Pages

Sunday, April 24, 2022

2022-04-24

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

Economic and Market Fare:

Josh Bivens: Corporate profits have contributed disproportionately to inflation. How should policymakers respond?

....... High profit margins are generally not a signal of generalized macroeconomic “overheating”

Calls are getting louder for the Federal Reserve to adopt a much more contractionary stance of monetary policy by raising interest rates sharply. The rationale for this is simply that today’s high inflation must be driven by an imbalance of aggregate demand (planned spending by businesses, governments, and households) and aggregate supply.

But over the entire post-World War II period, accelerating economic recoveries and falling unemployment that might indicate that the economy was running “hotter” have been associated with rising real wages and a rising labor share of income. The dynamic generally has been characterized by falling unemployment rates that increased bargaining power for workers that in turn led to real wage growth threatening to outpace economy-wide productivity growth. If this dynamic was allowed to get out of hand, the result could potentially be a wage-price spiral, with firms having to raise prices simply to meet workers’ wage demands and workers in turn demanding pay increases to insulate them from rising prices. To be clear, these instances of spiraling inflation driven by macroeconomic overheating have been far rarer than commonly characterized, but the pattern of lower unemployment leading to faster wage growth and filtering through to some slight upward pressure on inflation is clear and consistent in economic data.

Currently, however, the labor share of income and real wages are falling sharply in the recovery even as unemployment falls. It seems strange to see a pattern in the data that is the complete opposite of how overheating-driven inflation has historically worked, and not ask if it might be something different this time causing inflation (i.e., the pandemic).

Many of those most dismissive of claims that increased corporate power has driven recent inflation adopt the view that generalized macroeconomic overheating is the culprit. But in dismissing the increased corporate power explanation for recent inflation, they also seem to be discarding any useful information that recent sky-high profit margins might provide about the validity of their alternative view. Profit margins may not be telling us that very recent increases in corporate power are the root cause of inflation. But they are telling us that a simple macroeconomic imbalance of supply and demand is not driving inflation either


... In short, the rise in inflation has not been driven by anything that looks like an overheating labor market—instead it has been driven by higher corporate profit margins and supply-chain bottlenecks. Policy efforts meant to cool off labor markets—like very rapid and sharp interest rate increases—are likely not necessary to restrain inflationary pressures in the medium term.


The Hoisington Management first-quarter 2022 bond outlook has a markedly different feel this month. Let's tune in.

......... This is the most cautionary we have seen Lacy for as long as I can remember. The reason is we are at the mercy of a Fed that does not understand what inflation really is.

.... Lacy Concluded: "At this current level, the long-end treasury market has value considering the impending recessionary conditions which have always reduced inflation and interest rates. However, should the Federal Reserve cease in their efforts to calm inflation before it has been fully restrained, bond investors should be wary."




Charts: 
1:


... Bank of America's Chief Investment Strategist Michael Hartnett, whose latest note was a chilling reminder of our favorite market maxim, namely that every Fed hiking cycle ends in crisis, or as Hartnett put it, "with default and bankruptcy of government, banks and investors."

... Warning that in a world of extreme inflation the rates shock is only just beginning (indeed, as Friday's dismal action showed, "75bps is the new 25bps") Hartnett sees an acceleration in the secular flip from QE-winners to QT-winners which is already well-underway - see natural resources vs biotech...



..... With the above admonishment out of the way, there is light on the inflation horizon.
  • Used car prices are coming down.
  • Year-over-year gas prices have either peaked or soon will.
  • Indeed, comps are so difficult, year-over-year prices in many goods either have peaked or soon will. I will take a look at this idea in a subsequent post.
  • The inventory build with still more coming will pressure prices for many goods.
  • A huge amount of housing supply is under construction. This too merits another post.
  • Finally, demand destruction, discussed below, is about to hit big time.
.... Bond Bulls? Why Now? 

To understand the case for bonds, we must first understand the stock market picture. ...

... The minimum decline I see from the top, based on valuation, is 50%. With that decline on the S&P 500 the more speculative Nasdaq will be down 70% or so and things like ARKK 90% or so. ...

...The Fed Searches For the Neutral Interest Rate, Where the Heck Is It?

... My message is the same today as it was in 2006. Another deflationary bust is coming.

The Fed will not see it because it clueless not only about where neutral is, but also because the Fed is clueless about the asset bubble boom-bust cycles that it is perpetually blowing.

Given the massive amount of debt and leverage, neutral is likely far lower than most presume.


MMT Fare:


.... China urgently needs to “liberate” itself from traditional ideas that fiscal and monetary policy must be kept separate and that government deficits are bad, according to Liu Shangxi, head of the Chinese Academy of Fiscal Sciences, a think tank under the Ministry of Finance.

“Modern monetary theory at least sheds a ray of light for us to solve real conundrums and discuss what’s considered taboo in the past,”


(not just) for the ESG crowd:





Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and other masters of the universe are betting big on Greenland as mining in the Congo gets too dirty for even Elon Musk.


Ontario might reduce its gas tax. Alberta killed its tax. Will this mean more driving?


SARS-CoV-2 vaccination can elicit a CD8 T-cell dominant hepatitis


Other Fare:


In our book The Elephant in the Brain, Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, Kevin Simler and I first review the reasons to expect humans to often have hidden motives, and then we describe our main hidden motives in each of ten areas of life. In each area, we start with the usual claimed motive, identify puzzles that don’t fit well with that story, and then describe another plausible motive that fits better.


Paris, 1719: After a financial panic sweeps the nation, a decision is made—convicts will be sent to work the swamps of Louisiana.

In Paris, the year 1719 was characterized by what a prominent aristocrat who lived through it all described as “delirium,” sheer “madness,” a veritable carnival of money and speculation. In an attempt to indicate how widespread that “delirium” became, Voltaire, who experienced the collective madness firsthand, called it “a contagious disease, an epidemic.” As the “contagious disease” of 1719 spread like wildfire through French society, Parisians went mad for money and windfall profits. And because this sickness was founded on France’s colonial ambitions, money madness sealed the fate of the women who were deemed “fit for the islands.”

The individual who engineered this money madness, Scotsman John Law, was many things: a speculator, a gambler, a charlatan to some, a visionary theoretician of money and finance to others. He lived a life as flamboyant as his theories. In London, Law was convicted of murder after killing his opponent in a duel. He escaped from prison, fled England, and, adopting a series of aliases, flitted through Europe, bouncing from capital to capital, trying to launch various financial schemes, and seeking in particular a prince or a government willing to experiment with the introduction of paper currency and with the use of stock as what Law called “a new type of money, perhaps better than gold and silver.” Law had long cherished the dream of using the relatively conservative French economy as a proving ground for his most revolutionary theories, but Louis XIV and his ministers had repeatedly rejected his proposals. Then, after the Sun King’s death in 1715, Law at last began amassing influence in France, as it became openly acknowledged that recent wars had saddled the country with a catastrophic public debt ... In an attempt to eliminate that debt, over the course of the next four years Law was given free rein to transform every aspect of French economic life. ...




Tweet Pics of the Week:

Bayt Al Fann: During the last 10 nights of Ramadan, many Muslims spend more time in Mosques in contemplation & prayer.

Mosque ceilings are designed to reflect the magnificence of the universe.

For Ramadan, here are spectacular details of 24 Mosque ceilings from around the world…

A thread…






Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

Staring Into the Abyss

The global economy is perched on the edge of an abyss, and averting our gaze doesn’t actually lessen the risk, it increases it because problems which aren’t faced directly and addressed directly fester and rot the system from within. 

This is why we’re collectively staring into the abyss: all the big problems have been dismissed, ignored or papered over with PR-happy-talk “solutions” that only make the problem worse. There are three basic techniques that our “leadership” (public and private) have used to avoid dealing directly with our pressing problems: 

1. Appear to address the problems by doing more of what’s failed spectacularly. 
2. Propose magical-thinking happy-happy technological “solutions” that are appealing but impractical. 
3. Keep the status quo glued together to maximize quick-buck gains for the elite while guaranteeing long-term catastrophe for the entire society / economy.

Doing more of what's failed spectacularly is one of the phrases you've seen here over the years. This generates an illusion of control because the tried-and-true Band-Aid makes it look like the problem is being addressed. Since doing more of what's failed spectacularly doesn't break the system immediately, everyone incorrectly assumes it's benign or actually helping.

The Federal Reserve's blowing of serial speculative credit-asset bubbles is a good example.


Unsustainability / Climate Fare:


Preface.  It is likely that all world oil, both conventional and unconventional, peaked in 2018. The good news is that this means there isn’t enough carbon left to turn the world into a hothouse extinction, though for centuries the planet will be plenty miserable with rising sea levels, heat waves, and crazy weather preventing crop production.  Fossil decline also means we won’t be able to get every last fish out of the oceans, erode topsoil and turn the world into a desert, cut down all the (rain)forests and continue to pollute land, air, and water with toxic chemicals.

The carrying capacity after fossil fuels is likely what it was before them (or less given all the damage we’ve done to the planet): about 450 million people were alive in 1500 before coal launched the industrial revolution.  What lies ahead is the greatest human tragedy in history.

But after this calamity occurs, the book “Dawn of Everything” offers great hopes based on past societies of our ability to create far better ways of living and has dozens of examples of how people did so in the past.

..... The Dawn of Everything concludes:

“In trying to synthesize what we’ve learned over the last 30 years, we asked question such as “what happens if we accord significance to the 5,000 years in which cereal domestication did not lead to the emergence of pampered aristocracies, standing armies or debt peonage, rather than just the 5,000 years in which it did? What happens if we treat the rejection of urban life, or of slavery, in certain times and places as something just as significant as the emergence of those same phenomena in others?

We’d never have guessed, for instance, that slavery was most likely abolished multiple times in history in multiple places; and that very possibly the same is true of war. Obviously, such abolitions are rarely definitive. Still, the periods in which free or relatively free societies existed are hardly insignificant.

Much of this book has been devoted to recalibrating how we view past societies, to remind us that people did actually live in other ways, often for many centuries, even millennia. In some ways, such a perspective might seem even more tragic than our standard narrative of civilization as the inevitable fall from grace. It means we could have been living under radically different conceptions of what human society is actually about. It means that mass enslavement, genocide, prison camps, even patriarchy or regimes of wage labor never had to happen.

But on the other hand it also suggests that, even now, the possibilities for human intervention are far greater than we’re inclined to think.”


Water, water everywhere but all of it polluted

..... In order to understand the grave danger China is facing, we need to understand water usage and thresholds below which the population begins to face some level of danger.



“A religion that takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion.” – Mahatma Gandhi

Today’s media is filled with claims of breakthrough technologies poised to revolutionize our relationship with energy. The reporting follows a predictable pattern: sophomoric barbs launched at oil and gas (now, aimed at Putin’s oil and gas, specifically) couched in breathless excitement over the latest promising solution. However, these features do a disservice in that they are almost always heavy on the possibilities and comically light on the constraints. How can constraints be addressed if we ignore them?

.... “Sahara solar could soon rescue Britain’s broken energy system: A new energy order based on cheap desert solar will undercut and replace Opec and Russia’s oil hegemony.” Written by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the piece describes an audacious plan from Xlinks to build a huge renewable energy project in Morocco and transmit the electricity directly back to Britain. While Evans-Pritchard litters his article with unscientific platitudes and a lazy attack on nuclear energy, drilling down into the project itself does offer an excellent opportunity to assess the current prospects for renewable energy, what is really holding the industry back, and where research dollars should ultimately be focused. Interestingly, this project is one of the better concepts we’ve reviewed, and it still falls short of likely.

............. The real costs of ensuring grid stability that arise as a direct result of intermittency are specifically and knowingly excluded from such calculations, which only serves to obfuscate the real cost/benefit analyses needed to make informed energy policy decisions. No similar game of Three-card Monty needs to be played by the Xlinks team in its baseload modeling.

Fundamentally, we question the use of lithium-ion batteries for the storage aspect of this project. The choice relies on materials in which the world is structurally short and for which higher priority use cases exist.


  • As the global energy transition continues to accelerate, the demand for key battery metals is soaring and demand is struggling to keep up.
  • The inconvenient truth of the energy transition is that the industry at the top of the clean energy supply chain is a very carbon-intensive one.

Every year, 70 billion animals are slaughtered at an enormous cost to the planet. How close are we to a high-tech alternative?

Even the most ardent carnivore might struggle to argue that meat is a force for good today. The global livestock industry produces more greenhouse gases than the exhaust from every form of transport on the planet combined. While doctors try to curb the prescription of antibiotics to slow the emergence of medicine-resistant superbugs, 80 per cent of the antibiotics used in the US are administered to healthy food-producing animals to minimise infections on crammed farms. Industrial animal agriculture is a major cause of deforestation, water waste, water pollution, eutrophication and outbreaks of diseases such as E coli and salmonella, not to mention a significant contributor to new zoonotic diseases and global pandemics. Every year, 70 billion animals are slaughtered to satisfy the global appetite for meat, their lives often miserable and artificially accelerated.


Related Tweets:

Cranfield: The IPCC and science community are the biggest climate deniers of all time.
They deny:
Current CO₂ level inevitably results in 4°C plus more warming from other GHGs
Loss of Arctic sea ice doubles the warming effect of all human CO₂ emissions
Full climate sensitivity is 6°C+



COVID Fare:

I've continued to come 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; plus Walter Chesnut on twitter; 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:

“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.” ― George Orwell, 1984
How come, after jabbing 90% percent of the population, the Covid death rate isn’t budging in Ontario? At all?! If anything, the Jan. 2021 Covid-19 death peak, when no one was jabbed, was lower than the last Covid-19 death peak in Feb. 2022, when 90% have been jabbed. Aren’t we being assured over and over again that, at least, severe outcomes are being prevented by these jabs, if not infections or reinfections? Isn’t death a severe enough outcome to qualify?


Re-Visiting the Biodistribution of Lipid Nanoparticles

(Note: this is a long but thorough article to make important scientific information accessible to the general public.)

Do you remember when public health and government officials assured everyone that the mRNA ‘vaccines’ function like traditional vaccine technologies? …meaning that they largely remain in the shoulder muscle where they are injected, with some portion going to the draining lymph nodes where an immune response is initiated.

Well, back in May 2021, I, along with some international colleagues, looked at a document that Pfizer had submitted to the Japanese health regulatory agency. It was a pre-clinical biodistribution study. This means it was an experiment done with an animal model to predict where the vaccine formulation might go when injected into people. What I saw was startling. Most of Pfizer’s vaccine spread throughout the body instead of staying at the injection site. This also meant there was the potential for toxicities that would never occur with traditional vaccines that largely remain at or close to the injection site. To ensure people could make a fully informed decision about whether to take the jab I went public with this information in a radio interview.

I wasn’t surprised by the systemic distribution of the vaccine per se. Being a vaccinologist, I knew that lipid nanoparticle delivery systems were originally designed to spread far and wide throughout the body with the hopes they could be a vehicle for gene therapy and/or drug delivery. Instead, my surprise came from the fact that the data confirmed my historical understanding and contradicted public health messaging that the mRNA jabs behaved like traditional vaccines. Public statements by health officials made me assume the lipid nanoparticles had somehow been modified to stay at the injection site, which was news to me. This highlights one of the first rules of thumb when practicing science. Transparently presented raw and/or peer-reviewed data are the cornerstones of objective science; not personal proclamations or data disseminated via media releases. In May 2021 I realized two things: 1. There was a lack of transparency about data supporting COVID-19 inoculations. 2. Incorrect messaging was being relayed to the public. As an academic public servant with relevant expertise, I spoke up when enquiries came from the public. I spoke the truth then and continue to do so.

As a result of this, a public campaign to impersonate and discredit me was mounted; it has not stopped and has likely caused irreparable harm to my career. Nobody involved in these personal attacks has ever been willing to talk to me about the scientific basis for my concerns. It is unfair to discredit a scientist based on a short interview for a lay audience in which only a tiny fraction of the messaging could be relayed. My challenge to detractors then remains the same now: if you want to prove that I don’t know what I am talking about, then debate me in a moderated public forum. I contend that a real-time back-and-forth discussion of the science will show that I know exactly what I am talking about; I’m not sure the same would hold true for most of those participating in the smear campaign against me. In that interview back in May 2021 I was asked if there might be a link between mRNA vaccines and cases of myocarditis that were being observed at increased frequency, especially among young males. My answer was yes and I started to present some potential mechanistic explanations for this, including Pfizer’s Japanese version of their biodistribution study.

Now, myocarditis is a publicly acknowledged side-effect of mRNA vaccines. Sadly, I have not received an apology from anyone who attacked me. Forgiving people is much easier when apologizing and seeking forgiveness is part of the resolution process. But this is no longer popular in our society, so I continue to struggle with forgiving those who relentlessly harass me. I need to do this to effectively move on.

In the meantime, the US Food and Drug Administration has been ordered by a court to release the data that they reviewed when authorizing Pfizer’s vaccine for emergency. Health Canada almost certainly would have reviewed the same information. It is unfortunate that the scientific community is only now starting to see reasonably transparent core data that were used to justify the rushed rollout of SARS-CoV-2 inoculations; an only due to a court order. .....

................................. The question regarding the impact of LNPs on cells in the blood should have been addressed before there was any consideration of proceeding into human trials.

............... All the Data are Indicative of Systemic Distribution

...... No attempt was made by those conducting the biodistribution study to estimate the total amount of the dose of LNPs that were circulating in the blood, so I did this. 

......... As an expert in pre-clinical experimentation, I can assure you that Pfizer’s biodistribution study was of poor quality. It appears to have been rushed, with many corners cut, possibly in an effort to meet a deadline at ‘warp speed’. If one of my graduate students presented the data in Pfizer’s biodistribution study to their advisory committee and proposed to include it in their thesis, they would immediately be advised that it represented no more than a preliminary experiment; the type that is used to design much more informative and conclusive experiments. They would be required to expand its scope and repeat it multiple times.

.......... Repeated Dosing With Lipid Nanoparticles is Dangerous
Here is some information that is of concern considering that many people have already received three or four doses of an mRNA ‘vaccine’ in less than one year, with the potential for more on the horizon…

This might be news to many members of the public, but it is a long-accepted scientific fact that lipid nanoparticles used to deliver the mRNA in ‘vaccines’ can be toxic. In fact, that is the very reason why some big pharmaceutical companies strategically focused on using them as vaccine technologies instead of for gene therapies and to deliver drugs. A good quality vaccine, such as those used in the mandated childhood series, only require one or two doses for a person’s lifetime. It was assumed the same would hold true for mRNA vaccines. Repeated administration of lipid nanoparticles, especially over a limited period of time, is known to be toxic.

............. Practical Applications
What should be done with all this information? Well, I would suggest that you investigate the myriad of questions raised by Pfizer’s biodistribution study. Ask yourself if you have been presented with sufficient scientific evidence to address your queries. Do not settle for personal opinions, no matter how much of an ‘expert’ the person or organization appears to be. If you are not confident that systemic biodistribution of mRNA vaccines in people is a non-issue, then consider encouraging the promotion of research to provide definitive answers. Expecting public health officials to practice the precautionary principle is reasonable.

Further, encourage uncensored public discussions of the science between experts on both sides of the debate. After all, the full spectrum of scientific information should not be hidden from the public.

Finally, encourage health regulatory agencies to recruit unbiased scientists with pre-clinical research skills to carefully evaluate these early types of studies.



this is a criticism with which long term readers of the musings of certain internet felines will be familiar. the mRNA jabs are not like other vaccines. they work in an entirely new modality and one fraught with quite a lot of known (and certainly unknown as well) issues. there was little if any testing around this and the systems set up to assess drugs like these were simply inadequate to the task.

this rush to EUA not only allowed a seriously rigged drug trial methodology to be used (ignoring or misattributing the ill effects of immuno-suppression post dose 1 and for 7 days post dose 2, both know and serious issues deliberately designed out of assessment despite the fact that all those getting the jabs would experience them) but also more or less ignored the overall mortality data despite the fact that it was not only available, but unfavorable.

certain felines were heard to describe it as “not so much as a vaccine study as an instagram selfie”

..... essentially, you get some reduction in “covid deaths” but it is offset and a bit more by cardiovascular deaths. this alone should give quite a lot of pause. it’s fairly astonishing that it was so completely ignored around approval

... taken as a whole, this starts to look like some pretty significant regulatory misbehavior. it seems that none of the normal rules ever applied here.

........ meanwhile, the side effects from boosters will be cumulative and perhaps even multiplicative.

there are just a dazzling number of questions here that need to be answered.


a look at new work on pathways and proposed areas for research

cliff notes:
  • mRNA vaccines appear to elicit profound, broad based immune suppression
  • they are structured very differently than live virus and have the equivalent of a biological passkey allow them to proliferate through the body
  • they persist in tissues for 60 days or more generating synthetic spike protein which is a toxin
  • and this likely goes a long way toward explaining why the immune response to them is so much more intense and prone to serious, lasting side effects than other vaccines or live virus
..... this paper is a strong set of hypotheses and pulls together a great many interesting threads of reasoning and evidence. it also starts to make it look like some of the pathways here are coming onto focus.

it also helps explain why so many people are having long lasting and serious side effects from mRNA, far in excess of covid.


For the souls that suffered COVID, authoritarian government interventions, and the unsafe and ineffective vaccines.

Expectations
COVID deaths and cumulative excess mortality should begin to trend lower after the initial COVID outbreaks due to:
  1. Deaths being brought forward from later periods;
  2. Depleted vulnerable population;
  3. Greater protective herd immunity;
  4. Attenuation of the virus;
  5. Better treatments.
The Vaccine Hypothesis
The vaccine is claimed to be substantially effective in reducing COVID mortality and also to be safe. If these claims are true, we should expect even fewer deaths than expected above due to significantly lower COVID deaths and insignificant vaccine deaths.

Empirical Results
There is a discernible reduction in the rate of COVID deaths in just 38 out of the 202 countries studied (19%). Therefore, in the vast majority of countries, both the rate and the number of COVID deaths after vaccination programs is higher than before.

In fact, the COVID death rate (deaths per million per day world average) rises from 1.4 to 2.0 after mass vaccinations begin, an increase of 42%. Confounders be damned! 

Pay close attention to Australia, Brazil, Brunei, Cambodia, Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, Cuba, Cyprus, Estonia, Faroe Islands, Fiji, Finland, Greece, Greenland, Guyana, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Isle of Man, Japan, Laos, Latvia, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritius, Monaco, Mongolia, Nepal, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Seychelles, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Timor, Turks and Caicos, UAE, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Wallis and Fortuna to see what happens when you aggressively vaccinate a naïve population, especially in the middle of an outbreak.

In 69% of the countries that report all-cause mortality (70 out of 101), the rate of cumulative excess mortality is higher after COVID vaccination programs.  In not one single country is cumulative excess mortality lower than it was at the time mass vaccination programs began. ....

Conclusion
The “safe and effective” vaccine hypothesis is rejected.

In fact, according to the evidence, the more obvious conclusion is that the COVID vaccine has caused more death, not less, so much more in fact, that it has actually wiped out the expected natural declines and caused yet more death still. The signal is significant in terms of temporal proximity and consistency across countries regardless of geography and demographics. ...

... This is a global public health failure of truly unprecedented and epic proportions.


For the vaccinated. Even for women

............ Conclusion

Overall, as has been known for almost a year, there is a clear link between vaccination and myocarditis and pericarditis. This is especially true for younger males when you look at numbers of excess events but is also a clear risk for females when you compare chances of heart problems compared with the unvaccinated.

What is interesting from this study is that it seems, in many cases, the largest risk comes from having a first shot of Pfizer and then a second of Moderna.

Remember when politicians and ‘scientists’ were saying it’s fine to mix jabs, in fact it might even be better for you. I do, very well. I questioned it at the time, saying surely there should be some larger trials looking at whether this is actually safe. But no, in this time of anti-science, the more mRNA and as many different types the better. ....


Because they were insufficiently safety tested.




April 1, 2022, another batch of 11,000 Pfizer documents were released by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Pfizer trial data reveal natural immunity was as effective as the jab, and that shot side effects were more severe in those under 55.





All-cause mortality data for 2021 is starting to trickle out in Canada and it’s showing some concerning trends. Accidental COVID data analyst and financial investor Kelly Brown has been a leader in analyzing official Government COVID data for the better part of two years. He began sounding the alarm bells on the post-vaccination myocarditis risk in young males and has continued this unpaid work ever since. After discovering loopholes in the government messaging and clear indications of harm using Governments’ own data, Kelly now finds himself doing deep dives into other statistical analyses. Using data published by Canada’s national statistics office, Statistics Canada, Kelly has dissected all-cause mortality and excess mortality. He notes that Alberta (AB) and British Columbia (BC) have the most robust data and it shows that the actual number of excess deaths exceeds the predicable baseline by nearly double!

Referring to this as a “tsunami of death” as deaths in BC and AB exceed expected levels by nearly 70%. 

... In certain areas of the country almost twice as many people are dying than what we would expect in those young ages and it’s not COVID.




Commentary:

*********** Rigger: The Bell-Ends of Doom

... It is no cause to celebrate. The deep and severe erosion of trust in our public institutions will have profound consequences. They are no longer worthy of our trust and maybe they never have been, but their duplicity and malevolence has been starkly revealed over the last couple of years in a way that, unlike the ‘pandemic’, really is unprecedented.

Back in 2019, in my blissfully naïve and innocent bubble, I was a good little soldier for the interests of Pharma. I got all my vaccines, so did my kids, and I thought vaccines were a modern miracle; a great achievement of human intellect that had saved millions of lives. The idea is brilliant - get your body primed, the defences built, before the viral or bacterial invasion. Fight them off on the beaches before they’ve reached the pastures and plains. But in science there is often something of a difference between in theory and in practice.

Now, vaccines might still be a modern miracle. The difference is that I’m no longer prepared to accept that as a statement of fact. After seeing all the tricks and almost fraudulent manipulations of data that have been undertaken to prop up the Safe and Effective™ narrative for the covid Goo, and how that narrative has wildly swung from ‘if you get vaxxed you won’t get covid’ to ‘if you get vaxxed it helps to protect you from serious disease’, I’m no longer quite as sure as I once was about vaccines. Any vaccine.

The probability that our health institutions and Pharma were 100% honest, straightforward, and acted with saintly integrity and objectivity for all prior vaccine data, yet just had a bit of a blip when it came to the covid Goo is, I would suggest, indistinguishable from zero.

If vaccines really are a modern miracle then, in health terms, the whole covid Goo propaganda machine has been a disaster. ...


COVID-19 is a product of the anthropocene: The birth of the meatbug

.... Ask yourself: Where do human beings manage to replicate the conditions of a bat cave? The answer is: In an abattoir. It is in here, in these environments where many animals are stacked together and where bacteria consume animal waste, where ammonia concentrations reach high levels.

Throughout the United States, the SARS-COV-2 pandemic was seeded in abattoirs. During the first wave of the pandemic, cases of SARS-COV-2 were ten times higher in rural counties with meatpacking plants, than in counties without meatpacking plants. It is here, in these places where animals are killed, where many of the first major outbreaks of this virus took place. These places, which served as ground zero for the pandemic, then ended up seeding the virus in other parts of the country.

........... Imagine if we abandoned this practice, of herding animals together and slaughtering them. Imagine if we abandoned this practice of eating them. Imagine if we lived surrounded by trees, if we ate a plant-based diet, of proteins that are designed to ward off viruses. What would be left of this virus named SARS-COV-2?

A laboratory in Wuhan struck a match. But we, we laid down the tinder everywhere around us.

.... You may not like it. You may be in denial, but what humans have done, is to create an entirely unnatural environment. And this unnatural environment, is the perfect breeding ground for the meatbug. 

 
There is no science in the house of COVID.

It’s 2022—year three of COVID —and in the official kingdom, the science is gone.

We just don’t have any normal science anymore! What passes for “science” is a juggling act, a rotten effigy made from scraps of arbitrary conventions, peer pressure, political correctness, constantly changing definitions, computer models, egos of immature human beings, nepotism, fear, pride, wishful thinking, and blatant fraud.

Mediocrity is elevated. Dissent is banned.

Debating COVID with a mainstream pundit is as productive as debating the imminent victory of communism with a proverbial Soviet bureaucrat who won’t even listen to your position unless you substantiate it with Lenin quotes and party slogans. ...

When confusion and dogma are thick in the air, I like to call upon my inner pure-minded five-year-old who is unaware of political correctness and just wants to know all the “why’s.” So let’s look at the existing situation through the eyes of a hypothetical pure-minded five-year-old!

What is science?
Science is a method of understanding life through observing the world, making theories about what leads to what, and then testing those theories by trying things out and being honest about the outcome. That is it. Nothing fancy. ...........



Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

el gato malo: this danish study is making the rounds. it’s an assembly/meta study of RCT’s for covid vaccines. what is perhaps most interesting here is not even so much the conclusion (as this has been known for a year by any intrepid enough to read the supplementary data in the mRNA drug trials) but rather the fact that is is now becoming OK to say this out loud and to publish it in places like “the lancet”.


Died Suddenly and Unexpectedly: As we've been saying and seeing, a rise in aggressive cancers that will progress quickly, resist treatment, and ultimately prove fatal. Diagnosis to death will be months.


Dr. Leslyn Lewis: I have, and will continue to sound an alarm when any international body attempts to encroach on our nation's sovereignty. We do not need the WHO telling Canada how we should respond to a pandemic. We need our own pandemic response plan. Do you agree?



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated that the response from Ukraine regarding the talks shows that they have no interest in negotiations.



Westplaining
The Russo-Ukraine war has become a focus of intense study on the part of mainstream and social media, academics and the twitter commentariat. Much of this has depicted the struggle as a clear case of good (Ukraine) versus bad (Russia). Those who have not accepted this narrative find themselves accused of ‘Westplaining’. This is a derogatory term used against those whose explanations of why conflict has erupted dwell on long-running problems in relations between Russia and the West, some predating the dissolution of the USSR at the end of 1991. These, it is alleged, miss the point that there cannot be any justification or legitimacy for an act of war on the part of one nation against another. They are the delusions of former Communists and current Leftists whose admiration for the Soviet Union has now collapsed into pro-Russian apology. These accusations are not absurd. There are apologists for Russia who blame everything on NATO and the West, some of whom certainly are old Stalinist ‘tankies’ (a few readings of The Morning Star letters column over the last few weeks has shown this quite clearly).

On the other hand, anyone who tries to understand what the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is about should know the history – or at least have a basic acquaintance with it. And it has to be said that this history (i) includes ongoing, serious divisions between Russia and the West over the shape of post-Cold War Europe; (ii) a Russian position, going all the way back to Gorbachev, which has been to oppose NATO expansion and call for a continent without blocs with its own, new security organisation and (after 1991/2) for a neutral Ukraine with its borders guaranteed by both Russia and the West. The evidence is all there to show that the West gave guarantees covering these issues to Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, which have simply not been honoured at any stage. Gorbachev at the end of the Cold War expected the USSR to be treated as a partner in the creation of a new European order but instead it was treated as a ....


also, old/background fare:



Minsk II was the 2015 agreement hammered out by Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany to end the civil war in Ukraine between the pro west, ultra nationalist government and the pro Russian Ukrainians in the eastern Donbas provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk. Why a civil war in Ukraine? Historically, Ukraine was cobbled together first by the Russian Empire, then the Soviet Union over 4 centuries, containing disparate peoples. The main ones were the Western leaning, Ukrainian speaking people in the north and west, and the Russian speaking in the east and south. Their relationship was always toxic, but under Soviet rule relative peace prevailed. Once freed from Soviet rule in 1999, the tension between the two disparate groups resurfaced.

Fifteen years on the U.S. essentially blew up whatever chance for peaceful resolution by aiding a coup which violently removed Russian leaning President Yanukovych, replacing him with an ultra nationalist government under Petro Poroshenko. Thus began the civil war in the Donbas that has killed over 14,000 Ukrainians in Kiev’s effort to subjugate and marginalize the hated Russian leaning Ukrainians. And leading the carnage for the past 3 years is current president Volodymyr Zelensky ...



After having shown that the war in Ukraine was prepared by the Straussians and triggered on February 17 by Kiev’s attack on the Donbass, Thierry Meyssan returns to the secret history that links the Anglo-Saxons to the Banderites since the fall of the Third Reich. He sounds the alarm: we have not been able to see the resurgence of Nazi racialism in Ukraine and in the Baltic States for thirty years, nor do we see that many of the Ukrainian civilians we welcome are steeped in Banderites’ ideology. We are waiting for Nazi attacks to begin in Western Europe before we wake up.



..... I should make no assumptions on what you or Roberts know or don’t know about the Ukraine or “the Kremlin,” so I will simply state the obvious.

There is no easily discernible difference between Russians and Ukrainians: same culture, language, religion and history. As a state, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic is a failed state; as a territory, it is part of Russia. Therefore, an all-out attack on the Ukraine would be essentially an attack on Russia itself. Apparently, Roberts feels that Russians should kill millions of other Russians in order to impress the West. That’s really cute, you know, in a genocidally maniacal sort of way, but completely impossible.

The complexity of the Russian Special Operation in the Ukraine had to do with disentangling the civilian population (which needed to be evacuated) and the regular Ukrainian military (which needed to be given a chance to surrender peacefully) from the Nazi battalions (which need to either be killed in battle or captured, convicted by a tribunal and shot). That is not something that can be done quickly.

There are other, less important but still very significant reasons to take it slow:

1. There is a rather large group of Ukrainians who wanted the Ukraine to be part of Europe, not part of Russia. These are now departing Ukrainian territory, mostly to Poland, and that, from the Russian point of view, is a wonderful thing because the Ukraine isn’t Europe, it is Russia, and those who believe it is Europe or want it to be Europe should be given a chance to go to the Europe of their dreams and stay there forever, helping Europe’s general dire demographic predicament and specific shortage of white people. For this reason, it has been important to keep the Ukraine’s western border open to exiting migrants, even though this allows weapons and mercenaries to filter in (for the Russians to blow up).

2. The Europeans’ willingness to absorb millions upon millions of Ukrainian migrants, whereas they balked at accepting anywhere near similar numbers of migrants from the Middle East or North Africa, exemplifies their essential racism. As it is, two-thirds of the world is either neutral or supports Russia in its effort to reclaim the Ukraine; as the message that the EU and NATO are essentially white supremacist organizations sinks in around the world, more and more countries will shift from neutral to supportive without Russia having to lift a finger to convince them. From this point of view, it is really helpful that a lot of the Ukrainians like to draw swastikas on monuments and shout Nazi slogans such as “Slava Ukraini” (of World War II Nazi collaborator vintage) and “Ukraina ponad use” (the Ukrainian version of “Ukraine über alles.”

3. Russia has a great and prosperous future as a wealthy, well-educated, civilized, vast and resource-rich country, but this future has nothing to do with Europe or the rest of the West, which are going to collapse. The fact that Russia has been rather tightly integrated with the West ever since Peter the Great moved the capital to St. Petersburg has complicated its transition away from the West and its turn eastward. Western sanctions, rampant Russophobia and the application of cancel culture to Russian culture has made this transition inevitable in the eyes of most Russians, but the process takes time. It would not be helpful if tensions with the West decreased prematurely or if anti-Russian sanctions were removed before they are made completely irrelevant. Also, the West’s unwillingness to buy Russian energy, metals, fertilizer and other essentials speeds up its collapse timeline and that, for Russia, is also a positive. .........

6. Finally, there is what Russia has to do beyond taking care of the situation in the (former) Ukraine, and that is to dismantle NATO. This will require some sort of small demonstration project: take over some small, insignificant NATO member and watch all the other NATO members run away instead of going to war against Russia over it. The myth of NATO as a defensive (as opposed to an offensive) organization would be dispelled and NATO would be no more. The demonstration country could be Lithuania, for instance: Peter the Great purchased the Baltics from Sweden for 1000 pieces of silver at the Treaty of Nystad on September 10, 1721, so it’s Russian territory. Unlike the Ukraine, which is huge, Lithuania is tiny and the entire campaign would be over in about a week. But if Finland or Sweden would like to volunteer for the role of exemplary victim by attempting to join NATO, that would be fine too. Finland’s security is guaranteed by its commitment to neutrality, based on which Russia (USSR at the time) removed its military base from Finnish soil. If Finland moves to renege on that treaty, it would forfeit its security.



.... If you understand the war in the Ukraine as the US operation to fight to the last Ukrainian for as long as required to save the Democrats at the November election and conceal the most incapacitated president since Woodrow Wilson’s stroke in October 1919, how well is it going?

And if you understand the war as the Russian operation to defeat the NATO attack against Russia through the Ukraine, and its neighbours, what is the parallel answer?

..... Putin has just stretched the time for the American, Canadian and other NATO officers directing the war from their Azovstal bunker to take Marshal Friedrich Paulus’s way out of Stalingrad – surrender, not suicide; then on trial testify to the war crimes of their commanders-in-chief.



The UN Security Council held an extraordinary event on April 6 under the rubric Arria Formula Meeting on Biological Security regarding the biological activities in countries including Ukraine. Predictably, the US and UK representatives didn’t show up at the event and the western media also blacked out the proceedings. But that does not detract from the profound significance of what transpired. 

The highlight of the Security Council proceedings lasting over two hours was the disclosure by General Igor Kirillov, chief of the Radiation, Chemical and Biological Defense Forces of the Russian Armed Forces, that Washington is creating biological laboratories in different countries and connecting them to a unified system.

.... Highly sensitive materials from the Ukrainian biological laboratories were exported to the US in early February just before the Russian special operation began, and the rest were ordered to be destroyed lest they fell into Russian hands. But the cover-up was only partially successful. Indeed, Russia is in possession of highly incriminating evidence.

... The proceedings of the Security Council conference on April 6 are in the public domain and are accessible. 

Russia has made specific allegations ...

However, the US has so far point-blank refused to accept any supervision and verification of such incriminatory evidences and has stonewalled the demand for a verification mechanism. It is unlikely that the US will permit an international verification process that holds the potential to expose it as indulging in crimes against humanity — although there are appropriate frameworks in place including the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and the UN, to hear the clarifications from the relevant country in a fair and impartial manner.


An overlooked loophole allows development, manufacture and stockpiling for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes

Deborah G. Rosenbaum, the US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological defense programs (ASD(NCB)), testified to the House subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations on April 1, 2022, that “I can say to you unequivocally there are no offensive biologic weapons in the Ukraine laboratories that the United States has been involved with.”  With this testimony, the US Department of Defense has made a clear statement that there were no OFFENSIVE biological weapons that the US was involved with.   Did you catch that slight-of-hand? No offensive biological weapons.  Why would the US admit to such a thing?  Wouldn’t that set off alarm bells in the international community?  The answer is that developing and even stockpiling biological weapons is allowed under Article I of the convention on the prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction (BWC).  This international convention (treaty) allows that the development, production and stockpiling of “defensive” biological weapons are perfectly legal. 

.... Any government could drive a train through this loop-hole. 



......... To summarize then: China is:
  1. the number 1 trade partner of more nations than anyone else, and more than the US had in 1990.
  2. the world’s largest manufacturing nation
  3. Technologically near even with the West, and in some places ahead.
  4. The nation that helps the most other nations develop.
  5. When you adjust for PPP and service sector crap, a larger economy than the US. With Russia, a larger economy than the US and the EU combined.
And this is the nation we want to enter into a Cold War with? We shipped them so much of our industry that they now have more than we do, and after doing that we decide it’s time to pick a fight?

One thing is true of post-industrialization great politics: industry, access to resources and tech are what determine power. Since there is no longer a situation where the West has technology that is vastly ahead of everyone else’s, it really comes down to industry + resources.

And with Russia locked in and South America and Africa tending to prefer it, China is ahead or secure in both of those those categories. ...


Related Tweets:

Lira: In the encirclement pictured on this map, there are some 60,000 Ukrainian combat troops—their finest men. They have no chance of being relieved, reinforced or resupplied. They have no chance to win. If they keep fighting, they will die—for nothing.
This is an utter tragedy.

George Webb: NATO shadowbanning this video.



This is totally normal. The BBC reporting on people getting implanted with microchips in their arms in order to buy things.


CaitOz Fare:

Shitlibs Are Foam-Brained Human Livestock: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

❖

If your understanding of world events doesn’t account for the easily quantifiable fact that the US is the most tyrannical regime on earth by a massive margin, nothing else in your understanding of world events will be fact-based.

There’s only one government that is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases, continually working to destroy any nation who disobeys it, and has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions. It isn’t Russia. It isn’t China. One must account for this reality.

❖

Future generations, if there are future generations, will look back in horror at the fact that we just let billionaire corporations not only profit from war but actively lobby for more war via think tanks, campaign funding and other influence ops.

❖

When the ecosystem is dying because of economic systems which depend on infinite growth on a finite world, your choices are either (A) abandon those systems or (B) pray that sociopathic oligarchs somehow get us into space in the next few years. Guess which one we’re going with.



Firstly and most importantly, it’s fine for people to share my work without attribution because I don’t do what I do to get rich and famous, and I’m not in this to have people stroke my ego. My sole objective here in this space is to do what I can to help expand human consciousness and bring awareness to dynamics which threaten the survival of our species, and to get good ideas circulating in an information ecosystem that is severely polluted with very bad ideas. Anyone who shares my work, with or without attribution, is as far as I’m concerned helping to facilitate this goal.


Other Quotes of the Week:

Kunstler: If the USA and its NATO allies actually cared about Ukraine, we would have just left the place alone to slowly settle into the de-industrialized agricultural backwater it was becoming. And if we wanted to prevent widespread devastation once Operation Z got underway, we would have promoted peace talks, with an emphasis on our previous declaration that Ukraine would not be a candidate to join NATO. Instead, we set up Ukraine as a launching pad for annoying Russia (while also using Ukraine as a money laundromat for public officials and arms-makers).


via Norton: Bolivia's ex president Evo is in Cuba discussing "how capitalism and imperialism don't sleep in their efforts to keep harming countries that have adopted sovereign policies, free of the IMF and neoliberalism, with states that invest in the economy, education, and free healthcare"


Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

"If someone sent you this link, someone thinks you are looking for something."

... if, to you, they make me and/or my ideas seem boring or weird or dangerous or something—this stuff is probably not for you. That’s fine. It’s not for most people. And there are many senses in which it is dangerous! Most people are what they are: imperfect beautiful mere human beings who should stick to the airport bookstore.

... “new right.” This label has some merits—principally that it is a neutral label in connotation, neither aggrandizing (like “modern monetary theory”) or pejorative (like “terrorist”). From a marketing perspective, there is a case for both aggrandizing and (ironically) pejorative labels—but not, I think, in this case.

I am certainly not prominent enough to own “new right,” which is a big tent—with more intellectual variety, in one corner of the groundsheet, than the whole Ivy League. To say nothing of its hilarious historical ambiguity!

But I want to stake claim on my favorite little micro-label, “deep right.” By the power of SEO, I decree as follows: anyone who calls themselves this, but doesn’t, like, agree with me, is a phony. Ban him or something.

I like “deep right” because: (a) it is not aggrandizing but mildly positive—with a hint of risk, as in “deep end”; (b) it mirrors “deep state”; (c) it has a little bit of flavor, but not so much as to be cringe.

And the brand is mine, so I get to make its rules. 

As a philosophy of politics, the deep right has five principles: it is timeless, neutral, absolute, vital and realist.

... And needless to say, the deep right has no interest in overseas conflicts. Its foreign policy is to shut down the empire. Stories of foreign wars are of human interest only. While these wars are often sad, and sometimes even monstrous, John Quincy Adams had something to say about the subject. The deep right thinks Adams was right—and being timeless, we do not dismiss him for being 200 years old.

In war, neutrality is the highest form of pacifism. In an example from the current year: the deep right is not rootin’ for Putin, nor does it have Ukraine on the brain. When we see an “antiwar rally” whose platform is shipping more guns, bombs and tanks to one side of a war, or we hear a phrase like “no justice, no peace,” we laugh sadly. “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

Neutrality is the only nonaggressive way to make peace. Unfortunately, when most people talk about peace, what they actually mean is victory. We cannot all agree on victory; we can all agree on neutrality.

.... What is the purpose of life? Is it pleasure? Whatever said purpose may be, the purpose of government is surely to promote that individual purpose across the population.

Americans today certainly seem to believe that the purpose of life is the pursuit of pleasure. The sincerity of this belief, however, does not make them right. Certainly most societies in history, certainly including most of their ancestors, would disagree.

The deep right is vitalist: it believes that the purpose of life is vitality, and the purpose of good government is the promotion of general and immeasurable human vitality. ...

One thing the deep right knows is that the condition of a nation is the condition of the humans in it, and that condition (the “common good,” if you like) can never be measured in dry numbers—only assessed by human wisdom.

A vital human being is operating at their full human potential. Even this potential varies between humans, and between groups of humans. When we look at America today, do we feel that most people we see are living up to their full human potential?

You would have to be, like, high. The condition of America is terrible. Yet if you are not convinced of this, it would be folly for me to try to prove it. ...

... The deep right is the faction of truth. It knows that the great intellectual institutions of our era do not deserve our unconditional trust.

And it knows that their conclusions cannot be accepted universally at face value. To act in any serious way an accurate assessment of objective reality.

..... We trust the marketplace of ideas because, structurally, it is a multipolar bazaar of every possible idea. In our bazaar, we trust that good ideas will outcompete bad ideas. But when we open our eyes, we do not see a bazaar at all—but a unipolar cathedral.

The American university does not have a pope. It might as well have a pope. It is as ideologically uniform as the College of Cardinals—at last. Yet its local branches, at every tier of prestige, are independently owned and operated. What is up with that?

.... In principle, thinking from scratch does not involve skepticism of math or physics or even chemistry, because it is quite easy to validate the hard sciences from scratch. For every field softer than chemistry, though, the skeptic must tread carefully. .. Thinking from scratch is merely intellectual sovereignty. 


****************** The Moral Reckoning
Covid Amnesia and the Call of Conscience

To where have we arrived? Has the New Normal truly come and gone?

This spring, many of us find ourselves warily adjusting to the apparent conclusion of two utterly surreal years in human history. We wonder if it is really possible to cast aside the legacy our leaders left us—the mask and vaccine mandates, the terror, division, social paranoia, and isolation—free to resume to the numb, hypnotic trance of life as we once knew it. Shall we continue our march into the soul-sucking banality of digitally mediated virtual life, with ever-increasing surveillance, alienation, and ubiquitous technological overwhelm of our humanity? Are we really free to wake up from the nightmare-dream of covid-induced fear, condemnation, segregation, and authoritarianism?

We wonder whether our fearless leaders have truly released us from our obedience training—from our dutiful imperatives to serve the greater good through compliance and self-sacrifice. It kind of looks that way on the surface, but an eerie feeling hangs in the air.

..... This 1984-style narrative shift has us all confused about whether Eurasia or East Asia is the enemy we’ve always been at war with. We seem to remember it both ways. Meanwhile, behind our muddled confusion, all the foundations of covid tyranny are still lying in place—just waiting to be reactivated. Governments have established their prerogative to abrogate all personal freedoms and human rights any time they declare an emergency. We are now supposed to accept total surveillance, the automation of everything, the end of medical privacy and bodily autonomy, and the unaccountable rule of technocratic corporations, NGOs, and oligarchs. We are supposed to have internalized our new role as obedient soldiers in the fight against (insert cause célèbre here), ready to surrender our speech, our minds, and our critical thinking the moment we receive instructions to do so. We are now supposed to vilify and persecute whatever proffered enemy our masters supply us with whenever the narrative changes.

.... Later, I discovered why the mandate had been lifted. Earlier that day, a federal judge ruled that the mandate had been illegal all along. It seems that as long as someone in authority (or with presumed authority) orders anyone to do anything, most people will just obey as if they had no rights at all. They will never look into the question of whether that authority is illegally derived, or whether the orders are morally grounded or rationally sound. Instead, most people will act as if they were subjects of a monarch or a dictator rather than citizens with inalienable rights, governed by representatives with limited powers.

... What else will people do as long as they are ordered to? What else have people already done? This is the moral reckoning that faces us as people.

... During the nightmare of covid governance, the populace has been strongly encouraged to practice segregation and discrimination. Millions enthusiastically answered the call in their private lives as well as public lives. Millions more went along with the segregation and discrimination without enthusiasm, but simply because they were told to.

... The justification seems to be as follows: “Jim Crow and Apartheid were only wrong because those systems targeted the incorrect people to be stripped of their humanity, rights, and equality under the law. It’s actually good to institute segregation and discrimination regimes as long as the correct people are targeted to lose all their rights and humanity—and as long as it’s for an important enough reason."

This is different from the moral lesson I took away from Jim Crow and Apartheid. The lesson I learned was that it is always wrong to discriminate against people, and that it is always wrong to segregate society. It doesn’t matter how good your reasons are, or how good you think your reasons are. It’s wrong to treat human beings this way, no matter who they are, no matter how superior one believes oneself to be

... As society regains its (relative) sobriety, the depth and gravity of the moral crimes committed in the name of fighting covid will become increasingly apparent. The moral bankruptcy of leaders across the world will become evident

..... “Let’s not get crazy,” I hear you say, speaking with the voice of kind, gentle, wise reason. “Let’s have compassion for our brave leaders in the military and government, and for their courageous talking puppet heads in the corporate press. You can’t possibly be saying they would release such a virus on purpose! It was just an accident! It could happen to the best of us.”

Does it matter if it was on purpose or an accident? They created it on purpose. They violated international treaties on bioweapons in doing so on purpose. They lied about doing so on purpose. I don’t care if they released it on purpose or if it was just an accident. I demand accountability. Every citizen in the world ought to demand accountability. Where is the reckoning for our morally reprehensible leadership class? It’s nowhere to be found. Even among those of us who have protested all of these covid measures and the long-term technocratic agenda behind them—there is little interest in a moral accounting for the creation and release of SarsCov2, nor for the lies about doing so.

.... There should be consequences for this kind of crime. Any of these amoral leaders who have us all by the balls in this world ought to think twice before afflicting the planet with their reckless science experiments in the future. They won’t think even once about it if there are never consequences; they’ll just keep making more of these diseases. And it seems almost certain there will be zero consequences for these people or for those who follow in their footsteps in the years to come. Our leaders have a blank check to do whatever they want to us and the world because the people of that world are suffering from collective amnesia, denial, and moral resignation.

... We are living in a moral vacuum—a dreamspell of hypnosis, denial, and programmable reactivity. The public has been trained to export their moral agency to the institutional leaders of government, science, medicine, academia, business, and the mass media. The public has been instructed that the way to be a good person is to obey whatever rules and commands are promulgated by these leaders—to leave the moral reasoning to them. It’s no wonder the public does not demand a moral reckoning. 

... There is much more to reckon with. At the time of this writing, in April 2022, large numbers of people still have no idea at all that the covid vaccines have caused high numbers of deaths and injury.  .. Please consult prior articles of mine for information and external links that will confirm these facts—that is, if you really want to know. The wealth of links and resources I provided in How to Inform Oneself While Living Under a Censorship Regime will be more than adequate as a starting place.

..... That’s what happened to me, I’m afraid. You see, I’m one of those people who trusts my own ability to discern truth and logic more than I trust established authorities to decide for me what is true and what I should believe. ... As a result, I listened to both sides of every dispute, I reviewed the evidence cited on every side, I considered the critiques and counter-critiques offered in all directions, I applied reasoning, logic, and context, informed by values and moral principles ...

.. It’s quite understandable that most people would choose to continue believing the prevailing narrative of the institutional leaders, rather than come to terms with the moral consequences of what has been done. 



... The phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ is true, but what is really meant here is reproductive fitness. With my usual penchant for schoolboy humour I can explain this very simply. Rigger’s 1st law of sexual evolution states :
if you become dinner, you can’t get it in her
Well, that is perhaps straying a bit too far into the schoolyard, even for me, but there’s a serious point. If you don’t survive long enough to actually have sex then, as far as evolution is concerned, you’re a dead end.

Rigger’s 2nd law of sexual evolution can be stated as :
if you don’t get laid, it don’t get made
... Biologists puzzled over why sex existed at all. It has kind of come full circle these days, at least as far as the human species is concerned. In the bad old days of rampant sexism and when patriarchy loomed like a loomy thing with extra loomy bits, you could often hear some bloke opine that “women are a bit of a mystery”.

Today they’re a freakin’ enigma. Nobody, including biologists, seems to have the faintest idea what one is.

This curious drive to entirely decouple ourselves from our biology is puzzling to me. It’s as if we’re trying to pretend that millions of years of evolution are entirely irrelevant to who we are and how we behave.

..... And so today we’re fast moving towards the infernal dance of the genders and blissfully ignoring millions of years’ worth of evolutionary influences that are screaming at us, hey, just hang on a blessed minute.

.... 
Yet societies themselves, animal or human, have been shaped by evolution and the necessities and desires of sexual reproduction. An environment, in evolutionary terms, is the totality of anything that’s going to impact reproductive fitness.

Ten thousand years ago you weren’t eating 3 meals a day, or popping down to the local corner store to get your food. And that food didn’t come in cans, boxes, or shrink wrap. You might have popped out to the local nut tree for a snack, but there was a decent chance some lion would be eating your nuts instead. The human environment has changed massively.

As a result of these massive changes, both technologically and societally, we have essentially decoupled sex from procreation. The desire for sex, of course, is as strong as it ever was, but we can pursue that now free from any awkward consequences like chest feeders. Our sexual environment has changed almost beyond recognition but we haven’t had time to properly adapt. It’s like the Great Spirit of evolution blinked and 10,000 years flew by and She saw what had happened and said, “Oh Shit”. ...

.... If this kind of misfiring is, as I suspect, an issue for us humans, then what other things are going a bit tits up for us?












Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)