Pages

Sunday, January 16, 2022

2022-01-16 weekend links

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

Regular Fare:


The mainstream was focused on whether the US and world economy were set to recover strongly or not after COVID; whether the hike in inflation would eventually subside or not and what to do about it.  The heterodox sessions were more focused, as you would expect, on the fault-lines in modern capitalist economies and why inequality of wealth and income has risen.

..... In another paper by Bakir and Campbell, the authors consider the role of increased debt in promoting and supporting that increased rate of profit. In this presentation, Al Campbell argued that finance was not a parasite on the productive sector as economists like Michael Hudson argue; it was worse than that!  That’s because it slows productive accumulation. 

... But what to do about avoiding or ameliorating slumps under capitalism.  A very popular policy alternative has been taken up in heterodox circles, namely more government spending and even permanent budget deficits financed by money creation as per Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).  MMT found some support in the heterodox sessions.  Devin Rafferty of St Peters University reckoned that the heterodox economist Karl Polanyi and MMT would agree on the process by which money is created as well as on the mechanisms that regulate its value. Polanyi would have embraced the MMT policy measures of a ‘job guarantee’ and ‘functional finance’ —the two staples of the MMT approach–which he believed would foster international peace, national liberty, and individual freedom.  I think this tells us something about Polanyi’s form of Marxism and MMT.



A view yours truly often encounters when debating MMT is that there is an inflationary bias in MMT and that its framework ignores expectations. ... Given its roots in the writings of Keynes, Lerner, and Minsky, it is — to say the least — rather amazing to attribute that view to MMT.




The Washington Post and Larry Summers don’t know what they’re talking about.

.... But for argument’s sake, let’s say that the Post and the economists are right—that predatory pricing by oligopolistic firms isn’t driving the current inflation, but rather, “supply chain hiccups” as the Post editors say, brought on by pandemic induced labor shortages and high demand.  The question is, why were the supply chains so fragile in the first place?

The answer is monopoly—in particular, the hollowing out of capacity as a result of industry consolidation and Wall Street’s demand for short term profits. Consider the case of semiconductors—crucial components in most of the products we use ...

... The failure of establishment voices like the Washington Post editorial board and the economists they rely on to grasp how monopolization and financialization have hollowed out our supply chains is no small thing. After all, if you misdiagnose the source of a problem, you’re likely to advocate the wrong solution. “The reality is that the best tool the nation has to fight inflation is the Federal Reserve raising interest rates,” the Post editors confidently assert. That might be true if monopoly has nothing to do with inflation. But if, as I’m arguing, it’s at the heart of the problem, and yet the Federal Reserve heeds the Post’s glib advice, it could plunge the country into a needless recession without having dealt with the underlying cause. Of course, it took decades, and countless bad decisions in Washington, for our supply chains to become as concentrated, uncompetitive, and breakable as they are now. It will take years of strong antitrust enforcement and other measures to set things right. But the sooner Washington acts—and the Biden administration is off to a good start—the less likely the current inflation will last.



*** {for lots more charts} *** Inflation Surge Pushes Fed To Hike Rates Faster
The spread between PPI and CPI combined with the Fed hiking rates has a long history of poor outcomes. 



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







QOTW:

Kelton: When all you have is a rate-hike hammer, every inflation looks like an excess demand problem [nail].

Saretsky: Trudeau plans to start turning away unvaccinated U.S. truckers at the border this weekend. Only half of US truckers are vaccinated, while more than 70% of cross-border trade moves by truck. I hope Canadians like higher prices.
and: Canada imports $21B of food every year form the US. The Trudeau government is more focused on virtue signaling than feeding its citizens.



Bubble Fare:

******** Hussman: Return-Free Risk

In an economy where the Fed has lost every systematic tether to common sense, empirical evidence, and concern for financial stability, it’s worth beginning this first market comment of 2022 by recalling the ways we’ve adapted in order to navigate that environment. In a world where securities are regularly described on CNBC as “plays,” it’s clear is that the financial markets presently have little to do with “investment” – at least not by Benjamin Graham’s definition as “an operation that, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return.”

It may be true that zero interest rates provide investors “no alternative” but to speculate. But as Graham emphasized, there are many ways in which speculation can be unintelligent. The first of these is speculating when you think you are investing.

...

Depending on market conditions, stocks can have “investment merit,” “speculative merit,” both, or neither. In our own discipline, we gauge “investment merit” by valuation – the relationship between the price of a security and the long-term stream of expected cash flows that we expect that security to deliver over time. We gauge “speculative merit” based on the uniformity or divergence of market internals. When investors are inclined to speculate, they tend to be indiscriminate about it. Since 1998, our most reliable gauge of speculation versus risk-aversion has been based on the signal we extract from the market action of thousands of individual securities, industries, sectors, and security-types, including debt securities of varying creditworthiness.

The single difference between the most recent market cycle and other cycles across history is that in every other cycle, speculation always had a well-defined limit. We gauged those extremes based on what I describe as “overvalued, overbought, overbullish” syndromes. Unfortunately, zero interest rates have proved to be a kind of acid that burns through every shred of intellect, driving investors to imagine that any asset that varies in price – regardless of how extreme its valuation or how uncertain its underlying cash flows – is better than zero-interest cash. 

... Over four decades of work in the financial markets, I’ve regularly been defensive at bull market peaks, shifting to a constructive, unhedged, or leveraged outlook after valuations plunged toward their historical norms, as they did in the 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 collapses. That flexibility produced beautiful results in previous, complete market cycles. Yet I’ve never seen such conviction among speculators that the good times will never end, or such faith that the Federal Reserve can make it so. I’m quite certain that this is a delusion, but I am less certain about how long that delusion can persist. 

... The chart below presents our most reliable valuation measure (based on correlation with actual subsequent market returns), the market capitalization of non-financial U.S. companies as a ratio to their gross-value added, including estimated foreign revenues.

... The scatterplot below shows how these valuation measures are related to actual subsequent 12-year S&P 500 nominal total returns, in data since 1928.

......

Put simply, by relentlessly depriving investors of risk-free return, the Federal Reserve has spawned an all-asset speculative bubble that we estimate will provide investors little but return-free risk. The chart below shows the menu of estimated 10-year returns across various conventional asset classes. Each line shows a different point in time, including the 1982 and 2009 market lows, and the 2000, 2007, and 2020 market highs. The current menu of estimated prospective investment returns is the worst in history.






COVID-19 notes:

Yong: COVID-Hospitalization Numbers Are as Bad as They Look



The way in which any topic is analysed in economics depends on methodological approach. The purpose here is to explore the argument that the way in which climate change is addressed depends on how economics is understood to relate to the physical environment and also to the social and ethical environment. This involves an exploration of the formation of knowledge, both in economics and in the economy. Alfred Marshall’s evolutionary approach to knowledge formation was central to his approach to economics and to his understanding of economic behaviour. Here, we consider the application of Marshall’s approach to issues around climate change, through the lens of the subsequent development of evolutionary economics and ecological economics.





Pics/Vids of the Week:

Hunga #Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai #eruption at 04:00 UTC on Jan 15. images courtesy #Himawari8

This view from the GOES WEST satellite gives a more 3D perspective of the huge volcanic ash plume that rose up to estimated 15800 m (52000 ft) or altitude or flight level 520 over the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano

More chilling images out of #Tonga, as the country reels from the intense Volcanic eruption today



Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

Yglesias: All kinds of bad behavior is on the rise
Murder, but also reckless driving, drug overdoses, drinking, unruly passengers, and everything else



We call this episode “Duality” because it covers what Bill Mitchell describes as separate realities experienced by the elites and the masses. We do not occupy the same universe. The results of this duality are reflected in the manufactured divisions within the working class itself and in the unequal economic power relations between countries. There is a conflict between the public’s need for services and capital’s need for profit and privatization. 

The point is, we live in 2 worlds – and the disparities are extreme.  

Bill lays out some of the ways our lives are organized around serving capital. 



Unsustainability / Climate Chaos / Collapse Fare:

Jacobson: On Generosity and Petty Tyrants



For several years now, advocates of “decarbonizing” our energy system, along with promoters of wind and solar energy, have claimed that the cost of electricity from the wind and sun was dropping rapidly and either already was, or soon would be, less than the cost of generating the same electricity from fossil fuels. These claims are generally based on a metric called the “Levelized Cost of Energy,” which is designed to seem sophisticated to the uninitiated, but in the real world is completely misleading because it omits the largest costs of a system where most generation comes from intermittent sources. The large omitted costs are those for storage (batteries) and transmission. But as we now careen recklessly down the road to zero emissions, how much will these omitted costs really amount to?

A guy named Ken Gregory has recently (December 20, 2021, updated January 10, 2022) come out with a Report at a Canadian website called Friends of Science with the title “The Cost of Net Zero Electrification of the U.S.A.” A somewhat abbreviated version of Gregory’s Report has also appeared at Watts Up With That here. Gregory provides a tentative number for the additional storage costs that could be necessary for full electrification of the United States system, with all current fossil fuel generation replaced by wind and solar. That number is $433 trillion. Since the current U.S. annual GDP is about $21 trillion, you will recognize that the $433 trillion represents more than 20 times full U.S. annual GDP. In the post I will give some reasons why Gregory may even be underestimating what the cost would ultimately prove to be. ..... 



.... To actually be on track to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement would require slimming the world greenhouse footprint by 184 billion tons over the next 8 years (36.7 GtCO2e in 2019 times 10 years, divided in half). 

With just 8 years to make up for ground lost, I have 8 suggestions of simple, relatively painless, ways to drop global emissions by 11 percent per year and hit the 2030 target of halving global emissions. Here, then, is my top eight countdown:

8. More vasectomies .....
7. Avoid stuff from faraway places, and going there .....
...
4. Skip electric cars. Bike 
...
If all of these ideas are not enough for you, Paul Hawken describes 100 more in his books, Drawdown and Regeneration.


Climate Tweet(s) of the Week:

Cartwright: Best data of the day.
If someone thinks this is going to end well, that person must be a #climatechange denier. Check out how it's now speeding up:
and:
Terrific data. #Bigoil can be proud. +1.5C in 2100 ? seriously?
And #Methane data  is even worse

and:
CO2 emissions UP, population UP
None of this would happen if people cared, & decided to act/ react
Trying to feel good about ourselves is irrelevant
We are losing the fight. We are not even trying

Rockstrom: At 1.2°C of global warming, with current pace, we will hit 1.5°C in 2033 and 2°C by 2060. With last 7 years being warmest on record, 2021 among them, we have strong confirmation of the global climate crisis as shown in excellent analysis by @BerkeleyEarth

(Rockstrom's conservatism or optimism bias is showing again: as he well knows, prospective temperature rises will not be linear, they will curve upwards a la exponential, due to tipping points having tipped, amplifying positive feedback effects worsening, especially but certainly not limited to accelerating release of methane from Arctic, etc... which is already apparent, as most of the most recent blue dots are already bending above the dashed black line "forecast"; see my other blog Too Late For 2, particularly all the Links labelled Reference Articles (aka Recommended Reading), for more)

as per Dermot: Such spectacular understatement from one of the world's leading lights in this area shows exactly why after 50 years of absolute, widespread knowledge on the cause, we're no further forward with the solution.

Todd: Some people unfortunately do not get why extinction rebellion and insulate britain protesters put their lives and liberty on the line. Because scientists say we are heading towards the potential collapse of civilisation - ie billions may die: see 3.00 https://youtu.be/-bDZEvSPvxA

XRCambridge: A lot of recent science points to an accelerating Earth system crisis. But two studies last year stand out. First the news that Earth's energy imbalance (the difference between energy in, energy out) has *doubled* in only 15 years was truly frightening. The second staggering news ... was the discovery that Earth is reflecting 0.5% less solar energy (heat) than 20 years ago. A small number with huge consequences. The kicker is that most of the drop happened *in the last 3 years.* These two together suggest an abrupt shift in the climate is underway. Links: one and two

Dynes: We are losing 25,000 tonnes of Ice from the Arctic per second. That’s not a small amount.

ClimateDad: In 1856 Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated the heating effect CO2 was having on our atmosphere. 
In 2020 governments paid fossil fuel subsidies of $5.9 TRILLION to ensure this relentless heating continues.
We've been sitting tight and assessing for over 160 years.

Tooze: We all know why they do, but in global comparative terms the fact that US, Australia and Canada huff and puff as much as they about the energy transition is staggering. You just wouldn’t predict the difference to the EU from the underlying econ structure. 


Climate Pic(s) & Vid(s) of the Week:






COVID Fare:

I am increasingly coming across too much excellent COVID-related content (with contrarian evidence-based points-of-view!!) to link to it all
Read everything by eugyppius; el gato malo; Mathew Crawford; Steve Kirsch; Jessica Rose!
Paul Alexander, Berenson, Chudov, Lyons-Weiler, Toby Rogers are also go-to mainstays; a list to which I have added Andreas Oehler, Metatron and, Julius Ruechel; Denninger worth staying on top of too for his insights, and especially his colorful language; and Norman Fenton; new addition: Marc Girardot; I will of course continue to post links to key Peter McCullough material, and Geert Vanden Bossche, and Robert Malone, and Martin Kulldorff, and Jay Bhattacharya, and Pierre Kory, and Michael Yeadon, and John Ioannidis, and Paul Marik, and Tess Lawrie, and Zelenko, and [local hero] Byram Bridle, and…
but going forward, my linking to material by those mainstays mentioned above will be reduced to key excerpts and/or essential posts

***** COVID Resources docs.google.com

Start: The following is a bank of Covid research which focuses on medical journals, respected publications, peer-reviewed studies and stories largely ignored by the media. Most will contradict the public narrative. - please share widely.



the title/subtitle say it all (though the post itself is more detailed and explained well):
Mass vaccination using an imperfect leaky non-sterilizing vaccine in the midst of a pandemic (as now), underestimates the evolutionary capacity of the virus to evolve/adapt, & natural selection

Get ready to learn more Greek letters. ...




With each passing day, the knowledge of the poverty of the vaccine-only response to COVID-19 increasingly becomes part of the widely adopted knowledge base of ordinary American citizens and an increasing proportion of health care personnel. The factors at play have included the failure of the vaccination program....
.............
...........
.......
....
Legacy media outlets have lost the public’s trust; CNN has lost 90% of its viewership. Meanwhile, podcast hosts such Joe Rogan have provided ample bandwidth to objective medical professionals such as Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Pierre Kory to help educate the public on the balance of information available on matters that impacts their understanding of COVID-19 as a disease, COVID-19 treatments, and COVID-19 vaccines.



An NHS nurse has unwittingly spelled out the barbarism of lockdown.

... We had to do it, for ‘the greater good’, says Jenny. The greater good. How much inhumanity and tyranny has been justified in the name of ‘the greater good’ throughout history?



... Unfortunately, it’s incredibly hard to access cases by age group in many states, but the data below highlights a number of key points that are important in assessing the unquestionable failure of masking in schools.

Of all of the inhumane, absurd policies adopted by The Experts™ and incompetent, terrified local bureaucrats, masking children is one of the most indefensible.

Masking children is completely unsupported by science, reason, data or logic, so of course it’s supported by ....


el gato malo: vaccine efficacy and social duty

covid vaccines were sold to us as societal duty. get the jab, stop the spread. become a dead end for the virus. despite the truly astonishing amount of whitewashing, gaslighting, and outright obfuscation on this, that’s a simple, clear truth.

it happened. we have the receipts.

this was, in fact, the underpinning for the idea of mandates. “it’s not about you, it’s about all of us!” the argument was simple: your vaxx status affects me. if you carry the virus, even if my vaccine is 90 or 97% effective, you put me at risk. you put others at risk. you put kids at risk, jeopardize the old and infirm who cannot vaxx, etc.

thus, it is your social duty to do this and our duty to make you by excluding you from society if you will not. and so began a campaign of vilification and othering the likes of which has not been seen since the 1930’s and 40’s in europe or in the stalinist or maoist revolutions.

but a funny thing happened: the basic data underpinning here was totally, completely wrong. we’ve known this for 6 months. these vaccines are non-sterilizing. they do not stop infection, carriage, or transmission. they do not even reduce viral load.

this has led to clear, consistent data coming out of the countries that report it honestly: the vaccinated are getting quite a lot more covid per capita than the unvaccinated. ... not only is this issue not new, it’s getting worse. 

.... this has been such a clear fact that most have shifted the debate away from cases and onto “severity”

... but, leaving these obvious incongruities aside, is it even true?

... if you have a vaccine that reduces your risk of death from covid by 50%, that sounds like a big deal. but it might not be. if your risk was only 1 in 10,000 to begin with, who cares? the risk reduction is not worth the side effects.

....... this takes us back to the possible data issue raised above: even if vaccines decrease the risk of hospitalization or death in any given person, if they also increase the likelihood that person will get covid, they may make that person, on balance, worse off.

...... is omicron really this much more contagious or is it vaccines MAKING it this much more contagious?


little old, but just getting to some of Morris' posts he made before I stumbled across his writing:

Life has been insane for the past 2 years. No question about that. The real question is, how do we stop the insanity? Let’s have a look.

First, some people believe we are entering a “new normal” era, and we should keep doing what we’re doing to avoid catching COVID-19. Those people are neurotic weirdos and you should never talk to them again. Shun them, push them out of your life and your work in every way you possibly can. They are unreliable, cowardly, and servile, not built for serious human interaction. That’s step one of how to restore sanity in your daily life.

Second, the coronavirus is now endemic. Well, it was endemic before you and I ever heard of it; there was never the slightest possibility of curtailing its spread once it escaped Wuhan. Ever single thing we have done to attempt to arrest it has been futile, and all the damage done to our economies, our souls, and our politics has been for naught. That’s the bad news; the good news is that you can just fucking ignore the virus. Refuse to be tested! If you feel sick, stay home from work, but who fucking cares if it’s a cold or if it’s COVID-19? There is no point in worrying about it; nothing any of us do will prevent approximately everyone from contracting this virus within the next year or two. So quit paying attention to it.

Remember how you treated infectious diseases before the government turned on the fear machine? You had a fever, you stayed home. Or maybe you didn’t. Did you ever wear a mask? If not, why not? Old people die from the fucking flu all the time, you grandma killer. You didn’t because wearing masks is inhuman, and grandma would rather take a small risk of illness in return for seeing her grandchildren’s faces when they talk to her. So get back to that. IGNORE THE CORONAVIRUS, DON’T GET TESTED, and for damn sure don’t act like people around you with a cough are spreading the bubonic plague. 

... But “remain vigilant to protect ourselves”???? What the hell man, YOU ARE GOING TO CATCH IT. Nothing will stop that. Quit being a fucking pussy and deal with it. That’s the number three way to get back to normal.

So just to reiterate, kids, three steps to restore normality: 1) tell the Covid Karens to fuck off, 2) stop getting tested and narcing on people who get sick, and 3) quit listening to the idiots from the hospitals and health departments. And have a merry, unmasked, vax-optional Christmas with all the sane people in your life!



... Dr Robert Malone was boosted off Twitter and yet his podcast with Joe Rogan, just a day or two later, has had over 50 millions listens, making it the biggest single podcast ever. So now a bunch of doctors are calling for Joe Rogan to be censored (what a surprise!). Dr Malone might be spouting the most egregiously wrong BS ever spoken (he isn’t), but that isn’t the point. The point is whether we want governments to be able to restrict the public information and opinions we have access to. 

... Here’s just a small selection of “inconvenient” truths - showing just how spiffingly well it’s all been going. 

... With the Glorious Goo, The Holy Ejaculate of Pfizer, we have a ‘vaccine’ that does not provide an effective break in transmission, but was designed to reduce symptoms (that’s what it was tested for in the trials). We used to call these kind of things prophylactics. By this current criterion we could legitimately call things like Ivermectin and HCQ “vaccines”.

... Despite the evidence, governments across the world are ramping up their punishment of the Goo-free - and even the double jabbed, the GooGoo’s, are finding themselves no longer quite as “free” as promised in some places.

... Even if the Goo were doing the job of a good old-fashioned vaccine, I would not agree with punitive measures being applied to those who, for whatever reason, decide not to be vaccinated. Bodily autonomy has to be a fundamental right. And “rights” contingent upon circumstance are not rights at all - they are merely privileges to be granted if circumstance permits.



Part 2 of my response to Mr. Alex Berenson’s personal attack on Fox

...... Here’s the inconvenient truth.  The Federal Government’s Department of Health and Human Services of the United States of America has developed an atrocious track record during the many waves of COVID-19 disease which have swept across the country.  As if it were not bad enough that the evidence implicates Dr. Anthony Fauci and his minions as having created the pathogen SARS-CoV-2 in a biodefense strategy that would make Rube Goldberg’s Professor Butts proud, the United States is listed by Worldometers as having the most deaths attributed to the disease in the entire world.

.... So, without further ado, I am glad to finally be able to provide photographic evidence of what is responsible for the miracle of Uttar Pradesh.  I have nothing more to add, other than that an apology is owed (By Mr. Berenson and many others) to the many brave physicians who have persisted, against enormous coordinated media and governmental pressure, to prescribe this agent as a key component of the staged early treatment protocols responsible for saving countless lives across the USA and the world.



Mythbusting Whether Flu Was Rebranded as Covid

.... Consensus is irrelevant to truth. Science is the most undemocratic process in the universe — and it has to stay that way if you want science to function as a tool for uncovering truths. There is a wonderful story about how Einstein was shown a German newspaper that claimed, "One hundred physicists claim Einstein's theory of relativity is wrong." Einstein supposedly replied, "If I were wrong, it would only take one."

.... An ordinary claim requiring ordinary evidence is that PCR tests are unreliable and produce a massive number of false positives. Even without getting into cycle thresholds and all the other technical issues with PCR reliability, let's take our cue from Tanzania's late president who pretty much single-handedly put a dagger through the heart of PCR reliability when he tested a papaya and a goat, and both came back positive. I wouldn't want to trust my healthcare to many of the other beliefs he held, but boy oh boy did he nail that takedown.

... “I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.” ― Richard P. Feynman

... This kind of lie only requires a small number of incompetent or corrupt top-level public health officials, a compliant media, scientifically illiterate politicians, and a frightened public. It's confirmation bias on steroids where everyone believes what they hear, sees what they believe, and views the world through a distorted lens. It's a self-sustaining mass hysteria, created by group think, through the silencing (deplatforming) of dissenting voices, through deliberate and deeply arrogant fear-based "nudge" behavioral manipulation (evidence here)

... "Trusting the science" is not (and never has been) about trusting results or trusting experts. Trusting the scientists is what got us into this mess. For science to function properly, we must NOT trust the scientists. Instead, we must trust in the messy self-correcting process that allows truth to boil to the surface even if every participant in that process is flawed. 

... Covid is serving as the takedown of an arrogant and broken system that was already collapsing under the weight of groupthink, corruption, political correctness, conflicts of interest, corporate influence, political meddling, and the vulgar competition for funding. But like a phoenix that rises from its own ashes, Covid is also sowing the seeds of the antidote to that broken system by making the public aware of the fact that scientists are as mortal and flawed as everyone else.




An explosive case is currently being hotly debated on social media: In France, a rich, older entrepreneur from Paris is said to have died as a result of a Corona injection. Previously, he had taken out multi-million dollar life insurance policies for the benefit of his children and grandchildren, according to a media report. Although vaccination is recognized as the cause of death by doctors and the insurance company, it has refused to pay out. The reason is because the side effects of the Corona jabs are known and published. They argue that the deceased took part in an experiment at his own risk. Covid-19 in itself is not classed as a “critical illness”.

The insurance company justified the refusal of payment to the family by stating that the use of experimental medication or treatments, including Corona injections, is expressly excluded from the insurance contract.



Toby Rogers: Thinking Points Memo

.... Washington Post article: 
More than 1 million students have gone missing from higher education in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
Great job bougiecrats — you destroyed our economy, destroyed K-12 education, destroyed higher education, destroyed healthcare, all to serve the cartel. Your junk science rules made no difference in connection with the pandemic. Prophylactic ivermectin for the win you knuckleheads.

Everything they do backfires because they have the wrong theory of the case

Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, announced plan to raise interest rates to “tame” inflation.

My take:

Prophylactic ivermectin would reduce economic inflation because it actually does what it is supposed to do. It’s a medicine. Healthy workers would keep working and getting things done.

The evidence shows that prophylactic vaccines increase inflation, because vaccines do not work and they cause iatrogenic injury. It’s toxic junk science, not medicine. Workers get injured and sick, miss work, and cannot complete tasks. Supply of goods and services decreases which raises prices.

Is there anyone inside the Biden administration (or the Fed) who can understand those two simple points? No. All they care about is defending their broken down ideology. Madness.

... 

Do you know what would reduce hospital staffing shortages other than sending in 1,000 military medical personnel?

Re-hiring 1,000 civilian medical personnel who were fired for having natural immunity and common sense.





a




Tweets & Quotes of the Week Whatever:

DrHoenderkamp: The 47th ranked player in the world, double jabbed, was welcomed into Australia and THEN tested positive! Meanwhile the best player in the world, unvaccinated, but with natural immunity tests negative and is in a quarantine hotel. These vaccine passport rules work so well.

Greenwald: Note that Australian authorities acknowledged that Djokovic -- who had COVID in mid-December -- posed no threat to transmit the virus, and that he legally qualified for an exemption. He was deported solely due to comments he made in 2020 that implied skepticism about vaccines.

Ilargi: Bodily autonomy was always very important; until about a year ago, that is. Still, most people couldn’t define it to save their lives. So when Novak Djokovic appealed to it, they didn’t recognize it as their own basic right, and instead replaced it with Stockholm Sydrome.

BackToLife: Covid waves.... (see short vid)

Dr. Samadi: Today is Day 673 of 15 Days To Slow The Spread.

Changizi: The mass hysteria that hit us in March of 2020 was not subtle. It did not require some special acumen to see it. It was a hurricane that suddenly hit, and then just sat and stayed for two years thus far. All it took to see it was not having been swept up in it.

Me, in response: Or to have been initially swept in, as I myself was, but analyze and research your way out of, swimming against the tide (of propaganda), as I and many others have done (& if you didn't manage to do so in the first 3mths, or 6mths or 12, .. or 21 mths, no time like now!!)

Malhotra: My biggest fear now is that it’s going to get violent. When the truth comes out we must do all we can to stop that & show compassion to those who got it very VERY wrong.This is not individual failure but that of a corrupted system that needs to be dismantled & rebuilt TOGETHER!

but, clearly not there just yet:
Martenson: I don't know what disturbs me more;  That 48% of Democrats support prison time for asking questions about these vaccines, or that 75% of them view Fauci favorably.  How does one bridge such a divide?

Windt: To those of you blindly advocating for measures that are actually making things worse as the deaths mount, and are unwilling or unable to see the evidence of that: you are in a cult and it's killing people.

Kory: I know Dr. Nass. Highly expert in both early Rx's & safety/efficacy data of vaccines. Her license was taken for applying her analysis of these data, borne of 41 years of practice. What (or Who) is next? Answer should terrify you.

Kaur: We're told today by politicians that it's now "illegal" to "intimidate" HCWs in Canada? Does this only apply to HCWs who support govts' unethical, unconstitutional, unscientific lockdowns/restrictions? Why isn't it illegal for politicians/bureaucrats to intimidate HCWs & citizens?

Cole: The public’s relationship with science should, ideally, be governed by what’s known as “good-faith skepticism.” It’s an assumption going in that scientists are not trying to do harm, and indeed, most sincerely want to do good. But, under certain conditions, be it human error, avarice, political pressure, or competition for grants, even people with decent intentions can foul up.

Morris: Cole’s term “the politician/scientist alliance” is, I think, incredibly apt. Politics is an innately corrupting force, and to the degree that it intersects with any field, it will corrupt that field.

Rowe: Just was told by a dear friend that a couple she was extremely close to won’t talk to her right now because she said she listens to @joerogan. Apparently we’re at a point where showing derision to Joe is on par with the moral imperative to oppose slavery. Bonkers.

Rudkowski: lol so about the 300 “doctors” crying about Joe Rogan (see pic)

David Anber: Stop lying: 
1. Vaccines don’t reduce the spread of COVID-19 in any meaningful way;
2. There is no serious evidence that vaccine mandates accomplish anything in the way of health and safety;
3. Vaccine hesitancy doesn’t cause lockdowns; cowardly, unintelligent politicians do.

PJHLaw: Given the inefficacy and safety concerns if the SARS CoV2 injection any university that attempts to discipline students for not being injected will be reported to the police for human rights breaches.

Rigger: the CEO of Pfizer effectively just said the same thing, our covid vaccine products are crap, and governments across the world still seem to be infatuated with the useless Goo.

Broekers: Question: What would happen if tens of millions of people had sub-clinical cardiovascular disease and didn't know it yet because they did not exert themselves like all these athletes are now doing?

VigilantFox: The Ronald McDonald House in Canada will evict all tenants, adults and children over the age of five, who are not vaccinated by the end of January. The father of a young boy with leukemia responds. 
"This is some kind of crazy evil like I've never seen in my life."

Kirsch: In Quebec, they are planning to require 3 doses for a vaccine passport. Is there a medical reason for this? No, admits Quebec Minister of Health Christian Dubé, but "it makes the passport easy to manage." He gets credit for honesty there. But that's all I'll give him.

Braddock: I think they should do mail-in vaccines. They mail it to us, then we sign certifying that we took it. Just as safe and secure as the 2020 election.

el gato malo: it is not easy to turn soccer moms and carpool dads into aggressive social activists. it is not their nature and they have other stuff to do. but muzzling their kids, subjecting them to alienation, indoctrination, and depriving them of education and then turning around and seeking to brand these parents as literal domestic terrorists when they complain? well, that’s gonna do it.
..... they are not teaching they are preaching and their gospel is grotesque. history has become hallucination. math is racist. children are dangerous disease vectors.

ITALY: Covid-19 injections researcher Domenico Biscardi found dead. Domenico Biscardi was found dead in his home. He was a prominent Covid-19 injection researcher in Italy who recently claimed he was going to European courts over what he found in the vials. Coincidence ? 



CO-VIDs of the Week:

***** UFC President Dana White is asked about the 200+ Doctors demanding Spotify censor Joe Rogan. His response...




related tweet vid
Higgins: Right Wing Conspiracy






You know what women arguing against mandatory head scarves don't ever do? Supply loads of empirical data arguing against the claim that wearing head scarves reduces male libido and augments the general welfare.

When Pol Pot emptied the cities and marched the population out into the jungle, you know what kind of argument would have been missing the point? One providing empirical data showing that socialism and the forcible return to village life doesn't make society better off.

Similarly...

When your leaders (and neighbors) demand your complete obedience to their draconian interventions to help defeat a pandemic, the main retort is NOT that their interventions don't empirically work. The response is that they do not have the right to implement them.

That’s why I have tried to focus, since the start, on the moral and civil rights facets of this, as well on the underlying mass hysteria causes of it. That’s why my Science Moment series barely addresses the empirical issues concerning pandemic severity or intervention effectiveness.

Even engaging them on whether their civil rights quashing interventions work implicitly admits that it matters, and that they’d be justifiable if they did work.

They wouldn’t be.


recommended to read particularly for the latter part, on Emotional Blackmail, and social credit systems:

.... But this new (new?) level of emotional blackmail is not a small problem. Scientists, doctors, academics, writers, airline pilots, educators, cab drivers, and even chameleon generalist heretics such as myself should not have our "social credit" dictated by a pharma-intelligence mafia. But that is already happening. I can choose not to self-censor my words or actions, but the consequential outcomes have already been designed to be punitive for those not willing to carry water for the Kunlangeta.

... Not understanding this is a mistake that many of the would-be Mandarins and intellectual leadership in the fight against medical authoritarianism currently make because this is their first time operating with the "dissident" label. Many of them were unaware of the degree of capture of the whole political system right up through the ballot they cast for Biden, and most of them are still taking first steps outside the Matrix, taking baby steps. They don't know much in the way of true details about the Anonymous war with the Church of Scientology, the real reasons for the endless wars in the Middle East, the media's divide and conquer tactics between Tea Partiers and the Occupy movement, the larger picture behind Pizzagate, or the way "domestic terrorism" was engineered as a flipped script from the start.


On Novak Djokovic and Mass Formation Psychosis



COVID Corporatocracy / Idiocracy / Conspiracy Fare:

Leaked Fauci Financials Expose How Millionaire Doctor Profited From Pandemic



............... Keep in mind, we are talking here about the last week of January. The top experts in the world were living in fear that this was actually a lab leak and perhaps a deliberate one. This consumed them completely, 

.... this account from Farrar is pretty extraordinary proof that discovering the virus’s origins was the major concern from these official and influential scientists for the last part of January through February. Rather than thinking about things such as “How can we help doctors deal with patients?” and “Who is vulnerable to this virus and what should we say about that?”, they were consumed by discovering the origin of the virus and hiding from the public what they were doing. 

Again, I am not interpreting things here. I’m only quoting what Farrar says in his own book. He reports that the experts he consulted were 80% sure it had come from a lab.

... They deliberated in secret. They used burner phones. They spoke only to their trusted colleagues. This went on for more than a month from late January 2020 to early March. Whether this virus originated as a lab leak or not in this case is not so much the issue; there is no question that Farrar, Collins, Fauci, and company all believed that it was likely and even probable, and they spent their time and energies plotting the spin. This fear consumed them entirely at the very moment when their job was to be thinking of the best public-health response. 

... The virus did what the virus does, and all we are left with are the breathtaking results of the pandemic response: economic carnage, cultural destruction, large amounts of unnecessary death, and an incredible paper trail of incompetence, fear, secrecy, plotting, and neglect of genuine health concerns. 



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:



Helmer: Is Geneva 2022 Munich 1938 Without Chamberlain’s Piece Of Paper? How To Read the US Paper to Russia For Peace For Our Time

... Lavrov is announcing that Russia today knows the US intention is to go to war; and that Russia is prepared and is already on war footing on all fronts.


The CIA has been secretly training anti-Russian groups in Ukraine since 2015. Everything we know points to the likelihood that includes neo-Nazis inspiring far-right terrorists across the world.



Orwellian Fare:

okay, I've read up on lots of "conspiracy theories" (aka investigative journalism not approved by the corporatocracy) but this is first I heard of this one; without digging in to it, can't say if it may be a little out there, but nothing shocks me anymore:
first, came across this tweet: 
In 2016, Tory Smith released a video accusing Mike Pence of allegedly murdering 51 children and raping 77. A few weeks after posting the video he was poisoned and died a couple weeks later.

then found this.. watch 6min video:
it could very well be B.S.
but, knowing even just the tip of the iceberg that we know of the Epstein operations...
if your reaction is "no f'g way" or "this has to be B.S"... 
grow up; wake up; we are ruled by evil sociopaths
there are too many rabbitholes for me to go down, and I will stick with climate and covid and imperialist geopolitics like the 9/11 false flag op, but quick search turns up lots of material.
yes, that IS the world we live in.. so believing TPTB about COVID and vaccines, and vax passports is as stupid as believing them about WMD or the Skripals or Syrian chemical attacks or, or, or....


CaitOz Fare:

Don't Underestimate How Badly The Powerful Need Control Of Online Speech

Controlling the thoughts we think about our nation and our world are of paramount importance to our rulers, because it's only by controlling what we think that they can control how we vote, how we act, and whether or not we get fed up with being exploited and oppressed



In a drastic pivot from typical denunciations of false flag operations as conspiratorial nonsense that don’t exist outside the demented imagination of Alex Jones, the US political/media class is proclaiming with one voice that Russia is currently orchestrating just such an operation to justify an invasion of Ukraine.

...... The US government has substantiated these incendiary claims with the usual amount of evidence, by which I of course mean jack dick nothingballs. The mass media have not been dissuaded from reporting on this issue by the complete absence of any evidence that this Kremlin false flag plot is in fact a real thing that actually happened, their journalistic standards completely satisfied by the fact that their government instructed them to report it. 

... This sudden embrace of the idea that governments can stage attacks on their own people to justify their own pre-existing agendas is a sharp pivot from the scoff which such a notion in mainstream liberal circles has typically received.



Other Quotes of the Week:

Garcia: Speaking of ennui, Bill and Hillary Clinton reportedly are not only bored with being pariahs, but they smell anemic Biden blood in the water and are planning a comeback.

Tim: The Clintons deceived their way through life: covered up Bill’s rapes, created policy to enrich themselves, established a fake charity, lied to start wars, by which they would personally profit. Such “purity warriors,” they are.

Joe Biden is a Dick Cheney Democrat: Can’t wait to see what goofy shit Hillary tweets today. I really hope she runs in 2024!!

Schuler: I thought Fareed Zakaria’s most recent Washington Post column was full of unintended comedy. The claim of the column is that “politics is trumping economics” as though it were a recent phenomenon

Medhurst: The United States runs a torture camp for Muslim men at Guantanamo Bay, where everyone is held without charge or trial— but wants you to believe that it cares about Uyghur Muslims in China.

Smith: What I find interesting is that leftists actually believe that THEY are the underdogs and that they are fighting a “revolution” against the establishment. This is a bizarre disconnect from reality. Every major institution of power and influence in the US is on the side of the political left. How can you be rebelling against the establishment if all your values coincide with the establishment’s agenda?



Good Reads / Big Thoughts:

**** el gato malo: taking back education

if there is one little ray of sunshine in the dystopian scholastic hellscape of the last two years, it is this:

parents all over america got a good, hard look at what is being done to their children in schools.
they saw what was being taught
they saw what kinds of people they had left their children alone with
they saw the true colors of the teachers’ unions
and they saw the school boards and the school board associations for the unaccountable karen conclaves of tyrants, bullies, and lunatics that they are
and more and more, all over america, they rose.
this was the bridge too far. the parents have had it.
...
it is not easy to turn soccer moms and carpool dads into aggressive social activists. it is not their nature and they have other stuff to do. but muzzling their kids, subjecting them to alienation, indoctrination, and depriving them of education and then turning around and seeking to brand these parents as literal domestic terrorists when they complain? well, that’s gonna do it.

..... there is a simple fact that cries out for redress:
we left our children alone for decades with an increasingly marxist and totalitarian group of evangelical indoctrinators. and they have run amok.
they have proselytized race, gender, and class war to our impressionable young ones and sought to induct them into collectivist cults and grievance cultures.
they have weaned them on self- hate, othering, intersectional division and conflict, and notions of gender, race, and health based original sin that demands contrition.
they instilled systems of imaginary structural oppression instead of encouraging and lauding achievement. self-improvement was shunted aside in favor of self-flagellation or self-pity.
they are not teaching they are preaching and their gospel is grotesque.
history has become hallucination. math is racist. children are dangerous disease vectors.
... this is WAY past stupid. this is abuse.
... education, not indoctrination.
... and so we must change it. 
if not now, when?
if not you, who?



older fare, but getting caught up on some of his, like on so many other writers/researchers I've just recently stumbled across, older posts:

Khan: Applying IQ to IQ
Selecting for smarts is important

Homo sapiens are very smart. They are very smart because they have large brains. This is not controversial. In relation to our body size, humans have bulging craniums housing large brains. About 20% of our caloric intake feeds our brain when we’re resting even though it’s only 2% of our body weight. It’s a calorically expensive organ.

We were not always so large-brained. The fossils make it clear even to a non-specialist.  Our brains began to grow several million years ago. There are many theories about why this might be, but the result is clearly that we have an extremely energetically expensive organ. So it must be useful. Evolution’s rule of thumb is “use it or lose it” if it’s imposing a cost. Just ask snakes where their legs are.

But all good things come to an end. Around 200,000 years ago the growth of our brains leveled off, probably due to biological constraints ... And H. sapiens and its brain found its barrier 200,000 years ago. In fact, the largest brained humans seem to have lived during the Ice Age, not today. Since the transition to farming our brains have been shrinking.

... The primary use of the brain is to cogitate. To think. But there are many ways to think about thinking. That’s why cognitive science and psychology are expansive disciplines. For example, there are a set of human competencies that derive from “hard-wired” and “innate” aptitudes.

... Von Neumann... was arguably the apotheosis of “general intelligence,” the ability to move fluidly between disciplines due to an innate mastery of abstraction and universal principles. In a stone-age society, someone of von Neumann’s caliber may have been unrecognized. His exceptional talents would not have found an expression in the world of flint blades. But embedded within a modern cultural matrix which leveraged his skills he became a supernova of intellectual creativity. Like Archimedes moving the earth with a lever, culture and civilization are the frameworks in which geniuses of von Neumann’s caliber can shine. Alone on an island, they are stranded with their thoughts, but poised in the matrix of civilization their explosions of brilliance shed a discernible light on all.

But obviously, there is a spectrum between von Neuman and the typical human. The human race is not divided between von Neumann and the rest of us. The ability to engage in deep and complex abstraction varies greatly amongst humans, along a normal distribution.

... Those who do poorly on one type of test tend to do poorly on another type. This is the general intelligence factor, a statistical construct that summarizes the positive correlation among standardized tests. It is what we colloquially refer to as the “intelligence quotient” or IQ. 

This should not be surprising. There are many people who are athletic and excel at most any sport they try. It turns out that substantial muscle mass, fast reaction times, and a high level of coordination are useful across sports.

... Because general intelligence does not manifest physically in the same manner that a fit physique does, it is often assumed that intelligence is purely a matter of internal effort. .. Sometimes there is the expectation that if you work long enough you can derive a novel mathematical proof. Would we ask the same of an average height and athleticism person when it comes to dunking a basketball? There are limits to how far effort can take you.

IQ matters

General intelligence is one of the most predictive psychological measures in existence. The chestnut of wisdom that ability to test well measures how well you take a test is true but trivial. The implication that test measurement does not correlate with other aspects of performance is manifestly false. Those with higher measured IQs have higher incomes, greater educational attainment, and lower crime rates...

... At each stage the athletes are more unique and exceptional physical specimens, endowed with both physical talents and harder-to-define cognitive abilities maximizing coordination and skill. There are many tall human beings, but very few can be elite basketball players, because these athletes combine great size with a grace and coordination that tall humans often lack. Michael Jordan’s fluid movements were not typical for a man of 6’6. In this, he exceeded even his peers in the NBA, who often seemed ungainly next to “His Airness.”

It is quite plausible that one can obtain a university degree through conscientiousness despite modest cognitive aptitudes. There are many such individuals. But who is going to win a Fields Medal in mathematics, which recognizes the most brilliant young minds? A high IQ is not sufficient in this case. Not at all. But it is probably necessary.

............ When examinations fell out of favor, as occurred during the Eastern Han, the Tang, and the Yuan, the consequences were inevitable. A coterie of great families, or ruling castes, came to dominate the administration, and unattached youth of talent were excluded and marginalized. The testing regime was uniformly disliked by the aristocrats because they already had power, connections, and polish. They perceived in themselves the right to rule. They required no test to validate their self-worth. For those born to rule, the memorization of ancient texts and the drafting of learned essays is tedious. But to the bright but unconnected, mental gymnastics are a chance to demonstrate their worthiness.

.... Tests are imperfect. But what is the alternative? Over the past few years graduate schools have been removing the GRE as a requirement for admission. What will the consequence be? If the history of China is any guide, those with connections and pedigree will benefit. Without a hard-to-fake entrance exam, recommendations from those you trust will loom large again. The abolition of the GRE will be a back door through which the “letter of introduction” returns. Who will be hurt by this? Who will benefit? There are many answers here, but one thing seems obvious: those without connections will suffer. ... Ironically, attempts to “foster inclusion” by removing standardized testing will inevitably constrict the space of those included. 

Genes, IQ, and Family

Depending on the study IQ is at least 50% heritable. That means that half the variation in IQ in the population is due to variation in genes....

...... When scientists assert that the GRE does not predict success, they magically forget the ability of range restriction to constrain the predictive power of a variable. Believe it or not, taller basketball players are not the best basketball players in the NBA. That’s because NBA players are all already tall, more or less. The abolition of the GRE and marginalization of the SAT, amount to a massive natural experiment. These experiments are predicated on the idea that standardized testing is useless. No matter that in various forms this method has been around for 2,000 years, and we have evidence of the benefits and deficiencies of testing in the historical record. Close your eyes and believe.

.... The next generation will be a test. Will America turn away from intelligence and aptitude testing to unleash untapped capital? Or will our society’s meliorist impulses only usher in a new era of cronyism and favoritism? History teaches us to anticipate the latter. But you never know until you run the experiment.




...

... Trillions of cicadas emerged; to avoid them was an impossibility, but you only had to bear them for a short while, and yet people unable to reason that there is no eliminating something of that magnitude and too impatient to wait decided that they knew better. Is there a more perfect encapsulation of the American mindset in these dwindling days?

I’d be amazed if you couldn’t sense it—the coming end of things. .....

.........

Everyone’s favorite Slovenian Marxist Slavoj Zizek snottily gurgled it a decade ago, writing in Living in the End Times that the “global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point,” and identifying four horseman in the form of environmental collapse, biogenetics, systemic contradictions, and “explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions.” Not everyone claims to see the gathering storm however, especially those who are most responsible, though if they do, they’re silent about it in their New Zealand compounds. Degenerated, chipper, faux-optimism is a grift during our epoch of dusk; Jeff Bezos expecting us to clap when he shoots Captain Kirk into space; Elon Musk mouth-breathing about cryptocurrency and terraforming the rusty soil of Mars, as if we haven’t already heated one planet too much; Peter Thiel promising us that there will be a digital heaven where all of the billionaires can download their consciousness unshackled from the material world, and we can serve alongside them as Egyptian slaves entombed with their masters, clicking on PayPal,and Amazon and Facebook for a silicon eternity. Such promises are the opposite of hope, they’re only grinning assurances of dystopia instead of apocalypse. Besides, such things are chimerical; ask not for whom the Antarctic ice shelf collapses, or for whom the ocean acidifies, or for whom the temperature rises at 3 degrees Celsius, it does all these things for Bezos, Musk, and Thiel as much as you and me. Ours is the age of Covid and QAnon, supply chain breakdown and surveillance capitalism, food shortages and armed militias, climate change and bio-collapse. We’re merely in a milquetoast interregnum as we wait for monsters to be born in a year, in three. If poets and prophets have traditionally been our Cassandras, then on some level everybody knows that a rough beast is slouching towards Bethlehem right now, though despite that one sees perilously little grace, kindness, and empathy. Even the insanity of those who believe whatever conspiracy theory happens to give them scant meaning intuit that the insects are disappearing, the waters are rising, and the absence of 700,000 lives means that something is askance. 

“The world sinks into ruin,” wrote St. Jerome in 413, some six decades and change before the final sack of Rome that marks the Western empire’s fall. .... As Edward Gibbon noted in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the “zeal of fanaticism prevailed over the cold and feeble efforts of policy.” Stop the steal! Lock her up! Make America GREAT again! Living on a heating planet filled with dying animals and governed by either the inept or the insane, and it’s hard not to feel a bit strange going to work, buying groceries, saving your salary, as if everything were normal. “We live as though we are going to die tomorrow,” wrote Jerome, “yet we build as though we are going to live always,” or, as David Byrne sang, “Why stay in college? Why go to night school?… I ain’t got time for that now.”

Whenever comparisons are made between Rome and America, there’s always somebody who denounces such language as not just histrionic, but clichéd. The latter is certainly fair .......

.... comparisons of America to Rome tell us little about the latter and everything about the former. But for those who see the comparison as tortured beyond all reasonableness, the truth can be bluntly stated as follows: our current problems aren’t like the fall of Rome because they’re far, far worse. Would it only be that we faced the collapse of the U.S. government, or authoritarianism, or even civil war, because the rising average temperature per year, the PH of the oceans, and the biodome’s decreasing diversity are things unheard of on the Earth since the Permian-Triassic extinction of more than 250 million years ago, when 70 percent of life on land perished and almost 95 percent in the seas did.     

cover“It is worse, much worse, than you think,” writes David Wallace-Wells ....

... This summer I threw a little digital life buoy out into the whirlpool of Twitter, another one of those horseman of dystopia, and asked others what it felt like to be living during what could be the apocalypse. Mostly I discovered that my anxiety is common, but one gentleman reminded me that there were Medieval millenarians and Great Awakening Millerites awaiting their messiahs who never came, and that they were all mistaken. That is, if you’ll forgive me, exceedingly stupid. ...

... The signs that are appearing in the windows of McDonald’s and Subway, Starbucks and Chipotle, from workers tired of being mistreated and underpaid is the largest labor rebellion in a generation, the totally organic Great Resignation spoken of everywhere and reported on nowhere—it gives me hope. It gives me hope because that dark faith, the capitalism that has spoiled the planet, isn’t inviolate; a confirmation of Ursula K. LeGuin’s promise that “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings.” A corollary is the welcome mocking of fools like Bezos, Musk, and Thiel. Just the widespread awareness of our situation is promising, not because I valorize despair, but maybe if there are a billion little apocalypses it will somehow stave off the big Apocalypse.

... In The Guardian, novelist Ben Okri recommends “creative existentialism,” which he claims is the “creativity at the end of time.” He argues that every line we enjamb, every phrase we turn, every narrative we further “should be directed to the immediate end of drawing attention to the dire position we are in as a species.” I understand climate change as doing something similar to what Dr. Johnson said the hangman’s noose did for focusing the mind.

.... I’ve no strategy save for love. “The world begins at a kitchen table,” writes Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, in a lyric that was introduced to me by a Nick Ripatrazone essay. “No matter what, we must eat to live.” Harjo enumerates all of the quiet domestic beauties of life, how the “gifts of earth are brought and prepared” here, and “children are given instructions on what it means to be human” while sitting at this table, where “we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and/remorse. We give thanks./Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and/crying, eating of the last sweet bite.” That, finally, is the only ethic I know of as the oceans flood and the fires burn, to be aware of our existence at the kitchen table. When the cicadas come back in 17 years, I wonder what the world will be like for them? I hope that there will be bird song.



Charts, Pics & Memes of the Week:










Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)