Jan 072023
 
 January 7, 2023  Posted by at 9:30 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,


Pablo Picasso Interieur au Pot de Fleurs 1953

 

Ukraine On ‘NATO Mission’ – Defense Minister (RT)
Ukrainian Political Scientist: Putin Needs Truce To Prepare New Offensive (Az.)
US To Send Ukraine Dozens Of Bradleys In $2.85b Aid Package (RT)
US To Arm Kiev With Sea Sparrows – Politico (RT)
WWIII HAS BEGUN: Medvedev Wants Hypersonic Missiles Near Washington (Celente)
McCarthy Elected House Speaker After Last-minute Call From Trump To Gaetz (PM)
Senators Make New Demand Regarding FBI, Hunter Biden, Obama White House (CB)
2 Yrs After Jan. 6: 1,000 Arrests; Zero ‘Insurrection’ Charges (Attkisson)
Jan. 6 Comm. Releases Social Security Numbers Of Trump Officials, Allies (Fox)
Adam Schiff’s Assault on the First Amendment (BB)
Ted Cruz Slams Joe Biden for Turning Pharmacies Into Abortion Centers (LN)
Biden Spokeswoman Blames Trump Ahead Of Border Visit (Fox)
Repentance (Kunstler)

 

 

 

 

VSRF

 

 

 

 

‘Unavoidably Unsafe’
https://twitter.com/i/status/1610373150767824901

 

 

Disturbing trend

 

 

 

 

 

 

What? Has NATO denounced this? Since when can NATO not do its own business?

Ukraine On ‘NATO Mission’ – Defense Minister (RT)

Kiev is shedding blood to carry out the mission NATO set for itself and expects the “civilized West” to provide weapons and ammunition in return, Ukrainian Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov has said in an interview for a domestic TV channel. Appearing on the 1+1 network’s TSN channel on Thursday evening, Reznikov pointed out that at the Madrid summit last summer, NATO declared Russia the greatest threat to the US-led bloc. “Today, Ukraine is addressing that threat. We’re carrying out NATO’s mission today, without shedding their blood. We shed our blood, so we expect them to provide weapons,” he said.

Reznikov also claimed that his NATO colleagues have told him, both in conversations and via text messages, that Ukraine is the “shield of civilization” and “defending the entire civilized world, the entire West.” Ukrainian officials, from President Vladimir Zelensky on down, routinely make public appeals for tanks, missiles, artillery and ammunition. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu told the General Staff in December that Moscow was de facto fighting the collective West. By his estimates, the government in Kiev has received almost $100 billion worth of weapons, ammunition and other supplies in 2022 alone. Reznikov has led that effort, boasting to the US outlet Politico in October that he had figured out the Pentagon’s political process. His goal, he said, was to keep raising the bar until Ukraine received main battle tanks.

While that particular threshold has yet to be crossed, on Friday Washington announced the delivery of 50 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, the most modern armor sent to Kiev so far, as part of a $3 billion weapons package. Earlier this week, France pledged a number of wheeled ‘light tanks’ as well. These shipments are intended to replace Ukraine’s battlefield losses. Last month, Kiev’s top general Valery Zaluzhny told The Economist he would need 300 more tanks, up to 700 infantry fighting vehicles, and 500 howitzers to conduct offensive operations. This is more than the number of such vehicles in British or German inventory. Moscow insists that Western weapon deliveries only serve to prolong the conflict, and has repeatedly warned Ukraine’s backers that this could result in an all-out military confrontation between Russia and NATO.

Read more …

Yeah, Putin needs just 36 hours for that.

Ukrainian Political Scientist: Putin Needs Truce To Prepare New Offensive (Az.)

On January 5, Vladimir Putin instructed the Russian Defense Ministry to introduce a ceasefire along the entire line of contact from 12:00 on January 6 to 24:00 on January 7. Kyiv rejected this proposal, calling it a cover and declaring Russia’s intention to bring equipment, ammunition and military personnel closer to the positions of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The Ukrainian political scientist believes that Vladimir Putin needs this truce in order to prepare a new offensive in Ukraine by February-March. “Russia is now short of shells, and for them this truce was necessary,” Reichel said. According to him, Russia now has only one option for a mediator in the person of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, because Western leaders will not talk with Putin: “Negotiations with China made it clear that the country wants to distance itself from the conflict without providing special support either to Russia or to Ukraine.


India is not up to the war in Ukraine now, it already has so many internal and external problems with Pakistan and China. Therefore, Erdogan is now the only person with whom Moscow can talk and whom Kyiv can listen to. Using his mediating experience Turkiye has offered Russia the idea of a truce, thereby taking a step towards future negotiations, in which Putin is very interested,” he added. According to the expert, it was immediately obvious that Kyiv would not agree to a truce. “This truce is nothing but a political cover, Ukraine does not need it,” he said. Yuri Reichel explains this by the fact that any truce is beneficial for Russia, which is now trying to accumulate certain reserves in the Donbas, Zaporizhzhia in order to prevent a possible Ukrainian offensive, which, according to Western and Ukrainian experts, is being prepared in February-March.

Read more …

Do US taxpayers now pay twice for these obsolete machines?

US To Send Ukraine Dozens Of Bradleys In $2.85b Aid Package (RT)

The U.S. will send Ukraine nearly $3 billion in military aid, in a massive new package that will for the first time include several dozen Bradley fighting vehicles, U.S. officials said Thursday, in the Biden administration’s latest step to send increasingly lethal and powerful weapons to help Ukraine beat back Russian forces, according to AP. European allies also stepped up their weapons commitments. Germany announced it will provide armored personnel carriers and a Patriot missile battery to Ukraine, and France said it will soon hold talks to arrange for the delivery of armored combat vehicles.


All of the announcements, however, fall short of sending heavier battle tanks, which are more complex to use and have a longer-range gun. The Bradley, an armored carrier used to transport troops to combat, is not a tank but is known as a “tank-killer” because of the anti-tank missile it can fire. The latest U.S. aid — totaling about $2.85 billion and about 50 Bradleys — is the largest in a series of packages of military equipment that the Pentagon has pulled from its stockpiles to send to Ukraine. It is aimed at getting as much to the Ukrainian forces as possible during the winter months, before spring sets in and an expected increase in fighting begins.

Read more …

“..fitting US-made munitions onto Soviet-made launchers suggests heavy US involvement in such an upgrade..”

US To Arm Kiev With Sea Sparrows – Politico (RT)

The US may supply Ukraine with RIM-7 Sea Sparrow short-range anti-aircraft missiles, Politico reported on Thursday, citing unnamed officials. The missiles are expected to be fitted onto Soviet-made Buk launchers in an attempt to mitigate a shortage of munitions for the systems remaining in Kiev’s inventory. The missiles, developed in the early 1960s, are expected to be included in a new upcoming military aid package to prop up Ukraine in the ongoing conflict with Russia. “The package will for the first time include radar-guided Sea Sparrow anti-air missiles, which can be launched from the sea or on land to intercept aircraft or cruise missiles. In a bit of battlefield innovation, the Ukrainian military has managed to tweak its existing Soviet-era Buk launchers to fire the Sea Sparrow,” the outlet wrote, citing “two people familiar with the matter.”

Politico did not explain how Kiev came up with this “battlefield innovation,” but given that Ukraine has never been in possession of RIM-7 missiles, fitting US-made munitions onto Soviet-made launchers suggests heavy US involvement in such an upgrade. The missiles in question had previously been successfully fitted onto the Kub anti-aircraft launchers, the predecessor of the Buk system, in a collaboration between Raytheon and the Polish defense manufacturer WZU Sa. The upgrade to Soviet-made launchers was first unveiled in the early 2010s.

The inclusion of unspecified “surface-to-air” missiles into the new massive $3 billion aid package for Ukraine was confirmed by White House officials during a news briefing on Friday. In recent months, Western backers of Kiev have intensified their efforts to bolster Kiev’s anti-aircraft defenses, struggling to deal with a ramped-up bombing campaign against critical Ukrainian infrastructure launched by Moscow in the aftermath of the Crimean Bridge blast. Recent deliveries to Ukraine have included US-made short-range NASAMS systems, German IRIS-T air defense systems, while at least one battery of the US Patriot system, the backbone of NATO’s anti-aircraft defense, is expected to be transferred to Kiev in the near future.

Read more …

Seems a bit overdone.

WWIII HAS BEGUN: Medvedev Wants Hypersonic Missiles Near Washington (Celente)

Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chairman of Russia’s national security council, on Thursday called for Moscow’s hypersonic Zircon missiles to be placed about 100 miles off of the coast of the U.S. in retaliation for Washington’s support of Ukraine. He called for these missiles to be in close striking distance to Washington, D.C. and called them a New Year gift. Business Insider reported that the Kremlin announced Wednesday that it will sail the Admiral Gorshkov warship armed with the Zircons “on a long-range voyage that would pass through the Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, and Mediterranean Sea.” The ship is one of Russia’s most advanced warships. In 2019, the ship docked at a Havana, Cuba, the port.


The AP reported at the time: All of the Russian naval missions to Cuba have been seen as a projection of military power close to U.S. shores, although neither Cuba nor Russian have described them as anything other than routine. His threat came after a U.S. embassy video emerged that supported Russians who oppose the war in Ukraine, Reuters reported. We reported in May that Moscow said it successfully fired its Zircon from a warship in the Barents Sea that traveled 625 miles and hit its target in the White Sea. The missile can reportedly travel nine times the speed of sound. In April, Russia also successfully test fired its new Sarmat superheavy Intercontinental Ballistic Missile that can reportedly deploy 10 or more nuclear warheads on each missile.

Read more …

Theater.

McCarthy Elected House Speaker After Last-minute Call From Trump To Gaetz (PM)

California Rep. Kevin McCarthy won a late night vote to become Speaker of the House on Friday night after Donald Trump called Matt Gaetz, a source familiar with the situation confirmed to The Post Millennial. Gaetz was leading the charge to oppose McCarthy along with Rep Lauren Boebert, and had opposed McCarthy in nearly every vote since Monday. This after McCarthy made major concessions to the 20 GOP holdouts who spent the week vocally opposing his leadership. Those concessions, however, were not as key as the head of the MAGA movement insisting its members stop rejecting the victory of a GOP-led House.


The final vote saw the hold-outs Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Andy Biggs, Crane, Good and Rosenthal not stand in the way of McCarthy’s leadership This after a vote earlier on Friday saw the flip of 14 in the GOP who had been consistently voting against his speakership. Florida’s freshman Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna posted some of the concessions made by McCarthy. She had offered her vote for McCarthy on Friday, making a note in the House of the successful negotiations between the Trump-backed speaker hopeful from California and the MAGA contingent.

Read more …

What investigations will we see?

Senators Make New Demand Regarding FBI, Hunter Biden, Obama White House (CB)

Two GOP senators who have been investigating alleged Biden family corruption for years have stepped up their efforts. After Facebook and Twitter suppressed, to an extent, explosive revelations about Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020, Republican Sens. Charles Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin want more answers. Grassley and Johnson have sent a letter to Zuckerberg noting that in October 2020, “when the New York Post published articles based on evidence from Hunter Biden’s laptop, many news and social media organizations inappropriately rushed to censor and discredit the initial reporting and falsely labeled it as ‘disinformation.’” Mainstream media outlets have finally admitted that the information gleaned from the laptop was not Russian disinformation but was in fact real.

“You recently appeared to indicate that the reason why Facebook made the unwise decision to censor articles about Hunter Biden’s laptop was based on an alert from the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the senators wrote. Whistleblowers have also alleged to Senator Johnson that local FBI leadership instructed its employees not to look at the Hunter Biden laptop immediately after the FBI had obtained it,” the senators noted further, going on to say that Americans “deserve to know whether the FBI used Facebook as part of their alleged plan to discredit information about Hunter Biden.” “Congress and the American people require clarity with respect to the extent the FBI communicated with Facebook during the 2020 election about Hunter Biden-related information,” they added.

Expected incoming House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan believes there’s been a seismic shift regarding the ongoing federal investigation of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden. The Ohio Republican suggested “something is up” with the probe because of a new interest in the story by many of the same media outlets that initially dismissed reports of corruption evidence stemming from materials and emails obtained from a laptop he reportedly abandoned at a computer repair store in Delaware in 2019. “It sure looks like Joe Biden was involved,” Jordan added. “So, my, how this story has changed. And now, we find out these text messages and emails that link the entire family, not just Hunter and Joe and — but also uncle, the — Joe’s brother, James Biden, is involved in this as well.”

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“..there was no evidence proving that Byrd did not fear that Babbitt could kill him..”

2 Yrs After Jan. 6: 1,000 Arrests; Zero ‘Insurrection’ Charges (Attkisson)

Two years after the January 6 pro-Trump rally and Capitol riots, the Dept. of Justice has charged nearly 1,000 people with crimes. However, nobody has been formally accused of “sedition,” “treason,” or “insurrection,” according to officials. Sedition is defined as: Conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of a state or monarch. Insurrection is defined as: A violent uprising against a government or authority. Treason is defined as: Betrayal of one’s own country by attempting to overthrow the government through waging war against the state or materially aiding its enemies. The closest related charge made is “seditious conspiracy,” which is planning or plotting with at least one other person to incite rebellion against the authority; not necessarily, personally, committing an act of sedition.

Several suspects pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy. At least one of them, a member of the “Oath Keepers” group, was not present at the US Capitol on January 6. To date, it is inaccurate and arguably libelous to refer to January 6 defendants as “insurrectionists.” Most of the defendants, approximately 860, are charged with entering or remaining in a restricted federal building or grounds. Typically, when Congress is conducting business on the House or Senate floor, the public has a right to enter the US Capitol and watch the proceedings. However, members of the public were blocked from attending on January 6, and there would not have been space for the many thousands to observe in the normal gallery seats. So far, the Dept. of Justice reports, about 192 people have been sentenced to jail or prison.

Officials say 52 people have pleaded guilty to federal charges of assaulting law enforcement officers. The only person shot at the US Capitol on January 6 was an unarmed protester named Ashli Babbitt. The US Capitol Police officer who killed her, Lt. Michael Byrd, was not charged with a crime. Officials kept his identity secret for weeks while they investigated the shooting. Prosecutors eventually found there was no evidence proving that Byrd did not fear that Babbitt could kill him. A shooting by an officer in fear of his life is typically considered to be justified. In an interview, Byrd claimed he’d “saved countless lives” by killing Babbitt, even though Babbitt was unarmed, and there was no evidence she attacked or intended to attack anyone.

July 6th
https://twitter.com/i/status/1611491464537862144

Read more …

“..inadvertently..”

Jan. 6 Comm. Releases Social Security Numbers Of Trump Officials, Allies (Fox)

When the House Jan. 6 committee released hundreds of documents from its investigation online at the end of the year, it inadvertently made public nearly 2,000 Social Security numbers belonging to high-profile individuals who visited the White House in December 2020, according to a report. The Washington Post reported Friday that the leaked Social Security information was included in a spreadsheet buried within the “massive cache” of records from the committee’s work. Social Security numbers belonging to at least three members of Trump’s cabinet, a few Republican governors, and several Trump associates were reportedly compromised. The data was part of the White House visitor logs published by the committee.


While many Social Security numbers in the logs were redacted, the Post reported that around 1,900 of them were not. The Government Publishing Office (GPO), which was responsible for publishing the file, does not appear to have notified any of the individuals whose private information was released, the report said. Those whose Social Security information was made public include South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) and her family, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R), former Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. Others include an unnamed federal district court judge and a federal appeals court judge, at least half a dozen people who testified before the Jan. 6 committee, and a lawyer who represented another witness before the committee, the Post reported.

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“..Sperry’s reporting was never refuted..”

Adam Schiff’s Assault on the First Amendment (BB)

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) violated the First Amendment and, arguably, his oath to uphold the Constitution in 2020 when his office demanded that Twitter suspend the account of Paul Sperry, an investigative journalist. Sperry happens to be the journalist who reported in 2019 that the “whistleblower” who worked with Schiff to engineer the impeachment investigation against President Donald Trump was Eric Ciamarella, a CIA analyst who had worked at the White House. Though Democrats convinced the media and Silicon Valley to suppress the story, Sperry’s reporting was never refuted, and the article remains live at RealClearInvestigations today.

This week, investigative journalist Matt Taibbi revealed in the “Twitter Files” that Schiff’s office at the House Permanent Select Intelligence Committee sent a list of requests to Twitter, including that it suspend Sperry. Schiff claimed, without evidence, that Sperry was spreading “QAnon conspiracy theories.” (Sperry denies he has ever done so, anywhere.) Twitter declined that request, but suspended Sperry in 2022 with no explanation. The attempt by any member of Congress to suppress the freedom of expression of a journalist is a flagrant violation of the First Amendment, which specifically restricts Congress from interfering in a free press. That violation is even more egregious when perpetrated by a congressional leader with unique access to secret information, and who implies that he has evidence no one else does and is acting to protect national security.

Schiff, who is now considering a run for U.S. Senate, is a frequent guest on mainstream media news programs, who have given him wide latitude for years to promote unfounded claims, such as the “Russia collusion” hoax. These journalists, who described Trump as a threat to press freedom merely for insulting the media, have a professional and ethical duty to demand that Schiff explain why he thought he could censor any journalist. It is also worth revisiting Schiff’s egregious record on civil rights in general. Last year, this author outlined five reasons that a new Republican-run Congress should subpoena Schiff — as he has subpoenaed so many others.

Read more …

“This decision was not made with the wellbeing and health of women in mind..”

Ted Cruz Slams Joe Biden for Turning Pharmacies Into Abortion Centers (LN)

Senator Ted Cruz, a longtime pro-life Texas senator, is not happy with Joe Biden’s recent ruling from his FDA that essentially turns pharmacies into abortion centers. As LifeNews reported, the FDA will allow pharmacies to sell the dangerous abortion drug that has killed millions of babies and injured thousands of women. Previously, mifepristone could only be dispensed by clinics, medical offices, and hospitals or under the supervision of a licensed physician. Following the decision, Walgreens and CVS announced they will sell the abortion drug that has killed millions of babies. Cruz slammed the decision, saying that not only will it expand abortions that kill babies, it will put women’s health at risk because the mifepristone abortion pill has killed at least dozens of women and injured countless thousands more.


“This decision was not made with the wellbeing and health of women in mind,” he said. “We should all be able to recognize that these pills can cause very serious side-effects, and should never be taken without medical supervision.” Cruz continued: “This is a reckless decision that puts the lives of women and girls in Texas and America in danger in order to push a pro-abortion agenda. This decision is not based on science, but on radical politics, and I am deeply disappointed by the callousness of the FDA.” The FDA has already lifted its in-person requirement for a doctor visit which is a medical necessity because taking the abortion pill in a variety of situations such as an ectopic pregnancy can be fatal for women. The decision will set up the ability of customers to purchase the abortion pill via teleconference — denying women the doctor’s visit they should be getting to avoid potential death or major complications.

Read more …

After two years of absence…

Biden Spokeswoman Blames Trump Ahead Of Border Visit (Fox)

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Friday blamed the previous administration for the immigration crisis facing the Biden administration, accusing Republicans of making the problem worse by opposing Democratic proposals for comprehensive immigration reform. Ahead of President Biden’s first visit to the southern border as president, Jean-Pierre told reporters that immigration reform is a “high priority” for the administration and that Biden is looking for Congress to act in the face of historic rates of illegal immigration overwhelming resources at the border.

“The president inherited a mess because of what the last administration did. We inherited a mess. And, you know, Republicans in Congress made it worse by blocking comprehensive immigration reform,” Jean-Pierre said at the daily White House press briefing. “And so what you’re seeing from this president is he’s acting. He’s acting to protect, to continue to protect the border, secure the border, and also deal with irregular migration.” Biden announced several changes to his immigration policies Thursday in a major speech from the White House. His speech came after more than 2.3 million migrant encounters were reported in FY 2022, breaking the historic 1.7 million record encountered in FY 2021.

So far in FY 2023, which began in October, the first two months have outpaced the same period last year — with 233,740 encounters in November, compared to 174,845 in 2021 and 73,994 in 2020. To address this crisis, Biden will expand a humanitarian parole program for Venezuelan nationals to include Haitians, Cubans and Nicaraguans, allowing some 30,000 individuals per month from those countries to be paroled into the U.S. for a two-year period if they meet certain conditions. Those who attempt to cross the border illegally will be ineligible for the program.

Read more …

“..Something will emergently replace this monster we call “health care.”

Repentance (Kunstler)

And what are they going to do now? Pretend that none of this is happening? Continue to demonize, discredit, and punish the few doctors who won’t pretend? My PC doc doubles as Chief Health Officer of his group practice. He’s fired doctors and others on the staff who refused to take the shots his company mandated. He’s dishonored his Hippocratic oath. He’s in mid-life with, one would assume ordinarily, many working years ahead of him. The information about vaccine deaths and disabilities is going to get worse, and his own behavior around the crisis is going to look worse, probably even to himself. There are hundreds of thousands of doctors like him. As of now, early 2023, there is no general movement among them to explain or apologize for their actions. What will happen?

I’ll tell you what will happen: medicine as we’ve known it is going to collapse, along with most other activities in our society. Apart from ethical offenses against the public in the single instance of the Covid-19 emergency, doctors and their administrative cohorts have stealthily surrendered to a racketeering business model that had already badly damaged the practice of medicine before Covid-19 came on the scene. Remember: as a general principle, organisms and systems often assume their greatest size just before the go extinct or fail. That’s exactly what you’re seeing in the conglomeratization of hospitals in the USA. If the idea was to remove redundancies for the sake of “efficiency,” then they did exactly what destroys ecosystems. Anyway, the net effect of all that hospital consolidation was just to make access to health care much more difficult for the average citizen, and the only benefit was to make multi-millionaires of the executives who run the hospitals.

Then Covid-19 came along and they decimated their own workforce with vaccine mandates. Now, many hospitals can barely function, and many have had to shut down specific services. Quite a few hospitals are going bankrupt, which only feeds the predatory consolidation still ongoing. When the financial, banking, and insurance disorders ahead start to bite later this year, hospitals will be shutting down. In the meantime, a lot of people will lose their lives to the disastrous side-effects of the vaccines. It is already the case, that the vaccine-injured who seek help from the medical system are lied-to, mis-treated, or ignored. Some of these are the doctors themselves and other health professionals who collide with reality the hard way. Something will emergently replace this monster we call “health care.”

Maybe it will still think of itself medicine, but it will operate at a much smaller scale, minus a lot of the expensive and rather miraculous high-tech developed in our time, but also minus a lot of hazardous high-tech interventions, especially pharmaceuticals, that were used as revenue streams despite the adverse blowbacks they induced. Will the doctors recover the trust of the public? It’s going to be a slog for them. They’ll have a long way to go just to recover their own honor and self-respect. Some sort of organized act of apology and repentance will have to happen first.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

It takes time

 

 

 

 

Speed
https://twitter.com/i/status/1611121105640505350

 

 

Ant hill

 

 

 

 

Glass octopus

 

 

Tiger mom

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Home Forums Debt Rattle January 7 2023

Viewing 40 posts - 41 through 80 (of 90 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • #125337
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    ” But it’s created itself, really. Not me. Which is much better, obviously.”

    I think a Dunbar’s # riff applies here in terms of commentariat population.

    Too many commentators create too much chatter and the discursive atmosphere separates into various subset echo bubble chambers.

    There are enough people involved here to keep things lively and credible, but not so many that we just become another crowd. Crowds are great at making its members mostly invisible and inaudible to each other, and the echo bubble chamber effect kicks in.

    This of course reduces revenues but does keep the blog’s soul intact and vital.

    Hmmm. A thought. The market is ripe for a no frills grass roots fact checker on, say, substack.

    No ax to grind other than data hygiene and adequate interpretive context. Such a thing could not only make serious money but might also, in a sense, expand the Dunbar Window. Commentators would naturally focus on their pet topics/themes, in the process forming subset echo bubble chambers that illuminate and clarify rather than darken and mute, because the blog’s core theme: just the facts, if you please — naturally tends to dissolve ideological or thematic meme viruses. You know, like The World IS Warming/the World is NOT Warming. Such word-flus would tend to stay within their respective echo bubble chamber commentator cliques, allowing many more commentators to get involved without having to struggle with too much groupthink.

    Topics would change rapidly, rather than lock into themes like (for example) covid/Ukraine.

    The commentators would also do much of the bloggist’s work for him.

    Just a thought. I know I’m not gonna do it.

    And yea mon, Raul has been an adroit administrator because he has upheld the decency to let things be what they are. One wonders how many times he has had to talk himself out of going nuclear on us/one of us/some of us. It’s not easy. He’s tried to intervene a few times But I think he’s learned that democracies either run themselves or not at all. He owns and runs the place, but is not a king, just a janitor. (That’s a compliment, btw.)

    Segueing off janitors, here’s a dark but wryly insightful gem:

    The Janitor on Mars

    cuz everybody loves us now:

    A Sense of Duty and Devoted Honor

    #125338
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    I’m bored and energetic. Just warning yes that I might wade into the odious climate thing, gloves od and brass knucks on. Y’all argue that stuff like whiny Furbees. I just might janitor down fro0m JMars and get all serious and shit. Oh mies. Maybe it’s time for us to set the world on fire by arguing so much that the friction sets the world on fire.

    #125339
    tboc
    Participant

    Amittedly it is a toss up as to whether my mental capacity is that of a box of rocks or a sack of hammers. Six hundred years of Enlightenment has produced a civilization that reserves to itself the right to muder indiscriminately. Within this civilization are societies comprised of individuals prepared to surrender liberty and autonomy, perhaps life itself, to retain material possesions.

    Bosco could you please point out the virtue to be found, i am at a loss. (perhaps a tune from the Hot Club de France would set me straight)

    #125340
    D Benton Smith
    Participant

    Now that the word “bombshell” has been overused so mercilessly that it has no utility at all (instead of inserting the word “bombshell” in its adjectival sense you might as well just insert a blank space by tapping the keyboard’s space bar) whatever can we do or say to flag an item as shockingly important?

    I sure dunno. Therefore, and with no further ado, check this out : https://youtu.be/ERvURcpg3JE

    Seems that the Us Department of Defense centrally planned and controlled the ENTIRE Covid/DeathVax debacle for well over a decade.

    Not the top of the Cabal, to be sure, but much closer as regards proving it (to those who require external proofs of what they are staring at with their own two eyes.)

    #125341
    jb-hb
    Participant

    I’ve always had a hard time believing it comes down to complexity.

    Certainly I came across the concept back when I came across Peak Oil and from there the general Doom-O-Sphere a little bit after Katrina. Or really, with that first episode of Connections with James Burke. Complexity surely enters into it somewhere.

    Thinking of Noirette’s post about the medical establishment:

    Let it all rot.. and it does, as complex systems that are not maintained by keen ppl working precisely defined slots in a matrix break down quickly.

    …which sums up why we are in the shit right now in all aspects of civilization, I don’t know that I jump straight to blaming complexity. Surely a properly functioning medical system is a value ADD for civilization.

    Maybe we could say at a certain level of complexity, the complex system is mistaken by humans living within it as being reality. A plant that forgets that dirt exists doesn’t do too well either.

    #125342
    Afewknowthetruth
    Participant

    (PS, “Deep sea level temperatures”? See: Underwater volcanism, as per the “unusual warming in Antarctica” that turned out to be this. It also releases the world’s largest CO2 right on 100 million year schedule, 30x times in a row. Has it been tracked and quantified? Then how can you refute me?)

    Bullshit and lies Dr D, as you well know. There is no ‘100 million year schedule, 30x time in a row;.

    Just why are you posting this crap? It is neither informative nor entertaining. Just irritating.

    The Earth’s interior has been cooling for 4.5 billion years, as the radioactive isotopes within it have undergone nuclear decay (transition) to form more stable isotopes or completely stable isotopes. Hence, volcanic activity has declined throughout all of geologic history, and is still declining.

    I take it the crap you invent and post on TAE comes from The Science, , as opposed to actual science.
    .
    .

    #125343
    jb-hb
    Participant

    @D Benton Smith- interesting

    Back on the old defunct LATOC, there was a forum member (maybe it was Old Horseman IIRC) who was VERY insistent that a government created pandemic would be used to cause lockdowns, loss of civil liberties, mass injections. He was also writing a dramatization/novel in installments of how that could work out.

    That goes back to around 2005. I should have paid more attention. I thought the pandemic angle was one of the wackier, less-interesting subjects in the Doom-Sphere. I gave it a cursory glance and wrote it off. Derr. If I’d paid attention, I would have been able to take note of where he was getting his info; what caused a quivering of the antennae 18+ years in advance? Dunno.

    #125344
    Afewknowthetruth
    Participant

    ‘Six hundred years of Enlightenment has produced a civilization that reserves to itself the right to muder indiscriminately. Within this civilization are societies comprised of individuals prepared to surrender liberty and autonomy, perhaps life itself, to retain material possesions.’

    Well said, tboc

    It goes further. This ‘civilisation’ is predicated on continuation of practices known to eventually cause the complete annihilation of most life forms, including humans of course, on the only planet known to support life.

    Institutionalied insanity is the only term I can think of, other than utter evil.

    #125345
    D Benton Smith
    Participant

    @jb-hb

    Yeah. I , too have a rear view mirror that works way better than my headlights. Ah, well. Live and learn, hopefully. Otherwise it’s back to the old fashioned way of gaining wisdom . . . die and learn . . . (which takes a lot longer and feels much worse during the process.)

    #125346
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    “Howdy boscohorowitz

    How the surface temperature of the ocean couldn’t be relevant to the discussion of ocean surface temperature, I won’t understand unless it is explained to me in further detail.

    If it is argued that say, 3-10 degrees increase in ocean surface temperature leads to a Planetary Meltdown, and the rejoinder is that it has been at BOILING TEMPERATURE and there has been copious life on earth before and afterwards, how is this NOT relevant, in-context discussion, please?”

    I promise on my dead Mother’s dentures that if I do engage with this stuff seriously, you will not like it. But you will like it. You will like it or else. You will especially like not liking it. But for now, I’ll note that this — “How the surface temperature of the ocean couldn’t be relevant to the discussion of ocean surface temperature, I won’t understand unless it is explained to me in further detail.” is not even in the same universe as what I actually said.

    May it please you to know that I am already struggling with old anger habits from my misspent middle-aged tenure as a certified internet chatterbox. The ego is like William Gibson’s description of drug addiction:

    “Addictions […] started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn’t seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were […] less intelligent than goldfish.”
    ― William Gibson, Zero History

    And my ego has been entrained for many decades to freely project my frustration at what I perceive to be another’s obtuseness or obfuscation (they resemble each other a lot). But I know — I KNOW — I am smarter than a goldfish. Right?

    #125347
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    “Amittedly it is a toss up as to whether my mental capacity is that of a box of rocks or a sack of hammers.”

    Someone needs to make an app where I can turn any two things into a yin-yang symbol. In this case, hammers and rocks. With Zen-lite aphorisms like Liberate Yourself: Hammer Outside the Box

    #125348
    Afewknowthetruth
    Participant

    ‘Surely a properly functioning medical system is a value ADD for civilization.’

    A properly functioning medical system is of value to practitioners within the institutionalised industrial medical system and for financial speculators in the short term.

    However, as professor Albert Bartlett famously pointed out several decades ago in the video that most people absolutely refuse to watch, everything we consider good is actually bad in the long term.

    Of course, what was the long term when Bartlett spoke about it all decades ago is now the short term.

    .

    #125349
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    “Bosco could you please point out the virtue to be found, i am at a loss. (perhaps a tune from the Hot Club de France would set me straight)”

    Do you mean virtue to be found in modern human civilization? If so, I nominate that which has also proved to be our downfall: symbolic reasoning aka language. It’s so good it’s bad for us, but I am an ardent verbophile (and a huge fan of myself), so I will just leave this here as an example of something I feel is virtuous, i.e., makes life worth living:

    Ode to a Dictionary

    I wished to look up every word
    Of every world that has unfurled
    Beyond the thin horizon’s edge,
    On every translucent page,
    In every dawn’s unrolling sky’s
    Enscrolling clouds where carpets fly
    Not by any property of flight
    But that the ground has grown so light
    It joins the air, and with delight,
    Absorbs the stars into itself…
    I placed the book back on the shelf,

    But warily, as if it might
    Request that I leave on the light
    So it might read itself, although
    It’s hard to see how any glow
    Could penetrate a closed-up book.
    There is no keyhole light can look
    Through to illuminate inside
    The pages lying side by side
    Like countless sleeping princess brides.
    Instead I placed it on the table,
    Opened to page ‘ruth through sable’,

    Wondering if our books read us
    While we read them, if wanderlust
    Afflicts their words, like they do we
    Who read of things we’ll never see.

    Robin Morrison 2-7-16

    Clarinet Marmalade

    #125350
    Michael Reid
    Participant

    Why Are Healthy People Dying Suddenly Since 2021 Since 2021? w / Ed Dowd

    #125351
    Afewknowthetruth
    Participant

    “First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

    Thank you for the plywood violin.”

    First we take Soledar, then we take Bakhmut.

    Then we take Ukraine.

    Eventually we watch Manhattan and Berlin collapse.

    Alex has a rather boring style of delivery but is spot-on in analysis.

    I think the ‘plywood tanks’ are just not going to stand up to battle conditions. Thanks for the video, Oroboros.

    #125352
    Afewknowthetruth
    Participant

    Song for NATO

    #125353
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    Regarding Pentagon’s preparation/planning of covid vis a vis big pharma, the milindustrial complex chicken or egg question applies: do the druggies run the Pentagon or the Pentagon run the druggies? (I know that’s a false dichotomy; it’s employed only to demarcate a spectrum of possibilities.

    sAID QUESTION, IF ANSWERED, MIGHT TELL US IF THE kOVID sTATE (CAPS oops) was employed to make people rich no matter who dies or was employed to make people die except those whom the process makes rich. (Also a false dichotomy; also a possibility spread marker.)

    One of TAE’s fundamental question since covid hit has been: do they just not care who dies so long as they are ok? or do they want people to die for death’s sake?

    My vote still remains for the former: ‘wealth and power uber alles‘, not with ‘wealth and power want less alles to be uber‘? Either way, I don’t like TPTB’s chances of getting away with it much longer. If their plan is to deliberately depop us alles, they will themselves also get the depopping they deserve. The alles are the ship of state that TPTB pretend to steer.

    Jesus didn’t freak that the justification for the money-changers to be on the temple steps was to convert foreign currency so people could buy animals to be sacrificed to appease Yahweh’s weird charcoal fixation. A guy like Jesus had to see the senseless cruelty “unto the least of these”.

    But what he freaked over was that they were pulling de facto funny-money scams on their clients, the pious Jews.

    JC was more pissed at the commercialization of atrocity than atrocity itself. Maybe Jesus was smart that way. I think so.

    #125354
    jb-hb
    Participant

    It goes further. This ‘civilisation’ is predicated on continuation of practices known to eventually cause the complete annihilation of most life forms, including humans of course, on the only planet known to support life.

    as far as what you’re implying, YOU FIRST.

    Unless you just want OTHERS to believe this to their detriment.

    A properly functioning medical system is of value to practitioners within the institutionalised industrial medical system and for financial speculators in the short term.

    Thanks for posting a video I watched 18 years ago that says nothing about the value of medical systems in a civilization.

    The video you posted about concerns % growth rates.

    Do I accurately interpret that you simply take anything that happens to allow a positive population growth rate as bad?

    If properly run medicine saves lives, allows for population growth, is therefore bad, doesn’t it follow that medical malpractice that does the opposite is good? Making the not-vax good?

    Are you for good medical practices, which will facilitate population growth? Or bad medical practices that inhibit or stop population growth? Are you both for and against both good and bad medical practice?

    Instead of saying you are refuting one point, then responding with something you consider to be irrefutable that concerns something else, please just state your case honestly and openly and have it out.

    #125355
    D Benton Smith
    Participant

    I am not much interested in the fine-grained detail of US politics or the functioning of its various institutions because we are WAY past the point at which a totally corrupted apparatus can be used to correct that self-same apparatus. Those who try will gain new wisdom (and perhaps even some enlightenment) in their efforts to do so. God bless ’em and good luck.

    Cleaning up any part of the extant US government is akin to fixing a clogged toilet while the house is burning down.

    #125356
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    “Do I accurately interpret that you simply take anything that happens to allow a positive population growth rate as bad?”

    Speaking on behalf of AFKTT (just to piss him off;) ), I say, No, you do not interpret him correctly.

    A more correct interpretation would be that human population growth grows like compound interest. Human pop growth requires civilization. Civ always uses ever more resources as our clever brains and horny hearts find ever new ways to consume what’s around us.The more we make, the more we destroy, and not just the inevitable amount of waste required by thermodynamic entropy.but also the amount required by what economists call “growth”: for example, hot industries like Pet Rock manufacturing:

    We are not a sustainable species as apex predators, essentially. Human uber alles is our only mode since the agricultural revolution, but especially once we learned to use fire to make machines work for us, and human uber alles is not a survivable mode for a species that is addicted to consuming everything possible.

    Congrats

    #125357
    Germ
    Participant
    #125358
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    “‘Surely a properly functioning medical system is a value ADD for civilization.’

    A properly functioning medical system is of value to practitioners within the institutionalised industrial medical system and for financial speculators in the short term.

    However, as professor Albert Bartlett famously pointed out several decades ago in the video that most people absolutely refuse to watch, everything we consider good is actually bad in the long term.”

    Remove emotionally-based absolutes like “everything” and its logic lines up with itself: “systems” which are human bureaucracies always turn over time to serving the bureaucracies’ needs not those whom the system was originally built to serve.

    In the long run, antibiotics absolutely are bad for homo sapiens even though in the short run they’ve been a great blessing. In the long run, we are the creatures who control fire. To a hammer, everything is a nail. To a fire, everything is a holocaust.

    That’s the logic I read from the quote.

    #125359
    oxymoron
    Participant

    D Benton – I have been following this stuff on Bailiwick and through Sasha Latypova. It is ultimately where the yarn unravels.

    I like the way you think Mr Benton. Probing, unafraid and at times serious, but always with razor sharp awareness of the power of the mind and the importance of honesty and thinking.

    #125360
    jb-hb
    Participant

    Me – “Do I accurately interpret that you simply take anything that happens to allow a positive population growth rate as bad?”

    boscohorowitz – “Speaking on behalf of AFKTT (just to piss him off;) ), I say, No, you do not interpret him correctly.”

    I said a functioning medical system is a value add for a civilization. He quoted that saying our civilization is maximum evil, and then

    “everything we consider good is actually bad in the long term.”

    Followed by a video explaining the evils of population growth.

    It isn’t like we’re in an Apostolic church, he just spoke in tongues, and needs an interpreter for us to know what he said.

    If he wants to say that the rest of his post is completely out of context with the quote of me that he started off with, he can of course say it.

    #125361
    D Benton Smith
    Participant

    @oxymoron

    Aww, you’re just saying those nice things about me because they’re true!

    #125362
    Germ
    Participant

    Cardiac Incidents for 15-44 year-olds Double Since Vaccine Rollout in Australia

    https://www.americaoutloud.com/cardiac-incidents-for-15-44-year-olds-double-since-vaccine-rollout-in-australia/

    TVASF

    #125363
    Figmund Sreud
    Participant

    A program designed to compensate Canadians for vaccine injuries has paid out $2.779 million since it started accepting claims 19 months ago.

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/covid-19-vaccine-injuries-compensation-canada-1.6704655

    #125364
    jb-hb
    Participant

    Maybe I can simplify and reduce a lot of sparring and walls of text to a somewhat simpler question for Afewknowthetruth

    Are you familiar with the writings/thoughts of Robert Jensen? His favorite saying is that “we need to tear it all down”

    He maintains that agricultural practice causes all the ills of humanity. Agriculture leads to civilization, which HE maintains is the cause of child abuse, rape, racism, murder, incest, war, etc. etc

    He therefore reasons that the only proper existence for humanity is as neolithic peoples practicing neither agriculture nor animal husbandry.

    He advocates that we need to, right now, start tearing down all the roads, bridges, power plants, hydroelectric dams, everything. We need to “tear it all down.”

    He thinks about 8 billion people need to die ASAP and if he could take a time machine back to retroactively kill them such that those 8 billion never get to have a life in the first place, he’d be happy with that too.

    He says we are headed for a Climate Meltdown.

    He says civilization is evil

    He says humanity is evil for causing extinctions (at least, whenever it practices agriculture)

    Afewknowthetruth, please tell me what, if anything, Jensen is wrong about?

    If you take his presumptions as a given, how do you not arrive at his conclusions? I ask because it seems like you are starting from the same presumptions and at times possibly arriving at the same conclusions. I’ve been trying to determine what exactly your conclusions are and, if different, how did you get there. Because Jensen’s “solutions” seem to follow automatically and logically from his presumptions.

    #125365
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    One thing I love about the climate debate is summed up by the following joke from Huck Finn: Everybody talks about the weather but no one does anything about it.

    Climate change deniers claim that the weather is unaffected by our activity, so don’t do anything about it. Makes sense to me.

    Climate change supporters (the honest ones, not the paid ones) say that it’s too late to do anything about what we do to the climate. Not at this point of the game anyway, so leave it be and let’s work on figuring out how to live with much less energy since we’re running low on fuel anyway. Makes sense to me.

    However, there is also a strong correlation (that I perceive as fading) between deniers of climate change and deniers of Peak Oil. And there is also a strong correlation between (honest) supporters of climate change and supporters of Peak Oil.

    One reason I tend to camp with (honest) climate change supporters is that Peak Oil is demonstrably real, and the idea of learning to use less energy one way or another is also logically good since (to cite just one reason) it seems to turn us into something that a guy named Rick Larson described oh so well: “The fascist’s socialist economy is slowing because an increasing amount of people no longer have the will to live a natural life. Insulin bloated blobs of entertainment seeking sugar for brains. If the cure doesn’t kill them all off, a virus certainly will. Not sure what will happen to the economy if the sugar blobs aren’t around to circulate entertainment money. But when the sugar blob’s resource draw disappears, for people who make it through the coming bottleneck there will be a lot of resources made available, at least for those of us with something to defend.”

    I could cite other reasons but why explain the obvious benefit of efficiency as an economic basis versus the ever increasing consumption as an economic basis? Economies based on denying entropy must fail, cuz entropy never quits and always takes its % TANSTAAFL, even!

    More is not necessarily more gooder. Long term anythings exist long term because they form relative levels of equilibria between things. Everything is a tide. A civ based on the tide always coming in ends up drowning itself, in our case ironically with something closer to fire than ice.

    Hungry

    #125366
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    “I said a functioning medical system is a…..”

    And I said what I said. We can talk to each other or about ‘it’, whatever ‘it’ is. My recommendation is that you respond to me not whatever ‘it’ you choose to sidetrack with. Or, if you prefer, let afktt speak for you. 😉

    But seriously: try and stay on target, ok? I can only do so many tangential recursive logic loops in a day. Preferably none, unless it’s for a joke and then I am all flathead home erectur for it. 🙂

    #125367
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    “He says civilization is evil”

    Whatever evil is. Bacon is good… unless you’re it’s source. I suspect that most Terran life forms would deem us evil, if they thought in such terms. As it is, they know to be wary of us (to grossly understate the situation).

    As for the rest of that Jensen dude: I agree with his diagnosis of the patient, but his Rx is just adding more damage to a dying system. Beating a dead horse, repaving the road to hell with lunatic good intentions, typical moral supremacist logic.

    It will die of itself. I see individual survival rapidly becoming much more ambitious an enterprise than the manner in which we’ve lived and been raised.

    Cold de-Coaled Ground

    #125368
    russellnblbs
    Participant

    This climate change debate in the comments is great, gives me a chuckle every morning.

    If I may add, the apocalyptic thinking associated with it seems to me a cultural bias. Talk of planetary meltdown or making the planet uninhabitable is nothing more than someone preaching of the rapture in the town square. No matter what perspective you are arguing and what supporting evidence you use, extrapolating this to the end and mass disaster is just the inversion of the progress focused utopian vision and reveals that one is trapped within the same Western European modes of thought. Get out of the straight line and get more into the circle, or the spiral, or anything that doesn’t go from the caves to the stars (or the End).

    Another cultural bias is the conclusion that the commonly accepted consequences of climate change (either warming or cooling) would be bad for everyone. Looking at paleo climate data there would quite clearly be winners and losers. But our all encompassing infinite bias means we have to talk for all of mankind, and the same problem/solution has to apply to the entire globe.

    #125369
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    I strongly recommend that we refrain from putting our words into other people’s mouths but instead, reply to what they wrote. (However, feel free to speak on anyone’s behalf. No one has to take you seriously, after all. Maybe bill7 can tell me what’s on madamski’s mind these days. I kinda miss her sometimes.)

    #125370
    jb-hb
    Participant

    boscohorowitz

    sure, he might have meant our civlization is the bestest most highly moral one by:

    “This ‘civilisation’ is predicated on continuation of practices known to eventually cause the complete annihilation of most life forms, including humans of course, on the only planet known to support life.”

    I literally quoted him and that literally is what the video is about.

    But seriously, boscohorowitz: try and stay on target, ok? I can only do so many tangential recursive logic loops in a day. Preferably none, unless it’s for a joke and then I am all flathead home erectur for it.

    #125371
    jb-hb
    Participant

    “As for the rest of that Jensen dude: I agree with his diagnosis of the patient, but his Rx is just adding more damage to a dying system.”

    The problem is that the conclusions follow intrinsically from the presumptions.

    If you start from, and think on a continual basis that everyone and everything are rotten, essentially…. if you internalize key phrases, it will definitely have a deep adverse effect INDEPENDENT of the presumed bad stuff.

    It will have an adverse effect individually, psychologically and it will have an adverse effect societally, civilizationally. I don’t accept the presumption that everyone can agree with Jensen’s starting points and then say “no matter” and be unaffected.

    Those presumptions are deeply psychologically damaging.

    “However, there is also a strong correlation (that I perceive as fading) between deniers of climate change and deniers of Peak Oil. And there is also a strong correlation between (honest) supporters of climate change and supporters of Peak Oil.”

    Funny you should mention that, and it’s no coincidence.

    I do not doubt at all that you’ve come across people proclaiming both Peak Oil and Climate Meltdown

    This relates to the demise/implosion of LATOC. We had a lot of great posters with different sub-interests and discussions ranging freely on all types of issues. It was a really great community.

    Then, in a short period of time, there was a very large influx of new people. “Coincidentally,” ALL of them were pushing a combination of the Wokeist NeoMarxist ideology in combination with the Climate Meltdown Jensenite creed.

    The first place I ever heard, as a repeated catchphrase, “Tear it all down” was at LATOC with these newcomers. I’d guess maybe starting around 2010? A bit earlier?

    When I heard “Tear it all down” associated with other stuff in 2020, the shared NeoMarxist roots were extremely obvious.

    It’s no coincidence. Wokeists/NeoMarxists have done hits on everything from the D&D comunity to grandma’s knitting circle forum. The comic book industry, the gaming community, whatever. In retrospect, it plays out EXACTLY like stories I came across in other communities 2016-present.

    They ran exactly the Alinsky Rules playbook, pretending to BE the crowd while selectively targeting forum members and driving them off one by one. They’d organize and plan on Facebook before dogpiling onto the forum like flying monkeys.

    The fact that you previously saw a greater, but receding coincidence between Peak Oiler and Climate Meltdowner is no coincidence at all.

    I can tell you that prior to this, WE, the Peak Oil Community, were concerned and interested in all the Climate Things, but we definitely did NOT overlap with the Climate Meltdown Jensenites

    So yeah, I am SURE you have come across “Peak Oilers” saying We Are The Crowd and agreeing with All The Things

    #125372
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    “Talk of planetary meltdown or making the planet uninhabitable is nothing more has much in common with than someone preaching of the rapture in the town square. ”

    “No matter what perspective you are arguing and what supporting evidence you use, extrapolating this to the end and mass disaster is just the inversion of the progress focused utopian vision and reveals that one is trapped within the same Western European modes of thought. Get out of the straight line and get more into the circle, or the spiral, or anything that doesn’t go from the caves to the stars (or the End).”

    Applause from me. Very well done. Nonetheless, the strikethrough strikes again. It is not “just” vision/bias based; the data at hand shows countless reasons why we’re headed for another big extinction event. We’re already in one, in fact. Just how big remains to be seen. Such data adds fiber to the anti-utopian vision/bias…. altho I see it impossible for us to move in an anti-utopian direction. Not as Who We Are Now. People who just yesterday believed that flying cars were the future.

    I see the best survival strategy as being as utopian as possible in a small group as possible. Not a grim survival group altho there will be grimness for sure, but a group based on being as happy as possible with what they can contrive: cuz that’s how our minds appear to be wired.

    ***

    ” “This ‘civilisation’ is predicated on continuation of practices known to eventually cause the complete annihilation of most life forms, including humans of course, on the only planet known to support life.”
    I literally quoted him and that literally is what the video is about.”

    I agree with him and I believe you (haven’t watched the vid yet but plan to). I wrote a paragraph or two explaining why I believe his diagnosis is correct.

    “But seriously, boscohorowitz: try and stay on target, ok? I can only do so many tangential recursive logic loops in a day. Preferably none, unless it’s for a joke and then I am all flathead home erectur for it.”

    You flatter me, sir. Imitation is the sincerest form of… nonetheless, you asked for a target. Here, back by popular request, is a target that actually stays on me!

    Scottus Homorectus

    You have a very oblique manner of discussion, jb-hb.But perception is everything, and perception is subjective. That said, I feel like I’m being circled by Injuns than discussing things forthrightly with another person.

    ***

    “Another cultural bias is the conclusion that the commonly accepted consequences of climate change (either warming or cooling) would be bad for everyone. Looking at paleo climate data there would quite clearly be winners and losers. But our all encompassing infinite bias means we have to talk for all of mankind, and the same problem/solution has to apply to the entire globe.”

    We live in very very very weird and extremely toxic/lethal times, and this further propels that globalistic thinking. Kids raised on nuclear winter etc. tend to think in those all or nothing terms. Movies are convincing things:

    Many Many Terminators

    #125373
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    “If you start from, and think on a continual basis that everyone and everything are rotten, essentially…. if you internalize key phrases, it will definitely have a deep adverse effect INDEPENDENT of the presumed bad stuff.”

    I concur. Hard things to think or feel about can be, you know, hard to think or feel about. Everything has a cost. Ask any anti-vaxxer about the cost of communicating the idea of the entire medical system being functionally more enemy than aid, with the ratio growing worse over time.

    The pursuit of truth is expensive although truth itself is free.

    #125374
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    “So yeah, I am SURE you have come across “Peak Oilers” saying We Are The Crowd and agreeing with All The Things”

    That is surely one reason for the overlap, but hardly all. BTW, I stipulated 3 times — THREE!!! — (CAPS thrills…) that I referred to HONEST (and unpaid) climate change supporters. Why throw straw men at me? They cayn’t fight for sheet.

    Meanwhile, it still makes sense not to worry about climate change, including the worrisome waste of having to refute it, which is also pointless; and it also makes good sense to play close attention to Peak Oil implications and developments. Which is what I said before. Also, I’ve been watching Peak Oil and climate change online since ’99, so I’ve been exposed to a great many peak oilers/climate changers, so what happened after 2010 is only part of the story. That said, I based my observation here on what I’ve see at TAE since… 2018?

    I perhaps should have stipulated HONEST (and unpaid) in my descriptions of climate deniers/Peak Oil dismissers, perhaps. That would’ve removed the idea that pointing out corruption of the climate/peak oil crowd made it any different than the climate deniers/Peak Oil dismissers, and we wouldn’t have wasted time on propaganda demographics (or something like that) when the topic is climate change with a necessary* emphasis on climatological logic and fact, not media spin campaigns regarding climate change.

    *Well, I think it’s necessary. But what do I know?

    #125375
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    Regarding Trump supporting McCarthy: Trump’s a weather vane. He turns wherever he thinks the reelection camera is focused on his best side, is all I see there.

    #125376
    jb-hb
    Participant

    boscohorowitz, I salute you.

    And also thanks for claiming peak oilers are on your side.

    There was a time the Normans invaded the Byzantine Empire – many of them, the same ones who had invaded England. …and came up against a Varangian guard composed of English fighters who had been at Hastings.

    It felt just a little bit like that

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