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Wednesday, February 2, 2022

2022-02-02

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

Regular Fare:



We provide an update on what our in-house monetary policy framework suggests about the appropriate trajectory for monetary policy using more reliable “real-time” measures of gross labor income

... While our framework’s criteria for the Fed to begin considering slowing the economy have nearly been met, the Fed seems poised to tighten more and faster than our framework would recommend.


Inflation hawks are winning. A ‘beggar thyself’ race to raise interest rates has begun. But this response to inflation actually slows economic growth, undermining central bank credibility.

... Inflation hawks denounce price increases, claiming – without evidence – that it impedes growth. Former World Bank chief economist Michael Bruno and William Easterly refuted these popular, but false prejudices.

Using 1962-1992 data for 127 countries, they found, “The ratio of fervent beliefs to tangible evidence seems unusually high”.

....

Inflation misdiagnosed

Friedman’s sweeping generalization that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” ignored other factors possibly contributing to inflation.

Without careful consideration of inflation’s causes, the same old policy prescriptions are likely to fail, but not without causing much harm. 



there was an important speech delivered by the Governor of Australia’s central bank today that reveals the reasons that the RBA is once again refusing to be bullied into increasing interest rates rises by the ‘markets’. It is almost comical to observe the ludicrous self-importance that the ‘markets’ are exhibiting at the moment. Every day there is a new article or segment on the finance reports about how the ‘markets’ are going to win the battle against the RBA, who will buckle soon on interest rates. Well, yesterday the RBA didn’t buckle and they made fools of the ‘markets’. Remember the ‘markets’ is just a collection of economists who work for financial institutions that make more profits when interest rates are higher. It is no wonder they are always demanding higher rates. That is what vested interests are about.

.... The ‘market economist’ bullies then run the story that unless the central bank does what they say it will lose all credibility and inflation will run out of control. Sure. Believe that and I can sell you the Sydney Harbour Bridge cheap.



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



Quotes and Tweets:

Mr. Blonde: 1/12   I believe in weight of evidence approach. Here are several reasons to think ISM is due a sharp fall in next couple months…maybe it starts today.  
weak/disappointing regional PMIs is a sign

2/12 new orders/inventories is a classic leading indicator


Pettis: 1/6 "The IMF suggested that Beijing ramp up fiscal support by increasing spending on social services and suggested the government prioritize spending on 'targeted direct income support' instead of infrastructure investment."
2/6 It is becoming increasingly obvious that much of China's recent infrastructure spending has been wasteful and does not contribute to sustainable growth. But recommending that Beijing and local governments redirect infrastructure spending to support low-income...
3/6 households, is much easier said than done. A meaningful shift in government spending from investment and supply-side subsidies to social services and demand-side subsidies is also a major transformation in the way the economy is run.



Bubble Fare:


If there isn’t a recession, selloffs tend to burn themselves out at around the 20% mark, while the average drawdown, once a selloff has reached 10%, stops at 15.4%. According to research by Crandall, Pierce & Co., since 1945 the average S&P fall of between 10% and 20% has bottomed at 13.96%, so this incident would look pretty typical if the bottom was already in. It doesn’t seem too much to ask that the worst is behind us. Or, to put a more bearish spin on it, the market will muddle through for now, and only collapse once a recession becomes unavoidable.



We are in the midst of a Lehman style collapse in real-time, but you can't tell because today's pundits are programmed to broadcast sugar coated bullshit across every media channel. The sheeple wouldn't have it any other way. ...

Last Friday I posted this chart on Twitter showing that to-date the volatility at the 200 day moving average was the highest since March 2020. The third highest was March 2000.




COVID-19 notes:

Brain fog, headaches, blood pressure swings are being probed by NIH and other researchers




Initial results suggest significantly impaired air transfer from lungs to bloodstream, linked to breathlessness, indicating possible microscopic damage to respiratory system







(not just) for the ESG crowd:

Have tipping points already been passed for critical climate systems?

... Permafrost carbon emissions and the dangerous climate feedback loops they will set off are not accounted for in most Earth system models or integrated assessment models, including those which informed the IPCC’s special report on global warming of 1.5°C, nor are they fully accounted for in global emissions budgets.

 If carbon-cycle feedbacks are accounted for, "such as tipping points in forest ecosystems and abrupt permafrost thaw, the estimated remaining budget could disappear altogether”.

In conclusion: are permafrost and methane clathrates the "carbon bomb" that could drive the the "Hothouse Earth" scenario? Yes.  Do we know that the feedbacks have already driven these systems to a tipping point? No. But when risks are existential, focus must be given to the high-end possibilities, and what needs to be done to prevent them being realised.


Trends in surface air temperature (SAT) are a common metric for global warming. Using observations and observationally driven models, we show that a more comprehensive metric for global warming and weather extremes is the trend in surface equivalent potential temperature (Thetae_sfc) since it also accounts for the increase in atmospheric humidity and latent energy. From 1980 to 2019, while SAT increased by 0.79°C, Thetae_sfc increased by 1.48°C globally and as much as 4°C in the tropics. The increase in water vapor is responsible for the factor of 2 difference between SAT and Thetae_sfc trends. Thetae_sfc increased more uniformly (than SAT) between the midlatitudes of the southern hemisphere and the northern hemisphere, revealing the global nature of the heating added by greenhouse gases (GHGs). Trends in heat extremes and extreme precipitation are correlated strongly with the global/tropical trends in Thetae_sfc. The tropical amplification of Thetae_sfc is as large as the arctic amplification of SAT, accounting for the observed global positive trends in deep convection and a 20% increase in heat extremes. With unchecked GHG emissions, while SAT warming can reach 4.8°C by 2100, the global mean Thetae_sfc can increase by as much as 12°C, with corresponding increases of 12°C (median) to 24°C (5% of grid points) in land surface temperature extremes, a 14- to 30-fold increase in frequency of heat extremes, a 40% increase in the energy available for tropical deep convection, and an up to 60% increase in extreme precipitation.



Other / Fun Fare:

SOCRATES ON THE BLESSING OF BEING REFUTED

... Parker paints a dismal picture of fellow citizens divided by unbridgeable, or at least too often unbridged, differences – such that conversation across the divide seems all but impossible.

Frisbee Sheffield’s essay in this journal admirably indicates how the examined life as led by Socrates, which consists fundamentally in the art of conversation, can make us better human beings by fostering in us the very virtues which constitute its subject: for example, courage to debate hostile interlocutors; justice in giving dialogical partners their share of the conversation; moderation in limiting one’s own speech; and a spirit of collaboration that fosters community and friendship. Following her insights, I would like to highlight a further attitude of Plato’s Socrates that is fundamental to his ethics of conversation – but one that may seem to us, in view of our zero-sum culture-war battles, strange or even incomprehensible. I mean Socrates’ insistence upon the blessing of being refuted.

... Indeed, Socrates says of himself: “[I am one of those people] who would be delighted to be refuted, if I say anything untrue, and who would be delighted to do the refuting, if someone else were to say something untrue.” “But their delight would be no less,” Socrates continues, “in being refuted than in refuting: for I consider [being refuted] a greater good [than refuting], precisely inasmuch as it is a greater good to be released oneself from the greatest evil than to release another.” The greatest evil, Socrates next explains, is false opinion (δόξα ψευδής) concerning the subjects of the present conversation: “I believe there is no evil so great for a human being as false opinion about the things we are discussing right now.” (458a–b)



Pics of the Week:

Giant dying star explodes as scientists watch in real time — a first for astronomy




Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Unsustainability Fare:

Stories Of Continuity

Was it inevitable, this ongoing anthropogenic, global mass-extinction? Do mass destruction, carelessness, and hubris characterize the only way human societies know how to be in the world? It may seem true today but we know that it wasn’t always so. Early human societies in Africa—and many later ones around the world—lived without destroying their environments for long millennia.



Related Quotes and Tweets:

Cranfield: This graph doesn't mean we're in big trouble.
It doesn't tell us we need to cut emissions fast. 
It doesn't say societal transformation can save us.
This graph tells us that IT'S OVER.
This is a planet-sized timebomb. 
We need to prepare for impact and protect children.

Zach Labe: The 12-month running mean of the methane (CH₄) growth rate is currently at record high levels...




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, 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


Analysis:

After COVID was a complete non-event, how come the Norwegian elderly are dying at unprecedented pace now? Or as they say in Norway, "liten tue kan velte stort lass"?

.... Again, the cumulative excess deaths gives us a very clear picture of timing and magnitude (Figure 4). Epidemic COVID of spring 2020 (#1) is nothing compared to previous years, even after a really soft 2019.

However, given the unseasonality of the event that starts in the summer of 2021 (#2), Norwegian elders have not experienced anything close to this sort of excess death in the last six years.



... It is hard to imagine a worse strategy than universal vaccination against a single, obsolete virus protein. Every booster dose just further ingrains this off-target immunity, ultimately assisting Omicron in its spread. Here we are saved only by Omicron’s starkly reduced pathogenicity. In causing mild, fleeting illness in most of those infected, Omicron spreads more effectively in virus-paranoid populations, and it provokes fewer antibodies, expanding its prospects for reinfection and continued, endemic circulation.

All of the other endemic coronaviruses that regularly infect us work in much the same way. They are pervasive, they cause very mild illness, and they commonly reinfect their hosts every 1 to 3 years. We are not on the verge of the endemic phase, we are in it. There will be seasonal SARS-2 infection spikes probably for as long as humans walk the earth. The vaccinators, unless they are stopped, will only make these spikes more dramatic and disruptive.



... The news is that despite the vaccine not doing anything at all, Federal officials decided to go ahead anyway and start vaccinating 2-4 year olds. The official explanation, which is difficult to believe, is that “they want to start the two dose regimen in hopes that third dose will magically start working”.


Key References with Abstracts


25 to 64 year olds are dying at unprecedented rates since Dec-20. If the vaccine is responsible, it would indicate an under-reporting frequency in VAERS of 65X.

In 2019-20, the year of the COVID epidemic, deaths of adults in their prime (25 to 64 years old) in America between July and June ended up 5% higher than expected (Figure 1).


In 2020-21, feeling the collateral effects of the non-pharmaceutical interventions, deaths followed a much steeper trajectory than usual. By the end of the week ending 9-Dec-20, deaths were running 20% above expectations. By the end of the year, they were 23% higher.

So far, in the year 2021-22, deaths of prime adults in the States are running a massive 35% above expectations.

...

If you’ve already seen my attempts to prove that mass vaccination caused the resurgence of COVID in 20211 then you’d already be thinking that the deaths attributed to COVID in this period really ought to have been attributed to the vaccine.

But the thing is, COVID did not account for all the excess deaths in 2021. Inevitably, we must seriously consider that the vaccine was responsible for the non-COVID excess too.



... As we all know, the vaccine more or less stopped preventing illness, due to the virus mutating and changing its spike protein. No problem, right? The vaccinated person would just experience a “mild” Covid19 and acquire full natural immunity! This is the soothing talk we are hearing from our “health authorities”, who promise that after vaccine failure we will somehow “return to normal”, as the breakthrough-infected would become naturally immune.

Unfortunately, it turns out that, because of vaccination, the vaccinated do NOT acquire such a full spectrum immunit,y and this is exactly what UKHSA is describing.

Upon being challenged by Covid, the vaccinated produce “significant increases in S (Spike) antibody levels consistent with boosting of their antibody levels.” So the vaccinated make more original Spike antibodies, even though they were infected by the virus that evaded those spike proteins in the first place! Those are the useless antibodies that did not even protect Brits from new variants they just got sick with!

But, UKHSA says, “recent observations from UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) surveillance data [show] that N antibody levels are lower in individuals who acquire infection following 2 doses of vaccination.” They are a little coy about it as the N levels are not just “lower”, they are nonexistent: “Seropositivity estimates for N antibody are lower”, so the N antibodies are not even detected at all!

This phenomenon of the vaccinated not developing full immunity upon breakthrough infection, is called “original antigenic sin” and has been known since 1950s.

Unfortunately, without a proper immune memory response, it means that the vaccinated will get reinfected often, with likely very deleterious consequences.



The researchers, led by Steve Hanke, the co-founder of The Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise, screened 18,590 studies to select the 24 papers used for the final analysis.

They concluded that lockdowns in Europe and the United States reduced the mortality from COVID-19 by 0.2 percent on average.


Medical debt is the predominant cause for about 25% of consumer bankruptcies, with medical debt often triggered by sudden adverse events — such as vaccine-induced myocarditis.



It is impossible to inject something without some of it ending up in the circulation — that is, in and around the endothelium. That begs the obvious question as to which is more-dangerous: A definite exposure of your endothelium to the spike from an injection or a possible one from infection if, and only if, you get severely hammered? Nobody knows and nobody has done the work to find out. Despite the signal in December of 2020 we went ahead anyway without first disproving that the balance of harms went the wrong way especially in healthy, low-risk individuals.

On top of this we knew very early on that there was no reduction in transmission from the jabs; a person who had a “breakthrough” was just as infectious (per Fauci and the CDC itself) and thus might be more-dangerous because by hiding symptoms you make the problem worse. If I do not know I’m sick I will not self-isolate in my home since I have no reason to suspect I’m infected. An inoculation that does not prevent infection, replication or transmission but prevents symptom expression is thus not only bad from a public health perspective its disastrous.

.......

This strongly implies that what the jabs are doing is producing VEI (vaccine-enhanced infection); that is, causing actual harm and either wildly potentiating first infections or, far worse, destroying immunity from infection whether prior to or subsequent to vaccination such that people are getting the virus a second or subsequent time and not mildly either .. We knew the latter was likely this summer, incidentally, because “N” protein seroprevalence in Britain flatlined during Delta — an impossibility unless the vaccine was interfering with building that titer or destroyed existing antibody titers if jabbed after being infected and recovered.

Never mind that there’s evidence these jabs may be back-boosting other common coronaviruses. That was known to be a risk in May of 2021. We see that in the data too; people showing up in the ER and Urgent Care with “covid-like illness” but they don’t have Covid, and a huge percentage of them are vaccinated. Are these jabs turning the common OC43 and HKU1 coronaviruses, that usually produce mild colds, into severe disease events? Maybe — and we knew they might in May of last year but didn’t bother to follow up on that either.


Request for vaccine exemption on scientific grounds

... It is remarkable that a scientific exemption does not exist. Implicit in this conspicuous absence is the belief that a new scientific result can be “settled” or “certain.” That, of course, is not how science works. These are new medical treatments whose already lengthy list of both adverse events and failed efficacy puts the lie to them being overwhelmingly "safe and effective.” Precluding people from opting out based on a careful analysis of the scientific evidence for their safety and efficacy is, in fact, anti-scientific. 

...

Justification for a vaccine mandate rests almost entirely on the ability of the vaccine to prevent transmission. However, the impairment of viral transmission with these novel mRNA technologies remains unreliable and transitory at best. An Oct. 2021 study of the Swedish nationwide registries found that, in the case of Pfizer, after day 211 from vaccination “no effectiveness could be detected” against infection.1 Another study published in Oct. 2021 found “no significant difference in viral load between vaccinated and unvaccinated, asymptomatic and symptomatic groups,”2 another from Nov. 2021 that both “vaccinated and unvaccinated might transmit infection”.3 The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency demanding the healthcare mandate, admits in its own documents that “the effectiveness of the vaccine to prevent disease transmission by those vaccinated are not currently known”.4 Pre-Covid any vaccine unable to dramatically reduce viral transmission would have been rightly regarded as a failure. This is the linchpin argument for the purveyors of mandates—if these mRNA technologies do not prevent transmission to a durable and predictable degree, then a coercive campaign pushing a vaccine mandate “to protect others,” or “for the greater good,” fails immediately.

A slew of logical inconsistencies further reveal the illegitimacy of any vaccine mandate... 

Note the false foundational assumption of pro-mandate assertions—that these novel mRNA technologies have a perfect safety record. ....

...

.... I refuse to comply with any mRNA vaccine mandate. But I reserve the right to be convinced. There’s an old saying in law—“if you have the facts pound the facts, if you have the law pound the law, and if you have neither, pound the table.” Vaccine mandates look an awful lot like pounding the table.



create a historical record of the myriad actions taken against ivermectin by the global vaccine and pharmaceutical industry due to ivermectin’s long known and now proven role as the single greatest solution to the global pandemic.

...

Let us be clear, that all of these nefarious actions, which I will detail in numerous subsequent posts in this series, could only have been made possible by their massive and/or direct control of numerous major national and international public health agencies, mass media outlets, social media companies, high-impact medical journals, and captured researchers. Their ability to exert such fearsome power allowed them to suppress and/or distort the knowledge of the lifesaving efficacy against COVID-19 of one of the worlds safest, most widely available, and inexpensive medicines. Never forget that these actions have resulted in millions of deaths. These are crimes against humanity.


Commentary:

Covid Situation Continuing to Develop Not Necessarily to the Officialdom’s Advantage

It is both bizarre and telling to see evidence of increased intensity in enforcing the Panglossian “Shut up and get your vax, and you will be safe in the face of our ‘let ‘er rip’ policies,” even as more evidence comes in raising doubts about their wisdom and cost.

The wee problem is that emerging information continues to reinforce the idea that the West lacks choices it likes with respect to Covid. That is particularly hard to accept in our insistently optimistic, tech and expert obsessed culture, which has been reinforced by rule by MBA. A diseased managerialism has taken hold



One of the saddest things for me, personally, has been my almost complete erosion of trust in various institutions over the last couple of years. It would be a fair criticism to say I’ve been largely encapsulated in a bubble of misplaced innocence and naivety for too long. But the astonishing chasm between government, media and health messaging and the data has been too stark, too perplexing, to ignore. Perhaps saddest of all has been my erosion of trust in the medical profession overall.

Today I want to examine an open letter of rebuttal to three of the famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) figures at the centre of things - Dr’s Malone, Kory and McCullough (I will abbreviate this group as MKM). The letter is written by Dr Hooman Noorchashm and can be read in full here.

The letter is inspired by the recent much higher profile these figures have enjoyed, largely as a result of being Roganned, but also as a result of the recent press conference organized by Senator Ron Johnson.

Overall, the letter reads more like an emotional rebuttal, rather than any scientific rebuttal of the various claims made by MKM.

.....
....
...

Notice that the primary argument here - the one italicized - is to suggest that because vaccination has now become the de facto standard of care it is therefore the correct course of action. It’s an appeal to the authority of the majority. It presupposes that the data surrounding the efficacy of the vaccines is correct and there are very good grounds for being sceptical on that, as I have mentioned.

....
...

There’s a lot more in the letter, and I recommend you read it in full. There’s nothing to “get hold of”, scientifically speaking. It’s almost entirely made up of unsupported claims and appeals to authority and smears. If the doctor is so worried that MKM are wrong, are persuading millions of people with their arguments, then he utterly fails in his duty to counter those arguments and persuade those millions of people otherwise.

Why are MKM wrong? If, as claimed, they get basic immunology wrong, then explain where they went wrong. Don’t just put words they never said into their mouths and smear them. Don’t just say they’re outside of the orthodox box - explain why the orthodox view is correct.

Respect the dignity and intelligence of those apparently deluded millions by countering the supposed errors directly and let the millions see for themselves what MKM have got wrong (if anything).


Masks have never worked. Testing has always been problematic. Kids were never high-risk. The past has never been altered. Welcome to the COVID consensus, circa midterms 2022.

... By January 2022, however, the failure of the previous two years of U.S. COVID policies has become undeniable. Vaccinated people were once promised that they would be “dead ends” for the virus, but 80% of the first omicron cases in the United States were double vaccinated and one-third had received a booster. Many cities that implemented mask mandates and vaccine passports are seeing some of their highest case counts of the pandemic. As a result, the original justifications for COVID restrictions are now being openly contradicted by the same people who once argued for them—but without acknowledging the pivot. With the 2022 midterms in sight, the narrative is simply shifting without apology, and many of the arguments once made by “covidiots” are now being backed by Anthony Fauci, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and the familiar cast of journalists and experts.

It was never social media “misinformation” that harmed people, but rather a coordinated attempt by public health officials and reporters to limit open discussion and skew coverage of COVID. This campaign manipulated the public into acquiescing to measures with catastrophic second-order effects but little epidemiological value. Now that the damage has been done, the old arbiters of truth and morality will not get back the trust or credibility they’ve squandered.

... In other words, while major news outlets presented rates of “cases” as synonymous with rates of illness, the number of positive PCR tests has never necessarily reflected the number of people sick with COVID (because the SARS-CoV-2 material detected by PCR may not be intact, abundant, or infectious). This was a problem in 2007 when the use of PCR tests to detect pertussis led scientists to believe they were observing an epidemic, only to discover that the tests had been generating false positives and patients most likely had other respiratory infections like the common cold. While COVID testing may be clinically valuable for people with symptoms, testing millions of asymptomatic people can lead to large-scale, unnecessary quarantines and disruptions (as Fauci has now admitted).


****************** Rigger: Why I haven't been Goo'ed

I’m not averse to putting toxic substances into my body. I enjoy a large brandy and a cigar. And Skittles.

So why didn’t I choose to get the Goo?

I’ve had lots of vaccines before - left arm, right arm, and both arse cheeks - never thought twice about them. So why my Hesitancy™ over these new covid vaccines?

Initially, I was delighted that something had been developed so quickly. I had hope. Lockdowns, masks, sanitizer and plastic screens had already meant I had to buy a new MoronMeter which could measure beyond a KiloTwat. But governments seemed blind to the data and so I thought, finally, here was something that could get us out of the ridiculous holes we’d dug for ourselves.

... What really inspired my Hesitancy™ at the time, though, was the fact that the vaccines had been developed, and mass-produced, so quickly. I was more than happy to let others choose to be the guinea pigs. Personally, I wanted to see how it all played out. Even in my more naïve state back then I was dimly aware that it was very unusual for a new drug, of any kind, to go from invention, trial and then into production in a matter of months.

Even being repeatedly beaten about the head by the Government’s Great Stick of Safety and Effectiveness did not shake my suspicion that the lovely cuddly kitten might grow up to be a Pferal tiger. I wanted to wait and see. I really did want my suspicions to be unfounded. Only some kind of psychopath would be wishing for the vaccines to fail.

... Even taking these results at face value and assuming the honesty, integrity and scrupulous morality of Pfizer, we can see that the baseline risk of (symptomatic) covid infection was not all that high (less than 1%).

... After seeing the tragic and spectacular failure of these vaccines over the last year, I’m glad I waited. The data has only confirmed, and continues to confirm, the correctness of my initial position. I take no pleasure in that - it is a tragedy of epic proportions that things have gone so wrong and also that so many have been directly harmed by the Ghastly Goo

... It’s not much use being saved from a covid death if the stuff you take gives you a heart attack. Out of the covid frying pan and into the clot conflagration. So what we really need to assess is whether the vaccine has reduced overall mortality. It doesn’t seem to be the case, so far, with many places seeing worrying rises in excess mortality. Even in the initial trial data there were indications that the vaccines had worsened overall health.

You don’t try and get data hidden for up to 75 years if you don’t have something to hide. The only tenable conclusion is that there’s something desperately wonky with the trial data, data that doesn’t support the Safe and Effective Narrative™.

... The other thing that has prevented me from doing my Sacred Duty is the pressure to get vaccinated that has been applied. It has been off the scale. The propaganda and messaging has been bad enough, and also off the scale, but the punitive mandates and so-called passport schemes have been grotesque and deeply unscientific. They make not one jot of medical sense, given the data.

Where there is risk there must always be choice.

This unholy push to enter the Jabbathon has been extraordinary and a huge red flag for me. Like almost everything about this pantodemic it has been insanely out of proportion to the actual threat level.

There’s just something not right about all of this. It’s too much, for too little. Even if we allow for a smidgeon of over-zealous overreaction at the beginning of things - this bloody freakshow has gone on for nearly 2 years. 

... Elsewhere in the world the fight is very real and more serious - governments have hurtled down Authoritarian Avenue for no good medical or scientific reason.



... George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist at UC Berkeley, is the intellectual godfather of progressive messaging. ...  The guy is a genius who just happens to be wrong about the most important issue in the world right now — the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.

........ This is where it all falls apart. Lakoff is on record as supporting Pharma fascism — because (this is what I see at least) he’s never read a vaccine safety study in his life and has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. But if we lived in a sane world, the progressive response to vaccines would look like this:

✅ Nurturant parents do NOT allow felons to perform genetic experiments on their kids.

✅ Nurturant parents do NOT allow regulators who are captured by industry to make decisions about their family’s health.

✅ Nurturant parents do NOT allow school officials to deprive their children of oxygen and require toxic injections as a conditions of school entry.

✅ Nurturant parents do NOT gaslight other parents for their medical decisions.

✅ Nurturant parents do NOT get their medical information from news sources that are captured by industry.

✅ Nurturant parents have a responsibility to read vaccine safety inserts and vaccine safety studies for themselves.

✅ Nurturant parents have a responsibility to read the Nuremberg Code and understand the reasons why “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.”

✅ Nurturant parents have a responsibility to listen to the mothers and fathers of vaccine-injured children and learn from their experience.

✅ Nurturant parents have a responsibility to engage in critical thinking and unbiased due diligence and have realized that independent doctors understand prevention and treatment of Covid better than captured regulators.

✅ Nurturant parents have a responsibility to oppose show-me-your-papers and vaccine passports because they do not want their children to grow up in a fascist country.

See that’s not difficult. If progressives were still progressives they would be fighting Pharma fascism with every cell in their body. Some are, but most are not.


There is no data to support such a decision. We have 14 days to stop the FDA from committing a crime against humanity

... Acting FDA Commissioner, Janet Woodcock, following orders from the Biden administration said, (I’m paraphrasing here) ‘don’t worry about the fact that the shot does not work, we’ve got a drug to sell, submit an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) application anyway.’

So today Pfizer submitted an EUA application for children six-months to four-years old.

Neither the FDA nor Pfizer have any idea how many shots they will recommend. Pfizer says maybe three shots will work when two did not. There is no data to support that hypothesis.

The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee will meet in two weeks — on February 15 — to evaluate this EUA application THAT HAS NO DATA.


Camaraderie and Generosity among the Truckers and their Supporters

... One can almost hear the educated readers of The Guardian snickering into their masks.

Alas for them, good grammar is not a proxy for truth. Vast swaths of the educated class have demonstrated, these last two years, that their educations were woefully inadequate. When told to #FollowTheScience by a dude who claims that “I am science,” they do so. When asked whether or not there might be more to the story, whether the story might not be what it seems, this same educated class assures us that the science is settled. And what does “the science” say? Somehow it justifies a conveyor belt of Covid vaccines, from here into eternity, vaccines that prevent neither transmission nor infection (although just months ago we were assured that they did), vaccines even for children and pregnant women; also masks for everyone, including children, who need even more than the rest of us to see each other, to speak and breathe freely and to see others doing the same.

Somehow the fact that “the science” is an incoherent mash-up of politically motivated policies does not register.  

... One thing that all of this has put in stark relief is how uneducated many of the educated actually are. How ignorant the smart people are, how smug and naïve are those who just happen to be best positioned to ride out the insanity—the lockdowns and the masking and the fear campaigns—while relying on people who do real work—people like the truckers—to keep on trucking, but please, leave the thinking to us.

... There is a cult to be found in this story, to be sure, but the truckers and their supporters, who together number in the millions, aren’t in it. These media bobbleheads are not speaking truth. They are not even speaking what they think. They may not be thinking hard on it at all, considering new information, more data, or a better analysis, and coming to a different conclusion the next day. No. That would be a scientific approach, one based not in ideology, but in humanity.

... But the mainstream media would have us believe that this is a movement awash in confederate flags and swastikas, that these are people full of ignorance and hatred.

I posit that it is, rather, the mainstream media that is full of ignorance and hatred.

Here are the words of a professional man, a man who will remain anonymous out of concerns for his job should his positions be known—a man who is fully vaccinated against Covid, by the way—regarding what he saw as of the convoy between Quebec and Ottawa:

“I had the privilege of travelling through Ottawa on Saturday January 29th from the Quebec side and I got to see, first hand, the Trucker Convoy protest. What surprised me was how much activism and support there was on the Quebec side (and effort made by authorities to prevent people travelling from Quebec into Ottawa). I was stuck in traffic for four hours (for what is usually a 40 minute drive). The energy, positivity, camaraderie and celebration were truly emotionally profound. The inclusivity and solidarity were something I haven't felt for years. Finally I felt like I was validated in my beliefs. Everyone was so kind, and so supportive. It was such a positive experience.”

He goes on to say that “I did not see one example of anger, violence, racial or gender prejudice, and not one confederate or Nazi flag. The movement of people I witnessed would have denounced any examples of the aforementioned.”



If you’re looking for a reference book covering the futility of COVID policy, there are few better options than those written by Michael Betrus.

His first release, “COVID-19: Lockdowns on Trial” focused on the impact (or lack there of) of lockdowns and his second, “COVID-19: The Science vs. The Lockdowns” is an incredibly thorough breakdown of the data and evidence supporting Team Reality.




Charts: (sources: one, two, )





Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

Farber: Justin Trudeau Might Be Insane. These Tweets Demonstrate Total Loss Of Contact With Reality

Kaur: Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly’s Media Stmt Jan 31, 2022
“This demonstration is unique in nature, massive in scale.. No injuries, no deaths, no riots in last 4 days in Canada’s capital, even though we have a global cause, national protest”

Kaur: Today Norway announced it's joining Finland, England, Ireland, Denmark et al in ending all Covid restrictions
Millions around world inspired by Canada's trucker/tractor convey: now conveys in Brazil, Italy, Australia, Netherlands & growing!

Crawford: Much of what most people believe is science, is not science. A lot of people might agree with that sentiment, but there is a more important corollary that will make some scientists flip their lids, which is that most of what scientists believe is science, is not science.

eugyppius: The purpose of peer review, is not to enhance the integrity or reliability of academic publications. Peer reviewed studies turn out to be wrong all the time. It is rather one of many mechanisms, via which academics aim to police their own discourse and exclude outside ideas.

Mike: Is a healthy child at risk of serious illness from Covid? No
Do the vaccines stop a child from catching Covid? No
Is there any long-term safety data for the vaccines? No
Is there a risk of serious illness or death (however rare) from the vaccines? Yes

Hayes: The same governmental agencies that served the American people this deceptive hogwash, now have the temerity to demand that I submit to a forced medical treatment filled with, based on, and enforced by these same lies and liars? I cannot.

Kunstler: It kind of looks like they have Mr. T over a Molson barrel. For now, it’s a stand-off, but it looks to me like the Prime Minister must resign and whoever takes charge next will have to rapidly rethink the country’s entire Covid-19 policy in a not-insane direction. 

Eisenstein: I’ve been telling myself that I’m done writing about “the pandemic,” which as a social phenomenon (as opposed to an epidemiological one) is over only when people agree that it is over. I know a lot of people are done with it. Sick of talking about it. Sick of performing pandemic theater. For my part, I am sick of having opinions about it. And yet…



CO-VIDs of the Week:

********** Joe Rogan (<10 min) (.. if that link doesnt work, s/b avail here)




Dr. Bruce Patterson’s team has discovered that the S1 pieces of the spike proteins persist in the monocytes post-vaccination resulting in immune dysregulation and long-haul syndrome 


****** Weinstein: It’s a monster. It is willing to actually harm people with a vaccine, and then gaslight them over whether they have been harmed. (<2min; worth your time)


Rae: Western Australian government have banned unvaccinated parents from visiting their sick children in hospital… The main stream media are laughing on air about it and saying that they hope it’s the last straw to change these parents “philosophy”. The world needs to see this…


I would not be Unacceptable Jessica without plugging Jordan Peterson's interview with Brian Peckford!
He is the last living drafter and signatory of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and he is suing the Canadian federal government over its unconstitutional travel bans.


Zach: THIS




Anecdotal COVID Fare:


Dr. Ira Bernstein has been practicing medicine for 30 years. He treated his first patient with COVID-19 in November 2020 with Ivermectin. Successfully. He is also the co-founder of the Canadian COVID Care Alliance: a group of independent Canadian doctors, scientists, and health care practitioners committed to providing top-quality and balanced evidence-based information about Covid-19 to the public. He is a humble and dear man, with a family, who is far more concerned with treating his patients and helping his fellow humans using his skills as a physician than he is with obeying dictates from unqualified selected government officials that literally fly in the face of true public health.


What used to be unusual in obits is (as it were) pandemic now


Evan: The needle and the damage done...



Pushback Fare:

Kid Rock Says He Won't Perform At Venues With COVID-19 Vaccine Or Mask Mandates


Almost Half of Spain Is Now Vaccine Passport-Free (At Least for Domestic Uses)



COVID Conspiracy Fare:


Let’s cut the crap eh? It’s established that DARPA was handed a proposal from Ecohealth, Duke, UNC and Palo Alto Labs that intended for work to be done at the WIV and then intentionally released into bat caves in China related to coronaviruses. It’s also established that DARPA told them to pound sand, because, as I’ve pointed out, it not only violated gain-of-function but also raised grave concerns about being dual use (that is, bioweapon use) and that Ecohealth was apparently claiming the right to do same on a foreign land where they neither owned the cave or the people around there that might get screwed. As it turns out people did get screwed and it appears to have initiated right there. There is evidence NIH funded this after DARPA told them to go to Hell. The evidence points to that how Covid-19 occurred.

Proved? Not yet. But if not… it’s a hell of a coincidence, isn’t it — both on what was being done and the timing.




Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:


I am quite impressed with Richard Hanania’s new book Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy. It makes a simple but important point: U.S. foreign policy is less due to some persistent grand national strategy than to inconsistent lobbying pressures of various political groups. While at times causes millions to die for no good reason.




Defusing Cold War II is possible and could be just the beginning

Let’s play Guess Who Said This:

“I am convinced that the only mechanism that can make decisions about using military force… is the Charter of the United Nations.”

1. Franklin Roosevelt in 1945
2. Eleanor Roosevelt in 1946
3. Adlai Stevenson in 1956
4. Kofi Annan in 2003
5. Vladimir Putin in 2007

............ Folks, this is no way to run a planet! We face all kinds of problems—climate change, pandemics, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, bioweapons, weapons in space, and on and on—that could prove collectively existential if the world’s nations don’t get together and address them. And if world history becomes a dialectic between cold wars and hot wars, addressing them is going to be really hard.

We need a turning point. We need to move decisively toward the creation of a true global community.



Could the U.S. defend Ukraine militarily? What could do in the face of a Russian invasion? The answer is, almost nothing.

What could it do to itself in the process? Quite a lot of damage.

......

In other words, the U.S. has, in Scott Ritter’s words, "the pretense of power."

What could the U.S. lose if Russia picks up the gauntlet Biden is throwing down? It could lose that pretense and be exposed for what it is, a bully fit only for beating selected victims.

If the U.S. keeps posturing, it's up to Putin alone to decide whether to expose our weaknesses. If he doesn't, it may be an act of mercy.



Orwellian Fare:

The fact-checkers who flagged Paul Thacker's British Medical Journal article about a Pfizer subcontractor for Facebook admitted they police narrative, not fact

... “Missing context” has become a term to disparage reporting that is true but inconvenient. As Thacker notes in the Q&A below, “They’re checking narrative, not fact.”

The significance of the British Medical Journal story is that it showed how easily reporting that is true can be made to look untrue or conspiratorial. The growing bureaucracy of “fact-checking” sites that help platforms like Facebook decide what to flag is now taking into account issues like: the political beliefs of your sources, the presence of people of ill repute among your readers, and the tendency of audiences to draw unwanted inferences from the reported facts. All of this can now become part of how authorities do or do not define reporting as factual.

“But that’s not a fact check,” says Thacker. “You just don’t like the story.”



CaitOz Fare:

What Has Been Asserted Without Evidence May Be Dismissed Without Evidence

... The US political/media class is just saying whatever it wants about what Russia is doing and planning to do with no regard for facts or evidence. Nothing is too cartoonishly hysterical; in fact the more clickbaity and attention-grabbing the better. They feel free to scattergun these outlandish claims willy nilly all over our information ecosystem because five years of Russia hysteria have taught them that they will suffer exactly zero professional consequences when they are proven wrong


America’s buddies Saudi Arabia and Israel have been bombing their neighbors constantly with extensive US support. The friendship between these nations and the US exists not in spite of their nonstop military butchery but exactly because of it.

...

If Russia was an actual threat they wouldn’t have to keep lying about it all the time.



In short, free speech matters because it’s how the status quo gets changed. It’s how society collectively figures out that racism is undesirable, that women are equal to men, that science is superior to superstition, and that the world perhaps does not work the way we once thought it did. It’s also how society figures out that a government has become inundated with “excess and corruption,” that status quo systems aren’t working, and that new systems are required.

Now here’s the kicker: if free speech matters because it’s what allows the collective to change the status quo, then it is exactly those voices who oppose the status quo whose speech must be adamantly protected. The speech of those who support the mainstream orthodoxies of the political/media class is vastly less important than those who dissent from those orthodoxies, because only the latter is pushing for change.

... Which is of course the idea. A tremendous amount of effort goes into keeping the public from awakening to and freeing themselves from the injustices of status quo systems while still giving them the illusion of freedom. Whoever controls the narrative controls the world.

... So it becomes clear that the only thing to do is let everyone speak, on the platforms that people have come to rely on for sharing ideas and information with the largest possible number of people. A great many of them will be wrong, and a great many of them will be stupid. But the alternative is shutting down the possibility of healthy change ever occurring in a status quo that is killing our ecosystem, pushing us toward confrontations between nuclear-armed nations, and becoming increasingly despotic.


Other Quotes of the Week:

Vance: Billions spent on the Kennedy school, grand strategies seminars, and the Georgetown school of foreign service has bought us an elite that’s about to blunder us into a Ukraine war. Our country is broken, especially in how it trains its leaders.

Sadly, the profession of the modern Western "journalist" (Johnny is a "journalist", by his own admission--of course, all vacancies in State Department are occupied by ignoramuses from much more prestigious schools and with connections) is a euphemism for an ignorant BSer. Most of them anyway, and Harris is not an exception because the amount of propaganda and BS he spews in his video about what Putin "really wants" is staggering. 



Short Read / Awesome Rant:


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.

Our Highly Skilled leaders have not figured out how to manufacture paper masks two years into a pandemic. They just let a miles-long stretch of highway sit dormant for 20 hours in freezing cold temperatures. They can’t fathom economic growth that doesn’t involve strip-mining existing, productive industries and/or buying into blatantly false technological promises made by flagrantly moronic charlatans. They can’t win a war in spite of having the largest and most wasteful military in human history. They can’t provide healthcare in spite of spending more than any other nation on earth.

These people despise intelligence and regard integrity as naivety. They revere only savvy and ruthlessness.  They are incapable of neither empathy nor self-reflection. They believe their ability to nod blankly at charts they do not comprehend and defer all of their decisions to self-serving corporate bodies is a mystical skill possessed only by a chosen few, and that these few are the rightful leaders of all organizations public and private. 

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 moron and never question the authority of the morons around you. 



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

Are we too focused on a goal and not enough on the work that is necessary to achieve our goal?


Cognitive Dissonance: Coming Up For Air

.. Quite frankly at that age I had little capacity for alternative explanations for life’s various insanities since I was being taught to regurgitate force fed ‘facts’ rather than to critically think. Fifty plus years later, it’s even worse.

About 20 years ago when I began my ongoing and never-ending awakening and was consumed by my initial reassessment of just about everything I thought I knew, I began to realize the emotional response patterns of “We the Conditioned”



Satirical Fare:


From an undisclosed hiding place outside Canada's capital city, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confirmed for the world that he has tragically tested positive for fascism. 

"I took the fascism test this morning," said Trudeau, beginning to sob. "And the test came back positive. I understand this may come as devastating news to freedom-loving Canadians, and I am here to assure you that everything will be ok... after I crush you underneath the jackboot of government tyranny until you learn to start obeying me."

"Together, we will achieve strength through unity, and unity through faith. In SCIENCE."

According to sources, Trudeau will remain in his hiding place under quarantine until all the scary protesting truckers go away, after which he will emerge to grind his people into the very dust until they accept his vision for a glorious fascist future for Canada.

Fortunately, his plans have been delayed as his replacement glue-on vanity eyebrows are still stuck on a delivery truck somewhere, and the fascist dictator refuses to be seen without them.



[Not] Satirical Fare:

Freedom Convoy: Trudeau calls trucker protest an 'insult to truth'





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