Looking Down,
Many of us can see that we are being treated to false emergency narratives to make us comply with the established power order, and give up our rights, as established by existing laws. It is hard to see why, to see the real emergency, perhaps the real emergency is being hidden more effectively than the artificial emergencies are being promulgated. Not a bad bet, and we might even be complicit in obscuring the real emergency, ourselves.
I propose that the real emergency is that global growth economy has already ended, and those who are aware of that are making feverish preparations for the day that the world realizes it, and the distribution systems based upon growth-economy become perplexed and dysfunctional.
Expect the mandates of command-economy. How will this play out?
That is absolutely not a bug, and look, YOU are the feature! You will be happy to cooperate, we assume...
An Israeli company’s spyware was used in attempted and successful hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, government officials and human rights activists around the world, according to an investigation by 17 media organizations, published on July 18th...
The investigation highlights widespread and continuing abuse of NSO’s hacking spyware called ‘Pegasus’ which the company confirms is only intended for use against terrorist groups, drug and human traffickers, and criminals.
Pegasus is a very advanced malware that infects iOS and Android devices to allow operators of the spyware to copy messages, photos, calls and other data, including secretly activate microphones and cameras.
Based on the investigation, the leak contains a list of 50,000 phone numbers that have been identified as those of people of interest by clients of NSO since 2016.
The list includes many close family members of one country’s ruler, suggesting he might have instructed the country’s intelligence agencies to explore the possibility of tracking and spying on their own relatives.
They will get to 100% Facebook-user-vaccine-acceptance on their own schedule, if you don't mind... (Uh, Joe, what about the vaccine-death pandemic?)
On Friday, Biden tore into social media platforms such as Facebook, accusing them of “killing people” by not cracking down on non-conventional opinions about vaccination fervently enough.
“They're killing people... Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they're killing people," the US president said.
Dismissing the allegation, Rosen accused Biden of essentially making Facebook a scapegoat for his administration’s failure to reach its self-imposed goal of having 70% Americans vaccinated by July 4.
"President Biden’s goal was for 70% of Americans to be vaccinated by July 4. Facebook is not the reason this goal was missed,” Rosen said, arguing that figures “tell a very different story to the one promoted by the administration.”
On Friday, Biden tore into social media platforms such as Facebook, accusing them of “killing people” by not cracking down on non-conventional opinions about vaccination fervently enough.
“They're killing people... Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated. And they're killing people," the US president said.
Dismissing the allegation, Rosen accused Biden of essentially making Facebook a scapegoat for his administration’s failure to reach its self-imposed goal of having 70% Americans vaccinated by July 4.
"President Biden’s goal was for 70% of Americans to be vaccinated by July 4. Facebook is not the reason this goal was missed,” Rosen said, arguing that figures “tell a very different story to the one promoted by the administration.”
Since you missed the story about vaccine-deaths, Mr. President, I'll help out. (Some folks even think this count is a lowball.)
For Second Week in a Row: More COVID-19 Vaccination Deaths than COVID-19 Deaths in the US According to CDC and VAERS Websites Taken together, the letter warns that these new pieces of evidence force all physicians administering COVID-19 vaccines to re-evaluate the merits of COVID-19 vaccination, in the interests of their own ethical standing, and their patients’ safety and health.
Summary:
Rapid and efficient memory-type immune responses occur reliably in virtually all unvaccinated individuals who are exposed to SARS-CoV-2. The effectiveness of further boosting the immune response through vaccination is therefore highly doubtful.
Vaccination may instead aggravate disease through antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE).
“You shouldn’t be banned from one platform, and not others, for providing misinformation out there,” press secretary Jen Psaki demanded, creepily calling on the social media giants to create “robust enforcement strategies that bridge their properties.”It's not just about Biden and Facebook disagreeing about where to draw the "free-speech" line this week. (Jen looks really good, and sincere, too.)
"Misinformation" Means Whatever Those With Censorship Power Want It To MeanWhat is 6.72 times as much as "95% effective"
With a total of 835,792 Israelis known to have recovered from the virus, the 72 instances of reinfection amount to 0.0086% of people who were already infected with COVID.
By contrast, Israelis who were vaccinated were 6.72 times more likely to get infected after the shot than after natural infection, with over 3,000 of the 5,193,499, or 0.0578%, of Israelis who were vaccinated getting infected in the latest wave.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/309762By contrast, Israelis who were vaccinated were 6.72 times more likely to get infected after the shot than after natural infection, with over 3,000 of the 5,193,499, or 0.0578%, of Israelis who were vaccinated getting infected in the latest wave.
Yes, really.
The punishments are part of a draconian effort by the French government to force citizens to get the coronavirus jab amidst multiple unruly protests across numerous major cities.
President Emmanuel Macron announced earlier this week that those unable to prove they’re vaccinated or a negative COVID test (at their own cost) will be banned from using public transport, entering a cinema, shopping mall, bar, cafe, restaurant and other venues from August 1st.
The non-compliant must not be allowed to gather together. They will conspire...
Vaccine passports will be compulsory to enter packed venues such as nightclubs in an extraordinary U-turn announced by Boris Johnson hours after clubs were allowed to open for the first time in 16 months...
“I should serve notice now that by the end of September, when all over-18s will have had their chance to be double jabbed, we are planning to make full vaccination the condition of entry to nightclubs and other venues where large crowds gather,” he said.
How Breakdown Cascades Into Collapse, Charles Hugh Smith “I should serve notice now that by the end of September, when all over-18s will have had their chance to be double jabbed, we are planning to make full vaccination the condition of entry to nightclubs and other venues where large crowds gather,” he said.
Finnish "Linux" open source nasal spray COVID vaccine has been ready for clinical trials since May 2020.
It is still waiting, since no billionaire-bait is attached.
This is the most recent story I could find, from this March.
Novavax is a fairly traditional vaccine, without RNA or DNA going into your cells to make them into spike-protein-factories.
Florets of spike protein and an adjuvant to irritate the immune system to notice them are injected into the muscle.
(90.4% effective could mean anything these days.)
Novavax shared that its two-dose COVID-19 vaccine was 90.4% effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19, based on results from its Phase 3 clinical trials.
Catchy title, but it is time to catch-more-flies-with-honey-than-with-vinegar in Afghanistan. T
he CIA opium and heroin trade has to be replaced with real, productive economy, which is being negotiated now.
This will reduce militarized heroin imports into Russia, China and Iran.
Nobody hated the old-silk-road. The Taliban have declared China a "friendly country". Afghans want a nice country again.
New Great Game gets back to basics, Russia-China-Iran alliance is taking Afghanistan's bull by the horns , Pepe EscobarIs Global Collapse Imminent ?, Graham Turner 2014
This was the last formal academic assessment of the 1972 Limits To Growth computer models of global economy from MIT. The old girl was tracking pretty well.
I think we went over the real-economy cliff a couple of years ago, and that cat is hard to keep in the bag. Thanks Charles, for the next 3 stories.
China has nice, new, steel reinforced concrete.
The End of the Industrial Age is Set in Concrete Now the bad news. Concrete has a life span. Salt, water and heat degrade it until at some point it can no longer be the road or the bridge or the high rise or the dam it once was. If nothing is done to replace or repair it, it fails. And people die.
Now the really bad news. Most of the infrastructure of the United States is made of concrete, and most of that concrete is at the end of its life span. If you want to see what that looks like, go to Surfside, Florida and look at the pile of rubble that used to be the Champlain Towers. The pile of rubble that demonstrates perfectly the nature of the rapidly approaching concrete crisis.
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers:
Nearly half of America’s 617,000 bridges are 50 years old, or older, and 46,000 of them are structurally deficient.
40% of the country’s highways are rated in poor or mediocre condition. Many of them in urban situations are impossible to close down in order to rebuild them.
2,300 dams rated as high hazard — meaning that any failure would be catastrophic — are also rated as deficient.
Which brings us to the really, really bad news. There is no logical way that the local, state or federal governments in this or any other country are going to find the political will to raise and spend the money necessary to fix this problem.
Let's talk about infrastructure, shall we? Living in the human-built world day in and day out, we often forget that all these buildings, roads, buried pipes, wires, sewers, and literally everything else we build is not actually natural. We require nature - other plant and animal species - for the ecosystem services they provide, but nature does not require our infrastructure. Think about that deeply for a moment and realize that no other species requires our electrical grid - it only serves us, and even we don't require it for survival; we got along fine for most ALL of the last 200,000 years or so (except for the last 150 years) without electricity. We *could* get along just fine without it now too, except we went into ecological overshoot. There is now no way to keep industrial civilization humming along without it, and this brings some rather uncomfortable facts to light as shown in this study.
So many people focus on emissions reductions but don't realize that technology use CAN NOT reduce emissions. The only way to reduce emissions is to consume less - less food, less energy, and less products and services across the spectrum.
Now the really bad news. Most of the infrastructure of the United States is made of concrete, and most of that concrete is at the end of its life span. If you want to see what that looks like, go to Surfside, Florida and look at the pile of rubble that used to be the Champlain Towers. The pile of rubble that demonstrates perfectly the nature of the rapidly approaching concrete crisis.
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers:
Nearly half of America’s 617,000 bridges are 50 years old, or older, and 46,000 of them are structurally deficient.
40% of the country’s highways are rated in poor or mediocre condition. Many of them in urban situations are impossible to close down in order to rebuild them.
2,300 dams rated as high hazard — meaning that any failure would be catastrophic — are also rated as deficient.
Which brings us to the really, really bad news. There is no logical way that the local, state or federal governments in this or any other country are going to find the political will to raise and spend the money necessary to fix this problem.
So many people focus on emissions reductions but don't realize that technology use CAN NOT reduce emissions. The only way to reduce emissions is to consume less - less food, less energy, and less products and services across the spectrum.
Thanks Dan, lots of good, factual facts, here... Bad time to be a farmer or a hog.
"Mergers and Acquisitions" make monopolies and cartels.
Investigation shows scale of big food corporations' market dominance and political power
A handful of powerful companies control the majority market share of almost 80% of dozens of grocery items bought regularly by ordinary Americans, new analysis reveals.
A joint investigation by the Guardian and Food and Water Watch found that consumer choice is largely an illusion – despite supermarket shelves and fridges brimming with different brands.
In fact, a few powerful transnational companies dominate every link of the food supply chain: from seeds and fertilizers to slaughterhouses and supermarkets to cereals and beers.
A handful of powerful companies control the majority market share of almost 80% of dozens of grocery items bought regularly by ordinary Americans, new analysis reveals.
A joint investigation by the Guardian and Food and Water Watch found that consumer choice is largely an illusion – despite supermarket shelves and fridges brimming with different brands.
In fact, a few powerful transnational companies dominate every link of the food supply chain: from seeds and fertilizers to slaughterhouses and supermarkets to cereals and beers.
Charles Hugh Smith gets what is happening, Thanks Charles
Welcome to the 21st century sequel of the catastrophic 1600s, an extended period of mutually reinforcing crises that overturned regimes and empires from England to China and triggered unremitting misery across much of the human populace. (Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the 17th Century is a riveting overview of this complex era.)
What can we learn from the catastrophic 1600s? Leading the list: humans don't respond well to scarcities. They get crotchety, argumentative, and prone to finding ways to become disagreeable rather than agreeable. Their derangement deepens as they form self-reinforcing echo-chambers of the like-minded, and the source of their misfortune shifts from fate to equally fixated human opponents.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly21/1600s-sequel7-21.htmlWhat can we learn from the catastrophic 1600s? Leading the list: humans don't respond well to scarcities. They get crotchety, argumentative, and prone to finding ways to become disagreeable rather than agreeable. Their derangement deepens as they form self-reinforcing echo-chambers of the like-minded, and the source of their misfortune shifts from fate to equally fixated human opponents.
Maintaining the illusion of confidence, permanence and stability serves the interests of those benefiting from the bubbles and those who prefer the safety of the herd, even as the herd thunders toward the precipice.
The misconception that collapse is an all or nothing phenomenon is common: Either the system rights itself with a bit of money-printing and rah-rah or it collapses into post-industrial ruin and gangs are battling over the last stash of canned beans.
Neither scenario considers the fragility and resilience of the socio-economic system as a whole. It is both far more fragile than the believers in the permanence of the waste is growth model grasp and more resilient than the complete collapse prognosticators grasp.
The recent relatively mild logjams in global supply chains of essentials are mere glimpses of precariously fragile delivery-supply systems. These can be understood as bottlenecks that only insiders see, or as unstable nodes through which all the economy's connections run. Put another way, the economy, as a network appears decentralized and robust, but this illusion vanishes when we consider how the entire economy rests on a few unstable nodes.
One such node is the delivery of gasoline and fuels. It's such an efficient and reliable system that 99.9% of us take it for granted: there will always be plenty of gasoline at every station, the tanks of jet fuel will always be topped off, and so on.
The 0.1% know that this system, once disrupted, would knock over dominoes all through the economy.
Hyper-efficiency and hyper-globalization has reduced the number of producers of essentials to the point that disruptions cannot be overcome with redundant sources.
The misconception that collapse is an all or nothing phenomenon is common: Either the system rights itself with a bit of money-printing and rah-rah or it collapses into post-industrial ruin and gangs are battling over the last stash of canned beans.
Neither scenario considers the fragility and resilience of the socio-economic system as a whole. It is both far more fragile than the believers in the permanence of the waste is growth model grasp and more resilient than the complete collapse prognosticators grasp.
The recent relatively mild logjams in global supply chains of essentials are mere glimpses of precariously fragile delivery-supply systems. These can be understood as bottlenecks that only insiders see, or as unstable nodes through which all the economy's connections run. Put another way, the economy, as a network appears decentralized and robust, but this illusion vanishes when we consider how the entire economy rests on a few unstable nodes.
One such node is the delivery of gasoline and fuels. It's such an efficient and reliable system that 99.9% of us take it for granted: there will always be plenty of gasoline at every station, the tanks of jet fuel will always be topped off, and so on.
The 0.1% know that this system, once disrupted, would knock over dominoes all through the economy.
Hyper-efficiency and hyper-globalization has reduced the number of producers of essentials to the point that disruptions cannot be overcome with redundant sources.
TOUCHE' ! Half Million Chinese Sign Letter Demanding WHO Probe US Fort Detrick Lab https://www.johndayblog.com/2021/06/fort-detrick.html
"But this lab has a notorious record on lab security. There have been scandals of anthrax bacterium from the lab being stolen, causing poisoning to many and even death. There has been a leakage incident in the lab in the autumn of 2019 right before the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic, however, detailed information had been withheld by the US under excuses of national security," the letter said. ...
"What is more perplexing is that, when China allowed virologists from Western countries and even US mainstream media to visit the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the US has not opened the Fort Detrick lab, let alone shared the original data with countries including China that are independent from US geopolitical influence," it added.
"What is more perplexing is that, when China allowed virologists from Western countries and even US mainstream media to visit the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the US has not opened the Fort Detrick lab, let alone shared the original data with countries including China that are independent from US geopolitical influence," it added.
Growing Nice Things
