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Thursday, January 27, 2022

2022-01-27 mid-week links

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

Regular Fare:

Research from the BIS suggests that much of the recent increase in inflation is really a result of changing relative prices rather than a generalised rise. That has important implications for policy.

The Bank for International Settlements produces some of the most interesting macro research of any global institution. And whilst I don’t always agree with it, I usually find it interesting. This week the VoxEU write-up of a recent paper on inflation did what a good paper should do, it got me thinking.

Macroeconomics, as a discipline, has been having something of a crisis of confidence over its understanding of inflation in recent months. I’ve written before about Rudd and Goodhart’s worries that modern central banks lack a general theory of inflation. Jason Furman’s recent piece, asking why so few forecasters spotted the recent spike in inflation coming is well worth the time to read.

The paper from Borio, Disyatat, Xia and Zakrajsek is, perhaps, even more challenging. It starts from the premise that the spiking prices we are currently witnessing across the advanced economies are not really inflation at all, or at least not in a conventional macroeconomic sense.

True inflation, in macroeconomic theory, is a generalised rise in the price level. And a generalised rise in the price level is distinct from a series of idiosyncratic changes in relative prices. To give a concentrate example: a world in which energy prices quadruple is a world in which the headline rate of measured consumer price inflation would certainly rise sharply, but what would be happening would be the price of energy – relative to other goods and services – increasing rather than a generalised rise in prices.

Monetary policymakers are, of course, aware of this. One reason to focus on ‘core’ measures of inflation, stripping out often volatile components such as energy and food, is to allow them to judge to what extent any period of rising prices represents ‘true’ inflation and to try and concentrate on variables they can directly impact through changing monetary policy.

The new research from the BIS goes further. ....

.... Furthermore, they find that monetary policy operates on a surprisingly narrow range of prices.



Quotes and Tweets:

Tchir: I generally hate FOMC meeting days. Despite all the preparation you’ve done, most of us seem to spend the hours ahead of the decision at 2pm and the press conference at 2:30 second guessing everything. Staring at the tape trying to divine some information that you’ve missed. 

Perli: Completely agree that curve flattening is a direct consequence of Fed tightening.  Harder to see how the Fed can talk up the 10yr rate or use the dot plot given that the market already thinks the terminal rate will be below the longer-run median dot. 1/2


Be clear, it's no one's job to see this coming. From every salesman's standpoint, it's their job NOT to see this coming. After all, what are Wall Street analysts with their unanimous buy ratings and perma-bullish market predictions other than glorified salesmen?



Other Charts: (source links: one, ..)




Bubble Fare:

NFTs are emblematic of capitalism’s growing retreat from productive activity — and the wealthy’s desire to extend their dominion into the digital ether. They’re worse than useless




COVID-19 notes:





The LSE’s director and former Bank of England economist is outspoken over the need for a reset of the wider capitalist system

... “The idea that you are successful because you are smart and hardworking is pernicious and wrong, because it means everyone who is unsuccessful is stupid and lazy,” she says. Referring to her friend Michael Sandel, the Harvard philosopher, she says the next phase of history should be characterised by a shared endeavour, ending the extreme individualism of the last 40 years.






Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:



Profiting off of Prison Labor




Unsustainability Fare:

Jacobson: The Demise of Hopium

Hopium (n)
  • Irrational or unwarranted optimism. [YourDictionary.Com]
  • That deranged condition in which a person is deluded into thinking humanity will survive omnicide. [DoomforDummies.blogspot.com]
I am not here to re-litigate the inevitability of the near-term collapse of global industrial civilization and the obvious consequence that billions of humans will suffer terribly as a result. Collapse is the endpoint of overshoot and overpopulation and it has already begun. While the speed of this collapse may be altered by various projects, plans and efforts, the end result will not change. Exponential growth on a finite planet is unsustainable, period. (If you need a reminder of what’s coming, review this article.)

Hopium pervades the climate change and environmental movements. It festers in every green industry, boils in the rhetorical language of world bodies like the UN and IPCC, is demanded in academic journal articles and grants, and lands like a heavy-handed thud as a tool of suppression by the media and popular authors. Hopium is a psychoactive medication, an addiction, a coping mechanism and a group therapy session. Hopium offers escape from the nightmarish reality the planet is plummeting towards. Hopium is a delusional distraction, fostered by mass media, politicians and academics. And hopium is harming us by creating more suffering and restricting free choice. ...

......

... The demise of hopium will be the beginning of the freedom to regain our critical judgment about the most important moment in our lives and in the history of humanity and the planet. It can’t come soon enough.

Be kind.  Be generous.  Be of service.


“I’m telling you that we’re putting our kids onto a global school bus that will with 98% probability end in a deadly crash.” ~ Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director Emeritus of Potsdam Institute

............. Realize that the current level of CO2 equivalent GHGs already exceeds 500 ppm. The increased pace of extreme weather events we are now getting from climate change is shocking even those scientists who predicted it. 

... If this trend of Earth dimming due to climate change continues, climate models will have to (once more) be significantly revised to include this additional net warming. We are headed for a Miocene climate during which the Antarctic ice volume was half of what it is today and the Arctic Ocean was ice-free in winter. Sea levels were 130 feet or higher and temperatures were about 5 to 8ºC warmer. Our ancestors were apes at that time. The European shoreline was 120 miles inland from today’s coast and dense swamp-forests resembling modern Louisiana clogged coasts and estuaries in Denmark and Germany. Nothing living in its region today is adapted to what will come. 

.... The cocktail of chemical pollution that pervades the planet now threatens the stability of global ecosystems upon which humanity depends, scientists have said. .... “There has been a fiftyfold increase in the production of chemicals since 1950 and this is projected to triple again by 2050,

... This development falls in line with what another expert, Professor Harold R. Wanless, had said years ago about sea level rise and climate change—that sea level rise does not happen in a gradual and linear fashion but rather as sudden, large pulses. I blogged about him six years ago, and what he said back then in the context of what is happening now gives me chills

... Evidently, we are biologically programmed to eventually crash and burn. Just as with all other species, humans have the imperative to expand their numbers, exploiting all resources until stopped by environmental constraints, and those limits to growth are fast approaching as we speak.





Endemic 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, Joey Smalley (aka 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 prof] 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


“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
—Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds
At a time when the rest of the world’s nations are slowly recovering their senses, one by one, Oregon appears to be attempting to prove Einstein’s apocryphal quote about insanity:
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”
In this letter, I will prove that masks:
  • do not prevent the spread of COVID
  • may cause physical health problems
  • may inflict psychological harm
  • pose a special threat to children and teens
I could share a bunch of peer-reviewed studies demonstrating that masks are not only ineffective at preventing the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 but also pose threats to both physical and mental health (and don’t worry, I will), but before we go there, how about we take a look at this sobering graph:

That is the 2020 vs. 2021 all-cause excess mortality for Oregon. The green line represents 2020 excess deaths, and the blue line is 2021 excess deaths. Notice anything?

In 2020, there was a 3.9% increase (1,541) in deaths over the anticipated number.

That percentage jumped to 16.1% in 2021—in other words, there were 6,346 excess deaths over the expected number.

Hmm, something big changed in 2021. What was that, I wonder.… I’ll bet a lot of people could figure it out if this Upton Sinclair quote didn’t apply:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Oh well, no matter, that’s not the topic we’re discussing today. But if you are curious—and you care about saving lives—you will click this link to discover why.

Setting that variable aside, would you agree that the pandemic response policies were pretty much the same from 2020 to 2021? Masking, periodic lockdowns, social distancing, the whole shebang, right?

So if that’s the case, why did the deaths increase—and not just by a little bit, but by a substantial margin?

Does it look to you like those policies worked? Be honest. Don’t think like a bureaucrat following orders; think like a human being with your own rational mind. You are capable of assessing data and coming to logical conclusions independently. It’s time for you to exercise that ability.

Now that you’re in critical thinking mode, let’s dive into the science.

For starters, you can scan this compilation of 150 comparative studies demonstrating the inefficacy and negative health impact of masking.

Written by former Queensland Health Principal Research Officer Wendy Corfield and submitted by Alan Ballard, this 76-page report provides exhaustive peer-reviewed evidence of the ineffectuality of and hazards associated with mask-wearing.

Swiss Policy Research also offers these comprehensive pieces delineating the peer-reviewed evidence disproving the safety and efficacy of masks:
  1. Are Face Masks Effective? The Evidence.
  2. The Face Mask Folly in Retrospect
But all that might be a bit overwhelming.

How about we start with this CDC study published in Emerging Infectious Diseases in May 2020? This was early enough in the pandemic that some researchers could still be a tad truthful without fear of reprisal from the Ministry of Truth.
.....
....
.....



Infectious healthcare workers returning to work. Boris Johnson ends all COVID-19 restrictions. Israel ends all COVID-19 restrictions. CDC says we should learn to live with COVID and says five days’ isolation is “enough”. CDC will be re-visiting the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths - looking to determine how many who have died with COVID-19 actually died from COVID-19, not just died with COVID.

Why all of sudden?

After vaccine efficacy plummeted below the FDA required 50% efficacy - defined by FDA as a 50% reduction in the risk of “laboratory-confirmed” infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, or a similar level of reduction in symptoms of SARS-CoV-2 infection, FDA did not revoke the EUAs. Why not?

The data are in from all over showing negative efficacy. It started with Israel. Then the UK. Then Barnstable County. Then Gibraltar. Then Scotland.

And now, the US.

CDC has admitted that natural infection is superior to vaccination.

The so-called establishment has lost the public’s confidence - and thus, their 36-year con game on vaccine safety is coming to an end.

It’s not just COVID.

It’s the flu vaccine. It’s the MMR. It’s TDAP. It’s seizures. It’s autism. It’s ADHD.

It’s death.

But it’s also been 36 years of job loss. Parents of vaccine-injured children are left without any help from the government to care for their injured children - so one of the parents has to stay home. It’s also divorce - the stresses of vaccine injury & death - especially if one’s marriage-related relatives or even blood relatives won’t accept the vaccine as the cause of a child’s death or injury.

With COVID, the lockdowns were the last straw. Over 500,000 small businesses closed. Jobs were lost. Drug use skyrocketed, and deaths from drug overdose are not at an epidemic level.

That’s the legacy of the public health “prevention” agenda. ....




.. former White House Coronavirus task force member Scott Atlas gave a presentation entitled “The SARS2 Pandemic: Will Truth Prevail?”. Atlas’s presentation reviews the span of important topics: the lockdown, school closures, the effects on children and others. All of them stem from the abuse of PCR in COVID-19 testing ...



IVERMECTIN: AN UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH

THE reported leak of United States Military documents, which appear to validate ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19, should re-ignite the debate over whether this well-established drug was buried in favour of new multi-billion-dollar experimental vaccines.

The documents, authored by Marine Corps Major Joseph Murphy and obtained by the American organisation Project Veritas (projectveritas.com) contained this assessment:

“Ivermectin, identified as a curative in April 2020, works throughout all phases of illness because it both inhibits viral replication and modulates the immune response.” 

... Ivermectin has been in use since the 1980s as a treatment for parasitic diseases, including malaria. Its development was recognised with a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015.  Across the world more than 3.7 billion doses have been given and its safety record is better than Ibuprofen. On-going trials and studies offer evidence that it is effective as an anti-viral and anti-inflammatory drug to help treat Covid-19.




... The study confirms that “OVERALL vaccine efficacy is zero,” Zywicki told Just the News: The first few months of protection “rapidly approaches zero” around the six-month mark and then goes negative for a few more months. He said the JAMA study was the fourth to find “basically this same negative [vaccine efficacy] effect” that he documented in an Epoch Times op-ed on “original antigenic sin.” Zywicki highlighted research from Toronto, California and Denmark that found negative VE starting two to six months after vaccination. 




... Renz told me the numbers tended to be remarkably similar in all those preceding years, including in 2020, which was the first year of the pandemic but before the vaccines were distributed. But then in 2021, the numbers skyrocketed, and the 2021 data doesn’t even include the months of November and December.

... 
• myocardial infarction –269% increase
• Bell’s palsy – 291% increase
• congenital malformations (for children of military personnel) – 156% increase
• female infertility – 471% increase
• pulmonary embolisms – 467% increase



Some experts worry that an unprecedented rise in death rates of younger people is linked to the vaccine






COVID Commentary:


Although this essay barely scratches the surface of all that has happened, I hope it may provide an accurate overview of the enormity of what has happened over these past two years and serve as the first step towards a long-overdue conversation.

Table of Contents:


The Emergency Must Be Ended, Now. Harvey Risch, Paul E. Alexander, Jay Bhattacharya

The time has come to terminate the pandemic state of emergency. It’s time to end the controls, the closures, the restrictions, the plexiglass, the stickers, the exhortations, the panic-mongering, the distancing announcements, the ubiquitous commercials, the forced masking, the vaccine mandates.

We don’t mean that the virus is gone—Omicron is still spreading wildly, and the virus may circulate forever. But with a normal focus on protecting the vulnerable, we can treat the virus as a medical rather than a social matter and manage it in ordinary ways. A declared emergency needs continuous justification, and that’s now lacking. ... 




Thanks to frens, we get signal…

A few days ago, I published a long-form post that went into some detail about some likely reasons why deeply-vaxxed people appear to be variants’ favorite food. Indeed, much to the consternation of the fearful good-citizen Left, obeisant sheep herded to the jab and no doubt triple-masked, they and their pals seem to be coming down with coof in record numbers. Included in my treatise was a lengthier-than-normal discussion of T-cell memory and why the Spike-only multi-injection regime (not “vaccination”) that has been thrust upon us is quite incapable of generating the “robust” (God, they love that word for some reason) long-term immunity that is protective against variants.

At some level, the vaxx enthusiasts, the planners at the top, behave erratically and stupidly but in fact they are not ALL stupid. Some have had some tradscience exposure and a moment to reflect on what has transpired over two years now, especially on a molecular level, and they see the ocean quickly retreating at their feet. This is a bad sign for them and they know it. They know where the main unsupportable logical hole is in all of their pronouncements about “efficacy” and “reducing severe disease, hospitalization, and death.” It is their gross (accidental?) overcommitment to B-cell (humoral) aka immunoglobulin (Ig) immunity over cellular immunity, the immunity of T-cell mediated death of the infected cell population. Making T-cells focus on this virum was the plan. They thought they could induce it. They failed. Now they want you to think they nailed it. They will go to any lengths to protect the idea that they have handled this well, climbdown the claims, and attempt to keep the pitchforks and [other things] at bay when it becomes clear how ridiculously they ruined and continue to ruin this life of ours. ...



Sen. Ron Johnson's "Roundtable on Covid-19: A Second Opinion" reports massive corruption to suppress doctors and early treatments and sell leaky vaccines, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.

Corruption and malfeasance by public health agencies charged with controlling covid has allowed adoption of an ineffective, poorly tested vaccine; kept treatments beyond reach of skilled doctors and their desperately ill patients; and, moreover, led to thousands upon thousands of needless deaths.

Those were just some of the explosive revelations discussed yesterday by a panel of national experts on the monumental missteps made by the United States government’s response to the covid-19 pandemic.

... Further, data is emerging to show that the vaccinated are as likely, or more, to infection with a new variant that is far different from the one for which it was created. Additionally, hospitalization and mortality are higher in people who are vaccinated and boosted, speakers said.

... Clearly, the government’s emphasis on vaccines came at the expense of treatments, including ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, fluvoxamine and budesonide, that could have kept people out of hospitals, speakers said.

Pierre Kory, a pulmonologist and treatment advocate, had one word for this policy decision, which he repeated several times: Corruption.

... Symbolic of a government beholden to pharmaceutical interests are the drugs approved so far. They are high priced patented pharma darlings, while inexpensive generics have been soundly rejected



When all you have is a several hundred billion dollar money train, legal immunity, governmental-media-social tailwinds and ton of fear....everything looks like it needs your vaxx.

Yes, the world’s biggest game of immunological whack-a-mole has begun.

BioNTech and Pfizer have concluded that the time is finally right, ~2 years into their initial mess, to finally develop a “variant specific” version of their genetic injectable. The also-rans are hot on their heels.

Do not spend much time thinking about how vaxx led to escaping immune surveillance, and reduced immunity of varying dimensions. Do not think about how, to the extent that “surveillance” ever even happened properly, the presence of vaxx also caused low levels of ubiquitous Rona to easily mutate around the problem, possibly even recombining with vaxx instructions to yield the variants we now hate hearing about. (Ask Vietnamese how they feel about AstraZeneca.) No, just pray to Heaven in thanks that FINALLY somebody will end the dread lowkey coof called Omicron that has plagued the vaxxed + boosted with a quick mid-week URI over these last 60 days or so.

Except it won’t end it. It will continue it and make things worse. Much worse. Both as great immunological risk, and continued, escalating social risk. ....




... Americans must learn that they cannot trust any public or private institution. Everything is driven by money; nothing by truth and the public interest. 




... None of the bourgeois institutions that caused this problem (from the corporate media to the government to the public health establishment) are capable of correcting course based on new data. They are guided by ideology, not facts. The only solution is revolution.




COVID Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

Denninger: If you keep trying to play for another month or two of “protection” that is followed by six months of enhanced infectivity you are eventually going to lose on that dice roll and get screwed.

Horowitz: I can share with you from attorney Thomas Renz that the number of cancer diagnoses in the military's DMED system went from a 5-year average (2016-2020) of 38,700 per year to 114,645 in the first 11 months of 2021. This is a predominately young population.

Kory: “If you look at these failed policies, there’s only one way to understand them. They are literally written by pharmaceutical companies. Almost every single policy serves the interest of a pharmaceutical company.”

Tracey: I’m still constantly receiving these little reports from across the US (and Canada!) detailing the petty indignities and absurdities to which people are subjected in the name of this-or-that overheated COVID concern. ... the thing I keep coming back to is the cumulative pettiness — how corrosive the sheer quantity of snippets like ones I’ll list in this post

West: The lethality of the covid “vaccine” is the last thing media and political and money elites want us “useless eaters” to understand. The mantra they have pressed on us is “safe and effective,” which I think of as the new “Sieg Heil.”

AJ Kay: It’s okay to be mad.
But be mad at the people who lied to you - not the people who saw through the lie.

Rigger: People like Mr [Neil] Young want to remove all doubt for us. They want a society where only Approved™ and Safe™ narratives are allowed. Questioning the narrative is said to be dangerous. Being offensive is said to be harmful. Words, and even silence, have been equated with violence. We must be kept Safe™ from all of these bad and “harmful” things, surely?

el gato malo: to tell a lie over and over, you must believe the lie or accept yourself as a villain and few have the strength to embrace overt villainy. so they conjure and contrive internal tales and dialogues that make them out to be the good guys. they become transfixed by their own sales pitch until they need it to be true.

DeSantis: Biden’s “indefensible edict takes treatment out of the hands of medical professionals and will cost some Americans their lives. There are real-world implications to Biden’s medical authoritarianism – Americans’ access to treatment is now subject to the whims of a failing president.”

Dr. Ben Marble: “We deliver the early treatment protocols to them as early as we can, and we have a 99.99 percent survival rate. So, I believe myfreedoctor.com, the free volunteered doctors, have settled the science on this—early treatment works, period!”

Paul: See, I would say bear spray but I’m afraid that will get me in trouble so I won’t say that..




CO-VIDs of the Week:

*** Dr. Aaron Kheriarty explains why doctors are extremely hesitant to write mask and/or vaccine medical exemptions. 
Wow!!


The one-two punch to knockout woke-authoritarianism




Anecdotal COVID Fare:

Nervous System Disorders After The Jab – A Case Study

NERVOUS system disorders following Covid vaccination are being recorded in shocking numbers, with reports to the UK’s Yellow Card Scheme of almost 300,000 injuries and 300 deaths. Despite this, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), who run the Yellow Card scheme and review all suspected injuries, are sticking with their mantra that Covid vaccines are ‘safe and effective’.  ...




Mandates Pushback Fare:

Welsh Businesses Demand Vaccine Passport Exemptions After Government Fails To Prove They Work




there seems to be some divergence in between the “official narrative” in canada and what is really going on on the ground.

let’s start with trudeau: .....

....

this is the way.

these are not antivaxxers. most ARE vaxxed.

these are anti-mandaters, and that distinction is one you can drive a truck through.

....

these are not “unacceptable views.” this is the bedrock foundation of basic liberty.






Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Steve Kirsch, Drs. Pierre Kory, Paul Marik, Peter McCullough, Robert Malone, Ryan Cole, & Richard Urso lead a peaceful rally against vaccine mandates at the Lincoln Memorial.




I hope I can be forgiven for the liberty I have taken with the title - it was too good for me to pass up on. Technically, the group “Jews for Justice” is against vaccine mandates, and, more specifically, against the dangers of discrimination based on vaccine status.

It’s a wonderfully-worded letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury and I quote it in full below. It needs to be shared widely.

You will doubtless all have seen the faux outrage that is evoked whenever anyone draws a parallel between the unthinkable horror of the Holocaust and the measures adopted to “combat” covid. This letter explains the concern, and why the parallel with Nazi Germany is appropriate, far better than I could ever express.

People do tend to forget that the Holocaust was an endpoint in a much longer game played with ruthlessness and calculated evil. It took years to get to this horrific endpoint.

...

LETTER TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY FROM LONDON'S JEWS FOR JUSTICE ....

.... National Socialism in Germany subjugated the rights of individual citizens to the collective will of the state; exactly the same is now happening here in Britain.

It is impossible to deny the parallel between the first two years of the Nazi regime in Germany and the last two years in Britain.

Furthermore – although public hostility to Jews in Nazi Germany was evident from the beginning of the regime in 1933 – Jews were not sent to concentration camps in any large numbers until 1938, nor enclosed in ghettos until 1939, nor forced to wear yellow identifying badges until 1941; and it was not until that same year of 1941 that concentration camps became extermination camps.

So it was not evident in the mid-1930s where hostility to Jews in Germany would eventually lead. But we know what happened, and it is our duty to ensure that we learn the lessons of history.

.... In Nazi Germany, the confinement of Jews within ghettos and their ‘evacuation’ to concentration camps was justified by the regime on grounds of public health, in particular the threat of typhus. The very same ‘public health’ justification is being used today to restrict the civil liberties of those who choose not to be vaccinated.

People in public life such as yourself who stir up hostility to the unvaccinated are no different from those Nazis who stirred up hostility to the Jews in 1930s Germany. If you cannot see the parallel it is because you are closing your eyes deliberately.

You will also be aware that the German churches were conspicuous in their failure to speak out against the crimes of National Socialism. You are repeating that mistake.




COVID Corporatocracy / Idiocracy / Conspiracy Fare:

They suggest something nefarious was up on the lab leak theory yet the press has refused to notice




Throughout this pandemic, certainly in the UK and it would seem also in most other places, we’ve been treated to an advertising campaign. It has been a campaign of epic proportions - designed by professional psychologists whose job it was (and is) to “nudge” the population into certain ways of thinking and certain ways of behaving. In the UK this team of arch-manipulators is known informally as the “Nudge Unit”.

Laura Dodsworth’s excellent book, A State of Fear, goes into this in much more detail and the picture she paints is quite horrifying.

Two of the primary tools used in this nudge campaign were fear and guilt. The population was steered into thinking this was a deadly pandemic, unprecedented even, something novel, and one that required an extraordinary response. They were nudged into feeling guilty if they didn’t comply with the “necessary” measures taken.



Identifying "fall guys" to distract public anger




Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:

The Bottlemen podcast: Finding the Writer’s Nook

Riley and Dan talk a little more about our two favourite topics as lenses to understand the decrepit failure of the Canadian political system: housing (Riley) and our ongoing ridiculous belligerence regarding Russia/Ukraine.




.. If the path forward is unpredictable, what got us here is easy to trace. The row over Ukraine is the outgrowth of an aggressive US posture toward Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago, driven by hegemonic policymakers and war profiteers in Washington. Understanding that background is key to resolving the current impasse

..... The constant expansion of NATO has led to what the scholar Richard Sakwa calls a "fateful geographical paradox": NATO, Sakwa says, now "exists to manage the risks created by its existence."



... Luckily for us, Russia is currently being run by hard men from the old KGB who are experienced and cautious. 



... The origin of the Ukraine-Russia conflict, which goes back to the violent overthrow of the pro-Russian Yanukovych government in 2014, is often misrepresented, omitted or even covered-up by Western governments and, with some notable exceptions, the mainstream media.



Orwellian Fare:

Taibbi: The Folly of Pandemic Censorship
As the latest anti-Substack campaign shows, more and more people are forgetting why free speech works

.... Whether it’s WMDs or the Gulf of Tonkin fiasco or the missile gap or the red scare or the twenty-year occupation of Afghanistan, the worst real-world disasters always turn out to be driven or enabled by official falsehoods. In the case of Afghanistan (and Iraq, and Vietnam before both), the cycle of war disaster was perpetuated by a sweeping, organized, and intricate system of official lying, about everything from the success of missions to the efficacy of weaponry to the political devotion of supposed allies. The only defense against these most dangerous types of deceptions is an absolutely free press.

... Instead of seeing the root causes of this atmosphere of rapidly declining trust, officials keep pushing for even more sweeping campaigns of control, most recently seeking to make platforms like Google and Twitter arbiters of speech.


...... As is the case with the Assange story, the paucity of information in mainstream press about the serious draconian measures in places like Australia and Germany has already massively heightened distrust in those outlets and in official reassurances. The “nothing to see here” attitude about the potential downsides of authoritarian policies has reached sick joke status (see Russell Brand’s hilarious but depressing take on the Australia situation here). ...



But none of that has helped. My blog posts once attracted tens of thousands of shares. Then, as the algorithms tightened, it became thousands. Now, as they throttle me further, shares can often be counted in the hundreds. “Going viral” is a distant memory.

No, I won’t be banned. I will fade incrementally, like a small star in the night sky – one among millions – gradually eclipsed as its neighbouring suns grow ever bigger and brighter. I will disappear from view so slowly you won’t even notice.

Which is why I am saying my goodbyes now while I can still reach you, my most obstinate followers.



CaitOz Fare:

Censorship By Algorithm Does Far More Damage Than Conventional Censorship

... You’ve probably noticed this if you’ve tried to search YouTube for videos which don’t align with the official narratives of western governments and media lately. That search function used to work like magic; like it was reading your mind. Now it’s almost impossible to find the information you’re looking for unless you’re trying to find out what the US State Department wants you to think. 

..... The status quo is not working. Our ecosystem is dying, we appear to be rapidly approaching a high risk of direct military confrontation between nuclear-armed nations, and our world is rife with injustice, inequality, oppression and exploitation. None of this is going to change until the public begins awakening to the problems with the current status quo so we can begin organizing a mass-scale push toward healthier systems. And that’s never going to happen as long as information is locked down in the way that it is.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. And as more and more people get their information about what’s happening in the world from online sources, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation has already become one of the most consequential forms of narrative control.




.... Humans are storytelling creatures; that’s why it’s possible to gain such a tremendous amount of power over us by controlling our stories. We are storytelling creatures whose primate brains weren’t evolved for the purpose of giving us any absolute understanding of ultimate reality, whose senses only take in a tiny fraction of our surroundings, whose minds don’t process what’s happening in the ways science tells us things are actually happening.

What do you get when you have a storytelling animal with a very limited capacity to perceive life as it really is? You get a lot of things happening in ways that the creature did not expect, because none of their mental stories told them to anticipate it happening in that way. And then probably telling a bunch of stories about what happened which don’t truly reflect reality.

If and when humanity does wake up from its propaganda-induced coma and push for the changes needed for us to evade extinction and create a healthy world together, it will happen in ways we’re not expecting. It will happen in ways that aren’t pleasing to the ego. It will happen in ways that don’t allow us to stand up and say “Aha! You see? I was right all along!” It will happen in ways that don’t form a compelling narrative.

And how could it? If humanity is to survive into the distant future we’re going to have to transcend the egoic mental habits which led us into this mess. We’re going to have to transcend our unhealthy relationship with mental narrative which made us so easy to manipulate and propagandize. We’re going to have to transcend our self-destructive patterning, which will necessarily have to come from an unpatterned, and therefore unexpected direction.



Maybe get okay with the fact that literally any strategy for revolutionary change is going to look like a long shot. Because the system is just that entrenched and the public is just that propagandized. Ignore anyone who dismisses an idea for facilitating healthy change as a long shot. They’re all long shots.



Other Quotes of the Week:

Moon of Alabama: With regards to the completely made up story of the 'imminent Russian invasion' of the Ukraine a commentator remarked to me:
What we are seeing is a 'parthogenetic' conflict/war/crisis. A first - to my recollection.
Indeed - the virgin birth of a conflict in which there is no enemy.


Waldman: because Our Democracy is already so crippled. Most Americans aren’t all that alarmed about what we might lose, because most Americans don’t perceive ourselves as meaningfully enfranchised. Yes, we can vote and our votes are counted, but both parties arrange electoral institutions so their insiders and incumbents are protected. As Krystal Ball recently observed, despite “change election” after “change election” our political system seems unmoved, impervious, corrupt, dysfunctional. We are misgoverned, and voting the way we vote has become just a ritual within a stable equilibrium of misgovernance. If Democrats hope to run on saving that, well, good luck




Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

Welsh: The Psychological Difficulty Of Radicalization

... It’s clear our societies have failed. We pretend they haven’t because the final collapse hasn’t happened, but that’s like saying that the Titanic hadn’t sunk after it hit the iceberg. Technically true, but believing it will get you hurt, bad. Might be good if other people believe it, though, while you sprint for the lifeboats.

The argument for this is tedious, and I’ve made it many times so I won’t bother here.

In face of a failed society, trust in leaders is insane. Crazed. They’ve obviously run society off a cliff, and they either are OK with that or are incompetent, or both. (And the smart ones are selling you that everything is OK while they sprint for the lifeboats: aka. New Zealand.)

..... But this article isn’t about “we are fucked”, it’s about “too many of us refuse to admit it and that it means we need radical change.”

And one of the big reasons for this is the need for daddy. One of the big hurdles to radicalization is that it means you can’t trust your leaders at all. That they have fucked up, betrayed, or both. That they are bad, evil people who not only aren’t acting in your interest, but are your enemies.

I’ve been pounding this issue for a couple  years, and some regular readers are probably sick of it. I am.

But it matters. If you don’t accept, psychologically and intellectually, who your enemies are, you can’t protect yourself from them. If you don’t accept, psychologically and intellectually, that your leaders are your enemies, you can’t properly take action on your own, with friends, family and other groups because at some level you’re still thinking that government or corporations will come thru and take care of.

... An entire life’s conditioning works against radicalization in anyone for whom the system has even slightly worked.

But the fact of the matter is that if we want to handle climate change and environmental collapse and all our other problems (handle doesn’t mean stop, but ... We need to change our system completely and we need to entirely get rid of our current leadership class, who have proved their incompetence and ill will.

That’s radical. That’s a leap.

And that’s hard.



Satirical Fare:

Stalingrad & Poorski: BIDEN ADMINISTRATION SAYS WORKING WITH UKRAINE TO MAKE SURE RUSSIAN FORCES SHOW VALID PROOF OF VACCINATION BEFORE INVADING UKRAINE



Pics of the Week:








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