaders”:

the time to change uniforms so you can pick over the battlefield with the winning side..



On January 23, 2022, over 10,000 healthcare providers will, for the first time, speak freely about the COVID vaccines. SIMULTANEOUSLY.

Mass formation can continue only so long as the authorities can censor the truth tellers.

What has allowed this nonsense to continue for so long is three-fold:

Trust in authority. People trust their doctors

Restricting the free speech of medical authorities. The 30% of doctors who have “broken the code” and realize the COVID interventions have been counter-productive have been afraid to speak out because EVERY SINGLE medical board in the country has notified doctors that if they speak out against the CDC narrative, they will have their license to practice medicine revoked. Truth and patient safety are not the criteria. It matters not that you’ve saved lives. The criteria is only whether you agree with the CDC or not. If you don’t, your career is toast. So few people are willing to speak out.

Marginalizing and censoring those who speak the truth. Truth tellers such as Robert Malone have been banned from LinkedIn and Twitter. Others such as Robert F. Kennedy, are the subject of vicious and unfair ad hominem attacks such as this one from Jake Tapper.

This creates a cycle where the public believes the narrative because all doctors support the narrative and no one in the mainstream media is challenging the narrative. Others are written off as spreaders of misinformation.



Our goal is to demand new policies to eliminate the state-sanctioned discrimination by vaccination status.

We will begin at the Washington Monument at 11:30am and end at the Lincoln Memorial where a wide range of featured guests will be waiting.

Recording artists, prominent doctors, first responders, journalists, pro athletes, and premier thought leaders will give a series of inspiring "TED talks" and musical performances.

We are not marching against the COVID vaccines, we’re marching against the government forcing these vaccines onto Americans. It’s something I hope we can all agree on.

For example:
  • We don’t even know what is inside these vials and we are being forced to take it.
  • The VAERS data shows the vaccines kill more people than they save (by 15X)
  • The vaccines suppress your immune system making you more likely to be infected
  • There is no stopping condition. If 1M people are killed by the vaccines, they won’t stop them.

The only hope is that enough Americans will have been inoculated after this bout of madness to be immune to, and deeply skeptical of, the next attempt to erode their rights.
 


COVID Corporatocracy / Idiocracy / Conspiracy Fare:


... During his viral podcast with Joe Rogan after he was banned by Twitter, [Dr. Robert] Malone explained how the global population was being manipulated into remaining in a constant state of hysterical anxiety via mass formation psychosis.

“What the heck happened to Germany in the 20s and 30s? Very intelligent, highly educated population, and they went barking mad. And how did that happen?” asked Malone.

“The answer is mass formation psychosis.”

“When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it, and then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point just like hypnosis, they literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere,” he added.



This is a story I am writing with great disgust.

It’s about the forced hospitalization of Dr. Mel Bruchet, a retired “dissident” physician in Canada who was kept in the hospital for 25 days against his will, treated like a criminal, force-medicated with anti-psychotics, and possibly had a stroke as a result of that medication.

Are we human anymore?

....

Earlier from Jessica Rose:
“Dr. Mel Bruchet is a retired Canadian physician who has recently spoken out about the above background reported still births occurring at Lions Gate Hospital in British Columbia, Canada. Dr. Daniel Nagase has also been speaking out on the subject of above background reporting of miscarriages in Canadian women.

A few days later, it has been reported that Dr. Bruchet has been taken against his will and had a psych diagnosis assigned to him so that he can be ‘medicated’. Dr. Nagase has become a very prominent voice for the females suffering these losses and for the unborn children they will never get to raise. Will he be next? Will you still think this is ok? Just two weeks to flatten the curve has turned into black-baggery pretty fast, eh? 

Dr. Bruchet has been speaking about the incomprehensible blocking of ivermectin by corrupt government officials as well. He is only abiding by his Oath to do no harm and is has been ‘taken away’ for it. This happened this week in CANADA



This is either where we are today, or where we’re headed.










Whatever graphene is doing there, it has no business being there. ... Graphene is also far more electrically conductive than copper, and, according to the scientific literature amassed by La Quinta Columna in its studies, it can conduct electrical impulses inside living creatures. 

First, of course, it has to get inside the living creatures. .. Enter the "covid" "vaccine," brimming with graphene among other corona-virus-extraneous nano-particles, plus mystery "self-aware" creatures. ...

Where Catherine Austin Fitts and others focus on  "the vaccine" as the gateway to "vaccine passports" and the end of human liberty in a global tyranny run by those who control digital currency and I.D., La Quinta Columna focuses on the workings of these graphene-based "self-assembling" nano-systems, and the possible eradication of humanity itself. It is their belief that these injected operating systems are designed to be powered by what we regard more or less harmlessly as cell phone technology, including 4G, 4G-plus and 5G



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:



Escobar: Steppe on Fire: Kazakhstan’s Color Revolution

 

The change of President two years ago from Nazarbayev to Tokayev brought no substantial changes in who runs the country.

The fuel price rises triggered protest, and once a population that had seen no outlet for its frustration viewed the chance to protest, then popular frustration erupted into popular dissent. However with no popular opposition leaders to direct it, this quickly became an incoherent boiling up of rage, resulting in destruction and looting.

So where do the CIA come in? They don’t. They were trying to groom a banned opposition leader (whose name I recall as Kozlov, but that may be wrong) but then discovered he was not willing to be their puppet, and the scheme was abandoned under Trump. The CIA were as taken aback by events as everybody else, and they don’t have any significant resources on the ground, or a Juan Gaido to jet in.


By Accusing Emma Watson of Antisemitism, Israel’s Apologists Are Showing They’re Desperate

Of course Israel’s defenders called Emma Watson "antisemitic" — for years, well past the point of absurdity, their strategy has been to call anyone who acknowledges Palestinians’ existence antisemitic.
 



Despite a growing resurgence of interest in the science and psychology of narcissistic sociopaths and psychopaths it seems as though society today has lost track of how these people can sabotage the core fabric of a civilization or nation. It is very easy to hyper-focus on collectivist ideologies as the source of our problems and forget that these ideologies do not function in a vacuum; they cannot wreak havoc by themselves, they need psychopathic people directing them to do real damage.



The majority of the public does not believe that this was an “insurrection” despite the mantra-like repetition of members of Congress and the media. The public saw that terrible day unfold a year ago and saw it for what it was: a protest that became a riot.



Several years into my education research I came across Arizona State University’s Center for the Future of War, which was largely funded by New America and Eric Schmidt of Google Alphabet. When I first found out about the program, they had three areas of focus: drones, autonomous weapons, and weaponized narrative. That last one is information warfare. We are living through total information warfare. As James Giordano asserts, the mind is the battlespace, though to my way of thinking the heart comes a close second.
 


CaitOz Fare:

Meta Censors Anti-Imperialist Speech In Obedience To The US Government

....I think I’ve been failing to appreciate the madness of this situation over the last two years because it’s simply too crazy to take in all at once. You have to really sit with it a minute and let it absorb. 



China and Russia are right to try to undermine US unipolar hegemony. The planet is not America’s property and efforts to stop it being treated as such are good.

It’s not okay to be a grown adult in 2022 and still believe the US is a force for peace and justice in this world.
 
....
 
You could very easily fill a list with one thousand things Americans should care about more than the one year anniversary of a few wingnuts wandering around the Capitol Building for a bit and then leaving.
 
...

There is no “human nature” apart from our immutable physiological features. What we’re dealing with in matters of societal organization is the human condition; conditioning by propaganda, by early childhood trauma, by generational trauma. And we can heal all of that conditioning.

People who cite “human nature” to argue that society must necessarily be organized a certain way are only ever talking about their own conditioning. If they think it’s human nature to be selfish and competitive, they’re just telling you how they’ve been conditioned to be.


Other Quotes of the Week:

Greenwald: The orgy of psychodrama today [Jan 6, 2022] was so much worse and more pathetic than I expected — and I expected it to be extremely bad and pathetic.
 
 
Taibbi: Even if he wanted to overturn “democracy itself” — I don’t believe he does, but let’s say — Trump has proven over and over he lacks the qualities a politician would need to make that happen.  Which brings us back to Cheney. All those things Trump is rumored to be, Dick Cheney actually is. That’s why it’s so significant that he appeared on the floor of the House yesterday to be slobbered over by the Adam Schiffs and Nancy Pelosis of the world. Dick Cheney did more to destroy democracy in ten minutes of his Vice Presidency than Donald Trump did in four years. 
 
 
Savage: For years, it simply didn’t matter that Holmes offered no tangible proof that her company’s technology could actually do what it was purported to. What mattered was that she told a story that people with wealth, power, and influence found both useful and compelling



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:
  
******* Cook: The Lesson of Covid: When People Are Anxious, Isolated and Hopeless, They’re Less Ready To Think Critically

The corporate media is not our friend. Its coverage of the pandemic is not there to promote the public good. It is there to feed our anxieties, keep us coming back for more, and monetize that distress. The only cure for this sickness? A lot more critical thinking.

When I criticize meddling in Syria by Britain and America, or their backing of groups there that elsewhere are considered terrorists, it does not follow that I am, therefore, a cheerleader for the dictatorship of Bashar Assad or that I think that Syrians should be denied a better political system. Similarly, when I criticize Joe Biden or the Democratic party, it does not necessarily follow that I think Donald Trump would have made a better president.

A major goal of critical thinking is to stand outside tribal debates, where people are heavily invested in particular outcomes, and examine the ways debates have been framed. This is important because one of the main ways power expresses itself in our societies is through the construction of official narratives – usually through the billionaire-owned media – and the control and shaping of public debate.
You are being manipulated – propagandized – even before you engage with a topic if you look only at the substance of a debate and not at other issues: such as its timing, why the debate is taking place or why it has been allowed, what is not being mentioned or has been obscured, what is being emphasized, and what is being treated as dangerous or abhorrent.

If you want to be treated like a grown-up, an active and informed participant in your society rather than a blank sheet on which powerful interests are writing their own self-serving narratives, you need to be doing as much critical thinking as possible – and especially on the most important topics of the day.

Learning curve

The opportunity to become more informed and insightful about how debates are being framed, rather than what they are ostensibly about, has never been greater. Over the past decade, social media, even if the window it offered is rapidly shrinking, has allowed large numbers of us to discover for the first time those writers who, through their deeper familiarity with a specific topic and their consequent greater resistance to propaganda, can help us think more critically about all kinds of issues – Russia, Venezuela, Iran, Israel-Palestine, the list is endless.

This has been a steep learning curve for most of us. It has been especially useful in helping us to challenge narratives that vilify “official enemies” of the west or that veil corporate power – which has effectively usurped what was once the more visible and, therefore, accountable political power of western states. In the new, more critical climate, the role of the war industries – bequeathed to us by western colonialism – has become especially visible.

But what has been most disheartening about the past two years of Covid is the rapid reversal of the gains made in critical thinking. Perhaps this should not entirely surprise us. When people are anxious for themselves or their loved ones, when they feel isolated and hopeless, when “normal” has broken down, they are likely to be less ready to think critically.

The battering we have all felt during Covid mirrors the emotional, and psychological assault critical thinking can engender. Thinking critically increases anxiety by uncomfortably exposing us to the often artificial character of official reality. It can leave us feeling isolated and less hopeful, especially when friends and family expect us to be as deeply invested in the substance – the shadow play – of official, tribal debates as they are. And it undermines our sense of what “normal” is by revealing that it is often what is useful to power elites rather than what is beneficial to the public good.

Emotional resilience

There are reasons why people are drawn to critical thinking. Often because they have been exposed in detail to one particular issue that has opened their eyes to wider narrative manipulations on other issues. Because they have the tools and incentives – the education and access to information – to explore some issues more fully. And, perhaps most importantly, because they have the emotional and psychological resilience to cope with stripping away the veneer of official narratives to see the bleaker reality beneath and to grasp the fearsome obstacles to liberating ourselves from the corrupt elites that rule over us and are pushing us towards ecocidal oblivion.

The anxieties produced by critical thinking, the sense of isolation, and the collapse of “normal” is in one sense chosen. They are self-inflicted. We choose to do critical thinking because we feel capable of coping with what it brings to light. But Covid is different. Our exposure to Covid, unlike critical thinking, has been entirely outside our control. And worse, it has deepened our emotional and psychological insecurities. To do critical thinking in a time of Covid – and most especially about Covid – is to add a big extra layer of anxiety, isolation, and hopelessness.
 
...

Complex thinking

It is not hard to understand why the magic bullet of vaccines – to the exclusion of all else – has been so fervently grasped during the pandemic. Exclusive reliance on vaccines has been a great way for our corrupt, incompetent governments to show they know what they are doing. The vaccines have been an ideal way for corrupt medical-industrial corporations – including the biggest offender, Pfizer – to launder their images and make us all feel indebted to them after so many earlier scandals like Oxycontin. And, of course, the vaccines have been a comfort blanket to us, the public, promising to bring ZeroCovid (false), to provide long-term immunity (false), and to end transmission (false).

...


 
*** Greer: Tomorrowland Has Fallen!

... The result is a collective frenzy being eagerly fed by a great many people. Of course it’s not surprising that the corporate media would push scare stories at full volume. Whoring out the news to sell advertising space is their stock in trade, and “if it bleeds, it leads” has taken precedence over responsible journalism since before there was responsible journalism.  Still, this isn’t limited to the media.

... One of the ways America’s caste system played into the pandemic was that most people in the privileged classes got to work from home, instead of being laid off or made to go into work straight through the crisis the way the working classes did.  That showed a good many people in the managerial class that they can do their jobs perfectly well without the poisonous office politics and mean-spirited authoritarianism of their workplaces. Now that the pandemic is winding down, they’re scrambling around for excuses to stay out of the office a little longer.  The latest Covid variant is just another source of grist for that mill.

... What we’ve seen over the last two years doesn’t look like a constructive response to a pandemic.  It looks like the desperate gyrations of control freaks who are trying to avoid dealing with their fears by piling exorbitant demands on everyone around them.

...

... For me, at least, it’s hard to read any of the literature of those years without getting a potent sense of déjà vu.  The same autumnal sense of an era past its pull date, the same spectacle of people and institutions going through motions that stopped functioning a long time ago, the same plaintive voices wondering why the world just doesn’t seem to make sense any more—it’s all present and accounted for, the familiar backdrop for the last few decades of public life in the United States and a good many other industrialized nations. The sole remaining questions are what combination of crises will topple the hapless ruling class from its position, and how soon that inevitable moment will arrive.

Yet admitting that the managerial class has turned out to be incompetent at running societies is unthinkable, to members of that class. It’s not just a matter of status panic, either. The entire collective identity of our managerial aristocracy is founded on the idea that they’re the experts, the smart kids, the people who really know what’s what. 

...

That, in turn, defined the destiny of the managerial aristocracy.  They strode boldly off toward Utopia, only to find that it wasn’t where they thought it was. The results of that quest are being counted out today in the coinage of total failure.  From the economy to Afghanistan, from education to (ahem) public health, if you compare the statements of qualified experts to the facts on the ground, the experts generally end up looking like idiots.  It doesn’t help that members of the managerial class are inevitably sheltered from the consequences of their mistakes, no matter how disastrously wrong those are or how many people get hurt as a result.  That’s why nowadays, when experts make a claim, a very large number of people take the opposite view on principle. Worse still, those who do this and ignore the experts very often turn out to be right.

...

That’s sending waves of stark shuddering terror through the managerial aristocracy. If the deplorable masses stop bending the knee and tugging their forelocks whenever one of their self-proclaimed betters mouths a platitude, after all, how long will the authority of the managers last? That terror, in turn, gives rise to the displacement activities discussed above.  Since it’s impossible for them to admit to themselves that they’ve failed, much less that everyone else is aware that they’ve failed, they find other things on which they can focus their feelings of panic. The Covid virus is one of those. It wasn’t the first and it doubtless won’t be the last, but it’s serving its purpose now, which is to allow members of the managerial class and its hangers-on in the media and the academy to distract themselves from the end of their era of power.




Real Hope in a Troubled 2022


.... Minister, essayist, lecturer, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was among the most influential writers of the 19th Century.

Emerson asks us to notice how much we rely on our calculating-self, the part of our thinking preoccupied with comparing, evaluating, wanting, and designing our next move. Today we call that calculating-self our ego—the insatiable, internal narrator exerting itself to direct our life.

Emerson has good news for us; there is a better way to walk in the world than listening to the voice of our ego. In his essay The Over-Soul Emerson tells us our calculating-self misrepresents who we truly are: “What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself.”

Emerson points us in another direction, to live as an expression of our soul eternally connected to the “fountain of action and of thought”: .

....

When we willingly admit just how much of our distress is coming from our thinking, we open up a quiet space in the present moment. Our minds begin to still. In that relative silence, Emerson instructs, you will hear the “right word”: “There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word.”

Emerson’s path to God requires the addition of nothing. The wall of separation from God is nothing more than a manifestation of our mental churning. Subtract the mental churning and we open a space in which we breathe in the wisdom, virtue, and love flowing from our connection with God. God’s grace, Emerson would say, is our birthright.



Satirical Fare:

n.



Pics of the Week:











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