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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.


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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


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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.



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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.


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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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