Quizzical,
Societies are coordinated in their works, efforts and aspirations by shared narratives of meaning and purpose. Those typically degrade over time, as they are gradually corrupted for selfish gain. What remains is a worm eaten corpse, which must not be closely examined at all, or the delicate societal glue will dissolve.
I think we're there again, like in the Great Depression. China was there in the Cultural Revolution. Russia went there in the 1990s. These Social Contracts and civilizational narratives take a whole lot of sustained work, with frustrations, fears and disappointments at betrayals, by the entire society, to be renegotiated and reworked, so that society can again function. This takes something like 10 years to bottom out and turn around. How far are we? I have to ask, so I don't think we are anywhere near a bottom, a "capitulation".
The Western Empire is still pretending it can rule the world. The globalist "owners" don't seem to have an alternative, except finding ways to reduce the useless-eaters and motivate the useful eaters to excellence-in-service.
I was recently a useful-eater, but I bucked the narrative and refused COVID vaccination, on principle first, and on scientific evidence also.
Now I am a problem, because I examine the corpse of the governing societal narrative.
It stinks. It's dead. It cannot be resuscitated rationally, because it is completely irrational and counterproductive for everybody except the globalist owners, and it breaks for them next...
The oligarchy consists of global finance, backed by global military-industrial complex, which forces countries to accept American dollars at interest, through a new BIS-controlled central bank, which is promptly installed. International investors buy resources, assets and human labor at a discount, extract extra at interest, and periodically crash the economy to buy at an even deeper discount. Korea, Vietnam, Libya, Venezuela. It's the same game plan, but it doesn't always work the same. It also hollows out the economic core of the centers of empire, like the US. That's been done.
If the rest of the world abandons the $US as global reserve currency, and uses something else for international trade, (gold would serve) then the price of everything in the US would double, and valuable things would be bought by foreigners with their dollars, and exported to them. Printing dollars would no longer be an option to fund the government. This began in the decade after Nixon had to default on the gold standard, when America ran out of gold, funding the Vietnam War.
The petrodollar was arranged by getting Saudi Arabia to only accept $US for oil, and coercing other oil producers to do the same. those $US could be recycled into US Federal debt, holding the system intact. The American/NATO global military (the biggest users of oil on our planet) would enforce the regime.
This worked well for a long time, but all of its foundations are now rotten, all of them.
The interests of global finance and the military industrial complex are well aligned, and Big Pharma is an eager ally. Big media, the corporate-state-propaganda-apparatus (Free News!) is completely on board, as is the information-search-monopoly, Google, as is the computer software duopoly of Microsoft and Apple.
What is not holding is a narrative that this is good for society, because that is obviously false. Scapegoats have been created, like Russia's President Putin, America's recent President Trump, middle aged white Americans with political opinions (aka "white supremacists"), productively-employed American farmers, truckers, craftsmen and factory workers ("deplorables"), and other "homegrown-terrorists-spreading-disinformation".
That's a pretty big tent excluded by the narrative, but it is sustained by the increasingly stressed Professional Managerial Class and all of those "compliance officers". Political Correctness helps put boots-on-the-ground.
Supporters of transgender rights ignore that the great majority of transgendered people just want to be invisibly accepted and left alone. They don't want to be standard-bearers for the social alliance that supports the status-quo at such a low actual cost to the owners.
Most black people I talk to have seen this movie before, would like the check, please, but don't want to be pawns in street riots. They are some of the most suspicious about the COVID narrative (killed a lot of black people) and the mandatory vaccination "solution". All of the black patients I served were very receptive to getting their families on vitamin-D to help their immune systems work better, all of them, for two years...
It is too late for this corpse, and I'll keep pointing that out. I'm going to do some more internal finishing work on the homestead-addition today. The bathroom is going in, too.
Michael Lesher has a thoughtful article. Here are some excerpts.
...The COVID coup is fundamentally not about medicine or science. It is not about inflated “case” rates or jiggered statistics or fake news or the pseudo-studies circulated by propaganda outfits like the World Health Organization or the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yes, all those things have figured in the derangement of constitutional democracy that has characterized the COVID coup. But at bottom it’s not about any of them.
The real nature of the campaign is at once simpler and far more dangerous. What we’re experiencing is an attack on the very foundation of ordered liberty, an assault that is already in the process of submerging democracies beneath what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called a “permanent ‘state of exception.’” To put it bluntly: our ruling classes, in one country after another, have effectively switched off their nations’ constitutions and the whole set of civil liberties that are supposed to accompany them – not by formally abolishing them, mind you, but by adopting the extra-legal mechanisms of a “state of emergency” in place of normal constitutional procedures, with the result that the ordinary rules of democracy and the rights of individuals have, for most practical purposes, been indefinitely suspended.
That’s why the COVID coup began, in my own country, with declarations of an “emergency” in four-fifths of the states – and why, with very rare exceptions, those “states of emergency” remain in effect to this day, nearly two years later. Again, this cannot be explained away as a response to a respiratory virus. When an “emergency” involves suspending constitutional government for two years, it should be obvious that the “emergency” has ceased to be a real emergency (if it ever was one) and has become an extralegal norm – and this is even more emphatically true when virtually no one in the political opposition, the civil rights bar or the mainstream media so much as mentions this fundamental fact...
And that allows them to skirt the real issue. COVID fascism is not a comedy of scientific errors. For all intents and purposes, it is a coup d’état. And it must resisted accordingly... What we’re engaged in is a spiritual struggle. It’s a battle for the survival of the human soul, and in that battle our main weapons are likely to be spiritual ones: courage, hope, self-sacrifice, faith.
Remember, the enemies of humanity have a weak point: they do not believe in human beings, and consequently they do not understand the power contained in each soul that refuses to be duped.
Glenn Greenwald: The Pressure Campaign on Spotify to Remove Joe Rogan Reveals the Religion of Liberals: Censorship
Constitutional illiteracy to the side, the “hate speech” framework for justifying censorship is now insufficient because liberals are eager to silence a much broader range of voices than those they can credibly accuse of being hateful. That is why the newest, and now most popular, censorship framework is to claim that their targets are guilty of spreading “misinformation” or “disinformation.” These terms, by design, have no clear or concise meaning. Like the term “terrorism,” it is their elasticity that makes them so useful.
When liberals’ favorite media outlets, from CNN and NBC to The New York Times and The Atlantic, spend four years disseminating one fabricated Russia story after the next — from the Kremlin hacking into Vermont's heating system and Putin's sexual blackmail over Trump to bounties on the heads of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, the Biden email archive being "Russian disinformation,” and a magical mystery weapon that injures American brains with cricket noises — none of that is "disinformation” that requires banishment. Nor are false claims that COVID's origin has proven to be zoonotic rather than a lab leak, the vastly overstated claim that vaccines prevent transmission of COVID, or that Julian Assange stole classified documents and caused people to die. Corporate outlets beloved by liberals are free to spout serious falsehoods without being deemed guilty of disinformation, and, because of that, do so routinely.
This was my conclusion when "the unvaccinated" first became an underclass.
I stand unemployed with the underclass.
Holocaust Survivor: Never Again Is Now. Unless We All Resist
In a speech delivered Sunday in Brussels, Holocaust survivor Vera Sharav described the striking parallels between what she witnessed as a child in Nazi-controlled Romania, and COVID policies being enacted today by governments around the globe.
Five People died in the January 6, 2021 Protests in Washington DC. Four were killed by police, and the death of the police officer from a stroke, the last death investigated here, could have been avoided, if the medic at the protest had been heeded by the man's fellow officers, when he said that the officer was showing signs of a stroke and needed immediate medical attention. The officer had not been hit or harmed, not shot dead, while trying to restrain an agent provocateur, not killed by concussion grenades, and not killed by being beaten to death with a billy-club. That was those other folks, and they all got unfairly dissed after they were murdered.
Jim Kunstler: The Revolt Begins
Canada under the Trudeau government has been more restrictive on Covid-19 than the Big Gorilla to its south, with the population compliantly following all the insane, economy-wrecking rules, until a recent mandate to vaxx-up every last trucker in the land finally sparked-off a revolt. Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal Party failed to win a parliamentary majority in last September’s federal election, and he heads a flimsy coalition potentially facing a no-confidence vote that would drive the PM out of office.
For now, the truckers seem determined to stick around and disrupt the Canadian capital. Their estimated 50,000 rigs could surround the city and create siege conditions, where food supplies and other goods won’t get in, starving the government into surrendering on its mandates and restrictions. So far, the local Ottawa police have stood by with a very light hand, and there are rumors that they are on the same page as the truckers against federal overreach.
Will Mr. Trudeau resort to using the military to break up the revolt? ... How will that help move stuff from Point A to Point B? It kind of looks like they have Mr. T over a Molson barrel. For now, it’s a stand-off, but it looks to me like the Prime Minister must resign and whoever takes charge next will have to rapidly rethink the country’s entire Covid-19 policy in a not-insane direction...
Let the trucks roll from Fresno to DC if they still want to play rough. Think the “Joe Biden” gang will try to divert attention by starting a war in Ukraine? They don’t dare. Think the financial markets will tank? Well, of course they will, no matter what, because the markets and the money are detached from reality. Face it: what America needs most of all is to reconnect with reality, and you can be sure that the process will be uncomfortable, having sojourned so far from it for so long. (“Let’s Go, Brandon!”) And Let’s go, Canadian truckers!
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-revolt-begins/
Hundreds of protestors have gathered in front of Australia’s Parliament House in solidarity with the massive Convoy to Ottawa that converged on the Canadian capital around the weekend of Jan. 29.
Calls for a similar movement have been echoing Down Under for days, and on Jan. 31, a crowd organised under a “Convoy to Canberra” campaign gathered in front of the national legislature, according to videos circulating on social media...
Social media has been awash with footage of drivers making their way to the Australian capital. The grassroots movement has begun gathering steam as a four-day-old GoFundMe campaign already garnered AU$167,539 in donations, as of Jan. 31. According to the ABC, the funds have been frozen by the website until details are provided regarding how the organiser will disperse them.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/protestors-gather-front-australian-parliament-solidarity-ottawa-truck-convoy
If you get a vaccine to only Wuhan-COVID-spike-protein, then your body will only make antibodies to that small part (20%) of that particular virus.
Your body will make those same antibodies to that historical spike protein when it meets a current strain, which may have an unrecognizable spike-protein (Omicron has a very different spike protein). Those vaccine-antibodies will not work well.
If natural infection had produced the antibody response, then other parts of the virus would also be targeted by antibodies.
The N-protein (nucleocapsid protein) is a really good target for antibodies, but for those who got one of those vaccines, the body, which has been trained to make the antibodies against that outdated spike protein, will do that same trick, and will not modify the trick much, will not readily learn to make better antibodies to the new virus.
Steve Kirsch, The story of N-antibodies and why they are so important
In its Week 42 "COVID-19 Vaccine Surveillance Report" (published 21 October 2021), the UK Department of Health admits on page 23 that "recent observations from UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) surveillance data that N antibody levels appear to be lower in individuals who acquire infection following 2 doses of vaccination.”
What does this mean? It means that the vaccine interferes with the body's ability to make antibodies after infection against other parts of the virus.
In particular, vaccinated people do not appear to form antibodies against the nucleocapsid protein, the envelope of the virus, which is an important part of the response in unvaccinated people. The observation may explain why the vaccines actually produce negative efficacy as was shown in the Denmark study, for example.
Shown effective in Bangladesh in July 2020, and many times since then. I have prescribed ivermectin based treatment to good effect, since August 2020.
A Japanese pharmaceutical company, Kowa Co, said on Monday that the drug ivermectin has an "antiviral effect" against Omicron and other Covid-19 variants.
The finding was made with Tokyo's Kitasato University on a joint non-clinical research project, which has been testing the drug as a potential treatment for the disease, according to Reuters. Kowa says that ivermectin showed the "same antiviral effect" on all "mutant strains," including Alpha, Delta and Omicron. The company also noted that ivermectin suppresses invasion of the virus and inhibits its replication. "[Ivermectin] is expected to be applied as a therapeutic drug (tablet) for all new coronavirus infectious diseases," reads the report. Of note, Reuters changed their original headline from "effective" against Omicron to having an "antiviral effect," and corrected a statement that the finding occurred during "Phase III clinical trials."
Charles Hugh Smith observes the financial rock and hard place that the $US Empire is in. When inflation eroded the dollar in the late 1970s and early 1980s, global finance moved away from the $US as global reserve currency, which greatly threatened global wealth extraction through the global dollar and imperial military combination.
The empire must maintain this wealth extraction mechanism until it has something as good or better in place. Nothing yet... Stocks must fall without loose money.
No wonder the market is skittish:
Every time the Federal Reserve began to taper quantitative easing / open spigot of liquidity over the past decade, reduce its balance sheet or raise rates from near-zero, the market plummeted ("taper tantrum") and the Fed stopped tightening and returned to easy-money expansion.
Now the Fed is boxed in by inflation--it can't continue the bubblicious easy-money policies, nor does it have any room left to lower rates due to its pinning interest rates to near-zero for years.
(WARNING: Potentially Russian disinformation!)
We really need the "right" war before the financial system collapses. We really need to blame Putin...
Despite weeks of escalating tensions and claims that Russian troops and tanks could begin streaming over the border into Ukraine at a moment’s notice, Moscow doesn’t actually appear to be masterminding an invasion of its neighbor, a top NATO official has reportedly admitted.
The senior figure, who represents an EU member state in the bloc’s Brussels HQ has told pan-European news outlet Euractiv that they believe Russia is not on the verge of starting a military incursion into Ukraine.
“To invade such a large country with such military forces [like Ukraine], you need military capabilities other than those that have been currently deployed,” the source said.
Brandon Smith sees it: The Globalist Reset Agenda Has Failed – Is Ukraine Plan B? (I don't agree, however, with everything he sees...)
..The funny thing about planning ten steps ahead though is that if anything goes wrong with steps 1-9 then getting to step number 10 will be impossible and you just wasted a whole lot of energy on an elaborate plan that ended up going nowhere. The globalists are NOT the smartest people around; not even close. They aren’t even all that effective when their plans actually function and there are no surprises. Their ideas fail constantly. There is only one reason that centralizing criminals have not been brought down, and that is because no one has ever targeted them directly. Every time there is a governmental shake up or rebellion or mass movement for change people target “the system”; they blame the system for all our problems (or they blame a handful of political puppets) and they seek to add a fresh coat of paint or change some of its basic functions, but the men behind the curtain always end up back behind the curtain. The problem is never “the system”, it’s the people running and influencing the system while enjoying the comfort of the shadows...
Every once in a while it becomes obvious when they have invested an immense amount of time and planning into a single unique scheme, a fulcrum point that many of their other plans will rely on in the future. There is no doubt that the response to the covid outbreak was meant to bulldoze over numerous social and legal conventions and achieve full bore centralization before the vast majority of people even knew what hit them... More recently, the covid agenda and by extension the globalist “Reset” has fallen apart in the US and this has led to problems for them in other parts of the world.
American resistance to the vax mandates and lockdowns was key to everything, more so than I think many people realize. Even if the globalists could implement medical tyranny through much of the rest of the world, with conservative red states blocking the agenda at every turn this created a focal point for resistance. Meaning, all the people in the world can still see that there is another way to do things that does not involve authoritarianism. Life in the red states goes on as if covid barely existed...
For whatever reason, the globalists invested an intense amount of energy into the covid virus and it let them down, and now they are stuck trying to create mass panic over a nothing-burger...
It makes sense that they will need a distraction as a means to redirect momentum, and the globalists will do what they always do, which is create war tensions. This does not mean that large scale war is the intended outcome, but limited regional wars that could grow into something more are always on the table. It is not a mistake that the US could potentially be caught up in not one but two major regional conflicts at this time, including a Chinese invasion of Taiwan as well as a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Monday UN SecurityCouncil hearing on Russian troops in Russia, near Ukraine, called by the US, was a chance for the US to blame Russia, for Russia and China to say, "No, NATO is the provocateur" and for other countries to choose sides in public. Who won? (I don't think Russia wants that rotten bait.)
US Charged With Trying To Provoke Russian Military Action At UN: "You Want It To Happen"
"Sitting ducks"; there for show. An attack on Russia would see them sunk by hypersonic missiles in a few minutes, right? Then what?
US warships spent about 182 days in the Black Sea in 2021, compared with about 82 in 2020
The nuclear submarines are very important.
Russia's Northern Fleet conducted anti-submarine drills in the Norwegian Sea, not far from NATO member Norway, at a moment of broader and rival naval movements in places like the Black Sea
Russia's military described the northern drills as involving ships "hunting down a notional enemy’s submarine using sonars and data from military pilots,"https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russian-navy-holds-anti-submarine-drills-near-nato-country-prepares-more
Mish Shedlock, The Battle for European Integration Has Failed and Russia Provides Proof
Eurointelligence founder Wolfgang Münchau is a strong pro-Europe advocate...
Earlier this month he commented:"The battle for European integration has failed. It is time to recognise defeat, and to think through the consequences....
"When you fight for a cause that does not materialise, at what point do you recognise, and admit, defeat? There are some causes you may want to keep fighting for no matter what, like human rights or climate change. Is European integration in that category? For me, it is not. My biggest area of disagreement with my fellow European federalists is not in what we think is desirable. What we disagree on is where the dividing line between realpolitik and wishful thinking lies.
A good example occurred this weekend. The fool whose committed the crime of saying what everybody in the SPD is thinking was Kay-Achim Schönbach. He was forced to resign as head of the German Navy for revealing to the world that Germany’s natural ally is Russia.
Same threat as "I'll shoot myself in the stomach and die horribly on your doorstep"..
EU threatens to halt Nord Stream 2 & cut Russia off from SWIFT
According to von der Leyen, any EU sanctions against Russia would have a devastating effect. Brussels is Moscow’s largest trading partner, and 75% of direct foreign investment in Russia comes from the EU, she explained, suggesting that economic measures would be painful.
Earlier in January, German newspaper Handelsblatt reported that the EU and the US had refused to consider disconnecting Russia from the SWIFT international bank payment system. It noted that it could destabilize financial markets and help create an alternative payment infrastructure that would no longer be dominated by Western nations...
It turns out that societies undergo upheaval when bad weather for a few years destroys their food supply. Big volcanoes can do that, even if you live across the planed and are clueless about them. I wonder if it's the food-production system breaking down that does this. Seems logical, right? Thanks Charles.
As scientists rapidly improve their ability to decipher past climate upheaval through ice cores and other “proxies,” historians are re-examining previous political and social turmoil and linking it to volcanic eruptions, prolonged droughts, and other disturbances in the natural world.
Pregnant Reporter Forced To Stay In Kabul After Home Country Of New Zealand Denies Her Entry Due To COVID Protocols She had been covering "the difficult conditions mothers and babies face" in the country, and has now herself been forced to take up shelter in Kabul, according to AP. She is 25 weeks pregnant and has been vaccinated three times.
Calling "Batshit"
(pictured downstairs workspace, with stairway project in process)
