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Thursday, July 28, 2022

2022-07-28

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

Economic and Market Fare:



An economic downturn is a political problem, so the White House is playing semantics by redefining the term.

The Biden administration appears to be preparing for a recession—or rather, for news of one. Rather than tackling the underlying economic problems, the White House is playing word games. Economists have long defined a recession as “a period in which real GDP declines for at least two consecutive quarters,” to quote the popular economics textbook by Nobel laureates Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus. This definition isn’t perfect, but it describes almost every downturn since World War II. With expectations of low or even negative growth for the first two quarters of 2022, President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers has been trying to blunt the news by disavowing this textbook definition. It is “neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle,” reads a post on the White House website.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen endorsed the claim on NBC over the weekend. In place of the standard economic definition of a recession, administration officials point to the business-cycle dating committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research as the “official recession scorekeeper.” It’s a highly convenient move for them. While the nonpartisan NBER employs a robust set of indicators to pinpoint recessions, it does so retrospectively. The great recession of 2007-09, for example, had already been under way for a year before the NBER released its determination. Sometimes recessions end by the time NBER classifies them, and this built-in delay limits the utility of NBER scorekeeping for real-time policy decisions.

The White House’s attempt to wordsmith its way around a recession shows the dangers of politicizing economic terms. Mr. Biden’s economic advisers are trying to buy time by exploiting NBER’s otherwise defensible methodology. They hope doing so will insulate the administration from the electoral backlash in the event of a downturn. There is no federal statute that appoints the NBER as the official arbiter of recessions. Quite the contrary, the federal government has historically followed the conventional textbook definition. The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act of 1985, which attempted to rein in the deficit by triggering mandatory sequestrations in federal agencies, introduced a recessionary escape clause for tough economic times. If the Congressional Budget Office projected a recession, Congress could fast-track a vote to suspend the sequestrations. The law defined a recession as a period when “real economic growth is projected or estimated to be less than zero with respect to each of any two consecutive quarters.” ...


What happens in markets when the ISM Manufacturing index drops below 50 over the next quarter? We have looked across all assets with interesting findings.


Now is one of the worst times ever to buy a car. Wait six months or a year and things will be different.



Quotes of the Week:

Tchir: I am clearly in the camp that the recession risk is closer than we think and that it will be deeper and more painful than the market is currently pricing in. Speaking in front of a thousand or so people at the SFA Vegas conference, I had the opportunity to give my Wile E. Coyote scenario, where the economy, much to the surprise of everyone, hits a wall.


Mac: NONE of which risk is priced into stocks right now. What IS priced into the stock market is a soft landing. In a run of the mill recession, stocks decline 20% which is where they are now. In a deleveraging recession such as 2000 and 2007, stocks decline 50% or more. Which means that what we've seen so far in markets is the denial phase. Which will be followed by the investor panic phase. And finally the Fed panic phase.


Mac: What today's Fed pivot zealots don't understand is that after Y2K and 2008, when the Fed began cutting rates, the market STILL went down. The pivot was not the end of the bear market, it was the beginning.


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Other Charts: 
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(not just) for the ESG crowd:

The announcement Wednesday of an agreement in the Senate almost instantly reset the role of the United States in the global effort to fight climate change.










RIP Fare:

Scientist, environmentalist, inventor and exponent of the Gaia theory of the Earth as a self-regulating system

The scientist James Lovelock’s discoveries had an immense influence on our understanding of the global impact of humankind, and on the search for extraterrestrial life. A vigorous writer and speaker, he became a hero to the green movement, although he was one of its most formidable critics.

His research highlighted some of the issues that became the most intense environmental concerns of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, among them the insidious spread through the living world of industrial pollutants; the destruction of the ozone layer; and the potential menace of global heating. He supported nuclear power and defended the chemical industries – and his warnings took an increasingly apocalyptic note.

“The planet we live on has merely to shrug to take some fraction of a million people to their deaths,” Lovelock wrote in 2006. “But this is nothing compared with what may soon happen; we are now so abusing the Earth that it may rise and move back into the hot state it was in 55m years ago, and if it does, most of us, and our descendants, will die.”


The scientist was best known for his theory that the Earth is a self-regulating community of organisms



Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

Fraudpocalypse

People​ talk about capitalism as if it were just one thing, but the truth is that we live in a global system of capitalisms plural, with a chunk of ideology in common but considerable differences in local emphasis. Britain has fantasies about itself as an ideologically clear-minded capitalist state, but our political economy is riddled with padding and feather-bedding and cronyism and inefficiencies – perhaps the most spectacular example being the £15.7 billion-plus lost in fraud and error during the Covid response.* If you were to draw up a matrix showing how big a scandal is on one axis, and how under-noticed it has been on the other, that would surely be in the top right-hand corner, an outrageous failure that in a well-functioning society would be guaranteed to bring down the government and trigger reform of the Treasury and procurement systems. Instead, the person at the head of the machinery which supervised, or failed to supervise, the fraudpocalypse is currently in a run-off to be the next prime minister.

Capitalism always has a local tenor, for better and for worse. Singapore consistently tops lists of free-market societies on a range of metrics, but also has one of the largest provisions of state housing in the world. The US is a capitalist society with a denuded to non-existent safety net for the poor, but multiple quasi-socialist exemptions and subsidies for corporations and the rich. France is being led towards the unconscionable horror of neoliberal capitalism by President Macron, his critics say – though he has just nationalised EDF, the world’s third biggest power company. Denmark is a model of tolerant, inclusive economic equality – but it does have a law against the existence of ‘ghettos’ which explicitly gives a lower level of rights to people from ‘non-Western’ backgrounds. Capitalism shares principal ingredients, but it comes in as many different flavours as ice cream.

The German version of capitalism is often seen as the world’s most grown-up. It is a capitalist society free from the excesses of Anglo-American speculation and financial engineering. It is famous for, inter alia, the level of worker representation at board level in its companies; the robustness and variety of its Mittelstand, the medium-size employers that are the backbone of the country’s manufacturing industry; the strength of that manufacturing sector and its unrivalled (for a rich country) success in export markets; its probity and responsible attitude to economic management, with individuals, households, companies and governments all equally determined to spend less than they earn. Nobody thinks Germany is the most exciting political-economic landscape in the world, and it is widely envied for exactly that reason. All of which makes it even more surprising that in the last ten years, two companies in the DAX, the stock-market index of Germany’s thirty (now forty) biggest corporations, have experienced colossal implosions, caused by fraud. For one of them, it was a near-death experience; for the other, it proved to be terminal. ....


Unsustainability / Climate Fare:

Lenton: Upward-scaling tipping cascades to meet climate goals: plausible grounds for hope

Limiting global warming to well below 2°C requires a dramatic acceleration of decarbonization to reduce net anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions to zero around mid-century. In complex systems – including human societies – tipping points can occur, in which a small perturbation transforms a system. Crucially, activating one tipping point can increase the likelihood of triggering another at a larger scale, and so on. Here, we show how such upward-scaling tipping cascades could accelerate progress in tackling climate change. We focus on two sectors – light road transport and power – where tipping points have already been triggered by policy interventions at individual nation scales. We show how positive-sum cooperation, between small coalitions of jurisdictions and their policymakers, could lead to global changes in the economy and emissions. The aim of activating tipping points and tipping cascades is a particular application of systems thinking. It represents a different starting point for policy to the theory of welfare economics, one that can be useful when the priority is to achieve dynamic rather than allocative efficiency.



.... Caro et al.’s focus on the decline and extinction of individual species, while easier to quantify, masks the more pervasive and critical impacts climate change can have on ecosystems; most species in any ecosystem are adapted to similar abiotic conditions, thus climatic change will stress most species simultaneously, undermining the resilience of the system and increasing the potential for dramatically nonlinear changes in its structure and function. These rapid changes may lead to the simultaneous losses of whole communities of species

... Clearly, climate change has the potential to severely damage biodiversity, both in isolation and in combination with other anthropogenic threats, emphasizing the need to proactively manage ecosystems to protect them from the multifaceted nature of future global change. Indeed, failure to do so threatens the resilience of human societies and natural systems ...



Earth faces a climate emergency which renders conservation goals largely obsolete. Current conservation actions are inadequate because they (i) underplay biodiversity's role in maintaining human civilisation, which contributes to its marginalisation, and (ii) rely on false assumptions of how to catalyse transformative change. We suggest a paradigm shift from biodiversity conservation to survival ecology, refocusing the field on safeguarding a planetary system in which humans and other species can thrive. Rather than seeking to maintain a world which will no longer exist, survival ecology acknowledges unavoidable change and seeks to shape the world that will: it looks to the future, not the past. Since conservation science and advocacy have not been sufficient to achieve the required change, survival ecologists should additionally embrace non-violent civil disobedience.


or, I guess, alternatively, just plan to live in a pod:



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; Marc Girardot; plus Walter Chesnut (on twitter); new additions: Sheldon Yakiwchuk and Aaron Kheriarty; 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



At some point, I’ll list out the Substacks I recommend [and why I recommend them] but this is just a quick highlighting of some highly pertinent reading and/or viewing material.


In reading Nuremberg, The Belmont Report, and now the Helsinki Declaration, I can say that up to 2020, US had far lower ethical standards for human subjects research than WMA. Now? None.

Both WHO and the US HHS suffer from a form of ethical blindness when it comes to vaccine research. Foregoing long-term vaccine safety studies in favor of retrospective analysis of real-world data, these agencies fail to recognize that post-marketing (and post-EUA) studies are de facto uncontrolled, non-randomized prospective clinical trials conducted without proper consenting procedures.

If you’ve read the Nuremberg Code, the Belmont Report, and the Declaration of Helsinki, you’d know that protections are supposed to be in place not for some people undergoing some clinical studies, but instead are considered to be required to be in place for all people undergoing any clinical studies. ...

...... It’s time to revisit why and how it came about that the pharmaceutical companies are able to write the rules by which they conduct clinical research.


Don't look to American physicians; the truth is out there

The mRNA vaccines are as safe as they are effective. Physicians from around the world agree!

Below are a handful of the post-vaccine side effects doctors have reported to medical journals for the mRNA shots in just the last few weeks.

This is not your cousin telling you about how his sister’s buddy passed out after her Pfizer booster. These are case reports on a variety of severe side effects, including diabetes and lymphoma. They’re published in well-respected medical journals, with substantial supporting detail. ...



Mark Steyn did a good episode recently that you can watch here. In this episode, he covers the leading cause of death in Alberta, Canada. I had to check this out. I headed over to open.alberta.ca to see if I could download the data and plot it for myself. I could, and sure enough, Mark was correct.


The number one cause of death listed in Alberta for 2021 was “Other ill-defined and unknown causes of mortality”. Not malignant neoplasms, not heart disease, not COVID-19: some ‘unknown’ cause. What do you think Canadians? Do you believe that the uh-anti-uh-Fringe-uh-minority-guy-uh, uh-pushing experimental injections into every uh-Canadian soul should look into those shots being the etiological agents? Should I also say it in French to appear intelligent? Croyez-vous que les euh-anti-euh-Fringe-euh-minority-guy-euh, euh-poussant des injections expérimentales dans chaque âme euh-canadienne devraient examiner ces injections comme étant les agents étiologiques? Duh. ...


******** Rigger: Immunology minus 101

.... Vaccination seems like a great idea when expressed in simple terms. You expose your body to a ‘safe’ version of a pathogen so that it learns how to mount a defence against it. When the real thing comes along your body is already primed to respond and can do so quickly, thus preventing an infection taking hold and running out of control.

It probably is a great idea, but it also means we’re frigging about with a system that has been exquisitely honed over billions of years and that’s risky. It’s why any new vaccine needs to go through extensive, and lengthy, trials. Or they ought to. The empirical data gained, if successful, gives us some confidence that we haven’t frigged things up too much. It ‘fills in the gaps’ of our theoretical understanding, in a sense.

It’s one of the reasons I was very hesitant to get the covid ‘vaccines’. Whilst some testing was done, there’s simply no way that it was sufficient given the short time scale. Corners had to be cut. The vaccine proponents will try to tell you otherwise, but they are lying or being disingenuous. And we know they fucked things up (where were the studies showing how the mRNA and subsequent spike distributed itself around the body, for example?).

The point here is that when you’re buggering about with our finely-honed defence mechanisms you need more caution, not less. But the US has just given the green light for new covid vaccines to be deployed without any clinical trials at all. If you know any words stronger than ‘batshit insane’ I’d appreciate them - because it’s hard to express my sense of disbelief at this decision in an adequate way.

...... consider just three objects interacting gravitationally with one another. Each object is exerting a gravitational pull on the others. This cannot be solved in ‘closed form’ - indeed, the solutions for the more generalized n-body problem are chaotic for most initial conditions. So, we struggle to properly solve the simple problem of just 3 things interacting via a single force, gravity. The best we can do is to chuck a computer at it.

And we think we understand the human immune system well enough, and can predict its response with complete confidence, when it comes to something like a vaccine?

I’m not saying that vaccines are always going to cause more harm than benefit, I’m saying that we do need to be bloody careful before we inject some lab-generated goo into the arms of billions of people. And we need to stop pretending that we know what the fuck is going on in full detail. Because we don’t.

You can tell the ‘experts’ don’t have a clue, or that they are lying, when they make statements to the effect that the unvaccinated are driving the evolution of vaccine-resistant variants. This is such unconscionable nonsense it’s hard to know where to begin.

To understand why it’s nonsense we have to understand how evolution works. ...

..... The purpose of all of this long-winded broad-brush evolutionary waffle is to arrive at the point where, based on simple evolutionary first principles, we are now armed with some pertinent questions and predictions. ...

... How many words do I actually need to say the equivalent of: people who do not take antibiotics are not responsible for the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains?

... The problem when it comes to the covid goo is that evolution did not see fit to provide us with an immune mechanism that generates a massive immune response to just one part of a virus. Why not? If this is a ‘better’ response to infection, then why was it not selected for by evolution?

... Well, one thing that seems to going disastrously wrong is the issue of Original Antigenic Sin, or immune imprinting - call it what you will. It’s probably an evolutionary feature also - the body ‘learns’ a particular response that seemed to work well before, and so rather than wasting resources on going through the whole process again when a variation to a previous pathogen comes along - it just does what worked before. This sounds very much like infection-acquired immunity and mostly it works really well - except that it can, occasionally, go horribly wrong. A new variation arises that evades much of the previous immunity and the body gets itself stuck in a rut. It gets fixated on producing the old, now inadequate, response.



Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

Spartacus: First, a minor clarification. When I stated in the previous Spartacast that no one under sixty should have the vaccine, due to the risk of death from the vaccine very likely exceeding that of the virus itself, it was intended to highlight the insanity of vaccinating small children with Moderna and Pfizer’s mRNA shots. It was not meant to imply the reverse, that people over sixty should have the shot. On the contrary, that’s exactly the geronticide I have been referring to.



Anecdotal Fare:

The toll of "vaccination" will soon be too obvious for ANY propaganda to obscure it—as we're now seeing in the USA and Canada, Ireland, Cyprus, Sri Lanka and Australia


Why is this not news, beyond one website? Why has (say) the New York Times not picked it up, to look into the CAUSE of all those deaths? We know why..



OFFS Fare:




Pushback Fare:


I was in the doctors lounge this evening with two other docs.

Tucker came on. A 20 minute monologue about Big Pharma and the corruption Thereof. I simply could not believe what I was seeing.

He took 20 minutes and decimated opiates, SSRIs, COVID vaccines, Fauci, Birx, and the Biogen Alzheimer’s drug.

If you want an idea what I am barraged with daily even by the MSNBC crowd, look no further. I hear these same issues from patients all day long.

Tucker clearly has his problems but he also clearly has balls of steel. The execs at Fox with Big Pharma providing about half their revenue must clearly know the gig is up or they would not be allowing this on TV.

People are getting more enraged by the day. It is clips like this that make me certain the day of reckoning is coming soon.

Both the other docs in the lounge tonight, MSNBC watchers, agreed with me that there is not a thing in this monologue to be quibbled about.

Since the mid 2000s, right when Tom Cruise did his SSRI interview with Lauer – Tucker played part of it – the original Lilly Pfizer papers have been a standard the world over on how data is manipulated and how relative risk is abused. I have used them as examples of inappropriate data manipulation in classes for more than a decade. Most physicians with a questioning mind have known these drugs were a problem for years. And this is the first time I have ever heard this discussed on national TV in my life.

The Birx clip he features “I knew they were not going to be effective stopping the spread of the virus” was played today in a conference. Immediately followed by the Fauci, Walensky, Biden, and Maddow clips detailing that the vaxxes were a dead end, that you would never catch it, etc.

The ID fellow presenter, whose hospital and clinics are now being overrun with vaxxed and boosted COVID patients, after the above clips were played, in a dull monotone said, “One needs to ask WHAT exactly did these people know and more importantly WHEN did they know it?”

I could scarcely believe it. That kind of talk would have garnered intense guffaws and probably a trip to the chairman’s office just a few weeks ago. Now silent resignation.

The Fauci clip where he is asked about menstrual problems and states “we are going to study it….”. An epidemiologist commented “Seriously, you forced this upon millions of young women, and ONLY now we are going to study it? Did anyone have a hint this was a problem before the mandates? Knowing Pfizer’s history, my gut tells me they knew all too well.”

And yet another zinger from a retired ID professor – “If they knowingly released a non-sterilizing vaccine into an acute coronavirus pandemic and forced millions to take it, that may be the greatest act of medical malpractice in the history of this whole world.”

I am slowly seeing the return of “science” in my profession. Tough questions are being asked. Finally.

What do I feel tonight ….. the sun is shining, the scales are falling out of the eyes…and we are on the Road to Damascus. This may take quite a bit longer than you would expect, but I am fairly sure this is going to get really interesting


but, no, you cannot watch that clip of Tucker on youtube:


so go here, to Fox



COVID Idiocracy Fare:

el gato malo: the sources and effects of vaccine hesitancy
public health runs on public trust, and that trust was violated

we have spoken much here about corners cut and warning signs ignored in the development of covid vaccines.

the tactical morality and memory around these issues has been surreal. this entire public health misadventure has been the world’s most politicized greased pig. it’s all squealing and squirming and sliding through the mud stopping only to fling it.

science and prudence have gone begging.

and it is ravaging credibility.

even if you’ve seen it before, watch the video above.

watch the iron bar certainty and the crocodile tear sincerity as all the vaccines’ soon to be fiercest proponents were calling the jabs fraud when they thought that orange man might get the credit for them. it was trump’s rush job poison needle that only a fool would take and in which no one should place faith. the FDA was not to be trusted. transparency was needed. all the data needed to be released to all the experts. the fix was in and the american people should not fall for it.

then, suddenly, it was the blessed fauci ouchie, the social duty, and as much as could be made possible the legal obligation to get one. and no, you cannot see the data, it’s private and the FDA who everyone knows MUST be trusted because they are the experts wants 75 years to release it. analyzing it yourself is arrogant madness. the science is settled now shut your pie hole and accept our grand largess.

how is any trust to survive that?

did they ever really know better? who knows? 3 to 2 the field and pick ‘em. it sounded like sense, but it could just as easily have all been posturing and the aping of prudence and process for political profit. ...

...... and stunningly these alleged experts are now so divorced from reality that they cannot see what they have wrought.

this is like watching lenny from of mice and men wonder why the bunny doesn’t want to play anymore ...

... you know why people trusted vaccines for MMR and polio and diphtheria?

because as long as you didn’t get some cut rate version from a bill gates crony, they worked.

they had long records of safety and efficacy. you got the vax, the side effects were negligible, and you did not get the disease. polio and measles and smallpox went away.

(*the flu vaccine is, admittedly, a joke and likely provided a template here, but at least it’s not notably dangerous)

these jabs spent 10 years in development and 10 more getting used in high risk groups before really going wide.

they were incredibly well tested and incredibly safe.

no one would ever have launched one this broadly this fast on such little data, especially using an entirely novel mode of action never before approved in humans that had already failed who knows how many times as a therapeutic because it was too toxic and deadly to be a fricking oncology drug.

let that sink in. ...



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:


... Whatever the original plan, Russian forces continue to press slowly forward and could occupy the 1922 territories by summer’s end should negotiations continue to be rejected or stall again. Thus, the direction of the present Russian war offensive suggests a goal of returning the territories given to Ukraine by Lenin in 1922. To be sure, this will bring several other benefits should Moscow decide to hold these territories as independent protectorates or as members of the Russian Federation, which is likely since the casualties, sanctions, and false propaganda being leveled by the West and Kiev need to be compensated for in the Russian mind. The benefits include: numerous natural and labor resources in these regions ranging from coal to natural gas to mining and steel production and other labor; the formation of a land bridge from Donbass to Moldova’s pro-Russian breakaway republic of Transdnistria; a bridgehead threatening to cut Ukraine off from the Black Sea; and the incorporation of a significantly pro-Russian population back into the Russian fold.


Medvedev offers Kiev a visual on its worst case scenario


“Western analysts believe it will look like this, actually,” he said, posting a second map. On it, “Ukraine” is reduced to Kiev and its surroundings. Seven regions in the West have been annexed by Poland, and three in the southwest by Hungary and Romania, respectively.

Everything else is marked “Russia.”

He did not specify which Western experts may have envisioned such a partition.






Yves Smith is aghast about the U.S. eyepoking of China: ...

.... The U.S. government is currently watching as its proxy force in the Ukraine gets systematically dismantled by Russia which is destined to win that war. There is nothing that the U.S. can do about that. Any conflict around Taiwan would have a similar outcome.

Washington may think that would be a great opportunity to isolate China.

But isolate from whom? It would be the U.S. and its allies which would be most hurt by it while the much larger rest of the world would simply continue to work with China just as it does now with Russia.

But with incompetence and arrogance ruling in Washington (and Brussels) one can no exclude that that is exactly their plan.



CaitOz Fare:


... Now, I know what you’re thinking: how is Zelensky making time for a Vogue photoshoot amidst his busy schedule of PR appearances for other major western institutions?

I mean this is after all the same Volodymyr Zelensky who has been so busy making video appearances for the Grammy Awards, the Cannes Film Festival, the World Economic Forum and probably the Bilderberg group as well, and having meetings with celebrities like Ben Stiller, Sean Penn, and Bono and the Edge from U2. It’s as busy a PR tour as he could possibly have without having a discussion about the strategic importance of long-range artillery with Elmo on Sesame Street.

Oh yeah, and also isn’t there like a war or something happening in Ukraine? You’d think he’d probably be somewhat busy with that too.

... Call me crazy, but I’m beginning to suspect that there might be a concerted effort to manipulate the way we think about the war in Ukraine. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say it’s the most aggressively perception-managed war we’ve ever experienced.



Octogenarian House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has decided to spend her final years on this mortal coil trying to start World War Three, pushing the Biden administration to designate Russia an official “state sponsor of terrorism” and planning a freakishly incendiary trip to Taiwan just in the last few days.

Beijing has made it clear that the first visit to Taiwan by a major US official in decades would be seen as an aggressive escalation and an egregious transgression of Washington’s official one-China policy. ...

... In reality, though Democrats tend to lean more toward supporting aggressions against Russia while Republicans lean more toward favoring aggressions against China, they’re both just manufacturing consent for the same unipolarist agenda of total global domination. They pretend to be on opposing sides, but if you ignore the narratives and just look at the actions what you see is a steadily escalating “great power competition” designed to facilitate the US empire’s longstanding agenda of securing unipolar planetary hegemony at all cost.

The drums of war are growing louder and louder, and the psychopaths who feed off it are growing more and more aroused. Let’s hope this evil empire ends as soon as possible in as peaceful a manner as possible, before these freaks get us all killed.




new section
Rigger-ous Fare: I'm sorry, Dad


... Whilst I am in total agreement with this sentiment, this attitude, it also conflicts somewhat with my own upbringing.

My dad, who passed away in a nursing home last year, was a wonderful, sweet, giant of a human being in my eyes. He taught me that if I didn’t have anything good to say about someone, I should not say anything at all. It was extremely rare to hear him say anything bad about anyone. Almost all of the time he was positive, friendly, supportive, and always looking to find the good in people. If he stayed silent, that was when you suspected he was thinking “what an absolutely monstrous fuckwit”.

It’s not a bad way to be provided you don’t let yourself become a doormat because of it - which of course he never did. He was strong and protective, but in a way that never diminished others or attacked them.

These days I find myself coming into increasing conflict with my Dad’s approach. I see what some people are writing, the direction we seem to be heading, and I just want to un-holster the Magnum of Vituperation and let off a few rounds.

.... This movement is, quite clearly, not confined to a few random nutters on the internet. Nor is it those pesky right-wingers just whipping themselves into some white supremacist frenzy.

This is fucking about with kids heads based on some ideological and unscientific gender claptrap and Stonewall are a very influential organisation.

How is one to respond to this absolute rampant idiocy except in the strongest terms? Staying silent is not a helpful option. It’s tantamount to pretending that things will all just sort themselves out nicely, eventually, someday, perhaps when the Sun has turned into a red dwarf.



Rig Quote of the Week:

Rigger: We’re not giving them more genders to choose from. We’re giving them more neuroses to choose from.



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

deBoer: No, We Have Not Proven That There is No Neurological or Physiological Influence on Depression
disproving the serotonergic theory does nothing to deny neurological origins

A big meta-analysis has provided even more evidence against the serotonergic theory of clinical depression - that those who suffer from it have insufficient or imbalanced serotonin levels and this causes the condition. This finding has been the result of a great deal of ballyhoo, but I don’t really understand why; this theory has been declared dead many times before. Unfortunately, given the way digital media and social media work, we’re seeing many people taking the ball and running with it in an unjustifiable direction: that the seeming death of the serotonergic explanation means that we know that there is no defect of the brain that influences clinical depression. And we absolutely do not know any such thing. 

... The fact that the story of serotonin and depression that was promulgated in the 1990s is likely false does not at all imply that there is no chemical/neurological/physiological element to depression! Unfortunately a quick perusal of Facebook for the past several days has shown me hundreds of people responding to coverage like this with total certainty that it has spelled the death knell for any pharmacological treatments of depression specifically or mental illness generally, and has played right into the hands of some bad actors. 



Satirical Fare:

Scholars: In Lieu Of Hell, Unbelieving Introverts Will Be Sent To A Business Networking Event That Lasts Forever







Posted by at No comments:

Sunday, July 24, 2022

2022-07-24

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

Economic and Market Fare:

**** Varoufakis: What is really going on?

My answer: A half-century long power play, led by corporations, Wall Street, governments and central banks, has gone badly wrong. As a result, the West’s authorities now face an impossible choice: Push conglomerates and even states into cascading bankruptcies, or allow inflation to go unchecked. ...



... given the record high inflation, real interest rates are still clearly negative, giving the impression that the current global cycle of interest rate hikes is far from reaching its end.

But this consensus assessment will prove to be wrong . The current cycle of interest rate hikes could go down in history as the shortest and weakest in recent decades. Here’s why.


and say automatic re-orders are jamming even more excess inventory to stores


  • Beijing turned down the request from Hebei, Hainan and Liaoning, saying their current quotas were sufficient and regional debt limits were declining
  • Local government revenue from land sales has tumbled this year due to a property market slump, while Covid-19 containment has added to pressure


Quotes & Tweets of the Week:

Sheets: Among other things, 2022 remains a reminder to be careful what you wish for. Over the last decade, it’s been common to hear “yields are too low”, “spreads are too tight”, “valuations are too high”, “value never works” and “central bank policy is steamrolling everything”. But then a year came along that gave us higher yields, wider spreads, cheaper valuations, value outperformance and policy reversal…and it hasn’t exactly been a day at the beach.


...

...

...



Charts: 
1:



Bubble Fare:


I've been too bullish. Like many investors, far too focused on markets. What's happening under the surface of the Disney markets is far more dire than what's happening on top. This "Everything" bubble is a multi-pronged attack on the middle class. We are witnessing the final meltdown of the U.S. middle class at the zero bound. 

The greatest risk isn't even currently acknowledged by anyone in the mainstream media - monetary policy failure at the zero bound. This Volcker gambit has no chance of succeeding. Not only does it wrongly assume the Fed will have sufficient rate cut powder it ALSO ASSUMES the middle class is as strong now as it was in 1980 when the middle class was at its apex of power. Whereas, now the U.S. middle class is at the lowest share of GDP in history. No unions, no labor protections, no pension plans, no job security. All strip mined and fed into the stock market and out to the Cayman Islands. A multi-decade crime spree capped off by a COVID-driven monetary sugar rally. Because we are to believe a pandemic improved the economy. 

This belief in the enduring strength of the serially laid off and underemployed "consumer is the greatest fantasy underlying this era. The magnitude of this disaster far exceeds the ability of central banks to "fix" when it explodes. Ironically, the stock market's durability to date has been covering up the carnage taking place below the surface. As is end of cycle inflation. Sales VOLUMES are collapsing, but prices are staying high. For now. This is how every bubble crash begins - buyers and sellers move further apart. At first sellers are reluctant to lower their asking prices. But then the market slows down to a point at which they have to sell. And then the race to the bottom begins.  ....



Vid Fare:





(not just) for the ESG crowd:




Vast sums provide power to ‘buy every politician’ and delay action on climate crisis, says expert






This is the second forest fire started by Land Life in a month.



Other Fare:



Companies are increasingly looking to engender loyalty by tapping into our evolved need to belong. But the emotional costs of bonding sessions and other techniques can be high and the sense of belonging false, warns Jonathan R Goodman



Fun Fare:

What To Know About The European Heat Wave

A record-breaking heat wave is sweeping across Europe. The Onion tells you everything you need to know about the European heat wave.

Q: How hot is it expected to get?
A: Some number that initially seems low, but then you remember it’s Celsius, and you’re like, holy shit.

... Q: What can I do to protect myself and my family from the worsening effects of global warming?
A: Attain massive levels of wealth.

... Q: Are there countries successfully managing the heat wave?
A: Countries like Greenland have avoided it by strategically locating themselves in the Arctic Circle.



Pics of the Week:

Stunning Photos Capture Great White Sharks Leaping High in the Air





Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

just kill me now:
Former Clinton Advisor Says Hillary Is Preparing To Run Again In 2024


....

....


Unsustainability Fare:

Murphy: Limits to economic growth (PDF) (Nature)
Across the world, decisions on investment and policy are made under the assumption of continuous economic expansion. Fundamental physical limits may soon put an end to this phase of development, as foreshadowed by the 1972 report The Limits to Growth.


"Covid, climate and war migrants have validated the “ecovillages-as-lifeboats” metaphor."

About 20 years ago the Australian futurist Ted Trainer wrote something to the effect that, “Ecovillages are perhaps the most important invention of the 20th Century.” Ross Jackson has said—most recently in his opening address at the International Communal Studies Association (ICSA) triennial meeting last Thursday—that it is because ecovillages are like lifeboats. That is how master planner George Ramsey, who coined the word “ecovillages,” envisioned them when the Club of Rome came out with their Limits to Growth study in 1972 that predicted we would reach several important limits in about 50 years. Well, 50 years is now. Ecovillages provide an alternative to the culture built on endless growth, depletion of non-renewable resources, military aggression, and social hierarchies. Ecovillages are accessible and friendly alternatives that actually work. Are they the most important invention of the past century?

.... In Europe, the ECOLISE network has joined communities of ecovillages, permaculture and transition together. Like a modern Library of Alexandria, they maintain an open source collection of databases on many of the subjects of greatest interest for our time.



...









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; Marc Girardot; plus Walter Chesnut (on twitter); new additions: Sheldon Yakiwchuk and Aaron Kheriarty; 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

Journalist, Graham Crawford, reports on Professor Richard Ennos's letter to the Scottish government.

.... recent detailed analysis of National Records of Scotland data now suggests a causal relationship between excess death in Scotland and covid-19 vaccinations.’

Professor Ennos states that the argument leading to this conclusion begins with the observation that in the last 32 weeks of 2021, excess death began in different age classes of the Scottish population in a staggered manner, approximately 12 weeks after peak vaccination of that age class.

Beginning with the oldest, this pattern was repeated as the jabs rollout continued down through ever younger age groups. ...


A layman's guide.

I read Dr Paul Alexander, Geert Vanden Bossche, Bad Cattitude and Dr Robert Malone daily (sometimes ten times a day thanks to Paul!). They often write about the virology and immunology explaining how and why the mRNA injections, aka “vaccines”, can be responsible for unnatural selection of variants, repeat infections and more frequent progression to disease for the vaccinated. But what does this all mean?

I’m going to test my own understanding and attempt to explain it in lay terms for those of us who can’t always make head nor tail of the experts. Inevitably, it won’t be complete and perhaps not entirely accurate but I’m just trying to convey the gist of it as simply as I can. ....


Second of two articles sharing the slides from Dr. Peter McCullough's 2-hr presentation is Grand Rapids, MI last weekend. Dr. McCullough came to the correct conclusion: the vaccines have failed.


It's still troubling but...nothing has actually changed.

....... It’s not like droves of additional people are dying - from COVID…

But it’s also not like anybody is being saved from COVID either.

Now…if you weren’t vaxxed…you’re in no more risk than you were 28 months ago and you’ve survived 28 months of this.

However…

If you have been vaxxed, with each subsequent jab your chances of getting COVID are now actually greater and the side effects with each poke actually increases.


CMOH - Hinshaw

Or so she said in her presser yesterday…

So, I decided to dive into these “Peer Reviewed Studies”, that she mentions. Should be some KICK ASS INFO, if they’re going to completely ignore the provincial data, you’d think…

But if you thought that, you were dead wrong.

.. In one of the first studies I dove into, was linked from a portion of Deena’s diatribe under Hybrid Immunity, where the good doctor says that Hybrid Immunity seemingly is more ideal with the “initial series plus a booster” - 3 jabs.

Funny thing though…when you open up the study, the first thing that you’d notice is that this article is a preprint and HAS NOT BEEN PEER-REVIEWED!

But…okay…a minor oversight.

The big punch in the ball sack comes when you actually read the fucking thing - down to the interpretation, where it says:

NO MEANINGFUL ADDED BENEFIT AGAINST BA.2 FROM A THIRD DOSE!

If you weren’t convinced already that relying on Alberta Health Services is actually putting your health was in the hands of complete morons, this will hopefully be your first clue.



This article will show that since June 1, 2022, when Ba.5 variant took over the entire Europe, boosters are PROMOTING Covid deaths. Unlike before, boosters do not “prevent severe outcomes”. In fact, starting this summer, boosters make severe outcomes MORE likely. This is shown by using linear regression-based analysis, looking at death rates versus booster rates by country, for various periods of time, but for the same countries. ...


A Guest Post by Journalist Jeremy R. Hammond

I invited objective and ethical independent journalist Jeremy R. Hammond to share his latest in his series of newsletters summarizing how the FDA relied on scientific fraud to authorize Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine for infants and toddlers. In this piece, he reports how the FDA attempted to justify its decision by exaggerating the risk to children from "Long COVID". ...


I Am In Shock




Bacterial and fungal isolation from face masks under the COVID-19 pandemic




... I expected you to objectively reconsider your position in light of the voluminous scientific evidence of ivermectin’s efficacy for treating COVID.

I expected you to evaluate the designed-to-fail studies with the same eye for corruption and fraud you apply to the injection studies.

I expected you to recognize that ivermectin is being targeted for smearing and censorship because it poses an existential threat to the injectable product.

How could you not realize the pharmaceutical corporations discredited ivermectin to obtain the EUAs that granted them immunity from lawsuits?

How could you not see that it was necessary for them to obliterate consideration of early treatment protocols so they could force us into their billion-dollar “solution”? ....



Tweets & Quotes of the Week:

el gato malo: first a trickle, then a flood. the focus of mainstream news on covid is shifting noticably. it’s becoming OK to call BS. and the jerseys are changing at speed.


Wiggins: “I did it,” he said, referring to getting the shot. “And I was an All-Star this year and champion, so that was the good part, just not missing out on the year, the best year of my career,” Wiggins added, but he stated that he was forced to get the shot against his will.
“But for my body, I just don’t like putting all that stuff in my body, so I didn’t like that. … It wasn’t my choice. I didn’t like that it was either get this or don’t play,”




CO-VIDs of the Week:


... Kirsch says, “Whenever I have an audience, I ask people, ‘How many people in your household died from Covid?’  There will be one hand or two hands.  Then I ask, ‘How many people do you know died from the Covid vaccine?’  The last time I asked that question, it was a 7 to 1 ratio.  7 times more people reported a death from the vaccines.  If they are wrong even by a factor of 10 . . . it is still a disaster beyond proportion. . . . I saw a tweet from a doctor saying how much longer are we going to pretend that these (vax death) incidents are just bad luck?  He is basically saying we know the vaccine is causing this, but we can’t speak out because we will be fired and have our hospital privileges revoked.  We will have our licenses to practice medicine revoked.  This is why you are not seeing doctors who realize this speaking out.  They all have to remain silent.”

Kirsch goes on to say, “This is the biggest catastrophe in American history.  Even a member of the EU parliament recently said this.  She said these vaccines are the biggest disaster ever.”

The massive amount of victims of this vaccine fraud are waking up to the fact they have been poisoned and murdered.   Kirsch says, “They are not going to be happy.  I don’t want to predict what they are going to do, but a lot of people are going to be extremely upset.  I think at minimum, they will not trust anything from the CDC, FDA and NIH ever again.  That’s at a minimum, and they won’t trust the mainstream media either.  They won’t trust representations from Congress because most of the people in Congress are saying get your vaccine.  This will destroy trust in the mainstream media, Congress, in the mainstream medical community, in government agencies and medical science in general.  It will be the greatest trust destroyer in human history, these Covid vaccines.  This is not just in the U.S., this is worldwide.  When people figure out that they were told by their government to take a shot that was way more likely to kill them than to save them, people are going to be livid.  It won’t just be a few people that will be livid, it will be a lot of people.”

There is much more in the 1-hour and 10-minute interview.





Anecdotal Fare:

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...


...




COVID Conspiracy Fare:

*** Fenton: A critique of the BBC2 documentary “Unvaccinated”

Before this programme was screened on 20 July 2022 promotional material from the BBC and in newspaper articles such as this suggested it was going to be extremely biased and inaccurate.

.... The programme turned out to be every bit as bad and biased as feared.


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



I know, you’re probably sick and tired of hearing about the Rise of the New Normal Reich. You want it to be over. So do I. It isn’t over … not by a long shot. It might seem like it’s over where you are. I imagine it does if you live in Florida, or in Texas, or the UK, or Sweden, or Croatia, or in some other country or state in which the majority of the “Covid restrictions” have been lifted, or perhaps were never introduced in the first place. If that’s the case, I’m happy for you.

I happen to live in New Normal Germany, the current tip of the New Normal spear, or one of the tips of one of its spears (or mRNA-laced hypodermic needles), the others being countries and states like Canada, China, Australia, New York, California, and assorted other hotbeds of New Normalism. If you live in one of these New Normal strongholds, as I do, you are acutely aware of how it is not over.

Yes, the Covidian Cult is kaput. The spell has been broken. Only the most insanely fanatical New Normal cultists continue to walk around in public in their plague masks and homemade hazmat suits. But the New Normal Reich is not kaput. The New Normal Reich is being … well, normalized. The masses are being systematically conditioned to accept the biosecurity police state that the global-capitalist ruling classes have been implementing for the last three years. Despite the now irrefutable evidence that the “vaccines” do not prevent transmission of the virus, “the Unvaccinated” are still being segregated, banned from working, attending school, competing in major sporting events, and so on. People are still being forced to wear masks — the symbol of the New Normal Reich — on planes, trains, public transport, in doctors offices, hospitals, et cetera. Here, there, and everywhere, New Normal symbols and social rituals are being permanently integrated into everyday life.

These symbols and rituals are more than just the window dressing of the New Normal Reich. They are how our new “reality” is being created and maintained. .....

.... And these are just a few recent examples. I don’t think I need to provide an exhaustive list. At this point, you are either well aware and capable of facing what’s happening, or you’re not, in which case you are telling yourself whatever you need to tell yourself in order to pretend that what is happening isn’t happening.

If that is what you’re doing, I cannot help you. Nothing I write or say will get through to you. Facts will not make any difference to you. Government and health officials and media talking heads will lie to your face, over and over, and get caught lying, and you will go on adamantly repeating their lies, not because you do not understand that they are lies, but because you do not care that they are lies. You do not care that you are killing and injuring countless people with your officially-approved lies, with your cowardice, with your mindless obedience. Your goal is to remain within the bounds of “normality,” ...



Pushback Fare:

Eisentstein: Pandemania, Part 4

It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.
– Ursula K. Le Guin

Earlier this year, Bill Gates published a book about how to stop the next pandemic. Basically, he urged that we do the same thing we did this time, only more thoroughly and more broadly. And also, to normalize many of the temporary Covid policies, creating a permanent biosecurity state.

Here I too will offer some principles to prevent the next pandemic. But I am not using the word in the sense Bill Gates does. I refer to the entire sociopolitical phenomenon surrounding the disease itself. In short, I would like to prevent exactly what Bill Gates is proposing. 

I have been using the term pandemania to describe the broader sociopolitical aspect of Covid. It includes the hysteria, the persecution of dissent, the censorship, the mandates, the propaganda, the corrupt practices of pharma and its regulators, the radical rearrangement of society, the suspension of civil liberties, and the tendency toward medical fascism. None of the ground conditions for those have substantially changed.

I will skip over certain practical matters such as prosecuting corrupt officials and corporations, reforming regulatory agencies, and so forth. These measures are important, but researchers and journalists are doing a better job of exposing them than I ever could. My part is to look at the ground conditions that make the public so vulnerable to the machinations of power in the first place. .......

.... In mob dynamics one might distinguish five roles. First there are the instigators, loudly pointing at the victim, egging on the rest of the crowd, and defining who shall be the sacrificial victim. Second are the enthusiastic accomplices, who happily act on the instigators’ accusations. Third, there are the people who just go along with it, assuming that what everyone seems to be doing must be right. Fourth are those who are skeptical, but seeing that no one speaks up think that either they themselves are mistaken, or that it is futile or dangerous to do anything. Fifth are those who do speak up or otherwise oppose the will of the mob. If they are few, they become the next victims, confirming the fears of the fourth group.

This is the social pattern that fascists and despots ride to power. It can be broken only when enough people are brave enough to defy the mob. 

A recent expose by two physicians, Marty Makary M.D., M.P.H., and Tracy Beth Høeg M.D., Ph.D,, offers a window into how this phenomenon affected the medical and scientific professions. The scientists who spoke to them of the malfeasance of the agencies that employed them (the FDA and CDC) did so on condition of anonymity. They’d kept silent heretofore. This is the conspiracy of silence that made other potential dissidents and whistleblowers stay silent themselves. I also hear this a lot from friends in the medical profession, who are afraid to say anything because of fear of repercussions. Their silence again creates the impression that everything is fine.

Today, more and more people are finding the courage to speak out. Information on the failure of vaccines, masks, and lockdowns is slowly penetrating mainstream consciousness, and even top medical journals (see here, here, and here for indications and references). That is good, but what is to stop the same mob dynamics, the same mass formation, from recurring? We have to learn to recognize it as it is happening. We have to develop the habit of speaking up. And we have to cultivate communities of mutual support to mitigate the effects of ostracism from the dominant institutions and platforms. .....



Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:


Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered powerful remarks to the Plenary session of a conference titled ‘Strong Ideas for a New Time’. Participants attending the event represented leading figures from the public and private sectors and was sponsored by the Agency for Strategic Initiatives.

.. Since the Russian President’s remarks took direct aim at the underlying flaws in the western unipolar system and succinctly identified the only possible solution to said self-annihilation, I thought it fit to reproduce his remarks in full…


Pedro Gonzalez details the connections among Zelensky, oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky and Washington, D.C.



CaitOz Fare:


All of human civilization is being organized around a “great power competition” between the US-centralized empire and the China/Russia/Iran bloc, and that “competition” stands to benefit ordinary humans in no way, shape or form. It will hurt all of us and help none of us.

There’s no valid reason why powerful nations can’t simply work together toward their mutual benefit. But it would mean the US empire giving up its plans of total global domination, so it’s not even being considered.

This conflict is slated to last throughout the 21st century, and it already has a massive body count. The war in Ukraine is a direct result of this “great power competition”, and the economic warfare between the empire and Russia will starve many more. This is a terrible thing.

Our world is being steered toward a dark and dangerous path full of impoverishment, starvation and proxy warfare, and fraught with the possibility of nuclear exchanges. They’re playing games with our lives, and because we’ve bought into the propaganda, we’re letting them.

❖

One of the most asinine things about US foreign policy is that there are Republican wars and Democrat wars. Republicans cheerlead more for escalations against China and Iran while Democrats cheerlead more against Russia and Syria. They each facilitate different imperial agendas; when Republicans were in power we saw the Iran deal shredded, when Democrats took power we saw the proxy war in Ukraine. When I criticize US warmongering against China I get Republican morons yelling at me and when I criticize US warmongering against Russia I get Democrat morons.

They each think their wars are better than the other side’s wars, but in reality the opposing sides are an illusion and it’s all the same unified agenda: the agenda of planetary domination. They’re just trained by propaganda to cheerlead more for different aspects of that agenda.

❖

Friendly reminder that the prospect of revolution will become far more remote once there are bulletproof AI-guided robot armies who will fire upon locals without a moment’s hesitation. Revolution has a pretty definitive use-by date.

❖

The world will never know peace as long as there are systems in place which financially incentivize war. Hoping for peace without opposing those systems is like jumping off a cliff and hoping gravity doesn’t do what it always inevitably does.



.... From our earliest moments we are trained to fit in with a society that was designed from the ground up by the powerful in the service of the powerful. As soon as we are old enough to get curious about the world and how it works our heads are filled with lies about such matters, by our education systems, by the media we consume, by our parents who were indoctrinated in the same way, and by the very culture we find ourselves immersed in from day one.

...... This civilization is the set of the Truman Show, and we are all Truman.

But because we are all Truman, we can only walk off the set if we walk off together. There is no option to leave as an individual, because even if you know it’s all lies, you’re still stuck in a world full of humans whose behavior is driven by lies.

Awakening to reality as an individual can for this reason sometimes be more uncomfortable than remaining asleep in the dream, because you’re like Truman after he realizes it’s all a sham, but before he escapes. At times you’re just stuck there, freaking out at the actor who’s playing your mother while she tries in vain to cut to a commercial break. It can be distressing for you, and it can be distressing for the people around you who aren’t yet on the same page. ...



Other Quotes of the Week:

Doomberg: The Oxford Dictionary defines a demagogue as “a political leader who seeks support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument.” The word has close associations with tyrant, prejudice, and untruthful, and is often preceded by the adjective dangerous. Interestingly, it wasn’t always this way. The word originally meant “a popular leader” and is derived from the Greek dēmagōgós, which combines dēmos (people) with agōgós (leading, guiding).


Hanson: We often think we are immune to a cognitive bias if we are aware that it exists, and understand why it happens. But in fact, general awareness is usually quite insufficient to eradicate a bias; you have to put effort into particular cases to make headway. 


Schryver: To be even more precise, it’s batshit crazy silly talk. Indeed, the only possible interpretation of Kendall’s broaching of the subject at this juncture is that there is now a profound recognition, at the highest levels of the Pentagon, that the inevitable outcome of this war is set in stone. But, because political considerations preclude them being able to acknowledge this reality, they must somehow stall for time, during which they can better prepare the American people to receive the bad news that the Mother of All Proxy Armies – which the US spent eight long years and countless billions building – has been comprehensively wrecked in a matter of months by the supposedly inept armed forces of the Russian Federation.




Long Reads / Big Thoughts:


Today’s Western economy is dominated by the FIRE sectors (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) plus the military industry, all of which have usurped the bulk of the economy’s wealth and income, leaving far too little for the other sectors to survive let alone grow. The result is an alarming rise in extreme inequality with, it is claimed, the top 1% (or 10%) of the population owning the bulk of the wealth and income. Other sectors have also grown, most prominent are those related to IT and services. But these are highly volatile and high-risk businesses and not all who enter them succeed or remain and prosper. Quite a few have turned into Zombie companies that absorb endless bouts of capital increases in the millions and even billions of Dollars but fail to show a profit.

The great western industry has all but disappeared. It has migrated to China, Asia, and elsewhere, as a result of an erroneous application of the famous economic edict of “maximizing profits”. It was applied exclusively to the short-term with total disregard to its negative long-term implications on both the companies themselves as well as the economy as a whole. The result, among other things, was the stripping of the West’s industrial capability, increasing its balance of trade deficit, creating endless supply chain bottlenecks, and increasing its vulnerability and reliance on the outside world.


Rigger: The Peterson Effect

...................... We can’t, of course, ever be truly objective, but we can do our damndest to get as close to it as we can. In this spirit I would suggest that, objectively, JBP is an extremely intelligent, eloquent, scientist/thinker who has some valuable insights and opinions, and is objectively not hateful. I came to this conclusion by listening to what he said and thinking about it - and I came in with the pre-conceived notion that I was going to be listening to some unhinged fascistic loon.

What appears to be happening is that many people seem to get their opinions neatly pre-packaged by other people. I can’t say I’m entirely innocent of this, either. Time is finite and sometimes it’s just not feasible to investigate every claim and every idea and every person to the nth degree. So it’s very tempting to ‘borrow’ an opinion from someone you respect and with whom you mostly agree.

That’s OK, as long as you file it in the “caution: this is a borrowed opinion” section of your memory and are prepared to listen to, and honestly consider, conflicting opinions as and when necessary.

JBP might be the most misrepresented person on the internet. The overwhelming majority of the critical comments and commentary I’ve seen simply miss the points he’s trying to make and disastrously misunderstand them. Or it could be wilful misrepresentation in some cases - but it’s hard to read people’s minds. ...

..... There are hopeful signs. Twitter is a medium designed to amplify division and outrage. Nothing gets more clicks than a good froth. The popularity of podcasts like The Joe Rogan Show, however, show that millions of people really want to listen to topics explored in depth.

The issue these days is that institutions seem to have been captured and over-influenced by spoiled shouty children - the kind of people who think Twitter is the height of intellectual debate. In these conditions, where Twitter has far more influence than it deserves, we have fertile breeding grounds for The Peterson Effect.

But there’s a large number of people who are more Rogan than Slogan, and that’s a cause for optimism.



... If you think I’m exaggerating about any of this, I congratulate you for being self-employed or otherwise insulated from the basics of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training. I’m actually not doing justice to the most hysterical aspects of this movement. Heck, the excessiveness of these beliefs are part of what insulates them from effective criticism: it’s nearly impossible to describe what’s actually being taught without sounding like you’re making stuff up. 

And so I want to ask a simple and direct question: has anyone bothered to think about how much this shit is fucking with the heads of young people? The psychological toll of actually existing racism is bad enough. But this new, cartoonish, all pervasive understanding–in which racism is the sole structurer of social relations and the primary driver of all human interaction–I don’t see how anyone could leave the house if they actually believed this. .....

But mark my words: there will be consequences. They’ve only recently started to manifest. Things are going to get very bad, and they will stay bad for a very long time. 



Satirical Fare:

White House Clarifies That Biden Only Claimed To Have Cancer Due To His Dementia



Pics of the Week:







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