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Thursday, February 24, 2022

2022-02-24

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

Regular Fare:

The Mystery of the Declining U.S. Birth Rate

The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007. This decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes.


"Economic Injustice": 72% Of PPP Money Went To The Top 20% Of Earners In America


Has the Willingness to Work Fallen during the Covid Pandemic?



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











Bubble Fare:

Lacalle: China’s Property Bubble Collapse Gets Worse


... This “surprise” isn’t uncommon. When we look at the burst of the real estate bubbles in Sweden, Spain, Japan, Iceland, and other economies, the process always starts with the message that one default is an anecdote and continues with the realization that the allegedly safest companies suffer from similar problems of excessive leverage and weak cash flow generation.

As I mentioned in September, many Chinese companies follow the “running to stand still” strategy of piling on ever-increasing debt to compensate for poor cash flow generation and weak margins.


COVID-19 notes:

Many people don’t understand the long-term effects of COVID-19 and prefer to catch it and get it over with, yet a new small study gives the best reason to stay away from the virus.





Yves here. I’m in no position to verify the underlying data, but the fact that both Moderna and Pfizer stocks are markedly down says investors regard these concerns about vaccine liability as serious. ...

... My understanding is the liability is actually not the adverse events as such. They have liability waivers for that. It is for fraud. Once fraud is proven, the liability wavers go poof. Apparently, there are people lining up with hands open willing to sell all kinds of damning documents.

... We’ve seen a few Dowd videos lately, but nothing like this. He should be on Joe Rogan ASAP.

The entire thing is so complete, devastating, shocking, that I don’t know what else to do than give you some quotes. It very much feels like the end of mRNA, and of the FDA in its present shape, because they -the government itself- are deeply complicit in outright investor fraud. Wall Street (“multiple brokerage houses”) is finding this out, Moderna stock is already down 70%, and that’s just the start.

mRNA vaccines are killing and maiming people: “..no matter the effort, one cannot hide the bodies – and “the bodies are piling up.”

... He likens the FDA today to the rating agencies during the Mortgage Crisis. “FDA is the trusted third party, just like the rating agencies were. And a lot of doctors in this country, a lot of local governments are placing their trust in the FDA which gets 50 percent of its budget from large cap pharma. It wasn’t any one person…I think they overlooked things…An all-cause mortality end-point should have stopped this thing in its tracks – and it didn’t.”

There were more deaths in the vaxxed group than in the unvaxxed. Dowd assumes fraud based upon the FDA backing Pfizer in not releasing their data. He believes this is a knowing attempt to conceal the deaths.

... Dowd remarks that no matter the effort, one cannot hide the bodies – and “the bodies are piling up.” He notes that the deaths skyrocketed after the vaccine rollout when they should have dropped. And the deaths are what distinguished the 2021-2022 vaccine scandal as far worse than what happened with Enron. “People are dying and being maimed. This is a fraud that goes beyond the pale…We have the VAERS data…We have the DoD leak…And now we have the insurance company results and the funeral home results…We don’t need to think too hard about this…Deaths should have gone down after the vaccines rolled out. This is the most egregious fraud in history of the nation – and it’s global…





(not just) for the ESG crowd:

Methane emissions from the energy sector are 70% higher than official figures


Basal meltwater is thawing the Greenland Ice Sheet from the bottom up




Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:


Boeing Would Kill Us All to Increase Its Profits





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 eugyppiusel gato maloMathew CrawfordSteve KirschJessica Rose!
Paul AlexanderBerensonChudovLyons-WeilerToby Rogers are also go-to mainstays; a list to which I have added Andreas OehlerJoey Smalley (aka Metatron)Julius Ruechel, and Charles Rixey; 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:

Rixey: 
Pandora's Box: An Index & Beginner's Guide to the quest for justice & common sense in the COVID-19 pandemic
Spoiler Alert: there's still a lot of questing to go


Chudov: How did Moderna's Patented Sequence End up in Sars-Cov-2?
And why Moderna "took only two days" to create the "Covid Vaxx"?

... A peer reviewed article came out today:..

The short of this (and you NEED to read the long version) is that Sars-Cov2 has a genetic sequence CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG, that is the mirror image (complement) of the same sequence called “MSH3”, in the Moderna patent 9,587,003 from 2018.

How did bats copy the moderna patent sequence into their coronavirus, as @JikkyKjj asked? Of course they did not, and this is a further proof that it is a lab virus.

Commentary:

Vaccine Toxicity Is More and More Visible to All

... On a global scale, what do we have today?
Lying and unethical authorities:
  1. Leaders are supposed to be exemplar in ethics and in behaviour. If they slip, the whole world slips into chaos. What we have witnessed these past 2 years are repeated lies (masks, lethality, lockdowns, vaccines…), surreal made-up forecasts, constant statistical manipulations, evident obfuscations, fraudulent studies, psychological nudging, constitutional overreach, in-your-face corruption and collusion, shady vaccine contracts, violent punishment of opposition…
...... This highlights two fundamental facts about this world vaccination campaign:
  1. These vaccines are toxic: in concentrated fashion - direct intravenous injection - they are more toxic and kill faster, but the cytotoxic effect of the nanoparticles remains the same.
  2. Authorities cannot be trusted as either by pure panic or by evil corruption, they have been very slow to pick up the extremely disquieting signals that many of us had seen over a year ago.
..... Who, in their right mind, would want a child to produce spike where it’s not supposed to?
We have known for months now, and the vaccine manufacturers have known for over a year, that the viral vector and the lipid nanoparticles leak into the body in large quantities with catastrophic consequences.

... The mechanism of action of these vaccine is hacking healthy cells to have them produce pathogenic material. The immune system will attack those cells: See the hands and feet of this poor child…as he’d been burnt. Now imagine concentrated in the heart, the brain, the bone marrow… Is that a risk worth taking for a virus that isn’t dangerous to kids.


***** Margaret Anna Alice: Letter to Governor Ron DeSantis

Dear Governor DeSantis,

I’m not a big fan of politicians. I probably only need one hand to count the ones who appear to possess a whit of integrity, rationality, and moral courage—off the top of my head, Tulsi Gabbard, Ron Johnson, Ron Paul, Brian Peckford, and you. [Gideon van Meijeren’s pretty kickass, too.]

But back to you, Governor. Throughout the manufactured COVID crisis, you have displayed sanity, respected individual liberties, followed the actual science, and resisted the worldwide mudslide into tyranny.

You did lock down (a disappointing concession to authoritarianism, but, to your credit, one you later expressed regret over and vowed not to repeat), but only for a month. Unlike most of your peers, you kept your word and lifted the stay-at-home order after thirty days.

You stated at a November 2020 press conference that there would be “no lockdowns, no fines, no school closures. No one’s losing their job because of a government dictate. Nobody’s losing their livelihood or their business.”

You signed legislation to protect Floridians from coercive mandates. You support the rights of workers to decide whether to wear masks.

You set up monoclonal antibody treatment sites around the state—until the FDA suddenly revised the emergency use authorizations to prohibit providers from administering these highly effective treatments in the United States.

You support proposed legislation to protect the rights of loved ones to visit patients in hospitals and long-term care facilities, noting, “COVID cannot be used as a excuse to deny patients basic rights.”

You advocated for the rights of physicians to prescribe drugs they believe will work without fear of penalties such as loss of license, preserving the sacred doctor-patient relationship from interference by politics.

You even honored Firecracker Fiona Lashells, a second-grader I proudly featured as an example of brave noncompliance with unhealthy mask mandates.

You haven’t gotten deliriously drunk on COVID emergency powers like so many tyrants and colluders across the nation and around the world.

All in all, you’ve done a dang good job defending the liberties and rights of your constituents against the contagion of tyranny—a far graver threat than an illness with a 99.8-percent survival rate.

People who live in and visit Florida tell me it’s like BC (Before COVID) times—a mighty feat given how hard the WEF’s global spiderweb of puppet dictators have been working to Ctrl-Alt-Delete the world.

Now you have a compelling opportunity to demonstrate you aren’t owned by the pharmaceutical-medical complex—as distinguished from your colleagues; mainstream media; Big Tech; compromised scientists and medical professionals; and captured agencies. ...

... Let’s take a moment to reflect on how broken the current zero-liability system is.

Something is malodorously wrong when hospitals are rewarded for negative health outcomes.

Why on earth would a government incentivize illness and death; prohibit the administration of potentially life-saving treatments; and disincentivize safety mechanisms such as reporting adverse events?

... When a medication is known to be so fatal that casually killing nurses nickname it run-death-is-near and remdeathivir, something is wickedly off.

At $3,120 a pop, remdesivir is so hazardous and its EUA approval process so unscrupulous...

... There are thousands of such stories,

... Perhaps most importantly, we must end the regulatory capture that financially rewards agencies such as the CDC, FDA, and assorted entities for serving the pharmaceutical drug cartel rather than the people. Simultaneously, we need to outlaw the deceptive practices used to obfuscate conflicts of interest and the mafioso-style corruption that defines “the Science.”


GIORGIO AGAMBEN: MEN AND LEMMINGS

We take it for granted that all living beings wish to continue living: in lemmings for some reason this will has failed and the instinct that drove them to live has turned into a death instinct.

I believe that something similar is happening today to another species of living beings, what we call homo sapiens .. Collective suicide occurs here - as befits a species that has replaced instinct with language and an endosomatic impulse with a series of devices external to the body - in an artificial and complicated way, but the result could be the same. Human beings cannot live if they do not give themselves reasons and justifications for their lives, which in every age have taken the form of religions, myths, political beliefs, philosophies and ideals of all kinds. These justifications seem today - at least in the richest and most technologized part of humanity - to have fallen and men are perhaps for the first time reduced to their pure biological survival, which, it seems, they prove unable to accept. This alone can explain why, instead of assuming the simple, lovable fact of living side by side, we felt the need to instill an implacable sanitary terror, in which life without any more ideal justifications is threatened and punished at every moment by disease and death. And this alone can explain that, although the industries that produce them have stated that it is not possible to predict the effects of vaccines in the long term, because it has not been possible to comply with the foreseen procedures and that the tests on genotoxicity and carcinogenicity will only end in October. by 2022, millions of people were subjected to an unprecedented mass vaccination.


Charts:

Analysis of unadulterated death certificate data from Massachusetts provides conclusive evidence for the tribunals.




go to link for many more charts


Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

Gregg GonsalvesSo, well-connected, liberal commentators and physicians have been gaslighting many of us who have worked on infectious diseases for years making unsubstantiated claims (e.g. on #COVID19 in kids; masking; risk of vaccination in kids), using their privilege to get attention. 1/
These "experts" then cry that they are being attacked when they are challenged, saying it's just a "difference of opinion" and we can all agree to disagree. No. This is the gaslighting part. Spreading misinformation is different than scientific discussion. 2/
.... And this is not about asking anyone to stay in their lane. It's about the way class privilege is used to silence expertise in pursuit of personal, not public health, goals. 6/

el gato malothis is very much a story to be run down and a set of facts we want to get to the bottom of. and it’s clearly a set of facts we cannot trust the agencies that mandated and hectored about these products to be honest with us about. but the insurance companies are going to get a good look.

Dr. David Martin ‼️‼️
"All governments are participating in racketeering… I think it’s time to expose it.. especially Trudeau…"


CO-VIDs of the Week:



Canada cancelled the Emergencies Act today. Regardless of what the government and media may claim, the most likely reason is that the Senate would have voted against it following a truly remarkable speech given by Senator Donald Plett. It is a remarkable speech that sets the record straight about what happened on the ground in Ottawa over these past weeks, the dangerous legal precendents that were being set, the historical context of what Justin Trudeau tried to impose, and the devastating consequences to our democracy, our legal system, and our financial system.

I encourage you to listen to Senator Plett’s extraordinary speech - it is worth every minute. And please send it to every single person you know, especially those who believed the government’s actions to be lawful. This speech goes a very long way towards helping Canadians understand the terrifying magnitude of what our leaders did and the monumental challenges ahead to repair the damage that has been done to our country over these past few weeks.





Pushback Fare:

The Canadian government's decision to freeze bank accounts in the trucker protests is a mad leap toward bureaucratic dystopia



By a vote of 185 to 151, the Canadian Parliament voted to approve Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s motion to invoke the Emergencies Act. The vote is chilling given the fact that the protest has ended and the roads have been cleared. Nevertheless, the Trudeau government still wants to wield the excessive and unnecessary powers claimed under the Act. The vote shows how easily many drift into more and more draconian measures against their political opponents.


Rav Arora, a 20-year-old writer from Canada, offers his perspective on his government's ongoing despotic response to the convoy protest.

... On the ground, the reality of the movement starkly clashed with the melodrama of the government's declaration of a National Emergency: kids jumping in bouncy castles, crowds merrily singing and dancing (a relief in the bitter cold), protesters hugging police officers, and youth playing street hockey. In one video, a group of Sikh Canadians can be seen preparing traditional Indian meals to feed the truckers (an act of charity known as "seva" in the Sikh tradition), all in the name of national unity and freedom.

In fact, Trudeau’s opponents bear more resemblance to Gandhi’s satyagraha movement than any terrorist faction. The truckers and their supporters were brimming with national pride, and they appeared to be committed to peaceful protest, non-compliance, and civil disobedience. 

Only Trudeau and his media allies' warped, Machiavellian perception could caricature this diverse coalition as a group of “swastika wavers." When the media was able to find a handful of protestors donning a Swastika, or spot a couple confederate flags in the convoy, the predictable histrionics ensued, as Liberal and NDP politicians attempted to defame the intentions of the vast majority of those present. 


In February 2020, a hugely influential philosopher decided COVID lockdowns looked a lot like Nazi Germany. The fallout in academia and beyond has raged ever since.



Above all, this is the age of chronic confusion, of squinting at the screen wondering what’s real, who’s an actor, who’s an agent, a plant, part of the PSY OP, or maybe an all out assault on our perceptions. You finally realize there are all these digital invasions of your mind, and somewhere in there, there’s the real you. ... It has become virtually impossible to know what is real, unless you’re looking at a bird, or tree.



COVID Idiocracy Fare:


Modern liberals can hurtle from extravagant tolerance to suppression without batting an eye. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dramatizes the tendency.


...while pedaling hard to get out of there.

First, a little bit of history.

Is it possible that our western leaders of today have betrayed us? To put it in context, let’s ponder history—while remembering that all leaders of all times are merely human beings—human beings with subjective desires, money, and connections.

There have been many examples in history where national leaders aligned with other leaders—or supra-national entities—over their own people. On other occasions, leaders simply became obsessed with this idea or another and bulldozed over their own people in the name of that idea.



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:

Orlov, via The Saker: The day Russia’s patience ran out

... Finally, Western leaders may not realize this right away (they seem to be in a rather sorry state mentally) but it seems likely that they will eventually realize that 22.02.2022 was the day their bullshit finally stopped working. The idea of them spreading freedom and democracy rather than death and destitution (as evidenced by the Ukraine, on top of a log list of other countries they have “liberated” and “democratized”) is beyond preposterous. The idea that the US is a global hegemon and can dictate terms to everyone is dead as dead can be.





Not in his entire life has President Vladimir Putin made a speech like Monday’s Donbass address to the Russian people.   

Nor has he ever named the Americans to be Russia’s national enemy in such unequivocal Russian terms – American promises worthless, American intentions deadly, American speeches lies, American actions intimidation, extortion, blackmail.  

“So I want to ask”, Putin said: “why, why all this, for what? Okay, you don’t want to see us as a friend and ally, but why make us an enemy? There is only one answer: it’s not about our political regime, it’s not about anything else, they just don’t need such a large independent country as Russia. That’s the answer to all the questions. This is the source of traditional American policy towards Russia.”

“The pretext for another sanctions attack will always be found or simply fabricated, regardless of the situation in Ukraine. There is only one goal – to restrain the development of Russia. And they will do it as they did before, even without any formal pretext at all, just because we are and will never give up our sovereignty, national interests and our values.



Three days ago I wrote “Today the World Has Changed.”  The Kremlin recognized the Russian territories that Lenin had folded into the Ukraine as independent states and gave the Ukrainian Nazis an ultimatum to cease its attacks on the Donbass Russians. The Russian Armed Forces were issued orders to ensure provision of peace on the territory of the independent republics.

Unfortunately, the dumbshit Ukrainians didn’t hear and neither did the dumbshits in Washington.  Instead of avoiding conflict, the dumbasses provoked one, and it arrived this morning.  What a collection of fools the Western World is.

The Ukrainian attacks on Donbass did not stop.  According to some reports they intensified.  If the Ukrainian Nazis thought that Russia was going to ask for more negotiations, they learned differently as this morning news reveals.

In a televised address President Putin announced this morning a military operation to “demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.”

As it is impossible to learn anything factual from the fake news Western media, I will do my best to tell you what is happening.

As far as I can tell, at this time of writing there are no Russian troops involved. Russian troops don’t even seem to have been sent to the territory of the republics. Using precision weapons the Russian military has disabled Ukrainian military infrastructure facilities, air defenses, military airfields and aircraft. Putin has announced that Ukrainian soldiers who lay down their arms will not be attacked. Tass reports that “Ukrainian troops are leaving their positions in large numbers, dropping their weapons.” Clearly, the Ukrainian soldiers have more sense than their leaders.

The West, of course, is screaming its impotent accusations, but the barrage of Western media lies will have no effect on the outcome. If the Western World had any intelligent leaders, what would they conclude? They would conclude that the days of baiting the bear are over.  As I have reported for some time, Russia has had enough of the West’s lies, deceptions, insults, and provocations. 

Henceforth, when Russia tells them something, they would do well to turn their ears on.  Putin has said that Russia will not permit Ukraine to develop nuclear weapons, and he has said that Russia will not tolerate US/NATO bases on her borders.  The US and NATO had better believe it.

Putin said Russia has no intention to occupy Ukraine.  Russia does not want Ukraine, but Russia will not permit the continued militarization of the country by the US and NATO or the Ukrainian attacks on the Donbass Russians.  The West had better understand this.

The US and Germany have declared that no troops will be sent, a hopeful sign that sanity might return to the West.



On February 15 Professor John J. Mearsheimer gave a talk (video) about the Ukraine crisis. He starts out (at 3min) by explaining who has caused it:

The United States, mainly, and its allies are responsible for this crisis.
I recommend to watch it in full.

Like me and many other analysts Mearsheimer did not expect that a Russian move into the Ukraine would happen. Why the Russian government finally decided to take that step is not clear to me. I believe that Zelensky's lose talk about acquiring nuclear weapons for the Ukraine was one of the decisive factors. Who told Zelensky to come up with that?

The Russian operation started with a volley of cruise missiles that destroyed air defense radars and missiles, military airports, ammunition depots and some military harbor. The followed ground attacks by armored forces from Belarus southward, form Russia westward and from Crimea northward. These progressed well though some tanks got destroyed by anti-tank missile fire. The ground moves have air cover and heavy artillery moving up behind them.

The plan seems to be to a. take Kiev, b. encircle the 60,000 strong Ukrainian force that was preparing to attack Donbas c. take the coast. 





If you are going to pay the price, why not take the prize?  This reasoning had to play a role in Putin’s latest move.  Moreover, it was supported by the bitter disappointment the Russians have with the German leader overall.  Olaf Scholz’s remark at his joint press conference with Putin in Moscow last week that it was ‘laughable’ to speak of the Ukrainian authorities’ policies towards the Donbas as ‘genocide’ was deeply offensive to Vladimir Putin and to the Russian political class.  It was intended to remove all basis for comparing Russia’s recognition of the Donbas republics with NATO’s recognition of an independent Kosovo in 1999.  And lest no one think that Scholz’s remark was a slip of the tongue, he repeated it in the open session of the Munich Security Conference last week.  From intercessor for Russia within the EU, which role it had played in the Merkel years, Germany now showed itself to be a willing tool of U.S. policies of confrontation and domination with respect to Russia.  The Germans will pay dearly for the unprofessional and ill-considered policies of their new coalition government.


Address by the President of the Russian Federation – February 24, 2022

..................... The purpose of this operation is to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime. To this end, we will seek to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation.

It is not our plan to occupy the Ukrainian territory. We do not intend to impose anything on anyone by force. ...

... The current events have nothing to do with a desire to infringe on the interests of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. They are connected with the defending Russia from those who have taken Ukraine hostage and are trying to use it against our country and our people.

I reiterate: we are acting to defend ourselves from the threats created for us and from a worse peril than what is happening now.  ...


Orwellian Fare:


... Mostly gone is the anonymity that comes with transacting in physical cash – the ultimate manifestation of a decentralized currency. (Just try booking a hotel room with nothing but cash and a valid passport.) In its place we find myriad extrajudicial procedures and complex regulations that strip away our freedoms and, if left unchecked, will ultimately make way for the displacement of our representative democracies with totalitarian states.

In a staggering 56-part Twitter thread that recently went viral, an anonymous account by the name of @punk6529 drives home this point brilliantly. A link to the full thread is here. The core thesis is that one cannot have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, or freedom of religion without the freedom to transact. Robbing a citizen of his or her ability to transact is a devastating punishment, and for the government to claim it has the ability to do so without judicial review or any reasonable recourse is the functional equivalent of totalitarianism.

... As we described in our last piece, Justin Trudeau has crossed the Rubicon in this regard, and if his actions become normalized, the entire edifice of Western democracy will undoubtedly collapse. Lest our readers think this is hyperbole or that Trudeau’s behavior will be contained to Canada, we point you to an excellent piece called In Praise of Bitcoin written by Dr. Ben Hunt (the article can be found here, and you can follow Hunt’s Twitter account here). In it, Hunt correctly likens the US Treasury to the Eye of Sauron.

... Gold bugs and crypto advocates alike should be aghast at what Trudeau has done and at what those in the US Treasury undoubtedly have in store for Americans.

And therein lies the critical conundrum: alternative forms of money require a benign government to allow for their proliferation, but a benign government negates the need for alternative forms of money. This is a political problem, and no amount of Bitcoin or Gold Eagles will help when the political eye turns against you. Money is what the government says it is, and we just got a glimpse that our views – political, cultural…personal – form a relevant condition to being allowed to spend it.



CaitOz Fare:

Perhaps The US Should Shut The Fuck Up About Respecting Other Countries’ Sovereignty

... Some might say, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” Okay. But inflicting ten thousand wrongs definitely means you should shut the fuck up about anyone doing one wrong.

... The US empire criticizing Russia for violating another nation’s sovereignty is like Jeffrey Dahmer criticizing someone else’s eating habits.


Other Quotes of the Week:


Craig Murray
I should be very interested if any of the mainstream media journalists going war crazy today, can explain to me the difference in international law between what Russia is doing in Donbass and what NATO did in Kosovo. Genuine invitation.



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:



To return to a theme: For me, the moment that seemed to pierce reality, Don Delillo in real life, was when anarchists protested in favor of mask mandates. Children in black hoodies who wave the anarchist flag fight for the government and its right to override individual choice. They do not do so because of how they have parsed Bakunin or Kropotkin; they never bothered to know what anarchism is or means in the first place. Why would they? Politics is only who you sneer at and who sneers at you. Jeremy Corbyn was briefly the most powerful authentically-socialist politician in the Anglophone world in generations. His reward is the World Socialist Website declaring him a “pseudo-leftist.” A lifetime of actual socialist practice, meaningful and real, wiped away by people who have never once in their lives thought that they might actually enact socialism. Liberals cheer the FBI and CIA, call for limitless censorship, and insist on blind faith in tech giants and pharmaceutical companies. Conservatives have cast off Christianity, their north star, the orienting principle of all they believed, discarding it offhandedly like a gum wrapper. All that remains in its place is pure reaction, corruption, bigotry, rot. Democrats gin up a new red scare and call out for war; Republicans care more about trans swimmers than small government. The show must go on.

What we are living through is definitional collapse. Our moment is one in which anything is possible because nothing means anything. Every last set of orienting principles in politics is being dissolved in the acid bath of culture war, before our very eyes. I am telling you: never in my lifetime have political terms meant less. You can easily imagine a world where vaccine skepticism was left-coded - indeed, in the Trump years it was! - but in this particular reality your thoughts on vaccines overrule your feelings about the means of production. That condition is the product of pure contingency, chance; there is no a priori reason the left-of-center would treat vaccination status as a definitional landmark. But right now that is what yelling people yell about, and there is no ideology anymore, no ideas, only Yooks and Zooks.

In other words there is a vacuum of meaning, in our politics, and the really scary question is what will fill it.

.... I think chaos is coming.



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