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Wednesday, July 6, 2022

2022-07-06

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

Economic and Market Fare:

Malinen: The Economic Growth That Never Was


**** see link for charts
Snider: The Chillingly Realistic Path To Rate Cuts This Year

... Nothing in life—let alone the economy—is inevitable, but the entire global system may have passed that point of no return some time ago before anyone (outside of markets) had realized it.

... Since then, these same markets after having moved on from “if” to “when” are now thinking especially hard about “how bad.” And this is where recent data fits in.

... To begin with, sales of goods were revised downward, while at the same time inventory accumulation was revised upward; basically, the BEA now thinks fewer goods were sold leaving more stuck in the hands of retailers who other data (Census Bureau) conclusively shows are already drowning in stuff, and are increasingly desperate to get out from under it all.

The inevitable result should be a near-term future of discounting and liquidations (falling prices, at least outside of energy for now) of that inventory pile to go along with canceled, cut, and desisted new orders for producers all around the world, domestic and foreign. We’ve seen this take shape already (PMIs have uniformly shown rapid declines in manufacturing order activity).

... What happens if—or when—the aggregate labor situation actually does become meaningfully worse?

... In short, Uncle Sam massively boosted corporate earnings and these companies responded rationally to what was a temporary, one-time gift. They were cautious about rehiring (which is why jobs overall still lag so far behind, not some ridiculous Great Resignation excuse) because the “transitory” supply shock phenomenon isn’t the same thing as real and actual recovery.

... All the preconditions for nasty have been set, met, and made plain by the flow of recent data. Therefore, taking curves more literally, exactly the way in which the inflation-fighting certitude and aggression from the FOMC becomes the meek, embarrassing U-turn (or “pivot,” as the Fed’s apologists prefer) into rate cuts.

This year.


Steve Keen: Paul Krugman reinvents the wheel

..... Krugman’s ignorance of this “historical evidence” is par for the course amongst mainstream, economists: they simply don’t read anything outside the textbooks and papers that their fellow Neoclassical economists write. In fact, Krugman bragged about this disregard for historical evidence in an online fight with me a decade ago, when he said that, when it comes to reading what old economists have written, “I Don’t Care”

..... There’s much more to say about what Phillips was actually trying to achieve with his curve, and how this was ignored by mainstream economists, but I’ll stop with a comparison. Imagine that this same shoddy scholarship applied in physics. “Some old guy called Einstein said that E=MC2! But hey, the 2 is probably a footnote number, I haven’t read his paper anyway, and E=MC is simpler—let’s use that.”


A reader asked that question today. To those unfamiliar with the answer, it might seem shocking: Nobody's.



Tweets of the Week:
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More Charts: 
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Efforts to accommodate the growth in global energy consumption within a fragile biosphere are primarily focused on managing the transition towards a low-carbon energy mix. We show evidence that a more fundamental problem exists through a scaling relation, akin to Kleiber's Law, between society's energy consumption and material stocks. Humanity's energy consumption scales at 0.78 of its material stocks, which implies predictable environmental pressure regardless of the energy mix. If true, future global energy scenarios imply vast amounts of materials and corresponding environmental degradation, which have not been adequately acknowledged. Thus, limits to energy consumption are needed regardless of the energy mix to stabilize human intervention in the biosphere.



Other Fare:

Serious Adverse Events of Special Interest Following mRNA Vaccination in Randomized Trials (preprint)

... The excess risk of serious adverse events of special interest surpassed the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group in both Pfizer and Moderna trials



Pics of the Week:

24 stunning astronomy photographs that will take you to infinity and beyond




Contrarian Perspectives

Extra [i.e. Controversial] Fare:

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


Regular Fare:

Neuberger: Democratic Voters Have Some Stepping Up to Do
Establishment leaders keep the system from changing, and “normie voters” keep them in their place

.... To this day, these voters keep Barack Obama rolling in money and cred. They praise him as a hero still instead of holding him up as the smiling anti-populist, anti-black, politician he is.

More recently, Democratic “normie voters” in the South killed the last chance we had of electing someone like Sanders. Were voters led to that point by Party pied pipers like the happily corrupt James Clyburn? Of course they were. And he was highly praised by Party leaders for doing it. ...



Unsustainability Fare:


.... Just as Copernicus' description of the universe was subversive of the traditional or then mainstream view of the universe, the 19 papers I have chosen from Real-World Economics Review archives for this 100th issue are subversive of the traditional view of the economy. The primary basis of their subversion is that they view the economy within a bi-directional causal context and, compared to traditional economics, an infinitely larger one. Most especially, they see a two-way interdependency running between the economy and the biosphere and between the economy and society. Keynes' introduction of macro greatly widened the possible view of causality in economics, but his expansion of economics' conceptual framework was tiny by comparison to what is now required if economists are not to continue to lead humanity toward ultimate catastrophe.


Despite decades of studies and climate summits, greenhouse gas emissions continue to soar. Energy scientist Vaclav Smil says it’s time to stop ricocheting between apocalyptic forecasts and rosy models of rapid CO2 cuts and focus on the difficult task of remaking our energy system.


.... For those who ignore the energetic and material imperatives of our world, those who prefer mantras of green solutions to understanding how we have come to this point, the prescription is easy: just decarbonize — switch from burning fossil carbon to converting inexhaustible flows of renewable energies. But we are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life, and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years.

... Those who chart their preferred paths to a zero-carbon future owe us realistic explanations, not just assumptions

..... It makes no sense to argue with the details of what are essentially the academic equivalents of science fiction. They start with arbitrarily set goals (zero by 2030 or by 2050) and work backward to plug in assumed actions to fit those achievements, with actual socioeconomic needs and technical imperatives being of little, or no, concern.


McGuire: Going under
For anyone living within sight of the sea, the future is looking grim



..... The main problem underlying conventional economics is its reliance on a conceptualization of the economy that deliberately ignores the physical context of which it is necessarily part, including the most elementary laws of physics. This means combating the assumption that resources and energy are unlimited, without even considering the fallout of the activity or the planet’s limited carrying capacity. In view of the hegemonic nature of economic thought and its ability to mold the framework of social thought, this is crucially important, because it makes finding effective solutions to the eco-social crisis virtually impossible.



.............. Nevertheless, most of the analyses carried out have concluded that, in general, no decoupling between economic activity and environmental pressure and impact is happening, and, furthermore, is unlikely to happen at any point. In most cases, no kind of decoupling is taking place with regard to consumption of materials, energy consumption, water use, greenhouse gas emissions, or loss of biodiversity. Where studies have found some evidence of decoupling, it has been based on local analyses, restricted to specific countries or regions, for short periods of time (during a crisis, for example) or on an insufficient scale to tackle the ecological challenges.26

It is obvious that strategies to increase technological efficiency must be complemented with sufficiency strategies, that is, with a reduction in the material scale of production and consumption in many sectors so that economic activity can fit within the planetary boundaries. This is where the proposals for degrowth have emerged most forcefully. Degrowth began as a political and social movement and should not be understood either as an economic concept or as a consistently structured theory, but as a broad, heterogeneous stream of thinkers and proposals seeking to ensure development of the global economy within the planet’s biophysical limits. Quite simply, degrowth should be understood as a criticism of the theory of decoupling and green growth, and as an affirmation of the need to reduce the pressure of human beings and their economic model on ecosystems and the natural environment without betting everything on technological promises.

Fifty years since The Limits to Growth, we are now fully aware that the production and consumption model is causing pressure and impacts on the natural environment to such an extent that life itself is threatened. What is lacking, however, is the political will to make decisions equal to that challenge, as the institutional policies followed to date have proven clearly insufficient. Despite the speeches and rhetoric from the governments of the most developed countries, the commitment in the Paris Agreement not to raise the global temperature by more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels is currently undeliverable. ........



... Most people do not understand that the world economy is a physics-based system, powered by energy. If the energy is suddenly much less available, there will be a huge problem. The world economy has been powered by a rapidly growing supply of energy for over 200 years.

My concern is that the current attempt to bring inflation down will lead to falling energy supply and a world economy that is rapidly changing for the worse.

Figure 2. Energy amounts for 2010 and prior equal to those in Figure 1, with a corresponding amount for 2020. Future energy for 2030, 2040 and 2050 are rough estimates based on the observation that the world is now reaching extraction limits for both coal and oil.

Everything I can see says that world leaders are not able to face the possibility that the world is already running seriously short of oil and coal. Future supplies are likely to be much lower, and much more expensive, if they are available at all. Other energy types (including natural gas, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind and solar) are simply add-ons to a system built using coal and oil.

Current world leaders do not realize that the energy situation is very much like the water level in Lake Mead. Looking at it from the top, there still seems to be water there but, in fact, the required depth is lacking. .........

............................................ We don’t really know precisely what lies ahead, and perhaps, this lack of knowledge is for the best. We cannot even imagine a world economy changing rapidly for the worse.



... the thing that keeps me shaking my head in baffled fascination is that so many people still think of the twilight of our civilization as something that’s still somewhere off there in the future.  It’s not. We’re around seventeen years into the decline right now, hitting our second round of resource-driven economic crisis—the first was in 2008-2010, in case you didn’t notice—and there are many, many more still to come. The Long Descent is unfolding around us. All those things I’ve been talking about since I started blogging about the future of industrial society?  They’re here, taking shape right before our eyes.

................... Back before the beginning of the industrial age, fossil fuels were far and away the most concentrated energy source on this planet.  Now that we’re beginning to run low, we’re stuck with a civilization and a technological infrastructure that requires gargantuan inputs of concentrated energy, and that’s just what we don’t have enough of any more. We’ve invested fantastic amounts of wealth, resources, labor, genius, and emotional commitment into a technological structure with a short shelf life, and that’s left us hopelessly unprepared to make the transition to societies, technologies, and lifestyles that can get by on the modest energy supply we’ll have left when it’s over.

.... Can we prevent that? Not this late in the game. We could have managed a soft landing if the first tentative movements toward a sustainable society in the 1970s had been followed up, but that didn’t happen. We might have been able to cushion the process to some extent if the warnings of the peak oil movement in the first decade of this century had gotten a fair hearing, but that didn’t happen either.  At this point we’re closing in on the end of our second decade of decline.  The truck is picking up speed as it heads down the hill and there are no brakes.


***** Murphy: The Ride of Our Lives

How much time do we spend fretting over the course we take as a human species? Granted, perhaps too few are focused on ultimate success, which I define as long-term sustainable living as a subordinate partner to all of life on Planet Earth. Even for those who do concern themselves with the intermediate and far future, attention tends to focus on what adjustments we can make to steer a safer course. Yet, when have we ever truly steered our path as a species? Are we actually in control at all? I’ll argue that we’ve never really been in the driver’s seat on the decisions that have mattered most. Our path has been more like an amusement park ride equipped with an ornamental steering wheel, giving the adorable tykes an intoxicating but illusory sense of control. ...

...... No Agency

In this light, we can see that we never sat around a table and debated whether to use fire, agriculture, science, fossil fuels, technology, or capitalism. Sure, we had discussions, and may fool ourselves into thinking we were in control—yet another facet of our human exceptionalism. But it wasn’t a true choice, in that those opting out are either gone or not faring well in our current global civilization. So it can seem in hindsight like a series of deliberate moves that put us on the “right” track—where “right” just means “current,” possibly translating to “disastrous.”

... Today, markets and financial systems obligate the victors of this world to pursue short term returns, robbing humanity of the opportunity to exercise wisdom or consider the far future.  As an illustration, Bret Stephens of the New York Times disappointingly asserted that “Democrats need to figure out a set of climate-change policies that don’t threaten people’s wallets, jobs or businesses.” Those are indeed the elements firmly clutching the steering wheel, navigating a route to failure by naively inverting the hierarchy of artificial systems with respect to biophysical reality—as if proclaiming that nature dare not impose bounds on our ambitions and ideals.  Such tantrums demand Immediate “empty calorie” gains that in practice out-compete more rational approaches. 

.... Continuing the raft metaphor, we can think of the agricultural shift as people stepping onto a raft on a slow, gentle stream. The choice conferred some modest advantage at first, traveling toward resource security more swiftly than would be possible by bushwhacking along the shore. But it was still possible to safely hop back and forth between the shore and raft for a time. Eventually, those who stayed on the raft got ahead of the shore-bound folks. The stream joined another and picked up speed—now undoubtedly superior to travel along the shore. The larger stream, joined by other branches, became a small river. Fast-forward to today, and we find ourselves bumping along on a class-5 rapid. It’s exhilarating, more than a touch dangerous, and unbelievably fast.

Since the acceleration to our current breakneck speed has taken many generations, most perceive this insane condition as being normal, and don’t give much thought to the situation. Yet, we owe it all to an extravagant one-time spree of inheritance spending: a fireworks show, made possible by our fossil fuel suit. Some attempt to better contextualize our situation by casting their gaze upstream toward our history, asking how each “decision” at each confluence led us to this impressive state. Many imagine that the ride only gets more exciting. In a sense, they may be right—in that we likely face a waterfall ahead that is unsurvivable in our primitive raft. Not everyone agrees that there’s a waterfall: we haven’t had one yet (ignoring previous civilization collapses in tributaries to our river). While some look to the past and use this as a basis for extrapolation, most simply look within the raft (consumed by culture, human affairs) or over the immediate edge (hey look: there’s a fish!). The waterfall is not obvious from our low perch in the churning water. But it is not really that hard to see the mist and discern an approaching roar.

Techno-optimists might suggest retrofitting our raft with thrusters so that we can take to the air as we cross the waterfall’s edge. At least that approach acknowledges the waterfall, but let’s be more realistic. A friend suggested that we really need to throw a line to the shore, but lack any rope in our raft. We have to make a rope out of materials on hand. Well, we could use our own hair! This is apt, because getting out of our current situation will involve pain and sacrifice. Are we capable of it? Do we even have time? .....



.......................... This is a chart you should spend time with, till it soaks into your emotional bones. Look at the shape of those curves.

This is civilization collapse. It is going to be very bad, much worse than most people expect.

The collapse has begun, worldwide. It’s not evenly distributed, but it’s here.

We are post peak. Plan accordingly



...... On Twitter, writer and climate activist, Dave Rhody, supplied the usual, wistful, climate red herring:

‘galvanizing fear into action is a tall order for most people. Looking away is the most common reaction, unfortunately’.

This just isn’t true. State-corporate interests generate and galvanise public fear into action with great efficiency when they want to. We need only think of World Wars I and II when millions of people were mobilised to kill and be killed to defend ‘democracy’, the ‘Fatherland’, the ‘Motherland’. 


***** Cory Doctorow: The Swerve

We’re all trapped on a bus.
The bus is barreling towards a cliff.
Beyond the cliff is a canyon plunge any of us will be lucky to survive.
Even if we survive, none of us know how we’ll climb out of that deep canyon.
Some of us want to yank the wheel.
The bus is going so fast that yanking the wheel could cause the bus to roll.
There might be some broken bones.
There might be worse than broken bones.
The driver won’t yank the wheel.
The people in expensive front row seats agree.
“Yank the wheel? Are you crazy? Someone could break a leg!”
We say, “But there’s a cliff! We’re going to go over the cliff! We’re going to die!”
“Nonsense,” they say. “Long before we go over the cliff, we’ll have figured out how to put wings on this bus.”
We argue.
They add, “Besides, who’s to say we’ll fall off the cliff? Maybe we’ll be going so fast that we leap the canyon. Fonzie did it! Calm down. Hey! Keep your hands off the wheel? What are you, a terrorist? Don’t you dare do that again. Someone could get really badly hurt.”

The climate emergency is real and we are living through it. As I write this, I’ve emailed some writer friends in the southwest to ask if the fires threaten them or their homes. One hasn’t answered yet. The other wrote back to say they’re fine, but what about the wildfires near my house?

Oh, I wrote. We’re fine. So far. California is in for a hell of a wildfire season. It’s dry out there. It’s an emergency. Officially.

(It was an emergency before, but that was unofficial)

We’re not acting like it’s an emergency. ......

.... People are already getting really badly hurt, and it’s only going to get worse. We’re poised to break through key planetary boundaries – loss of biosphere diversity, ocean acidification, land poisoning – whose damage will be global, profound and sustained. Once we rupture these boundaries, we have no idea how to repair them. None of our current technologies will suffice, nor will any of the technologies we think we know how to make or might know how to make.

These boundaries are the point of no return, the point at which it won’t mat­ter if we yank the wheel, because the bus is going over the cliff, swerve or no.

Focus on the swerve.

Believe it or not, the swerve is a happy ending. This is a hopeful article. Here’s what I hope we can do: I hope we can swerve. 

A couple decades ago, the swerve might have been avoid­able. It was 1977 when Exxon’s own scientists concluded that their products would render the planet uninhabitable for humans. Exxon knew. They buried the research and paid for denial.

George H.W. Bush came into office in 1988 as the “Environ­mental President.” He campaigned on “conven[ing] a global conference on the environment at the White House. It will include the Soviets, the Chinese… The agenda will be clear. We will talk about global warming.” By 1992, he abandoned the idea of the US retooling to avert the catastrophe. “The American way of life,” he told the Rio Earth Summit, “is not up for negotiations. Period.”

If we’d started in 1977, we might have paid some civil engineers to build a bridge over the cliff. In 1988, it was still entirely possible. In 1992, the option was still there.

Today, time has run out for bridges.

All we’ve got left is the swerve. .........


Over the next six months, the defense community should champion and help plan a whole-of-society “hyper-response.”

Why hasn’t humanity responded to climate change—currently on track to produce global catastrophe—with the same intensity in which we respond to military threats? And is there a way to reorient the defense sector to enable and support a whole-of-society effort to protect our planet’s ability to support life as we know it?

One barrier is the way we think. Research finds that humanity’s “deep frames”—worldviews wired into our neural circuity over a lifetime, and which influence perception and decision-making at the sub-conscious level—hinder our capacity to understand new kinds of threats. These frames, often reinforced by those they benefit, influence security posture and institutional design.

This helps explain why the climate crisis is generally approached as a scientific, economic, and governance issue. IPCC reports employ social scientists, not security practitioners, to tease out climate-security issues. Legitimate concerns about securitization help ensure that climate response remains a strictly civil matter.

In the security sector itself, thinking about climate change is dominated by Sherri Goodman’s original framing of global warming as a “threat multiplier” introduced in a 2007 CNA report. For example, John Conger, a former Pentagon comptroller who now leads the Center for Climate and Security, writes that global warming is one ingredient of many risk factors; it “amplifies” other threats but is not the threat. Likewise, NATO’s brand-new 2022 Strategic Concept describes climate as both a “challenge” and a “threat multiplier,” last in a list of 14 security concerns.

Consequently, defense forces the world over are ambling toward lower-emission technologies, preparing for more natural disasters, and debating the near-term consequences of a degrading global-security environment. These debates miss the main point: that we are moving toward “a shift to a climate inhospitable for most forms of life” that will bring ecological collapse, violence, hardship, and death on nearly unimaginable scales.

Is there another way? What if the security sector could be persuaded to think of climate change as the central threat? Could it help chart a pathway to a safe planet?

A new approach called PLAN E frames climate and environmental issues not as an influence upon the threat environment, but as the main threat—indeed, a new kind dubbed the hyperthreat—subjected to a military-style analysis and response-planning process. The rationale for this approach and the methods used are outlined in the Spring 2022 issue of the Journal of Advanced Military Studies. To prompt broader imagining of what a new threat posture could look like, Marine Corps University has published a notional PLAN E grand strategy. ....


...


Pandemania 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


We need wide distribution for this.


I mean, no thank you.


Comprehensive reasons why the U.S. FDA decision authorizing COVID vaccinations in infants and young children must not happen in the UK.


Oehler: New Brunswick's MADS
Mysterious Adult Death Syndrome

An updated Statistics Canada report Thursday showing an estimated 4,599 people died in the province during the final 25 weeks of 2021, 886 more than long-term averages for that time of year after adjusting for population growth and aging. New Brunswick officially recorded just 114 deaths from COVID during the 25 week period under scrutiny. It is a death rate 23.9 per cent above normal, the highest rate of "excess mortality" among provinces over that period.
How big is the 23% excess mortality? Davison of OneAmerica’s group life policy holders said “a 1 in 200-year catastrophe would likely only cause a 10 percent increase [in all-cause mortality]”. So is it one in 10,000 years event? Try to explain this away, CBC!


People are fretting about re-introducing masks, but not about thousands of non-Covid excess deaths.

...... People are labouring under the illusion of control. Infections are frightening, and it is comforting for people to think that the ritualised wearing of a mask will help, in the same way as people invest faith in rosaries, or crossing their fingers, or not walking under ladders.

Masks also provide a signal, by appealing to ‘norms’ and social conformity. The behavioural psychologists love masks. They believe they promote collectivism, the feeling that we are all ‘in it together’

...... The idea that masks work is lodged in some people’s brains and they can’t change tack. They are trapped by their own confirmation bias. (I’m sure they would say the same to me, but I think my mind could be changed with hard evidence. I’m still waiting.) I imagine it would be very difficult now for people who pushed for restrictions and masks to change their minds at this stage.

... But there is an urgent health situation that too few people are talking about. Non-Covid excess deaths are worryingly high. In the last week’s reported ONS data, there were 10,836 deaths in England and Wales in total. Covid was the cause of 166 of them and involved (mentioned but not main cause) in a further 119. The concerning part is that this total is a staggering 1,432 deaths above the five year 2015-2019 average.

Deaths registered in May 2022 were 5,873 above the average seen pre-pandemic in 2015-2019. Of those 4,357 were not due to Covid. Of the main causes of death, heart disease had the largest number of deaths above average.

If these excess deaths were due to Covid, it would have been all over the media. You would not be able to avoid red graphs, blaring headlines, panicked demands for restrictions, so why is no one talking about these non-Covid deaths? Although the causes are multi-factorial, these deaths are inconvenient and cast blame on lockdowns and the quality of healthcare.

Some sort of madness has taken hold of people if they are fretting about re-introducing masks for Covid and not worried about the excess thousands of non-Covid deaths.


With a fantastic set of authors

... Even Professor Francois Balloux, a self-described COVID “centrist,” who is rarely prone to extreme declarations or hyperbole, admitted recently that the masking of young children is “the most bizarre public health policy ever:”


Mask Usefulness Myth: Nature has already given us an air filtration system that is optimised for our bodies and for respiration. Fooling around with it is lunacy.

............................ Frankly, the only time a mask can potentially be useful is when you are truly sick, you can’t stay at home for a reason and you don’t want to contaminate with high inocula people around you. This is the Japanese model many have been mis-interpreting. You can’t guarantee to not infect someone else when you go to work sick, but you limit the damage to the maximum. But frankly, if one is sick (by definition with symptoms), one stays home. In other words, there’s no need for a mask.


This is the new ‘right way’ to think about vaccinations...

Despite increasingly compelling data and peer reviewed studies coming out detailing the harms and side-effects of vaccinations, Canada’s Liberal-Socialist coalition government is doubling down on vaccinations, and appear ready move the goalposts on what constitutes vaccine compliance.


***** Eisenstein: Pandemania, Part 1

Oh my goodness. The social illness that the pandemic launched into its active phase is far from over. ...

.... The social illness I speak of was not Covid per se, but our response to it. I will call the illness pandemania—a social, psychological, and political derangement that caused much more harm than the disease itself, and continues to do so. Like Covid itself, which kills people indirectly by provoking a cytokine storm, the pandemic provoked a socio-political tempest far out of proportion to its epidemiological danger.1 And, like an opportunistic germ that reveals and exploits an underlying imbalance, Covid landed on a social tissue already severely diseased.

..... It isn’t that we are vindictive. It is tempting just to let everyone forget the whole thing. To let people forget that they excluded, denounced, canceled, censored, and ostracized us. I am willing to let bygones be bygones, except for one thing: How are we to know it won't happen again? Partly it’s a matter of PTSD: I don't feel very safe among these people. But more important than my own comfort or safety is what kind of world my descendants will live in. As George Santayana famously wrote, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. I fear the possibility that pandemania will become permanent, woven into our social and political institutions, our habits, taboos, and norms. ...

.... Obviously, on a collective level we have a long way to go. In fact, the harm has only subsided, not ceased. The authorities have not changed at all—all four signs are starkly visible. Many in the Covid dissident community expect a renewed attempt to impose medical totalitarianism come the fall. I am not so sure. The abuse may take a new form. Covid was a test-drive for technologies of control and habits of submission that can be applied outside the pandemic context. All that is required is to direct the attention of the mob onto a new threat and a new enemy-in-our-midst. ...



Charts:

*** check out link for good charts on country-by-country comparisons on various measures, including covid restriction stringency and economic outcomes

e.g.



CO-VIDs of the Week:
...
...



COVID Conspiracy Fare:


.... Jeffrey Sachs is the ultimate insider, the golden boy that capital can always turn to in order to make things right so that they can return to conquest (while feeling great about it).

So of course The Lancet named Sachs to head its blue ribbon commission to look into and cover up the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

Well, apparently the lies about SARS-CoV-2 were too much even for Dr. Sachs and at a recent conference he revealed that the best evidence points to SARS-CoV-2 originating from a bio(weapons) lab — IN THE UNITED STATES!

Like the horror movie cliché, the call is coming from inside the house.

.. Sachs is presumably referring to the Baric Lab at the University of North Carolina but there could be many other suspects.

This is a massive story — literally the story of the century — that the mainstream media will completely ignore and censor as they have done with nearly all important news since the start of the pandemic.

But even with this massive revelation, the story of the origins of SARS-CoV-2 still does not add up. .....



SARS-CoV-2 was not the product of natural zoonosis. It was not the product of an accidental lab leak, either. It was the product of deliberate, willful bioterrorism by what I've come to call the Biodefense Mafia.

This Biodefense Mafia grew out of an expansion of USAID, DARPA, BARDA, and DTRA-affiliated civilian biolabs, both in the US and elsewhere, thanks to the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program and Robert Kadlec's expansion of biodefense after Amerithrax. That initial expansion of the Biodefense Mafia involved Kadlec awarding rigged contracts to Fuad El-Hibri's company, BioPort, for anthrax vaccines. BioPort was a spinoff of DynPort, which, in turn, was spun off from the American mercenary company DynCorp in a partnership with Porton in the UK.

Yes, the same DynCorp that Kathryn Bolkovac blew the whistle on in Bosnia for sex trafficking of young girls, the same DynCorp that continued to receive US State Department contracts even after soliciting “dancing boys” in Afghanistan, and the same DynCorp whose OV-10 Bronco turboprops loaned from the US State Department for coca eradication crop dusting with RoundUp in Colombia happened to have the same tail number as a helicopter mentioned in Jeffrey Epstein's flight logs, N474AW, on one of the aircraft.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Robert Kadlec again awarded rigged contracts for COVID-19 vaccines to Fuad El-Hibri and Emergent BioSolutions, which is what BioPort renamed themselves to. Emergent BioSolutions came under fire due to the scandalous condition of their vaccine manufacturing facilities and the poor quality-control practices exercised there. ...


*** go to the link if only to see the screenshots of ridiculous MSM articles
Rigger: Sudden Article Derangement Syndrome (SADS)




Back to Non-Pandemic Fare:

GeoPolitical Fare:

Exclusive documents and interviews reveal the sweeping scope of classified 127e operations.





Orwellian Fare:

A German independent journalist reporting from Ukraine is facing charges back home for allegedly spreading Russian propaganda by speaking to residents in the contested Donbas region.


“You are now my Enemy—and I am Yours.”

.... As strangely low an ethical standard as it was, the days of “Don’t be evil” appear to have been left far behind. Big Tech platforms now routinely side with raw state and corporate power, showing a disregard bordering on outright disdain for the rights and welfare of the human beings whom their actions affect. The recent history of Big Tech is a history of repeated usurpations, all demonstrating as their direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over the people.

Big Tech platforms openly disavow any role in abiding by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, to which all American citizens owe a duty and to which any person who chooses to become an American citizen must swear an oath to uphold and defend. They censor centuries-old news organizations for publishing true, factual, and timely information.

Big Tech platforms routinely censor the legal speech of citizens, concealing the rationale behind their decisions and applying their terms of service selectively, if at all. They mislead the public as to the scale and scope of this censorship, systematically silencing the most articulate voices on one side of any given debate unbeknownst to the vast majority of the public.

Big Tech platforms openly collude with governments to suppress the speech of their own people, while overtly abusing the legal system and paying massive settlements to conceal the evidence of their collusion. They craft the false illusion of consensus on political issues of their own choosing, a power unprecedented in our democracy and historically held only by the most despotic regimes, promising in every instance to wield it for good, but falling short every time. ....





CaitOz Fare:

********** Information Anarchism

Our civilization is built upon lies and obfuscation to such an extent that advocating for transparency and the democratization of information can be a complete political ideology, all by itself.

Rather than claiming to know what’s best for society (whether we should move left or right, whether we should espouse this model or that model), it is perfectly legitimate to simply support giving humanity the information tools necessary to know the truth about what’s happening so that they can collectively determine for themselves what direction to take.

This would mean supporting the end of the mass-scale manipulations and obfuscations used by the powerful to influence the way the public thinks, acts and votes, and it would mean giving them the democratic infrastructure to steer their civilization in response to the true information they’ve got access to.

It would mean supporting the end of government secrecy and advocating transparency for any institution with any degree of power over the people. The more power and influence they have, the more transparency should be required of them, whether they be governmental, corporate, or financial institutions. .....



It is good that the last two US presidents have been slobbering idiots with holes in their brains. You never want the world’s most evil government to have a charming face.

❖

The correct response to “Ah shit the ecosystem is dying” is not “therefore we’d better entrust ruling power structures with even more power so they can fix it,” it’s “therefore we’d better overthrow the ruling power structures whose madness created this problem so we can fix it.”



..... Obviously American weapons of war kill far more people overseas than they do domestically, and those killings are done in wars of aggression for power and profit which are sold to the public with lies and propaganda, so they’ve got no higher moral standing than the killings of any mass shooter. But because the Democratic Party exists only to kill leftward movement in the United States and ensure the continual functioning of a globe-spanning empire, gun violence is seen at its highest echelons not as a moral issue which should be opposed everywhere but as a wedge issue which should be exploited for campaign donations.

We saw this illustrated in a notorious 2017 tweet from now-US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigeig which said, “I did not carry an assault weapon around a foreign country so I could come home and see them used to massacre my countrymen.”

Silly Republicans! Assault weapons are for killing foreign kids!

.... We saw this “those bullets belong in foreign bodies” Democratic talking point seeded way back in 2013 by that masterful empire manager Barack Obama. ...

... That’s the face of the Nice Guy Empire, also known as the rules-based international order, also known as the liberal world order, also known as the US-led world order. It presents the facade of humanitarianism and democratic ideals, but underneath the performance it’s just as savage and bloodthirsty as any other empire in history.



Other Quotes of the Week:

Astore: Welcome to “extreme life,” as Tom Engelhardt notes today at TomDispatch.com. And while his article focuses mainly on soaring temperatures and extreme weather due to climate change, he starts by noting how the Supreme Court struck down the New York law that restricted the carrying of concealed firearms. Yes, America today is “packing heat” in more ways than one. Rising temperatures, soaring gun sales, more and more mass shootings, increasing alienation and unease: these times aren’t just “interesting,” as the alleged Chinese curse goes, they truly are increasingly extreme


Yves: It looks as if John Helmer could create a new sideline in eviscerating books by self-styled Western experts on Russia…that rely heavily on other self-styled Western experts who don’t know all that much about the subject at hand but gossip convincingly. Here the object of inquiry is Vladimir Putin and the experts consist heavily of spooks.


Ilargi: Myocarditis cases in USA, Ages 12-20:
2019: 16
2020: 9
2021: 2,301



Long Reads / Big Thoughts:

(The Right Wing of the Leftwaffe)

I keep coming back to the infamous “Yale Halloween Incident” because it was something of a watershed moment for me. It was the first inkling I had that the wheels on the shopping trolley of society had gone a bit wonky.

................. Awesome, I thought, I really have to find out more about this nutjob. I do quite enjoy seeing crazy people say crazy things - it’s an eccentricity of mine. Just like I thoroughly enjoy conspiracy theories. It’s fun.

...... Yet this curious mythology seemed to emerge where Peterson was reviled, on the “left”, as some sort of demonic mad evil person. I experienced this myself. During a family meal at a restaurant I happened to mention Peterson in a neutral to positive light. I can’t remember why, or what we were discussing at the time, but I can tell you I would have had a better reaction had I dropped my trousers and laid a fresh one on the table.

It was a kind of Peterson Derangement Syndrome every bit as real as TDS. Of course, none of those present at the table could actually provide any example of anything Peterson had said that was hateful or extreme. They’d been ‘programmed’ into a certain response that had become instinctual - a kind of Pavlovian angst.

.... There have always been disagreements, different ways of seeing things, heated arguments and a whole variety of beliefs and ethical priorities. And long may that continue - it’s in the crucible of argument that new ideas are formed. But I’m seeing an apparent rigidity and extremity now that I don’t think was as prevalent in recent previous decades.



[Not] Satirical Fare:

Tweet Vids of the Week:

must see idiocy:

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