willem
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AFKTT: “The fact that ‘preparations for nuclear war’ articles are popping up all over suggests someone has a plan to do something diabolical.”
I tend to believe that if actual nuclear war was (intentionally) in the cards, the ground would probably not be laid with advance advertising–it would just get dropped on our heads unannounced. More likely this is some kind of scare campaign, similar to the “mass die-offs” we were promised in the wake of Covid’s march across the planet. Both intended to get the public to do something or accept something, but in themselves not a reflection of actual happening.
Lots of chatter these days about immigration all over the Western world. TPTB seem intent on facilitating it to the maximum, pressing on despite significant opposition to the policy from the general public in most countries. They keep shoving in more and more of the world’s destitute. Here in the US we are certainly doing our share since “Biden” took over.
One has to ask–why? The usual explanations are either 1) cheap labor or 2) creating voters for the party that believes it can gain from such a strategy. But after due consideration, I believe that the real reason is the simple strategy of filling up Western society with people who have relatively low expectations.
TPTB are planning to take away the last few remaining punch bowls from the general population (in the name of their own greed, saving the planet, as necessitated by planetary resource exhaustion, or some combination thereof, or whatever). When we start moving into this phase (I believe quite soon now), those who are coming from wretchedness will still consider themselves much better off, and will be the natural allies of TPTB.
Regarding the government’s tendency to classify virtually everything, one big reason is usually overlooked–the fact that it is easy. Back in the 70s when I was getting trained by the military in nuclear technology, later subjects did indeed deal with details of the technology that were somewhat closely guarded. But the early part of the training was just math and physics, all stuff that you could easily find in college textbooks. But we were required to stamp every page of notes we took with a rubber stamp “CONFIDENTIAL-NOFORN”. It was just because no one could be bothered to review each page to decide if anything confidential might actually be on there.
Dr. D’s dissertation on “terrorism” is on the spot. “The word “Terrorist” like the word “Racist” now means all things.” Since 9/11, the word has become increasingly abused to the point where it is now both alarming and at the same time just tiresome. But one thing I feel pretty confident of is that when two governments are conducting Modern War on one another, neither can really call any action its opponent takes against it “terrorism.”
@zerosum: Re your link to “Where the Fuck Did Everybody Go”, I have asked myself this exact question numerous times in a couple of different ways: 1) If all-cause deaths were much higher than normal but this fact was not publicized, would anyone notice/know? Or 2) How much would an increase in all-cause deaths have to rise to become noticeable to most of us? This is the first time I’ve seen anyone else asking these questions.
This is interesting, given the supposed big push for renewable energy.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/GE-Slashes-Wind-Power-Workforce.html
@Mr.House: I read the article you linked (“Z Marks the Spot”). I don’t know what to say–this guy is talking about a completely different war than the one I’ve been reading about. Some of his statements are even completely at odds with video evidence I’ve seen. I’d be interested to know what sources he’s using.
I noticed there is only one comment on the article. Perhaps he lost all his followers after such a long layoff.
@DBS: “We can always tell when fuckwits have lost arguments: they resort to insults:” Great one!
@Dr. D: Thanks much for your climate post–very well written.
@John Day: Very informative post on the fetal heartbeat stuff. Back when the board was talking about abortion after the Supreme Court decision, I pretty much stayed out of that discussion. Personally, I think this heartbeat stuff takes the whole issue into the weeds.I revise my opinions about all kinds of things regularly as I live and learn. My own belief has been that the judgement on whether a fetus not generally recognized as viable outside the womb represents an actual (vs. potential) life is a matter of faith and not science (at least not yet), and that the decision to abort prior to viability must therefore be one of conscience rather than law.
@Redneck: As I see it, Ritter, the two Alexes, and Luongo are all just offering opinion and analysis. One can certainly take issue with anything one of them says, but I think it’s safe to say that at least they are not intentionally lying. That privilege is reserved for the “trusted” sources.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most manipulated infectious disease events in history, characterized by official lies in an unending stream lead by government bureaucracies, medical associations, medical boards, the media, and international agencies”
There has always been a certain amount of lying, but then the “trusted” sources forgot one of the basic rules of good lying–staying as close to the truth as possible. Their stories just don’t hang together any more, to the point that it has become obvious to a large portion of the public. Let’s hope that portion achieves critical mass.
@aspnaz: Agreed. I view centralization as one of the big evils. Distribute everything. If we need to have “centers”, let’s have many rather than one. This is not only robust, but it allows a selection process to determine which among all the alternatives available is the best way.
@Dr. D: Models put in 300 active variables. Why is CO2 the only relevant one? If it is, why do they bother with the other 299? It makes computering expensive. System dynamics is intended to deal with complex systems containing multiple feedback mechanisms. The problem is that the human mind does not do well with lots of variables, and tends to focus on just a few when it starts getting overwhelmed. The CO2 variable gives the public “one evil thing” to focus on, and happens to work well with the Climate Change narrative they are trying to perpetuate. The intention is also to establish it as a convenient metric for measuring (and eventually metering) overall personal resource consumption.
@boscohorowitz: I agree with your response, which is detail I did not include in my own. We are talking about a multi-variable system that is not only growing increasingly complex, but is a system in which one of the main variables is population size.@boscohorowitz: Yesterday you wrote: “A crisis is a relative thing. Weather that 600 years ago would impact a global population of “only 500-600 million, maybe a few hundred at most, like the infamous Little Ice Age, would now impact a global pop of 8 billion, 16 times as many people.It only takes a decade of really wicked weather to crumble a global food/essentials economy like ours…”
I think part (most?) of the disruption from such stuff is not that we have 16 times as many people. It is the fragility of our current “finely tuned” production and distribution systems. In general, the more a system is tuned to be efficient, the less robust it is.
@UpstateNYer: “CO2 and climate change. Doesn’t matter what humans do with the damned oil, resources [ie, that all important item called food] will collapse before “climate change” (is that the current approved term?) has a chance to, idk, kill all of us.”
I’m with you on this one. Human effects on the climate are small enough that resource depletion will get us far sooner. The world is past peak oil, and as the burning of it drops off, so will the follow-on effect on the environment.
The whole Climate Change narrative is something that was decided on in a conference room years ago as the theme that would be used to create the proper sense of crisis for the public. Which seems a bit strange, BTW. I’m confident that human civilization can adapt to a changing climate (and has, numerous times in the past). Resource depletion in contexts like the one presented in Limits to Growth is, to me, a far scarier prospect, and one there seems to be no good answer to.
@ezlxa1949: As I once read, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is man’s inability to understand the exponential function.”
@phoenixvoice and others: I think humans in functional social groups have symbiotic relationships with one another, e.g., of two that might be in a cooperative relationship, both gain more on an individual basis than either would if working alone. This should be taken over the lifespan of the membership in the social group, not on a short-term basis.
@DBS: ” TAE has drawn the attention of top tier intelligence interests who are applying very sophisticated psychological operations, using duped (for the most part) human operatives, and assisted by the finest AI to disrupt our dangerously fruitful conversation.”
Or perhaps we think a bit too much of ourselves… (and nothing personal intended in this comment)
The ultimate state of emergency is the declaration of martial law. This pretty much allows the PTB to do anything they want under the color of war, including massive censorship and the jailing of violators. So I suspect the challenge now is to get the actual hot war started, but keep it from going nuclear and completely destroying the planet. However well-equipped and protected their doomsday bunkers are, even the plutocrats don’t want to spend the rest of their lives inside a hole, even a luxurious one.
Regarding Transnistria, I saw this a couple of months ago, pretty interesting writeup:
https://www.palladiummag.com//2022/07/18/war-will-decide-the-fate-of-transnistria/
@John_Day: I never saw or read that one, but much of the Lovecraft that I have read (mostly when I was much younger) would be challenge to do justice to in film. I think the imagination is often much more powerful than the screen.
@boscohorowitz: I read “The Road”, in this case a few years after seeing the film. I did think the film was pretty well done, but as is almost always the case, the book was much better. I’m a bit prejudiced here, since Cormac McCarthy is one of my favorite fiction authors. But speaking more in general, I’ve read lots of books that films were based on, some before and some after seeing the film, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that I thought was better than the book.
I’ve noticed in particular that the resemblance of the film and the book often ends with the title (Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi and Steven King novels both come to mind–I read the Philip K. Dick story that Blade Runner was based on, and I could barely recognize it.) And Hollywood is especially outrageous about completely changing the endings. (Watch Robert Redford in “The Natural” and then read the Bernard Malamud story.)
Sometimes truly great books defy the filmmakers. McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” has defied the filmmakers for years, and it was easy to see why once I’d read it.
@chooch: I hope you’re going to let a troll or two chase you away–I get something out of almost every serious post, yours included.@Bill7: The old chairs are amazing, especially considering they were built completely without power tools. I have a friend who has a long-standing hobby of collecting and using hand tools, and he loves building stuff completely by hand, no power.
Could be a valuable skill in the not-too-distant future…. 🙂
@upstateNYer: “404” in the Gibson promotion probably refers to Ukraine. I have Andrei Martyanov refer to Ukraine as “404” (which I guess is suggestive of its web-related meaning of “missing”).
Dr. D: Saw a blogger item about that purported RAND paper a few days ago. Some readers think it is probably fake, and I agree with that reasoning.
https://2ndsmartestguyintheworld.substack.com/p/bombshell-classified-rand-corporation
‘I still haven’t seen anyone explain how the US got so far behind on hypersonics. Spending 10x what Russia spends, and still be 10 years behind.’
It depends on whether the goal of your ‘defense’ industry is to produce weapons rather than profits and order churn.
Don’t Listen to Those Asking To Stop Supporting Kiev, EU’s Borrell Says
“People want to end the
warsanctions because they cannot bear the consequences,the costs.” There, fixed it.@Dora: Thanks for that link. I have had many of the same thoughts myself, but not in such a neatly organized fashion. I think the big question I’ve asked myself more than once is: “How many more citizens would have to be dying before I would notice it in real life?” My impressions of all this are mediated ones–I have actually not set eyes on anything obvious in the physical world that supports them.
“US Considers Sanctions on China to Deter Taiwan Attack”
The Ukraine conflict is being used (was invented?) by the globalists as the excuse for the sanctions that put Western Europe on a permanent energy diet and will de-industrialize it. Obviously (see Art Berman graphic above) people could never be forced to choke it down unless first given a “reason”.
US sanctions against China would complete the setup, and the blowback will probably make the Russia sanctions blowback look tame by comparison.
@afewknowthetruth: “The energy ‘transition’ graphic and text are spot on.”
I agree, especially with respect to climate change. Just for starters, a little high school math is enough to show that “renewables” like solar and wind can’t even come close to replacing today’s global energy demand—not even the existing electrical portion of that. My own guess is that maybe 5-10% of that is the absolute best that can be expected.
Not only that, but the “harvesters” of the so-called “renewables” are themselves non-renewable. (In fact, Tim Watkins refers to them as “non-renewable renewable energy harvesters”.)
So what seems most likely is that the push for “renewables” is just a way to prolong the agony of our exit from the Industrial Age by giving us access to a little bit of power from a source other than combustibles for a few extra years. And in the process of manufacturing this, shifting yet more wealth to those that already have too much.
The only good news here is that possibly there won’t be enough energy around to implement the grand plans for 4IR, digital currencies, and the all-encompassing surveillance grid that certain people dream of. That all takes a lot of energy, and will not quite be compatible with our newly medieval lifestyles.
@anticlimactic: “Is there any body left who you would trust?”
Ah, that is the point of the exercise…“Scholz called for an expanded, militarized European Union under German leadership.”
With our newly designed spring-loaded weaponry and our new naval galleys.
I, too, wonder exactly what is going on in Ukraine. I read and listen to lots of reporting and commentary–too much, probably, given that it is unlikely any of them have an overall grasp of the actual facts on the ground. A few of them might have a piece of it, and I guess I’m hoping that my brain can assemble those pieces into a coherent whole of some kind. Now the trick is telling which “pieces” are the true ones….
Ugo Bardi had a very good blog post on this subject back in June:
What’s Really Happening in Ukraine: The Rules of Disinformation During Wartime
I noticed he followed this up last Friday with a short note after the “counter-offensive”:
A Quick Note About Ukraine: When Propaganda Rhymes With Itself
The media and political tidal waves of celebration following the latest Ukrainian moves reveals something for those who see through today’s headlines.
If Ukraine had really been kicking Russian butt all this time as these people would have us believe, there would be nothing particularly abnormal about this latest “offensive”. The fact that they are so effusive is an open admission that they have had precious little to celebrate up until now.
According to the Military Summary channel, Russia hit the Ukraine electrical supply to stop the trains, which in Ukraine are apparently all-electric. Stopping the trains halts all rail-based troop and equipment movements.
@slimyalligator: At the Frontline Covid Critical Care Alliance website, they have a protocol called I-PREVENT that has you taking IVM twice a week.
https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/i-prevent-covid-protection-protocol/
I read somewhere about nurses using a similar protocol with IVM on Day 1 and Day 3 of each week while working in hospitals with infected patients, but I can no longer find it. If I remember right, none of them got Covid.
@citizenx: Where did you see the quote about “getting to work to clean this mess up”?
Saw this on Moon of Alabama yesterday about comment-bombing problems he is having. In one part of his post he refers to this rogue commenter posting under several different names, and apparently inciting squabbles between others in the more-regular part of the MoA commenter community. It says this is happening on lots of other websites, too. Something to be aware of.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/09/comment-moderation.html
Red: “Experts” seem to think that the wood smoke will be worse than the hypothermia!
Perhaps they’re thinking of smoke inside the house. I remember when I was back in the US Navy and we visited Pusan, Korea in the late ’70s. The primary mode of heating for many (most?) living spaces was charcoal in a stove placed in the center of the room. (If you took a bus ride through town you could see the big clinkers, yesterday’s burned out charcoal blocks, set out by the street for pickup.) Prior to putting into port we were warned that if we spent the night in town, we should be aware that carbon monoxide poisoning from these stoves was not uncommon.
@adrian144: I found this link yesterday, but figured it was not the right one. If you click through to the IVM page and look at what it says under the heading “Recommendations”:
The Panel recommends against the use of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19, except in clinical trials
RIM: Thanks much for the video!
@DBS: A lucid and clearly stated piece, very well written. I differ on a few details, but I’m definitely on the same page with the overall theme.
@UpstateNYer: I too bought IVM early on from India, and have had it at the ready. Although I have not needed it myself, my wife took some as a prophylactic before taking a flight overseas last year, and I have shared a bit with some friends who needed it.@Bill7: The fault line under Diablo Canyon is NOT an “active” fault line. This is mythology promulgated by plant opponents. And I live about 10 miles north of that sucker…
