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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: 
1:





(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







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