Mister Roboto
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I have thought for a while now that the lockdowns were a bad idea because you need a healthy and resilient society to handle a public health crisis such as Covid. The lockdown approach has too many effects that make society less healthy and resilient. I think there would have been a negative effect on the economy without the lockdowns (a contagious and possibly deadly respiratory disease is going to make people less keen on going to bars and restaurants), but when you look at what happened to the unemployment rate in March, it’s difficult to defend how dealing society a body-blow like that helps us to deal with any sort of emergency.
Also, it is seriously doubtful how much locking down stops the spread of the virus. People will still interact with each other for some absolutely necessary things in the event of a lockdown, so the virus will continue to do what contagious viruses do.
@dermot: Even though I don’t read JMG anymore, I think his evaluation of classical Fascism is the one I used in referring to things as Fascism. I think American right-wing authoritarianism [I would like to interject here that I think it’s the authoritarian-nationalist faction of the Deep State, as opposed to the neo-con/neo-lib globalist faction represented by Biden and Harris, who is propagating this story about a stolen election] will certainly have some things in common with old-fashioned Fascism. But in Fascism, the government was very much the senior partner in the amalgamation of the corporate establishment and the government, but in American RWA, the corporate establishment will be the senior partner and the RWA government would do whatever it does to prop up the interests of the corporate establishment. This is not to deny, however, that the globalists are soft authoritarians.
I think the authoritarian-nationalists would have been able to hold onto power if they hadn’t had a figurehead as unstable and erratic as Donald Trump in the Oval Office. However, it was Trump who was able to capture the fancy of a large subset of voters who felt alienated by the whole globalist game, and he was willing to be their guy, so they took the opportunity that presented itself to them, as their power has been seriously on the wane ever since the Clinton Administration. I have to admit, I am not looking forward to seeing how this all plays out.
Honestly, I just think people are going insane individually and collectively from continually decreasing net-energy availability and its impacts. And of course, being Americans, we’re making the whole process as drawn-out, agonizing, and lugubrious as we possibly can. 🙂
DailyDot.com’s take on the reaction to the recent Time article about the election.
YouTube removed two videos from a December 8th hearing before the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. It featured Kory who discussed the use of Ivermectin as a potential treatment for Covid-19, particularly in the early stages. It is a drug that treats tropical diseases caused by parasites. Kory was calling for a review by National Institutes of Health on trials for the drug.
Just fuggeddabout all the lives that could be saved and the suffering that could be eased, we gotta protect all those nice, pretty Big Pharma remdesivir and vaccine profits!
Continuing my Ivermectin musings from the previous thread, another thing I simply can’t fathom are the people who continue to struggle with severe symptoms after a bout with Covid. I think it’s war-crime level stuff that we aren’t treating these people with Ivermectin, just letting them suffer and suffer and suffer.
I still stand with my opinion, Jan. 6 was mainly unescorted tourists enjoying Capitol Hill and taking selfies.
Deliberately trying to crush a man to death is not something it would occur to me to do if I were ever part of a tour-group. 🙂
Another thing is, now that Covid has a massive foothold in the human population, it is showing a strong predisposition to mutate into new, more dangerous strains, and so even if a worldwide program of aggressive treatment with Ivermectin would be more difficult than if it had been initiated six-to-nine months ago. Not impossible, mind you, I’m just emphasizing how much damage was done by failing to nip it in the bud when it was a new thing.
What it boils down to is that we can treat Covid in a widespread, cost-effective way, but we’re not despite the damage it’s doing. So maybe somebody wants the damage. Though I am also willing to entertain the possibility that it’s just a combination of incompetence, institutional inertia, and big pharma only wanting the most expensive treatments (thereby limiting the utility of said treatment-approaches) that put us in our current situation.
Whatever the situation really is, I suspect that it’s more weird and complicated than any of us fully realize, and the normalcy of pre-2020 simply isn’t coming back because things have changed too much now, no matter what we “little people” say, do, feel, or think.
As for the origin of Covid, I think it probably just accidentally escaped containment from some lab facility, and if it is deliberately being allowed to run rampant, that is because of the “don’t let a good crisis go to waste” dictum that elites often follow. There’s a saying that tells us to never attribute to willful malice what can just as easily be attributed to stupidity, but I can’t help but suspect that come combination of both is at work here.
Thapsia villosa, eh? Well, if it’s cheap and easily produced, I guess we won’t be seeing much of any such therapy in North America, Europe, or Australia, will we?
I acknowledge Covid is a very real and deadly problem if left untreated. The thing is, it’s at least more easily treatable than influenza with Ivermectin, Azithromycin, Vitamin D3,and Zinc, but we simply won’t do that here in the developed world, despite the fact that it should be easier than falling off the proverbial log. So the question to ask is, “Who benefits?” Well, unchecked Covid is killing a lot of poor and elderly people, so perhaps somebody wants a lot of poor and elderly people to bite the dust right now.
It has also had the effect of seriously inhibiting normal social and economic life, which I’m guessing it would even without the dubious lockdown strategy that is so widely favored now. Perhaps we were about to hit an economic wall fast and hard, and the pandemic has introduced a convenient way of inducing this in a more “slow-motion” manner (at least from the perspective of elites)? It certainly provided a convenient rationale for ramping up to the nines the whole “print-money-for-the-financial-markets” strategy that has been in place for the past five years.
Normally, I’m averse to conspiracy-theories, but I really have to think that if something like this would have happened thirty years ago and the means to stop it were so readily available (which they would have been in 1991), we would have stopped it, or at the very least not let it burn through our population like a fucking prairie-grass fire!
Here’s the Zero-Hedge article about silver boiled down to its “brass-tacks” essentials for finance-dummies like me: There are two different kinds of precious metals markets, one in which the actual metal (usually gold or silver) is actually bought and sold; the other one is where paper pseudo-assets that are notionally based on the actual metal, are moved around in such a way as to create an illusory “spot-price” for the metal in question that benefits a small subset of big-time players in the financial markets. The purchasing-frenzy of actual physical silver is precipitating a schism between these parallel markets, which if it happens, will have consequences nobody can entirely predict but will probably be pretty major. But for now, maneuvers in the more notional of the two markets are keeping the price of silver suppressed.
There was a lot of ballyhooing about silver over the weekend, but it would appear that for all the effort to “short squeeze” it, it went up a bit, then shrugged and said, “Is that all ya got?” Might the central banks have counter-moved against the “Reddit Army”, as it’s now being called, to prevent the short-squeeze on silver? Just a thought. 🙂
Honestly, I think the thing Donald Trump would hate the most would be if people could just forget and stop talking about him, forever.
The fact that Covid seems given to rapidly mutating makes me even more skeptical of the “lockdown” approach. Lockdowns come with a very high economic price tag, and if this virus is going to be a little sumthin’-sumthin’ different every year, necessitating yet another lockdown again and again, then that cost may just prove to be way too high.
As for Donald Trump representing some sort of last, best hope for, well, anything, David Roth at Defector.com sums up what I think about that. (Trigger warning: The prose doesn’t get much more purple than this!)
The United States of America has always been more of a business concern than it ever has been a real country. Once the empire collapses, I really do expect it to break up into smaller units that will be a lot more like actual countries. It’s inevitable, even if it doesn’t happen in my lifetime (which may not be a whole lot longer, given the little foretaste we had this week of where things are headed).
Black Capitol Police Officers Describe Fighting Off “Racist Ass Terrorists”
I normally wouldn’t post a link to a Buzzfeed News article (they really embarrassed themselves by reporting on the Steele Dossier as if it were an actual thing), but this eyewitness account on the part of African-American capitol police officers on the scene of the DC Trumpster-Putsch is an important one.
An idle question: Does anyone suspect, as I do, that the rise in oil prices over the past two months had a lot to do with this holiday season’s very online-dependent gift-shopping (which would, obviously, involve a lot of hauling packages by truck and van)?
@WES: It is my understanding that in old Britain, the ne’er-do-well sons of the upper classes would be shipped off to Ireland.
Another major impact that the discovery of the Western Hemisphere had on China: The transplantation of maize-corn there fueled a great deal of China’s population boom, as it would grow anywhere something could conceivably be grown, being a much less temperamental member of the Poaceae family of flowering grasses than wheat, rye, barley, or rice.
Two things: 1) It is also Kwanzaa (African Christmas). 2) I’m guessing these new, relatively untested vaccines are going to turn into a monumental clusterfuck. This might encourage more people to become anti-vaxers, which I don’t like, but it might also further sour people on the Myth of Perpetual Progress, and I do think that would be a good thing.
I recall reading a report that several members of Congress are using prescription drugs that are designed for countering the effects of Alzheimer’s. Pelosi’s recent performances in television interviews (“Good morning, Sunday morning”) really make me think that she might be one of those people utilizing said medications.
We’ve been adding a billion more people every 12-13 years since 1961, so I’m thinking we are going to hit a wall with that, at some point. Still, I will never countenance any sort of mass-murder as a solution.
So add to the long, long list of medical mass-murders.
I’m in complete agreement with you, for a change. Normally, I’m very conspiracy-theory averse, but I’m really starting to wonder if perhaps the oligarchic PTB simply want to get rid of as many of the poor people with chronic poor health/ preconditions and the elderly as they can in anticipation of…something.
Based on what Dr. Chris Martenson has been informing me about Ivermectin, it shows rather more than just “promise”. I’m reasonably sure that if an Ivermectin-based treatment-regimen were implemented worldwide, I would entirely cease being concerned about Covid, as Ivermectin would appear to have prophylactic effects, curative effects on both acute and chronic Covid-related sickness, and it knocks out transmissibility, to boot. The only reason it isn’t being implemented instantly, completely, and universally, I really do think, is because Ivermectin is cheap and doesn’t make the big bundle of cash for Big Pharma that these new and relatively untested vaccines will. You will recall that I recently posted a comment about Dr. Martenson’s video about Ivermectin being censored by YouTube and Facebook.
I also deplore the fact that hydroxychloriquine was derided as a treatment option merely because President Trump recommended it. I’m no fan of the man at all, but something isn’t automatically wrong just because Donald Trump said it!
I wish someone would come up with what the odds would actually be, of a pandemic occurring in an election year, where “protesting” with people from all over your state does not spread the disease but going to church with your local community does.
The virus is 20 times more likely to spread from person-to-person in an indoor gathering than an outdoor gathering. But I still think it’s a better idea to avoid both sorts of gatherings (I certainly do) as too many people are not wearing face-masks even now.
Funny how “protesting” goes in scare quotes when it’s those other people who are doing it.
Definitely can feel it coming. My sense is that people might play it cool through the holidays which is time for home & family anyways. But come January & February, if the wanna-be tyrants in public service don’t ease up then they’ll be in for a world of hurt. Not enough cops to arrest everybody just because the governor wants it so.
I think it’s morally right to avoid crowds and large gatherings whenever possible as long as the pandemic is raging. But government-mandated lockdowns do more harm then good because 1) how do you determine which human interactions are acceptable and which are not and 2) how do you enforce it short of arresting everybody who is out and about? People have to want to socially distance, and if the virus continues its spread because we chose not to, well then, we have only ourselves to blame as a society when the consequences of that have social, political, and economic knock-on effects that we failed to anticipate.
I find this interesting: Dr. Chris Martenson says that YouTube and Facebook have banned his most recent video about the great helpfulness of Ivermectin in treating Covid-19.
While Facebook and YouTube certainly have the legal right to do so as private companies, I still find actions such as these morally redoubtable. The only time I think there is a morally justifiable case for Big Tech/ Social Media to take stuff down is when something promotes negativity and hate without contributing anything worthwhile to the discussion. By no stretch of the imagination whatsoever do I believe that Dr. Martenson’s video could have been described as any such thing.
Peak Oil never went away, the whole picture of it is just more complicated than we thought it was twenty years ago.
Once again, Chris Martenson sums it up better than anybody else.
As to the article about trucking and consumer goods, I will admit to having done the bulk of my Xmas shopping online this year. I get around Milwaukee on the county bus, and at the age of 53, I have well and truly lost any taste I might have had for long, long bus-rides.
My thought for the day on Covid: The virus is known to be especially hard on people with medical preconditions and poor health in general. That’s why I think it hits populous nations with very large gaps between the rich and the poor (being very poor is very bad for your health) such as the United States, Brazil, Mexico, and India, so harshly.
I always thought it was pretty ridiculous that Michael Flynn was somehow guilty of something because he had informal conversations with Russian government officials. Wasn’t that just part of the job he was supposed to do? It really underlined how the whole Russia-Gate thing was just a five-gallon bucket of pure hysteria.
Curiouser and curiouser. The postal worker in Pennsylvania is “recanting his recanting”, but an investigation into his allegations have found very little to nothing to substantiate them.
Sometimes I feel like I’m in an episode of “The Simpsons” that just won’t end. And not one of the good episodes from the nineties.
From WaPo: Postal worker admits fabricating allegations of ballot tampering, officials say. I understand if one is reluctant to trust WaPo as a source, as they have allowed their objectivity to be compromised since 2016 especially, but I would believe them before I would believe some of the sources that seem to be trusted around here.
@Doc Robinson: If insomnia were mental illness, they would have thrown me into the booby hatch by now. 🙂
I did find this news story about electronic voting-machine vote-flipping at a mainstream television-channel news site. Regardless of the parties involved in the actual event, I can very easily believe an account of electronic voting shadiness. This kind of voting has always seemed to me to be made-to-order for election fraud and rigging.
