willem
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Notice that the tactic of the 1/6 Committee is the same as that trotted out for the jab—the hard sell. This seems destined to become a regular feature of our lives in the new “mediated reality.”
Products, narratives, etc. will sell themselves with virtually no extra effort if the benefits of buying them is clear. And the 1/6 narrative, just like the jab, should be an easy sell if the truth of the narrative or the quality of the product is obvious. Obviously in both cases, high-pressure sales tactics are required. In the current case, if the 1/6 Committee had anything more than innuendo, the heads of the “conspiracy” would have been brought to trial long ago, and Trump himself would already be in court somewhere. This is obviously nothing more than a mid-cycle election pre-game show.
Ed Curtin is an eloquent yet low-key commentator that I follow. Today he had a brief post up consisting of the following thank-you:
I want to thank everyone who comments on my articles, for it is important and uplifting to see people in dialogue and not bashing each other. We all have a lot to learn from each other, even when there are disagreements between commentators and those who disagree with what I write. I read everything but don’t have the time or energy to respond. I never censor comments, so the site is where freedom of speech is practiced. This is very important, especially these days. And I want to thank the few who contributed some money, since once upon a time I was paid for my work when publications paid writers, but those days are long gone, even while those same publications pay their staffs. Writers are supposed to work for nothing these days.
http://edwardcurtin.com/thanks-you/
Both Ed’s commentary and that of the commenters are both models of civility, while remaining interesting and stimulating. This is also one of the best features of TAE that keeps me coming back. Most commentary here is also quite civil, for which I am grateful. Thanks to you all for that.
There is a weekly “farmer’s market” within walking distance of my house. I live in a smallish town on the coast, well away from any large urban areas, but more importantly, most of the vendors come from inland where most of the farms are. I know that some of these people drive a long way to bring their goods to this market, which is only open for about 3 hours, and then go about 12 miles down the road to an evening market in a nearby town.
Today I was talking with one of the vendors I regularly buy citrus from, and I remarked that it must be getting expensive to gas up that stake-bed truck of hers. (This morning gas here was $6.15/gal, and about $7/gal for diesel.) She said she drives 150 miles each way (so 300 miles round trip) to get here, and on a good day, the truck gets ~13 mpg. Wow. That means that one fruit seller has to pay for around 25 gallons of fuel just to break even on the transportation cost. I might add that she told me her truck has 425,000 miles on it–it will obviously need to be replaced at some point, it isn’t going to run forever. I really don’t know how she has held her prices steady for the last year or two.
Elsewhere in the market there is another vendor I buy pasture-raised pork, chicken, and eggs from. He only drives about 80-90 miles round trip. The meat is much better and healthier, but it certainly isn’t cheap compared to its supermarket feed-lot raised equivalent. Last week a customer came by to buy some meat, and I’m pretty sure it was his first time buying meat directly from the grower, because he made a very pointed comment about how expensive the meat was. I just don’t think most people understand how much it costs to raise food and get it to market, not to mention the value of the hours and hours of labor involved.
The way things are going, however, these small growers and ranchers are going to be one of our only semi-reliable sources of food before too much longer.
If you’re not tired and disgusted enough by all the articles trying to persuade you that myocarditis is due to all kinds of different things that have always been around but that you never noticed; that it is perfectly normal for school-age kids to have heart attacks; that professional athletes keeling over mid-game is not unusual, that fake food, GMOs and lab meat are really good for you, you’ll love this one:
And (of course!), this “certain protein” comes from all the stuff you probably thought was good for you:
Newly released research confirms the link between a certain amino acid called proline and depression. Proline is a nonessential amino acid and is found in grass-fed beef, pasture-raised chicken, gelatin, bone broth, organ meats like liver, and cage-free egg yolks. According to the study, a diet rich in proline is linked to an increased risk of depression.
I recommend the “Military Summary” channel on both Youtube (which I avoid) and Rumble for daily updates and analysis on the Ukraine-Russia military situation. About 20 minutes each day updating what happened since yesterday, and going into some analysis on objectives for each side, etc. The commentator uses both Russian and Western military maps/sources for his info, and seems objective.
@chooch: As we have our media whores, so does the Russian media. Both the West and Russia give certain people a long leash on their speculations, both for reasons of their own.@Noirette: I follow Edward Slavsquat (pseudonym for Riley Waggerman), who lives near Moscow. Among other commentary from the Russian side of things, he makes a strong case for Putin playing along with the WEF agenda, despite appearances to the contrary.
Something someone said to me yesterday reminded me of something I had forgotten, which is that Ukrainian railways are different than others in Europe. Since it was part of Russia when the rail network was built, its railroads are the same as Russia’s.
The reason this is significant is that Russia uses a wider gauge railroad bed than the rest of the world. This was done intentionally to hamper invaders by making it impossible to use non-Russian rolling stock to bring in men and material from outside. Might make a difference.
Discussion on the EROEI argument is certainly relevant to the energy situation, and is becoming more common. But what seems to be getting ignored by commentators is consideration of all the other things we depend on combustible fuels for besides producing a heat source to convert.
Plastics are a petroleum by-product. Think of what the total elimination of plastics would mean to modern society. Pharmaceuticals, even the common ones, are derived primarily from petrochemicals. There are no really good substitutes that can be used for either one of these.
Massive amounts of natural gas are used in the Haber-Bosch Process to produce ammonia used for fertilizer. We’ve been doing it this way for around a century now. Going to have to come up with something new. All of a sudden, the climate change evangelists are preaching the merits of “natural” farming methods, completely ignoring their former arguments that going all-organic would not be able to feed the planet because of the drastically reduced yields.
One could argue that if petroleum is in short supply, it might be too valuable to burn.
“The Complexity Trap” link was shared by one of our commenters about a week ago. It is a great article, and definitely extended my thinking on the subject.
It’s pretty obvious why they chose to bring the hammer down on Peter Navarro while ignoring so many others. He is one of the biggest of Trump cheerleaders out there. His book “In Trump Time” doesn’t contain a single disparaging reference to Trump anywhere within its 200-some pages. For the most part, I wish I had the hours of my life back that I spent reading it. But he does make a number of good points about the way in which the pandemic was administered, the shots and the PCR tests in particular. And he asks one excellent question: Why did we have an Operation Warp Speed for vaccines, but not an Operation Warp Speed for therapeutics, which probably would have yielded results much sooner?
What I heard about SSDI was that a lot of people that could no longer qualify for extended unemployment benefits were trying to go on long term disability, and many of those applications got approved.
“The acceleration of the “emergency paradigm” since 2020 has a simple yet widely disavowed purpose: to conceal socioeconomic collapse.”
I found that this said it all in a nutshell. Anyone interested in diving deeper into this idea of governing by emergency might be interested in reading Giorgio Agamben’s “State of Exception” and/or his more recent “Where Are We Now? The Epidemic as Politics.”
@John_Day: I agree, and I found this “explanation” function of one half of the brain to be fascinating. It really puts one’s explanations about his observations and behavior in doubt.
@Armenio Perira and @John_Day: I have done a LOT of reading and a LOT of thinking on the concept of free will. I’ve read convincing arguments both for and against it. All I have been able to conclude after all this effort is the following:
– My inner “senses” seem to tell me that I do indeed have free will, and I think this is true for most other people, too. (This could just be due to all of us being conditioned in this belief from a very early age.)
– Whether it exists or not is probably immune to proof, which means that our belief in it is faith-based rather than science-based. (But if it doesn’t exist, you are not capable of making that choice, are you?)
– If free will did not exist, it would have been necessary for humans to invent it.
Two very interesting books that got me thinking even more:
– “Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain” by Michael Gazzaniga. (He has written several others, but this is probably one of his best.) Gazzaniga was able to learn a lot from experiments with patients after they had had surgery that severed their corpus callosum, the main nerve bundle that connects the two hemispheres of the brain. (BTW, this surgery is generally done because it has been found to relieve epileptics from recurring grand mal seizures.)
– “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” by Julian Jaynes. (Read his Wikipedia bio for more information about him and his ideas on consciousness.)
Theodore Dalrymple’s observation on how Communist propaganda was meant to work:
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
This does a good job of explaining all the screwy stuff we’re expected to accept these days, esp. related to so-called “gender theory.”
“So refusing Urals will likely sideline the refineries, perhaps permanently. Then it’s inefficient to buy in the completely wrong crude, so Europe will buy in finished petrol and diesel instead. That will backlog every other refinery on earth. China then gets the world’s biggest discount, while Europe pays 5x for what they used to get at market. With certain shortages…”
What I’d be interested in seeing is how the next World War between The West and The Rest goes. The West and its new All Electric Military should be a smashing success.
James Corbett had an hour-long interview with Mattias Desmet the other day:
@Kassandra: We have lived in San Luis Obispo County for over 20 years now. We make the trip up to Portland to see my daughter once a year, and can JUST manage it in one day–if it was even an hour farther, I couldn’t do it.
We lived in Portland for several years back in the 90s, and are still best friends with a couple up there. So we get to see them as well.
I love the climate here and the fact that this particular area is very quiet–no big city, and I can look out the window and see the ocean half a mile away. But there’s very little else to recommend California any more. I think it would be wise to move (and Idaho was one place I thought might be a possible choice), but my wife won’t leave. I’ve told her that maybe the question people should be asking in the US is “If each state was its own country, which one would you choose to live in?”
@Kassandra: We must be going in opposite directions for our visits. We live on the California central coast, and drive up to the northwest to see our daughter. Sounds like you must live up there somewhere and drive in the opposite direction.
The 12 hours we drive is actually more like 14 hours. Sane people probably take 2 days to make this drive, but we always do it in one long day. This was easier when I was young.
@Kassandra: I feel for you. Last fall we took a 12 hour drive to visit our daughter, her husband, and our 1 y/o grandson. We, too, are unvaxxed, and my daughter wrote me before our visit (an annual thing) that her husband was nervous about our visit, so it was not completely unexpected. They met us outdoors in the driveway fully masked, and although there was no confrontation or anything, we were invited to spend our time with them outdoors in the yard. It was a very short visit, and I understand when you say you don’t even want to go any more. I guess as it stands, I’m unlikely to ever get to play with my grandson while he’s young.
Ugo Bardi has a very dark assessment of Europe’s near-term future. This is a pretty dire assessment of how things are likely to go with Europe if it persists with its sanctions. He predicts that while Russia itself might regress to a 1990s standard of living, things in Europe will fall back to a medieval 1400s-type life. It’s hard to believe that the people and the governments would actually let things get that bad without one of them doing something. It also doesn’t consider several possibilities in the way things might play out as they slide into this situation. But still…
https://thesenecaeffect.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-age-of-extermination-viii-how-to.html
“California Poised to Adopt ‘Medical Misinformation Bill’ (ET)”
I think this bill should include the establishment of facilities around the state, including a master state-of-the-art facility at the California State House in Sacramento, where sick people can go to see their assemblyman for medical advice and treatment. And since we’re already paying them, the visits should be free, of course.
@DBS: I would piggyback on your AI comments with my own opinion regarding one big reason that AI just won’t work for many things.
Admiral Hyman Rickover (father of the US nuclear navy) once commented that someone always has to be responsible. When something doesn’t go right, there always needs to be someone that can be held accountable. With AI we just don’t have that. It is pretty obvious when you look at things like a bad suspension decision on FB, where the “appeal” also seems to be handled by the same faulty AI engine–no human accountability.
@Red: Thanks greatly for the Consciousness of Sheep article on The Complexity Trap. I have long believed that the world is running out of cheap energy, and that this scenario is really what drives many of the narratives and large-scale actions (climate, “going green”, food supply, etc.) we have been seeing in recent years.
I realize now that I had only followed that line of thought just so far. This article takes that line of thought to the next level, and although it reinforces my belief that dramatic changes to our lifestyles are indeed coming, it has extended my thinking on the subject. I don’t think I had recognized the paradox inherent in the energy situation.
I’ll have to start following that website.
@citizenx: Although I didn’t agree with his observation either, your response to @chooch was pretty harsh, to say the least.
@John Day: I was going to weigh in on the “it takes a village” question, but you expressed my own feeling pretty well on the subject. For me, it’s one thing to accept the mutual support and blessings that accrue from true community. But when the sentiment comes from someone like Hillary, it seems to carry an unpleasant subtext that implies the desire to control others.It’s disturbing and depressing to read older books and find that years ago, the authors were frequently quite prescient about where things were going. The same goes for older films.
Last night I again watched the film “The Postman,” with its own spin on a dystopian near future where a survivors of a national upheaval live in small post-technological communities. (Fun fact: I read the book by David Brin a few years before the film came out, and thought “This would make a great movie.”)
A brutal feudal army of “The Holnists” rides around exacting tribute and occasionally terrorizing these small communities, force-drafting reluctant recruits now and then. They refer to their clan as the Army of 8, and wear patches with the number “8” on their uniforms. The story is how the resistance to them pops up essentially by accident.
As they force train new recruits, they introduce them to the “Laws of 8”:
THE LAWS OF 8
1. You will obey orders without question.
2. Punishment shall be swift.
3. Mercy is for the weak.
4. Terror will defeat reason.
5. Your allegiance is to the clan.
6. Justice can be dictated.
7. Any clansman may challenge for leadership of the clan.
8. There is only one penalty–death.So how are we doing so far?
It is only useful to whistleblow or leak information if by doing so, one has a hope of appeal to a higher authority. In better times, this ‘higher authority’ was assumed to be either the government or the public-at-large.
In the case of government, there was still a belief that most of the government was not yet corrupted, and that the “good” part would deal with the cancer within it. Now that most of government is bought and paid for, that argument is gone.
In the case of the public-at-large, there was a belief that public pressure could force authority to change its behavior. This is proving to no longer be the case (if it ever WAS).
I have to conclude that leaking information no longer accomplishes much. The only sign of surviving moralism is authority’s shrinking but still slightly present need to clothe its actions in some kind of “just cause.”
“..Russia’s economy is actually more like the size of Germany’s..”
If we open Pandora’s Box to get a closer look at this truth, the fraud that sustains these metrics will become obvious.
GDP is quintessentially qualitative in nature. One great example is the “defense” industry, since this is one of the few major value-added exports the US has left. Objective analysts concede that the most modern Russian weapons systems are superior to those of the US, and come in at a far lower cost. Yet we tally up GDP for the two nations using the monetary cost each government is willing to pay for these systems, rather than some “objective” value of their worth.
Only governments buy such stuff, they aren’t spending their own money, and in the case of the US, are egregiously printing most of what they are spending. So we can hardly consider the reported “monetary” cost as an objective, market-based measure of product value.
@Veracious Poet: “It took me until the last decade to fully realize that “the damage” is multigenerationally self-inflicted 😕”
I fear I must agree, and think I wrote as much a few days ago. Just as no one is coming to “save” us, no one really “ruined” us either. At least not all by themselves…
“The powers have this problem as well as they say ‘There’s no going back’…’New Normal’ as they attempt to unmoor human psychology entirely and replace it with a new vision of Fascist NeoFeudalism. The unmooring they’ve been at for 50 years is causing deep harm, insanity, and often violence.
Even if by the push of a button we could make these “powers” all disappear, the damage they have already wrought and the division they have already intentionally sown would take decades to undo.
When we say we don’t care, and then expound at length, the painful reality is that we DO care. Otherwise we would dismiss the issue without comment. ANY emotion that is evoked by the issue at hand is evidence that we care, whether it is sadness, disgust, anger, etc. To truly not care means we have no feeling associated with it. (P.S. It’s OK to care!)
“Laws don’t matter if they are not enforced or enforced by fiat, unevenly.”
So true, and soon the general public will start to catch on. A given system of justice only prevails over anarchy by public acceptance. In older societies, populations had internalized the idea that The King and certain elites were “higher” and thus not subject to the same rules as “the commoners”, but in modern societies, the public’s expectation is that justice will be administered objectively and not play favorites.
So from here we can choose one of three paths. 1) We can go back to the concept of “privileged classes” where people are no longer equal under the law. 2) We can take down and replace our currently appointed “administrators of justice”. 3) We can massively ignore the laws until anarchy forces change upon society.
One sure Mark of the Beast is the professed desire to “centralize, centralize, centralize”. Eliminate borders, concentrate assets and control in fewer hands, shrink peoples’ choices so they can’t avoid the undesirable, mandate or prohibit as much as possible. Centralization = Control.
The answer and the way to defeat these people is to DEcentralize.
Push everything down as low in the social organization as possible.
To Big To Fail = TOO BIG.
Bigger is not better; there is an optimum size for everything, and most of our institutions exceeded that optimum size a long time ago.@WES: “Have you noticed that joe biden and the democrats no longer seem too worried about the mid term elections in November? That is because the uniparty is busy doing it’s usual fixing magic in the primaries and have already prepared the actual election results.”
Or maybe it’s because they know it doesn’t really matter who “wins.” The road we are on will stay the same.
Dr. Robert Malone had an excellent post on Monkey Pox this morning that should put some of the fear-mongering to rest:
@boscohorowitz: Thanks for that download. I just saw that book referred to by a commenter on another blog a few days ago, but when I went looking for it, only expensive used copies were available. Looks like it might be out of print.
@chooch: You might want to read what Andrei Martyanov has to say about Khodaryonok today:
@RIM: “200 years, 2 world wars, always neutral. Makes me wonder: Is Switzerland next?”
Yes it is:
Well, this shows some incredible nerve:
“Russia’s eventual victory would be the second major case in modern times where forces equipped and trained by the West have been defeated by non-Western armies.” To which @Dr. D added: “Are you kidding? Bush started 2 wars, Obama 5 or more, and we lost all of them…”
We can no longer talk about victory and defeat, winning and losing, unless we first define what that is now understood to be. The classical definitions apparently no longer hold.
When one side loses (say) 50,000 soldiers and 500,000 civilians and has its infrastructure completely shattered while the other side loses maybe 10,000 soldiers and NO civilians, and goes home to a country as intact as the one it left, who won? By any classical standard, the latter would be considered the winner. Now? It depends. What was the objective? If success is measured in terms of forcing “the invaders” to go home, perhaps body count is secondary. If it is measured in the number of weapons sold or financial profits made, or in the ability to blind a foolish and distracted public to the other crimes going on under their very noses, body count is irrelevant to the declaration of victory (though certainly NOT irrelevant to the recently deceased owners of those bodies).
@John Day: That Anti-Empire article is dated March 19.
Another piece of the puzzle drops into place. Ukraine sovereign debt.
Some “interests” are advocating for restructuring, delaying payment on, or outright cancelling Ukraine’s outstanding debt. We all know that should such things happen, it won’t be the bankers or investors that take the hit. It will either be covered by taxpayers, or “retired” via the printing press (which means that all of us pay).
And lo and behold, new EU will be issued to cover Ukraine’s short-term financing needs.
Even with the Western financial system about to fall apart, this same playbook is being rolled out yet again. Kind of like the Covid jabs—“the first ones didn’t work, so let’s try it again!”
Brandon Smith recently wrote:
“All wars are banker wars. The only wars that are not are wars of rebellion against the bankers. There is nothing you cannot eventually understand in terms of geopolitics as long as you accept the fact that international conflicts are generally engineered and are always designed to benefit a particular group of establishment power brokers and financial elites.”
