madamski cafone
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@ D Benton Smith
“mRNA vaccines are the biggest and riskiest genetic engineering experiment of all time.”
That we know of. Having been raised in a secret underground government Marvel Comics franchise laboratory, I know whereof I speak. 😉
@ teri
“it is de rigeur” is strong language, teri. Maybe you could at least replace “it is” with ‘it seems’.
There are occasional comments made here regarding Trump that indicate some faith that he has good intentions and the ability to make them happen. Occasional. Most Trump analysis here focuses on how Trump is used by both parties as a way to hide from the public the lousy, hopelessly corrupt shititude of both parties. After all, if either party had allowed even a remotely qualified candidate to make it either into the primaries (the GOP and its clown-car calvacade, with Ron Paul at that time being a spent force they merely tolerated) or to enjoy their rightful win (DNC vs. Bernie), Trump would’ve humiliated himself running for president by losing big-time.
fwiw, “Under the Obama Administration, the Department of Justice did not indict Assange because it was unable to find any evidence that his actions differed from those of a journalist.[169] However, after Trump took power, CIA director Mike Pompeo and Attorney General Jeff Sessions stepped up pursuit of Assange.”
Considering how Trump has been stymied most of the times he tried to do something (for whatever reason, selfish NPD ego-feeding or a fit of moral flirtation) that went against efforts by the Deep State (what we oldsters used to call The Establishment) to continue militarily dominating the world even if it meant WWIII, I cannot see an airtight case against Trump for the Assange decisions made by Pompeo and Sessions. This is not at all to say that Trump cares about Assangre one way or another. He didn’t denounce or rescind those decisions, after all. I’ve survived close (but not intimate) relations with a major NPD, and went through some major hell getting past it. So I have no belief in Trump as a moral champion. I like to think I know a major creep when I see one.
But the wikileaks revelations have already happened. Trump has no logical reason not to pardon Assange unless he knows or believes Assange has a “dead man switch” of the kind of kompromat that can get a person killed or at least financially ruin them.
Also, “In November 2010, Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange over allegations of sexual assault.[8] Assange said the allegations were a pretext for him to be extradited from Sweden to the United States because of his role in publishing secret American documents.[9][10]”
Assuming Assange is being honest and properly informed here (highly likely, considering Assange’s history and subsequent events), I would not let Obama, prez in 2010, off the hook either.
Frankly, I don’t understand why people waste their time arguing over which creep’s bunghole is stinkiest. They all stink, including Trump. There is, however, a kind of grudging affection for Trump among people like me simply because his personality makes him an outsider anywhere he goes, including the Oval Office, and this outside erraticism, driven by his hopelessly deranged ego and possible encroaching senility, makes him someone who naturally stymies the duopoly’s plans — and those plans are as bad or worse than anything a mere aging NPD playboy, with insecure delusions of grandeur, could come up with.
A rogue snake is in some ways better than an entire roomfull of snakes working together to bite your ass.
I for one have some hope that Trump will pardon Assange because a) it potentially could give him some political capital, and b) Trump is an unpredictable lunatic. It seems that unpredictable lunacy is our last faint hope for dear Julian and his poor family. Biden obviously won’t pardon Assange unless plans are in place to assassinate him shortly after release.
^&*
@ Susmarie108
CHSmith has a knack for concise clarity. I read the quote and lingtning struck. I had planned to avoid TAE for a few days but couldn’t resist sharing it. And now here I am defending a bloated lunatic as the last gasp hope for something other than the Establishment Steamroller paving over what’s left of our constitution or whatever-the-hell this wacky nation was founded on.
An anecdote: long ago, way back in the 80s, a woman I know worked for what was then called Ma Bell: AT&T. Her old boss left. New boss came in. He was oddly honest. He said:
“I don’t care what you do so long as it makes me look good.”
Internet porn was not yet invented so we are not sure what he did with all that spare time in the office while his workers made him look good. But, she says, he was the best boss she ever had. Well-meaning competence had no place in the corporate structure, and this guy at least left them alone.
We’ve been fascist forever. Well, at least since WWII. The question, as I see it, is: Is fascism failing at last?
My answer: yes.
^&*
“Does it matter?
No, because regardless of what you believe, you will die.
Yes, because while you live, you can be at peace with yourself.”I like that. Suitable for framing.
From today’s Charles Hugh Smith:
“6. Process replaces results as the Prime Directive of the system. Devoting resources to following processes rather than to getting results generates an illusion of functionality even as the ability to evolve and adapt is lost.”
I see this as the Mystery Ingredient linking incompetence with evil. Process superficially resembles tradition, except that it is routinely altered or replaced by a new Process. It has no real meaningful links to a functional past, as genuine traditions do. It has a life of its own, a life that serves as host or compost for both incompetent yes-men and their like, and deliberately malign actors.
“Are they really that evil or just that stupid or both?” We’ve all asked this question numerously, exhaustingly. The word Process in the bureaucratic sense hides evil and incomeptence, and shields them when they’re discovered. It is the binding agent that creates both.
To summarize if oversimplify my view on blockchain currency: when I hear of USD$ valued in bitcoins rather than bitcoin valued in USD$, then I’ll take it seriously as something other than a fad bubble. Blockchain tech is significant and potentially useful for many things (like honest elections) but is to date an investment vehicle than can function as a currency only because people hold enough faith in its ability to convert into the currency of their choice.
One can trade stocks valued at x amount of USD$, and use them as stakes in a poker game if the other players agree. But they’ll only agree because they know that the x number of Microsoft shares you’re profferring are valued currently at x dollars. The same with bitcoin, which has yet to acquire any intrinsic value in and of itself.
If I believed the current structure of civilization were stable into the future, I could see bitcoins becoming a new global currency. (We’ll set aside for now how the heavy players might muscle in and take control of the concept just as they muscled in on ancient humanity’s invention of trusted currency such as iron bars, etc. That’s another subject altogether.)
But bitcoin is a product of this collapsing cultural paradigm. It too depends on having ever more energy to throw at ever more things, and we don’t have that, hence the collapse. Ironically, fully developed quantum computing might solve cryptocurrency’s apparently exponentially growing need for physical resources to produce more bitcoins. But in so doing, it might also destroy the cryptographic security.
But the nimble can make good money gathering the pennies that fall from the top of the steamroller wheel as it rolls forward spewing shiny virtual coins.
As for bitcoin minting becoming sufficiently energy efficient, we’ll see. I’m not particularfly optimistic. The remedies I know are either speculative or based on degrading the purity of security that makes bitcoins bitcoins.
^&*
Nice to see Bonnie Raitt speaking so powerfully about Linda Rondstandt as a pioneer and a voice in a million. They’re equals in my ears but I prefer Bonnie both as a singer, musician, and onstage sex symbol.
%^&
Incidentally, me and mine received two $600 deposits in our bank last Friday morning.
And please, Dr. D, don’t sully us and yourselves by inane statements like:
“Although the queer physics mean essentially they look into the future – that is, they could name the combination of a iron safe in a gas station for instance – which is not logical, they are not “computing” anything, however, you’re going to have the NSA set up a $100M computer for a week just so they can read ONE random guy’s hash?”
Replace “essentially” with ‘metaphorically’ and you’ve got something, albeit VERY loosely. Entropy remains. Time’s arrow is not broken or even bent.
Meanwhile:
“It can’t be “hacked”, because if I print out a paper wallet and put it in a coffee can, or even if I put it on a Trezor fob at home, who knows I have it? I’m offline with an airgap, how would you reach me?”…
…neglects the ‘cashout’ process. To cash out, you must make yourself accessible to that online verification system to at lkeast some extent. Bitcoin is not invulnerable. It is, in fact, the most widely vulnerable currency since cowrie shells. Currently, it is airtight only because it is a tad bit ahead of the tech development curve, that’s all.
But I could be wrong. Someone correct me if I am.
That blockchain currency was not necessarily started as a fraud doesn’t mean it has or will remain honest. The fact that it requires an enormous amorphous ephemeral structure like the internet makes it a silly wish from the start. One does not create durable lasting value via an enormous amorphous ephemeral structure.
I see it as a fanciful deification of our magical trust in money. Also, while I do not doubt that its inventers and early adopters intended it as honest currency, and don’t see it as a fraud, they were deluding themselves. The problem has never been “stable currency” or such. The problem has always been the relationship between available material resources (including human beings) and the markers they use to symbolize stored value.
Money has always been a concept symbolized by some kind of material marker, be it cowrie shells, iron bars, gold dubloons, greenback dollars, or bank checks. Now we have a vast mathematical vortex of mathematically choreographed electrons called bitcoins that requires a huge amount of material and energy just to remain solvent.
In the end, I see it as about the same as Pythagorean numerology.
“According to Aristotle, the Pythagoreans used mathematics for solely mystical reasons, devoid of practical application. They believed that all things were made of numbers. The number one (the monad) represented the origin of all things and the number two (the dyad) represented matter. The number three was an “ideal number” because it had a beginning, middle, and end and was the smallest number of points that could be used to define a plane triangle, which they revered as a symbol of the god Apollo.The number four signified the four seasons and the four elements.The number seven was also sacred because it was the number of planets and the number of strings on a lyre, and because Apollo’s birthday was celebrated on the seventh day of each month. They believed that odd numbers were masculine, that even numbers were feminine, and that the number five represented marriage, because it was the sum of two and three.
“Ten was regarded as the “perfect number” and the Pythagoreans honored it by never gathering in groups larger than ten. Pythagoras was credited with devising the tetractys, the triangular figure of four rows which add up to the perfect number, ten. The Pythagoreans regarded the tetractys as a symbol of utmost mystical importance. Iamblichus, in his Life of Pythagoras, states that the tetractys was “so admirable, and so divinised by those who understood [it],” that Pythagoras’s students would swear oaths by it. Andrew Gregory concludes that the tradition linking Pythagoras to the tetractys is probably genuine.”
Currency holds accurate validity, as a genuine symbol by which material resources can be exchanged in a sufficiently fair virtual manner*, only insomuch as there is an accurate census of how much stuff exists versus how many markers of value exist. *(that’s a complex notion, jah? in fact, it’s magical thinking, but magical thinking has its value. mathematics are just an uncommonly symmetrical form of symbolic magical thinking)
The very fact that one can invest in bitcoin — or any currency — in order for today’s dollar-worth of bitcoin to become two dollars-worth tomorrow is proof of their vulnerability to corruption: markers do not increase the amount of stuff they can buy.
Any currency that can represent the value of, say, an entire town, is bullshit. All modern currency is bullshit, and while bitcoin’s initial concept was to create a symbolic store of value that can’t be corrupted, the very idea of “buying money” renders it a fever dream. This isn’t to say that, for example, Boogaloo’s enhanced sense of security via bitcoin is foolish: his logic is sound. He knows it’s a game among many other games. I think he is wise in this matter.
We have all been rasied in a thoroughly financialized society. People trust money more than just about anything except maybe their closest friends, their spouse, and their dog. God-fearing Xtians work 40 hours a week for Mammon and 5-10 hours at most for God… unless they’re paid ministry.
Money rules us. We don’t rule it. We don’t own the internet. No one owns their bitcoins. It’s an illusion. A highly profitable illusion if you understand how rapidly Taleb’s Steamroller can accelerate and decelerate, and are able to read the signals indicating the imminence of either event. But nonetheless, an illusion. That very few people understand. That is by nature ruled by its predominant investors since it is, after all, merely a money market, which have ever been the spawning ground of evil.
In Monopoly, people buy stuff in order to make money. Boardwalk is considered good only because it earns the most money not because the Jersey Shore is a swell place. Money uber alles.
Davis Astle writes difficult prose but it’s worth navigating, imo, if one wants to get one’s head around why the Prince of Peace went apeshit on the money-changers. If anyone knows of an image of this event that shows a bit of blood, I’d be grateful to see it. A scourge can do nasty things to a human body.
“I love it when people disagree with me, by the way; it’s my best chance to maybe learn something.”
Just cuz I’m gay doesn’t mean I don’t admire a real man. *swoon*
The conflation of genuinely feasible alternative energy with “green” was given more momentum by Maggie Thatcher than all the Stewart Brands combined.
She wanted a PR weapon to use against striking coal-miners, and heard about this fossil-fuel global warming thing. Perfect, she thought. The public loearned about global warming.
Ever since, we’ve focused more on how bad for the environment are fossil fuels (true) while ignoring an equally pressing problem: we’re running out of fossil fuels while building an unsustainable petrotech socioeconomic system that requires ever more fossil fuels.
When Scams Collide, truth is the result, usually painful. The truth: we’re running out of energy while the climate’s weather goes insane for at least a few decades but perhaps a few centuries or millennia.
Not only is bitcoin just another ludicrous bubble based on copycat behavior like the infamous Tulip Mania a few centuries ago, but it is based on unsound everything, beginning with it requiring ever-growing data farms using ever more energy merely to keep it’s virtual essence of a non-entity from being hacked to (excuse me) bits..
It’s WAY cheaper to “print” traditional currency than bitcoin.
Plus, the rigged aspects Dr. D mentioned. Plus, you can’t stuff it in a mattress. Plus, it is beginning to be likely that robust quantum conmputing is pretty close at hand, and that will crack bitcoin wide open.
If the banks are now the markets, which I certainly believe is true, it’s almost as if all the genuine speculative risk-taking investment energy, that used to make Wall Street the global jitter joint of economic outcome, is now piled into markets based on sheer speculatioon on sheer speculation on sheer speculations*… and nothing else: bitcopin. It produces nothing, not even a stable currency.
*turtles!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!It’s more or less a symbol for our time: digital nonsense about nothing conflated with genuine wealth which is Energy&Matter times Intelligence. Bitcoin is the quantum woo of investment. It is a religion not a currency. How can you ride the wave when it’s also a stream of particles with bank teller windows as the slit screen of the famous experiment?
“a delightful night so many years ago, snowed in, a tiny mountain cabin, warm fire, some fine weed and spirits, a beautiful blonde amazon of a woman, a beautiful svelte brunette of a woman…and my lucky lucky lucky self.”
Why, Gepetto, you appear to be a lesbian! 😉
Possible double-post warning:
No one should be conscripted to fight in yet another insane war. But I cannot understand how “but all the other kids are doing it” makes moral sense of unnecessary killing, or assisting in the logistics by which other soldiers unnecessarily kill, people roughly as ‘innocent’ as you or I.
Whether a year in the pen is worse than, say, a tour of duty in Nam, is a moral question worth considering on its own merits, I would think, not the habits of history: ‘But Dad, all the other kids are killing each other!’
Now, please don’t feel singled out, any veterans here. All of us here, I presume, pay our taxes to governments more lethally powerful than and at least as brutal as, most governments throughout history. We pay for the wars that soldiers fight. If we don’t pay, we’ll be financially punished or sent to jail. Those of us who were drafted had a uniquely challenging moral dilemma before them, it being their own body, not just their pocketbook and conscience that was being taxed.
But there it is: we deserve what we submit to. We are usually more willing to submit to mandatory violence demanded of us by others than we are willing to fight those demanding that we fight others on their behalf. I say that no law is worth respecting if one can’t take it into one’s own hands. Those mythically glorified soldiers of the Revolutionary War were breaking the law by opposing British rule.
But they were a different group of kids, doing what all the other kids were doing, than the British troops conscripted or shanghaied or self-enlisted into King George’s imperial troops. There were enough local colonial kids doing this new independence/whatever thing for them to form a peer group that could place enough peer pressure and offer enough peer camaraderie for them to feel that killing a bunch of British troops (or British loyalist neighbors) for some vague notion of self-governance was worth taking a new law into their hands.
And so, as too often happens, strangers killed strangers for abstract reasons that no one really understood, reasons about which whose authors (our dear hallowed wax museum Founding Fathers) were less than sincere. A lynch mob has more moral honesty than a standing army, the existence of which stands on a pad of lies as thick as the stack of G-notes and piles of bullion used by the bankster oligarchs who’ve been inciting unnecessary* wars for many millennia in order to divert as much of those financial currencies into their account as they can get away with. * unnecessary as in not directly caused by major resource depletion necessary to two population groups
^&*
As for Wilde on socialism, all the talk of noble selfishness sounds lovely until you confront the Tragedy of the Commons and find yourself fighting for resources because you failed to create a social structure whereby those resources could be shared in a manner adequately beneficial to the group commonwealth. I neither like nor dislike socialism more than any other -ism, all of which have failed miserably in their turn. I am selfish where my self is concerned, and selfless where others are concerned. You take what you need, you give what you can, and for God’s sake don’t kid yourself that you have even a ghost of an answer to these problems at large. You don’t.
But you do have full grasp on your personal actions and how they affect your moral conscience (and, for the religious among us, I’ll add morTal conscience). Those are yours alone. Sometimes the most selfish thing a human being can do is be selfless if their moral conscience requires it.
My life is mine to live and to lose. Sadly, I have to consume the flesh of other living beings in order to survive, the Great Circle of Life being what it is. This is inescapable. All other killing… is escapable. Everyone has a price, I learned long ago. I decided that my price is that of my soul, the value of which is immeasurable to me, and worth more than any fool can offer or threaten me with.
Guys like Buddha and Jesus said the same thing, Jesus actually demonstrating this in action.
Yes, I pay my taxes. I am not morally superior to anyone here that I know of. “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s.” Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, if only because Caesar will make you pay more money than you would already pay in taxes.
Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. Saith the gov:
I.R.C. § 7201 – ATTEMPT TO EVADE OR DEFEAT TAX Any person who willfully attempts in any manner to evade or defeat any tax imposed by this title or the payment thereof shall, in addition to other penalties provided by law, be guilty of a felony and, upon conviction thereof, shall be fined* not more than $100,000 ($500,000 in the case of a corporation), or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both, together with the costs of prosecution. * As to offenses committed after December 31, 1984, the Criminal Fine Enforcement Act of 1984 (P.L. 92-596) enacted as 18 U.S.C. § 3571, increased the maximum permissible fines for felony offenses set forth in section 7201. The maximum permissible fine is $250,000 for individuals and $500,000 for corporations.
Sayeth H&R Block:
“Moral of the Story: The IRS Saves Criminal Prosecution for Exceptional Cases
“While the IRS does not pursue criminal tax evasion cases for many people, the penalty for those who are caught is harsh. They must repay the taxes with an expensive fraud penalty and possibly face jail time of up to five years.
“But if you’re like most taxpayers who make a good faith effort to file and pay their taxes accurately and on time, you won’t end up like John.”
Give unto God that which is God’s. Saith God: ?????
Having no knowledge of what God is, only personal hopeful yearnings, I am stumped except to cite my conscience, that thing which, coincidentally, leads people to wonder about and yearn for things like a benevolent deity in the first place. It’s my conscience, and being a selfish being, I’ll hand that conscience over to a (possibly only imaginary) deity before I’ll hand it to what all the other kids are doing. One might say that I am not a socialist in that regard: your right to tell me where to swing my fist ends with it up your ass as I pull your entrails out the old-fashioned way.
As for the idea that maybe some supernatural demon might offer something otherwise unobtainable in exchange for my soul: I have met the devil, and it is me. The devil and I both learned the hard way what a cold bitch can be.
Like the man sang:
Like my old man often said: “Well don’t that just frost your ass!”
I intend to either freeze hell or warm up my cold old ass in heaven, if such things avail, but if not I for sure don’t want to spend my dying days regretting being lukewarm while I lived. And now, if you’ll excuse me, Colonel Sherburn’s ex-wife is here for an especially intimate social call.
“Wealth has nothing to do with hard work or entrepreneurship. America’s billionaires made 931 billion dollars from the pandemic. They got richer in their sleep. Yes, 2020 was a vintage year for capitalists, but capitalism died! Liberated from any remaining competition, colossal platform companies like Amazon own everything. So, yes, during 2020, Capitalism morphed into an insidious Technofeudalism.”
Yes, and things like “technofeudalism” require genuine management leadership skills, things of which I see no evidence in our reigning powers that be. One can’t own “everything”. Private property is an illusion sustained by rules of engagement and traditions of cooperation. Lacking, at this point, either, I see this grand balloon of bloated billionaires poised to burst. (I want to see a mash-up of Sagan and Sanders in a rap battle based on billions and billions and billions…) One supposes we will have to endure a major shooting war as part of the popping process.
%^&
My. That is the finest Monet I’ve seen. It’s like a virtual hologram. Only really good art can make things like virtual holograms.
“My friend who volunteers for our homeless shelter has observed that the homeless that live on the street are not getting Covid. The ones in the shelters are. Robust immune system? In the long run that has the ‘really nasty bug’ in it, that toasty interior may not be all it’s cracked up to be.”
Having done my time as a homeless person in all weather extremes, I personally feel that toasty warm interiors are all they’re cracked up to be and more. But modern “air-conditioned cubicles”, to quote Joni Mitchell, are natural bug-spreaders.
Not to mention that most people avoid the homeless like the plague… in so doing failing to share their plague with the homeless.
#$%
@ Dr. D and the ecosophia MD quote: a person close to me works in the therapeutic counseling field. She describes how herd-like they all are, how she has had to keep her head low and just do what she thinks best. She describes how every few years there’s a New Big Thing that is The Answer to the challenge of successful psych healing. Everyone jumps on board, in the process often adopting techniques and attitudes opposite to those of the previous Big Thing.
So it is refreshing to hear this gentleman’s anecdote.
We’re monkeys. Monkey see, monkey do.
^&*@ Doc Robinson:
On the Defenstration of Fear (money quote at 3:30)
%^&
As for the RNA vaccine: how it affects people currently doesn’t much worry me. How it might affect people after a few years of lingering in our chromosomes worries me greatly. If I had time to worry, that is, about yet another human folly enacted on a global genomic scale. Like Kenneth Patchen wrote:
“So he thinks the world owes him a dying? What’s another little mistake?”
“…the sheer scale of Wednesday’s Democratic surrender was truly a sight to behold…”
Very much so, not that I watched.
^&*
Why the Scottish woman was arrested for filming an empty hospital ward is one thing. Before covid, she might well have been arrested for reasons related to the ancient War on Terror and Civil Liberties. So that aspect remains ambiguous to me. That the video remains online is another thing. I am curious to see what happens to it.
The latter (video remaining online) intrigues me. The former fits in with the blindness that power confers on its recipients: “It’s the law!”
Bailiff, whack her peepee. She is a naughty girl.
^&*
As for nuclear reactors, the crime is less that they want to extend operating licenses for older reactors than that we have proven unable to improve our nuclear power engineering to the place that Russia has. Like almost everything in modern Western culture, things are no longer made for their actual utility or material value but for the money some sneeze-rag can make off the process. Anything worth having these days is too expensive to properly make (except by some artisans, especially wealthy ones). A culture based on money uber alles cannot maintain material standards of any kind, not even in its favorite areas of accomplishment like digital technology and weapons systems. Brand-new ferroconcrete construction today looks like 1930s/40s/50s concrete construction after 70-90 years of wear. Ironically, it is probably safer in America to use 80-100 years old nuclear reactors than newly built reactors.
One way or another, our declining energy platform will involve nuclear power or will cease to be a platform. That is, if we do anything other than let things fall apart in the name of digital currency in plutocrats’ bank ledgers. It increasingly looks like we will do the latter.
Interestingly, Russia too is flirting with possible disaster:
“Eleven of Russia’s reactors are of the RBMK 1000 type, similar to the one at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Some of these RBMK reactors were originally to be shut down but have instead been given life extensions and uprated in output by about 5%. Critics say that these reactors are of an “inherently unsafe design”, which cannot be improved through upgrades and modernization, and some reactor parts are impossible to replace. Russian environmental groups say that the lifetime extensions “violate Russian law, because the projects have not undergone environmental assessments”.[17]”
That said, I agree with Isaac Azimov’s assessment back in the 70s/80s: that the risks of not having enough power are far worse than the risks of even a full meltdown. We’re a society based on widely available affordable energy via our electrical power grid. When such a society crumbles, as is ours, nothing is safe. People will break into power plants to steal stuff or just break things. When things are in decline, the masses generally turn sour and start breaking everything that doesn’t seem worth stealing. Russia, having fresh memory of a collapse only 30 years old, and historical knowledge of the fin de siecle troubles of the Russian Revolution, understands that the risks of socioeconomic instability can cause collapses that make even the fictional China Syndrome seem ok.
It’s the same logic by which responses, to whatever baseline biological risk covid presents, too often prove more dangerous and destructive than the known baseline biological risks.
Not to mention that fossil fuels, while not especially radioactive, have proven capable of producing what looks to be a major extinction event while operating with relative safety.
$%^
Also: “It’s not just the gargantuan price of nuclear power, and the preferability economically today of green, renewable energy led by solar and wind…” No one in journalism seems able to write error-free articles anymore. What is “the preferability economically today”? Even with the necessary missing commas, it would still be a sentence a person should not be paid to write. How about ‘economic preferability’? Robots make lousy copy editors.
Never mind that green power as a power-grid platform is NOT economically preferable except in terms of financial swindlery. We don’t expect them to cite honest accurate facts, but maybe they could at least lie intelligibly?
$%^
One last thing: sooner or later, a really nasty bug will appear, quite likely released from some biolab. If this happens soon enough after covid for people to remember the fiasco we are currently experiencing, our ability to muster the large-scale cooperation necessary to prevent population decimation will be tragically impaired.
There is more than ample evidence that our institutions of authority are mostly using covid for reasons other than honest pandemic control, and that what they are doing in this regard generally just makes things worse. How much of this is ‘merely’ the incompetence of reactionary corruption, and how much of this may be the result of proactive corrupt planning begun before anyone had heard of covid, is anyone’s percentage ratio, i.e., guess. However, the commonly proposed corrolary conspiracy to this — that covid is mostly harmless, an overblown bugaboo — remains ambiguous at best.
I see no reason to think Wolf Richter is lying. This doesn’t mean he’s telling the truth, either. But calling him a liar doesn’t make him a liar anymore than the opposite would be true. The suggestion to call local ICU nurses is hardly without merit for persons seeking to obtain for themselves hard data and opinions from honest-to-good/bad-ness healthcare professionals who should have first-hand knowledge of covid mortality in their ICU.
Black Lives Matter was very much a grass-roots movement. Sadly, it was successful. Therefore, it had to be financially co-opted.
^&*
“First step
The USA has got to stop sending money, in the budget, to the scammers in the Ukraine.”I don’t think zerosum “missed” a single thing. He just cut to the core chase, strictly essentials, including that he felt this was a necessary First Step.
This seems fitting to the topic du jour:
It’s a sign of the ages, markings on my mind
Man at the crossroads at odds with an angry sky
There can be no salvation, there can be no rest
Until all old customs are put to the testThe gods are all angry
You hear from the breeze
As night slams like a hammer
Yeah, and you drop to your knees
The questions can’t be answered
You’re always haunted by the past
The world’s full of children
Who grew up too fastYeah, but where can you run?
Since there ain’t no world of your own
And you know that no one will ever miss you, yeah, yeah
Yeah, when you’re finally gone
So you cry like a baby, a baby
Or you go out and get high
But there ain’t no peace on Earth, man
Maybe peace when you die, yeahBravo, Dr. D. Now that’s what I’m talking about.
A note on solar energy: some energy needn’t be converted into anything but ambient warmth as stored in crude matter like water, rocks, contained air space… point being that the concepts of “alternative energy” have been so hijacked by our culture of electricity and (mostly) internal combusion, that simple words like ‘solar’, applied to the idea of human utility, have been reduced to ‘makes electricity and cars go vroom’.
Likewise, wind power is GREAT: at pumping water, or heavy grinding, or very small DC electric conversion via very simple machines that don’t necessarily involve circular motion but oscillation: a semi-taut membrane flapping in the wind in a way that pulls magnets back and forth. But mostly: pumping water.
Let’s remove electricity or fuel generation from the alt energy concept. THe 20th century obsession with electrons is understandable but infortunate.
If anyone responds to me, I’ll put a hex on them. I’m not here to challenge or be challenged EXCEPT on matters of data hygiene or glaring mistakes of discursive rigor. Too many people here feel the need to fight, to prove themselves right, for me to want to engage the group. Sorry.
@ Geppetto
“I would posit that the *idea* that we humans are some how capable of controlling and modifying nature to our own ends is hubris. I believe that security and control are illusory……..”
I quite agree. That doesn’t mean we aren’t able to contain pandemics. We know how. We have, in fact, done so in the past. We had our chance with this one. We screwed it up.
^&*
@ Bill7 (one the countless but not innumerable Numbered People)
As for authentic health crises: I certainly didn’t say that covid is the only current health crisis, nor would I say that we deal all that well with things like heart disease, cancer, the growing obesity of our culture, etc. What a pretty trail of shining slimy red herrings people toss into my wake!
^&*
@ Mr. House:
Why the CIA remark? Because I know many bright people who ignore, to the detriment of their well-informedness, the writings of writers like Manufactured Consent (MC) because of MC et al’s tendency to use expressions that are better suited to, say, recent presidential “debates” or the average Youtube flame war. This is a shame, because the likes of MC know much and have much wisdom to share.
In using such language, writers like MC, despite their considerable knowledge and insight, add to the “mere conspiracy theorist” taint they otherwise work so hard to dispel. It’s like sites with titles like Consciousness of Sheep. Such titles drive many people* away from reading what would be illumating knowledge if they weren’t immediatyely put off by the shrill arrogance they perceive (rightly or not) in such titles and in the kind of antagonistically absolute verbiage I addressed. I presume entities like the CIA/NSA would a[pprove of this.
*yes, I know some personally^&*
I will go silent for awhile. I speak my mind and, as usual, people rush to replace what I said with words of their own and then argue with me over those words of theirs. But, a hint: just because a paragraph follows another does not mean that it directly addresses the former. The opening thrust of my post under discussion was about people choosing to focus their rhetorical energy against a perceived enemy by making glaring absolute statements that sound much like the bullshit coming from their perceived enemy. That is what the martial arts paragraph addressed. Mea culpa for not more clearly segueing that intent, but some blame is also on those who rushed in to assume they understood something clearly although it was (again, my bad) ambiguously constructed. Instead, they jumped on the opportunity to project their biases and tell me how right they are/how wrong I am without clarifying that what they disagree with is what I meant.
But then, this IS the internet. Lacking physical consequences to our words online (things like broken beer mugs in someone’s face), the standard angry hominid response to things we disagree with runs rampant and, typically, in rhetorical circles.
Now don’t everybody fawn over me at once. I’m too old to endure such adulation. I think I’ll let you all misconstrue each others’ words without me for awhile.
One ore attempt. Let’s hope the third time is the charm:
from the Year Zero article from Consent Factory linked above:
“but there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of any authentic public health threat that remotely justifies the totalitarian emergency measures we are being subjected to or the damage that is being done to society. ”
What is it with the ridiculous absolutes stated bassawkwards? If not for the word “the” between “justifies” and “totalitarian”, and the words “are being”, the sentence is nonsense. Covid is a very real virus with very real consequences occurring through high contagiousness, i.e., an authentic serious health threat. Any effective response to such a thing is by nature totalitarian because things to which the vast majority are susceptible to encounter and be infected with are universal in scope.
Yes, they fucked up their response big-time. Yes, they are obviously using it to exploit us for their desires. That’s what they do. Yes, we are being lied to. Yes, they are screwing us over. Yes yes yes…
But that’s no reason to go hyperbolistic lobbing bullshit missiles.
Recap: there IS an authentic health crisis. It’s proper defanging would have required measures totalitarian in nature (like we saw China do when this thing started). What has been done instead is awful at best and is moving rapidly toward worst.
The more profound martial arts understand that your force against the foe works best when it doesn’t directly counter the foe’s force but, instead, deceptively accepts then diverts. This is better not necessarily because a direct punch in the nose is ineffective. It is better because it prevents you from becoming a mirror image of your foe, which is both morally and strategically asinine. Morally because an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind including thyself, and strategically because the foe knows itself better than it does you, and becoming like your foe makes you an open book to it and a mystery to yourself.
And so you see smart people like Manufacturing Consent’s writer waxing deeply sophomoric. It’s enough to make a girl think they’re writing for the CIA.
The main assertion of Raul’s text .jpeg was true just 8 days ago, while we have been told for much longer than that to expect a mainstream pharma vaccine and submit to the discipline. I think the most important assertion to vet in that text is the final one and the second one.
TRUST THE SCAM: BARR RESIGNS AFTER COVERING UP EPSTEIN CASE, HIDING HUNTER BIDEN INVESTIGATION
Bit of a smorgasbord, hits and misses, but overall, a lot of the shit on the TP roll is real. A damning smear.
@ John Day
I am, indeed, a pretender, but over the decades, have become what I pretend to be. People have always had trouble with me being real but when I pretend to be real, they eat it up.
‘When illusion and reality are one, the people are content and the kingdom prospers. When illusion and reality are separate, the people are confused and the kingdom suffers.’ wise Asian stereotype, circa 7th century BCE
This is, as the kids say, from some guy on the web (a site called Gray Mirror, itals mine):
“America’s water-polo elections
“Let’s face facts. There is nothing historically un-American about election skulduggery. Not only is it traditional, it may even be proper. If your party gets outskulduggled, that tells us something—just as if you lost a real head-bashing contest. It tells you that the other side was strong and your side was weak.
“Woe to the defeated, Brennus said! And chucked his sword upon the scales—which the whipped Romans had to balance in gold. They remembered that whipping for a long time. Maybe they even turned a profit on it in the end.
“While skulduggery is wrong, in a sense it is right; because an election is a proxy for civil war. Perhaps the best analogy is water polo. Above the water, water polo is a sport with a referee. Under the water, anything goes—these guys are twisting each others’ balls all afternoon. (And their lawyers are twisting each others’ balls about the rules.) Also, if you do not play the underwater game, you are playing wrong and will just lose.
“Since balloted elections are actually designed to destroy information—that secret-ballot thing—the bottom layer of every election, the trust layer below anything the security layer can touch—is pure agar for any and all ball-twisting fuckery. The security of an election is a consequence of the thickness of this layer and should be treated as such. Also, if you do not play the underwater game, you are playing wrong and will just lose.
“If any election system were fuckery-proof, would it need election observers? Also: is there any system in America that counts or tracks citizens precisely and reliably? Also: is there any system in America that you would trust to mechanically distinguish everyone’s signature from some random scrawl? Also: what stops anyone running a voting station from slipping ballots in at the end of the day, while crossing off the names of people who didn’t vote? There is plenty of evidence that there is no election fraud—and plenty of evidence that no one is looking for it, or even could find it.
“We know exactly what a genuinely secure physical and electronic counting system looks like. It looks like Vegas. We know exactly what a genuinely secure 21st-century voting system looks like. It looks like Sweden, Mexico or even Iraq.
“Ours looks nothing like any of these things. It looks, in fact, like a typical American shitshow. (Or, as the New York Times put it in 2016, horror show.) And anyone who lacks quick and savage comebacks for the above questions is ill-positioned to educate us out of this Bayesian prior.”
“…he’s about to be holding the baby. And it’s ticking..”
A delightfully Looneyu Tunes moment, that.
“the turnout at 66.2% is the highest in over a century.”
If it were a referendum for, say, a Constitutional amendment to make or preserve the USA as a democratic republic, the amendment would fail due to lack of interest alone.
@ John Day
Having been a happy idiot for more years than I wish to admit, struggling like us all for the legal tender, I submit that true love is the only contender. The rest are hollow stand-ins. And Tina Weymouth was having too much fun that night with the Talking Heads.
Many here have many times commented that the measures being taken against covid might prove more damaging and lethal than covid itself. I agree with this in general. Such a concept implies higher death tolls, period, whether they are caused directly by covid infection or indirectly by the insanity of the past year.
%^&
We all know the CDC is mostly shit. Personally, I don’t think they’re worth mentioning except in dismissal. The following says all one needs to know on the matter:
“As of 2013, the CDC’s Biosafety Level 4 laboratories are among the few that exist in the world,[21] and serve as one of only two official repositories of smallpox in the world. The second smallpox store resides at the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR in the Russian Federation. In 2014, the CDC revealed they discovered several misplaced smallpox samples while their lab workers were ‘potentially infected’ with anthrax.” wiki
“Thousands of years ago, variola virus (smallpox virus) emerged and began causing illness and deaths in human populations, with smallpox outbreaks occurring from time to time. Thanks to the success of vaccination, the last natural outbreak of smallpox in the United States occurred in 1949. In 1980, the World Health Assembly declared smallpox eradicated (eliminated), and no cases of naturally occurring smallpox have happened since.
“Smallpox research in the United States continues and focuses on the development of vaccines, drugs, and diagnostic tests to protect people against smallpox in the event that it is used as an agent of bioterrorism.” (cdc)
So it doesn’t exist in the wild anymore. It is a useless bioweapon. Infect a nation/people you don’t like and they can drown you in smallpox cadavers in a month, infecting your nation/epeople. There is no single good reason for them to keep smallpox around. Yet the two dominant global powers in real muscle terms, USA and Russia, keep it around:
Blast sparks fire at Russian laboratory housing smallpox virus (article dated sept 2019)
^&*
@ Doc Robinson
Regarding the Mark Twain quote in your death count .jpeg: cognitive scientists have done research indicating it is easier to believe something than disbelieve something. Belief is easier than doubt. Cognitive harmony is more satisfying than cognitive dissonance.
@ John Day’s post from yesterday:
“I have given this considerable though and consideration for a long time.
I think we should shoot for 1970, as an economic model, not 1840, then work it out from there going forward in a different direction.
What are you thinking about a path forward?”As in a path forward for ‘us all’? I think that thinking in such terms is a collective joke that few people get but when they do, do not feel it’s funny. People enter a theater fairly orderly, even a death metal lunge festival. But if the place catches on fire, the exodus is generally a mess.
But I’ll provide some specifics: we’ve forgotten most of how we lived in 1840. That was still in the age of techne, i.e., craft. Knowledge handed down orally and manually from generation to generation. Meanwhile, we have a population whose under-30s can hardly give street directions without shsowing you colored lines on a cellphone view of some shitty map app.
“Follow the purple line, see?” (verbatim from actual personal experience a few years ago).
We seem to assume that 1970, or 1840, have been patiently waiting for us to come back to our senses and retrieve them from the past. It will take a decade or three just to raise enough livestock to make 1840 look plausible. How long it will take to rediscover lost techniques or devise new one is anyone’s guess, but I thionk it will take awhile.
In the interim between the post-modern neo-industrial paradigm crash, and the emergence of something new, stable, and tolerably liveable, I foresee extremely primitive conditions and accompanying behavior, the latter probably being the primary cause of the former.
As for a personal path: those who can should do something like you do. Most people can’t. My prescription, overall, is: be nice. Be kind and fair and decent to people. Even if it doesn’t save your tushie, it will help you die with a relatively clean conscience.
This ain’t no party and, thank god, no disco. It is, I regret to say, mostly us just fooling around. Why, look at Bill7. He wants to fight and I don’t even have a bucket of fried chicken for him to steal.
I have no clue, Doc. I acknowledge patterns but avoid motive inference. Smoke is not itself evidence of arson. People are known to be careless with matches.
What can one say, Doc Robinson? Dr. D. is both an extremely informed and insightful sociopolitical analyst, and someone who seems to delight in making bold bullshit pronouncements. He is anything but someone to dismiss out of hand yet also no one to take at face value.
He’s not Uncle Walter but he’s no Gil-Scott Heron either.
I learn something new from him quite often, and delight in certain phrase-turnings he uses, but it doesn’t take much Dr. D to set off the smoke alarms in my head.
