One of the things I’ve had to get used to in writing these weekly blogs is that events sometimes move fast enough that I have to scramble to keep up. The self-inflicted epic fail of mass Covid vaccination seems to be turning into a good example of that phenomenon. Two weeks ago, when I posted part three of the current sequence, medical and political authorities across the industrial world were still striking heroic poses in front of every available mirror, preening themselves on how well they responded to the Covid pandemic. Now? Not so much.
We’ve had the head of the CDC admit that their response to Covid was pretty much a failure, and announce a top-to-bottom reorganization in the hope of doing better next time. We’ve had Dr. Anthony Fauci, the highest-paid bureaucrat in the US government, suddenly announce his retirement. We’ve had the governor of New York belatedly admit that shutting down the schools was a bad idea. We’ve had one of the two leading contenders for prime minister of Britain state publicly that it was a bad idea to hand over that nation’s Covid response to an unelected gaggle of scientists, and the British government decide that it’s a bad idea to give untested vaccines to pregnant and breastfeeding women. We’ve had the Democratic Party here in the US pivot on a dime and insist that the US Covid response was all Donald Trump’s fault Er, weren’t you all just boasting a few weeks ago about how Biden was fighting Covid?
My one consolation is that I wasn’t the only person left scrambling. I think most people know that major corporate and political interests in the industrial world hire rent-a-trolls—er, “paid social media influencers”—to push their preferred agendas on comment pages and the like. If you happen to like to write things that offend major corporate and political interests, as I do, you get used to them. I had a flurry of them early on in the comment cycle two weeks ago. One of the claims they took from their sheet of prearranged talking points was the insistence that the study I cited, showing that nearly a third of young men injected with a Covid vaccine suffered heart damage, was so weak it would never be published in a peer-reviewed journal. Apparently they forgot to check with the peer reviewed-journals. Here’s the published version in the respected peer-reviewed journal Tropical Medicine and Infectious Disease. (If you really believe in following the science, this might be a good place to start.)
Exactly where this is going is a fascinating question. The speed with which the backpedaling has begun suggests to me that something may have gone very, very wrong with the Covid vaccines, and word of this has been leaked to some parts of the political establishment. If the US government follows its usual approach to admitting mistakes it can no longer cover up, I’d expect an announcement from a midlevel staffer on the Friday before Labor Day right after the stock markets close. That gives the people responsible ample time to get assets, and just possibly themselves, out of the country before the boom comes down. Still, that’s a hypothesis at best; they may try to keep a lid on it until after the midterms. We’ll just have to see what happens.
Meanwhile, as the popcorn pops and I hand out beers to all and sundry, and we all wait to find out whether there are perp walks and whose reputations get hauled away for decent burial, I’d like to talk a little about how we got here and where we might be going next.
The first point I’d like to make is that the clerisy of the modern industrial world—yes, that’s the class of university-educated experts who claim that their mastery of fashionable abstractions makes them uniquely qualified to run the world—hasn’t actually been in power for very long. A century ago, the vast majority of people, and indeed the vast majority of politicians, didn’t think of university-educated experts as the kind of people who knew much about running anything at all. The image of the smarter-than-everyone expert, clear-eyed and steel-jawed, leading the world toward a bright future of progress? That was restricted to science fiction pulp magazines in those days. Most people thought of university-educated experts, rather, as—well, eggheads. Boffins. Absent-minded, unrealistic eccentrics who’d strayed from the real world into a wonderland of abstractions, who might now and then come up with something interesting or useful, but who might just as easily kill us all through inattention or malice. There’s a reason why mad scientist movies were so fashionable in those days. (I sometimes wonder if people back then had some kind of dim intuitive sense of what was coming.)
The Second World War was the turning point. By the time it broke out, the exploitation of the gargantuan reserves of nearly free energy provided by petroleum had launched a cascade of technological revolutions—tanks, airplanes, motorized transport, and much more. The United States and the Soviet Union triumphed in that war because they had colossal petroleum reserves and the scientists and engineers they needed to cash in cheap energy for the headier currency of military victory. The actinic flashes that turned two Japanese cities into smoldering moonscapes in August of 1945 emphasized the point, and convinced elites all through the industrial world that handing over as much authority as possible to experts was the key to national survival and supremacy in the Cold War struggles that followed.
The experts, for their part, were more than happy to oblige. There followed promptly the vast metastatic expansion of government bureaucracies, the creation of thousands upon thousands of advisory panels and scientific positions in government, and the equally explosive growth of the university system in most industrial nations, so that there would be a certified expert ready, willing, and able to fill every imaginable position in government and business.
That expansion was driven by a classic good-cop/bad-cop routine carried out with gusto by the rising clerisy. On the one side, you had an endless parade of visions of a shining future of perpetual progress that would surely come our way once the experts were given all the power they craved. On the other, you had an endless parade of all the world-ending catastrophes that were sure to mash us all flat to the dust if the experts weren’t given all the power they craved. That’s still going on now, of course, though it’s lost some of its vigor; I recall seeing signs at recent climate protests reading “Every disaster movie begins with politicians ignoring warnings from scientists.” Granted, but the people waving those signs apparently haven’t noticed that those movies are fiction. In the real world, how many of those much-ballyhooed disasters actually happened? Meanwhile, where are the domed cities, the flying cars, the cures for cancer and the common cold, and all the other things we were promised so earnestly?
For that matter, it’s worth noting how many of the failures, disasters, and avoidable calamities of the last three quarters of a century have happened not in spite of the clerisy but because of them. Here’s a wonderful new technology that will bring all kinds of benefits! Oops, well, I guess it had a whole series of ghastly costs we weren’t expecting, but here’s another wonderful new technology that will fix them! Here’s a change in society that our theories say will benefit everyone! Oops, well, I guess that had a whole series of downsides and blowbacks we weren’t expecting, either, but here’s another change in society that our theories say will fix everything! Rinse and repeat, and you’ve got a pretty fair summary of what’s happened to the industrial world over the last seven and a half decades. It’s not a pretty sight.
It’s quite possible that in 1922, say, most industrial nations really could have used more experts than they had, and that a certain amount of advice from the clerisy actually helped in the years that followed. The opposite of one bad idea is usually another bad idea, however, and over the last century we’ve gone from too few experts to far, far too many. Consider the table above, which shows the expansion of administrative personnel in the US medical industry as compared to the expansion of physicians. If you’ve ever wondered why health care is more expensive in this country than anywhere else in the world, there’s your reason: all those administrators have salaries and benefits that have to be paid for out of your medical bills. Nor, if I might add, has the quality of health care risen accordingly—quite the opposite.
In a nutshell, that’s what happened to us in the age of experts. That’s also what happened to the glorious future of endless technological progress rule by experts was supposed to bring us: it got misplaced somewhere in the rising heaps of interoffice memos generated by an endlessly proliferating managerial bureaucracy. Right now, in hard economic terms, most Americans are significantly worse off than they were seventy-five years ago in 1947, when the clerisy hadn’t yet tightened its inept grip on the nation’s economic life, and when rent, health care, college classes, and a great many other expenses were insanely cheap by modern standards, even with inflation factored in. In that year, furthermore, anyone with an eighth grade education could pretty much count on getting a job and earning enough to stay fed, clothed, and housed.
The history of the last decade and a half can be defined fairly neatly as the process by which the clerisy threw away the last scraps of its legitimacy in the eyes of the general public, and then started panicking over the inevitable blowback. The boom and bust cycle that ran from 2002 or so to 2008, to my mind, was the critical event in that process. University-trained economists across the board loudly insisted that the speculative bubble in real estate that popped that year wasn’t a speculative bubble and wouldn’t pop. They didn’t count on a blogosphere that by then was large enough, widely read enough, and more than skeptical enough to challenge them point for point and make accurate predictions that left the economics profession looking like fools.
In the aftermath, things got worse for the experts. The Bush and Obama administrations jointly shoveled billions of dollars of money into the pockets of bankers, insisting that giving yet more unearned wealth to the kleptocratic rich would benefit the rest of us. Of course it didn’t, and the blogosphere and a growing number of ordinary people said so. They were sneered at by the experts, and of course they were also right. Obamacare, another gargantuan giveaway to corporate interests, put icing on the cake: practically every claim made by its proponents, from Barack Obama right on down to the flacks in city paper newsrooms, turned out to be false; a great many of the claims made by the critics and skeptics turned out to be true; and people noticed this. Meanwhile similar shifts were going on elsewhere in the industrial world.
Fast forward to 2016. The Brexit vote in Britain and the election of Donald Trump in the US put the clerisy of the industrial world on notice that a very large number of people no longer trusted them and would not take their advice any longer. The result, as we all remember, was a pair of world-class tantrums. How dare ordinary people doubt the expert opinions of their betters? Of course that didn’t exactly go over well among the ordinary people in question, and the result was the increasingly hostile armed standoff between the clerisy and its supporters, on the one hand, and those people who had lost faith in the clerisy on the other. Since the clerisy was doing nothing to give people a reason to have renewed faith in their competence—shrieking insults at your critics isn’t an effective way to do this, after all—stresses rose to the breaking point.
That, I’d like to suggest, had a great deal to do with the bizarre way that the educated classes in the United States and elsewhere insisted on absolute obedience to a set of wholly untested public health measures once Covid broke out, lined up to get injected with vaccines (that is to say, experimental genetic therapies that were hurriedly renamed “vaccines”) that had been rushed through a few weeks of pro forma testing, and responded with shrill fury and calls for censorship when anybody raised questions about what, by every previously recognized standard of public health, was a very dubious set of procedures. The heart and soul of the clerisy’s claim to political power is its insistence that qualified experts approved by the relevant bureaucracies know better than everyone else. That made it easy for the clerisy and its hangers-on to turn blind acceptance of the official Covid policies into a loyalty test for adherents of the clerisy itself.
That, in turn, explains one of the oddest features of the whole Covid phenomenon—the way that so many people who used to insist that corporations couldn’t be trusted and that natural healing modalities were the better option suddenly turned on a dime and insisted that the only option was to believe every word that came out of the mouth of a Pfizer flack and take whatever quack nostrum Big Pharma wanted to push on you. The people who did this were by and large members of or aspirants to the clerisy, proud of their educational status and their white-collar jobs. Here as so often, class loyalties took precedence over everything else.
That was even true among a large share of medical herbalists and other alternative health care practitioners. Those of my readers who haven’t been tracking the alternative health care scene may not know that the beads-and-blue jeans folk herbalism of the 1970s and 1980s got shoved aside a quarter of a century ago by upwardly mobile herbalists who wanted to claw their way into the clerisy, with status and income to match. As that happened, teas made from familiar roadside weeds got replaced by chemically standardized extracts of exotic plants you can’t grow locally, certification programs became all the rage, and medical herbalism started blatantly modeling itself on mainstream medicine. Having committed to the values of the clerisy, they had to support those values, even at the cost of everything they once claimed to believe.
The same thing happened to the arts community, for the same reason. Since the fine arts in today’s America have embraced a sterile academicism and done their level best to chase off the mass audiences they had a century ago, the clerisy is the only market they’ve got left. For that matter, most of the arts community is obsessed with credentials these days—it’s not whether you’ve got the least trace of talent or skill, it’s whether you’ve got an MFA from the right school that matters. Those are among the reasons why every fad among academics and the managerial class gets picked up and loudly trumpeted by the arts these days. Going whole hog on the cootie theater of masks, shutdowns, social distancing, and vaccine mandates was just one more step in the ongoing quest to please their masters.
Thus it’s fair to say that the clerisy of the industrial world decided that the officially approved response to the Covid-19 pandemic was the hill it was going to die on. The problem with such decisions, in turn, is that very often, that’s indeed where you die.
British politician Rishi Sunak’s comments to the media about the failures of the British response to Covid-19 are a useful straw in the wind. He said in so many words that it had been a mistake to put that response into the hands of a panel of experts. What that means, clearly enough, is that those experts are going to be the designated scapegoats as the downsides of the vaccines, social distancing, and the rest of it come to light. Anthony Fauci is pretty clearly being set up for the same role here in the United States—admittedly, it’s one he’s richly earned. Expect similar scenes to unfold in other countries and on more local levels.
The politicians aren’t willing to take the hit for this one. For once, that’s reasonable. It wasn’t politicians, by and large, who decided to throw out a century of hard-earned epidemiological experience in favor of the unproven theories behind shutdowns and social distancing, or to demand that entire populations get injected with drugs that hadn’t had anything like enough testing to make sure they were safe, or even did what they were supposed to do. It was the experts who did that—and it’s the experts who are going to be left holding the bag.
It would be one thing if this was a one-off, the sole failure to be laid at the feet of an otherwise efficient and successful clerisy. Unfortunately for them, it’s anything but that. Here in the United States, it’s hard to find anything the clerisy hasn’t botched. Consider, as one example out of many, our public education system. It used to be one of the best in the world; now it routinely graduates entire classes of functional illiterates from high school. That happened because university education departments and school administrations imposed a long series of intellectual fashions on classroom teachers, discarding methods that worked and replacing them with ever more dysfunctional policies and programs. The ensuing collapse of public confidence in the public schools didn’t happen by accident. It was richly earned by the experts.
Here again, take the same principle and apply it to most other aspects of American public life and you’ll see the same thing endlessly repeated. Nor was any other outcome ever likely. University-trained experts, after all, are no more immune from the temptations of arrogance, corruption, and faddishness than the rest of us. Give them the opportunity to form a self-selecting, self-regulating, and self-aggrandizing coterie that runs important elements of society, without effective oversight from any outside source, and they’re going to make a world-class botch job out of it—as indeed they have done.
And now? It’s only in the imagination of the clerisy that the clerisy is indispensible. Especially here in the United States, where our era of global empire is rapidly waning and retooling our government and society to get by on much less wealth is an imperative, the privileges and salaries of the clerisy are low-hanging fruit for the first rounds of government cutbacks. It’s not hard to imagine a president in the near future, for example, noting that the Council of Economic Advisers has offered consistently bad advice to presidents since it was founded, and sending its inmates out to find honest work somewhere else, or noting with equal clarity that the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and most federal spending on science have become slush funds supporting educated failures and could be terminated without undue inconvenience to anyone but those battening on them. This list could be extended at great length without any great difficulty. It may well be so extended, to rousing cheers from everyone outside the narrowing circles of the clerisy, in the very near future.
Once again, a hundred years ago university-trained experts didn’t have the kind of wealth, status, and influence they’ve had in the recent past. It may take quite a bit less than a hundred years for them to revert to the condition they had in 1922. Fail badly enough and you forfeit your grip on power—and no, if that happens, it doesn’t matter how loudly you insist that people can’t possibly get by without you, they’re not going to listen. If the blowback from the failure of the Covid vaccines turns out to be bad enough, a loss of status may be the least that the clerisy has to worry about in the years ahead. Still, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Excellent points about the class loyalty of those who abandoned anti-corporate views for complete surrender to Big Pharma, etc.. These were the same people that used to accuse me of “white male privilege”. Now, the neo-Nazis of Ukraine aren’t real, but Trump was a Nazi, etc., ad nauseum.
Chris Martenson just posted a blog article on the Covid vaccines and had to put it behind his paywall because it would have gotten him shutdown on YouTube. He says in the teaser that there is enough to make a correlation between these so-called sudden deaths among young healthy people and the Covid1984 vaccines.
https://peakprosperity.com/criminal-vaccine-deaths-continue/
A Funeral Director in the UK by the name of John O’Looney began noticing an uptick in deaths shortly after the vaccines were pushed on the public. He also attended autopsies and found massive amounts of blood clots that could not be explained other than the vaccines did it. He even went to great lengths posting those videos on Rumble (too squeamish to view them). Shortly thereafter he was censored and had his undertakers license suspended although I have read that apparently he has got it back.
Then of course Insurance companies are noticing an above average of deaths among all ages since the vaccines were introduced.
Haha Thank You JMG this was uplifting!!! Have you been following the undertakers and embalmers reporting on strange “clots”…? Your thoughts on this if you have any…?
Best Regards martin
Indeed, the next two years are going to be a search for scapegoats, and a rising tide of lawsuits against anyone pushing these lethal “vaccines”…Life expectancy is plunging, down 2.8 years since 2020… https://www.axios.com/2022/08/31/covid-us-life-expectancy, and when the population finally figures this out, the consequences will be dire…
And speaking of failing and flailing systems:
https://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-biden-administration-partnering-job-090044117.html
No mention, of course, of getting administrative flaks out of the way so that teachers can teach or jettisoning the layers of bureaucracy (where is education listed in the enumerated powers of Congress again?).
My mother was a teacher over the course of three decades until her retirement some years ago and in that time I watched the joy of teaching slowly squeezed out of her. It was a sad, sad thing.
I’ve heard for years that WWII was won on oil and octane – but I hadn’t realized just how bad things were for the Germans and Japanese at the end. They were towing trucks with draft animals, trying to make pine root fuel, and generally having a far worse time of it than at least I’d picked up in the assorted history classes and books I’ve read.
I found a fascinating article recently focusing on “Fuel in WWII” – and the problems caused by lack of it to those who didn’t have enough at the end (or, apparently, at any point throughout the war). It really brings home just how much the Allies won because of American oil and our ability to create high grade fuel from it.
http://www.eiaonline.com/history/bloodforoil.htm
As has been pointed out endlessly here and other places, energy is the driver behind all the other nifty stuff we’ve figured out how to do, and it looks like we’re well on track to find out what a world without enough energy, at any cost, ends up looking like.
“The politicians aren’t willing to take the hit for this one. For once, that’s reasonable”.
Maybe the clerisy will take the blame this time. But surely, whoever made the wrong decisions, the political leaders are ultimately responsible. “The buck stops here”. Politicians have the ultimate power in society. They fought for it – often tooth and nail – and now they have it, it behoves them to use it in the best way for society as a whole.
Although the ancient Athenian democracy was pretty much of a shambles, they had some good ideas. For instance, choosing officials for a year, and letting the voters decide at the end of that period whether they should be rewarded or punished. (A whole string of Athenian generals fled abroad at the end of their period of office, for fear of the death penalty). The principle wouldn’t have to be limited to presidents and officers of state; it could apply to the Faucis and their subordinates. It would be binding on everyone who slurps from the public trough. After all, surely the employer should have a say in the hireling’s reward (or otherwise).
Whatever the details, we urgently need a return to the idea of accountability, with serious penalties for those who abuse power.
I have for a long thought of this group referred to as clerisy also known as the professional managerial class with another label.
That is Tie Wearing Boomer.
As in the phrase “so simple even a tie wearing boomer can understand it”
I knew when I was 13 in 1968 that certain choices were clear, you could put on a tie and tell yourself you were going the change things from within.(We all know who really got changed).
In other words Sell out.
Or not.
I picked not.
Almost all of the people I admire picked not.
If the great rejection that you foresee takes place as seems likely.
Many of us who did not sell out are going to have a large amount of responsibility dropped on us.
I live in hope that we can handle it.
Hi JMG. A good post as usual. I must point out that Rishi Sunak and his opponent have spent the last six weeks saying all kinds of stuff to impress the 160,000 selectorate to give them a job that no-one in their right mind would want. As you say nobody knows what will come of this vaccine business. But from over here it looks like a LOT of people are losing their minds. I think I read that President Biden’s son has now grown a moustache. Many are calling for an FBI investigation into Hunter Biden’s Toplip. (Actually I made that up).
Snort laughed at the image of Professor Honeydew alongside your text. That muppet was satire – along with Beaker – and they are certainly now our reality.
I appreciate you emphasizing the failure of the vaccines again in this post. As a person who still is forced out of work due to vaccine mandates which show no sign of ending, it cheers me up to have someone with your intellectual capacity call it out. It also forces me to confront the fact that my peers are striving to be seen as faithful members of the clerisy by their continual enforcement of vaccine mandates.
I feel like the president of the U.S. has pivoted from wishing death on the unvaccinated to calling for attacks on Trump supporters. His speech last night had an implication of using the U.S.military against people who didn’t vote for him. Clearly the IRS agents will be used against regular citizens. Things are going grim on multiple fronts and there’s no pretense of compromise, following the law, or unification. Why are they pushing so hard on so many fronts at once?
Dear JMG,
thanks for sharing your unique American classic view on the slow-motion train wreck.
Here in Northern Europe, the Professional Managerial Class, a.k.a. University Graduates, have been busy “creating” cappucino-office-jobs for their children and giving each other unfair advantages (e.g. lower interest loans) over the backs of the rest since the 1980s.
The deplorables are not happy.
We are approaching something that 100 years ago would be called “class war”, but the populists are still scrambling to find the appropriate wording.
Will the ruling class realize in time that it makes sense to negotiate, like they did a century ago, to appease the Labor movement?
Or will the pitchforks puncture their dreams of eternal Progress?
Winter is coming to Europe.
Peace,
Goran
As if on cue, the NYT begins walking back it’s covid Hysteria today with this sideways admission.
“Good morning. Americans on the left end of the political spectrum have become less anxious about Covid.”
Weasel words throughout but definitely a sign of things to come.
It’s occurred to me that this be a good place for the Adam and Chris meme:
Befitting for the time of your article JMG, there’s an interesting interview with Karin Kneissl, former Austrian govt Minister and long time diplomat, versed in Arabic and other languages.
Much behated by our “left” or “liberal”, “green” or whatever caste.
There was some scandal because Putin appeared at her wedding or something.
Now she is allegedly an sought after Energy Analyst for Asia, living in Lebanon in a mountian village without running water and only a few hours of electricity a day.
Isn’t that symbolic?
I like her interview. All I knew of her were solely those headlines about Putin and her, which for me solely computed into “bonds with the other side, is enemy of our caste”.
In her interview she complains about the focus on media and marketing in Politics since the 1980s, and about a total lack of understanding of the bigger picture of oil and gas,
among all the chosen decision shapers.
I mentioned her to the old guy at work, the only one who studied at the agricultural university like me working in this ~200 p software dev office.
He is rather versed in the topic of energy, with quite a good stock of experience with the practical nature of trade work and technicalities.
He replied a negative comment about Kneissl when I mentioned her, yet with interested seemingly changed his disposition when I told him about her career and obvious skills.
A friend of mine is also more and more open to the wider implications of resource use and its dynamics. When I mentioned Kneissl he sneered about her corruption and earnings.
“Man, how many people do earn anything unearned and do something corrupt” I replied. He also appreciated the information about her background which surprised him.
Well of course, all most people saw of her were a few sneering headlines, and it has to be admitted she was minister for the right wing party, when I hear of its members
from people involved in one way or another (eg in popular noble drinking spots for the wealthy and prominent), that they befit their negative stereotype well.
But OK, the are opportunists grabbing for the discontent of the economic consequence of our secular cleric politics, and why should those affected be noble beautiful
creatures suffering in the most innocent and saintly way? Why should opportunists riding on their wave be all too pretty a characters?
Meanwhile, Vienna’s municipial energy administration holding seems to stand before a massive blowup because it shorted energy contracts…
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Lastly about corona and class allegiance: yes, yes, I saw it too, many times; what this article says, people usually leaning towards alt care and then…
often benevolent and sufficiently curious characters, not stupid, but with corona, class allegiance went into full gear.
Funny though also as my cousin is married to a rather “green” guy, and they live the Waldorff lifestyle. Competently, I argue, I give them quality as teachers as parents.
In my grumpier days a few years back, I disliked my “green” in-law for that, for his family’s noble middle class leftism, but since corona him and my cousin are actually the renegades to this caste due to corona, with my in law totally disobedient to any mandates, at this he is absolutely without compromise.
I’m socially disposed to an “alternative”, maybe hippie crowd, despite holding rather conservative values, for historic reasons and to an extent for reasons of a mutual
understanding on the love for nature and a will for a more natural life.
Increasingly those are now renegades to their former allegiance. Many older ones are working class people though, and I think their allegiance to the wider cleric society was
shaking already before.
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In one way or another: the predictions also of absolutely standard, mass media business papers for my region, central Europe, are absolutely horrible.All the people with any interest and practical experience with the energy or agriculture business, and all representatives of commerce and industry, are shouting red alert.
If even for that it is that I am alive, I will see how this really turns out here. I have absolutely no clue, I mean of course because I cant predict the future, but I don’t
even have the feeling of the faintest idea of what kind of reality expects me here.
I can’t put it into words well, but opposed to all the other years and how it was, the warning signs, the pace of the apparent downturn visible to one’s open eyes in the near
vicinity, it has never been more drastic.
The latter, at this time, is what the CEO’s of energy companies and other people in Western Europe are voicing too right now.
That one day I would consent with them on something 🙂
Here’s journalists taking a swing at the clerisy – no mention of vaccination, but they’ve dangled just enough information out there to assemble it together.
Twitter Feature: The growing evidence that Covid-19 is leaving people sicker
A Financial Times analysis of data from the UK’s NHS, one of the world’s richest health data sets, showed significant rises in deaths from heart disease since the start of the pandemic in all but the very oldest age groups.
https://twitter.com/i/events/1564937519568920576
The series of posts Twitter arranged here is very very damning.
“Even people who did not get very sick are now suffering from a range of heart and brain diseases.”
As you say, efforts for self-serving/self-aggrandizing behavior by elite “experts” goes back centuries. In 20th Century America one saw multiple examples of elite groups rapidly increasing their role, status and claim on national income. Engineers in the 50s, lawyers in the 60s, MBAs in the 70s, IT and Finance in the 80s. Initially contributions to society were positive but inevitably turned negative. The poor track record of these groups and the inevitable oversupply in each sector limited how much damage they could do. Don’t disagree with any general criticisms of the clerisy, but need to understand how their impact changed from variable/problematic to hugely destructive.
The bigger change, I think, was the capture of most of these “expert” groups by the larger corporatist movement. A broad “medical/public health” field with lots of internal debate between people pursuing different objectives was absorbed into Big Pharma. A fairly diverse “media” ecosystem was replaced by one where the pursuit of advertising metrics supplanted all other concerns. Every other major “expert” field—academia, law, defense, technology, etc.-followed the same pattern.
In each case the idea that the legitimacy of the field depended on its actual ability to produce tangible, visible benefits for society as a whole was destroyed and replaced with a focus on supporting the interests of capital accumulators and entrenching the political systems supporting them. In each case this destroyed the potential for open debate within each field, which further reduced the ability to impose discipline based on the obvious failure of past efforts and the ability to establish new approaches that might work better. As each field became dominated by corporatist values (there is no such thing as the public interest, pursuit of short-term private income and stock-market price increases trump any other concerns) the ability of individual fields to discipline other fields vanished.
“University-trained economists across the board loudly insisted that the speculative bubble in real estate that popped that year wasn’t a speculative bubble and wouldn’t pop.”
They lived and they are living yet in a parallel world…Economics world.
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It’s a bit off topic, or maybe not. If you have noticed it., Mikhail Gorbachev has died (91) with a long and severe disease. Seeing what it’s happening between Ukraine and Russia, it could be a symbolic death, don’t you think it? I mean he was the last USSR president, and his perestroika was the last attempt to save a condemned system…
Coincidentally, Pfizer stock hit a new low for the year this morning, even as the market has rebounded from its June lows. It’s been going down all month. Gotta give the insiders plenty of time to bail out.
I wonder how this will play out in Europe. That energy crunch is making a lot of stuff inviable that was previously working reasonably well. The rush to collapse is underway at fairly high speed right now. The clerisy has a lot of power in Europe and the EU bureaucracy, more than in the USA. They aren’t popular with everyone (think yellow vests and Dutch farmers), but I’m not sure you can remove the clerisy from power without ending the EU and the Eurozone.
Not that there wouldn’t be plenty of people screaming for joy at that outcome, and I can’t see the EU surviving more than another couple of decades in anything like it’s current form. Maybe a lot less time than that. I wouldn’t be shocked if it imploded and ceased to be a thing within the next five years. But it seems to me that a loss of faith in the clerisy to the point it is summarily booted from power is likely to be more messy and dramatic in the EU than in most places around the world. Watch this space and make sure you’ve popcorn handy.
Given the sheer number of european secular clerics, the power they wield, and their many sometimes exorbitant salaries, this would likely free up significant resources for other things, and make europe more able to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances in a way it is failing to do so far.
Why the undruidly word aren’t they pushing basic insulation and weatherization as hard as they can? Even just handing out free weatherstripping kits and instructions to everyone who asks would be helpful, and are they?
All they seem to be doing while energy costs skyrocket is a lot of moaning, completely inadequate subsidies, and a lot of new rules to restrict use.
Belatedly, I’m announcing that the summer issue of New Maps is out now!
For those who haven’t heard of it yet, New Maps is a magazine of short stories set during and after the long decline of the fossil fuel age: it’s for futures outside the approved narratives, very much in line with our host’s recent post about the way the people of the future won’t remember us as gods but will have much more ambivalent and troubled stories to tell about us, when they’re not just living their own lives and stories. You can read more about the magazine here.
This summer’s issue, unexpectedly, ended up in part a theme issue: high tech in the deindustrial age. By and large the gizmos of the ’60s-type Jetsons future* are destined to always be imaginary, especially as the clerisy that so loves to hawk them vanishes into irrelevancy — but some of them, through one chance or another, could actually come to exist, and what might that look like? I found myself surprised by some stories that imagine interesting answers to that question.
You can order a copy or subscribe here. I really appreciate the support of all the readers here who’ve helped make this magazine happen!
—
*Distressingly, still decades later being marketed to impressionable kids.
Does anyone know if there is a vaccine for expertosis?
Wow. Awesome post. I thought this morning as I struggled through SO MANY crazier-than-usual articles on ZeroHedge, that I should head over to Ecosophia and see what JMG has to say. The volume on all the official narratives has been cranked to 11, including those on energy, housing crash, Taiwan, Ukraine and the Middle East – so it definitely looks like noise to keep the Covid blowback in check. If I didn’t know any better, the emotional pitch is right up there as if the Earth had deviated from its orbit and was plunging towards the Sun at a million miles per day.
I just hope I’ve got time to move – leaving Illinois over the next month and heading north. Trying to get out while the getting is good (and still possible).
Last week was a jam junk dunk, this week it’s back to raining three pointers. (Tips and raises hat to full height in respect). There is something about saying, or articulating, what is sensed but not quite known, or at least, in full silhouette. I’d feel sorry for them, but I estimate they’ve offed maybe half a million people or so give or take, stateside, with the vaccident et al, so it’s real hard to scrape up the empathy. That, & I was denied a place in the clerisy due to background, cultural heritage, lack of ideology, etc., so I can affirm they can be “replaced” by being canceled and then let organic leadership organize things unofficially (I keep up with things, and routinely am amazed at the basic lack of background and expertise in the fields I could have entered). Victor Davis Hanson raised an interesting point – https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/21/the-worst-and-the-stupidest/ – in the last 100 years, the middle classes have elevated their game, while the Elite has done the opposite. Will they just pass, one going down, one going up? Or will there be no “replacement”? Just improved living conditions and a return to the “intermediate institutions” of conservative, organic society? Weren’t the experts originally just talented amateurs? Or at least, incorporative towards them? At this point, scaling things back is not just a prime directive or even imperative, but a necessity. The question I end up asking, is, Will the very idea of expertise (in a nascent Tamanous society) simply melt away like morning fog, to be replaced with the free spirit, local wisdom, lore and tradition, which will be seen as more satisfactory (even when “wrong”) than any so-called “fact” or “expertise”? And if so, how can I help temper this so we don’t lose contact with the residue of what is good in Faustian culture? (there’s a little bit of Faust in any divine-inspired person, right?) We won’t just all turn into American Indians, I don’t think…If Faustianism was too “solar”, Tamanous would seem to want to be very “earthy”. I actually welcome this. But the balance between them is greater still. Guess gotta get busy archiving, preserving, etc.! And let the God and the gods work it out…
And to piggyback on this post, the unelected, and highly paid “experts” of The Council on Foreign Relations, The Atlantic Council, and of course, the U.S. State Department continue to give special smooth brained imbecilic advice on virtually every aspect of U.S. foreign policy – their expert opinions cover two areas – sanction everyone who disagrees with the U.S. or start a war with __________, and create chaos, so we can pillage.
JMG,
I know this is old news by now but I recently watched the latest Simpsons episode (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poorhouse_Rock) and it was incredible the PMC entitlement it proudly displayed.
Basically after presenting (some) reality about the dismal prospects for a young person today, they blamed… people that don’t vote as they are told to!
The wikipedia has a quote from some critic: “The Simpsons have reclaimed their anti-establishment roots” (what? I am speechless.)
Anyway, I bring this up because I have this fear that most people are too far gone to ever wake up – they will follow the woke PMC class right over the cliff, chanting slogans.
Here’s hoping they won’t take ALL of us with them!
My first hand observations from with a bureaucratic structure comes from working within a couple of UN post-conflict missions and for the USDA. Socialization pressures in each theatre did not take much time to crush upstanding morals, pushing all within those bodies toward whatever level of corruption they could stomach. I’m not necessarily saying corruption in the sense of bribe extracting (although it was there), but also the corruption of failing or refusing to do the job to the letter of the job description (as that becomes increasingly risky in those environments) and anything in between the two poles.
Most derived their sense of meaning from exercising their only real power: the power to obstruct, to say no.
What I don’t yet understand is what is the psychological mechanism that creates the kind of self-serving twisted creatures that the bureaucracies attract.
Is it that environment in which there is no real accountability for doing a “bad” job? Is it some sort of childhood development, such as sibling envy? Deep insecurities?
I heard an adage the other day that feels like it is related to the question: “most people would rather bleed than sweat”
What are the ingredients that create our low to no value “betters” and governors? What measures can we take to stop fostering the development of that type of person and encourage better public “servants”?
Any insights?
Post script: I eat as little commercial vegetable produce and meat as I can get away with. My experience is that the regulatory safeguards are like the achievements within the UN missions: they exist on paper and barely elsewhere.
I got things to say! This post really got my dander up. I’m going to start with this one.
“…university education departments and school administrations imposed a long series of intellectual fashions on classroom teachers, discarding methods that worked and replacing them with ever more dysfunctional policies and programs.”
As a father I look back on raising my son and can see places where I did well and places I fell short. But the one thing I look back on with actual anger at myself was in my sons public school education.
When he was in about 6th grade he came home with a one page story he had written. It was a cute story, but it was chock full of mispellings, punctuation errors, and grammar errors. And the teacher had already seen it and checked it off. At the next parent teacher conference I brought it in and asked when he was going to be taught proper writing. The teacher looked at me like I was a rube and explained that they don’t teach those things as it “interferes with the child’s creativity.”
I thought this was completely nuts. Unfortunately, at the time, I was running a grant on a college campus. I mentioned this event to a woman I worked with who designed curriculum.
“Oh, that’s completely true,” she exclaimed. “A number of studies have been done.”
“Well, when does he learn those things?”
“Oh, he’ll learn them later.”
As you can guess, he never did. It’s not hard to figure out why, and that is why I am so mad with myself. I’m pretty good at gaming things out. As long as it is legitimate to not teach a thing and assume that someone else, some time in the future will, teaching the thing will get put off indefinitely.
And so it was.
AV
I forgot to mention: excellent essay today.
I was meditating on it this morning on way to work – there’s a little bit of all great cultures, in every great culture – eg., a bit of “Magianism” in Faustianism, and vice versa – almost as if this is what entitled them (in their clean, pure, immaculate spring time) to “stand in” for the Divine as a Great Culture to begin with. But, inevitably, human nature being what it is…and then you get the pendulum swing. There is a lot of good stuff we’ve only just begun to even appreciate, in high Faustian culture. That’s at least, how it appears to me…one of Faustianism’s last plays was to be “multicultural” – to infinitely grasp what was good in all the great Cultures. Instinctively postpone and stave off the realization of it’s own mortality. This got all garbled and wadded up in the Diversity Craze (confusion of planes, loss of the “great” in Culture, etc.). Now it’s just a mess.
Another area the “experts” blew it is in the Ukraine. Virtually all the think-tanks, military, and geopolitical “experts” insisted that given sufficient western support, that the Ukraine could oust the Russians and re-take the Donbass and Crimea.
Like the “vaccine” rhetoric, in the past week or so, the “Ukraine can win” rhetoric also seems to be starting to quietly being backed away from.
Antoinetta III
With regards to the herbalists, a Bach practitioner I know was fully vaxxed and called the unvaxxed stupid fools who were ruining the health of others. I kept my mouth shut. Most people in the clerisy assume I’m one of them because I have a science degree. I actually feel more comfortable in a greasy spoon somewhere on a side road in Hicksville.
The Chinese dealt with this problem in the 1960s by sending their clerisy into the countryside to farm with their hands. While this took care of much of the corruption, rational thinker problem solvers were caught up in the hysteria and the country took a retrograde turn as a result. Lets see how we can escape the same fate. While many young people in the US want to adopt the old fashioned Marxist model to deal with this, clearly we need to come up with something new, and fast.
My own personal observation from working inside govt (as college teacher) corporations (as research scientist) and during another 25 years of lawyering for all these guys, is that the vast majority of “scientists” are not scientists. This includes physical scientists such as particle physicists and especially mathematicians who get carried away with their beautiful equations, which they confuse with reality. Unfortunately even engineering has been destroyed and the clerisy includes many or most engineers. Over the years working closely with many types of “engineers” and “scientists” I could not find a genetics engineer who knew what DNA is, or any electrical engineer less than 60 years old who knows what a transistor is. But these guys sure are good with pushing buttons on a computer and in believing the contrived reality that appears on their screens, and use their make believe “science!” to obtain money and prestige. Thus, one view of this problem is how do we get rid of these guys (or minimize them) while respecting/using/elevating the real problem solvers who almost by definition are not into it for the money and have been shunted aside these years while the clerisy run rampant.
I think that everyone anticipates a collapse, which hopefully cleans out these clerisy in a more clean manner than the Chinese experience/Marxism model. All of my thinking leads to the same conclusion-that development of small self sufficient communities is a way forward as this may weed out the BS purveying clerisy idiots and elevate the real problem solvers. I think that the fundamental problem is the reality check. Rational thinkers introduced reality testing as the scientific method and to follow the reality/facts to figure out how to build a better life in the last Dark Age (the emergence of Sir Francis Bacon style science in the middle ages). But this class of advanced thinkers (now the clerisy), are primarily experts on pushing buttons on their computers and believing in the contrived reality of their screens as a substitute for real action in the real world We still need the objective problem focused thinkers, the engineer on Gilligans Island for example. My view of things is that the monetary system lost track of reality and collapse to small communities is needed to return to this focus on what we really need and how to get those needs taken care of. But lets avoid the communes of the Chinese 1960s.
I’ve heard people suggesting that there should be something on the order of the Nuremberg trials. It seems a bit extreme, but in a way they have been experimenting on the entire population, myself included. I haven’t had any of my healthcare professionals ask me about COVID vaccines/boosters lately, but if they do I will tell them emphatically that I won’t be getting another shot at least until it has successfully completed full FDA trials, and even then I will be skeptical thanks to the behavior of the medical/media/political professional classes over the last few years.
Fenian, I get the same sort of drivel from members of the same class. The basic principle seems to be “reality is whatever we say it is!”
Rod, yep. It’s looking distinctly ugly.
Martin, I want to see the findings replicated and the clots analyzed thoroughly. Until that happens, it’s unsettling but hard to assess.
Pyrrhus, yep. Given some of the data points — especially the nine-sigma increase in cancer diagnoses in official US data — I’m concerned that it may get much, much worse.
David BTL, my dad and stepmom are both retired teachers, so yeah, I got to hear all about that.
Russell, exactly. I used to have people come barrelling onto The Archdruid Report to insist that we could solve liquid fuel shortages by coal-to-liquids technology. They didn’t like it when I pointed out, with numbers, just how poorly that worked for the Germans in the Second World War.
Tom, oh, I think the politicians are going to get it in the neck, too. The flailing as they and the experts try to push the blame onto each other will be entertaining.
Valiant, I was born right at the end of the Boomer cycle, in 1962, and so I spent much of my youth watching people I’d admired cash in their ideals and turn into everything they claimed they hated. Yeah, it was lonely there for a while, wasn’t it? I’m not so sure that anybody’s going to turn to us, though. There are younger people with some very clear ideas of what they want and what needs to be done, and my guess is that they’re the ones to clean up the mess our generation left.
Nobodyspecial, granted, but the mere fact that Sunak would say that shows just how the wind is changing. Of course a lot of people are losing their minds over on this side of the pond, too…
Denis, they’re pushing so hard on so many fronts at once because they’re losing. That’s what you do when the initiative has slipped from your hands and you’re trying to stave off imminent defeat.
Goran, that’s the big question, isn’t it? So far, it doesn’t look as though they’ve got the common sense to negotiate…
Clay, good heavens. In the immortal words of Ghan-buri-Ghan, “Wind is changing!”
John, timely indeed!
Curt, fascinating. Glad to hear your Waldorf cousin and husband are sticking to their guns; I’ve heard from a fair number of Anthroposophists who remembered very clearly what Steiner had to say about a future vaccine, and acted accordingly. Good for them.
Denis, ouch! That’s bad news — though it’s good that it’s being discussed.
Hubert, keep in mind that the corporatist movement was itself staffed and guided by experts — people with MBAs, people with economics degrees, who claimed that their training and experience made them smarter than anybody else. What you’re describing can also be seen as the unification of the clerisy under the rule of the subset of that class that proved to be more politically and financially adept than the others. I don’t think it would have turned out much better if a different group of experts had been the one to seize power over the whole system.
Chuaquin, it could indeed.
DaHoj, that may well be what’s going on.
Pygmycory, the EU in its current form is doomed one way or another — its leaders are so convinced of their own goodness and wisdom that they’re incapable of learning from their many mistakes, and in the real world, there’s no faster route to total disaster. Whether it’s this winter that takes them out (which does seem possible to me) or one of the other self-inflicted crises barrelling down on them, they don’t have much time left. The question in my mind is whether what replaces them is any better.
Nathanael, thanks for this!
Justin, don’t give them the idea!
Drhooves, you should have plenty of time. Here in the US, we’ve got a little while yet before crunch time hits.
Celadon, quite a bit to meditate on in there!
Christopher, I don’t think they’ll even be able to get spots as plumbers’ apprentices. Maybe we need to create homes for failed experts, where the nursing staff can give them crayons and maps to play with or something.
NomadicBeer, nah, if they’re having to push their propaganda in so hamfisted a way, that tells you right there that they’ve lost their grip on the public. More on this in an upcoming post!
Zhao, I’m not sure what it is, but it seems to be pervasive among every bureaucracy on the modern model. Some older forms of bureaucracy seem to have done better — I mentioned the Confucian mandarinate in a previous post, as a good example — but it would take a lot of close study to figure out what you need in a bureaucratic system to keep the usual nastiness from happening.
AV, I know. It’s probably going to be necessary to eliminate the current public school system completely and replace it with something that actually works to get back to the point that kids get taught the skills they need to know.
Celadon, that makes a great deal of sense. Since Faustian culture has the goal of infinite expansion, absorbing all other cultures into some kind of grand amalgamation is very much its style — but yes, the result has been a total mess.
@Justin Patrick Moore, #21
Sure enough. You just have to train for a job that allows you to work side by side with the clerisy, without becoming one of them. Think of nurse aide, paralegal clerk, lab assistant, etc. Work in the sausage factory for a decade and you will loose you appetite for whatever fix the expert industry is peddling this days.
On the down side, you will pretty much be a lackey for the duration of the treatment, and you will probably suffer mind control, psychic attacks, suppression of will and other bad spells thrown your way by your betters. The side effects of this harsh vaccine are depression, PTSD, burn-out, feelings of helplessness, etc.
Whatever you do, do not fall into debt while engaging in this journey. It will make it harder to pull out once you have learned what you came to learn.
Antoinetta, no argument there!
Jon, a Bach practitioner? Good gods. They should have taken a course of Vine, the remedy for thinking you know everything and should tell everyone else what to do.
Mots, I think we’re way past the point at which it’s possible for fringe intellectuals like you and me to have any significant impact on the course of events.
David, I’d like to see the people responsible tried by a jury and punished according to the laws. My worry is that things will take a much more chaotic and violent turn.
Another great article! I’ve learned more by reading your material than I ever did in any of my college classes. Most of that education was a worthless waste of time and money. Thanks for providing a sound, sane corrective. Keep up the excellent work!
Back in June 2016, a friend of mine, who is a retired college professor, asked me to accompany him to the prestigious Collège de France, in Paris — an institution dating back from the Middle Ages — to hear one of his former student, a woman who had become a professor of classics, make a lecture on some obscure points of ancient Greek and Roman culture. We listened to all the lectures that were made that morning. I was impressed by the utter uselessness of all those pedantic speeches, none of which seemed to reveal anything really new, even to a non-specialist like me.
The former student’s lecture was by far the most pedantic of all, full of abstruse expressions which baffled even her erudite former professor. We took her to lunch, and, mind you, I’ve seldom had such an interesting conversation with someone. Then the conversation turned to politics, and I told her that I considered Hillary Clinton a warmonger, which she vigorously denied. Like most members of French academia, she was fully pro-Clinton and anti-Trump. We sympathized nevertheless, and she told me later, by mail, that of course she knew of Hillary Clinton’s aggressive foreign policy positions, and I must have misunderstood her.
Since that day, I am convinced that part of the mission of higher education is to provide useless but cushy jobs to a whole class of people. My guess is that it is so because France needs universities to keep her international reputation as a highly civilized place, and you can’t have universities without academics. Latin and ancient Greek require long years of study to learn, and the people who have those jobs can say that they worked hard to get those jobs, which, nevertheless, are what David Graeber would call bull**** jobs.
In my opinion people who have those cushy but useless jobs cannot be real dissenters, because they know, half-consciously maybe, that their jobs depend on the good will of the ruling class. College departments can be defunded or even suppressed overnight, and experts are only experts because they are recognized as such by the real decision-makers. When the real decision-makers decide that vaccines are the solution, only pro-vaccine experts have easy access to newspaper columns and TV newsrooms.
Of course, I wouldn’t tell this to my friends who happen to have those well-paid bull**** jobs.
JMG,
I think I remember that in the sixties the classical education curriculum that many colleges were using got throw out for something more “relevant”. It seems to me that was when the rot really got started in earnest.
Of course, a thorough grounding in classical Greek or Roman history right through late antiquity could be really useful right now.
A small straw in the wind: I am a member of the First Unitarian Church of Providence, heavily infected with the clerisy ( like me), and this week the church decided to drop the mask requirement it has had for the past two and a half years.
One thing you discuss is the enthusiasm with which the arts community jumped on the vaccine bandwagon and masking. Yes, I’d noticed that in the classical music types this year when I started studying recorder seriously and doing things at the music conservatory once the vaccine passport got dropped in the spring.
The music camp I used to go to with my parent in my teens still required vaccination despite vaccine passports not being a legal requirement for months, and there were apparently masks required in all indoor spaces… um how did the wind instruments and brass play? I didn’t go, but heard from someone who did.
Maybe the winds and brass used those masks with holes in them and bell covers I saw in Long and McQuade a few weeks ago. Laughed myself silly when I saw them. I bet the flute one does horrible things to the sound, if it can even be used at all.
I sure hope all the rules and control doesn’t come back in the fall. I may be an enthusiastic musician, but there’s limits to the amount of stupid authoritarian overreach I can take.
JMG, has there ever been a situation like this in the past?
I mean let’s call this what it really is, “murder” of innocent people. We have a fraudster posing as a Mad Doctor, who funds a virus that gets loose either by accident or on purpose. We have a medical system that how about this, “happens to create a miracle vaccine” to fight the bad virus within a few months until they find out it doesn’t work and instead creates a “Fun Factory” in your body, credit to James Kunstler.
Then they find out during the trials that people are getting injured and dying from these vaccine shots, so they sweep it under the rug and have an accomplice Media suppressing that information. The government gives Big Pharma total immunity.
The Government then coerces and forces, Joe and Joan Public to take the shots or else. I mean this is right up there with Josef Mengele stuff.
@CR Patiño #35
I think that way will work, for sure! It seems that’s the method of developing immunity to expertosis that is currently in process of innoculating the collective system. It seems to have a few unfavorable side effects though! And they are now widespread… now the people who got that vaccine are going to be in need of other trickments. What we need are treatmensch.
But yes, the vaccine you mentioned is very much in play, and people are tired…
Meditation and wide reading are other methods, and those just for starters.
Hope you & your s are well!
Do we have a rough timeline on when the US was the best in education?
I’m thinking of seeing what I can dig up on archive.org from that time.
I agree with everything you’ve said here, but as a low-level member of the clerisy I hope I can hold out until my side-gig can take off and provide something more tangible and useful than my credentialed government work. I feel a bit guilty about nodding along with these sorts of articles when I haven’t yet figured out a way to get out of this muddle.
Wer here
Well I had the laugh of my day after seeing that meme John posted. The clueless Experts are going to be angry etc. You want to hear a Polish joke “Najpierw magister a potem magazynier”
Basically it says that someone gets a Phd which Polish taxpayers paid for and then ends up working in a magazine because there is no demand for overpriced one trick pony experts especially now. I often don’t watch videos on the internet but there is a savage parody channel in Polish YT called “Matura to bzdura” where one person is interviwing people who just got a degree and the results are both funny and frightening. Everything from university graduates who were making grammatic errors like a 12 year old to people who couldn’t write without a smartphone in hand and were already 13 years old etc. For example there are “experts” in war and economics that were predicting Russia’s imminent collapse and etc.
And now a sad example Odra is dead like a doornail, A national park in Poland is now a dead zone “Ujście Warty”, Polish and german farmers are angry and furious because of the charade. First concealing the fact what is happening then an inablity to diagnose what was happening ( We still don’t know). There are rumors that certain high up people in the Polish goverment are hidding the truth in order to cover up polution by their relatives owned company and of course IT IS ALL PUTIN’S FAULT (that was not a joke), recently we are hitting disaster after disaster right now Polish National company “Grupa Azoty” is running out on CO2 – how is that even possible isn’t it everywhere ??? There could be problems with the breweries which got the local drunkards furious and up in arms (won’t repeat what they were talking it will get me banned).
Lord allmighty it sounds like we are living in a madhouse “Lies are Truth”, “War is democra oops sorry Peace” “Water in a river full of dead rotting fish is safe to bathe in ( don’t ask me Polish viceminister was saying that a day later they said that everybody should stay away from the river)
Stay safe everyone Wer
“Denis, they’re pushing so hard on so many fronts at once because they’re losing. That’s what you do when the initiative has slipped from your hands and you’re trying to stave off imminent defeat.”
–cough — the ukraine — cough cough —
Three Dutch soldiers were tragically shot in Indianapolis last week. They were commandos training in urban warfare south of town, enjoying the entertainment district, it happened in front of the Hampton Inn where they were staying before catching a flight back home. “The elite Dutch soldiers, reportedly from the anti-terrorism 108 Commando Company, had been training at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center used for training by the Department of Defense “as well as other allies,” the Indiana National Guard told WISH.”
Muscatatuck is the Department of Defense’s (DOD’s) largest urban training facility and includes a recreated city to wargame urban conflict.”
It used to house the mentally challenged, and was closed due to abuse issues.
I bring this up because Donald Rumsfeld (iirc) reorganized the military, began using the National Guard as active duty troops instead of emergency units for duties here in the US. Not much was said about it at the time, but it is important. The line between police and military duties has been blured, urban conflict and war are two different categories.
On another note, I found Bulfinches Mythologies at recycling, is it reliable?
JMG or anyone?
“university education departments and school administrations imposed a long series of intellectual fashions on classroom teachers, discarding methods that worked and replacing them with ever more dysfunctional policies and programs. The ensuing collapse of public confidence in the public schools didn’t happen by accident. It was richly earned by the experts.”
I present to you the creators of “Common Core”. Who would’ve have guessed it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzxVyO6cpos
@Rod #42
“has there ever been a situation like this in the past?”
In terms of “mad scientist kills millions” Lysenkoism might come close…
https://allthatsinteresting.com/trofim-lysenko
Brennain, one of my hopes is that someday there’ll be a university in the United States that actually teaches classes worth taking. Yeah, I know, it’s a long shot.
Horzabky, exactly. It’s common for kings and emperors to have court jesters, who caper about and keep them entertained. Our elites have university-trained experts for the same reason.
John, that’s quite correct.
Peter, good heavens. The Moon is bright blue.
Pygmycory, you can always practice solo until the next round of idiocy blows over; still, I know, it’s irritating.
Rod, it’s not even that unusual, except that this example is on so large a scale. The FDA has a long track record of approving dangerous drugs for sale — Fen-Phen and Vioxx are two of the most famous, but there have been many others — and then pulling them from sale only when the public outcry gets too embarrassing. More generally, idiotic government policies that kill people are a recurring theme of human history.
Drakonus, 1900 to 1950’s a good window to shoot for, and Archive.org has a huge collection. To start with, this 8th grade exam from rural Bullitt County, Kentucky will give you a good idea of the level to which you should aim…
Sirustalcelion, consider these articles wake-up calls for you to get your act together and get ready for a new career.
Wer, you may not know this, but “magazine” in English means czasopismo, while the Polish word magazyn in English is “shop” or “store.” In the US, we’ve got a version of the same joke: “What does the liberal arts graduate say on their first day on the job? ‘Would you like fries with that?'” (That latter being what counter help at McDonalds always say…)
Mark, didn’t they know that they were in hostile territory? I wish that was a joke…
Rod, that explains so much!
About Brexit: Michael Gove said in June 2016, “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.”
The phrase “had enough of experts” was then quickly adopted as a sneer by the UK intelligentsia against the lower classes. Oh well.
I tried for a long time to become one of the university certified folk and could never get through. Although I miss working at a large chalkboard with friends at math-y curiosities, after long enough out of the system my thoughts feel healthier. “Education” corrupts.
It occurred to me the other day that “being wrong” and being “wrong” have been smeared around together and confused. I hope what isn’t corrupted can be extracted from the system…Ideas so far include that if the knowledge systems peddled by universities wish to continue, they should be part-time, online, with open course ware and a pay-for-exam certification model.
Peter,
That is quite a shock. Did your minister have anything to do that decision?
As a former card-carrying member of the Clerisy, I can’t disagree with one dang thing that you said. But, here is the hard part that most folks don’t want to acknowledge.
There really aren’t that many people who are smart enough to be effective members of an effective Clerisy. I would posit that the number of current college graduates that have finished their degrees and gotten appropriate certificates are probably ten-fold the number who actually have the intellectual horsepower to get the job they have the certificate for done properly.
Mostly the problem to me appears to one of self-esteem. There is just too much of it in management and the clerisy. Everyone thinks that they are the BSD of the room when they walk in. Nine chances out of ten they are of average intelligence or thereabouts.
Take a hard look at the distribution of IQ in this country. Despite all the squealing about how the test is terrible, it does measure intelligence as well as anything out there. I feel that 130 is a good starting point for the Clerisy. That leaves 2% of the population with the requisite horsepower. It doesn’t mean that they will be good at it, it just means they are smart enough. But right now the 20% that preens and struts needs a thorough weeding.
Disclaimer: Being in the Clerisy sucks.
What I wonder about these days is the old parable of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. If there really is a pandemic (not some media invention) and they really do need to tell you about it – how many people are completely tuned out, just rolling their eyes at them when they do so? How many people have any sort of trust in them whatsoever, any faith they can deal with it in any constructive manner?
BTW, they’re slipping those gene therapies into the flu shots now. And being very quiet about it too.
And I view them reorganizing the CDC the same way I view my cat reorganizing the litterbox – ultimately pointless although it may temporarily hide some things from you for a while, but you’ll still have to deal with it anyway at some point.
Hi John Michael,
I give you a quote from Professor Charles Goodhart, a professor emeritus at the London School of Economics.
“One of these was the Friedman monetary theory that inflation is always and everywhere a function of too much money chasing too few goods,” he said.
“Now that theory has become so discredited that central banks now, as a general matter, do not even mention monetary aggregates at all, and seem embarrassed to do so.”
You can read the source quote from the article here: Prices are rising. But does anyone know where inflation’s heading?
Yes, let’s ignore what history has to say about expanding the money supply beyond the growth in real wealth, what could possibly go wrong?
Granted though, he might be smarter than I.
Cheers
Chris
When the clerisy becomes unemployed, will “learn to plumb” be the new “learn to code”?
Martin @ 3 and JMG.
I find it striking that these clots have not been found and described at autopsy. In an autopsy, anything suspicious is removed and sent to the pathology lab, where the lab pathologist prepares it for analysis under a microscope at least, and writes up a report. That report is key input for the death certificate, which in turn goes into the public record. In theory, death certificates are vital public data that enables the public to keep health authorities, doctors and the government accountable. Anything that is new and statistically frequent, like bizarre clots coming out of nowhere and killing people would get reported by the pathologists to the public health authorities, medical journals and media. The public health authorities would issue a clarion call that a new cause of death is afoot, and that every effort would be undertaken to get to the bottom of it. Reality? Crickets.
(Lordy, all-cause deaths are up by 20% or 9 sigma for the US population. For perspective, just a 6-sigma event equates to a 1 chance in a million of that event being random. 9-sigma is statistical impossibility; printed statistical tables never even list it.)
But there’s been a multi-decade trend for fewer and fewer autopsies to be performed. IIRC, it wasn’t that long ago when 5% of all deaths were autopsied just to ensure nothing is amiss in the way of new causes of death coming in under the radar, along with any death that occurred outside of a doctor’s care, or was unexpected. Nowadays, it’s getting such that only homicide victims get them; I may be exaggerating here, but not by much.
What with young people, or otherwise well people suddenly dropping dead left and right, and all-cause deaths extremely and inexplicably elevated, there should be autopsies. But I’m not hearing of any reports of them (though that aspect of medicine is far from my line of work). Instead, we have a new “cause” of death: SADS or sudden adult death syndrome. No autopsy necessary; just cite climate change. I get the sense that the cause(s) of these deaths is being deliberately uninvestigated.
–Lunar Apprentice
PS: BTW, I confess to being a member of the clerisy, albeit a disloyal one. My roots are White Trash.
Kfish, well, of course! The British clerisy knew perfectly well that what your ordinary Briton meant by that was “I’ve had enough of you lot” — and for good reason.
Boo Da, that might be a good start.
Degringolade, you know, that’s a critical detail I hadn’t thought of. It would make enormous sense if the reason the clerisy has failed so badly is that 90% or so of their members don’t have enough intelligence to do what they think they can do.
Owen, well, here’s what’s happened to school vaccination stats in Ontario…
Chris, yep. It may be sinking in about now that so much money is hemorrhaging from the economy that printing more at a frantic pace is the only way that overpaid flunkeys like Goodman will get paid…
Methyethyl, I hope so!
Lunar, that’s one of the reasons that I remain uncertain about this business about clots. You’d think there would be more information about it. But we’ll see.
@Mark
Bullfinch is a great skim-level overview of Greek and Roman mythology for the purpose of being able to understand later literary references to that mythology. That’s what it was written for, and I use it with my kids for that purpose. Is it good? Depends on what you want it for.
@ John: The minister is on sabbatical, so she will find out by reading the minutes of the Prudential Committee Meeting.
I have never been on team mRNA injections but I will say that I know a healthy baby boy whose mother was injected in the first and second trimesters, and has gotten a booster since (and is mostly breastfeeding). One of the realities of being a featherless biped is that you tend to remember things that reinforce your beliefs, and I think it is important for those of us in these rare circles where something approaching the truth is discussed to remember that.
I can probably continue to do harp and voice at church; just put up with the masks. But the recorder and flute may well go through a solo practice at home period of a month or four. Oh well. I have been pushing very hard on the recorder while the going is good, so a little slow-down for a while isn’t the end of the world.
John of Red Hook #13
Chris > electrician (or plumber)
I had a good laugh at this. Thanks❗️
I suspect that Chris’ income is understated — by a lot — in your example. If my gauge is right for the region where I live, regarding electricians, plumbers, and various specialties other construction like finish carpentry, the $ per year they are pulling in is more like $200K. Journey(wo)men and masters set their own hours and charge big bucks.
As long as one can read, write, do algebra, geometry, some trigonometry, and took (and flunked out of calculus) (things which a person cannot assume upon graduating high school), it would behoove (male and female) high school graduates age 20 ± 5 years to arrange for themselves an apprenticeship in their preferred discipline. These fields are wide open for women. Oh, and when I say “write,” I mean a two-page report, not an essay.
💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
JMG: “…the way that so many people who used to insist that corporations couldn’t be trusted and that natural healing modalities were the better option suddenly turned on a dime and insisted that the only option was to believe every word that came out of the mouth of a Pfizer flack and take whatever quack nostrum Big Pharma wanted to push on you.”
Yes, yes, yes! It was so shocking to me when the groups who I thought had been anti-corporate and pro-alternative medicine switched to the official narrative. It made me feel like when I left the evangelical Christian community because they didn’t live up to what they preached. I think the same force is at work in all human communities (religious, political, educational, cultural etc.): grand plans are imposed for supposed human betterment that even the grand planners themselves can’t live up to. Then excuses are trotted out, denialism abounds, and distractions are offered to dissuade people from seeing the obvious: the grand planners don’t know what they are doing, and the common people are the ones to suffer for it. Or maybe the grand planners do know what they are doing, which is using ideas and slogans to convince people to follow them, and then when in power reveal what they are really promoting. And the people still suffer.
Joy Marie
That’s quite the set of school vaccination stats… not something I’ve read about, though I’m not 100% surprised. I wound up re-evaluating whether I should get a flu vaccine, and deciding not to bother last year. I’m planning not to get one this year either. They aren’t especially dangerous, but my risk from the flu is not that high at this point in my life and the efficacy of the flu vaccine stinks.
I still plan on getting a tetanus booster when that comes due, though. Lockjaw is a horrible way to die, there’s not much in the way of cures/treatments, and I have my hands in the dirt a lot.
Early on in the covid pandemic (I hesitate to say simply “the pandemic”, because that may be more ambiguous than we expect within a few years), I read that covid was a “viral thrombotic fever”, as distinct from more well-known viral hemorrhagic fevers (Marburg, Ebola, etc.) Those VHFs are noted to cause bleeding from multiple sites, while VTF causes anomalous clotting (heart attack, stroke, etc.). To the extent that a “vaccine” mimics the virus in a weakened form, how do we distinguish between viral clotting and vaccine-induced clotting? How do we distinguish viral fatalities from vaccine-induced fatalities?
When there’s a statistic for “non-covid fatalities”, how is it that we trust THAT classification, and not the classification of “covid fatalities”? Maybe just nobody has the expertise to know.
If I had to caption that graph, it would be “Turn on, Tune in, Drop out”
I almost hate to do this because the guy is sort of annoying but usually has important things to say. Andrei Martyanov has a site where he cheerleads for the Russian military. He is right much more frequently than he is wrong, but he is one of those folks that annoy you while educating you.
http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2022/08/a-good-explanation.html
read the highlighted quotes from a book by a professor of law at West Point.
Thought I’d share this here: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/covid-panic-is-a-site-of-inter-elite
The author is a full-blown vaccine believer, looking at the behavior of his peers and is thinking “We’re all vaxxed and boosted, right, and supposedly safer because of that? So why is everyone panicking even harder?”
Now that Gorbachev has up and died…
(1) serious, long-term, protracted, difficult
sickness, illness
I want to know more. Something like long-COVID? poison? cancer? What chronic illness was it? There seems to be secrecy around the illness. Why the mystery?
(2) Born in 1952, I was a child of the Cold War, therefore in the 1990s, I was aghast when The Americans and The Europeans cozied up to The Russians and kept up the romance for thirty years. Did the West not learn ANYTHING about Russia, particularly how its leaders behaved from 1945-1950? I guess not. Why is the West so surprised that, suddenly, Russia pulls the rug out from under the oil market, screwing Europeans?—it is what Russia did, does, and will do.
Gorbachev didn’t do anybody any favors. He is not a hero. It would have been better off all around if Russia had kept itself walled off. Westerners have dug their own graves by becoming intertwined with, and embedded in, Russia. The same goes for China. What were we thinking? What ARE we thinking?
Anyone who reads history would know better than to treat Russia as an intimate — oops, I forgot. People don’t read history anymore. History is against their religion.
💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@Degringolade,
I agree with you that many (most?) of the clerisy do not have the intelligence or work ethic to be effective members of the clerisy.
I would like to add that in my neck of the woods (a decent-sized public school district), the clerisy of district administration is a battle-ground between two fraternities and two sororities. (I don’t belong to any of them.) It took me years to figure out why certain people got hired or promoted… but once you start looking at rings and tie tacks and noticing colors that people wear, you see a pattern.
It is amazing that adults who graduated college decades ago still belong to a fraternity or sorority, but I guess that is where they get their clerisy membership card.
Plus the other side of the Biden Bill he claims is about the climate – it’s about giving more oil leases to the oil corporations – it’s in the deal the evil Manchin finally agreed to sign.
Useless, the packof them. People do not want to give up their :stuff: or shopping for fun. We’re in for hard, yes, interesting, times..
In case you haven’t seen it already….
“Drug Company Unveils New Drug To Fix Side Effect From Other Drug That Fixed Side Effect From Other Drug”
https://babylonbee.com/news/drug-company-unveils-new-drug-to-fix-side-effect-from-other-drug-that-fixed-side-effect-from-other-drug/
Justin, that’s a useful data point, but it’s one data point. It should be balanced against other data points.
Joy Marie, yeah, basically. It’s not the first time I’ve watched it happen, either.
Pygmycory, I was quite startled by the stats as well. I knew people were turning against the narrative, but I didn’t realize they were doing so that dramatically.
Lathechuck, that works. As for statistical labels, that’s why the all-cause mortality is worth paying attention to.
Owen, ha! Yeah, pretty much.
John, ouch. If that’s true, the next time the US gets into a war with a major rival, we’re toast.
Carlos, thanks for this. That makes a lot of sense.
Nancy, interesting indeed. Hang onto your hat.
Blue Sun, trust the Bee to land sting after sting…
I was surprised to read how people disdained Woodrow Wilson for being a college professor. The English upper class has cultivated disdain for intellectualness since at least Jane Austen’s times. In Germany, university professors have enjoyed very high prestige since the 19th century, though there are also numerous and well-earned (I say that as one of them) jokes about professors’ distractedness. Which is to say, public schools aren’t as bad everywhere as you say they are in the USA, and the biggest messes Germany has gotten itself into over the last decades were not intellectuals’ fault, so I think your prediction of problems for the college-educated will vary from country to country.
As an aside, the only people I have ever seen wearing masks on the street (or in their cars!) here in Canada were English speakers. They may have been more strongly affected by whatever wind blew over the American border.
Finally, it is very good to see the Thai study published, with warts and all. The discussion about the merits and demerits of any treatment needs to be out in the open.
Hey John. Another great one. I was caught by your comparison of herbalist from the 80s and now. You hit it on the head with so much holistic training being a paid certification now. These are not deep learning experiences by any measure. And I don’t have a situation were I could spend the necessary time with people who could at this time.
A year ago I documented my vax firing experience here and considered walking completely away from modern health care to more holistic medical approaches to respiratory ailments. I hoped to be full time in a more rural setting by now but must still split time between urban Massachusetts and rural New Hampshire as my wife and her brothers spend a significant amount of time caring for her 95 and 84 year old parents to keep them in their home and out of nursing ‘care’ in the Boston area. After 7 months out of work I took a part time gig at a small community hospital on the MA/NH border. Back to basic care with simpler patients and not to many hours. I say this as an intro to what I am seeing out there. Anger, lots of anger over not having enough staff at every level. It permeates many peoples tone. A national corporate hospital chain owns the place. Some floors and sections of the hospital are closed. They look like a scary movie scene. Nurses are short staffed and angry. The overpaid traveling worker scam seems to be coming to an end and didn’t help regular employee moral. Under paid, understaffed, and under trained nursing assistants are overwhelmed and to many are indifferent to patients. Woke propaganda probably isn’t helping people work together very well either. Many if not most of the doctors are per diem. Part timers the majority of which are Indian and third world visa workers, many with such heavy accents I can hardly understand them, never mind older deaf people. Supplies are short with to much wasted time going to different floors for stock because bins are not refilled by stockers (not enough of them) or the just in time delivery is not on time or is back ordered. Medications are always taking turns being in short supply and even occasionally not available. And to many of my coworkers are understandably indifferent to a job where they are just another disposable and replaceable commodity. Half the staff is constantly late or calling out. Half the new hires quit for better offers elsewhere. Even human resources can’t keep HR people.
Anyway, just an update on my experience in ‘healthcare’ out there. I don’t have great opinions to share. I appreciate all those that do. Just giving what I got. Den
JMG, oh I agree. I just really hope it continues to work out, because if it doesn’t there will be a lot of pain.
John of Red Hook (no. 13), I’ve seen a number of what you call “Adam and Chris” memes over the last couple of years, and always wondering what the original was. Unfortunately, they’re really hard to google–“Adam and Chris knowyourmeme” got me stuff about Chris Chan (*) I do remember that the names and photos of the two people (as well as the gender and major of the one on the left) change from version to version. This is weird, because why would anybody go to the trouble of copying a meme, but with only slightly different content, and no change in meaning? They never do that with “If the earth was flat, then cats would knock things off of it” type nonsense. Is there some sort of troll farm out there cranking out anti-college / anti-student loans / anti-liberal arts memes for some reason? And they keep producing slightly different versions, in order to slip past the censors (like the “Epstein didn’t kill himself” ones)?
(*) Do not google him! Just trust me on this one–you’re honestly better off with Cthulhu. Except for everybody who supported close-kin relationships last week, you people should definitely google Chris Chan.
—————————
Chuaquin (no. 17) “Mikhail Gorbachev has died…”
I could have sworn he was already dead like, twenty years ago or something. This is what they call the “Gorbachev effect.”
————————–
drhooves (no. 22) “SO MANY crazier-than-usual articles on ZeroHedge […] The volume on all the official narratives has been cranked to 11…”
Uh, Zerohedge is some combination of doomsters and Russians (permabears either way!), and don’t reflect anybody’s “official narrative.” I remember just before the Russian war, how they kept pumping out articles saying there was no way Russia would invade, that was just NATO propaganda–and then the next day there were a bunch saying the war was all NATO’s fault. Right now there are a bunch saying that Russia is getting ready for a big push into Odessa and Kharkiv / -ov. Various other media hint that Ukraine is poised to take back Kherson, so we’ll see who is right. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think the two sides were at a stalemate.
—————————
JMG (no. 50) “Brennain, one of my hopes is that someday there’ll be a university in the United States that actually teaches classes worth taking. Yeah, I know, it’s a long shot.”
The US has such an enormous variety, surely there must be *something* you’d approve of. (Of course money is always an issue.) Great Books schools? check. New Age institutes? check. There’s even this one school in California that’s held on a ranch where all the students work, and where they vote on what courses will be taught. (That one’s free, but very competitive.)
Just caught a headline from The Atlantic right after reading this weeks essay. It goes
The whole article can be found here.
From experience, second generation anything has usually been a let down. The rhetoric here really helps cement the connection you illustrated in the essay concerning the clerisy and their belief in progress, and that a chosen few will help deliver us to progress. It’s scary, rather cultish. Aliens definitely won’t be delivering them.
Just stumbled upon this:
https://currentpub.com/2020/03/11/dont-vilify-educated-people/
I can attest to Johns link regarding the quality of upcoming Army Leadership. I coached a high school lacrosse team in the mid 2000’s ( it was a club sport so I was not a school employee). I had two brothers on the team who’s father was a full colonel in the army ( deployed to the National Guard during this period). They were both handsome and athletic but lacked drive and any sense of strategy on the field as well as being a few candles short in the intellect department. Much to my surprise at the time they were both admitted to West Point.
Today the FDA authorities approved the omicron booster and tomorrow the CDC will rubber stamp the approval,leading to boosters after Labor Day but only for the good boys and girls who took 2 doses of OG “vaccines’” .Anyone who wants the new booster but hasn’t taken the 1st 2 must take those and wait 2 months.No human trials either ,just 8 mice .Compared to 40,000 humans for the original vaccine.
So tell me you are trying to kill the vaccine program without killing the vaccine,this is all so absurd now people will stop who aren’t forced.The interesting thing is only 5% of the youngest people parents allowed them to get the vaccine and of those 80% dropped out meaning only 1% of 6 months to 5 year olds are vaxed.That was probably the breaking point ,the problem in the USA is there are too many people in charge but nobody is responsible.So we get “mistakes were made ,but not by me” until the problems with the vaccine causes the system to breakdown and either stop it or let it entropy.
@Degringolade:
Going to Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard in 1900 didn’t have all that much to do with intellectual prowess…
Interestingly enough we got this headline a few hours after today’s article was posted;
“Dr. Moore moves Ontario from panic to management of COVID-19”
And some new guidelines….
“Under new guidelines, the province is now asking people who have a close contact with someone who has COVID-19 to monitor for symptoms rather than isolate for five days”
https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/lilley-dr-moore-moves-ontario-from-panic-to-management-of-covid-19
Ain’t that something…
Great timing JMG
I went to college studying biology with the intention of working in a national park. Instead I wound up graduating with majors in Religious Studies and Asian Studies.
Writing about religion I was all about playing along with analyzing its phenomena through the lens of historical materialism, various flavors of critical theory, etc. I learned some important things from doing so but after getting into occultism I look back and think how absurd it was to have to cloak my heartfelt interests and intentions with the inoffensive and mundane to be successful.
A friend of mine is getting an MA in the same school’s philosophy department and talks about how parochially ridiculed and suppressed any defense of continental philosophy is there. Academia is the least intellectually free place.
Lathechuck #67
Just one point. I have thrombophilia. I was born with it. It means when I get a cut, the blood clots immediately — no bleeding whatsoever — upon touching air, the red turns maroon. My nurse-mother thought it was way-cool, and so do I. I brag to flobotohamopolitimists, “Don’t worry about me bleeding out❗️”
Twenty-five years ago, an MD tried to get me to take an anticoagulant medication to thin blood. I swear this (ooh ooh, I get to use this word) “wanker” tried to scare me by saying that I was at risk of stroke and whatnot. Pssst! What else is new? I said no. Under my breath, I said, “So long, duffus.” I didn’t return, and didn’t need to see him again.
Had I been a “yes-med-lady” for 25 years, I don’t think I would be alive today. I don’t like humans messing with me. I have zero trust. I go by “if I feel good, I ain’t gonna take no f-ing drug.” I felt fine, and wasn’t about to let anyone mess that up. I live on a knife-edge as it is. There are just certain things to just let be. I don’t particularly believe in God, but “God knows best at certain times.”
I had two Pfizer COVID vaccinations (my husband reminded me it was two), and like I wrote in a past post, I feel better than I have for forty years. Go figure.
I live according to the wise philosopher Roseanne Rosannadanna (in real life, Gilda Radner) who said,
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9hYGtXIqDa0
“It’s always somethin’. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”
💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
John, yet another enlightening post. I think it is worth telling you about about my dad that was laid off during the lockdown(very loyal wage worker), pressured into getting the first round of “vaccines”, and a week after getting those no-think shots he was paralyzed from the neck down, and his lung collapsed. Since then, he has been to the ER 15+ times(no exaggeration) and the physical rehabilitation unit a little over five times. He was suddenly given a year to live, and diagnosed with Gillian-Barre syndrome, which now has developed into something they can’t provide a diagnosis for. The “experts” have made a lot of money from the countless medical bills. I think it’s very obvious that the problem itself started with the miracle shots that will protect everyone. Luckily, I have not given in to their failing agenda, and I am happy to say I have developed antibodies the natural way from having covid once, which was nothing more noticeable than a common cold. Once again, thank you for bringing this to the surface, when all of this was first going on I thought my dad was the only person having a severe reaction to this.
Northwind, Russia was our ally in both world wars. Furthermore, the Russian govt. supported the American colonists against the British and The Union cause against the Confederacy. The Tzar of the time sent Russian navy ships to San Francisco and New York as a warning to European powers who were contemplating invading in support of the Confederate states. I do read history.
JMG, I think I have to pretty much agree with the remarks of Hubert Horan @ 16. It does seem to me that, valuable as your essays are, they are only telling half the story. I suspect Mr. Horan’s characterization of experts being captured by “the larger corporatist movement” is fairly accurate. It always seems like conservatives of all persuasions, from Burkean to libertarian, have trouble understanding that “business” is rarely benign.
I’ll take “an unelected gaggle of scientists” who are actually mostly top doctors dealing with real patients while providing advice, over the buffoon of a prime minister who can’t keep his pants up, lies pathologically and who surrounds himself with the thickest bunch of MPs / fraudsters that he can find. The SAGE model wasn’t perfect and we even had the Independent SAGE team who were able to speak more publicly and frankly on the issues which was helpful.
As for a cover-up claim for adolescent myocarditis, there is plenty of evidence in peer reviewed journals although the systematic reviews suggest a far lower incident rate than the one you have cited.
Personally, I think we should go with the Confucians they had a good track record until the commies and Christian missionaries gave them a black eye.
Mike Adams carried out a lab analysis of some clots found in a vaccinated person’s dead body. His main observations:
“We’ve not seen anything like this before.”
The analysis shows the clots are absolutely not made of blood, that they attract different types of elements more than typical blood would; it accumulated a higher level of aluminum, sodium and 6-7X higher levels of tin, and phosphorus, all of which are conductive.
“It’s a self assembling, carbon rich structure.”
https://www.bitchute.com/video/YAoeEIPKR6Dt/
https://www.bitchute.com/video/TfNebXbNyzZ0/
“We are testing in an ISO-accredited laboratory which means our analyses can be used as evidence in a court of law”
“Here are some of the elements that are injected into your body (in the vaccine): vanadium, chromium, manganese, nickel, copper, arsenic, selenium, strontium, molybdenum, cadmium, lead, and uranium”
“these metals do not belong in anything that is injected into the human body”
“The Working Group for Covid Vaccine Analysis, a 60 doctor group in Germany, has tested Astrazeneca, Pfizer, and Moderna vaccine vials, and they have found alkaline metals such as cesium and potassium, they’ve found alkaline earth metals such as calcium and barium, they’ve also found cobalt, chromium, iron, and titanium. They’ve found aluminum, which has been found in post vaccine clots. Aluminum is conductive. They’re also finding silicon and sulphur.”
“They are self-assembling biostructures that are dead (non-living) but growing, like prions or viruses”
“The deaths have only just begun”
To put UK PM candidate Rishi Sunak’s comments in context, he was tailoring his message to Conservative Party members who will be choosing between him and Liz Truss for party leader and therefore PM. Interesting that he judges that enough Tories have their doubts about the Coronabollocks too that it is politically advantageous to come out with a comment like that.
Wer here
i want to make it clear that the the only side i am on is my familly and my local church community here in Ujście, not Brussels or Washington or Moscow and things are getting crazier.
recently there are scenes like from a monty python movie playing out in my country case in point 1:
https://www.bankier.pl/wiadomosc/Inflacja-w-Polsce-sierpien-2022-8398067.html
It turns out that inflation ending in Poland which was claimed in may (just like imminent collapse of Russian economy ) is not happening and everything is getting worse.
To be honest the official numbers were complete manure to start with Energy is up more than 200% since last year, medicine in local pharmacies has either gone missing or costs up to 300% since last year and coal has gone missing in action. Piła police is reporting an escalating theft of resorces and illegal forest cutting everywhere.
And speaking about coal people are literally hoddling around coal mines in a desperate attempt to get anything
https://www.bankier.pl/wiadomosc/Kolejki-po-wegiel-w-kopalni-Bogdanka-Dziesiatki-samochodow-i-ciezarowek-czekaja-8396742.html
Some old folks are openly said that even the Communist times coal was never missing and all of it was from polish mines. Sadly depletion never sleeps and remaining coal is either very deep or brown coal which need to be strip mine entire forest to get which costs a lot. And our goverment has slammed its head into the sand with this. And Odra God thoose poor people lost everything there
https://www.tygodnik-rolniczy.pl/articles/aktualnosci_/odra-ner-i-welna-przez-skazone-rzeki-rolnicy-moga-stracic-plony-i-zwierzeta/
and nobody even “officialy” knows what is happening. Toxic fumes are now getting out of the river dead animals are floating everywhere and rotting and the Epidemic center is worried sensless.
It is like all lights on the dashboard are going red a the same time.
Like the Chinesse proverb said living in interesing times.
Wer
Another example of the Clerisy not thinking things through and when it happens to someone like Gavin Newsom, it just makes me smile. Maybe he’s too focused on becoming US President instead of concentrating on California. Then again Californian’s might want him to focus on other things besides California.
“Just Days After Phasing Out New Gas Cars, California Says “Avoid Charging EVs” Amid Grid Emergency”
https://www.zerohedge.com/weather/avoid-charging-evs-california-grid-operator-warns-blackouts-urges-energy-conservation
What’s the best way to counter the repeated messages from the Biden administration on how MAGA people need to be eliminated? Along with the calls in the media that a civil war is going to start? Given our U.S. military and CIA has no shame in using drones on innocent people around the world, its not a stretch to imagine who else they would use it on. I’ve run into two people in the last two weeks who proudly proclaim their very blue status absolutely salivating at the idea of the country going to war with itself. After watching how people got swept up into taking unlimited numbers of vaccines, I feel like I need a strategy other than standing there with my mouth hanging open.
Tangentially, one of the theories my friends had in Aug 2021 was a new virus was going to be released that was only going to affect unvaccinated people.The mRNA shots recoded people’s DNA so they wouldn’t be harmed. They both got vaccinated once shots were mandated for the military (that to them was the sign this was the plan). My stand at the time is I didn’t believe given the diversity of the human genome and epigenetics, an intentional virus release to attack specific DNA would go as planned. More lab virus escapes is one of my other worries, but not much can be done from where I sit. Our elected representatives saw fit to increase the funding and expand scope of the bio labs.
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan stop all covid protocols and tell employees they must return to their NYC offices 5 days a week. But the firms are also predicting lay-offs by end of year due to the economy. Looks like throwing down the ultimatum is how they’ll do their first cuts of their workforces.
I love this little quip in the article I read –
“I think the CEOs are really worried … employees have become less efficient as a result of not having that discipline” of working in the office, said Gary Goldstein, founder of the Whitney Group, an executive search firm.
The regime + media tells people they’ll die of covid, then climate change, and that they are all homophobic racists, while inflating the price of everything, and allowing crime to explode everywhere. People feel hopeless and confused, not much of a bright future ahead. Rather than change messaging back to what’s worked in the past, they keep blaming everyday people for everything. “The world’s ending, and you’re a homophobic racist, but I’m going need you to work 60 hours this week.” isn’t such a winning strategy it seems.
We have an “elite” that inherited all this power and they don’t know how it works at all. It looks like they just hammer people with it. And people instinctually just try to stay out of the way. Horrifying and amazing to watch.
In testament to what you’re saying here, I will be voting straight-ticket Republican in the upcoming midterm elections. My doing any such thing ten years ago would have been every bit as inconceivable as Pat Robertson suddenly becoming a huge advocate of LGBT rights! And the reason I am doing so is that 1) the way our society responded to Covid was very much the baby of the Democratic Party and the left (including the “real left”) and 2) I am, at this point, ready and willing to do anything it is within my power to do to undermine the power and influence of the Professional-Managerial Class and their administrative-class hangers-on, even if it’s something very corrosive and destructive in the short-term. And as I said in a previous comment, raw revenge for trying to force the jab on me is a very big part of my decision, so I will have no regrets even if there is no notable undermining of the power and influence of the PMC. IOW, whatever happens after this November, the PMC has nobody but itself to thank or blame to my way of thinking.
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/albanese-lauds-monash-moderna-vaccine-partnership-20220815-p5b9xb.html
The Kool aid is still flowing freely here in Australia.
Apparently, there are talks happening to reduce the isolation period from 7 to 5 days.
Does that give you some idea of where the Elite are (still) at?
About a week or so ago I heard a piece on the radio about a meeting with livestock industry and the Agriculture Minister about the threat of Foot and Mouth disease entering the country via tourists returning from Bali.
Conclusions? Vaccines of course! In particular mRNA ones because they’ve been so successful.
“You can’t make this stuff up”, to quote the great Mark Groubert.
I’m not sure if people from outside of Australia, realise what a house of cards we’ve built down here.
Almost all our industry has been offshored to China.
Houses and Holes is what we’re about.
IE plenty of tax breaks to buy property and digging up minerals (and gas) and shipping it off to mainly China.
I listened to a podcast the other week, one point was that former Prime Minister Keating wanted to ‘save us’ from the factory floor and make us a Financial Capital.
At the moment, food appears to still be readily available, but increasing in price.
Builders and developers are going belly up left right and centre.
Apparently during the height of Covid madness, many were trading while insolvent and the government knew it but did nothing.
Although in many ways we are a minnow, we are just as good at graft and corruption as the next country.
Almost all Politicians have 2, 3, 7, or more rental properties.
Hardly anyone blinks an eye.
I could go on.
At this point my biggest concern is a war in the Pacific and us getting dragged into it.
If a protracted blockade of shipping and or flights happens we’re kind of stuffed.
Anyway spring fast approaches and the winter garden will soon make way for warm weather crops.
I just finished today, redoing my shade cloth structure over the raised beds.
6 Quail eggs in the incubator are a few days off hatching, the existing quails should soon be back into full egg production
(Mildred actually never stopped laying all winter), and the 5 pullets are a few weeks off maturity.
Next on the list is to finally get my drip irrigation system properly worked out.
Two weeks holiday and it’s work work work 😬
Regards,
Helen in Oz
Hi John Michael,
I hope you’re enjoying your popcorn 😇
For reference commenting from the UK.
Thank you for this; your point about class loyalty trumping self-interest and professed beliefs suddenly made sense of things that have concerned me for years; especially when catalysed be the “before” and “after” herbalists photos.
I’m now in my 6th decade as an alternative practitioner )but I always tell my clients that I’m a “Backstreet Quack”) and have observed for a long time the drive amongst the practitioners to get into the clerisy.
This means swallowing the medical model as well as getting some kind of University training.
The Universities of course jumped on this because it was a great way to make more money. There was even a Bachelors degree course teaching Reflexology ! Reflexology – one of the simplest, direct and effective modalities. And you have to TOUCH people ! With your own hands ! I mean eww. So you only be in the lowest possible class of the Clerisy. Unless you teach. And that’s why there’s is such an emphasis on ‘Continuing Professional Development’, the agenda is right there in the title.
It is sad because a lot of alternative therapies can be used very effectively by people totally unsuited to academia, and they now have to fly under the radar.
I remember a senior Osteopath Naturopath and author saying “I’ve seen the Physiotherapists swallow the medical model and lose their souls; seen the Osteopaths swallow the medical model and lose their souls and now it’s happening to the Massage therapists. ” Well he was right, !
The last herbs and nutrition seminar I went to there was almost no mention of symptoms; it was almost all about laboratory findings; well thats more add-on sales for the Clerisy.
Anyway sorry for the rant. Tanks again
Lurksalong
JMG
Your blog reminds me of the chorus of the John Prine song “Living in the Future.” It goes:
We are living in the future
Tell you how I know
Read it in the paper
15 years ago
We driving rocket ships
And talking with our minds
While standing in soup lines
Standing in soup lines
Prine died 2 years ago from covid related illness. RIP.
Wow Signal !
“Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told me he doesn’t plan on getting a booster at all this fall because, after three vaccine doses and an infection, “I think I’m protected against serious illness.”
The MSM would have tarred and feathered someone for including their infection as a reason not to get vaccinated this time last year.This is The Atlantic,probably the top regime information source,there definitely is a “kill the vaccination program without saying so going on now”.
Hi John Michael,
I hope they’re embarrassed when they’re proven wrong?
You know mate, when I read the title of your essay this week, I got a flashback from they fun days when you used to promote the apocalypse of the week. Who knew that they were that common? The flashback by the way, was of those dudes and dudettes who went in vast groups to hill tops. And weren’t they after the second coming, ascendency, or something like that? I now forget, but I tell ya, I well recall they had to slink on home again afterwards.
Makes you wonder if there will be slinking this time around, or wailing and gnashing of teeth? So many questions… I guess all will be revealed in time.
Cheers
Chris
Another Atlantic article and “this is probably Americans last free Covid vaccine “
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/08/americas-baffling-booster-messaging/671312/?utm_term=2022-08-31T22%3A33%3A39&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
They have a group of people they absolutely terrified beyond all reason about what is the basically another virus that causes common cold now.So they have to offer something,and if things begin to accelerate further after a few “mysterious deaths” of semi-high profile people the shift to Orange Man did this ,he is the father of the vaccine will begin before November 22 elections.The election is definitely critical pivotal date for our overlords,any master plans on timing have been taken down by the Chaos Gods who detest anyone trying to “plan anything “.
Hi JMG,
This is a wonderfully interesting post which I have enjoyed very much. As so many have said: one of your very best! There’s just one part of it I can’t quite fully agree with: that the reason so many well-educated people, who would formerly have been against taking a basically untested medical product, and who were for alternative medicine, extremely suddenly turned on a dime to the complete opposite. I saw it happen here in the co-housing community I live in. It was really rather breath-taking to observe. Only about 10 out of some 200 adults here, including myself, did not take the “maxxcine”. About 8 of us formed a support group and have discussed this very issue many times. We keep asking, why were we different? On the surface of things, we are all in the same general class, college educated, yet not “experts”, financially fairly comfortable, and Democratic voters (although a few of us, myself included, will never vote Democratic again). It wasn’t class that made us decide not to get maxxed, and not to trust Big Pharma. We can each point to something that may have caused our different decisions, but they are not compelling. It was just eerie to see that happen, and in fact virtually none of the maxed folks here appear to have changed their minds, although some have accepted, without saying much, that the maxxines do not protect against illness or transmission.
Although I would not consider myself at all an occultist, I ‘d have to say there must have been something very unusual and powerful involved to have caused that massive turn-about in so many people at the same time.
Thanks, JMG. Before I retired, one of my colleagues would say, when someone said he was an expert, “An expert is a former drip under pressure.” : )
Mac
:
My wife is a doctor. A pretty good one, I think. Her advice? Stay away from doctors (unless absolutely necessary).
One of the most astonishing things about this is, the clerisy is also likely to see the most harm from the gene manipulation, as they are the most enthusiastic about boosters. So they are likely to find it harder to maintain the standard of living they have grown accustomed to, at the same time their health is failing.
One writer on substack, uTobian, surmised, if there is some supra-natural intelligence made up of all of humanity, perhaps call it gaia, why would it want to slough off all those technocratic middle managers?
I don’t think they can keep a cap on this much longer. There seems a quickening, the information about the jabs and their true consequences is turning into a flood, and there is only so long they can pretend all cause mortality is not tracking with the shots, just as birth rates are falling in vaxxed countries. It increasingly looks like this was all ever nothing but a charade for some other purpose, namely an exponential growth in the power of the global, technocratic state.
I am for epic restructuring and downsizing the State.
https://williamhunterduncan.substack.com/
I took my 1-year-old to the cardiologist last week. He was born with a valve issue that was fixed in the NICU and gets regular checkups to make sure everything’s on track. I asked the doctor about the advisability of getting him vaccinated, framing it as just doing my due diligence since I had a chance to check with a pediatric cardiologist.
He gave a very…measured…response. He told me that the cardiac issues were mainly with teenage males, not with infants (which is notably not a rejection of the study), and that my son’s heart should basically be treated as just as healthy as anyone else’s. Then he said, very carefully, “The symptoms in infants are usually very mild, but the American Academy of Pediatricians does recommend the vaccine for all children.”
Now, maybe he’s just a good doctor and has enough bedside manner not to brush off a good faith question, but I feel like a year ago I would have gotten a boilerplate, “You need to do this, stop reading stuff on the Internet.”
I have the distinct impression that the pushing of gender theory to young children in schools; and the horrific stories that are surfacing around puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries being used on minors – that when added to the unraveling of the Fauci-era covid narrative, is going to provoke a frightening reaction. The word “tumbril” evokes the memory of France’s terror – I note that an ongoing internet meme regarding the preferred fate for a pedophile involves a wood chipper. This worries me, as there is already a push to include “minor-attracted persons” as part of the LGBT umbrella. People of my parents’ generation had the knee jerk association that gay=pedo, and the dis-association of those two words is a significant part of the acceptance gay people finally got. I really don’t want to see that acceptance removed, but the activists seem hell bent on providing confirmation to voices saying “see, they really are coming for your children.”
Thoughts?
Hello, thanks for this post. I have been deliberately cutting down on screen time, and that means that I can no longer get all the way through these comment threads… many apologies if this doubles up on what someone else has said, or if I fail to answer any comment personally addressed to me. 🙂
Still, clerisy doing what clerisy does is all too apparent in California’s AB 2098 bill, which seeks to prevent “dissemination of misinformation or disinformation related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, or “COVID-19” [by doctors who wish to continue to be licenced to practice]”.
I’m not sure where this bill is at, but when I heard about it, with great curiosity, I looked up the wording as of – I think – 22/Aug, to see how they define mis/disinformation, and how they will decide who is guilty of mis/disinforming.
Now “disinformation” requires malicious intent to be proved (see link below), but dangerously, the bill defines misinformation quite broadly, as:
“false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care”.
What is immediately noticeable about this definition is the complete lack of a role for evidence, or for observation and discovery. Instead, the definition ends up being a sort of “whatever we say it is”, by establishing “scientific consensus” (whatever that means) as gospel, and “standard of care” (whatever that means) as sacrament.
Is this not effectively an attempt to “establish religion”? Would this not be open to challenge as breach of the “non-establishment” clause of the First Amendment of the US Constitution?
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB2098
David, I’d like to see the people responsible tried by a jury and punished according to the laws.
There are two types of people:
1. Those who think the above is mean-spirited and punitive.
2. Those who think the above is merciful.
peace,
Zach
John–
The issue of abstractions represents, it would seem, a significant hurdle for me. One of the commenters referred to “mathematicians, who confused their beautiful equations with reality”–something of which I must admit myself to be guilty. I have long been an idealist, in the sense of there are forms, concepts, patterns, which represent how things “should” be, in contrast the to muck of the material plane through which we must all slog. Now, I am learning that this perspective is itself flawed, but I’m having a devil of a time reorienting myself. If the forms of the astral or mental planes don’t aren’t “higher” (purer?) manifestations than these distorted reflections in the material plane, then what are they? And why wouldn’t mastery of abstractions represent an advance beyond (and thus be superior to) the manipulation of mere matter?
Here’s a spate of young people JUST dying from “sudden heart attacks”. The article just begins to explain why it’s so possible to have heart attacks at an early age. I thought people from India had somewhat healthy diets and yet the list grows of young people meeting their fate with heart attacks? No mention in the article if any of those young people perhaps were vaccinated but ironically they mention that Covid1984 can produce heart attacks.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/lifestyle/health/sonali-phogat-dies-of-heart-attack-experts-on-what-causes-sudden-cardiac-arrest-101661252058836.html
Greetings JMG,
Some experiences I had when I was in the German Army might add some minor insights to what you wrote about the role of the clerisy. When I joined, we were equipped with a new battle rifle (G 36). The rifle was lightweight and seemed to be outstanding. However, it had one major flaw: when you use it under combat situations it doesn’t work. After 70 – 80 shots in quick succession the accuracy is reduced for middle to long ranges. We also were introduced to a new mobile howitzer which impressed us. It had all sorts of gimmicks, worked fine on the testing ground. But, as the Ukraine War showed, it was meant to shoot about 100 rounds a day (or one round every 15 minutes). Being in an actual war and what not, the AFU didn’t bother to follow the manuals (who can blame them) and blazed away. The mobile howitzers broke down and have to be fixed in some other country.
Every grunt in every army ever could have told you that a rifle that can’t shoot and a howitzer that can’t deliver barrages is of no use. But, this didn’t bother the admins in the defense department who never imagined that the weapons would have to be used one day. They gave specific directions to manufacturers which the manufacturers put into products. The reason behind the rifle that doesn’t shoot was to make it easy to carry, after all women were meant to join the army in large numbers and to be cheap at the same time.
On a side note, I recently read “The Populist Delusion” by Neema Parvini which gives a concise overview of elite theories. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the subject. It clarified a lot for me.
@AV That’s the whole language approach! I didn’t realize that was still around… I’m an elder millennial and thought this was something that was just perfectly timed for my generation and stopped.
The theory was if you just read and write eventually you’ll learn grammar. What actually happened was we all learned grammar in our foreign language classes (and in my case one older 8th grade teacher who went rogue and finally taught us what prepositions were.)
@David BTL
“All models are wrong, some are useful.”
I’m someone who shares your natural inclination towards abstraction, and is perhaps taking JMG’s characterization of all of us as Dr Honeydews a bit too personally! 🙂
The key is to try to cultivate a sense of humility in your own models. It’s easier said than done… I think of myself as intellectually flexible, yet have learned over the years the hidden thoughts I’ve actually held too dear…
JMG,
After reading todays Coffee and Covid, it occurred to me that the Orange Man Bad (TM) may still be embodying the changer architype and perhaps even more effectively than he did before. Again, we shall see…
That is a pretty broad indictment of the clerisy. Much is on track. But the attack is so broad it fails to distinguish between actual experts and the faux experts that dominate the rhetorical sphere. (Maybe you can come up with a good word for that…the people who weave words without concern for their connection to actual reality). In the end, the society that retains its actual experts that know how to build things like water treatment system, bridges, agricultural equipment, medical diagnostic tools, and precision guided weapons will outcompete both the society that relies on faux experts and the society that falls into anti-expert ideology. Remember your history. The last large scale experiments in anti-clerisy revolutions ended in things like the Khmer Rouge, the Holodomor, and the Great Chinese Famine. Now it is indeed different this time, because the clerisy in question has descended a long way into delusional abstractions, and many must be forced from their places of prestige from which they recommend destructive policies. But if we also force out the clear thinkers among the trained medical doctors, engineers, and economists, we will be outcompeted by a society that effectively distinguishes rhetorical expertise from actual expertise.
“The politicians aren’t willing to take the hit for this one. For once, that’s reasonable. It wasn’t politicians, by and large, who decided to throw out a century of hard-earned epidemiological experience in favor of the unproven theories behind shutdowns and social distancing, or to demand that entire populations get injected with drugs that hadn’t had anything like enough testing to make sure they were safe, or even did what they were supposed to do. It was the experts who did that—and it’s the experts who are going to be left holding the bag.”
I’m not sure if I can entirely accept this. What the politicians have done is what they have NOT done. ie- what is sometimes called a sin of omission. By and large, they have NOT governed – as elected to do – and instead wordily by-standed while UNelected “experts” were permitted by them to do their job of governing, all while continuing to collect their paycheques for work not performed.
I’ve been following the obituaries in several towns, not because I’m morbid, but because of the uptick in deaths across the nation.
In my hometown, which is near a reservation, deaths of Native Americans is high, very high. Many of them took the vaccine. Also, deaths of those in their early sixties is much higher than expected. Most have died in the hospital. Hmmm? Ventilators? CDC protocols? One woman I knew as a kid died the day following orthopedic surgery. Why? Well, perhaps it was because she was 79. There is ample proof that many are being euthanized with a chemical cocktail that no sane person would give to anyone. By the way, in this town, there have been at least 21 deaths per month on average for the past two years. Before that, maybe five or six at most.
In another town, not far from where I now live, the hospital refused to follow the Covid protocol. You go in sick, you come out well. Number of obituary notices per month? Three or four. A number that hasn’t changed since 2018.
So, hospitals, thirsting for Covid profits, are responsible for an untold number of deaths. The “vaccine”? We are only seeing the beginning. Fortunately, many around the world caught on, thanks to intrepid souls such as JMG, that it truly is a kill shot.
Wonderful article, JMG, and thanks for including the graphs. I have a couple of points to make about them.
Physicians and administrators: I wish I could make a graph regarding the over-bureaucratization of government, but the real story is not so much the number of people on payroll, but the processes instated within government. I have been dealing with governments (federal, provincial, municipal) as part of my professional life since the ‘90s. And what I have really noticed is that over the past decade, many of these governments have become so crammed full of silly rules and regulations and administrative processes regarding contractors that it has become utterly unbearable. If I could graph it, the line would be exponential (i.e., “hockey-stick” in shape). Whenever I think, “they can’t possibly make the process more labyrinthine” they go and out-do themselves. And don’t get me started on how so many government employees have morphed into petty dictators. Seriously – this can’t continue much longer…
Ontario school vaccination rates: the thing to keep in mind is that for the past two years, schools provided the “virtual school” option – and a large number of parents took it. Fewer kids in mortar-and-brick schools; fewer vaccinations. Also, for the better part of the past 2.5 years, doctors offices and clinics have been closed and/or practically “shoo” prospective patients away so that the doctors can do their work via telephone. Waiting rooms that used to have 20+ patients now have one or two. This plus the general anxiety of Ontario parents about children going anywhere unless absolutely necessary (this summer being a glorious exception) must also be kept in mind. As much as I would like to believe that the precipitous fall of vaccinations of school-age children is a sign of loss of faith in the medical establishment, the fact that most Ontario parents got their kids foxed with the experimental goo (and a lot of them fell on their knees this summer thanking the great God Science for making the foxes available for their preschoolers) tells me that the Ontario graph needs to be taken with a few pounds of salt. I live in urban Ontario – where on a daily basis I still see people walking all alone on suburban streets wearing masks.
One other thing. Words matter. The scientific paper you cite in its abstract says “Cardiovascular manifestations were found in 29.24% of patients…with all cases fully recovering within 14 days.” The “manifestations” include tachycardia (elevated heart rate). But somehow in your article it morphed into “nearly a third … suffered heart damage.” Temporarily elevated heart rate is not the same as heart damage.
@Northwind Grandma #87
Ma’am, you gave us this utterly delightful word “flobotohamopolitimists”. I use the Microsoft Snipping Tool and Pictures File for a major chunk of my commonplace book (thanks to our host for telling me what I have been doing the last 40+ years), and I have a separate folder for new, strange, wonderful, and interesting words.
This one qualifies in all 4 categories.
If you could also provide (if not too much trouble) etymology, definition, and pronunciation, I would appreciate it very much.
Note to Mr. Greer and the General Commentariat: the above (looking out for and collecting the Good Stuff) is one of the ways I stay sane as a neurodivergent in a largely neurotypical world.
Thank you.
Elizabeth Ann Kennett
There is a YouTube clip where Trump is telling Germany at the UN that they will be dependent upon Russian energy if they don’t change their ways. The camera then shows the German delegation smirking and laughing. The clip, by Bloomberg, was meant to mock Trump. However, the majority of the comments are very recent and mocking of Germany.
My own experience with the clerisy is that people join it for power. Camille Paglia has also cited that reason for those that joined the university system, starting in the 1970s. The vast majority of my involvement with the clerisy has been from a position of servitude, and they like to emphasize that relationship in sometimes subtle, but often not-so-subtle ways.
JMG, I think you are right that once the Plebs connect the dots, there’s going to be some major blowback towards the Clerisy. Since the vaccines were pushed out we have been hearing about “sudden deaths”, “cause of death unknown” and yet the Media has been silent other than making excuses or creating deflections on how these kind of deaths have always occurred, “we just never paid attention or cared to notice”.
And yet another kid didn’t make it past his 20 birthday. And yes we can all ASSUME he was vaxxed and probably boosted because this story comes from Canada.
“Junior ice hockey player Eli Palfreyman dies at 20 after collapsing during game”
https://www.cbssports.com/nhl/news/junior-ice-hockey-player-eli-palfreyman-dies-at-20-after-collapsing-during-game/
As we get closer to Christmas maybe we can start singing these “New” Christmas Carols.
“It’s Beginning To Look Like Genocide Everywhere You Go”
https://www.bitchute.com/video/Bsa9y5YKUAra/
Tens of thousands are dying to test American weapons.
Hundreds of thousands are dying to test American vaccines.
A counter point, which, quite frankly, I don’t understand.
I like this post JMG, but if the assessment is accurate then why is the FDA approving, and the government rolling out the bivalent vaccine in a few days?
The only thing that I can think of is that it is that it is being allowed on purpose as a setup. A gotcha moment to pin the blame on the clerisy for a (now understood to be dangerous) vaccine that was tested on a total of 8 mice.
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/ba5-boosters-8-mice-trial-actually
Because otherwise I don’t understand how the bivalent vaccine can be rolled out at the same time that the narrative is changing. If you have any insight here I would love to hear it.
Hi JMG
Many thanks for this fascinating serie of post!
Regarding to the crazyness of the European clerisy the German FM has just said:
“I will put Ukraine first …no matter what my German voters think… or how hard their life gets”
https://twitter.com/ivan_8848/status/1565067553671626760
I will translate this message to german:
“Wenn nötig, totaler und radikaler, als wir ihn uns heute überhaupt noch vorstellen können” (Sportpalastrede, 1943, sorry! 2022)
Obviously…… Sieg Heil!
So the German politicians are following the finest German tradition with all his Todestrieb
Cheers
David
Aldarion, it’s quite possible that my conclusions are more relevant to the US than elsewhere, though I gather from responses that they’re not entirely off target in Britain and Australia. I’m well aware that our public schools are the worst in the world, btw!
Den, many thanks for the data points! It sounds to me as though something’s going to give.
Justin, I won’t argue with that at all.
Bei, oh, doubtless if I spent a lot of time hunting I might find one in a corner somewhere. Or behind the couch. 😉
Prizm, and the next-generation booster has been tested…on eight mice. No, I’m not making that up. Gods help the people who let themselves be injected with it.
Bei, well, of course! Did you expect the clerisy to sit still while public support for their status and incomes is trickling away, and they still have control over propaganda venues?
Clay, that’s really unsettling.
Hplovecraftsshadow, yes, I heard about that. Thank the gods that those of us who are unjabbed won’t be pressured to take the latest dose.
Ian, good heavens — Ontario’s doing that? Check the calendar, it must be a blue moon!
Ataulfo, that’s why I didn’t go on to get a master’s degree. I saw up close and personal what passed for scholarship about the subjects that interested me, and hightailed it to the fringes.
Elijah, ouch! Very sorry to hear this. You might consider posting something to https://www.realnotrare.com/ , which is one of the big sites that collects accounts of the vaccine-injured.
Mary, obviously I disagree. It doesn’t surprise me that the clerisy should be trying to deflect blame onto “the corporatist movement” or, well, anything else that doesn’t run away fast enough. Au contraire, the experts themselves have failed and that needs to be recognized and addressed.
Stuart, nonetheless the hard fact remains that the SAGE committee pushed recommendations that imposed misery and economic hardship on millions of people and did nothing noticeable to stop the spread of Covid. That is to say, they were wrong, and a very large number of people suffered because of it. That needs to be recognized and addressed. Btw, did you think that trotting out sneering clichés about your prime minister would impress anyone who didn’t already agree with you, or were you just virtue signaling?
James, a case could be made!
Kimberly, so noted, but here again I’d like to see that replicated.
Sam, thanks for this. That’s all the more fascinating.
Wer, I’ve been hearing much the same thing from all over Europe these days. I hope you and your family can get through the winter in one piece!
Rod, that’s so typically Californian it makes my head hurt.
Denis, ignore them. The Democrats are frantically trying to goad Republicans into launching an armed insurgency against the government; if that happens, the Dems seem to think they can get the uncommitted middle to rally around them. So far GOP supporters have been smart enough not to rise to the bait; instead, they’re winning local and state elections and doing grassroots political organizing, knowing that the Dems are losing the support of the Hispanic community, the gay and lesbian community, and many other elements of their former coalition. Don’t take the bait! As for Goldman Sachs et al., I think they’re going to be very surprised by the results…
Mister N, you might be surprised by how many other people have told me this; it’s a very big number. On the other hand, you might not be surprised…
Helen, many thanks for the data points. Glad to hear about the quail, the pullets, and the garden — those are sensible steps.
Lurksalong, thanks for this. Of course we have the same nonsense over here, as you know — though I haven’t yet heard of bachelor’s degrees in reflexology. Oof!
Moo Foo, ouch. I hadn’t heard of his passing. Thanks for letting me know.
Hplovecraftsshadow, wow indeed.
Chris, yes, that was the Great Disappointment of 1844, when Jesus was supposed to return on October 22, 1844. Thousands of people went up on hilltops that day so they’d have a good view when the skies opened and down he came. No doubt it was quite a humiliation to go back down the hill that evening.
Hplovecraftsshadow, nice Freudian slip — the only president who ever got elected on a November 22 was of course Lyndon Johnson, and the vote was held at Dealey Plaza…
Lydia, hmm! Fascinating. Thank you for the data point, and I’ll certainly take that into consideration.
Mac, ha! The version when I was growing up held that an expert was “an unknown drip under pressure.)
Zak, I’d go to a doctor like your wife if I had a health care issue I couldn’t handle myself. The problem is of course finding one.
William, I’ve been scratching my head about that too. It’s as though they had a mass suicide pact.
DaveOTN, hmm! That’s a very good sign.
Raab, I suspect that’s why a lot of gays and lesbians are distancing themselves as fast as possible from the TRAs (transgender rights activists) and their enablers — well, along with basic decency, which is also a powerful motivating force. Organized pushback from within the gay and lesbian communities might be a good way to help draw a hard line separating them from the groomer brigade.
Scotlyn, well, of course. The thing that strikes me most forcefully about the California bill is that it’s an admission that they’ve lost the information war. All that propaganda failed, and now they’re desperately shouting “shut up! shut up!”
Zach, then there’s me. I think it would be fair.
David BTL, the planes are discrete and not continuous. Abstractions are valid and relevant on their own plane, but that plane doesn’t happen to be the plane of matter. On the material plane, abstractions are at best rough generalizations, and at worst, wrong. (Equally, on the mental plane, material phenomena are at best rough approximations, and at worse, false.) Matter has its own laws and its own reality; it is later in the process of creation than mind, but no less real, and each plane has to be approached on its own terms and in its own way.
Rod, ouch. I’m wondering uneasily just how widespread this will get.
Engineer, yikes. I know our weapons systems here in the US are produced by a system that’s riddled with graft and fraud, but as far as I know nobody’s deliberately designing weapons systems that can’t actually be used. I’ve suggested in the past that Poland could invade Germany and conquer it in a month-long blitzkrieg (or whatever that would work out to in Polish); clearly that’s even more possible than I realized.
John, we will indeed see. This could get colorful.
Ganv, as I commented in response to a similar argument above, I confidently expect members of the clerisy to try to shift the blame to every target that doesn’t run away fast enough — “not us real experts, those faux experts over there!” is a great example. As for your anti-clerisy revolutions, er, did you notice what all three of those have in common? The persecution of intellectuals in Communist Russia, Communist China, and Communist Cambodia (or, as it was then, Kampuchea) was a function of Marxism, which is, please note, rule by experts. That’s what Marxism is, after all — the claim that handing society over to a cadre of experts trained in the right set of abstractions (in this case, Marxist abstractions) will produce Utopia. On the off chance the self-proclaimed “real experts” want to avoid the same fate as the others, I do have a suggestion: work on your listening skills. One of the main reasons so many people are ready to jettison the clerisy en masse is that even those who claim to be dealing with the real world very often won’t listen to people outside their disciplines who are trying to tell them that something has gone wrong.
Scotlyn, granted, and doubtless a lot of them will lose their jobs over that.
Sebastian, can you post a link to the business with the chemical cocktail? I don’t find that implausible but I’d like to be able to check the details.
Ron, okay, that makes more sense. I was astounded to see those figures for Ontario!
Ganv, so noted.
Jon, yes, I remember that. There are also clips of Putin telling NATO types that a new security architecture needed to be created, and they were smirking and laughing at him, too. Pride goeth before a what?
You’ve noted succinctly what I’ve been trying to describe for a few years now. well done.
I have to say, back when I read Vonnegut’s Player Piano, I never thought I would live to see such a reality; but here we are.
(For those that haven’t read it, Vonnegut’s 1959 book is a narrative fiction version of Michael Young’s 1958 book that gave us the term currently in vogue, The Rise of the Meritocracy. The two are sufficiently close in timing that I feel some event must have inspired both; but I have so far been unable to find that inspiration. Oh, and they both end poorly for the clerisy within!)
Just some anecdata/observations for whoever might be interested. I moonlight at a Parisian University. This is the first time since 2019 that I am here in person. All the way from London to here, in the stations, on the trains, in my hotel, on the streets of London and Paris, in the Paris restaurants, just everywhere really, masks are conspicuously absent. At the University today not a single student was wearing a mask. The very few mask wearers I spotted were of the Boomer generation. Amazing. Only 6 months ago people were getting escorted off the Eurostar for not wearing masks. It’s like the past two years of Kafkaesque travel hell (testing and tracing, paperwork and more paperwork, vax passports, etc.) never happened…
So the question I have, if the educated people are in fact stupid and the “stupid” people should be in charge….what does our next clerisy look like?
Rod, the spate of sudden deaths is a major issue; another is the way that the corporate media has been flailing around trying to blame those deaths on anything but the obvious cause. Note to media hacks: if you want to flush your remaining credibility down the ol’ crapperoo, that’s a great way to do it.
Martin, ouch. True…but ouch.
Team10tim, my guess is that if they expect a lot of deaths, they’re going to try to blame those on the booster, which has had only the most nominal testing. Some people can be made to fall on their sword for approving it, but (they hope) the wider crisis can be contained. I think they’re wrong, but we’ll see.
DFC, yes, I heard about that. I wonder what German voters think of that suggestion.
Jim, thanks for this. I hope some of my readers pick up Player Piano!
Miow, fascinating.
Ken, “clerisy” is not a label for ruling class. It refers to a specific phenomenon — a cadre of certified experts who claim that their knowledge makes them best suited to run things. Now that the certified experts have by and large proven to be certifiable, it’s going to be a long time before that particular claim gets taken seriously again. In the meantime, you know, we might give a try to having people elect officials to carry out policies the voters want — shocking as that notion may be…
Re: approval of effectively untested bivalent vaccine
My thought is that they’re buying time and trying to ward off angry inquisitions.
Keep in mind that there is a very vocal fraction of the population that still believes the vaccine narrative 110% and has been demanding an updated vaccine against the very latest strains for months now. These folks will blame their adverse reactions in anything but the vaccine and would get very angry at the FDA and CDC if they didn’t get their fall dose of miracle juice.
By making them unavailable to folks who didn’t get the first ones they are preventing any state/local bureaucrats from mandating them against people’s wishes and growing the vaccine-injured mob crying for blood.
So…just trying to ward off the pitchforks for a few more months while more rats can flee…
@Stuart @JMG
On the nature of Boris Johnson.
It’s the last few days of his (first?) time as PM, and I’m sorry to say that despite the expectation of a sudden end as foretold, I am disappointed by the man. He was elected with a substantial majority I suspect because he _did_ demonstrate a certain independence of thought from the clerisy. Of course Brexit was finally completed, against a great deal of pushback from the section of the public capable of making their voices heard but at that point he seemed to lose much of his impetuous. The pandemic notwithstanding.
Partygate, which is what finally did for him may have been a trap laid by others but at best he was catastrophically careless. The image of a man breaking his own rules when others were denied access to loved alive, dead, or dying was not something that was politically survivable. However I suspect he may well be back. There’s a remarkable similarity to Berlusconi.
That said, I’m sure we can all agree that he has the most appalling taste in wallpaper. Number 10’s interior now looks like the a badly designed curry restaurant. Cost a fortune too.
@ JMG, Jack #117
So it looks like my errors are a combination of a confounding of the planes on the one hand and a quasi-gnostic planar elitism on the other? (Old habits of thought die hard.)
At this point you don’t even have to go to “misinformation” sites to find out that the latest boosters were tested on eight mice that were killed not too long after the injection.
The demonic hypothesis seems pretty credible these days given that they’re onto the “9 out of 10 Nigerian princes recommend the boosters” stage of the sales pitch, I expect we’re going to find out pretty soon. I expect an initial paroxysm of anger at the unvaccinated and an attempt to paint them as draft dodgers of a sort before the mania sets in.
Perhaps our long spate of peace, prosperity, global supply lines and family vacations has done us no favors.
Despite the Korean War, Vietnam, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and some minor skirmishes, the professional class has succeeded in largely evading military service since WW II. Giving draft deferments for college students during the Vietnam War made it obvious.
After WWII, the Bretton Woods agreement committed the US to patrol the world’s seas. For the first time in history, people we didn’t like could trade freely with other people we didn’t like, and American taxpayers paid for it. That world is circling the drain and taking the global manufacturing system with it. Members of the elite class have been able to duck serving their country as soldiers, statesmen or diplomats, and the professional class has done the same.
In general, having an unelected bureaucracy run things can be either good or bad for a state’s survival and cultural continuity. The Roman and Chinese bureaucracies kept things operating for centuries despite leadership chaos, wars, coups, terrible emperors, fratricidal infighting and imperial overreach.
I suspect that our problem is that our managerial class suffers from not being subjected to the Darwinian pressures of having to respond to normal history. We have had over 85 years to focus on personal ambition and navel gazing.
Human beings revel in having a sense of purpose. We are gratified by effective teamwork (because that is the only thing that keeps us alive.) We are headed for a tough patch now.
Many people will find purpose and teamwork in adversity. Many will rise to the challenge. Many of our future leaders are stuck in boring office jobs right now, knowing that they are wasting their life energy.
Probably more people will run around in circles squeaking, but no matter, it only takes half of one percent to effect change.
Data point from lunchtime – from a place where the residents, by and large ,lined up for their shots #s1, 2, and 3 like lambs. One of the last people I expected to day this told the entire table that she’d take the flu shot, but not the COVID shot. She said “Enough is enough.” There was agreement from those who were listening, including me. And I’d come to that conclusion myself before she did, but never said so. I did say so then.
The #15 post by Denis suggests that officialdom is attributing likely vaccine-death/ illness/ injury to some kind of Mysterious Long Covid that causes systemic blood-clotting. I do know that the online Covidian Cult promotes the notion that even asymptomatic Covid-infection can cause this clotting with supposed dire health-consequences for those so affected as time goes on. I even saw a Tweet recently that attributes likely vaccine-harms to the effects of this Mysterious Long Covid.
This makes me wonder if that was the purpose of official vaccinators denying the efficacy of natural immunity in those who have been infected with Covid already and insisting that they too must be vaccinated: If the vast majority of those have had a bout of Covid-illness are also vaccinated, then it becomes possible to attribute vaccine-harms to this Mysterious Long Covid as a rhetorical sleight-of-hand.
To my way of thinking, attributing probable vaccine-harms to an infection that yielded no symptoms, as I’m sure the Covidian Cult will before very long, makes about as much sense as attributing these harms to wicked faeries or mad-scientist space-aliens.
James (no. 91) “Personally, I think we should go with the Confucians they had a good track record…”
Daniel A. Bell, call your office!
(No relation to the famous Harvard sociologist, although I suspect that’s how Daniel A. got his first job at Tsinghua University–they may have assumed he was the same guy.)
https://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/3183
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_A._Bell
> vaccination booster
I have been vaxxed twice, ditto husband. He has been talking about getting a booster. Today, I said that I would rather he didn’t get one. He asked why, but I know this question is a minefield cuz he runs rings around me in any debate. I replied that people are dying from the vaccinations, to which he said (I knew this was coming), “Nah, not possible—there has been nothing on the news about it.” I kept mum. Patience… patience. I knew if I kept pushing right then, he would say something like, “Who you been listening to?” and so I hemmed and hawed, giving him no straight answer, but going into 3-year old fussy mode, I-am-not-a-happy-cat. Pause… pause… pause.
Then he asked (boom❗️), “On a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being most, how much do you not want me to get a booster?” (This is what knowing a man for forty years is good for.) I said, “Ten.” He said, “Okay then, I won’t get one.”
Bingo.
I knew the first couple months of being with him that I could never “win” if I appealed to logic. He trounced me a few times, I felt like an idiot, and I had to come up with something more effective/affective. So in forty years, I pick the choicest battles. I developed a way of whining but not the-annoying-kind-of-whining, keeping things humorous and light. It is sort of like winning an argument with Mel Brooks — we go around in circles.
I figure hubbie and I did our “duty” by way of vaccinations. No more of this cr_p. When are COVID shots going to stop? Certainly not with the help of mainstream news. Certainly not the drug companies, with their cash-cows. Between the two parties, they will keep this up for years.
I herely declare stoppage‼️🙈🙉🙊
COVID is not a thing anymore — it is the f-ing common cold.
*** I *** DON’T *** CARE. ***
Both news and pharma have to come up with some other schtick.
💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
David, BTL:
I come from a family of educators and any one of them still teaching in the last 15 years or so has gladly retired as quickly as possible. For that matter, I refereed soccer for 30 years and retired at the end of 2020 because so many youth athletes, their coaches, and parents, had become so utterly intolerable. In a matter of one season.
It’s quite remarkable. I don’t see how this ends well.
Don’t expect I’ll get to enjoy performing the “I told you so” song and dance I’ve been rehearsing either, for that matter.
Cheers,
Grover
Ron
On Newsom and petrol engines: I suspect he realized that by 2035 there would be neither sufficient oil nor electricity to run many private cars anyhow, and he would be out of the picture and no one would remember anyhow, so he could promise whatever he thought would gain him support now. He is such an arrogant tw.., that he didn’t think people would connect being told not to charge electric cars now with his previous statement, just as he didn’t think they would notice his being taken to one of the most expensive restaurants in the world by lobbyists for his birthday while the rest of the state was locked down. I sure hope he is not the best the Democrats can come up with in 2024.
I can see how the mass vaccination push in so many countries works out to be a mass sociological phenomenon, very much like China’s Cultural Revolution. It has been a real education for me to see how the intellectual compassionate left I knew and loved in my childhood could blunder into some blind alley and wind up in a dystopia completely the opposite of what they were aiming for, and how, being human, they react when that happens.
Mark, that’s plausible, too. We’ll have to see how it plays out.
Justin, I like that — maybe somebody can make a meme with “9 out of 10 Nigerian princes recommend the booster shot” or the like.
Raphanus, that’s an excellent point.
Patricia M, hmm! Definitely a straw in the wind. Thank you.
Mister N, that’s certainly my interpretation. Spreading horror stories about “long Covid” and assigning to it all the harm that’s being done by the vaccines is a very typical sort of propaganda gimmick.
A group of Tesla owners in Norway are not happy…
https://www.teslahungerstrike.com/
This week’s Time magazine has an article about the teaching of reading in the US. We Boomers recall Dick and Jane and the look-say method that left many of our generation crippled in literacy. Then there was a pushback led by _Why Johnny Can’t read_ and new curricula that emphasized phonics. But the cycle has gone around at least three times in my lifetime. Oh yes, we are teaching phonics parents are told. But then it gets watered down and replaced by whole language and other names for guessing the words. According to the article parents of dyslexic children have been leading the latest push for a return to phonics. However, the real question seems to me to be, why? Why do the professionals keep pushing methods that fail and bypassing methods that anyone who knows how to read can use successfully? Lack of teachers trained in phonics is one aspect. The assertion that teaching phonics is boring to both children and teachers is another. Tearing down the schools of education and the textbook publishing houses and sending their occupants to clean pig pens seems to me the only solution with a prospect of long-term success.
However, I am moved to ask the commentariat in other English-speaking nations–do you have this same problem? What about nations with other languages with alphabet-based writing? How is reading taught?
Throughout the COVID mess, especially after we were told that it emerged from the wild food markets in Wuhan, I have wondered why a nation as authoritarian as China would continue to allow those markets to exist. It is not as though it is the occasional fruit bat or pangolin sold out the back of someone’s garage. The authorities could slap padlocks on those markets any day, and did close some during the worst of the pandemic. So why have they been permitted at all? My theory–the government wants those markets to exist because they provide a cover for the real problem–escapes (or deep into paranoid territory–releases) from the labs. No, no, no–this virus did not escape from the laboratory–it was from the fruit bats at the market.
Rita
I saw an interesting thing today, from a very silly place. But it I think deserves a mention, if I can compress the story so as to not bore those with better taste in culture than myself.
For decades there has been an anime series from Japan called Dragon Ball, about martial artists with super human powers training, fighting, and saving the world. Lots of punches and screaming and ‘ki techniques’ that amount to shooting death rays while screaming the name of a technique. It has decades of lore, and is one of the most internationally influential franchises going, though well over the hill.
I happened to see the most recent movie today. Most of it is cliches that only make sense to fans of the series. But there is a relevant thread that stuck out like a sore thumb.
One of the longest running antagonist organizations in the series is the Red Ribbon Army. They’d been defeated several movies ago, ‘for good’. SHOCKINGLY they weren’t defeated, they had gone into hiding as the Red Ribbon Pharmaceutical Company; trying to raise the money and technology to rebuild their army. That raised an eyebrow!
The Pharmaceutical Company convince a young genius to make robots that can kung-fu fight the heroes. Many fights happen, and the Pharmaceutical Company leader, against the protests of the young genius, releases the most powerful weapon he had created “before it is ready” even though that is very dangerous. It goes out of control and tries to mindlessly destroy the word, this cause more kung fu and some sappy tragic deaths; and the young genius being lectured on the evils of how his technology caused problems despite his desire to be the hero.
Another theme is that one of the series heroes is studying to be an expert and a scholar instead of doing kung-fu training, so he isn’t strong enough to keep his family safe, because he was focused on becoming a scholar.
It is hard to not see this as commentary on the modern world.
Dear John
Your comment about my “sneering clichés” is a little disappointing and while I note that you require “Courteous, concise comments”, I had assumed that principle might work both ways.
Boris Johnson embodies the elitist approach that you are rightly keen to expose. His refusal to follow his own laws culminating in 10 Downing St probably having the highest number of crimes committed in a single place, i.e. his assumption that he was above the law, particularly a law of his own making, is surely a key definition of elitism – unless I am quite mistaken. One rule for them, another for me – or let them eat cake as his probable replacement seems to be suggesting.
We can disagree with what would have happened without the lockdown and while you are correct that it damaged the economy, it prevented the NHS from being completely overwhelmed that was a choice and one that I think was the right choice. There is, however, a much more fruitful discuss about resilience and adaptation that I had hoped to see in this blog rather than the criticism that UK economy was damaged instead of letting a pandemic rip through society.
You know JMG, I just had an unsettling thought: I just spent a year as a jobless doctor after refusing to either submit to the quax, or demand my patients get it as a condition for seeing me.
As hard a year as this has been for me, given all the anger at the clerisy in general and doctors in particular, I’m beginning to wonder if my being out of circulation might prove to have been a blessing.
—Lunar Apprentice
JMG: I’ve suggested in the past that Poland could invade Germany and conquer it in a month-long blitzkrieg
Perhaps it’s relevant that Poland has suddenly demanded $1.3 trillion from Germany as reparations for WW2…
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/01/europe/poland-germany-wwii-reparations-intl/index.html
About the announcement of the German defense minister Baerbock, where she said that she would deliver to Ukraine, no matter what the voters think, there are news: the German foreign office has said that the whole affair is a Russian disinformation campaign and/or a conspiracy theory; people, according to the spokesman of the Foreign Office, would distort information out of their context and thus create conspiracies.
Regarding the mood in Germany, many people are worrying about high energy costs in winter, but don’t seem to think that something big is coming (if this is indeed the case). Myself, I don’t have a good feeling about it all, but I don’t know exactly what will happen, either.
The Biden speech last night…..I didn’t watch it but saw some photos this morning and oof. You had just made this statement here hours earlier “The Democrats are frantically trying to goad Republicans into launching an armed insurgency against the government; if that happens, the Dems seem to think they can get the uncommitted middle to rally around them.” Then Biden standing in front of Independence Hall like he’s fighting for freedom. I recall Hillary standing triumphantly on Election Eve 2016 and we all saw what happened right after.
I feel like the history of that building and it’s meaning to the country is more complicated than the current Dems understand. (Add to list of things they are ignorant about.) While yes, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were debated and passed there, it is also the place where Congress was run out of town by the Pennsylvania militia for not paying them for their war service. Philadelphia has also always been a regime loyalist city, not a city of freedom and liberty at all. It comfortably housed many southern plantation families during the Civil War, for instance.
I don’t think anyone in DC realizes how apathetic the majority are to what DC wants to do. People stayed home and followed all the covid baloney because they didn’t want family and friends to get sick and die from it. Somehow DC interprets it as “oh we gave these orders and everyone followed them so we can push farther now.”
I can certainly encourage people to continue to ignore whatever is coming out of the media. How about mockery? Too soon?
When I’ve been pushed, I remind people that 40-50% of the adults in the country aren’t even registered to vote. If they want to make real change and do it democratically, then getting everyone involved is step 1. That always shuts them up.
Good thing I don’t have any credentials then!
Here is a quote I formulated based on a certain quote from this author which fits: Start a garden now and avoid the rush! Still not happening despite rising food costs, but I think when it does we will know the timing of the revolt against the incompetent clerisy, which btw, is fully imbedded into the agribusiness rip off and failure. Food that makes people sick and looking for the miracle cures which take all their money before cremating them to get rid of the evidence – funny how that works!
@JMG
Is it possible your thesis about the failure of the clerisy is a correlation/causation error? I mean, outside the US, clerisy-centric things like universal healthcare, public transit, public education, urban planning, etc. work quite well.
Notwithstanding question marks about the vax, and quirks of individual countries (looking at you, German energy policy), I’d say the clerisy era continues to be a roaring success for a broad swath of the developed world clear from Amsterdam to Tokyo. In other words, this is largely a story of Anglosphere decline and dysfunction, not a problem with trusting experts per se.
Of course this success story is unsustainable in a low energy future. And yes, the clerisy is now bloated with “studies” instead of STEM. And yes, this clerisy-led era is spiritually unsatisfying. But those are different questions.
Late to this, so rather than write a long screed let me again refer to some of my recent Substack articles, which I know some of you read, and in which I argue that we have seen a catastrophic decline in the quality of the political class in most western states over the last forty years, and a deliberate hollowing-out of the capability of states and governments to perform their basic functions. hence the current chaos, and hence the coming even worse chaos.
Just three brief points. Having spent a lifetime working in government, I know that one of the major problems is how to make use of specialist advice in a political context. Governments require advice on everything from agriculture to transport and back again, and it’s the mark of a good system that it uses this advice properly. There was a saying in the old days that experts should be “on tap but not on top.” This meant that the political leadership and its advisors had to have the skills to listen to the (often conflicting) advice of experts and make the decisions, for which they took responsibility. There are very few subjects on which you won’t get even some divergence of views (how about Magic for example?). This has now gone, and politicians these days are sterile managers, fixated by the news cycle and believing that there are no problems that can’t be somehow finessed away.
Second, the graph you display does not show the increasing influence of experts, but precisely of non-experts. Organisations, including governments, have been dumbed-down over the last forty years, partly through the massive increase of people with credentials but no useful knowledge. When I was young, Britain’s NHS had very little bureaucracy and worked well. These days, it is drowning in bureaucracy, and, according to family members working in it, is on the verge of breaking down. In Universities, actual teaching posts (you know, experts) are being cut back and casualised, while administrators, who contribute nothing, are recruited in large numbers and earn high salaries. If you want a one-sentence encapsulation of the problem you describe, it is the triumph of the managerialist PMC over people who actually know what they’re doing.
Third, economists. In the days when I was studying the subject, economists were practical people, rather like engineers, who studied how the economy actually worked, and how it could work better. Unsurprisingly, western nations enjoyed thirty years of unprecedented prosperity and full employment. Partly for political reasons, we’ve seen the rise since the 1980s of what was aptly called “voodoo economics,” which treats the economy not as it is, but as a bunch of mathematical equations say it should be. Modern economics has about as much relationship to the economics of fifty years ago as Harry Potter does to the kind of magic you write about. The results are everywhere: a good example is the mania for “competition”in the natural monopoly of energy supplies, which has produced a network of shadowy “suppliers” who do nothing but buy and sell electricity, and are mostly owned by hedge-funds or based in tax-shelters, or both. Such a system can’t cope with the energy crisis we have now.
With apologies, a final word, because I’m not sure if your US readers are aware of the horror with which other countries look at your governments’ handing of Covid. Simple calculations show that if the death-rate in the US had been the same as in most western nations (never mind Asia), somewhere around three quarters of a million lives would have been saved. The insouciance of your managerialist PMC elites, and their obsession with a vaccine-only strategy, is a source of disbelief in other countries. It’s no wonder that some US critics have started to refer to your PMC as a “death cult” sacrificing its citizens. I can understand why conspiracy theorists find it easy to assume that the world’s PMC, led by Gates or somebody, are trying to wipe out surplus populations. But that’s what you get with a political class that’s been captured by managerialism, and can’t deal with actual crises.
Dear Mr Greer
Do you mind if I clarify something. You have often talked about the PMC in the past. Is the clerisy the same as the PMC. I would assume that it is at least a subset of the PMC.
Please forgive me if you have mentioned it somewhere and I have missed it.
Yours sincerely
Jasmine
Unsure if this was the action of the unelected clerisy, but it’s a good way to induce the UN to relocate:
https://www.rt.com/news/562032-russia-accuses-us-violating-un-obligation/
Foolish belief that one is “indispensable,” as one former president asserted, and thus can act with impunity.
Hi John Michael,
Thanks for that. Yes, that would have been a humiliating experience.
Had an interesting experience with the chickens over the past week or so. Two of the chickens had been sneakily eating eggs. It’s not good, but the birds are seeking additional protein. It does happen from time to time. Anyway, over the past two days, those chickens died, because they were ill and at the end of their life. Saves me having to neck them for the egg eating.
Anyway, I tend to wonder if what’s going on with all the stuff you’ve written about this week, isn’t a similar thing? Dunno, but am wondering about it. I’m genuinely surprised that the certain very low risk groups in the population aren’t seeking concessions for the craziness inflicted upon them? Makes no sense to me, but then the cops were shooting protesters with non-lethal projectiles, not to mention the other threats such as loss of income. Not sure that I can forgive them for this one and fortunately we have an election coming up in two months.
Anecdotally I’m encountering a number of odd incidents of people being tetchy very recently. Surely this is a sign of stress in the population? Have you noticed anything unusual like that in your part of the world?
Cheers
Chris
JMG, I think your prediction of the eventual collapse of the Higher Education Industrial Complex is about to ramp up. Here is a news article about a mid tier private catholic university losing a record number of students who they thought had committed and paid deposits for the fall. The shortfall is so significant that it is throwing their budget in to chaos. It seems that in the last few months students and their families have figured out that they might be better off not going in to debt for a degree of marginal value, or their financial prospects have gone upside down, or the same thing is happening further up the food chain , and they were offered spots in a more prestigious school ( who also had a shortfall) for the same or equal money. Look for more of this same story popping up around the country this fall.
https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2022/08/record-number-of-students-withdraw-from-university-of-portland-contributing-to-134m-shortfall.html
I hope our Host will allow me to post James Howard Kunstler’s Blog post from today in its entirety because I believe it fits in so well with our discussion of the Clerisy and what government, academics and false intellects have become. [snip]
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/soul-man/
[Ahem. Please don’t post entire blog posts here as comments! A simple link is preferable. — JMG]
JMG and commentariat,
Matt Taibbi has recently started collecting underreported news stories from his Twitter audience every week, and covers a few of them as “America This Week” in his substack.
Like for example, I found that farmers in both Germany and Serbia are protesting against the climate policies of their governments.
https://twitter.com/RadioGenova/status/1559236518610345984
https://twitter.com/RadioGenova/status/1559608913389096961
Check it out every week if you want. Oh, and to save you time, I have created this URL that will search the words “news” and “week” from his tweets. Just paste it on your browser.
https://twitter.com/search?q=news%20week%20(from%3Amtaibbi)&src=typed_query&f=live
We here in Jackson, Mississippi, are all big fans of JMG, so we have decided to take his advice to heart and go ahead and “Collapse now, before the rush”.
So any readers of this blog are more than welcome to come here to “See the city of the future, today!”
“Damaged due to the vaccine” – A documentary from a major german TV channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIfRSobbJEw
(didn’t watch it)
That surprises me.
My take on the “Clerisy” is that they are the PMC of the PMC. Most of us have met them ,in some form. *eyes “TED Talks”
This phrase in your article had me thinking, always a dangerous thing.
” “Every disaster movie begins with politicians ignoring warnings from scientists.” Granted, but the people waving those signs apparently haven’t noticed that those movies are fiction. In the real world, how many of those much-ballyhooed disasters actually happened? ”
I think we have a problem of scale. In engineering there is a thing called a Process Hazard Analysis where you systematically go through the plant pipe by pipe, tank by tank, circuit by circuit figuring out what can go wrong and how to either prevent or contain any given failure. It’s exacting and tedious and quite effective. But it’s limited in that there are always new failure modes out there, and the rules are quite explicit in that you assume only one thing goes wrong at a time. (Note: nuclear plants go through the same process but are not limited to one thing going wrong at a time.)
If you go through the Chemical Safety Board videos, and lots of them are on Youtube, you see that single point failures are rare, usually multiple things have to go wrong at once to wreck a chemical plant. So the system does work. One of the things they teach plant operators early is to not try to evade or override the safety system. Let the system function, then see what is left after the excitement stops, and recover from there. It’s hard to teach people to do that, the instinct is to dive in and rescue it. From back in my mining days conveyors have a bad habit of eating people who are trying to clear jams. The belt would grab the shovel and the operator would hold on tighter trying to get the shovel back and be dragged into the conveyor. You have to fight your instincts to let the shovel go. (If the conveyor wants your shovel, let it have it, shovels are cheaper than arms.)
But back to PHA, I’m not certain this process scales up to regional or planetary levels. If you don’t fully understand the feedbacks built into system you are guessing way too much. There are infinite paths to DOOM out there, and the news media is willing to hype any and all of them for a dollar, but most of them damp out and many of the rest can be designed out.
Remember the year 2K panic? When nothing happened many people thought it was all a scam. Part off it was, but a large part of it was prevented by people realizing they had a system at risk and fixing it beforehand.
Hello Rita;
Phonics vs Look-say, or as I call it shape recognition. The problem seems to be the education system’s stubborn refusal to admit that different children learn in different ways. Phonics works for some, and not for others. The same applies to shape recognition. Playing flash cards with my daughter in kindergarten it was obvious she was going by the shapes of words, from and form consistently confused her. Elephant she never missed.
In the third grade at a parent teacher conference the teacher (who was a good one) told me that my daughter was having trouble reading aloud in class, but had very high comprehension scores. I had to explain to the teacher that she was reading the way I do, by the shapes of the words. They were never sounded out in her brain. The next day my daughter asked what I had said as they had moved her up a level in reading. They decided to go by the comprehension scores, not the verbal. That is rhetoric or oration, not reading.
JMG,
Ouch. I think both the American and Polish governments must be reading you and acting on what you write – immediately. 🤔
> https://www.teslahungerstrike.com/
I find it interesting instead of banding together to fix some of these problems or reverse engineer the parts and systems (like BMW owners are fond of doing), they want to shout at Tesla until Tesla does something.
What’s that phrase I’ve heard before? Learned helplessness?
>a mid tier private catholic university losing a record number of students and they were offered spots in a more prestigious school
I guess competition is a good thing. I would feel sorry for the unis, except they have almost as much of a car dealer mentality as the hospitals do. They mark up their tuition by insane margins, just to see if there’s anyone out there who will pay it and then they offer all sorts of “discounts” if you start objecting to the sticker price. In any case, I guess uni tuition will be priced at what it’s worth to the people paying for it. Eventually.
It says something when car dealers are the more honest entities out there. Something not good at all.
@Denis
“When I’ve been pushed, I remind people that 40-50% of the adults in the country aren’t even registered to vote. If they want to make real change and do it democratically, then getting everyone involved is step 1. That always shuts them up.”
As Sarah Hoyt once said on her blog, “Let’s hope it’s never required that the majority of the people be THAT well informed.” https://accordingtohoyt.com/2013/03/14/a-state-of-ignorance-and-an-ignorance-of-state/
[Ahem. Please don’t post entire blog posts here as comments! A simple link is preferable. — JMG]
Yeah I was thinking of doing that but I wasn’t sure about how you felt about the naughty word in the link. So that’s why I did the whole post, sorry. 🙂
Booklover#155:
Here there is a reference to German minister…that she did’t said but she would have said (si non e vero e bene trovato).
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHC3gfYpy2Rp2r8A6K-IZM-nprMv-wPrYWzVfZZuxlNtpTEZNWaZdM_s8kZRnuqw7AlpIyWCqFtIT61h9eeMzvQkheEGK1JyDjuil2OCci5yg2CMkCFhlSd9yei_CuhA4pQS7y_BWTs7IKWHQXwFq-wqYEP4k-jIsWAX5BCcjnqawoft69Uca-e0YX7A/s534/390c318dd76871da4cda61ef79652dbd.png
Some lies tells more that the supposed truths about a person.
Is it possible to earn a modest living from herbalism without selling out? I’m curious how herbalists did this in the 1970s and 80s, I’m not old enough to remember.
I’ve been learning the basics of it primarily to handle some basic health care for myself and family, but as I’ve grown more interested in it I’ve started to wonder if I could eventually turn it into a side gig. Especially because the health care system in my country is increasingly coming under strain.
However I also notice with some discomfort all the certification programs (of seemingly very mixed quality) and expensive herbal supplements in shops.
@Stuart Jeffery
I understand your desire for everyone to be polite. With regards to Covid and the vaccines, I think that time, for me at least, is gone. They crushed any dissent throughout 2020 and 2021. People I thought were friends called me an idiot for relying on “horse paste” instead of vaccines.
Our leaders knew that Covid was a nothingburger in March of 2020 with the Diamond Princess cruise ship. It was a perfect control group and 80% of the passengers were automatically immune. That critical fact was ignored.
Dr Birx admits in her book that the lockdowns were arbitrary and went against policy. Dr Fauci’s first phone call after he heard about Covid was to the Wellcome Trust in the UK. Why? We don’t know.
How many lives could have been saved with simple drugs like Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin? They manipulated everything to push untested vaccines. How many will die from the vaccines?
I cannot give the powers who have been in charge of this mess even a tiniest bit of the benefit of the doubt. They lied to us. If anyone in the media wants to have a conversation, they should have let the dissenters speak in 2020.
All that said, I wish you the very best and hope that my comments do not come across as hostile towards you personally.
Hi John,
I know this is a wee bit off-topic, but what is going on with Founder’s House? I noticed a couple of days ago that the original Weird of Hali series (Innsmouth > Arkham) is no longer available on their website. Indeed, it appears all references to them have been erased. The later spinoffs are still available, though, as are the other books of yours they have published. Likewise, when I checked out several major book chain and e-commerce sites (Barnes & Noble, Thriftbooks, Mal-Wart, the Big Slimy River, etc), all them have the books from the series listed as out of stock or unavailable, or they no longer show up at all with the relevant webpages deleted.
Brian,
I’m in Canada, and the things you mentioned as working quite well outside the USA, aren’t working that well here.
We may have ‘free’ healthcare, but if you don’t have a family doctor already you aren’t going to find one in my area, Emergency at the hospital has huge wait times if you get seen at all, and the walk-in Clinics now mostly aren’t. You phone in, get an appointment for some time later that day if you call in early enough, if not, try another clinic, and if you’ve left it too late forget it till tomorrow or go to overwhelmed Emergency and hope they aren’t too busy to see you that day. If they’re open. In some communities Emergency departments wound up closing because they can’t find staff. And there are people dying in small communities without a first responder getting to them because the town’s one ambulance was in another community 40 minutes away seeing to another emergency.
Transit… mostly okay in cities, though not nearly as good as Europe or the UK. But there’s very little in small towns and often none in rural areas.
Urban planning… we have serious problems with sprawl around most cities, housing affordability is completely messed up in my province and is rendering people homeless and/or forcing them to leave cities (plenty of people can’t afford the rents now being charged, let alone buy a home in my city). And rents in small towns have skyrocketed now, too, so you can only get limited relief by leaving, and if you don’t have a car you don’t have decent transport in your new home, and if you need an ambulance, well see above…
And a lot of these small interior towns are being threatened by wildfires caused partly by climate and partly by bad forestry policies. 90% of the structures in Lytton burned to the ground last year, and it was threatened by another forest fire in the area that didn’t burn this year.
Public education, you say? It isn’t as bad as the USA, but the tertiary education system produces way more people than there are jobs for those specialties so you end up with lots of people with degrees with McJobs and debts to pay off the degree they can’t use.
So no, this isn’t just a US problem.
And what I’ve been hearing about the UK’s energy issues from the media and my relatives who live in the UK is also severely not fun. And it’s all across western Europe, not just the UK or Germany.
Dysfunctional clerisy making messes is definitely NOT just a US problem.
Speaking of Poland and a hypothetical blitzkrieg against Germany, the Polish military is arming up in a huge way, with massive orders of state of the art hardware from the US and South Korea. The Polish Army recently announced they are buying 500 M142 HIMARS rocket artillery systems and 250 M1A2 SEP v3 main battle tanks from the US, as well as 116 older model M1 Abrams from US Army stockpiles.
They are also acquiring 48 FA-50 fighter bombers, 1000 K2 Black Panther MBT’s (probably the world’s most advanced tanks currently in service) and 836 K9 Thunder 155mm self-propelled howitzers (Probably the most capable tube artillery system currently in service with any country) from South Korea. The initial batches are being bought outright, while the remainder will be built under license.
To paraphrase George R.R. Martin, winter is coming…
I think this JP Sears bit is spot-on this week. It includes a clip from mainstream TV news. The messaging and seriousness of the presentation is unbelievable.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F74iqEJnb14
For those who don’t do video, the punchline is that “Unknown Causes” (yes, you read that right) was the leading cause of death in Alberta last year.
Having grown up with TV news but not having actually watched it for a few years, I found it quite hilarious to hear the anchorlady in the clip proclaim in that polished and self-important newscaster voice, “Unknown Causes was the leading cause of death in Alberta last year.”
How can these folks continue to take themselves seriously?
Chuaquin, thanks for the link! It will be interesting to watch how German politics go this winter.
re emergency departments closing, I mis-wrote. I didn’t mean all the time closing. I meant closed on weekends for lack of staff.
Mark, er, that seems like a very strange way to try to deal with the situation. Do they think Musk cares?
Rita, the reason the education industry is hostile to phonics is quite simple. Children vary sharply in the age at which they’re ready to learn to read. In a given class of first-graders, some will be ready to hit the ground running, some will be just ready to totter, and some won’t be ready at all and would be better left to do other things for a couple of years before they start learning to read. Our education system can’t handle that. It insists that every child must learn the same things at the same time. Whole-language methods allow them to fake that, by holding back the ones who are ready (if you learn via the whole-language method, remember, you can only read those words your teacher has taught you) and allowing those who aren’t to stumble along by brute force memorization. So the fact that phonics works much better than whole-language methods doesn’t matter to the education industry — what matters is its fixation on forcing children to conform to a rigid schedule of learning.
Ray, interesting. Commentary indeed…
Stuart, if you’d simply objected to Johnson’s policies I would have had no complaints. If you’re going to trot out the usual tired insults about his pants, however, don’t be surprised if I call you on it. As for “elitism” in some vague general sense, that’s not what I’m talking about in this post, you know.
Lunar, that may indeed be a very good thing. As this unfolds, you may end up facing a lot of “yeah, he’s a physician, but he lost his job because he refused to get vaxxed, so he’s good.”
Bogatyr, yes, I noticed that. I wonder if the Poles found out just how useless the Bundeswehr’s rifles and cannons are, and are starting to consider how much better off they might be if their western border was to shift, say, to the Elbe…
Booklover, that is to say, they’re frantically backpedaling. I’ve heard from a lot of other European readers, btw, that most of the people they know are serenely convinced that nothing serious can actually happen to them. It’s a fascinating state of mind, and it’ll be interesting to watch how they deal with the next year or so of events.
Denis, that was a great example, wasn’t it? I’m glad to report that the meme battalions are already hard at work making merry mock of him:
Rick, starting a garden now is a very good idea — now’s the time to get the beds double-dug and get as much organic matter in them as possible, so that you can get a few quick fall crops, overwinter if your climate permits it, and hit the ground running in spring.
Brian, I have quite a few readers in other countries, and to judge by what many of them are saying, no, the clerisy-based system is not necessarily working well at all. It does seem to depend on where you are, to be sure, but most of Europe is bracing itself for a miserable winter because the clerisy insisted on a green energy transition that didn’t work, on top of economic troubles because the clerisy insisted on globalization that didn’t work either — and there’s also the Covid vaccines, and rates of excess mortality that are rising steadily all through the parts of the world where the clerisy got their way and vaccine mandates were imposed…
Aurelien, these are excellent points. Thank you!
Jasmine, they’re the same thing; I simply decided to introduce a useful word not many of my readers may have known. Sorry for the confusion!
David BTL, the US has been doing that for years. You’re right, though, that sooner or later the UN will relocate — if I had to guess, I’d say it will end up in Singapore or somewhere not too far from that — and the US will be in an interesting fix.
Chris, interesting — we also have an election in two months, and to judge by the flailings of the party in power here, it could be quite colorful. It’ll be interesting to compare notes once the votes are counted. Yes, people are acting very stressed and irrational here too — Joe Biden, for example.
Clay, thanks for this! The sooner the current higher “education” system crashes and burns, the sooner we can rebuild something that, you know, actually teaches something.
Collapsenik, good for Matt Taibbi! By the time this is over, he may be the CEO of a news company far bigger and more influential than CNN. (Of course by that time CNN may consist of a single blogger ranting weekly to an audience of fifteen or twenty diehard readers…)
Dashui, are you actually in Jackson? If so, how accurate are the media articles?
Curt, good heavens. The narrative isn’t merely cracking, it’s snapped.
Marlena13, a case could be made!
Siliconguy, fair enough. I may just be sour because I watched so many people in the sciences breezily dismiss the consequences of peak oil back when there was still time to do something about it.
@marlena13
My friend has often called Ted Talks and books along the lines of Malcolm Gladwell as, “Self help books for intellectuals.” Thanks to you, I see them exactly as what they are: metaphysical reinforcement for the PMC. Thanks!
“The sooner the current higher “education” system crashes and burns, the sooner we can rebuild something that, you know, actually teaches something.”
I think the entire education system needs to crash and burn so we can rebuild it. I remember back in the early 90’s I went with friends to St Augustine, Florida and we went to the historic center. While I was there I visited a school from the late 1800’s to early 1900’s. The school was basically a tent with dirt as the floor and the kids used chalkboards the size of an iPad to learn from as they would use to learn math and other things.
Even back when I went to High School, I learned a trade for free which now costs tens of thousands of dollars. In the 70’s school was still a place to learn reading, writing and arithmetic. Today it’s more about Woke Studies and Common Core. Funny that kids from India or China still seem to excel in the basics we used to excel in.
Oh, and I’ve seen reports that Poland is negotiating with South Korea to buy several hundred K239 Chunmoo modular MLRS (K239 is the ROK equivalent of the American HIMARS, Chinese SR5 and the Russian Tornado series), and as many as 160 KF-21 Boramae stealth fighters. Again, these are state of the art weapons systems that are at least equal to their American, Russian and Chinese equivalents. It looks to me like the Poles are clearly preparing for war. The only question is, against who?
Hey Booklover, JMG about Baerbock: I though it couldn’t get even more bizarre but then there are articles like this one in “Die Welt”: https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article240836825/Propaganda-Kampagne-gegen-Baerbock-wohl-von-prorussischen-Accounts-angestiftet.html
They claim that Russia has cut Baerbocks speech in a way that distorts her message and uses this to drive a campaign against her. Well, luckily you can watch the whole unedited show on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78-_Ou5sH3k
At 1:23 Baerbock starts talking and she couldn’t be more clear in that she really doesn’t care what “her voters” think. To claim that the abbreviated version of her talk would distort the fact is in itself a distortion of facts that is truly astonishing.
Many have already pointed out that Baerbock should try to remember (and I would add that she’d need some hours of meditaion to understand) what she has sworn last year: “Ich schwöre, dass ich meine Kraft dem Wohle des deutschen Volkes widmen, seinen Nutzen mehren, Schaden von ihm wenden, das Grundgesetz und die Gesetze des Bundes wahren und verteidigen, meine Pflichten gewissenhaft erfüllen und Gerechtigkeit gegen jedermann üben werde.”
In the meantime Russia has stopped the operation of Nord Stream 1 and while the G7 are planning their great oil price cap, Russia has declared that they won’t deliver crude or natural gas to countries that take part in this measure, which should (at least theoretically) surprise nobody.
That our society would crash (or decline, for that matter) was clear to me for quite some time and your writings, JMG, helped me a lot to figure out why I had this gut feeling. But I admit that for a long time I didn’t expect to see what looks like a planned demolition. It’s very sad and you’re right Booklover, that most people don’t seem to realize just what an even moderately bad scenario might mean for our society. The worse scenarios (which might easily happen if we get a very cold and long winter) might truly mark the end of the society we used to live in until 2019. But we’ll see.
Greetings,
Nachtgurke
@Stuart (if I may)
“…[the lockdowns] prevented the NHS from being completely overwhelmed that was a choice and one that I think was the right choice”
Unfortunately there is precisely zero evidence for that which doesn’t emanate from the orifice of some clerisy-sponsored think-tank tasked with upholding the Current Thing. Lockdowns have consistently shown to have no measurable effect on the spread of covid – see the Faroe Islands for just one example. No mandates, and an infection and recovery rate comparable to pretty much anywhere else in the world.
Lockdowns are, however, extremely effective at (temporarily) providing a distraction from uncontrollable economic predicaments, shutting down smaller businesses in competition with major corporate players, and providing a pretext for authoritarian crackdowns in the anticipation of major civic unrest caused by said economic issues.
I concur with Jon Goddard, above. I fully endorse courtesy towards individuals, but the narrative that has been used as a pretext to stop the dying from seeing their families (in case they, I dunno, die quicker, or something); to destroy thousands of livelihoods in our country alone; to berate, traumatise, blackmail, and gaslight an entire population into following pointless and unscientific mandates that change with the wind; to manipulate and coerce *millions upon millions* of people into making what could be the worst decision of their entire lives… that narrative gets no gentle consideration from me.
That narrative is also crumbling quite steadily. My advice for those who insist on upholding even its most outdated tenets would be to introspect as to where your thoughts and ideas may be coming from. It might be rather startling to find that out 5 or 10 years down the line.
Charles Hugh Smith posted a really nice article on the “Global Energy Crunch”. People seem to gloss over that Green Energy is intermittent. Therefore you need a backup system and we don’t have enough rare earth materials which are finite to make the hundreds of million batteries to produce vehicles and such. So as the article points out, the wise course would be to use fossil fuels alongside green energy until a cheap and reliable energy source can be found. We have been chasing and searching for that all illusive cheap energy source which always appears to be 10-15 years out. Instead the power structure wants to shutdown fossil fuel use for good.
California is the future on how well that will work. California plans to ban gas vehicle sales starting in 2035. We are not there yet and California most recently pleaded with its customer to cutback on electricity demand during peak hours so they wouldn’t overload the system.
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-global-energy-crunch.html
JMG wrote
what matters is its fixation on forcing children to conform to a rigid schedule of learning.
Alvin Toffler pointed out back in the early 1970’s that the present American school system was to a great extent originally set up to train and socially condition young people to be good little factory workers. He noted that the socio-economic system schoolchildren were being groomed for was already on its way out by then, which has created a growing mismatch between the public school system and the real world, with huge numbers of young people being left ill-prepared to face the realities of life after they get out of school.
Re: Matt Taibbi’s “America This Week”:
I’m happy to see that he brought Walter Kirn on to do this new project with him. Kirn consistently has really thoughtful and useful observations on things.
And speaking of journalists adapting, I don’t think I’ve seen Breaking Points mentioned here? I commend anyone who’s avoiding the news altogether these days–but for anyone looking for a non-partisan mainstream news show, I recommend it. The co-hosts, Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, had a successful show on The Hill but decided to leap out of corporate media and go independent in 2020. Their mission is simply to report on and discuss the national news without corporate or partisan bias. She leans liberal and he conservative, though they’re both pretty centrist, and part of what they’re trying to do is re-establish that it’s possible for people who disagree on politics to discuss the facts and share ample common ground. They succeed–they’re both smart and discerning, they clearly respect and like one another, and 95% of the time they’re just laughing and agreeing. And their business seems to be thriving; as far as I can tell they’re still entirely subscriber-supported, and they’re already hiring more journalists and staff. That’s a great sign, I think!
Jonathan.
John, I may just try something to test that theory.
Rod, I don’t like Jim’s choice of language, but it’s kind of hard to reach his site without using his moniker!
Jbucks, yes, but you have to be very careful to stay within the laws. The medical industry loves nothing more than busting herbalists and other alternative health care providers for the “crime” of practicing medicine without a license. It helps if you have some kind of simple certification, and are very careful to get your clients to sign a paper acknowledging that you provide education only, having to do with herbal treatment of only those conditions for which a reasonably prudent person would use over-the-counter remedies.
Sardaukar, the seven volumes of the Weird are on their way to a new publisher, as I announced on my journal a little while back. I’d prefer not to discuss the reasons in a setting this public; I’ll just say that you can expect further announcements regarding my other novels.
Sardaukar, I’d heard that. It really does sound as though they’ve realized that the EU and the post-World War Two European peace are both circling the drain, and a certain amount of redefinition of borders in the old-fashioned way is on the agenda.
Blue Sun, they’re trapped. They can’t admit that the Covid vaccines are killing people by the cartload, but they can’t blame something else without running afoul of Canadian law, and just possibly what’s left of their own consciences. So they utter absurdities and try to make themselves believe that it will work out all right.
Rod, the public school system is already facing its Waterloo. Between a dramatic expansion in homeschooling, growing support for charter schools, and a tidal wave of angry and empowered parents running for school board positions and ousting the enablers of the status quo, we can expect a decade of convulsive change in public education in most US states.
Sardaukar, Poland has borders with Russia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Germany, and I could see it setting out to adjust its borders with any or all of them except the first — and even that might be an option if Russia ends up suffering a period of weakness, as it did not so long ago under Yeltsin. The Poles also have to consider the risk that any or all of those nations might decide to adjust borders in their own favor. That said, I still think the most likely target for Polish expansion is due west, since Germany is basically incapable of defending itself these days; the talk about reparations may be a first move in that direction. Maybe they could cut a deal with Austria, Denmark, and France to partition the country; Austria and Denmark still haven’t gotten back the territories that were taken from them in 1866 and 1864 respectively, and France has had its eye on everything west of the Rhine since the high Middle Ages.
Nachtgurke, fascinating. It seems to have occurred to them that there may be a little problem with Baerbock’s utterance.
Rod, yep. It’s going to be, er, colorful.
Sardaukar, Toffler had a lot of misses but that was one place where he scored a direct hit.
Jonathan, subscriber-supported media is increasingly the way to go. It cuts the middlemen and the clerisy out of the loop, so that reporters can say what they choose and audiences can support who they like. I’m glad to hear that Breaking Points is doing well.
JMG (no. 184) ” I wonder if the Poles found out just how useless the Bundeswehr’s rifles and cannons are, and are starting to consider how much better off they might be if their western border was to shift, say, to the Elbe…”
And how would that make them better off? It would ruin ties with their major economic partners, as well as with NATO. What are our goals here–a slightly bigger Poland? (Why?) A natural barrier against a very unlikely military invasion? Young people are primarily concerned about jobs, while far right groups focus on Catholicism and immigration. Polish expansionism isn’t on anybody’s radar, unless we count Polish support for Baltic, Belarussian, or Ukrainian nationalisms.
Sardaukar (no. 180) “…the Polish military is arming up in a huge way…”
Another possible explanation occurs to me.
jbucks (no. 176), the conflict you’re describing goes all the way back to the split between Thomsonians and Medical Eclectics in the early 19th c. Thomson hated doctors, while the Eclectics wanted to *be* doctors. (And chafed at the proprietary, franchised nature of Thomsonianism, which I guess points to one possible route to monetization.)
marlena13 (no. 168) “*eyes “TED Talks””
All kinds of people end up on those. I remember a female throat-singer and a remote-sensing guy. TED Talks is the PMC of Toastmasters!
Rita Rippetoe (no. 150) “So why have they [traditional Chinese markets] been permitted [in China] at all?”
They’re the normal way people buy their food! I recall that Singapore moved theirs indoors at some point, so they could regulate them more tightly (taxes, sanitation, etc.). But there’s always going to be a market.
@Rita #150:
German is halfway phonetic, or at least more so than English. I learned it from magnetic letters on a board, my brother and sisters from good old-fashioned letter training. My daughter learnt reading French (which to me is a formidable achievement!) and started writing French in her first grade using a very much letter-based methods – each letter (or diphthong) was an animal with its corresponding sound. In second and now in third grade, she is learning the finer aspects of writing based on sentence analysis – noun group etc. That is probably the only way to get the inaudible gender and number markers right in French. I also noticed a strong insistence in her second grade on “how-to” recipes for adding and subtracting over the 10 and 100 boundaries.
All of these are public schools.
I don’t count Portuguese because it is nearly perfectly phonetic – my daughter learnt reading it without even trying, just from being able to read French.
“Rod, yep. It’s going to be, er, colorful.”
Is it possible this could all accelerate the collapse of Western Civ and the fossil fuel era? I ask because I got to thinking, most people are beyond tapped out and yet the Clerisy wants it citizens to switch from a somewhat inexpensive source of energy to a more expensive form of energy i.e. Green Tech.
People don’t realize how expensive the upfront cost of an EV vehicle is. Then you add the cost of replacing the entire battery cell in just a basic EV can cost at minimum, $8000. Try paying that when you are already making car payments and you get hit with a bill like that. I could see people just walking away from their vehicles.
I did some auto repair work for a customer who was telling me how he got such a good deal on his Chevy Volt, in pristine condition with low miles. He went on to tell me that he had to replace the batteries and lucky for him it was under warranty. IIRC, the price for a new battery pack was something like $12-15K. Ouch!
It’s so much cheaper operating and “maintaining gas powered cars vs operating an EV. In a nutshell I just don’t see how Green Tech can work from an economic POV? Too expensive and not enough rare earth materials to build the quantities they need.
Yes, that might be true. It’s the usual “see, that was all misinformed disinformation fake by the evil guys”-move you can see so often.
One other thing: As Nord Stream 1 is now defunct and so are all other pipelines that might be used to transport Russian gas to Germany (except for Turkstream, I think) I wondered how could it be that our gas storages fill rather quickly. I had a speculation and now found confirmation in an article of the “Berliner Zeitung”, where the president of the BDI (Bund der Industrie) said that the gas consumption of the German industry has dropped by 21% in July which is the result of a “dramatic drop in production” and a “sign of a massive problem. The substance of German industry is threatened”. I think Germany and large parts of Europe are on the brink of a devastating chain reaction. The news get worse and worse every day.
Greetings,
Nachtgurke
Hi John Michael,
It’ll be interesting, that’s for sure. Down here, either the political opposition is getting little air time in the media, or possibly they’re ineffective – it’s hard to know. Strange times.
Anyway, a huge get together of unelected representatives have made some bold policy decisions recently for the country, which will probably come into play. Increase to working limits for pensioners as jobs summit ends.
Benefits for pensioners – tick
Increased migration – tick
Free technical skills education – tick
Not sure what to make of all that. You see there are genuine energy shortages such as with gas where demand will soon exceed supply. Of course idiotically, people are being encouraged to switch to electricity, yet the same mob are hell bent on shutting down coal fired power stations. 90% of our crude oil comes from overseas. And inflation is real, it’s a problem. Real wages are stagnating. Housing is very expensive and rentals are hard to get. So yeah, why not chuck a whole bunch more new people into the mix? What could possibly go wrong?
I had a little flash of insight recently. Over our history down here the country has moved from agriculture, to manufacturing, to construction (buildings and dwellings), and I suspect what with the way things are headed, we’ll return to agriculture. It’s not a difficult prediction.
The way it looks to me is that the numpties in charge are attempting to return to policies which got us into this mess after energy supplies had peaked – that’s when the policies began to fail. It’s kind of sad in a way, because it will push a lot of people into economic misery, a return to nostalgia might feel nice, but if it were possible, it would just be, but it ain’t.
I honestly don’t know what to make of it all.
Cheers
Chris
Booklover #155, Nachtgurke #188
I have in-laws in the Netherlands. I tried to convince them to get a couple things as insurance for this winter, just in case. A zero degree F rated sleeping bag (about -20 C) to spread over their bed at night if the power goes off. Some extra-warm clothes, like ski clothes, for daytime. And a little backpacking-type stove and a fuel cylinder, to make hot soup and coffee. That’s all.
Having lived in a car in the winter once, I know from personal experience these few items can keep you reasonably comfortable. It got down to 5F (-15 C) that winter. My water bottle froze solid. But I was fine.
It was a no-go. They are serenely convinced that because their apartment is all electric, the natural gas situation can’t affect them.
I didn’t even bother to mention an old-fashioned kerosene heater (they still make them) and a couple gallon jugs of kero to tuck away in the closet. If a sleeping bag is too much bother, the idea of having kerosene in the closet would make their heads explode.
>Between a dramatic expansion in homeschooling, growing support for charter schools, and a tidal wave of angry and empowered parents
JMG,
Ahem. You’re a writer, yes? I just had a thought. A small suggestion. Homeschooling is something I’ve been looking at for a few months now, it went from doubling every 10 years, down to doubling every 2.
Here’s the question. What would a homeschool curriculum look like – if written by an experienced occultist druid? What if there was a homeschool kit parents could buy that taught their kids all sorts of things? The fundamentalist christians have had quite the head start (*cough* Abeka *cough*), but there’s no reason there couldn’t be – alternatives.
Remember, it’s doubling every 2 years now and probably accelerating…
I do have a rhetorical question about Biden and MAGA. So if they’re opposed to Making America Great Again, what are they in favor of? Making America Mediocre Forever? Making Responsibility Shift Again?
And what ever happened to Build Back Better? It doesn’t seem like he’s too interested in building anything anymore, let alone better.
@Jon Goddard #185
You are most welcome
Glad it helped
They are very tricky and slick.
Further evidence that in Oz, the madness continues.
Here’s an example from QLD
https://youtu.be/DiaK3IUKnjw
Weather wise, we have a convergence of 3 climate systems this spring, including a 3rd La Niña, a negative Indian Ocean dipole, and one more emanating from the Antarctic region, sorry, I can’t remember the term.
Anyway much of the Eastern part of the continent is going to get drenched – even more – this Spring.
A lot of food and fibre is grown there, so it will be important to see how sowing and planting is affected.
Simon Sheridan, mentioned once on his blog, that Australia is the most bourgeois nation on Earth.
I think he’s correct and I think we are totally unprepared for the inevitable big economic and social shock that is coming.
In the meantime the fix is on to increase the immigration intake from 160, 000 to 200,000+ per annum.
Under the guise of ‘skilled migration’ but really for cheap labour. All those people delivering food on bikes and mopeds? They ain’t Aussies.
Also for the higher education racket and the property rackets.
Did I mention before that we are as good at graft and corruption as any other country?
I think there could be a lot of eruptions of anger, after all people here were getting into fights in the supermarket over the loo rolls…
Remember that?
Regards,
Helen in Oz
@pygmycory #179 @JMG
I think of it this way. There are concentric circles of institutional rot in the developed world. The U.S. is dead center. Everything seems to be failing all at once. Our “experts” are totally incompetent, in cahoots with bad actors to plunder the country, or both.
The ex-US Anglosphere countries compromise another ring. Things are certainly bad, but not Jackson, Mississippi bad! It’s more about an erosion of freedoms and trust in government, a decline in quality of service, but no one is going into medical bankruptcy or suffering death by carjacking because of flawed ivory tower criminal justice theories.
The EU is a third ring. Clearly, there’s major stress. France and Italy have trouble with migrants and entrenched bureaucracy. The quality of life is still world class in places like Germany and the Netherlands, but their energy policy is sabotaging it. By and large, however, things work in 2022 much like they did in 1982. Certainly not “dynamic” societies by American standards, but perhaps that’s been a bulwark against institutional decline, along with the language barrier that prevents our worst ideas from spreading easily.
East Asia is another galaxy culturally so hard to compare. However, Singapore is maybe the ultimate clerisy run society. Say what you will, but it’s a marvel in person. I never heard anyone gush with genuine pride about their government until I met Singaporeans. Of course, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are futuristic as well. They clearly have best in class experts. Too bad petroleum is a finite resource and 2/3rds of the world’s population lives in Asia, dependent on said petroleum. Oh man. We’ll see how they handle it. I wish them the best.
As for Covid and the vax, I see that as a unique event. I don’t see it as some kind of canonical example that proves listening to people with deep expertise is flawed in of itself. For example, the authorities in Sweden were pretty on the mark about Covid policy. In hindsight, the best policy was probably no policy (e.g. Africa) but it is what it is.
Just watched the pilot episode of the new Lord of the Rings series with my family, mostly out of curiosity and because I do like the books (including Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales and other sources that were used for this episode).
What struck me was the constant harping on the issue of the Elves wanting to leave Middle-earth and go “home” because the enemy was declared to have been defeated for ever, when of course he hadn’t been. Now 500 Second Age is not much fleshed out in Tolkien’s writings, even in “Galadriel and Celeborn”, so the writers had much leeway.
Still, this spin on things seems to me to against a very constant theme in all of Tolkien’s writings: meddling in the affairs of far-off lands is always a bad idea. The Valar bringing the Eldar to Valinor did not do them any favour; the Numenorëans getting involved in Middle-earth (even though my name-sake meant well) proved in the end to be their undoing; the motive of Galadriel for staying in Middle-earth is described as pride, not as a sense of duty.
The episode had one setting that reminded me strongly of American soldiers getting involved in Germay after the war. Do I feel in this episode a subconscious appeal not to abandon the American military bases around the world?
PS: Why are there so many blond elves in the movies, when the Noldor and Teleri weren’t?
You mentioned Obamacare once again in this post, and for good reason, to my way of thinking. Do you believe that Obamacare may have been the proverbial straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back that turned a lot of formerly neutral people against the clerisy? I’m wondering because when my best friend from high school and I discussed the 2016 election on Facebook-chat the following morning, he said to me that he had been telling people that if Trump won, it would be because of Obamacare. “It [Obamacare] really is horrible, you know,” he said.
Bei, consider the possibility that the EU is going to pieces and Poland’s “major allies” are going to be its future enemies, just as they have been for most of European history. Economic power in the deindustrial era will depend, as it did in the preindustrial era, on control of farmland, natural resources, transport corridors, and population; a Greater Poland that included the former DDR would be a much stronger nation, capable of enforcing its will on much of Europe and warding off potential threats from Russia.
Rod, yes, it could. It’s by no means certain yet, but there’s a very real possibility that we’re about to hit one of those sharp downward lurches I’ve talked about so often, in which catabolic collapse bites down hard and a lot of things go by the boards in a hurry.
Nachtgurke, ouch! That implies that German industry is basically in depression-era conditions. If that continues I wonder how long the country can keep supporting its social welfare system.
Chris, many thanks for the data points. It sounds to me as though the numpties in question have no clue what’s happening and are simply flailing around trying to come up with something that sounds good.
Owen, I’ll put some thought into it. The short form is that it would start by focusing on three sets of basic skills — literacy (including grammar, logic, literature, and writing), numeracy (primarily arithmetic and geometry but also including other forms of quantitative thinking), and naturacy (ecological literacy, including knowledge of the local ecosystem and knowledge of the processes that maintain life on earth). It would pay close attention to readiness factors in the individual child — some kids are ready to read at age three, for example, while some aren’t ready until eight or nine — and it would encourage the child to follow his or her interests, while still making sure that he or she becomes familiar with the skills just listed and the cultural heritage of his or her nation and region, as well as the world at large. As for your rhetorical question, I suspect Build Back Better has gone by the boards, and the only thing that matters is trying to stave off a GOP victory large enough to make impeachment trials an option.
Helen, definitely a wild ride. Hang on tight!
Brian, so noted. We’ll see how it plays out.
Aldarion, well, of course! If they listened to Tolkien and talked about why getting involved in foreign wars was a bad idea, what would happen to support for the US empire?
Mister N, I know a lot of former Democrats in particular for whom it was the final straw, so I think you’re probably right.
I realized that there’s an established word for the religion of progress – its humanism. Literally worship of (educated) humans. And the words humane and inhumane for humanists carry the same meaning as christian and unchristian for Christians.
Anyway, JMG, did you enjoy president Brandon’s speech from he’ll? Many believe he crossed a line there.
@JMG #207:
“It would pay close attention to readiness factors in the individual child — some kids are ready to read at age three, for example, while some aren’t ready until eight or nine”
Reading this, I suddenly had an epiphany (though quite possibly already obvious to many people here) about the classic one-room schoolhouse. Previously, I’d not thought about it much, which appears to have left me with the conventional view that the only reason all the students were mixed together was there not being the resources available to properly separate them out, and obviously it was better to separate and stratify instruction by age.
_But_, if all the students are mixed together, with no separate and standardized grade levels… then there’s no being ahead of the grade, or behind, and facing problems either way. The students who learn different things at different rates… just learn those things at different rates, and the teacher, who without grade levels is already dealing with students at drastically different levels of education anyway, just works with that.
…Like I said, it seems obvious in retrospect, but I don’t think I’d realized it before.
What a difference from the teacher basically being an assembly line worker, who sees students arrive at their station, performs operations X, Y, and Z on them, and then sees the line move them to the next while brining in a fresh lot… with any parts that didn’t fit the line process well enough either getting tossed in the discard bin, maintaining “product” quality at the cost of decreasing volume and, of course, the welfare of the discarded people, or lowering the quality of the “product” if QC puts the mishandled “products” through anyway.
Brian, if the Singaporeans you met live/travel abroad, they are generally well-off and those that benefited from the government’s policies. That’s why they would generally be satisfied with the government. If you ever visit and talk day-to-day with people, you’ll find a range of opinions.
I am a Singaporean, I have to credit where it’s due, Singapore has developed a lot since independence. At the same time, society is stifling, no real, effective political opposition exists, and generally most of the educated classes, if they oppose the government, would support policies more in line with wokeism.
I somehow doubt that Singapore would welcome the UN, on some issues, for better or worse, the dominant party here, the PAP, is opposed to liberal/woke policies. The political axes are just different from those in the West.
JMG – In her awkward speech Baerbock also said “we will help you with social measures” towards her neglected voters that are about to not being able to pay their energy bills. I have stopped counting just how often I hear sentences like this these days… Basically it means giving something for nothing with no more material wealth behind it to back it up. “Getting something for nothing” is a common theme on Magic Mondays and I think in mundane settings the consequences will be similar… Usually it’s banks and big companies that get the states “money for nothing”. When they are willing to give it to the average people (like they already did during the last two years), things must be really bad. I don’t know if you read the German substacker eugyppius but he has written a few thoughtful pieces about how bureaucracies turn “evil” and dysfunctional. I find this highly related to your thoughts on “living in abstractions” and decline in general as it seems to provide a more in-detail mechanism. In case you are interested:
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/stupid-and-evil-in-equal-measures
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/government-by-vampire-zombie-squid
Greetings,
Nachtgurke
Mother Balance – Thanks for this. Yes, with my relatives it is the same. My sister and parents live in an urban region and I warned them several times to make preparations like the one you suggested. My sisters words were “No, I’m not ready to think such thoughts”. My mother a least says “I know you’re right (but your father doesn’t want to to anything)”.
Greetings,
Nachtgurke
Nachtgurke, JMG, I have read somewhere (I don’t know where) that Germany buys Russian gas from the Chinese, who of course mark it up in price. This is only one of many examples of schizophrenic behavior in Germany and the Western world .
I myself have largely retreated from society, because the Covid panic took a toll on people; there are not as many events as in the pre-Covid days and the mood has become rather somber and subdued. Public events are simply not that interesting any more. I have heard from a friend who regularly visits church services that quite a few people, which she once met there, have completely retreated from society as a consequence of Covid.
About Poland invading anyone, I thought the same thing as you described: these are things which would rather happen after the dissolution of the EU, so it is not an immediate issue, but something to watch out for (as is, of course, the possibility of German rearmament). Maybe they have set their eyes instead on parts of Ukraine, which has the real possibility of becoming a failed state. Since Germany has in the EU the function of a quasi-imperial center on a smaller scale than the United States, the lessons which one can learn from history for imperial decline can be applied there also.
About learning to read and write in German, I can second that the method used in the primary school where I was was based on letters and their sound values.
Addendum: The background of the Forum 2000 in one of the pictures taken of Annalena Baerbock during her speech at first sight looks like a series of white skulls on blue background.
“I know a lot of former Democrats in particular for whom it was the final straw, so I think you’re probably right.”
And you want to know the irony of it all? It was the opposition of the same Clerisy who voted to keep it in. Republicans and Trump campaigned on eliminating Obamacare and to his credit Trump did remove the tax penalty if you refused coverage. It was Justice Roberts, a Republican who helped save Obamacare. IIRC, it was John McCain who voted to keep it in after Trump was elected because supposedly his State of Arizona would lose Federal funding if Obamacare was eliminated.
I like to say that to me, the two party system is nothing more than two sides of the same coin, good cop vs bad cop.
@Owen and @JMG homeschooling curriculum with an occult basis – We used an excellent Christian curriculum called Tapestry of Grace. It’s hard to explain because there is nothing else like it. It follows the classical model of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric and relies on both oral and written work by the student to show proficiency. For high school student (rhetoric) there is a philosophy track and a government track which covers the fundamentals of western civilization. It’s structures so a parent can teach all the kids the same topic at once but to their level. It also uses real books through out and no textbooks. We loved it. It filled in so many holes in my own education as we cycled through it. The overview is here https://tapestryofgrace.com/explore-tapestry/
An occultist in a hurry to homeschool could certainly use this as a basis and swap out the religious mentions. But it doesn’t hurt to learn the Christian basis and influence on the modern world either, of course.
@Jeff in the Bluff (which my autocorrect turned to “buff”) That Sarah Hoyt post from 2013 is such a quaint relic. I just read Writing on the Wall by Tom Standage (also published 2013) which had a similar view that political debate can managed, tech is great because it allows for wide ranging conversation that can’t be had in the media, and thank goodness we don’t live in an authoritarian society.
My how times have changed in the past 10 years!
She said “Pray. Pray very constantly that the crash isn’t bad enough to wake the rest of the people. PRAY that there is never a state of affairs where your survival depends on almost everyone knowing the constitution and being able to tell you if they’re for or against each amendment.
Because that will mean a state of unimaginable chaos and fear and possibly a tri-or-four part civil war.”
This is exactly where we are now at. I was told by a colleague last week that “most people in our field are liberals and this is a good thing” to which I responded “is it?” and laughed. Then I added “most people just say what is necessary to go along and the majority don’t vote.” But my colleague signaled something I’ve been feeling the past three years – if you don’t believe what we believe, you aren’t welcome here. We’ve had vaccine mandates – still today! – that keep me from doing my full work. Right now I can go to people but I could see ways that it gets closed off.
I also told my colleague that people are voting in fear of that other team will hurt them if they get elected. It’s all that is discussed in the media and it’s sad. There’s no discussion of what is best for the country or the people who live here. Sad! It got her to nod silently and I don’t know if I broke the spell she is under or now. Perhaps I’m more on the shale list now.
@JMG
I looked a bit into the content of the documentary(reminder for the others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIfRSobbJEw unfortunately only available in German)
– just som snapshots I watched (I dislike watching video as much as you do). The content is really heavy! Young people report immense complications up to real disability and talk about the pain of being belittled when speaking out.
A spiritual friend consulted a medium, last year I think. She also said that this vaccine is a spiritual problem for many. Maybe I’d get a chance to contact that woman as well.
In an ideal case, my friend and me will start doing energetic exercises a little in the upcoming weeks – to protect from the immensely negative atmosphere the big city around us has.
As we are both c vaccinated, let’s see how this will play out.
I think you recommended leaving the big cities for small towns. It makes sense to me. The country side has the problem of transportation, I am not a car guy (though I still own one).
I intend to wait and watch this upcoming winter – I am sufficiently prepared for it here in the big city – and hopefully thereafter, I can start to leave this sickening moloch.
regards to you and all the commentariat, and thanks for the guidance.
Slightly off-piste but I thought a poem would be nice:
When you destroy a blade of grass
You poison England at her roots:
Remember no man’s foot can pass
Where evermore no green life shoots.
You force the birds to wing too high
Where your unnatural vapours creep:
Surely the living rocks shall die
When birds no rightful distance keep.
You have brought down the firmament
And yet no heaven is more near;
You shape huge deeds without event,
And half-made men believe and fear.
Your worship is your furnaces,
Which, like old idols, lost obscenes,
Have molten bowels; your vision is
Machines for making more machines.
O, you are busied in the night,
Preparing destinies of rust;
Iron misused must turn to blight
And dwindle to a tetter’d crust.
The grass, forerunner of life, has gone,
But plants that spring in ruins and shards
Attend until your dream is done:
I have seen hemlock in your yards.
The generations of the worm
Know not your loads piled on their soil;
Their knotted ganglions shall wax firm
Till your strong flagstones heave and toil.
When the old hollow’d earth is crack’d,
And when, to grasp more power and feasts,
Its ores are emptied, wasted, lack’d,
The middens of your burning beasts
Shall be raked over till they yield
Last priceless slags for fashioning high,
Ploughs to wake grass in every field,
Chisels men’s hands to magnify.
– Gordon Bottomley.
This is a real ( for whatever that is worth these days) newspaper article on the plans of the Oregon Education Department for New High school graduation requirements. It is not ” The Onion”, or Mad magazine. A quick tidbit, reducing requirements for math and reading and introducing requirements for ” resume writing”. Things are starting to move downhill quickly in the education arena.
https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2022/09/oregon-should-make-high-school-diplomas-easier-to-earn-require-a-financial-literacy-course-education-department-says.html
this article from last week’s NYTimes on psychiatric drugs may be of interest. ‘A generation of guinea pigs’
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/27/health/teens-psychiatric-drugs.html
So the revelation that the foundation of SSRI based drugs is built on fraudulent research seems to be unravelling a good bit of credibility as well. I suspect that the revelation of the fraudulent research is going to cause a good bit of placebo effect to unravel for many. I may have witnessed this personally. In the past my ex-boss inadvertently disclosed that he is on a cocktail of SSRI drugs. In the past couple of weeks he began behaving very erratically. He called me out of the blue unscheduled and was rambling about ‘respect’ and ‘security and safety’ in our workplace. (Our crew was 100% remote and spread all over the country.) His voice was cracking. I asked him what was going on specifically and he did not say anything, then hung up. Then yesterday we had a daily morning call and he closed the call by rambling about getting away from the toxicity of the work and spending time with family, before dismissing everyone for the day. keep in mind this is the day before our product launch and there are a lot of things to tidy up. Then at lunch a couple of us were abruptly let go. Idk. It seemed to me like a mental episode that follows what many have described in their pharmaceutical misadventure. Made me wonder if the sudden reveal that everything people have been told for 20 years about the SSRI science being bull**** is causing some issues for people. (Don’t feel bad for me – in my work I take 6-12 month contracts and this one was coming to a close in a couple weeks anyway.)
Thank you for these. I’ve had a couple of days to chew on the meaty arguments and your writing seems to sum up ideas I’ve long understood in a visceral, non-verbal way, viz.,
– That the ascendancy of the intelligentsia over the course of the 20th Century has been the cause of most of the problems and issues in the world that purportedly deeply concern the intelligentsia and by extension, must perforce be of concern to the rest of humanity, like the effects of extremely rapid climate change and the hyper-extraction of viable resources because the intelligentsia were clever enough to make up policies and had the hubris to act on them, but were disconnected from the basic wisdom to foresee all the ramifications of those policies.
– That the qualification creep that basically kept me, personally, and a very large number of smart, but not book-smart, people from positions of authority is an aspect of this ascendancy. The Clerisy (which is a much more poetic and lyrical term than Professional Managerial Class) declared that expensive university degrees are the sine qua non of all well-paid jobs. Jobs which used to require no more academic skills than being able to read and write and learn by experience to do them. Clerical jobs, supervisor jobs on an assembly line, how to manage people: mere experience and ability is no longer considered, just a paper from an official institution. This has had a very deleterious effect on general wealth.
– That the clerisy has become so lost in intellectual abstractions and we, as a society, have become so entranced by these, that we can’t even decide which bathrooms to use any more. Just as in any intellectual endeavor, once one begins to follow a logical set of questions far enough, one begins to live in a realm that is both detached from everyday reality and functionally useless, but beautiful in its sense of order. Like a philosophy that determines that, fundamentally, nothing is real, that all we are is just energy waves (Here, let heave this set of energy waves we call a “brick” into the energy waves you call “your face” and we’ll see if you can imagine that into nothing) but which can’t give good advice to guide us through daily life. Or Feminist Theory that begins with the observation that there are many aspects of the modern world that exclude women for no valid reason, such as voting or becoming a doctor, since we have long left the agricultural economy that demanded physical strength be the defining factor in job assignment, who reach the conclusion that there is no real difference at all and therefore men should be allowed to arbitrarily decide they are women and everyone is forced to go along with this nonsense.
Thank you for the well-written set of essays that helped me to clarify these and other questions.
On more post on medical science – I had the opportunity sometime back to work with a technology called Flow Cytometry. We were studying a disease called Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). The process with Flow is to use non-reactive stains or markers. These are dyes that bind to proteins. The cytometer can then see the proteins as they work through cells. We used living tissue samples and could thus study what effect drugs had on living diseased tissue in real time. The results were remarkable. The head of our research said that technically every patient is a different disease because of how different the activity could present. This was in stark contrast to the medical establishment’s knowledge. Of course the company eventually failed because there was no way to change the medical science. Of course the medical establishment’s knowledge of AML was based on the old slide method. Take dead tissue, mount it on a slide, and see what it looks like. I came away with the impression that medical science on slide as compared to flow was like trying to understand music by looking at a snapshot of a band. After seeing through the years reports that 6 out of 52 landmark cancer studies cannot be reproduced, I don’t think its just fraud to be taken into account. They are often generating noisy pictures and drawing whatever correlations can be taken out of that specific study. It is my view that medical science in its current state is built on a foundation of knowledge akin to alchemy was to chemistry. My last thought is to note that placebos regularly outperform manufactured drugs in clinical trials and placebos work universally (unlike any drug that can only apply to a specific purpose.) It seems to me medical science should be aimed into understanding that mechanism more fully and exploiting it.
@ Mister Nobody and anybody else planning to “vote straight Republican” over covid issues –
You might want to take the time to actually check the records of individual politicians.
I looked up the positions of both the Republican and the Democrat candidates running for congress in my district, and lo and behold, the Republican appears to have an even WORSE pro-pharma (including pro-mandate) voting record than the Democrat. He (the Republican) was heavily funded by pharmaceutical money in past elections. (And I now have no idea what I’m going to do – I may just have to toss my vote away on a protest candidate or something.)
Point is, it’s not wise to assume that just because a politician has an R after their name means they’re opposed to jab mandates and other pro-big-pharma legislation. Your straight Republican vote may include votes for pharma-bought-and-paid for candidates.
Here is a link to an Atlantic article about an economist who I would vote for as the poster boy for the delusional clerisy. ( from what I can gander from the article) this guy thinks that the “economic miracle” that happened from 1870 till 2010 was the result of technology, capitalist innovation and liberal democracy and has now come to an end because of inequality and fascism. Dude! might these dates also coincided with the wide spread use of fossil fuels, first coal and then oil, and then ended a few short years after peak oil ( 2005). He even thinks that economic colonialism was not important and the Colonizers had a benign or positive influence on the global south. Wow, this is what you get when you marinate a brain in 8 years of extended delusional summer camp ( Harvard) and then send them off for finishing school with the Clinton Administration. He says something like, ” we set out to do good in the Clinton Years, but somehow it only increased economic inequality and poverty.” The real damage this guy does is by further deluding the ” good people” in to thinking that we can turn things around with more liberal democracy and kindness. I think further down the road in catabolic collapse we will need to put a wall around Harvard and turn it in to a kind of cautionary museum like Alcatraz, or one of the European concentration camps so people don’t repeat what went on there.
https://apple.news/AkWyhZhU-TI254LsTyM7kZg
Thinking about how the U.S. got itself embroiled in overseas conflicts with faked or overhyped events. Not so sure a civil conflict can be avoided. (And I’m allergic to conspiracy theories).
Dear JMG and commentariat,
Regarding possible future border realignments, and wars, in Europe, you have more than once suggested that Poland might seek to invade and/or annex portions of Ukraine and/or Germany, among other neighboring states, in the chaotic years to come.The one problem I see with this idea is that there seems to be almost zero interest or desire among anyone in Poland to do so.
Unlike pre-WWII Poland, which was a multi-ethnic state in which ethnic Poles constituted barely 60% of the population, today’s Poland is almost perfectly monoethnically Polish (aside from one million or more Ukrainian refugees, whose long-term status is uncertain). Given the huge political and social problems that interwar Poland dealt with in regard to its multiple ethnic minorities, the almost universal lack of interest in expanding Poland’s current borders is not surprising — particularly as there are now only tiny and very scattered remnant Polish populations in any of the pre-WWII Polish territories, as a result of the ethnic cleansing (let’s call it what it really was) that was purposely and explicitly instigated by the Allied powers immediately following World War II.
I’m not saying that your scenario could not happen, but there would have to be a radical change in mainstream Polish political thought in order to bring it about.
Now, if you want to consider the possibility of a rebirth of Pilsudski’s dream of a multi-national “Intermarium”, a confederation of several central and eastern European nations (something along the lines of a consolidation of the current Wisegard group of nations), that is quite a different matter, and one that I think stands a much better chance of taking shape in the years ahead. But even that, I suspect, might suffer the same eventual fate (i.e., dissolution) as the EU currently faces.
Hi John,
Great post as always.
https://forecastingintelligence.org/2022/07/13/living-with-the-long-descent/
I recently blogged on my recent thoughts on what is happening.
As a European, I can can confirm that the vast majority of Europeans, in particular those in the elites, are in utter denial about the scale of the crisis hitting Europe right now.
Whilst there is an awareness in large parts of the population and elites that we are facing a very tough winter, the assumption is that governments will (largely) bail us out, like they did with Covid. Now, probably they will, this winter, but what is lacking is the awareness that this isn’t a “this winter” issue but a structural, long term issue for the continent.
As for the break up of the EU and the risks of wars, very few people are thinking along those lines. Publicly, the only people who have forecasted that are yourself and Peter Zeihan, as far as I’m aware.
Forecasts of a European civil war/armed insurgency by Islamists is more mainstream, albeit among the nationalists/Right-wing political spectrum across Europe. And, in eastern Europe, you do get some nationalists who advocate Greater Serbia, Greater Poland or Greater Hungary (among others).
What is also odd, is that very few people seem to connect the fact that our sanctions and solidarity with Ukraine is directly causing the massive energy rises that is hammering so many people. I think, once this link cements itself among the public, you will see growing support to remove the sanctions and get the cheap gas, coal and oil back running from Russia. How long that takes, how many governments will need to be removed (or overthrown?) is the million dollar question.
I’m currently reading the Europe section of Zeihan latest book, and it is interesting that his macro thesis is broadly in line with your thoughts. His specific forecasts for countries, I’m not so sure!
Interestingly, he also thinks Poland has a chance to become a serious player in central Europe. I’m married to a Pole and, I have to admit that whilst the nationalist population distrust Germany, nobody is really thinking about invading Germany. The overwhelming fear is Russia which is why the Polish government is gearing up for war.
Saying that, I’m sure there are elements within the nationalist government who have privately thought about a future war against Germany as there is a deep distrust of Germany in the Law and Order party that runs Poland.
As for the genetic vaccines, the scientific data coming through, dribbling though, to be precise, seems to suggest that we have a very serious crisis on our hands. How many will get sick or die and over what timeframe remains to be seen, but I am extremely worried.
It remains the wildcard in any future planning. European governments mandated the genetic shots on their armies, by and large, so what happens if our European professional solders start going down with heart attacks, cancers and autoimmune diseases over the next 10 years? Who is going to defend us? The implosion of the EU could be quite sudden and violent and sooner than even I fear.
My intuition suggests that we will see a “manageable” wave of sickness and deaths over the next 5 years or so, but on a slightly longer timeframe, I do wonder if we will see a huge wave of illnesses hitting vaccinated, with something truly terrible happening in around 10 years from now.
Ecosophian, I didn’t watch Biden’s speech. I worked as an aide in nursing homes back before I got into print, and I listened to enough angry senile babbling then that I didn’t have any interest in hearing more.
Reese, exactly! The old one-room schoolhouse model provided a superior education for that reason: instead of children being forced into age-segregated classes, they worked in groups based on where they were in the learning process, and very often children who were further along would help others learn.
Nachtgurke, I do indeed read Eugyppius, and his insights into bureaucracy seem sound to me. As for your sister — dear gods. I wonder if she realizes that “No, I’m not ready to think such thoughts” might end up being her epitaph. The universe is under no obligation to wait until we’re ready to think about things!
Booklover, that’s quite possible — iirc Ukrainian Galicia used to be part of Poland. The sudden push for reparations from Germany, however, strikes me as a casus belli.
Rod, the GOP is currently split down the middle between pro-clerisy and pro-populist wings, though the pro-clerisy wing is losing ground fast — Liz Cheney’s humiliating defeat in the primaries this year is a straw in the wind. If the populist wing continues to gain ground, Obamacare may not survive the next Republican administration.
Denis, interesting. Thanks for this.
Curt, good heavens. And this was on German TV?
Benn, thanks for this — a good solid incantation.
Clay, dear gods. That’s classic, and not in a good way.
Jastin, that made the NYT? I’m astonished. Granted, SSRIs do nothing to help most depressed people, and they have ghastly side effects, but they’ve been an immense cash cow for Big Pharma for years now and so they’ve been sacrosanct in the media. If the NYT is throwing them under the bus, Big Pharma may be in much more trouble than it realizes.
Renaissance, nicely summarized. Yes, exactly.
Jastin, that makes enormous sense to me, and (I suspect) to anyone else who’s worked with alternative health care.
Clay, granted, but people like that economist have to believe that. If the great economic boom wasn’t the result of the right economic and political systems, but depended on something as grittily material as fossil fuels, then the boom in question is one of history’s supreme stupidities. It’s all too easy to imagine people in the future talking about how we used up all those resources in a few short centuries of wretched excess, and left a damaged planet to our descendants…
Denis, that’s why it’s crucial that as many people on the right keep in mind that the establishment is trying to force a civil conflict.
Alan, maybe so, but prolonged poverty has been known to change opinions like that very quickly. Nor is it at all certain that a future Polish invasion of Germany will want the people currently inhabiting that part of Europe — they may just want the land and what’s under it. The mass deportations of ethnic minorities from various parts of eastern Europe after the Second World War offer one way in which that could be done. As for Pilsudski’s Intermarium, that’s a possible transitional stage, of course.
Forecasting, thanks for this. I note that earlier today there was a huge protest march in Prague demanding that the Czech government declare its neutrality in the Russo-Ukrainian war, remove sanctions against Russia, and get access to Russian fuel again — “Not Our War” is one of the slogans. So it’s quite possible that the denial is beginning to crack in at least some parts of Europe. As for the vaccines, I’m just as worried; every week brings more peer-reviewed studies showing more ways that the Covid vaccines can damage the body, more evidence that death rates are rising well above normal, and no evidence that anything is being done — or can be done — to avert disaster. If this goes the way I’m afraid it will, the great political fact of the 21st century will be the difference between those nations that vaccinated nearly all of their population and those that vaccinated only a minority; in Europe, that distinction is between west and east respectively. If the death toll is high enough, western Europe is facing potential culture death and the erasure of its current nations from history.
@jmg — what is going on with our moon program 🙂
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/03/1120742884/nasa-artemis-1-launch-saturday-time-moon-mission-rocket-orion-sls
2 failures in one week….
Jerry
“Alan,, maybe so, but prolonged poverty has been known to change opinions like that very quickly. Nor is it at all certain that a future Polish invasion of Germany will want the people currently inhabiting that part of Europe — they may just want the land and what’s under it.”
John, that is a chilling possibility that I naively was not considering. But it is of course exactly what the Allies forced on the Polish immediately following WWII in regards to the Germans inhabiting postwar Poland’s newly-annexed western lands, as Polish borders, and populations, were shifted westward —- as it was also what Stalin forced upon the unfortunate Poles who were living in the Soviets’ newly annexed, formerly eastern Polish territories as well.
Maybe I had not been thinking along those lines because I would like to believe that “my people” would not engage in such activities, but objectively and honestly I probably have no particular logical reason to believe so.
#163, #185 about TED talks, if there was a church for the Religion of Progress, TED Talks would be the sermon.
What kind of worship songs would they sing? Perhaps this: Carl Sagan – ‘A Glorious Dawn’
Global CV19 Vax Propaganda Means Mass Casualties – Dr. Pierre Kory
https://usawatchdog.com/global-cv19-vax-propaganda-means-mass-casualties-dr-pierre-kory/
“World renowned CV19 critical care and pulmonary expert Dr. Pierre Kory thinks the CV19 vax is a “humanitarian catastrophe,” and it is being “ignored . . .suppressed and censored” through a well-organized global propaganda campaign. This propaganda will be responsible for millions of deaths that have already happened and many more millions of CV19 vax deaths in the future. “We have data screaming at us everywhere we look. You can start with the life insurance data, India’s data, Germany’s data, and we know people are dying at unprecedented rates.”
Re: Poland
There are all kinds of things going on under the surface,
The UK seems to be taking the lead in pro-Ukraine rhetoric and military aid, to the extent that I see comments here and there that the US is alarmed and trying to rein them in. At the same time, the post-Brexit UK is seemingly deliberately antagonising the EU over trade in general and the island of Ireland in particular. I see rumours that Jens Stoltenberg is due to step down as head of NATO, and that Boris Johnson wants to replace him.
Meanwhile, the Eurocrats are similarly taking the hardest of hard lines against Russia but, at the same time, they are cutting funding for front-line Poland (and Hungary) because they are pursuing ‘non-European’ domestic policies. At the same time, Brussels is trying to end the requirement for unanimous agreement in both domestic and foreign policy – again, because the governments of Poland and Hungary keep insisting on doing what their electorates want, and are in conflict with what Brussels insist they should want.
Also meanwhile, there was this weird story, which seems to have generally vanished from the news, that the UK wants to form a new union: the UK, Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states.
https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/1704219/johnson-proposes-alternative-union-with-ukraine-may-include-baltic-states-media
Specifically re: Poland and Germany, my recollection is that when Poland joined the EU, it first had to pay a great deal of compensation to the Germans who had formerly (ie pre-1945) owned property in what was then eastern Germany and is now western Poland. However, I am finding it remarkably difficult to find any reports dating back to that time. Perhaps Wer, and/or other commenters in Poland and Germany could chip in here?
Hi John Michael,
I suppose that recklessness develops when there are no consequences for failure, little acknowledgement that failure is an option, an inability to learn from history, incomprehension as to the present, and delusions as to supremacy? That’s what a hill to die upon looks like.
Cheers
Chris
A cracking analysis of where we are at. I observed last night that the covidians had lost the fight but had not realised it just yet. In our local govt elections down her in Tasmania approaching 50% of all mayors are not standing for relelection. Local govt was totally onboard with the orthodoxy on covid…..
Very shortly the fear will be palpable, and physically evident, in those responsible. They will know they are on the wrong side of history and they will be waiting for the backlash to come. Serves them right.
Your response: “David, I’d like to see the people responsible tried by a jury and punished according to the laws. My worry is that things will take a much more chaotic and violent turn.” is interesting. Isn’t the judiciary as it currently stands in the Western world just another part of the clerisy, and as such very much exposed? I see the chaotic and violent turn as inevitable, and well and truly deserved. In fact, it may well be critical in embedding the lesson that mass murder is just that, regardless of how many fools with degrees and lab coats try and tell us otherwise.
When I was an adult apprentice learning to repair electrical machinery I had a foreman who was one of the best workshop managers I have ever come across. He was regularly dealing with people far more “qualified than himself” who sought outcomes that were not practically possible. he described them as being “educated well beyond their natural ability”.
For what it’s worth: https://electrek.co/2022/09/02/rooftop-solar-vacuum-tubes/
https://www.france24.com/en/france/20220902-france-to-restart-all-nuclear-reactors-by-winter-amid-energy-crunch It seems odd that 57% of Frances nuclear reactors would all be shut down for usual maintenance all at the same time. At the very least that would seem like bad planning. Now that France is committed to get all of them back online, probably for political reasons, rather than because they’ve actually fixed whatever caused this, what is the over under for some kind nuclear accident over the winter?
On a tangeant https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/25/guilty-trafficking-ashley-biden-diary-00053770. When I heard about the contents of that diary a year or so ago, I was certain that the diary was a fake. Yet the prosecution is over them taking Ashley Biden’s property, not defamation, spreading misinformation etc. I tried to find mainstream fact checks for the right wing claims about Joe Biden’s relationship with his daughter (based upon the contents of that diary), I can’t find any mention of the claims. Have I been duped by right-wing disinformation? Would something of this nature about the sitting president have been basically ignored twenty years ago?
Jerry, consider the F-35 — pilots call it the Penguin, because it flies like one — or the Ford class aircraft carriers. These days, failure is our most important product.
Alan, I hope I’m wrong. Given the history of Europe, though, I’m not going to count on it.
Bogatyr, thanks for this. The subsurface politics are far and away the most interesting feature of the current situation.
Chris, exactly. The clerisy has set things up so that there are no penalties for them if they fail; ergo, failing is most of what they do these days. I don’t think it’s occurred to them what the consequences will be.
Eagle Eye, here in the US, many judges are elected by the public and the rest are appointed by elected officials. The result is a judicial system that is opportunistic — it backs whoever has the power. The shifts in our Supreme Court are an indication of the way that power is shifting away from the clerisy, and that suggests that it’s entirely possible that Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, and the executives of certain large corporations might be thrown to the wolves by way of the judiciary in an attempt by the rest of the elite to preserve some of their power.
Patricia M, interesting. Thanks for this.
Dagnarus, I’ve been wondering about those nukes myself. It would be awkward if one of them melted down! As for the diaries, nope. Those would have destroyed a political career not that long ago.
With perfect timing, this song walked into my life:
“Wall of Denial” by Stevie Ray Vaughan
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kaNqLrAl8Q (sorry, ads before the song. Because YouTube/Google.)
Lyrics: https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/stevierayvaughan/wallofdenial.html
JMG,
“The sudden push for reparations from Germany, however, strikes me as a casus belli.”
I’ll comment: it’s not sudden and it is not new. It was used before (If I remember correctly against Russia in 2016 or 2017). It was also used as a media-play against EU pressure on Poland due to unrelated and rather complex judiciary reform, which EU judged to be shady.
It’s one of those “distraction issues” or emotionally-charged red herrings that all political parties have at the ready to throw like smoke-bombs when things go poorly. Things were getting bad in polish economy so PiS (ruling party) is going to get busy deploying smoke-screens. Also, here is a quote, from Kaczyński, missing from many articles: “We do not promise it will be great success, it may take many years” (my translation). Most people I know are laughing.
That particular smoke bomb generated a lot more ugly stink than usual, because of war next door and international media attention on Poland, but it does not go beyond politics-as-spectacle. The price of bread is getting higher, so it is time to deploy a circus.
-changeling
John O Looney (funeral director) has also mentioned via Telegram the large proportion of fighting age men being let into th UK. He speculates that it is to police/round up the unvaxxed, as with what I understand has been happening in Australia. There are large prisons being built here. Given the untaxed in the UK is about one fifth of the population and say, those who refused further jabs adds to that, do you think It’s likely we’ll be terrorised at this point?
Great article. Thank you.
Unvaxxed not untaxed!
@JMG
Yes absolutely, on German cable TV! This documentary originates here: https://www.mdr.de/investigativ/corona-post-vac-long-covid-100.html
It is timestamped with 09. August 2022 – relatively recent – and the TV channel “MDR” for “Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk” is part of German state TV that people have to pay for whether they want or not, in this case MDR is the state TV channel of the province of Saxony, one of the 16 german federal states, an eastern German state at that.
We can say that this documentary has appeared through a regular channel of state mass media, not in some niche media, on any alternative news channel.
“that’s why it’s crucial that as many people on the right keep in mind that the establishment is trying to force a civil conflict.”
Agreed – many of the prominent populist figures on the right are aware of this. And as you mentioned the meme warriors are on top of things.
I did laugh alone at the fact the Biden and the media threatened Trump supporters with F-15’s. Why not the F-35’s? Perhaps folks here will laugh along with me on that one.
@Bogatyr Check out the Three Seas Initiative, “”an old Polish project aimed at developing this region while preserving it from any German or Russian influence” https://www.voltairenet.org/article217490.html
@JMG: I ordered a book copy of the Arch Druid Report from Founder’s House and only received two out of ten volumes. Founder’s House replied that I should wait. They stopped responding to my emails after half a year, and it turns out that is when PayPal will no longer investigate. Good to hear you are moving publisher!
@ForecastingIntelligence #228, JMG #229, EagleEye #236 re: COVID vaxx morbidity
I tend to agree with EagleEye that there will be no earthly justice meted out to those responsible for this atrocity, at least not in the orderly fashion JMG hopes for. The entire medical Establishment was behind this. In the U.S., the “sick care” sector makes up 1/7 of the economy (14.5%). That is only second to the military and the Federal civilian payroll in terms of total employment.
14.5% of 335 million people is nearly 48 million people. If you assume that 20 percent of those were in decision-making positions, that is still over 9 and a half million people.
How do you prosecute all these people? Where will you incarcerate them? Yes, I know that the U.S. has the biggest prison Gulag in human history, far exceeding even the Soviet Gulag at the height of Stalin’s purges. Even so, this looks to me like an insurmountable logistical problem.
Suppose we find room enough to lock up 9 1/2 million people? How do we prosecute so many of them? It would take centuries, if due process of law were followed.
Even in Nazi Germany, only a small handful of top officials were actually prosecuted. Klaus Barbie escaped justice altogether (rumor has it that he was “shod with new shoes” as a CIA asset), and Josef Mengele apparently ended his days in a swimming accident in Brazil. Most of the war criminals escaped via various “rat lines” to South America and even (in some cases) to rural Canada!
If any justice is meted out, it will more likely be “rough and ready, Law-West-of-the-Pecos” as EagleEye says: “I see the chaotic and violent turn as inevitable, and well and truly deserved. In fact, it may well be critical in embedding the lesson that mass murder is just that, regardless of how many fools with degrees and lab coats try and tell us otherwise.>/i>”
Judge Roy Bean, call your office!
Two articles from the Grauniad / Observer that show how quickly things are swinging around and at least some of the fog of craziness is beginning to lift.
First this on tech-billionaires and their extreme protected status and mindset: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff
Yes, it’s extreme left (Marxist) meets extreme right but the result is arguably a purity you only get when you collide extremes e.g.:
‘These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch.’
Second article is shows very personally how our highly stratified and detached western health care system can miss the bleeding obvious (pun intended). Key thing here is that this has been experienced by the journalist. It feels like she’s only just coming to terms with her disbelief, and on the pages of this newspaper no less:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/sep/03/13-year-old-daughter-dead-in-five-weeks-hospital-mistakes
e.g.:
‘More important is something that’s obvious but doesn’t get said enough: our trust in doctors should have limits. Medicine is like any other job: there are many talented workers in the NHS, but also those who are less dedicated and less able. Think of the old medics’ joke: “What do you call the guy who graduated last in his medical school class?” “Doctor.” There are plenty of clinicians prone to arrogance and complacency. Some doctors are “heroes”, but we should stop thinking of them all as such.’
@Dagnarus, It may not explain the whole situation, but it is true that France generally schedules reactor maintenance for summer, when less electricity is needed.
There’s one thing that has puzzled me in this gradual to rapid descent of Western Civ and that is Sports. You’d figure by now with most people unable to make ends meet that it would effect all major sports. Now granted most sports are funded by television deals but those deals are paid for by television networks who in turn get their money from advertisers.
The last two links are the most important because it is the advertisers who are paid by those who purchase their products and the rub is that now Mr. and Mrs. Sixpack don’t have that kind of expendable cash and instead can now be seen in the ever growing Dollar store franchises or your Walmart’s or Aldi’s Supermarkets so they can try and put food on the table.
Yet prices continue to trend higher for all National and International sports. Concession food is priced to the extreme. I remember going to an NFL game back in 1996 and a season ticket holder sold me and my friend a pair of 50 yard line tickets for $40×2. His cost back then was $280 per seats. Now it takes a family of 4 close to $1500 to an NFL game and those are just average to crappy seating locations. Prices for a seat behind home plate at Yankee Stadium can cost anywhere between $500-$1500 and yet the stadiums appear full, TV contracts continue to spiral upward and athletes get paid more.
I would have thought the whole Sports business would have come crumbling down by now. This is almost like a ponzi scheme with the poor saps at the bottom with barely enough money footing the bill. And lets not forget the Owners of these sports clubs who get the tax payers to foot the bill for their extravagant stadiums.
More british humor on energetic crisis:
http://www2.b3ta.com/host/creative/10643/1662296041/DaddyWar.jpg
By the way, the mans face remembers me some (in)famous british politician, but I don’t know who…
Bogatyr, do you, or does anyone else know how much longer Johnson is likely to be PM? And can he read a map? (I know Americans who don’t know what a map even is.) His idea looks like a logistical nightmare, if the proposal is for a military alliance.
John,
I really want to use your chart comparing physicians and administrators, but I can see the legend. Can you please forward me the source link? Great series, finding it very useful and circulating widely.
Thank you
Jerry Silberman
#248 looking at the article about the super-wealthy preppers, they mostly sound like they expect a sudden apocalypse, at some kind of ‘event’ in time, also known as when TSHTF.
Ignoring whether this premise is realistic, the obvious problem, is unless they have advance warning of it, how can they be sure of actually being able to get to their doomstead, would even private jets be able to fly when TSHTF?
The desire for luxury living in their said doomstead seems to conflict with the ability to safely wait out the apocalypse, it would surely make them a bigger target for the locals, and require more flunkies who need to have their loyalty bought and paid for, in an environment where cryptocurrencies and tech stocks may not hold their value. Some of the ideas in the article sound straight out of sci-fi villainy or Mr. Burns from the Simpsons:
But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?
The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”
Hi All
Some news from the energy “front” in Europe, especially from nuclear power plants:
a) The Ringhals-4 nuclear reactor in Sweden will not start-up again up to the end of November, they were making some maintenance including some mandatory hydraulic tests in the pressure vessels and then “the” plant pressure vessel was damaged….
https://www.reuters.com/article/sweden-nuclear-outages/update-1-restart-of-swedens-ringhals-4-nuclear-reactor-delayed-to-end-november-idUKL8N307156
a1) The Ringhals-4 reactor started commercial operations in 1983, but at the beginning of the 90’s severe cracks were detected in the steam generators (is a PWR design), less than 10 years in operation:
https://inis.iaea.org/search/search.aspx?orig_q=RN:24033500
a.2) So the swedes decided to change the 3 steam generators of Ringhals-4 in 2011 and they did:
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Ringhals-steam-generators-shipped-to-Studsvik
a.3) And now they have a damage in “the” pressure vessel making an hydraulic test? it does not seem a very sustainable installation at all.
b) The Olkiluoto 3 nuclear reactor (in Finland) output drop to zero due to a turbine failure, and they do not know when the reactor could produce electricity again:
https://yle.fi/news/3-12599009
c) All of this with 32 french nuclear reactors shut-down many of them due to the huuuuge SCC problem with no easy solution at all, anyway it seems they will restart them for this winter at any cost, because everybody knows we are at warrrrr, so cross your finger:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-restart-all-its-nuclear-reactors-by-this-winter-minister-says-2022-09-02/#:~:text=PARIS%2C%20Sept%202%20(Reuters),Energy%20Minister%20said%20on%20Friday.
Cheers
David
Here’s a view – or at least my view –from inside the science monkeyhouse, in two main points.
As Weinstein and Heying (two PhD biologists with awkward career troubles) noted over at their DarkHorse podcast some months ago, to be successful in science you’ve got to sell projects and bring in grant money. They also noted that scientific integrity is all based upon being able to keep a healthy level of skepticism about your own ideas, and having the ability to jettison those theories when the data stack up against them. They concluded that these two qualities are diametrically opposed, and thus having integrity is often fatal to a scientist’s career.
I can add the observation that the scientists who gain control of more funding ultimately gain control of institutions, laboratories, and funding agencies. This mapping between a lack of integrity and career success is not 100%, but from what I’ve experienced it’s in the neighborhood of 80% and rising. Of course, as scientists move up from doing science toward supervising science and directing funding, things only get worse.
On a related note, look up “Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy” when you have a minute to spare. It’s relevant, but already this response is getting too long.
The second observation is of medical doctors and their relationship to science. Their education is heavily skewed toward memorization, so as quickly to apply a good enough solution to a problem before, say, a patient bleeds out. Often this is the right approach. However, when it comes to sorting out the unknown, frequently they are amateurs of the worst sort, with only the vaguest notion of the observe-hypothesize-experiment-refine loop that is the core of doing science. No, all too often their approach becomes answer-act-discharge (or if unsuccessful, -sign death certificate).
Add all this up and you get a Fauci MD claiming to be some kind of infallible science pope. And nearly three years in, here we are: millions dead, no widely-accepted remedies, no functional vaccine, and a bewildered, polarized population.
Ugh, I hate commenting so late in a blog post’s life cycle. I may well have repeated others’ points here. OK, I’ll get off my soapbox now. Thanks for the corner of the park to rant from, thanks for listening.
JMG,
have you been keeping up with the people trying to force a constitutional convention? There’s apparently been a lot happening in that area I was totally unaware of:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/activists-more-halfway-forcing-constitutional-amendment-convention
According to this, 19 state legislatures have already called for one, and there’s significant momentum.
Shades of ‘Twilight’s Last Gleaming’ much?
I find myself wishing them luck…
Your attack on scientists at the start of this piece is a little off target. You post an image a little later showing the proportions of administrators vs physicians over time. The same has happened in the hard sciences, with the bloat of university administrators and the paper pushers generating endless “amazing new discoveries!!!” headlines from every small step in the vast grinding of actual science.
Your list of mistakes made “because science” lists some of the many ways in which the halo of science has been appropriated and misused by the managerial class lackeys, the military, and their oligarchic bosses. You’re not wrong in pointing towards the pulp scifi years as generating the useful-but-wrong beliefs about how science works and why it will lead to utopia (a theme you’ve covered plenty).
Actual working scientists (of which I know many) have zero interest in guiding public policy or blowing up the world with untried theories, they just want to find out how things work in a little more detail than we know today, within the bounds of what is possible at minimal risk. And working scientists are almost all miserably underpaid and overworked, same as everyone else.
After the horrific genocide of politicised “science” through the covid pandemic years, I expect that working scientists will be the scapegoat used by the oligarchs to maintain their death-grip on society for a few more years. I don’t think it is sensible for you to help the perpetrators (Fauci, Walensky, near everyone in DC and other western capitals) or the beneficiaries (the rich who have become richer, faster, than ever before) escape justice.
@Magaret L Ceniceros
Until 12;35 Monday 5th September BST. As far as anyone can tell on the 4th, the next PM will be Liz Truss.
Any strange ideas he’s proposed in the last few weeks will be washed away by the tides of history. If it is Liz Truss, the future in the UK will head off in quite a new direction I think.
Rod – I suspect that the expensive seats in a sporting arena are bought by corporate accounts for tax-deductible business entertainment (a component of marketing and sales). The more expensive the ticket, the more gratitude it should evoke, right? As for the masses, maybe the event provides a much-needed escape from the discomforts of everyday life.
Yesterday, there was a football game at the Large State University a few miles from here, and I was in a crew that sold off-campus parking spaces to visitors. We setup around 10 AM, about two hours before the game, and the “tailgate” parties close to the stadium were already busy. For the next hour, we watched student-types strolling in groups toward the event, but by the time the actual game started, there was just as much foot traffic away from the stadium as there had been toward it. The parties ended when the game began, so the “event” was over and they were going on to other activities.
Also, in today’s Washington Post (magazine section), there’s an essay admitting that NFL fans are complicit in the culture of injury (acute and chronic) experienced by the players. The author hasn’t quite abandoned the game, but it was clear that he was not comfortable with it. (And I haven’t been, since I played a few full-contact games in high school.)
I used to object to auto-racing, due to the waste of fuel for driving in circles, but then I realized that the amount of fuel burned by the fans is probably much greater, and it’s just as bad for the *-ball sports, too.
The local radio is full of ads for recently legalized sports betting. I’m sure that there are powerful interests behind the gambling activity, and no football would mean no betting on football.
JMG – I’ve seen an announcement of a new mortgage program from Bank of America: no down payment, no closing costs, for People of Appropriate Color buying their first homes (in appropriate neighborhoods). It’s promoted as a generous step toward building wealth in historically disadvantaged people, but it looks to me like a last gasp at unloading some properties before the prices collapse. “0 down, 0 closing”, but at what interest rate? At what sale price?
Why not offer it to all low-income buyers? Making it easier for White buyers to buy in minority neighborhoods would lead to charges of gentrification. Encouraging minority buyers in minority neighborhoods – sounds like segregation to me.
Straws in the wind
https://lifehacker.com/financial-lessons-from-the-great-depression-we-can-all-1849450829?utm_source=pocket-newtab.
https://torontolife.com/city/inside-the-weird-world-of-cryotherapy-biocharging-and-fecal-transplants/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/give-your-yard-back-to-nature?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Cicada Grove, thanks for this! A genuine classic from a genuine classic.
Changeling, so noted. Thanks for the correction.
Pholiate, er, your news from Australia is iirc a year out of date. That said, I’ll ask some Australians to comment.
Curt, hmm! Fascinating.
Denis, ha! I didn’t even think about the F-35 Penguin. You’re right that it wouldn’t be much of a threat to anybody. I”m reminded of a joke article from a while ago: “Red Baron Shoots Down F-35″…
Thinking Turtle, I’ve contacted the publisher. This is a major problem, because you’re apparently not the only one who’s been stiffed by Founders House.
Michael, oh, it won’t be possible to prosecute them all. The Nuremberg trials didn’t do that, either — they concentrated on those at the top. I’d be quite satisfied with that.
Jay Pine, good heavens. The Grauniad said that???!!! Here we go…
Rod, I figure professional sports in the US are probably propped up by money laundering.
Chuaquin, funny.
Jerry, the caption down below says this: “Bureau of Labor Statistics, NCHS: Himmelstein/Woolhandler analysis of CPS Manageres as moving average of current year and two previous years.” That’s what I know.
DFC, yep. Nuclear power looks really good until you have to rely on it.
Dr. Coyote, thanks for this. It certainly fits my experience.
Pygmycory, yes, I’ve been watching it very closely. If it follows the usual trajectory, once it’s clear that they’re going to get enough states on board, Congress will panic and give them the amendments they want. That’s what’s happened pretty reliably in the past.
Greg, I’ve noted several times already that one of the things that’s happening now is that everybody involved in the current mess is frantically trying to push the blame off on other people. That’s what you’re doing here. You might glance at Dr. Coyote’s comment a little further up the thread. I should also mention that in both of my stints in university — one in the early 1980s and one in the early 1990s — I got to see blatant experimental fraud being practiced as a matter of course, condoned by the university authorities, and rushed into print by supposedly reputable journals. I saw “double-blind experiments” where the experimental techs knew exactly what they were supposed to find, and also knew that their work-study money depended on how well they found it. I watched p-hacking being invented by eager computer geeks in the early 1980s and used to fill psych journals with a really remarkable amount of garbage science. No doubt there are still some scientists who, as you say, “just want to find out how things work in a little more detail than we know today,” but there’s an enormous amount of dishonesty in the scientific community these days. For that matter, how many of these oh-so-noble scientists were willing to put their careers on the line to dissuade people from taking the Covid “vaccines”? Precious few.
Andy (if I may), thanks for this. Is that the official date and time at which the next prime minister takes office? I’d like to have that for astrological purposes.
Lathechuck, predatory loans aimed at nonwhite people, who often have been denied a decent education, is an old gimmick. I see this as more of that.
Patricia M, thanks for these.
JMG – I’m not sure I’d go so far as to consider this scientific fraud, but… I regularly look at the Space Weather Prediction Center (swpc.noaa.gov) web site, which has a three-day “forecast” of geomagnetic conditions. (I’m interested in solar effects on ham HF radio… among other things. 😉 ) So, all today, I watched the real-time data indicate moderate storm levels, while the forecast for today showed sub-storm levels, with storm levels predicted for this evening. Well, now that today is almost DONE, the forecast for today (which is no longer a forecast) has been amended to show what actually happened, as if the forecast had been accurate from the beginning. In a few hours, the forecast will be updated again, not including today’s data at all.
There’s something about amending a forecast after the fact that just doesn’t seem right to me.
Is this what they mean by “gaslighting”? “See we told you this was going to happen, didn’t we? It’s right here on our web site.”
Hi John Michael,
Frack! Jay Pine’s link to the Guardian article made for harrowing reading. If I’ve learned one thing in life, it is that you have to take sole responsibility for your health (and of course those for whom you care about). I’ve experienced first hand that that lot don’t get things right, with fatal consequences, and they can be grifters. Sure, they’re not all like that, but if I’ve had those experiences, it ain’t uncommon either.
As to your reply – so it has come to this. Yeah. Well, what they sow, do they reap.
Cheers
Chris
I have read through the posts on the great Reset/Rehash with curiosity because of the fairly widespread fears circulating about its credibility as a gravitational force in global events. There are lots of places like Davos where powerful people meet privately and publicly to interact and I assume to stay connected to the power lines. I am dubious that Schwab himself is particularly central or that anyone really is. But I think you may be overstating the failures and weakness of such entities and of the academic, engineering, computer science, political collaboration and training that is able to pull off the massive coordinated gaslighting of Covid vaccinations, of russiagate, of Trumpism, WMDs etc. The thing is that there is a very real infrastructure of spying, banking, media, militarism and fossil fuel based production, and transportation of goods and people, that has centralized power in ways that are strikingly congruent with Schwab’s basic technocracy ideas. And AI keeps getting more powerful and flexible.
That history will continue to bend to the will of this vast machinery seems less and less likely to me, but the empire will probably do a great deal of further damage before a complete or partial demise. And the nuclear threat becomes real as social and ecological instability grows. They are fools, and inept in many ways but the power they hold is as real as any Chinese sword multiplied many thousand fold.
“And now they have a damage in “the” pressure vessel making an hydraulic test? it does not seem a very sustainable installation at all.”
Translating back from the Double translation through the language and a journalism major, they broke something on the pressurizer, which is a pressure vessel, but not the reactor vessel itself. So now it either needs a hydrostatic test or it was damaged during the hydrostatic test and will need another one after they finish repairs.
It does continue to amaze me that a bunch of high school graduates with one befuddled ensign in charge can run reactors anywhere though the planet’s oceans whipping the throttles open and shut, bouncing into the occasional mountain or other ship and have so little reactor-based drama while the civilians seem to be in a continuous uproar (Point Beach in Wisconsin being an exception)
JMG – thankyou for your reply, I appreciate your taking the time to read my comment so late in the piece. I hadn’t seen Dr Coyote’s comment, and he does make many fine points agree with.
It’s been my experience that most fields of human endeavour have a mix of participants that take to it honestly, and those that are merely using it as a convenient arena for basic tribal power games. The clerisy of “science” are clearly the latter. The current leadership of almost every profession are made up of similar, as we seem to have engineered our society to promote such, and to inhibit honest labour.
As Dr Coyote rightly pointed out, good scientists (and good observers of the world, which is the more general class) have found themselves wanting frequently. I’d suggest you could sort the would-be priests from the scientists by the method Yeats proposed in another context “The best lack all conviction, while the worst _Are full of passionate intensity.”
I don’t believe I’m trying to shift the blame from those who deserve it. I think anyone who has declared confidence in the efficacy of the “vaccines”, or even called them vaccines for that matter, is deserving of blame. However I don’t think all scientists everywhere fall in that category. I have followed many scientists in the wider internet who have been appalled by the actions of the public health institutes and their leaders throughout the plague years.
My unease with the now common anti-science reaction I’m seeing is based in caution about the proposed replacement (an entirely predictable reaction for which I also blame Fauci Walensky et al).
I don’t think the obvious failures of those scoundrels who proclaim that “science brings utopia, so do what I say” necessitates trusting those who claim “science brings damnation, so do what I say”. In fact, I expect those two groups of charlatans have significant overlap.
Thankyou again for providing a forum in which these topics can even be discussed, the current trend for censorship is depressing.
@Siliconguy
Strange that all of the nuclear plants seem to be having trouble this year – or maybe it’s just making the news this year since there is a shortage of electricity.
As for why the power plant reactors have more problems, I imagine it is because they are substantially larger (~1 GW vs. ~150 MW) and they run full-tilt almost continuously for 40+ years while the submarine reactors seldom run at full capacity (and thereby spend much less time approaching the design limits of their materials). And the design safety factors (ratio of failure load/pressure/temperature to working load/pressure/temperature) are probably much higher for submarines as well.
@JMG
12:35 today is the moment of the announcement of the winner, but the actual moment will happen on Tuesday the 6th. The usual process is that the old leader of the party heads off to Buckingham Palace for a brief meeting with the Queen and as that individual emerges the new one is ushered in for the ceremony of ‘kissing hands’. After the that, the new leader is also the PM and heads out to 10 Downing Street. This will happen on the 6th and these days BBC helicopters usually follow the new and old ones so you can get a pretty good view on the time.
Unfortunately on this occasion Her Majesty is in Balmoral in Scotland and it has been decided that she’s staying there. It’s also not clear whether there will be an actual meeting or whether everything will happen by video link. So at the moment I can only narrow it down to daylight hours of the day. It may be possible to get a more accurate time further by looking at the BBC web site or the Court Circular which is a record of events and sometimes has times as well. I will do so and report back here.
JMG, the results of the leadership contest for British PM will be announced here at 12h30 pm (British time) today, but the newly elected PM will only be confirmed as such once she (yes, all indications point to this) meets the Queen up in Scotland tomorrow where the monarch is spending her usual summer break. I don’t think anyone knows what precise time the meeting with the Queen will be on Tuesday. It is also unusual that this meeting will be in Scotland and not at Buckingham Palace here in London as it has been for the 75 years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Under normal circumstances she would have flown down to do this here in London but our Queen is fading fast, I’m afraid, and they decided she should not travel. I would be interested to know if the change in this location is significant for your ingress chart?
@Michael South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission might be a better framework than the Nuremberg trials. I’ll leave you to do the internet search of what everyday people confessed to doing. Those who went along with the covid vaccine agenda might find it healing to sit before others and tell of what they did and why they did it. Because so many everyday people enthusiastically supported vaccines to the point they were willing to set up their own vaccine passports even when it wasn’t asked of them (and no government agency stopped them) and banned their own family members from weddings, funerals, etc. Brushing this aside and just moving forward is the wrong thing to do for these people’s souls.
I sent a copy of that “doctors/administrators chart to
Jean in Oregon, and the first thing she wanted to know was how many of those “administrators” were simple low-wage clerks and such. She believes the vast majority would be.
@mawkernewek re billionaire preppers – in Retropia, one of the characters, a millionaire herself, recalls her early days doing grunt labor and assigned to cleaning up such a compound after the recovery. Blood-chilling. But at the same time, let’s just call it frontier justice.
@pygmycory -did you notice that one of those terms proposed was “nullification?” Which had been a major talking point in the run-up to the Civil War, and which was firmly quashed by the Union victory. No, the states can NOT nullify a Federal law, IIRC. Shades of the Second Civil War.
But then, for some reason, an external crisis seems to have ended up followed by an internal crisis 65-80 years down the road. A postwar consensus papering over the cracks, perhaps?
Behold! An article from Austrian paper “Wiener Zeitung”, you may translate it easily via Google:
https://www.wienerzeitung.at/dossiers/russlands-krieg-in-der-ukraine/2159835-Indiens-Bande-zu-Russland.html
An indian guest writer explains India’s view on Russia and the naivete of Western intellectuals to think everybody else is on their board, or necessarily views them and their society as morally superior.
“Wiener Zeitung” is a major newspaper of Austria, tilted to the conservative pages but the difference between “conservative” and rainbow liberalism has been blurred in the past.
If I may interject on when the UK prime minister takes office (ref Andy #265). We know who the next leader of the Conservative Party is at 12:35 today. However, until the official ‘kissing of hands’ ceremony with the Queen (currently in Balmoral), the PM remains Boris Johnson. Its a quirk of the UK system that the Queen appoints the PM so Boris has to formally resign to the Queen before the new PM takes over – but we will know who that will be as it is the leader of the Conservative Party at the time. That hand kissing ceremony is sometime on 6th Sept (but they haven’t yet announced the time from I can see)
(https://royalcentral.co.uk/uk/an-ancient-tradition-hitting-the-headlines-again-what-is-the-kissing-of-hands-179984/)
>It does continue to amaze me that a bunch of high school graduates with one befuddled ensign in charge can run reactors anywhere
I’ll guarantee you, now that they’ve gone woke, one of their reactors is going to have a major accident. Nuclear reactors do not care about your feelings, they do not care about your ideologies, they do not care about political agendas.
James Howard Kunstler wrote another great piece called: “Labor Day Assessment”
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/labor-day-assessment/
Sample: “There will be a Great Re-set, of course, but it’s not exactly the one that Western Civ is blabbering about — a mere shuffling of political and financial protocols. It’s happening with or without “Joe Biden,” the EU, and der Hoch Schwabenklaus, though the aggregate stupidity they represent is surely making the entry process worse. The Great Re-set is what happens when the business model goes bust for powering the world with oil and other fossil fuels — even if there is quite a bit of all that stuff left in the ground. Years ago, I called it The Long Emergency.”
@rod — great insight on the sports! It is a mystery….
@jmg — not sure how to say this… This blog is awesome — I read it for the comments and much as your blog post(i started reading u around 2015ish). I think with da Covid and the Ukraine though I am noticing some commenters seeming to be ‘stuck’ — and decide to argue. And the arguments do not seem very compelling (compared with say, @rod, who has been tearing it up this week on a wide variety of subjects).
is this something that is normal? Does if come and go in cycles? Or have I just not noticed it before?
thx again!
Jerry
@Rod #279 good old Kunstler, always good for a chuckle. “Der Hoch Schwabenklaus” particularly tickled my funnybone today 🙂
@JMG, @Blinky
Indeed. The news of the day enables the timing on the 6th to be narrowed down a little further.
Boris Johnson will make a speech at some point in the morning in front of Number Ten. He and Liz Truss will travel up to Balmoral together and Liz Truss is due to make another speech in front of Number Ten at 4pm.
If you assume 9am for the first speech, an hour out to Brize Norton where the Queen’s Flight is located and a further hour and a half to Balmoral. The earliest that Boris could meet the Queen would be 11:30. To be back at Number Ten by 4pm with the same travel times you would have to leave by 13:30.
If Boris takes 10 minutes, Liz could be in by 11:40 and if you allow for 10 minutes prep time at the end of the day it’s really an 13:20 departure from Balmoral. So at the moment with a lot of hand waving it’s probably between 11:40 and 13:20. Unfortunately, that’s still a rather wide window. There may be further detail available on the 6th but that’s the best estimate so far.
I think (maybe optimistically?) that the coming blowback against Science is going to stop well short of All Scientists Are Evil.
From weather forecast models to radio waves to sterile surgery, modern science has created enough unequivocal improvements that most people are going to want to keep it around. Few farmers want to return to a world without reasonably accurate seven-day forecasts. Few enough citizens want to return to a world in which appendicitis is usually fatal.
The priesthood of Science is going to fall, along with the hegemony of scientific knowledge over all other forms of knowledge, which has been particularly rampant and unfortunate in medicine and in the uncertain business of understanding the past and projecting the future. That said, so much of the modern world from electrical wiring to wastewater treatment to irrigation is based on scientific discoveries, and people with an understanding of the science behind these systems will be needed to keep them running.
My sense after leaving academia is that the workaday, blue-collar world might hate Fauci and The Science but is still open to scientific principles, ideas, and solutions that keep their systems running and solve everyday problems.
@ Jerry #280….shhh, I came close to getting a timeout. 😜
Our host might like this other review of ‘The Great Rehash’, so sorry ‘The Great Reset’.
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/the-terrifying-vacuity-of-klaus-schwab
It seems to exemplify how the bull**** level actually rises as one moves through the socioeconomic groups (social classes) from E to D … to A. (David Graeber’s 2018 book ‘Bull**** Jobs’ fits in well here.)
But the fact is, the WEF and its bull**** seems to have infested the EU power structure plus the governments of Canada, Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, New Zealand, some Australian states, probably Germany (other countries are much less clear).
I reluctantly took the vaccine. JMG touched upon it to a degree when he touched upon the class interests involved. Many people, like myself, were compelled to take the vaccine partly through gaslighting but mostly by the threat of unemployment. Had I been very wealthy, like pro basketball player Kyrie Irving, I would have given the middle finger to the establishment, like he did, and refused to take an essentially untried and and thus unproven concoction like these vaccines. At this point, I simply have to hope there isn’t anything more sinister behind the mad drive to vaccination other than the clerisy flexing its muscles.
Another example of the cluelessness and incompetence of the Clerisy. We were told by the Clerisy that Russia had to suffer and they would be punished unless they left Ukraine. Well, judging by this, the Russians seem to have been doing a lot better than the West. So much for those sanctions and punishing Putin.
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Sun-Inflation.png
@ Rod: Attending sporting events is indeed very expensive. We usually go to one Royals game a year, and it’s only because my dad pays for it all. Otherwise it wouldn’t be financially responsible of us. But I think sports will continue to thrive because it’s many peoples’ favorite form of mindless entertainment, mine included. And it’s relatively affordable compared to many things, because all you need in order to watch it is a cable subscription or one of the streaming services that have live sports. As long as that’s the case, it isn’t going anywhere. Add to the fact that online sports betting is becoming legal across the country, which only bolsters the interest. If people feel like they can make a little money (especially these days of high inflation), sports betting becomes quite the temptation for many.
JMG,
I’m less inclined than you to let politicians off the hook for the corona debacle. Here in Melbourne, it was clear the state Premier was making the decisions. We know that because the chief health officer publicly denied recommending some of the more egregious policies like curfews.
Here’s another example you’ll appreciate – https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/green-hydrogen-ruling-stokes-fire-at-kurri-kurri-20220831-p5be6o
The federal government decided that a new power station had to run partly on hydrogen. As you know, this is as good as impossible with current technology. The CEO of the power station just resigned over the matter. Reading between the lines, he told the government that the hydrogen thing was a fantasy and they told him to walk. That’s what happens to dissenting experts these days.
I wonder if our politicians read the story of King Canute and thought it meant that they were all powerful.
@Mark L: Keeping science and scientific thinking around after the collapse might depend on a continuing supply of coffee.
For some fascinating speculation on this, watch What Michael Pollan Learned from Quitting Caffeine for 3 Months”
For those disinclined to watch videos, here’s an excerpt from the google transcript:
“[when they discovered coffee] they made a drink and it’s like it makes sense that uh it was in the arab world because if you think about all the science that was being done in the arab world all the literature back then so my theory is that the arab world had coffee first and had this incredible golden age yes and there is a historian of of um psychoactives named uh wolfgang shivelbush and he correlates isn’t that wonderful german of course wolfgang shivelbush it’s a great book it’s called taste of paradise highly recommend it um and he said this was the perfect drug for the culture that invented mathematics and had this incredible and it helped the culture in two ways one was as safe as alcohol made water boiling it made it much safer and coffee and tea of course both require boiling water no one ate a drink boiling water uh or hot beverages before so this gave this incredible public health boost to these places and then you have the drug that basically fosters a kind of more linear rational focused way of thinking and so there is a lot of evidence linking coffee and tea consumption with the enlightenment in france and with the age of reason in england and people in the 1600s started writing about it so like wow people you know we have this new civil and sober drink that we that and it was so popular because it was new that people drank less and they used more caffeine and that i think makes possible things like the industrial revolution because you know when you’re when you’re doing physical labor outdoors which was most of history right you could be buzzed you didn’t have to know what time it was you work from sun up to sundown there were beer breaks actually on farms in england they would give you beer because it gave you calories and made you happy um but when you start moving into like running machines and doing double entry bookkeeping you need a clearer head”
Final timings:
The BBC reports that Liz Truss will be ushered into the Presence at around 12:00 and will leave before 13:00. The actual ‘kiss’ – probably just a handshake in these pestilential times – will probably happen as soon as they meet so unless something startling happens The UK will have a new prime minister shortly after 12:00 BST at Balmoral (57.0397° N, 3.2292° W) I don’t think it can be narrowed down much further than that. It’s a private moment in the end.
While the sanctions against Russia may not have succeeded, maybe the coming Freeze can be used to cover the excess vaxx deaths.
I had an experience yesterday in the chess class i teach that makes me feel the “teach children at their own speed” might be a bigger disaster if the parents are anything like those here (Malaysia). Everyone seem to think their child is a potential genius.
Guess we can discuss it in the open thread week. Meantime I will try to find some answers to this dilemma.
@Justin
“I have never been on team mRNA injections but I will say that I know a healthy baby boy whose mother was injected in the first and second trimesters, and has gotten a booster since (and is mostly breastfeeding). One of the realities of being a featherless biped is that you tend to remember things that reinforce your beliefs, and I think it is important for those of us in these rare circles where something approaching the truth is discussed to remember that.”
I can’t help but think that those people actually received the Saline or the effects kick in later. But a high percentage received the real deal.
Who knows what shenanigans are going on to make those exceptions as well as the adverse effects in others.
Fog!
Turns out that I need more practice as a prognosticator. Liz Truss was delayed by fog at Aberdeen Airport. She entered the building at 12:22. The appointment would have happened a few minutes later.
Hi JMG. I hadn’t heard about the Thai study but I accepted your suggestion to investigate it. What I learnt is that the conditions reported, while having scary-sounding names, mean things like “elevated heart rate” or “heartbeat varies with respiration” – and are observed frequently in normal healthy children. The kindest explanation I have for you writing “a third of young men suffered heart damage” is that you have profoundly misunderstood the study you’re referencing.
Of the sources I consulted, this was the most comprehensive contextualisation for an educated layperson. Notably, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the paper – but it doesn’t mean what many have assumed: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/covid-19-vaccination-and-myocarditis-another-preprint/
About the high cost of sports – there was an article which I’d send on if I could find it again, comparing the cost of a San Francisco game vs an Oakland one, and taking it from there. That is, check around locally and blow off the big name games and you can still see some pretty good ball games,
@jerry #280: It’s a bit hard to know which comments you are referring to since you only say the commenters are “stuck and decide to argue”.
I thought arguing was the point of this comment section? Or were you expecting a gaggle of Greerians who say Amen to anything our host proposes? While there is happily still quite a bit of dissensus in the commentariat, I feel it has been dwindling since the times when Bill vocally and repeatedly confronted JMG on his “Trump = working class” thesis. Today, there is a certain majority group whose members reinforce each other. I also think the quote semi-open unquote threads have taught people to expect consensus.
More generally, while I highly respect JMG’s 2008 predictions of oil price cycles, and his Jan. 2016 prediction of the Trump victory, he has by no means always been right in even a general direction, or at least his projections have not yet come to pass. I just recall those about the break-up of Saudi-Arabia or the effects of Ebola. This does not mean I don’t take his current predictions serious, but it would be dangerously naive to take all his suppositions about the future of the European Union or long-term effects of the mRNA vaccines as the revealed truth.
A late side note: I remember the painting of the caveman-like figure in the ruins (actual title “A New Dawn”) being popular in the early 1970s, one of several by John Pitre. If I recall correctly, they were originally sold as expensive art prints advertised in magazines, and then later appeared on posters from places like Spencer Gifts. Other paintings by Pitre often seen at the time included “Tomorrow,” “Overpopulation,” “Restrictions,” “War,” and “Passion.” Those images are easily found online, now.
I associated them with countercultural themes, like what would happen if we didn’t all learn to live in peace and harmony like the songs said. (One tin soldier riding away, and all that.) Of course, it was manufactured pop counterculture, the only kind I had any chance of coming into contact with as a suburban pre-teen. In any case, I think they disappeared from popularity just about the same time as the first “energy crisis” came along. I hadn’t seen them or thought about them since about then, but they nonetheless proved quite memorable when I saw the image in this week’s post.
So now I have to wonder, JMG, since it’s very likely that you were also familiar with those paintings back then, might that loin-clothed gentleman have been the first ruinman? As in, the germ of the idea?
@Mark L, #283
I think you are overly optimistic, yes.
There’s a saying: “the squeaky wheel gets the grease”, or something along those lines. When science (engineering, really) fixes a big, noticeable problem, – and when the problem returns rapidly after the customer stops paying for the fix,- then yes, it does get the credit for fixing it. However, it is often the case that the problem is so thoroughly fixed that many people loose the cultural memory of what life was like before a solution was found. In IT there’s another less well known saying: “technicians/engineers are all stupid or lazy”. If you do your work too well, you become invisible and other areas think you do a few minutes of button pushing per day; if you, on the other hand, seem to be working all the time, people notice you but they attribute your being overwhelmed by the work as you being incompetent.
Think of the current vaccine mess. It is certain beyond all doubt that the current crop of experimental genetic therapies (which were deceptively mislabeled as “vaccines”) will have a direct, negative impact on the populations they were applied on. It is not clear to me if this direct impact will measure up to the damage that has been done on the credibility of all vaccines regardless of the technology they are based on. Most people today simply lack the cultural memory of having half your kids die before age 2; and, while sanitation goes a long way towards preventing that, it is beyond doubt that early vaccination contributed in a major way towards moving our societies away from that reality.
@JMG: Thank you for that advice!
@Bei Dawei: Hmm, that’s interesting, so the conflict between the two sides is much older than I thought. I’ll look into it further. Thanks!
@Martin Beck #290 – there was a hilarious parody of that meme in ASF (whether still Astounding or later, Analog, science fiction.) A design firm called in an expert to find out why their designs were no longer working. He noticed they were all drinking herbal tea, and asked when that happened. The same time as their designs stopped working. The conclusion was some poorly remembered answer dealing with the brown coffee cup rings on their blueprints, but the connection with coffee and science (as opposed to the medieval ale or wine and whatever preceded science) had been taken for granted for long before said story came out.
Readers: If anyone can remember the tale and track it down, I think Martin Beck would get a big kick out of it.
The Scottish writer, former diplomat and advocate for Scottish independence has his own special take on the new PM:
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/
“The Tory party has now moved so far to the right as to be invisible to the naked eye.”
“Expect refugee deportations to the Antarctic.”
Murray seems to think that Mme. Truss is something like George W. in drag, “stupid” being the kindest thing he has to say about her.
@CR Patiño
It may depend on how one defines “science”. I suspect that the sort of science that requires laboratories and white coats and big government funding and that tries to discover new “truths” about the world and new “solutions” to global problems/predicaments will soon be going the way of the dodo.
At the same time I foresee a renaissance of “salvage science”, answering new questions like “how do we turn these big rusting GPS-guided combines into something smaller-scale farmers can use and fix themselves?”
This sort of work will require not just an aptitude for mechanical tinkering but also an understanding of the underlying principles of physics, engineering, fluid dynamics, chemistry, etc. And it will benefit from application of the scientific method to determine what works best (and I don’t see the scientific method per se as being irreparably tarnished in the fall of the Religion of Science).
I guess what I’m saying is that as long as we’re working with technology and machinery, there will be a market for people who understand those things, and that will provide both a career path for unemployed scientists and a way in which the principles and methods of science can survive.
If we end up in a post-technological dark age centuries from now, then that could change.
The ‘experts’ can sometimes give the game away for us plebs who have to work for a living. There was an intern who works for Linkedin in Chicago who posted about her typical day of ‘work’. It mostly consisted of picking out which free food she wanted. Here are some comments under this video laughing at her video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFgvNXkFXdY
“That’s not work that’s an adult daycare center for narcissists”, “I’ve never hoped for a recession more than now after watching this video” and “getting strong “end of the Roman Empire” vibes.”
And these are the people who think they should make decisions for the rest of us?
Wer here
JMG Ihave to tell you something. You noticed that Poland might be trying to reajust it’s borders I have to deny this. Our goverment is so insane and corrupt that they can’t manage anything at all. For example Polish mainstream is completely dependent on the Brussels etc. polish nationalists are busy daydreaming about kicking out jews and Ukrainians out of the country. population is declining much more rapidly than Russia or Ukraine, a lot of young men are either sick or if they live in cosmopolitan cities become twisted with LGBT ideology.
For example our goverment is full of emotional people who are screaming about virtue ( they don’t display it themselfs) desperate fixes for giant complex problems. Our economy is dependent on the EU without money from Brussels they would have to shut down a lot of the bloated social security systems that we have. All of this and a lot worse things are happening now and accelerating. Dose that sound like a country that will reajust other countries borders??
For example our central bank had predicted 70% inflation in Russia by May and predicted that the base inflation in Poland will never go above 15% and will start to rapidly decline in the Summer once hyperabundant gas from Norway starts comming. Not one of thoose things had happened all the clerisy in the news had been wrong about everything since the Damned COVID.
I can go one how Poland is a hotbed of corruption, Mainstream News in Poland is owned completely by one political party (Communism prety much?) In recent times there was a scandal where Polish news media was ordered from the above to portray Poland in more “optymistic” terms aka they were lying about the economy, military and importance of our goverment on the world stage. I have to adress this because people in the comments section here are repeating the party line form the One party owned mainstream news here. Meanwhile coal is missing inflation is seting records and some of our political elite are sending large amounts of cash to offshore bank, it says something doesn’t it. meanwhile people in rural Poland are between the anvil and the hammer. Everybody abandoned us our goverment, NATO, EU and all of our so called leaders.
I didn’t wantto rant but I can’t stand when people are repeating the lies we are being fed.
With re to Russia, sanctions, and western clerisy failures to understand history
In my view, it should be obvious to anyone who’s paid attention in history class that Russia is preparing to deploy her most powerful weapon: Winter.
I have followed some of now prime minister Liz Truss’s comments on Ukraine on Moon of Alabama. To call her stupid is a complement: ditto right wing. She goes way beyond either definition. I have heard that Bojo wanted to be followed by someone who would make him look good
Lathechuck, yep, that’s gaslighting. In this case, especially so, since what’s involved is the behavior of ionized gases!
Chris, “frack” was pretty much my first response, too.
Joseph, of course. I find it useful to compare them to the leadership of the Soviet Union in its last years: hopelessly detached from reality, unable to cope with a situation spinning out of control, but still capable of causing a lot of misery and disruption due to the huge if dysfunctional infrastructure of spies, propagandists, secret police, and planners.
Greg, fair enough. I’m not in favor of the inevitable backlash either. I’d like to see public attitudes toward scientists revert to what they were a century ago, as described in my post, and I think it’s crucial to preserve the scientific method — as I’ve noted rather more than once in my blog posts, I consider it to be one of the half dozen or so greatest intellectual achievements of our species, up there with the invention of mathematics. But we’ve got a hard row to hoe.
Andy and Miow, thanks for this. I’ll be casting the chart for Balmoral, since that’s where the event takes place.
Patricia, good question. I don’t happen to know.
Curt, fascinating. I’m not at all surprised, as I read Indian media now and then, but it’s quite something to see this in a major European paper.
Blinky, thanks for this.
Rod, score another for Jim!
Jerry, it’s something that happens just about everywhere when stress levels are high.
David, I read that! A fine review of a profoundly dreary book.
Rod, well, there’s that!
Simon, duly noted. It does seem to vary from country to country — and also from state or province to state or province.
Andy, thanks for this. The Beeb is live posting, of course, and they give 12:43 UK Summer Time for Truss’ meeting with the Queen and 12:48 for the official announcement that Truss is prime minister. Unless you or my other British readers know of good reason to doubt that, I’ll go with it.
Chola3, maybe, but it may well cause a lot of deaths all by itself.
Treefrog, thanks for this.
Walt, yep! When I was a teenager I was seriously into John Pitré. You could get posters of his paintings at a head shop in Burien, Washington, which is not coincidentally where I grew up). This is the one I had on my wall for many years; its title is “Conflict”:
I liked “A New Dawn,” the painting I included in the post, but not so much as “Conflict.” (I wish I could find a better image; the hawk is mechanical, and the man and the hawk are both staring down at the metal skeleton of another hawk of the same kind.
Mary, thanks for this. I read somewhere that only about 12% of the British electorate think that Truss will do a good job.
Bridge, ha! I’m delighted to hear about the response.
Wer, oh, it won’t be the current government. I expect governments to crumple across Europe over the next couple of years, since Russia has zero reason to negotiate or cut a deal that would preserve the status quo in the EU — quite the contrary. It’s a future Polish government, quite possibly under a different constitution, that I expect to begin revising borders.
David, exactly. I’ve come to think that the Russians are deliberately going slow, because the longer they drag this out, the more catastrophic the consequences for the EU will be.
Stephen, the one bright side to this is that she can exceed expectations very easily! 😉
@Patricia #302. I have a vague memory of reading the story about the engineers and the coffee rings on their plans.
Short stories are damnably hard to track down. JMG’s illustration of the Red Baron tackling an F-35 reminded me of a Paul Gallico story called Pentiffer’s Plan, IIRC. But I couldn’t find it to confirm.
@JMG
You really are very welcome. It’s probably very revealing that I found the whole process of trying to make a prediction based on nothing more than a (as it turned out) poor sense of the the logistics a pleasant distraction from personal matters.
As it happens though, I do have what I think is a sound reason for an earlier time, possibly around 12:28 BST. I was actually watching the live pictures from Balmoral when the new PM arrived and was doing so on an accurate clock. It showed 12:22. In fact, it’s possible that the entire transmission was effectively time delayed by about a minute because of the time required for live video to be compressed and sent out over the internet.
At that point she was around 20 minutes late and it strikes me as unlikely that either the PM or the Queen herself would be kept waiting by officials under the circumstances. I don’t think the castle is a very large place so the short walk between the front door and wherever the Queen was actually located was probably quite quick. Apparently the formalities are generally conducted briskly in order that the conversation can turn to the future without being contingent on the offer and acceptance of the role.
So what of the BBC’s live report? I don’t know what to make of it beyond speculating that I suppose the Queen might have been briefly unavailable – she is a very elderly individual and there are many possibilities there. I’m sorry to say that my immediate suspicion is sloppy journalism.
In any case, that’s my reasoning and of course you can give what weight you think appropriate to it. I’m looking forward to seeing your interpretation in any case.
I’m not sure all the readers here grasp what NATO was/is trying to accomplish here.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was due to USSR trying to park missiles 90 miles from Miami – a thousand from Washington DC. That’s about 15 minutes to get up and hit DC metro, and that was with old missile tech.
Moscow is 350 miles from the Ukie border – and that is under 5 minutes flight time with a cruise missile – conventional or atomics. By joining NATO or turning Ukraine into a lawless failed state, the PNAC/neocons/warmongerers put Russia into their own Cuban Missile Crisis situation. Only they announced it years back, and Russia held them off until they had their new missile tech ready and their troops ready.
Russia pulled the trigger when they felt ready – and are moving things at their own comfortable land speed – not air speed. This is their backyard which NATO let wild dogs loose on to poop, ravage and immolate anyone in reach. The goal is failed state or fascist state run by NATO, and nukes on tap minutes away to control Russia – nuclear blackmail. THIS WAS ALWAYS THE PLAN – but EU members did not want the retaliatory strikes, so Ukraine became the target that was possible due to their corruption and Biden business links.
Many here will refuse to believe this, but very little research will reveal these links, and Russia has made no bones about their reasons – they are listed in many documents. The links to Biden related businesses are a bit more hidden, but easy enough to dig out via stock ownership and BODs…
Missiles under 5 minutes flight time from an enemy that has categorically declared war on your country is just not something any country can ignore… I am sick writing this at what my country has become…
Lathechuck, John Michael:
Regarding forecast accuracy, I’m an employee of an NWS office so I’ll weigh in on this one from a forecaster’s standpoint:
Yes, from a PR standpoint, you could make a very good argument stating that changing an incorrect forecast amounts to gaslighting the public into thinking that the forecast was always accurate. However, the alternative may be worse: deliberately leaving misleading or incorrect information on your webpage where the public would be viewing it. Would you find it preferable if — instead of adjusting the message on the webpage to a message conveying proper, if initially unforeseen information, the space weather prediction center left their bad forecast up even after new data had come in proving it incorrect?
Don’t we expect other agencies to update their guidance if it turns out that they’ve been wrong? The counter example would be the CDC, who still continues to insist on their initial “forecast” of “safe and effective” for the mRNA COVID shots, months after it has become blatantly apparently that they’re neither safe nor particularly effective. The responsible thing for them to do would be to take the offending, incorrect information off of their website once it became readily apparent that it was wrong — just as it is the responsible thing to do for the Space Weather Prediction Center to update their own guidance once it’s obviously clear they blew the forecast (via a missed incoming moderate solar storm). Would we expect the National Hurricane Center to not update their forecast guidance if a hurricane that was forecast to land one place took an unexpected turn and started threatening a different location on short notice, simply because their earlier forecast stated the threat was minimal? Case in point: metropolitan Mobile Alabama finding themselves under the eyewall of Hurricane Sally in 2020 when only a day and a half earlier, forecasts were calling for a landfall closer to the MS/LA state line. To their credit, the area *was* under a hurricane warning due to the uncertainty on the timing of the re-curve, but hopefully my point still stands: local media latched on to that further west forecast and quite a few folks in Baldwin County AL found themselves quite rudely surprised being woken up by 110 mph winds for a few hours in the middle of the night.
I get feeling burnt by bad forecasts — we try our hardest to avoid them — but even with the best data out there, they get missed now and then. It’s just part of forecasting. As for “why can’t the space weather prediction center keep all of their archived forecasts on the web so we don’t feel gaslit”…I’ll just say that the whole agency’s web infrastructure is lacking.
Hi John,
Seen this? Quite extraordinary comments.
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.politico.eu/article/poland-central-bank-adam-glapinski-germany-design-poland-territory/amp/
Now just imagine for a moment what will happen when fossil fuels are banned and you try and run “industrial civilization” off of green energy? Where are the Keystone Cops, when you need them?
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/californians-ignore-pleas-conserve-power-grid-pushed-brink
California Issues Level 2 “Real & Immediate” ‘Blackout’ Threat As Power Usage Soars Despite Warnings
“We are heading into the worst part of this heat wave, and the risk for outages is real and it’s immediate,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a video posted Tuesday on Twitter. He urged residents and businesses to cut back on energy use during the late afternoon and early evening to help the state avoid outages.“
“California’s 2035 EV Mandate Being Debated In More Than Dozen States“
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/californias-2035-ev-mandate-being-debated-more-dozen-states
Roughly 17 blue states and as the article mentions that in order for this to work, you need a power grid overhaul. So far California has failed the test, trying to switch from fossil fuels to green energy.
This whole idea reminds me of the poor idea of GM’s Chevy Volt. It was a bassackwards attempt at EV. The car was designed with a “short battery range”, backed with a large fuel tank. So basically when you ran out of battery fairly quick, you then switched to gas.
@Mark L, #304
There you have it. The sooner you start labeling yourself as “tinkerer”, “hacker” or even “inventor”, the more you will position yourself in the good graces of the market where those skills will be most needed (and valued). You may use (and teach!) the scientific method all you like, but it is better not to mention it in front of customers.
Actually, you are a physician, right? The label to go is “healer”. Make sure to add herbs and broths with every prescription you make! 😉
deathcap – Thanks for the response. What I would LIKE to see is one line for the forecast, and two lines for the history: the forecast, and the actual. That would provide a sense of what kinds of forecasts are reliable (are unexpected storms more likely than unexpected quiet times), and what kinds of errors are typical (errors of severity vs. errors of timing, for example). I am indeed grateful, by the way, that this data is available to the public in any form!
Rod – I heard the warnings, even here in Maryland, about the lack of adequate electric capacity in California, and how people were urged to turn their thermostats up to 78F (which is where mine is anyway, even in humid Maryland), and turn off unwanted lights (which is a trivial amount of load, now that we’re using LEDs). I DID NOT hear advice to schedule car charging for the early morning hours, vs. plugging in when one arrives home from work.
I hope that this might, maybe, possibly, be that the car charging infrastructure is a remotely managed load, so just because a car is plugged in, maybe it doesn’t draw power right away. (My utility offers an option to let them disable my A/C to manage peak load; it could be something like that. I hope so.) But then, how would you know whether or not your car was ready for the next day’s driving?
Rod @ 315
I’m sure that Gov. Gruesome wouldn’t possibly have any contingencies for being relieved of whatever heat effects abound (like say, jetting to cooler climes w/ the wife and chilluns post haste) whilst everyone else cooks towards a well-done state!
French Oven, anyone..
@deathcap, #313
I think the point is if it is listed under forecast it should remain as it was otherwise how does anyone assess the accuracy rating of a forecasting service?
I agree that we need to reflect reality (what actually happened also) but if you make a forecast you dont want to then remove it so folks can no longer compare forecast to reality.
Taking your CDC example you noted that they are stubbornly sticking to safe and effective – pretty stupid however I prefer that to them removing the original “forecast” and replacing it with one saying caution – user beware of the following side effects if they did not also keep their erroneous original forecast.
Really we need to keep both the original forecast AND the record of reality against which we can compare.
@CR Patiño
I’m not a physician. I have a graduate degree in biological engineering (during which I pursued alternative energy Progress and realized it wasn’t realistic) and currently fit in the “inventor” or “tinkerer” category :-).
@ MarkL RE: future …#304
I think what will be needed to be successful is the opposite of today…far fewer ‘experts’ and ‘specialists’. What is needed in refurbishing, rebuilding, modifying, re-purposing is far broader base of knowledge – an area where I operate.
I am suggesting that generalists will likely be far more in demand than specialists. For instance, your example of retooling GPS combines – by removing the entire ECU and replacing it with “oldskool” mechanical operation, you eliminate not just the GPS but every sensor connected to the ECU. Instead, you dump the ECU, revert to ‘oldskool’ analog sensors which use your eyes and brain (far and away a better computer than the ECU) just as previous generations did. Eliminating myriad points of failure of sensors tied into a computer that attempts to mimic analog systems in the first place..
An ECU expert is unlikely to be able to even conceive of this as a solution. To make this happen IRL, one needs a broad knowledge base to even imagine this as a solution – history of vehicles, knowledge of sensors, how timing works in firing an engine, etc.
I think this is also where medicine is going – generalists like NP, DO, etc. and specialists being the final stop rather than a gaggle of them all mis-diagnosing in their little specialist bubbles – which is what often happens these days.
There is too much clerisy all around us – stripping that away is a good start to a better business model, IMHO…
For whatever it may be worth, my understanding of the current Russian/Ukrainian situation is essentially the same as that of Oilma[n2?] in comment #312.
Meet Britains new Health Secretary, Therese Coffey. Sometimes you just can’t make this stuff up. 😳
https://ibb.co/FmBNVgD
One more thought on timing (this is my last comment on the subject I promise)
There’s been a number of pictures published of the meeting as Liz Truss greets the Queen. Liz Truss is wearing a clearly visible wristwatch. Can you make out the time?
@Oilman2
I’m all in favor of a future ruled by generalists, given that I find specialization sufficiently tedious that I have never been able to force myself to do it. Perhaps teams of (former) specialists working together can compensate for an initial lack of generalists.
Re: forecasts
The purpose of a forecast is to provide the most accurate and up-to-date information with regard to weather, space weather, traffic, air quality, etc. As such forecasts should *always* be corrected in real time if parameters or conditions change unexpectedly.
The value provided by updating the forecast (when that could lead to action that saves lives or property) greatly exceeds the value of being able to see that the forecast was wrong. And if you want to check accuracy, you can always compare the previous day’s forecast to the next day’s actual conditions.
So…I wouldn’t call that gaslighting.
>I am suggesting that generalists will likely be far more in demand than specialists.
Usually you want to know one thing and know it very well. In this particularly perverse era, being THE BEST is a losing strategy. You instead want to know 10 different things and know them just barely OK. More is better. Master something to the point where you can just about do something about it and then move on.
And you never know what you might find peeking into all those different silos. Almost as if that’s how um, progress, actually happens.
>I’ve come to think that the Russians are deliberately going slow, because the longer they drag this out, the more catastrophic the consequences for the EU will be
Maybe. But it could be they’re just being methodical because they’re methodical people? It does seem they learned some things from their mistakes in Afghanistan. They could’ve taken the entire country but if you’re noticing, they’re only occupying the parts that are majority ethnic Russian. And they’re acting like they’re going to hang onto what they’ve taken as well.
>Picture of an old biplane fighting an F-35
That would be silly. But I do wonder how well an F-35 would fare against a dogfight with a Texan (https://wikiless.tiekoetter.com/wiki/Beechcraft_T-6_Texan_II). I think the supporters of the F35 would probably say something like “missiles and never getting close enough” and they might be right but still.
late in the day but:
1 Malaysian ex PM, Mahathir, blames the west for the Ukraine war.
2. more importantly,
CONFIRMED: Malaysia removes indoor mask mandate https://newswav.com/A2209_ajPOF2?s=A_pd5bsis
see the comments. the chinese here are gnashing their teeth while the malays are happy.
Khairy the health minister knew the reality of covid but we had to go along with what the west says.
Apparently the govt is feeling the 5 eyed Mordor is weak.
John–
A partial admission, at least:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/opinion-america-has-a-problem-we-my-fellow-progressives-must-admit-it/ar-AA11xxr0?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=e8ea6c6aac0b46cba7e73b6c0c01008b