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Wednesday, January 19, 2022

2022-01-19

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

Regular Fare:

Pandemic Inflation: A Guide for Progressives
A few weeks ago, I published a Working Paper to develop an alternative understanding and analysis of recent inflation pressures through the lens of Modern Monetary Theory. In it, I argue that conventional explanations of inflation remain ideologically compromised and constricted to an outdated social theory and framing. Consequently, public policy responses to recent price increases such as interest rate hikes and deficit reduction are antiquated, blunt-force tools that cause immense societal harm and simply don’t work. TL;DR the paper shows why Larry Summers and the gang are all wrong. ...


Other Charts: (source links: one, two..)





Prasad: We need to talk about the vaccines
Public debate on side-effects is being censored




(not just) for the ESG crowd:

Report: Global resource use hit record high in 2021, despite pandemic slowdown


Elected officials work through compromise, but a warming planet waits for no one.



Quotes:

John Pasalis: Over the past week both the Ontario Gov & Ottawa have kicked off meetings to investigate high home prices
Confirming that...
Politicians have no idea what they're doing



Pics of the Week:

Adam Summers Art





Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

Glenn Greenwald Exposes Deep State Effort To Stop Trump Pardoning Edward Snowden And Julian Assange


The appalling ideology of diversity, inclusion and equity is demolishing education and business
.... There were many reasons, including the fact that I can now teach many more people and with less interference online. But here’s a few more:
First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). 



Ecological / Sustainability Fare:

Spratt: Have tipping points already been passed for critical climate systems? (1) The basics

Sixteen years ago, James Hansen warned that “We live on a planet whose climate is dominated by positive feedbacks, which are capable of taking us to dramatically different conditions. The problem that we face now is that many feedbacks that came into play slowly in the past, driven by slowly changing forcings, will come into play rapidly now, at the pace of our human-made forcings, tempered a few decades by the oceans thermal response time."

... Feedbacks, with or without  abrupt change, can drive a system past its tipping point, which is a critical threshold at which small change causes a larger, more critical change to be initiated, taking components of the Earth system from one state to a discreetly different state. In other words, the system has reached a point of fragility such that it will move to a different state due to its own internal dynamics, even if there is no further external forcing 

... In 2012, James Hansen warned of scientists’ fear about the Arctic and the cascading of tipping points triggered in the Arctic: “Our greatest concern is that loss of Arctic sea ice creates a grave threat of passing two other tipping points – the potential instability of the Greenland ice sheet and methane hydrates… These latter two tipping points would have consequences that are practically irreversible on time scales of relevance to humanity.”

Cascading events may in turn lead to a “Hothouse Earth” scenario, in which climate system feedbacks and their mutual interaction drive the Earth System climate to a “point of no return”, whereby further warming would become self-sustaining (that is, without further human-caused perturbations). This planetary threshold could exist at a temperature rise as low as 2°C, possibly even in the 1.5°C–2°C range. 

The problem, elaborated in a 2019 paper, "Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against", is that time is close to running out: "We argue that the intervention time left to prevent tipping could already have shrunk towards zero, whereas the reaction time to achieve net zero emissions is 30 years at best. Hence we might already have lost control of whether tipping happens. 

... Prof. Tim Lenton says that the evidence from tipping points alone “suggests that we are in a state of planetary emergency: both the risk and urgency of the situation are acute… If damaging tipping cascades can occur and a global tipping point cannot be ruled out, then this is an existential threat to civilization”.  








Mark Cranfield: To suggest we're only now passing the safe limit for chemical pollution is the most horrible propaganda. There's no other word for it. Now disseminated by an unwitting respected figure.

Mark Cranfield2: We aren't destroying the planet in real time.
We have already destroyed it in the future with the emissions of the past.
There's a lag. We are in the lag.
We need to protect ourselves from the asteroid.

and3: Beware:
- carbon budgets are an absurdity
- climate stabilisation is an absurdity
- net zero is an absurdity



COVID Fare:

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


eugyppius: Former Bay Area Lockdown Guru: "OK Everybody Please Stop Locking Down Now"
"It's time to start living again," says Zero Covid thinkfluencer Tomas Pueyo

Erstwhile Zero Covidian Tomas Pueyo, whose viral Medium essays drove lockdown policies across the world, wants everyone to stop locking down now.

This is because “Between Omicron, vaccines, and treatments, the risk of COVID is down by 10x to 1000x.” We should still be “cautious” over the course of the next wave, but now “The biggest risk” is that nobody “internalize[s]” Pueyo’s all-clear and our governments continue to restrict social and economic life.

Pueyo thinks that the Omicron death rate is down 90% compared to Delta, and 75% compared to the wild-type, “making Omicron just about 2x as virulent as normal flu.” For proof of this we go to the bizarrely wrong Footnote 2:
Alpha was ~60% more virulent than the original variant, and Delta was yet again ~60% more virulent than Alpha. A reduction of virulence of ~90% of Omicron vs. Delta broadly puts it at ~75% less virulent than the original variant, which is huge. It would go from an average fatality rate of ~1% in mature economies to ~0.25%, just about twice the virulence of a normal flu.
Clownworld is when the random Medium writer and Stars Wars narratologist who condemned you to two years of house arrest, social isolation, and movement restrictions, decides on the strength of some casual envelope math that it’s fine to go outside again. It’s just amazing, after all this time, that there are still Corona pundits – even in Zero Covidistan – who assign SARS-2 a 1% fatality rate. 

....
...
.. Unlike Pueyo’s earlier efforts, this one will not be translated into all major world languages, and will not proceed to dictate public health policies in multiple countries. Mass hysteria is easy to start, but very hard to stop, and nobody is any longer listening to our viral Medium essayist.


***** Kirsch: Incriminating evidence

... As of Jan 16, 2022, the CDC says the spike protein that is produced by the COVID vaccines is “harmless.” The scientific literature clearly shows that they are lying to the American public. What is their proof it is harmless? How do they respond to the papers cited below? If we can’t trust them on something this basic, how can we trust anything they tell us?

These papers in peer-reviewed medical literature show very clearly that the spike protein isn’t harmless. How does the CDC explain the discrepancy?

.... One of the world’s top pathologists, Dr. Peter Schirmacher, one of the world’s most respected pathologists, found that 30% to 40% of the deaths after vaccination were due to the vaccine. That is a bare minimum. It could be 100%. His results were independently confirmed by other German researchers who showed numbers as high as 93% of the deaths within 6 months after vaccination were caused by the vaccine itself (here and here).

Overall, the safety evidence is very troubling. All of these references show that the vaccines are unsafe. .....



As the mass uncontrolled experimentation on people with the novel mRNA COVID-19 vaccines continues, policy decision are being made in response to the rapid waning immunity seen in people vaccinated against COVID-19. These policies are being made with no reference to long-term clinical studies, and scientists are starting to worry about the effects of repeated vaccinations over such a short time frame.

In fact, on Tuesday, European regulators warned that frequent Covid-19 vaccinations could adversely affect the immune response. ...



.... the examples linked about lay it out clearly: you can make a zero efficacy vaxx look like it works and this works even better if it causes a rise in risk in the 2 week period you lump into the prior group.

thus, boosters make “full vaxxed” look bad. fully vaxxed made unvaxxed look bad. so much of what has been claimed to be vaccine efficacy is just a mathematic rig job from poorly chosen definitions and there is simply no way that that was an accident.


Covid vaccine injuries are being grossly underreported and censored: evidence from multiple, independent sources

In May of 2021, I took the second dose of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine. At the time, I was led to believe that everybody knows the vaccines are safe and effective. I kept hearing that anybody who believed in science should want to get vaccinated.

I used to be a biologist, so of course I believed in science. So I took the vaccine.

If I had known what I know now, I would not have taken it.

At the time, I had no idea of the level of censorship that hides Covid vaccine injuries from the public. At the time, I thought we could trust our health institutions, more or less.

But not all vaccines are the same, and not all vaccines are equally safe. And criticizing the Covid vaccines, does not make one “anti-vax.”

When it comes to the Covid vaccines, there is overwhelming evidence that they lead to much higher rates of injury and death, than what our health institutions, like the CDC, acknowledge and report to the public.

I wrote this article in order to take some of the evidence for this and compile it into one, shareable article. ....



To these college administrators, demanding boosters probably seems like cheaply achieved “virtue signaling”, showing themselves to be “on the side of science”, perhaps reaffirming some liberal ideals about forcing people to benefit society at their own expense, etc. Some administrators might even still believe that “boosters” somehow will help their students, not being involved in vaccine science.

As a human being, I understand where these administrators come from. But please realize, for a minute, that more than half of these previously vaccinated students just had Covid this month. The result of giving boosters to just-recovered young women and men will be disastrous. 

.... In addition, adding antigenic spike protein to recently-recovered will likely provoke exaggerated immunogenic response and cause side effects, ranging from neurological, to pulmonary, to cardiac, to blood clotting.

There is no possible benefit to boosting recently-recovered.


*** Rigger: It's a Marathon, Man

Actually, those of us with more of a questioning and open mind, are seen as the baddies now, asking the question “Is it safe?” again and again and again. I think most of us would like to adopt Olivier’s style of questioning and apply it to governments, government health agencies, and board members of Pharma in order to get to the truth.

... This is not going to be a short piece. ... Whole chapters, even books, could probably be written on each one. ... 

lots of good questions, including:
4. When did asymptomatic transmission become a thing?
6. Why were pandemic preparedness plans ditched?
7. Why no cost-benefit analyses?
13. Why downplay promising early treatment?
14. Why was vaccination seen as the only way out?
15. Why cripple doctors’ ability to try different treatments?
20. Why such a high cycle threshold for the PCR?
23. Why such arbitrary and obviously contradictory (and stupid) rules?
25. Why not debate instead of just smear?
36. Why ignore vaccine side effects?



The whole sorry saga of covid has been awash with counterfactuals.

If we hadn’t locked down it would have been so much worse
If we hadn’t worn masks infections would have spiralled out of control
If you hadn’t taken the vax your covid symptoms would have been much worse

I remember (at least) one quote in the legacy media where grieving relatives of a person who died of covid expressed thanks for the Glorious Goo: My dad died, but it would have been so much worse had he not taken the vaccine.

If he’d been unvaccinated he’d probably have died several times over.

Counterfactual thinking is a kind of prediction about an alternate reality that didn’t happen. It has been mercilessly used by governments and their propagandists everywhere to drive fear to insane levels.

..... I wear an amulet around my neck that has protected me from being trampled by a rhino. It’s very effective. If I hadn’t worn it I would have gone on an instant rhino-diet and become impossibly thin.

Where’s your evidence?
I haven’t been trampled by a rhino

This is pretty much the level of “evidence” we’ve often been treated to over covid. ...


Girardot: Absurd Reasoning to Kill an Absurdly High Fatality Rate
..... Debunking IFR Absurdity with Absurd Reasoning

The COVID crisis has been utterly absurd from the start, and we - conspiracy theorists or Team Reality advocates (choose your point of view :-)) - have been on a wild goose chase all along, going down one rabbit hole after another… But the very justification of it all, a dubiously high lethality was never challenged as the narrative was overwhelmed by a constant flow of apocalyptic news.

Frankly, I haven’t been able to watch television peacefully ever since, sickened by the stream of idiotic fallacies.

So, let’s get back to reality. These past 2 years, many have asserted absolutely unfounded high fatality rate numbers. And many still believe those numbers, the justification for the incredible sacrifices imposed on everyone…





Background: Ivermectin has demonstrated different mechanisms of action that potentially protect from both coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection and COVID-19-related comorbidities. Based on the studies suggesting efficacy in prophylaxis combined with the known safety profile of ivermectin, a citywide prevention program using ivermectin for COVID-19 was implemented
... 
Conclusion: In this large PSM study, regular use of ivermectin as a prophylactic agent was associated with significantly reduced COVID-19 infection, hospitalization, and mortality rates.



COVID Charts of the Week: (one, two ..)




COVID Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

TraumaaaNurse: Critical thinking does not make me an“anti-vaxxer”. Asking questions does not make me“ignorant of the science & research”.My belief in the precautionary principle does not make me“selfish”. My advocacy against coercion, segregation & hate speech is not a crime. Good will prevail

Tino: A lot of people put more effort, do more research and ask a ton more questions when they go buy a new television than for an injection into their bodies by a not yet approved, new, unproven, (manufactured & trialed by the most criminal companies in the world) gene therapy serum.

Tanya: Not a single one of my Nigerian students is vaccinated against Covid. Why? Because Pfizer experimented on Nigerian kids without the proper parental consent and those maimed by the drug are a still alive to tell the story.

Vanden Bossche, via Windt: "Scientifically there is no rationale whatsoever to vaccinate children. There is no added value ... There is only major risks ... How on Earth, with that knowledge, can you even think of doing such a thing? This is criminal. As a scientist, we don't use this word lightly."

ITGuy: One of the most evil persuasion tricks was not challenging the term “vaccine” while arguing about efficacy, side effects, & mandates. These were never vaccines, they were prophylactic drug treatments

Farrow: Now, just as I don’t call genetic therapies “vaccines,” or those who worry about them “anti-vaxxers,” I don't call the current step in that direction, here in a Quebec, a santé tax. I call it a sanity tax. It is the sane that Premier Legault is trying to penalize, and ultimately to eliminate, lest they remain as a control group against which to compare the psychotic and politically insane .. The sane long ago smelled a rat. 

Johns Hopkins' Dr. Marty Makary: "There's actually broad consensus now by public health officials acknowledging privately, & they're starting to say so publicly, that cloth masks have almost no impact on transmission whatsoever, and we basically have known that the entire time."

Miller: You have to respect Fauci’s commitment. He never tires of being hopelessly, consistently, incredibly incorrect about nearly every possible COVID policy. His actions as the head of the U.S. COVID response have been rife with failure, authoritarianism, zero understanding of human nature, indescribable egoism and maniacal self-importance, and disastrous inaccuracies that have influenced local jurisdictions and corporations into mandating horrific, unacceptable policies.

Whitney Webb: The targeting of Dr. Meryl Nass is extremely sinister, with the Maine medical board forcing her to undergo psych evaluation and revoking her license. Dr. Nass is not spreading "misinfo", as she's been accused, but she is a threat to the official narrative.

Dr. Gold: Today is January 17th, 2022, and healthcare workers are still the only group deemed ‘unqualified’ to make their own health choices by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling. This is not justice, nor is it science. This is tyranny.

eugyppius: The vaccinators are deranged lunatics, and whatever happens with Corona, we now face a prolonged, multi-year struggle to retain control of our bodies and our bloodstreams. This is what I get from COVID-19: What’s Next?, a World Economic Forum panel discussion featuring Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel. 
Like everything produced by the WEF, it’s stultifying, boring and terrifying all at the same time. 

Dr. Ponesse: I am hearing so many people say they wish they could be de-vaccinated, either for medical reasons or a as a matter of principle.

Changizi: I’m suspicious of any medication that
- bans all its competition
- needs all criticism stifled 
- you can’t sue
- is mandated
- if not taken you’re fired, banished, jailed and treated as a leper
- has unprecedented injuries
- is from the great minds behind lockdowns & masks.

"Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche




CJ Hopkins: The Last Days of the Covidian Cult

This isn’t going to be pretty, folks. The downfall of a death cult rarely is. There is going to be wailing and gnashing of teeth, incoherent fanatical jabbering, mass deleting of embarrassing tweets. There’s going to be a veritable tsunami of desperate rationalizing, strenuous denying, shameless blame-shifting, and other forms of ass-covering, as suddenly former Covidian Cult members make a last-minute break for the jungle before the fully-vaxxed-and-boosted “Safe and Effective Kool-Aid” servers get to them.

Yes, that’s right, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, the official Covid narrative is finally falling apart, or is being hastily disassembled, or historically revised, right before our eyes. The “experts” and “authorities” are finally acknowledging that the “Covid deaths” and “hospitalization” statistics are artificially inflated and totally unreliable (which they have been from the very beginning), and they are admitting that their miracle “vaccines” don’t work (unless you change the definition of the word “vaccine”), and that they have killed a few people, or maybe more than a few people, and that lockdowns were probably “a serious mistake.”

I am not going to bother with further citations. You can surf the Internet as well as I can. The point is, the “Apocalyptic Pandemic” PSYOP has reached its expiration date. .....


We Must Understand the Current Evil

I wrote recently here about the fact that we find ourselves in an historical moment involving monumental evil — the kind of evil that we, as a human race, have not seen on a global scale for eighty years. And I argued that we can’t fully understand where we are in this thicket of darkness and unknowing, unless we are willing to understand and face the nature of evil.

... Something that is slowing down many people from fully grasping what is upon us, is that they are making mistakes in their reasoning about events, because they are engaged, naturally enough, in what intelligence analysts call “mirror imaging.” That is, because most of us are decent people with basic compassion at our cores, and are not sociopaths or psychopaths, we tend to “mirror image” in assuming that others are also driven by basic human motivations such as empathy, altruism, and kindness — or even just by the basic notion that other human beings are also deserving of life, self-determination and dignity. How can such brutality be imposed on us? How could others be at the helm of such vicious policies?

But this assumption, that those currently influencing events and making certain key decisions, are “like us” — is a fatal error.

I’ll explore here, evil achieved by cultivating an elite within metanational corporations; and in a later essay, evil achieved by faceless nonprofits; and in a final essay, evil done by compartmentalization and contractors. 

To understand this moment, in which a brutal tyranny is being enacted upon us in lockstep globally, by many otherwise familiar and formerly benign-seeming Western leaders and philanthropists and investors — men and women we thought we knew — we have to begin to “think like a tyrant.”

I am not talking about anything arcane or occult. I am not talking about a Q-Anon fantasy of a few elites running the world.

I am talking here, rather, about the global elites whom I know and among whom I have lived for forty years, and about events that I have witnessed.

I am talking about what the German-Jewish philosopher of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt called “the Banality of Evil.”

To understand what is happening in the current global lockstep of tyranny (I until recently would say, “toward tyranny”), we have to understand that certain subcultures, certain leaders and certain ideologies simply don’t have these core values at heart; and we must face the fact that these monsters are not just Nazis long dead, or members of the CCP far away, taking out their brutality on their own distant, silenced populations. Some monsters are very near to us; .....



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:

I Spent 20 Years Covering America’s Secretive Detention Regime. Torture Was Always the Subtext.



Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is making a comeback as the Pentagon hypes a new Cold War with China and Russia. Threat inflation is a big part of this “new” war, just as it was in the old one. So too is greed. There’s much money to be made (a trillion or more dollars, perhaps) in building new nuclear missiles and bombers, even though these weapons represent incipient holocausts.

We need to stop this MADness. There is no need for a new Cold War, and there is no need for new nuclear weapons, weapons that could very well destroy human civilization and most of life on our planet....


Is the Ukraine/Russia conflict a US foreign policy goal?

Dare I say a dangerous truth, but there are politicians and analysts and journalists who want Russia to invade Ukraine.

Not because these folks are “Putin apologists,” to quote a popular insult they use against the anti-war crowd. But because they see Russian actions as a pretext for U.S. intervention and perpetual U.S. presence in Ukraine, if not elsewhere. (Poke the bear and you’re the antagonist. Get attacked by the bear and you’re the victim.)

How can Russian aggression best be used? For some, it is the justification for more troops and more weapons in Eastern Europe. ...



Wallace starts out by saying that Russia’s belief that it is threatened by NATO is a ‘straw man’. Why? Because – and you’ve heard this before – ‘NATO, to its core, is defensive in nature. … It is a truly defensive alliance.’

Really?

How was NATO defending itself in Yugoslavia? Or in Libya? Or even in Afghanistan, for that matter? The idea that NATO is ‘to its core, defensive’ is, of course, ridiculous.


hat tip: naked capitalism
Resilc: “Just about every shitstorm we face starts with Clinton.”


Yarvin: A clarification on "Ukraine"
"A classic case of weird 19th-century nation-inventing."

... Perhaps a better description of the meaning of “Ukraine” is that this “Ukraine” is, like “Yugoslavia” or “Czechoslovakia,” two historically separate but linguistically-similar countries jammed together by deranged 20th-century diplomats. If that fool Putin really does invade, let us hope he has the wisdom to separate them again.

The first country is Malorossiya, or “Little Russia.” Malorossiya, which has its own national identity, is and has always been, since before the birth of the USA, as much a province of Russia as Texas is an American state. Its capital is Kiev, which every educated GenX American knew as one of the three great Russian cities. Kiev was a Russian city when America was the Dominion of New England. Its second city is Odessa, another great Russian city, whence some of my ancestors came. If anyone thought my grandfathers were not Russians, it was only because they were Jews.

The second country is Ruthenia. The easy way to use this historically complex label in the modern world is to define it as the area inhabited by Ruthenian speakers, but which was never part of the Russian Empire. Its capital is Lviv, formerly known as the Polish city of Lwów. Various parts of Ruthenia changed hands between Poland and Austria at various times, depending on who had more jazzy uniforms.

....  Invading this “Ukraine,” but stopping at the 1914 border of Imperial Russia, would be an incredibly based and pragmatic move by Putin. ...



CaitOz Fare:


I’ve been kicking around some ideas for a dystopian novel lately, and I was hoping readers might be able to provide me with some feedback.

I’m picturing a story set in a world where everyone’s a slave but doesn’t know it. People think thoughts they believe they came up with themselves, make decisions and lifestyle choices that they think are their own, buy things they sincerely believe they want, consume entertainment they honestly feel they enjoy, vote for political candidates they truly think they support, when in reality they’re all marching in complete obedience to an elite ruling class whose high-level mastery of mass-scale psychological manipulation has bent the public to their will.

In my novel people will be funneled from early childhood through an education system designed by plutocrats and social engineers to create efficient and compliant gear-turners, then when they are grown their programming continues in the form of mass media indoctrination. If they become politically aware they are funneled into artificially constructed ideological perspectives that are designed to look truthful and appealing but which don’t challenge existing power structures in any meaningful way.

In the same way, the political system in this dark alternate reality is designed to look free and democratic, but there’s no real connection between how people vote and the way their civilization actually functions. An unacknowledged, unofficial alliance of plutocrats and government operatives makes the actual decisions about how money, industry, government, and military forces will behave from day to day, and this secretive alliance controls the official political system the public believes is responsible for overseeing those matters. What people call “elections” are actually just the public choosing between two lackeys of that ruling alliance, and their only meaningful disagreements are on how the will of those rulers should best be advanced.

My dystopian society is built on endless violence, oppression and exploitation, but because in this world the science of mass-scale psychological manipulation is so advanced, people don’t even know that it’s happening. Mass murder is committed continuously in nonstop military operations overseas, and the public is successfully convinced that it’s to promote freedom and democracy and keep them safe from terrorism. People have to work multiple jobs in the wealthiest nation in the world just to put food on the table, and they are brainwashed into believing it’s their fault for not making better life choices. People die of exposure on the streets while billionaires rake in exponentially more wealth, and the public is programmed to believe it’s because the latter work harder than the former. Police forces and prison systems keep expanding in order to exert more control and people are trained to believe it’s to make them safe from crime. Journalists are imprisoned for telling the truth and people are told it’s to protect national security. Information on the internet is aggressively controlled and people are propagandized into accepting that it’s to protect them from dangerous speech.

..... Obviously such a dystopia would be completely unsustainable and the most obvious ending would be to kill the whole world off within a few books by nuclear war or ecological disaster or something equally terrible, but maybe I could have the populace simply wake up to the manipulations and take back their will and shrug off the elites’ control like a warm coat on a summer’s day? I dunno. Something tells me that for some unknown reason today’s readers are too inured with learned helplessness and knee-jerk pessimism to be able to even imagine such a scenario, let alone accept it as a believable development.


Saying propaganda doesn’t work is the same as saying advertising doesn’t work, and advertising is nearly a trillion-dollar industry. Also, advertising would be much more effective than it already is if corporate ads were allowed to disguise themselves as news reports in The New York Times.


Other Quotes of the Week:

PCR: As an old cold warrior as a member of the anti-Soviet Committee on the Present Danger and as a member of a secret presidential committee that helped Reagan end the Cold War, I can tell you that I am astonished that Washington has not heard what the Russians have, in all frankness, told them. If the Committee on the Present Danger had heard the Russians say this in the 1980s, we would have told President Reagan to acknowledge their concern and reduce the tension. Today the situation is so different that to an experienced cold warrior such as myself it is extremely scary. But the idiots in Washington, who face a far more powerful Russia armed with weapons that Washington can only dream about, have no fear. Washington, the collection of the most stupid and arrogant people in the world, is exposing human life to untold risk on the sole basis of Washington’s belief in its own omnipotence.


*** This line of bullshit would be less infuriating if this country wasn’t being run by credentialized, “highly skilled” dimwits who are objectively horrible at their jobs.
....
They are morons. It’s incredibly difficult–borderline impossible–to become a Highly Skilled American unless you yourself are a moron or you are at least willing to pretend to be a moron and never question the authority of the morons around you.


Taibbi: To win an exhausted nation's admiration, all Joe Biden had to do was nothing. Instead, he's burning future votes like kindling


1. There was no electricity bill in Libya; electricity was free for all its citizens.
A long thread...


Martyanov: I understand these two dudes (as well as their org) have an agenda to push but, come on, not by spewing an obvious BS which doesn't even pass the smell test in terms of proper timing. Do I need to remind these two "experts" (a euphemism for grant-abusers in all kinds of US ethnic agenda "think-tanks") events of 2008 or 2014, how about events of 2015. What about events of March 1, 2018, what about other events which provide an easily recognizable pattern of Russians knowing exactly what the US is militarily and economically. But I am sure, while pulling Clausewitz' abused quote about war (do these two "experts" even know the Deng Xiaoping's version of this dictum?), they call for shutting down of Nord Stream 2. Sure, let the US do this, I will need a bucket of pop-corn.


Martin Tye: "Jobs n Growth"- the great political lie:
The whole idea of using #population growth to drive economic growth is to ensure the system always has more people who need jobs... than jobs available
Thus shifting power from labour to capital.


Ethical Skeptic: The purpose of the narrative ninny and fake skeptic is to mislead you into substituting the state of comfort/simplicity/familiarity - in lieu of the process of comprehension.
One still wallows in ignorance, however no longer bears the dissonance to even detect that reality.




Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

**** Greer: The Unmanageable Future

... Yet there’s another delusion, subtler but even more misleading, that pervades current notions about the future and promises an even more awkward collision with unwelcome realities.

That delusion? The notion that we can decide what future we’re going to get, and get it.

.... This isn’t simply an exercise in sarcasm, though I freely admit that political antics of the kind just surveyed have earned their share of ridicule. The managerial aristocracy that came to power in the early twentieth century across the industrial world defined its historical mission as taking charge of humanity’s future through science and reason. Rational planning carried out by experts guided by the latest research, once it replaced the do-it-yourself version of social change that had applied before that point, was expected to usher in Utopia in short order.  That was the premise, and the promise, under which the managerial class took power.  With a century of hindsight, it’s increasingly clear that the premise was quite simply wrong and the promise was not kept.

....... We’re arguably not far from similar scenes here in the United States, for the same reasons:  the gap between rhetoric and reality gapes just as wide in Biden’s America as it did in Chernenko’s Soviet Union. When a ruling class puts more stress on using the right abstractions than on getting the right results, those who have to put up with the failures—i.e., the rest of us—withdraw their loyalty and their labor from the system, and sooner or later, down it comes.

....... These things are certain—but they don’t tell us that much. What technologies and social forms will replace the clanking anachronism of industrial society over the decades immediately ahead?  We don’t know that, and indeed we can’t know it.



It’s time for me to go on a news fast. That means a complete break from reading any news site, including the various social media channels where I get a lot of my news.

Wanna join me? I’ll tell you some of the reasons why I do these from time to time, and why I’m starting one right now.

(1) Anything can be addictive that pretends to meet a real need, but leaves it unmet while intensifying the need. I have a need to take action to do something about the state of the world. Well, lately I find that instead of taking action I read about it instead. When I indulge my outrage and indignation, it seems like I’m doing something. I’m being concerned. I’m feeling passionate. But all I have actually accomplished is to read so-and-so’s Telegram channel. Yeah OK, I’m “informed” now, but so what?

That isn’t to say being informed is useless. But if all I do is to stay informed, I’m really not doing anything at all. I can tell myself that I need to be informed as a citizen and especially as a writer; however, most of the information doesn’t serve either. It just presses the same emotional buttons again and again in my bloated amygdala. 

(2) I fast from the news for the same reason some people fast from food. ....

..... We speak a lot about information. What is information, really? It is that which comes in and forms us.

... I’ll confess as well to a certain sense of futility that has visited me repeatedly over the last couple years.
Wokeness, “a term referring to awareness of issues that concern social justice and racial equality,” is everywhere these days. What is going on? The CIA going woke? The Pinkertons, long-time nemesis of labor unions, flying the Rainbow Pride flag? Raytheon pushing critical race theory? Has the U.S. Left finally triumphed over their foes? No, in fact, progressives are circling the drain (Medicare for All is going nowhere, the minimum wage remains $7.25/hr, unions are on the verge of extinction, impotent Twitter protestations by Bernie notwithstanding) but so are their woke-boosting corporate foes. Why and how is this so? The explanation has its roots in 1) the state-sponsored battle against civil unrest U.S that began in the 1960s. and 2) intellectual concepts discovered by polymath thinker Gregory Bateson.

The U.S. during the 1960’s suffered an eruption of domestic rebellion, ranging from the civil rights movement and the feminist revolution to organized labor and the anti-war movement. Strangely enough, most of the leaders in these movements were assassinated (RFK, MLK, Malcolm X) or died under mysterious circumstances (Walter Reuther). Was it enough for the ruling elite that the leaders of these movements were dead (neutralized)? I contend that it was not and that the elites embarked on an additional strategy: capture of the movements to 1) prevent a resurgence of rebellion against the ruling elites and 2) prevent cross alliances between the various rebel factions, a reason theorized by some to explain the death of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, who was trying to unite the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the organized labor movement at the time of his death. From feminism, where a movement leader (Gloria Steinem) has been revealed to have worked for the CIA, to civil rights, where Black Lives Matters is subsidized by the Ford Foundation to the tune of $100 million, to organized labor, where the AFL-CIO provided assistance to various U.S. government regime change efforts, these movements are infested with corporate and state actors. Meanwhile, concrete measures of material progress, such as increased wages for the working class, universal healthcare, and support for organized labor remain curiously out of reach.

There is a name for this highly effective signal jamming by government and corporate elites: maintaining the schismogenesis.

Schismogenesis means the beginning of the breakdown of a relationship or a system. Gregory Bateson, a scientific polymath, actively conducting research from the 1930s throughout the 1970s, in a wide array of fields including anthropology, semiotics, cybernetics, linguistics, and biology, first developed it while observing the social interactions of a New Guinean tribe called the Iatmul. Interestingly enough, Bateson later weaponized the idea of schismogenesis and deliberately sowed divisions while working for the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. This perpetuation of division, schismogenesis, is what I contend all of these woke corporations and government agencies are actively engaged in.

The explosion in wokeness launched in the years immediately following the Occupy rebellion of the Left and the Tea Party rebellion of the Right. Very curious timing indeed. Absent in all of these modern woke campaigns, of course, are the aforementioned measures that actually represent material improvements for the working class nor any mention of the menace of war and imperialism

... The elite project of maintaining the schismogenesis has been effective for generations and was put into overdrive by the wokeness campaign. Now, with the need for national solidarity to address existential threats to the nation, set against the rise of the populist Right, are U.S. elites capable of retiring wokeness as a weapon, surrendering some material power to the non-elites, and therefore saving themselves and everyone else from the fallout of national collapse?



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