A basic requirement of every human society is that it must have a set of rules that define the society and the people in it. It is this shared understanding of what defines the society that keeps the thing together. “Who we are” is defined by “what we do” and it is the commonsense of the people. People living in a monarchy take the king and the nobility for granted. To question the legitimacy of the king is to question the very nature of society and the rules that define it.
In modern America, the experts who run the country have become one of these fixed things that everyone accepts. For example, the head of the Federal Reserve runs the banking system and controls the money supply. Since Alan Greenspan made the job famous, Americans have just accepted that the person in this job is responsible for keeping the economy from danger. He does not set taxes or control spending, but he makes sure the economy avoids catastrophe.
This general assumption is not without merit. It was the Federal Reserve that pulled the country out of stagflation in the 1980’s. They kept the Savings & Loan crisis from creating a bank run. In the 1990’s, they organized the bailout of Long Term Capital Management and then navigated the Dot-Com bust. They came to the rescue of the global economy in the mortgage crisis. So far, they have managed to prevent the Covid panic from cratering the economy.
There is a lot one can quibble with in that list and many will say that those crises were the fault of the bankers, including the Fed. To most people though, the mysterious group of people who run the economy are one thing you can trust. Even though trust in government at all levels has declined sharply over the last few decades, the Federal Reserve remains the most trusted institution. Most years, the Fed chairman has better approval than the president.
In a world where people assume there is an answer to every problem and an expert able to find the answer, there is an assumption that whatever problems crop up, the people in charge will find the solution. This is what makes managerialism both possible and tolerable. If the experts keep getting things wrong, what is the point of having a society run by experts? People put up with the metastasizing set of rules because there is a general trust that there is logic behind them.
This trust in experts is not new. It has been a defining characteristic of American society since at least the 19th century. Taylorism was the attempt to use science to improve management of companies in the 1880’s. That gave birth to the Efficiency Movement, which sought to apply engineering principles to social policy. What we think of as the Left in America grew out of this belief that social reform could be achieved by experts changing the rules of society to achieve the desired outcome.
The fact is the strength of the American system over the last century has been this faith in the experts to find the right answer. When things go wrong, the current experts are fired and new experts are brought in to solve the problem. Elections have been an indirect review of the experts class. If the people are not happy, they vote for the other party who come in with new experts. If things go well, then the party is rewarded with a good election the next time.
That is what makes the current crisis so serious. Most people think the experts badly bungled the Covid problem. The experts said we had two weeks to bend the curve and two years into it the curve is not bent. The vaccine was supposed to be the great triumph of science and technology and it is looking like it is not only not working but possibly a billion dollar boondoggle. The last two years have been a massive blow to the credibility of science in modern America.
Then you have the economic troubles. Most people assumed there would be some trouble from the Covid panic. You cannot close down the economy for months and not have consequences. Unlike those prior economic crises, the Fed is not skillfully navigating this one. Empty shelves and spirally prices are not what people expect from the expert class. Things that could be acquired in days now take months because the supply chain is a chaotic mess.
The deeper problem is the old habit of just voting for the out-party when things are not doing well has not been working either. People voted for Obama to close the books on the history of race. Instead, race relations got sharply worse. Obama was supposed to end the forever wars and he expanded them. Trump was the shot across the bow by the people and the system responded with a four year tantrum. Biden was supposed to be the return to normal and we have chaos instead.
This is why 70% of Americans think the country is in a serious crisis. They are not puzzling it out like this, but they just sense that the system has broken and there is no one around with an understanding of how to fix it. One of the paradoxes of the current age is the people in charge say we are in the middle of a crisis, but then wage jihad against anyone proposing a way out of the crisis. Their solution to “save democracy” is to eliminate any trace of it from society.
The core of the current crisis is that no one can honestly answer the question that is the basis of all human organization, who are we? It is no longer easy to say what it means to be an American. The commonsense that are the rules of society are no longer making sense, which calls into question the basics of society. We used to be a people who assumed the experts would eventually get it right. Now we are a people wondering if there is such a thing as experts at all.
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I think they’re probably are people that know things and could probably solve some problems in the ruling class but the maliciousness of these people and how much they hate us cannot be underestimated so it doesn’t matter how much they know or what they can do or what they don’t know. That’s all that really matters.
And this is amazing. The insurance companies are going to see all this first. Now the question is will the billionaire class throw money at them to get them to look the other way? I don’t know? do they have enough money to do that?
https://freewestmedia.com/2022/01/14/life-insurer-refuses-to-cover-vaccine-death/
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I saw the article. Spoiler alert; the insurer refuses to pay because, what do ya know, the guy took an EXPERIMENTAL vaccine for a mild illness voluntarily. They ruled it a suicide.
That, my friends, is priceless.
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I don’t recall there being weird injections and Burnham’s Suicide of the West? Must have skipped that chapter
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We may be referencing different cases. I assumed the article you linked was about the French billionaire who took out life insurance for his kids and grandkids.
He passed away, and the cause of death was listed as, wait for it, The Jab.
Insurer said, not so fast. He wasn’t forced to take an experimental drug. And doing so, amounted to suicide.
No payout for you!
The courts have so far agreed.
If I am referencing a different article, I apologize.
I was making a joke. Same article 👍
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“Their solution to “save democracy” is to eliminate any trace of it from society.”
Brevity is indeed the soul of wit. Well crafted.
Long may you run Z-man.
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Ford idles a major plant in Michigan for a week due to chip shortage, others may follow.
The current administration hasn’t the will or a clue to do what is necessary to get back on track. The gods will reward them and us if more diversity and anti-racism is implemented. Even that smarmy fudge packer in charge of transportation is all in on racist overpasses blocking teams of black bus riders.
Nothing good will ever come from these retarded incompetents. Look at LA and the looted trains.
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The chip shortage that has been going on for over a year. Wouldn’t a competent industry at least have developed a work around by now?
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That’s like saying”Since the Coof overwhelmed the ICUs across the country, wouldn’t Hospital’s have created more ICU capacity over the last two years?”
Jogger please…..
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Not really. The silicone shortage really is screwing with everything we take for granted.. I’ve even seen considerable delays with crap like cycling computers and fitness watches; two big sellers but things nobody thinks about.
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” Wouldn’t a competent industry at least have developed a work around by now?”
“wouldn’t Hospital’s have created more ICU capacity over the last two years?”…
We did that in NYC nearly two years ago, at the beginning of the craziness. There was a field hospital of tents put up in Central Park; there was a repurposed hospital ship in the harbor for a month or so. Tents are great! (sarc) .. what sick person wouldn’t want to live outdoors in the cold rainy springtime? And the hospital ship treated a grand total of ..TEN PATIENTS! before it became superfluos.
Hell, MSI re-released the GT 730 because of the shortages. Entry-to-mid range GPUs gamers would scoff as they upgraded for a few more FPS are hugely inflated. I put myself on the list for a MSI’s RTX 3090 Ti Suprim X but I don’t think I’ll see it for months.
The lead time to design high volume products is many years. You don’t make changes to running designs until you can secure a delivery schedule for those alternate ICs. Even the low volume scientific instruments I design have become a nightmare to get built by the dozen. An of course you have to spin a new PCB too…
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But, but, but! All of *the Great Reset, *Green Economy, *Pandemic Pass tracking,
*Autonomous vehicles,
*Internet of Things,
*Social credit bytecoin,
All of these are based on integration into a 5G cellular standard.
The retarded incompetents saw a shiny new toy, 5G, and began making big plans.
And here you’re saying that the wave of the future might remain just that- in the future- for a tad longer?
Dang. We are going to have to train those dusky scientists a bit faster. We need more money to educate disadvantaged youth!
In a competent country, something like a chip shortage would trigger a national security crisis and plans to fund multiple plants would be debated in Congress within a week.
But no, let’s depend on a defenseless island country adjacent to our main economic rival.
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I’m again reminded of all the discussions from 2 years ago, which posited that the Holocough would be the impetus for large-scale repatriation of manufacturing to our shores. That talk got squashed quicker than the notion of using HCQ or ivermectin to treat the coof. Who gave that order?
For the thousandth time, the U.S. was formed as a representational Constitutional republic, not “a democracy”.
That is a complete & total lie repeated ad nauseum by the Left/Dems/media.
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The republic was murdered quite some time ago.
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“The republic was murdered quite some time ago.”
By Miss Scarlett in the library with the rope?
Or by Abe Lincoln at Appamattox with the gun?
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While your point may be accurate, it is also a bit spergy. It ultimately matters not whether one classifies the U.S. as a “representative Constitutional republic” or a “democracy” or whatever else; like all governments before and after it, the U.S. is an OLIGARCHY. Any state of even moderate size will be run by elites. The notion that “the people” call the shots is just part of the civic mythology, i.e. the propaganda, designed to help the civilization plug along. The real question is this: Will the elites who control a given state practice some form of noblesse oblige? It certainly doesn’t appear so in the case of today’s United States.
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“The real question is this: Will the elites who control a given state practice some form of noblesse oblige? It certainly doesn’t appear so in the case of today’s United States.”
Because our elite is an artificial elite; a contrived elite; and ersatz elite; a make-believe elite. My grandmother would have called them “jumped up.”
They are not an organic elite. They didn’t grow or arise out of a given culture and set of historical circs. They were “decided upon” by this childish faith in “experts.” It’s a real problem. Zman’s article today is one of the most insightful of ’em all. Anyway, that’s why there’s no semblance of noblesse oblige. The whole thing’s fake.
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Our society has become too degraded in the past few decades for there to be any real semblance of cohesiveness anymore. We’re now just a jumble of competing groups who all want their say in how things get done. When some pajeet, jogger, muzzie, jew or beaner is opining on this policy, or that policy, it’s obvious we’re done. How people like those came to be in a position of influence or power in the American public sphere is pretty much all we need to know about where things now stand. The sad thing is former vast majority Whites were largely complicit in allowing this to happen and now all that remains is to see how bad it gets – and it’s probably going to get really bad, with the never ending, idiotic covid shenanigans leading the way.
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Industry capture seems to have affected all institutions in the West where the regulatory agencies are now owned by who they’re supposed to regulate. It’s very visible in the pharmaceutical industries and the CDC and FDA. They just trade all their executives back and forth. All our politicians have gotten rich in office. The media tells the people what to do at the behest of their masters. The Vatican which can be thought of the regulatory agency for Satan is now almost entirely in his power. What a time to be alive!
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“How people like those came to be in a position of influence or power in the American public sphere is pretty much all we need to know about where things now stand.”
1865 & 1965.
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One other, very visible failure of the managerial experts you didn’t mention is our southern border.
The fact that the rulers are unable and/or unwilling to solve that issue severely challenges their legitimacy to at least a significant portion of the population.
Of course, the results are quite possibly, maybe even likely, the exact desire of the so-called experts.
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The southern border could be closed in a few days, IF the G decided to do something about it,OR got out of the way.
One would be take the troops stationed in Europe and lace them shoulder to shoulder on the border. Shoot to kill anyone trying to cross. Problem solved after the first few kills.
Two, would be to let the landowners take care of business and not interfere with the owners protecting their property.
If a burglar was coming in your window, would you just let him in? I think not. Yet that’s exactly what is happening on the border.
If anyone thinks my ideas are draconian, fear not. In the event of a societal collapse, it will be much, much worse.
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“We used to be a people who assumed the experts would eventually get it right.” Here’s something that addresses this in depth…
https://palladiummag.com/2021/12/29/americas-late-ruling-class/
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“Now we are a people wondering if there is such a thing as experts at all”.
I am one of the people no longer wondering. I am sure experts do in fact exist, but said expertise will be disregarded, discounted, disparaged, denigrated, defamed, or otherwise denied in the great cause of Equity – and ironically under the banner of Science. At least this is so in the realm of politics. Whether actual expertise continues to be permitted in other realms of endeavor and for how long remains to be seen.
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“I am one of the people no longer wondering.”
Yep. We live in a time when “scientists” can speak with a straight face about something called “settled science.”
The Fed was always little more than the sanitation worker following behind the Congressional parade of pooping animals, and this has led to Congress defecating on the streets more and more and it is finally overwhelming the ability of the Fed and their pool of reserve currency to mop up the mess.
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Robert Kennedy jr. wrote a book, The real Anthony Fauci. I need to read that. I assumed it was about Covid, gain of function research (deliberately making vira more morbid (dangerous), infectious or adopting them to a new host, in short the first genuine equivalent to nuclear weapons from the science of biology as opposed to physics).
But it seems the first 200 or so pages are about HIV and the conjecture that there is no causal link between HIV and AIDS. I had NEVER heard of this conjecture in med school or later in hospitals or in research. Now, I am a lot more open to ‘tin foil’ ideas, in various areas, than I was two years ago. I am much more ready to say ‘bring forth the evidence and let’s just look at it and forget everything we think we know about why this can’t be.’ This is the effect of having been lied to repeatedly by ‘authorities’, both legal and professional.
Still, this one, about HIV and AIDS I cannot believe. And I really want it to be wrong (I am also convinced it is. But the point that I am trying now to suspent pre-conceived notions of what is true and what is nonsense, which is actually hard).
IF, should it be, true – which I still do not believe – then everything you learn studying biological sciences, is now cast into doubt. Imagine everything you read in science or engineering now has to be established from first principles and personal observations. That is the death of science, we are back to Galilei, maybe early electromagnetism (have fun deriving Maxwell’s equations…) When I read that fairly serious people are now entertaining the ‘HIV has nothing to do with AIDS’ conjecture (and that RFK jr.’s book is said to be full of references), it was like the floor opened up beneath me and below was only the abyss of ignorance. I need to get that book, I am convinced it is wrong here. And I fervently hope so.
1
I look forward to your review of the book.
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All you need to know is Fauci has been in charge of the HIV/AIDS racket.
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Please, don’t fret. You need not reinvent the wheel.
Just do with HIV what has not yet been done with covid: isolate the virus and make samples available.
I don’t think either is a complete fiction; I say they don’t want anyone to see what the bioweapons boyz been up to.
Remember the 28 suddenly dead top microbiologists when “anthrax vaccines” were rolled out? (Hint: there are approx. 10,000 strains of anthrax, a common sheep virus.)
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(Hint hint: there are no samples of the vaguely named Human Infectious Virus, or of the ‘weaponized anthrax strain’, are there?
So what is the root structure or signature of the H.I.V., then, eh?)
1
Forgive my abuse of comment space, but, in line with today’s, there were 5 research directions, 4 seemed to strengthen HIV lethality, one weakened it, so that was the one defunded and shut down.
I’m surprised you’ve never heard of the original controversy, the ‘connection’ controversy.
By root etc. I meant “descriptor”.
(A D- minus grade just to allow me to graduate high school is the extent of my schooling, as everybody here can tell. But then the bar patrons had put up $500 so the janitor kid could could go further! I bowed with delight as the small town audience clapped and applauded this surprise announcement.)
I honestly do not recall anyone questioning the link between HIV and AIDS. That was taken as a given, as firmly established knowledge. It is the equivalent of questioning the link between hypertension and cardiovascular disease or stroke. If such a link is severed we are sent spiralling back to square one in the relevant field. And must be suspicious of similar ‘foundational rocks’ crumbling beneath our feet. That is why I profoundly hope the HIV-AIDS link remains.
I have of course heard of various ‘wild’ theories about HIV being introduced deliberately etc. But the technology was just there to do that in the late 1970s. Don’t forget, DNA technology, while certainly established as a science, was still in its infancy as technology back then.
hehe anthrax is a bacterial, not viral, infection. The reason it is so ‘popular’ as a bioweapon is that the anthrax bacterium produces particularly robust spores. Spores are a metabolically inactive form of a bacterium, sort of similar to seed corns. I believe they’ve found infectious anthrax spores among Ancient Egyptian mummies. Something so robust, just waiting for you to add a little saline for it to ‘wake up’, is clearly a potential bioweapon. Except for that anthrax is a very different problem compared to Covid.
> IF, should it be, true – which I still do not believe – then everything you learn studying biological sciences, is now cast into doubt.
The insane lies of the mental health profession brought the entire medical field in doubt for me. I had a new doctor tell me, with no self-awareness to how insane he sounded, that if you’re not pretty much over a parent dying in 6-8 weeks, you probably have a chemical imbalance and should consider anti-depressants.
While there is a small percentage of people who react positively to medical treatment, anyone that separated from the human experience is not capable of being a good judge of action in pretty much anything.
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The mental health fields have been in deep trouble for decades. Psychiatry became too obsessed with neurochemistry and clinical psychology took the Kool Aid on Freud and all that nonsense.
Some fields of medicine have seen real and incredible progress over the 20th century. Infectious medicine and cardiology/heart surgery are two important examples. Other fields such as oncology have had real but far lesser successes and less impressive overall gains and some, such as neurology, are still largely confined to diagnostics and supportive care for too many of their ailments. Progess has been real but very unevenly distributed across the various medical fields.
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You are brave to flip the switch which possibly removes the floor of assumptions beneath your feet. My salute to you, sir. The most painful experiences, besides the obvious big ones (death of a loved one, natural disasters, etc) are the deaths of beliefs, hopes, wishes. In addition to the RFK book, a few people are beginning to find “Inventing The AIDS Virus” by Peter Duesberg. And a few of those are beginning to uncover names like Antoine Bechamp and Gaston Naessens, to name only two. The rabbit hole goes very deep indeed.
Frankly I’m amazed it took this long — it’s a real testament to the power of bread and circumstances. For at least 40 years now, it has been a mantra that one must go to college to become an Expert Without Portfolio.
Then one goes to college, and spends four, five, six plus years being told for a fact that there’s no such thing as a fact, that all “truth” is relative, and that everybody is where they are solely because of systemic this-and-that. Even though everything’s a social construction and nothing’s truly true, no one can ever be other than what they are, right now, forever, because at some time in the past some people did some things.
Then one graduates, and is told that the sheepskin means one is now a Certified Expert, ready to handle whatever the world throws at you — what there is to know, you know it, and what you don’t know isn’t knowledge, for you have (just barely) passed college.
How did we even make it out of the 1980s without some dumbass accidentally sitting on The Button?
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I gave you an upvote for the last sentence.
However, Brandon may still accidentally squat on it. Give him time.
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To your last sentence, Phil Collins imagined Reagan doing that in his video for, “Land of Confusion”:
https://youtu.be/Yq7FKO5DlV0
“The last two years have been a massive blow to the credibility of science in modern America.”
What the whole idiotic farce has shown us–beyond any shadow of a doubt–is how staggeringly deep and broad *superstition* is in modern America and, indeed, in the whole world.
Masks = Magical amulets
Science = the word of power (like “abracadabra”)
social distancing = avoiding evil spirits
Joe & Karamela even had magical circles on the ground at an outdoor pep rally in 2020:
https://www.alamy.com/democratic-us-presidential-nominee-and-former-vice-president-joe-biden-salutes-during-a-campaign-stop-in-warm-springs-georgia-us-october-27-2020-reutersbrian-snyder-image383697112.html
Like drawing a pentagram and circle on the floor for safety when conjuring spirits they had their circles:
https://www.kusi.com/the-latest-joe-biden-tells-small-crowd-the-country-must-come-together-to-fight-virus/
Etc.
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Heh. Just the title in the final URL posted is crazy. An army may come together to fight another army; i.e. a tangible enemy. But how exactly can ‘The Country’ do this against a virus.
It’s the meaningless rhetoric that is two-a-penny now, that is mimicked throughout other wings of government and business. With zero information content, window dressing for the plebs.
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“But how exactly can ‘The Country’ do this against a virus.”
The correct answer is … MAGIC!
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I see lots of pentagrams in our future, for sure…
Oh, yeah, and the Minimum Wage Priestesses in grocery stores performing the ceremonial purification of shopping cart *handles.* Never any other part of the cart; just the handles. I remain convinced that the evil spirits inhere only in the handle of shopping carts, and I know that because none of the Minimum Wage Priestesses ever performed the magical ablutions on cans of soup in the soup aisle, or packages of ground round in the meat market, and I finally realized that the particular evil spirit that causes the dreaded Covid-19 (“the invisible enemy”) cannot inhabit canned or shrink-wrapped goods.
Which I regard as valuable knowledge.
Science, indeed!
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48625/sonnet-to-science
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Speaking of the grocery store, I took great comfort knowing I was safe seeing the masking tape on the floor in the aisles in the shape of an arrow!
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Yes, but at least they were GREEN arrows! (At least they were where I shop).
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Meanwhile, the girl at the checkout touches each and every item, collects the bugs from each customer and deposits a sample onto your purchases. Strange that we’re still alive.
Here’s Doctor Krull’s recipe for a healthy immune system
1) Never wash your hands
2) Scratch your balls a lot
3) Eat your own boogers
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We’ll call ’em “Krull’s Postulates.”
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Right?
Why aren’t the bodies of young cashiers stacked like cordwood in the big box parking lots?
> What the whole idiotic farce has shown us–beyond any shadow of a doubt–is how staggeringly deep and broad *superstition* is in modern America and, indeed, in the whole world.
The swarmy “We Believe” lawn signs with the “Science is Real” and “All genders are real” slogans are baffling to your average person unless they realize they are not statements of reality, but magical incantations. It’s so vapid it doesn’t even rise up to the level of articles of faith. It’s primitive animism that is no different than the dance of a tribal witch doctor.
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“The smarmy “We Believe” lawn signs […] are […] magical incantations.”
What a great insight! I should have thought of it but never had. Thanks!
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“The core of the current crisis is that no one can honestly answer the question that is the basis of all human organization, who are we?”
It’s a good question, and one that I started thinking about many years ago when it was already becoming apparent that my thoughts were massively deviating from the accepted norm. How can such a diverse (and not just racial diversity) society agree on anything? Much less thrive?
It always seemed that the main things that would tear us apart were the standard two: race and religion. But it seems now that ruptures can develop between two people for the most trivial reasons: one is a vegan the other a vegetarian, one thinks that we should wear masks for the rest of our days and another doesn’t, The list goes on and on. And of course, Legacy MSM has a huge part to play.
Perhaps a more pertinent question – on the local level – is “Are these my people?”. Maybe that’s the same sort of question, but I find myself asking it more and more of anyone that I meet. Are they ashamed of their history? Are they the same race as me? What do they think of home-schooling? Are they overly trusting in the government? Do they have a family? If so, how have they raised them? What is their opinion of multi-culturalism? Do they value God? Do they talk too much?
The events of the last few years have made me realise that I am really on my own. Well, with the family. But that unit is on it’s own. And finding trustworthy associates is now a real challenge… a shame, because they’re sorely needed.
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We have a problem where idiots are deciding who the experts are and which experts should be demonized, censored and banned. Dr. Fauci is seen as an expert and giants in their field, like Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Michael Yeadon and many more are cancelled by the “Fact-Checkers” on mainstream media sites. There are plenty of experts out there, it’s just that they may not fall in line with what the regime is imposing on us.
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It would be interesting to give the “fact-checkers” multiple choice tests on basic science.
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I think the checker that canceled Dr. Malone lived in his mom’s basement and was part of a garage band.
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That’s sort of perfect.
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Fauci and his ilk are nothing more than suits. Period
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If nothing else, this Covid nonsense has destroyed the medical profession forever. Now admittedly I have always been one of those people who just won’t go to the doctor unless I just can’t stop the bleeding (or equivalent), but I did go, on the assumption that the doc will know what this cold is that I just can’t shake, and will give me the appropriate meds. The meds were always the primary thing, but I assumed there was underlying competence, too.
Post Fauci, I’d take my aches and pains to a goddamn Santeria shaman before I let an MD anywhere near my bod. All the brujo wants to do is sacrifice a chicken to his primitive jungle god, and that’s not going to do any further harm (except to the chicken). The MD might frickin’ kill me. If I must go down to doc-in-the-box, I will have extensively researched the problem beforehand. “I’m presenting with thus and such. The appropriate therapeutics are X and Y. Please write me the scripts, NOW.”
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This was supposed to be a reply to Moran y Simba, below. Sorry.
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Even if you find a doctor who, for example would actually write up a prescription for ivermectin to treat covid, there’s a slim chance the pharmacy, at least the big-name pharmacy, would fill it. That’s where we’re at now. They’re controlled by the regime.
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Bought a syringe of Bimectin off Amazon just in case.
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The larger system itself has been discredited at this point.
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Just Rode the Rona last week. Here’s what my doctor told me:
“Can’t see you because you tested positive. There is no proscribed treatment for Covid 19. Go home and isolate until you don’t have any more symptoms. Oh, you’re vaccinated, right?”
This, after 2 years. Unbelievable. Good reminder that doctors are highly trained technicians who follow a cookbook, not scientists.
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They follow the script the Pharma reps spiel to them. Equating most pill pushers to cooks does a great disservice to cooks.
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During the deadly Delta and ominous Omicron, the health office in our plant of 500+ people has been closed for renovation.
*honk honk*
I once dated a woman who was a pharma rep. The things she talked about were mind-blowing to me at the time. Doctors, ultimately, follow a flowchart for diagnosis and treatment. That flowchart is for the most part the same sort of treatments that would have been prescribed 30 years ago (we figured out a lot of this stuff long ago). However, past that, it is heavily influenced by what reps are going through the door, how short their skirts are, and what “speaking gigs” they can give them. Doctors are not going home at night and reading scientific journals. They are not keeping up to date on cutting edge research and medicine. It is not what they do. So when the media trots out some MD to tell us that really this vax is super safe and necessary, he really is not to be trusted. The media is trading on an unearned reputation.
Ultimately, keep in mind that even if a doctor really does have your best interests in mind, and even if he is incorruptible, he is ultimately reliant on the corrupted institutions like the FDA, CDC, and AMA to give him guidance. He faces very serious consequences for deviating from that and you know all those institutions have been looking for doctors telling his patients not to get vaxed.
Well I am an MD and it brings me enormous heartache that this crisis will hurt the progress of medicine very substantially. The foundational basis of the Western medical tradition is what we call ‘evidence based medicine.’ The idea is sound, it is that there must be evidence that a treatment is effective. This is one of two reasons why there are clinical trials. The other important reason is to establish that a treatment is safe. In what may seem a morbid sense of humor, to explain why this is important I sometimes tell people that killing cancer cells is absolutely no problem. Cyanide does it wonderfully effectively. But people understand why that’s not a solution to oncology. Likewise, decapitation cures all headaches. And these illustrate exactly why one of the central commandments of the Hippocratic Oath are ‘first, do no harm.’ Medical therapeautics involve, to name a few things, sawing into people’s chests to cut their hearts, drilling into skulls to pick around in the brain and to introduce by various methods highly potent chemicals into the body. This is really dangerous sh*t when you pause to think about it. Hence ‘first, do no harm.’ We need to know what the heck we’re messing with here.
Now what have my wonderful colleagues done in regard to the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine? They have dispensed with the need to establish the basic safety of a very radical new medical technology, mRNA therapy (which is not, by current knowledge, ‘gene therapy’ but that’s assuming both that there is no reverse transciptase enzyme in the vaxx (guess one rumor thus regarding I’ve heard at least twice now) and that we know how it really works. Prions violated the ‘central dogma of molecular biology’ when they suddenly jumped out).
They are also pushing for active therapeautics where there is no or very insufficient indication. I am here thinking of vaccinating children from Covid. Again, this needs to be seen in the context of being a very new technology. I am NOT indicting all vaccines, I’ve received plenty of vaccines, for yellow fever and what not. But these are old technologies and we have a fairly good idea of the risks of complications here. Prescribing a novel techology therapy on very weak indication is in my opinion, very, very shabby clinical practice. Yet, almost all my colleagues gingerly went along. I at first did too. Then I started reading.
I am also astonished, now having read up on virology a little (this is not my clinical or research field) that ‘serious people’ could suggest or even believe that we could eradicate an RNA virus with hastely prepared vaccines (RNA, and retro, viruses mutate far more than DNA viruses because RNA is a less stable molecule than DNA; this is presumably why nature has selected for DNA to be the carrier of inheritied genetic information). You do not kill RNA viruses with immunization in this way and influenza and HIV are the prime RNA and retro virus examples of this, respectively.
I am also repeatedly frustrated by the obfuscation and what must be disinformation, floating around in the professional medical literature on Covid. I sometimes resort to ‘dissident’ information to help gain a better picture of what is going on with the vaxx, exactly because the ‘professional’ literature is entirely confused and, a picture slowly emerging, some of it intended to be be misleading. Who have written the oceans of papers and labels and bulletins since this began? Judging by the (correct) use of scientific terminology and description of highly complicated molecular biology and biochemistry involved, it must clearly have been physicians or other biomedical experts. Just like you can’t get a literature major to deceive mathematicians about a math paper, much of the professional stuff was written by people who know about biomedical science. They probably believe much of it themselves but they make claims that I believe to be on shaky ground.
Finally, doctors being predisposed to being very concerned with their reputation and ‘good standing’ with their colleagues, have begun witch hunts and ‘tinfoil’ accusations against those of us who are questioning what is going on. This turning on the ‘dissident colleague’ is ugly in the extreme and we all know that we are risking our careers, future jobs, future grants and funding etc. to question the narrative. Who the hell told these automaton dimwits that science even HAS a ‘narrative’. That is exactly what it is NOT supposed to have. A paradigm sure. A narrative?? Hell no! Nature is supposed to be our ‘narrative.’ Or, whatever it is we are doing, is NOT science!
It is not entirely painless to concede that I am disappointed in my profession and in the majority of my colleagues. There will be much rebuilding to do at some point.
7
What’s your take on ivermectin?
2
Anyone capable of rational thought can now clearly see your profession is filled with little besides outright quacks and devoted shills to the satanists running Big Pharma. I’d trust a random internet search over the prescriptions of a psychopath in a lab coat at this point. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
Something seemingly minor happened yesterday that is quite foreboding for the Fed. Larry Fink, the notorious and vile BlackRock CEO, indirectly criticized the Fed for planned and long-overdue rate hikes, saying this will flatten the yield curve. In and of itself, this would be mere corporate self-interest rearing its ugly head.
Here’s the rub, and it is a big one: Fink is a de facto part of the Fed, maybe its most important member albeit a purportedly unofficial one. He has been appointed by the Fed chairman to buy assets left and right, mainly bonds, and many of the purchases directly benefit his personal financial interests. Fink is a demonic force in the United States who wants to implement the Great Reset and turn the nation’s population into serfs. Inflation of assets, many that benefit him, force the serfs to pay more for the food and shelter he and his fellow robber barons control.
Coupled with the (non-)shockingly underreported reports of insider trading among Fed members and people in Congress and the government, either a total collapse is planned or anticipated, and they are getting while the getting is good.
9
I saw someone refer to what’s happening as the great liquidation. The US is going out of business and everything must go! Low, low prices
6
That’s possible. Either Fink and Co. will ditch their assets in the near future or lay back and buy up even more once the economy craters and people with million dollar shacks get thrown out of work.
3
Agreed.
Definitely a “grab everything you can while running for the life raft” kind of vibe from our pols and the monied class.
2
Blackrock is the main agent for the money printer the financial class is using to bust out the US in one final looting operation before the US collapses and opens the door for them to attempt to remove all freedom on Earth.
I’ve been in agreement with Ron Paul about the Federal Reserve for a long time, so glowing paeans to the competence of the Fed really don’t do it for me.
4
HUNDREDS of billion boondoggle!
3
“Now we are a people wondering if there is such a thing as experts at all.”
https://www.amazon.com/Wrong-us-Scientists-relationship-consultants/dp/0316023787/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2YRY3IH1H75RO&keywords=wrong+david+freedman&qid=1642605152&sprefix=wrong+david+freedman%2Caps%2C7227&sr=8-1
https://www.amazon.com/Death-Medicine-Gary-Null/dp/1607660067/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2EH9IAQZG9YCN&keywords=death+by+medicine&qid=1642604945&s=books&sprefix=death+by+medicine%2Cstripbooks%2C151&sr=1-1
https://www.amazon.com/Memoirs-Superfluous-Man-Albert-Nock/dp/B001KIM3LK#:~:text=Memoirs%20Of%20A%20Superfluous%20Man%20Hardcover%20%E2%80%93%20January%201%2C%201964&text=Albert%20Jay%20Nock%2C%20perhaps%20the,ended%20up%20doing%20much%20more.
2
Once upon a time we could “replace” the experts by replacing the politicians. Think swapping Arthur Burns for Paul Volcker. And that there was a difference in these “experts”. Now, as you have pointed out, the “experts” have merged into a singular parasitic class whose interests (and rice bowl) are very different from the rest of us. Success or failure is immaterial to them, failure only hits the “little people” outside the beltway. So we’ll get a war in Ukraine since it’s made many fortunes (or good livings) for the technocrats and the politicians they are fastened to as an out of the way place to launder NGO money and bribes. But as Ben Stein’s father famously said, “things that can’t go on, won’t”. While I still believe in the “slow decline”, there are more points where things could go from May, 1914 to August, 1914 in a blink.
5
There seems to only be a crisis of doubt of who we are among White people. Chinese Americans know that they are Chinese. Indians are Indians. Mexicans are Mexicans or Mexican Americans. Whites have been told that they are plain Americans but see Whites demonized and their country changing in ways they don’t like.
Experts, most institutions and the press especially have lost a lot of credibility with our side of the divide. But they are more revered than ever by the other side of the divide. 10 years ago I knew no lefty who held the NYT as a holy publication. Now it is a sign you are a low IQ Fox News watcher if you don’t respect the NYT. Most of the left I encounter now view the CIA as heros who are defending the country from insurectionists.
9
It’s over-education. The new god of Science! replaced the old God by promising to eliminate uncertainty and provide and endless progress. In the process, ideas like genius, inspiration, and especially faith were jettisoned in favor of trusting the process. The gray men and bean counters have hit the wall and unsurprisingly can’t claim to work in mysterious ways. Nature found the weak spot and is pounding it bloody, thank God.
4
The part that Z-Man left out is that they don’t care because they will suffer zero consequences. In fact, the incentive structure exists for them to further insulate themselves so they can pretend to be experts and continuing make bad choices.
Most of these “experts” are political appointees – whether in business or in corporations. They are wedged into their positions in ways that makes extraction expensive.
Eventually, this will collapse. But that could be hundreds of years.
4
“Eventually, this will collapse. But that could be hundreds of years.”
The collapse is well underway. It’s not going to happen overnight. It never was. The dominoes have begun falling, and there is no stopping it.
Events have now gained their own momentum and are beyond the control of any power in this world. Events must now go to their logical conclusion, whatever that is. The notion that anybody can now control anything is an illusion.
2
“It is no longer easy to say what it means to be an American.”
When you give the vote to anyone, there becomes no such thing as an American. There are only Hyphenated-Americans.
3
The only thing that unites Americans is the glorious “economy”. You’re not an “American”, you’re an “economic unit”.
So when things continue to go sideways, all the economic units start looking at each other and wondering, “What is the point of all this?”.
3
Who are we?
As a result of prolonged affluence, we are now a majority of parasitic fat-asses driven by the Comfort First Imperative and solely reliant upon the “magic pill” solution for all problems, large and small. That is why we routinely elect the worst of us to high office and then naively expect them to lead us out of the morass we’re in. And that is a foundational dysfunction that can only be cured by a major change in our environment, i.e. collapse and the return of real hardship, existential threat, and the rebirth of natural fitness selection. The weak must die (or at the very least, not reproduce) and the incentive for strength and intelligence must reemerge as the prime driver.
Yakking will not change our environment and the curative collapse cannot be avoided. The best we can do is to make it happen quick and then aid the rebound so as to minimize the negatives. How do we do that? 4S & focus.
5
Agreed. I have a formula for it: “Americans are too rich, too secure, too sell-fed, and they have way too much time on their hands.”
Our problems are those of rich people who have no *real* worries or problems. I’m sure that “Gender fluidity” is not no the radar screens of the parents of hungry children in Syria or Iraq.
So our “problems” are manufactured; not real.
2
And of course, the idle hands of our leaders help cause those hunger problems (among other things) you cite in Syria and/or Iraq
2
But it seems the first 200 or so pages are about HIV and the conjecture that there is no causal link between HIV and AIDS.
No, the bit about AIDS is later in the book, and I don’t think Kennedy says as much. He describes how Peter Duesberg – one of the premier cancer researchers in the world and who proposed the missing link – had his career destroyed by Fauci. Kennedy seems agnostic on the matter but is scathing about Fauci’s penchant for solving scientific disputes with personal ruination of dissenters.
However, the handling of AIDS is not the only health campaign he criticizes and gives several examples of where a short-lived vaccine program – approved by the FDA and NIH – killed an order of magnitude more people than the disease. If I were to have kids today, I’d look very long and very hard at the vaccines I’d subject them to.
But almost everything Kennedy describes is way beyond scandalous. I’ve read most of it on the internet before, but Kennedy, supposedly, had his book thoroughly fact checked.
Be advised that it’s a fairly demanding read with lots of names, lots of medical Latin, lots of acronyms for obscure NGOs, quangos, government offices and institutes etc. Here’s a convenient link to an electronic copy – no personal information required for download, wink, wink:
htt p:/ / library . lol/ main / B8D919A7007CCAD84DEDB4AF4E523ABC
That was a reply to Moran.
RFK Jr. has given some good interviews where he points out that the controllers have been wargaming pandemic responses for over 20 years.
He says there are two constants at these exercises:
1) CIA involvement
2) A monomaniacal focus on how the pandemic response can be used to roll out totalitarianism
1
Rather than the Fed being particularly great at its job, I’d say that, like America itself, the fed is burning through capital built by it predecessors. By the early 1980s, the fed’s fund rate was at an astonishing 19%. In addition, private and public debt was at ~160% of GDP.
This gave the fed a lot of room to play with. At first, it just used interest rates. Every time the economy or market show any signs of distress, lower rates. Then, in the recovery, you raise the rates back up, but not as high as they were before the recession, which allowed the recession to keep going. This also allowed for more and more financialization, i.e., debt, which, of course, boosted the economy.
When the Dot-com bubble burst, Greenspan dropped rates to nearly zero, causing the investors to look for yield which very much pushed the housing bubble and driving total debt to GDP to 370%. When the fed tried to raise rates back up again, the market and economy collapsed. The debt was just too high to service, and you had a good old fashioned banking crisis.
The fed then dropped rates to zero for the first time since the 1930s, but it wasn’t enough because the debt was too high, so the fed printed money to save the banks. Again, they weren’t geniuses. They did what governments have done throughout history.
But fine, the fed did what it had to do to avoid another depression. But the debt was still there and rates were still crazy low.
This was the moment when the “experts” should have said, “it’s going to hurt, but we have to fix this. We have to get the debt down and gets rates higher. We didn’t a have crash, but the next ten years are still going to suck as right the ship.”
But they didn’t. The fed kept rates at zero and continued to print money to keep the economy alive. After initially falling from 370% to ~340%, total debt to GDP flattened out. There was no great deleveraging. Households got the message but corporations and the government kept borrowing more.
Everyone knew that the problem was still there. The fed had just avoid dealing with it. Hell, the stock market and economy started puking when the fed tried to raise rates to 2% in the middle of the best economy in a decade. Did the fed stick to its guns? No. It dropped rates again.
Even before Covid the repo market collapsed and the fed papered it over. Again, avoid, avoid, avoid. These aren’t experts, they’re cowards. We were heading for a recession even without Covid. Indeed, Covid gave the fed some cover.
Regardless, when Covid hit, the fed was out of weapons. Rates were already near zero. So, the fed went nuts with QE, but even that wasn’t enough. This time we need huge fiscal stimulus to go with monetary stimulus.
You’ll notice that there’s a very logical progression since the early 1980s. 1) Lower rates at the hint of trouble, but don’t raise them to their previous high after the recession. 2) When rates hit zero, QE. 3) When rates hit zero and even massive QE isn’t enough, fiscal stimulus through massive borrowing, much of which is financed through the fed.
But the experts have hit the end of the road, because option #3 is causing inflation (along with other things). The economy is pushing back for the first time. The experts were doing anything special for the past 40 years. They were just using up capital built from the 1940s to the early 1980s. They were trust fund kids who finally blew threw their money.
Now, the fed and govt are stuck. The economy is addicted to cheap money, but when the economy goes into recession, it’s in such bad shape that it needs QE and fiscal stimulus. But that leads to inflation – and voters really hate inflation. But raising rates isn’t possible because the debt load can’t handle it.
The fed and govt have two choices:
1. Leave rates low and let inflation run, which helps lower debt to GDP but pisses off voters. Also, if inflation gets out of hand, you have a serious problem.
2. Raise rates and tank the economy.
“Experts” wouldn’t have put themselves in this position. They had 40 years and a lot built-up capital to run the economy and money supply smoothly, and they blew it.
7
The fed’s track-record is terrible. It blew up one of the largest bubbles in American history at the time, the 1920s and then sat back and did nothing as the world went into a deflationary depression caused by the bursting of the bubble the fed itself created.
With the exception of portions of the 1930s, which were highly deflationary, the fed has been causing inflation for as long as they’ve been around. With the exception of the war periods, there was no inflation from the 1600s till the creation of the fed. Prices fell throughout that entire period.
The problem is that our system is now entirely built around “growth” and if it does not grow, at least nominally, the wheels come off. As I understand it, a single year could undo the nominal gains of the last 30 years. That every Dollar of debt we have is some one else’ Dollar of asset plus interest income. While it might have taken you 20 years to build all the debt you have, it gets defaulted on all at once. A little inflation is the status quo. A lot of inflation is better than deflation in their minds (and probably in reality).
A LOT more damage was done between 1980 and today than what was done between 1913 and 1929. It’s not going to be fixed in a decade. The entire country’s productivity has been hollowed out, auctioned off and/or shipped to other countries. There are 10s of thousands of former factory sites with either shells of a building or no building at all. Not only the physical destruction, but the psychological destruction. Americans actually believe we are now in the “information age” as opposed to the industrial age. Try eating or wearing or living in “information”
” Empty shelves and spirally prices are not what people expect from the expert class. Things that could be acquired in days now take months because the supply chain is a chaotic mess.”
One of the guys who came up with the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect wrote a book either on “experts” or there was a chapter on “experts” and how they screw up everything they touch. He used an example from the BLM. They took over some land to “improve” it. Of course, comically and predictably, everything got worse no matter what they did. Housing projects are a good example. Allegedly “scientifically” designed and managed by “experts” and largely seen today as one of the worst blunders of planning ever in the US.
But in the private sector, experts perform seemingly miraculous feats. Maybe their systems aren’t as complex or have any degree of randomness the way a natural system has. The fact that supply chain ever worked at all is a miracle of central planning.
There was a similar period of supply chain wreckage at the end of WWII. There is a video on YouTube of a propaganda short-film made by the car companies (industry association) about why the car companies are so behind schedule and why so few new cars are being made despite the war being over for 18 months at the time. They blame supply chains. It went all the way to 1949.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTWYBoGkgJM
1
Who are we? To paraphrase the TDS guys, we are a large, Jewish owned shopping mall without borders. Our reason to exist is to consume product and do into debt, and to stay in debt, eviscerated and severed from all history and culture.
But the mall is getting old and seedy, and full of dangerous foreign thugs. It’s not a nice place to be anymore like it was in the 80’s. And each store now has the same Chinese merchandise.
In hindsight, America will clearly be seen for what it was. The refined pinnacle of a modern consumer economy. A short period in human history where humanity thought it could come together as one big food court, divorcing itself from ethnic ties and tribalism. But tribalism doesn’t exist for the good times. All nations, over a few generations, go through bad times. Fragile consumerism can’t get us through that. The concept of the tribe is genetically engrained for a group of people to band together in times of scarcity. We haven’t remotely had scarcity since the 1930’s. A time of scarcity alone will unravel the country and send it into history’s landfill, with all the Chinese things we’ve bought.
2