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Monday, February 21, 2022

2022-02-21

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

Regular Fare:

Roberts: Inflation: supply or demand?

... If rising inflation is being driven by a weak supply-side rather than an excessively strong demand side, monetary policy won’t work.  Monetary policy supposedly works by trying to raise or lower ‘aggregate demand’, to use the Keynesian category. If spending is growing too fast for production to meet it and so generating inflation, higher interest rates supposedly dampen the willingness of companies and households to consume or invest by increasing the cost of borrowing.  But even if this theory were correct (and the evidence does not support it much), it does not apply when prices are rising because supply chains have broken, energy prices are increasing or there are labour shortages

... In other words, the task must be create unemployment to reduce the bargaining power of workers.  Full employment and wage increases are to be opposed.  Wolf and BoE governor Bailey claim this is to stop runaway inflation.  In reality, it is to preserve profitability. 

As I have shown in previous posts, there is no evidence that wage rises lead to higher inflation.  We are back to the chicken and the egg.  Rising inflation (chicken) forces workers to seek higher wages (egg).

... If rising inflation is really an indicator of weak supply and not strong demand, it means that monetary policy tightening (and the Fed is now planning sharp rises in its policy rate starting next month), will not curb inflation without pushing the US economy into stagnation or slump.  There is a danger that the US economy is heading for a ‘Volcker moment’, when the Fed chief of the later 1970s hiked interest rates into double-digits to crush high inflation. That triggered a stock market ‘correction’ and the deep post-war recession of 1980-2.  Just as now, profitability was at a post-war low, so the sharp rise in the cost of borrowing just led to a collapse in investment and eventually production.


James Galbraith: How the Left Should Think About Inflation
There is no compelling reason to raise interest rates, now or later.



Tweets and Quotes:

Kelton: Ezra's piece is worth reading, though his description of MMT is puzzling. MMT is not about gov being able to spend what it wants b/c it can "print money to pay its debts." What MMT is actually about is, well, the substance of what @ezraklein  calls "supply-side progressivism". 1/
As @M_C_Klein put it, The Deficit Myth "is ultimately a plea to use permanent wartime mobilization for civilian ends." 2/


Other Charts: (source links: one, )




Vid of the Week:

**********



Bubbles are sustained only by ever increasing amounts of Credit.

The most pernicious Bubbles are those fueled by “money” – perceived safe and liquid Credit instruments.

Bubbles are mechanisms of wealth redistribution and destruction.

Structural impairment caused by Bubble excess escalates over the life of the boom.

The pain and dislocation unleashed during the bust is proportional to the excesses of the preceding boom.

Though we’re in uncharted waters when it comes to global Bubble Dynamics, I’ll suggest that geopolitical risks expand exponentially over time.

My thesis holds that 2022 is a pivotal year for a historic multi-decade Bubble period. On multiple fronts, things have come to a head. Today, more than ever, historical context is invaluable for making sense of current developments, while also recognizing the dynamics behind unfolding instability, turmoil and Crisis Dynamics.

... Led by the U.S. and China, the entire world succumbed to reckless “money” and Credit growth without precedent. End-of-cycle “blow-off” excess sustained myriad Bubbles, but at tremendous cost. Securities speculative Bubbles morphed into precarious manias. Mal-investment spun completely out of control. Structural maladjustment ran deep and wide, both within real economies and market structures. Powerful inflationary dynamics escaped asset markets to jolt consumer and producer prices. Moreover, the forces of wealth inequality were dramatically energized, within nations and between them.

... In short, years of mismanagement and resulting Monetary Disorder are coming home to roost – Big Time.

... Following 1999’s manic blow-off excess, I thought the Bubble had burst in 2000. I had to reverse course in 2002, warning that Fed reflationary policies were unleashing a “mortgage finance Bubble”. The “Moneyness of Credit” – the transformation of Trillions of risky loans into perceived safe and liquid AAA securities – was instrumental in, at the time, unparalleled Credit and risk-intermediation excesses.

I thought the bubble had burst in 2008. I reversed course (again) in 2009, warning of an unfolding “global government finance Bubble” – the “Granddaddy of all Bubbles.” The so-called “Great Financial Crisis” (GFC) gave cover to a perilous – and fateful - escalation of government inflationism.













Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Climate Chaos Fare:



Related Tweets and Quotes:

Paul Maidowski: Some scientists claim that we can avert 2°C, "if only X," with X = pure fantasies. The reality is, this type of denial is killing our futures. We need focus to avert 4-13°C global warming. There is no time to waste. For the love of all you hold dear, please start to face reality.

Roger Hallam: 1.  Why is it that natural scientists think they know how social change works - they don't! They are utterly illiterate on the most basic rules of political change. NOTHING will change in the time we have left without CIVIL RESISTANCE ...2/.

Cranfield: Activists and the public are in the thrall of poor quality climate scientists who are overspecialised and simply reinforcing the narratives of Davos elites.
Desperately needed risk assessors have been excluded from the process.



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 Sucharit Bhakdi, and Pierre Kory, and Harvey Risch, and Michael Yeadon, and John Ioannidis, and Paul Marik, and Tess Lawrie, and Zelenko, and Dolores Cahill, and [local prof] Byram Bridle, and Ryan Cole, and…
but going forward, my linking to material by those mainstays mentioned above will be reduced to key excerpts and/or essential posts

Analysis:

********** eugyppius: Why People Believe Wrong Things

How so many people can believe demonstrably false things, and persist in their beliefs for years despite mountains of contrary evidence, is a great problem. There are of course liars and grifters, some of them in positions of great authority; and there are many others who are simply deceived or misinformed. A far worse problem, though, are all those who espouse obviously wrong things, while being well-informed and perfectly sincere. A great part of the maskers, the lockdowners and even the vaccinators, are like this. There are some cynical and evil voices, and there are some stupid people, but then there are all the others, who simply believe ridiculous things despite it all. There are social, psychological and emotional explanations, but being wrong is above all an intellectual problem, and it is so pervasive, because of our intellectual limitations. ....


perhaps a better questions: "are any boosters a good option?" and "should we rein in this runaway train of speculative inoculation campaigns that lack sound validation?"

cliff notes:
  • booster campaigns have been undertaken widely in response to failing covid vaccines.
  • they were not supported by clinical outcomes data.
  • the results have been poor and seem to fail on a risk reward basis
  • post omicron, they make even less sense
  • this is the result of undue haste and insufficient testing.
  • therefore the idea of “faster response with novel vaccines” next time idea is one we should abandon, not embrace.
..... the simple fact is that with novavax we are, once more, assessing a new vaccine modality and the WSJ article, irresponsibly in my view, is making entirely speculative claims for which there is no evidence at this time.

we rushed on approval a couple times already. we approved boosters based on biomarkers not clinical outcomes. corners were cut and poor study designs allowed. it has not worked out terribly well. the top people in vaccines at the FDA got so disgusted with this that they quit.

... high rates of vaccination are not reducing all cause mortality. it’s actually higher, a remarkable outcome after so much cohort depletion and natural immunity generation.

... you can see the resurgence of cases and deaths in a gompertz violating double hump pattern in places all over the world. it coincides with vaccine rollouts and aligns with known immuno-suppressive and longer time susceptibility amplification data.

speed is not a virtue in vaccines, efficacy is.

therefore, it pays to take your time.

... leaky vaccines are worse than no vaccines at all. they drive worse long term and societal effects. they can be very, very dangerous.

... maybe rushing these assumptively founded and outright presumptive interventions and new modalities to market is not such a great idea after all…


Commentary:

Awakening from Ideology

Over the course of January and February 2022, the institutional covid narrative seems to have entered a state of free fall. Many of the points I expressed in my December, 2020 article What to Make of Covid and the Lockdowns? have finally broken free from their previous status as misinformation, conspiracy theory, or whatever appellation was once employed to discredit and censor them. These include the admissions that facemasks are not effective at stopping the spread of SarsCov2, and that lockdowns are equally ineffective. In fact, it is increasingly recognized that there is no way to stop the spread of this virus, and the recommendations of the once pilloried Great Barrington Declaration are now mouthed by the very media personalities and politicians who previously condemned them. Early in 2021 they also admitted the virus was likely created and leaked from a laboratory (though for many of us, this fact is not merely likely, but certain).

The institutions of technocratic governance responsible for promulgating the official covid narrative (which I collectively refer to as “The Network”) are even finally admitting that the covid vaccines do not prevent the spread or transmission of covid. In 2020, it was the height of heresy to suggest that covid was about as dangerous as a bad flu. Now, the omicron variant is openly compared to an amped-up cold in terms of its deadliness for most people. What’s more, it has been admitted that counting all of those who have died “with covid” instead of “from covid” as covid deaths leads to a gross distortion in the covid death numbers. Italy recently reduced their official covid death count by 95% in recognition of this. These figures are also in alignment with evidence from my article linked above, which referenced the CDC’s own figure of 94%, quietly released in August 2020 and utterly ignored by the Network.

These realities were already clear in 2020 to those of us who had turned to independent news sources to learn the truth, having recognized that governments, the corporate press, and their affiliated partners in academic and medical institutions were ignoring the facts about covid. In fact, they were promulgating information that simply wasn’t true, while censoring information that was true. In my aforementioned article, I wrote that although the perspectives laid out in it were deeply taboo at the time, I believed they would come to be accepted as true in the future. Some truths are too glaring, too prominent to be denied forever.

I’m relieved and gratified to witness my prediction coming true. While authoritarian measures still persist in countries such as Australia and Canada, many other countries in the world are rapidly abandoning them at the present moment, including (thankfully for me) the United States. It is my prayer that the authoritarian holdouts will fold to pressure soon and follow suit. Phenomena such as the monumental Canadian trucker convoy and protest movement are harbingers of this eventuality.

I do not write this to say “We told you so,” though for the sake of us all, I do wish to say, “Listen to us next time!” Other aspects of the narrative are still intact at the moment, but I believe it is likewise only a matter of time before these facts are finally admitted to and recognized. These include the high degree of efficacy and safety of early treatment and preventative protocols such as the use of Vitamin D, hydroxychloroquine, and ivermectin; the deadly effects of common hospital treatments such as the use of Remdesivir and ventilators; and the unacceptable degree of vaccine injury and death caused by the covid vaccines (and their limited efficacy in even reducing symptoms). The Network is currently attempting to convince the public that although cloth facemasks never worked, despite 2 years of useless and harmful mandates,N95 masks do. I believe this one will fail as well. One prediction I hope does not come true is that the vaccines will prove to cause long term damage to the immune system, resulting in future health issues for millions—but there is already some evidence that this may indeed be the case.

For many of those who have trustingly followed the Network’s narrative for the past two years, the current condition of narrative collapse may not yet be visible. Indeed, the Network’s next narrative shift will probably be to declare “Mission Accomplished!” and attempt to convince the public that their lockdown, mask, censorship, and vax mandate policies were responsible for defeating covid and limiting the damage it caused. This will work for a while on some people, but I believe we will eventually all look back on covid governance the way we now look back on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—as an indefensible, large scale crime perpetrated by the ruling class with disastrous consequences.

But this won’t happen on its own. Those of us who have seen through the narrative must insist that these policies be recognized for what they were, and further insist that support be withdrawn from those who promulgated them, even if they are too firmly entrenched in power to be held accountable. If this does not happen, our societies will be doomed to suffer through the same destructive authoritarian measures the next time one of our government’s frankenviruses are unleashed on the public—or at any time the Network announces the necessity to reenact authoritarian polices on the populace for any reason they deem sufficient.

Waking Up from the Spell of Politics

That’s what this article is about. In order to prevent another catastrophe of governance like the one we’ve been living through for two years, we need to understand how we got here. .....



Dr. Martin Kulldorff is one of the most qualified public health pandemic experts in the United States. To the narrative-shapers, he’s a pariah.

As a prominent epidemiologist and statistician, Kulldorff has worked on detecting and monitoring infectious disease outbreaks for two decades. His methods are widely used around the world and by almost every state health department in the United States, as well as by hundreds of people at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Kulldorff has also worked on vaccine safety for decades, developing globally used methods for monitoring adverse reactions in new vaccines.

His résumé on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) website is 45 pages long and includes a list of 201 peer-reviewed published journal papers. His work has been cited more than 27,000 times.

...

It’s quite something for a public health scientist at the top of his game to admit that “both science and public health are broken.”

“For some reason, a public official narrative was established, and you weren’t allowed to question it—which, of course, is very detrimental, both to the pandemic and how to deal with the pandemic, because you have to have a vibrant discussion to figure out how best to deal with these things,”

.... Kulldorff said the Great Barrington Declaration proposed nothing new.

“It’s just the basic fundamental principles of public health that existed in the pandemic preparedness plan that was prepared many years before,” he said. “It’s sort of astonishing that it wasn’t followed from the very beginning of the pandemic.”



............... The covid battleground has been very different - it has occurred in the media, on social media, and by government diktat. It has also raged in academia too where many anti-narrative papers have had to face a significantly more stringent set of requirements to warrant publication whereas pro-narrative papers got rushed through (it was an emergency, see, so it was important to get this information out, but not that information).

... Although several places are now rolling back the restrictions and seem to be going back to ‘normal’, I am not quite so sanguine. The easing of restrictions is certainly something to celebrate, but I think the underlying damage to our sense of balance and what is right has been severe. If I were to don the crinkly foil hat of cynicism I might even say governments are not in retreat, but actually very pleased with what they have achieved.

A very significant proportion of the population now think it’s entirely right and proper for governments to step in with sweeping restrictions of civil liberties, to determine who you can have in your own home, what you can do in your own home, how often and for how long you can leave your own home (and so on) - in order to keep other people safe from a virus that poses a low to moderate threat to the majority (and that’s overstating things). Many people think that health passports are a good idea - even though they might also recognize that, in the particular instance of covid, they haven’t worked too well.

Look at the number of people who have called for the severe restriction of liberties for those choosing to remain vaccine-free. Some have said they should be not allowed on the streets. Some have said they should be denied access to healthcare. Some have said they should be denied access to education. That this has become normalized and considered to be morally OK is not something to celebrate at all.

The shadows were cast, covid was a real thing, but the inferences that have been allowed to be drawn are truly infernal.



... it’s like the last vestiges of observational capability have finally been beaten out of a meaningful portion of the population.

truly, we have entered the post rational world of the unfalsifiable claim.

“it would have been worse if i had not!”

... it does not matter. no aggregate data can refute any individual belief about one specific datapoint among many.

“i’m sure it helped.”

it literally turns the contraction of covid by vaccinated people into the belief that covid vaccines worked for them.

this may be the most successful piece of product positioning in human history.

... the alternative is admitting that you were played for a chump. people are highly averse to such conclusions.

of course, spotting the chump is easy:

ask such a person what would convince them that the vaccine did not prevent covid from being worse.

see if they have an answer.

if they do not, well, then it’s pure presumption.

that which cannot be falsified cannot be proven either.

bingo. chumpitude verified.

and boy do people not want things proven.

we’ve reached the point where agencies will no longer publish objective data because it does not support their conclusions.

“we cannot provide data because people might analyze it!” is not much of a mantra, is it?



When one is in the midst of trauma it is often impossible to step back and see the full picture. Over time abuse and trauma become normalized as ‘just the way things are.’ So I think it is important to pause for a moment to note that: a child having a heart attack during a math class on Zoom, athletes in the prime of life collapsing during the middle of a match, a news anchor having a stroke live on camera, a comedian collapsing on stage and fracturing her skull — NONE OF THESE THINGS ARE NORMAL.

The FDA, CDC, and mainstream media — who all know exactly why this is happening — have turned to the ‘autism defense’ that they’ve been using for 35 years. They claim that ‘this is normal — healthy young people have always had heart attacks and strokes and died for no apparent reason.’

..... The 12% increase in automotive fatalities in 2021 is vaccine injury too

... Needless to say, the FDA, CDC, and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will never investigate the association between Covid-19 shots and vehicle crashes because that sort of critical thinking is not allowed.


Charts: (source links: one,..)




Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

Girardot: Tropical remote islands that resisted COVID in 2020, ended up with substantial "Covid" deaths following vaccination. I know correlation isn't causation.
When was the last time you caught a cold in Seychelles in May? 😉
Did doctors get confused in 2021?

*** Garcia: However, the fine art of ignoring the pandemic does entail a tricky learning curve. Threading the needle between Following the Science® on the one hand and wallowing in rank magical thinking on the other is not a skill that you can learn overnight.

Kirsch: Let’s be clear. The CDC hid the data because the data proves they were lying to us. That’s the real reason.

*** Kunstler: O Canada, the Great White North, hovering ominously above Niagara Falls somewhere, is a winter wonderland, and one of the great pleasures of the season there, apparently, for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is skating on thin ice.

Toby: The fascists are liars who want everyone to believe that the Canadian truckers are “extremists.” In fact, the truckers are decent, hard-working fathers and mothers who just want the government to leave them and their families alone. Invoking the Emergencies Act against the bouncy castle citizens is the definition of tyranny

Viva Frei: I have spent 12 days live streaming from Ottawa. I did not see one shred of violence until the police showed up.

Dr. Kaur: “It’s for your safety” ...from the country formerly known as Canada

Jeff: This is the darkest day in Canada in my lifetime. But I have a feeling that the fight has just begun and JT has no idea how many he has awakened.

We're All Rising: If your powerful position in society depends on not understanding something, the patently obvious suddenly becomes impossibly complicated. Corollary: it’s often necessary to believe impossibilities in order to maintain power.

Miller: perhaps their greatest success has been exposing Justin Trudeau as a delusional, incompetent authoritarian.... It’s not hard to pile on his frequent missteps and disturbing lack of decorum and awareness, but what’s most infuriating about his incredible dedication to COVID mandates is that the policies he’s defending demonstrably do not work.
... Refusing to accept reality has been a hallmark of COVID policy throughout the pandemic, and Trudeau’s dedication to a policy with no clear societal benefit and massive harms is the latest example of a politician committing to nonsensical, disproven measures to avoid admitting their own failure and maintain an illusion of control.

Scott: Wow… just on CPAC now an MP asked why Klaus Schwab was bragging he owns half of Canada’s parliament and who are the MP’s he owns… the speaker cut him off and said the audio was bad and moved on… the whole system needs to come down Canada isn’t ours anymore…



CO-VIDs of the Week:

Ed Dowd: We don’t need the MSM…the sleeping leviathan known as Wall Street is waking up…money talks…BS propaganda walks.




Anecdotal Fare:

In the past six months, a slew of professional and amateur athletes have collapsed and died on the field. Yet, mainstream media appear to take this in stride, acting as if what is happening is completely normal.

.... Many of these people and their stories have remained hidden from public view. YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and other social media platforms have censored the personal stories and videos of individuals documenting their injuries and permanent disabilities, so those who only read mainstream media are unaware of the overwhelming damage being done in the name of science.

.... The bottom line is, even if you can prove you were injured by a COVID shot, you can’t sue the drug company and the compensation you receive from the program is capped at $50,000 for lost wages and $370,376 for wrongful death.



Pushback Fare:

Ottawa Freedom Convoy Tears Down Illusion of Democracy in North America

... Countless thousands of patriots have driven across the country to bunker down in Ottawa in peace and high festive spirits which I had to see with my own eyes to believe demanding something so simple and un-tainted by ideology: freedom to work, provide for families and a respect for basic rights as laid out in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (a 1982 upgrade to the embarrassingly oligarchical British North America Act of 1867). Mainstream media and political hacks have been working overtime to paint the Freedom convoy that converged on Ottawa on January 29 as an “insurrectionist movement” full of “white supremacists”, “Russian stooges”, and “Nazis” out to “overthrow the government”.

... Faced with an organic civil rights movement of blue-collar truckers, farmers and tens of thousands of supporters who have convened on Canada’s capital to demand a restoration of their basic freedoms, the current Liberal government has failed to show even an ounce of humanity or capacity to negotiate.

This shouldn’t be a surprise for those who have seen the hypocrisy of neo-liberal “rules-based” order ideologues in action over the past few years who are quick to celebrate the “liberty” of citizens of Ukraine, Hong Kong, or Xinjiang when the outcome benefits the geopolitical aims of detached technocrats hungry for global hegemony.

.... Due to the inflexible Borg-like inability to negotiate with an organic civil rights movement suffered by all technocratic Davos-creatures, major fissures have begun to break throughout the political establishment of Canada.

... Even NDP head Jagmeet Singh who had labelled all protestors white supremacists just a few days ago reversed his tune- perhaps due to the overwhelming presence of Sikhs in the federal and provincial convoys.

... One thing is certain. Those tyrants living in their ivory tower echo chambers demanding the world to conform to their ideal post-nation state utopias are panicking as they have no idea how to interact with actual human beings organizing themselves around such non-mathematical principles as “freedom”, “justice” and “rights” which are inalienable to all citizens- even if they live under a monarchy.



... Canada appears a long way from Trumpist fascism. However, one should recall that fascism does not storm bastions of power; it is let into power’s corridors by those in charge.

Today, Canada’s leaders appear as prone to do that as any others. Yesterday’s invocation of the Emergencies Act could come to count as Mr Justin Trudeau’s worst political decision.


Understanding Martial Law

..... The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, of course, guarantees freedom of speech and expression, peaceful protest, and assembly. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms also guarantees Canadians the right to a democracy itself, so what Justin Trudeau has done is unlawful on its face. Canadians, any Canadians, according to the Charter, can take him to court for having suspended their democracy unlawfully.

..... In every direction, the WEF has staked its alumni and speakers in national leadership roles, or, as in Boston, at the helm of local leadership; in every direction, they are cracking the totalitarian whip via “health” or in Canada, via the “emergency” of lawful peaceful protest.



The violence the Prime Minister has expressed concern about during the three-week protest in Ottawa didn’t unfold until Justin Trudeau’s Emergencies Act police army was sent in to disperse the crowd.

The three major incidents Friday, under a form of martial law, were grotesque.

Video of Toronto Police Mounted Unit officers charging into the crowd and at least one horse trampling multiple people — including an elderly woman with a walker — was disturbing.

... While Trudeau tried to pin the online postings of a Swastika and Confederate flag on the truckers, they brought in a crane to rise the Canadian flag and sang O Canada every day. They definitely wore out their welcome while clogging up the parliamentary district of Ottawa, not wearing masks and excessively honking their horns. But they didn’t cause violence. So why the heavy hand in their mission to win back the city? That’s the question Ottawa Police, the Prime Minister, Premier Doug Ford and Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson need to answer.



Justin Trudeau’s confrontation with the Canadian truckers may be the single most significant event of the Covid pandemic – not because of its eventual outcome, whatever that may be, but because of what it symbolises. It captures, in perfect microcosm, the tensions between the competing imperatives of the age: freedom versus security; the rule of law versus flexible ‘responsive’ governance; the priorities of the workers versus those of the Zooming bourgeoisie; the need for real-world human interaction and belonging versus the promises of splendid online isolation; the experiences of the common man, who knows where it hurts, versus those of the professional expert class, who know nothing that cannot be expressed as a formula. 


The trucker convoy and leftist re-alignment

..... I didn’t think I’d ever live so long to hear a truck driver described as ‘petite-bourgeois.’

... Another think-piece was used to explain away the large presence of south-east Asian truckers who were part of the protest, especially Sikhs. They’re there because they’ve been duped, you see, because they don’t understand that they’ve been roped into a white supremacist protest.

.... What’s left of the left now, I don’t know, but I know this has happened before, and many times. After such mass re-alignments, just like after mass hysteria, everyone looks around at each other a bit shocked, a bit embarrassed, and a bit horrified. Jung’s Wotan thesis also applies here, that something seizes us, something buried in our repressed unconscious, but then it eventually lets go.

After the seizure comes the reckoning, and maybe they’ll all look back in shame at the things they justified while seized by virtue.


Justin Trudeau just created a caste of economic untouchables. Can we stop this dystopian policy from taking hold in America?



COVID Corporatocracy Fare:


one of the deeply frustrating aspects of covid has been the fact that the data has been so limited.

this is not because much of the data has not existed. it’s simply being cloistered and hidden.

this is not because agencies have been overwhelmed or unable to do so. it has been the systematic suppression and slanting of data in order to support political narratives. and the CDC has been among the very worst.

... it’s pretty clear that wallensky is getting set up as the “fall gal” for this and while she has certainly earned it, the CDC has been dismal from the very beginning. redfield was appalling. they have selected and published what can only be described as pseudoscience: studies that lacked control groups, studies that used truncation to cherry pick total failure into apparent efficacy, and frankly, outright fraud.



One of the things I try to do here, is explain how much the insanity of the past two years can be put down to the ordinary, routine shortcomings of our institutions, our culture and our psychology. This analysis routinely displeases some of my readers, but it is just unquestionably true. Of course I understand the impulse to characterise Corona as pathological, malevolent and conspiratorially arranged, and I would never deny that there have been bad actors at work throughout all that we have endured. None of this would have been possible, though, without legions of true believers inside our native institutions furthering this madness in autonomous good faith, in accordance with an array of very mundane incentives.

Equally obvious, is that a lot of highly placed, powerful people believe a lot of crazy stuff, and they vigorously support a whole array of counterproductive, ridiculous policies and programs. This did not start suddenly with Corona. As the West has entered a period of protracted decline, their numbers and the depth of their folly have only grown. There are many specific reasons for this, but driving the decline more than anything else is an intellectual and cultural disease of affluence, expressed in the overproduction of elites, the increasing emphasis on conscientiousness at the expense of ability and intelligence, and the diffusion of political power downwards, as a means of cementing consensus among disparate corporate, academic and government factions.

Before 2020, these people did and said all kinds of ridiculous things, but the consequences of their absurdity either unfolded too gradually to attract all that much attention, or they were confined to specific sub-populations and not felt all that widely. Corona was simply that moment, when the wages of the horrendous judgement of the people who govern us hit everyone all at once.

Even in optimal conditions humans aren’t rational creatures. With enormous effort, we can develop views and theories of the world that are semi-reliable. We can work within paradigms of medium resolution that have some probability of being approximately right. As the general ability of our establishment intelligentsia declines, the reigning theories in every field become more removed from the world, less likely to be useful, and subject to insane arbitrary swings.

People on the establishment side of the debate mainly argue that Corona is an unprecedented and unusual virus, and that the scientific response has been totally reasonable and justified. People on our side of the discussion tend to see Corona as nothing special, but the scientific and political response as something new and unusual. I suggest that it helps to see the virus, despite its laboratory origins, as a biological threat of the kind we’ve lived with for millennia; and that it likewise helps to see our unbalanced reaction to this virus as an expression of our own declining society and institutions. That’s a big reason why fixing this has proven to be so hard.

... I think it is important to come to terms with these simple facts, because these dangerous crazy lunatics are still running everything. ... It would be better, if all of this nonsense were directed, or the result of some unusual passing madness. It’s not; it is the way things are. This is the nature of the political and social institutions that govern us.



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

Vids of the Week:

This is the most censured Video, it kind of sums it up Quick Time.


GeoPolitical Fare:


In Responsible Statecraft, Jack F. Matlock, the longtime diplomat who in 1997 warned that expanding NATO “may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War,” recounts the US mistakes that paved the way for the Ukraine crisis. And, though NATO expansion is not surprisingly on his list, Matlock usefully reminds us how many other items belong there: over the past quarter century, every American president has made consequential missteps. After Clinton launched NATO expansion, and Bush compounded the mistake by getting NATO to pledge future membership to Ukraine, Obama took over. Matlock (who was ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991), writes:

Although President Obama initially promised improved relations through his “reset” policy, the reality was that his government continued to ignore the most serious Russian concerns and redoubled earlier American efforts to detach former Soviet republics from Russian influence and, indeed, to encourage “regime change” in Russia itself. American actions in Syria and Ukraine were seen by the Russian president, and most Russians, as indirect attacks on them. And so far as Ukraine is concerned, U.S. intrusion into its domestic politics was deep, actively supporting the 2014 revolution and overthrow of the elected Ukrainian government in 2014.





Orwellian Fare:

America's Ruling Regime Doesn't Fear Disinformation... It Fears Truth

Casting critics as terrorists and threatening to sic the most powerful, pervasive and sophisticated security state in the history of the world on them is of course not about defending democracy or protecting the truth — it’s about intimidating democratic opposition into silence and submission to an official narrative.



When it comes to distant and adversarial countries, we are taught to recognize tyranny through the use of telltale tactics of repression. Dissent from orthodoxies is censored. Protests against the state are outlawed. Dissenters are harshly punished with no due process. Long prison terms are doled out for political transgressions rather than crimes of violence. Journalists are treated as criminals and spies. Opposition to the policies of political leaders are recast as crimes against the state.

When a government that is adverse to the West engages in such conduct, it is not just easy but obligatory to malign it as despotic. Thus can one find, on a virtually daily basis, articles in the Western press citing the government's use of those tactics in Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and whatever other countries the West has an interest in disparaging (articles about identical tactics from regimes supported by the West — from Riyadh to Cairo — are much rarer). That the use of these repressive tactics render these countries and their populations subject to autocratic regimes is considered undebatable.

But when these weapons are wielded by Western governments, the precise opposite framework is imposed: describing them as despotic is no longer obligatory but virtually prohibited. That tyranny exists only in Western adversaries but never in the West itself is treated as a permanent axiom of international affairs, as if Western democracies are divinely shielded from the temptations of genuine repression.  Indeed, to suggest that a Western democracy has descended to the same level of authoritarian repression as the West's official enemies is to assert a proposition deemed intrinsically absurd or even vaguely treasonous.

The implicit guarantor of this comforting framework is democracy.  Western countries, according to this mythology, can never be as repressive as their enemies because Western governments are at least elected democratically. This assurance, superficially appealing though it may be, completely collapses with the slightest critical scrutiny. ...

...

This last decade of history is crucial to understand the dissent-eliminating framework that has been constructed and implemented in the West. This framework has culminated, thus far, with the stunning multi-pronged attacks on Canadian truckers by the Trudeau government. But it has been a long time in the making, and it is inevitable that it will find still-more extreme expressions.

It is, after all, based in the central recognition that there is mass, widespread anger and even hatred toward the neoliberal ruling class throughout the West. Trump, Brexit and the rise of far-right parties in places where their empowerment was previously unthinkable — including Germany and France — is unmistakable proof of that. Rather than sacrifice some of the benefits of inequality that have generated much of that rage or placate or appease it with symbolic concessions, Western neoliberal elites have instead opted for force, a system that crushes all forms of dissent as soon as they emerge in anything resembling an effective, meaningful or potent form. ...

... What is most notable, though, is that this alleged criminality is not adjudicated through judicial proceedings — with all the accompanying protections of judges, juries, rules of evidence and requirements of due process — but simply by decree. ...



CaitOz Fare:

The Media’s Odd Double Standard On Evidence Required For Claims Of An Impending Attack

None of these claims being reported by the obedient mass media have any evidence. They’re just government assertions being passed on to the audiences of these media institutions. It’s possible that there’s real intelligence behind them, but if the public can’t see it and verify it it’s the same as there being no evidence. Secret, invisible evidence is not evidence.



What the US and its proxies are doing with Yemen is universes more horrific and universes more urgent than what Russia is doing with Ukraine.
...
The US has spent years accusing Russia of inflaming far right extremism in America and that whole time they were fixing to ship weapons to Nazis in Ukraine.
...
Saying we need to defend Ukrainian democracy is like saying we need to defend Iowa’s fjords.
...
To be a westerner is to be continuously inundated with made-up stories about evil tyrants who want to terrorize the world while living under a vast empire that is actually terrorizing the world.
... 
The US empire does not promote democracy, it violently opposes it and subverts it at every opportunity. Opposing the planetary domination of the US empire is what promotes democracy.
...
Don’t worry if people call you a “contrarian”. Frequently disagreeing with mainstream consensus is probably a sane and healthy thing to do in a profoundly sick society.


And I think it’s important while this all unfolds to take a moment to remind ourselves that the burden of proof is always on the party making the claim. This is a basic principle we all hold true in matters of logic and debate and in the legal system, and really anywhere that disputed claims are scrutinized, and it doesn’t magically stop being the case just because a claim is spoken in an assertive tone by powerful people about a country they don’t like. 
[or about a novel experimental "vaccine" being safe and effective despite not being tested properly?]
...
The onus is not on anyone else to prove that the US and UK governments are lying when they make these claims, the onus is on the US and UK governments to prove that they are telling the truth.
[the onus is not on anyone else to prove that the "vaccines" are not safe and effective; the onus is on those mandating that everyone get "vaccinated" to prove that those inoculations are safe and effective]
...
But it’s not fine. It’s not okay that this bizarre cold war hysteria environment has melted everyone’s brain over the last five years. It’s not okay that the most basic standards of logic and evidence have been flushed down the toilet.


Other Quotes of the Week:

Rigger: One of the things that has been very evident to me over the last few years is the lack of any real sense of proportion. Issues, like pronouns, have become an important thing for many. Pronouns? Seriously?

Woods: “I am floored by the MSM black out of the Justice Dept findings that HRC paid ppl to spy on a sitting Prez. It’s close to an explicit admission that they are not news agencies at all but PR firms for a powerful sector of the ruling class.”

Biden: “We have a significant intelligence capability, thank you very much,”

Margolis: Nothing like a jolly little war to distract public opinion at a time when rightwing forces are fast gaining ground in the US and now, of all places, in placid Canada.

TheLastUprising - Real Climate Action Now: You guys are taking my point to a tangent, but OK. I like Bernie, but he is invested in believing he can make change happen within the system, against all evidence. And it's too late for political change anyway. Now, we rise up or we d*e.

Greenwald: The core value of civil liberties is they apply equally to everyone regardless of ideology, but western liberals no longer believe in that framework - they don’t recognize rights to dissent for their adversaries - and many have stopped even pretending:

Levant: As hard as it is to believe, this woman (Chrystia Freeland) is the deputy of BOTH Justin Trudeau and Klaus Schwab, at the same time. She’s deputy prime minister of Canada and a director of Schwab’s World Economic Forum.



WEF Great Reset Fare:








Last month, 2017 footage of World Economic Forum (WEF) head Klaus Schwab resurfaced in which he boasts of having 'penetrated' various governments through its Young Global Leaders program. The clip is notable because the WEF - known best for its annual gathering of the global elite in Davos - has been openly pushing for digital IDs and vaccine passports, while leaders of said governments continue to impose Orwellian vaccine mandates which have resulted in widespread protests for medical freedom.
"I have to say, when I mention now names, like Mrs. (Angela) Merkel and even Vladimir Putin, and so on, they all have been Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum ... But what we are very proud of now is the young generation like Prime Minister (Justin) Trudeau … We penetrate the cabinets."
"So yesterday I was at a reception for Prime Minister Trudeau and I know that half of his cabinet, or even more than half of his cabinet, are actually Young Global Leaders." -Klaus Schwab
Other notable Young Global Leaders include: New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda "this will never end" Ardern, French President Emmanuel Macron, and other high ranking officials from Germany, Finland, Greece, the Netherlands and Denmark. It might even explain Pete Buttigieg's odd success-to-competence ratio.


Canada Plunges Into Darkness, And It's Hard To Find Words

Perhaps I’m off base about everything, because I lack the mind to look at this squarely, or at all. My mind ceases to form narrative. Grief feels like rage, or nothingness.

One silver lining, I suppose, is we not longer have to work to demonstrate that a perfectly monstrous spirit possesses the globalists.
I am shocked, nauseous, stiff with worry, about what has transpired in Canada.

We no longer have nations, we only have places where the globalists are worse than in other places, at the moment.

In the silence, I imagine long lost friends writing to say:

“I see it now.”

But they haven’t, and they won’t. Not even if these monsters actually blow up the world. 

.... Can’t somebody arrest Justin Trudeau?

Can’t somebody remove that Chrystia Freeland woman and say: “Listen. You make the world too awful when you speak, so please stop at once. You’re both insane.”

She makes me appreciate Jen Psaki.


Vid of the Week:

MUST WATCH: Maajid Nawaz leaves Joe Rogan speechless by explaining how the World Economic Forum (WEF) is infiltrating governments around the world.




Long Reads / Big Thoughts:


Unfortunately, it seems that no one other than Douthat is given the opportunity by major news outlets to argue that policy, rather than inevitable processes like globalization or technology, is responsible for the relative deterioration in the situation of people who do manual labor. To be clear, there are prominent columnists like, Paul Krugman at the NYT and E.J. Dionne at the WaPo, who argue for welfare state policies to reverse this deterioration, but you won’t see any pieces saying that the deterioration itself was the result of deliberate policy.

This absence is striking, given how the major news outlets are perfectly comfortable giving large amounts of space to pieces based on little evidence, or that sometimes even fly in the face of the evidence that does exist.



... Those of us who are different in the head tend to need some convincing of that fact. You see, we assume we are normal, and relevant evidence tends to be ambiguous.

... All of this I think suggests that I’m unusually willing to fully own all of my main opinions and research choices, instead of inheriting them from others. So perhaps that’s another explanation for my atheism. Most people accept the usual beliefs of others around them and assume they must have good reasons. I’m instead enough of a think-for-myself polymath that I have to see such reasons for myself, and know enough tools from enough fields to be able to follow most relevant arguments. And I just don’t see good reasons to believe in hidden powers influencing the thoughts, feelings, and life outcomes of most humans.



Pics of the Week:



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