COVID Is Endemic Now

 Getting Used To It,

  We are fatigues from the long crisis of COVID. How long can a "pandemic" last? 

When is the presence of the dread contagion "the new normal"?

I argue that our world has already passed from the spread of SARS-CoV-2 into a vulnerable and naive population, "Pandemic", into the situation we have always had with colds and flu, "endemic". 

COVID is here to stay, no matter where you live.

  I live in Texas, so I like to follow the graphics which the Texas Tribune compiles. Texas has (usually) a mild enough climate that people can get sun on their skins, even in winter. Texas is close enough to the equator for the winter sunlight to cause vitamin-D production. To drug companies, vitamin-D is a competing product. To our bodies it is an essential hormone, with receptors on every cell in the body, that our species lost the ability to make a couple of hundred thousand years ago, when we lived in the tropics, with minimal clothing.

TexasTribune graphics show the "double wave" of the pandemic, with the first dip in September, peak natural vitamin-D month. The big second wave peaked in mid January, and is fading fast in "cases", hospitalizations, deaths and the percent-positive rate of tests. 

Few tests are coming back positive these days.  

https://apps.texastribune.org/features/2020/texas-coronavirus-cases-map/

  Texas would be expected to have milder pandemics, since people can be outside more, don't ride trains much, and get the sunshine vitamin.

When looking at public health mandates, like lockdowns and masking, people often ignore the differences in the regions and lifestyles. Most people have a political position they want to argue. 

I'm just a public-health guy. I want to help people live healthy lives. I don't have a product competing in the marketplace.

  Our main defense against the coronavirus family is the innate immune system in our nose and throat area, which aggressively attacks viruses, molds, bacteria and sometimes pollen that we inhale. It's a mixed blessing for those with allergies. The innate immune system is always ready to go, but it has to keep in training with frequent exposure to non-self things we inhale. This vaccine scientist worries that the current vaccine strategies actually weaken the innate immune system, our main defense, while promoting viral escape from the vaccines. The vaccine targets a viral coat protein, so the virus changes it to look different. He worries that the current vaccination track (business-driven) is making the world more susceptible to future viral variants, and weakening our critical first-line defense systems.

​ ​ If we, human beings, are commited to perpetuating our species, we have no choice left but to eradicate these highly infectious viral variants. This will, indeed, require large vaccination campaigns. However, NK cell-based vaccines will primarily enable our natural immunity to be betetr prepared (memory!) and to induce herd immunity (which is exactly the opposite of what current Covid-19 vaccines do as those increasingly turn vaccine recipients into asymptomatic carriers who are shedding virus). So, there is not one second left for gears to be switched and to replace the current killer vaccines by life-saving vaccines. I am appealing to the WHO and all stakeholders involved, no mater their convicton, to immediately declare such action as THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY OF INTERNATIONAL CONCERN.
Author: Geert Vanden Bossche, DVM, PhD

https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2021/03/mass-vaccination-amidst-a-pandemic-creates-an-irrepressible-monster/#post-70950

​​Israel Fears South African COVID Strain Spreading Beyond Control
Closing Israel's borders did not stop this coronavirus strain from entering: Dozens are being infected each day. Israel vaccine data shows it's the only variant with less inoculation effectiveness

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-vaccine-data-south-african-covid-strain-spreading-no-control-1.9587065

​Fear of death keeps people willing to give their life force to mysterious business products for profit and control. 

Cheap and safe competitors threaten that business model. 

It's the business model of our owners/masters.

Censorship Kills: The Shunning of a COVID Therapeutic

Pierre Kory, MD, is president and chief medical officer of the Front-Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance

  Doctors fighting COVID-19 should be supported by their profession and their government, not suppressed. Yet today physicians are smothered under a wave of censorship. With coronavirus variants and vaccine hesitancy threatening a prolonged pandemic, the National Institutes of Health and the broader U.S. medical establishment should free doctors to treat this terrible disease with effective medicines.
  For centuries, doctors have addressed emerging health threats by prescribing existing drugs for new uses, observing the results, and communicating to their peers and the public what seems to work. In a pandemic, precious time and lives can be lost by an insistence on excessive data and review. But in the current crisis, many in positions of authority have done just that, stubbornly refusing to allow any repurposed treatments. This departure from traditional medical practice risks catastrophe. When doctors on the front lines try to bring awareness of and use such medicines, they get silenced.

   I’ve experienced such censorship firsthand. Early in the pandemic, my research led me to testify in the Senate that corticosteroids were life-saving against COVID-19, when all national and international health care agencies recommended against them. My recommendations were criticized, ignored and resisted such that I felt forced to resign my faculty position. Only later did a large study from Oxford University find they were indeed life-saving. Overnight, they became the standard of care worldwide. More recently, we identified through dozens of trials that the drug ivermectin leads to large reductions in transmission, mortality, and time to clinical recovery. After testifying to this fact in a second Senate appearance — the video of which was removed by YouTube after garnering over 8 million views — I was forced to leave another position.   https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/10/censorship_kills_the_shunning_of_a_covid_therapeutic_145376.amp.html

Yet another mechanism by which ivermectin reduces COVID mortality and morbidity. It reduces clotting in blood vessels from inflammation and platelet-clumping.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3636557

Excess Mortality graphs by month, from many countries, in recent years, put COVIDpandemic in the context of human species health and survival. This virus is very far from the worst infectious threat our species has faced. Measles and smallpox wiped out vast swathes of humanity when Europeans brought them to the New World and the Pacific Islands, for instance. Measles and Smallpox could pull that trick again, now that we are so advanced.

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#excess-mortality

The Prophet Of The Trump Era
Review of Martin Gurri's "The Revolt of the Public," the book that called both an uprising and a reaction​, Matt Taibbi

(I said that either Sanders or Trump would get elected in 2016. This patch of history is just beginning)​

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-prophet-of-the-trump-era

Mexican President Says Biden Border Policies 'Encouraging Illegal Immigration' And Enriching Cartels

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/mexican-president-says-biden-border-policies-encouraging-illegal-immigration-and

​Slowness is death to these platforms. It breaks the addiction to wait. Not worth the wait.

Russia begins SLOWING DOWN Twitter over child porn, suicide & drug-use claims as regulator warns it could BLOCK service altogether

https://www.rt.com/russia/517688-twitter-slowed-down-block/

Google, Ad Tech, and the Gutting of the News Publishers

https://wolfstreet.com/2021/03/10/google-and-the-gutting-of-the-news-publishers/

​Captivated​

Change Something Yourself

 Free Agents,

Chris Hedges clarifies:

​  ​As the climate crisis worsens, the political constrictions will tighten, making public resistance difficult. We do not live, yet, in the brutal Orwellian state that appears on the horizon, one where all dissidents will suffer the fate of Julian Assange. But this Orwellian state is not far away. This makes it imperative that we act now.
​  ​The ruling elites, despite the accelerating and tangible ecological collapse, mollify us, either by meaningless gestures or denial. They are the architects of social murder...
​  ​What is taking place is not neglect. It is not ineptitude. It is not policyfailure. It is murder. It is murder because it is premeditated. It is murder because a conscious choice was made by the global ruling classes to extinguish life rather than protect it. It is murder because profit, despite the hard statistics, the growing climate disruptions and the scientific modeling, is deemed more important than human life and human survival.
​  ​The elites thrive in this system, as long as they serve the dictates of what Lewis Mumford called the “megamachine,” the convergence of science, economy, technics and political power unified into an integrated, bureaucratic structure whose sole goal is to perpetuate itself. This structure, Mumford noted, is antithetical to “life-enhancing values.” But to challenge the megamachine, to name and condemn its death wish, is to be expelled from its inner sanctum. There are, no doubt, some within the megamachine who fear the future, who are perhaps even appalled by the social murder, but they do not want to lose their jobs and their social status to become pariahs...
​  ​Social divisions benefit the ruling class, which has built media silos that feed packaged hate to competing demographics. The greater the social antagonisms, the less the elites have to fear. If those gripped by poisoned solidarity become numerically superior — nearly half of the American electorate rejects the traditional ruling class and embraces conspiracy theories and a demagogue — the elites will accommodate the new power configuration, which will accelerate the social murder...
​  ​The evil that makes this social murder possible is collective. It is perpetrated by the colorless bureaucrats and technocrats churned out of business schools, law schools, management programs and elite universities. These systems managers carry out the incremental tasks that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death work. They collect, store and manipulate our personal data for digital monopolies and the security and surveillance state. They grease the wheels for ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They write the laws passed by the bought-and-paid-for political class. They pilot the aerial drones that terrorize the poor in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan. They profit from the endless wars. They are the corporate advertisers, public relations specialists and television pundits that flood the airwaves with lies. They run the banks. They oversee the prisons. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps and medical coverage to some and unemployment benefits to others. They carry out the evictions. They enforce the laws and the regulations. They do not ask questions. They live in an intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot’s “the hollow men,” “the stuffed men.” “Shape without form, shade without color,” the poet writes. “Paralyzed force, gesture without motion.”
​  ​These systems managers made possible the genocides of the past, from the extermination of Native Americans to the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians to the Nazi Holocaust to Stalin’s liquidations. They kept the trains running. They filled out the paperwork. They seized the property and confiscated the bank accounts. They did the processing. They rationed the food. They administered the concentration camps and the gas chambers. They enforced the law. They did their jobs.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/chris-hedges-age-of-social-murder-ruling-elites/275801/

​Wiggs sends this video. The US Military is EVERYWHERE, which maps every US military base on the planet.

​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YR2TxHkb4c

Charles Hugh Smith: When Does This Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham Finally Implode?

1. The credit expansion/renunciation cycle. a.k.a. the Kondratieff cycle. Credit expands when credit is costly and invested in productive assets. Credit reaches excess when it is cheap and it's malinvested in speculation and stock buybacks, and as collateral vanishes then credit is renunciated/written off.
​  ​This is inexact, but obviously the organic postwar cycle of expansion has been extended by the central bank money-printing / credit orgy.
2. The generational cycle of four generations/80 years described in the seminal book The Fourth Turning. American history uncannily tracks an 80-year cycle of crises and profound transformation: 1860 (Civil War), 1940 (world war and global Empire) and next up to bat, 2020, the implosion of the debt-based Savior State and the financialized economy.
3. The 100-year cycle of inflation-deflation described in the masterful book The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History. The price of bread remained almost constant in Britain throughout the 19th century. In contrast, the 20th century has been characterized by inflation--the U.S. dollar has lost approximately 96% of its value since the early 20th century.

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar21/travesty-mockery-sham3-21.html

The War on ‘Misinformation’ Claims Two Victims. 

Truth. And the Right to Treatment.​   

by M​a​ry Beth Pfeiffer

Two public health battles are being waged right now.

The first, of course, is against the coronavirus.
​  ​The second has its sights on a broad and amorphous target called “medical misinformation.” This campaign aims, at least in part, to control what people read, see and know about potential treatments for COVID-19. Firmly in its crosshairs is a cheap, generic drug that just might turn this pandemic around, ivermectin.

https://trialsitenews.com/the-war-on-misinformation-claims-two-victims-truth-and-the-right-to-treatment/

​More, from last November, about that open source Finnish Nasal Spray Vaccine for COVID, that can't seem to get to people, even though​ it was ready for human trials last May.  It won't make powerful  persons in the machine richer and more powerful... so, IMPOSSIBLE.

https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/18270-finnish-covid-19-vaccine-yielding-promising-results-but-lacks-funding.html

Russia has a new vaccine, a completely conventional "killed-virus" vaccine, with "no side effects". Since it is a whole virus vaccine, it should be more effective against strains like the South African variant, which has differences in the spike protein, which most vaccines "target". Thx Jeremy.

​  ​The third Covid-19 vaccine registered in Russia is based on a “perfectly conventional” platform, and those who have been injected experienced no side effects, the head of the Chumakov Scientific Center, which created it, told RT.
​  ​“Globally, almost 100% of vaccines contain either deactivated or live pathogens,” he said, adding that the one developed by his center contains an ‘inactivated’ (dead) coronavirus. This type of vaccine simulates a natural infection process, introducing the immune system to the virus and “teaching” the body to fight the pathogen without the risk of it spreading through the body and causing disease, he explained.
​  ​“Since we are talking about a whole-virion vaccine, the deviations in the genetic sequence – something one is calling different strains or different variants – are insignificant and amount to less than one percent. So… it would be weird to think that a whole-virion vaccine might fail to work against new strains, considering how small the differences are,” he said.
​  ​“The most important thing is that at this point we have a vaccine that definitely has no side effects,” he said, adding that, out of 300 volunteers, none reported any symptoms except for occasional soreness around the injection site.

https://www.rt.com/russia/517024-russia-third-vaccine-dead-virus/

​It's all political now:

eBay Halts Sales Of "Offensive" Dr Seuss Books, Allows Mein Kampf

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/ebay-halts-sales-offensive-dr-seuss-books-allows-mein-kampf

​Thought Criminal​

As Agreed

 "Consenting",

"Did You Agree To This? Everybody's Locked Up": Ed Snowden On Power Of Silicon Valley Amid COVID Lockdowns

​...​Silicon Valley and its allies in the national security state, has served to keep individuals and entire populations 'gated off' from one another. "This is just the beginning," Snowden warns of these unprecedented times. "All of these things today have consequences which we are not informed about."
​  ​"I would say this is sort of unusual... we're all spread all over the world in different rooms, everybody's locked up... but for me this is how I've always lived." He narrates that so much of our life is "intermediated by the screens." Increasingly our lives are "intermediated by these screens. We spend less time outside and more and more time staring into glass or through glass to connect with that larger world - something beyond ourselves."​  ​"Edward Snowden 2021: The Most VICIOUS HONEST 10 Minutes of your LIFE!".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2kpxvh9gx0

​Tessa Fights Robots, on Broken People​

I have been thinking a lot about brokenness.
​  ​If we look at history, at one point, one of the two things happened in most known cultures of today. Either a local ruler, who was seeking personal prestige and approval by more influential leaders of the time—much like the leaders of today are going for the “Great Reset” to elevate or at least to preserve themselves—forced the people to abandon their traditional way of life and to become “civilized”—again, much like the leaders of today are pushing us toward transhumanism—or foreign invaders came along and did the same.
​  ​So what we are dealing with today is not particularly new, it’s just strange to belong to a generation on the receiving end of a religious reform. I am thinking every day, wow, I have never thought I would be living through a thing like this!​ ...

​  ​It seems like today, history is repeating itself.
For example, the victory march of “science as religion” that is happening today—very much in the name billionaire profits and asset management (i.e. capitalism)—is nearly identical to the march that was happening in the Soviet Union in the name of “socialism” when my grandparents were young. Just like the proverbial “scientists” of today are denouncing peasants’ self-preservation instincts (so that certain pharmaceutical companies can make a fortune on certain therapies, which are wrongfully labeled as certain must-worship medical products), back then, city-educated folks would come to the village and yell at peasants for their backward ways, force them to use toxic fertilizers, and teach them to not breastfeed their babies (see an ironic throwback from 2016).

https://tessa.substack.com/p/isms

​Caitlin Johnstone:

​We are here to participate in the expansion of consciousness.
  Our world appears disordered at the moment because much of it is deeply unconscious. Humanity is mostly unconscious of its inner dynamics and sleepwalks through life in a very destructive way. People loaded with unconscious trauma ascend to positions of power and spread their trauma around without consciousness. Government secrecy and corporate secrecy keep most power dynamics which affect the world unconscious. Propaganda distorts humanity’s collective efforts to consciously perceive the reality of our situation.
  Wherever there is a lack of clear seeing, there is disharmony. Wherever anything moves into consciousness, harmony is increased. Becoming individually conscious of unconscious mental habits created in response to early childhood trauma allows us to change or eliminate those habits and begin functioning more harmoniously. Becoming collectively conscious of racial inequality allows us to collectively begin moving toward racial harmony. Becoming collectively conscious of the abuses of tyranny allows us to collectively begin moving toward political harmony. Wherever there is more seeing, there is more harmony.
  This is why we are here. To make the unseen seen and to dispel illusions which distort our perception. The more visible the universe and humanity’s dance in it becomes to us, the more harmony there will be.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/03/01/the-universe-is-just-trying-to-see-itself/

​Matt Taibbi stands up to professional slander against actually independent and principled journalism, which he practices.

​  UCLA professor Sarah Roberts, co-leader of something called the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry — media critics whose stated goal is “strengthening democracy through culture-making” — went on a lengthy Twitter tirade against Substack last night, one that gained a lot of attention. I should probably respond since, as one prominent reporter put it to Glenn Greenwald and me this morning, “Shit, it’s like she wrote this for the two of you.”

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-substack

Self-Harm Claims Among U.S. Teenagers Increased 99% During Pandemic, Study Finds​  ​The coronavirus pandemic has had a devastating impact on the mental health of teenagers in the United States, according to an analysis of medical records and insurance claims conducted by nonprofit FAIR Health, which found that overdoses, intentional self-harm claims, substance use disorders and claims for depression and anxiety disorders all increased substantially in 2020 compared to the prior year.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2021/03/03/self-harm-claims-among-us-teenagers-increased-99-during-pandemic-study-finds/?sh=33c40a0c33e0

Finland Had a Patent-Free COVID-19 Vaccine Nine Months Ago — But Still Went With Big Pharma

​  ​Saksela’s team has had a patent-free COVID-19 vaccine ready since May 2020, which they dubbed “the Linux of vaccines” in a nod to the famous open-source operating system that also originated from Finland...
They believe their nasal spray, built on well-established technology and know-how, is safe and highly effective.
​  ​“It’s a finished product, in the sense that the formulation will no longer change in any way with further testing,” Saksela says. “With what we have, we could inoculate the whole population of Finland tomorrow.” ...
​  ​In the mainstream narrative, the first-generation COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca are typically presented as an illustration of how markets incentivize and accelerate vital innovation. In reality, the fact that the profit motive is the overriding force shaping medical research has been devastating — particularly in a global pandemic. The Finnish vaccine provides a striking case study of the many ways in which the contemporary patent-based funding model has slowed down vaccine development, and how it currently hampers the possibility of conducting effective mass-inoculation campaigns.

  ​"We felt it was our duty to start developing this type of alternative,” says professor Kalle Saksela, chair of the Department of Virology at the University of Helsinki. “Back in the spring, I still thought that surely some public entity will get involved and start pushing it forward. Turns out that no situation is urgent enough to compel the state to start actively pursuing something like this.”

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/02/finland-vaccine-covid-patent-ip

Charles Hugh Smith:

​  ​GDP is another insane, irrational distortion of the Keynesian Cargo Cult that worships "growth" as the only goal. The Keynesian Cargo Cultists believe that paying people to dig holes and refill them is an excellent strategy for "growth:" ordering bureaucrats to bury wads of cash in abandoned mines and then turning the unemployed hordes loose to find the cash is Keynes' own example of worthy ways to generate "growth."
​  ​This disconnected-from-reality understanding of the world completely ignores the non-renewable nature of hydrocarbons and the critical concept of maximizing the utility of capital, labor and resources.
  Any​ system that has no way to measure, much less prioritize opportunity costs (i.e. what else could have been done ​with ​the capital, labor and resources) and maximization of utility is not just flawed--it's terribly misguided and destructive.
​  ​No wonder the Keynesian Cargo Cult's method of encouraging "animal spirits" is dancing the humba-humba around the campfire waving recently strangled chickens. (Hey, is that Paul Krugman in the shaman outfit? No, it's Ben Bernanke!)
​  ​Any economy stupid enough to rely on the insane distortions of GDP "growth" as its primary measure will richly deserve a Darwin Award when it inevitably collapses in a putrid heap of squandered resources and capital. Don't think it won't happen just because it hasn't happened yet.

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar21/gdp-waste3-21.html

Dr. Seuss didn’t have ‘a racist bone’ in his body, stepdaughter says​ (Ted Geisel had no natural children)

“There wasn’t a racist bone in that man’s body — he was so acutely aware of the world around him and cared so much,’’ Lark Grey Dimond-Cates said of her late, now-embattled stepdad, whose real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel.

https://nypost.com/2021/03/02/dr-seuss-didnt-have-a-racist-bone-in-his-body-stepdaughter/

​Dr. Seuss was specifically anti-racism. Tucker Carlson reviews The Sneetches, one of the most effective anti-racism books ever. 

​  ​"Dr. Seuss was not a racist," Carlson asserted. "He was an evangelist against bigotry. He wrote an entire shelf of books against racism, and not in a subtle way. They were clearly, explicitly against racism. That was the whole point of writing them, to teach children not to be racist."​ ...​

​  ​"Canceling Dr. Seuss isn't stupid. It's intentional. They're banning Dr. Seuss not because he was a racist, but precisely because he wasn't."
​  ​Carlson pointed to Seuss's work, "The Sneetches and Other Stories," written in 1961. The story describes a population of furry colorful creatures that are nearly identical to each other aside from a star shape displayed on the stomachs of only half of the population.

​https://www.foxnews.com/media/tucker-carlson-dr-seuss-not-racist

​BlackWhite​

Unmasking Texans

 Free To Choose,

  Texas Governor, Greg Abbot has rescinded the Texas mask mandate for public places like grocery stores, leaving it up to business owners to decide whether to request customers to wear masks or not. This is a complex political decision, and it is something of a gamble.

  Some business owners want to be off the hook for not requiring masks, like bars and strip clubs. Other businesses, in anti-mask territory, feel that they are being put on the firing line between customers who don't want masks, and vulnerable employees, as well as vulnerable customers. The grocery store chain HEB is the largest employer in Texas, and has shown real appreciation of it's workers and the risks, morbidity and mortality they faced by serving the public every day.

  Austin was masking well before the mandate. Austin has been ahead of the precautions curve for a year, since South By Southwest music festival cancellation was announced just about a year ago. That was SERIOUS. When school was cancelled the day before spring break was to begin, the traffic reduced to a small percentage of its usual crush, having already halved before that (in the estimation of a daily bike commuter).

  Rural Yoakum seems to have largely quit masking in stores in the last 6 weeks, including employees. HEB employees mask, though.

If you look at the graphs in the link below, you will see that Texas has had a first wave of viral infections and deaths in spring and early summer, with a lull in the fall (as vitamin-D levels rose while the virus spread in summer and stabilized in September, before falling in October). The big surge came with Halloween, as there were so many parties, then Thanksgiving, as families joined together for food, drink and fellowship, then Christmas and New Year festivities. All of this human social engagement was somewhat muted, but it was present, and more for some people and towns than others. 

  "Herd Immunity" is a condition when there are few enough members of a group that are susceptible to a contagious pathogen, that the pathogen has a hard time finding  a new host to infect before being eradicated by its  host, or killing its host. There are some members of any herd who are just not very susceptible to any contagious virus, and that percentage is hard to determine prospectively. Most defense against coronavirus infection happens in the nose and throat area, as a general defense, not requiring specific antibodies. That is what children do so well. That is why most people do not get very sick with the current novel coronavirus, because they stop it before it does it's special thing of attacking the blood vessel linings. Most people with mild coronavirus infection in the nose and throat area do not get a test at all. The current best estimate is that the actual number of infections is running about 6 times the number of reported "confirmed cases", which means positive tests.

  Somewhere between 50 to 60% of Americans have had COVID, mostly mild, and mostly over the fall and winter holidays, so immunity has not likely faded away. Coronavirus specific-immunity mostly fades between 6 and 12 months from infection, unless stimulated again by a little re-exposure. Some people get re-exposed to cornaviruses fairly frequently. As a doctor, treating a general medical population, I get exposed to this and that regularly. Jenny, my wife, who is a Birthday Girl today, is a school librarian. She sees every kid in the school and gives and receives and helps them pick books off the shelves. 

  Jenny and I MIGHT be in the group that is not very likely to get sick with a coronavirus, whether we catch a little in our noses or not. We don't really know. We take vitamin-D and a little zinc, as we have for years. 

  Vaccinations in Texas are up to about 6.8% ofTexans fully vaccinated, and many of them have had the virus already, so they are getting an immunity boost. Vaccine immunity is not as broad as natural immunity, especially since these current vaccines just target a few protein sequences on the viral spike protein, not every little part of the virus, as natural immunity does. There is some argument about how good the vaccine protection is against the South African variant, which has a lot of difference in it's mutated spike protein. They are clearly less effective against it. How that will play out for cases, hospitalizations and deaths in the broad world is uncertain, so there is argument.

  Spring Break is the week after next in Texas, and the mask mandate has been lifted. Young adult Texans and high school students and families are likely to vacation and congregate a lot, though not at South By Southwest. There was a surge in cases among Texas college students last year, and they were much disparaged for acting like young animals again, as they do every spring break. They spread COVID. In the fall at UT, Austin there was a lot of rapid testing for COVID at ground level, including football games, which required a negative test for students wanting a ticket. There was something like a 9% background positivity rate on those tests, on people with little to no symptoms. That meant that the virus was spreading quickly through the university population. We can presume that it pervaded that population pretty well over fall and winter.

  So Governor Abbott has more specific information about testing in special populations, like college students and school kids, than the rest of us do. He is under a variety of political pressures to move and stand still, and I'm sure he is tired of it. Texas just got whacked with the deep freeze ice week around Valentine's Day, and the biggest electric utility in Texas has filed for bankruptcy. There will be more.

This guy, who I have never particularly liked, but who is not stupid, really craves some kind of decisive victory, which will allow him to move the Texas economy forward, which is what his job and popularity depend upon.

  My guess is that Governor Greg Abbot is making the sprint to the finish, desiring to declare "herd immunity" or to declare that it is emerging as such, almost all the way there. A lot of people are afraid that we are going to get another spike of morbidity and mortality, like we did in December and January, but I really think that wood is mostly burned, already. 

Will there be some spike in cases from spring break, or will cases continue to decline on the same trajectory? 

  A small spike in positive tests in a population of young people, without a subsequent rise in hospitalizations and deaths would lead to a declaration of victory by the Governor of Texas. "Texas is Open For Business" would be declared. 

  That would be a big advantage for the Texas economy, and it needs it, as the economic damage from the big freeze is still being assessed. Texas needs a big infrastructure rebuild over this decade, and it needs an economy to do that.

https://apps.texastribune.org/features/2020/texas-coronavirus-cases-map/?_ga=2.141593010.1485168098.1614777733-1037324414.1591643250

All marketing oversells benefits and undersells risks. Vaccine makers really, really want to give the impression that their vaccines have led to herd immunity, as it rapidly emerges anyway. Take 5000 units per day of vitamin-D to support your immune system, with or without vaccine! 

Number of Injuries Reported to CDC After COVID Vaccines Climbs by Nearly 4,000 in One Week

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/injuries-reported-vaers-climbs/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=c490b1d0-2794-435a-8896-d82a74129051

  Inflating asset bubbles has been the psycho-economics game to keep wealth perceptions cheerful in the investor class. 

"Everything Bubble" is the term. "Inflation" measures are things like toilet paper, gasoline and hamburger at street level, so inflation of housing, stock and bond "valuations" is not "inflationary". They don't need to be deflationary as long as the bubbles can be maintained, or rolled over into some other dominant asset, something without inherent "valuation" metrics can serve; something like Bitcoin, perhaps...

​  ​They know they can rig the bitcoin market with their big megaphone, at least for a while. And they have done it loudly and clearly. But when they want to take profits and get some despised fiat dollars for their bitcoin, as they all will, because that’s what they’re in business to do, who will be there to buy?
​  ​These are big positions, and they’re tough to get out of without blowing a huge hole into the price, that then triggers a cascade of selling. And when this happens, there is suddenly no liquidity, and the bottom falls out. Bitcoin has become legendary for this.
​  ​But now the amounts are much bigger. So maybe they’re hoping that, when demand suddenly vanishes, the despised Fed will step in and bail them out of their bitcoin by buying their bitcoin and handing them billions of despised fiat dollars in order to prevent their highly leveraged and interconnected funds from taking down the financial system or whatever.
​  ​And that day, ladies and gentlemen, the day that the Fed bails out the biggest most leveraged bitcoin gamblers because the price collapse of bitcoin is threatening to take down their highly leveraged funds, thereby threatening to collapse the entire financial system – that will be the day bitcoin has truly arrived.

https://wolfstreet.com/2021/02/28/the-big-buy-hype-bitcoin-casino/

​  Bitcoin uses as much electricity as The Netherlands, and is gaining on the larger economies, because it must use exponentially more electricity as the remaining mathematical coin-solutions become more and more complicated and expensive to derive, and the entire global Bitcoin-mining computer enterprise has to keep up and confirm every new transaction. 

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56215787

  There is a limited number of Bitcoin "solutions" remaining, each more energy-demanding than the last. When will the last solution be derived, and at what energy cost? Is that even going to be possible? If not, when will the game be over, and who will hold the empty bag?​
There are only 21 million bitcoins that can be mined in total.
Once bitcoin miners have unlocked all the bitcoins, the planet's supply will essentially be tapped out.
As of February 24, 2021, 18.638 million bitcoin have been mined, which leaves 2.362 million yet to be introduced into circulation.
Once all Bitcoin has been mined the miners will still be incentivized to process transactions with fees.

https://www.investopedia.com/tech/what-happens-bitcoin-after-21-million-mined/#:~:text=transactions%20with%20fees.-,The%20Supply%20of%20Bitcoin%20Is%20Limited%20to%2021%20Million,allow%20for%20a%20larger%20supply.

Awaiting Next Crisis

Great Resetters

 Unresettled,

John Ward looks at the "Great Resetters":  Precisely what defines a Resetter?

​  ​Starting from a database of 37 million companies (he likes a challenge) Glattfelder used multivariate criteria to boiled off the number to just 1,318 (1) had ties to two or more other companies (2) had an average connection to 20 and (3) collectively owned huge chunks, through shares, the majority of the world’s large blue chip firms – accounting for 60 per cent of global business income.
​  ​The more one boils, the smaller the numbers get…with a top ten controlling four-fifths of everything everywhere. They are:
1. Barclays plc 2. Capital Group Companies Inc. 3. FMR Corporation 4. AXA 5. State Street Corporation 6. JPMorgan Chase & Co. 7. Legal & General Group plc 8. Vanguard Group Inc. 9. UBS AG 10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc.
​  ​Also present in the top 25 are Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and Goldman Sachs.
Yup, they’re all engaged in bancassurance, and they’re mainly Anglo-American. There are no big manufacturing, energy or pharmafia corporations in the Top 49. There is just one distributor in the shape of Wal-Mart at N° 15.
T​  ​his is the key insight I offer on this data today: if you want to know what marks out a Great Resetter from the rest, it’s this: they don’t make anything – they simply move stuff around – but they do control the ownership of everything. 

​  ​This makes them incredibly vulnerable to a global va​l​uation crash….but the only people truly able to engineer a ‘Reset’.
That’s what I call money, means and motive. But would they ever try such a dastardly thing?

https://therealslog.com/2021/02/17/explosive-string-pullers-audited/

Critics Must Be Silenced for Billionaires to Keep Profiting From Pandemic​, Robert F Kennedy Jr.​

​  ​On Feb. 15, the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post published a Feb. 11 Associated Press article applauding the censorship of those who criticize the government’s pandemic response policies.
​  ​The lockdown has netted Bezos $70 billion since its start. If you are Bezos, a permanent lockdown is a goldmine.
​  ​Bill Gates, meanwhile, has made $20 billion from the lockdown he previously war-gamed and then cheer-led. His strategy has included emasculating the independent media — the most likely sources of the sort of vigorous journalism that might otherwise scrutinize his self interest in the polices he helped successfully engineer for the rest of us.
​  ​Gates used millions in grants to transform the once proudly unbridled The Guardian into his personal newsletter. With $250 million, he purchased immunity from criticism by news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde and the Center for Investigative Reporting...
​  ​The mainstream network news shows, including CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox have put COVID Terror, Vaccines Salvation and the obligatory shaming of dissidents on a 24-hour loop with each segment (and I use this term in every sense of the word) with pharmaceutical advertisements.
​  ​These outlets have turned their weekly talk shows into fawning hagiographies for Gates’ regular satellite tours in which credulous, obsequious Sunday morning talk show hosts lob softball medical questions to a billionaire with no public health training.
​  ​Nobody ever asks Gates or his mini-me, Tony Fauci, why they chose to spend tens of billions in taxpayer dollars on speculative vaccines and zero dollars investigating the many off-the-shelf, off-patent medications that have demonstrated extraordinary success in the hands of private doctors — medications that might have ended the pandemic a year ago.
​  ​The media, which has enabled this global hostage crisis, is arguably the most consequential criminal enterprise in human history. As Rahm Emmanuel observed, “never let a good crisis go to waste.”
​ ​Gates and Fauci have demonstrated that by controlling the media, billionaires and their government cronies can prolong a crisis forever and accumulate unprecedented wealth and power over humanity.

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/billionaires-profiting-pandemic/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=2b9af66c-cba0-4577-b22e-491d5cbe62b0

​Glenn Greenwald:​ (Military-industrial-billionaire-deep-state-social-media-complex is threatened by inadequate censorship)

​  ​For the third time in less than five months, the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms. On March 25, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will interrogate Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebooks’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai at a hearing which the Committee announced will focus “on misinformation and disinformation plaguing online platforms.”
​  ​The Committee’s Chair, Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and the two Chairs of the Subcommittees holding the hearings, Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), said in a joint statement that the impetus was “falsehoods about the COVID-19 vaccine” and “debunked claims of election fraud.” They argued that “these online platforms have allowed misinformation to spread, intensifying national crises with real-life, grim consequences for public health and safety,” adding: “This hearing will continue the Committee’s work of holding online platforms accountable for the growing rise of misinformation and disinformation.”...
​  ​The power to control the flow of information and the boundaries of permissible speech is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. It is a power as intoxicating as it is menacing. When it comes to the internet, our primary means of communicating with one another, that power nominally rests in the hands of private corporations in Silicon Valley.
​  ​But increasingly, the Democratic-controlled government and their allies in the corporate media are realizing that they can indirectly and through coercion seize and wield that power for themselves. The First Amendment is implicated by these coercive actions as much as if Congress enacted laws explicitly mandating censorship of their political opponents.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-escalates-pressure-on-tech

​Tom sends this historical parallel about the threat to Roman oligarchs by a populist Tribune, Tiberius Gracchus (RIP).

​  ​Tiberius Gracchus was a Roman politician and official in the Second Century BC. Gracchus was a member of the populares, a faction that sided with the plebian – the common people – against the conservative aristocratic patricians who had traditionally held power in Rome. At the time of Gracchus the small independent farmers of the Roman Republic were increasingly feeling economic pressure from the concentration of public lands into giant estates held by aristocrats. Rome, a nation whose strength had also been built on a class of free, independent men was now increasingly owned and controlled by a strata of oligarchs.
  Tiberius Gracchus proposed reforms to break up the giant estates and redistribute the land to average Romans. He was vehemently opposed to the aristocrats and made no secret of his intention to destroy their power. He was aggressive. He was loud. He threatened the entire power structure of those who believed the Republic belonged to them.

​https://andmagazine.com/talk/2021/02/09/killing-the-republic-trump-as-tiberius-gracchus/

White House Enlists Social Media Giants to Suppress Vaccine ‘Misinformation’
​  ​As concerns about vaccine safety grow, the Biden administration is enlisting Big Tech’s help in removing social media posts that deviate from “officially distributed” COVID-19 information.

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/white-house-enlists-social-media-suppress-vaccine-misinformation/

We have already seen COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths declining for 6 weeks.

 It's not from vaccines, or lockdowns, and it's not from vitamin-D. 

The  "second wave" is burning out. Over half of the people in the US have had COVID (private communication from medical epidemiologists), most with no test performed.

Johns Hopkins Prof Sees US Herd Immunity By April

​  ​"Experts should level with the public about the good news..." exclaims Makary (who is likely on the verge of getting canceled), as he cites the "miracle" 77% drop in cases over the past 6 weeks and that testing likely only captured about 10% - 25% of infections; he extrapolates that to saying 55% of Americans have natural immunity (and add to that the 15% of Americans that have been vaccinated). Additionally, he cites Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, who believes that 250mm doses of the vaccine will have be delivered to 150mm people by the end of March.
"There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection.
As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected.
At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life."
​  ​Critically, Makary explains the recent plunge in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths is not policy-related (no matter how much the politicians and their media lackeys push that narrative):
 "...the consistent and rapid decline in daily cases since Jan. 8 can be explained only by natural immunity. Behavior didn’t suddenly improve over the holidays; Americans traveled more over Christmas than they had since March. Vaccines also don’t explain the steep decline in January. Vaccination rates were low and they take weeks to kick in."

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/johns-hopkins-prof-sees-us-herd-immunity-april-fauci-fearmongers-2022-return-normality

​Finally the answer to why Gardasil reactions are so inexplicably bad, an "unlisted" ingredient. ("Contamination" is such an ugly word.)​

New Study: Gardasil HPV Vaccine Contains Chemical Used in Biological Warfare
PMSF, a nerve agent, is used to manufacture HPV vaccines, but it is not supposed to be in the final product. 

However, new research documents its presence in Merck’s Gardasil and Gardasil 9 HPV vaccines.

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/gardasil-hpv-vaccine-contains-chemical-biological-warfare/

​There is loss of faith in "authoritative" institutions for good reason, and those reasons must be stamped out!​

​Cook includes details of how Brazilian vitamin-D treatment study was assured to "fail", based upon design and facts already known.​

By putting Big Pharma’s patents before patients, doctors will further erode trust in experts​,  Jonathan Cook

​  ​In this regard, let us consider my own area of specialist interest: Israel and Palestine. Jewish settlers in the West Bank have been beating up and shooting at Palestinian farmers trying to work their land or harvest their olives for more than half a century. It is one of the main practical means by which the settlers implement an ethnic cleansing policy designed to drive Palestinians off their farmland.
​  ​The settlers have thereby expanded their “municipal jurisdictions” to cover more than 40 per cent of the West Bank, territory under Israeli occupation that was supposed to form the backbone of any future Palestinian state. This settler violence is part of the reason why Palestinian statehood looks impossible today.
​  ​But until a decade or so ago – when phone cameras meant that recorded visual evidence became commonplace and irrefutable – you would rarely have had a way to know about those attacks. Correspondents in Jerusalem had decided on your behalf th​​at you did not need to know.​..

  All this is by way of a very long introduction to a follow-up post on an article I wrote last week about the failure of doctors to press governments to finance proper, large-scale studies on the treatment of hospitalised Covid patients with Vitamin D – an important immunological hormone created by sunlight on our skin.The role of Vitamin D on our general wellbeing and health has come under increasing scrutiny over the past two decades after it was discovered that it is the only vitamin for which there is a receptor in every cell in our body.
​  ​Long before Covid, researchers had begun to understand that Vitamin D’s role in regulating our immune systems was chronically under-appreciated by most doctors...
​  ​Today we know that many people in northern latitudes, especially the elderly, are deficient or severely deficient in Vitamin D, even those taking these low-level supplements. In fact, it would be true to say there is a global plague of Vitamin D deficiency, even in many sunny countries where people have lost the habit of spending time outdoors or shield themselves from the sun.
​  ​The doctors and researchers who have been gradually piecing together the critically important role of Vitamin D are the medical equivalent of the dissident journalists who try to present a realistic picture of what goes on in Israel-Palestine.
​  ​Because Big Pharma can make no serious money from Vitamin D, researchers into the sun hormone have struggled to raise funds for their work and have mostly been denied corporate platforms from which to publicise the stunning findings they have made.​..

   Rather, the opportunity for Big Pharma to develop a magic bullet to treat Covid has led to an intensified campaign to discredit Vitamin D research.

​https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2021-02-22/doctors-vitamin-d-erode-trust/

​Resettling​

Texas Warmed Up

 Warm Well Wishers,

  Jenny and I are fine. I guess the news cycle ended Thursday, because Texas warmed up Friday, and we hit the road to Yoakum that afternoon when the roads were safe from being driven on for several hours. Our duplex in Austin did not have water when we left, or when we returned after a big Saturday workday in Yoakum, but we took showers in Yoakum. That modest town was almost unscathed, though it had not gotten the initial ice storm 2/10 - 2/11/21. One outside pipe burst, but was heard to burst Friday by the electrical work crew. That was quickly dealt with, capped off by the plumber they called, who had done a lot of work on the house last year. 

  Our sons Steve and Jim came down from Dallas and Ft. Worth late Friday night, and we did a lot of tree work and cleaning up of the grounds..

Jim cut down lots of big limbs and we dut them up into firewood and brush piles laid out neatly by the street.

  The avocado trees were hit really hard. I've never had somebody tell me their avocado tree survived 8 degrees F. We unwrapped the plastic tents we had created around them and put that neatly away in the shop.

We will see over the next month if any of them shows signs of life sprouting out from below.

  The Mexican avocado seedlings I have been growing for a little over a year got covered in ice by the initial ice storm, and stayed in it for a few days, but 

we put them in the garage before the temperatures dropped down below the mid 20s, and they are doing pretty well. 6 to 8 of them are looking like we could just put them in the ground, though I did just pot them up into big pots a few weeks ago. I have ordered at least one replacement avocado tree, and will likely order another variety, and get as many other replacement varieties as I can from Texas growers.

The roster might shift a bit. We'll see over the next month or so.

  The Texas power grid was seconds to minutes from collapse, which is estimated would have taken at least 8 days to bring back online. That sure would have been worse. A very few professionals had to act quickly and decisively. They did. They will never be thanked, I suspect.

https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/texas-was-seconds-and-minutes-complete-disaster

  Clarity came to Texans last week. It was clear that things were much worse with power, water and gas infrastructure than people realized, and everybody was affected. It all needs major fixing which will take a long time and be expensive. It may be politically unifying, for awhile...

​  ​Hardship like what Texas is going through right now can bring clarity. And in the teeth of this winter storm, the entire energy industry, with its high-powered lobbyists and its billions in taxpayer subsidies, is beginning to look like every other elite institution in America: a corrupt and parasitic enterprise whose failures come at the expense of ordinary Americans—in this case, people who are now trying to stay alive in their own homes.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/18/the-failure-of-the-texas-power-grid-is-worse-than-you-think/

Cold Truth: The Texas Freeze is a Catastrophe of the Free Market
By James K. Galbrait​h​

​  ​Under New Deal-style regulations, electric utilities got a rate-of-return on their investment, governed by a utility commission that set and stabilized prices. It was (in principle) enough to cover construction and maintenance and a fair profit, not so much as to amount to monopoly profits; utilities were a stable but dull business, municipal socialism. Economists complained: there was an incentive, they said, for such utilities to over-invest. The bigger their operations, the higher their total costs, the more they could extract from the rate-setters.
​  ​What to do? Economists proposed a free market: let generating companies compete to deliver power to the consumer through the common electrical grid...

​...​Electricity isn’t like that. Supply has to exactly equal demand every single minute of every single day. If it doesn’t, the entire system can fail.
This system, therefore, had three vulnerabilities. 

First, it created an incentive for cut-throat competition, to provide power in the cheapest possible way, which meant with machinery, wells, meters, pipes, and also windmills that were not insulated against extreme cold – a rarity but not unknown, even in Texas. 

Second, it left prices free to fluctuate. 

Third, it assured that when prices rose the most, that would be at exactly those moments when the demand for power was the greatest.
In 2002, under Governor Rick Perry, Texas deregulated its electricity system.​..

 Enter the deep freeze of 2021. 

Demand went up. Supply went down. Natural gas froze up at the wells, in the pipes, and at the generating plants. Unweatherized windmills also went off-line, a small part of the story. Since Texas is disconnected from the rest of the country, no reserves could be imported, and given the cold everywhere, there would have been none available anyway. 

​ ​There came a point, on Sunday, February 14 or the next day, when demand so outstripped supply that the entire Texas grid came within minutes of a collapse that, we are told, would have taken months to repair.
​  ​As this happened, the price mechanism failed completely. Wholesale prices rose a hundred-fold – but retail prices, under contract, did not, except for the unlucky customers of Griddy, who got socked with bills for thousands of dollars each day.​..

  When the lights go off and the heat goes down, water freezes and that was the next phase of the calamity. For when water freezes, pipes burst, and when pipes burst the water supply cannot keep up with the demand.​...

  Rick Perry ​(no longer Governor) ​has reassured us that as Texans we’re prepared to sacrifice ourselves to avoid the curse of socialism. But it’s too late now. In the aftermath of this debacle, we will return to New Deal-style municipal socialism, or this disaster of power, water, and gas will happen again. 

​https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/cold-truth-the-texas-freeze-is-a-catastrophe-of-the-free-market

Feeling Neighborly

Real Threats In Fake World

 Brainwashed,

Opening The CIAs Can of Worms, Edward Curtain  Thanks Wiggs [attacks and deplatforming on RFK Jr, self-limiting journalistic dissenters]

​T​he CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy,” wrote Douglas Valentine in his important book, The CIA As Organized Crime.​..We have long been subjected to this “information warfare,” whose purpose is to win the hearts and minds of the American people and pacify them into victims of their own complicity, just as it was practiced long ago by the CIA in Vietnam and by The New York Times, CBS, etc. on the American people then and over the years as the American warfare state waged endless wars, coups, false flag operations, and assassinations at home and abroad.
​  ​Another way of putting this is to say for all practical purposes when it comes to matters that bear on important foreign and domestic matters, the CIA and the corporate mainstream media cannot be distinguished.
​  ​For those who read and study history, it has long been known that the CIA has placed their operatives throughout every agency of the U.S. government, as explained by Fletcher Prouty in The Secret Team; that CIA officers Cord Myer and Frank Wisner operated secret programs to get some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom among intellectuals, journalists, and writers to be their voices for unfreedom and censorship, as explained by Frances Stonor Saunders in The Cultural Cold War and Joel Whitney in Finks, among others; that Cord Myer was especially focused on and successful in “courting the Compatible Left” since right wingers were already in the Agency’s pocket.

https://off-guardian.org/2021/02/14/opening-the-cias-can-of-worms/

​After being deplatformed on Instagram, and libeled by the New York Time:

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Chairman of Children’s Health Defense, said:
“Every statement I put on Instagram was sourced from a government database, from peer-reviewed publications and from carefully confirmed news stories. None of my posts were false. Facebook, the pharmaceutical industry and its captive regulators use the term ‘vaccine misinformation’ as a euphemism for any factual assertion that departs from official pronouncements about vaccine health and safety, whether true or not. This kind of censorship is counterproductive if our objective is a safe and effective vaccine supply.

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/robert-kenney-jr-instagram-removal-account/

​  ​Conspiracies for good and for evil do exist now, as they have from time immemorial, Matthew Ehret writes. The only question is which intention do you want to devote your life towards?
​  ​If you are starting to feel like forces controlling the governments of the west are out to get you, then it is likely that you are either a paranoid nut job, or a stubborn realist.
​  ​Either way, it means that you have some major problems on your hands.​..

Nancy Pelosi’s official biographer Molly Ball, recently penned a scandalous Time Magazine article entitled 

‘The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Elections’ which admitted to this conspiracy saying:
​  ​“Even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream- a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.” (Lest you think that this was a subversion of democracy, Ball informs us that “they were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.”)

​  ​Another conclusion you might come to is that many of the political figures whom you believed were serving those who elected them into office, actually serve the interests of a clique of technocrats and billionaires lusting over the deconstruction of western civilization under something called “a Great Reset”.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/02/15/how-conspiracy-theorizing-may-soon-get-you-labelled-a-domestic-terrorist/

​  The "incompetence defense"; (These guys/gals just do as they are told, and are comfortable saying their lines with straight faces, no matter how inane.)​ Thanks Wiggs, and Our Girl Helen of DesTroy

America’s future is in the hands of woefully inept cretins at a time when creativity and innovation are needed more than ever

​  ​The US’ future looks grim indeed in the face of a ‘Great Reset’ proposed by the same powers that steered it into a deadly economic quagmire. Why are Americans allowing those who broke their world the privilege of ‘fixing’ it?
​  ​Americans with more power and connections than sense have rushed forward over the last year, attempting to seize the right to ‘fix’ a society broken by shockingly stupid responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. Entire generations are being rendered suicidally depressed, unemployable, hopelessly alienated, and worse, while the likelihood that the current generation of children will mature into functional adults is rapidly shrinking. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for such a heterogenous population, and this moment calls for an unprecedented degree of creativity and imagination if we are to survive as a society.

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/515745-wef-biden-failures-future-destruction/

​Uh, so protesters did not kill that capital cop with a fire extinguisher? That was just made up? 

He was fine at home that night, then died mysteriously? (Did he have a COVID vaccine?)

The False and Exaggerated Claims Still Being Spread About the Capitol Riot  , Glenn Greenwald
Insisting on factual accuracy does not make one an apologist for the protesters. False reporting is never justified, especially to inflate threat and fear levels.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-claims

No "conspiracy" here, nothing to see. Those people were well enough to be discharged and the nursing homes were the only place they could go to free up hospital beds. The governor had to order it. Nobody could have known this would happen. You'd have done the same thing...

Cuomo blames ‘politics,’ fails to address nursing home cover-up admission

An unapologetic Gov. Cuomo doubled down on a litany of past excuses Monday as he blamed “politics” for the spiraling scandal that’s engulfed his administration since The Post revealed his top aide admitted they hid from elected officials and the public the true number of nursing-home residents killed by COVID-19

https://nypost.com/2021/02/15/cuomo-fails-to-address-nursing-home-cover-up-admission/

​Well, maybe...

​  ​The biggest political scandal in America right now is playing out in New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo is in a lot of trouble — and rightly so. The Democratic governor did not merely wildly mismanage his state’s response to the COVID emergency, while netting himself a lucrative book deal and an Emmy. He did something worse.
​  ​In the middle of a public health emergency, he used his office to help one of his largest political donors shield itself from legal consequences as 15,000 nursing home residents died from COVID — and then he and his administration underreported that death toll, helping the same donor.

https://www.dailyposter.com/p/cuomo-gate-a-nixonian-scandal-is

​Texas' one nuclear power plant, the always-ill-fated South Texas Nuclear Project, which usually powers 2 million homes, is shut down for winter weather, because it would never face winter weather on the Texas Gulf Coast, so it was never winterized.​ (Our Fukushima?)

https://www.zerohedge.com/weather/texas-failed-winterize-nuclear-plant-leading-reactor-shut-down

Texas Freeze Raises Price ofCharging a Tesla to $900 

(Well, it would be funny if it really did, tee, hee, hee...)

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Texas-Freeze-Raises-Cost-Of-Charging-A-Tesla-To-900.html

Facebook vs Australia. What are the odds on this showdown? Are there some odds? 

Facebook seems to feel it has the upper hand, but does it? 

Australia wants to indict executives, not the faceless corporation. 

Maybe the executives are just acting out of desperation.

https://meanjin.com.au/blog/the-deplatforming-of-australia/

​It's about time, time to get finished with COVID-phobia.

The cheap, generic anti-parasite drug Ivermectin finally is to undergo rigorous clinical trials in a first-world nation for use in fighting COVID-19.  Japan has been hit with a second wave of COVID cases, and as a result, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (population: 13.8 million) is looking for approaches that could minimize stress on available hospital beds.​..

​  The Tokyo government hopes to support the trials using some beds at metropolitan and public hospitals. Ivermectin will be given to patients with mild symptoms, comparing their response with those receiving a placebo...

​  ​Japan has a large and thriving pharmaceutical industry as well as a respected medical research capability.  In fact, Ivermectin was developed in Japan by Kitasato University professor emeritus Satoshi Omura, who won the 2015 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his feat.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/tokyo_metropolitan_government_plans_clinical_testing_of_ivermectin_for_covid_therapy.html

Why politicians and doctors keep ignoring the medical research on Vitamin D and Covid​ , Jonathan Cook​
​  ​It is probably not a good idea to write while in the grip of anger. But I am struggling to suppress my emotions about a wasted year, during which politicians and many doctors have ignored a growing body of evidence suggesting that Vitamin D can play a critically important role in the prevention and treatment of Covid-19.

https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2021-02-15/lives-lost-covid-vitamin-d/

​Brad and Jeremy bith sent versions of this molecular biology analysis of plausible effects of the COVID-19 spike protein, and also the m-RNA based "vaccines" designed to stimulate immune response against the virus. Spike protein​ segments are the critical factor. They seem to be able to cause abnormal folding of intracellular proteins into "prion" configurations. "Prions", abnormally folded proteins, are what cause "Mad Cow Disease" and the Jacob-Kreuzfeld human equivalent. These configurations cause other pieces of the same protein to also fold abnormally, and this shows up as protein clogs , "amyloid plaques" building up, and making nerve cells and regions of the nervous system malfunction and gradually worsen, as in Alzheimers. 

I am not endorsing this hypothesis, but merely considering it, keeping it in mind.

  The initial binding could be between spike proteins on the surface of the cell transfected by the vaccine and ACE2 on the surface of an adjacent cell. The resulting complex may become internalized. Alternatively, the interaction could initially take place in the cytoplasm of a cell that makes ACE2 and has been transfected with the vaccine RNA coding for the spike protein. The interaction is quite concerning given the belief that the virus causing COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, is a bioweapon [10,11] and it is possible that the viral spike protein may have been designed to cause prion disease​...

​  ​Finally, others working in the field have published additional support that COVID-19 vaccines could potentially induce prion disease. Authors [18] found prion related sequences in the COVID-19 spike protein which were not found in related coronaviruses. Others [19] have reported a case of prion disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, initially occurring in a man with COVID-19.

https://scivisionpub.com/pdfs/covid19-rna-based-vaccines-and-the-risk-of-prion-disease-1503.pdf

​Brain-Freezed​

Texas Freezing Blackout

 Sharing Space Blankets,

​  Texas is cold, colder than anything on record, overall, for this time of year, and snowed-in, which never happens for more than a day here in central Texas. This combination, and the long duration, 6 days already, and counting, make this event an order of magnitude or more beyond the parameters that engineers considered when designing safety measures. Something similar, but milder and more localized happened in the Dallas, Fort Worth area during super bowl 2011, I hear, but I don't recall it. I didn't live there.

  The cost to keep a temperature differential from inside to outside matters in several ways. Texas houses and businesses often pump something like 35 degrees, between 105 outside and 70 inside during the summer, with AC units, which are heat pumps. Heat pumps are pretty efficient. They might use 1 unit of electricity to pump 9 equal energy units of heat outside. Gas burning furnaces and stoves are pretty good. Stoves don't waste any heat. They are unvented heaters. CO2 does build up with lots of burning over a long time. Lots of us lived with unvented heaters for many years in the old days. Gas furnaces won't work when the electricity is out. Stoves will. You may need a match.

  Electric heating is different. It does not pump 9 units of heat for every equal unit of electricity. 

Resistive electric heaters make 1 unit of heat for 1 unit of electricity. Resistive electric heaters take 9 times as much electricity to cover that 35 degree differential, and a lot of us are trying to get 65 degrees inside with 15 degrees outside this week. 

A lot of people need 12 times as much electricity as during summer peak load.

  About 40% of Texas households are currently without electricity. We just had about 20 hours without electricity, after 8 hours without last Thursday evening and night. We are fortunate to have a gas stove, and an older one with a gas pilot light, so we used it and blanketed up overnight, and sweatered up in the daytime. 

We have been able to cook. We have nice fresh produce we harvested ahead of the deadly cold. 

We gave some away, too. Not the spinach. Jenny cooked lovely Saag paneer 2 days ago, and I made spinach omelets with mushroom and cheese sauce today. Still tasting it...

  I carried in frozen rainwater buckets to put in the refrigerator and freezer, which became "the icebox", which was fun to say. 

I put them back outside a while ago when the power came on. They are "recharging". 

​  Without internet, I read most of Charles Hugh Smith's latest book, print version, by a window, A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet. I have other books I still need to read...

  There is a lot of blame being cast in Texas, for political purposes, but the fact is that nobody would have budgeted for something this extreme. Now they will need to. 

  Many natural gas wellheads are frozen and some of the pipelines are not working right in the extreme cold. Remaining natural gas power plants are burning all the gas they can get, and competing with residential users for it. 

A lot of natural gas plants have been shut down in recent years, but they are the only kind of power plant that can ramp up fast to meet changes in electrical generation requirements. Some plants will need to be renovated and brought back online. 

It will cost more most days, but it will provide resilience for times of severe need. Texas has the gas...

  There is no wind or solar electric  power currently online, due to ice storms last week and no thaw since then.

  We got down to 8 degrees F, with a wind, yesterday morning, and 6 F this mo​rning. I've never experienced it getting below 16, and that was the winter of 1983-1984, when every palm tree in Houston died. 

  All of our "cold tolerant" Mexican avocado seedlings, now over a year old, are in the garage in their pots. The coating of ice from Thursday has melted. We put them in there before the temperature dropped below the mid 20s. That's too cold. 

No point killing them all. I just want to see which ones do better.  

  We're not sure at all if any of the 15 Mexican avocado trees in Yoakum will live, though we cut up a roll of white plastic to wrap them with in sub freezing wind Saturday (Thanks Jenny!). We have been making deer-deterrence cages of chicken wire for a month, so that helps hold the wraps, but makes them harder to do and to tie. Jenny and I drove back to Austin after that chore, and harvesting the vegetables. 

The "ghost trees" are pictured below. 

We hope some live, but people are proud of the few that lived through 1983-1984, very proud.

  I'm actually very hopeful for Texas, because this is a big adversity, unanticipated and overwhelming for all Texans, a shared hardship. Political unity of purpose is exceedingly rare these days, and organizations are locked into status-quo procedures and protocols. That's terrible, and only serves a few insulated power elites. 

  This event provides a platform for practical initiatives to be taken by (politicians in) the State of Texas, in the interests of all Texans. 

Washington can only get in the way of Texas reinforcing it's power grid backup-capacity for severe events. 

Run with that Ball, Texas!

Mike Shedlock is politically incorrect, but factual here. Natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel, and still abundant. Combustion = Real Economy.

Hello Clean Energy Advocates, What Do We Do When the Wind Turbines are All Frozen?
https://www.thestreet.com/mishtalk/economics/hello-clean-energy-advocates-what-do-we-do-when-the-wind-turbines-are-all-frozen

"Extremely Dangerous" Weather, Grid Chaos Sparks Outages Across 15 US States, Spreads To Mexico

https://www.zerohedge.com/weather/4-million-texans-without-power-amid-grid-collapse-second-storm-nears

Presidents Day: Carter's Prescient Farewell Address in 1981​,​​  Charles Hugh Smith​  (We took this good man for granted. Watch a little.)​

​  ​Regardless of our opinions about President Carter and his legacy, his Farewell Address is worthy of our attention and study.
On Presidents Day 2021, I invite you to read/watch President Carter's Farewell Address from 40 years ago. As a Washington outsider, Carter was relentlessly mocked and undermined by the Establishment, as insiders' loathing of outsiders knows no bounds.
​  ​In a similar fashion, the loathing of the corrupt and self-absorbed for the faithful aspiring to better world despite our weaknesses and flaws also knows no bounds, and so the establishment insiders that run the nation had no use for Carter other than as a handy whipping post.

http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2021/02/presidents-day-carters-prescient.html

The Thirty Tyrants​  (Jimmy Carter's foundation and others have determined that the USA is an oligarchy.)​ Thanks Eleni in Athens.​
The deal that the American elite chose to make with China has a precedent in the history of Athens and Sparta​,  by Lee Smith​  (Thanks Eleni)​

... ​But if Donald Trump saw decoupling the United States from China as a way to dismantle the oligarchy that hated him and sent American jobs abroad, he couldn’t follow through on the vision. After correctly identifying the sources of corruption in our elite, the reasons for the impoverishment of the middle classes, and the threats foreign and domestic to our peace, he failed to staff and prepare to win the war he asked Americans to elect him to fight.
​  ​And because it was true that China was the source of the China Class’ power, the novel coronavirus coming out of Wuhan became the platform for its coup de grace. So Americans became prey to an anti-democratic elite that used the coronavirus to demoralize them; lay waste to small businesses; leave them vulnerable to rioters who are free to steal, burn, and kill; keep their children from school and the dying from the last embrace of their loved ones; and desecrate American history, culture, and society; and defame the country as systemically racist in order to furnish the predicate for why ordinary Americans in fact deserved the hell that the elite’s private and public sector proxies had already prepared for them.​..

​  What seems clear is that Biden’s inauguration marks the hegemony of an American oligarchy that sees its relationship with China as a shield and sword against their own countrymen. Like Athens’ Thirty Tyrants, they are not simply contemptuous of a political system that recognizes the natural rights of all its citizens that are endowed by our creator; they despise in particular the notion that those they rule have the same rights they do. Witness their newfound respect for the idea that speech should only be free for the enlightened few who know how to use it properly. Like Critias and the pro-Sparta faction, the new American oligarchy believes that democracy’s failures are proof of their own exclusive right to power—and they are happy to rule in partnership with a foreign power that will help them destroy their own countrymen.
​  ​What does history teach us about this moment? The bad news is that the Thirty Tyrants exiled notable Athenian democrats and confiscated their property while murdering an estimated 5% of the Athenian population. The good news is that their rule lasted less than a year.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-thirty-tyrants

​Ron Paul on the second Impeach Trump show-trial:​

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2021/february/15/trump-acquitted-again-but-trump-hatred-continues/

​Jim Kunstler is irreverent again:

...in a telephone parley between Mr. Biden and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over the governor’s refusal to lockdown his state. The world-famous Dr. Fauci was also on the call, in which Mr. Biden threatened to curtail American citizens travel to Florida by road and air — since an offshoot of Covid-19 policy has been to drive a huge demographic exodus from the economically failing states of New York, Illinois, and California down there. He also threatened to withhold federal funding to Florida and deny the state access to Covid-19 vaccines. Dr. Fauci chimed in, “Governor, do you want to be responsible for reinfecting the nation? Truth is, we don’t even know how effective current vaccines are against the UK strain.”
​  ​DeSantis told Dr. Fauci he trusted his own state health authorities over financially incentivized federal officials. The conclusion of the conference call went like this:
  ​"​How much do you stand to earn from these vaccines, Dr. Fauci? And, Joe, if you continue with this course of action, I will authorize the state National Guard to protect the movement of Floridians,” DeSantis said.
​  ​“Address me as Mr. President or President Biden,” Biden said.
“I will not, and you can go fuck yourself,” DeSantis said before hanging up.

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/unity/

John Glubb and Avoiding the Fate of Empires​ Thanks again to Charles for sending this. 

  Glubb was an English army officer who spent the best part of his career serving the newly-independent governments of Iraq and Jordan. An avid—if amateur—historian, he developed a theory on hegemonic orders that he called the “Fate of Empires.” Comparing a series of ancient and modern empires, he concluded that their average lifespan was 10 generations—about 250 years—and that, despite great geographic, technological, religious, and cultural differences, all empires follow a general pattern as they expand, develop, and finally decline and collapse. Although Glubb himself was the first to acknowledge the risks of over-simplification in his generalised model, his observations aptly describe, in broad-brushstrokes, not only the fate of past empires, but the contemporary situation in global politics today, particularly regarding the West and China.
  Glubb was agnostic on whether the “laws” of history he claimed to uncover were at all deterministic, but hoped that, by understanding how empires decline and collapse, modern citizens stood a chance of avoiding their typical fate...

​  ​Glubb’s account therefore makes uneasy reading for a modern, cosmopolitan intellectual. Although we can question his generalisations and his selection of examples, his broad picture holds true not only for the periods he discusses, but also seems applicable to modern empires, such as China, which appears to be somewhere in the transition from the “Age of Commerce” to the “Age of Affluence,” and the North Atlantic liberal hegemony, which—depending on your vantage point—is in either the later stages of the “Age of Intellect” or entering the “Age of Decadence.” His questioning of intellectualism, immigration, and the welfare state is also challenging for the progressive project, casting the attainment of its goals as symptoms of its impending collapse.​..

​  But a more careful reading of Glubb reveals that such a strategy treats only the symptoms of the decline, not its cause. Glubb was quite clear—it is greed, and the transition of a culture from “service to selfishness” that marks a nation’s tipping point into decadence and decline. The rise of intellectualism can be better understood as an early reaction to this decline... ​ 

  Be that as it may, the political class of the West remains undeniably in the hands of the decadent generation of Affluence. The language of commerce is everywhere—politicians talk of “the UK plc” or “Australia Inc.”—and honesty is certainly not a guiding virtue. Through lobbyists and direct consultation, business leaders influence all aspects of state policy, and yet give as little as possible in return, avoiding tax and moving capital and jobs away as soon as it is in their interests to do so...

​  ​What lessons can we draw, then, from Glubb’s account of the Fate of Empires? Two things stand out. First, the need for a value higher than money. Second, the need for a spirit of service and self-sacrifice to a cause of which we are all a part. We need to stop thinking like businesspeople, and to stop treating the acquisition of wealth as the measure of success, both as individuals and as a society. And we need to actively replace it, with something that binds a community together and gives it meaning.​..

​  ​Communities should decide for themselves what such activities might be. But I believe that an emphasis on connection to the natural world, and self-reliance, should fall at the centre of them. A respect for the natural world is vital in these times of climate emergency, and may help us to become less materialistic and more appreciative of the simpler comforts we take for granted. An education system that teaches self-reliance through character-building would be an invaluable aid in forming citizens who could resist the frivolity that marks the decaying empire.

https://quillette.com/2020/09/30/pasha-glubb-and-avoiding-the-fate-of-empires/

​Pepe Escobar has a long and thought provoking essay about what the failing western empire might be able to patch together if it does not get us all killed.

 ​ ​The West’s hostile strategy to Russia is conditioned on the idea that Russia has nowhere else to go, and must accept whatever the West offers in terms of “partnership”. The rise of the East fundamentally alters Moscow’s relationship with the West by enabling Russia to diversify its partnerships”.
​  ​We may be fast approaching the point where Great Eurasia’s Russia will present Germany with a take it or leave it offer. Either we build the Heartland together, or we will build it with China – and you will be just a historical bystander.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/escobar-why-russia-driving-west-crazy​.

Acting Locally​